What drives the human instinct to create art?

ART
What Artists See
Quentin Sprague
Monash University Publishing, $29.99

“The art world is supremely good at finding ways to make art seem complicated,” writes Quentin Sprague in his latest book What Artists See. Anyone who has encountered some of the dense, deadening and jargon-laden copy that circulates in the art world knows precisely what he means.

At the other end of the spectrum exists the lightweight guff that garners millions of Instagram followers and makes celebrities of lesser scribes. Writing well about art is a skill and Sprague a master of it. Take the opening line of one of the essays in his new book: “Brent Harris still recalls the moment when his father first told him of his plan to murder his wife and children,” Sprague writes about the acclaimed Melbourne-based painter.

Who wouldn’t read on?

Sprague, whose first book The Stranger Artist won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction, is foremost a storyteller. At its best, What Artists See reads like a series of intriguing short stories that immerse the reader in the lives and minds of artists.

The book’s format, an easily handled paperback, lends itself to Sprague’s narrative style – you can savour it as you might a novel, lying in bed or in a comfy armchair. I’d suggest breathing space between each chapter – while Sprague’s writing is accessible, he digs deep.

The book is as much about the artistic approach to life as it is about the art itself – what artists see in the broadest sense, and how their thinking might even apply to our own lives. I’m drawn, for example, to the view of Malaysian-Australian artist Simryn Gill, who is motivated by “the drive to carve out space at the edges of things, to grant attention to what might otherwise go unseen, the simple fact of bearing witness”.

Sprague’s writing feels motivated by a similar drive. He focuses on artists with well-established careers (the youngest, Stuart Ringholt, is in his 50s) but who are not necessarily household names, or who have drifted from the limelight to make way for the latest thing. What distinguishes these artists are their persistence, their commitment to process, their acceptance of failure, and the patience to keep going. At its core, the book explores “the process of reaching, holding and reaching again that propels an artist’s practice”.

In a bold editorial (and marketing) move, the book’s 12 essays are not named after the artists they cover (apart from the essay on late Indigenous artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori). Instead, the essays are given more cryptic titles, such as “The World is Made of Layers” (on Vivienne Binns), that relate in some way to the artists’ attitudes or work.

The effect is one of discovery, or rediscovery, of contemporary artists worthy of our attention such as Gill, who represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 (her artwork is on the book’s cover).

Others include the uncompromising Mike Parr, known for his confronting performance art, in a fascinating essay about Parr’s collaboration and eventual falling-out with master printer John Loane. Another beautifully observed essay, “The House at Glenorie”, explores the relationships between lauded architect Glenn Murcutt and artists Sydney Ball and Lynne Eastaway, for whom he designed a house in the middle of the bush at the titular Glenorie, about an hour north-west of Sydney.

Sprague situates himself in the essays as he visits the artists at their homes and studios and reflects on the conversations they have about art (apart from Gabori, whom he met only briefly, and Helen Maudsley, who was not available for interview). He is a searching and solemn writer, but on no occasion cynical. Even when he is not particularly keen on an artist’s work – and he admits that he doesn’t love Gabori’s – he seeks to understand it. An art-school graduate and former artist who has worked as a curator and arts co-ordinator, Sprague continues to place art “somewhere close to the centre of my life”, and it’s this that gives his writing an unusual empathy.

As Sprague explains in the introduction, his love of art was piqued as a child when his single mother would take him and his sister on the 300-kilometre round-trip from their home in Monaro, regional NSW, to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, leaving at dawn in the family’s “twin-cab Kombi utility”.

“It was visits to the National Gallery of Australia that truly imprinted on my young consciousness,” he writes. He compares the “quiet awe – enveloping, gentle, deadly serious” of the gallery atmosphere back then to the galleries of today, which can sometimes seem as “mere extensions of some vast industrial entertainment system”.

What Artists See is a counter to that “vast industrial entertainment system”; the pace is unhurried, reflective and psychologically probing – although at least one of the artists, abstract painter Karl Wiebke, seems to grow slightly impatient with Sprague’s insistent need to find the “lesson” in his art. Sprague hopes that “Wiebke might arrive at an overarching definition of his work”. But Wiebke is not interested in absolutes. If Sprague in this instance is guilty of over-complicating things, he is self-aware enough to recognise it: “If I was after the ‘lesson’ of his work, this was surely it: don’t expect a concrete revelation. Or, put another way, don’t expect for the puzzle to be solved.”

Several of the essays in the book have been previously published, mainly in Schwartz Media’s The Monthly magazine, for whom Sprague regularly writes. I question the inclusion of two essays that for me dilute the power of this collection and seem to stray somewhat from the central premise.

The shortish essay on German artist Katharina Grosse feels slight in comparison to the others, and she is the only non-Australian artist included. At 32 pages, “Eric in the Desert and Elsewhere”, the essay on the late media theorist and anthropologist Eric Michaels, is the book’s longest and densest, and I found my attention drifting. Both essays have been previously published elsewhere, and I’m not convinced of the need to republish here.

These are quibbles about an impressive work. Ultimately, What Artists See is as much about what Sprague himself sees when he looks at art, and one could not want a more perceptive and original guide.

What Artists See by Quentin Sprague (Monash University Publishing) is out now.

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