The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
One thing Ian never showed us was how to be productive creative in anguish. Which is something we have to invent.
To think about Ian is to think about the most unlikely of things.
When I heard he had drowned I remembered his affection for and sense of the tragedy of that great radical cartoonist Claude Marquet who drew for the labour movement through the 1917 General Strike in Australia and then that same year drowned in Botany Bay.
Retracing final conversations seems to be a way of remembering his way of thinking. He had talked about the Balkan war and the war crimes trials planned for the Hague, and that he'd been through there looking at Mondrian's with Mel Ramsden and Paul Partos in the mid-1960s. Recently he was thinking a lot about the 1960s, as a moment when a radical politics became possible for artists. It was why he found the exhibition Mao Goes Pop interesting, for some of the artists were reworking the Mao effect and, as an ex-New York Art & Language Maoist, he hadn't previously seen ways in which that particular legacy could work in this age of lost socialist ideals. The show which he curated earlier this year, Looking at Seeing & Reading, which was intended to frame, or be framed, by the retrospective of his Minimal-Conceptual Work, was. part of this line of thinking. Ian didn't particularly like the curating business but he wanted to make certain arguments about perceptions and politics which could only work in a gallery. For instance, he wanted people to engage with the possibilities created by placing an Ad Reinhardt black square beside one of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline