Pictures in CD | Project Center for Contemporary
Art 1998 | Article
Tony Ameneiro lives and works on the extreme northern edge of the Illawarra at Stanwell Tops. As well as being a practising visual artist he is also a conservator of works on paper. Until recently Tony played in the seminal Wollongong punk/performance rock band Dinky Crash. His dual roles are the points around which his work is constructed. His work as a conservator, a highly trained and skilled practice, is manifested in the conscientious nature of his artwork. The high proliferation of images, techniques and skill reflect the work that he deals with on a daily basis.
For an artist to be in such a position is neither a luxury nor a blessing. To look at the 'best' and perhaps more importantly the 'worst', is one thing but to then make your own work with that looking over your shoulder is another. Art workers and administrators are at times the most anxious of artists. They are highly aware of the futility of practice, the impossibility of immortality, the fleeting success of an exhibition. For someone working in traditional object based practice, these problems are confounded even further.
Ameneiro's work reflects the complexities of this conundrum. He chooses not to settle into a fixed medium or style and his technical and aesthetic concerns transcend faddishness. At the base of the work is its presentation in clear plastic CD covers, or jewel cases. Although a practical and simple way to present the work they also reference the artist as a collector of images and relate to similar concerns in popular music. In the last few years in popular music we have seen a cut and paste technique. Its greatest practitioner at the moment is perhaps American musician Beck, whose music runs the gamut from hiphop collage to blues to rock and cabaret. Ameneiro draws inspiration from an artist like Beck who refuses to stick to one genre. Ameneiro's collage of styles is similar.
You can break his work into subgroups and then break these groups down even further. In some of the small ink drawings Ameneiro acts like a jazz musician jamming on a motif, ad libbing the image. In other works like cover version - A Forest, and cover version The Well is Dry the musical reference becomes a form of play. The ink image of a vinyl record, used predominantly now by mixers and DJs, is presented almost like a museum piece in the CD case, the format by which it has been superseded. Ameneiro becomes a DJ of the visual, taking images and mixing them up, cutting and editing to emerge at the end of this process with something of his own.
Ameneiro takes this visual jamming further in the more detailed collage works which are products of his working life as a conservator. Here Ameneiro uses the flotsam and jetsam of his conservation work. Often the collage works may be direct quotations of other artists' works, re-presented and refocussed into a small square format. In Unico en su Clase Ameneiro directs his gaze towards Schwitters, the dadaist collage artist. The word dada is spelt out in bits of paper like a ransom note while the title of the work, printed on what appears to be a cigar wrapper, sits in a brown field of torn papers and old drawings. At first glance this appears to be an exercise in surface, composition and tone, a homage to a modern master. In talking with Ameneiro the complexities of this work become obvious. It may be a statement on Ameneiro's Spanish heritage, the direct Spanish translation being 'the only one in its class'. However the materials used have all been obtained from work sources, gum tape inadequate for conservation purposes obtained from the back of some family heirloom, glimpses of writing and typed letters that could have been found like a secret treasure map under an old frame, the detritus of work and age.
In other works, working life discoveries and refuse appear as artistic devices, a pH colour wheel framing a Iandscape, fragments of discarded prints, sometimes Ameneiro's own, sometimes too ambiguous to tell. Ameneiro's conservation work transforms him into a conduit of art: here he references Gerhard Richter referenced by John Young; in another he pays homage to Balson by discreetly pointing out the failings of painting Balsonesque pastiches; a portrait in the style of Auerbach; a personal letter in the style of On Kawara; a corner of the room at the last Futurist exhibition. All exhibit the traits of an obsessed artist and an obsessive worker. His eye is cast over everything and it all goes into the mix. The vast number of works in Pictures in C.D., over 130, give him license to do whatever he pleases.
There are though obvious threads in the exhibition, and the most consistent vision in Ameneiro's work is the landscape, made more obvious through its peculiarity which is at first glance banal and deadpan. Ameneiro draws our attention to something that we only glimpse, but rarely look at, as in the way he places an insignificant, discarded piece of brown paper framing into a collage. What is interesting is that it demonstrates how the landscape burns itself onto or consciousness.( Like tracks being burnt onto a CD?). In many of the works, often around Waterfall, Helensburgh and Maddens Plains, the landscape is something seen from the window of a car or train, conveniently framed, on the way to Sydney. Personally I find it dull, boring. monotonous and devoid of major landmarks but it recalls immediately catching the train, or driving to see an exhibition, catching a band, going to an opening etc. However, when looking at Ameneiro's work, it is surprising how aware I am of this landscape and how its every nuance is stored my head.
The landscapes are close in spirit to the work of American artist Edward Hopper, and like Hopper, by drawing our attention to the pedestrian and focussing on composition, tone and structure he shows us the place between things. Ameneiro's work could be also what Hopper claimed his paintings were about, 'the fall of light on a building' though in Amenerio's case it is on the landscape. Ameneiro does not try to reign in the vast emptiness of the landscape but, like Hopper, he concentrates on the evidence of people, telegraph wires and goalposts, parks and roadside markers.
Ameneiro's landscape represent the edge of the Illawarra, a kind of cultural
and physical deadzone. It's a limbo, an in-between space undefined, uncelebrated
and unattractive. He is showing us the physical edge of where we live, and
the edge, both pictorially and metaphorically, is what most of this work
is about. Ameneiro looks at the edge and holds it up to the viewer. The
escarpment cut hard against the sky, a crisp lawn of a football field meeting
the surrounding scrub, a piece of paper collaged against another, power
cables breaking the sky into lines and a picture of a roadside where the
Illawarra meets Sydney.
Glenn Barkley - 'Periphery' - Issue No.36 Spring 1998