Listening to reason

Like many of his generation, Richard Deacon adopted Marcel Duchamp’s proposition that titles were an extra colour on the artist’s palette. In using language in this way the younger artists of the 1970s put distance between themselves and the abstract artists who came before them (who often labelled everything ‘Untitled’). ‘Listening to reason’ is a case in point.1 The shape of the work describes five double loosely ear-shaped curves, connected by twisting pieces of laminated wood to make one continuous line. The title encourages us to think of a circle of people listening to an argument, each connected to the other but all slightly differently. It is far from being a symmetrical form; each section is joined by twisting connections that appear to be arranged at random. The line is made up of multiple layers of laminated ply, which have been glued together in sections and clamped onto forms that give them their twisting motion. Deacon has left the hardened glue that squeezed out of the laminations as a trace of the process, thereby adhering to a principle of truth to materials and processes. The plain, glowing yellow surface of the ply against the beige colour of the glue in the side grain of the wood helps to reveal the twisting body of the loops. The sections were then bolted together through offset joints, once again making a virtue out of the visible process to articulate the form.

The resulting curves and loops defy imagination. The piece is like a five-fold moebius strip but some-how it all comes together into a convincing whole. When asked how he had visualised this complex form in order to be able to make up the necessary jigs and formwork, he acknowledged that he never visualised it as a whole. It seems that he had the twisting straight sections lying around waiting to become a star-shaped work. On the other side of the studio were the five ear shapes destined for another work. Living with these forms, he eventually realised that they would fit together with a few minor modifications and the resulting sculpture is what we see here.2 There is an interesting parallel between this accidental juxtaposition and the working methodology of assemblage artists such as Haim Steinbach or Janet Laurence. Sculptors of this kind accumulate objects and materials in the studio and one day bring them together to make something new. This aspect of chance encounters belies the purely formal aesthetic that most American art aspired to at this time and leans towards a history of European surrealism, in particular to Duchamp’s theory of chance.3

1. This work was first reserved by the AGNSW in 1986 but only acquired when it was brought out for the 1988 Biennale of Sydney
2. Conversation noted by the author after a studio visit with Deacon in 1987
3. Duchamp believed in allowing chance to play a part in the creation of his works, for example the accumulation of dust that he used to colour the sieves in his ‘The large glass’ 1915–23

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006