God, better, best

The Sun, the Moon, the Earth and its contents are material to form greater things, that is, ethereal things - greater things than the Creator himself has made.

John Keats in a letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon,

quoted by John Dewey in 'Art as Experience (1934) 

When selecting single-word artworks for the 1999 MCA Sydney exhibition 'word', Matthys Gerber's 'God' was among the first we sought. Unfortunately, it had been damaged and then destroyed. It was a rare image and reference matter in Australian art. (Gerber b.1956 in the Netherlands, came to Australia 1972.)  

 

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    Knock knock
    Who's there?
    God
    God who?

Gerber's God painting includes a couple of trompe l'oeil Fontana-esque cuts. It was seeing some Fontana 'spatial concept' works in a touring exhibition (Italian Painting 1940-1960) at the NGV in January 1972 that initiated the Fountain of Light for your correspondent : through this pierced-green projection screen ] Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1962 ( just like Alice! In the catalog for the Antipodeans, it was reproduced as shown below, left-right reversed. 

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

   The filmy veil of greenness
   That thickens as we gaze.

   from Dorothea Mackellar’s 'My Country'

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

    Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio, 1964 

    Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, The End of God, 1964

    Knock knock
    Who's there?
    God. Who's asking?

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

    Ben Vautier, Fluxbox containing God, 1961

That rivalry and jealousy were the main drives of Ben’s early work was acknowledged by the artist himself. He recalled for example how in 1960 he had marched to see Yves Klein and declared: You say you are the best, you have taken over the purest, most extreme elements, and yet I am better than you, because as you can see, if God is everywhere, he is also in this ping pong ball and, by signing this ball, I’ve signed God because he is contained in it. And God is the maker of the universe.

Anna Dezeuze, ‘Terrain vague: Ben Vautier and the Ecole de Nice’, Art History, vol. 39, no. 4 (September 2016), special issue on 'Material Imagination: Art in Europe, 1946-72', edited by Natalie Adamson and Steven Harris, pp. 772-795.

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

 detail

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