The text was published to accompany David Austen's major solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2019. The text can be found in the publication 'Underworld' co-edited by Beth Bate and Eoin Dara. The book also includes commissioned texts by Lavinia Greenlaw, Beth Bate and Rupert Thomson.

Reading time 10'

I once interviewed the oceanographer Don Walsh for a project I was working on and it didn’t go very well. Walsh — alongside Jacques Picard — was the first person to visit the Mariana Trench in 1960. They were the only people to have descended to the deepest part of the ocean until the filmmaker James Cameron made the trip in 2012. The trench is in the Western Pacific and is roughly 11km deep. It remains largely uncharted and obscure, a place that continues to haunt our imagination. 

For a world that is seemingly quantified and accounted for, the ocean remains opaque, countering the assumption that we have mastered and mapped the planet. We can imagine the light of the submarine illuminating the depths of the ocean like a film projector through a dark auditorium. When I interviewed Walsh, I asked him what it felt like to be the first person to see the bottom of the sea. The question confused him, and as he recounted his memories from the day he told me that his concerns about cabin pressure left little time for feelings. I expected to be regaled by his accounts of extraordinary encounters and ended up hearing about pressure gauges. 

I wonder what David Austen would make of the bottom of the ocean? 

Underworld, Silence Beach, Ocean, Edge of the World. His titles reveal a fascination with the natural world, and his nomadic work — encompassing painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture and filmmaking — frequently portrays images of the sea, stars, the moon and the sun. His iconography is pervaded by a certain romanticism, tempered by a chilled and stylish painterly economy. The sun is denoted by a yellow circle; the sea as a dilating collection of lines on a monochromatic surface. His formalism possesses the brevity of a haiku. 

A place of love and fear... 

Collectively, the works form a cinematic vocabulary. Diminutive figures painted in watercolour take the role of protagonists, abstract geometric gouaches offer a scenography and large dense paintings of epigrammatic texts provide snippets of dialogue and suggestive titles. Working in series, each component furnishes his filmic oeuvre with its own particular tenor. Austen makes literary art, translated through the formal vocabulary of Modernist painting. No line is wasted, and there is no illusionism in the work; it’s all on the surface. The liquidity of watercolour and rigidity of oil paint — each medium does its thing and no more. 

In the figurative watercolours we encounter a cast of naked characters, deftly captured with the acuity of a few brief marks. Sometimes alone and often coupled up, they variously stand, kiss, piss, screw and mess about. Beyond a few simple props there is no landscape, and — while each figure is wedded to a gravitational space — there is no horizon line. There is a slapstick and anecdotal quality to much of this series, the body becoming the agent and subject to acts of sensuality and violence in each scene. To paraphase one of Austen’s own titles, these characters seem to occupy a land of ‘love and fear’; a space of unabashed hedonism where shame and contrition lie just beneath the surface. 

As light as a painting, as heavy as an image... 

Besides the figure, the paper is left unmarked. I’m reminded of David Toop’s anecdote about his teacher Harry Thubron making his students draw radiators, asking them to pay particular attention to the space between the pipes. The space around Austen’s figures is like the gap in the radiator. Like a pause just before a chorus, like John Cage’s silence, like the space in Japanese woodblock printing — it creates the conditions for possibility. Gaps, absences and silences are frequent motifs through much of the work. What possibilities lie under these surfaces? The blank paper — just like the ocean — oscillates between metaphorical opacity and potentiality. Can we see Austen as the love-struck protagonist in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante? In this 1934 film, a recently married captain of a river barge is told by his wife that he will see the person he loves when he puts his head under water. At a tumultuous moment in their marriage he dives into the canal where he eagerly awaits visions of his wife. In the film, as in Austen’s art, water takes on a theological and transformative state. 

Words fall with a muted violent thump... 

Austen’s oil paintings often incorporate singular and resonant figurative images such as Medusa trees, hearts and geometric motifs that suggest architectural fascia or stained glass. Other works encompass textual statements in the same bold sans-serif typeface. He persistently uses thick flax canvas redolent of sail cloth and paints large monochromatic areas with tiny brushes. The oil paint encrusts the heavy tooth of the canvas providing a dry and brittle surface. There is a ritualistic quality to the way that Austen persistently employs the same techniques and approach; repetition becomes meditative. 

Ocean, 2018, incorporates an irregular pattern of stylised stars. The surface of the canvas trembles with an asymmetrical pattern, like a Bridget Riley gone slightly awry. The stars continue off the edge of the canvas suggesting an infinite patterning. Of course, the stars we see at night have often long since imploded and what we are viewing is the light that has travelled millions of years to reach us. In a further act of lyrical resonance, Austen has used a paint pigment ground from charred animal bones. Dead stars and dead animals. A star can guide us and fool us — send us in the right direction and down the wrong path. It is, then, a particularly apt symbol for the act of painting: looking, believing and day dreaming. Austen’s art asks us to stare up at the night sky and the soil under our feet, to look right in front of us and for things we’ll never find. 

In the 16mm film The story of my death as told to me by another, 2019, we find Austen in minimal clown make up. Wearing a nautical jacket, he is redolent of a figure from the early 20th century. His face is painted white with blocks of black marks over his eyes and mouth. We view his body from above as it floats in black space. As we move in, the character utters a brief monologue written by the novelist Rupert Thomson inspired by a dream Thomson had of Austen’s violent demise. Is the clown a self-portrait or a mask? Is he coming back to life or staging his own death? 

Time and travel are the durable themes of Austen’s work. From the brevity of the watercolours to the painstaking surfaces of the oil paintings, we travel into space and descend under water, are transported into distant memories and projections of potential futures. Austen makes the instant indelible — a trapeze artist in mid-flight, a figure painted while the artist holds his breath, an image read in seconds that unravels over a lifetime. Painting is like trying to petrify a soap bubble. 

Submerged light beams in dark oceans... 

Time, though, has not been kind to the characters in The Heads, 2016-19: a cast of seemingly identical looking figures that could be self-portraits but serve just as well as cyphers or archetypes. Unkempt and unshaven, their surfaces are whitewashed and they bear the accumulations of re-drawing and overpainting. They could be washed ashore onto a desert island or dishevelled after months out at sea. Like down and out Argonauts, Austen’s portraits form a motley crew. Travel has its consequences, and we don’t always find what we’re looking for. Can we read the artist’s biography for narrative clues? His father was in the Navy and he is of a generation whose formative years were framed by the space race and moon landing. Perhaps the lesson in Austen’s work is not so much about where he is from but where he wants to go. 

From the sea to the sky, looking at this planet from above and below. What does this attentive looking reveal? 

The first full photograph of the earth, taken in 1972, captures the planet from outer space as it floats in a black monochrome. The astronaut Jack Schmitt famously said that when he took the photograph and contemplated the earth from above he felt tiny. Austen’s studio takes on the form of a submarine or spaceship illuminating the depths of the world through the light beam of his curiosities. This captures something of his art, of gazing at something that threatens to overwhelm us, of naked figures running around an Edenic garden trying to make sense of the world and ending up in all sorts of bother.