Vivienne Binns: Test Pieces

I catch sight of a stray human hair. Suspended in ochre-blotted oil, it’s one of the many strands of Vivienne Binns’s (1940–2026) immense oeuvre that appears in Test Pieces. Plucked from her private studio before she relocated to an aged-care home last year, the show consists of seventy abstract “test” paintings that are haloed around the main gallery as a frieze. Each piece is small in measure—only slightly larger than your conventional postcard. Ordered (albeit porously) by their hue, this near-elliptical trail extends out as a horizon, or perhaps more aptly an equatorial line. With chrome in place of chronology as the longitudinal method of articulating Binns’s engagement with abstract painting, we observe—wall to wall to wall—the cross-pollination and recurrence of her interests over the span of an odd three decades. Here, her formal and philosophical revisions are laid out as a kind of recourse.

Vivienne—known by her peers as Viv—passed away on the day Test Pieces opened, becoming, quietly, an exhibition held in her memory. The period it accounts for is only half of her time as a practising artist. Its earliest works date to 1980, and the most recent to 2013, though most go undated (one imagines Binns catching an idea, or a “little vibrating germ,” as she called them—mid-flight, and forgetting, in the fluster of momentum, to write anything down at all). I would tout the fact of her sixty-year endurance as astonishing if it were not already so widely acknowledged: simply put, we already know Binns as a national tour de force, an artist whose countercultural iconography, wayfinding in “relational aesthetics,” artistic pedagogy, feminist throughlines, and cross-cultural exchange have come to expand and define the canon of Australian art. Test Pieces draws open the curtain behind these anthologies to leave us with the same questions she spent a lifetime asking in her “language of abstraction.”

The strand of hair is embedded in the congealed oil rosette of Untitled (2001). It runs into and out of one of many tube-to-substrate blots. These marks hold the puckered, folded form of their extrusion from the tube, its spectre looming in recessed and volcanic reliefs. Brightly chromed flesh-toned wads pulse forward amidst a sea of browns and ochres, appearing like the bubble-gum stigmata of Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–79). The work conjures Wilke’s psychosexual, vulvar associations, a shorthand Binns prefigured in 1967 with her seminal painting, Vag Dens. Amid buttoned-up Menzies-era conservatism, the work scandalised critics with its gonzo abstraction of female genitalia, worked up with Binns’s instinctive élan. Untitled sits by another work, Padded with Stripes (2004), which, with the addition of three black/reddish globby bars, resembles the impasto encrustations on a painter’s palette if it had been abandoned mid-session. Binns’s presence—her studio, and a mirage of her tinkering inside it—comes to the fore in all of this.

Some works in Test Pieces also point beyond the studio, toward Binns’s Pacific fieldwork and cross-cultural exchanges. In 1992, she toured Rarotonga in the Cook Islands by motor scooter, where she wove tapa cloth with Tongan craftswomen (for a stand-in visualiser, look no further than the snap of a steely, slightly younger Binns perched outside the National Art School gates in 1960). Tapa-making is a communal, intergenerational labour—fig or mulberry bark harvested, beaten, and interlaced by many into trilateral designs—a mode of shared labour already echoed in Binns’s collaborative studio practice since her return to painting in the 1980s. She noted how, from afar, tapa’s substrate might read as a waiting queue from above—every element reduced into one homogenous, unbroken form. But inspect more closely and faces emerge. Slippages. A missing cross in the weave. One hand tiring, another accelerating.

Pacific Learning Two (1992), a wobbly pink tapa mapped alla prima, carries this slow gesture into oils. It enacts the same idea that initially drew Binns to tapa: that a surface might index, in some way, the movement of its own making. In recollecting her encounter with the cloth to long-time curator and collaborator Merryn Gates, she described how “there’s something that’s being transmitted, human to human… I could feel the movement of the arm and the hand.” Patterning becomes, in her words, “close to consciousness.”

As repositories of her impossibly varied oeuvre, Binns’s paintings hold a resonant capacity to signify their own making. Her recount of the Pacific provides us with a sensibility that we might adopt in our own viewing of Test Pieces. Testing 6 (2004), a compact MDF panel striated with silver acrylic, is studded by whorls of the artist’s fingerprint. Layered above with dexterity, an ivory coil unspools. It’s the most overtly indexical work in the show, the singularity of Binns’s hand multiplied into a metallic field of signs.

I am reminded of Isabelle Graw’s idea of paintings as “quasi-people”: objects that, like handwriting, retain a personalised trace of—and even operate as—their author. She locates “highly personalised Peircean-like signs” within painting’s medium un-specificity. Similarly, Binns has also styled the bedrock of her approach to art as “not a material or a style,” but the processes and relationships through which an object or form takes shape. It follows that her habit of turning up—of surfacing—in her paintings comes by way of the fingerprint, the wrist, the hand. Standing in front of Binns’s test pieces, where we might rehearse the choreography of her marks as they were made, or trace a flattened warp under weft, we are implicated in its making—witness to the mirage of, and perhaps to, the artist herself.

Binns’s interest in pattern was a domestic inheritance: her mother Joyce’s sensitivity to fabric. In the ongoing series In Memory of the Unknown Artist (1955–), she embraced kitchen linoleums, tiles, ribbons, and printed tablecloths, what Helen Hughes termed the linen closet’s “museum of women’s art.” Selecting the used object rather than the found object (in a Duchampian sense), Binns extracted a subject for its history of use, returning that pattern to objecthood when painted. Around this time, Binns’s transition to acrylic coincided with a raking technique she developed from self-fashioned comb instruments—a tool suited to pattern’s demand for repetition, where a single gesture could be drawn out into a field. A cluster of works in the gallery’s right corner share this technique. Black moiré lines roll across these picture planes like hot liquorice, twisting with the wavers of her wrist. Untitled (n.d.), a compositional littermate of From David’s Jumper Mark II (2007–8), hidden behind the gallery desk, holds a tight lattice of diamond tessellates. Parallel combing is confined within each optical “overlap.”

The pattern is fractionally off-axis, edges softening where oil bleeds into acrylic, so the grid reads as hand-pressed rather than mechanically ruled. Even a tool built to standardise a mark, it seems, cannot fully absent the hand that guides it—if anything, its very mechanism becomes a new kind of signature. We notice (much like viewing tapa) the same imperfections, the same off-kilter imprecisions.

Comparing pattern to poetry, Binns described translation as a search for what will “speak of the nuances and inflections of the original.” But true for all translation is its impossibility: something of the translator always remains. If the works in Test Pieces are signifiers of Binns’s hand, her paintings of pattern are equally signifiers of the unnamed artists she set out to preserve—and in the act of preservation, Binns’s hands and their history collaborate on the same surface.

Echoing the frieze’s logic, in the adjoining gallery hangs Particle Thought (2009), a gridded formation of forty-two uniformly scaled works. The panels do not cohere into a single visual idiom: a topographic contour map in blue and ochre sits beside a field of looping red biro; a striped, brown ground interrupted by two vertical gold lines gives way to a dense confetti of dots, and, further along, a scorched, near-monochrome plane of maroon. Text surfaces once, faintly, in the bottom corner. As a finalist in the 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria, it was hung dispersed as a cloud, with the cumulus logic of a thought still forming.

But here, it is modulated into a grid. As Rosalind Krauss reminds us, the grid is centrifugal by nature, always threatening to extend beyond its frame, so that any given exhibition of it can only ever be an arbitrary fragment of a larger, unbounded field. Its rearrangeability is the point. Each of the forty-two fragments can be lifted, reset, and made to speak to a different neighbour, carrying the promise (embedded in abstraction more broadly) that painting is an infinitely varied undertaking. Doubling back, the same logic governs Sutton’s main gallery: the horizon along which its seventy fragments are strung is no less arbitrary than any other, and could, in principle, be walked again in reverse, or rearranged into an altogether different constellation.

I’m told that many works that might otherwise have joined the frieze were given away by Binns to friends over the years. What remains at Sutton is therefore only one possible constellation, assembled from a practice already dispersed through so many studios, collections, households, and institutions. Test Pieces does not condense that body of work into a final account: its paintings will soon return to circulation, carrying with them the irregularities, repetitions, slippages, and strands of hair, still somehow hers.

Today, as Test Pieces closes, that constellation comes apart again.