Television on the Blink: Michael Nicholson

There’s an old cliché about video art that it might be mistaken for the “telly having gone on the blink”- the television set just needing a good thwack to adjust from a dance of abstract line back to a representation of the world.

That now seems so long ago. Much video art these days suffers from a complete disregard for the fabric of the medium it is using, and is simply a tool to record the representational.

Yet I’m taken back to that time with Michael Nicholson’s Visual Music at the Film Archive. The way the screen deteriorates under the intense heat of colour and spazzed-out oscillating line in his work reminds me of visiting an 1980s takeaway joint when the spacies machine was on the blink, the marauding aliens reduced to an urgent ooze of hyper-abstraction. That was my introduction to abstract painting.

The inspiration for Nicholson’s remarkable works are Kandinsky and the early 20th century mavericks who rejected representation for the spiritual calling of abstraction. Nicholson even calls himself a classical composer, suggesting that while Kandinsky took the first step in the idea of an abstract visual music, in bringing such an idea into motion he provides the next.

That overstates its cultural significance. Back in the 1920s Germans Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger moved abstraction in their filmed Opuses. In the 1940s and 50s the extravagant abstractions in film of Americans Harry Smith and Jordan Belson were inspired by abstract expressionism.

Nevertheless Nicholson’s work carries this work forward powerfully. His work has an almost molten intensity. It is as if in the spatial layering of the analogue and digital he has given these streams of light a sculptural truth. Sizzling lines and hot colours are cooking in the fabric of things. It’s as if the work is inside a rainbow, an exploration of the intense organic process that gives birth to all things. Len Lye would approve.

Now in his 80s, Nicholson has had a distinquished career from the 1950s abstract painting vanguard in Auckland, through to work in New Zealand since returning in 1988. An accompanying experimental documentary provides a look at some tremendous sculptural work in Australia in-between. It shows his interest in spatial complexity, with structures that are constantly fragmenting and turning. Nicholson throughout appears more interested in exploring the abstract language of things than reaching any gallery-pleasing formal resolutions.

The four pieces here have been edited and digitised from work completed in the 1970s in Canberra using an early computer animation system called Scanimate. The reconstituted work is almost an elegy to the process of deterioration of our moving image heritage from film and tape to pixelation on Youtube.    

Following Kandinsky banishment of single perspective, this strong colourist provides undulating fields where biomorphic elements saturated in colour stretch and pulsate. The accompanying electronic soundtrack (whose burbling takes you back to the early synthesiser experimentation of the likes of Douglas Lilburn) contributes to the experience of something dangerously elemental, a firestorm in which lightning cracks and heat tears holes in the material of things.  

These works may reject the simpler structures of pop music, but I nevertheless struggle to find their shape. They never feel completely resolved. Nor as music are they works I am moved by. Remarkable explorations of the abstract potential of the material they may be, but I sometimes get lost in the storm of matrices created. 

The Michael Nicholson Visual Music Project Stage 3, until 20 September, The Film Archive