Visual Art

Song of the Earth, the first comprehensive survey of John Nixon’s art practice from the 1960s until his death in 2020, is a testament to his tireless creativity. By Carolyn Barnes.

Song of the Earth a testament to John Nixon’s tireless creativity

John Nixon’s Experimental Painting Workshop Colour Test Painting.

Credit: Estate of John Nixon and Anna Schwartz Gallery

In a side gallery at Heide Museum of Modern Art hangs Untitled/Black (1968), the monochrome “block” painting that John Nixon regarded as the foundation of his artistic project. Only nine centimetres square and made from scraps of linen and wood discarded by fellow art students, the painting sits alone on the wall, framed by the doorway between two galleries.

Amid the profusion of works in John Nixon: Song of the Earth 1968–2020, Untitled/Black evokes the earliest moment of the universe, when all space was compressed into an intensely hot, dense state. As physics explains, the Big Bang was not an explosion within space but the rapid expansion of space itself, carrying all matter with it. The conditions “before” this primordial event currently escape scientific description.

The preconditions of Nixon’s practice are known, yet, like matter coalescing after the Big Bang, they gather around the formative encounters with radical modernism that produced Untitled/Black in 1968. The work establishes his duty to experimentation as both refusal and catalyst, setting in motion the principles that shaped his practice across many forms and genres for the next 50 years.

Nixon was prolific in using exhibitions to articulate the different facets of his practice, but he remained relentlessly forward-looking, continually testing new forms and ideas. Song of the Earth is the first exhibition to survey his practice in its entirety. Curators Sue Cramer and Melissa Keys assemble a large group of works into a single historical frame, revealing how the different elements of Nixon’s practice contribute to the whole.

Nixon’s introduction to the genealogy of 20th century avant-garde and modern art came through three key exhibitions seen in quick succession at the National Gallery of Victoria: Two Decades of American Painting (1967), Marcel Duchamp / the Mary Sisler Collection: 78 works 1904–1963 (1968) and The Field (1968). Two Decades surveyed major postwar American movements, including abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism. The Field showcased Australian artists working in formalist abstraction, colour field and minimalism, asserting that local practice could meaningfully engage with international developments. The Duchamp exhibition challenged conventions of artistic authorship and value through the nomination of everyday objects as art.

Together these exhibitions exposed Nixon to the full force of postwar abstraction and its disruption by work that rejected autonomous, self-expressive form in favour of literal objects, serial structures and an anti-illusionistic material presence. Through the 1970s, Nixon used minimalism and conceptualism to radically rethink the terms of art-making.

For a time, he abandoned object-making for text-based provocations typed on index cards. One work referenced Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which advanced the idea of the paradigm shift – the collapse and replacement of a framework when challenged by increasing anomalies – prompting new ways of interpreting the world. Another cited Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975), which linked scientific progress to rule-breaking and developed the idea of “anything goes” as an argument for methodological pluralism.

In Australia, the ethos of “anything goes” gained added force from decades of official conservatism, followed by its rupture in the late 1960s by a measure of institutional support for art as action, event, idea and critique. Song of the Earth shows Nixon pushing this new openness in a distinct direction, combining historical and postwar avant-garde strategies on his own terms to privilege possibility over any single legitimising stance on contemporary practice.

He looks outside visual art to practitioners from varied eras and fields to explore new ways of working. Text works of the 1980s reference Jean-Luc Godard, who disrupted cinematic narrative to show how film could critically reinvent itself, and Samuel Beckett, who pared language and story to their barest essentials to reshape the possibilities of drama and literature. His work draws on key ideas from Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Kasimir Malevich and Kurt Schwitters, selectively adapted to serve his conceptual purposes. Embracing amateurism, he expands his practice into music, film and photography, leveraging the freedom to explore ideas and media unbound by professional conventions or technical mastery.

Though much of Nixon’s approach was established early, Song of the Earth traces how the parameters of his practice develop across the 1980s and ’90s by breathing new life into avant-garde concerns while rejecting the idea that radical modernism was a spent force. For instance, his interest in the art-life dynamic saw him incorporate ordinary objects into his work. This everyday materiality drew on Duchamp’s readymades but was also deeply tied to the circumstances of Nixon’s life.

Rather than elevating a single object through designation alone, as Duchamp’s deliberately deskilled, anti-retinal and anti-market readymades had done, Nixon folded the texture of daily life directly into the logic of abstraction through his use of ordinary materials and objects. When his studio was a kitchen, paintings had seeds or grains pressed into their surface or kitchen utensils attached. When living in the country, he made monochromes from potato sacks, while other paintings featured tools from the local hay and grain store.

Many works merge minimalism’s interest in objecthood and non-art materials with constructivism’s insistence on functionality and material honesty. This alignment signals a deliberate philosophical stance: art as an ethical practice grounded in clarity, economy and integrity rather than luxury or spectacle, modelling expanded ways of living and experiencing through the resourceful use of whatever is at hand.

In 1990, this thinking crystallises in the Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), conceived as an open, site-responsive framework for Nixon’s painting practice. A large group of works in the exhibition demonstrates his use of the EPW to push painting’s limits through sustained experimentation with abstraction and readymade elements, including a variety of painting supports. EPW: Orange (1995) tests the possibilities of working within one dominant colour. EPW: Silver (2001 onwards) examines the interplay of reflective surfaces and rough textures.

After a period of constraint, EPW: Polychrome (2006 onwards) expands the range of colours while treating chromatic relationships like musical structures, exploring repetition, variation and rhythm, with some works serving as visual scores for musical performances. EPW: Polychrome connects the EPW to broader vanguard traditions in which painting, sound and action merge into a single experimental field. Nixon’s applied painting projects (2009 onwards) extend this approach into operatic and theatrical contexts, drawing on Russian constructivist stage design to explore painting in performative, cross-disciplinary forms.

Song of the Earth also documents Nixon’s collaborative projects such as Anti-music and The Donkey’s Tail, which extended his commitment to experimentation beyond painting into sound, performance and collective making.

In a comprehensive essay for the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, Sue Cramer highlights the lyricism that runs alongside the analytic foundations of Nixon’s practice. She observes that the Russian avant-garde “captured Nixon’s heart as well as his mind”, highlighting the emotional and imaginative dimensions of his engagement with their vision. The nature imagery that recurs in Nixon’s writings and the simplicity of conception, components and processes in his physical works equally reflect his poetic sensibility.

Song of the Earth is a testament to Nixon’s tireless creativity, innovation and productivity, providing rare access to an artistic universe that unfolded from a specific point of origin and continued developing in ever more nuanced and unexpected directions.

John Nixon: Song of the Earth 1968–2020 is showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, until March 9.

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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 6, 2025 as "Expanding space".

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