Review of An Opening: Twelve Love Stories about Art

Lucy Clark, Australian Art Review, 2012

Do it your way!

Stephanie Radok remembers the moment she decided to be an artist. As a child travelling in the family car, “in the usual tense silence”, she felt the certainty of it. It seemed to the child an important moment, something to keep secret. It’s significant that Radok remembers clearly what she was looking at at the time: “… the curve of a half-ploughed field divided by a sweeping line, intense green on one side, red-brown on the other. I took a deep breath and thought I definitely know what I want to do, that’s what I will do with my life, show and convey this intensity, this feeling in my heart and gut that this abrupt edge of colour gives me …”

This sort of deep thought and feeling characterises a truly beautiful collection — An opening: twelve love stories about art — in which Radok excavates the deeps layers of her love for art through the prism of her own personal history.

Using the twelve months of the year to give her stories structure, Radok walks her dog through her Adelaide suburb and the seasons, observing the world with an artist’s eye and recording it with a writer’s sensibility: she sees the beauty of the universe in a leaf.

As she does so, she walks the reader through her reflections on the artworks that influence her thinking, the images that have become touchstones in her life, from the voluptuously elaborate Hieronymus Bosch triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, to the simple, yet no-less-awe-inspiring Aboriginal rock art on Groote Eylandt.

This is where Radok first encountered the Indigenous art that would come to enthral her throughout her career as an art critic, and here she plots the blossoming of contemporary Aboriginal art as an international cultural force, and how this frames our national identity.

Radok charts her own history as well, writing about her childhood as the daughter of an East Prussian father and an Irish Australian mother, spending her early years moving from America to Austria to Australia — a peripatetic existence that contributes much to her memory and make-up. She positions her own background against a larger thematic backdrop of identity, ethnicity and human migration, constantly asking the big philosophical questions about the human condition.

This endless curiosity framed her pathway from artist to art critic with the rigour of inquiry: What does art mean? How should we interpret it? Should we listen to critics or should we listen to ourselves? How do we even decide what art means?

Radok writes with a gentle wisdom and a clear, unfettered voice. Peppered with lovely anecdotes, An Opening draws the reader into a wonderful discussion about art, culture and identity with an accessible style that suggests that thinking critically about art might be a less rarefied occupation than it might otherwise seem.

But ultimately this book is Stephanie Radok’s exhortation to surround yourself with art purely for the sake of its beauty, not its possession. The inspiring images around Radok are mostly torn from newspapers or journals, are postcards and calendars and reproductions bought in galleries over many decades. The true possession, the true investment, she says, is the way art makes us feel and think, what brings us alive inside ourselves.