Tyger! Tyger! is a series of six exhibitions featuring work created by six pairs of artists. Firstly, we invited six artists – Constanze Zikos, Philip Brophy, Maria Kozic, David Chesworth, Lyndal Walker and Ian Haig – who, in turn, were invited to nominate another artist (or artists) to work with. The Tyger! Tyger! projects will be mounted at different times and durations across 2011 and 2012 in different gallery spaces at West Space according to their needs. Furthermore, each of the six exhibitions will be accompanied by two commissioned texts, to be published in a suite of six publications deigned and produced by Stuart Geddes.

The first iteration of Tyger! Tyger! will occur with the launch of West Space’s new premises. The first exhibition presents work by Ian Haig who invited Kotoe Ishii, a recent graduate of VCA’s Master of Fine Arts program, to work with him. Haig and Ishii’s work shares an interest in the inter-relationships between technology and the body, albeit in strikingly different ways. The first publication will feature texts contributed by Ian Haig and Kelly Fliedner.

A guiding principle behind Tyger! Tyger! is a desire to create opportunities to invite different artists to work at West Space. At present the West Space artistic program focuses primarily on artists in their first ten years of exhibiting. West Space has long desired to change this focus in order to exhibit a broader range of artists, partly as a strategy in which to interrogate definitions of ‘emerging’ versus ‘established’ artists and also to challenge the idea that artist-run spaces primarily exist as ‘stepping stones’ to a more illustrious career. West Space’s relocation to a new site, one double the size of our old premises, gave us an opportunity to expand and diversify our program. We liked the idea of potential pairs as it enabled us to work with artists that were not customarily exhibiting at West Space as well as continuing our relationship with many artists who are still considered emerging in their careers. Rather than set up a ‘mentorship’ relationship, we preferred a model that enabled collaboration and that acknowledged existing synergies. Tyger! Tyger! illuminates some of the many interesting networks and relationships that crisscross the art community.

Each of the six artists that we invited to be part of Tyger! Tyger! has an extensive and idiosyncratic history of making art. They, in turn, were invited to nominate another ‘emerging’ artist that they would like to collaborative with. We were very open with our brief. ‘Collaborate’, for instance, could take the form of creating a project together, or it may simply mean presenting individual works together as a kind of comparative exhibition. ‘Emerging’ could be interpreted in a multitude of ways too (What does it mean to be emerging? What does it mean to be established?). The funding for the program was generously enabled through the Australia Council’s ‘Opportunities for Young and Emerging Artists’ grant, so the idea of fostering emerging practitioners was integral to the project. Some ‘pairs’ were quickly assembled and – at the time of writing this – are well underway into a creative development process; some pairs have turned into quintuplets; and, in some instances, boundaries between the emerging artist and the established artist have been interestingly blurred. We are thrilled at the chain reaction we have set off and very excited about the ideas that are emerging.

Tyger! Tyger! also features a text-based component. Each of the six projects will have two texts commissioned for them – another gesture towards pairing and symmetry. The texts will be published alongside each exhibition as a series of small publications, which are being designed and printed by Stuart Geddes of Chase & Gallery (www.chaseandgalley.com). Stuart is an accomplished publication designer, who also runs the independent publishing project A Small Press. Stuart’s contribution to West Space over the last few years has been significant – he (along with Brad Haylock) has redesigned the West Space identity, and his interests with regards to independent publishing aligns him with West Space. In late 2011 West Space will launch an enlarged library space, which we envisage as an engine room for West Space publishing and the Tyger! Tyger! editions are an exciting way to launch further publishing initiatives for this bold new chapter of West Space.

A note on the title.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Tyger! Tyger! borrows its name from William Blake’s poem The Tyger written in 1794 and published as part of his collection of mystic poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake set each poem within an elaborately illustrated page, for which he completed all the engraving and undertook all the printing himself. The book meditates – through brilliantly evocative and beguilingly visionary words and pictures – on the nature of human experience. It is an expansive vision, one that charts an epic rise and fall, oscillates between innocence and evil, and pits the sweetness of the lamb against the terrible beauty of the tiger. It is also a startlingly personal vision, full of Blake’s own quasi-schizophrenic hallucinations mixed in with grand imagery drawn from sources such as the Bible or Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is a work that is symbolic of the imaginative potential of art and writing and, as a document, it is testament to the power of singular artistic vision – or as Blake put it: ‘To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit’.

Blake was also one of the first radically independent artists and self-publishers in a time when both were a rarity. Blake was conventionally trained; he followed the classic path of instruction through the Royal Academy, yet his career ultimately doglegged and he focused on interpreting his own intensely personal vision. He was considered a loon by most of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, he continued unabashedly drawing and publishing his own wildly prophetic visions. (Blake wrote how he would ‘converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables’.) He was certainly idiosyncratic: few of his beliefs or behaviors aligned with his times. He was – and still is – relatively hard to classify. Even his spelling of the ‘Tyger’ was strange – the generic spelling in his day was ‘tiger’, just as it is today. Blake oscillates between the two in different editions, but prefers the more archaic ‘Tyger’. Like many independent publishers Blake was a passionate publisher of books but not a commercial success. He sold only twenty copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience while he was alive. He died in poverty, apparently still propped up in bed painting all the way through his period of final illness.

In a curious twist of fate – and thanks to massive endowment by local industrialist Alfred Felton – the National Gallery of Victoria holds one of the most important folios of Blake’s work, most of which are illustrations to Dante’s The Divine Comedy. These were secured for Melbourne in 1918 by ‘Robbie’ Ross who worked as the London Advisor to the Melbourne Gallery. Blake’s bold and brilliant visions are now one of the most treasured in our state collection.

All these connections – independent art and publishing, idiosyncratic attitudes, eclectic approaches to art and writing, a folio of works residing not far from where I write this – coalesce to create a swirl of ideas from which the Tyger! Tyger! project emerges. Each of the artists, writers and designers contributing work to Tyger! Tyger! are – like Blake – notable for their incandescent vision, independence of spirit, and charming air of recalcitrance. I have found inspiration in the way they have navigated their careers and managed to continue producing work under their own terms and in their own way. More specifically, the project makes reference to Blake’s celebrated poem, The Tyger. The poem, which meditates on symmetry and duality, is a fitting – and spirited – title that heralds the paired structure underpinning the iterations of Tyger! Tyger!

Phip Murray