Peter Tyn­dall
“blank words, but I use them” 
Samuel Beck­ett, The Unnamable

In 1984, Peter Tyn­dall paint­ed the words ART IS AN ADJEC­TIVE in Hel­veti­ca Bold across an abstract paint­ing of his from 1974. He elab­o­rat­ed at the time, ​“Art is a word. A word we use to describe some things as Art and the remain­der as not-Art.” Study­ing sec­ond year Archi­tec­ture at RMIT in 1971, the set text in the Phi­los­o­phy com­po­nent was ​‘Art and its Objects’ by Richard Woll­heim. For Tyn­dall, the book’s cov­er con­veyed it all with its con­cep­tu­al­ly suc­cinct black title, print­ed over a seem­ing­ly ran­dom abstract design.

Since Novem­ber 1974, when Tyn­dall first paint­ed a meta-scene of two per­sons look­ing at a sus­pend­ed rec­tan­gle of paint, he has, as a par­al­lel activ­i­ty, been refin­ing his lan­guage to describe this scene of regard.

By con­ven­tion, it is accept­ed that an artist-painter, like an artist-writer, has the right to name their cre­ation, to bestow a Title. It took Tyn­dall, sev­er­al decades to devel­op and refine the for­mal Title attached to each of his works:

detail
A Per­son Looks At A Work Of Art/​
some­one looks at something…

LOGOS/HA HA

Just as he crit­i­cal­ly devised his poem-like Title, Tyn­dall also cri­tiques the Art Muse­um Label, its hier­achy of selec­tive infor­ma­tion cat­e­gories, its mate­ri­al­ist descrip­tions (e.g. ​‘paint on can­vas’), even its posi­tion (often low­er) in rela­tion to the giv­en eye­line and its ref­er­ent. Oscar Wilde wrote, ​“I have spent most of the day putting in a com­ma and the rest of the day tak­ing it out.” Tyn­dall, after three or four decades of such writ­ing, has honed his Label thus:

LIST OF WORKS