‘I’m getting closer and closer’, he says, his face lighting up, ‘to intertwining sound and shape and color. I feel a bit like a caveman who discovered a bit of charcoal and realised I could draw on walls. I can imagine a day in the near future when the sky is the artist’s canvas.’ —Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski talking to Sandra McGrath, ‘From the way out’, Art, Australian, 9 June 1979

Josef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski may have been Australia’s first true multimedia artist. Although he died in 1994, his unfailing interest in technology paved the way for its wider acceptance in the visual arts of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. With a voracious appetite for the new, he explored every imaging technology or image display system he encountered, from drawing to painting in acrylics to the laser and his sound and image presentations, though he always saw himself as painting with light.

He was born of upper middle-class parents in the village of Golub in Poland in 1922. In his youth he took an interest in mechanical things and was destined to go to the technological university. The Second World War intervened, his father was taken prisoner of war in Germany and, while living with his mother in a village north of Warsaw, he began painting, taking private lessons from the Polish impressionist painter Olgierd Vetesco. Towards the end of the war he was sent to Germany on a forced labour program and was there when the Americans arrived in 1945. In the aftermath he won a scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf where he studied painting and drawing and was exposed to a constant exchange of ideas and to exhibitions from France, Italy and Britain.

At the end of 1949 he emigrated to Australia and remains a significant reminder of the way that new ideas have been injected into Australian culture through immigration. He was initially housed in the Bonegilla Migrant Hostel near Albury, and shortly after moved to the Maribyrnong Hostel in Melbourne. He took the jobs assigned to him by the Department of Immigration, at first working in a concrete factory and later cutting sandwiches in an army camp. This was an early morning shift and it allowed him to study, so he enrolled in the National Gallery School in Melbourne and studied for two years under the tutelage of Alan Sumner and William Dargie.

Ostoja-Kotkowski’s earliest works in Australia appear to have been drawings, some of which were featured in Meanjin in 1951. They show a strong, confident line and form in an expressionistic style that leaned towards abstraction. Alan McCulloch was referring to the European influence on his work when he described the drawings as being ‘strong enough to withstand the ravages of parochial surroundings and even to gather force from them’.[1]

After Ostoja-Kotkowski’s time at the National Gallery School he approached several advertising companies, but found them uninterested in contemporary ideas. Nevertheless his design jobs included commercial murals and designing printed fabrics for Prestige Fabrics. [2] The fabric designs included organic shapes, repeated patterns and some typography.

Lack of money was an abiding problem, especially as it made it impossible to have an exhibition, so he went to work at the coal mines in central Australia, spending a year in Leigh Creek. It was there that he became attracted to the possibility of painting directly with light. He spoke about his experience of the light in central Australia in a 1969 interview with Hazel de Berg:

The colour is so superb and vivid, it’s alive. I’d get up in the morning, just before the sunrise, and everything is covered with blue … and then you get the green sky with pink clouds, or pink sky with green clouds, or—it’s incredible the light and the changes of light, and then I started to try to incorporate this light into my paintings.

The intensity of the light in the desert drew him back to perceptual effects he had first experienced as a young man, when he had found that if he pressed on his eyeballs he could generate the sparkling internal light effects known as phosphenes. In an earlier interview he had mentioned the effect the light of the desert had on him:

The terrific iridescence you can get behind the eyes in Central Australia forces you to think of the source of light—be it beam, lantern or sun—and to think of it as the most impressive, most flexible and richest tool imaginable for an artist. The life giving source. … Why couldn’t a painting change its shape, form and color? ... It seemed to me that you could achieve this by using light as a tool and that the closest thing to the source of light we know and can handle confidently is electronics.

A painter and sculptor, he was also an inventive photographer, and his initial experiments in his ‘painting with light’ came with his photography, film-making and designing sets for the theatre, opera and ballet. He described his photographic practice as one of abstraction:

I used a normal camera with several systems of lenses which I usually set up for each individual shot, in such a way that I get my object so abstracted that it doesn’t remind me of the original any more and it becomes an object on its own—it has completely its own right.

Sometime in 1955 he discovered the technique of sandwiching transparencies, producing abstract meaning from figurative photographs. This later ‘became the basis for Stan’s Sound & Image productions’.

His film-making was often an extension of the techniques he developed in his photographic experiments, and would later be thought of as ‘underground film’. In 1955, during the shooting of his film Seven South Australian Artists, he met filmmaker and cameraman Ian Davidson, with whom he collaborated on several imaginative, abstract and sometimes surrealistic films, from Quest for Time (1955–56) to the planning of Time Riders, which became the 1970 Sound and Image event. Quest for Time was followed by Translucencies, made using materials laid out geometrically onto a sheet of ground glass lit from below; and Four Movements (1956), inspired by a performance of the SA Ballet Theatre that Ostoja-Kotkowski attended in December 1955. He was subsequently asked to paint the backdrop for the SA Ballet Theatre’s 1956 performance of Swan Lake and it was with this that his career as a set designer began.

His design for Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1960) was an abstract painted backdrop of sweeping organic curves, while for Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral (1961) for the Adelaide University Theatre Guild he created a household of furniture in a two-storey interior. From 1959 he worked with a minimal line, few props, scrims, lighting and slide projections to stimulate the imagination, giving an indication of the setting without making it explicit and he became more adept at evoking mood and the imaginary. The set for Verdi’s opera Macbeth (1964) exemplified Ostoja-Kotkowski’s use of photographic projections and the lighting ‘of stark evocative forms which were varied atmospherically by the play of additional lights of changing intensity and direction’.[7] From 1960 and its inauguration, he was a regular contributor to the Adelaide Festival’s theatrical and opera presentations.

Ostoja-Kotkowski’s stage work was complimented by what became his own unique series of Sound and Image presentations. These were abstract versions of his theatre work using collaged projections: film, photographic slide, electronic music and, after 1967, lasers, with dancers and actors working in the light and becoming screens for its projection. Lasers provided an important vehicle for the development of a range of new techniques and technologies that could be used in theatre and audio-visual production. In 1960 the Adelaide entrepreneur Derek Jolly had returned from Europe with a range of new equipment including tape recorders, projector dimmers for producing dissolves between multiple slide projectors and the latest photographic apparatus. This new equipment enabled the first of the Sound and Image events, Orpheus (1960), to include the first use of quadraphonic sound, and the first demonstration of ‘chromasonics’—Ostoja-Kotkowski’s term for the synæsthetic mixing of sound and light using technologies that analyse the sound to control the switching and dimming of lights or lasers—in Australia. The production was compiled and directed by Ostoja-Kotkowski and presented in the Union Hall at Adelaide University. With contributions from many in Adelaide’s artistic community, it involved dance, music, poetry and projections of ‘continuous multi-image changes that go from one mood to another, from one type of music to the other’[8] to tell the tragic story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

His Sound and Image production for 1964, which was incorporated into the Adelaide Festival program, introduced a new light technology, his Polarchromatics, developed in conjunction with Dr G. de V. Gipps of Philips Research Laboratory in the Adelaide suburb of Hendon.[9] Through the use of a rotating polaroid disc mounted in front of sheets of polaroid film, they produced slowly fluid colours projected onto the backdrop, silhouetting dancers performing to multi-channel music. But it was more than just technology. In 1964 the performances included Genesis, a poem by Rob Morrison to music by the Dutch composer Henk Badings, and Woman of Andros, also with music by Henk Badings.[10] There were many collaborations. Ostoja-Kotkowski worked with photographer John Dallwitz and Derek Jolly, who this time supplied an ‘ambiphonic’ sound system. The 1966 Adelaide Festival Sound and Image included fourteen short experimental pieces set to poems, two of which were composed by a computer, with two dance performances by Antonio Rodrigues accompanied by Henk Badings’ electronic music.

For the 1968 Sound and Image Ostoja-Kotkowski presented twelve short pieces, one of which, Tidal Elements, was a poem that had been randomly composed on a computer by Clare Robertson,[11] and a play based on science fiction writer Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Veldt’,[12] which, for the first time, was accompanied by laser images.

Ostoja-Kotkowski’s most ambitious Sound and Image was his presentation of Time Riders at the Perth Festival in 1970, followed by Adelaide and other cities. Time Riders explored Aboriginal Dreamtime mythology using film, slide projectors with dissolves and filter effects, Australian music and dance. It appeared as a surreal dream-like reading of the landscape executed through the use of infra-red photography in which the natural colour of the landscape could be changed, bringing out the ‘spirit in [it], and because it has a spirit in, the trees are not the same trees and the sky is not the same, it has a different atmosphere’, though no longer the Australian colouring.[13] Davidson remarks that

Stan was using ... the ‘synchronisation of the senses’ ... where one leaves one’s mind open, to allow the artist to direct the senses, often working separately, but all coming together subliminally as an experience of the whole theme.

As rather more of a development from his exploration of light in painting, and running in parallel with his stage design and Sound and Image works, we should now look at Ostoja-Kotkowski’s electronic drawing, which in visual terms led to his later work with the laser, an intense beam of pure light.

When Ostoja-Kotkowski had first arrived in Adelaide he was painting with oils. He showed two pictures, Bridge and Light in Garden, at the 1955 South Australian Contemporary Arts Society (CAS) exhibition, and the paintings Form in Landscape and Landscape 1957 at the 1957 CAS exhibition. Form in Landscape was awarded the Cornell Prize and was purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia. However, by the later 1950s, in attempting to replicate the light and the strength of the colour he experienced in Central Australia, he began painting with PVA (acrylic) paint.

But the brightness of acrylics still was not enough. He began fiddling with an old TV set. He found he could introduce extra contrast and put the picture out of alignment and out of synchronisation .

These experiments led to his interest in electronic images and, in 1962, to his first development of ‘electronic painting’ by photographing the manipulated television screen. The first series were shown in 1964 at the Argus Gallery in Melbourne. They were of a highly distorted television raster, sometimes with images from broadcast programs embedded in them, sometimes just the raw raster lines. The lines of the television raster produce a shape on the screen of the set, which is controlled by the timing of the deflection waveforms so that it is usually a rectangle. But it need not be so, and this was the key to how Ostoja-Kotkowski produced his images. They were expressionistic, abstract images formed from the scan-lines of the TV magnetically pulled towards a point or drawn together into a cascade and yielding a loosely woven surface of bright lines sweeping and curling across the screen.[15] He predicted that the artist would be able to control the form of the electronic images as much as with painting, even though this ‘may be restricted by temporary technical short-comings’.

At the Argus Gallery exhibition he also showed the works he called Chromasonics, in which symmetrically arranged lamps changed colour according to the frequency and volume of the electronic music with which he filled the gallery along with smaller versions of his Polarchromatics.

The Argus show was not well received by the critics. Bernard Smith in the Age of 1 July 1964 described the photographs as having ‘an impersonal clinical beauty’ but said the works were ‘not painting’. Smith was also somewhat scathing of his interest in colour-music. Yet the show did lead to an invitation to give a talk at the Fine Arts Department of the University of Sydney in 1968. Still more satisfying for him was the response of the younger visitors who, he said, ‘kept coming back, over and over again, to watch these exhibits’.

In August 1965 he had a show at the South Yarra Gallery in which he exhibited his first series of Op Art paintings. They were made of plastic adhesive tapes in a limited range of colours, similar to the material used by the roads department to make reflective signs. They are strictly laid out very hard edge geometric pictures and are pure op art. Margaret Garlick in her review of the show for the Age describes two of them:

*Enclosed Spheres ... has a red and black striped background behind which run a set of circles in different colors.

The stripes change precisely at the edge of the circles and an exciting movement and release of changing colors and shapes results.

Constellations is a set of black spots on white, basically simple. But the circles are so placed that they move into a flower shape and then break apart when one concentrates on the background rather than the dots.*

She suggests that the work had its roots in ‘the fascination of pure shapes that began in the Bauhaus’.

Meanwhile, with further help from technicians at Philips in Adelaide, the electronic drawings become more tightly controlled. The technicians built him a special ‘Electronic Designing Unit’ with extra controls using test instruments from the Philips laboratory to produce waveforms that were injected into the deflection circuits of the cathode ray tube to drive the electron beam around the screen. This unit may well have been the very first video synthesiser. Although video art was only then being invented by Nam June Paik in Germany, what Ostoja-Kotkowski saw himself as doing—electronic drawing, or drawing with light—was very close to what would become a substantial aspect of it in the later 1960s and 1970s.

Using this equipment he produced a second series of electronic drawings that were shown, along with a further series of Op Art paintings/collages and four Polarchromatics, at Gallery A in Sydney in 1966. Four of the electronic drawings became the cover images of the four issues of Meanjin for 1966. These new electronic drawings, now individually named, are discrete ‘objects’, the twist and curl of the raster is three dimensional, complete, and contained within the limits of the frame. Earle Hackett, in his note accompanying the fourth cover, referred to the ‘visual delight in the sweeping mathematical form’. He considered them to be ‘chords isolated from longer pieces’ and suggested that the works should be presented as films.

James Gleeson described the Op Art paintings as a ‘cool study’ in the way colour ‘can be induced to create a sense of movement by stimulating the nerve endings in the eye’. They are severe geometric abstractions forming moiré patterns built from circles, spirals, rectangles and lines rendered in plastic tape onto a luminous acrylic painted background with such a density of packing that the natural micro-jitter of the eye makes them dazzle. For Ostoja-Kotkowski their purpose was to stimulate the retina, to learn more about colour and, as it was with the electronic pictures, to experiment further with light. There was no place ‘for sudden irrational gestures with their overtones of emotion’.[20] Elwyn Lynn complained that ‘one feels (if feeling comes into it) only retinally, not emotionally involved’.

Ostoja-Kotkowski’s evangelistic embrace of technology was considered radical. Although his skill was admired, these comments indicate one of the more common attitudes expressed at the time—and for a considerable period thereafter—about art produced with new technologies: that it was unemotional, impersonal and even inhuman.[22] Perhaps the real issue was raised by Sydney Daily Telegraph columnist Ray Castles, who, in referring to Ostoja-Kotkowski’s 1966 Gallery A exhibition in Sydney, noted that the artist

*suggested that his sort of art eventually will make the conventional brush and palette as out of date as running boards [on cars].

He sees a time when artists stand in front of computers with helmets on their heads and ‘think’ their pictures through a computer on to a glass screen beyond.

It is, he claims, already a possibility.

I don’t doubt it, but I don’t want it. Or perhaps it’s just that I’m unwilling to accept it; that I don’t want to live in a world in which art is a computer.*

However others, such as the Sydney Morning Herald critic, thought they ‘convey[ed] a feeling of mystery and simplicity’,[24] and Adrian Rawlins described Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work as being ‘perfectly attuned to the space age ... a new synthesis of art and technology which is perfectly in tune with today—and tomorrow’.

But Ostoja-Kotkowski wanted to paint with light and it was his discovery of lasers that set his course for the following years. In 1967 he received a Churchill Fellowship and travelled to the United States and Europe where he had the opportunity to take in much of the kinetic art of the time and consider new approaches. He tried out the electronic music studio in Utrecht, Holland, and visited Stanford University in California, where he witnessed experiments using lasers. In an interview with Melbourne Herald science writer Frank Campbell, he explained his interest in the laser, remarking that: ‘No matter how beautifully one paints a sunset it will not be as beautiful as the light of the real sunset. But the light of a laser can give the radiance and the brilliance that paints cannot.’

Ostoja-Kotkowski’s first public use of a laser was in his 1968 Sound and Image (with support from scientists at the Weapons Research Establishment Laser Laboratory in Salisbury, South Australia). He beamed the laser patterns onto a large rear-projection screen by directing them through pieces of distorted glass assembled onto rotating discs so that they refracted the beams of the ruby-red helium-neon laser and the brilliant blue-green argon-ion laser as the program’s rhythm or his interpretation of the music suggested.

Ostoja-Kotkowski was awarded an ANU Creative Arts Fellowship in 1971. With the considerable assistance of the staff of the ANU’s Research School of Physical Sciences workshops, in particular Terry McGee, an electronic technician, he developed a new set of sound-to-light devices, the Laser-Chromasons, which consisted in two small helium-neon lasers as well as six lamps of various colours housed in a 60-cm sphere of translucent perspex. In the base of the device, inputs from a microphone, a synthesiser or tape-recorder were divided up with a set of filters and then assigned to circuits that controlled the brightness of the lamps, whose light was reflected from rotating wavy mirrors, or that vibrated mirrors from which the lasers were reflected.[28] Essentially they show fields of colour shifting and dissolving across a translucent screen pierced by the intense striations of shutter-modulated red laser light.

At the end of his fellowship Ostoja-Kotkowski collaborated on a major sound and image concert with the Australian composer Don Banks. Banks had been director of music at Goldsmith’s College in London and was now Creative Fellow at ANU. The resulting season of concerts, Synchronos ’72, played five nights in Canberra and three nights in Sydney. Banks used the sophisticated electronic music studio he had established at ANU during his fellowship, while Ostoja-Kotkowski utilised his multi-projection capabilities, incorporating extensions of the techniques developed for his Laser Chromasons to add laser images to the slide projections.

Banks engaged two other composers, Donald Hollier and Larry Sitsky, both teaching at the Canberra School of Music, and sound artist John Crocker to write music for voice and chamber ensemble, and the Don Burrows Quartet contributed, combining their jazz sensibility with the electronic and chamber music of the more traditional composers. The four composers were introduced to Ostoja-Kotkowski’s visual concepts and then wrote their music, which was recorded and given to him so that he could incorporate the music into the visual program.

Roger Covell described aspects of the Sydney performance. Large projection screens were suspended above the array of musical instruments, sound synthesisers and other electronics, lasers, slide projectors and spotlights. Ostoja-Kotkowski’s projections gave them:

the appearance of the observation panel of a space craft, peering into ... luminous pageants of suns and moons and planets ... [which] occur when the main laser unit is tracing sprawling green nebulae and sculptured whorls of light.

He also felt that the slide projections were, when abstracts, at best repetitive and, when naturalistic, somewhat amateur.

Besides the Synchronos ’72 concert series and the Laser Chromasons, Ostoja-Kotkowski was making abstract photographs. He collaborated with Canberra architect Derek Wrigley on a chromasonic tower for the 1971 Universities Arts Festival held at ANU. In 1974 he was invited to build another Laser Tower for the Australia 75 Festival of the Creative Arts and Sciences and he provided a composite of laser images for the poster for the festival. He was also invited to contribute to the Computers and Electronics in the Arts exhibition of the festival. For that exhibition he brought along two Laser Chromasons and several of his first series of theremin pictures, setting them up on the stage so that the audience could come and play them. He had not abandoned work based on reflected light, but had added interactivity to it.

From at least early 1971 he had been making ‘paintings’ of Op-Art designs sandblasted into sheets of mirror-finish stainless steel. In 1976 he produced expressionistic abstracts in vitreous enamels baked onto stainless steel at the Simpson-Pope white goods plant in Adelaide. Both these series of paintings could be made responsive by attaching theremins, designed for him by Adelaide engineer Phil Storr, to the steel ‘canvases’ so that they became an antenna for the theremin electronics. The effect was that they made sounds as people came up to them. As Nene King noted in a review of these paintings in Ostoja-Kotkowski’s 1977 Australian Galleries exhibition: ‘Approach [the painting] and it growls and grunts. The closer you get, the more excited it becomes. If you touch its surface it lets out a high-pitched scream.’

His other important work from this period was for the Frontiers exhibition (1971) at the National Gallery of Victoria. It featured five photographers, among them Mark Strizic and Ostoja-Kotkowski, taking diverse approaches to photographs and photographic murals. Strizic worked with recoloured urban studies using his ‘photochrome’ technique, combined into a mural, and Ostoja-Kotkowski produced infra-red coloured, abstract and distorted objects, laser patterns and photo-collage in a collection of images mounted on a set of stands arranged in a circle. Their act of transcending photography, making it an art form and not simply a matter of record, outraged some of the critics and excited others.

Perhaps the main consequence of kinetic art, of which Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work was a fine and diverse example, was that the artwork became an object to be experienced, that changed over time. As Jasia Reichardt has remarked: the kinetic, in ‘creating a situation which allows for the unfolding and changing of images … suggests a process of continual development’.[31] Much of Ostoja-Kotkowski’s art was not simply contemplative, but turned on change, on variance in light and the effect that has on its context.

Light fills its environment, altering the colour, form, shading and readability of a space. At its simplest it is the light reflected from a picture and into the eye of the beholder. At its strongest it is light as the source, not reflected, but entering the eye directly; from lamps, through filters, from neon, from the television tube and the trace of the laser. Ostoja-Kotkowski came to understand these factors well. In his painting he explored the potential of reflected light and attempted, through his electronic images, to bring it directly to his audience. In his stage sets and Sound and Image events he used light, photographic projections and lasers to transform both mood and scene, and lights and lasers gave him the entry point to his responsive sculptural works. For him, the interest was in visual phenomena, but it also lay in motion and the synchronisation between sound and the light.

Notes

1.Alan McCulloch ‘Art Chronicle: The Drawings of S. Ostoja-Kotkowski’, Meanjin, 1951, no. 3. Back to article

2.Ian Davidson, ‘The Beginning’, in his Art, Theatre and Photography, Remembering Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski (1922–1994), n.d., n.p.Back to article

3. Hazel de Berg, Conversation with Josef Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski, 1969, NLA Oral TRC/1/448–9.Back to article

4.Ostoja-Kotkowski, quoted in Laurie Thomas, ‘Creating images—at the speed of light’, Australian, 9 January 1968.Back to article

5. de Berg, Conversation.Back to article

6.Davidson, ‘The Beginning’Back to article

7. Joss Davies, ‘Culture in Australia–Adelaide’s Festival’, Current Affairs Bulletin, vol. 33, no. 12, 27 April 1964, p. 187.Back to article

8.de Berg, ConversationBack to article

9. A smaller scale, self-contained version of the Polarchromatics was shown at his Electronic Images exhibition of that year at the Argus Gallery in Melbourne. Back to article

10. See Ian MacDonald’s website, http://www.crookedmirror.com/soundandlight/sound.htm.Back to article

11.Davidson, ‘Sound and Image’, Art, Theatre and Photography; see also de Berg, Conversation.Back to article

12.This short story is the first work that I know of which actively describes the concept of virtual reality and its potential developments (somewhat horrific in this case).Back to article

13.de Berg, Conversation.Back to article

14.Davidson, ‘The Beginning’.Back to article

15.The work on this project was supported by the Philips Research Laboratories at Hendon. Back to article

16.Argus Gallery exhibition catalogue sheet, 1964.Back to article

17.de Berg, ConversationBack to article

18.Margaret Garlick, ‘Experiments with our vision’, Art Notes, Age, 25 August 1965.Back to article

19.Earle Hackett, ‘Electronic Painting: The “Images” of Ostoja-Kotkowski’, Meanjin, no. 4, 1966, pp. 494–5. There are film sequences of these images in the Mortlock Library archive of Ostoja-Kotkowski.Back to article

20.Hackett, ‘Electronic Painting’.Back to article

21.Elwyn Lynn, ‘Beholder’s Eye’, Bulletin, 1 October 1966.Back to article

22.Helen Sweeney, ‘A marriage of art and science’, Sunday Telegraph, 25 September, 1966.Back to article

23.Ray Castles, ‘Can’t add up art by computer’, Daily Telegraph, 22 September 1966.Back to article

24.Sydney Morning Herald, 22 September 1966.Back to article

25.Adrian Rawlins, ‘Beyond painting—Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski talks about electronic methods of creating images’, Announcer (Netherlands), February 1965.Back to article

26.Quoted in Frank Campbell, ‘Instant art with a laser beam’ Herald, Melbourne, 17 April 1971.Back to article

27.S. Ostoja-Kotkowski, ‘The medium is not the message’, Hemisphere, vol. 15, no. 12, December 1971, pp. 18–24; and S. Ostoja-Kotkowski, ‘Audio-kinetic art with laser beams and electronic systems’, Leonardo, vol. 8, 1975, pp. 142–4.Back to article

28.Telephone conversation with Terry McGee, 8 November 2005.Back to article

29.Roger Covell, ‘Image of Music’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 October 1972.Back to article

30. Nene King, ‘His paintings growl and grunt’, Woman’s Day, Sydney, 19 December 1977.Back to article

31. Jasia Reichardt, ‘A perspective of kinetic art’, Studio International, vol. 173, no. 886, February 1967, p. 58.

— Stephen Jones