Higher beings command mystic truths

Glenn Barkley is an artist, writer, curator and gardener based in Sydney and Berry, New South Wales, Australia. His textured and tactile works draw upon the history of ceramics, poetry, the garden and conversations about art.

Many of the works in this exhibition were made in the looming shadow of Australia’s bushfire and climate change emergency — a time of political tension and doubt about the future and what it might look like. In this context, Barkley began to question his own faith and beliefs and in turn developed a series of works engaging with the spiritual.

The exhibition’s title, Higher beings command mystic truths, is from a mash-up of two works in the contemporary art canon that question and affirm the spiritual in art — Sigmar Polke’s Higher Beings Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black and Bruce Nauman’s The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths. For Barkley, both works question the spiritual relevance in art, whilst, especially in Nauman’s case, seem an affirmation of spirituality’s importance.

“‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths’ was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it. It’s true and it’s not true at the same time. It depends on how you interpret it and how seriously you take yourself. For me it’s still a very strong thought.”

Bruce Nauman

Barkley likes the idea of true and not true, earnest and not earnest, joke or deadly serious — the spaces between these competing ideas are the space in which he works.

Barkley was previously senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2008–14) and curator of the University of Wollongong Art Collection (1996–2007). He is co-founder and co-director of The Curators Department, Sydney, and of kil.n.it experimental ceramics studio, Glebe, Sydney. Recent major exhibitions include imayimightimust, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2018); yetmorecontemporaryart, Artspace, Sydney (2017); and the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object, Art Gallery of South Australia (2016).