In the 21st article in a series on 20th century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius explores the world of Caesar Attard.

The art of Caesar Attard (b. 1946) is difficult to define due to its complexity and idiosyncratic evolution. Attard investigates the opposites, the dualities; experimentation is an integral part of his game. His art, conceptual, inquisitive and ephemeral, is very much in touch with the general world around him, be it technological breakthroughs, sociopolitical considerations as well as the introspectively personal.

Caesar Attard

Attard, born in Żejtun just after World War II, is the sixth of seven children. He enjoyed a happy but cocooned childhood amid a genuine Catholic rural upbringing and a parental encouragement to pursue his artistic studies; his parents realised that their young son demonstrated a precocious aptitude at drawing. His brothers all found employment at the dockyard and followed in their father’s footsteps. The young Caesar was the exception as he had a different calling.

He was named after his uncle Ċesarin, a priest who died years before he was born. The young boy was deeply intrigued by what could be termed as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ at his parents’ house, which displayed some heirlooms, for instance a miniature chapel in a bottle and a chalice which belonged to uncle. There were mementos, his uncle’s legacy, spread all around the house and this contributed to a haunting atmosphere as it felt that Uncle Ċesarin still inhabited the house, 15 years after his untimely demise.

Attard’s imagination as a young nascent artist was also fired by a couple of Francesco Zahra’s very peculiar paintings at the Żejtun parish church. A decapitated St Catherine, milk spurting from her neck, and a St Dominic, indulging in some sadistic fun involving some poor souls suffering the pangs of hell, revealed a different perspective to a religion embracing love, mercy and repentance. The parish church’s burial crypt, with its holdings of exhumed mummified bodies, must have been another source of morbid wonder.  This imagery is somehow evoked in the series of early 1990s paintings of people in bed, arguably one of the zeniths of Attard’s artistic career.

In Bed 2 (from the 1994 series Paintings and Drawings)

Attard started to attend evening classes at the School of Art when he was about 14 years old, under the tutorship of Vincent Apap who was known to insist on technical perfection in drawing. Barthet, who was a great colourist and a stickler for perspective, was his tutor both at the Lyceum and,  later, at the School of Art.

Attard initiated his studies at St Michael’s Teaching Training College to become an art teacher and, later, a lecturer at the Junior College, a career that spanned decades.

In the early 1970s, he met Josef Kalleya, one of the fathers of Maltese Modernism. A great friendship flourished, notwithstanding that the sculptor was almost 50 years Attard’s senior and that they were opposites in terms of artistic concepts.

Kalleya’s Apokatastasis was the fruit of years of experience through his enthusiastic exploration of the literature of Dante, Milton and Papini as well as in the ‘heretic’ philosophy of Origen. Attard was like a nerve ending, interested in current global events, among which were those related to science and technology, to cybernetics and sociology, acting as a stream of stimuli. Kalleya’s mix of theology, philosophy, Christology and literature intrigued the younger artist as this was far removed from his normal fare and the two artists nourished and stimulated each other in terms of concepts and execution. Both were in search of art that didn’t put special relevance to the finished work. They both abhorred a stereotyped art in which the finished piece became an artifact serving a collector’s agenda.

Matter for the Christian

I am not so sure whether what we do now is art or something not quite art. If I call it art, it is because I wish to avoid the endless arguments some other name would bring forth

This friendship led to a 1975 exhibition, Innovation and Continuity, at the Malta Federation of Professional Bodies that, in those days, was headquartered in Paceville, a far cry from the chaos it is nowadays. The title of the exhibition itself is an empirical indication of the dualities that run through both artists’ oeuvre. Kalleya exhibited his expressionistic drawings and sculptures, thematically derived mainly from his Apokatastasis philosophy while Attard indulged in his novel spectrum of technological-themed and Fluxus-inspired art works.

Participant at B/S/b installation

This exhibition was a multimedia event in which a new composition for vibraphone by Maltese composer Charles Camilleri was performed by drummer and percussionist Charles ‘City’ Gatt. Meanwhile, Attard projected hand-cut slides to Ray Agius’ Jazz improvisations on keyboard, a multidisciplinary performance titled Triangular Relations. Happenings and performance art were something totally new for Malta in those days. This event and others, such as Attard’s Human Pantographers and his Open-Ended Meta-Dimensional Field, both of 1977, should be considered as breakthroughs that contributed to our country’s mid-1990s conceptual art revival, amid Malta’s participation in the 1999 Venice Art Biennale.

The term ‘Happening’ owes it origins to American artist Allan Kaprow, who coined it back in the late 1950s to describe performances and events that even included occasional theatrical productions. The events were restricted to a limited audience that interacted and participated in the actual happening, thus contributing to its creative evolution.

Happenings and performances are generally regarded as the aftermath of Dada and Surrealism transposed to a different time and space. Artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Nam June Paik, dance choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage were very active protagonists, an indication of the multidisciplinary nature of these revolutionary and new art forms. Fluxus is intricately linked with these artists too. However, Fluxus was more interested in avantgarde music while happenings delved more into the theatrical aspect of the improvised performance. In all cases, there was an emphasis on the artistic process rather than the finished product. This resonated well with both Maltese artists’ philosophy.

Attard joined the aged and moribund Atelier 56, which he tried unsuccessfully to revive. The older members of the iconic group wouldn’t be bothered to embark on its reinvention. Attard was one of the brains behind Vision 74, an artist group that stood for a new direction and attitude towards art. He tried to redefine Atelier 56 by fusing it with Vision 74, under a mutual aegis.

Feeding the Crowd (from The Life and Passion)

He attempted to reinvigorate Atelier 56 through the concept of Ideazzjoni, loosely translated as ‘IdeaAction’. It was a partly successful attempt to decentralise the art group and encourage and promote initiative – the transformation of a concept into its active counterpart through improvised performance. It implies energy, youthfulness, improvisation, flow (the moniker Fluxus refers to flow) and movement but taking on board the older generation of modernists was doomed to fail. The important 1950s group that contributed so much to the birth of Maltese Modernism through its constant advocating of change was now well past its heydays.

The 1980s saw a return to a more conventional art by Attard that resulted in a number of solo exhibitions. In 1987, together with E.V. Borg and the late lamented sculptor Frans Galea, he was one of the lecturers of the Systems of Knowledge studies in post-secondary education. Attard taught art practice at the Sixth Form and, later, at the Junior College in 1994. He was joined by fellow artists Joseph Paul Cassar and the late Isabelle Borg as teachers.

The early 1990s’ The Life and Passion series of limited-edition prints demonstrates Attard’s superb mastery in the graphic medium. This cycle of etchings started out as drawings and organically evolved into two sets of 10 prints. One can regard these works as a revisit of his Roman Catholic roots and upbringing and a revisitation of biblical New Testament narratives.

In these early years of the same decade, away from the heady youthful days of conceptual art, Attard delved into the indelible memories of the Żejtun parish church burial crypt and the mummified bodies down below. These ruminations subconsciously returned to haunt the artist and to produce a series of poignant expressionist paintings thematically linked to vulnerable people in bed, in different states of slumber, sickness, sexual intimacy and death.

WHITEPAGES installation in H-ardcore

The imagery concerned dualities and religious narratives of death and resurrection; the threshold separating life from the afterlife; the bed as the stage for sweet death, a metaphor for the strictly intimate; the transience of dreamworlds; the reluctance to leave the comfort of the bedsheets to get on with life’s routines.

Attard exhibited this series of impressive works in his 1994 Paintings and Drawings solo exhibition in the crypt-like space of the New Gallery at the Auberge de Provence, in Valletta. One can be casually reminded of Oskar Kokoschka’s Bride of the Wind (aka The Tempest) in the rhythm and flow that characterise transient, occasionally doomed relationships – bodies, sheets and all. These works also evoke Henry Moore’s amassed and shrouded cocoon-like bodies of his Shelter Drawings, eliciting vulnerability and impotence in the face of some predetermined destiny.

The new millennium found Attard pursuing a more conceptual path that beckoned to his 1970s oeuvre, among which “­ -> ” (2007) and H-ardcore (2012). One can also mention his participation with an installation titled In Memory of our Luminaries in a 2018 collective, The Island Indoors, that featured Matthew Attard, Aaron Bezzina and Ryan Falzon and his B/S/b (blood/spittle/blank) installation that investigated his 1970s ink-drops experiment.

Attard certainly deserves the title of pioneer of Maltese Modernism as he introduced conceptual art as well as more unorthodox artistic approaches to these islands. Kaprow’s words could be his own: “I am not so sure whether what we do now is art or something not quite art. If I call it art, it is because I wish to avoid the endless arguments some other name would bring forth.”