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Painter, film maker, printmaker, puppeteer, performance artist, George Noel Gittoes was born in Sydney in 1949, and spent his early years at Rockdale, about three kilometres west of Botany Bay. In 1966, after an unhappy time at Kogarah Boys High, he spent the last two years of high school at Kingsgrove North High, near the family’s new home at Bardwell Park on the East Hills railway line. Gittoes’ early interest in Islamic cultures led him to persuade his art class to specialise in Islamic art for the first NSW Higher School Certificate of 1967. Inspired in part by his sister, the artist Pamela Griffith, and his mother, the potter Joyce Gittoes, George was early interested in making art but despite a precocious talent for drawing, he turned at first to poetry. At the end of school his English teacher, the actor Don Reid, gave each of the advanced English students a copy of Fitzgerald’s translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which led the young man to read further into Sufi literature.

On leaving school Gittoes enrolled in combined Arts/Law at the University of Sydney. 1968 was the first year Fine Arts (now called 'art history and theory’) was taught to undergraduates. This he found interesting, especially the lecture on Van Gogh which led him to read the artist’s Letters to Theo. Fellow students remember him enthusing on Van Gogh’s vision of art and his doomed dream of an artists’ community. Other university subjects were less than inspiring to Gittoes and he effectively dropped out before the end of first year. Undergraduate students were invited to attend the first Power Lecture in May 1968 which led the young Gittoes to meet the visiting American critic Clement Greenberg, who advised him (and other students) to travel to New York. By the end of 1968 Gittoes was in New York where he spent some time at The Art Students’ League, an open access art school. Here he worked with the African American realist artist Joseph Delaney. He also met Andy Warhol and observed the operations of The Factory.

On his return to Australia in 1969 Gittoes befriended Martin Sharp, Albie Thoms and others in their circle which included many discontented former students of East Sydney Technical College (which was a part of the state-wide institute of technical art education, with the umbrella title 'The National Art School’). In the early 1970s Australian art education, especially in New South Wales, was in flux. Universities had yet to incorporate art schools, and the TAFE sector was less than satisfactory to students who were interested in ideas as well as manufacture. Art, music, performance, food and film were experiencing a burst of creativity, but there was no formal institution to channel this energy, no official educational program to encourage new ideas. The idea of living Van Gogh’s ideal of a Yellow House where artists could be and work together came out of casual conversations and opportunities that surrounded this group of discontents. The Yellow House was established in 1970 at 59 Macleay Street Potts Point, the site of the old Terry Clune Gallery, with Martin Sharp as its prime mover. Here, for about two years, the work of an unorganised group of artists and performers became one focal point for creative activity in Australia. The aesthetic adventures of that time captured popular imagination, especially those in the media, advertising and in performance. Gittoes was a performer and the puppeteer. His magnificently decorated puppet theatre of 1971 has been recreated in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum. The puppet theatre is also recorded in Greg Weight’s Yellow House photographic portfolio, which remains the only reliable visual archive of the Spring exhibition and other events of that time. As a part of working through his ideas for performance and painting, George Gittoes began at this time to create elaborate diaries, visual, collaged and written records of art and ideas that became his daily companion. He continued this practice throughout his career, and diaries of various aspects of his career are often exhibited alongside his more formal work.

Life at the Yellow House was intense, fast moving and unsustainable, and Gittoes left towards the end of 1971. By 1972 he had moved to Bundeena, at the edge of the New South Wales Royal National Park, where he lived until 2008. The light-filled waters of Port Hacking and the patterns of the bush were woven through his art, especially his holograms of the 1970s and paintings of the 1980s. In 1972 he met some visiting Aboriginal artists from Mornington Island, temporarily based near the Park to link them with local Indigenous communities, and began working with them. Friendship and curiosity led Gittoes to explore aspects of Aboriginal sensibilities and he began making paintings, performances, holograms and a film, The Rainbow Way. Although this used abstract forms and imagery it was based in part on the great creation myth of the Rainbow Serpent. His collaborators on this project included the young art historian Gabrielle Dalton, who later became his wife, and the composer Martin Wesley-Smith. Between 1979 and 1981 these two joined with him and the late Ian Fredericks to create a series of light shows, held deep in the bush at the fresh water lagoon of Wattamolla.

By the end of the 1970s Gittoes was thinking in film. His first documentary, made for ABC TV in 1982, was Tracks of the Rainbow which followed a group of Aboriginal children from New South Wales as they travelled north to meet with tribal elders from Mornington Island. His ongoing friendships with people at Mornington Peninsula led him to what was to become his first war film on the conflict between Indigenous people and the white legal system, Warriors and Lawmen (1983). Gabrielle Dalton was producer, a position she retained for all his subsequent films. Three years later Gittoes travelled to Nicaragua to make another war film, The Bullets of the Poets. His interest here was the connection between war and poetry, and this triggered a long-term involvement with art, war and culture in conflict. An interest in visualising conflict also extended to his interest in industrial life, and the human faces behind decayed industrial sites. A painting of a soldier led to his first acceptance by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the Sulman Prize of 1988 with El Tigre – Nicaragua. He became a regular exhibitor in the annual series of prizes awarded by the AGNSW. In 1993 Gittoes was awarded the Wynne Prize with Open Cut, a painting of a decayed Aberdare Colliery in Queensland.

The 1991 invasion of Kuwait turned Gittoes to a fresh examination of both war and how those who designated themselves to be 'peacekeepers’ would face conflict and death. His photographs of conflict in Cambodia (1992) and Somalia (1993) were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial as he recorded Australian soldiers working in United Nations’ peacekeeping activities. This led to his first success in the Blake Prize, awarded in 1992 for Ancient Prayer. He also accompanied members of the Australian Army’s Public Relations unit to Rwanda in 1995. His photographs record some of what he saw; his paintings and drawings show what could not be photographed as the United Nations soldiers tried in vain to prevent the massacres. He has described his place as an artist in this context as an 'independent witness’, an observer who is not a part of any side. This is the context for his painting The Preacher (awarded the Blake Prize in 1995), which he says he painted as a demonstration of the power of faith to both save lives and to face death with grace. In 1997 George Gittoes was awarded an AM for his services to the arts and international relations.

Gittoes’ paintings, drawings and photographs of war gave him a significant international reputation, and throughout the 1990s and into the new century he received many invitations to speak in both the USA and Germany. He was also invited to a residency at the University of Michigan. He continued his fascinations with Islamic cultures, and travelled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2001 he was awarded a Centenary Medal 'for service as an internationally renowned artist’.

In late 2002, shortly before the US invasion of Iraq, Gittoes was in the USA to give a paper at the University of Michigan. He visited Washington where he witnessed the mass demonstrations against the future war in Iraq. The futility of these protests combined in his mind with the age of the demonstrators who tended to be older than the generation being sent to fight. He saw the need to speak to those who saw life through rapid-fire video clip images on MTV, to make art that would speak their language. This led to the creation of the documentary Soundtrack to War (2004) which was the result of two extended journeys to Baghdad. Despite having no official standing he interviewed the young US soldiers on the music they played as they burnt and bombed the city. On camera he asked about the impact of death, and recorded their responses to killing. He recorded music of the inhabitants of Baghdad as they dealt with regime change, and also the ideas and original music of the US soldiers from the African American underclass providing the bulk of the US fighting force. Soundtrack to War was shown at the Sydney and Berlin Film Festivals (2005), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2005), Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (2005) as well as being shown on cinema screens in Europe, the USA and Australia. Seventeen scenes in Soundtrack were used by Michael Moore in his Academy Award winning film, Fahrenheit 911 (2004). A second film, Rampage (2006), which examines the Miami based subculture of one group of African American soldiers whom Gittoes had met in Iraq, was shown at the Berlin, Sydney, Vancouver and Montreal film festivals in 2006 before being released in Australia, the UK, and the USA. When it was first released in Australia, Margaret Pomeranz described Rampage as “intensely human, vulnerable, and insightful” (2006).

In 2007, in order to make the third film of the 'War on Terror’ trilogy Gittoes returned to the North West Frontier Province Pakistan, which he revisited in 2008 for further filming. The Miscreants of Taliwood shows both the culture of the frontier land, and the contrast between the militant dogma of the Taliban and the spiritual traditions of Sufism. In The Miscreants of Taliwood Gittoes argues that the Taliban have more in common with their former paymasters of the CIA than with their co-religionists. As a part of the narrative Gittoes has incorporated scenes from two comedy Pashtu language films made with local actors, using original performances of traditional tunes. This has the added advantage of circumventing copyright issues with recorded music that effectively eliminated the profits from Soundtrack to War. The burlesque of the actors is contrasted with footage of bombed shops and mosques. The Miscreants of Taliwood also includes interviews with senior figures from several aspects of the complex politics of the region. Even in its preliminary version, as screened at the 2008 Sydney Underground Film Festival under the title The Miscreants, this film was surprisingly predictive of later events in the North West Frontier and gives cultural context for the rise of the Taliban. The Miscreants of Taliwood was successfully screened at the Telluride Film Festival in 2009 in advance of cinema release.

In 2008 George Gittoes was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of New South Wales. His work at the time included paintings and etchings (printed by Pamela Griffith and her assistants at the Griffith workshop). This work progressed toward allegorical interpretations of the conflicts that are shaping our age, using imagery derived from art made by US soldiers in their Kuwait staging post, and the Marvel comics made to honour the 'War on Terror’. In June 2009 Gittoes participated in Creative Sydney’s 'Notes from the Underground’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art for which he recreated and updated the giant puppets from the Yellow House era, modified to include his recent concerns.

In July 2009 George Gittoes relocated to Berlin, Germany.

Writers:

Mendelssohn, Joanna Note:

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed