'Reflections on art and art history by one of Australia’s most distinguished and innovative contemporary artists.
'Credo brings together essays from different stages in Imants Tillers’ career, from ‘Locality Fails’ to ‘Metafisica Australe’ and ‘Journey to Nowhere’, and closes with an essay written especially for the collection, ‘The Sources’, on the artists and writers he has drawn on in his art. These essays express an aesthetic credo which has larger implications for both literature and art created out of the experience of migration. His self-coined concepts like ‘the idea of incommensurability’ and ‘reversible destiny’, his ideas about appropriation and the importance of reproduction in Australian culture, the encyclopaedic range of his work, and his orientation and re-orientation towards Aboriginal art, articulate an Australian aesthetic which constantly seeks connectedness between the local and the international, and a broader understanding of the complexities of provincialism. What he calls ‘the revolt of the margins’ is evident in the provocative nature of his writing too, in its wit and irony and intelligence.' (Publication summary)
'In the early sixteenth century, the Italian Renaissance poet and philosopher Giulio Camillo conceived an imaginary structure for universal knowledge named The Theatre of Memory; essentially a classical amphitheatre that inverted the position of spectator and stage, turning the auditorium into a tiered structure that fanned into rows of encyclopedic knowledge. Imants Tillers makes no mention of Camillo’s theatre in his anthology of essays, Credo, but the structure could be a parallel schema for his own expansive project The Book of Power – an ongoing inventory of all the canvas board panels Tillers has painted since 1981, which totalled 102,663 by 2018.' (Introduction)
'In the early sixteenth century, the Italian Renaissance poet and philosopher Giulio Camillo conceived an imaginary structure for universal knowledge named The Theatre of Memory; essentially a classical amphitheatre that inverted the position of spectator and stage, turning the auditorium into a tiered structure that fanned into rows of encyclopedic knowledge. Imants Tillers makes no mention of Camillo’s theatre in his anthology of essays, Credo, but the structure could be a parallel schema for his own expansive project The Book of Power – an ongoing inventory of all the canvas board panels Tillers has painted since 1981, which totalled 102,663 by 2018.' (Introduction)
