Tracey Moffatt - Body Remembers

The current shutdown has given me an opportunity to reflect on an exhibition held at Tarrawarra Museum of Art last year; Tracey Moffatt’s Body Remembers photographic series and her video work Vigil both of which received acclaim at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Walking into the space, there was a strong sense of alienation pouring out of these 10 sepia-hued photographs, of displacement and discord.  A lonely domestic figure (played by Moffatt) in an abandoned homestead seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  The colour of the walls was obviously chosen to emphasize the sombre mood of the exhibition.  Yet the photographs are also highly evocative, there is a sense of longing and sorrow.

Why has she been left behind, or has she returned?  What was she doing there in the first place?

Moffatt rarely gives interviews, but a Sydney Morning Herald article tells us that in preparing the series of photographs she created a diagram or mind map listing her various ideas and influences;

“Desert and silence”

"Essays about the ruin in art that I have never read."

"The back of women's necks."

"The history of Mount Moffatt Station – the former vast cattle station in Queensland where some members of my family worked in 1910 – of which I know nothing."

"De Chirico – shadows of the afternoon."

She also mentions the film Black Narcissus, the works of Andrew Wyeth and Martin Scorsese, glass-plate photography, Irish lace, Spain, Egypt, and various film scenes and actors.  A disparate list indeed, yet you can see many of these influences in the final series. 

We never see Moffatt’s face, instead we either see her in the distance from behind or she is gazing away from us.  According the Tarrawarra’s director Victoria Lynn, this emphasises one of the central themes of the photos: the collision of looking and being looked at.

"It is as if the woman portrayed is returning to the place where she used to be a servant, returning to that place of servitude, remembering the trauma," Lynn says. "She is looking and gazing in various directions away from the camera but she is also aware that we are looking at her.”

Moffatt was born to an Indigenous Australian mother and an Irish father in 1960, but was adopted into a white family in the suburbs of Brisbane at age three. Her birth mother would visit her and accustom her to Indigenous identity, thus allowing her to take part in two separate cultures growing up.

This exhibition is at once personal and universal, referencing the stolen generation.  This is not a new theme for Moffatt.  Her 1989 series Something More referenced the forced removal of young Aboriginal women from their families and their internment as domestic servants on rural properties.

Tracey Moffatt describes Body Remembers as ‘a play with time, backwards and forwards of the past and present’.  She appears to be exploring the legacy of colonisation, of resulting intergenerational traumas and their reverberations across time and place.

It was one of those exhibitions where viewing it alone seems to be the only option.  The carefully constructed compositions allowing the viewer to absorb the loneliness and the sense of simply being out of place.

References;

Sydney Morning Herald

Tarrawarra Museum of Art

Mosman Art Gallery

Fred McCubbin; A Story Of Evolution

A recent article published online by the National Gallery of Victoria discussing Australian artist Fred McCubbin got me thinking about a memorable exhibition from the mid 1980’s.  “Golden Summers” was held at the NGV from October 1985 until January 1986 and it was the exhibition that left me convinced that my future would be an artistic one.  (At the time I was studying for my Associate Diploma in Cartography – GROAN!!). I can remember taking a day off work to visit the exhibition thinking the crowds would be modest – wrong!  Hell, it wasn’t even raining which is when many people think of visiting galleries.

The Golden Summers catalogue - a wonderful resource

The late 19th Century saw a blossoming of Australian landscape painting in and around Melbourne, and later, at Sydney Harbour which was part of a nationalistic fervour that was developing at the time.  This was not a uniquely Australian phenomenon, there were similar movements happening in the Barbizon School in France and in Russian landscape painting at the time.

Walking around the NGV show, I could almost taste the dust and feel the heat emanating out of these works, constantly asking myself “how did they do it?”  One of my favourite artists of this period has been Fred McCubbin whose work showed great development during his career.  While, for me, the work of Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts seemed to plateau early on in their careers.

Fred McCubbin (arrowed) with his students at the National Gallery School, 1893. Note the large number of female students. A study in art was considered part of a woman’s deportment at the time.

McCubbin, or The Prof as friends liked to call him (he was an avid reader), was born in West Melbourne in 1855. The son of a baker, his mother encouraged his fondness for drawing while a local pastor lent him Cunningham’s Lives Of The Most Eminent British Painters to read and a set of landscape prints to copy.  In 1869, McCubbin enrolled at the Artisans School of Design at the Trades Hall in Carlton and paid 2 shillings per term to study figure drawing under Thomas Clark.  Fellow students included his close friend Louis Abraham and Charles D Richardson.  According to McCubbin, “Clark was partly paralysed, he could only speak in the faintest whisper and was so feeble that he could hardly hold a crayon – so we youngsters did what we pretty well pleased.”

Among the artists he most admired early in his career was Louis Buvelot (1814 -1888), arguably the first artist to portray the Australian landscape as it really was rather than viewing it through European eyes.  In 1871 McCubbin enrolled at the National Gallery School where he remained a student for 15 years before being appointed drawing master there – a post he held (much loved, apparently) until his death in 1917.

Home Again, 1884, oil on canvas, 85 x 123 cm. This early work shows the strong influence on McCubbin of his teacher G F Folingsby.

McCubbin married in 1889 and the following year he named his first son Louis, after his close friend Louis Abraham.  Abraham reciprocated by naming his son Frederick.  Abraham had shown great promise as a painter and founded, along with McCubbin and Tom Roberts, an artist’s camp at Box Hill in 1885, but he had to devote more time to managing his father’s cigar manufacturing business.  During the 1890’s he became increasingly depressed, once writing to Roberts in Sydney of his lost artistic career.  He committed suicide in the cellar of the factory in 1903.

A Bush Burial, 1890, oil on canvas, 123 x 225 cm

Whilst at Box Hill, McCubbin painted A Bush Burial in 1890.  He dug the grave in his own backyard and the female figure is his wife, Anne.  He initially intended to title the work Last Of The Pioneers, as by the 1880’s a nostalgic reverence for the pioneering early days of settlement was already widespread in the now largely urban community.

It’s instructive to contrast this painting with one of his later works, Autumn Morning, South Yarra from 1916.  Over the decades, commentators have tended to focus on the narrative aspects of McCubbin’s work, yet in his own writings McCubbin discussed the craft of painting and his fascination with the painted surface together with the use of different materials and techniques.

Autumn Morning, South Yarra, 1916, oil on canvas, 68 cm x 135 cm

It is argued in the NGV article that the apparent spontaneity of Autumn Morning is misleading and the work is actually just as technically complex and fastidiously constructed as his early work.  He would apply the paint layer, let it dry and then rub it back to reveal the layers underneath.  He would manipulate the paint using palette knives, brush handles and even cloth.  “Experimentation with the construction of the painting was clearly of far greater interest to McCubbin than was the subject itself”.

McCubbin’s preferences in supports changed over time as well as his technique.  In Lost 1886, the paint is applied thinly over a finely woven canvas.  However in Lost 1907, McCubbin used a much courser canvas to assist in the development of texture of the painted surface.  In his early paintings, he concentrated on careful modelling of forms using predominately brushes and playing down the surface.  Later in his career, he focussed on the development of the surface using a variety of techniques.

What The Girl Saw In The Bush, 1904, oil on canvas (private collection)

In What The Girl Saw In The Bush 1904, McCubbin appears to have applied the paint directly onto a cotton surface without any preparation of sizing and priming.  This is thought to be bad practise and yet the painting has survived well.  This highlights McCubbin’s keenness for experimentation.

So why the transformation in McCubbin’s technique, you may be wondering?  I always thought it was his trip to Europe in 1907 which was the catalyst for change.  But as I have discovered in this NGV article, his technique was undergoing transformation long before this which makes it all the more remarkable.  It is his desire for innovation that stands McCubbin apart from almost all of his contemporaries.

The Pool Heidelberg, 1910 oil on canvas, 50 x 75 cm

For me, it is something of a relief to learn that McCubbin’s later work was not as spontaneous as it seems, that he worked and reworked the surface to get the effect he wanted.  Patience, perseverance and a willingness to experiment is just as important in an artist’s armoury as raw talent.

References;

Golden Summers - exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, 1985

The Art of Frederick McCubbin, His Materials and Techniques - NGV Art Journal 33

Art Born Of Anger - David Wojnarowicz

“Hell is a place on earth.  Heaven is a place in your head.”  Thus wrote New York based artist David Wojnarowicz in his essay Shadow Of The American Dream.  He was a gay activist, print maker, painter, poet and photographer who died of complications from AIDS in 1992.

It was only in 2018 that the arts establishment decided to afford Wojnarowicz the recognition he deserved by staging a series of retrospectives of his work.  One of those exhibitions was held at the Whitney Museum in New York and was titled History Keeps Me Awake At Night.

Born in New Jersey in 1954, he began creating a body of work in the late ‘70’s.  But given his background it is remarkable that he made it to adulthood at all.  He was the youngest of 3 children, his mother was very young whilst the father was a violent alcoholic.  When David was 2 years old, his parents split up and after spending time with his siblings in a boarding house where beatings were frequent, they ended up with their father and his new wife in New Jersey, the universe of the neatly clipped lawn – according to Wojnarowicz, “where physical and psychic violence against women, gay people and children could be carried out without repercussions.” 

Chelsea Piers, the setting for much of Wojnarowicz’s photography

By the mid 1960’s, the Wojnarowicz children decided they’d had enough of their father’s violence and traced down their mother, but she had only a tiny apartment in Manhattan and was in no shape to be caring for 3 now troubled children due to having problems of her own.

David eventually ran away from home and found himself hustling in Times Square at the age of 15.  He also liked to draw and go to movies on his own.  He briefly returned to his mother’s apartment but she had already kicked out his siblings and at 17, he found himself on the streets for good.  He would sleep in boiler rooms or cars, some men were kind to him, some weren’t.  In 1973 his sister threw out a lifeline by offering him a bedroom in her apartment.

Wojnarowicz, Self Portrait 1983-85

In the late 70’s he began taking photographs of his friends wearing a mask of his kindred spirit Arthur Rimbaud in locations from his hustling days before he fell into the somewhat dysfunctional East Village art scene that included Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat and Peter Hujar.

Jacket worn by Wojnarowicz at a 1988 AIDS demonstration.

But it was the AIDS crisis that propelled Wojnarowicz’s work to prominence in the 1980’s as, one by one, he witnessed his friends and lovers die of a disease the Reagan Administration refused to name.  Art (and for that matter, sex) provided him with an avenue to escape the loneliness and isolation of his life – to escape the “prison of the self” as author Olivia Liang puts it in her book The Lonely City.

Wojnarowicz, Death Of American Spirituality 1987

In his wanderings around New York he often found himself at the Chelsea Piers which were left in a dilapidated state following the decline of shipping in the 1960’s.  It was here where his erotic and creative juices were fed and it was here where the ravages of the AIDS epidemic took hold.  Photography was to Wojnarowicz an act of taking possession, a way of making something visible and keeping it in storage.  He also produced some short films and his writings included the autobiography Close To The Knives (1991). The title says it all.  After he was diagnosed with AIDS in the late 80’s, his work took on a more political edge and he became involved in public debates around medical research and funding, morality and censorship in the arts, and the legal rights of artists.

Wojnarowicz, One Day This Kid 1990

According to Laing, 66,000 people died of AIDS in New York City alone between 1981 and 1996 when combination therapies became available.  People were sacked from their jobs and rejected by their families, patients were left on hospital trolleys (that’s if they were able to be admitted in the first place).  Nurses refused to treat them, funeral parlours to bury them and politicians and religious leaders blocked funding and education.

Wojnarowicz, Green Head 1982

In Close To The Knives Wojnarowicz wrote “My rage is really about the fact that when I was told I had contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realize I had contracted a diseased society.”   He died 22 July, 1992 with his lover and family beside him.  The expression triumph in the face of adversity is a tediously overused cliché, yet it seems to describe his life.  In spite of everything he went through, he was able to so intensely and eloquently express his inner most feelings through a variety of media.  And act as a passionate spokesman on behalf of others.

Chelsea Piers

References;

The Guardian

The Lonely City – Olivia Laing, Picador Press, 2016

The Woman Who Conquered Marcel Duchamp

In the final 20 years of his life, Marcel Duchamp secretly carried out work on an installation piece that none of his friends were aware of at all.  Quite an achievement for one of the 20th Century’s most famous artists. He gave explicit instructions that it was not to be displayed to the public until after his death which was in 1968, and the work had puzzled and intrigued friends and art critics alike for more than 30 years since.  It had been assumed that Duchamp had given up producing art decades before – but not so.

Marcel Duchamp, ‘Etant Donnes’ (Given), 1948-68, mixed media

The personal drama that inspired this masterpiece is as fascinating as the piece itself.  Born in 1887, Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, conceptualism, whatever took his fancy at the time.  Early in his career he experimented with various painting styles which he later referred to as his swimming lessons.  Having become proficient in a particular style, he got bored with it and moved on to the next.  The final painting during this restless period was the now famous Nude Descending A Staircase which was regarded by Cubists of the period as an affront to their genre.

Marcel Duchamp, ‘Nude Descending A Staircase’, 1912 oil on canvas, 147 cm x 89 cm

As a consequence, Duchamp removed himself from the Cubist coterie and never worked within a group again.  He said he was never comfortable being in a group because he always wanted to make a personal contribution.

He then decided to subvert centuries of art history with his readymades, everyday objects which he turned into art simply by adding his signature.  The most notorious being a urinal he submitted to an exhibition in 1917.   He once said he didn’t care for the word “art”, it’s been so discredited. And after being reminded that he had contributed to this discrediting himself, he agreed but also referred to the ‘unnecessary adoration’ of art today.  “But this is hard for me because I have been in it all my life and yet I want to get rid of it”.  A conflicted individual, perhaps?

One of his more perplexing works was “Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even” or “Large Glass” which was thought to reflect his inability to combine sexual and emotional involvement.  It is an etching in glass which he worked on for 8 years from 1915.

Marcel Duchamp, ‘Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even”

The top glass is thought to contain the bride whilst below her are nine bachelors seeking to be united with her but are locked in an endless cycle of frustration.  The remarkable American artist Beatrice Wood (1892 – 1998) fell in love with Duchamp in 1916, but found him perplexing and emotionally detached.  He was regarded by his friends as the king of the bachelors, but then along came Maria Martins.

Martins was the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States.  They arrived in New York in 1939.  Early in her life in Brazil it was thought that she would become a professional musician, instead she became a very accomplished sculptor. After her first marriage ended she moved to France where she met and then married the diplomat Carlos Martins Pereira e Souza, and through his various postings, she learnt a variety of styles from woodcarving, ceramics to bronze carving  which would become her medium of choice.

Maria Martins, ‘The Impossible’ 1946, Bronze

Not long after arriving in New York she fell in with a group of surrealist exiles which included André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson and inevitably Marcel Duchamp.  The surrealists had an impact on her work which became more complex, organic and plant like but still drew on Amazonian folklore.  The female figure was always central to her work.

Maria Martins, ‘However II’ 1948, Bronze

Martins began her passionate affair with Duchamp in 1946.  Her daughter, Nora Martins Lobo thought it was extraordinary that they could get involved given that they were so different – he, a cold, withdrawn intellectual and she a passionate person who loved and hated violently.  At this time her life alternated between the diplomatic circle in Washington and a more bohemian life in New York.  He was fascinated by her and she found him a challenge and according to her daughter, Maria loved challenges.

Duchamp’s biographer, Calvin Tomkins, believes this relationship opened him up emotionally in ways that had never happened before.  He was unable to maintain the emotional detachment that had characterised so much of his life.  In 1947 Duchamp produced an erotic sketch of her that confirms Maria was the model for the Etant Donnes.

During their 2 year affair Duchamp encouraged Maria’s development as a sculptor, spending many hours in her studio and helping to organise exhibitions of her work.  But in 1948, her husband was posted overseas – and off she went.  This left Duchamp devastated and he wrote a series of despairing letters begging her to return whilst working on the Etant Donnes.

In an interview, Nora Martins Lobo draws attention to the sculpture ‘However II’ (above) and how the figure has her feet firmly on the ground – and that was her mother.  She knew she had to stop flying and come back to earth.  Maria and Duchamp met briefly in 1951 and he resigned himself to the fact that it was over.  “I feel happy when I think of you”, he wrote.

Duchamp was briefly married in 1927, but in 1954 he married Alexina Matisse (Teeny), daughter in-law of Henri.  They had a happy marriage and she helped him construct the Etant Donnes.  Late in the development, he changed the colour of the hair in the model to match Teeny’s, not Maria’s. In accordance with his wishes, the Etant Donnes was installed in a room next to the Large Glass at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Initially the public is confronted by a large wooden door that Duchamp found in Spain and had transported back to New York.  Through 2 peep holes, the viewer can see a body moulded in plaster and pig skin sprawled out on grass and twigs (first image).

When it was revealed to the public, the work came as a shock to those who thought they knew him as it seemed a denial and contradiction of everything he stood for.

In 1966 a major retrospective of Duchamp’s work was being installed in London by artist Richard Hamilton.  Shortly before the exhibition opened a mysterious package arrived from Brazil which contained the picture below.  The sender was Maria Martins.  Hamilton spoke of taking Duchamp on an inspection of the show just before the opening and when they came to this picture, Duchamp seemed initially shocked and then clammed up, not wanting to talk about it.

Maria Martins died in 1973 at the age of 78 and spent her last few years holding occasional exhibitions before turning to writing essays on poetry.

Maria Martins, ‘Night Chant’ 1968, (her last sculpture), gold bronze

References;

The Secret of Marcel Duchamp – BBC/RM Arts, 1997

www.awarewomenartists.com

Calm In A Crisis

At times like these when we are reeling from the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic, not to mention last summer’s bushfires, we can become so pumped up with anxiety and dread that we can forget to keep an appointment with someone very important - our inner selves.

We might have intimations of it whilst driving on a quiet freeway or when contemplating a sunset or dawn.  I can remember when I was a kid the beautiful aroma of eucalypt forests that would waft across the suburbs of Melbourne first thing on a hot summer’s day, before the traffic pollution and rising heat obliterated it. 

Author Alain de Botton argues that we should bring a little perspective back to our needlessly tense and preciously brief lives.  I think the operative words here are “preciously brief”, and this brings me to a regular theme of his at the School of Life – the concept of a higher consciousness.  For much of our lives we have no choice but to live in a state of lower consciousness – we must in order to attend to practical everyday matters.  But taken to an extreme, this can lead to us over reacting to insults, blaming others and developing an exalted sense of who we are, our beliefs, and our place in the world.

Alone In The Marches, oil on canvas, 71 cm x 100 cm

Achieving a higher state of consciousness involves loosening our hold over our own egos and rising to a less biased perspective of the world.  Our mind moves beyond self-interest and cravings and we are able to relate more to our natural environment, wind, cloud, trees or even the aroma of a distant forest.  We may even start to have a little more compassion for our fellow human beings.  Periods of higher consciousness can be desperately short lived, but the idea is to harvest their insights for the panicky periods when we need them most.  This is not easy to achieve and I am still working on it.

Art has a role to play here as you will see from the following;

Jacob Van Ruisdael, ‘Wheat Fields’, ca 1670, oil on canvas

A man with a traveller’s pack approaches a woman and child in a cultivated landscape.  There is a glimpse of boats at sea on the far left.  But it’s clear the viewers’ eye is directed to the dominant sky which takes us to another level of consciousness, and thus the encounter below is rendered insignificant.

Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Monk By The Sea’, 1809, oil on canvas

This painting was daring in its originality when exhibited at the Berlin Academy in 1810.  It’s not strictly a landscape or a seascape, so what is it?  Friedrich once said a painter should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself.  This could involve making a conversion from the material world into the spiritual world.  At a time when most artists were producing images of an idealized or corporeal world, Friedrich presented viewers with a void.  Or is it?  The presence of a figure who appears to confront the unknowable void before him adds a poignancy to the work and gives it an emotional power.  Critic Robert Rosenblum argues this painting prefigures the work of Turner and Rothko who sought to escape from the material world by distilling the mysteries of nature and spirit in veils of atmospheric colour.

Antoine Chintreuil, ‘Expanse’, 1869, oil on canvas

As the realities of the industrial revolution began to hit home, with grueling and often dangerous factory work replacing traditional farm labour, there grew a demand for images of a disappearing rural Arcadia.  People were flocking to the cities to find work and just survive.

Many artists of the mid-19th century began to focus on nature’s awesome immensity as, perhaps, a form of meditation including Antoine Chintreuil with this painting that made quite an impact at the Paris Salon of 1869.  There is a rural setting in the foreground but this is reduced to insignificance by the vast horizon and the sky above.  The scene is peaceful and the sunrise “suggests a benevolent deity presiding over the verdant land below.” ROSENBLUM

‘Arctic Summer’, oil on canvas, 77 cm x 92 cm

Places like these really do exist and we need to acknowledge them.  They can bring a context to our own existence in the overall scheme of things.  Our relationship with the natural world is a contract.  If we respect the laws of nature, we will reap the benefits.  If not, we will be punished - as is becoming increasingly apparent.

‘Hopetoun Lawn’, oil on canvas on board, 61 cm x 72 cm

When I paint a scene I try to imagine being there, how I am feeling in that scene – perhaps serene or a little melancholy but not anxious.  It helps me create a mood so that these scenes are intended to be more than just a record of what’s there.  I guess you could argue that I’m trying to access a state of higher consciousness.

References;

Alain De Botton - The School Of Life

Robert Rosenblum - Paintings In The Musee D’orsay

Robert Rosenblum & H. W. Janson - Art Of The Nineteenth Century, Painting and Sculpture

A Canine Conundrum

If you are a dog lover and you are wondering how to fill in your time during the current coronavirus pandemic, well I’m afraid viewing the 1999 documentary Puppy Love presented by art historian Waldemar Januszczak is not the answer.

A curious title given that for 50 minutes, Januszczak snarls his way through a canine critique and it’s not clear which he despises more, dogs or their owners.  He visits a dog show which he regards as incorrigibly eccentric and he considers breeding practices to be the canine equivalent of eugenics practised by the Nazis.  “We breed them until their heads look like misshapen Halloween pumpkins (often to the detriment of their health), we cut their bollocks off, we send them to a doggy psychiatrist and still most of them won’t do what we want them to do.  The message appears to be that we love dogs, but not for themselves, it’s for the prestige they can bestow upon their owners.

We witness dogs defecating. He is particularly annoyed at dog owners who treat his local park as a public toilet, and he scoops up some dog shit with a spoon and takes it to a laboratory for analysis.  We are presented with a list of nasty diseases it can cause and yes, dog shit can make your baby go blind.

He visits the proud owner of the world’s heaviest dog, a 130 kg British Mastiff.  We see the certificate the owner received from the Guinness Book of Records – with flies crawling across it.  We are told that averaged across the entire population, the British spend 50p per dog per day on dog food, 50p a day would keep a family of 3 alive in Angola.

He speaks with a clinical psychologist who has some unflattering opinions about dog owners, but you’ll have to watch the program to find out what they are.

He interviews a RSPCA inspector who admits to be driven to tears at home after witnessing instances of cruelty against dogs.  There was the famous case of the celebrated Kennel Club judge Jennifer Bosson, who was sentenced to 4 months jail and banned from keeping dogs for life after being convicted of cruelty.

He visits a Korean restaurant and eats dog meat (yuk!).  Needless to say, it is heavily spiced.  This staggers me somewhat because it’s my understanding that dog meat contains vast quantities of vitamin A.  When the Australian Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson lost all his supplies down a crevasse, he was left with nothing to eat but his huskies.  The vitamin A almost killed him.  And which part of the dog do the Koreans cook, you may be wondering?  All of it.

Dog show eccentricity?

We witness a castration (ouch!) and Januszczak describes the practice as pest control. 

To the strains of Elvis Presley singing ‘Old Shep’ we visit a dog cemetery and witness a funeral.  Januszczak talks to a grieving owner who said she couldn’t stand the thought of her pooch being buried at home. Which is fair enough, but the exercise is expensive.  For some reason, watching this segment took me way back in time to the demise of my beloved cat from childhood.  Shortly after I got married I found out that it had been “put down” by a vet after being savaged in a possum fight.  She was quite old by then and afterwards – well she was left with the vet.  To be disposed of, I guess.  This has always bothered me so I won’t be too sarcastic about the concept of pet cemeteries.

K-9 from Dr Who. The perfect substitute?

At the end of the program, there is some consolation for dog owners when we see footage of dogs being trained in rescue work in Korea.  Strangely, there is no mention in the program of the incessant barking which has always been my bone of contention (pun intended) with dogs.  Then again seeing-eye dogs don’t rate a mention, nor does the consolation dogs can provide to the elderly.

Gustave Courbet, Nude Woman With Dog, 1868

But if at the end of my days all I have is a dog, then I think I’d rather die alone.

Puppy Love is available on Vimeo On Demand

Taking On The Corporate World - Ron English

He’s been referred to as a guerrilla artist and his practice described as “culture jamming”, the practice of modifying billboards or other advertisements to change their corporate message to a radically anti-capitalist one.  Since the 1980’s, American artist Ron English has been tackling consumerism, corporate America and politics head on.  His targets include fast food, liquor and cigarettes.  Strictly speaking, he is defacing public property and this is a second degree felony in the United States.  “Right up there with bashing someone over the head with a baseball bat”, he claims.

I first became aware of English with the 2005 documentary “POPaganda – The Art and Crimes of Ron English” produced by Pedro Carvajal.  Declaring that ordinary people deserve free speech and corporations do not, English and his crew hijacked billboards across New York City, either repainting them or more often posting their own signs which were a scathing attack on the original.  This was done in broad daylight – English argues you are more likely to be considered a legitimate employee than if you did this at night – then high-tailing it out of there before the police arrive.  Usually the operation takes about 7 minutes if all goes well.  Occasionally he has been arrested.

He coined the term POPaganda to mean a combination of pop art and the public being force fed information which he reinvents into something perverse.

Usually the billboards got de-hijacked within a few days but the operation generated enough public interest to make the operation worthwhile.  And besides, English was ensuring as many people as possible were able to see his art whereas most artists’ work rarely leaves their studios.

Born in Illinios in 1959, there was always something of the prankster about English.  His mother once made him an Evel Knievel costume, so he borrowed his little sister’s bike and rode over some matchbox cars.  He later made several insanely dangerous home movies with some mates before going to college to “save himself”.

A response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

In the Carvajal doco it is stated that when you live in a world so dominated by an endless stream of commercial images, where kids are growing up with their entire visual landscape being bought, sold and co-opted, you can either acquiesce to it and be passive about it you can confront it.

A reinvention of the famous Marlboro cigarette logo.

English says that one of the joys of this form of art is that he can have an idea today, paint the poster tonight and have it up on a billboard tomorrow.  He feels a little like a political cartoonist except that he doesn’t have a disapproving editor to deal with, let alone a major corporation who owns the newspaper.

English’s wife, Tarssa Yazdani, who has often collaborated with him in his projects believes the most destructive aspect of advertising is the direct marketing to children.  She sees Ron as at the forefront of a movement to take back the message and the media.  And this brings me to his campaign against Camel cigarettes and his horror that the company would create a cartoon character called Joe Camel to market their products to children.  English went after Joe Camel with a ferocity that probably led to its demise.

Another target was Apple computers and their ‘think different’ campaign where they appropriated images of some of the worlds greatest minds (including Einstein) from the 20th century.  English argues that Apple have no right to assume these people would have approved of their products because they are dead.  His response was to feature images of Charles Manson and Apple’s arch enemy – Bill Gates.

One criticism of the Carvajal documentary is that it contains no response from the corporate world.  English claims they were invited to respond, but declined.  One of English’s collaborators, Shepard Fairey believes English is challenging the whole concept democracy and free speech in the USA and to undermine the symbiotic nature of consumption is very dangerous to the powers that be, whilst the average person does not have a voice.

In 2005, McDonald’s restaurants celebrated its 50th anniversary and became an obvious target for English.

English’s character MC Supersized later featured in the film Super Size Me.

Inevitably, English became a victim of his own success, at least in regards to his billboard art.  He became so recognisable it got to the point where he could barely put a foot on a ladder in public without attracting the attention of the police or the billboard owner.  In recent years, English has produced designer toys, album covers, collaborated with musicians and others in various projects as well as holding exhibitions featuring his richly coloured and textured oil paintings.  This is much to the relief of his wife who expressed concern at the impulsive nature of his poster art, which involved many hours of work but didn’t appear to be doing anything that would enhance his career or meet their financial goals.  She wasn’t alone in this belief – a gallery director expressed the same concerns.

In 2018 he held an exhibition in Montreal called “Universal Grin”, and was asked about the title. “The grin treatment is akin to a political or corporate logo. If you want people to feel good about what your organization is doing you don’t need to engage in practices they will approve of, what you really need to do is front with a happy face…  This show is on some level about being so totally consumed by the cultural circus you can no longer be objective about it, just fall in love with its sublime perfection.”

Ron English - Universal Grin

It was also inevitable that a guy like English would be asked for his opinions on Donald Trump:  “He has the single most important human insight. Command all attention. No one cares if you are lying or not, no one cares if you know what you are talking about, they care if you are loud, proud, self-assured and entertaining. Great hair works too.”

As it did for Margaret Thatcher.

“Abraham Obama”, produced by English for the 2008 presidential elections.

References;

Juxtapoz Magazine

The Guardian

“POPaganda, the Art and Crimes of Ron English” - 2005 documentary

The Case Against Ben Quilty

I paid Tolarno Gallery in Melbourne a visit to view the work of an Australian artist who (we are told) has garnered international acclaim.  His paintings are in the collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian National Gallery and the University Of Queensland Gallery Of Art among others.  The only problem is, it’s Ben Quilty.

My latest encounter with his work has me convinced that as an artist, he would make a very good earth moving contractor.  If you are the type of person who gets almost violently passionate about contemporary issues, and you look to an artist who can vent his spleen by moving vast quantities of paint around a canvas with the dexterity of a one punch attack, then Ben’s your man. 

150 Year, Rorschach

An artist who supposedly has the ability to invoke passion and drama in his work doesn’t necessarily produce work that is aesthetically pleasing.  He seems to have no idea of surface, no idea of colour harmony.  Subtlety is Quilty’s enemy.

Are we meant to admire Quilty’s process of constructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing an image again rather than the final product?  In other words, is this a form of conceptualism where the means to an end is more important than the end?  I don’t know, all I know was the feeling of disillusionment as I walked around the gallery space.  If this is where Australian art is today, then we are in a dark period of our creative history.

Exhibition notes by Milena Stojanovska tells us that each work invites us to participate in a critical discussion.  It sure does, but not in the way she intended.  Quilty’s Santa series is meant to reference the crass commercialism of the festive season, and as a satire of a children’s fictional character it’s meant to be funny.  Really?  All I see is an ugly painting.  Reference is made to the tension in his brushstrokes, but that tension is created by a guy who doesn’t know how to handle paint.

The Big Fellow

If there is a narrative element to Quilty’s work, then for me, that narrative is lost in the execution.  Perhaps he sees himself as another of those heroic, belligerent artists in the vein of the American sculptor Richard Serra who go out of their way to challenge the art market. 

There are many artists throughout history who have expressed their despair with the world around them, but they did it in a way that engages their audience.  Quilty’s work is likely to have many viewers rushing for the exits.

The Desert

If I wanted to view the work of an Australian artist who really knew how to handle paint, who understood colour harmonies, composition and texture whilst conveying a sense of drama, I would look at James Gleeson.  His retrospective exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne during the summer of 2004/5 still resonates.  There was nothing he couldn’t do with oil paint.

I think it’s time for Mr Quilty to drive off into the sunset in his fabled Holden Torana, and perhaps throw in some burnouts along the way.  The case against Ben Quilty – pretty overwhelming, I would have thought.

Ben Quilty’s exhibition “150 Years” finishes at Tolarno Gallery on 29th February.