Sturgeon Issue 4 by Artbank

Australian art, culture, etc. Issue 4, 2015

aud $15.00

CONTENTS

Sturgeon Issue 4, 2015 11

Contributors

Editorial Daniel Mudie Cunningham

The Model and the Drawing: Intersections Between Art and Architecture Sam Spurr

On Their Own Terms: The Warlpiri Moment of 1971 Kieran Finnane

One of the Gang Miriam Kelly

Impurity and the Logic of Specialisation Katherine Moline

Beauty, Horror and the Terror of Life Chris McAuliffe

Sydney Festival

The Narcissists ZoĂŤ Coombs Marr

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I Slept With Your Image Under My Pillow The Telepathy Project & Julie Rrap

Patrick Doherty: Brute Virtuosity and Dangerous Innocence Adam Jasper

Beauty Truth William Yang

Seeing the Beauty in Contemporary Art Jacqueline Millner

108 64

Special Talent Daniel Mudie Cunningham

White Elephant Stephen Bush & Lee Serle

Grey Matter Mark Feary

A Love for Blood Greg Sindel

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What’s On August — December

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 — FRIDAY 7 AUGUST AT 8PM Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University Clayton

SATURDAY 8 AUGUST AT 2PM MONDAY 10 AUGUST AT 6.30PM Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall The very epitome of Romantic music, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 is one of the most beloved concertos in the history of the modern keyboard.

Sibelius’ Finlandia — THURSDAY 19 NOVEMBER AT 8PM FRIDAY 20 NOVEMBER AT 8PM Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall Yan Pascal Tortelier conducts the MSO in the 150th anniversary celebration of two Nordic masters. Sibelius’ majestic Finlandia is contrasted with Nielsen’s spirited Violin Concerto.

Rachmaninov’s Third —

Scheherazade —

Sir Andrew Davis conducts a thrilling night of virtuosic composition, with Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein displaying his mastery of the formidable ‘Rach 3’.

Following his enormously successful concerts with the MSO in 2014, Jakub Hrůša returns to conduct Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a vivid orchestral work inspired by the tales of the Arabian Nights.

Handel’s

Bramwell Tovey conducts

SATURDAY 5 DECEMBER AT 7PM SUNDAY 6 DECEMBER AT 5PM Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

SATURDAY 12 DECEMBER AT 7PM SUNDAY 13 DECEMBER AT 2PM Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

Join conductor Bramwell Tovey, the MSO Chorus and renowned international soloists for one of the MSO’s most beloved Christmas traditions, Messiah.

The inimitable Bramwell Tovey joins the MSO as conductor, pianist and host in this celebration of the great musical traditions of Christmas. With a program that includes classics such as Sleigh Ride, Silent Night, music from The Nutcracker, and of course, Jingle Bells sung by the MSO Chorus.

THURSDAY 20 AUGUST AT 8PM FRIDAY 21 AUGUST AT 8PM SATURDAY 22 AUGUST AT 8PM Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

Messiah —

Tickets from $25 Book Now mso.com.au | (03) 9929 9600

Jakub Hrůša conducts

THURSDAY 1 OCTOBER AT 8PM FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER AT 8PM MONDAY 5 OCTOBER AT 6.30PM Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

Christmas Carols —

A musical comedy to remember

THE LAST MAN STANDING by Steve Vizard music by Paul Grabowsky WORLD PREMIERE In this hilarious and moving comedy, Steve Vizard cuts deep into the Anzac legend, and no one gets off scot-free. The Gallipoli Centennial Concert is meant to be the television event of the year, but it’s on track to be a complete fiasco. Until, amazingly, it’s discovered that the last remaining Gallipoli digger is still alive. But what will the crafty and loveable old codger say on live TV? Peter Carroll, William McInnes and Alison Whyte lead this powerful evening of story and song with music by Paul Grabowsky.

6 Nov – 12 Dec Southbank Theatre, The Sumner Book now mtc.com.au 03 8688 0800 Peter Carroll

MTC is a department of the University of Melbourne

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MASTHEAD

Sturgeon Editor Daniel Mudie Cunningham Sub-Editor Miriam Kelly

Special thanks All staff at Artbank Polly Borland Patrick Doherty Emma Johnston Gabrielle Mordy Sydney Festival Murray White

Editorial Committee Daniel Mudie Cunningham Miriam Kelly Peter Lin Tony Stephens

Sturgeon is a conceptually driven publication which commissions original content addressing issues relevant to Australian cultural life. Sturgeon is an initiative of Artbank and seeks to further promote the value of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian contemporary art to both the public and private sectors nationally and internationally.

Design Collider

sturgeonmagazine.com.au

Publisher Artbank Contributing Writers Stephen Bush Zoë Coombs Marr Daniel Mudie Cunningham Kieran Finnane Adam Jasper Chris McAuliffe Miriam Kelly Veronica Kent Jacqueline Millner Katherine Moline Sean Peoples Julie Rrap Lee Serle Sam Spurr Contributing Artists Greg Sindel Tricky Walsh William Yang Contributing Photographers John Tsiavis Zan Wimberley Artbank Artwork Photography Jenni Carter Jeremy Dillon Stephen Oxenbury

Sturgeon Published by Artbank Unit 1, 198–222 Young Street Waterloo NSW 2017 +61 2 9697 6000 editorial@sturgeonmagazine.com.au subscription@sturgeonmagazine.com.au advertising@sturgeonmagazine.com.au Printing Toppan Pre-Press Splitting Image, Melbourne All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form without permission from the publisher. Artworks from the Artbank collection have been reproduced under the Statutory Government License outlined in section 183 of the Copyright Act, 1968. All other images are reproduced with permission of the copyright holders. ISSN 2202-5294 Typefaces Lyon Text, designed by Kai Bernau Founders Grotesk, designed by Kris Sowersby Cover Tricky Walsh Because 2015 (detail) Gouache and watercolour on paper, 80 x 120 cm Courtesy of the artist Disclaimer The opinions expressed in Sturgeon are those of the respective authors and are not necessarily those of the editors, publisher or the Australian Government. Sturgeon may contain material which offends some readers.

‘Sydney Festival’ image credits (pp. 98–103) Todd Fuller Adrift 2012 Hand drawn animation, 5:45 mins Artbank collection, purchased 2012 Greedy Hen Morning Meeting Hallucination 2012 Stop motion animation, 0:55 mins Artbank collection, commissioned 2013 Angelica Mesiti Rapture (silent anthem) 2009 Digital video, 10:10 mins Artbank collection, purchased 2011 Dorota Mytych Reading 1 2009 Digital video, 12:33 mins Artbank collection, purchased 2009 Joan Ross BBQ this Sunday, BYO 2011 Digital animation, 5:00 mins Artbank collection, purchased 2012 Artbank is a Commonwealth Government program mandated with a support (through collecting and commissioning) and promotion role for Australian contemporary visual art and artists. Artbank is one of the largest institutional collectors of Australian art in the world—making its collection available to the broader public through a leasing program operating nationally.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Contributors STEPHEN BUSH is a Melbourne based painter whose painterly range is as varied and free-flowing as his subject matter, moving from lurid abstraction to figurative realism. Bush has exhibited nationally and internationally since the mid-1980s. Bush is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. ZOË COOMBS MARR is a Sydney based writer, theatre maker and comedian who is one third of the performance company post, a regular on the ABC show Dirty Laundry Live. Marr has performed in Australia and New York and was awarded Best Newcomer at the Melbourne Comedy Festival (2011). KIERAN FINNANE regularly contributes arts writing and journalism to national publications and is a founding journalist of the Alice Springs News (1994–). Finnane studied at the University of Sydney and at the Université PanthéonSorbonne, Paris, France. ADAM JASPER has written for Frieze, Cabinet Magazine, and Art and Australia, and is currently based in Zurich, Switzerland. Jasper’s doctoral thesis was on the minor categories of aesthetics both in the Enlightenment and contemporary writing. CHRIS McAULIFFE is Professor of Art (Practice-led research) at the School of Art, Australian National University. McAuliffe is a former Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne and publications include Jon Cattapan: possible histories (Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), Linda Marrinon: let her try (Thames and Hudson, 2007) and Art and Suburbia (Craftsman House, 1996). MIRIAM KELLY is Curator & Collection Coordinator at Artbank and Sub-Editor of Sturgeon. Kelly is a former Assistant Curator of Australian Painting & Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 11

JACQUELINE MILLNER is Associate Dean (Research) and lectures in critical studies at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Millner’s publications include Fashionable Art (Bloomsbury, 2015, with Adam Geczy), Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (Ashgate, 2014, with Jennifer Barrett), and Conceptual Beauty (Artspace, 2010).

GREG SINDEL is a Sydney based graphic novelist, filmmaker and animator, who participates in the Studio ARTIST program, facilitated by Studio ARTES, Hornsby. Sindel’s novella for Sturgeon was commissioned by Artbank as part of the NSW Arts and Disability Partnership, generously supported by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services and Arts NSW.

KATHERINE MOLINE is an artist, researcher, curator and senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales Art & Design. Moline’s current projects explore how experimental design reformulates strategies of historic artistic avant-gardes and social pacts. Moline is represented by Yuill Crowley, Sydney.

SAM SPURR is a designer and theorist working with the intersections between art and architecture. Spurr is a senior lecturer at University of New South Wales Art & Design and part of the collective N, who present art, architecture and design projects and lectures internationally.

DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM is Assistant Director & Head Curator at Artbank and Editor of Sturgeon. For the past two decades he has been productive as a freelance writer, curator and artist. JULIE RRAP is a Sydney based artist whose practice is concerned with representations of the body. Rrap has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, and surveys of her work were held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007) and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (1995). In Australia, Rrap is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. LEE SERLE is a Melbourne based choreographer whose works have been presented across Australia and internationally. Serle has received numerous awards and has made work for Lucy Guerin Inc, Sydney Dance Company, Lyon Opera Ballet, France, Zoukak Theatre Company, Lebanon, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

THE TELEPATHY PROJECT are Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent, Melbourne based artists whose collaborative practice is based on the possibilities of alternate forms of communication—particularly telepathy and dreams. Their projects have been presented in Australia and internationally. They produced new work in 2015 supported by the Artbank Gertrude Contemporary Commission. TRICKY WALSH is a Hobart based artist whose projects focus on spatial and communication concerns. Walsh has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally. Walsh is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart and Mars Gallery, Melbourne. WILLIAM YANG is a Sydney based photomedia and performance artist who is well known for his exploration of identity politics with reference to his sexuality and cultural heritage. Yang has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. In Australia, Yang is represented by Stills, Sydney.

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EDITORIAL

Editorial: Letting the truth get in the way of a good story All I want is the truth Just gimme some truth... – John Lennon, 1971 This issue of Sturgeon considers two perennial themes important to cultural life: truth and beauty. Personally, I stopped believing in truth a long time ago. If you’ve spent most of your life in the service of art, you quickly realise that truth is an interpretation among many others of the events and things making up everyday life. Yet, our culture is doggedly held ransom to the imperative of truth, as if we somehow need a benchmark against which to pin all the lies we feel we’ve been told. But as I say this, a John Lennon protest lyric penetrates my headspace— Just gimme some truth—and as it does I understand where truth lies. Beauty is one of the great lies of our time. And while I think this is ‘true’, I can’t quit beauty or resolve why it is important to everyday life. Or why I feel lied to. That’s fine because the many fine contributors in these pages go some way in fleshing out a diverse, unfixed picture of the poetics and politics shaping beauty and truth in contemporary Australian culture. In a sense the words and pictures in this issue remind us that contemporary art is important as it makes meaning of life, calling attention to the invisible ideological bonds that tell us what to think and how to be. In doing so, the in-between zones or the ‘grey’ areas (as Mark Feary points out in these pages) are revealed. It becomes apparent that to talk of beauty and/or truth is to make it visible in unexpected, otherwise invisible places. Whether say in the seductive decrepitude of Polly Borland’s imagery; the subtle “poetics of ordinariness” found in William Yang’s world; the complex relationship of picturing to seeing in Warlpiri desert painting; the mercurial subconscious dream states unravelled by Julie Rrap and The Telepathy Project; or just because (to quote Tricky Walsh’s commissioned work) a single word can cut through the noise and tell it like it is. Because. Daniel Mudie Cunningham Editor, Sturgeon

STURGEON

Beauty, Horror and the Terror of Life Chris McAuliffe

“Do I look all right?”, Nick Cave asks the photographer. Professional obligation prompts the question; the lens is his cue to deliver indie-rock-god. There’s a part to be played, however contrived he finds it. “Do I look alright?” Actually, under the circumstances, it’s a legitimate question. Cave is sporting an electric blue wig and a matching dress. His head has been squeezed into a stocking. A crude lipstick mouth has been scrawled across his crushed features. The Joker meets Sailor Moon. “You look beautiful”, Polly Borland reassures him. Really? Beautiful? “I think my work is ugly but beautiful at the same time”, says Borland. “There are two contradictory elements. I surround myself with what I consider to be beautiful things but I don’t think my work is beautiful. I think technically, it’s beautiful. The way I photograph things is beautiful. But I don’t think the subject matter or the content is beautiful.”

Portraits & Styling John Tsiavis

BEAUTY, HORROR AND THE TERROR OF LIFE

This duality is something Borland traces back to her childhood in Melbourne. The daughter of an architect, she recalls, “There were always two different things that I was attracted to. I was surrounded by a lot of Scandinavian design...there was a certain level of sophistication and taste. But I also was very attracted to the garish and the tacky and the carnivalesque style; cheap clothing from the Victoria Market, kewpie dolls from the Melbourne show.” Fresh out of art school in the 1980s, Borland says she was “obsessed” with beautiful people. No surprise, then, that her early work was in fashion and editorial photography. But eventually she concluded that while “beauty is fantastic, there’s a lot more going on in life than just that. That’s why I’m not content with pretty pictures.” All the same, after Borland moved to England in the mid-1980s, her success as an editorial photographer meant that her subjects were frequently people who were beautiful for a living; Natalie Imbruglia, Kylie Minogue and Michael Hutchence among them. Confronting that contradiction made for a curious type of portraiture. Borland didn’t deny the beauty of her subjects but neither did she surrender to it. Cate Blanchett, says Borland, “is incredibly beautiful.” But that didn’t tempt Borland into glamour photography; “I’m not in pursuit of an idealised form of beauty; in those photos, she’s stripped back, no makeup, plain clothes.” While there’s no getting around the essential architecture of Blanchett’s beauty—there’s a spot reserved for her cheekbones in the National Museum of Australia, right next to Phar Lap’s heart—Borland’s flattened, frontal perspective injects a stark, schematic note. It’s almost as if the tight framing and unmodulated, occasionally chilly, lighting were damping the bright flames of charisma and celebrity. Elsewhere, Borland seems to contest her sitter’s aura; rich, decorative fabric backdrops and lush, saturated colour make for an amped-up kitsch that talks over the top of the subject. A portrait, Baudelaire wrote, “is a model complicated by an artist.” (81) And Borland is adamant that her complications, not the model’s attributes, take precedence. “I want things to be difficult to look at,” she told David O’Reilly in 2007. “I don’t want things to sit easily. I don’t want people to be comfortable with my work. I find the things that have influenced me most through my life are things that have jolted me out of complacency, shocked me almost... Things that have got a horror to them.”(47) There’s a clue there to the particular version of beauty that Borland pitted against what she now calls the “La La land” of colour supplements and newsstand glossies. The 17

disquieting effects of many of Borland’s photographs have their roots in surrealism’s ‘convulsive beauty’, which André Breton discovered in the mysterious effects of natural camouflage and mimicry, the eerie stasis of frozen movement and the fetishised fragments of the found object. Versions of these are scattered throughout Borland’s photographs in her shape-shifting masquerades, stark apparitions and talismanic constructions. Borland is no card-carrying Surrealist; it’s not a case of direct affiliation, more the chance meeting of the crepuscular figuration of Charles Blackman and Arthur Boyd with punk rock in early 1980s Melbourne. Convulsive beauty isn’t a matter of merely startling images, such as the infantilising of grown men in Borland’s series ‘The Babies’ (2002). It has more to do with effects first explored in her portraits and brought to a head in her recent series ‘Smudge’ (2011), ‘Pupa’ (2012) and ‘Wonky’ (2014). These are photographs of creepy domestic theatrics, perverse dress-up games, and manky arts and crafts projects. Bodies are squeezed into tights, sprouting boils and phallic appendages. There’s a menagerie of scruffy plush toys that you wouldn’t want anywhere near a nursery, and a giant bunny that’s more Donnie Darko than Peter Rabbit. Thrift store stockings are transformed into shabby puppets or crushed together into tabletop landscapes that look like the sock drawer from hell. Borland melds beauty and decrepitude in a fatalistic aesthetic. A Freudian trajectory, then? Pleasure principle meets death drive? I prefer to think that Borland is taking up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s challenge, setting aside the superficial, the “boasters and buffoons,” and joining the “perceivers of the terror of life”.(318) “I’m twenty years away from death,” says Borland, “it’s always there, you get more and more conscious of it. We’re all in various states of decay. Nature’s in various states of decay and yet it’s incredibly beautiful. People are beautiful in their various stages of decay. I’m celebrating life but I’m also aware of the inevitable horror.” This is a riposte to a beauty become routine. As Stendahl put it, “Beauty is the expression of a kind of habitual search for happiness.” (251) Always forthright, Borland puts it more bluntly. “For me,” she told Ignacio Andreu, “beauty is easy... I think we see it so often we’re saturated by it.”(24) The more astute observers of Borland’s photographs aren’t led astray by beauty but turn instead to the deeper mechanisms at work in the exchange between the image and the viewer. For Susan Sontag, the key issue is the “attractiveness” of Borland’s

BEAUTY, HORROR AND THE TERROR OF LIFE

photographs. (16) Beauty is a button to push, attractiveness is an appeal to a psychic economy—a kind of courtship ritual involving the photograph’s offer and viewers’ discovery of their desire. As Peter Milne notes, this is what makes the photographs both “seductive” and “sinister”; honest viewers have to admit that an image is attractive because it unearths their deep fantasies rather than just delivering on the superficial ones.(7) Beauty is a complex calculus of display and desire, exhibitionism and voyeurism. In Borland’s case this rests on conscious, hard-worn transactions. She pursued Gwendoline Christie, her model for the series ‘Bunny’ (2008), through the streets of Brighton and, having recruited her, spent five years developing the relationship that would produce the works. Aside from Christie’s height (the physical attribute that initially caught Borland’s eye), her great contribution was her sense that photography somehow owed her its attention: “When Polly came into the shop and wanted to take photos of me I just thought, ‘Finally!’”(Walker, 78) Both artist and model understood that the photograph was a partnership, a kind of aesthetic contract. One wanted to photograph, the other wanted to be photographed; a relationship that gave the images an almost primal character. Both had made such a direct investment in their desire for the image that the question “Do I look all right?” became redundant. But it wouldn’t look all right to someone outside of the transaction. Christie reported her then-boyfriend’s response to Borland’s photographs: “He was horrified. He didn’t recognise me in them and I think he was disturbed to see the recorded visual evidence of the depths of a relationship he was no part of.”(Walker, 78) Christie says: “Look at me”; Borland says: “You must look at her”. But viewers feel that this is an imperative disguised as an invitation, a demand that they enter a territory that they haven’t designed, wouldn’t care to design. To find an image repellent isn’t to declare it the opposite of beautiful; it’s about being unwilling or unable to participate in the image. In ‘Bunny’, Borland and Christie partnered up in a battle against complacency. That is, complacent image making; easy beauty. And complacent image consumption; liking beauty rather than constructing desire. Being open about what they wanted out of an image meant being open about what images were for; the enactment of desire. That’s not always a pretty sight. Complacency now underwrites the ubiquity of the transmittable digital image. The glib instantaneity of a 21

post-and-like online image culture must be shocking to a photographer who routinely devoted years to a project. Borland has recently started using Instagram and Facebook. “I’m horrified at what it’s doing even to me”, she says. “You become more and more aware of the homogenisation. Not only of conceptual and intellectual information, it’s the homogenisation of visuals that I find really scary. And the fact that I’ve become more and more aware that everyone’s doing the same thing.” Borland’s responses to this have been simple but substantial. Now based in Los Angeles, she has almost totally abandoned editorial photography. “You become dependent on the people you’re photographing, and I didn’t want to be dependent on people.” For the first time in twenty-five years, she has a studio. She’s begun confronting digital homogeneity by painting and drawing on photographic prints; something she did as a student over thirty years ago; “I always really wanted the photos to almost look like paintings. It’s a little bit punk rock. Even though the photographs are technically not rough, what’s in them is a bit rough.” She’s enjoying a sense of release and license; “I’m now much more in touch. It’s almost like the photograph isn’t enough. I’m using photography as a medium but I’m no longer really a photographer. I’m a visual artist.”

references Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Polly Borland are from an interview with the author. 24 March 2015. Baudelaire, Charles. Art in Paris 1845–1862. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. Oxford: Phaidon, 1981. Second edition. Borland, Polly with Cave, Nick. Smudge. Barcelona and New York: Actar, 2010. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Prose Works, vol 2. Boston: Fields and Osgood, 1870. Kubler, Alison, with Milne, Peter and Andreu, Ignacio. Polly Borland: Everything I want to be when I grow up. St Lucia: University of Queensland Art Museum, 2012. O’Reilly, David. Britain’s Global Australians: Sixteen Profiles. London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 2007. Stendahl (M-H Beyle). Histoire de la Peinture en Italie. Paris: Seuil, 1854. Sontag, Susan. “Baby Love.” The Independent on Sunday. May 27, 2001. 12–13, 15–16. Walker, Esther. “How we met: Gwendoline Christie and Polly Borland.” The Independent. June 29, 2008. 78.

STURGEON

Polly Borland Untitled XXIX 2010 Type C photograph, 80 x 69 cm ‘Smudge’ series Artbank collection, gift of the artist 2013

BEAUTY, HORROR AND THE TERROR OF LIFE

Untitled XXXVII 2010 Type C photograph, 80 x 69 cm ‘Smudge’ series Artbank collection, purchased 2013

STURGEON

I Slept With Your Image Under My Pillow The Telepathy Project Julie Rrap in conversation

Julie Rrap Remaking the World: Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Dreaming 2015 Pictured: Julie Rrap, Hilarie Mais Courtesy of the artist

I SLEPT WITH YOUR IMAGE UNDER MY PILLOW

the telepathy project (veronica kent and sean peoples): Sean and I both slept with your image under our pillows and these are the dreams that we had. veronica’s dream I’m with a group of friends going to stay at my friend Sophie’s house. We travel through winding stone passageways lined with hotels and bars in a medieval town and arrive at a weatherboard house with a huge backyard that ends in a large grey factory wall. The landlord is tending a small vineyard in the backyard. We have a dinner party and I drink a glass of red—I am upset as I am trying not to drink wine, but then realise it is only grape juice. We have to wait to cook the main course as there is a vegan who needs to use the oven first before we are allowed to put our meat in. Later that night everyone settles down to sleep in swags, many sleeping in the back yard. I stand on the back deck watching an electrical storm roll in—birds are colliding and being struck by lighting and feathers fall from the sky. sean’s dream I am walking down Gertrude Street in Melbourne with Veronica’s daughters. I can’t remember what, but I want to show them something from my laptop. I get it out of my bag and rest it on the window ledge outside of the Dialysis Centre. Before I even get a chance to turn on the laptop, I have to pack up and rush to the studio—I leave Sunny and Mia by themselves. When I get back to the studio I get my laptop out again but realise I am missing the keyboard and only have the screen. I realise that I left in such a rush before that I must have left the other half of my laptop back on the street. I rush downstairs to see if I can find it but instead encounter Veronica holding a brand new iPhone and coffee on top of a laptop like a canapé dish. I take her up to my studio where I explain I have been selling houses belonging to Gertrude studio artists over the phone. She doesn’t believe me so I demonstrate by selling a few. She laughs each time one sells.

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Later, I’m calling for a pizza. The lady on the other end says: “Afternoon, you’re speaking with Satan.” I am a little surprised by this but reply: “Hello Satan.” My girlfriend is standing beside me and laughs. She explains that all of the money for the pizza is going to the police because they did a really good job helping Susan with a boating accident the other week. julie rrap: I have had your image of Dreaming the Collection (2013) under my pillow for two nights. I have been dreaming but in the morning I can’t recall them. I will try again tonight. vk &sp: How’s the dreaming going? It can be really hard to dream on demand, as we have found during numerous projects where we have set ourselves this challenge! Currently we are researching and developing a project involving us choosing landscape paintings from the Artbank collection, then locating and sleeping at the sites where they were painted, and recording the dreams we have in these locations. These site-specific dreams become prompts for new dream landscape paintings. The first location, at Costerfield in Victoria, Veronica found eerie and she barely slept, only managing to catch a strange vision in the early morning. Sean, on the other hand, slept and dreamt happily. The trip to a landscape at Tidal River, also in Victoria, found our dream experiences reversed. Sometimes literal dreams aren’t necessary though and instead it’s a type of ‘dream logic’ that is generative for art making. I see this at play in your work Julie; where your body is morphing and slipping in and out of dreamlike states—enacting classic displacement and condensation-like actions. Also this lack of dreaming brings to mind this quote from French surrealist poet, Robert Desnos: “An invented dream…delivers the same secrets, carries the same portents, as an authentic one. Dream on then, Dear readers.”(Conley, 107) Desnos presented a weekly Parisian radio show called La Clef des Songes [The Key of Dreams](1938–39). The show was built around Desnos’s performance of the dreams sent in by his listeners. This strategy, of using dreams as prompts and scripts, is one that we spend a lot of time exploring in The Telepathy Project. jr: I have been conscientiously sleeping with your image under my pillow but I only seem to remember fragments. Here’s some: Percentages added to the value of something? Now confused as to what the source of the valuation was as reality drifts back into my half-awake thoughts. Marina Abramović is leading a pack of students, naked, shouting a slogan. What? It’s slipped away again. Back to reality. My dog, Cloud, barks. I have to get up to move his position. He’s nearly fifteen years of age and can’t get up without help. I slide back into

sleep again. My hand touches the paper under my pillow with your image: I’m running. The wind is heavy against my body. The colour grey saturates my dreaming. It’s Thursday night. I watch a recorded version of the American television series Empire (2015); pretty bad: Large, imposing groups of black women bounce through spaces that wind down into shifting terrains. I follow a car park underground? Winding stairs that lead where? Another night: I grow hair that is like tree branches but then appears like a pruned bush. Then zooming in the hair become tendrils of vine-like roots. It’s Sunday afternoon and I fall asleep on the couch. I wake up smiling. So Veronica and Sean, that’s all I have for the moment, but I am enjoying the process and hope that the fragments stitch together in interesting ways. Meanwhile, artists continue to come to my studio and sleep/dream for my exhibition, ‘Remaking the World’ (Ian Potter Museum of Art, 2015). Yesterday it was Matthys Gerber. Soon Lindy Lee and Mikala Dwyer. I love your Artbank project. The effect of the landscape painting and its original location prompting another version through your dreaming is such a fantastic process. I am also enjoying your research on dreaming. Many so-called Art Brut artists used dreaming as streaming; usually religious messages. I am also reminded of Odilon Redon and the Symbolists. I have a note I once took from a 1986 translation of Redon’s autobiography—To Myself: Notes on Life, Art and Artists—that he wanted to “place the visible at the service of the invisible” and to represent the “ghosts of his own mind”, which I guess is akin to representing the dreamscape. Anyway, let’s keep our discussion/thoughts going, maybe might lead to a few new works! I can picture making my hair like tree roots, Medusa-like! vk & sp: Thank you for sharing those dream fragments. There is so much there! It’s fascinating to see how the “recent and indifferent material” (that’s the way Freud described it) of your waking life is translated through your dreams into such evocative and vivid scenes. Maybe we are more used to turning our dreams into narratives because recounting our dreams to each other is such a part of our practice. When we are away on residencies together, the morning’s (amateur) mutual dream analysis is not just creatively generative but a forum for the airing of concerns about working and

The Telepathy Project Dreaming the Collection 2013 Documentation of a site-specific work, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Courtesy of the artists

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living together—cleaning, sharing funds, cooking, our collaborative projects—Sean doesn’t do the dishes, while Veronica crashes them around in the kitchen before going to bed. Sean later dreams: Veronica is at his home crying, worried how she will react to his mum’s dreadful cooking: a horrible green chicken. We have always loved the way people speak when recounting a dream as it involves a wonderful narrative confidence and certainty in the telling of a phantasmagoric experience driven by a strong internal logic. Redon stating that he wanted to “place the visible at the service of the invisible” highlights the distinction we make between these two worlds: visible/invisible, waking /dreaming, and attempts at reconciling the two, making sense of our dreams during our waking life while our waking life informs the content and fabric of our dreams. Symbiosis, doubling and transgression are everywhere. You spoke to us on the phone about the idea of objects and artworks having agency; the ability to inform and determine their own creation or outcome. The Surrealists were particularly fond of automatism and dreams and the notion of the author becoming blurred during these acts of creation. We think about our early telepathic exchange work here; making drawings that were telepathically inspired raises the question: “Are you channeling the other, or simply accessing your own preconscious thoughts?” Either way, the act of creation in these instances feels as if it is coming from the outside. Do you see the ideas of “dreaming as streaming” and “artworks having their own agency” as coming from the same place? Also are you recording the dreams of the guest artist sleepers in your studio?

jr: No, I don’t ask them about what they dreamt. The idea is that this part of the work belongs to them. Maybe they will use their dreaming to make their own work later, but I like the idea that it exists in this more liminal or potential space. Viewing the work, we can imagine what each artist may have dreamt, especially if we find out more about his or her work. The question about artworks having agency is relevant to my series ‘Loaded’ (2012). I was reading What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (2004) by W J T Mitchell when I made this work, and became interested in the push/ pull between the artist’s process and the work’s demands; a sort of call and response that goes both ways. Wearing frozen ink shoes that melted as I performed on the surface of the canvas, the resulting ‘painting’ really ‘directed’ me; things began to collect on the surface of the painting. And finally a dream: I am trying to escape some strange oozing brown mass. I run through a space, which feels familiar and I notice it is the windows along the side passage of the house in which we lived in Nerang when I was aged between nine and eighteen. I arrive into an open area like a large sports ground with tiers of seats. I notice a man who feels like it is my father but I don’t see his face. From my position on the stands I see that the brown oozing form has covered much of the surrounding terrain but now it has solidified and frozen over the shapes it has immersed. Suddenly the scene shifts. I am asleep in bed but am woken by the sensation of a moth flying into my eye. This feeling actually half wakes me and I rub my eye thinking the insect is caught in my eyelashes. The scene shifts back to a landscape that looks like glutinous rolling hills then zooms out and reveals itself as the surface of a bandage that is covering the eye like a protective patch. vk &sp: That dream was worth waiting for!

I SLEPT WITH YOUR IMAGE UNDER MY PILLOW

above Julie Rrap Loaded: Green #1 2012 Digital print, 130 x 130 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2012

references Conley, Katherine. Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life. Nebraska: Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska, 2003.

opposite The Telepathy Project’s Sean Peoples in Tidal River, Victoria, January 2015, with an image of Liz Sullivan’s painting in the Artbank collection, Tidal River Landscape 1988 Courtesy of the artists

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Beauty Truth William Yang

X, Brisbane 1968 It was a search for a particular kind of beauty, a forbidden male beauty, a search full of desire and danger. The danger was all in my closeted mind. Art was the subterfuge, the legitimising of my action. The camera between us made the action safe. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what private thoughts my subject had of the process. I dare not ask.

All images are digital scans from the archive of William Yang Courtesy of the artist

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Vernon, Sydney 1975 Then I came out. I found I could take photos freely, really about anything I wanted. Yes, I became liberated. Yes, my subjects knew my intentions. The excitement of the forbidden was replaced by a delirium of openness, although to be honest the taboo of the previous, closeted activity was more exciting.

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Strand of Flooded Gums, Buderim 2008 I looked for beauty in nature; in trees and the landscape. It seemed endlessly creative, all of its forms organic and pleasing, much more reliable than human nature.

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Frogâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hollow, Maleny 2012 But when I looked closely I saw the struggle of nature, each part of it fighting for its own survival. The giant symphony was a battle of life and death. Perhaps it was not so different from human nature after all.

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Emily, Orange County 2010 Most children are beautiful. They are just themselves. They like the camera with its attendant attentions. Then something happens and they get self conscious. They realise people look at an image in a certain way, they try to manipulate the way they look by posing, and they challenge the photographer. It becomes complex.

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Ko Un, Seoul 2015 Some old people, not everyone, come to terms with their life. Everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life is hard in some way, but the Korean poet Ko Un has had an extremely hard journey. He was traumatised by the Korean war, losing relatives and friends. In the late 1970s he became active in the democracy movement and for this he went to prison four times. He has attempted suicide twice. When I met him I expected to find a broken man, but he had come to terms with life. I found that heartening.

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Sydney Opera House during Vivid Festival, Sydney 2014 Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get me wrong, I love spectacle, I love the showy and the grand scale. The large and the magnificent impresses me, but it is an easy excitement.

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Bucket in Bathroom, Arncliffe 2009 I prefer now to be impressed by the poetics of ordinariness. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve had to work on my sensibilities a little but it can be satisfying to see the beauty of everyday things.

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Unexpected Projection, Arncliffe 2014 This picture appeared on the wall of my living room one day. It was caused by the reflection of the sun from the window of my neighbourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s car which was parked in the street. The image moved slowly, imperceptibly slowly across my wall. I thought of the sun and the earth as a rotating planet. I love projection, another term for it is magic lantern.

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My Balcony, Arncliffe 2013 A photograph captures a moment in time. You don’t have to do anything special for this to happen, just press the shutter. There’s something about the nature of the camera that makes it freeze a moment in time. There’s something about the nature of the world that makes it change and move on. These moments can never occur again, except in a photograph. Bell ringing.

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Seeing the Beauty in Contemporary Art Jacqueline Millner

In contemporary art it is a crime to speak of beauty, to refer to it, and to imply that it exists, for beauty is all emptied out, hollow, shallow, only surface deep, like a good wine to be swallowed and pissed away... â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Michael Petry, A Thing of Beauty Is... (1997)

Pat Brassington Lisp 1997 (detail) Inkjet print, 116 x 93 cm Artbank collection, purchased 1998

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Jonny Niesche Sugar ‘n’ Spikes 2012 Synthetic polymer paint, glitter and glue on canvas, 185 x 154 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2012

SEEING THE BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY ART

In his book The Love of Beauty (1989), philosopher Guy Sircello makes the at once self-evident and outlandish observation that “beauty is the best and most delightful part of our world and in loving the best and the beautiful we are the happiest and best of creatures.” Self-evident, in that for most of us an examination of our lived experience would likely accord with this observation: we would recognise the feelings of well-being and joy that overcome us when we gaze upon a beautiful scene or a beautiful work of art or the beautiful face of a loved one. Yet also outlandish, because beauty has largely left our public cultural landscape; it remains mostly in the degraded guise of mass media sentimentality and celebrity. As Petry suggests, the felt experience of beauty and beauty in art brings on embarrassment in the public sphere. Sircello argues that since the late eighteenth century, the love of beauty has lost prestige—his statement about beauty now sounds naïve, silly, and out of style. He explains this development by suggesting that with modernity, the desire to love the world was subsumed by the desire to control or remake it.(4) In his eyes, with the instrumentalism of modernism began the disparagement of beauty other than as that manufactured as another means of controlling the world. Beauty itself came to be seen as instrumental, suspect, corrupt and inaccessible, our disdain for it fuelled by fear of its power as much as by a general distrust of pleasure. Given beauty’s evocation of pleasure, a distrust of the notion of the beautiful is “inscribed upon the agenda of modernism. Under modernism, pleasure was trivial or a distraction from modern art’s work of uncovering authenticity.” (Gaskell, 272) Modernism’s ‘urge to demystify’ led us to a position where it became “nearly impossible to pilot ourselves between our substantial love for art for its own sake and our deep suspicion that all such loves are poisoned by the ideological masters they secretly serve.” (Soderholm, 3) This legacy of modernism expressed itself with particular vehemence in conceptualism, perhaps the most important forebear of contemporary art. Following conceptualism’s rethinking, aesthetics was deemed to be extraneous to art. Its argument against the commodity status of art in particular had a significant effect on the attitude towards beauty: to produce beautiful works became equated with furnishing the market with what it demanded. Postcolonial critiques conceived of aesthetics as inextricable from Eurocentric cultural oppression and the myths of Western civilisation. Postmodernist criticism was also influenced by Marxist critiques that cast aesthetics as either incompatible with serious political purpose or positively distracting of ethical concern, while feminist critiques identified beauty as a tool for the objectification of women. The postmodern critique of the pillars of classic modernist aesthetics—autonomy, disinterest, and formalism—created a crisis in aesthetic discourse, and aesthetics struggled to find a language outside these discredited terms. 43

Aesthetics also was seen as incompatible with difference —the key idea associated with poststructuralist thought. Philosopher Mario Perniola ventures that the founding philosophers of difference, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, took issue with aesthetics on a variety of counts: “Nietzsche thought that aesthetics was an aspect of optimism unaware of tragic experience. Freud believed that aesthetics dealt with topics connected to positive emotions, inspired by the beautiful and the sublime, leaving out those aspects of feeling characterised by negative emotion, such as the uncanny. Heidegger maintained that aesthetics belonged to Western metaphysics (to a thought oblivious to the sense of Being).”(4–5) Aesthetics was perceived to be founded on an assumption that the human subject was a stable entity whose feelings were self-evident, whereas difference relied on destabilising that subject and questioning the capacity of human beings for self-knowledge. (Perniola, 4–5) The legacy of this modernist and postmodernist suspicion of beauty undoubtedly permeates the contemporary period, although beauty emerged in a far more complex guise as a result of late modern and postmodern critiques that question the link between beauty and morality: “the moral weight that was assigned to beauty helps us understand why the first generation of the avant-garde found it so urgent to dislodge beauty from its mistaken place in the philosophy of art... Once we are in a position to perceive that mistake, we should be able to redeem beauty for artistic use once again.” (Danto, 28–9) The beauty that emerges from these critiques is beauty that has in certain respects appropriated some attributes previously thought to pertain to the sublime: beauty that can defend itself against charges of conceptual vacuity and commercialism by reconfiguring the theoretical parameters; beauty not reducible to a prescribed set of formal properties; beauty that does not claim to belong to an autonomous realm outside politics and social practices. It is beauty that is in some part shaped by the perceived need to craft alternatives to the dead end of an art no longer capable of communication and meaningful affect, beauty recovered by the need to find a ‘yes’ somewhere.(Beckley, xviii) It is beauty marked by pleasurable affect as a result of both sensual and conceptual engagement, defined in part by its ability to provoke an aesthetic experience that entails a ‘decentring’ of self—and hence not reliant on the discredited conception of a stable and self-knowing human subject once thought to be intrinsic to the ‘aesthetic experience’—and an expansiveness that connects the viewer with the world and the other. I have coined the term conceptual beauty to capture such an understanding of beauty. Yet, beauty in its contemporary guise is distinct from the sublime in at least two crucial ways. First, the sublime is an aesthetic founded on terror and a negative impulse, while beauty elicits a profoundly moving aesthetic response grounded not in fear but in “the desire to live, a sense of the abundance, the plenitude of life”. (Kirwan, 124) Second, beauty is grounded in the here and now; it is an aesthetic of the intelligible and the finite, which is crucial to its ability to

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Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy Deceased Estate 2004 Digital Type C print, 117 x 148 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2007

SEEING THE BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY ART

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grant pleasure widely; it is not an aesthetic of the forever deferred that ignites passions only to frustrate them. Whereas the sublime intimidates us with its ungraspability—as with the artwork that confounds us, “feeding our insecurity, abnegation, even self-loathing” (Steiner, 194) —beauty satisfies our desire for imaginative playfulness with its boundedness and accessibility. And it does so by activating our bodily responses, our physical cultural awareness. Beauty offers us an innovative approach to negotiate the persistent divide between politics and aesthetics: it places pleasure and value as central, not marginal, to any radical cultural politics; and, rather than distracting us, it can assist us in our impulse to justice, intensifying the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries.(Scarry, 111–13) Beauty facilitates a reconnection with nature, and can reignite our love of the world in such a way as to encourage us to care for it, a point driven home by James Hillman: “below the ecological crisis lies the deeper crisis of love, that our love has left the world. That the world is loveless results directly from the repression of beauty, its beauty and our sensitivity to beauty.” (Hillman, 264) Beauty as a rubric allows for the consideration of artists’ reinvestment in ‘quality’ and artistic skill and their increased turn to formal concerns in a variety of practices: not only a reappraisal of traditional media such as painting and sculpture (quite distinct from the heroic ‘return to painting’ of the 1980s), but a mounting emphasis on aesthetic and formal concerns in the originally ‘formless’ art of installation. Beauty also provides a context in which to trace the increasing engagement with materiality in conceptually driven work, as well as the enduring importance of issues related to perception and visuality. Beauty’s vernacular, its association with presentation and communication—rather than with the collapse of meaning that characterised the sublime—also allows for the consideration of how enduring concerns with identity politics, such as feminism and race are being handled with increasing emphasis on community and collectivity rather than difference. To see the beauty in the paintings of Jonny Niesche or the graphite works of Jonathan Jones allows the beholder space to muse on their various thematic allusions — to spirituality, to nature, to perception — in a mode of expansive pleasure rather than one ruled by strict conceptualism or didacticism. To give oneself over to the intensely hand-worked detail of Fiona Hall’s sculpture and etchings, or the formal intricacies of Robyn Stacey’s photographs, is to connect with broader, natural forces beyond our individual existence. To appreciate the astute arrangement of form in works like Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s Deceased Estate (2004)is to register something very profound about the relationship between aesthetics, care and belonging. To enjoy the finely honed aesthetic choices in Tracey Moffatt’s Up in the Sky (1997) is not to overlook the social realities it references, but to physically sense them with heightened empathy. To delight in the

texture, colour and composition of Polly Borland’s masked portraits, or Pat Brassignton’s domestic tableaux reconciles us to the socially awkward and repressed. Beauty may still be suspect; it may remain redolent of all the crimes and injustices that are laid at its feet. But at the same time it retains the power to attune our sensibilities to ethics, to affirm both the viewer and the viewed. It is salutary to experience contemporary art that openly engages with beauty, which complicates our viewing experince by allowing us the full gamut of the aesthetic experience. Such works go to prove that it is no longer a crime to speak of beauty in contemporary Australian art.

references Beckley, Bill. “Introduction: Generosity and the Black Swan”. Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (eds). Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New Aesthetics. New York: Allworth Press, 1998. Danto, Arthur C. The Abuse of Beauty. New York: Open Court Publishing, 2003. Gaskell, Ivan. “Beauty”. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds). Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Second edition. 267–80. Hillman, James. “The Practice of Beauty”. Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (eds). Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New Aesthetics. New York: Allworth Press, 1998. 261–74. Kirwan, James. Beauty. Manchester and London: Manchester University Press, 1999. Perniola, Mario. “Feeling the Difference”. James Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Grey (eds). Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death. New York and London: Continuum, 2002. 4–14. Petry, Michael. A Thing of Beauty Is... London: Art & Design, 1997. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Sircello, Guy. Love and Beauty. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Soderholm, James. “Introduction”. Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in the Age of Cultural Studies. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Steiner, Wendy. “The Sublime Shudder”. Bill Beckley (ed). Sticky Sublime. New York: Allworth Press, 2001.

SEEING THE BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Robyn Stacey Help Yourself 2011 Type C photograph, 94.5 x 124 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2011

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The Model and the Drawing: Intersections Between Art and Architecture Sam Spurr

Art and architecture have always been close allies. They share preoccupations with form and experience, they argue passionately about aesthetics and philosophy and they make grand claims again and again toward nothing less than the value of beauty and their agency toward social transformation. While some architecture is more artistic and many artworks highly architectural, the distinctions between the two disciplines are bound in the differences of scale, use and cost. While this is true, one need only look at the public art proposal by Hany Armanious for the City of Sydneyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a giant milk crate, which has been described as a building, and costs the equivalent of a small houseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; to realise these definitions are fluid at best.

Dr Chau Chak Wing School of Business, University of Technology, Sydney Photography Andrew Worssam

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Thomas Street Science Building, University of Technology, Sydney Courtesy of Durbach Block Jaggers Architects, Sydney

THE MODEL AND THE DRAWING: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

This article examines this entangled relationship through the lens of architecture, in particular two recent Australian examples. The University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) has been in a state of physical transformation over the past few years, producing some of the most innovative examples of contemporary architecture that Sydney has seen since the Opera House. The most famous of these is of course Australia’s first Frank Gehry: the Dr Chau Chak Wing School of Business. The second to consider is the Thomas Street Science Building just around the corner, by Sydney firm Durbach Block Jaggers. Both buildings are exceptional, yet with differences that can be framed through their distinct relationships with art: one with the model; the other with drawing. This is not simply to say that one firm has used models and the other drawings to produce their designs. Instead, it suggests how architecture’s relationship to the visual arts can aid in our understanding of its differing ways of, and capacities for affecting the world. Let’s start with the Gehry building, which has made such an impact on the Sydney architectural scene and become a central branding tool for UTS. At eighty six years old, over his long career Frank Gehry has built an illustrious international reputation with the kind of architecture that transforms cities. When the Guggenheim Museum opened in the forgotten Spanish port town of Bilbao in 1997, the value of contemporary architecture to catalyse urban renewal was born. The building was like nothing seen before at that scale—all shimmering, curving metal forms against the drab backdrop of an industrial town. What it did look like was a sculpture; a model someone had lovingly shaped in their hands, turned upside down and back to front and held up to the light. It was deployed like an object that had landed on the site, and was to be seen from multiple viewpoints: down a city laneway, across a computer screen or on a souvenir. On visiting the Gehry Studio in Los Angeles, what is initially so striking is the plethora of models, many made by both hand and machine. They amass on shelves and tables, presenting a kind of process dedicated to formal experimentation made possible through digital fabrication. The new UTS business school may be built with humbler materials than the Guggenheim, but its formal exuberance still glitters and resonates through the drab precincts of Ultimo and Chinatown. Putting aside whether or not you like how it looks—or even whether it works as an educational building—it is undeniably impressive. As an object in space, it beckons to passersby and students; as well as more abstractly, attracting more lucrative systems to the area like institutions, economic development and tourism. Around the corner is a very different kind of architecture. While hardly a conventional building, beside Gehry’s undulating bricks—or even the mammoth perforated skin of the new Denton Corker Marshall Engineering building next door—it is the most modest addition to the UTS architectural master plan. Unlike the immediate response garnered through the encounter of a striking architectural object in 51

the city, the Thomas Street Science Building must be walked through, sat in and observed, it must be experienced. This is the result of seeing a building not as a model but as a drawing. Walking through Thomas Street, the drawings that come to mind are the expansive works of New York based artist Julie Mehretu. In her wall-scaled drawings, architectural perspectives and urban landscapes, geometric shapes and forces flow in charcoal and graphite; layered and oscillating they become grand immersive environments. In these drawings time and movement coalesce to produce complex spatial experiences. Thomas Street unfolds as one walks through it; a process that is perspectival and layered. Qualities emerge that are ephemeral and shifting. This building is not difficult to grasp formally or spatially, however what remains in one’s mind is a series of experiences, crystalised moments in time. The most striking of these is to walk along the southern length of the building, a triple height chasm that draws natural light deep into the basement science labs. Descending along this fissure is to walk into and through a series of geometries constituted through form, shadow, colour and light. The fascination with drawings lies in their capacity to envision the impossible, and then allowing us to step ‘inside’. From Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Roman ruins to M C Escher’s optical illusions, in drawings the unbuildable can stand upright and inhabitable. To invert this explanation describes real spaces that take on the complexity of the extraordinary. This process heightens one’s awareness of the environment, sharpening the attention towards carefully framed vistas or undulating patterns from repeated geometries. Unlike the model that seems to extend beyond individuals, the drawing pulls architecture back into personal experiences. Art and architecture are related practices, yet their conflation is only useful if it allows us to see either one in a new light. After such a cursory discussion it would be easy to see how architecture seen through the model is about form, while to read it through the drawing is about experience. However, all architecture by necessity must do both. What models and drawings give us, beyond techniques of creation, is a way of seeing what a building does as opposed to simply what it is. Of how a piece of architecture resonates, engages and transforms us at the scale of a city, and the scale of a body.

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On Their Own Terms: The Warlpiri Moment of 1971 Kieran Finnane

The rear door opens and we step in from the bright day. Light falls from narrow high windows into this space aglow with colour, flickering with movement. Ochres, reds, white, black, softened by age. Many large concentric circles, vigorously drawn, linking parallel lines, long sinuous ones, shifting fields of dots, and a multitude of detail I have no time to apprehend. An outpouring. Thomas Jangala Rice walks ahead. In this side aisle both walls—one high, one low opening onto the central space—are entirely covered in murals. Jangala pauses, places his hand on one set of concentric circles, walks a few steps, raises his hand to another, pauses. We turn into the centre. Light streams from a concealed opening in the roof onto a winged wall of quarried red-brown stone, a gentle enfolding. Scores of people could gather here, the expanse of floor unencumbered except for a recessed three panelled ‘ground painting’—more an assemblage really, using a downy plant fibre, coloured by ochres, to form its motifs. Jangala gestures towards it, smiling, moves away.

Yuendumu Men’s Museum, front entrance All images courtesy Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, Yuendumu, Northern Territory Photography Greg Weight

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Darby Jampijinpa Ross, Willie Jampijinpa, Danny Jampijinpa Nolan and George Jangala Fry Emu Dreaming, 1971

ON THEIR OWN TERMS: THE WARLPIRI MOMENT OF 1971

Harry Jakamarra Nelson arrives. He walks straight to the opposite side aisle. He puts both hands onto the low wall and sings, softly, briefly—on the inside face of the wall is a Snake Dreaming belonging to his “mob”. He turns now, businesslike, and soon I am ushered outside to talk, wondering if I will get a chance to see again this enthralling space. I am not Warlpiri and I am a woman, two things making it an open question. This is the Yuendumu Men’s Museum, on the edge of the community of Yuendumu in the Tanami Desert, some three hundred kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. The work I have just glimpsed shakes up the prevailing narrative of the contemporary Western Desert painting movement. Its beginnings till now have been neatly tied to the creation of the Honey Ant murals on the outside walls of the school in Papunya, about two hundred kilometres by road to the south. They were painted from June to August 1971 by senior Pintupi men at the urging of a white man, schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon. (Bardon and Bardon, 12–19) Deplorably, these murals were later painted over by an unimaginative administration. The murals in Yuendumu, by contrast and almost miraculously, have survived. They were complete by the end of July 1971 when an opening ceremony was held. (Jones) Exactly when they were begun is not yet certain, but outside, when I visit, Jakamarra points towards nearby bushland: this is where he and Jangala camped in the last two weeks before the opening, to support their Old Men—providing transport and firewood. Perhaps towards the end the sacred work inside intensified. For the Old Men were bringing into this space the ceremonial designs from their secret cave sites far afield— a major decision, one that was theirs alone to make, although clearly it was in response to the dramatically changed circumstances of their lives. Their nomadic ways had been critically disrupted by European colonisation and by the mid-twentieth century the majority of Warlpiri were being drawn into government run settlements, Yuendumu being one.(Hinkson 49–65) Calendar dates and their art historical significance are of little immediate concern for Jangala and Jakamarra. What matters is that the Old Men “left us this one”, and that they are now its most senior custodians. But Jakamarra says planning for the museum began “long before” it was built. It involved “proper consultation” between the different “moieties”—he uses the anthropological term that describes Warlpiri social organisation. Jangala draws in the sand to show how the consultation took place: four sets of parallel lines converging on a central square (this shape perhaps in reference to the square museum building). He speaks in Warlpiri, Jakamarra translates: “People from the east, north, south and west all came together here.” A little later Jangala speaks and draws again, concentric circles. The Warlpiri used to fight, explains Jakamarra (comparing it for my benefit to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland): “But when they came to the decision of building a museum here, all were together. So peace.” 55

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The term ‘museum’ implies display and is apt in the sense that it was intended as a showing place, even if highly restricted. Jakamarra says the murals are “identical” or “similar” to the rock paintings in the caves of the Warlpiri “sacred grounds”, some many hundreds of kilometres from Yuendumu. “Instead of Old Men taking their young fellas out there and showing them the paintings and the stories associated with that particular place, they decided to build a museum.” Sacred objects were also brought in. In the past these had been kept hidden at their different related sites, only retrieved for ceremonial use and revitalising care. In the museum some were displayed in glass cases, but the more important and powerful were kept out of sight, inside locked metal cabinets. These furnishings were provided by the South Australian Museum (SAM) which in the 1960s had established close links with Yuendumu, chiefly through the late Darby Jampijinpa Ross, employed in a curatorial role dealing with the SAM’s collection of Warlpiri objects. Jampijinpa was also among the Old Men who painted the murals, and he went on to become this museum’s curator. (Jones) From the start, sitting alongside its role as a keeping place, was the museum’s potential as an attraction for outsiders and a source of income. A sign in the grounds proclaimed that it was for “Men Only—Wati Mipa” while smaller text advised an entry price. Initially it was thirty cents.(Jones) A photograph of Jampijinpa taken in the grounds some years later shows it had gone up to two dollars. So no women and children, but non-Aboriginal men could enter if accompanied, and presumably if they paid up. Older nonIndigenous women on occasion might also be allowed. (Alfonso) It is not clear how profitable this aspect of the museum became. Historian and curator at the SAM, Philip Jones, author of a forthcoming book about the museum, describes a “golden era” in the 1970s, but it was in decline even as early as 1980. Jampijinpa was already seventy five years old. It would have needed two to three younger men to be actively involved and a steady stream of visitors to maintain momentum and interest. Sooner or later the key was lost, the door left open, and petrol sniffers got in. The Old Men became aware that the building was no longer secure, decided to remove their sacred objects, and the museum, with its precious murals, was virtually abandoned. Jakamarra says some objects were taken back to “their proper place where they came from”, while others are kept hidden in sacred places close to Yuendumu, more readily accessible for use in ceremonies. It is too risky to think about returning them now to the museum, despite its complete restoration and security fence—he fears them being stolen, even by “our own people”. Jampijinpa’s biographer, Liam Campbell, describes the devastation of the museum when the artist visited for the last time in 1997: “The door was no longer locked, the roof had rusted out and inside everything was destroyed. He was visibly shaken as he picked through the old cabinets and

broken glass, surprised to find two sacred objects. But what to do with them? The people who owned them had passed away. He continued to search and found another broken one, lying in the dust, and wept as he held it.” (24) There is no mention of the murals here despite this being the heyday of outside interest in Aboriginal art from the Western Desert and the now very elderly Jampijinpa being one of its ‘stars’. A decade earlier Jones in the company of the SAM director Chris Anderson had also visited the museum. All the pair saw in the museum’s gloom (there was no electricity) was the same disaster of destruction. Several anthropologists had done extended fieldwork in Yuendumu. Some of them had an interest in Warlpiri design and artistic expression, but none, it seems recognised the significance of the murals.(Jones) Even the very recent work by Melinda Hinkson on the crayon on paper drawings made by Warlpiri in the 1950s and 1960s—paying some attention to them in the context of wider Central Australian art history—does not allude to the murals. Hinkson continues to account for Warlpiri pictures as historically ephemeral, made in the sand and on bodies—“performed and communicated in their making rather than stored for contemplation at a later time”.(10) This rendering, as so many others, overlooks not only Warlpiri rock painting, but the extraordinary fact of it having been brought into the museum in mid-1971, and its generative relationship to much that would follow in contemporary Warlpiri art. That the murals sank so deeply into obscurity is hard to account for, says Jones. Here were Warlpiri artists taking the opportunity “on their own terms, in their own space and time, with no white person looking over their shoulder, to produce a coherent set of paintings reflecting the art of their country. We can imagine the museum full of song as they worked, full-throated song.” It was a unique moment in the canon of Australian art and its recognition will only make richer and deeper the foundation story of contemporary Western Desert art. Remarkable too was the museum’s original organisation according to ‘skin groups’ (eight of them in the moiety system): the sacred objects were placed in relationship to the murals of their skin group’s designs, the same as those engraved on the objects themselves, reflecting the crucial link between Warlpiri identity, sacred sites and ‘Dreamings’. “For a brief period,” says Jones, “it was the most coherent museum presentation of Aboriginal culture in existence, and no museum today could emulate it.” The initial security of this “sacred redoubt” may be one reason for the murals’ obscurity, as Jones has suggested elsewhere.(26–27) The public and ultimately insecure context for the Papunya murals pushed the Pintupi artists to paint their designs on other surfaces. Encouraged by Bardon, their art soon became marketable and market sensitive, entering an experimental and dynamic phase that attracted enormous attention. For the Warlpiri the museum, followed by their paintings on the Yuendumu school doors in 1984, delayed this process and kept in the shadows its astonishing origins.

ON THEIR OWN TERMS: THE WARLPIRI MOMENT OF 1971

Thus the museum languished until late 2006 when there was discussion at a committee meeting of Warlukurlangu Artists—formed in 1985 by some of the same Old Men who had created the museum—about what could be done to fix it.(WAAC, 1) Manager Cecilia Alfonso and assistant manager Gloria Morales, who has a background in art conservation, embraced the project and were successful in obtaining funding to restore both the murals and the building. In mid2007 a Senior Men’s committee was formed for the project’s cultural oversight. (WAAC, 2) A conservator, Catherine Millikan from the National Gallery of Victoria, was engaged and the painstaking process following the Burra Charter for cultural heritage conservation began. Only the three-panelled ‘ground painting’ has been newly commissioned. (Alfonso) Trusted non-Aboriginal professionals, including women in key roles, have been critical to the restoration. (Jungarrayi) When the museum is officially opened, as intended in September 2015, what of the old restrictions will remain? Senior Warlpiri women will have access, says Jakamarra. Paintings “identical to these ones here” are on the shields used in young men’s initiation: “Women see them, the paintings on the shields, out in the open. They don’t ask questions, they just see them.” But from the start the men’s committee also talked of the museum as a future cultural tourism destination, offering paid guided tours.(WAAC, 2) So I ask Jakamarra about access for non-Aboriginal people, including women. “By invitation and by request. That’s all”, he says, leading me back inside for a second, closely shepherded visit. “Pictures in Warlpiri reckoning are not pictures about things but rather retain an essential connection to the thing or person pictured,” writes Hinkson. “A picture of a place 57

is inextricably tied to the people of that place; the two are treated in relational terms. Acts of picturing are acts of making and remaking these relationships.”(7) And this extends to seeing—matters of display and circulation or access are as important as the picturing itself.(Hinkson, 7) In the museum with Jangala and Jakamarra I glimpse something of the Warlpiri way of seeing. It goes well beyond ‘the gaze’— there is touch and song, enacting the ancient, still vital bonds.

references Alfonso, Cecilia. Interview with the author. 25 February 2015. Bardon, Geoffrey and Bardon, James. Papunya: A Place Made After the Story. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2004. Campbell, Liam. Darby: One hundred years of life in a changing culture. Sydney: ABC Books, 2006. Hinkson, Melinda. Remembering the Future: Warlpiri life through the prism of drawing. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014. Jones, Philip. Interview with the author. 19 February 2015. Jones, Philip. Behind the Doors: An art history from Yuendumu. Adelaide: South Australian Museum in association with Wakefield Press, 2014. Jangala, Thomas Rice and Jakamarra, Harry Nelson. Interview with the author. 25 February 2015. Jungarrayi, Otto Sims. Chairman, Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation. Interview with the author. 24 February 2015. Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation (WAAC). Meeting minutes. 1–12 October 2006, 2–26 July 2007. above Darby Jampijinpa Ross, Willie Jampijinpa, Danny Jampijinpa Nolan and George Jangala Fry Emu Dreaming, 1971

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The Narcissists Zoë Coombs Marr

Blank stage but for a one by two metre tarpaulin sign that reads “The Optimists!” with the Facebook and twitter logos and @The_Optimists_2010. Now 2015, the handle is embarrassingly short sighted, a fact CAROL won’t let KERRY forget. But they are stuck with it. They will refer to it in their show, as they must; like a bad haircut it demands acknowledgement. The lights dim. A hush comes over THE AUDIENCE perhaps a second too late. A regional crowd, unaccustomed to the theatre, they fail to pick up on the subtle hints that the show is about to start. They are still chatting about parking at the venue or whatever it is that crowds chat about, so when the music starts up it jolts them slightly. CAROL picks her tux’n’tails leotard out of her bum, puts her self-respect aside and enters the stage. CAROL: Hello! [Insert name of town here] It is so good to be here. Enter KERRY in identical tux’n’tails leotard. KERRY: But I’ll tell you what, parking in this town is a bloody nightmare! Laughter from the audience.

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John Spiteri Cabaret 1995 Oil and enamel on composition board, 63 x 78 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2012

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CAROL: At least it’s not as bad as [insert name of nearby rival town here] KERRY: Not that you’d want to park there too long. I think I saw someone with two heads!! CAROL: Not that we can talk Kerry. I mean look at our twitter handle. Kerry did that. Clearly he thought it would be 2010 until the end of time! KERRY: Last time I join a doomsday cult! Badoom-tish CAROL: And look at this lovely audience here tonight. I can see some of you are here for the music, some of you are here for the jokes and some of you clearly got lost on your way to the pub. Badoom-tish The drumroll is ‘ironic’, but not really. And on a bad night, like tonight, it brings tears to CAROL’s eyes. CAROL and KERRY start pacing back and forth like hungry tigers. They make eye contact with the audience, picking out victims for lazy crowd work. CAROL: What do you do sir? MAN: I’m a butcher. CAROL: Well it’s nice to meat you sir! KERRY: And Shanks for coming! And what do you do madam? WOMAN: I work for the government. KERRY: You work for the government... is it, [looks around suspiciously] ASIO? It’s ASIO, isn’t it? WOMAN: [giggling] No it’s not ASIO. KERRY: Oh I know [taps the side of his nose] of course “it’s not ASIO”, but you can tell me...

This interaction can go on for ages, eventually ending with something stupid like: “Everyone watch out for this one. Be alert, not alarmed!” KERRY walks upstage-right and a little piece of him dies. While KERRY’s back is turned, CAROL notices him; a doughy, friendly face in the third row. Glowing. His face is like a life raft, shining unaware in a sea of dead eyes. It has been so long since they’ve had one like him. CAROL is mesmerised. KERRY turns and spots him. KERRY: And what sir is your name? MAN: Patrick. Patrick. Patrick. Of course it’s Patrick. For a second CAROL allows herself to hope. CAROL: And what do you do Patrick? PATRICK: I work for Coles. KERRY: Oh, so you’re a miner. Coles. Coals. Get it? PATRICK doesn’t get it. The Badoomtish rolls over CAROL, at this point far too excited to let it get to her. PATRICK: No, [confused] Coles the Supermarket. KERRY: How silly of me, I was lost in your eyes. CAROL: So Patrick—if someone puts their fingers in the shredded cabbage salad where you work, do you know what that’s called? PATRICK shakes his head. “Oh god, look at him” thinks Carol, “look at him.” CAROL: [through gritted teeth] It’s called Violating Coles Law... She may not be above this material, but he certainly is. KERRY: Patrick, have we met before? PATRICK: I don’t think so.

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KERRY: Are you sure? You’re just so familiar. PATRICK: Have you been to Coles here? KERRY: No, I haven’t had the pleasure. PATRICK: Then I don’t think we have. CAROL: Are you sure?! Have you been to one of our shows before.

KERRY: You never went into the city to watch The Lion King or something? PATRICK: I haven’t had the chance. CAROL: It’s been running for years now you know. PATRICK: I guess...

PATRICK: No.

KERRY: What about a puppet show?

CAROL: Surely, that’s got to be it. You’ve been to one of our shows and I’ve looked out into this sea of faces and seen yours shining like a nightlight. That’s got to be it.

PATRICK: Nope.

The sea of faces begins to feel neglected and ignored. PATRICK: Ah... No, I haven’t been. In row twenty three, MARGARET BENSON whispers to her sister. MARGARET BENSON: “Are they going to talk to this guy all night?!” Nobody listens to Margaret. Not even her sister. KERRY: You’ve been to the theatre though, surely? PATRICK: No, I haven’t. KERRY & CAROL: Never?!? They try to contain the excitement that mounts them both like an overpowering hunger. Anyone watching closely might notice their eyes brighten and teeth sharpen a little as they lean forward. KERRY: [whispered] Never?! PATRICK shakes his head. “Does this always happen? Is it part of the act?”, he thinks. He has no idea. He looks to either side of him for some sort of a clue, finding nothing there but the faces of strangers. He has come alone. CAROL: Not even a pantomime as a child? 61

PATRICK: We don’t really have them here.

CAROL: So it’s just us then? This is it. This will make it or break it for the rest of time. PATRICK: I guess so. KERRY: How magic. CAROL: And why, Patrick? Why us? Why our humble little show. PATRICK: Uh, my boss had a free ticket... Coles supplied a platter for the drinks after. CAROL: They did?! Well lucky us! And is your boss here tonight?! PATRICK: No. KERRY: And why is that? PATRICK: No-one wanted to come. A mean titter from THE AUDIENCE. CAROL: Patrick you’re upstaging us! As CAROL and KERRY continue questioning PATRICK, the rest of the audience cease to exist for them. Now forgotten, but having never seen anything like it, they remain in their seats, stunned. Two hundred and forty six invisible spectators. The questioning of PATRICK continues for over an hour, which is irrelevant to everyone in the room, who have forgotten what an hour is anyway. When there is nothing

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left to say, there is a long period of silence. KERRY stares at PATRICK, PATRICK stares at CAROL, and CAROL stares at the image of PATRICK reflected in KERRY’S eyeballs. A man in row forty one suddenly notices no one is speaking and the realisation makes him drop his beer. KERRY, jolted by the sound, steps off the stage and begins to walk up the aisle. It is all he can do to stop himself sprinting, grabbing the sides of PATRICK’s head and screaming: “SAVE ME! SAVE ME PATRICK!!! You have no idea! Seventeen years I’ve been trapped in this dead end act performing dead end shows in godforsaken bloody dead end towns like this one. No offense. But seriously, all you people have is a Booze Barn and a Coles and this monstrous old theatre. Why?! Bulldoze it, raze the whole town! It would be better for everyone. And someone’s got to put an end to this trap luring in bloody tired acts like us to perform cabaret acts to people who don’t care! We know she’s not in ASIO! And cabaret!? Why cabaret! I hate cabaret! Who likes Cabaret!? My god PATRICK!! Take me away from here!!!’ But he stays silent. PATRICK can’t take him away. PATRICK has to stay. There needs to be a sacrifice. KERRY reaches PATRICK, breathing deeply, remaining calm. KERRY: Take my hand Patrick. He does. CAROL: Kerryy... No... CAROL paces with a wild look in her eyes, searching THE AUDIENCE for anything to hold on to. THE AUDIENCE are nothing but a bunch of dead grey faces. CAROL hates them. PATRICK has his hand in KERRY’S as they walk up the treads to the stage. CAROL knows what is about to happen before it does. As KERRY gathers momentum, the audience wakes up and time slows down like one of those movies or NRMA ads where the car is flipping and you see everyone’s heads flopping like dolls and a child’s toy or shoe sail through the air in slow motion. PATRICK is on the stage now, blinking in the lights, hypnotised and thinking it is all part of the act. He doesn’t

want to ruin it, so doesn’t flinch as KERRY touches his hair. THE AUDIENCE laughs as KERRY leans in for the kiss. CAROL notices something wet in her clenched palm. Blood. THE AUDIENCE roars even harder as the two men kiss. They have seen ads on television for shows like this— stage hypnotists with jazzy music and names like Gary Mindmist—but they hadn’t realized this was one of those shows. Soon Patrick will be clucking like a chicken and running around doing the hokey pokey and they are excited. CAROL lets a sob escape her throat. She has lost. KERRY and PATRICK undress each other. PATRICK wraps his arms around KERRY to flick open the cummerbund as though he has done it a million times before. The are naked. THE AUDIENCE is quiet – this certainly wasn’t on the ads. Mrs ASIO whispers to her husband, or perhaps notes a message to send back to the government. KERRY and PATRICK dress again in each others clothes. CAROL keeps her eyes on PATRICK reflected in KERRY’s eyes. PATRICK now in a tux’n’tails leotard identical to her own. CAROL: NO!!!! KERRY runs. Runs and laughs, off the stage in PATRICK’s clothes and up the aisle taking two steps at a time. CAROL: DON’T LEAVE ME HERE!! THE AUDIENCE is silent. KERRY: [mouths silently] I’m sorry. The door shuts behind him and—like the NRMA ad— everything is in realtime again. Hubbub from THE AUDIENCE. Cue music for the final act. PATRICK and CAROL begin to dance, as they will every night from now, with sure feet and jazz hands and a glint of terror in PATRICK’S shiny eyes.

Jess Olivieri and Hayley Forward with The Parachutes for Ladies I thought a musical was being made Part 2 (detail) 2009 Pigment print, 103.5 x 104 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2012

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Special Talent Daniel Mudie Cunningham

Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother. —Janet Malcolm, 1994(158) On 19 December 2005, Adam Cullen staged a performance, Home Economics: Weapons of Mass Sedition, with then girlfriend Cash Brown to an audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (MCA). It’s only a week after the race riots in Cronulla and barely a month after then Howard Government revealed the Anti-Terrorism Bill that included sedition laws effectively inhibiting artists from expressing political critique or satire in their work. Appropriating the style of a television cooking show, Cullen and Brown demonstrated how homemade bombs are engineered. Using bottles filled with explosive fluids and chemicals, they built the bombs, lit them for a moment, and doused them before risking the explosive demise of the MCA. Afterwards the audience could inspect the bombs as if they were sculptures. Normally I’d question the authenticity of the explosives, chalking it up to a performative conceit. But having interviewed Cullen only five days earlier—I’d heard him tell me how he wanted to explode (like his hero Hunter S Thompson who suicided earlier that year)—I found myself sitting scared shitless and realising how appropriate that my death might take place in a contemporary art museum.

following Adam Cullen Drooges 2004 Synthetic polymer paint on three canvases 103.5 x 78 cm (each) Artbank collection, purchased 2004

SPECIAL TALENT

Five days earlier I’m driving to Adam Cullen’s house. He rings my mobile to say he has to duck down to the shop and I should let myself in and have a look around if I get there before he returns. I arrive, the front door is open, and I let myself in as instructed. Tom Waits is playing, stuffed animals peer at me suspiciously from the walls, and animal skins are strewn casually here and there. Gingerly, I look around, seduced by his art collection and the view of the Blue Mountains rolling beyond the balcony. Cullen returns minutes later, makes me tea, and his mobile rings: the first call of many. He explains that he is performing an anti-sedition piece at the MCA, and he has less than a week to get it together. Cullen’s mood is a combination of rage and nervous vigour at the Government’s conflation of sedition with terrorism. The phone keeps ringing as news gets around about the performance. I have barely touched my tea when he offers me a Bloody Mary. “Sure”, I say. We toast to anti-sedition before he shows me a couple of his favourite things. He asks if I have ever shot an air rifle, and when I answer in the negative, he insists on showing me how. Seated at his dining room table, we aim the rifle through the balcony doors at a knotted section of a distant tree. Remarkably I hit the target on my first attempt. “Hunter S Thompson used to have a great big head of Edgar Hoover he used to fucking shoot all the time”, he says before lodging another pellet in the tree. “I’ve even shot holes in artworks that I didn’t like”, he says while loading more pellets. The air rifle was a gift Cullen received when he was ten: “My parents gave it to me for Christmas and half an hour later my father was making a barbeque and my older brother paid me five bucks to shoot my father in the arse from the top storey of the house. He just went, ‘What the fuck was that?’” My Bloody Mary is half finished now, and I’m feeling less confident that my next hit will be a success. “Imagine it’s an extension of the arms and your eye”, he says when I’m not holding the rifle properly. “Very McLuhan”, I remark. “Sure is”, he agrees. I fire the air rifle and miss the target, the pellet firmly lodging in the doorframe. Unsure whether to be embarrassed, apologetic or just plain scared, I’m relieved when he laughs it off saying, “That’s pretty cool. I’m going to leave that there forever.” Cullen takes his turn and after three shots, he also misses the tree having coincidentally shot the other side of the doorframe. We just sit there astounded by the symmetry. “You’ve inspired me to shoot holes in my own house”, he says before making another round of drinks and setting down to answer some of my questions. * Last year I followed with great interest, the mixed responses to Acute Misfortune (2014), Erik Jensen’s biography on Adam Cullen—the first memoir on Cullen to be published after his death in 2012. Jensen spent time with the artist in his final years, obviously not aware though unsurprised in retrospect that they were to be his last days, drawing more 67

from the relationship formed with Cullen than archival or anecdotal accounts from others. “I am writing a character study in which art—in the end—is not the most important part”, writes Jensen.(11) What’s important to Cullen, to Jensen, to many invested in the industry of Cullen is the myth of the artist and its embedded tropes of genius and its torments. When I first met Adam Cullen in December 2005, he said, “I find myths and legends important” before proceeding to describe various Cullen family myths like they were fertiliser for the rhetoric he had constructed around his practice. This meeting with Cullen, part of which is described above, transpired because I had been commissioned to interview him for a magazine called Empty (Issue 6, 2006). I was already aware of ‘The Myth of Adam Cullen’, and it was fascinating to bear witness to its propagation. When Jensen’s book came out I was as curious as I was suspicious—having spent much subsequent time with Cullen as a Blue Mountains neighbour, friend and art world peer from our first meeting in 2005, until around the time Jensen came into the picture in 2008. By that time, Cullen’s alcoholism and drug addiction made him unbearable and unreliable, and I like many others were in a process of withdrawing from his orbit. Certainly Jensen describes his own experience of having abandoned Cullen some time before his death: “In the end, I found him difficult to be around. I moved cities but still got daily phone calls. I stopped answering them. His demands were sad and unreasonable.”(185) As the story goes, Cullen approached the young starryeyed journalist to write a biography contracted by Thames & Hudson. After some time, Jensen twigged that the book contract was a fiction; a ruse to get him to stay at his place and write his biography and ease his loneliness. Why this took him so long to realise is anyone’s guess. Surely negotiations with a commissioning editor over contract, payment terms and deadlines would transpire before embarking on such a project. What unfolds in Acute Misfortune is not any further insight into the self-made myth of Adam Cullen, than a questionable tale of a writer manipulated into some twisted modicum of companionship. Reading Jensen’s book is like watching the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery (1990). Cullen is played by Kathy Bates while James Caan as Jensen is captive writer. When Jensen describes being shot by Cullen in one instance and pushed off a speeding motorcycle in another, it smacks of Bates making mash of Caan’s legs, enslaving him to the whims of her literary fantasies. When Jensen describes Cullen turning up at his twenty first birthday party, I’m actually struck less by the poignant scene he goes on to describe, than by the absurdity that Cullen courted a writer so young. Regardless of his age, there’s no doubt that Jensen is a talented storyteller. He’s a match for Cullen’s youthful capacity for the fanciful. While I recognise the voice of the ‘Adam’ I knew in the book, much is in the aid of painting a particular picture to service his claims. A curious case in point: Jensen describes how the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) purchased a painting from the

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proceeds of a fundraising dinner event attended by several philanthropists. According to his interpretation, the painting was “bought not with one generous sum but with the dribs and drabs of thirty donations... It seemed telling: this was a man no longer capable of mustering singular enthusiasm.”(58) Astonishing that Jensen could write off the painting’s provenance given it was purchased, like many others before and after it—with the generous support of a large group of AGNSW members called the Contemporary Collection Benefactors, whose very role is to support the acquisition of contemporary artworks. The quality of an artwork or the enthusiasm it generates is not measurable by the number of supporters it takes. But for Jensen it’s a convenient way of devaluing the work, and by default its supporters. But why would the author know this? This story is not about art, let alone the art world or its machinations. Jensen reveals how attuned to Cullen’s lies he became, yet his convenient use of Cullen’s punchy quotes to push along the story reveals gaping holes. Cullen’s response to the AGNSW ‘purchasing’ an installation almost two decades after its creation—“It’s taken me eighteen years to fucking sell it... They take this fucking shit out of my house and call it art”(49)— contradicts the fine print elsewhere revealed by an image caption in the book that reads: “Art Gallery of New South Wales: Gift of the artist 2008”.(194) But the art—its production, reception, collection or dissemination—is not what this is about, unless you believe that the Archibald Prize, which Cullen won in 2000 and had work shortlisted for another eight times, is what sustains Australian art. Jensen makes it clear this book isn’t about art; it’s about persona. It’s about how much he hated his mother and idolised his father (read loathed women, loved men). Amid the haze of Cullen’s addiction to heroin and vodka, his vulnerability and loneliness is revealed. Therein tangled in this ethical knot is the author’s realisation that his subject was “in love” with him. The great masterstroke of the book is its impotent attempt to ‘out’ Cullen’s supposed bisexuality after a string of overtures that are homosocial at best. Sexual ambiguity for Cullen was just another stunt, like the performance where he chained a rotting pig’s head to his leg in art school. In 2006, my then partner Drew and I had dinner with Adam at his place in Wentworth Falls. He shot up in the bathroom, came out in nothing but his undies, sat between us on the couch (much to our discomfort) and made us watch all ninety four minutes of a VHS tape of Ken Hannam’s Sunday Too Far Away (1975) while he provided audio commentary on where the Cullen mythology intersected with the story of the hard-drinking sheep herders depicted in this landmark of Australian new wave cinema. How could Cullen love Jensen? All of Cullen’s pathological anxieties and neuroses, dependency and addictions, misogyny and selfishness are so vividly described in Jensen’s memoir that it’s difficult to comprehend he had the time or inclination to love anyone let alone himself at the bitter end.

In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994), Janet Malcolm brilliantly dissects the ethics of biography and its claims to truth, particularly if the subject has been canonised through the retelling of their life after death. Malcolm relays a moment in poet Sylvia Plath’s life where she felt enraged for having loaned books to a friend who returned them with pencilled marks and underlinings: “I was furious, feeling my children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien”, wrote Plath in a letter to her mother.(184) Malcolm sets up this anecdote to illustrate how “biography can be likened to a book that has been scribbled in by an alien. The biographer feels himself to be not a borrower but a new owner, who can mark and underline as he pleases.” (184) In writing this critique on the problem of biography, Malcolm inevitably becomes another biographer who sets about untangling the threads of this artist’s troubled life, and the troubles broadcast by those who make their private accounts of that life public. Ultimately it is the ‘truth’ of biography that is called into question. “Truth is, in its nature, multiple and contradictory, part of the flux of history, untrappable in language”, Malcolm writes. “The only real road to truth is through doubt and intolerance.” (80) For Cullen, paraphrasing Charles Bukowski’s Nietzschean sentiment, as spoken by Mickey Rourke’s character in the 1987 Barbet Schroeder film Barfly: “Endurance is more important than truth.” Cullen often scrawled this quote along with his autograph when signing his exhibition catalogues. I have it written to me in a catalogue from his 2006 Penrith Regional Gallery survey exhibition ‘Between the Lines: Works on Paper 1995–2005’. But it’s what Cullen edits out of this quote that is telling. Rourke says in Barfly: “It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.” In preparing this piece, I unearthed the recording of my interview with Cullen from 14 December 2005. About twenty five minutes in, Cullen snaps, “talent is cheap”. Not as cheap it seems as the sad remains, the residual emptiness left behind when an artist’s mythology dematerialises in plain sight.

references Cunningham, Daniel Mudie. “Waiting to Explode—The Art of Adam Cullen”. Empty. Issue 6, 2006. 72–77. Jensen, Erik. Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2014. Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. London: Picador, 1994.

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White Elephant Stephen Bush Lee Serle in conversation

Stephen Bush Babar looking at the NGA 1995 Oil on canvas, 205.5 x 135 cm Artbank collection, purchased 1995

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stephen bush: What’s interesting to me is that you viewed my exhibition ‘Steenhuffel’ (2014) without prior knowledge of my work, yet found some impulse to create a new choreographic work based on this experience. (White Elephant was part of the 2014 ‘New Breed’ series—a partnership between Sydney Dance Company and Carriageworks). I am curious as to what you saw in the show that could be translated into the languages of dance and performance? Perhaps a related question is: how do you apply your process of looking/seeing into a physical, time-based event? This type of thinking seems somewhat impossible to me. lee serle: That’s right, I wasn’t very familiar with your work. But I am so happy I wandered into the ‘Steenhuffel’ exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne that day! I was walking home after a rehearsal and my mind was preoccupied with what I was going to create for Sydney Dance Company, and within a few minutes of seeing your paintings I could already imagine how this could translate into a performance. I was immediately struck by the use of vibrant colour, and the surreal landscapes that spilled out from a central figure, animal 71

or object. The paintings appeared to be in motion, and I could imagine them coming to life. Looking at these paintings I could see a space saturated in colour inhabited by dancers; an abstract scene. The choreography within that scene would happen later in the studio, but immediately I could imagine what it would look like in relation to your work. I took the aspects of colour, mood and narrative to begin creating. Then there were the elephants. In your series ‘The Lure of Paris’ (1992–) it is Babar, and in ‘Type Cast’ (1990–2000) it was people in elephant costumes. I was so intrigued by this narrative, I wanted to know more. I was curious to see if I could incorporate an elephant into my work. That is when I contacted you. This isn’t the first time someone has used your work for inspiration or reinterpretation. What is it that inspires you to begin a painting? Especially considering the incredibly varied subjects of your work. sb: The idea of inspiration is a tricky one. It has long been mis-cast via various media as a romantic idea associated with notions of genius and the like. In reality, pinpointing tangible origins for motivation is not always clear. A certain work ethic plays a part.

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Through the repeated act of looking, searching, doing, and making, glimmers of possibility appear when previously all else had been extinguished. Patience is of value. One never really turns off from being open to images, notions, phrases or possibilities, and it’s never clear from where or when this initial start moment shall appear and how it translates directly into paint. Often the original image or idea ceases to bear fruit, and change is in order. Ultimately, the painting retains only minor traces of its initial state. I am alone in the studio, puddling about in paint, adding and erasing images. You work on your own, but your work requires collaboration. How do you translate an initial idea working within a group, allowing for various constraints such as time for development and budget, yet keep to the initial idea? Or are you able to revisit the initial moment in a completely different manner? As a choreographer can you point to an era of performance in contemporary dance that might foreground your thinking? ls: In 1960s postmodern dance there was a rejection of narrative and representational performance. They were concerned with investigating the body’s mechanics, and the body as a tool for constructing what was described as ‘pure’ movement, which was free from embellishment. This still interests me as a choreographer and I work in this way, but I am also intrigued by subtle characters and abstract narratives. What you have described in the process of painting is precisely what happens in the making of dance for me. Sometimes the initial idea or my hopes for the work can get completely discarded and the search begins for other

possibilities. When you enter into a collaborative process— and in this case with Sydney Dance Company’s dancers, who I had never met—there is a process of translating what’s in my body and in my head onto others, and then it becomes more like problem solving. Often an initial idea can begin a chain reaction, leading me on several tangents with unanticipated results. That is most satisfying for me. A specific example of how I translated an ‘idea’, in the making of White Elephant, grew out of your series of purple paintings. In our conversation, you spoke of the unpopularity of the colour at the time you painted these works, and also the history of purple pigment; once incredibly expensive and reserved only for the aristocracy. This fed me the idea to choreograph a section of ballet—the beautiful dance of the aristocracy. However, in relating it back to unpopularity— which is how I view ballet presently—I asked the dancers to do a ‘pathetic’ version. Ballet is concerned with finding aesthetically pleasing shapes, but I set a rule within this dance to never achieve its full expression. In the construction the dancers appeared to be weighted down by a force that was more that just gravity. I directed a dancer to lie on the floor and two dancers held onto an arm each, attempting to perform this pathetic ballet carrying a dead weight. The dancer on the floor ended up in an elephant costume, while others called through paper trumpets to ‘Celeste’ (Babar’s cousin) for help in a fanfare; a direct reference to the ‘The Lure of Paris’ paintings. The trumpeters were also positioned the same as the men in your painting This Big in the Afterlife (1990). This resulted in a tangled narrative that to me had logic, but was also nonsense.

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previous, above Performance stills from White Elephant 2014 Choreographed by Lee Serle for Sydney Dance Company’s ‘New Breed’, Carriageworks, Sydney, November 2014 Photography Jack Saltmiras Courtesy of Lee Serle

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I see a lot of logic and nonsense (and I don’t mean nonsense negatively!) in your work; in individual paintings, but also in collections and exhibitions like ‘Steenhuffel’. It was almost as if the exhibition was by several different artists. Is classification, or labelling of you and your work something you try to avoid? Or perhaps something you work with? sb: The idea of classification, or being pigeon holed, or type cast as the result of a recognisable ‘style’, is something I have engaged with consciously. I allow my work to follow tangents as they present themselves, but am ever mindful of own my so-called style. I like the idea that a show such as ‘Steenhuffel’ could be read as a group show by several different artists, rather than one. This variety celebrates a break with monolithic, linear displays. I think film directors and musicians are given this freedom; to play with and muddy their envisaged oeuvre. In this sense I strive to work within, to stretch, contract and bend the viewer’s expectations. It’s a circular logic that dovetails back on itself. The paintings do have as you say a “tangled narrative”, which is such a good description. It’s there, but possibly the point is never to decode it. I found this manipulation of uncertain narratives in many films post-art school, but also in the way some contemporary music (rock/alternative, whatever that now means) is put together; where not only the structure of the music is interrupted, but the imagery and phrases lyrically hold little logic. In effect, the poetry of the work itself becomes ephemerally meaningful. Music/sound is often such a loaded and emotionally charged force. How do you select and 75

devise the score for a dance work and balance that with the physicality required? ls: Music/sound and contemporary dance have a complicated relationship. Sound is often used to manipulate a viewer’s experience and prescribe them an emotion, just like a score for film would do. The problem for me with this technique in dance is that when you pair abstract choreography with emotionally charged sound, it can very quickly become deep but meaningless. If the viewer is aware of this, it does a disservice to the choreography. This is why in postmodern dance the choreography was often performed in silence. Yet, if you are able to get the balance right, sound can be useful in creating the correct ambience, in balance with lighting and other supporting elements. I had chosen the sound before I created White Elephant. This is unusual for my process, in that I always collaborate with a composer who creates the score simultaneously with the choreography, so that each influences and supports the other. The three pieces I selected for White Elephant brought a specific ambience to the work, reflective of my experience viewing your paintings. In some ways the sound drove the choreography, particularly in its virtuosity: one part was quite frenetic, almost violent; the others were much more subdued and meandering, with a sense of suspended time.

Stephen Bush Wilderswil 2000 Oil on canvas, 201 x 241 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2001

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Grey Matter Mark Feary

No other colour is defined in quite the same manner as grey. It is intrinsically linked to its varied composition of white and black, and spans the full axis of their gradations. It is the colour most frequently accorded the adjective of murky, connotative of an in-between state; between two opposing extremities. Drawing exclusively on works held within the Artbank collection, the following pictorial focuses on a selection of works that emphasise the ongoing allure for artists to work within a reductionist palette. With reference to the centenary of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and arcing forward to Robert Ryman’s expanded series of white paintings, Grey Matter assembles a number of works by Australian artists working within the vast greyscale between black and white. Conceptually bookmarked by the defining contributions by Malevich and Ryman, this selection platforms works of sculpture, painting, photography and video to acknowledge the pervasive potential of this palette constraint to be employed across mediums. These works emphasise conscious decisions with regard to tone, atmosphere and restraint, eliminating the spectrum and spectacle of colour in favour of the heightened amplification of contrast. There are various evocations at play here, from nostalgia for arcane printing and photographic technologies, systems of censorship, theatricality, binaries, and the omnipresence of concrete within the urban environment. But dominantly, these works dwell within and elucidate the indeterminable realm of the grey area, that space that acknowledges opposing perspectives and positions, and oscillates between them, acknowledging each yet siding with neither. Herein lies the gravity of grey as a shade and its reliance upon both the absence of light and its saturation. It is indeterminable, it is both, it is neither.

Following a period focussed on producing monochromatic grey paintings, Gerhard Richter poignantly remarked this of the colour grey: “It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.”(92) Less intent than Richter on representing nothingness, the artists featured here are more concentrated on representing the tension between everything and nothing, the banality of existence, the harshness of the built environment and the broad expanse of the unknown. If black and white might be regarded as absolutes, then these works revel in the oscillation between them. It is this realm of stark contrasts and the evasive realm in between that remains so prescient for artists. This is fundamentally where much of art is situated, within an ambiguous domain of possible and potential interpretations, ever subjective and changing. This too is the temporal grey area of contemporary art, perennially produced in a present, yet intrinsically reflective of various histories, and in anticipation of unknown futures. It is in the ambiguous grey area of this tension that these works are situated; recognising the potency of the indeterminate as well as the complex interdependence of opposing forces and positions to define one another.

references Elger, Dietmar and Obrist, Hans Ulrich, eds. Gerhard Richter: Text. Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961–2007. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009.

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Vernon Ah Kee Untitled 2000 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 92 x 79 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2003

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Paul Knight cinema curtain #05 2006 Type C photograph, 59 x 68.5 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2007

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Stephen Bush The Lure of Paris #3 1992 Oil on canvas, 195.5 x 196 cm Artbank collection, purchased 1993

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Daniel Crooks Imaginary Object #23 2006 Digital Type C print, 106 x 106 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2008

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Renee So Kwan 2008 Alvaro 2008 Clay, glaze and birch plywood, 138 x 50 x 30 cm (each) Artbank collection, purchased 2008

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Tony Garifalakis Cover Ups 2008 Enamel paint on two offset prints, 72.5 x 219 cm (overall) Artbank collection, purchased 2009

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Kate Mitchell Getting Through It 2013 (stills) High definition digital video, 28:10 mins Artbank collection, purchased 2014

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Zoe Croggon Untitled #1 2012 Digital Type C print, 66.5 x 52.5 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2013

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One of the Gang Miriam Kelly

I take pleasure in telling people that I’m related to Ned Kelly. The response is predominantly along the lines of today’s: “Shut the fuck up? How far back?” He’s my great great great grandfather. “Holy shit! Quick, put the valuables away in case it’s hereditary. Lol!” It is surprisingly not that often just “Really?!”, and never “Who?”.

Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly 1946 Enamel paint on composition board 90.8 x 121.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Sunday Reed 1977

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Ian Abdulla Ned Kellyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ghost 1993 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 78.5 x 104 cm Artbank collection, purchased 1993

ONE OF THE GANG

It’s a claim that to some is legitimised by the ubiquity of the name, both literally—in the sheer number of Kellys in Australia—as well as in popular cultural memory. My great great great grandfather’s story is one that is told with the events of the two years leading up to his death in 1880, and generally emphasises the ruggedness of the bush and settler struggles in nineteenth century regional Victoria. Oh, and his catchy costume design. Like any good myth, the drama, action, tragedy and heroism of this tale have lent themselves to a lot of creative re-interpretation (the pinnacle of which has to be the 2015 musical adaptation, although the ballet comes a close second). But importantly, over the last one hundred and thirty five years, the violent events leading up to his capture and execution have also been crowbarred into a “user friendly” national narrative. (Basu, 155) That’s the accidental brilliance of what remains from my great great great grandfather’s short but eventful life: just enough content for a theatrical narrative, with ample space for appropriation and manipulation. In the expansion of this tale—to now monumental mythic proportions—truths have been omitted and reinvented to reflect a range of cultural and political needs, both on the left and the right. (Basu,97) My great great great grandfather’s Irish heritage, for example—the root of much of his mistreatment at the hands of the dominant British settlers who perceived him as from both a sub-class and sub-race—has been swept aside in the fostering of national sentiment, in the absorption of this as a key origin story of (white) Australia. And yet, this same point sees his rebellious actions taken up as a symbol of the importance of fighting oppression. However, without Sidney Nolan’s accidentally intentional translation of my great great great grandfather’s story from popular culture yarn into high culture iconography in the 1940s, it is possible his notoriety may have been less celebrated, even buried in the pages of Australia’s settler history books, like other non sporting figures.Nolan liked the story because of its rebel-reformer romanticism. He was attracted to the masking of identity that the iron costume afforded, and the way that the story could be manipulated to disguise aspects of his own personal narrative, including his concerns about morality and the way humans treat each other, painting as he was in the years following the Second World War. Nolan had also begun working with my great great great grandfather’s story at a time when he was struggling to reconcile his desire to paint his surroundings in a way that distanced him from the traditional, stale approaches of the Australian Impressionists and the Federation era, yet borrowed their device of representing the landscape via the settler narratives that played out upon it. (Underhill, 265, 267). Nolan admitted in 1985 that his first paintings of my great great great grandfather were actually supposed to be ironic. This, he admitted, “backfired”, landing him, as he described it “stuck with Ned Kelly round my neck” (and I guess you know, just the most famous series of paintings in Australian art).(Underhill, 268) Art historians have accordingly had 89

a field day unpacking Nolan’s references: his appropriation of Malevich’s Black Square (1915), the Rousseau-like faux naïve approach, the hidden personal narratives, and of course his representation of the empty armour—through which not the man, but the bleached landscape returns the ‘gaze’. (Martin, 31) Situating my great great great grandfather’s story within this cultural realm—legitimised by European modernist references—laid the groundwork for the prominence and (helmeted) shape of the legend today. While for the most part, Nolan’s images are now tied to the (irony free) celebratory nationalistic sentiment associated with my great great great grandfather’s story, it is important to note that it is this straddling of popular and high culture that has allowed for contemporary critical engagement. That is, for others to also attempt satire and irony in the appropriation and manipulation of truth, history and narrative. From the 1970s, my great great great grandfather’s story was swept up in discussions of identity politics of race, gender and sexuality; critiqued for its role in the dominant white versions of Australian history. Alternative approaches to my great great great grandfather’s story flourished during the late twentieth century, seeking to unsettle prevailing narratives that foregrounded the heroic, heteronormative white male. In 1990s, Riverland based Ngarrindjeri artist Ian Abdulla recalled that as a kid he was pretty sure that he saw my great great great grandfather’s ghost one night, while walking his dogs along the Murray River. Abdulla made a painting about this experience, which offers a subtle yet powerful interweaving of personal narrative and political statement. A self-taught painter, Abdulla used the medium to recount a range of memories from his childhood growing up at the Gerard Mission, in the Riverland of South Australia, in as well as life on the Murray River more broadly during the 1940s and 1950s. Seemingly benign at first, the language and imagery within Abdulla’s works offer an alternative “truer history...for both black and white”.(Mundine, 16) His paintings speak about the environmental degradation of the Murray River in South Australia since settlement, as well as the dispossesion of Ngarrindjeri from the Riverland and whitewashing of Australian history; including the conspicuous absence of Aboriginal people within national narratives, such as my great great great grandfather’s. Abdulla noted that the ghost he saw lived on the banks of Lake Bonney—one of the many sites along the Murray of significant ecological concern due to the impacts of farming and industrial waste. While my great great great grandfather travelled a substantial amount while on the run, making it all the way up to Jerilderie, he never got as far as the Riverland. Abdulla’s work disrupts the adopted meanings of this settler myth by conflating it with the ‘truth’ of memory; not just a little influenced by the creativity of childhood imagination. This is characteristic of Abdulla’s works more broadly, and as Janet Maughan notes: “the narrative perspective is not that of a dominating white culture: it is that of an Aboriginal speaker”; a device designed not to further

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exclude, but to bridge “gaps between cultures” and to tell stories “for the future of events in the past”. (92) The absence of female and gay perspectives in the construction of this national narrative brought about responses in the late twentieth century, particularly in the cultural sector. A range of debates emerged about my great great great grandfather’s sexuality; particularly about the nature of relationships between his ‘gang’ in those long periods of isolation in the bush. Melbourne based émigré painter, Juan Davila appropriated his helmeted image, and its associations, in his postmodern critique of the mythologising of the dead heterosexual white male hero of Australian art. Similarly, a number of novels were published from the perspective of the strong women in my great great great grandfather’s life, including his mother Ellen and one of his seven sisters, Kate—whose rejection of unwanted advances from a police officer were part of the initial provocations for the family’s ensuing battle with the law. By the turn of this century however—with the release of the novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by New York based Australian author Peter Carey—the dominant narrative about my great great great grandfather in the public eye (now globally as well as nationally) was returned to one of specifically heterosexual white male dominance. (Indeed Carey fabricated a female love interest—evidently my great great great grandmother— among other ruses to explicitly deny any homoerotic interpretation). In responding to the veritable deluge of references to my great great great grandfather’s story, particularly in the last fifteen years, curator Tansy Curtain notes in her essay for the Bendigo Art Gallery’s exhibition Imagining Ned (2015) that “[i]t is not possible to examine artists’ engagement with the story without concluding that this is an aspect of Australian art history dominated by male artists.”(29) While this speaks of an ongoing imbalance in the written histories of Australian art more broadly, it also called to mind for me a particular work that counters this, in the vein of the ‘herstory’ novels of the 1980s: TextaQueen’s True History of the Kelly Gang (Salote), Warby Ranges (2008). Like Nolan and Abdulla, TextaQueen’s entwining of politics and personal narrative with my great great great grandfather’s story has achieved a playful, whimsical manipulation of the truth, as well as a critical engagement with the role of the landscape in the construction of an Australian identity. This drawing is part of the series ‘Naked Landscapes of Victoria’, completed over a series of road trips around the state, in a leaky van packed with an arsenal of coloured felt tip pens. TextaQueen was accompanied on her journeys by a range of willing models, including artist Salote Tawale. In this, ‘colour-by-numbers’ style, cheeky faux tourist portrait, TextaQueen evokes and unsettles the art historical and cultural value placed on the female nude, as well as the ‘truth’ of the landscape completed en plein air. Quoting directly from the title of Carey’s novel, TextaQueen capitalises on the absence of the definite article,

which “denies the possibility of a single truth”.(Basu, 168)“I drew my pen to make justice”, TextaQueen notes of this ‘True History’—an allegorical telling of the myth from a female, queer, non-white, feminist perspective—“not without humour, for mothers and sisters, who wore heavy garb of duty and disrespect but now lay as silent in history as dead bullock in drought. But they be mothers daughters outlawed and their ordeals must be repaid.”(TextaQueen) Nolan acknowledged in 1992 (the year of his death)— after painting images of my great great great grandfather for almost fifty years—that he wanted to just tell the “truth” about his original series of paintings. He wanted to repaint the works with a realistic representation of the personal narratives he had initially intentionally disguised behind the armour. These pictures never eventuated, perhaps in part as he was warned that such an action would “upset people’s notions of the legend”.(273) The very structure of this legend is, however, reliant both construction and deconstruction, about the upsetting, as well as the manipulation of ‘people’s notions’.About the intermingling of personal narrative, memory and imagination with the ‘truth’. While the public (and political) embrace of Nolan’s images, coupled with subsequent representations have established my great great great grandfather as shorthand for national identity, it is a version that is ultimately underpinned by the impact of colonisation, by a complicated relationship with the land, as well as the dominance of the heterosexual white male in history. The value in retelling this story these days is no longer in a telling of the ‘facts’. Rather, it is in the way in which the truth is massaged and personal narratives entwined, so as to explore social and political concerns pertinent to the contemporary Australian context.

references Basu, Laura. Ned Kelly as Memory Dispositif: Media, Time, Power, and the Development of Australian Identities. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. Curtain, Tansy. “Imagining Ned”. Imagining Ned. Bendigo: Bendigo Art Gallery, 2015. 19–30. Martin, Susan K. “Dead White Male Series”. Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe (ed). Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 23–52. Maughan, Janet. “Ian W. Abdulla”. Ian W. Abdulla: Elvis Has Entered the Building. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2003. 88–97. Mundine, Djon. “Back to Blak”. Yerbury, Di. Dreamtime to the New Millennium.New South Wales: Macquarie University Art Gallery and Penrith Regional Gallery. 16. TextaQueen. “Naked Landscapes”. textaqueen.com [accessed 2 April]. Underhill, Nancy (ed). Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words. Camberwell: Penguin Group, 2007. opposite TextaQueen True History of the Kelly Gang (Salote), Warby Ranges 2008 (detail) felt-tip pen on Stonehenge cotton paper, 127 x 97 cm Private collection Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney

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Impurity and the Logic of Specialisation Katherine Moline

Dialogues between art and design are sometimes criticised for contaminating the purity and autonomy of art. Increasingly, however, contemporary artists have moved into interdisciplinary practices that engage design. Some debates that negotiate the crossovers between specialisations privilege artists who are seen to operate independently of context. Others look to the historical interchanges between art and design and see little sense in idealising artists in this way. From this perspective, connections between the fields are valued for the insights they yield for critical interpretations of the social engagement of art in everyday life. The confusion between contemporary art and design and the fracturing of these specialisations, evokes questions about both the differences and affinities in commercial art and conceptual design. This essay discusses these themes and a selection of works by Australian artists that refute the autonomy of art and specialisation and reconnect art and design in new ways.

Akira Akira Edifice 2009 Enamel paint on polyurethane resin 165 x 95 x 5.5 cm (overall) Artbank collection, purchased 2009

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above Emily Floyd Linux for Beginners 2012 Lithograph on paper, 115 x 84.5 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2012

following Emily Floyd Structure and Silence of the Congnitariat 2012 Lithograph on paper, 115 x 84.5 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2012

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American art critic Hal Foster has railed against contemporary design’s imbrication with commercial aims in its current role as the handmaiden of neo-liberal capitalism, and insists that art should maintain strategic autonomy—a critical distance—from design.(13) Alternately, German art historian Helmut Draxler has argued that design is pertinent to contemporary art practice because it questions the ethos of art as autonomous, as functioning independently from society, untouched by everyday life.(78) Draxler adopts a definition of design as a practice engaged with social reform, rather than being entirely caught up in commercial imperatives. He points to American artists such asJudith Barry—who scrutinised modes of production and consumption with his generic multiple sculpture designed to flood a market tailored to ‘unique’ works with exact replicas— and Andrea Fraser who questions service relationships in museum contexts as institutional critique. There was an abundance of artworks that challenged the so-called autonomy of art in the 1980s with a critique of consumerism, such as the ‘commodity art’ by American Allan McCollum— who scrutinised modes of production and consumption with his generic multiple sculpture designed to flood a market tailored to ‘unique’ works with exact replicas—or the ‘Neogeo’ paintings of Peter Halley, which represent abstract painting as a space of confinement and subdivision, “a site of alienation and banality” rather than a utopia.(Halley) Draxler also critiques Foster’s proposal as ‘gnostic’, and argues: To put it bluntly, a reference to design might be seen today as a constitutive factor for artistic practice. Whereas since the 1960s artists have continuously sought to explore the space between art and design, theory has remained caught up in the old modernist oppositions that come with a purely negative concept of design.(52) I agree with Draxler. In the context of post-1960s art, Foster’s proposal makes little sense. The modern separation of art and design was initiated at the HfG School of Design (1953–68) in Ulm, when the school foregrounded design’s engagement with sociology and psychology in an industrial society. The school’s redefinition of design sought to revise the understanding of design as Gestaltung (foundation) and form-giving at the Bauhaus in which the boundaries of art and design were blurred. In some respects, the HfG reformation of design mirrored avant garde desires to assimilate art into life and demonstrated both the connections and the divergences between the two fields. In the years since, interpretations of the ‘Ulmian’ ethos have remodelled design as a service, distant from the school’s political focus. We must rethink the interconnections between art and design, caught as they are between autonomy and reflection, between conformism and demands for social change. Crossovers between the fields are valuable when artworks focus on the connections between the ostensibly separate domains, while retaining the richly textured histories and contexts of each. As long as the polarisation of these 95

fields continues, criticism will produce nothing other than segregation, as Draxler points out. For many decades, American artist and writer Dan Graham has interrogated the conventions of artistic autonomy and specialisation in art and design—most notably in his artwork Homes for America (1966) and his essay “Art as Design, Design as Art” (1993). Graham focused on how examples of Pop art and Conceptual art have symbolically referred to design and the role of design in producing the subjectivity of mass consumerism. He interprets such work as a ‘reduction of fine art to quasifunctional (or nonfunctional) décor’ and critiques the ambiguous nature of commercial galleries as “half showroom and half business office”.(1993, 209) Art’s contribution to society matters, rather than the accolades bestowed by an art industry corrupted by commodification.(1993, 422) Shifting the focus to the conventions challenged by recent art and design—rather than simply restating the aims of the artist or designer—is one avenue for developing an understanding of artworks and the contemporary context in which they function. A number of contemporary Australian artists’ works can be considered in the context of this alternative exploration of this interconnection of art and design. Some present devices for obscure needs, such as Thomas Jeppe’s Model for a Time Machine (2008–09), or boredom-alleviating activities employing mass-produced detritus, such as Daniel von Sturmer’s video series ‘The Cinema Complex’ (2010). Others pose provocative questions about art production in the context of mass consumerism, such as Kenzee Patterson’s cast bronze imitation of the humble ice-cream container, Amulet (2009), and Jud Wimhurst’s oversized trigger-spray bottle atop a polka-dot pedestal, titled Next to Godliness (Ezyoff BANG) (2010). Ephemera and timelessness are engaged in Toby Pola’s sculpture Thrasher Magazine (2012)— a combination of youth culture and whittling—as they are in David McDiarmid’s Disco Kwilt (c.1980). John Barbour questioned progress in Me, U and Another Thing... (2011), while Michael Kutschbach repurposed high technology for artmaking in works like Go You Little Dynamo, Go! (2008). My own work Untitled (Culture Vultures) (2005) questions the cultural capital produced by architecture. However, it is the recent work of two artists in particular that seem to best offer space for reflection on complex reciprocities between art and design: Akira Akira and Emily Floyd. In Floyd’s lithograph, Linux for Beginners (2012) a penguin stares at a jagged polygon; perhaps a three dimensional print of a complex shape designed using Linux open-source code, the basis of Apple’s operating system and a key tool for many designers. With head hung low, the penguin strains to see, its posture signalling consternation, if not defeat, in understanding this newfangled thing. Like the response of many to abstract art, the ambiguity and befuddling effect of specialisations other than one’s own shows in the expression of the stunned penguin. This print is from the series ‘All Day Workshops’ (2012), and is evocative of poster designs

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by Russian Constructivists Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky and of Bauhaus graphics by László MoholyNagy, the typeface echoing geometric Cyrillic letterforms. However, unlike the simple geometry of typefaces typical of constructivism and the Bauhaus, Floyd’s is close to illegible— we can barely discern the words ‘Linux for Beginners’ laid out over the first two lines in each print. Despite our attempts to decipher the code in the letterforms, by searching for repeated shapes, the last line remains unreadable. Perhaps it spells out the artist’s name—but then again perhaps not. We identify with the penguin confronted with the abstract geometry of Linux: “What words do these shapes form and what do they tell us?” Linux for Beginners recalls Lissitzky’s conception of typography, as expressive visual signs and the geometric forms with which he created compositions collectively titled ‘Project for the Affirmation of the New’ (1919–23). Lissitzky’s compositions reconstructed graphic layouts on the page as new spatial movements with multiple axes, which operated somewhere between the media of sculpture, painting and poster. For example, in prints he designed for the opera Victory Over the Sun (1913), Lissitzky visualised the triumph of new human technology over the old. Recalling the vitality of the Constructivists’ faith in the new, the penguin’s plight when confronted with the abstract geometry of code brings into the present the confounding aspects of modern mass production, further transformed by Linux into on-demand bespoke manufacturing. The ambiguity in Linux for Beginners can be found in the text’s design and Floyd’s accumulation of sculpture, painting, industrial design, typography and Apple’s operating system. By inscribing the title of her work in a typeface so decorative it is rendered illegible, Floyd fosters questions about the coded languages of art and design. Perhaps she is pointing to the expressive reinterpretations of constructivist/Bauhaus typography that transform the democratising principles of modernism into a decorative style. By contrast, Akira’s sculpture Edifice (2009) is an altogether different proposition. The repeated black shapes put into play the principles of mass manufacturing. Akira’s work juxtaposes bespoke one-off production in art and modernist dreams of mass manufacturing leading to democratically available design. The modular work— constructed from multiple units of polyurethane resin coated in automotive paint—celebrates the flux of technology. First exhibited in Akira’s solo exhibition ‘All That is Solid Melts Into Air’ (2008–09), Edifice was described in an accompanying text as “unstable”, as a work that is in constant transformation, a topological process through which the artworks’ relationships with different architectural spaces and institutional frameworks are in constant negotiation.”(2009) Unlike Floyd’s penguin gazing at a single geometric form, Akira’s work is composed of sixty identical parts and installed so that each connects at the corners. The geometry of the multipart work echoes the meandering

forked branches of a decision tree that maps out options and their consequences. Historically speaking, Edifice recalls popular culture of recent decades, and draws on the repetition of geometric abstraction for costumes by Bauhaus artist and designer Sonia Delauney in her sketch book Ses Peintures, Ses Objets, Ses Tissus Simultanés, Ses Modes (1925) and her commissioned painting of monochrome blocks on the facets of a Matra sports car (1968). Appearing only in black against white walls, Akira’s Edifice shadows Delaunay’s abstractions. The joining corners of Edifice recalls Halley’s ‘Neo-geo’ rectilinear paintings or McCollum’s multiples, and yet it also evokes popular culture references, such as the 1980s video game Pac Man, or cartoon and film Transformers (1984–87 and 2007), robots in disguise. Yet rather than the endless replication or the shifting of forms, Akira’s installations cut through the instrumental goals of design, drawing attention to whimsy, foible and aimlessness. The work’s title provides clues for deciphering: the word ‘edifice’, when combined with the multifaceted units, questions the beliefs and conceptual structure underpinning the production and consumption complex. Akira’s reworking of the material qualities and possibilities of contemporary production and fabrication question the realities of endless replication, as the units— like legions of Pac Mans—march mutely across the surface of the wall. The impenetrability of extreme specialisation is complicated in Edifice and, as Graham notes, becomes like a ‘machined décor’. As with Floyd’s poster, Akira’s

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modular units are imbued with HfG’s aesthetic of ‘objective neutrality’. Akira challenges the expectation that artists produce unique singular objects. The benefits of mass production and the utopian aim of modernist designers to create designs that are economically available to many is rethought in Edifice, where the conventions of sculpture, as unique, handcrafted and expressive—the very opposite of mass production—are interrupted by the repurposing of design technology. Akira short circuits the perceived benefits of mass production by assembling his modular units into a mass, devoid of either function or unique form. Despite their differences, Floyd’s typeface—a caption to a perplexed looking penguin—and Akira’s meandering forked patterning, both demonstrate an appropriation, of commentary and shared materials with art and design. These works reject determinate categorisation and point to the reciprocity of design and visual art, via their implicit commentary on design’s social effects and the failed agendas of social reform in design history; they illuminate how the logic of specialisation merely reproduces such failures. Further, these works help to reposition the audience and/or consumers—whether of art or design—as active agents in the bilateral responsibilities of mass consumerism. Linux for Beginners demonstrates the opacity and reception of much contemporary technology, while Edifice presents an ornamental pattern with a technology promoted as a means to simplify engineering. Defining the boundary between effective critique and collusion with the status quo is not always possible in either contemporary art or design. However, these two artworks necessarily emulate prevalent design assumptions and techniques, and in doing so pose critical questions about them. The connections these two artworks draw between art and design are blatant, and yet subject to ambivalence and contradiction. When viewed as a product of discussion and debate rather than as requiring ultimate resolution, the works of Floyd and Akira present a promising tactic, in that they identify the parameters of each field, their commonalities and differences, and the circumstances surrounding their historical connection and divergence. What Floyd and Akira contribute to this debate is contemporary analyses of the current status quo of both art and design.

references “Akira Akira: All That is Sold Melts Into Air”. utopianslumps.com/previous_ exhibitions [viewed 30 March 2015]. Delaunay, S. “Ses Peintures, Ses Objets, Ses Tissus Simultanés, Ses Modes”. cdm.reed.edu/cdm4/artbooks/delaunay [viewed 1 March 2015]. Draxler, H. “A Conversation with Helmut Draxler. The Substance of Design”. K. Gretzinger (ed). In a Manner of Reading Design. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 53–87. Draxler, H. “Letting loos(e): institutional critique and design”. A Alberro and S Buchman (eds). Art After Conceptual Art. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006. 151–160. Foster, H. Design and Crime and Other Diatribes. London: Verso, 2002. Graham, D. “Art as Design/Design as Art”. B Wallis (ed). Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects 1965–1990. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993. 208–221. Graham, D. “Art Workers Coalition Open Hearing Presentation”. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. eds. A Alberro and B Stimson. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999a. 92–94. Graham, D. “My Works for Magazine Pages: a History of Conceptual Art”. A Alberro and B Stimson (eds). Conceptual Art: a Critical Anthology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999b. 418–422. Halley, P. “Notes on abstraction”. Arts Magazine. 61. 1987. peterhalley.com/ artists/peter.halley/notesonabstraction [viewed 30 March 2015].

Sydney Festival

Artbank and the Sydney Festival have joined forces in a partnership designed to broaden audience experiences during this annual summer spectacular. For the 2015 festival, artworks were selected to accompany the program ‘About an Hour’, responding to the premise of ‘bite sized’ entertainment. Projected in the foyer over the five days of this program were seven videos from the Artbank collection by Daniel Crooks, Todd Fuller, Greedy Hen, Angelica Mesiti, Jess McNeil, Dorota Mytych and Joan Ross (artwork credits p9).

Photography Zan Wimberly

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Patrick Doherty: Brute Virtuosity and Dangerous Innocence Adam Jasper

The Marquis de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom (1789) in thirty seven days while imprisoned in the Bastille. The text details the activities of four aristocrats as they while away the winter with fornication and murder. De Sade wrote the original in hurried micrographia on rolls of paper that he hid in the walls of his cell. As with much pornography, languorous description soon gives way to an urgent, almost mathematical elaboration of the combinatorics of copulation; as if every conceivable permutation of atrocity might be captured in a single tale. By its end, the account is so hastened that it degenerates into a mere list of who was killed on which day, like a worm’s eye view of a Christian calendar of Martyr’s Feast days. Meanwhile, outside the sadist’s castle, spring inexorably blooms, like an Easter renewal that could neither be averted nor even delayed by a single day.

Patrick Doherty The Fairer Sex 2010 Synthetic polymer paint and graphite on canvas 288 x 170 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2011

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Patrick Doherty Me and the Mysteries 2008 Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 132 x 192.5 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2008

PATRICK DOHERTY: BRUTE VIRTUOSITY AND DANGEROUS INNOCENCE

In spite of its notorious reputation, The 120 Days of Sodom is a tedious book. Sexual acts take place with all of the charisma of a washing machine going into spin cycle, and the escalating murders imply diminishing returns as the perverts find that their most inventive abominations cannot compensate for the desensitisation they bring in their wake. Curtin University School of Design and Art, where Patrick Doherty has now returned for a stint after many years of productive freedom, is not a prison; although the resemblance of prisons to art schools in Australia is underscored by the fact that the National Art School in Sydney is located in the Darlinghurst Jail, and Sydney College of the Arts occupies the grounds of what was once Rozelle Hospital (originally Callan Park Hospital for the Insane). Doherty is also not the Marquis de Sade. By all accounts, and my own interactions with him, he’s a very nice guy. However he’s experimenting on closing the gap between art school and prison, between the painter and the obscene writer, by planning on having The 120 Days of Sodom read to him by his friend Marcus Canning while he paints over thirty seven days. As good a way as any of serving a sentence, Canning will perform the role of sublimated artist’s muse. Instead of playing the particular embodiment of the universal ideal—as some ninteenth century wag would put it—by sitting disrobed in front of Doherty in an Odalisque pose, Canning will be behind him, reading from the divine Marquis’s masturbatory theatre while Doherty paints, visually unaided, but spurred on by Canning’s breathy voice. God willing, they’ll get out of the studio unharmed. In a way, it’s impossible not to read Patrick Doherty’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’ project as a kind of transgressive defence. A defence, above all, against the scholasticism of the art school environment, as if he hopes risking being thrown out might innoculate him against the far greater risk of being absorbed. For Doherty is one of a paradoxical kind, the succesful outsider painter—a faux naïve illustrator with cunning and range. Examined as individual works, his paintings can seem genuinely pathological, as if they belong in a compendium by German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn, or should be left undisturbed in a locked filing cabinet in the collection he established at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Heidelberg. Take the painting Me and the Mysteries (2008). A large fairytale landscape, demarcated with childishly didactic colours: blue is sky, green is grass, brown is soil. Almost a children’s book illustration, if children’s books were illustrated by Bruegel on acid. At the left, a grey crystal thrusts to the very top of the canvas, touching the edge with its tip, and emitting amputated bloody limbs, some of them 107

still busy with household tasks. A man steps forth from the crystal, under the watch of a holy petrel that we can read from Doherty’s earlier works as being a metaphor for his generous father. The man stands on a kaleidoscopic plinth, composed of a patchwork of colour fields, and surveys a wasteland of theological atrocity. All the figures, bar one, are dead or dying, simultaneously struck by lightning dispensed by an indiscriminate God, as comically vengeful as a David Shrigley cartoon. The sole survivor (the same man?), is crossing this waste with a lemur on his back. Meanwhile to the right, across from the killing fields, a green meadow—seemingly inaccessible to the protagonists—features nursing mothers, a barbershop quartet springing out of their coffins and a man on a prize winning horse. What we have here is something like the narrative logic of the German flag (devised under Napoleon’s occupation), with its black, red and gold tricolor symbolising the black of the present day, the blood that must be spilt and the glorious utopia on the other side of the river of blood. The composition looks so haphazard that it’s as if Doherty can’t see the canvas until he’s standing arm’s reach from it, and it is there, as if compelled by the same god that torments Jonathan Meese, that he begins to paint. This apparent naïvety is belied by the meteorological void at the centre of the painting. There’s nothing here, other than the paint itself, in a kind of shifting protean nebula that gives forth a spectrum and partially obscures a recumbent body that recalls Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ (1521). That cloud of soft grey says more than the figures; it gives away Doherty’s hidden identity as a formal painter—the technique is too knowing, too painterly, to conform to the apparently aleatory psychosis of the subject matter. Read in series, Doherty is too mercurial a shapeshifter to be diagnosed by the symptoms he encodes in paint. His style ranges from Henry Darger to Marcel Dzarma, back to James Ensor or that art historical citation machine, Laura Owens. It’s the paradox of outsider art—there can be no such thing, because any outsider art is already ‘inside’ the system by virtue of having been named, and thereby caught in the machine of the art world. Looking for an unacceptable style, searching for an unrepresentable image, finding an impermissible act, they’re all doomed activities in the face of the omnivore we call secular art. And in trying to escape academicism with his sequential adoption of pathological styles, from tattoo to dismemberment, Doherty has become one of the great tourists and taxonomists of outsider art. If there’s a sense in which Doherty resembles the sadists, it is that he cannot escape his own virtuosity any more than the sadist can escape springtime.

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