J O N AT H A N M C B U R N I E PINNACLE S G ALLER Y 3 Novemb er 201 7 - 2 8 Januar y 2018
Please be advised that this exhibition and suppor ting publication contains imager y that may be considered offensive. Many of these ar t works are intended to be subversive, shocking, satirical, ironic, erotic, sincere, explicit , challenging, selfdepreciating, contradictor y and critical. These works are intended to challenge many of the notions that we take for granted in contemporar y society, and hopefully make us think about the world in which we live, and the way we consume resources and culture.
Publisher Pinnacles Gallery Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville City Council PO Box 1268 Townsville Queensland, 4810 Australia Pinnacles@townsville.qld.gov.au ŠGallery Services, Townsville City Council and the authors 2017 ISBN: 978-0-949461-24-7 Organised by Pinnacles Gallery Judith Jensen Erwin Cruz Louise Cummins Rob Donaldson Carly Sheil Samuel Smith Leonardo Valero Jacquelina Jakovljevic Sarah Monts Sarah Reddington Nicole Richardson Danielle Berry Wendy Bainbridge Jo Lankester Jake Pullyn Chloe Lindo Rachel Cunningham
Published on the occasion of
Pi nna c l e s G a l l e r y 3 N o ve mb e r 2 01 7 - 2 8 Ja nu a r y 2 018
Acting Team Manager Libraries and Galleries Exhibitions and Collection Coordinator Education and Programs Coordinator Digital Media and Exhibition Design Coordinator Digital Media and Exhibition Design Officer Digital Media and Exhibition Design Fellow Exhibitions Officer Exhibitions Officer Public Art Officer Education and Programs Officer Education and Programs Assistant Arts Officer Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant Gallery Assistant
Image front cover Eternia (Precipice 56) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper Image inside cover Installation view from Moses I Amn’t 2014 Image back cover Batman Cursing the Gods 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Contributing Authors Christian Flynn Adam Geczy Publication Design and Development Rob Donaldson Photography Shane Fitzgerald Jacquie Manning Richard Walker Acknowledgements Throughout the course of this project, I have incurred many debts of gratitude, the first of which is to the Gallery Services team, past and present. Erwin Cruz , Eric Nash and Shane Fitzgerald ushered in this exhibition with enthusiasm I rarely see. Thank you also to Louise Cummins for keeping the momentum going, and to Rob Donaldson, for designing this intimidating and comprehensive publication, and for being so agreeable to so many suggestions, no matter how silly. I would be remiss if I did not offer heartfelt thanks to Christian Flynn and Adam Geczy for their contributions to this publication, and for their ongoing advice and support. Both gentlemen have been friends and mentors interchangeably for some years now, and remain trusted advisers in all things, so please blame any shortcomings of character or artistry on them. Finally, I would like to thank my ever-patient and longsuffering partner Suzi for putting up with all of my silliness. You make this world bearable. www.jonathanmcburnie.com
Pinnacles Gallery Riverway Arts Centre 20 Village Blvd Thuringowa Central QLD 4817 Closed Mondays Tues - Sun: 10am - 5pm
(07) 4773 8871 pinnacles@townsville.qld.gov.au whatson.townsville.qld.gov.au PinnaclesTCC
CONTENTS What if ? 6 Dr Adam Geczy
P r e s e r v a t i v e 2 2 0 4 4 Christian Flynn
There is a satirical Australian short film from 1986, BabaKiueria, which tells of an ancient, Edenic land once harmoniously inhabited by a bunch of white people who then fall under the civilizing influence of black people. The whites are the ‘aboriginals’ (meaning originary, primary), and the blacks are the colonisers. They speak of their concern over the whites, that they mean well, and that they need good watch and care. For their own good (of course) their children are periodically removed from their families and sent to those of black families because of the better care and social opportunities that they can provide. It is a ‘what if ?’, with a dark lining to its humour, which through its dramatic reversal draws many persistent and still unresolved problems into stark and stiff relief. What if the same upending could be imagined with gays, lesbians, and all other queers? To put it in a truncated sentence, ‘What if the whole world were gay?’ Just picture the gay people huddled by the television at Mardi Gras time saying how charmingly straight these straight people are. Or the circulation of the line, ‘Yes and many of my best friends are straight’, and so on. To understand this logical mayhem, with all its implausibility and wishful justice, is to understand the work of Jonathan McBurnie. In his ribald, convoluted and overwritten world Batman has already had his coming out party as a bisexual, and Wonder Woman has confessed her love of a domestic life in which she bakes muffins and manufactures pincushions. The Australian conservative Prime Minister has finally had that sex change, and a Ron Mueck sculpture is used as an oversized paperweight.
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The birth of comic superheroes coincides with an historical period that was only beginning to recover from the Depression and the very real threat of both fascism and communism. Created in the year that the Nazis came to power in 1933, Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, Batman a year later (Detective Comics #27, May 1939). As if anticipating historical events Captain America was born in March 1941, and would be every boy’s nationalist hero once the US entered World War Two after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in early December of the same year. As symbolic defensive avatars of Cold War peril, Spiderman arrived, ironically again, just three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. He was followed by the troubled crusaders, Hulk, and Thor, and then Iron Man the following year. These would eventually incarnate into action figures but not before G.I. Joe who appeared on the market in 1964. There has been good deal of scholarly work done on action heroes and their relationship to classical mythology, the social subconscious, psychology, politics, and religion. Overall they stand for beliefs and aspirations, while also expressing personal fears in a highly encoded form. Batman, for instance, is the subject of considerable psychological inquiry. The victim of childhood trauma at witnessing the violent murder of his parents as a child, his mission for justice is tempered by anger, which leads to moral hesitation, reflecting a split in his consciousness. For by becoming Batman he has withdrawn from his human identity and, in a sense, renounced the human element in whose name he was created.
These are rather perennial themes about the tensions in the human soul, the undercurrents of anger and shame behind expressions of power and justice, nonetheless remain unexplored to the point of a beyance in the realms of perversion and sexuality. Aside from the underground pornographic travesties that have existed since the eighteenth century, the first popular (comic) artist to deal with male sexuality in the mainstream was Touko Laaksonen, Tom of Finland. Tom of Finland was to the world of soft porn and comics what the Village People were to the disco set. His stylized comic world was a man-agerie of hyermasculinity, a gay utopia in which all the men were ‘ripped’ and ‘pumped’, had massive penises and no problems with their erections under any conditions. Their clothing was always tight, to the point of looking like spandex. Laaksonen invented a universe in which jutting chins and full, pursed lips gazed longingly at biceps and pectorals that bulged with exaggerated rotundity, or to use the correct gay expression: ‘big pecs, tight abs and bubble butt’. In the post-industrial era bodily exaggeration had ultimately become the norm, and the bulging body became the symbol of displaced labour power in the increasingly virtualized financial markets of late capitalism.
Importantly—and this fact is not widely circulated for obvious reason that it threatened to bring myths of essential masculinity into disrepute—Laaksonen’s burly men enter into the popular consciousness before body building became an international aesthetic and lifestyle phenomenon. (Some of his first drawings were submitted to the American publication Physique Pictorial in 1957.) This occurred with the documentary Pumping Iron in 1979, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and a circle of friends (including Lou Ferrigno who would play the Hulk in the 1980’s television series) vied for the title of Mr Olympia. Until then bodybuilding was perceived as a hobby for fanatics, odd-bods and criminals. But while it became a rallying point for straight males, bodybuilding attracted just as many queers. The ‘Muscle Mary’ is the name for the gay male clone who is, so to speak, more man than man.
Image right: Precipice (Three Miles of Bad Road) 2017 Ink on paper
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These historical narratives are among many points of call within McBurnie’s visually saturated images, often where numerous narratives interlace, collide, and collapse on themselves. Sexuality is one of the best ways of understanding the strategies of parallax and reorientation in his work, since it is form of communication, of power, and of transgression. Sex and gender define the site of self at the threshold of the private and the public. This helps to explain, for instance, the role of explicit sexuality in James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that at its end combines countless narrative threads to make a frenetic, vertiginous surface of images, something that would return in full force in Finnegan’s Wake. As these works suggest, our world is not the neat set of rules and habits that we think it to be, but rather our perceptual comfort zones guard us perpetually against a world of clatter, confluence and confusion. Impossible and implausible, McBurnie’s discordant worlds are not simply to be seen as the return of the repressed, but as complementary to the more familiar narratives, both fictional and real. It can best be thought of as pornography in the expanded field. Pornography is not just the simplified ritualsation of sexual congress, but an industry in which sex is transacted with the foreknowledge that what is being carried out is considered lewd, and it takes pleasure in being wrong and naughty. What if this could be extended to all things? Art, fashion, music, religion, politics—even Mother Nature herself. With McBurnie a world where everything is wrong is presented as right: it is not only where black and white people live in peace and harmony but it is also where a Mickey Mouse teaches physics at university and where boys molest bishops. Dr Adam Geczy Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at the University of Sydney.
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Deeply Flawed Human 2017 Ink on paper
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Bill Callahan Phase 2017 Ink on paper
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Big Meat 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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This is Where the Comics Come From, Boy 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top No Title (Fortress Maximus and Skorpinok) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image bottom Precipice (Two Dead Ends and You Still Have to Choose) 2017 Ink and gouache on paper
Image top Phenominal Abdominal I 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Phenominal Abdominal II 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Complex Temporal Dissection Equipment 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Yanks Love Love (Precipice 354) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice 353 (Limp Funky) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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The Dead of the Experiment 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper Image overleaf: Mordred (Camlann V) [detail] 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top A Yardstick by which to Measure how 70’s the 70’s were 2017 Ink, watercolour and goauche on paper Image bottom Nothing is Right (Camlann VIII) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top World’s most OK Band 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Confused Soldiers (Endless Summer) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Images left Various Paper Dolls 2015 - 2017 Ink, synthetic polymer, and watercolour on paper Above Things I’ve Tried to Like (But Just Can’t) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Top left Bone Tired 2017 Ink and synthetic polymer on paper
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Bottom left I’m Gone. It’s All Bootcamp This, Trust Fund Fashionista That. White Nonsense. 2017 Ink and synthetic polymer on paper
Top right Hard Headed, Hard Hearted, Dick Hardened Blues 2017 Ink on paper Bottom right I Won’t Be Found 2017 Ink on paper
Top left Highlands (Time Out of Mind) 2017 Ink on paper Top right Hug the mountain 2017 Ink on paper Bottom right Posing for Joe (Always Gave me a Teriffic Workout, Which Helped me Increase my Endurance, Muscle Control and Definition) 2017 Ink on paper
Images overleaf Image right Serious Grudge, Frayed 2017 Ink on paper Image left Beach T Rex [detail] 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Self Portrait (June 14, 2017) 2017 Ink on paper
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Self Portrait 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image previous Installation photo from Moses I Amn’t 2014
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Alt Era Agita 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Top left Emerging Artist Blues (Today I ate KFC) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image above Ready to Rassle 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Bottom left Lockstep Electro Groove 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper Bottom right Ghost Soldiers 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Polymath My Fucken Arse 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Representation Blues 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top Bleakness and Poetry 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Mystery Man 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top Tylenol and Beers (Things like this) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Save me President Jesus 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Anxiety Dog (What’s My Habitat?) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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I killed a kraken in a wading pool today and buried it in my back yard. I ate the stomach of the thing and gleaned an underwater history of consumption and a life of hiding in the dark. The bullet that killed it, I ate it. The spear that killed it, I ate it too. The hook that caught it, I ate it. Now I’m full of sulphur dioxide because I ate the shitty bottle of red wine that was also in the guts of the thing. I’ll be farting all night. There is enough time to get to the toilet and kill again. First paralysis, then death. Shatter the first, second, third vertebrae, death is immediate. Eat the hand and then the stomach muscles. Gorge on the grot and parasites rampant in my own foulness. Make yourself your own meal. I am the kraken. I am my favourite food on which to gnaw, to learn, to watch. I am my favourite thing, to make as a meal for myself and for others. Christian Flynn
Bangers and Mash 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image overleaf Suplex [detail] 2017 Ink , gouache and synthetic polymer on paper
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Image top Precipice 316 (However Will We Survive) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image bottom Precipice 332 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top Hollywoody 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Recklessness in Water 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image overleaf Death by tits [detail] 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Attachment Unavailable 2016 Ink on paper
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Page from Pub Comics 2016 Ink on paper
Image previous page Loaded Skies [detail] 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Page from Pub Comics 2016 Ink on paper
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Back cover from Pub Comics 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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XXXX Phantom 2016 Risograph print, Edition of 30
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Just two ex-cons lookin’ fer some honest work 2014 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Flair vs Hogan 2017 Ink on paper
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Slugfest is Effective (People who are interested in the Resurrection, the Base of Significant Crossover Events) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top Orchestral Ambitions (Secrets of the Deep) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image bottom Casual Destruction (Camlann I) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Lavendar Batman 2016 Synthetic polymer and ink on paper
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Image top No more Glory for Anybody (Camlann IV) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image bottom This is Forever (Camlann X) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top Rupert’s Lament (Ruin) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image overleaf Do you Blame, to Hold a Grudge a Minute, You Know, Someone Doesn’t Pay You, You Will be able to Upset that You Cannot Leave that Control [detail] 2017 Watercolour on paper
Image bottom Look out Hollywood (He Opens a New Woman, Inspired by Carnal Redemption that has been Discoverd in Rebound Chicks, Probably the Most Euphoric Ode) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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A Bright, Fully Sexual Intercourse Croons and Then Blames the Former Lover of Being a Man-ho Full of Malicious Harmony 2017 Ink, watercolour and gouache on paper
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Shake Hands with Danger 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice (Bone Tired) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Precipice (Ouch House Doom Core) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Flesh of Lost Summers installation view, 2014, ink on wall, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
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Apocalypse Opera 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Dad Metal 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Seven Curses 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Sugar Shaker 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Artist, lost, in a bear suit, in the bush 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Top left Beach Adventures 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Top right Dick Boogie 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Bottom left 70’s Beach Hulk 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Bottom right I Shouldn’t be Here 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Page from Knife and Pan 2016 Ink on paper
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Sweet, Sweet, Sweet the Sting 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top Precipice 314 (Gis a Beer) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Trickle-down Love 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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I Couple With Death 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image overleaf Grumbling Combustion [detail] 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Fuck Boy 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top Study (S.F.) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Many a Life (Precipice) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image overleaf Installation view from Moses I Amn’t 2014
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Disturbing Scene at the Victory 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left Bat Anatomy 2014 Ink on paper
Image top right Raging Superman 2014 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom When I Die, Fuck You 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top Boundary Hotel 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Seafood Basket 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top The Union Hotel 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom Steak n Chips 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Having Babies on Purpose 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice (Purple Doom) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Huge Heavy Portion (Close to Ponder) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Caledonia (was the name allocated to Scotland by the Romans) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left Colour Study 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top right You’ll Fall in Love with Somebody Else Today or Tonight 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom left I Kill Them, Every Day, In My Studio 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom right Just Another Damn Sculpture Garden (All My Dead Mates) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Sunset Diamond Translation (Precipice) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice (Dread Sovereign) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice (Baseline Reality) 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image above Art Basel 2017 Ink on paper
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Images right Various images from the Grumbling Combustion series 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
Moses I Amn’t (installation view) 2014
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Moses I Amn’t (installation view) 2014
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Flesh of Lost Summers (installation view) 2014 ink on wall, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
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Tell it to me (Space Jesus) 2017 Ink and synthetic polymer on paper
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Image top Who Needs the Young 2017 Ink and synthetic polymer on paper Image bottom Pesky Stadium 2017 Ink and watercolour on paper
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‘Life drawing is my bag, too’ he said. I winced. 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left Bust 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top right Bends in the Spacetime 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom left Demolition of the Studios (Goodbye, Oldspace) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom right Bastard Nimbus 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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He’s more designer, now, than artist, twisted and evil 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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East Side Studio (Fuck You, Bastard Prick) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left No Gavel (Young Bohemian) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top right Who is Scully Morris? Do I Disgust You? (Like a Cartoon Version of an Artist) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom left Studio Butts 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom right Stag (tweet me @blues) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top left Living Well Jesus Dog 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image top right Parakeet (Walk Unafraid) 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom left Straight White Male Artist Blooze 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Make Yourself into a Monument (I am not a Monument) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice 311 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Back Issues (Order Now on Page 13) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Escape Artist II 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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The Whole Shebang 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Superhero Standing on Contemporary Art 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice 301 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Precipice 300 2016 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left Precipice 181 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top right Precipice 326 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom left Precipice 348 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom right Precipice 169 (Behind the Sun, Eternia) 2015 Ink, watercolour and gouache on paper
Precipice 175 (No More Heaven) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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I want a giant woman to fill my life, my thoughts, my studio 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left Precipice (Eternia) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper Image top right Inculcate me with Bitter Cynicism 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom left Field Below (Precipice 171) 2015 Ink on paper
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List of things I draw sometimes 2011 Ink on paper
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Above and Previous page Secret Pint installation view 2011 130 drawings and collages, Paper Plane Gallery, Sydney.
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Blizzard of Oz (more signal to more noise) 2015 Ink, watercolour and gouache on paper
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Cold War Sky 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left Concern over the Install of the Work 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper Image top right Halfway Home and Going Nowhere 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper Image bottom left Helmut Newton Babe Study (Fucking Garden Partay) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Drama, Drama, Drama! 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image top left Hulk Study (broken dolls) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image top right My Strongness, My Art of Sex 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom left Study (Modulok) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
Image bottom right Study (Heads) 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
The Darkness Can’t Be Over Yet 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image left That’s the Ticket 2015 Ink, watercolour, and gouache on paper Image below Architecture Tragedian 2015 Ink and watercolour on paper
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Image above Flex Low, Sweet Chariot (Get to ze chopair) 2015 Ink, watercolour, and gouache on paper Image right top By the Sea I do Abide 2015 Ink, watercolour, and gouache on paper Image right bottom Precipice 174 (the hanging man) Ink, watercolour, and gouache on paper Above and Previous page Secret Pint installation view 2011 130 drawings and collages, Paper Plane Gallery, Sydney.
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