6 minute read
Julia Gutman: Stranger to Ourselves
from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney & Melbourne, Australia & Singapore – Jan-Mar 2024
Words Neha KalePhotography Timothy Salisbury
Julia Gutman is grappling with an affliction that’s been part of her life since childhood. In the presence of other people, she’s torn between two impulses. An intention to participate versus the desire to observe.
AT A PARTY THE PREVIOUS SATURDAY, she tells me, she found herself standing in a corner with a group of artists and writers and directors. She watched them watch each other.
“We are all such voyeurs,” she laughs. “We were trying to observe the social dynamics. She shakes her head. “It became apparent to me that some people have a scribble in the brain. I grew up in a house where we were creatively encouraged but I was the only one with this neurotic itch to explain what was happening.”
The act of sewing, she says, can empty her mind. The thoughts disappear. She is back in her body again. “It is so physical. It is just process.” A smile crosses her face. “It is delightful.”
The words text and textile famously share a Latin root. Writers refer to the subjects they wrestle with as their material. The first time I encountered one of Gutman’s ‘patchworks’, in which clothes donated by friends and family are stitched together, re-assembled, to recall the surface of a painting, I felt like I was reading rather than seeing something.
The work, The Black Jeans, was propped up against a wall at the Fairfield City Gallery. I circled it twice, this portrait of the artist lounging in a chair. I knew the pose: Antoinette, from Balthus’s The White Skirt. But her expression was downcast, her gaze distant, sombre. The figure, rendered in cotton and thread and calico, seemed to me like a character in a short story. It didn’t so much describe a likeness as hint at a world beneath the surface that I could sense but never know.
In Gutman’s world, people aren’t abstractions. They are specific. Particular. There was Devra, her studio mate in New York, whose death changed her artistic trajectory. “I was grieving,” she says. “I asked ‘what could I do with Devra’s clothes?’ – and then I realised that all my favourite artists were making figurative paintings.”
There are the young women who starred in Muses, her first exhibition at Sullivan + Strumpf: reading and swimming and watching Buffy in front of the television. Limbs intertwined. Rope and chain tethering tableaux together, ordinary intimacy turned profound connection.
“I was so grateful to be with my friends,” she says. “To be alive. I still feel that way.”
Then there is her Archibald-winning painting of the singer Montaigne.
“It was the first time someone had called my work portraiture,” she says. “And I realised, wait a second! I am a portrait artist. Maybe this is about a very strong desire to understand someone else’s interiority. [Jung talks about] making the unconscious conscious. Otherwise it will control your life and you will call it fate.”
Gutman’s art, I think, exists in the space between self and other. But when we meet, during a cloudy Monday at her high-ceilinged Artspace studio, our conversation returns again and again to the idea of the self as other. We talk about our favourite writers: Zadie Smith, Siri Hustvedt.
Gutman plays with short fiction. Her ‘patchworks’, she tells me, start as text paragraphs. She owes the name for her upcoming Sullivan+Strumpf show – Everyone you are looking at is also you – to a quote by the great James Baldwin.
I notice that Gutman often articulates literary instincts. The desire to reveal our delusions of moral purity. To explore how we project our fear and fantasies. To reflect how the abject or shameful or violent might exist on a continuum of which we are also part.
The artist that appears in The Black Jeans was mysterious, but also secure in her subjectivity. In a new work, They are the ones who live their lives not as lives but as examples of life, she’s split in two. Her back is turned to face her own reflection. She’s watching herself watch herself, trapped by her own perspective, newly conscious of her limits. To prepare for the show, Gutman spent a month researching. She became interested in witch hunts. She revisited realisations from her Jewish childhood.
“The thing that was so pertinent for me about my upbringing was that Nazis were normal people,” she says. “I could have been a Nazi. Whenever there is a mob mentality, people have an inability to reflect on themselves and this desire to absolve themselves by pointing at each other.” The artist is very interested in “critically engaging with emotions.” She counts among her best friends a psychologist and a theatre director. She shows me the preliminary drawings for new works in the show. Two figures embrace. A couple sprawl on a picnic rug. Here, interiority – the depth of feelings – manifest as moments of tenderness. But what happens when connection ruptures? When all that goes unwitnessed, inside us, ripples out into the world?
Gutman has recently become fascinated by a painting Arrest for Witchcraft, an 1866 painting by John Pettie, part of the collection at the National Gallery of Victoria. In the show’s central installation, she reimagines its composition. She casts versions of herself as both ‘witch’ and an angry mob. The point is not to paint a picture of persecution but to explore how easily we vilify others when we refuse to confront our multiplicity.
“I think that’s what James Baldwin was talking about when he said, ‘walking down the street, you could be that cop, you could be that child’,” she says. “You could be any of them. I struggle with this the other way – maybe having compassion and absolving people of accountability. The desire to turn someone into a witch, is the witch.”
There’s power, still, in standing back, observing. “I do feel like if we look in the mirror, there is a bit of hope.” ■
