May 2014

trouble

Taking Centre Stage in Bendigo Launching 2015 Key features include: • • • • •

Largest dedicated auditorium in Central Victoria 960 seat theatre Professional team on site Generous foyers linking to tranquil outdoor spaces Suitable for performance, expos and conferences

For future bookings, general information, technical specifications and status updates please visit our website: www.ulumbarratheatre.com.au Email ulumbarra@bendigo.vic.gov.au Phone 03 5434 6006

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre

IRENE BARBERIS 121 View Street Bendigo, VIC, 3550 Apocalypse /+61Revelation: Re Looking 3 5441 8724 latrobe.edu.au/vacentre 2 May – 15 June

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street, Bendigo, VIC, 3550 T: 03 5441 8724 121 View Street E: vac@latrobe.edu.au Bendigo, VIC, 3550 W: latrobe.edu.au/vac +61 3 5441 8724 Gallery hours: Tue – Fri 10am-5pm. Weekends 12-5pm latrobe.edu.au/vacentre La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre

Image: Irene Barberis, Installation shot, Tapestry of Light, 2013, Convergence exhibition, RMIT University Design Research Institute. Photograph by Tobias Titz.

we’re all about the ear COMMUNITY RADIO FOR CASTLEMAINE AND BEYOND

www.mainfm.net 03 5472 4376

FEATURES (09) COMICS FACE Ive Sorocuk (10) THE MADNESS OF ART Jim Kempner (12) ASHLEY BICKERTON: ARTISTS ARE

DYED POODLES DANCING THROUGH

FIERY HOOPS FOR THE ONE PERCENT

Naima Morelli

(22) ARTHUR AND CORINNE CANTRILL:

ALL PART OF THE PROCESS

Klare Lanson

(32) HUGH LAURIE: HUGH & CRY

Inga Walton

(42) MAY SALON Major Madness (56) SEPARATELY WORKING IN TANDEM

Olivia Welch

(62) ACTEASE Courtney Symes (68) MELBURNIN’ Inga Walton (72) STRALIAN STORIES:

THE FIRE AT ROSS’S FARM

BY HENRY LAWSON Neil Boyack (75) JOB INTERVIEW Darby Hudson (76) GREETINGS FROM HINDUSTAN

PART THREE: BEN MEETS GOD

Ben Laycock

COVER: Ashley BICKERTON, Anyone With The Heretical Gall To Ask An Ironist What He Actually Stands For (detail) 2014, mixed media on jute, 200 x 200 cm. Junk Anthropologies, Gajah Gallery, 140 Hill Street, #01-08, Old Hill Police Station, Singapore, 26 April – 25 May 2014 - gajahgallery.com Issue 112: MAY 2014 trouble is an independent monthly mag for promotion of arts and culture Published

by Trouble magazine Pty Ltd. ISSN 1449-3926 STAFF Vanessa Boyack, administration (admin@ troublemag.com) Steve Proposch, editorial (art@troublemag.com) Listings (listings@troublemag.com) CONTRIBUTORS Ive Sorocuk, Jim Kempner, Naima Morelli, Olivia Welch, Courtney Symes, Inga Walton, Klare Lanson, Neil Boyack, Darby Hudson, Ben Laycock.

Find us on Facebook: facebook.com/Troublemag Subscribe to our e-news at troublemag.com READER ADVICE: Trouble magazine contains artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and the names, images or artworks of deceased Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. Treat Trouble intelligently, as you expect to be treated by others. Collect or dispose of thoughtfully.

DIS IS DE DISCLAIMER! The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication.

The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions. All content in this publication is copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior permission of the publisher.

Trouble is distributed online from the first of every month of publication but accepts no responsibility for any inconvenience or financial loss in the event of delays. Phew!

art comedy series

season 2, episode 7: Mapplethorpe A Mapplethorpe that far surpasses anything banned by the Cincinnati Museum of Art. You could go to jail in New Jersey for this! Where’s the elbows?

4

back to back

season 2, episode 8: Miami Madness Art Fairs, Red Dots, and an Angel: Jim and Dru head south for some sun and (hopefully) sales.

Could be important. But where’s Dranoff? And what about the big ANGEL fish?

visit: themadnessofart.com/

Artists are dyed poodles dancing through fiery hoops for the one percent ... an interview with Ashley Bickerton

by Naima Morelli

I was in Ashley Bickerton’s studio in Bali, staring at a painting of a blue man and several colourful girls. I was having a hard time keeping up with the direction our conversation was taking. A short time ago I had suggested to the artist that we sit together and have an old-style interview, but he ignored me. He went on instead with a stream of conscious banter as we wandered towards his workspace.

In a bid to gain his attention, I asked what the blue man in the painting represented. He replied with the weary voice of a man who had been asked that question too many times: “What does it represent? There’s plenty of literature on that out there. I don’t know. His hair is a desert island, his skin is the sea, in a lot of paintings he wears a French sailor shirt, basically I described him as representing …” Ashley went blank for a moment. “Forgot ...” He then mumbled something about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys going blank during interviews because of the drugs the songwriter took. I was unwilling to venture any connection between the two.

I met Ashley Bickerton in 2012, during my research on contemporary art in Indonesia. He was an important figure in the East Village scene of the 1980s, and has been associated with the ‘Neo-Geo’ movement, which included artists such as Jeff Koons and Peter Halley. In 1997, at the top of his career, Bickerton unexpectedly left New York for a retreat in an eccentric villa situated in a remote part of Bali. The move didn’t stop him from exhibiting around the world.

To fix an appointment with Bickerton was not easy. There were very good waves in Bali in those couple of months, and the artist would rather surf. I could understand that. Here was an artist from a small tropical island who had climbed to the ice-cold top of the International art world. What did that take? I wondered. And what had driven him from New York to that remote tropical island so suddenly? I suspected disillusion, deep cynicism at the very least, perhaps more. But once the date and time were finally set, and met, I must say he was extremely nice. In the press release of Bickerton’s latest exhibition, Junk Anthropologies at Gajah Gallery in Singapore (until 25 May), there is photo of the artist sporting a large, stretched smile, so similar to the characters of his paintings. Despite the brash strength of his manner and his words, that is how I most remember him.

Ashley Bickerton, Junk Anthropologies (detail) 2014, mixed media on jute, 203 x 243 cm.

4

“... The town’s in equal measure “So what the blue man represents?” Ashley genuflecting and continued, standing cross-armed in front of this ass painting: kissing as it is “When I made him up he was a sort of joke to represent the twentieth century man. ostracising.”

When he was skinnier he represented an escapee

from all that western literature, all that existential anti-hero, blah blah blah. I don’t know what he represents now that he’s fat. Maybe he’s set adrift from the shackles of a particular belief system or literature? Originally it was a take on Gauguin. I’ve been in Bali for almost twenty years now, and I never wanted to confront the elephant in the room, you know, artist runs off to a tropical island. I never wanted to deal with it, because the reality here is not Gauguin’s reality, that’s ridiculous! I never came down here for that, I always thought that was silliness. Finally, after 14 years I decided to deal with it, but I deal with it my way. So I invented this character to represent all of that.”

You lived in New York and Brazil before you came to Bali, why did you come here?

“There’s many ways to look at it. I was tired of New York. I wasn’t built for New York, but as long as the town stayed nice I would stay. But the town doesn’t always stay nice. It goes up and down. So on one of the downs I just left. I didn’t want to stay around like a fart in a phone booth. The town’s in equal measure genuflecting and ass kissing as it is ostracising. It was nice to be formed there, but I don’t have the patience to sit around. I had other things I wanted to do. I’m not built for cold climates, I was born in the tropics, I grew up in the tropics. I don’t like to wear more than enough clothes, so New York was a place I had to get out of eventually. I was very much an insider in that whole world, so it wasn’t that hard to go away to literally the opposite point on the globe from New York City, as far as you can get from Bali. Being connected, being very much part of the inner circles of New York made it not impossible to function out here.”

How was living in Bali at the time?

“It was a different time, there were no computers then. Bali was much more of a provincial outpost with nothing. There was no middle class in Indonesia as there is now. There were no communications. There certainly wasn’t the traffic.

In New York I had wanted to get away from fabricators and all the people who built my work; horrible boring trips to boroughs to visit some pokey, mangy fabricator who’s pissed off or trying to chisel you to make and build sculptures, playing havoc with deadlines and stress. I had just had enough, and so one of the reasons I came back here was that I decided to make my own paintings and not have any assistance, not have anybody working for me. I would just be alone and painting. I wanted the bloody peace and that was it.”

Ashley Bickerton / Naima Morelli

4

Has the geographic change influenced the way you work on your paintings?

“This is not art, this is stupidity, and it’s maddening stupidity ... equivalent to trying to handwrite the bible.”

“When I moved here I thought I was coming to a place that would be populated by painters, poets and writers. It ended up being a place populated by pains, posers, and write-offs. Bali expatriates. Lots of flashy entrances, fabulous presentations of self, and lots of fabricated histories, etcetera. I didn’t want much to do with it, so I didn’t let it mix, didn’t pay attention.

I did my work. It’s not to say I didn’t love the culture of Indonesia, they are the reasons I live here, but that’s another story. It wasn’t until 2004 that I suddenly looked up at the paintings I was doing and thought to myself ‘God! I’ve shut it out, I’ve kept it at bay, it snuck in through the cracks and under the doors, through the half closed windows’. You know, Indonesia is suddenly in these paintings, completely. Gone are the colour schemes I used in New York, safety yellow, safety orange, black, white and silver. Just straight up, and suddenly they were all these grey-greens, green-greys, brown-greys. They looked like Batuan school paintings. It took it over ten years, just turning away from it, thinking I was ignoring or even fighting it, and then suddenly it just popped in. Now I play with it, run with it. I’ve come full circle. So now it’s all sort of humorous at this point.”

The first period you where in Bali you were still very much into realism…

“That actually went on for years until I realised I was making five paintings a year. They took so damn long, three days to do a hand that would look exactly like the photograph you copied it from. This is not art, this is stupidity, and it’s maddening stupidity. It’s equivalent to trying to handwrite the bible with a pen that doesn’t write properly. That airbrush was a nightmare in complexity, you are working this close and the damn thing doesn’t work! You spend the whole time fighting it, eighteen hours a day sitting there, six days a week, and you are thinking ‘this isn’t life, this isn’t art! It’s idiocy on a grand scale.’ That’s why I don’t make these anymore. I don’t care, I don’t have anything to prove technically, I’m not interested; I do this stuff in Photoshop. I’ll always remain technical in my thinking but certainly not in the execution. That’s boring.”

What does Bali represent to you? In Indonesia Bali is not the focal point for art.

“Not for art, more for crafts. Well, I just wanted to get the fuck out of New York. I’m a surfer, I like it here, and I’ve always liked it here. It didn’t matter where I worked.

This was far away, I surfed, I didn’t want to care. I could live or be anywhere once I had a gallery established; the further, the better. Actually, further could be a problem. After a while you got kids looking around, ex-wives. Whatever, this is when you are stuck, then the traffic closes in, then you are even more stuck.

Ashley Bickerton / Naima Morelli

4

At least I can drive to the surf with no traffic. I don’t have to go anywhere, I don’t have a proper job. I guess this is fine for now. My girlfriend and I had to go to Sanur yesterday and it took us an hour and forty-five minutes. I don’t leave my house, so this is, like … my god, this place is utterly, completely, fucking fucked and corrupted and ruined. I just hold up in this little corner and I don’t see it that much.

Part of it I kind of enjoyed for the idea that Gauguin was after, the idea of the noble savages, and primordial Eden, all of that. Gauguin was a great truth seeker, but I speak a different language. I’d be closer to other artists in that sense, California artists who love that sort of stuff, going to school with Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy. How could Paul McCarthy do a Gauguin? I could see him do a Picasso. It’s not un-similar. It’s a different language now. Gauguin wasn’t just a syphilitic paedophile who painted pretty things; he was actually a philosophical man seeking some essential truths in the universe. He was a seeker and we live in different times now. All I’m working on, all I do, is play YouTube discussions on various subjects. I go through phases. First was New Atheism, now it’s Chris Hedges and the gutting of culture and American corporatisation of everything. So, different times to old Gauguin, maybe the end of times.”

What do think of the Indonesian contemporary art scene?

“It’s like saying ‘what do you think of American artists?’

Global art will always follow global economies; that’s just a rule. If you want to break it down to individual artists, there are a lot of good individual artists here.”

Do you reckon younger artists are influenced by western culture or you think they still refer to their Indonesian identity?

“Look, I’m a surfer, I’m a human being. Those breakdowns in-between cultures don’t exist anymore. Everybody wears Gap or whatever the heck, it all looks alike. Everyone has the same suitcases in the airport. There used to be individual surf styles, there was a California look, a Hawaii look where I grew up. Those things don’t exist anymore, that’s long gone, the internet has broken it down. As the internet has broken religion down, it also destroys cultural variety.

2 Women on Scooter with Matisse 2014, mixed media on jute, 215 x 215 cm.

4

We don’t need gods or differences anymore, not in the same way. It’s tribal in a different way now. There is a whole different epistemology at work. This is the fastest changing time in the history of the planet. Some might say we are cascading towards cataclysm, which, you know, when you go back and get stuck in the traffic you could tend to think they might be right on that one. Our ability to carry ourselves, even ... Maybe I’m bleak. The guy I’m listening to now, Chris Hedges – a brilliant ex-war journalist, ex-seminary student at Harvard, I think one of the more profound public intellectuals – believes we are headed into a pan global period, meaning hundreds of years of pan global barbarism, maybe thousands of years that we won’t be able to back out of. Could be, could be, maybe not. I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all, not an end of times guy at all, but looking at the individual indicators, ecological and otherwise, it’s as clear as day, and quite frightening. Make kids with caution.”

Your uncompromising way of seeing the world certainly influences your art. Does that represent an obstacle when it comes to dealing with collectors and the art market?

“Artists are just actually dyed poodles dancing through fiery hoops for the one percent. You could look at it that way, or look at us as plastic philosophers dealing in physical currency. There’s always a balance between surviving with what you do as a professional, making it a viable means of self support, and the actual searching you do with that. You know, Thomas Kinkade just died, he was the favourite of the religious right. He did the cottages and the little cute things with the lights. He made millions and millions of them, and printed them out on canvas, and he had special people to do the light parts, and paint, and then he got computerised machines that do his signature on them. I think he actually was the richest artist in the world, richer than Damien Hirst, for a while. That’s Damien by the way, in that painting over there. That’s his family.”

2CWaE2P.G.2TbW 2014, mixed media on jute, 219 x 244 cm.

4

Ashley looked at the painting for a few seconds, then his face grew upset: “Oh my god! That’s a trade I’m supposed to do with Damien Hirst … that’s him and his family a few years ago, but he and his wife just split up … Fuck me running … Shit! That means he won’t trade. Uh oh … I’m just going to have to stick his new girlfriend on there. That’s an issue, I’m going to have to text him right now and say: ‘Dude, your painting has your freaking ex-wife on it.’ What the fuck! So is our trade off? Or do you want to paste your girlfriend’s face over it, or maybe ‘This Spot Blank?’ This is going to cause some problems. This trade is outstanding ‘cause I did this painting in 2009, but I didn’t want to let it go … and then, uh wow, it’s taken so long he’s split up. Whoops! … I want my Hirst. I mean, he won’t trade value for value necessarily, he’ll trade effort for effort.” Ashley sighed: “It’s all over the gossip columns. She ran off with some guy who’s an arms trader, she does the Gumball Rally in America and drives Maseratis, Ferraris, Bugatis, American muscle cars … She does it and met this guy who’s a notorious English arms dealer and a supplier of private security services in Iraq. I think a two hundred and something million pound defence contract … That’s the new boyfriend, some English mercenary, nicknamed in the press ‘Dog of War’, so she ran off with him.”

I never did find out if the trade between Bickerton and Hirst eventually took place. What I can see from Bickerton’s new Singapore show was that, in the meantime, his style has changed. In Junk Anthropologies the paintings look more essential and rough than his previous work. His hallucinated figures with aluminium skin are painted straight onto raw jute canvas. The blue man has evolved as well. In the painting Temptation in the Banjar he has become a couple of blue snakes with human faces, enveloping a silver girl.

According to Ashley, his ideas still come from “the same old fortress”, from yet another devious angle. That is not surprising from an artist who looks at reality from multiple points of view: “Absolute truths are boring, unless it’s hard empirical truth. Cultural truths are boring, because all meaning is so slippery.

Languages are just slang with an army and a navy, and so is history,” he says.

“History is where the army and navy came down and when, and the rest is just gossip. History is just official gossip.”

Junk Anthropologies, Gajah Gallery, Singapore, 26 April – 25 May - gajahgallery.com

Naima Morelli is a freelance ar ts writer and journalist with a par ticular interest in contemporary ar t from Italy, the Asia Pacific region and ar t in a global context. She is also an independent curator focusing on Italian, Indonesian and Australian emerging ar tists. At the moment she is working on a book about contemporary ar t in Indonesia.

NEXT PAGE: Temptation In The Banjar (detail) 2014, mixed media on jute, 180 x 130 cm.

ALL PART OF THE PROCESS:

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

by Klare Lanson

I’ve arranged to meet with two of the most interesting alternative filmmakers in this entire swirling world. Arriving at their home, I am faced with many paths leading to the entrance and I’m hesitant. I choose the one with a hedged arch, I’m not sure why.

There are clusters of ripening tomato vines, the last of the season, strewn over a bench seat. The autumnal sunshine is magnificent and my boy is happy to settle down with his pencils and paper on the front veranda. I knock on the door and am welcomed by an incredibly generous and vibrant couple. Their films are housed in collections as significant as The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek (Berlin), Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), New York Museum of Modern Art, The British Council and the National Library of Australia. I feel as green as the tomatoes as I sit down in conversation with Arthur and Corinne Cantrill.

There are so many competing factors as to why artists begin to investigate themes within their practice, and who they choose to create with. Arthur and Corinne Cantrill immersed themselves in a career of innovative filmmaking from a young age; the intense contrast of the communist background of Corinne’s family history combined with the uneventful true blue Aussie sensibility of Arthur’s was energising. The post war landscape of Australia in the first half of last century helped to invigorate a children’s education movement. The Rivett sisters, Elsie and Mary (Matheson), started the Children’s Library and Craft Movement (CLCM) in Australia and this is where the Cantrills first met. The movement took on the ideas of Herbert Read (anarchist, poet, philosopher and educator) where the emphasis was on creative free expression, the significance of play and supporting children to discover the materials of art as they see fit. This is the kind of art that really cooks my crumpets.

“Mary Matheson was always on the lookout for interesting people,” says Corinne. “… she was looking for vitality, strength, originality and things like that … all the people who worked for the Movement were very unusual people, multi disciplinary, coming from all sorts of backgrounds.”

In this way Mary Matheson seemed not only to have a large influence on art in education in Australia but was also a champion for artists wanting to experiment with new ideas in their practice. Working within a collaborative environment was the springboard for the Cantrills.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Still from City of Chromatic Dissolution 1998 (17.5 min) Arthur & Corinne Cantrill / Klare Lanson

4

In the late 1950s, Mary saw the opportunity to make films about the creative activities at the CLCM’s centres to be programmed by ABC TV in the School Broadcasts and the Children’s programme The Argonauts’ Club. Several tenminute films about the work being done at the Sydney centres were made.

The Cantrills asked to make a series of eleven films about the activities at the Brisbane Centre of the CLCM; activities different to those already filmed in the Sydney centres. Mary Matheson agreed and gave them a contract.

Arthur says, “Fortunately for us, we had no formal training in film production”. It was an organic trajectory stemming from his work in puppetry for children that drove him towards film. After their documentaries on the Brisbane CLCM Centre, they moved into art documentaries and more experimental modes of practice.

Corinne elaborates: “Major themes in our work have been the cinematic process as the subject of the film, our work with the Australian Landscape (and that’s overlapping into indigenous concerns, though not in a documentary way), our work in three colour separation … and of course the other big area has been our film theatre performance works. They’re really interesting because they can’t ever be recorded as works, as such ... that was one of the big drivers for doing what we did at La Mama in Melbourne, all the interesting Avant-garde art scene really. If you weren’t there you missed it.”

Sound is also vital to their work and whilst they commissioned composers for some of their early films, Arthur took on the primary role of making the soundscapes. He worked as a film editor, first at the ABC in Brisbane, and then at the BBC in London after the family left Brisbane in 1965 for four years.

Inspired by the BBC Radiophonic Workshops in the early 60s and also the work of French composer and renowned broadcaster Pierre Schaeffer, Arthur and his contemporaries began to make original sounds, “relating to the needs of the image”. The Australian poet and social commentator Harry Hooton also profoundly inspired him.

On their return to Australia in 1969 to take up a Fellowship in the Creative Arts at ANU, Arthur and Corinne made an experimental homage to Hooton (Harry Hooton, 1970), whose anarchy, libertarianism and association with the Sydney Push of the 1940s/50s allowed ideas to emerge around technology and the ‘Politics of Things’. Arthur sculpted sound using the analogue modes of reel to reel tape manipulation, field recordings and found objects. He created cutting edge works now considered to be significant to Australian electronic music history.

Arthur & Corinne Cantrill / Klare Lanson

4

“Fortunately for us, we had no formal training in film production.�

These works range from restrained environmental soundscapes to abstract electronic and musique concrete, represented in the CD available entitled Chromatic Mysteries: Soundtracks 1963-2009.

Arguably the most pivotal event for the Cantrills was the Expanded Cinema project in Canberra (1969), the start of their multi disciplined performance works.

Corinne thinks back to this time: “That was very important, we were really able to open up whole areas of cinematic investigation through Expanded Cinema.

We had a lucky break with La Mama Theatre Company too; from 1977 onwards they gave us every opportunity to present five works we called ‘film theatre performance works’ where we were the protagonists; the live actors with our films and slides were investigating the films through a scripted narration, using sound effects and so on … it was very much rehearsed.”

Works over the years at La Mama such as Edges of Meaning (1977), Passage (1983), Projected Light – On the Beginning and End of Cinema (1988) and The Bemused Tourist (1997) created a hybrid approach to presenting their work, extending the cinematic boundaries of the screen to a more physical 3D space. They set up sand filled campsites, multi screen scenarios, object and installative elements and scripted narration to expand their ideas further. The audience now had an active role to play.

The Boiling Electric Jug Film (1970), Calligraphy Contest for the New Year (1971), Passage and The Berlin Apartment (1986) are just a few films that were created specifically for performance. Layered thinking around subverting the illusion of film and the destruction of the screen itself is prominent. Working with multiple screen technology, hand painted film techniques, physical interventions through painting and cutting up of the screen, projecting a film of the subject onto the real thing – for example boiling jugs of water that will inevitably steam up and cloud the imagery on screen beyond recognition – the Cantrills played with the theme of destruction at its most allusive.

There’s also an appealing mathematical basis to their film and sound work, and a sense of beauty in the equation of their films. The process driven practice of the Cantrills is very much embedded in the natural and everyday world, with a real sense of ecological concerns that is both attractive and powerful. “…from the mid 80s we started making films within our house using very slow film stock, picking up fleeting patches of light that were falling on objects around the house.

That was a whole series of work called Illuminations of the Mundane.”

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Still from In This Life’s Body 1984 (147 min) NEXT PAGE: Above Still from Warrah 1980 (15 min) Below Still from Waterfall 1984 (18 min) NEXT SPREAD: Arthur Cantrill, 1967. Photo: Corinne Cantrill Arthur & Corinne Cantrill / Klare Lanson

4

These art projects not only expand the screen but also seem to amplify the ongoing investigation into the more concrete, non-narrative nature of film; their study of object, colour and light has paved the way for much of the contemporary art practice we see today. I see their work as largely poetic, successfully engaging with the materiality of film and extending further into how we choose to live in the world, what we choose to believe is real, and how we value our environment. Calligraphy Contest for the New Year is one of the most popular projects they made, and was able to be fully developed through numerous presentations, stemming from the initial Expanded Cinema performance in Canberra, a three week season for the NGV at the Age Gallery in 1971, and finally as a special event for the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival. They developed ideas around the destruction of both the screen, the shift into less physical modes of processing film stock, and as an attempt to destroy the illusion of film as narrative and focus whole heartedly on the process of making it. The simple art of projecting light is the key.

As I leave, Arthur and Corinne discuss if there is enough light for getting the winter seedlings into the garden. I find myself thinking about the significant changes the Cantrills must have witnessed during their 50 years of filmmaking, art and travel. They are without a doubt inspired by the structure and process of the mechanics of film, but it’s also the landscape and the sonic texture of our everyday that makes their work so evocative. As we move more deeply into a more technologically driven world, the huge body of work made by the Cantrills seems to gain more and more momentum. The continually changing societal landscapes that we choose to live in seem to be catching up with their work, and this is the sign of true art.

Arthur & Corinne Cantrill also edited the review journal Cantrills Filmnotes, for 30 years and can be found online at arthurandcorinnecantrill.com. Arthur has a new LP entitled Hootonics – the soundtrack to their 1970 feature-length film Harry Hooton – to be released this month on vinyl through Shame File Music - shamefilemusic.com

Klare Lanson is a writer, poet, mother, performance maker, sound artist, data consultant, arts worker, past editor of Australian Literary Anthology Going Down Swinging (goingdownswinging.org.au/). She also presents Turn Left at the Baco every Saturday night on Castlemaine based community radio MAINfm. Her current project is #wanderingcloud (klarelanson.tumblr.com/).

Hugh & Cry

by Inga Walton

Photo: Mary McCartney

Hugh can sing splendidly, and play any musical instrument you throw at him, the son of a son of a son of a son of son of a bitch.

Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot (1997).

(James) Hugh Calum Laurie, OBE, is one of those people whose manifold accomplishments would otherwise constitute a super-storm of insufferability if he wasn’t so very diffident and self-deprecating. Indeed, Laurie has always seemed both apprehensive and rather startled by his escalating fame, plagued by pessimism, abashed and flustered in endearingly equal measure.

He has often cited his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing as a factor in his inability to trust or necessarily enjoy his success, “Ever since I was a boy, I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. Too often I embrace introspection and self-doubt. I wish I could embrace the good things”.

Despite his misgivings, in recent years Laurie has been both the highest paid actor in a dramatic series, and the world’s most watched leading man on television, tallying 81.8 million viewers in sixty-six countries, according to the 2011 Guinness Book of Records. As one of the few men living whose face is actually improved by stubble, American TV Guide magazine anointed Laurie as one of ‘TV’s Sexiest Men’ in 2005, much to his dismay.

“What I am – and I’m sure everybody knows this – is a profoundly unsexy person playing a sexy character. I’m actually crap in bed”, he moped. Nonetheless, he went on to serve as a L’Oréal brand ambassador in 2011, a decision that seemed rather incongruous considering his deep ambivalence towards his own celebrity.

“They call you up and say, ‘do you want to do this thing?’ I say, ‘no, you’re out of your mind.’ Then they say a sum of money, and it’s huge. I mean, it’s verging on the wicked, really”, Laurie explained. “But for that money I could build a school in Sierra Leone. Once that thought enters your head, you cannot turn away from it. Because if you do, what you’re really saying is that my pose, the way I present myself, is more important than kids getting an education in Sierra Leone. Who could do that?” (Laurie donated his modelling fee to a fund administered by Comic Relief.

Because he’s worth it, duh).

Hugh Laurie / Inga Walton

4

Laurie met his frequent collaborator Stephen Fry at Cambridge University where they were both members of the renowned Footlights Club (est. 1883). Laurie would serve as President (1980-81) with Emma Thompson as Vice-President, “A tall young man with big blue eyes, triangular flush marks on his cheeks and an apologetic presence that was at once appallingly funny and quite inexplicably magnetic”, Fry remembers. Laurie and Fry co-wrote much of the material for the 1981 Footlights revue The Cellar Tapes, which won the inaugural Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Both starred in the iconic BBC series Blackadder, Laurie initially appearing as ‘Prince Ludwig’ and ‘Simon Partridge’ in Blackadder II (1986). It was his stupendously arch and grotesque interpretation of George, the Prince Regent (later George IV, 1762-1830), in Blackadder the Third (1987), followed by the gormless ‘Lt. Hon. George Colthurst St. Barleigh’ in Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), that saw him rather corner the market on upper-class twits, buffoons and foppish dandies. “I think I’ve always felt a strong affinity with stupidity. I simply find it easy to play stupid people. That can only be because I am myself stupid and I am baffled by the world. I find the world incomprehensible and can’t make sense of it”, Laurie has declared. “My most common, most predominant emotion is one of bafflement and that’s what comes out in that kind of character. Just playing the fool ... I actually feel stupider and less experienced with every year that goes by”.

The duo enjoyed great popularity in the adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster (1990-93), and A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1987-95). They were costars in the films Peter’s Friends (1992) and the lumpen Spice Girls vehicle Spice World (1997). As a supporting actor, Laurie was a compelling presence in films such as Sense and Sensibility (1995), 101 Dalmatians (1996), Cousin Bette, The Man In the Iron Mask (both 1998), Flight of the Phoenix (2004) and Street Kings (2008). More observant viewers might have spotted him in various music videos over the years; as a government scientist involved in a military research project that goes awry in Kate Bush’s Experiment IV (1986), and reprising his ‘Prince George’ persona in Annie Lennox’s Regency-themed clip for Walking On Broken Glass (1992). He completed his début novel in 1996, a spy spoof called The Gun Seller, which follows the (mis) adventures of Thomas Lang, a whisky-swilling retired Scots Guards officer. It achieved considerable success at the time, and proved a sensation in France when it was translated and published in 2009 as Tout est sous contrôle (Everything’s Under Control).

Best known in America for the Stuart Little films (1999, 2002) at that stage, it was Laurie’s career-defining tour de force role as the drug addled, irascible, truculent, emotionally damaged and physically crippled diagnostician Dr. Gregory House in House, M.D (2004-12) which turned him into an unlikely global star. Revealing his tremendous range and versatility, Laurie embodied House’s sarcasm and eviscerating wit, tactlessness and lack of empathy, puerile behaviour, neediness and refusal to abide by social norms in a manner that saw the damaged anti-hero

Hugh Laurie / Inga Walton

4

embraced by audiences worldwide. Outrageous, curmudgeonly, embittered and with a pronounced contempt for authority, House is at odds with his colleagues, and disdains his patients (beyond their intriguing afflictions). Although his ‘bedside manner’ merely extends to snark-with-a-cane, Laurie imbued House with such vulnerability and pathos that he never loses our sympathy, even when he’s being a complete prick (which is often, thankfully).

Envisaged as a loose reinterpretation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, House’s misanthropic mantra of “Everybody Lies” redefined the ‘procedural’ medical genre show, typified by the melodrama of Chicago Hope and the scoop-andrun crises of ER. In focusing on the intellectual meanderings of a thoroughly dysfunctional but ultimately brilliant doctor, House gave the television pantheon one of its more defiantly original, seductive and enigmatic characters. “One of the interesting things about doing House is that an audience of Americans who might, as we suppose, turn towards the sentimental, have actually embraced someone so starkly and brutally cynical”, Laurie mused. The series saw him showered with industry plaudits including back-to-back Television Critics Association (TCA) Awards (2005-06), Satellite Awards (2005-06), and Golden Globe Awards (2006-07). He also collected two Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards (2007, 2009), although his seven Primetime Emmy Award nominations failed to garner a win. Courtesy of a smitten American public, Laurie picked up four People’s Choice Awards (2009-11) and a Teen Choice Award (2007), which some would argue is more relevant ... like, totally.

“ ... I’ve always felt a strong affinity with stupidity.

I simply find it easy to play stupid people.”

As the series progressed, the character of House adopted more of Laurie’s personal traits, from his motorcycle riding (Triumph Bonneville 790) to his pronounced musical abilities (piano, guitar). For audiences familiar with Laurie’s British television work, his periodic ivory tinkling came as little surprise. Laurie took piano lessons from the age of six with a certain Mrs. Hare, but only lasted three months, “She was a nice woman, probably, but in my childhood memory I have turned her into a sadistic bruiser who prodded me across the hot coals of do-re-mi ... I think I tended to favour the piano over the guitar because it stays in one place, which is what I like to do. Guitars appeal to the footloose, the restless.

I like sitting a lot”. Formal tutelage having failed, Laurie is largely self-taught, “It was actually quite a solitary thing for me, but I was rather a solitary child”, he recounts. “The piano was a place I got lost in and I would just play this for hours and hours. I just couldn’t believe how wonderful it was, and how wonderful it made me feel”.

Hugh Laurie / Inga Walton

4

“... When I first heard that sort of wailing blue note it was like a door opening onto this magical kingdom.�

Onstage at the Palais Theatre, Melbourne, 19 April, 2014. Photo: Inga Walton

4

Laurie recalls that his musical epiphany came sometime around 1971 when he was in a car with his elder brother Charles, “A song came on the radio – I’m pretty sure it was “I Can’t Quit You Baby” by Willie Dixon – and my whole life changed ... Growing up on the front line in Berkshire I had no idea where blues music came from, I just knew that I didn’t want to live without it. When I first heard that sort of wailing blue note it was like a door opening onto this magical kingdom. I hear it as music of great joy, and passion, and love, and it’s funny a lot of the time. Of course it has pain and heartbreak in it too. In fact I think of all human life, all human life is in it”.

Laurie had previously been active in comedian Lenny Henry’s blues band Poor White Trash and the Little Big Horns which began in 1995 when Henry got drunk and spent two hours singing his favourite soul songs at Ben Elton’s wedding.

The group later played events such as the Edinburgh Festival and Comic Relief, and featured an array of guest artists from Massive Attack (the instrumental portions of their 1998 song “Teardrop” became the theme music on House), Level 42, and The Spice Girls. House welcomed its fair share of guest stars from the music firmament during its run, including Academy Award winner Joel Grey, Dave Matthews, hip-hop artists LL Cool J (James Todd Smith) and Mos Def (Dante Terrell Smith), and Meat Loaf (Marvin Lee Aday), on whose album Hang Cool Teddy Bear (2010) Laurie played. Following an appearance in Season 2 of House, actor Greg Grunberg drafted Laurie into his project, Band From TV. The group, comprised of an array of television actors, started performing in 2006 to benefit various charitable organisations (Laurie’s is Save The Children), and released an album Hoggin’ All the Covers in 2008.

Despite his burgeoning music profile, when Warner Brothers approached Laurie with the idea of releasing an album, he was understandably concerned about the chequered history of the actor-as-musician. “I’ve broken a cardinal rule of art, music, and career paths: actors are supposed to act, and musicians are supposed to music. That’s how it works. You don’t buy fish from a dentist, or ask a plumber for financial advice, so why listen to an actor’s music?”, he reasoned.

The transition from gifted dabbler to committed recording artist would inevitably be perceived in some quarters as the vanity project of a dilettante. “I know there are going to be some people who say that a middle-class, middle-aged, balding Englishman has got no business having anything to do with the blues. And I understand that argument, but at the same time I would say fuck-off”, Laurie countered. “I don’t mean to say it’s not a real argument, of course it is, but what is one supposed to do about it? How do you force people into the corrals of music they are ‘authorised’ to like? Even if you could make all white children like Chopin, and all black children like Robert Johnson, why would you?”

The somewhat defensive title, Let Them Talk (2011), may have bristled, but Laurie’s fears of widespread scepticism did not transpire. Bolstered by

Hugh Laurie / Inga Walton

4

contributions from Sir Tom Jones, influential R&B figure Allen Toussaint, the ‘Soul Queen of New Orleans’ Irma Thomas, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr), the sincerity and conviction of the endeavour banished any preconceptions, and went on to garner widespread critical and commercial acclaim. The album reached the top of the American Blues chart, #16 on the Billboard album chart, went Platinum in Argentina, France and Poland, and Gold in the UK. “I have a sort of resistance to treating any of this music as if it belongs in a museum, I don’t feel that sort of museum reverence for it, but at the same time I just feel love for it, I can’t help that. It’s not an intellectual thing, I’m just opening a door on what I do and love when I’m not doing my acting”, Laurie remarked.

The love continued with the sophomore effort Didn’t It Rain (2013), where Laurie’s musical meandering along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, pauses to dally with a spot of tango in “Kiss of Fire” derived from the Argentine “El Choclo (The Corn Cob)”, and delivers a remarkable rendition of Bobby Sharp’s “Unchain My Heart” to happily banish all memories of Joe Cocker.

Working on the assumption that you are judged by the company you keep, Laurie’s musical stock is certainly high if his most recent guest collaborator is anything to go by. “Word came back that Taj Mahal [Henry Saint Clair Fredericks] would be interested in joining us in the studio, if we could find the right song.

That ‘if’ seemed to rise up out of the sands of the desert until it obscured the sun.

In the end, we plumped for ‘Vicksburg Blues’ and, to our relief and delight, Taj declared it to be a favourite of his”, he notes.

“I have a sort of resistance to treating any of this music as if it belongs in a museum ...”

The current Australian tour marks Laurie’s first visit since the three months he spent here in 1981 with The Footlights revue. He brings with him the formidable and varied talents of the Copper Bottom Band: Jay Bellerose (drums, percussion), Kevin Breit (guitars), Vincent Henry (saxophones, clarinets), Greg Leisz (guitars), Robby Marshall (saxophones, clarinets), David Piltch (electric bass), Patrick Warren (accordion, organ), with Elizabeth Lea (trombone) and Larry Goldings (Hammond B3 organ). Laurie is ably supported by featured vocalists ‘Sista’ Jean McClain (aka. Pepper MaShay) and Gaby Moreno, who won a Latin Grammy Award as Best New Artist last year. With his mooch engaged and a glass in hand, Laurie disported his lanky, elongated frame (a reported 189 cm) across the stage to the strains of “Iko Iko (Jock-A-Mo)”, the much-disputed ditty full of incomprehensible Creole patois. (Given his admiration for Dr. John, we can infer Laurie is following the version on his album, Dr. John’s Gumbo (1972), which credits James ‘Sugar Boy’ Crawford).

Hugh Laurie / Inga Walton

4

Laurie is certainly more practised and at ease with inter-song patter than many more experienced performers, segueing into an audience-participation version of the Shirley & Lee song “Let the Good Times Roll” (1956). Far from relying solely on either album, Laurie pulled out a host of other standards including Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” (1953) popularised by Elvis Presley, “Junco Partner” first recorded by James Waynes in 1951, (Irving) Lee Dorsey’s “Get Out of My Life, Woman” (1965), and a ‘bromance’ acoustic rendition of “Lazy River” (1930) with his hombres. Laurie’s inclusion of fellow Brit Jon Cleary’s “I Feel So Damn Good (I’ll Be Glad When I Get the Blues)” was one of the few concessions to a musician “still alive”, and an acknowledgement of another ‘outsider’ who has now been accepted into the blues fraternity as one of the finest exponents of the New Orleans funk style.

The show seems very much a ‘team effort’, with Laurie delighting in the talents of his band members, and often deferring to them to the extent of forgetting that he is supposed to be the headliner (a shame). The set provided many opportunities for the ladies to shine on tracks such as ‘Sister’ Rosetta Tharpe’s “My Journey to the Sky”, ‘Professor’ Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas’ “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”, and Ray Charles’ “What Kind of Man Are You?” (originally performed with his then inamorata Mary Ann Fisher). Taking some time out mid-performance for a ‘whisky hydration’, complete with anodyne ‘elevator’ backing track, Laurie informed the audience that they try this at every venue to see how long it will be tolerated (Switzerland apparently wins at forty-five minutes and two bottles).

Unlike many international acts, Laurie was mindful of the kill-joy restrictions governing most Australian concerts, “I know there are signs saying you can’t stand, can’t move, can’t dance, can’t breathe ... fuck them!”, he advised. ‘Sista’ Jean exhorted a willing audience to rise to their feet throughout the evening, but the crowd needed no prompting for the rip-roaring version of Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell”, which closed the show. “I have resolved to forge on, deeper into the forest of American music that has enchanted me since I was a small boy. And the further I go, the more bewitched I become – both by the songs, and by the people I have been lucky enough to play them with”, Laurie admitted. He departed with many fellow travellers looking forward to sharing his next musical journey.

Hugh Laurie’s Australian tour continues to 5 May, 2014 - hughlaurieblues.com

Inga Walton is a writer and ar ts consultant based in Melbourne who contributes to numerous Australian and international publications. She has submitted copy, of an inceasingly verbose nature, to Trouble since 2008. She is under the impression that readers are not morons with a short attention span, and would like to know lots of things.

Photo: Mary McCartney

may salon

1. Warren Lane, The Squeeze 2013, oil on canvas on board, 122 x 151 cm. Warren Lane – Continuum, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, 7 - 27 Snake Gully Drive, Bundoora (VIC), 9 May – 13 July - bundoorahomestead.com

1.

2.

2. Christian THOMPSON, The Devil Made Him Do It, C-type Print, 100 x 100cm, Banyule Art Collection. Seventh Skin, Hatch Contemporary Arts Space, 14 Ivanhoe Parade, Ivanhoe (VIC), 18 June – 2 August - banyule.vic.gov.au/arts 3. Rosalie GASCOIGNE, born 1917, Hung fire 1995, retro-reflective road-sign on wood 209.0 x 176.0 cm. Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art © Rosalie Gascoigne, licensed by Viscopy 2012 and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art. Luminous World: Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection, National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Canberra (ACT), 10 April – 29 June 2014 - nla.gov.au NEXT SPREAD: Irene BARBERIS, Installation shot, Tapestry of Light, 2013, Convergence exhibition, RMIT University Design Research Institute. Photograph by Tobias Titz. IRENE BARBERIS, Apocalypse / Revelation: Re Looking, La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, 121 View St, Bendigo (VIC), 2 May – 15 June - latrobe.edu.au/vac

3.

4.

4. Sir William NEWENHAM MONTAGUE ORPEN RA, 1878-1931, Self Portrait 1907.

Oil on canvas. Mildura Arts Centre Collection. Senator RD Elliott Bequest, presented to the City of Mildura by Mrs Hilda Elliott, 1956. The Case for Modern Painting: Mildura Arts Centre Collection, 199 Cureton Avenue, Mildura (VIC), until Sunday 10 August milduraartscentre.com.au 5. Tom NICHOLSON, Cartoons for Joseph Selleny 201214 (detail); charcoal drawings, perforated; wall drawing with crushed charcoal; artist’s book to take away; dimension variable. Photograph: Christian Capurro. Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane © the artist. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Rd, The Domain, Sydney (NSW), 22 May – 10 August - artgallery.nsw.gov.au NEXT SPREAD: Baz LEDWIDGE, Queen and Duke at Aussie Rules match, black and white photographic print. PROOF: Photo Essays from the Top End, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Parap, Darwin (NT), 3 May – 1 June - nccart.com.au 5.

6.

may salon

7.

8.

4

9.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: 6. Danie MELLOR, A man of high degree 2011, pastel, pencil, glitter, Swarovski crystal and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, 89.0 x 59.0 cm. Private collection, New South Wales. Courtesy of the artist, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane and Michael Reid, Sydney. DANIE MELLOR: Exotic Lies Sacred Ties, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Healesville (VIC), 10 May – 27 July - twma.com.au 7. Pat HOFFIE, Get a spoon and eat my ass 2013, gold leaf on saar wood. people do have the right to be bigots you know, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 19 Furneaux St Forrest (ACT), until 10 May - ccas.com.au 8. Igor GRUBIĆ, Monument 2014, video still, courtesy of the artist. Concrete, MonashUniversity Museum of Art (MUMA), Ground Floor, Building F, Monash University, Caulfield campus, 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East (VIC), 3 May – 5 July - monash.edu.au/muma THIS SPREAD: 9. Ben MOSS, the thrill of it all, 2014. Ben Moss: the thrill of it all, Back Gallery, FELTspace, 12 Compton Street, Adelaide (SA), 7 – 24 May feltspace.org 10. Deborah PRIOR, Nightwalk (detail) 2014, mixed media. Deborah Prior: The best lady anatomist, Front Gallery, FELTspace, 12 Compton Street, Adelaide (SA), 7 – 24 May - feltspace.org

may salon

10.

Separately Working In Tandem

by Olivia Welch

Working creatively with another person is not always an organic or immediate process, even when you hold them and their practice in the highest esteem.

Canberra-based artists Al Munro and Waratah Lahy have endeavoured an artistic partnership that has not resulted in collaboration, but in conversation.

The exhibition In Tandem began with partnering six of Brenda May Gallery’s represented artists to form creative duos that have an aesthetic or thematic connection. The aim of this curatorial decision was for the selected artists to create joint works. Munro and Lahy have taken this brief on an unexpectedly independent route.

4

ABOVE: Al Munro, Patterns that aren’t 14 2011, constructed green and black glitter cardboard, 25 x 17 x 1cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Brenda May Gallery.

Separately Working in Tandem / Olivia Welch

4

Pairing Munro and Lahy was decided for a few reasons. Firstly, they live within proximity to one another, secondly they openly follow each other’s practices with great admiration, and, finally, their works visually and conceptually have a relationship. They both often employ diverse combinations of colours and lines, and have a complementary fascination with enhancing or distorting plain sight.

In Munro’s interpretations of scientific data extracted using optical devices, and Lahy’s imagery depicting overlooked places and obscure viewpoints, attention is drawn to under-sights and oversights by either zooming in on invisible fragments or focusing on a single, stationary moment.

Meeting regularly at the Australian National University – their shared workplace – Munro and Lahy very quickly found multiple, interesting intersections within their practices, locating an aesthetic similarity between Munro’s ‘fictitious mineral drawing’ series comprised of prismatic structures, and Lahy’s alluring paintings that peer through stained glass windows at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. Despite these similarities, they could not easily devise a way to combine their ideas and methods of production into collaborative works, as their approach to creation was far from harmonious. Instead, using crossovers as points of departure, they have created solo bodies of work that pay homage to one another.

Enlarging information undetectable to the naked eye, Munro’s recent artworks employ the study and mapping of atom arrangements within crystalline solids, known as crystallography. Her last two bodies of work imagine crystallographic data using glitter, cardboard, paint markers and crochet. Unfettered by medium in exploring her fascinations, Munro’s artworks have varied in form from coruscating wall-mounted clusters of pyramidic peaks, to thousands of concentric circles arranged as to create detailed charts, spilling from their canvases onto the surface of the wall.

THIS SPREAD: Al Munro, Patterns from an Invisible World 2 (detail) 2013, paint marker on canvas and wall, 120 x 92cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Brenda May Gallery.

Separately Working in Tandem / Olivia Welch

4

Where Munro transcribes information into tangible forms, Lahy captures moments in time, most recently allowing the colours, shapes and deformities within the panes of windows, or created through light and shadow, to obscure her vision. As opposed to elucidating the invisible, Lahy complicates a clear view. In earlier works she painted familiar scenes on the insides of glasses, essentially painting the resulting image in reverse. She has also used perspex as her canvas, leaving gaps or hidden components within each scene. Throughout her practice, Lahy has illuminated the way people look at things, whether that is showing tourists huddled to experience the ‘Mona Lisa’ through their camera’s viewfinder, or capturing the unnoticed and therefore giving a profound presence to the peripheral.

Using Lahy’s most recent body of work – peering through windows – and Munro’s ongoing engagement with the scientific lens as starting points, both artists have adopted shapes and colours prominent in one another’s individual practices to create works that stem from a mutual fascination with human sight. Employing balsa wood and bright colours, Munro has mimicked the triangulated shapes in her own work and within Lahy’s patterned windows to create protruding clusters that mount directly onto the wall. Maintaining a fascination with the effect of observation through distortions, Lahy has produced a series of intimate paintings that similarly use the angular shapes apparent in both artists’ oeuvres.

Discovering via the prospect of collaboration that they work too differently to labour upon the same physical object, Munro and Lahy’s decision to instead create pieces that take cues from mutual aesthetic and thematic tendencies displays one of many differing ways in which the brief of “working together” can be interpreted and executed with intriguing results. As the mediator of this artistic relationship, it has been interesting to observe the way in which creative exchange and conversation can breathe new and tangential energy into an artist’s visual discourse.

Al Munro and Waratah Lahy are one of three artistic duos in the exhibition In Tandem on view from 22 April to 17 May at Brenda May Gallery, Sydney brendamaygallery.com.au

Olivia Welch is a curator and writer with an Honours Degree in Ar t History and Theory from the College of Fine Ar ts, Sydney.

She is the senior gallery assistant at Brenda May Gallery where she previously co-curated Mighty Small in 2013.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Waratah Lahy, Carnavalet 2 2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 30cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Brenda May Gallery.

ACTease DATELINE: MAY 2014 Courtney Symes

What is the most obscure name you have ever seen for an art exhibition? Like choosing a title for a book or film, deciding on a title for an exhibition is an important part of the creative process. It’s a fine balance of conveying what the exhibition is about, whilst creating an element of mystery and intrigue to capture your audience’s attention so they want to learn more.

Pat Hoffie’s exhibition title, people do have the right to be bigots you know was actually coined from a recent statement by Attorney General, George Brandis. This controversial statement instantly grabbed my attention. It also seems fitting for this exhibition, in which Hoffie has taken bumper stickers sold to Australian tourists in Bali and transferred their messages onto kitsch “traditional” carvings (also for the tourist trade). As expected, this exhibition has a humorous side and pokes fun at Australian tourists. However, the funny side of this show is also balanced out with a “sharp, sobering edge. It offers a startling insight into the way Balinese people see us. And it isn’t necessarily pretty”. This collection of work was first shown as you gotta love it at Artspace in Sydney in February 2013. However, people do have the right to be bigots you know has been updated by Hoffie “to include revealing quotes from Australian politicians that shed light on current relations with Indonesia”.

Pat Hoffie, Fuck Off We’re Full 2013, gold leaf on saar wood.

4

4

Mariana del Castillo’s latest exhibition, Scars of a ritual past is a “monumental clash of cultures” as she explores the contrast of two countries close to her heart – Australia and her native Ecuador. “There is a depth of displacement that children of migrants carry, and religious standings and convictions can often stand in opposition to the new secular society,” says del Castillo. Visitors will enjoy del Castillo’s dreamlike installation as she masterfully “captures the overwhelming experience of adapting past to present”.

Samantha Small plays with viewer’s minds in her latest exhibition, sour castles.

Viewers are teased by a corridor with multiple doors that offers false access into different worlds (the doors are locked and access denied). The corridor has also been designed to close in around the viewer, “generating a claustrophobic experience that is uncomfortable but totally fascinating”. The title of the work, sour castles, has been taken from Marcel Broodthaers’ untitled poem “bitter castle of eagles” or in French, “aigre château des aigles”. “Through this evocative verse she offers one small way of escaping into a world that might lie beyond the doors, or a view of sorts. This the viewer must find.”

All exhibitions run until 10 May at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House Arts Centre - ccas.com.au Drawing is a broad and varied practice, which is demonstrated and celebrated in ANU Drill Hall Gallery’s exhibition, Contemporary Australian Drawing: 20 Years of the Dobell Prize for Drawing. The Dobell Prize was established and continues to be funded from the estate of graphic artist, Sir William Dobell (1899-1970). It was the 20th anniversary of the prize in 2012, which was marked with a touring exhibition including work from previous prize winners and participants. This month, it’s the Drill Hall Gallery’s turn to host this beautiful collection of works until 18 May 2014. This exhibition is an Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition curated by Anne Ryan and toured by Museums & Galleries NSW - dhg.anu.edu.au Old Masters at the National Museum of Australia is a breathtaking exhibition featuring a spectacular collection of work from Australia’s ‘Old Masters’ – Aboriginal painters from Arnhem Land. This unique exhibition is special for several reasons: firstly, it includes 122 works from the National Museum’s bark painting collection (the largest in the world, with over 2000 pieces) and secondly it celebrates the genius and art of 40 master bark painters such as Narritjin Maymuru, Yirawala and Mawalan Marika.

TOP: Nicholas Harding, Eddy Avenue (3) 2001, black ink on two sheets of torn and abraided paper, 132.4 x 149.0cm © the Artist. Photo: Mim Stirling, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

BOTTOM: Anne Judell, Breath 2011, pastel, graphite, gesso on paper, triptych, 110.0 x 52.0 cm © the Artist. Photo: Mim Stirling, Art Gallery of New South Wales ACTease / Courtney Symes

4

4

Works included in the exhibition were created from 1948 to 1988. This time period is significant due to the cultural and historical changes that took part in the region during this time, such as the Second World War and the bombing of Darwin, as well as the exposure the artists received following the war.

Anthropologists and collectors introduced the works of these artists to new audiences in Australia and internationally.

The rich, earthy tones of the works included in the exhibition are beautifully set-off against a simple white, black and gold backdrop. I also enjoyed the inclusion of the tools and materials the artists would have used to create these works, such as brushes made from a few strands of human hair, which are then attached to a short handle and used for crosshatching work. Narritjin Maymuru’s brush (or ‘marwat’ as he calls it) is also on display in the exhibition.

Narritjin once explained that the hair used for the brush is taken from a young clan member’s forehead and each hair represents and idea or a thought.

“This exhibition challenges our notions of what Aboriginal barks are by presenting exquisite artistry, diverse palettes and innovative designs that are not popularly associated with barks…Most of the works have not been displayed in Australia before,” says said National Museum consultant curator, Wally Caruana. This exhibition is a beautiful tribute to Australian Indigenous history and culture.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have managed Australia’s land, rivers and oceans for countless generations. Also at the National Museum of Australia, On Country: Connect, Work, Celebrate is an exhibition that explores the traditional methods these communities continue to use, as well as the contemporary techniques that have been applied as technology has advanced.

The exhibition consists of approximately ninety photographs of over thirtythree communities that are managing feral animals, weeds, pollution, bushfire prevention and cultural and heritage sites. Many of the images included in the exhibition are photographs that were shortlisted from the 2010 and 2012 biennial photographic competitions run as part of the Australian government’s Indigenous Rangers program. “These beautiful photographs depict the unrivalled connection Indigenous people have to their Country and to the land generally – and how their unique cultural knowledge is applied to address contemporary environmental issues,” says National Museum curator, Barbara Paulson.

THIS SPREAD: Brook Andrew, born 1970, Replicant series: Owl 2005, Ilfochrome print 130.0 x 195.0 cm. Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art © Brook Andrew, reproduced courtesy of the artist and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art ACTease / Courtney Symes

4

I was particularly impressed by the diversity of images captured from a variety of regions throughout Australia. “Indigenous people are custodians of their lands for future generations and the photographs reveal how empowering this is for Indigenous communities,” says Paul House, Ngambri custodian from the Canberra region. Old Masters and On Country both run until 20 July 2014 - nma.gov.au A collection of works including contemporary paintings, photographs and objects have been brought together in National Library of Australia exhibition, Luminous World: Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection. Works have been drawn from the Westfarmers Collection and include a variety of pieces from renowned Australian and New Zealand artists including Brook Andrew, Paddy Bedford, Timothy Cook, Rosalie Gascoigne, Bill Henson, Rosemary Laing, Susan Norrie, Michael Riley, and Howard Taylor. Each of these artists explore the concept of light in different ways, including “the connection between the movements of the stars and the cycles of life on earth; and the diversity of cultural, mythic and spiritual ideas with which light has come to be associated”. Runs until 29 June 2014 - nla.gov.au

Courtney Symes is a Canberra-based writer, small business owner, and mother. When she’s not writing, you will find her enjoying a run around one of Canberra’s beautiful parks and seeking out Canberra’s best coffee and cheesecake haunts with the family. Read more at alittlepinkbook.blogspot.com.au

DATELINE: MAY 2014

Inga Walton

Previewed on the cover of last month’s issue, CJ Taylor’s exhibition even, still continues at Helen Gory Galerie (until 10 May). A lecturer in photography and new media at the South Australian School of Art, Architecture and Design, Taylor was recently awarded the Inaugural Adelaide Park Lands Art Prize (2014) for his work Denim (Pasha of the Park Lands) (2013).

CJ Taylor, Still Life With Possum, Mussels and New Holland Honeyeater (detail) 2012, acrylic-glass fused pigment print, (ed. 5) 57 x 75 cm.

4

Taylor commenced this ongoing series of still life works in 2011, influenced by the paintings of artist Pieter Claesz (c.1597-1660), an important exponent of the ontbijt or ‘dinner piece’ during the Dutch Golden Age. “It can be summed up in the title of a wonderful book called The Rhetoric of Perspective [Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (2006) by Hanneke Grootenboer. For me it’s literally that, a visual conversation that rapidly descends into an argument about what it means to be a human being on the face of this planet. These paintings that we’ve come to know as ‘photo-realistic’ are anything but realistic (or photographic for that matter). They’re a wonderful evocation of realism, but with all the tricks and showmanship of a magician’s act”, Taylor contends. “My adopted rhetoric of Flemish perspective and symbols flicks the viewer’s perception between known and unknown laws of physics.

This ‘flip-flopping’ between what looks real and what does not unsettles both ideas. In a contemporary photographic sense I see [these works] extending the visual conversation happening in the still life tableaux of [Australian photographers] Robyn Stacey and Marian Drew, among others”.

Each photography session is carefully planned months in advance in order to source props, decide on the produce to be used, and paint the forms. The completed works are then fused to acrylic glass so as to become less like a framed photograph and more like a 3D object. “Every tableau is just that, an arrangement in camera for the camera. Nothing is inserted after the event. They are, in effect, theatrical sets constructed to conform with that rhetoric of painterly perspective, and as such take an eon to get right. Everything must be built up to play to the visual distortions of the lens, camera and tricks of painting they’re alluding to. The shooting can be a bit gruelling and long (up to sixteen hours), particularly if fresh food is involved; although I do get to eat well”, quips Taylor.

There is, however, a pronounced (and wilful) kink in these meticulously contrived displays of domestic abundance and refinement. High-density foam bodies, more usually used in taxidermy work, crash into the frame in all their disconcerting and visually jarring glory. “These lovely, chemically smelly, amorphous polyurethane shapes (wax-coated for protection from their intended hosts’ chemically enhanced pelts) suggest the fully-formed whole, the ‘real’ animal. The forms are simulacra in search of their own unique place in the world, awaiting an arrangement befitting their unnatural state. They present as ‘ghosts’, an artifice of nature. Despite this they are themselves boldly seeking a new place in a reconfigured world. Quite heroic really …”, Taylor remarks. “When I look at a seventeenth century Dutch still life painting of a breakfast setting what I see is at once aesthetically beautiful, but is also likely to contain a yellow fluorescent possum scrambling up the table. In many ways the work is about the slippage of meaning. When I reconstruct the works in my mind’s eye it’s only then I can take the time to deconstruct exactly what has played out at first glance”.

Melburnin / Inga Walton

4

In subverting this artistic paradigm, Taylor alludes to a number of native species and floral emblems, grounding them firmly in the Australian vernacular.

Taylor lives in a rural area on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, which perhaps informs the more subtle references to sustainability, land management, threatened species, and environmental issues discernable within his work. “There’s a space where the city butts up against the country resulting in an irreconcilable clash. This overlapping state where the natural meets the man-made is inherently dysfunctional and always will be, like a war zone without a war, but it’s one that throws up so many possibilities for re-imaging our relationship with the natural world. It’s quite a violent place in an oddly quiet way. You need to be respectfully cautious to navigate each day”.

Human attempts to dominate and impose order on an unruly and uncooperative natural world, to control and shape it to our will, have been revealed as ultimately futile in many instances. In contemporising a somewhat moribund European painting tradition, Taylor engages with this uneasy and contested space, “My work is centred on notions of disquiet captured within, and potentially caused by, photography. My initial impulse was to create beautiful works that reinfuse the visual with meaning through a form of emotive thinking ... Still life painting has become clichéd in a sense, in that we absorb the visual tropes over time without actually thinking about them too much. But they are still relevant and beautiful celebrations of our existence wrapped up in the paradox of a finite consumption not envisaged when they were created. It’s that paradox that I find is at the crux of everything. Without a death there is no beauty, and that’s as it should be”.

Apparently, there are further layers of bewilderment associated with his works that Taylor did not intend, “Many people who see the work for the first time think they are photographs of paintings, photographs of photographs, or simply photorealist paintings full stop”. Rather than finding this frustrating, the disconnect and ambiguity is in keeping with Taylor’s philosophy about photography, both as an art form, and as an applied process. “In the eyes of most people, photography is inextricably linked with the truth, but the truth couldn’t be farther from itself in this instance. Photography is a construct. The visual interpretation of time through a machine at the whim of our interventions. Photography has less to do with truth than any other visual medium. It fractures time, and yet it is the only true measure of time. And that hurts my brain, and hopefully other peoples’ too!”

Taylor will participate in the group exhibition Moriendo Renascor: 19th Century Photography Techniques in Contemporary Context (20 May-27 June 2014) curated

by Amalia Ranisau at the South Australian School of Art (SASA) Gallery, K3-27 Kaurna Building, City West Campus, University of South Australia - unisa.edu.au • Helen Gory Galerie, 108-110 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy - helengory.com • Artist site - cjtaylorworks.com

Melburnin / Inga Walton

stralian stories with Neil Boyack

“As only natives ride” Lawson’s Adversity, Private Property and Australian Culture

A

ppearing in a number of Henry Lawson’s (1867-1922) collections

The Fire at Ross’s Farm catalogues aspects of a romanticised Australian identity: assumed mateship, hardy toughness, hearts of gold, a sense of fairness and adaptation to landscape. But through Lawson’s simple, cut-to-the-bone prose and word power he creates harshness, uncertainty and a violence that at once dispels this romance.

Deft backgrounding and solid landscape portrayal builds a delightful tension in this work.

We have the mean Squatter Black, and the underdog “selector” Ross, we have the “granite spur”, we have youth romance belying the rift between Ross and Black, and we have an array of rivalries, cultural and class-based, drawn out through the advent of a large bushfire; a force no-one can control.

Most Australians are careful with fire, its dangers sewn into our national psyche, our own deepest, darkest fight or flight response. Drought is common to the Australian landscape and bushfires are never far away, so Australians understand the pain, the grief and horror of these events deeply. Even in our winter, when watching bushfires in Greece or California on the news, the pictures are so familiar. The tension and seriousness create an inbuilt emotional pitch, an inner dialogue that sets off memories and stories seen and heard through our own families, communities, or media. When bushfires are around empathy is heightened, we are alert, and conversations between strangers are busy. Bushfires unify Australians because we know there is no one safe place in this country.

Fire has hammered and shaped Australian people. Aboriginal people routinely fire-farmed, and worked with fire in an organic natural cycle, but in Lawson’s poem whites find themselves anchored by private property and ownership. The Fire at Ross’s Farm covers a range of levels, but the basic tenet of the tension within the piece is founded on property ownership. Ownership of land creates the backdrop in which relationships are formed in this scenario. Black, the squatter, would have enjoyed his range, until the Government changed the law allowing others to “select” and occupy some of his holding, for the common good. Black was a part of the Squattocracy1. The occupation of Crown land without legal title was widespread, and often facilitated by the upper echelons of Colonial society, which possessed the means of production; running large numbers of stock and cattle on huge tracts of fenced land. Being ordered by government to share his land (stolen from Aboriginal people), would have surely caused red hot divisions and acrimony. Farmer Ross making a go of the meagre holding may well have added to Black’s infuriation.

4

Throw in fundamental cultural and religious divisions within white society at the time (Catholic, Protestant, Church of England, Irish, Scottish, English) and you have the makings of trouble.

It was, indeed, a deadly feud Of class and creed and race; But, yet, there was a Romeo And a Juliet in the case; And more than once across the flats, Beneath the Southern Cross, Young Robert Black was seen to ride With pretty Jenny Ross.

Lawson’s own history is that of a loner and an outsider growing up in tough times, and in remote locations. He attended school at Eurunderee from October 1876 but suffered an ear infection, leaving him with partial deafness. By the age of fourteen he had lost his hearing entirely, which only served to enlarge his already foreboding sense of isolation informed through a semi-transient family life as his family unit chased gold.

With his deafness, reading was a primary source of education for young Henry.

Lawson’s adult life and writing years were intertwined with alcohol, hard luck, mental illness, depression and attempted suicide. Lucky for us, he was able to capture the essence of an Australian reality in his experiences through his pen, whilst cultivating his own influential “voice”.

His powerful descriptive abilities and use of local vernacular set a scene for establishing a real Australian culture in the approach to Federation; a time where many debates and discussions were about independence, isolation, amidst a crystallising sense of Australian identity. His writing of course went hand in hand with his politics – he was a nationalist – and working/ mining class- socialist breed. These very elements created clashes with others including Andrew “Banjo” Patterson, who Lawson called a “City Bushman” implying that Patterson minimised the precariousness of bush life and thus undermining “the struggle” bush dwellers endured. This was a robust chapter encapsulated as The Bulletin debate. When responding to this episode years later, Patterson stated that he romanticised the strengths of rural life from the back of a horse with a cook in tow, and that Lawson’s experiences were solitary, and on foot. Patterson also stated that Lawson was a great writer.

Lawson’s subject matter came from his isolation, combined with his experiences on the road. The greatest influence here was a Bulletin-funded trip to Bourke, where Lawson experienced poverty and drought in the Australian outback, setting his imagination in a direction and tone that he would visit regularly throughout his writing life.

Stralian Stories / Neil Boyack

4

Drive and encouragement for Henry came from his mother Louisa, an advocate of women’s rights and a publisher/writer herself, editing a women’s paper called The Dawn2 (published May 1888 to July 1905). There is no doubt that this had political ramifications on Lawson’s worldview, and in his position as a well-read political commentator and writer who influenced public discourse and culture creation. With his spare, simple prose and poetry Lawson created a realism that many identified with. Some have compared Lawson’s power to that of other realists such as Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, as Lawson was prepared to use unhappy endings and bleak tones in his descriptions of landscape-dictated life.

There may be handshake at the end of this poem, but this should not be confused with the Australian cultural trait of mateship. There is a clear motivation for Black to come and help Ross with the fire, which is to ensure the safety of his son and to repair their own relationship. When Robert Black tells his father that the fire is near Ross’s farm and that he should “send the men”, Black tells his own son never to return if he goes to help Ross with the fire; a regret-filled salvo from a stubborn father simply chopping his son off. It obviously got the better of him as he turns up and helps Ross to put out the fire.

Now, father, send the men at once, They won’t be wanted here; Poor Ross’s wheat is all he has To pull him through the year.’ `Then let it burn,’ the squatter said; `I’d like to see it done -I’d bless the fire if it would clear Selectors from the run.

If Aboriginal culture is the hard bedrock of Australian culture, which I believe to be true, then Lawson helped pour the foundations of the Settler and Pioneer culture, creating a framework for national mythology at a time when Australia was searching for a national identity. A key ingredient to this national mentality is the romance of the bush; an ever powerful construct symbolic of perfection, driving “tree-changes”, and lying somewhere in the hearts of most Australians, peeking out on Anzac day, or when we win Olympic gold, but definitely when there’s a bushfire, or a tragedy, because Australians want to be “hurting together”. The romance of the bush is also tied to the notion of ownership and land; the land being the core narrative for Aboriginal people, every hill, every creek, every valley having a name, a meaning, a story. Land ownership and private property is the story for white society in Australia. Lawson shed light on these things through his work, and along the way paid homage to the elements that fulfil our landscape, underscoring man’s pointless, hopeless, position in the scheme of things, particularly the Australian bush.

Read The Fire at Ross’s Farm: http://www.bushverse.com/lawson/fireross.html

FOOTNOTES: 1. Squattocracy: In Australian history, a squatter was one who occupied a large tract of Crown land in order to graze livestock. Initially often having no legal rights to the land, they gained its usage by being the first (and often the only) Europeans in the area. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Squattocracy) 2. The Dawn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_(feminist_magazine)

PART THREE: Ben Meets God

words & pics by Ben Laycock

Having spent a lovely time with the Communists down in Kerala it was off to Varanasi for the burning of the Ghats.

If you are into strange religious practices then Varanasi is the place for you. Over a billion Hindus dream of ending their spiritual journey here on earth on the banks of the sacred River Ganga, ascending into the heavens as a puff of smoke.

Meditation on a Ghat on the Ganges, Varanasi (source: wikimedia)

At dawn, amongst yogis saluting the rising sun, women bathing discreetly in the shallows and Sadhus choofing on their first reefer of the day, the body is placed on a big pile of wood and set alight. It is said that the moment the cranium bursts from the heat is the moment the soul leaves the body. One can usually hear a loud pop! The ashes are then tossed ceremoniously into The Sacred Ganga. At dusk, after the mourners have gone home, the poorly paid fire monitors sift the river silt for valuables such as gold teeth.

Greetings From Hindustan / Ben Laycock

4

No sooner had we left the banks of The Ganga before we came across a pure white temple of solid marble, spiritual home of the Jains. Of all the sects in all the world the Jains are possibly the most extreme. They believe in total non-violence. If you thought vegans were far out, this mob are like vegans on steroids. Not only do they eschew all animal products, they won’t even pull up root vegetables because it disturbs the microbes in the soil. They rarely leave the house at night to avoid squashing bugs in the dark.

When l was a lad a couple of Jain devotees happened to stay in our house. They wouldn’t drink from the water tank because it had wrigglers (baby mosquitos) in it. They would only drink vegetarian water. They wouldn’t eat the sugar if it had ants in it. Very fussy.

No sooner had we left the Jain Temple, lured by the aroma of the tandoori chicken stall across the road, than we stumbled across a Sadhu sprawled across the sidewalk in a disheveled state of undress. Your Sadhus and Sadhuis (women sadhus) seek enlightenment through extreme self-denial. They have no home, living in caves in the forest or wandering the streets; some live in cemeteries and talk to ghosts. They have no worldly possessions save for a begging bowl and a saffron robe, the most devout have even discarded the robe and wander around stark naked. Upon initiation they attend their own funeral where they discard their ego and all sense of self and are considered ‘dead unto themselves’. Then they get to smoke gunja morning, noon and night, as they consider this their Eucharist.

Every three years the Sadhus and Sadhuis get together in a gathering called a Kamu Mela. This is the largest gathering of humans in all the world. Some say there are 10 million people in attendance, but how could you even count that many?

Greetings From Hindustan / Ben Laycock

4

No sooner had we stepped over the Sadhu than we came across yet another exquisitely beautiful temple in the shape of the sacred lotus.

Spiritual home of The Baha’is. This is a fairly new religion. It popped up in Persia in the 19th century and is steaming along with a set of thoroughly modern beliefs: the attainment of world peace being their primary goal here on earth, along with the unity of all human kind under one God. They believe that Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohamed and even Freddy Mercury are all emissaries for that one god.

It certainly has a catchy ring to it, doesn’t it? We’ve only got the one god so we just have to learn to share her/him/it.

IN THE NEXT EXCITING EPISODE: we will finally get to that big fat Indian wedding, God willing. benlaycock.com.au

Greetings From Hindustan / Ben Laycock

¢

trouble