Still Life Stuart Black by Alix Bromley

B L A C K

STILL LIFE STUART BLACK Craig Judd • Published by Courtesy the Estate of the late Stuart Alan Black

Stuart Black (1937-2007) was a Melbourne-based painter who gained critical notice early in his career for a refined synthesis of modernist styles. As a mature artist, Black made art as a diarist and social commentator. He also made art purely for pleasure. In its content, Black’s work sits between the comparatively covert explorations of the 1950s and 1960s to prefigure the freedoms of contemporary practice. Stuart Black’s art emerged when the figure of the homosexual male body was not such a pervasive cultural product and when the acts and signs of transgression had a (limited but potent) political power. Black’s refreshingly honest and direct paintings especially those made in the 1970s and early 1980s are very important, because they fill the gap in our knowledge of Australian artists who work in the subject area of sex and sexuality. The Stuart Black Memorial Bursary to the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, allows selected young artists to acquire materials, to travel and have the support of a sponsored drawing teacher. It is a lasting legacy of this charismatic personality and much admired teacher.

STILL LIFE STUART BLACK CRAIG JUDD

Lut aci blan henim autpat nulluptatue dignibh eum

Content Introduction

Stuart Alan Black by Craig Judd Chapter One

Early Years – Making a Break For It.

Chapter Two

The Heroic Years – Consolidation 1970-76. San Francisco/Melbourne 1978. The Metamorphosis of Stuart Black.

San Francisco/Melbourne 1976-78.

Chapter Three

33 58

The Final Decades.

Stuart Black CV – Biography

Acknowledgements

STILL LIFE STUART BLACK If you were a movie producer this would be a great story, full of conflict, colour, sex, adventure, pathos and tragedy. His friends say he was brilliant but lazy. He was intimidating and had a vicious tongue. Generous but also “mean as cats shit”. People say he was charismatic but also deeply bitter – and difficult. Think about this man – here is a potted life story. Country boy sent to Scotland when father returns from WWII, a damaged ex-Changi Prisoner of War. Boy has talent as a draughtsman. His uncle thinks he might be an architect. Instead boy chooses to be a schoolteacher. Initially works at isolated country schools then moves to the toughest schools in inner city Melbourne. We assume he comes out as much as he can in the Victoria of the late 1950s and early 1960s. At night, the boy, now man, studies successfully for his diploma and certificate of art. Meets first boyfriend. Begins exhibiting in group shows and quickly gains critical mention, then notice. Has first solo show in 1967, abstracted vaguely physical landscapes. In 1970 his art changes radically to become full of overtly sexualised symbolism and personal narratives. In 1973 boyfriend dies, leaves him comfortably off. Briefly travels to San Francisco. Begins teaching teachers about art back in Melbourne. In 1975-78 he goes to San Francisco to complete his Master’s degree at San Francisco State University. In 1978 he returns to Melbourne, has solo show of confessional paintings, almost a call to arms, about his life fantasies and experiences in San Francisco. Gains wide but perplexed critical notice. Works acquired by important state and national collections. He does not follow up on success/notoriety with exhibitions in either Sydney or internationally. Decides to be a barman and then hotelier. Is rocked by the HIV/AIDS crisis. Sells out of the business to retire to his penthouse where he sometimes makes art again but this time makes himself his main project – while picking up the occasional trick in the park across the road, he drinks himself to death. Boy once spectacularly handsome, now dies morbidly obese trapped in his St Kilda penthouse apartment. His wake replaces what was going to be the celebration for his 70th birthday – same guest list, same catering company. Is this Stuart Black? Yes and No. Stuart Black was a homosexual. His art is intrinsically linked to homosexuality. It is ultimately an art of overtly sexual images and motifs, though unlike his near contemporaries, Juan Davila, David MacDiarmid, Vivienne Binns and Peter Tully, he does not figure in the histories of Australian art, let alone Australian gay culture. This is not unusual in the development of canons of taste. Homosexuals are typical ghostly presences, talked about by friends and remembered sometimes fondly, but until recently, rarely acknowledged and documented. Stuart Black emerges into artistic maturity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Questions about his career include, why did he not gain the success his early promise and critical notices suggested was possible? Why is his work largely unknown today? This text attempts to answer these questions. It is a short introduction to the work, life and times of an Australian artist whose career, while not stellar, had flashes of brilliance that encapsulate many aspects of an important time in the development of contemporary Australian art and culture. What is most exciting about Stuart Black’s art is that it sits at the end of late modernist practice with its stress on individual expression, creativity and invention, prescient of a more culturally enlightened time when images of sexual difference and experience are sympathetically and critically examined. Stuart Black lived at a time when gay people were inventing themselves. Just as for the broader gay community it was a time of hope, desires, disappointment and conflict, the same can be said of the trajectory of Stuart Black’s career.

Chapter ONE

Chapter One Early Years – Making a Break For It. Stuart Black was born in 1937 in Kyabram, in northern country Victoria. Originally Yorta-Yorta land, from that language ‘Kyabram’ is derived, meaning ‘thick forest’. European settlement in the area began with squatters taking up land there in 1840. Kyabram is oddly situated between, but not quite near, the Goulburn, Campaspe and Murray Rivers, but with its rich soil and relatively flat land it proved attractive to settlers .The area was further opened up to selection in the 1870s, enabling the development of wheat farming and dairying. Fruit orchards arrived with the first irrigation water from the Goulburn River in the 1890s. Soldier settlers returning from World War I expanded the fruit growing industry and by 1922 had established a very successful co-operative venture to run one of the largest fruit canneries in the world. In 2009, while the export fruit industry has declined, it still forms one of the economic bases of the area, which has now diversified into dairy and other mixed farming businesses. A recent phenomenon is the arrival of “tree change” retirees mostly from Melbourne, 200 kilometres to the south, who have given the area and the town a new energy. (In the television comedy series “Kath and Kim” Series 2, “The Moon”, Kath and Kel win a mystery flight to Kyabram but never get to go because they are too excited by being at Tullamarine Airport). The town was much smaller than it is today, when Stuart Black was young during World War II and just after. Stuart’s father, an accountant, had been a prisoner of war in Changi, and suffered from what would now be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),so his parents thought it best that Stuart should be sent abroad. At 10, he was sent by ship from Melbourne to be a day boarder in Scotland, where relatives of his mother, an aunt and uncle and grandmother cared for him. There is a photograph of Stuart about to board the boat to the United Kingdom. He stands smiling beside a woman who was to be a chaperone for the trip. There does not seem to be any sign of anxiety. This is a great adventure. Unfortunately there are no letters extant from this period. There are photographs of the cottage where he lived, some school reports and shots of him in his school uniform. While no childhood is completely idyllic, Stuart did not seem to have a difficult time in Scotland. On the eve of his return to Australia his Uncle Ted wrote a poignant and encouraging letter of farewell to Stuart containing these words of advice: “I can imagine your mother and sister (and possibly your brothers too) meeting you on the Jetty at Melbourne, it is a great thrill and you have lots to tell them. As I said on Sunday, it is just one of your life experiences – you’ll have many more, and each experience you have (not necessarily travel) will help you develop character and understanding- never shun an experience- always be ready to do something you have never been done before – it is the accumulation of these experiences which give you a full and useful life.

Top; Passport Stuart Black aged 10 years Middle; Stuart Black with unidentified chaperone 1947 Bottom; Stuart Black aged 14 years? with unidentified family Port Said, Egypt

Judge from there the things you can do without too much effort-for the next chap may have to struggle with the same taste – by keeping a close watch on your reactions to certain experiences you will be able to determine what you are most suited to in life. My advice is that you should allow your mind to revolve around Architecture for your future career – my reasons for saying this are:

1. You are imaginative 2. You are Artistic 3. You are good at Drawing 4. Australia will need many good Architects for future development. These are only my ideas – and for you to reflect upon – there is ample opportunity to express yourself in this type of career… I wish you well Stuart and if at times you may have thought me a little hard I am sure you will soon realize your Uncle Ted is not so daft. Good luck to you Stuart – play the game and be prepared to overcome some hard knocks. You have a good future ahead if you keep your eye on the road you want to take, but remember – Whatever you are be a good one God Bless and my best wishes always Uncle Ted” (1) This letter is significant because Uncle Ted recognises Stuart Black’s difference. He could see that Stuart was creative and artistically inclined, and that this direction/psychology could create some problems in the future. The letter also implies some of the continuing difficulties for Stuart at home in Australia. As with many WWII veterans, his father’s PTSD manifested itself in alcoholism and according to friends, the two never had a very good relationship (2). Stuart completed high school in Kyabram. Among his papers is a reference he kept from the school principal that reads: “He has been a most industrious pupil, keen, co-operative and reliable. His conduct has been excellent. Stuart has shown very good aptitude for Art and his work in this subject is an excellent standard. As a school Prefect he has shown that he can accept responsibility. Stuart is interested in window dressing as a vocation and I consider that he would be well suited for this and associated types of work”. (3) In hindsight, this reference has a certain irony: in 1950s Victoria, window dressing was a male occupation linked to problematic social behaviour. Proximity to, and the promotion of women’s activities and desires were then one of the ways seen to lead to effeminacy, at worst homosexuality. Maybe the headmaster knew! Most young gay people have no idea of their sexuality or work hard to deny its existence – other people usually can see through the ruse. Black did his teacher training in Melbourne and was sent to a series of relatively isolated Victorian country schools for his first couple of years of service. Like many creative young people Stuart was probably forced by convention, or by his parents, to choose teaching as a respectable and stable career as opposed to taking up the somewhat more suspect and economically unviable life of an artist or window dresser. Growing up in a country town in the 1950s, to be ‘artistic’ was somewhat suspect and to parade difference was to bring trouble.

Top & Bottom; Stuart Black at the beach aged c16 years

The 1950s and early 1960s were dark times for homosexuals and lesbians. It is difficult to imagine from the vantage point of the early 21st century, but until the late 1970s in Australia there was no accepted vocabulary for referring to homosexuals and homosexuality. There were certainly no positive role models at that time in the press. Legal and medical proscriptions combined with strict censorship of literature, films and art reinforced the general belief that homosexuality was a crime at worst, and at best a disease that could be cured. Like a cancer, it could be excised from the body of the community.

But there were some with enlightened views who saw that homosexuality was not a frightening or contagious condition. As Max Harris wrote in 1962, “ The Australian's psychic fear and his antipathy towards the foreigner is perhaps exceeded by his antipathy towards the homosexual. Australian’s vernacular is rich in insults, but there is no insult as deadly and unforgiveable as to call a man ‘a fucking poofter’. The word is loaded with more disgust, distaste and hatred than any of the other unprintable words. Behind the contempt for the ‘poofter’, there is a certain amount of awe, an underlying troubledness, as if the homosexual were a mysterious non-human aberration from outer space. But the troubledness disappears when the homosexual is known at close quarters. The fear and contempt dissolve into nothing and are replaced by opposite emotions – an affection which is both patronising and disarming. The object of disgust becomes the underdog and if there is something totally surprising in the Australian temperament it is the fierce and compulsive sympathy for the underdog” (4). The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) argued in three separate submissions (1953, 1957, 1964) that homosexuals should not be employed in senior public service positions. ASIO believed that homosexuality was a “severe character defect” and that the characteristics of male and female homosexuals, “instability, willing selfdeceit, defiance towards society” constituted a seedbed for “treacherous behaviour”. The reports also suggested that because of the tendency to surround him/herself with other homosexuals there was even a threat of an international conspiracy (the so-called “Homintern”, a pun on the name of the International Communist organisation). Cabinet members to their credit, baulked at an outright ban on homosexuals in the public service, but advised department heads to watch out for, and to report those “character defects” (5). Active police surveillance of homosexuals was common. In 1958, while speaking at a Rotary luncheon at the Trocadero nightclub, Colin Delany, the New South Wales Police Commissioner, proclaimed homosexuality as “Australia’s greatest menace” (6). Maybe Delany was responding to some form of garbled intelligence about espionage in Europe, but he went on to boast that in 1954 some 286 people were convicted of ‘unnatural’ offences while in 1957 the number had risen to 475 convictions, an increase of 66%. He continued, “ These figures merely represent offences committed in parks, lavatories and picture theatres. But if we consider offences behind closed doors this would double even treble the numbers”. Similarly, the Melbourne Truth, 17 August 1957, aired a report about the formation of a new team within the Vice Squad, whose members were “alarmed by a startling increase of homosexuality in Victoria”. The new recruits were chosen for “(their) looks and tailoring as well as toughness”. The report concluded, “We know there are hundreds of perverts in Melbourne and we will get them all’ (7). In 1958, 166 people were arrested. Around Australia between 1945-1960 over 3000 people were convicted of the crime of homosexuality, an ‘unnatural’ offence. However, apart from the occasional brief mention of successful police entrapment campaigns in the yellow press, there was surprisingly little coverage of homosexuals and homosexuality. In a sense there was a conspiracy of silence in the Australian press about an issue that, in contrast, had become widely discussed in the United Kingdom (8). In 1962 K.S. Inglis, writing about the Australian press, commented, “Editors certainly do exclude newsworthy stories because they are deemed too nasty, too ‘controversial’. Contraception is a matter in which most readers are interested but which the press tends to neglect. Homosexuality is another. All the papers received on June 30, 1960, referred to a debate in the House of Commons about whether the law should permit homosexual acts between consenting adults

in private. In the two morning papers in Sydney reported some of the arguments. ‘The Advertiser’ allowed South Australians two sentences under the heading ‘Vice Vote’. In the morning papers in Melbourne – not a word. It is a hawk-eyed reader who can spot a reference to homosexuality in the 'Sun News-Pictorial ’ (9). Government censors were particularly alert to the perceived threat of homosexuality. Books such as Gore Vidal’s ‘City and the Pillar’, and James Baldwin’s ‘Another Country’ were banned, as were television documentaries from the UK that examined homosexuality (10). Yet in some left-leaning libertarian circles there were the glimmers of a more sympathetic response to homosexuality. Interestingly, the first issue of ‘The Australian Journal of Psychological Research’ was devoted to the ‘Question of Homosexuality’ (11). In a perceptive review of the journal in ‘The Observer’, January 1960, John Maze wrote, “Homosexuals still maintain and always will that they were born to be homosexual, that they are a 'special kind’ of person, despite the present day understanding (drawing mainly from Freud) of the large part that family and social pressures play in deciding a person’s sexual attitude… Most of the contributors to the first issue… lay stress on the social conditioning and cry down the notion of being born that way”. Then Maze notes the consistent use of terms such as “degenerate, unnatural and unhealthy”, continuing, “ Furthermore there are attempts to assign moral responsibility for these acts and we find statements such as “One does not see such acts occurring in the thoroughfares in broad daylight. Yet one would expect something of this sort to happen if the impulse were irresistible. If control can be exercised in certain conditions even for short periods it surely can be exercised for longer periods i.e. indefinitely. Homosexuals certainly know the nature and quality of their acts and they know they are wrong in law, so that they must be regarded as responsible individuals”. Maze recognises that this is not an objective position for the psychology profession to adopt. He then cites Freudian writers, cleverly applying some of their theories in the conclusion of his article. “It is these repressed homosexual impulses which in a disguised or sublimated form provide much of the motive power for some of the 'manliest’ of team games with their welter of body contact, and in general for the admiration of the ‘man’s man’, the rugged bloke who leaves the sheilas to mess about in the kitchen and gets out with the boys. So in denying homosexuals are a special different kind of person we are also denying that we are deep down specially different from them. Whether one is as square as a butter box or as camp as a row of tents, the underlying instinctual mixture is much the same” (12). Despite legal and medical proscriptions, homosexuals created a rich but hidden subculture. We can get a sense of this world in an extraordinary novel, No End To the Way, by Neville Jackson. First published in 1965, it was written several years earlier and depicts the vibrant but covert life homosexuals had to negotiate to survive. Set in a non-specific southern Australian city (Perth/Melbourne/Adelaide), it is the story of the ill-fated love of Ray Wharton, advertising executive, and Cor Van Gelder, a handsome Dutch immigrant barman. There are bars and cafés where people meet. The reader becomes enmeshed in a society of ‘friends’ but one that is ever watchful and fearful of exposure. There is blackmail, jealousy, sickness and separation. The novel is essentially a clarion call for the establishment of legal rights for same sex couples, similar to those that existed then in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Significantly, it is the character Ray Wharton who narrates the book. He is now resident in Hong Kong with a ”real” boyfriend/companion, far away from those dangerous prying eyes. Eventually published in paperback in 1969, this novel was for many Australian men the first public, albeit conflicted, validation of their social existence (13).

“Dear Mr Black,

Such were the social circumstances in which Stuart Black found himself. Nevertheless, he recognised early his attraction to his own sex. In a 1978 interview, Black says, “I knew I was ‘different’. I did the whole run of things, like always looking at guys and sort of looking at ads in the newspaper and getting sort of turned on by going to the football. Like everyone else born and bred in the country I did not think there was anybody else like me. I had no sexual experience there except for a couple of mutual masturbation sessions with a neighbour” (14). Perhaps this repressive country town background is the reason for Stuart’s later embrace of S&M with its appropriation of power codes. S&M owns and reworks the symbols of masculinity rather than being oppressed and manipulated by the dominant hetero-patriarchy.

I wish to take the opportunity to thank you very much for what you have done for Murray in his school work during the last two years. Murray being of a retiring nature and prone to nervous upsets was a worry to his Mother and myself in his early years at school, but since you have taken (him) in hand he has gained a good deal of confidence and from his reports appears to be progressing very well. For this we are extremely grateful I feel sure that (is) it with regret that the school accepts your transfer to another school but what is their loss is someone else’s gain

After some time teaching in country schools Stuart Black gained a position at the South Melbourne Technical High School. He also worked in Auburn and Richmond. In the days before yuppie gentrification they were bleak and tough inner city locations. He relished the challenges of teaching students from this background and gained a reputation for his motivating skills – a reputation he kept throughout his teaching career. Black kept a letter from a grateful parent, a Mr. B.C Smith (15). We can assume that the exceptionally handsome Stuart Black “came out” during this time and took advantage of the homosexual sub-culture of Melbourne. So much of this life is now lost, though it was rich enough to be mentioned in a New York published travel guide. The 1966 ‘IN Guide-International Guide to Interesting Institutions’ noted 11 Melbourne bars and bathhouses where men could meet. One listing, The Prince of Wales in St Kilda, remains an active gay venue (16).

Always interested in drawing and now away from the strictures of home, Stuart began Certificate and Diploma of Art Courses at Caulfield Institute of Technology. It was here that he met and became friends with Warwick Armstrong (1919-1953), a lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Art. Armstrong had a certain social cachet. He had recently returned from London after a successful career as a designer at Covent Garden, the Old Vic and the Mermaid Theatre, and he had also worked for film producer J. Arthur Rank. Back in Melbourne, he designed ‘La Belle Hélène for Edouard Borovansky, and ‘Lola Montez’ and other productions for John Sumner. In 1964, with Kristian Fredricksen, he designed ‘Aurora’s Wedding’ for the Australian Ballet. Warwick Armstrong became something of a mentor to Stuart Black. The significance of their relationship is perhaps measured by the fact that a painting by Armstrong hung in Black’s bedroom. This work, ‘Nocturnal Still Life / Flower of Peace’ is typical of the second generation decorative abstraction that developed around the world in response to the more radical abstract expressionists such as Pollock and de Kooning. With allusions to the landscape, to architecture and to the human form, Armstrong plays with the then fashionable ideas of elemental universal forms that literally evolve upon the distressed surface of the canvas. The shapes are evocative – possibly a moon or there could be a tree or stylized figure in gold emerging from the deep blue ground. Armstrong had solo exhibitions in Melbourne in 1946 and 1947 before he went to Europe, was a regular exhibitor at the Contemporary Art Society, and continued to show works into the 1970s.

May I extend to you best wishes for success in your future position…

Top; Stuart Black high school teacher c1962 Bottom Inset text; Letter from a grateful parent Mr. B.C Smith

Stuart Black’s studies at Caulfield would have been done at night after work. As a technical college with its educational roots in vocational training for the trades, Caulfield art teaching, though not wholly conservative, stressed . traditional approaches to art making with an emphasis on drawing from life, and a sense of finish and tidy completion to surfaces and composition. By the late 1950s a watered down version of 1920s and 30s European modernism was widely accepted within Australian art education circles. Indeed the first critical comment on Stuart Black’s work noted his homage to synthetic cubist models of composition and quiet but still recognisable abstraction. Students now had access to journals with photographs of the latest art from Europe and America. While there can be little doubt that Stuart Black met like-minded people at night school, it lacked the social and intellectual immersion and ferment that occurs in the daily activities of the Art School. Neither does night school provide the immediate social entrées and industry links that are essential for the artist’s career. Moreover, the then leading art school in Melbourne of the early 1960s, the RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) was characterised by an inner clique of alcohol-fuelled ‘blokey’ masculinity not sympathetic to outsiders and especially not to homosexuals like Stuart Black (17). This lack of grounding, the absence of a rich social and intellectual milieu, with contacts for art making, later affected Black’s career. His friends have said Stuart had a chip on his shoulder about not being part of the art gang which in a generational sense he belonged to. He probably always felt that he was not a ‘proper artist’ for not attending art school, and for being a mere art teacher. There is a destructive Australian turn of phrase, borrowed from Bernard Shaw, that “Those that can’t do, teach”, which illustrates this attitude. Apparently Stuart Black was hypersensitive to perceived personal slights and would take offence quickly. Consequently he never remained for very long with one art dealer/ gallerist, making it difficult to establish a client knowledge base or broad interest in his work. Stuart Black did find love, though. He met Alan Forsyth, a male model and actor in the early 1960s and they set up house in Prahran, later in Hotham Street East Melbourne. They were considered ‘a good match’, two men who had a ‘theatrical but proper relationship’. Together for over ten years they were “comfortable in the ways we lived and did not live at the time” (18). While not the world's greatest actor –‘all teeth and eyes’ (19) Alan gave entrée to Stuart into the upper echelons of Homosexual Melbourne, to a perfect social launching pad (and later a possible client base) for a handsome young artist. Not that Stuart was averse to consorting with all levels of the subculture.

Top; Warwick Armstrong Nocturnal Still Life / Flower of Peace. Oil on canvas c.1968, 115 X 145 cm Collection Stuart Black Bottom; Alan Forsyth c.1965, fashion photographs by Athol Shmith (1914-1990) Collection Stuart Black

During the period 1963-1970, however, Stuart Black was still an idealistic young man, making art that attracted the notice of Melbourne newspaper critics Alan McCulloch and Alan Warren. He gains his first mention, albeit just a number cited, in a June 1963 review. Alan Warren’s discussion of the exhibition, ‘Art and Crafts of Practising Teachers’ at the Leveson Street Gallery alluded to the rather stolid representation of current modernist art styles. Stuart Black’s No.5, ‘Still Life with Vegetables’ , an oil painting on sale for £32, was described as indicative of the post cubist art style, purism. Warren writes, “the show thus presents well-packaged versions of formalism (13,28), realism (35, 36), post-impressionism (42, 57), expressionism (62), abstract expressionism (6), purism (5), primitivism (8) cubism (54), and formal abstraction (78,79). The way to look at this exhibition is collectively in which case it leaves us with the comforting thought of students being conscientiously instructed according to the letter of the rule” (20). In 1965 Stuart Black made a concerted – and successful – attempt to be acknowledged in the Melbourne art world. Probably influenced by the advice and encouragement of his mentor Armstrong, he began to exhibit at the Victorian Artists Society (V.A.S) exhibitions. In 1965, Alan Warren singled out Black’s nocturnal landscape ‘City End’

out from an otherwise “not very imaginative” group exhibition based on the theme of the Yarra River (21). In July that year, Black won the Camden Art Prize in the Victorian Artists Society Exhibition, “Minus 30”, featuring the work of artists under 30. The winning entry ,“The Loneliness of the Time Machine”, now exists only in black and white reproduction. Its activated surface and composition pay a youthful homage to the work of Kandinsky and the synthetic cubists, in a work showing a mixture of landscape figures and still life. Alan Warren again noted Black’s work in the September 1965 V.A.S exhibition. In a “competent but boring show”, “Painting in a Landscape” was described as “gracefully poised between realism and abstraction” (22). He then entered and was hung in the John McCaughey Art Prize and the Corio Art Prize, Geelong. In October, Warren described Black’s work as having “the not yet dry, not quite certain look of the Australian vanguard on the prowl” (23). The next year, 1966, Warren observed that Black’s “Revelation of a Soul” was “full of vitality” and “a brave effort to break through conservative barriers” (24), however later the critic’s enthusiasm was tempered, with ‘Diary of a Painter’ being rated as merely ‘respectable’ (25). In 1967 Stuart Black continued to exhibit at the VAS where his works were recognised as, “rising above the general level of respectable mediocrity” (26) and “composed with more than customary assurance” (27). That year his works were also accepted for the Perth Prize for Drawing, the Benalla Art Exhibition and the Eltham Art Award. It is not surprising then, that after constant mentions in the press, the commercial gallery, Princes Hill Gallery approached Black to exhibit first in a group show in April, then in a solo exhibition in October 1967. Reports in the social pages claimed that some 500 people attended Stuart Black’s first exhibition opening, with notables including Joseph Burke, Professor of Fine Arts at Melbourne University and various actors and actresses. The works Black exhibited are competent, finely finished, landscape-based abstractions. Many paintings were inspired by drawing expeditions to Wilsons Promontory, south-east of Melbourne. They have weighty and serious titles such as ‘Residue of Time’, ‘Organised Formation’ ‘Primeval Silence’, ‘Rape of the Land’, ‘Fragment of the Ancient’, that illustrate the prevailing taste for the epic and poetic, which gave viewers a way of engaging with a style of painting (abstraction) that was still somewhat suspect. One of the most highly promoted Melbourne artists of the time was Leonard French, who made paintings with literary and cosmological overtones that featured stylisations of plants and animals. In the late 1960s the ground breaking heritage of the practices of Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) and Russell Drysdale (1912-1981) were also impossible to ignore. James Gleeson in the first edition of Art and Australia praised their work for the way it evoked rather than described “the sprit of place”. They had “poetic insight” where the viewer can “recognize something we had lost and forgotten yet subconsciously longed for” (28).

Top; Stuart Black, on front cover of cataloque for the 1967 Princes Hill solo exhibition Bottom; Publicity Photo, Stuart Black at Princes Hill gallery 1967

Stuart Black, however, longed above all for the male body, and in his first commercial exhibition there is an early intimation of this central interest. Part of the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, the nascent youth culture liberation movements were looking again to Nature as the source of primordial energy. Artists contemporary with Black such as Brett Whiteley (1939-1992), Judy Cassab, (b.1920) Shay Docking (1928-1998) and Lawrence Daws (b.1927) chose to depict sensual, elemental and symbolic shapes, but Black is more explicit in his interests. “Rape of the Land”, ostensibly an aerial view of ploughed fields with distant hills and seascape, has a large penile shape at the centre of the composition. “Interaction” features a throne-like fleshy form penetrating the flat ground. We are not sure what act/s we are witnessing. In other works, however, the tactile physicality of the body is more submerged into the landscape (‘Escarpment’, ‘Fading Light’).

Top; Stuart Black Rape of the Land. Oil on canvas 1967 Private Collection, 92 X 122 cm Bottom; Stuart Black Late One Sunday. c.1968 oil on hardboard, 94 X 124.5 X 3.5 cm The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Purchased as a memorial for I.T.C. course terminating at Melbourne Teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s College 1970 (1970.0250.000.000) Reproduced courtesy the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Copyright estate of the artist.

Still Life with What’s His Name’s Telephone Number. 1977 oil on canvas Private Collection Melbourne, 122 X 135 cm

Still Life with with Writing Between The Lines. 1977 oil on canvas Private Collection Melbourne, 122 X 135 cm

Some of the paintings have an almost surrealist quality (‘Desiccation’, ‘Primeval Silence’), while in others the landscape opens up to reveal musculature, joints and bones (‘Skin of the Earth’, ‘Brooding Land’), a tendency more clearly seen in charcoal and pen and ink drawings made at the time. As in any first exhibition by a young artist there is mélange of stylistic echoes – fragments of Fernand Leger, Juan Gris and William Baziotes, hints of Joan Miró, Grahame Sutherland, Nicholas de Stael and Brett Whiteley. Newspaper reviews of the exhibition were solidly enthusiastic. Alan Warren in ‘The Sun’, framed his weekly review with the statement that “Artists who only wish to be themselves take over from professional adaptors of overseas trends in Melbourne art galleries today”. Warren wrote that Stuart Black was “gifted” and, “goes the whole hog in his broody earthy and serious abstract pictures” (29). Alan McCulloch was impressed with Stuart Black’s technique in his positive review, “Crisply and economically painted, Stuart Black’s large semi-abstracts (Princes Hill) have this important asset: big bold forms backed by the knowledge that strength can be derived from simplicity of statements. The colour range moves from black, through red to white, the latter effectively used in some pictures in transparent veils of subtly changing tones. Depending of course on how hard he is prepared to work Black could be a young artist with a future” (30). This is a grand entrance into the art world. Here was a young and handsome ‘man about town‘ beginning to be mentioned in the social pages. If he was lucky and worked the scene and its inhabitants a little he could go far. In September 1967 Black set a challenge for himself. He published a short tract for the VAS newsletter in an effort to encourage the largely conservative readers to think more positively of recent developments in contemporary art. In ‘Understanding Painting’, Black introduces his own ideas about art, filtered through the ideas of Henri Matisse. He asks the art world to reject the idea of pure technique as “it is merely a skill, it is not art”. Black claims that modern art is both “difficult and more exciting” than earlier work. And then defines what artist do, and their relationship to their audience. He writes “The artist points out new experiences to take the place of dying ones; he discovers something new with the universe – some new relationship, some new idea or some new fragment. He does his best to express his own shock or surprise or pleasure at this discovery and to communicate this new perception to us. We can share his discovery best if we first know ourselves” (31). This is an idealistic, romantic vision of art and artist.

Top; Fragment of The Ancient. 1967, oil on canvas Private Collection, 61 X 92 cm

The next year Stuart Black entered the Maitland Art Prize, the Flotta Lauro Exhibition, the Wangaratta art exhibition and the Ronald Prize, City of Morwell. In the last of these, the La Trobe Regional Gallery bought a drawing for its collection. Yet from 1967 to 1970, Black began to recognise the real core of his universe, his sexuality, and started to explore the limits of that realm and then translate those experiences into visual form. He was getting to know himself and he wanted to share his new discoveries and new perceptions, but unfortunately many art patrons could not keep up with him.

Middle; Escarpment. 1967, oil on canvas Private Collection, 92 X 122 cm Bottom; Primeval Silence. 1967, oil on canvas Private Collection, 92 X 122 cm

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Handwritten letter from Uncle Ted dated 5 September c.1948, Stuart Black Papers. Interview with Tim Standfield and William Saunders, July 2009. E.F Daniels, Senior Assistant, Kyabram High School, 10 November 1954. Max Harris ‘Manners and Morals’, in: Australian Civilisation – a symposium, Peter Coleman, FW Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, pp.56. (Director General of ASIO). ‘Persons with Serious Character Defects as Security Risks’, 15 April 1964, CRS A5827/1 Vol. 7 agendum 1999. Australian Archives. Also see the famous ‘Time’ editorial ‘The Homosexual in America’, 21 January 1966. The last paragraph reads in part, “Even in purely nonreligious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty and, in the words of one Catholic educator, 'of human construction'. It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.” 6. (Anon.) ‘Homosexual Menace in Australia’, ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ (SMH), 11 June 1958, pp.5.

7. ‘Truth’, Melbourne, 17 August 1957. 8. Grahame Willett, ‘The Darkest Decade: Homophobia in the 1950s’ in: The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture Eds. John Murphy and Judith Smart, Australian Historical Studies, 28. (No 109), October 1987, pp.120-132. 9. K.S Inglis, ‘The Daily Papers’ in: Australian Civilisation- a symposium Ed. Peter Coleman, FW Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, p.168. 10. (Anon.) ‘Faces on the Cutting room Floor’, ‘The Bulletin’, 20 November 1965. 11. ‘The Question of Homosexualit’. ‘The Australian Journal of Psychological Research 1’, pp.1, October 1959. 12. John Maze, ‘Review’, ‘The Observer’, (Sydney) 23 January 1960, pp.24-25 13. Perth writer and stockbroker/financier Gerald Marcus Glaskin wrote ‘No End To the Way’ under a pseudonym, Neville Jackson. Interviewed in later life about the novel, Glaskin said: “It was banned in Australia and the paperback publishers, Corgi, researched the Australian censorship laws, and discovered that the book could not be shipped to Australia. So they chartered planes and flew them in“. The book was a best seller. See also John Burbidge, ‘Underexposed: Gerald Gaskin’s fiction’, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, (Nov.-Dec. 2007) pp.9. 14. Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S&M too’. Interview with Stuart Black ‘Campaign #32’, (Melbourne), Gay Guide Issue, May 1978, pp.13-14. 15. Mr B.C. Smith, letter 15 December 1960, Stuart Black papers. 16. ‘The IN Guide: International Guide to Interesting Institutions’. PO Box 4116 Grand Central N.Y N.Y 10017. 1966. 17. There are no books written about the art schools of Melbourne, and no collected information from alumni. Diana Gold, Director of Gallery 101, Collins Street, Melbourne, first met Stuart Black at Melbourne State College in 1981. The homophobic 'blokiness' of the art school scene she has verified in an interview, July 2009. 18. Interview with Keith Chivers and Ron Peel, Melbourne, July 2009. 19. Ron Peel, in an Interview with Keith Chivers and Ron Peel, Melbourne, July 2009. 20. Alan Warren, ‘Art and Crafts of Practising Teachers’. ‘The Sun’, Melbourne, June 1963. 21. Alan Warren, ‘The Herald’, Melbourne, 23 June 1965. 22. Alan Warren, ‘The Herald’, Melbourne, 8 September 1965. 23. Alan Warren, ‘The Sun’, Melbourne, 11 October 1965. 24. Alan Warren, ‘The Sun’, Melbourne, 22 June 19 66 and “The Herald”, 19 June 1966. 25. Alan Warren, ‘The Herald’, Melbourne, 7 September 1966. 26. AlanWarren, ‘The Sun’, Melbourne, 6 September 1967. 27. Alan Warren, ‘The Herald’, Melbourne, 5 July 1967. 28. James Gleeson, ‘Painting In Australia since 1945’. Art and Australia, 1, No.1, 1963, pp.4. 29. Warren Alan, ‘The Sun’, Melbourne, 24 October 1967. 30. Alan McCulloch, ‘The Herald, Melbourne’, 25 October 1967. 31. Stuart Black, “Understanding Painting’, VAS Newsletter, September 1967, pp.16.

Chapter TWO ONE

Chapter Two The Heroic Years – Consolidation 1970-76, San Francisco/Melbourne 1978, The Metamorphosis of Stuart Black

Introduction The glowing reviews of Black’s first solo exhibition created a climate of expectation amongst the critics, and the art audience at large. They were hoping to see clear evidence of stylistic and formal development, of ‘improvement’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s for the ‘good artist’, this was viewed as an inexorable teleological process. Where would Stuart Black go? The rituals of contemporary art making and its reception require that artists find some sort of modus operandi to graft on to pre-existing styles and approaches to Art, rather than branching out and creating something completely new or different. Black’s first exhibition showed his skill at synthesising a range of what was by that time, quite conservative early modernist styles and techniques. Black could choose to further refine those tasteful appropriations (developing a safe and decorative stylistic cul-de-sac) or to use the success of his first exhibition as a platform for experimentation. The title of this chapter, ”The Heroic years”, refers to the artistic paths that attracted Stuart Black from 1970 until 1978. Where possible, the artist’s voice is included to underline and perhaps explain the decisions and changes that occur. Divided into three parts, “Consolidation 1970-1976” shows how Stuart Black developed and refined his unique visual language; and “San Francisco/ Melbourne 1976-1978”, discusses the culmination of these exploratory processes. And the final section, “The Metamorphosis of Stuart Black”, written by the artist, provides perhaps the truest version of the contemporary events which affected him.

Consolidation 1970 – 1976 The decade of the 1970s is often praised as the beginning of an increasingly liberal social regime in Australia, though social change was piecemeal and a lot slower in coming than hindsight might suggest. For Australian homosexuals, the notorious record of police, legal and social proscription precluded the establishment of public homophile advocacy movements, such as the Mattachine Society or the Daughters of Bilitis, which operated in the United States of America from the 1950s. Nor was there the widespread agitation to change anti-homosexual laws, as in the United Kingdom, with the Wolfenden Committee report, and subsequent legislation. While the New York Stonewall riots of 1969 are popularly held up as a vital rallying call, again this is more 1990s revisionist fantasy than actual truth. In Australia there was no real homosexual advocacy movement until the winter of 1970, when CAMP Inc. (The Campaign Against Moral Persecution) was established. Two years later (1972) the comparatively more radical Gay Lib appeared on the Australian cultural landscape.

Above; Stuart Black drawing in the Northern Territory 1970

Reviewing Australian homosexuals’ activity and publications in the 21st century, one finds a beguilingly naive and outrageous energy. Infused with Marxist revolutionary fervour and utopian ideals derived from the activist human rights and feminist movements, some homosexuals were finding new ways of living and operating in the world. The central, and at the time shocking strategy to create this ‘brave new world’, was “coming out (of the closet)“ − the speaking and acting out of one’s desires in public without shame. For many, coming out was both an ecstatic and cathartic way of shedding self-hatred finding the self. For some coming out was also partly seen as a radical political

act aimed at shocking society into a sudden change of consciousness, forcing people to recognise the existing oppression and work to improve society. Eschewing such idealism for a grounded and safe reality, as “migrants from heterosexuality”, homosexuals set about creating a visible and vocal community to call home. The possibility of belonging, of leading a normal life was heady (1). As journalist Randy Shilts writes of the period, “We were the first generation to live openly as homosexuals. We have no role models. We have to find new ways to live” (2). It is at this time, in the heroic years of Gay Liberation (1970 - 1980), that Stuart Black’s mature art emerges. While the international journal ‘Time’ continued to publish significant feature articles about homosexuality, during this time there was very little sympathetic or informed reportage of Australian homosexual life, its problems and concerns, until the late 1970s (3). Even left-leaning journals such as the ‘Nation Review’ promoted the notion of homosexuality as some sort of sad pathology (4). Typical common misconceptions are summed up in Bob Ellis’s review of the Canadian prison film ‘Fortune and Men’s Eyes’, when he writes, “The film features amongst its sodomitical gang bangs, its shameless drug traffic, its writhing epileptics, its homicidal sadism and its long thoughtful solitudes, the finest evocation of the homosexual approach to life I have yet seen on film” (5). Within the prevalent homophobia ‘coming out’ was a courageous act, though as the decade progressed there was debate and a slow public acceptance of the necessity for homosexual law reform. For those Melbourne homosexuals comfortable in the covert world that had sustained them for nearly a century, all this Gay Lib coming out was viewed with suspicion. The social scene was changing too quickly – free love had hit Melbourne. According to Stuart’s long-time friend, Tim Standfield, “At that time there were broadly three types of gay people – the South Yarra Lot, professionals, rich theatrical types, the Always Closeted, and Rough Trade. There was very little open socialising or mixing between these groups. Most people had little time for Gay Lib. With his partner/boyfriend Alan Forsyth, Stuart Black was quite happy operating in the top end of the homosexual social scene in Melbourne. In 1972, when I met him, was the height of Stuart’s caftan phase, although his caftan was around his neck most of the time!” (6). Stuart was nothing if not provocative. In this rarefied world Stuart had gained a level of notoriety for his rather disturbing exhibition of paintings held at Powell Street Gallery in 1970 (7). As part of a group show, Black exhibited four large, square-ish format works. Compared with the attractive landscapes of his first exhibition, these paintings mark an exciting departure. The artist cleverly employs the reserve (unpainted white/gessoed areas) juxtaposed with painterly surfaces, more closely realised tonal forms and flat colour areas. He emphasises asymmetrical compositions, and combines these formal explorations with content that shows a strange embrace of Surrealism and Pop. The looser paint work, the comparatively distorted and abstracted compositions caused consternation among the gallerists. The gallery owner was obviously shocked when presented with the work on 4 December, three days before the opening, and David Chapman wrote a frantic note to Stuart, now amusing, in showing his obvious alarm.

“Dear Mr Black The paintings you have brought to the Gallery are not in context with those we saw when your work was first accepted. In planning a Group Show you will appreciate consideration is given to the compatibility of the Artists represented. The work you have delivered today, we consider is not within this context, and we are extremely perturbed with the prospect of exhibiting it. We have tried to ring you this evening on numerous occasions, and although unsuccessful, thought you may be at home. Therefore we have paid this visit hoping to save you embarrassment, and at the same time having the opportunity of looking at alternate pieces’. PS If you are not at home when we arrive, please contact us in the morning” (8).

Above Left; The Leaning Hair. 1970. Oil on canvas Private Collection, 153 X153 cm Above Right; Green Dragon. 1970. Oil on canvas Private Collection, 122 X 53 cm

The titles of the works, ‘Janet’, ‘Green Dragon’, ‘The Leaning Hair’, and ‘Come to me Camellia’ are relatively simple, but Chapman did not – could not – articulate clearly his horror at the true nature of the content of the paintings. Still essentially tightly composed landscapes, the spaces are now illogical, mysteriously inhabited, overloaded. The paintings are confessional. They are suggestively erotic. Here, Stuart Black depicts his personal world, with its not-so-secret codes, a world of fetish and desire. Assembled leitmotifs include anonymous body parts and orifices, architecture, medals, hair, belts and ribbons, stars, flowers and funnels. In a later interview with Lee Franklyn, the artist, Black admits that the content of these works emerges from personal experiences: “It came after an episode I had with someone. It was my first experience with ‘unnatural’ sex. It was an experiment with rubber and leather and this whetted my appetite and I wanted to know more about it” (9).

While ‘Come to me Camellia’ features a mass of body parts, a puckered pink camellia on top at once exploding and imploding, probably the most revealing work in the exhibition is ‘Green Dragon’. It has a flag-like quality, with large flat areas of red, yellow, black, and white. In the lower left corner of the painting there is a blood-red brick wall with a darkened portal. Directly above, this motif is repeated to reveal a public toilet block at night complete with a light shining down on to the darkened doorway and the usual ventilation pipe. Balancing the architectural elements in the lower right of the picture is a collaged image of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous ‘Figure of Man’, with a slash of red paint across it to defile the idealised classical male body. In the middle of the painting, crossing the picture plane, is a headless twisted torso that is reversed to reveal buttocks, leg or arm shapes, gripped by the stylised Chinese dragon of the title. On this roughly painted yellow torso is a large chain and a cross. Curling around this human form is a tree/ snake/belt that metamorphoses into a cat-o’-nine-tales whip, its tail-tips like insects or birds. Black plays with scale and finish as well as narrative, in a not-so-hidden revelation of the artist’s enjoyment of ‘beats’– venues for public sex acts – predictably disturbing the Chapmans. One wonders at the Chapmans’ reaction, though, seeing that the critic, Alan McCulloch wrote extensively about these paintings, so different from the cool abstraction of the other artists in the group show. “ The exception is Stuart Black whose large red, blue black and gold Expressionist / Surrealist forms are assembled like arabesques on white canvases. ‘Janet’, ‘The Leaning Hair’, ‘Come to me Camellia’ are the allusive titles reflecting perhaps recollections of some personal experience. Black hovers rather shakily between the dream and the reality but nevertheless expresses his feeling with some architectonic force” (10). Obviously impressed with the new developments (as opposed to Stuart’s behaviour on the opening night!) an artist colleague, Alun Leach-Jones, wrote a personal note to Black soon after the opening. “Dear Stuart I thought I would just drop you a short note to possibly cheer you up. You did look rather fed up at the opening and I agree with good cause. Though frankly where it really matters you were home and dry. I personally liked your paintings. I think they are the best things I have ever seen of yours. You really do have something going on there. I did say this in most strong terms to David and Bea Chapman and they looked at me as though I was stark staring mad. This obviously means I am right. The dealers never know do they? I felt you had made a really direct and personal statement and to hell with art and the consequences, Bravo. I feel this is the only way, everything stems from this. Look forward to seeing a one man show in the near future. Warm regards, Alun ”

Top; Come to me Camelia. 1970. Oil on canvas Private Collection, 153 X 153 cm Bottom; Janet. 1970. Oil on canvas Private Collection, 53 X 122 cm

For the time these works are extraordinary for what they depict. They are extraordinary as products of the relatively tame Melbourne art scene of the time. From our vantage point nearly 40 years on, they show possible mixtures of influences from the British Pop of Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and (early) David Hockney. There are also elements that have distant echoes of Richard Lindner and Marsden Hartley. Leach Jones has remarked that he found Stuart Black’s art to be “extraordinarily natural with an exciting uncultivated sensibility, quite different from (the art of) his colleagues Dale Hickey, Robert Rooney and Gareth Sansom” (11).

Dress Rehersal. 1972. Oil on canvas, Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art 153 X 153 cm

Nachtmusik. 1975. Oil on canvas, Collection Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, 61 X 91 cm

It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the sheer force of the youth culture liberation movements, that a number of Australian artists began to overtly explore sexuality and desire in their practice, and Stuart Black’s name should join the list of more familiar artists such as Mike Brown, Vivienne Binns, Richard and Pat Larter and Brett Whiteley, among others. An earlier generation of male homosexual artists, such as Donald Friend, James Gleeson, and Loudon Sainthill, clothed their work respectively (and respectably) in Exoticism, Poetry and Greek Mythology, and the Theatre; in contrast Stuart Black is uncompromising in the representation of his sexuality. At the time, it was not unusual for artists to move regularly from one commercial gallery ‘stable’ to another. The Chapmans’ response to Stuart’s work probably prompted him to search for a more sympathetic venue. In September 1972, Warehouse Galleries in Richmond showed Black’s next exhibition, which began the artist’s friendship with gallerist Tim Standfield. Works with a slightly larger scale than before, have an exuberant and sophisticated freedom of composition, mark making, with refined and painterly surfaces. Again the codes and symbols embedded in the work are subjects obvious to those (homosexuals) who know what to look for, but there is a level of confident play that is striking. Patrick McCaughey, art critic for ‘The Age’ wrote: “Stuart Black’s fetishistic paintings at the Warehouse Gallery are by far his best to date”. He also noted a new energy: “More openly worked than before, they have a wit and bounce nothing in the earlier paintings prepared us for. He may lack tonnage but he’s moved out of static implausibility” (12). Alan McCulloch is less opaque in his comments. While musing about the inevitable decline and obsolescence of art movements such as Pop and Abstract Expressionism which he claims are “late trains bound for nowhere”, McCulloch is nevertheless drawn to exclaim, “Stuart Black’s paper trumpets, belt buckles, coiling tapes and bangs of real hair celebrate a perpetual carnival which is both innocent and sleazy (and occasionally mildly obscene)” (13). If anything, the 1972 paintings are even more diaristic, with more overtly sexualised references, than earlier work. “Bad day at Black Rock” is a landscape that features a trophy-like clump of real hair (perhaps a toupée) in the top left of the picture. The penile ice cream cone and delicately fluttering ribbons could reveal that Black Rock was then a popular beat for homosexuals. According to his friends, Stuart Black was a loner who enjoyed trawling the beats. He loved the chase more than anything (14). “Inside Outside” is a night-time bedroom scene. Above a green striped single bed situated on an oval of patterned carpet, two yellow armatures join together. The point where they meet, Black has clothed in pinkish fabric, a tumescence that hints at the coming activities in this space. In ‘Un-registered to ride’, ‘Let’s go play again’, ‘Dress Rehearsal’ and ‘Last Supper’, whips, flowers, belts photographs and underpants appear to reflect the artist’s proclivities. The works reveal a close reading and understanding of the last phases of European and American Pop, an art style that celebrated the pleasures of simple appetite and consumption (15).

Top; Bad Day at Black Rock. 1972. Oil on canvas The estate of the late Stuart Alan Black, 107 X 135 cm Bottom; Inside Outside. 1972. Oil on canvas Private Collection, 153 X 153 cm

A contemporary and friend of Black, artist Gareth Sansom, met him in 1966 by chance at a fancy dress party he was hosting in a Carlton pub. Stuart Black and Maurice Cantlon were attempting to crash the party by climbing in through a window. Sansom confronted the pair and suggested that they come through the front door. They would then occasionally meet at Toorak College (later Melbourne State College), and soon Stuart became a regular dinner guest at Sansom’s Prahran house in St John’s Road. Sansom claims that Black only started to become a serious artist in the period from 1972 to around 1980, “really living the life of the artist” (16), and that his work then began to gain the respect and notice of fellow artists. Black gave Sansom an entrée into the ‘underworld’ of Melbourne homosexuals. They had fun and sometimes collaborated on projects.

Tim Standfield claimed that “they egged each other on” (17). Both Black and Sansom loved the role of performers, both loved acting as ‘agents provocateurs’. There are similar concerns in both artists’ work. Sansom burst on to the Melbourne art world in 1965 with a solo show at South Yarra Gallery. Bernard Smith wrote in his review that his paintings “were acts of provocation and courage with titles like ‘The Blue Transvestite’1964 or ‘On the Prowl’ 1965”. Now considered one of Australia’s most prominent artists, Sansom went on to explore what Frances Lindsay has politely described as “humanist concerns”, adolescence, the relationships of family and friends, sexual identity and role playing, religion, death and nostalgia. Lindsay describes his work as “challenging preconceived ideas” (18). Sansom embraced the persona of the ‘enfant terrible’ of the 1970s and 1980s Melbourne art world. Unlike Stuart Black, who could never dispense with his beaux arts training, Sansom created expressive and tumultuous paintings with crowded, collaged surfaces and complex personal and public references. The fact that Sansom was known to be personally interested in and depicted transgressive social and sexual practices was easily accommodated by the Melbourne art world because those practices were heterosexual, not homosexual as with Stuart Black. Sansom’s paintings are self-consciously ‘artful’, sometimes provocative and titillating in their finish and content but always cleverly contained within the tenets of the current art languages of the day. In 1973, Alan Forsyth, Stuart’s lover, died unexpectedly of cancer. Alan left Stuart enough money to live comfortably, and also left him the East Melbourne house where they had lived together. At the end of that year Stuart travelled to Europe and the United States for the first time. On his return, he began to concentrate on drawing, a medium gaining new prominence with the rise of interest in minimalist and conceptualist art practices. According to its proponents, the traditional art object was obsolete, disappearing before our eyes. Artists became interested in art as a record of process or trace of activity, and the ephemeral nature of paper was viewed as an ideal ground and laboratory on which to explore and quantify the constructions of space. As Maureen Gilchrist, critic for ‘The Age’ wrote, “Drawing constitutes an acid test for a painter. In a drawing sensitivity or crudeness and strength of conviction or the lack of it are easily exposed. This is because drawings close the gap between conception and execution. Ideas are registered with an immediacy of touch and feeling. There is no getting away from the brute fact of the specific kind and quality of the contact the hand makes with the paper ground; or the extent to which the ground is brought to life and, at the same time, felt to be alive itself” (19). The mark, transparency, translucency, the veiled whiteness and proportion became buzzwords. Stuart Black embraced this new attitude to art making and again met with critical and commercial success. He approached one of the leading galleries in Sydney, the Macquarie Galleries, and his work was included in their 1974 Christmas group show. The following section of a letter to Stuart from Eileen Chanin, a co-director of Macquarie, illustrates the inadequacy of words to describe the experience of this type of minimalist drawing so popular in the mid-1970s.

Above; Let’s Play Again. 1972. Oil on canvas Private Collection, 92 X 122 cm

“We have framed two of your drawings and they do look good. They have been framed as I think you would have wanted them – the paper flat on a white mount with a little over an inch border on all sides and very slim silvery frames. The framing job gives them a crisp emphasis which is an interesting contrast to some of the more sensitive passages of the pastels. The two which we selected are (if you can bear with my descriptions?): one with yellow on the top left hand corner, green and pencil on the bottom and a pencil line-up the left side to a red mark; the other features

three more solid squares of black, purple and green to the top left side, the bottom and the middle right side and penciled into the right as the inscription, the ‘Quick’, etc.” (20). The next year, 1975, Stuart Black again moved galleries to exhibit in a group show, ‘Drawing 75: Drawings by Five Artists’, at Stuart Gerstman Galleries, 17-28 February 1975. This was a prelude to a solo show at the same gallery in May that year. At first glance the works on paper have the air of homage to the Rome-based American artist Cy Twombly, but instead of the graphic intensity of his model, Stuart Black has substituted a somewhat more decorative sensibility in the placement of rapidly applied lines, splodges and squiggles. Black suggests some sort of mapping and architectural references with these marks that often slip outside and over the edge of the picture plane. Jeffrey Makin, critic for ‘The Sun’, was excited by Black’s drawings. “Pastelled abstractions, with an acute awareness of gesture… provide a quickening of tempo to the show. Black’s staccatoed line is beautifully controlled as it weaves and dodges in search for an alternative to an image” (21). Alan McCulloch, usually an advocate for Black, this time thought the work slight and too dependent on chance (22). Maureen Gilchrist wrote, “the best draftsmen in this exhibition obviously feel the surfaces they are working on are more than mere containers for animated graffiti” (23). Perhaps she was referring Black’s work in this aside. This style of drawing gained a better reception in Western Australia, where Stuart Black was included in a show at the Collectors Gallery, Subiaco, with Danish jeweller Per Lindholt (24). Murray Mason in the ‘The West Australian’ waxes lyrical: “The drawings are fragile understatements, which for this viewer are very satisfying. They leave much unsaid and tease with what they do say. They are cerebral, very gentle and dare one say decorative. Many will be worried that so little is put down yet the ‘emptiness’ is redolent of the comment that the most beautiful sound in music is silence” (25). The May 1975 solo exhibition at Stuart Gerstman Galleries (26) featured both drawings and paintings. From the titles, ‘Marschallin’, ‘Satie’, ‘Nachtmusik’, ‘Pavane’, ‘Liebestod’, ‘Heldenleben’, ‘Paradism’, it is clear Black wanted to explore the links between music and the visual arts. Inspired by Wagner, Richard Strauss and others, the paintings are finely realised romantic tonal abstractions that develop some of the motifs and spatial explorations apparent in the recent drawings. Part aerial, part close-up, part diagram, there is a play with depth of field relationships. Black injects into the picture plane ribbon-like lines or geometric shapes that suggest windows or portals. Music and a search for visual equivalents has been one of the key motivations in the development of the languages of abstraction in Eurocentric art. Walter Pater wrote in 1862, “All art aspires towards the condition of music”. In 2009, this statement is still a challenge to artists. How can the static arts – painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, photography etc. capture the same sensations and experiences as one’s favourite piece of music? In the late 19th century Symbolist artists and poets explored the possibilities of the art theory of synaesthesia – the linkage of all the arts. For example, one might look at the colour green and simultaneously think of a piece of music or poetry. Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist artists often referenced music in their practice. In Australia, with the exception of early 20th century composer Percy Grainger and artists Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin, these links had been of little interest. Strangely, this subject area caused a level of consternation amongst the Melbourne newspaper critics. However, while Maureen Gilchrist dismissed the works as “pedestrian abstractions with high-flown titles” (27) and Alan McCulloch called the paintings “ precious” and lacking coherence (28), the Queensland Art Gallery acquired two works from this exhibition for its collection.

‘Gustav” (1974) is a tremulous pastel possibly named in homage to the Viennese composer Gustav Mahler, with suggestions of a diagram, map or architectural form about to emerge from the bare woven paper. ‘Nachtmusik’ (1975) is a large abstract painting featuring geometric forms that hover over atmospheric tonal areas. As is common in Black’s work, there is a conscious but uneasy balance within the composition. A surprisingly sophisticated and positive review, one which parallels the chromatic allusiveness of the works, was written by Bernard Boles for the popular weekly journal ‘Nation Review’. Here Boles wittily draws together a range of art historical, literary and musical references. “The work is composed of small rectangles on larger areas, straight and isolated lines, splashed aureoles of colour and transversing wiggles all of which are signposts of abstraction. At first glance this debris from the attic of other artists does not rise above the ordinary, but Black is a painter who is prepared to use his canvas as a thinking board. His paint and symbols are sensitively and variously arranged. He has been hammered by critics of this show for being grandiloquently obscure in his titles. I am more prepared to be amused. “A propos’, I was looking at one canvas (no.8) speculating should Black return to recognizable shapes he would be inclined to take correspondences from Magritte when I noticed the title ‘Satie’. Well, Satie was a surrealist for sure and a close friend of surrealist painters like Georges Malkine. Satie came into his own with his jalopy lilted new piano music of the 1920s with droll, chic, Parisian libretto. Here is a Satie Berceuse. The day is at an end. Peter goes to bed? He was very well behaved. His mother kisses him. / He gets into bed very happy with himself and says” Will grandpapa and grandmama know I have been very good?”/” Yes” answers his mother. “Who will tell them?” “They will see it in the newspaper”/ Peter falls asleep with pride. Should it be Black’s whim to shoot arrows into the wastes of ockerland, they are worth retrieving” (29). The last line is another reference to Black’s difficult combative personality, as well as to his chosen artistic position.

Top; Gustav. 1974 pastel on paper Collection Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, 55.3 X 75.3 cm Bottom; Stuart Black c.1975

The exhibitions staged by Stuart Black in the period 1970 to 1975 reveal an artist who was ambitious and adventurous. This was an important period of consolidation in carving out a small but significant niche in the art world. Black was exploring and successfully adapting the latest styles of abstraction. He was continuing to receive generally positive critical notice for his work, and was beginning to be collected by state and regional art galleries. However, the artist was literally leaving ’ockerland‘ behind. In the aforementioned review, Boles reveals that this is the last exhibition by Black before travelling to California to complete his Masters Degree in Fine Arts. Dispensing with the familiar comforts of Melbourne, its public and private cultures, is a momentous rite of passage for Stuart Black artist and man.

Notes 1. (Author) ‘From camp to Queer: remaking the Australian Homosexual’. Melbourne University Press, 2002, p.5. 2. Randy Shilts, ‘The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk’. Penguin, 1982, p.47. 3. ‘Aversion Therapy –electrical attack on gays’, ‘Gay Rays’, Melbourne Gay Lib, 1972, pp.6-7. This type of treatment had generally stopped in Australia by the mid 1970s with a few minor exceptions in the 1980s. 4. In the ‘Nation Review’ of the early 1970s there were a few mentions of the U.S.A radical drag performance group, The Cockettes. Jim Sharman’s ecstatic review of their performance at Radio City Hall, New York in 1972, is unusually positive reportage. 5. Bob Ellis, Film Review, ‘Nation Review’ 1972 p.533. 6. Interview with Tim Standfield, October 2008. 7. ‘5 Local and Interstate Painters’, Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, 7-19 December 1970. 8. David Chapman, Letter to Stuart Black, 4 December 1970. Stuart Black Papers. 9. Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S&M too’, Interview with Stuart Black, Campaign #32, in ‘Melbourne Gay Guide’, May 1978, pp.13-14. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Alan McCulloch, ‘The Her’, Melbourne, 9 December 1970. Alun Leach-Jones, hand written letter to artist, n.d. Stuart Black Papers. In interview September 2009, Alun-Leach Jones spoke enthusiastically about Black’s charismatic personality – “a terrific livewire”, Jones also spoke Black’s dynamic personality – “a terrific livewire”, and also described the intense inter-art school rivalries that characterised the Melbourne art world of the 1970s: RMIT vs Prahran vs Caulfield. Patrick McCaughey, ‘The Age’, Melbourne, 20 September? 1972. Alan McCulloch, ‘The Herald’, Melbourne, 20 September 1972. Interview with Tim Standfield, October 2008. Interview with Gareth Sansom, October 2008. According to Sansom, the English art magazine Ark was readily available in Melbournefor those students and artists in the know. Australian Pop Art exponents developed a style which is an amalgam of English/US/French Pop influences, mixing elements of Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Alun Davie, David Hockney, and Martial Raysse. Interview with Gareth Sansom, October 2008, Interview with Tim Standfield, October 2008. ‘Gareth Sansom Paintings 1956-1986’. University Gallery, University of Melbourne, 12 March-16 May 1986, Curator: Frances Lindsay, pp7. Maureen Gilchrist, ‘The Age’ Melbourne, 19 February 1975. ‘Group Show’ at The Macquarie Galleries’ Christmas Exhibition, 5-20 December 1974. Letter from Eileen Chanin to Stuart Black, 5 December 1974. Stuart Black Papers. Jeffrey Makin, ‘The Sun’, Melbourne, 19 February, 1975. Alan McCulloch, ‘The Herald’, Melbourne, 19 February 1975. Maureen Gilchrist, ‘The Age’, Melbourne, 19 February 1975. Stuart Black and Per Lindholt, Collectors Gallery, Subiaco, Perth, Western Australia, 8-20 June 1975. Murray Mason, ‘The West Australian’,Perth, 14 June 1975. The other reviewer (unnamed) from Perth was a little puzzled- “What minimal marks he has made are beautiful in soft focus colour swatches, splotches and squiggles bound together – or held apart depending on your point of view – by big areas of white paper. Some interesting, if bizarre, compositions makes it appear that some of these works were made in passing, and in passing the artist has nearly missed the paper. It’s all quite soft and pretty but tells me nothing of the artist or his art, other than the manufacturers of his pastels has made some nice colours and he has rubbed them and made some pleasing marks”. ‘Stuart Black’. Stuart Gerstman Galleries, Melbourne, 5-23 May 1975. Maureen Gilchrist, ‘The Age’, Melbourne, 15 May 1975. Alan McCulloch, ‘The Herald‘, Melbourne, 8 May 1975. Bernard Boles, ‘Nation Review’, 23-29 May 1975.

San Francisco/Melbourne 1976-78 Stuart Black had been teaching education students at the Melbourne State College for a number of years. He had also been the Director of the Gryphon Gallery, that institution’s gallery space. But in the mid-1970s, the nature of tertiary level arts education in Australia was changing. There was pressure from government and within academia itself to order and to make the discipline of teaching art more professional. It was the beginning of the new ‘wave’, some would say epidemic, of higher degrees that are now so common in the Australian art world. Consequently Black requested and gained a leave of absence from the college – according to him few local institutions offered suitable courses to improve his qualifications. He writes, “I felt that to do this in Australia would be neither advantageous nor personally satisfying. There seemed something incestuous about continuing art training… in the same nursery where I learnt all my basic lessons. The United States, with which I felt I had an empathy, therefore appeared both the logical and desirable choice” (1). In taking this step, Black was one of the first contemporary Australian artists to gain a degree from an international academic institution. It seems surprising, that Black chose to study art in provincial San Francisco rather than New York or even Chicago, those cities being, at the time, far more exciting and culturally alive. It was not until later in the 1980s, that other regional cities, such as Vancouver and Montreal, Seattle and Los Angeles became recognised as vibrant and important art locations. It was not Art, or economics or simple convenience that motivated the artist’s choice, Black went to San Francisco because it was the scene then of a great social experiment, the creation of a contemporary Gay Culture. Gareth Sansom puts it simply as a question of style, “At the end of 1975 we took Stuart to Tullamarine (airport) to go to San Francisco dressed in plaid flares, brown boots and a double breasted car coat. He returned in torn jeans, pierced nipples and macho streetwise attitude” (2). But Stuart Black’s sojourn in San Francisco was more than a fashion statement, it was literally life-changing. Stuart Black was at the centre of a totally new world where the sheer concentration of gay people in one location had no parallel in history. Estimates of the gay population of the time vary, but in 1978, a commonly quoted statistic was that in San Francisco, a smallish city of just over 700,000, there were around 100,000 gay people. It was said that one in every 5 adults and one out of every 3 or 4 voters was gay. There were 90 gay bars, 9 gay newspapers, 2 gay foundations and up to 150 gay identified businesses and organisations (3). “Thousands of men and some women settled in a neighbourhood they called ‘The Castro’. In the Castro the bars were gay, but so were the clothing stores, the stock brokerages and the real-estate agencies. There were gay theatre companies, a gay marching band, gay policemen and gay lawbreakers, gay churches, gay foundations and gay holidays. There was a gay yellow pages for residents and tourists, a gay visitor’s guide. The previous November the Castro had elected Harvey Milk to the city Board of Supervisors… (He was the first openly gay man elected to public office in the USA).

Above; Stuart Black working in his studio in San Francisco

“The Castro or what they called their ‘liberated zone’ was a kind of laboratory for experimentation with alternate ways to live. It was also a carnival where social conventions were turned upside down… At the Castro Street fair, on Halloween or on any of the other gay holidays, men would turn up as Betty Grable look-a-likes, as Hells Angels toughs, as nuns on roller skates, and as men in Brooks Brothers shirts and tasselled loafers. This was play: it was at the same time a meditation on the arbitrary nature of gender roles and costumes: it was also real life for the men who had found themselves excluded in the middle of the terms male/female” (4).

Stuart Black lived at 4225 23rd Street, San Francisco, one-and-a-half blocks away from the Castro, for him his ideal milieu. It was heaven on a stick! He had a serious purpose, however: which was to gain a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the San Francisco State University (SFSU). He studied under Robert Bechtle and Richard McLean, artists who had gained a reputation for their meticulous Photo or Super-Realist paintings of humdrum subjects from the suburbs. Their art was about the incidental, the habituated and never questioned, only lately revealed by the photograph. Although McLean retired in 1995, Bechtle continued as an influential teacher until 1999. And both artists are still exhibiting their work to some recent critical acclaim. Robert Bechtle admired Stuart’s paintings and wrote a catalogue essay for his 1978 Australian exhibition. Richard McLean also later revisited Australia in the early 1980s and caught up with Stuart Black. He wrote how much he enjoyed Stuart’s hospitality, especially his cooking abilities (5). The first year in San Francisco was difficult. Stuart Black fell into a hole in the sidewalk and broke his leg, and he endured a number of subsequent operations to correct the injury. He also acquired an infection in the hospital that he never really shook off. In letters to Tim Standfield, he describes his frustration, complaining, “my social life has been non-existent and my sexual life is but a memory”. Always opinionated, he makes time to see some art, but also admits some degree of culture shock, “In spite of it being very ‘in’ here, super realism gives me the shits but a couple of guys are doing some interesting work. Saw a stunning Clyfford Styll retrospective and a delightful Braque, Picasso and Leger show. In many ways I am quite disenchanted. The city is beautiful but what hedonism, oh for some humility and unselfishness” (6). However, by the end of September 1976 things were a getting better, “ ….when I see some of the shit passing as ‘art’ and the prices demanded (not that that should be a concern) I at times am nauseated. My own work has returned to the figurative with lots of fragmentation. Objects much more freely painted and placed. A certain tightness prevailed on arrival but it is now going – too much exposure probably to super realism… Have had many a wild moment and I think nearly every fantasy of mine has been or will be fulfilled, so reference material is always on hand – firsthand – no longer vicarious. Next year will send you some slides like a dutiful prospective exhibitor and stand by like a naughty child, head bowed, waiting for some sort of verdict. Such submissive games – shall I wear leather for the pronouncement? Miss everyone… Every day blows my mind” (7). When Gareth Sansom came to visit in 1976 Stuart Black took him to the ‘Midnight Sun’ bar off the Castro, later boasting, “I want to show you something. This is where I got gravel rash” (8). While obviously attracted to the “Gay Life” Stuart was also critical of this new world, commenting, “The gay community seems always more concerned with the surface of things, for appearances rather than depth or content. Everything is packaging” (9). Top; Still Life with Faded Image. Oil on canvas c1976 Collection of William Saunders, 135 X 259 cm

For the written component of the SFSU Masters Degree, he produced two texts, ‘America through a Stranger’s Eyes’ and ‘Still Life – an Alternative Archetype’. Both reveal much about the author, his vision, and his experiences in America.

Bottom; Stuart Black working on Still Life with Faded Image. San Francisco 1977

As the title suggests, ‘America through a Stranger’s Eyes’ documents an aesthete’s journey of discovery. Black is fascinated by the differences and similarities between Australian and American cultures. After exclaiming “I speak English not American”, the text hurtles across the vastness of the United States of America with a series of aphorisms and observations of the banal, bizarre and wonderful. At times Black is rhetorical and then indignant about the landscapes and cities and towns and people he encounters in this road trip. He is often horrified, “I begin to realise that there is tasteless slickness about much that I see. A concern for facade…. Excessive embellishment, pretension and lack of restraint are its symptoms.” He experiences hurricanes, snow, local customs and the ubiquity of fast food. He is horrified by the unfettered commercial development, the ugly hotels and strip developments (On a funeral parlour a vast sign reads ‘Dig You Soon’) and then quickly shifts focus to comment on the appealing naiveté of US citizens. He claims that at every opportunity he visited art galleries and museums but deliberately chooses not to write about them. More focused is the text, ‘Still Life – an Alternative Archetype’. Here Stuart Black is at his most thoughtful and analytical. He writes about the content of the 25 paintings he made to fulfill the degree requirements, paintings later exhibited in Australia. “My concern is manipulating symbols not words, that is the domain of writers and poets, or, in the case of art criticism, journalists... I am not concerned with arranging selected inanimate objects harmoniously and then reproducing their appearances… However I am concerned with the essence of still life painting but, being an iconoclast, I set out to dispense with the expected and produce an alternative archetype”. He then admits to the use of certain motifs and schema. Throughout the text he claims to create an essence of experience, of time and place. Never one to avoid the limelight, Black proudly asserts, “It is true that I could counterfeit any actual scene or situation. But my concern is to analyse the subject matter in order to make a profound exposition of the lifestyle of the male gay sub-culture I so frequently use… I also invoke what I most venerate, exorcising whatever personal devils most torture me, finding a private magic instrument of ritual and sorcery. Certain fetishes, fantasies, emotions and ideas, I have are generated within the art product, and hopefully regenerated within the viewer. I choose to exploit the commonality of experience that is inherent in the subject matter I select, for the elucidation of all. But more so, I present the special flavour of experience (derived from my own personality), of a particular thing that I have encountered and thus selected for the enjoyment of those who are sympathetic to my own orientation.… Obviously and unashamedly homosexual, purposely ambiguous, I shroud the issue of whether the author conceives his work as voyeur, participant, commentator, disbeliever or cynic… I make revelations without explanations” (11).

Above; Still Life with Sweet Corn and Hot Aubergine. oil on canvas c1976 Collection of William Saunders, 259 X 135 cm

Black enjoys the concept of what he describes as “contrived incongruity”, which is underlined by the use of titles that can be mere reiteration of the “action”, or can be innuendoes or challenges. The key motif in the works is the anonymous male body. He continues, “The faceless, fragmented male figure, which appears in so many still lifes is a mere object. Anonymous and characterless, it as an archetype epitomizes so many of the characteristics of the male homosexual I have observed. Its placement, attitude and fragments, along with other sundry objects, help to best symbolize such things as loneliness, bizarreness, decadence, hedonism, artificiality, role playing, insincerity, uniformity, conceit, selfishness, anonymity, vulgarity, transience, immediacy, with sex, in the market place, being a mere commodity….” “I consider my work to be erotic, certainly involving sexual situations for pleasure or pain and not reproduction,

depicting sexual love and desire. If it assaults the sensibilities, invading eyes, emotions and morals then I feel truly rewarded. Hopefully then the viewer will respond with varying degrees of disgust, amusement, puzzlement, irritation, uneasiness, feelings of guilt or envy and even sexual arousal. All or some of these responses are after all preferable to none at all” (12) . Black reluctantly returned to Melbourne 20 January 1978, still having trouble with the leg injury and now also sick with hepatitis. As is typical with most world travellers on their return to Australia, he was not particularly happy. He told an interviewer ““I’m finding it very hard to settle down here but I know I have to. This is where I come from and probably where I belong. In the States I felt lots more was going on, I got out and about, it was interesting to meet people, to experiment… Melbourne’s a very respectable place with people really afraid to let themselves go” (13). During Black’s two year absence, however, recognition of Australia’s developing gay culture had been growing. The establishment of the lifestyle journal ‘Campaign’ in late 1975 was an important step towards its visibility (14), but when the members of the dominant ‘straight’ culture saw that there was some economic benefit in the support of a public, as opposed to the covert gay culture of the past, attirudes started to change quite quickly. For example, the headline of a Kay Kearney feature article on ‘The New Homosexual’ for the ‘Weekend Australian’ says it all, ‘Gay power is a fist full of dollars’. Kearney was at pains to reveal the extent of homosexuality in Australian culture, interviewing men and women from a range of occupations not traditionally associated with this ‘problem’. She quotes Rod Stringer, the publisher of the Sydney ‘Star Observer’, whose pitch to potential advertisers was ‘Reach the man with money to spare!’ Kearney is herself surprised at this new gay culture whose economic power “might raise eyebrows in the nation’s boardrooms” (15). Stuart Black’s 1978 ‘Still Life’ exhibition at Warehouse Gallery, South Melbourne, was an important but until now overlooked event (16). Arguably it was the first ‘out’ and proud gay exhibition to be staged in a commercial gallery in Australia. The stark black and white poster for the show is a collaboration between Stuart Black and Gareth Sansom that clearly spelled out the tenor of the show. On a checked table cloth, the foreground features innocuous elements of the traditional still life – an apple, a delicately decorated teacup and saucer, and a tall glass containing an overlarge bloom, the hydrangea. What looms behind threatens the domestic arrangement. A chain leads from the flower to a shrouded mannikin’s head complete with a military style helmet, while coils of rope curl around the base. With such radical contrasts of signifiers of masculinity and femininity, of comfort and threat, Black lets everyone know that there will be some surprises in the exhibition (17). From the earlier more tonal and atmospheric paintings, to the later graphic and ecstatic pop, all 25 paintings are titled ‘Still Life with…’ Significantly, Black claimed in an interview, “I could never have painted these in Australia. Almost everything I have produced there I have experienced and that’s why I think they’re the most honest paintings I’ve ever done. The source material was right in front of me, right within my grasp”.

Above; Poster for Still Life exhibition at Warehouse Galleries, design Stuart Black, Gareth Sansom 1978

“All of a sudden I’ve realised that me, my whole life, is the most important thing, not what I am going to glean material-wise or who I am going to impress on the social scene or anything like that. It’s taken me all these years to realise that I’m me and I’m going to do what I want. Not what people think I should do. That’s very much selfliberation and I had to go away to do it. It was probably two of the most important years of my life. It’s affected my art, my thinking, my philosophy: It’s affected everything about me: my looks, my actions, my mannerisms. And if I am not

saying anything about myself in my paintings, I should stop painting because all I am doing, is painting for a market without reflecting feeling from within” (18). The ‘Still Life’ series was always going to be unframed. Black originally wanted to hang the 25 works with ropes and chains but later decided that these materials would be too distracting, ‘gilding the lily’ so to speak. This bannerlike format was very much couched within the rhetoric of the day and showed just how much the supposedly apolitical Stuart Black was infused with current liberation ideologies. Living in San Francisco 1976-1978, it would have been impossible not to be affected by the spirit of the city at the time. The works are both a strident call to arms, and a reference back to the street sign aesthetic of Pop art and to popular culture forms. Like the banners in side-shows or religious processions, Black’s works combine elements of the vernacular with the sublime, to proclaim desire and wonderment (19). They are confessional, exultant, satirical, ‘in your face’ works of art. Robert Bechtle’s catalogue essay pleased Stuart Black. It provides another series of vantage points from which to view the work. One of the few published texts by this famous photo-realist, Bechtle talks about the art work as a vehicle for knowledge: “Stuart Black’s paintings present an alternative archetype to still life painting. They are on unstretched canvases which appear as banners or flags. They were produced in San Francisco and make reference to the gay community of the city. Black sees that community as being concerned with surface appearances rather than depth or content. Rituals among the gay sub-culture are as bizarrely formal as the courting dances of birds, using a whole wardrobe of leather, coloured handkerchiefs, keys and torn Levi’s. Such props orchestrate desires, explain preferences and indicate interests. The heart is worn on the sleeve, be it tailored by Brooks Brothers or Levi-Strauss. In work obviously and unashamedly homosexual in flavour, Black shrouds the issue of whether he conceives his ambiguous statements as voyeur, participant, commentator, disbeliever or cynic. He makes revelations without explanations. Even though the subject matter is specific, the reality is not so isolated that it will not be encountered again. He uses symbols and allusions as clues, in order that the viewer can delve a little deeper into what are, first of all, aesthetically pleasing works. For, ultimately, they must be seen as works in which the artist using the subject matter as a means of confronting the traditional issues of painting- drawing, composition, the uses of colour and so on. The challenge to the viewer, though, is the recognition and interpretation of his images, ambiguous enough to feed the appetite whatever the state of hunger. The artist’s employment of such devices as space, placement of image, colour, inconsistent light sources, abandoned perspective, faceless and fragmented male figures, etc, symbolize loneliness, decadence, bizarreness, hedonism, artificiality, insincerity, uniformity, selfishness, anonymity, vulgarity, transience and immediacy. Perhaps in the use of recurrent schema Black exorcises those personal devils that torture him. It is a private magic of ritual, fetish and fantasy” (20). Top and Bottom; Stuart Black - Melbourne Photos courtesy Gareth Sansom 1978

“These strong paintings assault the sensibilities, invading eyes, emotions and established values and mores. If the

Above; Still Life with Macho Shopping, Dog, Hard Hat and Flourishing Indoor Plant. 1977 Oil on canvas. Collection of William Saunders, 135 X 137 cm Page 39; Still Life with Man taking a Shower. 1977 Oil on canvas. Collection of William Saunders, 135 X 122 cm

Still Life with Clothes that Make the Man. 1977 Oil on canvas, Private Collection Melbourne, 153 X 135 cm

Still Life with Clothes Anonymous Assortment. 1977 Oil on canvas. Collection of William Saunders, 122 X 135 cm

viewer responds with varying feelings of puzzlement, amusement, disgust, irritation or uneasiness then Black feels he has succeeded, for any of the above reactions are better than none” (20). Rather than present a ‘shopping list’ description of all 25 works in ‘Still Life’, I will describe briefly some personal favourites of the series, which I feel successfully capture Black’s desire to create spaces of ‘contrived incongruity’. As in most serial production there is repetition in the representational forms and textures, yet most of the paintings are finely finished to allow the viewer a complete comprehension of the subject matter. What is contained in the field of vision is a deliberately confusing collage of disparate body parts and accoutrements, a teetering inconstant placement of forms objects and scale. There are multiple vanishing points. There is no art historical coyness, no disavowal of the key subject of the manifestations of male homosexual desire, and its commercial exploitation. Still Life with Faded Image The largest of the series, the tonal quality of this painting suggests that it may be an early work in the series / cycle. The composition is a deliberately ungainly mélange that establishes a template for works to come. It is also a complex metamorphosis of recognisable forms. On a table with a checked cloth, a male leather harness becomes the armature for holding a cap and a boot. The heel of the boot merges into the mouth of a mustachioed man, while a pink flower surmounts the cap. A large orangey-pink dildo becomes a vase for daffodils, a lampshade becomes a woman’s breast hanging from an ear that pokes out from the fly of man’s briefs. A faded blurred photograph is clasped by a brown belt (maybe an old lover? perhaps Alan Forsyth?) set against a window-ledge, its blind halfway up to reveal the night. Still Life with Clothes Anonymous Assortment Probably one of the most accomplished works in the series, a sort of portrait. A headless torso. The face a red square that dominates the composition. Possibly reflecting a residual memory of Sidney Nolan’s “Ned Kelly” series, but instead of a black horizontal visor there are ten vertical slots placed at different heights on the red ground. Here is a portrait of a man as ‘glory hole’. Below, are a tumble of fashionable accoutrements – a biker’s leather jacket, cap and boot, a leather waistcoat, a vial/ampoule for drugs (poppers or cocaine), a towel knotted at waist height, an arm, and some torn jeans covering a tight male arse – all against a matte pink ground. Still Life with Vanishing Fist With an undisclosed light source, the background is non-specific, tonal and atmospheric moving from dark to light. In the centre of the work, a large black belt curls animatedly across the picture plane, to form the base from which a range of objects or activities emerge. Mysterious shapes, maybe stylized shoe horns, douche bags, tubing and butt plugs, are scattered throughout the composition. Torn jeans reveal a firm white arse. A red shape is pinned to the thigh and simultaneously stepped on by a satin pink stiletto heel and a white sneaker/runner. From the stiletto emerges a arm with flexed biceps in a defiant muscleman pose, its fist disappears into a brown hole at the top centre of the painting.

Still Life with Vanishing Fist. 1977. Oil on canvas Collection of William Saunders, 132 X 132 cm

Still Life with man taking a shower This domestic interior scene has two distinct fields of action. While there are no actual bodies depicted, the viewer sees the traces of bodies. The subject is water sports. On the right, a yellow tube/ribbon curves gracefully out of the picture plane. The cursive form contrasts with the architectonic placement of clothes, a window etc. On the mattress is a pair of jeans with a yellow handkerchief in the back pocket, on the floor some brown boots. Facing the viewer, a yellow electric cord complete with two-pronged socket lies languorously on the bed after emerging from the fly of the jeans. To the left, on the green striped wallpaper, four torn photographs of varying dimensions, are pinned up. Still Life with Macho, Shopping, Dog, Hard Hat and Flourishing Indoor Plant One of the more romantic works in the series, this painting features a bright lolly-pink flat ground on which various objects are placed. In the top right is a symmetrical arrangement, at first glance a hanging pot plant, but composed of a hard hat held by heavy twine rope, while the flowers are two misshapen penises lying decorously over the rim. Balancing the composition, on the left is a fragment of a male body encased in leather jeans, a taut chain and a bunch of flowers. This reductive image of the leather ‘queen’ with flowers is an ironic comment on hard hyper-masculine public persona contrasting with his soft domestic and sweet interior psyche. Still Life with Clothes That make the man This work is the most overt reference to the artist’s recent San Francisco experience, depicting the prevailing taste amongst gay men to indicate their sexual tastes by subscribing to a rigorous code of fashionable accoutrements. Exploding out of a green packet which is decorated with part of a target and the (significant) word ‘Castro’ are a black boot, an Addidas runner, some torn jeans with cock showing, a red T-shirt, a flexed bicep arm/ fragment and keys hanging off the hip – completes the work. The target motif not only suggests an awareness of similar target symbols in the work of Robert Indiana, Charles Demuth and Jasper Johns but also a taste for ‘luckies’, Lucky Strike cigarettes. Black said of San Francisco “It’s all about packaging. Folsom’s the very heavy leather, denim area. When I say very heavy I mean they like to think it’s heavy…And Castro’s more your ripped denim and sweatshirts. Certainly neither of them are what you’d call your fluffy or smart chic areas. They really know what they’re on about, they know what they want and they won’t settle for seconds…. people aren’t afraid to let people know what they’re all about. They’ve come to an incredible honesty about their sexuality, which I found very impressive. If they had sexuality they flaunted it: and if you didn’t like it, too bad!” (21). Still Life with What’s His Name’s Telephone Number A now old-fashioned, outsized red plastic telephone handset/ mouthpiece covers the exposed male buttocks. The telephone cord curls its way down the picture plane through a floating stream, a rain of notes. These small pieces of paper have the names and phone numbers of possible or impossible assignations. There are tram tickets and various forms of ID. The telephone numbers are largely obscured but the beginnings of personal notes adds a poignancy to this distillation of some gay men’s perennial dilemma: so many men admire me, whom to choose, whom to discard? ‘Dear Joe…’, ‘Chuck’, ‘Dennis’...

Still Life with Writing Between The Lines One of the most sophisticated works in the series in its layering and mark making. Several different types of belt are linked together with one pink ribbon. Some of the belts have elaborate buckles – ‘Bolt’ in white and red enamel, ‘Wells Fargo’ in ornate bronze, others are studded etc. Behind the belts in cursive script are the lines of a poem or possibly a letter. Some of the text is legible, some smudged, “opened wide, cock, hand slip up, into the crevice formed... by the sprocket... looking away ... heaving against”. These are some of the legible words. Still Life with Rings and Pink Hooks

Still Life with Rings and Hooks. 1977. Oil on canvas Collection of William Saunders, 152 X 152 cm

This work is a paean to the delights of bondage, in particular rope work. Against a red-brown ground there are three hooks vaguely reminiscent of a nipple, and a rhino horn. From one of these hooks hangs a pair of jeans straining to support the headless man inside them, his upper body tightly bound with rope. From one leg, a rope curls decoratively down to another bound torso, this one surmounted by a bound cock with ball spreader, a cotton-bud stuck in the urethra. Stuart Black has painted the distressed testes in loving detail. This is an image of dangerous physicality, of testing the limits of the body – even today the distortion and juxtaposition of forms and their placement still creates a level of unease. Black himself said of his method: “The fantasy often comes first, but often I paint about the experiences as well. I have been turned on by my own paintings. Hopefully that is not just self-indulgence. And there is something very sensual about putting paint on the surface as well something very satisfying about that. It helps get rid of these tortuous things within you by maybe saying something about them on the surface of the painting… Torture can be painful or pleasurable, whichever the case may be. My torment comes in the frustrating experience of getting out on the canvas what I am trying to say or what I feel at a particular moment” (22). Still Life with Toys

Still Life with Toys. 1977. Oil on canvas Collection of William Saunders, 173 X 137 cm

On a blue ground, the only faces in the series, a ‘Mr. Squiggle’-like jack-in-the-box and a maniacal yellow teddy bear look towards the viewer, their gaze making us complicit in the complex scene of ball torture etc. In this work Black has also depicted a police nightstick, plastic orange dildo, blue anal beads, a jockstrap, rope, whip, a full body harness, green overalls, and penises bound by string. Still Life with Disappearing Jock Strap This work is a complex mass of parts, difficult to define accurately. An arm/dildo man in a red tuxedo becomes the thigh of another. A blue sash-cord binds the two forms together on a green ground. And from a fabulous arsehole emerges a limp jockstrap.

Still Life with Disappearing Jockstrap. 1977. Oil on canvas Collection of William Saunders, 133 X 152 cm

In 1979 a coloured detail of this painting appeared in a US-based porn magazine, ‘In Heat’, its focus on the dangling jock strap. The accompanying profile, “2 by Stuart Black” consisted of a black and white portrait of the artist and a smaller black and white image of his “Still Life with Incessant Hunt”. The copy reads in part, “What I had to say about my fantasies could not be said in Australia... In San Francisco I was free to reveal everything…What fascinates me with the American male is his sexual honesty, his bold display of his sexual trips, the keys, the handkerchiefs, the symbols to state preferences and desires, his directness and demands…” (23).

Still Life with Incessant Hunt Purchased by the National Gallery of Australia, this work is the most expressive and painterly of the series. Black combines acid yellows and pinks to depict two leopards or cat-like animals circling each other menacingly in an arena surrounded by a erect penises. Black said in an interview “The colour I use is very personal. I particularly like using colours that fight each other: lime greens and pinks and acid yellows. It helps the subject matter by making it somewhat vulgar, somewhat brash, somewhat evil, somewhat pleasant, frightening, sinister. Tasteful” (24). Still Life with Commodities The canvas is divided into three horizontal bands. At the top are compartments or corridors. In the central compartment, there is a careful pile of what could be toilet paper or rolled towels – maybe this is a bathhouse image? In the central band a green string holds fourteen red paper cut-out shapes of men hanging by paper, clips one man – falling into oblivion. On the lower panel Stuart Black employs yellow with blue-green under painting to reveal shadows of male torsos and crotches, of men in jock straps and underwear. Still Life with Missing Parts and Rope This is the most intriguing painting of the series. While all the works are unashamedly confessional and revealing of the artist’s recent experiences and appetites, this finely made work reveals what looks to be a family grouping of figures. The varying sizes of the androgynous shapes support this interpretation. The forms are composed of jigsaw pieces linked by rope set against a dark blue wall or ground. This exhibition was definitely noted by the Melbourne art critics. All wrote about the formal and metaphoric effects of the floating banner-like paintings. Their reactions were surprisingly measured, since all had some difficulty with the overt politics and sexual imagery. The Melbourne ‘Truth’, a notorious scandal-sheet then in its last days, tried to create some controversy with a small note, ”One of Melbourne’s weirdest art exhibitions has caused raised eyebrows and walk outs from a trendy gallery. The controversial exhibition by well known Australian artist Stuart Black caused a sensation when it opened…Stuart’s exhibition depicts sex organs in a variety of erotic arrangements. Some are seen plugged into electric sockets, growing from hanging baskets and one is laying in what appears to be a hamburger… ” (25). More serious, Alan McCulloch, a longtime champion of Black’s work, was unimpressed, even disappointed: “overt sensationalism and a weakness for the overkill appear to have taken possession of another exemplar of the “still life”, Stuart Black…the theme is the decimated, strapped, booted and belted male torso with an emphasis on the penis”. McCulloch did concede, “Black who has mastered the art of flat pattern design, organises his space well…”. but continued, “The effect produced in the black carpeted gallery is rather like a scene from the torture chamber of a science fiction film with an R rating. Such masochistic art may truly reflect an aspect of the world of entertainment. As a painting it appears as a contrivance as artificial as the source that might have inspired it”. But as Black states in his catalogue, “any reactions … are preferable to none” (26).

Still Life with Missing Parts and Rope. 1977 Oil on canvas, Collection of William Saunders, 211 X 135 cm

Still Life with Incessant Hunt. 1976. Oil on unstretched canvas 126 X 136.5 cm National Gallery of Australia Canberra, purchased 1978

Still Life with What’s His Name’s Telephone Number. 1977 Oil on canvas, Collection of William Saunders, 132 X 115 cm

Still Life with Commodities. 1977 Oil on canvas, Collection of William Saunders, 206 X 137 cm

Mary Eagle in ‘The Age’ admired the compositions but considered that while Black’s paintings showed “an emancipated new world”, they “smite the senses” (27). Rod Carmichael recognised that this was an important exhibition. He wrote, ”these are not easy paintings to relate to. The subject matter first intrudes then disappears as the artist moves through the polemic of doubt-ridden assertion to confident discovery of the power of the language of painting. From the rather adolescent Shockery of the early pictures to the mature understated beautifully painted jigsaw people of the later works…Stuart Black attacks, tongue in cheek, the images of sexploitation. The creation of a separate world designed for profit, which perpetuates the myth of normality by presenting other modes of life as deviant. If you think these are matters best not discussed then stay away. If you appreciate the irony and humour of human frailty you will be enchanted”. Carmichael was pleased that the Australian National Gallery had purchased a work and challenged the National Gallery of Victoria to follow suit – a step that this gallery has so far failed to take (28). Memory Holloway warned that Black’s paintings “were not for the timid, uptight narrow-minded viewer”. She admired how Black had “reshaped” the fine technique of the San Francisco Super Realists led by his teachers Bechtle and MacLean, and the “brusque amalgamations” of his compositions. Holloway then becomes ambivalent, concluding with a knowing, veiled warning, “Black’s gay assertiveness is equalled by the courage which he has to exhibit such private activities” (29). What does this mean? Stuart’s artistic milieu and learning environment were enmeshed in the modernist tradition in which art-making was ultimately a form of self-portraiture. Art, in his view, was all about the individual artists’ ability to communicate their unique psyches. The zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraged experimentation, not just in art, but also across all social groups. Stuart Black did not realise, though, that the ‘new’ can also be classed as radical or deviant, and as such it frightens gallerists, buyers – and critics, who feel they lack the background and vocabulary to accommodate and so actively engage with the practice. Stuart Black’s 1978 ‘Still Life’ series, like the original 17th century form of the genre, is an exploration of vanity and the limits of appetites. The artist does not shy away from the depiction of the sites of his desires, erogenous zones and pleasure points. Black’s ‘Still Life’ paintings document the heady pre-HIV/AIDS days of constant anonymous recreational sex. As one survivor recalls nostalgically, “Everyone seemed to be living out their fantasies from day to day. We had dates at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was like opening up a treasure chest and rummaging through it in some hysterical way” (30). These paintings place the viewer in the position of the detective, deciphering the clues or traces of sexual encounters. Black is not interested in hiding or disguising his interests in artistically loaded brush strokes or veils of paint. This formal decision lends a forensic quality to the accumulative effect of the compositions. The slang terms “cruising” or “trawling’ are interesting in this regard, since in these 1970s pre-HIV/AIDS times, many homosexual men claimed these activities and many others as a mark of honour or a right. For some men like Stuart Black, negotiating his life, one is always exploring, looking for treasure (read sexual conquest/sexual pleasure), a search which no longer has to be covert. The locations for this search can be the street, the gym, the bar, the park, the mall, on public transport, as well as in more familiar places, such as the health club, sauna or just the private home.

Sexual encounteres could happen anywhere, any time, day or night, when one wishes to satisfy one’s desires – while darkness, and the fear of discovery, could add to the erotic tension. As observed earlier, Stuart Black loved ‘beats’ and the chase, and the paintings clearly show that he also loved the masquerades of masculinity inherent in the leather scene. San Francisco showed that this way of life could be real, not just a fantasy. Stuart Black made his “Still Life” series to be provocative and confrontational. Such honesty was part of the Hippy/ personal liberation-inspired belief that confession created a fertile terrain for human communication. Seen from the vantage point of the early 21st century, the critics were not particulary unkind to Stuart Black’s project, but they were perplexed. Even in the relatively enlightened times of the late 1970s many thought Black’s new work would fail to advance his career – he seemed to be literally painting himself into a corner. Art that explores sexuality is about the foregrounding of the self. This position can be tolerated if the expression is situated within the mainstream, but Stuart Black was proudly proclaiming his difference, his deviance from the norms of behaviour and taste. Obviously the display and visual representation of male-to-male desire and sex acts transgresses normalised stereotypes. Further extending psychosexual interpretations, Black’s works can be viewed as a form of therapeutic re-staging and public illustration. He was breaking a major taboo in western culture, the display of the phallus/penis, especially the erect or tortured penis. With such astounding revelations, then, Black’s ‘Still Life’ works are a sophisticated form of advocacy. The art world, however, is to some degree a microcosm and mirror of society, – innately homophobic. There is a tradition within the dominant hetero-patriarchy holding that if the gay artist produces gay art, it imust be bad art, because it is gay and relating only to a minority vision and experience of the world. The supposedly limited worldview thus presented or reflected in the art, limits the market value of the product, so as a result the gay artist is reduced to the status of an artisan servicing a shunned minority. Strangely though, in the 21st century, this negative perception of artists who use sexuality as the core of their work, this has shifted only slightly. Academic and public critical reluctance to speak about sex and sexuality remains, in the case of artists who are known homosexuals. As an illustration, USA critic Charlie Finch, writes in frustration about James Fentons musings on Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, that appeared in the ‘New York Review of Books’. He quotes Fenton; “One suspects that several private jokes are embedded in the collage [Should Love Come First?]. The next word in the song from which the title is taken is Boys, but instead of boys the canvas features numbers. Phone numbers? Military numbers? Meaningless numbers?” To which Finch responds (perhaps with some venom). “No,... you obfuscating dweeb, numbers, as in gay, homoerotic, tricks, hustlers, pickups, Hershey bar whores, i.e. numbers. One dopey consequence of all the veiling euphemisms shielding Rauschenberg’s gayness, or Jasper Johns’ homosexuality, is that they shield us from the raw humour of their work. When Johns made F(l)ag, for example, he was punning on “fag” – using the most public American object as a metaphor for the most hidden Americans. Johns’ semen-like smearing of the surface made the conceit all the more obvious, even richer. And Johns pushes the joke’s possibilities in Three F(l)ags, one atop another!! Do you think you’ll ever read this anywhere? No!! Gay content in the older generation of same sexers is omerta!!” (31).

Similarly in the Australian context there is a reluctance to honestly address the possibility of the representation of same sex desire in the work of historical artists such as George Lambert and Rupert Bunny or Agnes Godsir and Dorrit Black, to recent éminences grises’ such as James Gleeson”. Australian critic Dean Kiley excoriated the incipient homophobia in the art world: “Heterocentric characterisation is only one or two good intentions away from homophobic caricature. We’re still being marginalized, infantilised, disenfranchised and commodified-patronised, we’re still being interpreted as excreting camp as a kind of butterfly-chrysalis critical solvent, we’re still being figured as a Bakhtinian-carnivalesque licensed trickster-joker sideshow, we’re still being asked to authenticate or author-ise (in Butler’s words “sign”) our essential. Otherness, we’re still being constructed as ‘Wildean style’ virtuoso mask-masquerade personae-players, we’re still analysed as (Tom) Wolfean retro-chic trendy outsiders making brief one-off staged performance piece guerilla raids on the orthodoxy, we’re still demonised as the pink mafia” (32). Whether homosexual or heterosexual, everyone has a sexual history. Recognising this fact, in 1978 Stuart Black was no longer interested in creating a sublimated visual vocabulary full of private jokes and asides. Why hide? Somewhat naively, but understandably, given the tenor of the times and his recent experiences in San Francisco, Black probably did not expect the extreme negative reaction within the local homosexual community. This negativity is palpable in Lee Franklyn’s interview with Stuart Black that appeared in ‘Campaign’ at the time of the exhibition. There were those who were angered at the public revelations of ‘secret men’s business’ – sadomasochism and fetishism. And according to Tim Standfield gallerist for Warehouse Gallery, there were many delicate souls from the South Yarra set, those with money and influence, (and onetime friends of Stuart’s) who were genuinely offended and perhaps frightened by the imagery and practices he celebrated (33). Very few of the 1978 works were sold, though mostly priced at $500-$1000. Bill Saunders and his business partner Jeff Nelson-Arnold eventually acquired the bulk of the paintings, which later occasionally appeared on the walls of the Laird Hotel in Collingwood, Melbourne. Even today, Black’s 1978 ‘Still Life’ paintings demand a reaction. They ask audiences to define standards of good art and bad art. While finely made, the content of the works is for some viewers still challenging – in retrospect it is surprising that the authorities did not attempt to prosecute on the grounds that the paintings were obscene, or deny public access, as they did to other works, such as Juan Davila’s paintings in 1988. Still a contentious issue, art that is deemed obscene by the authorities, can be declared likely to morally corrupt and deprave (34). Many of Black’s works are clearly erotic, if one agrees with the definition of art critic and poet Edward Lucie-Smith. To be erotic, a work of art should combine at least two of the four characteristics: “hedonistic, guilt ridden, boldly critical of society and transgressive for transgression’s sake”. Lucie-Smith states that artworks attain this quality if “they combine at least two of the 4 characteristics” (35). Earlier in the 20th century the Surrealists claimed that the erotic and the libido, being outside the law, are the most revolutionary forces in the world. In 1978, aged 41, in Stuart Black had well and truly ‘come out’ with his ‘Still Life’ series. In the artist’s personal papers there is an unsigned text, ‘The Metamorphosis of Stuart Black’. The unique candour, turn of phrase and personal rhetorical structure reflects Black’s academic work closely. I believe, therfore, that it is the work of the artist himself. Writing in the third person just after his return from San Francisco, it is a remarkable document for what it reveals, and is a counterpoint to the more art-historical text that precedes it. In many ways, ‘The Metamorphosis of Stuart Black’ is the definitive text about this artist’s work. It also hints at the tumultuous changes that Stuart Black was to encounter in the 1980s and 1990s.

“The Metamorphosis of Stuart Black” By Stuart Black Stuart Alan Black has been to San Francisco. For two years. San Francisco did things to him: turned him inside-out for instance. He used to be two men- the inside man of soul and sex and sin, the outer shell of an artist, puddling in oils and decoration, gracing the walls of your salon. “There was a time I wasn’t really aware of my maleness and my attraction to everything male. My homosexuality was for a time my shame, locked away, an embarrassment. I found ways to skirt and avoid this key part of my being. At first my painting was disciplined by training, and reflected the respectability of my lifestyle”. An artist of some panache, but the inner man there shrank away under the heavy pressures of Australian society. No release… frowning conformity… nobody ‘cool’. Society and the inner man – sadist and masochist. Society was definitely the top man, and part of that dominance for Stuart Black was the world of art, his meal ticket. “It was the new environment that did it. I knew I had to paint, and there were my fetishes and fantasies all around me. I was overwhelmed by the excesses of this vast pleasure dome. There was so much I just had to say. What I was seeing and doing could never be done within the rigid norms of Australian life, or in fact in most parts of America”. What San Francisco did was this: it reached in for that hidden Stuart Black, inhibited and shy, and drew him out into a bold and honest macho man, of erotic art. The fantasies of Stuart Black became reality: pinks and garish greens, and citrus puce and purple thighs and biceps, belts and buckles, chains and nipple clips, leather jock straps and dildoes and cocks and balls. (The ultimate fantasy is art to turn you on, in a haze of amyl to grab you by the balls.) The male erection released in a cacophony of colour… “What I had to say about my fantasies could now be said. In Australia my paintings would have been diluted, crippled. In San Francisco I was free to reveal everything. I am what I am….”. That is how San Francisco turned him inside out. His fantasies were livable right out there in Castro. Or Folsom more likely. The denim and leather. The ear-ring. The body harness. In blues and blacks and red and tangerine. The chapters of imagery: Still life with rings and pink hooks; Still life with bananas and bondage; Still life with vanishing fist. This is the art of inside-out Stuart Black. “I revelled in this new freedom which gave me all the liberties I sought, as a person, as an artist, as a sexual being”.

Above; Still life with writing between the lines. 1976 Oil on canvas, Collection of William Saunders, 148 X 142 cm

There are eleven rings if you look carefully into the paint: the Five Gates of Hell, the cock-ring, four nipple rings, one in the tender undertip of the cockhead. That’s eleven. His art and his sex, once disjoined, have fused into one. He has shattered the bodies, dismembered the torsos, in a jigsaw of brazen colours. Still life in Central Park, all that green. Jacking off behind the bushes. Still life with incessant hunt, acid lemon wildcats stalking cool-pink human cock in lime green jungle.

“What fascinates me with the American male is his sexual honesty, his bold display of his sexual trips, the keys, the handkerchiefs, the symbols to state preference and desires, his directness and demands. The social charade is elbowed aside by the immediacy of action. Males meshing”. What happened to the boy from Kyabram Australia? He tasted leather, that’s what. In San Francisco. And now his Melbourne home seems tame: the phalluses low profile, the bulging jeans and sweaty denim meat-racks tucked away from the straight-up-and-down world. Everything in his paintings he has lived himself – the boots, the ball-stretchers, the toys. Except fist fucking, an omission he regrets. “I now want no part of the fluff and the fashion, the cologne and then coiffures, the bangles and beads. My men have to look like men: denim and dirt, bristles and body, leather and lust. I put my experience into my pictures. There was Chuck, who spoke of endurance and dildoes, and performed a neat bondage job. (He knew how to spin it out and make it last). There was Jim, who was really into jock-straps. He had drawers of living jock-straps, each with a history. Still life with vanishing jock strap. There was Harry too. He was into pain: Still life with golden shower. The first experience I had with Chuck was the most exciting and stimulating event of my life. Even though we met by chance I trusted him enough to become his bottom man. He handled my inexperience with masterly care and took me to un-dreamt of heights”. What he wants to see is more honesty in Melbourne, calling a spade a spade and a cock a cock. Right there on the canvas in front of you. He talks of opening a bar: macho and sawdust and candles and leather and what you will. The Folsom Street look. And liberated sex. The laid open butch scene, no tender spirited groping and uptight glances, the blatant collision of guys about to unload some rocks. Together. The coolness of the American Master, is that a butch thing, or merely the American thing? If Stuart has his way, Melbourne may find out, and even discover SARAN WRAP. That’s what San Francisco did to Stuart Black (36). Maybe on a subliminal level Stuart Black thought that with the “Still Life” exhibition there was nothing more to say in public. Indeed, it seems that he chose chose to leave the art world, for the next two decades, to concentrate on other pursuits. His San Francisco experiences had given him his skills in negotiating between the various spheres of his existence on his own terms, at his own pace, and in the way he wanted. And he did so with confidence and style.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Stuart Black, ‘America through a Stranger's Eyes’, San Francisco State University Masters Report, 1978. pp.1. Interview with Gareth Sansom, October 2008. Frances Fitzgerald, ‘Cities on a Hill; A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures’, Picador, 1986 pp.27. Frances Fitzgerald, ‘Cities on a Hill; A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures’, Picador, 1986 pp.11-12. Richard McClean, Letter to author. 17 November 2008. Stuart Black, Letter to Standfield, 28 May 1976. Stuart Black Papers. Stuart Black, Letter to Standfield 15 September 1976. Stuart Black Papers. Interview with Gareth Sansom, October 2008. In an entry for Black in the catalogue for ‘The Ammunition Show’, May 1988, Sansom writes, “In late 1976 I was sitting in a bar called ‘The Midnight Sun’ off Castro Street in San Francisco with my friend Maree. I had earlier left a note at a house where Stuart had been living, but there was no certainty that he would get it...At 3a.m. he arrived at the bar after getting the note. It was a magic moment for the three of us”.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Stuart Black, ‘Still Lifes – an Alternative Archetype’ Appendix to Masters dissertation, San Francisco State University 1978 p.3. Stuart Black, ‘America through a Stranger's Eyes’. San Francisco State University, Master’s Degree Dissertation, 1978, pp. 5-6. Stuart Black, ‘Still Lifes – an Alternative Archetype’. Appendix to Masters Degree dissertation, San Francisco State University, 1978, pp.2-3. Stuart Black, ‘Still Lifes – an Alternative Archetype’. Appendix to Masters Degree dissertation, San Francisco State University 1978, pp. 3-4. Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S&M too’. Interview with Stuart Black, ‘Campaign #32’, ‘In Melbourne Gay Guide’ May 1978, pp.13-14. Art writing in the nascent gay press was not of a high standard. It is surprising considering the misogynist nature of the Australian homosexual world, that the first visual artist mentioned is Vivienne Binns. In an interview with Sue Ross (May 1976). Binns, a lesbian, had gained some notoriety with her community art projects, performances and paintings such as ‘Vag Dens’ which were shown at Watters Gallery in Sydney. A regular column on art began in ‘Campaign’ December 1976. Written by David Appebaum the copy was jealous, gossipy and conservative – he enjoyed the decorative and technically fine images of naked men, but was not particularly keen on contemporary art, as this diatribe against painter Arthur McIntyre reveals: “...an ultra trendy-pseudo-intellectual art radical whose works consists of splashes of paint haphazardly thrown on canvas and to hear him rave on about the inner depth and unprovincialism of his thought provoking abortions...”. McIntyre, at one time critic for the ‘Sydney Morning Herald’’ had a show at the Holdsworth Gallery in September 1977. His career has interesting parallels with that of Stuart Black. Daniel Mudie Cunningham has written about this work in the ‘Australian Art Monthly’. Appelbaum did not much like the younger generation of homosexual/gay artists, such as Peter Tully and David MacDiarmid, either. In the December 1977 issue of ‘Campaign’, pp.43, he writes, “Do come along if you can stomach Peter’s plastic food”, no mention of MacDiarmid’s important ‘The Australian Dream Lounge’ installation. Later Charles Van Dyk took over as arts writer, but by the early 1980’s art was rarely covered at all by the magazine. Kay Kearney, ‘The New Homosexual’, ‘The Weekend Australian’, 4-5 March, 1978, pp.1. See also John Lee ‘Trade Enquiries: a folio of nine posters by David MacDiarmid’, ‘Gay Changes’ (Adelaide) 2, 1974. Now a lucrative niche market, the pink dollar – is a standard market consideration. In the 1970s, within the homosexual communities there was much discussion about, and suspicion of, the wholesale commercialisation of homosexual desire. There was a (well-founded it turned out) of loss of control over the types of representation. ‘Still Life’, Paintings by Stuart Black. Warehouse Galleries, South Melbourne, April 25 - May12, 1978. There are distant echoes between this photograph and the infamous 1964 poster by the American artist, Robert Morris, to advertise his exhibition at the Sonnabend Castelli Gallery, New York. It featured the artist oiled, buffed and bare-chested, wearing a Nazi helmet, sun glasses, and chains. A collaborative photograph by Sansom and Black appeared in the May 1978 ‘Campaign’ interview, showing Black contemplating a dildo sandwich! Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S&M too’. Interview with Stuart Black, ‘Campaign #32’, ‘In Melbourne Gay Guide’. May 1978, pp.13-14. Carl Hammer & Gideon Bosker, ‘Freak Show Side Show Banner Art’, ‘London, Chronicle’ Books.1996. Robert Bechtle, Catalogue essay for ‘Still Life’. Paintings by Stuart Black exhibition. May 1978. Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S&M too’. Interview with Stuart Black, ‘Campaign #32’, ‘In Melbourne Gay Guide’. May 1978, pp.13-14. Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S&M too’. Interview with Stuart Black, ‘Campaign #32’, ‘In Melbourne Gay Guide’. May 1978, pp.13-14. ‘In Heat’. ‘Hot Men: Hot Action’, ‘In Touch for Men’ Publication, Hollywood, No. 6.1979, pp.32-33. Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S&M too’, Interview with Stuart Black, ‘Campaign #32’, ‘In Melbourne Gay Guide’. May 1978, pp.13-14. ‘Truth’, (Melbourne). 28 April 1978. Alan McCulloch, ‘The Herald’ Melbourne. 27 April 1978. Mary Eagle, ‘The Age’ Melbourne. 26 April 1978.

28. Rod Carmichael, ‘The Sun’, Melbourne. 26 April 1978. 29. Memory Holloway, ‘Melbourne Times’. 3 May 1978. 30. Frances Fitzgerald, ‘Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures’. ‘Picador’, 1986 pp.54-55 see also Randy Shilts, ‘The Mayor of Castro Street-The Life and Times of Harvey Milk’. ‘Penguin’ Books 1982. 31. Charlie Finch, ‘The Royal Flush’, ‘Artnet’. 29 October, 1997. 32. Dean Kiley, ‘Bad Gay Art: what’s the word for a triple tautology’. Catalogue essay for ‘Bad Gay Art’, ‘Raw Nerve Gallery’. 3 February 1997. Curator : Robert Schubert. 33. Interview with Tim Standfield. October 2008. 34. Witness the Bill Henson controversy of 2008. Also consider, ‘A concept that disgust always bears the imprint of desire’, in P. Stallybrass & A. White, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Transgression’. London, ‘Methuen’ pp. 191. See also Kerstin Mey, ‘Art and Obscenity’ London, ‘Taurus’, 2007. 35. Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘Ars Erotica; an arousing history of erotic art’. New York, 1992, pp.7. 36. Stuart Black, Undated typed manuscript. Stuart Black Papers, c.1979.

Chapter THREE

Chapter Three The Final Decades In the two decades to 2007, Stuart Black developed a peripatetic, perhaps more realist, hard-nosed relationship with his practice. Rather than playing the games of the art-world he knew, he sampled it now and then. He continued to refine his radical public persona as an ‘out’ gay man and embarked on a new career as a hotelier. He never stopped making art, exhibiting only occasionally, but without the youthful commitment and energy of the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, Black returned to art when in the mood. Invoking a type of self-consciousness typical of romantic artists of the 19th century, a favourite phrase of his became, “I paint because I want to. I paint when I have to”. According to his friends, this meant that he worked on his art only when he was ‘inspired’ or ‘driven’ (1), showing his visual, intensely individual personality. Innate talent aside, this intermittent rather than constant application to art making produced an oeuvre that is always competent but increasingly various in quality and final resolution. With any artist this is not unusual, but in Black’s case he also created some extraordinary works during this last period of his life. He had significant opportunities to develop his profile within the Australian and international art worlds. Just before Black left San Francisco, he was asked to adapt his thesis for a contribution to the ‘Journal of Homosexuality’ (2). Strangely, he did not follow up on this offer. This journal, still being published, is considered one of the preeminent publications in gay and lesbian studies. If Black had chosen to write, it would have been one of the first articles about art to appear in the publication and would quite possibly have established a wider reputation for his practice, particularly in the USA where there was a growing recognition of the psychosexual in creative pursuits. Nevertheless, before leaving San Francisco, he did have time to compose a strict invitation-only list to send back to Australia for his Welcome Home Party (3). The perplexed critical reaction to and commercial failure of Black’s 1978 ‘Still Life’ exhibition did not spur the artist to more production, rather he became embittered with the art world that he thought had so wilfully rejected his polemic. Again, strangely, he chose not to show the ‘banner’ works in Sydney, then establishing itself as a gay metropolis. In that city there was an excitement similar to that of San Francisco. A “buy gay be gay” attitude was creating the necessary economic base for later political activism, with entrepreneurs like Ron Stringer, Dawn O’Donnell, and Abe Saffron cleverly capitalising on this new niche market. The nascent Gay Sydney would have provided a fertile new – and sympathetic – client base for Stuart Black’s work. The ‘Still Life’ paintings’ inherently satirical content would have at the very least gained him public notice. But for whatever reason Black chose not to follow up contacts with Macquarie Galleries, with whom he had shown before the San Francisco sojourn and which maintained a significant presence in the Sydney art world into the mid-1980s. Nor did he approach other galleries.

Top; Stuart Black c1980 Middle; Portrait study Stuart Black (Photo courtesy Gareth Sansom) c1980 Bottom; Gareth Sansom Study for a Portrait 1980 oil and collage on canvas, Collection Geelong Gallery Victoria

Stuart Black appeared to assume a state of deliberate inertia at this time, perversely seeing himself as ‘locked into’ Melbourne – maybe he always had, Yet, as he observed in the 1978 ‘Campaign’ interview, he did not seem to ‘fit’ into his home city. Even so, he chose to remain there for the rest of his life, with a few forays out of that personal ‘comfort zone’ for holidays in Europe or the Pacific (4). Initially Black did follow up on some of his USA contacts. In January 1980 his work was part of a group show at The Leslie Lohman Gallery in New York. A press release for Leslie Lohman said that the gallery specialised in the exhibition of art that was “revelatory in terms of the human subconscious vis-à-vis homosexuality which illuminate

the homosexual mystique and the homophilic ideal” (5). Black exhibited some charcoal and graphite drawings that depicted various S & M leather themes, but except for some blurred installation photographs in the artist’s collection there is no indication of the success or otherwise of the exhibition. January is something of a dead time in the New York art market, so success, either commercial or critical was going to be difficult to achieve. Disappointed, Black did not pursue any further international exhibition opportunities. Leslie Lohman continues today as a foundation dedicated to the propagation of gay art and artists. Another apparent disappointment for Stuart Black was that the painting ‘Incessant Hunt’ purchased by the National Gallery of Australia was not immediately put on show. Nor was Black one of the many artists invited to the inaugural exhibitions of the new Gallery in Canberra. He took this breach of etiquette as a homophobic slur. Once again Stuart Black reveals a level of naivety. The work in question, while certainly ‘edgey’ with its lurid colour and content, was probably not exhibited because of Gallery staff fears of a negative public reaction since acquisition (The painting has never been on public display). While there is the illusion of Art being a free space of discourse and exploration, in reality the art world is as conservative and homophobic as anywhere else. As well as the “National Gallery of Australia Snub”, Stuart Black felt that his artist colleagues had also rejected him after the 1978 exhibition – to him more evidence of homophobia, to which he took great offence. Such reactions most probably firmed Black’s resolve to establish a new non-art career. In the early 1980s Stuart Black was having difficulty staying within the confines of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). While he still enjoyed teaching, he did not respond well to the growing number of bureaucratic procedures in the institution. Bill Ferguson, Head of Art and Stuart’s boss, admired his skills with students, especially the way he encouraged budding artists to find their own path rather than demand that they copy or pay homage to the teacher. Students such as Stephen Spurrier and Donald Williams were inspired by the way Black encouraged experimentation, how he taught people not “to draw but to see” with his anti-classical and ‘out there’ approach. Rosslynd Piggott remembers Stuart advocating the necessity for technical skills to underpin the individual eye or style. He could be simultaneously ferocious and generously supportive. He hated people who were what he considered wasting their time. Colleagues John Neeson and Suzanne Davies admired his radical politics and his skill with students. They also recognised the importance of his work as the first manager of The Gryphon Gallery. Black was responsible for the establishment of the gallery in 1972. The organisation and administration of the gallery was conducted outside ordinary lecture workloads. Over ten years Black developed a vibrant exhibition program so that the gallery became an important public face for Melbourne State College, but which no doubt distracted him from his own art practice. However, not many were surprised when in 1982 Stuart Black resigned from teaching – Bill Ferguson believed he had just ‘had enough’ (6).

Above; Market Hotel, Commercial Road Prarahn Victoria 1985 Design; Tim Standfield

In the early 1980s Black became interested in a comparatively new type of social life – as an ‘out’ leather man in Melbourne. The first leather bar In Melbourne, The Laird, had opened, and new nightclubs such as Mandate and The Key Club provided venues for those ‘in the know’ to meet like-minded people. Black began working part time as a barman at the Laird. His co-worker, William Saunders, says he was excellent at the job: he had good looks, an extremely intimidating manner with a vicious tongue that loved filthy jokes. He could be sometimes difficult with the customers; the mildest offence was that he would refuse to serve ‘girly drinks’ . There is a portrait of Stuart Black made at this time by Gareth Sansom, in the Geelong Art Gallery, that gives a hint of this public persona. There are also a number of collaborative staged photographs made with Sansom at the time (7).

Above; Untitled. 1984. Charcoal, gouache, collage on paper, Private Collection Melbourne, 56 X 76 cm Page 60; Blue Dog with Red Lips. 1986. A portrait of Peter Knight (1946-1985). Oil on canvas collage In the collection of Don, Annie and Nikky Knight, 192 X 103 cm

Black’s experiences at The Laird inspired him eventually to establish his own hotel. In 1985, in partnership with Ken Payne, Black established an extremely successful business, the Market Hotel, arguably Australia’s first contemporary gay Hotel, on Commercial Road, Prahran. Tim Standfield carried out the redesign and renovation of the existing Victorian building as an ultra-modern venue. The Market Hotel, with a stylish ‘cutting edge’ feel suitable for Melbourne’s first openly gay meeting place. Unlike other historic gay pubs/clubs in the city, it had a policy of allowing mixed-sex customers and so transformed the traditional understanding of hotel management in Australia. It was not only a safe fun meeting place for the gay community, but also catered for the wider hetero-normative – the Market Hotel gave many people their first positive insight into homosexual life. A bleak backdrop to this business venture was the HIV / AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a decade of fear and dispair that ended the heroic years of Gay Liberation. From early 1981 Australian newspapers began reporting a new physical condition in which the body’s immune system collapsed, and that victims of the disease were nearly all homosexual men. Soon pithily named ‘the gay plague’ by the media, the disease was identified in 1982 as virus-borne and officially identified as ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’. Australia’s first cases appeared that year. On 8 July 1983 the first Australian AIDS patient died in Prince Henry’s Hospital, Melbourne. By 1988 some 500 people had died, two years later this devastating death count was 1423, and by 1994, 4178 people in Australia had died in this epidemic. These impersonal statistics cannot portray the shock and grief in the gay communities that had developed and flourished in the wake of the San Francisco social experiments of the previous decade. The disease was insidious, because the virus could lie dormant for up to five years before manifesting itself,in a debilitating and degrading ways, once diagnosed the patient could then expect to live between six months to five years. There was no cure, at first not even effective treatment, so the mid-to late 1980s in particular were a tragic time as lovers, parents, friends were all affected by the disease. Ironically, it was this crisis that prompted authorities to grant homosexuals limited legal rights. For some artists – David Mac Diarmid, Peter Tully, Juan Davila, Felix Gonzales-Torres et al., the HIV / AIDS crisis was the motivation in creating a sophisticated new visual discourse. For others the situation promoted a sense of frustrating immobilisation – art making seemed irrelevant in the face of the imperatives of survival and care. How could art truly express or ameliorate the pervasive sense of dread? For Stuart Black, the HIV / AIDS crisis was harrowing: like many he lost 30-40 friends. As collateral damage Black also lost the client base that had supported his work since the 1960s. He would never go to a funeral. In spite of his constant refrain, “I am not going to play the art establishment game”, Stuart Black did make art during this time (8). At the Market Hotel in 1986 there was a Survey of Drawings 1968-1986. After the sale of the hotel later that year, Black worked towards an exhibition of paintings at the Standfield Gallery, South Melbourne, in 1988. In the early 1990s he moved to Gallery 101 Collins Street, where he had two exhibitions of drawings in 1993 and 1996. He also participated in a number of group shows, most notably, the “Ammunition Show’” at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1988. He continued working at his art until 2001, but sadly, in the 1980s and 1990s he continued what seems a deliberate retreat from the art world that had sustained him, in a fashion, for the previous two decades. Above; Untitled. 1983. Oil on canvas. Collection Tim Standfield, 103 X 67 cm

In 1982 Black went to Germany ostensibly to view early 20th century German Expressionist Art and to see Documenta 7 at Kassel. The latter exhibition is seen as vital for later art developments in that it released an energy previously suppressed by the dictates of late modernist conceptual and minimalist practice. This style, entitled ‘New Expressionism’, was said to herald “the return of painting”. Paint was everywhere, surfaces rippled and pulsed with all the traditional markers of emotion – large scale, lurid dense colours, frenetic mark making, an ecstatic embrace of narrative. Artists rejected the once fashionable hermetic abstraction, instead showing personal commentaries on politics and histories both public and private. They began to feel free to create a personal lexicon of signs and symbols, returning to confessional, easily recognisable imagery. German artists of the time, for example; Rainer Fetting, Jorg Immendorf, and Marcus Lupertz, explored the taboo, sometimes absurd, signifiers of masculine power, such as the naked male body, World War ll and Cold War symbols such as guns and watchtowers, swastikas and other Nazi regalia. The nightclub as a site of Dionysian pleasure, excess and conflict became a popular motif. This new style with its liberated attitude to content and finish should perhaps have both validated and inspired the artist in Stuart Black. But on this journey he probably decided to just to enjoy the renowned S & M leather bars of Germany, because in the few paintings he made in the early 1980s there is little evidence of the energy of “New Expressionism”. Rather than experimenting with gesture and surface effects, Black’s painting style becomes clearer, flatter and brighter, with more clearly defined targets. He embraces the role of the satirist – impolite, impolitic, indecorous, railing against authorities and authority figures – Christianity and especially the Roman Catholic church with its strictures on sexual practices and desire, capitalism, industrialism, women, colonialism, tourism, the family, animal rights, and death. It was only in the later drawings and mixed media works of the 1990s that Black experimented with the expressionist modes of depiction. Just after his return from Germany, Black completed two small canvases that have a confidence, energy and direct approach that, regrettably, he did not develop further. The first, an Untitled work (1983) from the collection of Tim Standfield, starkly depicts mummy-like creatures suspended from hooks, with ropes and ribbons, set against a flat green ground. ‘Painted Masks’ (1983) is a surprisingly painterly work for the artist. An interior genre piece, two leather masks from bondage play, one frontal, one in profile, are placed against a Matisse-like floral wallpaper near a window with a tied-back curtain. These works have an intimacy and lightness of touch that disappeared with the personal ordeal of the HIV / AIDS crisis.

Above; Untitled. 1983. Oil on canvas. Collection Tim Standfield, 79 X 62 cm

In 1984 ‘Blue Dog with Red Lips’ was commissioned by William Saunders as a memorial to Peter Knight, one of the first people to die of HIV AIDS in Victoria. Knight was one of the founders of the Victorian AIDS Action Committee. He organised support services, health professionals and other volunteers who would be mobilised when patients needed them. The Peter Knight Centre in South Yarra is named after him in honour of his work in the gay community. Ironically (and there was a lot of gallows humour at the time, in the face of mass homosexual panic and the absence of wider community and government support) Peter Knight was also one of the first to use the services he helped to organise. The painting is a defiantly coloured and detailed composition. The lower third of the canvas is a bathroom scene, the left a red checked shirt above a decorative border of foetuses, at the centre a profile in silhouette of a man’s head emerging from a lavatory bowl. Around its neck is a pearl necklace (or possibly anal beads, a sex toy), while a douche bag curls upwards from the mouth. A red crucifix, a window, the façade of a public toilet, a shadowy male figure, stained glass, and one Canary Island palm tree occupies the middle section of the painting. This species of palm is

Above; Hypertrophy With Wounded Dog in High Heels. 1987. Oil on canvas collage Collection Hugh Pierce and Mark Fisher, Melbourne, 122 X 122 cm Page 65; Wish You Were Here. 1987. Oil on canvas collage Private Collection Melbourne, 183 X 122 cm

a common planting in Melbourne, with numbers adorning the St Kilda forshore and the Albert Park ‘beat’ has some impressive stands. A bomber jacket lurks behind the trunk of the palm, and collage fragments lie scattered across the picture plane – Roman Catholic holy cards, men and women kissing, a bear-like biker on the cross. In the top left of the work is a dismembered blue dog, its nose in a pile of white powder (cocaine?). Black’s painting is a complex memento mori, a multi-layered work with a set of symbols and references that only the artist could adequately decipher. A possible study for this painting is an untitled collage and charcoal work depicting a stylised dog, with a penisshaped tail. There is a photograph of a man in a checked coat, wearing make-up and a wide-brimmed hat, around him are ropes and tree shapes, cock rings and ball stretchers. In the lower left of the work there is a torn sex aids/toys order form complete with ticks beside chosen items. Working at the Market Hotel and dealing with the HIV / AIDS crisis within his circle of friends diverted Stuart Black from art making, so it was not until 1988 that he staged a solo exhibition, with Tim Standfield at Warehouse Galleries, South Melbourne. Black had travelled recently to Samoa and its islands – typically, he found everything “too hot and too isolated” (9) – and used this experience in a number of works for the exhibition. The paintings are ambitious museum-scale works, in which he develops glaze techniques to enhance the luminosity of the high-keyed palette. ‘All Stock Must Go’ (1988) and ‘Wish You were Here’ (1987) are the most successful documents/commentaries on the Samoan experience. The former shows a general store with a complex array of goods, with a characteristic of formal equivalence in his depiction, fabrics, the Venetian blinds, the dildo and rosary beads, post cards, bananas, and underwear with an embroidered waistband announcing ‘God is Love’. This painting was exhibited in ‘The Ammunition Show’ later that year. ‘Wish You Were Here’ is a sophisticated stylised landscape that leads the eye from rocks like ribs to a shoreline barrier of postcards, to decayed buildings, and mountains behind them. This painting is an angry critique of the effects of tourism, colonisation, and Christianity. In ‘Hypertrophy with Wounded Dog in High heels’ (1987) Black seems to be directing his gaze towards the depiction of a particular woman and her pet: According to Black’s friends this work refers in a not-so-veiled way to a failed business relationship. The woman has a shock of red hair, pearls and a short bright print dress. Her form morphs into and across a walking stick, a hat pin, snakes, a fish, and a rope with a noose. The square format emphasises the somewhat cruel distortions of the work. This negative energy is seen once more in ‘Mum and Dad’ (1987). Cited as the “most terrible and shocking” painting in the 1993 Melbourne Art Fair (10), it features a juxtaposition of various sex acts, with Christian motifs and personages: a bishop has egg on his face, his mitre bears stylised emblems of an erect penis and a woman’s legs and breasts, while a candle becomes a dildo. From the same exhibition, Black’s ‘Alligator's Lament’ (1987) refers to the falsehoods of fashion, seduction, and organised religion. Top; Catani Gardens. 1990. Mixed media on paper Private Collection Melbourne, 76 X 54 cm Middle; Heading for Westgate Bridge. 1990. Charcoal on paper Private Collection Melbourne, 54 X 76 cm Bottom; Seagulls West Beach No.2. 1990. Charcoal on paper Collection of William Saunders, 55 X 83 cm

In a document among the artist’s papers, Black describes his approach to the content of the works: “In making social comments, I have said my piece. However, if I don’t talk to anybody, then I have failed. I think they speak loud and clear and the conversation I have with the viewer can be as long as he/she wishes. They are blunt, honest, uneasy, comment on double standards, therefore hypocritical (and I do not put myself apart from whatever is going on) – sexuality, melancholia, loneliness, humour, cynical, ambiguous, preoccupation with fantasies, fetishes, states of being; things that affect me past, present and possibly future, vulgarity, tawdriness, mediocrity, accusations,

disgust and the “esteem” in which religion is held and then its resulting effects” (11). Stuart Black moved from Richmond to his St Kilda penthouse in 1986. What he called his “Beirut building” because of its sad, weatherbeaten and distressed exterior and the pokey lobby,stood on a bend of the Beaconsfield Parade sea front. The luxurious apartment penthouse had several balconies and 320 degree views of Catani Gardens, Port Phillip Bay, Albert Park and the Melbourne CBD. It was a singularly diverting eyrie. In a 1993 interview for a lifestyle magazine he said, “The outlook is a perpetual entertainment to me with the changes of light and colour. I sit having breakfast and stare out at the sky and sea. If I am not too careful I can still be sitting there at midday over my empty bowl of cornflakes. This is a dramatic change from the warehouse I lived in. It is going from the ridiculous to the sublime. I felt closed in (there) and light came in through a skylight and frosted windows, and I had no rapport with the outside world. But the warehouse was enormous, I could walk around it eight times and it would be like doing a couple of kilometers” (12). There was enough room in the apartment for art making, and with so much going on around him in St Kilda, Black’s next exhibition at Gallery 101 Collins Street showed scenes from his new world: aerial views of the elegant Catani gardens, palm trees, the beach and freeway, distant views of Port Melbourne, still lifes of indoor plants and surfing gear. While some works retained overtly sexualised content, the majority of pieces of this period display a quieter sensuality in the artist. Working mostly in charcoal and pastel, some of Black’s late drawings could be interpreted as revealing that he was finally relaxing, letting go of the polemics that had informed his earlier work. ‘Outside the House’, ‘Sticks’, and ‘Catani Gardens’, all made around 1991, illustrate this new attitude. In works like ‘Median Strip West St Kilda’ and ‘Heading for Westgate Bridge’ Black obviously enjoys the visual challenges his new home presented to him. Being above ground is a powerful position. ‘St Kilda Weekend’ and ‘Hellsby Wetsuit’ relocate the viewer to Black’s sexualised world-view, to the beach. In the former work, the fluorescent colours, then signifying surfer culture, are splashed across the picture plane and combined with surf board shapes, erect penises, tight buttocks and ball stretchers, etc. ‘Hellsby Wetsuit’ is a stark and simple drawing that has the air of both a strange relic and an object of imminent potential. For someone so interested in bondage as Stuart Black, the invention of new synthetic waterproof fabrics such as neoprene would have caused great excitement. This blue and black wet suit, while functional and protective, depending on the viewer's taste, does have the fetishistic elements of limiting and binding containment. The shape is headless and segmented with more than a hint of the penis at the crotch – all favourite Black motifs. In spite of the voyeuristic excitement suggested in works such as ‘Come Inside’, the view from the penthouse was not always pleasant and comforting. Almost immediately after moving in, Black noticed that trucks filled with animal carcasses and hides were speeding along the freeway towards the meat works on the other side of the city. Not visible from the street, his ‘god’s eye’ view of this grim traffic motivated him to embark on what was to be his last major series. Possibly a call for animal rights, but more likely a delayed reaction to the HIV / AIDS crisis, this series is literally darker in tone and content, more confused and distorted in composition. Many of the drawings of this subject could be classed as dark satires or images of social critique, and there are a number of art historical echoes in these works, a focused anger similar to Weimar artists of the 1920s and hints of David Strachan, Colin McCahon, and Jan Senbergs. Above; Helsby Wet Suit. 1991. Mixed media on paper Private Collection Melbourne, 78 X 54 cm

Above Left; Driftwood. 1991. Charcoal on paper. Collection Gavin J. Winbanks, 76 X 56 cm Above Right; Outside the House. 1991. Charcoal on paper, Private Collection Melbourne, 76 X 56 cm

Above: Passing Trucks. 1992. Oil on Canvas, Private Collection Melbourne, 122 X 122

Above: Time Out. 1992. Mixed media on paper, Private Collection Perth, 76 X 151 cm

Above: Memories. 1992. Mixed media on paper, Private Collection Perth, Dimensions 76 X 152 cm

Above: Pensioned Pipes. 1992. Mixed media on paper, Private Collection Melbourne, 150 X 109 cm

Above: Doll Falling From a Bridge. 1998. Oil on canvas, 76.3 X 61 cm Gift of the Artist 2001, La Trobe University Art Collection LUMA La Trobe University Museum of Art

They are powerful and affecting drawings. From the relatively decorative ‘Hides’, with its stylised tripartite fields of spotted cowhide, Black switches swiftly to his real subject. ‘Passing Truck’ is a column of swirling flesh and bone, a charnel house against a black ground. ‘The Killing Fields’ sets a forest of snake-like smoke stacks or truck exhaust pipes in a vaguely post-cubist composition. In ‘Pensioned Pipes’, a tarpaulin has lifted from the back of the lorry to reveal a seething mass of bandaged, scarred and tattooed pipes that could be horns or bones. ‘Grubby Fronts’ depicts Y-shaped suspenders holding a tray of body forms, offal and embryos. Here the mechanical becomes physical, emanating a strange x-ray tonal quality. ‘Twenty Minutes’ is a reference to Black’s idea of the mindset of the men who drive the trucks. Road markings, ordinarily functional instructions, now pose a moral and intellectual choice: one way leads to the charnel house, the other to the world of sex, porn, and carnal pleasure – yet strangely, there is no real division between the two choices. Black also made works that are more diffuse and elusive personal revelations. ‘Time Out’ and ‘Mum and Dad II’ are large expressive panoramas. In the former, the body of a woman emerges from the landscape ground. She has a horse’s head and is being eaten by a bird pecking at her body while a dog looks out to the viewer, and Black has used the motif of the thong/foot print to break up the space. Equally disturbing is ‘Mum and Dad’, on the left side of the work a lizard with teeth and claws forms the vagina of a headless woman. In the centre, a pregnant lizard/dog creature, whose uterus reveals a child’s face being nurtured by dogs, sticks its muzzle into the buttocks of a male who wears underpants embroidered with ‘Mum and Dad’. The picture plane is scattered with decorative motifs derived from the charnel house meat works series. Raised a Methodist in country Victoria, Black always claimed to be an atheist. Yet religious subject matter becomes prominent in this latter phase of his career. The return to religious imagery can be seen as a part of the broader contexts of the HIV AIDS crisis where many Christians and their organisations denied the very existence of homosexuals. The Roman Catholic Church especially, raised the ire of Stuart Black. In works like ‘Tin Christ’ and ‘Washing Day’ the socio-historical references are clear, but Black confounds the reading with the inclusion of shadowy figures and forms like the blue singlet, once a symbol of the Australian working man. ‘Madonna’s Move’, a typical Black-style play on words, depicts the Virgin and Child being tied down with ropes. An extraordinary drawing in the series is ‘Shrine’. The vaguely surreal symmetrical composition is densely worked, yet stark. At the top centre a small crown supports a veil that covers a crucifix, lectern/frame and wharf. A small bunch of broken flowers emerges from the top of the crucifix while behind the lectern is a headless splayed form of a naked woman. From the mid-1990s Stuart Black found it physically more difficult to make art. He did try his hand at the occasional landscape and applied (unsuccessfully) to be part of various group shows, but generally he lost interest in the act of making art for public exhibition. According to friends, Black sensed his mortality and began to comment more frequently about the past, especially about his parents, and about his first lover, Alan Forsyth.

Above; Stuart Black’s Beaconsfield Parade apartment, St Kilda Victoria c1995

‘Doll Falling From Bridge’ (1998-99) well illustrates his sensibility. Set at night, the high horizon line punctuated by two piers and a glittering distant view of city lights is balanced, in typical Black style by an ungainly red-headed doll falling or perhaps having bean thrown, hurtling into the void. Maybe an ironic self-portrait, it is an extraordinarily bleak and unnerving painting. In this context the last dated works by Stuart Black in 2000 take on an added significance. Both are silvery, finely-wrought

and sombre meditations on his childhood. ‘Bed’ depicts a distorted view of a room at night. Lit by a solitary light globe, the slightly twisted bassinette contains an empty mattress, below which sits a chamber-pot or cup. ‘A Long Time Ago’ is another interior genre scene. In the background is a recurring Black motif, empty shelves. Two safety pins float on either side holding aprons back to frame a quiet still life. On the table are bread, a framed photograph, a saucepan and frying pan, a (feminine) curled back chair, a vertical and angular (male) chair. A tall stool lies on its side underneath the table. A note sits on the left with some lines that have been blacked out – possibly a wartime letter where information has been censored. The apron / curtains have an underlying texture that looks a lot like writing – another signifier of childhood the place where behaviour, language and literacy are imposed. As Black’s health declined, he became more particular and more private, further compartmentalising his friends and limiting his activities. His moods became darker, and more tconflicted. Diana Gold has said that at this time, Stuart really embraced the connotations of his name – Black, “ very black”. His friends supported him as best they could during this difficult time – he always remained forthright, witty and incisive, still engaging with art and the world. As he was about to turn 70 he began to plan a large birthday party designed to bring together all the elements of his life so far. Stuart Black died a week before his birthday. It should not be a surprise that his funeral and wake were equally well planned. Encased in one the largest coffins known to mankind, Black had clearly specified what was to occur at the funeral. A quote from his will conveys anew the humorous, contrary nature of the man: once again, one gains a sense of the often hilarious, contrary nature of the artist. "Funeral Arrangements 21.1 I desire that there be no religious service following my death, flowers and no religious references of any kind in the course of my obsequies. 21.2 I desire that there be a simple casket and cremation. On top of the casket, I wish there to be no flowers, only a single silver rose as used in Der Rosenkavalier and which may be artificial. 21.3 I desire that the music to be played before the cremation be Allegri’s Miserere, and at the end of the non religious ceremony, the final trio from Der Rosenkavelier, to the intent that the final note will sound after the casket has disappeared” (14). Black’s career can be reviewed most profitably through the lens of art history and broader cultural analyses.

Top; The Tin Christ. 1993. Mixed media on paper Private Collection Melbourne,136 X 114 cm Bottom; Washing Day. 1992. Mixed media on paper Private Collection Melbourne, 133 X 150 cm

His is in many ways a familiar story of the artist who, after initial public and critical acclaim, for a variety of reasons has faded from the art-world scene. Not unusual: according to Australia Council figures, the majority of Australian artists stop producing art around the age of 37-40, ‘burnt out’ and cynical at the difficulties of getting critical and public notice, and of simply making a living. Those that continue in art often have a partner to sustain and encourage them during hard times, and most teach. Stuart Black taught art but he was never completely imbued with the work ethic that informed artists like John Brack or Fred Williams. His life partner Alan Forsyth had died, he did not meet another. Black, like many artists became angry with the lotteries of taste that characterise the art world so that by the early 1980s he chose to devote more of his energies to an alternative career.

Above: Bed. 2000.Charcoal on paper. Private Collection Melbourne, 151 X 115 cm

Above: A Long Time Ago. 2000. Charcoal on paper. Private Collection Melbourne, 56 X 76

However, once an artist always an artist. Stuart Black always saw art as an essential part of his life. Unfortunately, when he was embarking on his mature style, post-San Francisco, the critical and theoretical umbrella that validates later artists in their representation of human sexuality, had not yet appeared. At 41 in 1978, Stuart Black was part of a generation at one remove from the theorists who would later inform some of the ideas, strategies and positions that were already inherent in his art. In the 1970s, the writings of Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhktin were being translated from the French and Russian, and in the early 1980s the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari was becoming widely known. Even though Stuart Black would have hated it, feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray could also provide theries to help critics and the public understand his work. If Stuart had wanted, these theorists could also have given him the intellectual grounding for further refining his style. Foucault, the philosopher and historian of ideas, stresses the importance of self-fashioning, the powers of desire, and his belief that while to possess a different sexuality can be revolutionary, the artist/self is also produced in and through the very discourses of heterosexual power: bleakly, everyone is complicit in upholding the dominant codes of sexuality, even while resisting them (15). French philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari, in one of their collaborative works, ‘One Thousand Plateaux’ describe the human body as a “desiring machine”. It is a riotous libidinal assemblage of parts, complex arrangements and connections of parts of bodies within bodies, spaces and moments, behaviour, intensities and surfaces (16). Feminist theorists reverse cultural canons with a view to exploding them. They speak of sex. They see the epic in the everyday. They recognise that the role of the masquerade and performance. The Gaze. Pleasure (17). Mikhail Bakhktin, philosopher and literary critic,writes of carnival as a motif. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the brief primal utopia of Carnival creates a paradise that overturns the dictates of the official order. This eruption can also be an erotic paradise. This is the Domain of Excess. For some, the experiences of the body completely open, entrapment, bondage, whipping, torture and stylised rape, the threat and thrill of violation are a pleasure beyond words. With these highly charged elements, this is the zone of the initiated, an underworld that can become the outer world. For some, the re/ enacting of such practices sets them free (18, 19). All these postmodern critical frameworks are particularly apt when considering Black’s oeuvre. As a contrast, in Black’s own analytical statement, he shows just how well he was trained in the ethos of late modernism.

ART IS A THING

MADE BY MAN

WITH SKILL

Above and beyond the natural order of everyday things. When it is non utilitarian it is as its most pure then its function is not only for the senses but for the mind.

Called the artist – he is a representative of mankind hence is art an expression/ statement with meaning. The Artist reacts to the world around him; he responds to various stimuli and extracts the essence called abstraction.

A marriage of the dexterity of the hand and an agility of the mind.

THE ELEMENTS OF ART No expression is really art unless it is creative. To create is to select or invent elements and to organize them into new and unique form. It means ORIGINALITY, INDIVIDUALITY and INVENTIVENESS. It does not mean only skill. A work of art is an arrangement of symbols or units of design, that are basically common to all forms of art; music, architecture etc. These are LINE, SHAPE, TONE, TEXTURE, COLOUR. These do not function on their own but it is up to the artist to organize these elements via the MEANS such as balance, harmony, rhythm, dominance repetition etc. (20). It is clear from this statement that Black believed in the essentially romantic, transformative powers of art, but at over 40 was resistant to new ways of thinking, though such resistance was a fairly usual reaction by Australian artists to the rise of theory in art practice from the late 1970s. Like him, many found these new ideas at odds with the idealised view of art as a space for freedom, for the ‘true communication’ they had grown up with. Or perhaps as his friends say, he was always wilful, snubbing the art world because of his perception of its snubbing of him. As a homosexual imbued with the gay liberation ethos of the 1970s, perhaps he thought that after his 1978 ‘Still Life” exhibition, he had nothing more to tell the world about his ideas. Whatever the reason, Black did not seek to actively develop, to build, the visual language of the “Still Life” series and small 1980s paintings. Black’s best work is compelling social critique or satire. The satirist is someone who observes and reflects on human foibles, selectively exaggerating and distorting for effect. Indeed, Black’s friends have commented that he prided himself on being “on the fringe, kept there permanently” (21). Diana Gold, another old friend and Director of Gallery 101, ruefully remarked that Stuart Black was a “witness to everything, a witness to himself”, and suggests that he was wrestling with problems deeper than those of his art. In his last years, he became wilfully self-destructive, full of self-doubt, even paranoia (22). Like many creative people, Black’s personality was his own worst enemy – undermining constantly the potential of his talent. Again, this is said to be typical of many of the great satirists in history – from James Gilray to Phillip Guston: informed critical anger, once so successfully directed outwards towards the world, instead becomes internalised and destructive (23). However, all this is speculation. Caught between the two worlds of compulsive pleasure – art making, sex and the libido, both entirely valid forms of personal expression, Black decided, in his last two-and-half decades, to work largely outside the art world. Although still exhibiting occasionally in his later years, he had other more important personal concerns: simple pleasures, the company of friends, the view from his apartment – all these sustained him.

Stuart Black’s work demands greater recognition because it fills a gap in the knowledge of Australian artists who work with the subject area of sex and sexuality. In terms of chronology, Black’s work sits between the comparatively covert explorations by artists such as James Gleeson, Donald Friend and Alan Oldfield, to prefigure the calculated excess of artists like Peter Tully, Maria Kozic, Jasmin Hirst and Juan Davila. Black’s best work from the late 1970s and early 1980s is exciting and radical. Unlike his artistic colleagues of the time he shamelessly depicts the rituals of desire. The paintings operate as not so private diary entries where the artist often reveals himself as an incisive and witty social commentator. These are powerful images that were made when the figure of the homosexual male body was not such a pervasive cultural product as it is today. This was a time when transgression had a (limited but potent) political power. They are significant art documents which detail the masquerades, acts and signs of a very particular social milieu which until before Stuart Black had not been so clearly depicted in mainstream Australian art. Later he made art as memorials, but throughout his career he consistently made art works that were quite simple and beautiful plays with traditional genres such as the landscape and of course the still life. What is striking about Stuart Black’s paintings, especially those made in the 1970s and early 1980s, is the surprising and refreshing honesty of content combined with a unique and sophisticated synthesis of late Pop art aesthetics. This is an uncompromising achievement and one that should be included in the canons of Australian art. Black’s friends, colleagues and students all note his deep passion and commitment to art and his belief in its importance in life. In a culture that still unfortunately values mediocrity, Stuart Black loved the challenges that art could present and its potential to give pleasure and to shift consciousness in both the maker/artist and the viewing public. A gifted and charismatic teacher, Black could recognise talent but also understood the value of disciplined training to complement natural ability. Through personal experience, Black saw that the medium of drawing could harness and focus the first fire of individual vision. It was also a lifetime laboratory. With this in mind Stuart Black has given back to the Australian art world that nurtured, sustained (and sometimes frustrated) him so much. An extraordinarily substantial benefaction from the artist to the Victorian College of the Arts and Music, Melbourne University, will promote the continuation of Drawing as a key basic discipline within that institution with the establishment of a permanent teaching position. To complement this new appointment, students and scholars will be able to get an immediate sense of Stuart Black the artist, with access to a substantial Studio Collection of works that are to be bequeathed to the Victorian College of the Arts. As well, the Stuart Black Memorial Bursary for students at the Victorian College of the Arts and Music, will encourage art practices by providing funds for materials and for travel scholarships, vital elements for the development of young artists when they most need this type of support. ‘The Stuart Black Charitable and Benefaction Fund’ is a singular gift to the Australian art world. It is a living memorial to a once overlooked but important artist, a most suitable legacy for a man with such a unique, always challenging and questing, personality.

Above; Stuart Black in studio 2001

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

9. 10.

Interview with Keith Chivers, Melbourne, July 2009. Letter of request from John P. De Secco, Professor of Psychology. 3 January, 1978. Stuart Black Papers. Interview with Keith Chivers, Melbourne, July 2009. Lee Franklyn, ‘Black and Blue and S & M too’. Interview with Stuart Black, ‘Campaign #32’, ‘In Melbourne Gay Guide’. May 1978, pp.13-14. Letter from John R. Neeson, October 14 2009. Anon. ‘Press Release to Artists’. The Leslie Lohman Gallery, 485 Broome Street, NYC 10013. c.1979. Interviews with Suzanne Davies and Donald Williams, Melbourne, July 2009. Also interview with Bill Ferguson, October 2009. Letter from John R Neeson October, 14 2009. Conversation with Rosslynd Piggott, July 2010. ‘Gareth Sansom: Seventh Triennale India’. Curator: Terence Maloon. Geoff Lowe Art Exhibitions Touring Agency, 1991 p.24. Interview with William Saunders, Melbourne, July 2009. Black had a challenging nature generally. His relationships with people were constantly tested. For example, Gareth Sansom and Black grew apart during this time. Sansom was working in the upper echelons of the Victorian College of the Arts, while Black had then moved to the hospitality industry. Interview with Keith Chivers, Melbourne, July 2009. Keith Dunstan,“...a tricky painting to have in your living room”. ‘Keith Dunstan On Sunday’. ‘The Age’, 24 June 1990 p.2.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Stuart Black Handwritten note in the artist’s papers – possibly made for publicity c.1988. Jeanne-Marie Cilento, ‘320 degrees of separation; Stuart Black’s Domain’. Supplement for ‘The Age’ c1998. Stuart Black, Last Will and Testament, c.2006. I do not propose to supply a copious bibliography for these general statements. However see ‘Foucault: a critical reader’. Ed. David Couzens Hoy, Oxford Blackwell, 1986. Philip Goodchild, ‘Deleuze and Guattari: an introduction to the politics of desire’ London, SAGE,1996. ‘Art and feminism’, Ed. Helena Reckitt, survey by Peggy Phelan. London, Phaidon, 2001. Paul Rutherford, ‘A World made sexy: Freud to Madonna’, University of Toronto Press, 2007. Simon Dentith, ‘Bakhtinian Thought: an introductory reader’. Routledge, London 1999. Stuart Black ‘ART IS’ and ‘THE ELEMENTS OF ART’, undated note Stuart Black Papers, possibly c.1982. Interview with Diana Gold, July 2009. See Vic Cattrell, ‘City of Laughter; Sex and satire in Eighteenth Century London’, London, Atlantic Books, 2006. See Patrick Moore, ‘Beyond Shame, Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality’. Boston, Beacon Press, 2004.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Concept / Co-ordination:

Tim Standfield Tim Standfield is a Melbourne based interior designer and art dealer. After a meeting in 1972 at Warehouse Galleries, Richmond, Tim formed a close working relationship with Stuart that involved, at various times, exhibiting his art at both Warehouse Gallery and Standfield Gallery, together with designing and administering various architectural projects for him. Stuart requesteded in his will that Tim administer his estate in relation to his art legacy and the establishment of a bursary for art students.

Writer / Research:

Graphic Design / Production:

Photographer:

Craig Judd Craig Judd is a curator, arts writer and educator. Oloff Tromp Oloff Tromp specialises in corporate graphic design and strategic communication governance. Max Loudon Max Loudon is a Melbourne based photographer who specialises in fine art photography.

Stuart Black C.V. - Biography • • • • • • •

Born Kyabram, Victoria. 1957-60 Primary School Teacher, country Victoria, Girgarre East, Cornelia Creek and Gladysdale Rural Schools. 1960-66 Taught at Auburn South Training School, Richmond Technical School, South Melbourne Technical School. 1967-1973 Lecturer in Art Education; Toorak Teachers College and Melbourne Teachers College (Melbourne College of Advanced Education). 1973-1982 Lecturer Melbourne College of Advanced Education and Melbourne State College. 1976-78 Lived USA. 2007 Dies, St Kilda, Victoria.

Education • • • •

1956 Primary Teachers Certificate, Toorak Teachers College Melbourne. 1963 Certificate of Art (Painting), Caulfield Technical School Melbourne. 1966 Diploma of Art (Painting), Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. 1977 Master of Art (Fine Art), San Francisco State University, USA.

Individual Exhibitions • • • • • • •

1967 Princes Hill Gallery, Melbourne. Saint Johns Hall, Junior Chamber of Commerce, Melbourne. 1972 Warehouse Galleries, Melbourne. 1975 Stuart Gerstman Galleries, Melbourne. 1978 ‘Still Life’, Warehouse Galleries, Melbourne. 1986 ‘Survey of Drawings 1968-1986’, Market Hotel, Melbourne. 1988 Standfield Gallery, Melbourne. 1996 ‘Series’, Gallery 101, Melbourne.

Selected Group Exhibitions • • • • • • •

1965 McCaughey Prize, National Gallery of Victoria. 1966 ‘Minus 30 Prize’, Victorian Artists Society, Melbourne (winner). 1967 Perth Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Benalla Art Prize, Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria. Princes Hill Gallery, Melbourne. 1968 Wangaratta Art Prize, Wangaratta, Victoria. Maitland Prize, Maitland, New South Wales. City of Mordialloc Exhibition, Victoria. Ronald Art prize, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre, Morwell, Victoria. 1969 Manuka Galleries, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. 1970 Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne. 1974 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney.

• • • • • • • • • • •

1975 Collectors Gallery, Perth, Western Australia. Perth International Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Western Australia . ‘Drawing 75’, Stuart Gerstman Gallery, Melbourne. Queensland Art Trustees Prize, Queensland Art gallery, Brisbane. Minnie Couch Prize, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria. 1978 ‘Contemporary Australian Painting’, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. 1980 ‘Three Australian Artists’, Leslie Lohman Gallery, New York, USA. 1989 ‘Imaging AIDS’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. ‘The Ammunition Show’, Victorian College of the Arts and Standfield Gallery, Melbourne. 1990 Australian Contemporary Art Fair, represented by Reflections Gallery, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne. 1992 ‘Christie's Teddy Bear Auction for the Victorian AIDS Council’, Melbourne. Australian Contemporary Art Fair, represented by Gallery 101, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne. 1993 ‘One to One; Works on Paper by Stuart Black and Sculpture by Peter Rosman’, Gallery 101, Melbourne. 1994 Australian Contemporary Art Fair, represented by Gallery 101, Royal Exhibitions Building, Melbourne. ‘Directors Choice’, Gallery 101, Melbourne. 1995 ‘Christmas Show’, Gallery 101, Melbourne. ‘Directors Choice’, Gallery 101, Melbourne.

Collections • • • • • •

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana USA. Queensland Art Gallery. National Gallery of Australia. Latrobe Regional Art Gallery. Melbourne University Collection. Latrobe University Collection.

Publications McCulloch, Susan and Alan, The Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Allen and Unwin revised edition 1994.

Acknowledgements

Special Thanks to

The Merits of this project were discussed vigorously and at length, with one participant who claimed, "Oh! Stuart was only famous halfway through his own lunch". I think this monograph suggest otherwise and stands testament to a talented, insightful man. Tim Standfield August 2011

Thank you to the colleagues and friends of Stuart Black who were very generous with their time and reminiscences. Thank you to Ted Gott, Jason Smith and Geoffrey Edwards for their professional support. We would also like to especially recognise the energy and drive (and patience) of Philip Winbanks and William Saunders, both close friends of the artist Stuart Black. Without their unique eye and their essential commitment and belief, this publication would not have proceeded.

Craig Judd and Tim Standfield would like to thank the following for their assistance and support:

We would also like to thank the following:

Su Baker. Victorian College of the Arts and Music. Keith Chivers Donna Collidge Elizabeth Cross Suzanne Davies (Director of RMIT Gallery) Christopher Dean Geoffrey Edwards (Director of Geelong Art Gallery) Peter Elliss Bill Fergusson Margot Foster Kym Gilham Diana Gold Ted Gott (Curator of International Art, National Gallery of Victoria) Gavin Harris Greg Howlett Alison Leach, Victorian College of the Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne Alun Leach-Jones Fiona Macdonald The late Jan Martin Richard McClean Brigid McCoppin (Editorial Support) Robyn Mc Kenzie Allan Mitelman John R. Neeson Rosslynd Piggot Peter Rosman Gareth Sansom John Sayers Jason Smith (Director, Heide Museum, Bulleen) Odette Snellen Daniel Thomas AM

National Gallery of Australia Queensland Art Gallery  Ian Potter Museum of Art  La Trobe University Museum of Art Geelong Art Gallery Private Collectors, Melbourne and Perth Craig Judd / Tim Standfield

The Killing Fields. 1992. Mixed media on paper, 76 X 151 cm Collection Greg Howlett Foyer Cox Howlett & Bailey Woodland, Architects, Perth Photography Alison Paine