SWERVE

From 31 August to 7 October 2012, at Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Sue Henderson, David Marsden and Penny Mason get together as Art3, to present Swerve, an extravaganza of re-purposed objects relating to the most function areas of the domestic interior. Lots of plumbing here! The installation was also a wonderful survey of the art of the print, or perhaps just work transferred to other surfaces, some unexpected (such as shower curtains) and others more usual (tiles) - although the latter were not quite what you would find in most suburban homes. Launching the show was great fun, watching the audience navigate the domestic encumbrances to act like gallery goers. My opening remarks follow:

Untitled, photograph by Art 3, for Swerve, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

I have for a long time been attracted to the work of Sue Henderson, David Marsden and Penny Mason, the work that they produce as individuals. I enjoy the allure of line and tactility of surface, and the chance to appreciate rather a lot of suspicious grungy objects. Somewhere between the methodical and the madness, I can find much to engage with. But in putting these three, Art3, together in one space the few similarities of practice seem to be accentuated, just as the disjunctions mess with your head. At first meeting, it’s actually quite confronting.

However, I realised when I saw an earlier outing by this collaboration, Space Antics, at Burnie Regional Gallery in 2011, that what disturbs me most about the project is the pervasive reference to the domestic. This is not my natural sphere of action, so when I made my usual dive into the dictionary of etymology for ‘swerve’ and found that it comes from the Old English sweorfan, to rub or to scour, it simply confirmed a lot of my suspicions about the project’s attachment to the kitchen or bathroom sink. I was only mildly comforted when Sue Henderson told me yesterday that the work ‘exploded the domestic back onto the walls’. Good spot for it, I thought, wondering whether the walls would now need a scour or a rub as well.

But, on reflection, it seems that this collaboration is all about a certain sort of activity experienced many ways. It is about action that is both deliberately performative – in that each element’s very materialising is a signification of its swerve – and it’s also the imposed yet serendipitous interaction that results from others’ physical interventions into the gallery space. You, as audience, are also participants, continually rematerialising, or performing, the work. Just in arranging yourselves for these formalities you will have realised that these objects – the carcases and panels; the discontiguous elements of other, imagined, ongoing domestic spaces – are also performers. So it is that the meaning of each performative act can be found in the coinciding of any object-as-carcase and how that object is enacted.

For all its disparate parts, this collaboration between three artists, and between you (the audience) and the outcomes of that collaboration, also relies on a cohesive context, its situatedness. Without this clarity, this whimsical locative referent, the continual repetition of the performative act would be groundless. That this site has been materialised by three individuals, and with its expected – indeed inevitable  – making and remaking during the course of the exhibition, is what gives the project’s performative nature a fractured and disconcerting edge. It is domestic, yet you are not ‘at home’. (It is truly umheimlich). The trace of continual process indicates the expected lines of sight, those directional gestures, and syncopated patternings yet these connections are continually blurred, bothered, and broken by mirrorings, by leaps in scale, by fluttering surfaces and strangely unfinished structures. Wallpaper and drawer liners, overtly asserting respectability, instead hint loudly at another life beneath their decorative surfaces. Three languages declaim, repetitively and almost simultaneously, the coordinates of each element. You try to follow directions but encounter static … really, it’s better just to relax and listen to yourself.

While the battle between dodgy green formica and white-tile-terrorism is a pervasive presence, and the discovery of mould, watermarks, and some very suss stains hint at various domestic failures, this space has its own purity. It has its own momentum and its own system of values, within the bounds of its activity. In this it refers – admittedly obliquely – to another vernacular, where swerve, as noun, can refer to an intoxication, a toxicity, often from illicit substances; to getting into a rhythm, to taking a positive direction and, inevitably, to sex. I’m not sure about that link but it’s probably something to do with plumbing, or maybe those stains.

But it does take me more logically to Judith Butler who wrote, two decades ago now, in Bodies that matter\; the discursive limits of sex that:

Performativity is not a singular “act”, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or a set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the convention of which it is a repetition.

Here, Sue Henderson, David Marsden and Penny Mason, provide within the bounds of a gallery, multiple iterative acts that emerge from the norm as visually playful, spacially disruptive and cognitively critical.  Swerve is all that a performative should be, and I take great pleasure in declaring the exhibition open – and that, too, is a performative.

GLOVER PRIZE 2012

The annual Glover Prize, Australia's richest landscape painting award, has been hung and won for the 12th time, and possibly with a touch more controversy than usual. ('Martin Bryant painting wins Glover Prize' ) The small frissons occurring over the selection of Josh Foley's 2011 winner, Gee's Lookout (public obsession over Foley's palette and gestural form over-riding his almost-impeccable use of picturesque principles) and Ian Waldron's 2010 Walach Dhaarr (Cockle Creek) (with its indigenous context that some found unsettling or only tenuously connected to the Glover ethos) built on the twitter of concern regarding the urban subject matter of Matthew Armstrong's Transformed at night (2009).

Rodney Pople's Port Arthur (oil and archival pigment on linen, 90x134) was sure to stir the possum rather more than these previous winners. Pople has a long history of visual agitation while staying just within the bounds of the subject of a prize or exhibition (see, for example, his Highly Commended Blake Prize entry of 2010) so no surprise there. He stated (Saturday Age, 10 March 2012, 7) that if the Glover painting caused pain, 'So it should. You can't exonerate what goes on there', citing Port Arthur as the site of violence to Aborigines, convicts and Martin Bryant's 1996 massacre of 35 workers and tourists. It is the inclusion of the small figure of Bryant in this current work that is causing the disquiet voiced in the media. Curator Jane Deeth has rightly commented that the media has rapidly moved to misrepresent the work, by enlarging or concentrating on Bryant's small figure, rather than the painting as a whole or, for that matter, the painting as a painting. (Examiner 12 March, 2012, 3)

My own disquiet in viewing Pople's work is not that it is a bad painting - it isn't. Nor am I overly concerned about the presence in the image of Bryant - at least on one level, and considering that Glover himself included in his own works the convicted going about their business, albeit not the business that got them into their situation in the first place  (My Harvest Home, with its convict labourers being a case in point). It is, rather, that this would seem to be a genre painting rather than a landscape in the strict sense of that term. My first reaction at seeing the work was to its atmospheric connections not to Glover but to another work that combines reportage and description with Gothic allegory, and that is the painting usually attributed to Thomas Watling, A Direct North View of Sydney Cove, the Chief British Settlement in New South Wales, As It Appeared in 1794, Being the 7th Year of its Establishment Painted Immediately from Nature by T Watling  (Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales. See image on National Treasures). Unlike Glover, Watling was not enamoured with the picturesque possibilities of the colonial landscape. Whereas Glover simply compressed or extended the encountered environment of Tasmania to create good (aesthetic) effect, Watling rather peevishly selected from what he saw as an impoverished catalogue of features from which to assemble his views. (See DAAO for more on Watling) His view of Sydney Cove combines figures, landscape and built environment. It is a contrivance, juxtaposing symbols of a morally-questionable society with settlement spruced-up for 'home' consumption at the behest of those in power. The already-displaced Aboriginals appear as shadows in their own land, and those Europeans shown turn their attention away from subject view. In its assemblage of multiple elements of a singular cultural view, Pople's painting, as Watling's, is a genre or subject image (see the description of the Sulman Prize, which Pople won in 2008), rather than landscape, no matter that both employ refined pictureque arrangement to carry a narrative on aesthetic (and hence moral) terms.

As Pople commented in the Saturday Age interview, Port Arthur reminded him of Nazi concentration camps he recently visited, in its connections to violence against specific groups. And this is where another niggle occurs, one that is to me almost more disquieting than the presence of Bryant. Port Arthur, as painted by Pople, is clearly the Disneyfied tourist conglomeration it is now. It is history commodified, pruned and pristine. That is the shock. It is the same shock some of us might have had when visiting a concentration camp such as Birkenau. It's a space that feels empty, almost abandoned of meaning, yet is endlessly open to imaging: Birkenau presents perspectives of barracks, of guard towers, of railway lines to the gas chambers which are impossible not to take in, to gaze upon. We cannot turn our backs as do the figures in Watling's View.  It is the shock of Auschwitz, beyond the souvenir stand in the car park, the introductory documentary film and the volunteer guide's spiel, when you encounter the warm brick of the buildings, the gracious avenues of trees, the Commandant's villa and swimming pool in sight beyond the walls. The order of the place - be it touristic concentration camp or convict gaol - is what makes the experience strange and estranged. The history is in your head, not in front of you. What should be emblematic of social chaos has gone cold. Even the presence of Bryant, an image Pople sourced from the media, contributes to the calculated juxtapositions that make up this painting. This is what I find most disturbing in this year's Glover Prize winner.

Someone in the crowd of exhibition viewers on Sunday morning commented that the Glover was becoming rather like the Archibald - more a headline than an art exhibition. Well, that's what prize exhibitions should do - generate interest and debate. In an editorial, Martin Gilmour commented (Sunday Examiner 11 March 2012, 26) that, 'The judges' decision this year is sure to broaden the reputation of the Glover Art Prize. Whether that reputation is enhanced or not is debatable'. Of course, by this Mr Gilmour means that the reputation of the Prize is not enhanced at all, at least in his eyes. But, if we move beyond the cliche, he's inadvertently right about one thing -- the essence of this work and the prize awarded it, is debatable, in that it should be debated. It's art, after all.

VERNACULAR CHAIRS

First it was just the fascination of seeing makers turning out beautiful and useful furnishings using "horizontal", the tough, impenetrable and ubiquitous scrub of West Coast Tasmania. (See particularly the work of David Ralph in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) Then it was locating the fine and beautiful Jimmy Possum chair, an early 20th century regional expression of -- almost certainly -- earlier English models such as the Windsor, and most closely associated with the farming, trapping and timber country around what later became Tasmani'a "craft capital", Deloraine. Just between these two examples can be seen an ongoing vernacular tradition in Tasmanian craft demonstrating clearly the impress of both colonialism and the natural environment on contemporary making. If you can find a copy, look at the catalogue of an exhibition at the Tasmanian School of Art in September 1978: Chairs - made by Tasmanian bush carpenters during the 19th and early 20th century. The result of a research project by then-students Michael McWilliams, Mary Dufour, Jenny Sharp and Adam Thorp, this publication remains the most complete published record of these wonderful remnants of innovative everyday furnishings.

JIMMY POSSUM CHAIR, DELORAINE, TASMANIA

National Gallery of Australia