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

ITERATION: AGAIN (and again and again ...)

Iteration: Again is a series of thirteen commissioned public art works taking place across Tasmania over the four weeks from 18 September to 15 October. The whole shebang is produced by CAST, with curatorial overview by New Zealander David Cross. A swag of local and international artists have  been brought together by seven further curators to create events and placements around Hobart, Launceston and a number of points in between.

At a curatorial conversation at Sawtooth ARI, Launceston, on 22 September, Cross outlined the project, identifying his interest in commissioned temporary public art. The curatorial brief was based around playing with ideas of duration and time, with thinking about public art through the framework of time in particular ways. Stories, chapters, iterations, cycles came into play, along with the opportunity to include performative, live dimensions to the work. Each work was to be remade, re-iterated, displaced and revived in a series of audience engagements over the term of the project. This allowed for an audience to engage with, and to follow, a work over a number of iterations - typically four 'moments' over the duration of a project, with a significant multi-faceted works creating a series of overlapping termporal frameworks. The specificities of places and their histories were crucial for the curators, with an emphasis on research.

Launceston theatre-based outfit Voice Theatre Lab, led by Robert Lewis, came up with their contribution to the project with Two Houses, curated by Damien Quilliam, Curator of Contemporary Art at the QVMAG. The scene was Civic Square, Launceston, between the brutalist centre of bureaucracy, Henty House, and the centre of early colonial commerce, Macquarie House.

 

The action developed through five performances (two to go at time of writing) references the tale of the two houses of Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets. With Voice Theatre Lab's emphasis on the coalition of movement and sound built around both Buto and Western voice practices, the slow mesmerising action is well-supported by oddly affective non-verbal sound pushing many of the emotional buttons.

  

Rob Lewis, Laura Bishop, Chris Jackson and Shannyn Foon bridge the gap with all the tension the symbolic red tape allows. A sound installation emanating from Macquarie House inhabits the space between the Friday 5.00pm performances.

Two Houses - Voice Theatre Lab

Civic  Square, Launceston
17/9 (noon), 23/9, 30/9, 7/10, 14/10 2011 (5.00pm)

MORE PINEAPPLE, PLEASE

A booklet on the pineapple, specifically in Queensland and in cooking, published somewhere between 1928 and 1940. Good use, in the cover illustration, of the iconic Glass House Mountains to cradle the cornucopia of pineapple; sliced, crushed, reclining decorously. The romance of the pineapple, indeed ...

A question as an aside to the use of the Glass House Mountains in this manner: is there a particular genre of images, largely the stuff of tourist marketing and tourists' snapshots, that is unconscious of any of the varied metaphors the placement of subject against this backdrop may suggest? An example that comes to mind is a photograph by Russell Drysdale of his second wife, Maisie, the image now held in the National Gallery of Victoria. (NGV 1964) Truly a touristic sublime.

TROVE

I've been playing around in Trove, the National Library on-line document "place",  a site of books and newspapers and images, from all over Australia, now delightfully accessible without having to battle brittle microfilm in creaky machines in the library itself. It is an addictive site, an archaeology dig in which you can assemble lists and tags. Totally engrossing for the researcher/editor, particularly so for a proscrastinator, it is possible to spend hours correcting transcriptions from blurred and wrinkled newspapers from across the country. As you correct, you are lulled into the language of the time and place and the idiom of the press: early 20th century  court reports from Cairns and coastal shipping from Cooktown, the "social pages" of post WW2 Sydney.
Today I found in Trove a site I had been looking for in other, more traditional, places (the dreaded microfilm, bound copies of newspapers, card indexes, people's memories and so on) for some time. I had been told that I had the wrong city: all I knew was that the place was named "Eltham" and most of those I spoke too pointed me gently towards Melbourne. But there it was, on the web, a guest house in Hobart, Tasmania, c.1910, run by a woman who once gave a gun to a gentleman astronomer on his way to Port Davey... but that's another story. For me, this place is now real, even though Google Street View has proved its 41 rooms, tennis courts and extensive gardens have given way to a parking lot and a block of offices.
Trove can be found at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/

MAPS WITH A MEMORY (OR TWO)

Maps both topographic and cadastral have always held a fascination for their layering of representations of physical forms with the immateriality of social and political experience. Rather than stemming the flow of memory, or correcting its creative excesses, maps open up longer histories, alternative narratives, secret files.  Parish maps and first grants, road alienations, accretions and erosions, rights of way, subdivisions that existed only on paper, streets that ignored the boggy or precipitous nature of the landscape they appeared to cross, were the things of cadastre. Combined with aerial photography, the satellite data from SPOT and Landsat, and now the voyeuristic probing of Google, mapping generates pasts and futures for otherwise familiar –and sometimes familial – places. As Jay Arthur has written:

A map marks a relationship between the cartographic and a landscape that includes intention, memory, experience, imagination, emotion and the influence of other relationships. To map a place is to be able to hold the place in the mind.

Here naming commemorates past ownerships, formalises old relationships, signifies influence and community standing. Cadastre - the overlaying law of word, line and symbol provides '...an intersection of language and place'.

It is, of course, possible to read the landscape itself (or, as happens here, the landscape as imaged) - in which case each reader extracts the communicating language of their own discourse from what stretches in front of them or lies beneath them: the body of the land: 

Arthur, Jay 2003, The default country: a lexical cartography of twentieth century Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2