On The 2010 Archibald Prize @ AGNSW

I tend to take a ‘death and taxes’ view of the Archibald Prize, currently on at Sydney’s AGNSW. Complaining about it seems futile, it’s as inevitable as the tides. As with those other two unfortunate afflictions far better to simply offer advice and succour in an attempt to ameliorate the pain it causes.This time it feels pretty grim, the trends toward giganticism, historical pastiche (although there is ONE good pun to be enjoyed) and splashy sanitized street art are all present an incorrect. Perhaps the fact that they’re so predictable only makes them more depressing, if nothing else the whole exercise makes you question the aesthetic judgement of our present generation of commissioning Medici.

It’s curious to see a portrait show in the age of digital reproduction. The rise of photography did not see the demise of painting but, instead, a move away from the illusionistic realism as such a key criteria of quality. The Impressionists were at work as the first plates of silver oxide were being exposed and they are the first group of artists who we recognise from photographic portraits rather than paintings, yet we accept their work as showing a perceived reality. Thus in the age of chemical and digital reproduction our criteria has changed, we ask for images to reveal rather than show. Photographs must capture a moment, and by moment we mean a frozen frame of time that represents so much more, the same must go for painted portraits where we hope that medium and representation offer something that could never otherwise be produced. That's the criterion used here.

We ought to start on a positive, with the winner, Sam Leach’s portrait of 'Tim Minchin'. Leach paints in the intimate cabinet style of the old Dutch Masters but it is his handling of light, both as subject and in the mirror like surfaces of his paintings that makes him extraordinary rather than the, still significant, precision of his painting. Photo-realism damns Leach with faint praise. That is not to denigrate his desegno and brushwork, his compositions are stunning, he makes the shining void a character in his work and he demonstrates how six hundred years of western art tradition is still relevant. Leach shows us that his miniaturist’s skill offers revelation rather than reproduction. His subjects often look uneasy, perhaps Leach’s method reminds them of the old Dutch vanitas, and brings intimations of mortality and posterity. He seems to capture living people resistant at being caught in his varnished surfaces and in doing so creates something more soulful than clever.

The piece that has stayed with me most persistently is James Money’s portrait of 'The Lord Mayor of Melbourne'. It’s not huge, it’s not flashy but it is beautiful and creates very human spectacle. The slight flattening and the geometric rigidity of the collar and tie give a hint of John Brack, but they also show give a basis for contrast, their formality, both sartorially and aesthetically, opens us the possibility of the big head atop them to appear ever so subtly alive. Money’s technique, where he has scraped away at the surface so it almost appears to be tattooed into the red earth ground, is impeccably matched to the subject. Like Melbourne’s architecture there is a sombre nineteenth century alderman quality to the surface, but you also become aware how smart and stylized it is (again you might remind yourself of John Brack). In every way Money has captured the balance between office holder and human being perfectly.

I would contrast this to some of the other ‘great and good’ portraits here. They range from the merely prosaic like Yang Li’s ‘Bishop Elliot’ or Peter Smeeth’s ‘Peter Fitzsimons’ to, a popular Archibald genre, the comic symbolic. The best representation of the latter here is Alexander McKenzie’s ‘Andrew Upton’ which is as cartoonish and heavy handed as Upton’s translations are cloth eared. If one painting symbolizes that Archibald tendency to wear references heavily but smugly it’s Giles Alexander’s ‘The Alternative Ambassadors (Professors Ross Garnaut and Martin Gree)'. I don’t mind a spot of historical appropriation but this is so witless that it steps into the realms of those pastiche Wild West photos you can dress up for. In picking Holbein’s masterpiece Alexander has taken on a painting full of mystery and replaced it with a series of glib references. It’s a classic ‘secret stupid’ painting, not seeming to understand that there is a difference between using a symbolic system to denote an object or a quality and using a small image of that object itself. I find it difficult to describe just how irritating I found this smug middlebrow mess.

There is always a thread of artists painting one another in the show and at least there are two interesting examples here. Rodney Pople, always refreshingly off kilter, is fairly traditional but darkly seductive in his triptych of Stelarc, the body modifier-cum artist. Pople’s blurring of photography and painting echoes Stelarc’s blurring of the body as organism and art medium and he gives the artist a kind of film noir intensity. I like the dramatic vitality of Pople’s work and here he raises the question of the difference between man and performance and personae through the different panels. That the question is never resolved actually makes it more interesting than Stelarc’s work. Another case of a portraitist outdoing his subject is Nigel Milsom’s portrait of Adam Cullen. The full length work picks out a figure in tones of black and gives him hints of Picasso, German Expressionism and even a hint of mystery play. Milsom creates a theatrical image that might have come from the salon of an early Twentieth Century actor, it captures the idea of artist as celebrity and plays at a knowingly symbolic level. It’s much more interesting than Cullen’s own entry, a typically drippy cartoon.

There are some more bravura stylistic experiments here that appear to sneak in by way of apology from the judges. The high shine abstraction of 'I wake up with TODAY!' by Shane Bowden and Dean Reilly, looks calculated to shock, whilst it is striking, a massive mirror varnished black panel is broken by multi-coloured lines that hint at human chins. It's hard to say what, if anything, it's trying to do with the idea of the portrait, it isn't that daring just opaque and seems to be a triumph of style over subject. While that's confusing Marc De Jong's 'Janice Petersen' just looks confused. There's a convergence of ideas here that never quite works out, the paintings surface is either pointillist or pixellated, depending on your bent, makes one remember television when of an older, lower resolution, past. The subject, a newsreader at work, is painted as if the lights and cameras were between us and her. The painting has a hugely self conscious composition that's dominated by a big black clump of TV camera, one imagines that it is supposed to say something about being behind the scenes, or surface and reality. All of these odd alienating effects add up to far less than the sum of their parts.

There are sometimes small treasures to be found in these shows, tucked away in a corner one of these is Khue Nguyen's 'Unleashed'. So modest in size and palette this watercolour self-portrait undoes much of the clumsiness elsewhere. An obvious precursor is Arcimboldo whose puzzle portraits of men created from fruits, fish and flesh were commissioned for renaissance monarchs. Nguyen bleeds a symbolic octopus into his face, and almost camouflages himself. That puzzle set within a side-on portrait also reminds us of Titian's 'Allegory of Prudence' but here none of these references are highlighted or screamed. The overall of feel of the piece is that of a faded document, as though Nguyen were unearthing his own history and using the form of the portrait to understand who he is.

The fact of the Archibald being a portrait prize concerned with prominent Australians (as opposed to all those other Australians who commission painters to do portraits of them) is problematic where it ought to be enlightening. At present the galleries are filled with ‘ooh’s and ‘aaah’s as people recognise subjects and consider the veracity of the representation. Imagine though (and this would take imagination, first of all, amongst the judging panel) an annual review of the art of the portrait, of its conventions, discontents and possibilities. That would be worth queuing up for.

On Sam Leach @ Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art

I have a weakness for the work of Sam Leach. His exquisitely crafted paintings are small chamber pieces of skill and concep. Their technical accomplishment and almost anachronistic naturalism lifts their conceptual questions to something far more poetic than most glib post-modern juxtapositions. His current show "The Next Billion Years" at Sullivan + Strumpf in Paddington blurs the line between machine and organism, whilst being perfectly clear in every other sense. Again and again nature sits, almost existentially, on the edge of an infinite silky blackness and its gaze back at us forms a series of questions.

When Leach is described as creating a pastiche of classic Dutch still life painting he is being damned by faint praise. What he actually does is approach the exquisite craft of that style of painting, which is more than the simple borrowing of tropes and reference. The technical virtuosity of this work is key to its success. Leach is able to create odd contradictions between surface and form precisely because he paints so well. To see the stealth fighter surfaces rendered in a feather light texture, that sensory disorientation, is exactly why these works are so powerful at a physical as well as conceptual level. These are much more than visual tricks, there are layers of ambiguity here, mirrors, shadows and echoes, that are realised through acute but restrained illusionistic detail, as a result they seduce and hint rather than harangue and smirk.

It is entirely right that Leach should choose Dutch still life as model to explore contradiction. The tension between the cornucopia of gold plate and hanging game is set at a counterpoint against human skulls in the classic 'vanitas', a mortal reminder. It's worth remembering that the original genre thrived just as the Dutch, with their East India Company, were at the crest of the first great wave of mercantile globalization and asking familiar questions about material success and spiritual sacrifice.

Leach's pictures demand to be seen in the flesh. His technique involves finishing each with a thick layer of perfectly clear gloss varnish. This has the effect of capturing light, each shines like a dark pool in moonligh. More disconcerting is the mirror like effect that this achieves, in the darker paintings one sees oneself. This is most evident in the, largely, monochrome paintings of scenes from an observatory or laborator. These might be frames from 1950s corporate documentaries, the scientists and technicians look just like scientists and technicians ought to. We see 'Something Very Important' happening, although we don't know what. At the same time we see ourselves reflected and that is an unsettling experience, we might be observing the observers as they plot a course for our future, but they're sealed securely on the other side of the resin and will never know.

Detail is supposed to be the home to both genius and the devil. Leach might render each hair and feather with prefect precision but he also allows darker more unsettling hints to intrude. This is nowhere more apparent than in 'Bigger Incision' where a pair of playtpus appear, at first sight, to be laughing almost anthropomorphically, one telling a joke, the other rolling on the floor. But the prone platypus has a slash cut through the pelt on it's belly, in the blackness a smear of red might be blood is the word 'animus', hinting at the malice in the garden or Jung's notion of the inner spirit that complements our persona and sits at the heart of creativity. The scene is all the more sinister for a hint of red dot in the eye of the standing platypus, a 'Terminator' marsupial.

In 'Butterfly Viewer' and 'Simulator' butterflies seem to provide the perfect symbol for something as light and unruly as magic or the human spirit. The specks of coloured pigment don't belong, they are like ghosts that crept into the machine before it was hermetically sealed, they might move beneath the glaze. That element of the random and wild looks very much like a sign of hope.

I was reminded very much of the myth of Icarus throughout this exhibition. Just as each morphing bird is reminiscent of the hanging bounty of Dutch game it is also, wings folded, plummeting to the earth. Icarus is the mythological predecessor to all of our scientists and inventors, his tale is one of hubris, it reminds us that we ought to keep sight of the earth even as we soar to the skies. The best known artistic rendition of Icarus is that of Pieter Bruegel, in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, there we think of man and the futility of the Greek's endeavour, now we feel that it is just as likely to end in collateral damage as an unheard splash.

There is a crystalline logic to Sam Leach's jewel like paintings, even occasionally to the point off feeling cold and forensic, that feels like intellectual enquiry in paint. Given his sheer level of technical ability these are remarkably restrained pieces, their modesty giving them gravity, but they are multi facetted and should be treasured as they reward viewing and contemplation in manifold ways.

On The Archibald Prize

There's a certain pleasure in the Archibald Prize, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  Like a second hand bookshop or the internet if we search through an awful lot of dross hard enough we might find the pearls that lie within.  The problem with the Archibald is always its attempt to resolve the artistic merit of individual works with the crowd-grabbing celebrity of the sitters.  The prize describes itself as  being for "Best portrait painting preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics" (sic).  That pretty much describes anyone who has hung around a gallery, can pay for a portrait or can paint themselves whilst looking in a mirror.

Some of the works here are wonderful and unexpected.  Sam Leach has produced a jewel like cabinet piece amidst all the acres of portentous canvass.  His portrait of Marcia Langton alludes to the classical, the Golden Fleece and Cain and Abel are all in there, but his real connection is through technique rather than aesthetic of reference.  Leach fetishises oil paint, and his love of seventeenth century Dutch virtuosity is worn proudly but lightly on the canvass.  He produces a luminous blackness perfectly in tune with his subject.  The quiet ambiguity of the piece, its hint of memento mori, lead us into the truth of portraiture, we can never know someone too well, we can only hope to capture the hints of what we don't know.  The depth lent to Leach's work through this beautifully realised ambiguity is entirely different to the glib paradox and oxymoron of so much post-modern art and is both sincere and powerful.

Surprisingly interesting, given that it represents a politician and a cause, is Richard Onn's 'Coupe SX010F', a canvass triptych of Bob Brown.  Here the Tasmanian Green Senator is presented mock heroically, standing in cruciform tension between the forces of industry and nature.  There is a lovely contrast between tree and logging truck, between bark and chrome.  At the same time Brown's face, despite being a little overpainted to the point of appearing airbrushed, could be an old growth forest topography.  The work is a classical portrait in the history painting mode.

What does strike you more than anything is the sheer size of much of the work, close cropped heads that would cover the wall of most rooms outside of a gallery.  These massive portraits, near billboard size, remind us of the debt of painting to photography.  They give themselves up immediately and cheaply, each broad expressionist stroke and smudge.  Across most of the works any sense of human scale has been well and truly lost, even the winner Guy Maestri's 'Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu' looks like a monumental Easter Island statue, hinting at his album cover rather than what we don't know or haven't seen.  This trend to massive overpowering faces is self-aggrandizing portraiture rather than revelation.  However one large scale painting that does make a virtue out of size is 'Mountain of Tom',  by Paul Ryan, the pink tremulous screeds of paint capture and bubble with Thomas Kenneally's exuberant fleshiness.

There is some really bad painting to be seen here.  Work that is both technically sloppy, conceptually asinine and desperately derivative.  Some deserve to be highlighted.  Anthony Bennett can stand for all of the painters in the show who use the magazine clichés of street art dripping, blotting and scribbling.  His eminently stupid picture, 'self portrait in the bathroom discussing beauty, bukowski, and brett whitely with my ex, now a stripper, who likes to dress as wonder woman'  does at least give us a chance to avoid it, that is if we subscribe, as I do, to the rule that the length of a painting's title is likely to be inversely proportionate to its quality.  Bennett's trendy bag of fauxhemian references would make a Year Twelve student ashamed, just as he takes pastiche and derivativeness to a previously forgotten level.   He really doesn't deserve the encouragement that inclusion might give him.

Poster boy for photo-realist kitsch is 'Brendan' by Vincent Fantauzzo.  The portrait has that level of realism that leads us to 'the uncanny valley' (Masahiro Mori's hypothesis that increased 'realism' in computer representations of humans causes revulsion in onlookers).  So shiny is it that it feels sacharine and calculated, not a good look for a young boy.

In the realm of painterly self-portraits Robert Hannaford's stands out in its restraint, human scale and stoic sensitivity.  It's hung close to Peter Hanley's hommage to Titian, the original is, perhaps, the apogee of an  artist's self portrait and the hubris in copying something that Rembrandt has already copied (as have so many artists) does win points for bravery.  Sadly the painting is a little too aware of its own limitations and is neither brilliant enough in technique or bravura enough in conception to be more than dull.

This year the Packing Room Prize was closer to getting it right.  'Flacco's Chariot', by Paul Jackosn, is an interesting painting about someone of whom I know little.  I see an ageing man perhaps clinging to a character who has taken him into the public domain.  On the framing walls behind the sitter are an oil sketch and a shadow, the genesis and exodus of a dramatic personae.  Out of the shadow, and a cartoon mousehole on the skirting board, come mice, gnawing away at the chair legs.  It's a surprisingly beautiful and melancholic work that rewards viewing.

That the Archibald should attract round the block queues is an unalloyed good thing.  Bringing more people into a gallery is not a victory in and of itself, we ought to be more ambitious than that.  A wider public should also place a further pressure on the judges and the gallery, this is an opportunity to educate (an unpopular word, I know), not just a popularity contest, and more could be achieved with hanging and glossing the pictures.  At present we get some artist blurb and a biography.  If the judges were confident in their choices they could begin to explain why some of these works deserve inclusion or perhaps explain the artistic merit of pieces, you only have to look and listen how people absorb and discuss the information there now.  Tens of thousands of people arrive in the Domain in nothing like the supine philistine state the art establishment often ascribe to them, a real legacy for the Archibald would be to give them even more of what they want, not celebrity, but art.