In the 1980s Post Modernism arrived in the art world with a cool rush. Finally there was a salvation from the oppressive expressionism of Australian painting and the absurdly over prescribed dictatorship of the conceptualists. Post Modernism was a third way, a way that allowed artists to conjure up personal histories regardless of boundaries and nationalities, to invoke art history and pop culture in equal measure, to take the forms and appearances of mainstream visual culture and turn it back on itself to create a new narrative of meaning and purpose. Artists were liberator-interrogators in nice suits with big hair and Ray Bans. It was Madonna and Baudrillard, Lacan and RUN DMC, it was the war of images, the super accelerated culture of Speed against the becalmed backwater of Fullerian modernism. If you were young and hip and high on the now, Post Modernism was everything and anything you wanted it to be.
Around 1987-88 the nature of mainstream culture as it had been known since the 1960s began to crack and craze into smaller and smaller groupings, niche cultures began to emerge and, when authenticity itself became a marketed commodity around 1992, it began to seem that the Evil Empire had reinvented itself in new colours, new music and new attitudes. Post Modernist art as it was popularly understood and practiced was more or less over, and artists drifted back towards older forms and styles.
This was an understandable end point for Post Modernism in the visual arts in Australia. When popular culture is perversely accepting and willing to accommodate almost any viable commodity within its market place, it becomes impossible to define oneself in terms of opposition. Instead of huge, culture-altering projects of interrogation and replacement, artists retreated into radically insular cults of the self. In other words, artists began to create niches occupied only by themselves. Market that if you can! The unbelievers in the art world, the classicists and the modernists who had told the Post Modernist kids they were foolish and wrong, welcomed the wayward sons and daughters home again, willing to forgive the last two decades as an aberration. “Let’s go to the Melbourne Art Fair, you and I,” they say, “and we’ll have a drink or two…”
In the art world, no one is much interested in the big picture politics of the image anymore and even fewer seem willing to define their work in terms of ‘projects’. Instead we have a kind of ironic, self aware individualism that, at its best, causally suggests the artists have a room full of secondary texts they could cite if they wanted to, but who can be bothered? At worst, it’s actually not that bad – it’s just more mannerist modernism with nice presentation and cool colours.
In Wollongong at the City Art Gallery at the moment is a show called MEGApixel by an artist who goes by the pseudonym of What. The show is probably one of the most ambitious art projects we have seen in years and that’s not just because What is using oil paints. The artist is going for the conceptual big time and for at least half of the exhibition he/she has been highly successful. The other half of the show isn’t nearly as good but still worth a look if only for seeing an artist who displays an incredible level of aspiration.
Before we discuss What’s art, we were wondering why the artist would use a pseudonym. Why would someone who obviously had put so much work into what they do want to go anonymously behind it? Maybe it’s something to do with the name? According to our dictionary the definition of the word ‘what’ is that it’s “an adj, pronoun – used in questions, indirect questions and statements, identifying or seeking to identify, classify a thing or person”. It would seem then that the artist is using a pseudonym to imply a way of looking at the world, perhaps a critical position shared by more than one person, a community of likeminded individuals. We don’t know for sure why What would use a pseudonym but it’s fun to speculate, isn’t it?
What calls him/herself an “artist in residence” and the world is that residence. The artist has taken on a project of translating the digital world of word and image into the analogue world of paint on canvas. So what does this project look like? The Curator is a massive work made up of 1,600 canvas boards that collectively create the image of a gigantic funnel web spider rearing up on its hind legs. Individually, the canvas boards are meaningless coloured units, analogue pixels that combine to create the greater image. In another work called Instrument for Measuring The Universe, the artist has applied what appears to be thousands upon thousands of blobs of paint, one on the top of the other on canvas, creating small blocks of paint that together create an abstract image reminiscent of a photograph of the background radiation of space. The small units of paint could also be blocks of wood, but whatever they are, the effect is stunning.
The Curator and Instrument for Measuring The Universe are physically huge works and must have taken What years to complete. They are also accompanied by an artist’s statement comprising the first few lines of the song Do You Realize by The Flaming Lips. For those of you not familiar with tune, we’ll sing it for you:
“Do you realize
That you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realize
We’re floating in space?
Do you realize
That happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize
That everyone you know someday will die?”
There is something undeniably crap about artists using pop song lyrics to accompany their work – one generation’s cool song is the next generation’s deep embarrassment.
Another work in What’s show is called Untitled and it is a pixilated map of the world where all the subtleties of the coastlines and national boundaries are rendered in crude blocks. Artist In Residence (the image on the invitation and exhibition poster) is a gasmask rendered at a higher resolution and God, a three panel canvas work that must be 3 meters high. The work is both a stupendously tasteless joke and a massive painting with a cat’s face at the top of the middle canvas. If one were looking for sexual symbolism in the work, one would not need to go much further than God to find a pussy (and vice a versa). We told you it was tasteless.
Tackle is a similarly abstracted image, either of porn or Rugby League players and the last work in the show, Hot Sauce, hammered home the nature of the artist’s project. Accessible only by a staircase and preceded by a warning to visitors that the last work contained adult material, the work itself consisted of a rectangular canvas, one half red, the other half white and was built up using tiny dabs of paint taken from a paint tube rather like icing on a cake. The “adult material” was the words of Rugby League player Mark Gasnier as recorded by a mobile phone back in May during the code’s recent embarrassments:
“Where the fuck are you? There’s four toey humans in the cab… It’s twenty to four. Our cocks are fat and fucking ready to spurt sauce and you’re in bed. Fuck me. Fire up, you sad cunt.”
Gasnier plays for St. George Illawara, the team of the Wollongong area and a club whose red and white colours are well known. The inclusion of the footballer’s words with the work, as well as the inclusion of the Flaming Lips lyrics and yet more text in a warning about the content of the exhibition “catalogue” (in actuality a transcription of a gay male sex phone line), the images and the words worked together to suggest an aesthetic of universal equivalence – if the artist’s project was to render the digital in analogue form, he managed to do it very well, creating a cornucopia of words and colours and fragmented images where no single element was notionally more ‘important’ than any other.
Although What’s project may have been conceptually tight and successful, it also seemed forced and over proscribed. There was little room to move within the project and the smart-arse attitude of the whole show was wearing. One might wonder why What would even dream of undertaking such a massive project when the two paintings The Curator and Instrument for Measuring The Universe would make such handsome additions to any survey show of contemporary painting even with their clever-clever titles and smarty pants “artist’s statements”.
Maybe the uncomfortable impasse of the Australian art world could be broken open with a return to the kind of big artistic projects like the one being undertaken by What. Artists need to be ambitious and make grand gestures. But they also need a level of humility – even ironic humility – to distance themselves from the world. The message is pretty clear – shut up and paint.
