What a big week it is. Tracey Moffatt is opening an exciting new show at Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Shaun Gladwell is in another big exciting show at The Australian Centre for Photography celebrating 20 years of art at the gallery and there’s just a few shopping days left before another Biennale of Sydney fades into memory… But what are we worrying about? Brett Whiteley. We know it’s hopeless but we’re finding this late winter melancholy hard to shake, and we think it has something to do with the visit we paid to the Brett Whiteley Studio on the weekend.
We had vowed we would never go back to the BWS, but the trustees have just fixed the roof and they decided to celebrate the fact by opening the doors to all comers. We had been to the BWS once before, late last year, and it had been a sobering experience. We went to have a look at the Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship show after we had seen a jolly little piece on the exhibition of finalists on Ovation. We thought, hey, Brett Whiteley, paintings, let’s get down there! But what a disappointment. If you’ve ever wondered where all those people who graduated from Julian Ashton Art School go to, this is the answer; they’re all entering their chocolate box paintings into the BWTAS and hoping to be sent away overseas where they may sketch the streets of Paris, just like Brett did.
The BWTAS exhibition was really crummy but that wasn’t the reason we had made our vow. What had troubled us was the deep and inescapable sense of sadness you feel inside the studio. Perhaps it was the ignominious junkie’s death, maybe it was the work that was in a serious state of decline in the last decade of his life, we’re not sure, but there is something unsettling in the way the BWS is part gallery and part shrine to the memory of man who was once vital, and then faded away.
A few weeks ago at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in a show called Conversations put together from the gallery’s permanent collection, we saw a Whiteley painting called The American Dream painted between 1968 and 1969 in New York, New York, USA. On the AGWA’s web site the painting is described this way:
“The imagery of the painting moves from a calm landscape on the left-hand side, reminiscent of the Australian interior, through an extraordinary range of images of terror and decadence, frightening electrical storms and vivid mushroom clouds, until it returns to a tranquil, Eden-like landscape again in the right-hand panels. Of the painting Whiteley himself said: ‘This painting is a record of a struggle and my resolve; it is an admission of failure.’”
If Whiteley could have stuck a kitchen sink to the painting – and it felt right – he would have done it. Looking at the massive red painting with its mushroom cloud, stuck on pictures of Bob Dylan, shark’s jaw, old vacuum tubes and a bird and bird’s nest at one end, we began to feel freaked out, the way people in the 1960s used to get “freaked out”. It was a bad trip, man. We had this thought years ago that Whiteley was way better at drawing than he ever was at painting, and looking at the vast dead areas of The American Dream, it’s horrible worked up surfaces and the artist’s love of wishy-washy colours (pale blue, insipid yellows, fading whites), this thought came back to us stronger than ever.
Which, in a circuitous route, brought us back to the BWS to see if we could find something to change that view. So many people have so much invested in Whiteley that we just kept thinking that there must be more to his work than that.
Alchemy (1972-73) is a companion piece to The American Dream and is a much more successful picture. It too is a sprawling psychic self portrait over 18 panels and has numerous massive details (big arse, the word IT, gold leaf, exclamation points) and tiny details (words, photos, drawings) mixed together. It seems to flow a lot better than The American Dream too, but we cannot, however, escape the thought that the work is also horribly dated. Anyone who is sentimental for the mythic past of the 1960s should take a look at this picture to be reminded of the reality – although it was painted in the early 1970s, its hippy concepts are so overwhelming it’s hard to take it seriously.
Even in smaller paintings at the BWS, like the fun pictures Willy Wag Tail from 1988 and Willy wag tail and passion fruit from 1987, there’s a serious sense in the pictures of unbalance. The works are as bold but there’s an uncertainty about them that is worrying. The works that he did in tribute to Van Gogh, ranging from the painting Night Cafe to the ill-advised early 80s series of works with match sticks and sculptures were a terrible misjudgment.
Searching for drawings we found a work from 1965 called Swinging Mickey that is a pretty simple but effective work and an indication that with a pen – even when his references were pretty naff and when he was just getting started – he knew what he was doing. Nuclear Vision of Plain de la Crau (Provence landscape) from 1982, a mixed media work from the 1982 period, and Starry Night, ink on plywood from 1982-83, are exceptions to the general awfulness of the Van Gogh pictures with their startling black and white and precise lines and gestural control.
Contemplating the Self Portrait in the Studio,we felt very uncertain. This is meant to be among the best Whiteley canvases, but the use of the blue, the dodgy references to Van Gogh and Picasso and the nasty ass self portrait – we just kept thinking, this isn’t right. And what can you possibly say about Art, Life and The Other Thing from 1978? Screaming baboon (Frances Bacon reference), syringe stuck on, and that “naughty little boy” look on Whiteley’s face… Ugh.
Upstairs we looked through the Whiteley detritus – his hat collection, his sunglasses lined up next to the CD player, his collection of post cards and clippings stuck to the doors – Bacon in his studio, Bob Dylan about five times, Whiteley with Malcom McLaren – the Heroin Clock sculpture and a telephone on which one can hear two dead men talking, Andrew Olley interviewing Whiteley. Unfortunately the conversation is one way only, so you can’t ask them how the weather is on the other side. Flipping through the photocopied note books on the coffee table we found:
“Absolutely not easier after 10 years of drawing and painting every day, the commencement of another piece or another try at an existing piece is the same unknown blank struggle.”
Eventually the sadness was too much to take and we vowed we would never again visit the Brett Whiteley Studio.
