We need to see a doctor. We were feeling distinctly unwell after seeing the Sulman Prize and have had a persistent headache for nearly a week. We always like this bizarre competition for “genre painting’ (read: ‘anything you like award’) and the crazy, mixed bag of works you get depending on who the judge is. This year Mike Parr did the choosing and it’s a wild ride of madness, badness, down right crapness and the occasional gem.
The headache was induced, we think, by the works and by the hang. It’s like seeing a really low budget horror film where you get the sensation that your brain is in a vice, but it’s a rare experience to see this kind of thing in a gallery. It seemed obvious to us that rather than a selection of the ‘best’ works in some quasi-objective sense, Parr had gone out on a limb and chosen a bunch of works that appealed to him for his very own personal reasons.
We have very little to say about the winner, Sandro Nocentini’s My Son Hast Two Mothers, except that we think it is a terrible painting on many levels, yet it has its own weird integrity and sincerity that’s hard to fault. Hung next to Joanna Braithwaite’s Fowl Relatives – 2005 – a big oval painting of three chickens – and Helen Farthing’s Merging of Families – it’s clear that this eclectic take on sequencing of works is as much an art work in itself as it is a selection of finalists in a competition with very vague guidelines.
There were works we liked without reservation – Nana Ohnesorge’s Loaded – that featured two disembodied heads floating over a black tree – Mathew Bell’s mammoth The Dog Walker which is just bursting with energy – Alan Jones’s Head And Grey Field which is self explanatory – and there were others we found frightening; Faye Gabriel’s Sunday Morning reminds us of so many other bad, Op Shop bound works that its depiction of space aliens having a commune on the Lord’s day made us break out into a cold sweat.
The remarkable thing about Parr’s selection and hang is that it takes the whole experience out of a greatest hits setting and into a unified aesthetic experience which is unique among the five competition shows currently on at the Art Gallery of NSW. We pondered why exactly Parr did it this way. Instead of just speculating, we decided to ask the man himself and arranged an interview. Wary at first, we convinced Parr we were bona fide and he responded to our email questions with a startling promptness and generosity…
