Up in the Rudy Komon Gallery at the Art Gallery of NSW is Unscripted, a selection of works from the collection [and a few ring ins] that use text in some way. There is a wall blurb that accompanies the show but we can’t remember much about it except that it says “cubist and dada” in lower case, which is odd, since they’re the names of things, proper nouns, and therefore we think it should be Cubist and Dada. Think about it. OK. Like, imagine, world war two in lower case. It doesn’t feel right or respectful to the memory of the diggers who fought and died for the upper case recognition of capital A australia. Some have said that Unscripted is somehow ‘not good enough’ – that a museum show has a responsibility to be encyclopedic and complete every time the gallery opens its doors, which is hogwash, since this is work mostly from the collection done on a budget and it’s like rearranging the furniture in your house. You might invite people over to have a look at the new arrangement and say, do you like the way we’ve moved the TV over there and put the Jason Recliner near the door, creating a kind of faux passageway? On that basis, yeah, we liked it.
As one customs dog said to the other, we’re really beginning to like the smell of this cocaine! Woof!
Rosalie Gascoigne, Metropolis, 1999. Retro-reflective road signs, 232 x 319.7 x 1.6cm.
You know the general consensus about Rosalie Gascoigne is that she was a landscape artist, right? Her collage material was sourced from the landscape and she arranged her works like landscapes so the next thing you know Stephen Fennelly is badgering the old lady into admitting it on TV. Finally, uncomfortable, she says “I suppose so” and instead of a radical experiment in collage [with interesting connections to theories of the way matter is distributed in the universe courtesy of the influence of astrophysics], we have a rather mundane landscape art. That’s disappointing since there’s so much more there but it’s what the punters can handle, see, so let’s call Gascoigne’s work decorative text. Her Metropolis from ‘99 is very pretty indeed. Mike Parr’s Language and Chaos III from 1990 has lines of text over fragments of self portraiture. Colour does not normally seem to be a big part of Parr’s work but this piece on multiple sheets of paper, with its charcoal black lines and snaky, indecipherable hand scrawl, was very pleasing to the eye. Saying that Parr’s work has decorative elements seems like sacrilege but then so is Imants Tillers’ work. Victory Over Death (For Paul Taylor) quotes from Colin McCahon’s Victory Over Death and eulogises the late Art & Text editor, which is all fine and good, but does anyone have enough energy to summon anything resembling interest when it comes to Tillers work anymore? We just blank it out now and enjoy the colour and shapes.
No one could accuse Ian Burn of having made decorative text. His work is old school conceptual stuff with the chocks pulled out and the wind blowing in your hair; three naïve landscapes each with text painted over the top – “Artists think”, “Artists think with” “Artists think with their eyes open.” It makes us wish we hadn’t thrown away our Art & Language membership cards, to wit, a man goes into a bar with a duck under his arm, the Bartender says, “What’ll the pig have?” The man says, “That’s not a pig, that’s a duck!” “I know,” says the bartender, “I was talking to the duck.”
In a similar spirit of never-say-die, Peter Tyndall has a work from ‘95 in the show [and weirdly the majority of the works in the show are from the early to mid 90s] called detail: A Person Looks at A Work of Art/Someone Looks at Something. We respect the hard line ethos of Tyndall and the way he has managed to brow beat museums into making sure that his title cards follow exactly his specifications (layout, font, ordering) and thus furthering the purity of the conceptual gambit: detail (it’s only part of the ongoing project) A Person (that’s us, the viewers, individually) Looks At A Work of Art (we are looking at a work of art, an object) Someone Looks At Something (yet the specificity of the named [us, the viewers] is called into question as is the specificity of the artwork [relieved of its special status as an object different to any other quotidian object not so named as ‘art’]). Every time we see a work by Tyndall our brains start to boil partly because his work has the effect of throwing us back in time to 1983, sitting in our parent’s living room smoking our mother’s Escort’s, listening to the Jane Cessna & Essendon Airport LP while flipping through a copy of Art & Text, the one with the candy bar on the cover, while having a lazy wank on the sofa, and partly because the Dick and Jane conceptualism bores the crap out of us. God, they weren’t the days, and they still aren’t.
Looking at Robert McPherson’s work from 1999, Mayfair: Summer farm, forty five signs for Micky Monsour, is like taking a dip in cool water after the hard dusty work of the rest of the show. MacPherson’s use of text and image is masterful, casually building up the relationships between the idiomatic use of half words, numbers and images in a colloquial pictographic language. The black and white egg shapes, the flow of arrows and the up and down arrangement of the words keeps the eye flowing back and forth over the work and its sheer visual pleasure is equaled by the artist’s deftly subtle approach. Perhaps disappearing under too much subtlety is Simryn Gill’s Forest, 1996-98, eight panels of photographs of a forest. We tried everything – matching the number of panels with the names of the plants, the bananas, the palms, making up an acrostic from the artist’s name, her gallery – but we’re pretty sure that there are no words or text in this work. [We hasten to add that after the Zina Kaye incident two weeks ago, we acknowledge there may be words hidden in the work, if only we could see them. Emails to the usual address].
Scott Redford is represented by a work called photo: The Pizza Boy from 1995 and the wall label specifies everything in the work – a mirror, clothes, shoes, etc. There’s some motorcycle clothes on the floor, a mirror casually placed against a wall with stickers affixed a la some guy’s bedroom and the words And the motorcycle boy is never coming back painted on the wall. That’s from the movie Rumble Fish and is a piece of graffiti seen on walls that refers to the character played by the once-beautiful-but-now-just-scary Mickey Rourke. We like pizza and our favourite pie is called L’Inferno and you can get it from Danny’s La Bussola on Victoria Street in Darlinghurst. It’s very spicy. We’re not sure if they do have home delivery, oh, and if you ring up and say “do you have mushroom pizza?” and they say “no” it’s because the guy on the phone doesn’t know that a champignon and a mushroom is one and the same thing. That’s the tricky thing about words – meaning – and the tricky thing about art by Scott Redford, and the artist as well, is that we’re scared of him, ok, and we fear using the wrong words because he’ll ring you up, or send you an email, or leave a comment, and then you’re fucked, ok? OK?
Kate Benyon is an artist whose work we have only seen in magazines and many fine art writers whose opinions we respect think very highly of her work. 100 Forms of Happiness is a work comprised of chenille sticks bent and shaped in the form of Chinese characters that apparently all mean a type of “happiness”. The white sticks are arranged on a big black rectangle that serves as the background for the words – or calligraphic shapes – and the sculptural objects become highlighted as you get closer, the background disappearing and the whole art work starting to look like some random pipe cleaners bent in funny shapes. Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, something, something, blah, blah, blah. [Look, it’s Chinese so we’re just taking it on trust – for all we know the whole thing could be just made up].
Speaking of proper nouns, as we were, we are sad that so few people in Australia know that the name “Gordon Bennett” is an exclamation of disbelief in the UK. Like someone in Australia might say “Fuck a duck!” someone in England would exasperate “Gordon Bennett!” From the point of view of the signified, how apt, we think. Gordon Bennett’s Notes To Basquiat Series have never convinced us. From the point view of painting, the works are incredibly poor in comparison to Basquiat, who knew something about texture, and in comparison to Basquiat’s use of text, Bennett’s paintings are faint echoes of something far better. As to how they work as an Indigenous artist appropriating African American content and identity, apparently subverting them into a commentary on black Australian identity – we just don’t know.
Adam Cullen, bad boy? Look, just forget about it alright? There’s no badness here. There is no badness. Here, there is no badness. We read an old review of a Cullen show from 1999 recently and the writer was trying to reconcile what Cullen had done in the show with the received-via-the-media preconception the writer already had about who the artist thought he was. Talk about tortured. “You don’t live up to my expectation of who I thought you thought you were so therefore you failed.” [Or indeed, as some readers of this blog have exclaimed, supposedly living up to the so-called reputation, and then sighing in exasperation ‘I told you so!’] Get over it and just use your eyes. In Unscripted the AGNSW has Anything I Say Or Do, from 2001 and it’s a classic Cullen – big heads, devil face, dismembered torso, a splodge of paint. And text: ANYTHING I SAY OR DO WILL BE HELD AGAINST YOU, A CORRECTIVE SERVICE and best of all STILL BORN STILL BORN IN AUSTRALIA. As an aphorist, Cullen is hard to beat and his supple and punning use of text puts the lie to the whole unthinking bad boy concept. He’s just too smart. In terms of the composition too, there’s a lot there – from the way he combines illusionistic three dimensional space with 2D drawing space, the precarious and wrong looking balance between the forms and the resolve the whole work has and then there’s the way the subject of the art fits so perfectly with the medium. If you’re still not convinced you’re beyond help.
Mikala Dwyer has nice piece of furniture in the show, Peter Kennedy has a very large piece that drains a lot of wattage powering fluro tubes, Janet Burchill has a saw horse and a painting that goes with it and Matthew Jones spent ages copying by hand an edition of the New York Daily News printed the day before the Stonewall Riots. We note them for the sake of completeness, but we conclude with a piece by Rose Nolan (who we now acknowledge is not a pseudonym for Robert MacPherson but a different person entirely). Help Me To Do Things Better (2003) is two rows of six pennants, red lettering on white. The top row reads like this [you’ll have to turn your head on its left side to see what it looks like hanging in the gallery]:
Better
Things
Do
To
Me
Help
The second row looks like this:
Things
Better
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You can see why we confused her work with MacPherson can’t you? It’s so incredibly simple yet so effective.
