The Word

TAL: What’s the actual set up for judging – do you walk around a big room and look at a bunch of art works or – as we were once told – you sit in a chair and they have the works brought to you? Do they give you coffee or tea or something stronger?

MP: No stimulants apart from the dubious effect of the art. I did it standing as 623 works were filed past me one by one, managed by a team of gallery assistants.

TAL: What are the guidelines (if any) for judging the Sulman? Are you advised or left to your own devices as to what constitutes a finalist?

MP: I was left to my own devices, though from time to time I thought I detected consternation in the background. I selected the works to be hung [determined by the space allocated], installed them in the space and selected the winner and two works for “special mention”.

TAL: Who was in the background? It sounds a very intimidating way to judge an award.

MP: Not at all. I expect this slight institutional texture otherwise the process has no grip.

TAL: The two rooms have very different feels. Was there anything specific you were going for – for example, the big chickens next to the winning painting and its ducks and the still life to the right?

MP: The works allocated to each wall were intended to set up a disjunctive communality or alternatively I was attracted to the faint absurdity of some connections or the way in which styles dilated in relation to one another. I particularly enjoyed the chickens [Fowl Relatives] and the small still life [Merging of Families] alongside Sandro Nocentini’s painting [My Son has two Mothers]. All three works are a little auto-hypnotic. It’s a kind of naivety that I think is important. The agrarian Socialism was an obvious bonus.

TAL: One of the things that seems fairly obvious in the selection this year is that notions of what people might call ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art have not been a consideration. Did you have a conscious idea about the kinds of work you were selecting or did you go on a more ‘gut feeling’ reaction?

MP: I selected the works that interested me in the following way. I did not want to know the names of any of the artists during the process of selecting pieces. I wanted to hear the title, which was read out as the work was carried into view and I looked at the work with the title in mind. I wasn’t interested in seductive, “well painted” lyrical abstraction or astonishingly painted realism, if the title indicated that it was naively literal, or sentimentally poetic. I chose works that had a stimulating gap between the title and what was on painterly show [the great preponderance of works were paintings]. A new kind of contemporary painting is in the process of emerging again in Europe. I saw a lot of this stuff late last year. It was interesting for me, because I realized that the conceptual painting [it got its run here mistakenly as “Neo-Expressionism”] of the 1980’s was re-emerging in a much more sophisticated guise. The stuff on offer at this year’s Sulman wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but some of it [the work I selected] indicated a kind of doubt or awareness of the double nature of the painted image, as referent and as style. I wanted to amplify this attempt to think about painting as doubly inflected, because painting is uninteresting now, unless it shows the impact of Conceptual art and I wanted to affirm a tendency that seemed to be latent to Australian painting in an original way.

TAL: Were you aware that two of the artists you selected are very well known as designers of t-shirts? It’s interesting that Paul Worstead, for example, combines a very heavily self aware irony with a faux-naivety that’s kind of Glen Baxter meets the People’s Liberation Army?

MP: I remember Paul Worstead from the Tin Sheds about 35 years ago [I think] so that sounds right. Designing T-shirts seems like exemplary tutelage to me!

TAL: Can you describe the work you saw in Europe – is it an overtly conceptual practice?

MP: In Paris youngish painters like Agnes Thurnauer, Olav Christopher Jenssen [pale, washy, sketchlike painting, text, weak amoeba like drawing… looser more uncertain than someone like Luc Tuymans], Frank Nitsche, Albert Oehlen, Sylvie Fonchon, Pierre Dunoyer [a strange, ironical sort of Neo-Tachism], Daniel Richter [political Expressionism, garish with a clever minus factor], Scheibitz, Doig, Magnus von Plessen. Deadpan figuration to von Plessen’s large squeegee or pallet knife paintings. Dirty yellow under painting, black wiped down [mechanical nature of gesture very important] scraped back with crude drawn in motif. Tachiste plethora of mechanical marks around a gawky self portrait etc. John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Bernard Frize, etc teamed up with more first order oldies like Francois Rouan, Kiefer [“The Secret Life of Plants”- considerable shift], Soulages [very interesting again, sort of Tachist Minimalism], Lavier & Morellet, Joel Kermarrel, Toroni, Boetti, Martin Barre etc, etc. Tip of the iceberg! I could do this for 20 European museums in as many cities. The point is a tremendous transvaluation of style under the sign of irony, plus or minus “profound” psychological instability of representation. The Sulman extracts from the local smorgasbord a tentative reconcepting. I’m interested in what artists stumble onto rather than programmatic intention. That always goes wrong in the provinces.

TAL: In previous years you could tell that the judge of the Sulman favoured a certain kind of art. Last year, for example, there was a roll call of familiar names. This year there are very few ‘names’ and a lot of unknown artists. Was this a statement of some kind on your part?

MP: As luck would have it [though perhaps the tendency of this show is more explicable than just luck] the painters I chose all turned out to be, with one or two exceptions, artists I don’t know. This seemed to vindicate my method. I am not interested in endorsing the authority of one style of painting, because Australian painting is often very provincial and “abstract” art of the lyrical kind, or Neo-Geo quickly degenerates into a dogma of closed formulas, so that ostensibly good art becomes self evidently bad… at least from my perspective.

TAL: Does that then mean bad art can also become good??

MP: I think it’s the curator’s role to establish a vantage point. Art, good or bad, is always on the point of going belly up. That is the dialectic of style. Anxiety of influence means that all art positions here are over defended as “true church”… until they become unintentionally comical. There are glimmers of comic genius in this year’s Sulman.

TAL: How do you go about deciding which art work to award the prize? Is it very difficult?

MP: The installation of the show was very important. We could only hang 27 works. I hung very much on the eye. I wanted to establish a range of concordances and contrasts between the paintings so the show is strangely animated. I wanted to confront the complacency of easy viewing assumptions.

MP: Sandro Nocentini finally got the prize [there were other contenders]. I thought My Son has two Mothers was an intriguing painting. It could be an account of a gay relationship but on the other hand it is probably a Nativity scene with the two Marys present and the 3 Wise Men as geese. It certainly has two fathers. Most obviously Picasso at the inception of Cubism and either late Malevitch or Picabia. It is an original return to the problem of early Modernism in the guise of Post-Modern relativity [it uses that relativity to open up a mystery around the Virgin birth and the identity of the picture with the style of painting].

TAL: Would it disturb you to discover that the work is both sincerely autobiographical and loaded with personal symbolism of the artist’s experience [as a father] with two lesbians??

MP: “It could be a gay relationship” is a kind of divination then on my part. The painting also feels achingly sincere, while also appearing a little awkward. This makes it immediately interesting. The two mothers configuration could read as an archetype of the Gnostic bible! The self absorption of this painting paradoxically adds to its public effectiveness. Two broad classes of painting-intentionality seem to characterize Sulman contenders; hackneyed professionalism and inadvertent amateurism. The over-determined nature of intentionality invariably means a gap between what is intended and what can be seen. Slight amateurism then can encompass a tremendous potential, but only if one takes risks with the show as a whole.