‘Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire’

I will shell out an exorbitant amount of money to see a Dali exhibition (there seems to be one every five years or so), based on an assessment of how many pictures it contains of that period before 1940, before his thirty-fifth birthday, when Dali’s corrupt imagination burned with a peculiar, stinky intensity.

The good news is that ‘Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire’ at the NGV contains many choice morsels and a good many even older pictures when the little creep was just a teenager. There is bad news, but more of that shortly.

It contains a number of juvenilia, pictures done as he was chewing his way through diverse influences as a teenage prodigy.

It seems that he landed on a selection of Renaissance and Mannerist painters, especially Caravaggio with his ability to concentrate the eye on symbolically loaded detail with deep shade and theatrical light; and Velasquez and his bravura technique (that Dali regarded as a personal challenge) and domestic surfaces picked out in raking light, rendering them su(per)real, like the crustiness of peasant bread, the lustre on a terra cotta milk jug, and the ancient ruin of a crumbling block of cheese.

And of course the peculiar mix of sacred subject matter and perversity found in artists like Parmigianino, whose ‘Madonna with the Long Neck’ (1534) he imitated in an early self-portrait.

Wall texts in blockbuster exhibitions are always slightly dubious. There is often a sense of a curatorial barrow being pushed, or else I sometimes suspect pressure has been brought to bear by lenders to stick to an approved line. (I have no proof of this, and I’ve never even heard it complained about, but then if it was happening, the borrowers aren’t likely to complain too loudly.)

The man’s peculiarities were evident from an early age but the text in this exhibition is often coy about the nature of the imagery. ‘Portrait of My Sister’ (1925) and ‘Girl’s back’ (1929) both fetishize his sister’s hair, an obvious erotic trigger for him. The latter is a peculiar inversion of a salon portrait, the subject is turned from us, her suggestive ringlets hanging down and rendered in expert chiaroscuro. ‘Portrait of My Sister’ has a hard-edged eye for detail, like the early Miro, set in an uncanny de Chirico space, but those ringlets over the subject’s shoulder are pure Dali.

The text plays a straight bat, waffling about their neo-classical pedigree, with the names of Ingres and Vermeer invoked, but the weird intensity of focus is already Dali’s own, and its nature is unmistakeable. The paintings virtually throb with it.

Later, the game gets funny when attempting to say something apropos about ‘Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano’ (1934). Needles to say, things are kept nice.

I’ve always appreciated Robert Hughes’ comment that Dali had a mind “like a gland, irritated by constant scratching.” It neatly suggests the sense of morbid pathology that the early paintings radiate. That is their lasting power as works of art, and what makes them key objects of the 20th century – objects of any kind.

The work ‘Suez’ (1932) is strange and unsettling, maybe because its restraint is so unlike his hysterical signature style. The famous canal was being constructed at the time and perhaps the idea of a huge trench linking two continents had some unusual connotations for him. An elongated spoon, liquid as if hot from the forge, reaches out from one wall of the canal towards an odd arabesque object, which emerges out of the other wall, the two forms forever in an unconsummated coupling. The image is suggestive and pathetic at the same time.

He was constantly registering new objects as fetishes loaded with unlimited sexual potential no matter how unlikely the resemblance. I was keeping a mental list while moving through the exhibition, which included:

Bones, beans, crutches, spoons, pianos (soft), violins and cellos, ants, knives, skulls, lamb chops, shoes, keys, lobsters, watches, keyholes, telephones, milk, trees, cannon, wheelbarrows. The list is evidently limitless and unconstrained by any obvious (to the rest of us) sexual connotation.

I was stopped in my tracks by a picture so unlike what had come before it, ‘Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September, 1939’.

This sombre image, heavy with grief, represents a path not taken. Again the mesmeric concentration on domestic objects but this time stripped of artifice, carrying their symbolic load with dignity. I was put in mind of Picasso’s paintings of the war period when he was shut up in his studio, the curtains drawn, anxious and cut off from his supporters and seemingly at the mercy of the occupying Nazis (who never in fact came knocking). He turned to still life in browns and greys, pictures of skulls and bulls’ heads, bizarre disjunctions of imagery telling their own suggestive story about what was going on outside.

For me this was the point of eclipse for Dali, after which he descended into mediocrity and confusion and an increasingly desperate chase after celebrity. By the late 40s he was already a full blown reactionary. His stated ambition was to be a ‘Renaissance painter’, whatever that meant, when he left Europe for the US, claiming he was leaving surrealism behind.

Needless to say he came back to it shortly after; that’s where the money was of course: baguettes and circuses. There was no way the American media or art establishment was going to let him get away with that. “So what kooky surrealist outrage are you going to foist on an art-hungry (and newspaper-buying) American public now, Mr Dali – walk down Broadway with a leopard on a chain? Give a lecture dressed in a diving helmet? Oh, Mr Dali, you are a card!”

And so the moustache grew in inverse proportion to any actual artistic achievement until it looked like a pair of tusks; classic sublimation, which as a good Freudian, Dali should have realised.

The only objects worth a damn in the latter part of the show (which goes on forever) were a couple of the jewels he made in the late 40s, just as I had given up hope and thought the show had hit a new low, with crude rehashes of his best imagery done in gold as indescribably tacky brooches and pendants.

There is only one object that for me suggested he still had his sense of humour about him. A ridiculous beating heart in rubies and gold, for the new Queen Elizabeth II, which actually throbs by means of a tiny motor, hitting just the right note if he was attempting to perpetrate an elaborate joke, which I’m not at all certain was his intention.

There is a section of the show dedicated to ‘Destino’, the animated film on which he collaborated with Walt Disney, left unfinished but completed (I assume faithfully) by Roy Disney in 2002. What a natural collaboration Dali and Disney turned out to be, Disney the entertainer anxious for high artistic credibility, and Dali the freak European aesthete who after all just wanted to play to the gallery.

I have my doubts about the success of the finished film. It’s hard from this distance to know how surprising it would have seemed to an audience at the time, but I doubt it would have really have satisfied anyone. It is too formless and lacking in narrative for a general audience, and too ‘Disney’ to satisfy the art crowd.

Given it was never finished, it looks like the evolution happened anyway. Less than ten years later, Terry Gilliam had started to make his surrealist cut-out animations for British TV, with a similar stream-of-consciousness (lack of) logic, and certainly advertising was well on to Dali much earlier than that. The fact that none of this would have happened had it not been for him is no criticism, but merely to say that he had anticipated himself way back in the 1930s. The rest was repetition.

I left the show feeling slightly sad and deflated, and the usual tacky merchandising outside the entrance was for once not a great break from what had immediately preceded it.

R. B. Kitaj 1935-2007

Every so often one hears about the death of another of the ‘great souls’ as I like to think of them, and the day discolours a little, with an odd sense of generalised grief for someone you never met. I felt this strongly a couple of weeks ago when I heard of the death of Ronald Kitaj, surely one of the greatest artists of the late century, even if most have never heard of him.

Kitaj was a ‘literary’ artist, if I can use the term that his friend Francis Bacon regarded as the worst insult that could be hurled at a painter. Bacon meant that kind of art which was reducible to the written word, or which didn’t aspire to anything beyond a description of itself. He put much self-consciously postmodern art in this category.

I use the word to mean that Kitaj’s painting had a unusually intimate relationship with the written word, but also that it frequently aspired to intellectual significance in a kind of discursive continuum that might include written texts. He was a thinker, with the thinking frequently embodied as art. Examples might be the long series of works featuring the “cafeist” Joe Singer, a character Kitaj made up to embody the notion of the wandering Jew, after Auschwitz, a picture of anxiety.

This is the first of that series, ‘The Jew, Etc.’ (1976). Joe Singer is Kitaj’s image of compromised survival. The Jew in a train compartment visualizes the physical and psychological restriction of the Diaspora. The cramped composition presses in on the man who also physically holds himself in. A hearing aid heightens the isolation. Being on the move, travelling on a train, is Kitaj’s metaphor for the state of restlessness Jews are heirs to. The only safe place to escape is the world of thought.

This mirrors Kitaj’s own situation, since he was American by birth and a wanderer in his youth (as he might have put it), serving as a merchant sailor and in the US Army before settling in England. Before his death, he returned to America. I think of him as a man in that tradition of displaced Americans, a man’s man like Hemingway and a compulsive builder of structures like Eliot.

His extensive writing on the situation of the Jewish artist, not to mention the works themselves, are a self conscious attempt to engage with the tradition of Jewish thought and to take a place in it.

I’ve seen people wince at this title [‘The Jew, Etc.’]; sophisticated art people, who think it’s better not to use the word Jew. Kafka, my greatest Jewish artist, never utters the word once in his work, so I thought I would. This name-sickness, which many Jews will recognize and understand in different ways, is so touching to me, that I’ve also given my Jew a secret name: Joe Singer. Now it’s not secret anymore.

His writings were an increasingly important aid to this enterprise and they had a fascinating, often independent relationship to the paintings themselves. Sometimes, they amounted to a commentary on them, an exegesis of their themes, sometimes even a contradiction of them.

An example is a work called ‘Two Brothers’ (1987), that appeared accompanied by a text of subtle literary ambition.

Kitaj wrote a text to accompany the image. He begins with an epigraph from Camus:

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be re-read from another point of view. Sometimes there is a double possibility of interpretation, whence appears the necessity of two readings. This is what the author wanted.

I’m intrigued by the implicitly Talmudic nature of the request: Before you look at the painting, it implies, read the text. Before you read the text, read this bit of Camus. Before you get into this Camus, refer to Kafka. But before you come back to the text, you must re-read Kafka! The meaning, he warns us, is not revealed in “clear language” (like the language he is using), but must be read from other points of view – that is, from the stand point that what we are reading is never the final word: “there is a double possibility of interpretation”. “This is what the author wanted”, Camus (and Kitaj) tell us. We’re entitled to ask: which author, since we’re already in a room full of authors?

Got that? Right, on we go:

For many years, this painting was called ‘Bub and Sis’. It depicted a lesbian couple and was inspired by a picture story about Times Square, which I’ve kept from the old Life magazine. Then I painted it over in black.

The new picture is about two brothers I got to know almost 30 years ago. I was a student at the Royal College of Art and I used to lunch now and then at a cheap Polish restaurant at South Kensington called Dacquise. It’s still there and still cheap. One day I sketched two men at a nearby table speaking Polish to each other. They noticed me and after a while, as they were leaving, one of them came to my table and asked if I would show him my sketch, which I did. He said he loved art and gave me his card which said ‘Count Martinus a Grudna Grudzinski’ and under that: ‘Fine Art Consultant’. They were quite old brothers, remnants of Ander’s army, who lived (and died) a few doors from the restaurant. To make a long story short, the Count appeared at my degree show and bought a life drawing. I visited them irregularly in their large dark flat. The Count lovingly kept a picture collection including Sickert, Corinth, Menzel, Polish painters I didn’t know and and unknown artists like myself. His brother kept small birds – he is clutching one in my painting while the Count is looking at a Matisse-like Polish painting.

Without pausing, the author (whoever that might be), double takes and simply ploughs on:

For many years, this painting was called ‘Bub and Sis’. It depicted a lesbian couple and was inspired by a picture story about Times Square, which I’ve kept from the old Life magazine. Then I painted it over in black.

The new painting is about two old brothers I knew almost 40 years ago. They lived together in the sam rooming house, in the 18th district (Wahring) of Vienna, as I did when I was a 19-year old student at the Art Academy in the Schillerplatz. The fat one was a poor painter who had a Matisse-like style as you can see in my painting. He had been a student at my very school along with Schiele, whose work he hated. Somehow, through thick and thin, he had survived as a painter. They painted and lived and kept small birds in a single large room. My landlady told me they were Nazis. I didn’t tell them I was a Jew because my landlady, Frau Hedwig Bauer, was a dear old (Gentile) friend of my grandmother and I didn’t wish to cause her trouble so I ignored the two old men. I was courting a Christian girl and my life was overflowing. The awful thing was to have to share a bathtub with the bastards.

So here we have it, a demonstration of the double interpretation. Does it make any difference to the painting? Of course it does. The image itself is ambiguous. What is happening and who are these people? Context creates meaning. Meaning is never completely free of the artist’s intention, but what was his intention? To make it quite clear we are in a hall of semiotic mirrors, he tells us this painting has another painting underneath it. He doesn’t tell us why he “painted it black”, obliterating it – a telling phrase. We can’t know if that’s true, but how closely does this image parallel the one under it? Closely, it’s implied, since it wasn’t just any picture but a picture of two women, two figures, just like we see here. It suggests that meaning in art is malleable and contingent while the artist still works on the painting, since figures can be men, women, or whatever the artist wants to suggest.

But, but… After all that, Kitaj was a visual artist of power and daring, a magnificent draughtsman and a bold colourist of great ambition. Have a look at ‘The Oak Tree’ (1991). A drawing-in-paint I want to call ‘supple’, but also a work of surpassing strangeness. I don’t know where that colour comes from, but what a powerful, memorable image.

UCLA’s Centre for Jewish Studies is about to open an exhibition from 8 January: “Portrait of a Jewish Artist: R. B. Kitaj in Word and Image”. This will be held in conjunction with the Skirball Cultural Centre exhibition: “R. B. Kitaj: Passion and Memory, Jewish Works from His Personal Collection“.

Vandalism

Who said graffiti artists have no sense of irony?

This is by Eine, in London.

Via the excellent Wooster Collective.

A more interesting question

I find the ill-informed commentary about the NGV’s Van Gogh revelation extremely irritating. Crikey have kept it up by taking the tabloids’ lead and referring to the painting as a ‘fake.’ This is nonsense. The painting has been found to be mis-attributed. It is not fake. There is a difference.

The piece by Geoff Maslen is called ‘Melbourne’s other big fake wasn’t a Rembrandt’ and he tells us the actually very interesting story of how the NGV handled its last attribution crisis. He is quite right to point out that Patrick McCaughey and now Gerard Vaughan chose to spin the story differently.

In his characteristically flamboyant style, in 1984 Patrick McCaughey was showing newspaper and television reporters around a newly refurbished section of the gallery when he stopped before the gallery’s only self-portrait by Rembrandt and admitted it was not actually by Rembrandt and was probably done by someone else.

McCaughey assured everyone that the NGV still had two genuine Rembrandts: “Two indispensable masterpieces. The real things.”

Yet he made the self-portrait still seem like a significant gallery asset, which it was.

Roughly a year ago, the NGV was in the headlines again over claims in the London Sunday Times that the gallery’s only painting by Vincent van Gogh, then on loan to an Edinburgh exhibition, was not by him.

Last Friday, current director Dr Gerard Vaughan called the media in and announced that extensive testing by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam had proved ‘Head of a Man’ to have been painted by someone else. It had been in the NGV collection since 1940 and labled as a Van Gogh since then.

There is no evidence that anyone ever attempted to pass it off as a work by van Gogh, except perhaps those who sold it. As he pointed out, Van Gogh had been largely ignored in his lifetime and only became famous long after his suicide. Although it might not be a forgery, Vaughan admitted the news made the picture almost worthless in money terms.

Maslen says:

“It is uncertain whether another crowd of sticky-beaks will turn up to marvel at it and ponder how simply changing the artist’s name could drive its value down from $20 million to a few dollars.”

This is the almost dumbest thing he could have said. Imagine this: I hand you a pistol and say this is an old target pistol my grandfather gave me. What are your feelings after you learn this information? Imagine how different they would be if I handed you the same pistol and said this is the gun that John Wilkes Booth used to kill Abraham Lincoln. What are your feelings now? Are they changed? Of course they are. The context has changed and context alters meaning.

This also ignores one of the central reasons why the picture was so valuable as a Van Gogh. As a Van Gogh, it was unique (and now we know why). There simply wasn’t anything else around like it.

The horizontal format was not found elsewhere in his portraits, and various people speculated that it might have been cut down from a larger work. The colours were more in the earlier, earthy social-realist style he favoured, but the brush strokes are broader, the impression more like the later work. It is rare three-quarter profile and so on and so on.

We now know the decision on the attribution: these qualities were so rare (or unique) in Van Gogh, that it has come down on the other side of the ledger.

But where I think Vaughan slipped up, is in the obvious question to asked now. If Vincent didn’t paint it, then who did? When was it painted, if the previous date is not accurate? Is it indeed a ‘fake’, or is there some other fascinating reason why someone was making pictures like this in 1885?

Giacometti at the AGNSW

Imagine my excitement when I heard that the Art Gallery of New South Wales, only 712.35 kilometres away, was about to present the only major exhibition of Alberto Giacometti’s work ever held in this country. Earlier this year I travelled to Zurich, a distance of 16,333.77 kilometres to see the Giacometti collection, which gives you an idea how much the monkish Swiss artist means to me.

I have done a lot of work on Giacometti over the years, to postgraduate level, and attempting to understand his insights into the phenomenology of perception, especially with regards to drawing the human figure, has inspired me and inspires me still. So I did have high expectations of the show in Sydney, and I have to admit that they were only partially fulfilled.

I really should have known something was a bit crook when the curator Edmund Capon was opinionising before the opening of the show in various papers:

“I’ve always had this feeling about the graphics and the sculptures being completely harmonious and the paintings being a kind of parallel journey. I had a feeling that the wonderful austerity – the rich austerity – of the sculptures and the graphics might be disturbed by the paintings.”

This should give any reader the idea that he does know what he’s talking about. Disturbed by the paintings? As anyone who has ever seen a Giacometti painting would know, they are merely extensions and elaborations of the theoretical concerns he explored in all his work, especially in the drawings and graphics, but in the sculptures as well.

The agitated, pullulating surfaces of the late sculptures are physical manifestations of the idea that the figure confronting the artist (engaged in rendering what Giacometti called a “likeness”), is fundamentally unknowable, a phenomenological appearance without certain boundaries. This is what he meant when he was describing what occurred when his brother Diego sat for him: “He’s posed for me ten thousand times. When he poses I no longer recognize him.”

This understanding is the foundation of his drawing style, with its constantly searching, interrogating line. The presupposition of a drawing or painting by Giacometti is not “This is what I see”, but “Is this what I see?”

This was not adopted deliberately, but arrived at over a great deal of time, the essential product of his exploratory attitude to perceiving. Similarly, the faces in the figure paintings emerge out of an agitated architecture of gestural marks, which are the exact corollary of the pencil or etched line in the drawings.

Capon has also complained about the lack of recognition Giacometti has received in this country, almost alone among the twentieth century masters. He’s right, so it is precisely the paintings that we need to see.

This appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Capon, who has curated the show himself, explains why he hasn’t included any of Giacometti’s paintings. “You put one of his spindly, emasculated figures into a room and suddenly it defines the space,” he says. “The drawings do that, too, but the paintings don’t. I’m probably completely alone in thinking that, but that’s OK.”

Yes, I think you are Edmund.

This essential misunderstanding has left its mark on the show in other ways. The inclusion of several large standing figures, both male and female, and the prominent place they have been given is unfortunate, as these are some of the weakest works Giacometti ever completed. The reason is related to their theoretical underpinning, or lack of one. Several of them were done as commissions to furnish architechtural spaces and they are larger than life-size. The figures had to be that big in order to register within the dimensions of the outdoor space they would occupy. Unfortunately, this also undermined their reason for existing in the first place, which was as a record of a specific perception of a figure in space, its relation to the space around it and its distance from the perceiver.

This is why many of the other figures are so small, and why they perch from various stands, plinths, steles, and so on. The platforms serve as distancing devices, their angled edges often mimicking the abstraction of perspective lines, indicating distance. The scale of a tiny figure balanced atop a massive broze platform is to approximate the sensation of beholding a figure from a distance, say, from across the street.

The large figures in the show don’t function like this. Your eyes (the artist’s eyes) don’t have the same relationship to the sculpture, with the result that they look mannered, their stylistic conventions forced. When the figures are larger than life-size, your eye-lines no longer match and the sense of perspective, as the space rushes away the further from the eye you get, is lost. The experience is therefore secondary, like the reproduction of a painting compared with the original.

It was also probably a waste of time to include the surrealist period sculptures, since this era is so rich and complex, that to have a few of the greatest hits belittles their importance to the history of surrealism and sells the artist short. Why not simply concentrate on the 1940s to the 60s, since this is where the show’s heart obviously is?

I was excited to be able to see all of the ‘Women of Venice’ reunited. The gallery has owned one for some time, but to my knowledge, I’ve never seen them all lined up together, like whores on parade, which is what they are.

‘Study of Apples’ (1952) – unmistakeably the son of Cezanne. They reveal a sculptor’s preoccupation with structure.

‘Standing Nude’ (1960) – a delicate pencil drawing. A female figure, like an apparition.

The various studies of rooms in pencil. These are images of the house of his mother and father, in Stampa, Switzerland. Heavy, rustic furniture. His mother sewing. Domestic objects never to be found in his studio, which was more like a monk’s cell. These drawings always look like a breath of fresh mountain air to me. It has always been my impression that on these trips back home, Giacometti took his bearings, spent some time in a caring, supportive domestic environment, re-energising his art in the process. It seems to me that his art always made real progress during, or just after, trips home. An eraser cuts through the line, like shafts of light falling on the tables, the heavy chandelier. Time slowed down. The products of intense scrutinising.

“Bust of a Man” (1950), “Head of Diego with Rolled Collar” (1951-52), “Bust of Diego” (1954), “Bust of a Woman [Diane Bataille]” (1945) – Surely nothing is as familiar as the human face, and yet here it is as if seen for the first time. Raw phenomena, nothing but an open confrontation with the living subject, an exchange, in the knowledge of impending death. I think of his friend Beckett’s lines: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Bolt at Pasquarelli’s opening

Crikey! I heard the alarming news this week that the crocodile hunter will be holding an art exhibition at Lynne Wilton Gallery on the gold-paved art strip in Armadale. No I’m not talking about Steve Irwin, but the other crocodile hunter and former political puppeteer of Pauline Hanson, John Pasquarelli.

Mr Pasquarelli is the kind of man people feel compelled to call ‘colourful’. Former crocodile shooter, skin trader, art dealer, right-wing agitator and Member of the New Guinea Parliament, National Party staffer, Liberal Party member, One Nation political fixer and speech writer. To that list we can add a profession I had not previously imagined he would have much time for: artist.

It’s a pity really, since a quick look around Lynne Wilton’s website reveals that the galley represents Julie Davidson, a painter I’ve admired as doing interesting things re-imagining the Still Life tradition.

It’s not difficult to see what might be in it for the gallery, since this is too good a story to pass up, especially since the show is reportedly being opened by right-wing blow-hard Andrew Bolt. (See, I’m doing it now: talking about them. I can’t help myself.)

I can see them now, the crocodile shooter with the new career and the ubiquitous opinionista, standing around with glasses of expensive Chardonnay in their hands, while the idol rich of Armadale compete with each other for Pasquarelli’s awkward pictures of rusty sheds and Hills Hoists. They would be congratulating each other, without irony, for not belonging to the hated ‘cultural elite’.

They certainly would be conversation starters, no doubt about that.

Melinda Schawel

As musicians, comedians, actors and painters can tell you, there are few things more difficult or more technically demanding than to be spontaneous on purpose. For many, if you can see the art in it, then the thing has already failed. Far better to be startled, just as the artist appears to be startled, by the accidentally perfect thing. All the better when it emerges, paradoxically, out of trained hands with years of practice.

As I clock up the years and my skills improve and perceptions deepen with use, I’ve come to more and more appreciate those things which seem to have simply occurred, and yet attain a kind of perfection which is often difficult to communicate to others not used to seeing it. It’s the kind of quality Chinese brush paintings can possess, or Japanese ceramics, or the painting of an artist like Antoni Tapies.

Last week, while in the city for some work related training, I had a few minutes to kill and wandered into the George Adams Gallery at the Arts Centre. It’s the kind of space that usually shows splashy travelling shows which are very light on the curatorial pedal, like the Archibald Prize; the sort of thing people who are there for a musical might be happy to kill some time in, until the curtain comes up.

They have a show presently called ‘Meeting Place, Keeping Place’, whose rationale is ‘Victoria’s cultural diversity and the vitality that different cultures bring to the visual and performing arts’. The participating artists are all émigrés from around the world who now call Australia home.

I was drawn immediately to work by Melinda Schawel, who I had never encountered before; a series of word paintings, dense and highly cultivated, abraded and heavy, worried into existence. The kind of stuff that really pushes my buttons, to be perfectly honest.

It was the kind of experience that’s exhilarating and also a bit embarrassing. When you have to say frankly, “I wish I’d done that”. I recognised immediately that these paintings had achieved the kind of artlessness that I was trying to get myself in the work I had completed last year for my own Masters degree show. Seeing these things, I became aware how little I had really achieved and how far there was still to go.

What was worse, the text which attended the works sounded like it could have been a quote from my own Exegesis. Damn it.

I was standing at the bus stop when an elderly woman approached and started chatting to me while I nodded and smiled in what I hoped were the right places. I waited for a lull in the chatter to say ‘es tut mir leid, ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch’, but it never came. The bus arrived a few minutes later, so we bid each other a fond farewell. I boarded in a daze wondering how I could actually participate in an exchange without contributing or understanding a single word.

It was one of many one-sided conversations I had when I first arrived in Zürich in 2001. I wasn’t an obvious foreigner; my father’s roots are German and my mother’s Slavic/Polish. Learning the language would be intrinsic to understanding the culture in which I was now immersed. The gaps or slippages that occur in communication, both between and within cultures, is the current focus of my work – what is misinterpreted, misunderstood or simply left unsaid.

My latest works are based on excerpts from antique letters and postcards found at the second hand shop in Zürich. They initially appealed to me because of the time that was invested to sustain and nurture personal relationships through the ritual of putting pen to paper. In contrast to the brief exchange at the bus stop, the handwritten correspondence also allowed me time to absorb intimate information about the lives of the writers. I decided to use these carefully constructed foreign scripts in an attempt to create a visual language of my own, one that might serve as a bridge across cultures when words alone cannot.

I was genuinely excited to find that Melinda had her own website, which is extremely simple and quite beautiful.

The works, both prints and paintings, are worked up in dense layers, mimicking the surfaces that life creates by accident, scuffed, grazed, and populated with a private language of signs and symbols. The kind that bump up against each other in overlapping semiological codes, whose explicit meaning might be just beyond us, but which act upon our senses in emotionally loaded if allusive ways.

Fragments of handwriting in old cursive script overlap sequences of apparently random numbers, stamps, symbols and markers, against a surface of tobacco coloured writing paper; letters containing we don’t know what longing for love or home. The associations are clear and we make the emotional inference.

The objects themselves seem to have simply come about through use, containing merely the marks which life leaves behind. The exquisitely difficult art of artlessness.

I’m excited to see that she has an exhibition coming soon at Flinders Lane Gallery, from September 5 to 23. I’m glad that she shares a home with Terri Brooks, an artist also capable of the same achievement. I’ll be there, and I might even introduce myself.

Gemma Nightingale – MAD Gallery

I’ve had it in mind for a while to get up to Lancefield and have a look at MAD Gallery, an exhibition space and cafe. I believe it’s been open for about 18 months, and doing quite well it seems.

Lancefield is a sleepy town, and not at all the sort of place you’d expect to come across a contemporary art space doing it’s best to represent some of the more interesting art activity in the central Victorian region, but here it is. Presently it’s showing Gemma Nightingale and Jocelyn Lu, who does high-key landscapes in colours that approach expressionist intensity. Unfortunately, they become undifferentiated after only a few minutes in their company, as if the relentless colour is motivated more by stylistic gesture than genuine emotion. The result is paradoxically a bit flat.

On the other hand, the paintings and sculpture by Gemma Nightingale acquire greater intensity the longer you look. The paintings, especially the smaller canvases, are rendered with great confidence and the sculptural installation is extremely wry and blackly funny.

The paintings are varied in size and format, but are unified by the use of black as a ground. This is difficult to pull off, as black can be the most inert colour on the palette, but she keeps the density of the pigment fluid by mixing in with vermillion and deep greens, keeping it moving, warmer and cooler by turns across the surface.

Grim forests rise up through thick, wet atmosphere in early morning winter light, that glows coldly through the branches. The trees have a slightly malevolent spikiness, which reminded me strongly of Sydney Long’s pastoral fantasies of the 1890s. The only thing missing is the prancing piper or woodland spirit. This is an appropriate link to make, as the great trees inhabit the pictures with an almost spiritual authority. Lacking figures, the trees are personified, and we imbue them with a living soulfulness.

The sculpture titled ‘The Flying Bride’ is a trio of bridal dresses, suspended above the ground as if caught in mid-twirl, all agitated movement and transparency. Only thing is, they are dull grey instead of bridal white, steel mesh in place of tulle, and corroded sheet metal cut to look like lace. They’re tethered by a chain, as if they might be in danger of floating off like magical figures from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’. And to underline the paradoxical joke, a bouquet of delicate steel flowers hang from the wall a little way off by a rusted chain, as if flung there by some extremely disenchanted bride. It’s called ‘Bridle Curb Chain Bouquet’; note the withering pun on ‘bridal’.

I was reminded of a strangely disconcerting poem by John Heath-Stubbs called ‘Mozart’:

“Mozart walking in the garden,
Tormented beside cool waters,
Remembered the empty-headed girl,
And the surly porters,

The singing-bird in the snuff box,
And the clown’s comic nose;
And scattered the thin blue petals
Of a steel rose.”

The overall impression of her show is bitsy, which is unnecessary as the stronger works command the space with such energy as to make the small, figurative pieces on paper look ill-considered and unconvincing by comparison.

Despite that, this is accomplished work, and I hope to see a more completely resolved installation by Gemma Nightingale in the future.

Postscript: I wasn’t there for the opening, but the invitation informs us that the opening of this exhibition featured live music by “Elston Gunn”. Is this a joke? I apologise if this really is the man’s name, but Elston Gunn was one of the stage names briefly tried on by the young Robert Zimmerman, a folk singer from Minnesota who later changed his name to Bob Dylan. Now that’s something I’d like to see in Lancefield.