Avago Gallery - Tinsheds - Sydney University - Aug. 1986
The deconstructivist's faith
The deconstructivist's faith
is to overcome disbelief
in one blind evolutionary step
into now
with one heart and one eye and many tongues
chattering a journaleze
toward the synthesis of this one moment
on clear drop
not necessarily like before
or after - but absolutely all this here
where from this side of the fence it looks like you
but our passage is in between
negotiating - empty-handed as best we can
bearing all costs in lieu of a deal
not necessarily agreement
although prices fixed by market demands
hansard terms - we loose to win - Cha Cha.
COG Gallery - Pitt St. Sydney 1987
Recurrent Theme
There is a common idea that, at the end of the day, the artist offers just one picture - like a tree bears only one fruit. In considering the significance of an artist's work in retrospect, some perspective on the nature of their qualitative offereing must be gleaned, before an accurate assesment of their contribution can be discerned. Many artists of the modernist traditions clarify their positions by removing all extraneous considerations, limiting the breadth of their focus.
I have gone out of my way to avoid such formailst processes. The problem with reductive fomalism in art practice is that you see one show and you've seen them all, and what remains is the overarching recognition that the work reduces to a marketing exercise. Whilst it is obvious that mastery only comes of commitment, I am concerned for the death of the poetic in process and suspicious of rigid theoretical or aesthetic positioning which supports it. If in the revery of creative experience we are prone to repetition, then I believe it is better left beyond our conscious control.
Personally I have gone out of my way to avoid reductive processes and repetitive systems.
Putting the inevitability of this 'one picture' theory to the test, on completion of each body of work I have made a point of changing the rules of production, methodology and materials, changing studios and sometimes cities. Given this practice, my work often appears to defy the protocols of proper practice, and is regularly overlooked, misunderstood, considered unworthy of serious consideration. However there are a couple of merits in my considerations I think worthy of note.
Although since the early 1970s my practice has been notably a post-medium practice, what seems to have gone unoticed is that since the late 70s I have affected a profound commitment to the privacy of ths studio-based practice with a predilection toward intuitive processes for discerning the subject and form within the process of the production of the work itself.
Whilst my exhibitions rarely appear to bear any resemblance to each other, they are noted for a peristent sensibility, despite the world and value changes which my work has come to bear witness to. This has not been a consequence of any predetermination, in fact quite the contrary, I go out of my way to change the rules of production with each body of work so any sense of repetition becomes impossible. Never the less what persistently arises is some sort of sensibility, which pervades each production, for better or worse. For me this is suprising, considering the lengths I have gone to scramble the codes of consistency. In fact it fills me with as much dread as it does delight to recognise my work continues to betray a certain sensibilty which I seem powerless to change. Although that having been said, I recognise that nothing ever really repeats itself, rather I am aware the persistent themes and issues revolve and perhaps evolve through my work.
In my defiance of the protocols of genre production, it has been the inevitablility of a specificity of sensibilty that I might have unconsciously placed my faith in. That this specificity of sensibility is recognisable regardless of the worlds we inhabit, points beyond the limits of language, and puts an end to the illlusions of infinite expansion. Although I would not suggest I am down to a single defining image, I can at least recognise certain recurrent themes.
Given the opportuntiy of this exhibition at COG, I have selected works from six different exhibtions which serve to expose a persistent structures of language which have arisen within my creative production, despite my shifting worlds and processes. Whilst this selection is not intended to summarize the exhibitions from which they have been derived, they do serve to denote an unconscious persistence of perspective. From CON-CREET - 1980 to Subterainian Spring' 1985 these works seem to indicate a persistent existential response to a world despite the shifts in medium and subject and indeed the very worlds that are represented within the works themselves.
Comings and Goings @ Riley Street
Darlinghust - Sydney 1987.
Sailing off into this still hour
empty-headed at the other end of this pencil
one end stuck in this grey scrawl
the other between the next stray thought,
in a bid to head-off any rising winds
I snip any rising yarn in the bud
goodbye to all that and goodbye to all this,
an end to all beginnings and a fond farewell to expectation.
Sailing through these doldrums where
ten thousand destinations arise on the whiff of one breath
and all anticipation is blanched in the rising heat
only to rise over and over again,
and puff, like a hundred thousand burnt offerings,
they blow like ashes around this silent knell.
The death of poetry and its birth collide
with echoes of the traffic below
which intermingle with the impulse to rush its cause.
Finally, the telephone leaves off
exhausted by its futile nagging,
and the bottom falls away
leaving this empty hulk hovering
somewhere between coming and going.
Painter's Gallery - Sydney - 1987
The Four Seasons
Going upstairs
burnt off
in no loves song
all thumbs and toes
and the navel's ache
of desire blinded
heaving
for an untouchables speakeasy
packed-out behind the attic store
nestled in
under the bedrom's drunk
unspeakable fire in the soul
taking the aim
of a hundred unknown soldiers
and shot burst passionless
on some hot-wired dream of escape
spun out pre-dynasty
soul against fate
on the thought which vanquishes any ill fitting orders
with one long sigh.
Too many tables and chairs
too much peck and too many pomping orders
we mere flegelings
hurled into gagging appetite
for an unknown otherness where the awesome study
becomes survival.
Hamstrung and far flung
from the birth passage
until now when shivering release
from the rites of spring give rise to the flowering gum
sealing the deal
on the ensuite and the garbage disposal unit.
A marriage of sorts,
more matrimonial mathematique
and affairs of the heart
between the jewel and the clown
the rattle and stocks
where some old models are signed up 'under new management'
and the philosopher's chair takes flight
hiosting a tide of diplomats.
tight lipped in a storm of
I am's and Is not's,
live
in a cachophony of a hundred songs
all argueing the toss of one fate
the public investment
in the empire stakes.
At the peak of this plot
all hats hung on one tail
the royal commission
slips off its gravy rail
and the sun king becomes
just another voice in the crowd
jangling cash register eyes
for another revolution of hits.
Just another anthem call
we say when our kilt calls cut
and the imperative of conquest
falls against the immutability of our desire,
star wars become cold wars
and paper wars shread rheems of resistance
and privates signal general retreat
en mass.
Whilst the legless watch
the faceless call to order
meantime under the last stand
defiant whispering tones
mutter to the last drop
as the surpassing self
recalls what remaining fibre
to face another day.
Correspondence files in and out
requisitioning old orders
taking stock and checking up,
between the gift and the garb
between the l'iver and the gaul
lies a world of difference
where the final account
is to the order of the deceased
and in this finite season
you have already
the picture you postulated.
Wear what you will, if you like
it comes on first like a costume
but now settles to cloak
your crippling gate,
yesterday's hearsay
became tomorrows T.V.
and went that-a-way some time back.
The winds have changed now
not necessarily for the better
or worse,
the world turns as the crow flies
out of faith
banking futures against the past
in the exchange
privilage arrives as an informed tipster
staking all bets on the triple word score
and getting it
on whose got it
this mob whose facile pursuit
works
from the bottom up
to the top of all we can capture
in all too brief occlusions.
From the archaeologists journals
we see the atlas
under construction
whilst the knaves bring the toffs
and the haves tell the nots
what day it is.
On mission streets
condolences come in red and blue flashing lights
and we are chilled and sprung at the thought.
Going upstairs.
Painter's Gallery, Sydney, 1988.
Drawing
Since the completion of long drawn out 'The Four Seasons' series, my work has imploded into a rapid succession of small drawings and quick paintings on paper, expressive of a need to range across a wider territory. These accumulated drawings and paintings on paper, represent an attempt to reveal the fibre of my own subconscious preoccupations and make headway in the struggle to overcome my own limits of language.
'Figurative, allegorical, humourous, graphic and expressive' a friend reminds me, but in all honesty I cannot vouch safe for such claims. They are however not derived from external reference as much as drawn from personal experience, memory and the language of mark and paint, in the unconscious hope of some confluence between the real and the imagined.
Ultimately the painter's practice becomes the means by which an artist negotiates the world. In this regard I have developed a practice which transgresses a number of stylistic convetions and imaginative boundaries in a bid to pinpoint a resonant place between projection and recollection. The work itself is a process where desire is syntheised into form in a bid to locate a future within the present.
More text in this mode available
Wolf in the after glow
Sydney 1989.
This poor dumb tongue of my heart,
this shameless wolf, knows no other name
since whose wetted appetite and instinctive homeing
draws helplessly toward your phantom roost.
blind in the guise of innocent eyes
to snuggle deep into the vaults of your tomb
and lift your timeless gift to the heavens.
lightfingered and guiltless in the ache of this lovesick night
I plunge firm into the intimate folds
sooth the tender crease of your memory
over and over again
rolling down the dimishing distance
between lost and helpless
till I unlock an unwilling hand
and shutter out a wary eye
and crawl into your consent
as if it were mine for the asking.
If only you knew
how often my remorseless love sustains itself
plundering the tender nest your plight left untended.
what quivering beast I have become
reduced to sooth my sleeepless nights
howling at the after-glow of this new-moon.