BILLBOARD LED WHITEBOARD

My view of the agora is the busy urban square or piazza, a marketplace driven by commercial concerns. My work is a dialogue between the artisan and the industrial; in my urban scape the prototype is a black, found industrial object, displayed against a studio whiteboard, that becomes the inspiration for a billboard image, surrounded by led lights. For me, tapestry was the billboard imagery of previous eras. Here, its warp rows resemble the pixel lines of an electronic display.

Imaging and display are the means of persuasion used by market forces; every aspect is calculated and controlled. The media I employ in my combine are woven tapestry, button assembly and a found object. The modernism of the tapestry reappears in the column of street signs, an ancestral totemic pole of vintage buttons, minimal and faux-primitive. By employing several generations of buttons, my intention is to draw attention to their design development. I use pearlshell for its natural luminescence, compared to the surreal glow of the buttons framing the tapestry. The initial reaction of industrial technology was to imitate nature, then to create ever more startling effects of colour texture and luminosity.

 

My editor’s impulse was to provide a right bottom edge to the whiteboard, and also consolidate the columnar on the left vertical.

button narrative

The Tamworth Textile Triennial has been dismantled, having clocked up a bigger attendance than any previous Tamworth Textile show. It is being packed up, and sent to the next destination, RMIT Melbourne in early Feb 2012. I am fine tuning my ideas for that show; it promises to be an event.

Tonight on SBS there was an ideas panel presented by Anton Enis looking at a very successful show SBS put together earlier in 2011 called Go Back to Where You Came From. It was about refugees and our, Australian reaction to them. There were focussed insights among the audience: one person described the Australian audience as multi-focal; many people argued that labelling people as “racist” was not useful. Another person said that some sections of Australian society considered themselves as “outside”; they never saw themselves represented on Australian TV. A young person working in the multi-cultural bureaucracy, and with digital media in mind, said that people being able to share their narrative was important.

Nobody simply asked whether so many refugees sewing their lips together indicated a successful govt policy. I am mulling over my own position and what I want to say. I’m sorry I did not interact with more people at the opening and next day, before my talk. Tho I know why, the effort of transplanting oneself by car over six hours of travel is exhausting, disconcerting, depleting, disorienting. I don’t drive, so my companion and driver took all of the physical burden. Nevertheless the journey took its toll.

Completing blog chapters on the two works exhibited was helpful, also the two jpgs of the work at an advanced stage then the severely revised version, with the stripped down fencing pattern, the re-highlit toy, proved an eye-opener. I was told that some curators still consider my craft somewhat of an outsider’s art object. That limited and retrograde viewpoint needs to be firmly binned. 

But working with buttons has become a very sensitising process. Having taken the wrong turns in my Sailor Boy work, this has taught me to listen more carefully to the promptings of my intuition. The texture, colour and luminosity of buttons contributes so immensely to the final work. The autonomy of each unit contributes so much, period style, background, origin of manufacture add to the narrative.

As Dion Fortune said about another matter, the buttons teach me that there are no bad or wrong pieces; apt placement, context is all.

Braiding time past present and future

The author of a recent gay history used the 1970’s play Boys in the Band as a barometer of prejudice. Baby boomers can barely bring themselves to revisit that depth of closeted self-hatred and societal condemnation. We think it has been banished. However gen X & Yers say that’s how it is for them today. Perhaps the signal-reading is more acute amongst contemporaries. The catholic monolith has fringe groups that practise gay conversions [ex-gaying!], the way people performed cult-busting in the 80’s. The fundamentalist right wing in the US now export hatred and prejudice to countries like Uganda. It took a concerted world effort to dissuade the Ugandan parliament from attaching the death penalty to a conviction for gay sex. The Westboro congregation of genetic deficients have concocted an equation staggering in its illogic: that God is punishing the US army in Iraq and Afganistan for the liberalised attitude towards gays at home. Talk about reading tea leaves.

According to their pastor’s sloganeering, I live in Sodom on the Pacific, and I’m proud of it. My position in the wake of my generation decimated by Aids, and the magnificent scholarship of Boswell and Bagemihl is to celebrate the individual courage of people like Gareth Thomas the Welsh rugby player who recently came out. They advance the profile of their particular community and that of humanity.

My Homage to El Greco obliquely questions his sexual orientation, while admiring his atmospheric portraiture. Meanwhile, traversing cultures in the other direction, one arrives at the vexed situation in Ayatollah-dominated fundamentalist Iran, where the chastity police arrest women and gays. The execution of people from cherry pickers in public places is Elizabethan horror show revisited, morality rhetoric run mad. The individual I depicted was not even an adult when arrested. Even his arrest was squalidly based on a family thirst for honour. An Iranian told me with a sorry shake of the head that the site of the execution, Mashhad, was a “religion town”, to be avoided.

Having travelled extensively in the middle East I look forward to a time, hopefully the near future, when neighbours are able to coexist peaceably as in the conviventia of medieval southern Spain under Syrian rule. Then, however, a Palestinian situation did not loom largely unresolved.

My work continues to explore issues of personal identity. Likewise, my choice of media. Tapestry and button assembly make for an ongoing dialogue of material, technique, work process. The most recent coupling was Deepest Night, where I compared the tilt of pearl shell buttons and the resultant lustre with revolving astronomical telescope dishes. The curatorial brief was to celebrate the great Italian astronomer Galileo. The work was exhibited in the Miniartextil show of 2009 in Como Italy, and travelled to Paris, thence to Venice. As a mute echo of the clustered buttons the lower panel of near indigo tapestry was draped with glass beads.

Lastly, the position of the artist in the changing world at large: observations of the adaptation of other species to climate change is an ongoing concern. Teach Us to Sit Still (TS Eliot) was my dialogue between indigenous and exotic.

retro 2 my family

On the decade anniversary of my mother’s death, I decided to return to academia, to complete a studio based thesis on the migration of my family to Australia after World War 2 had ended. My mother had gone to work in Germany and was declared a displaced person when the fighting ceased. I used her ID photo taken by the International Refugee Organisation in my art work. My father was doubly orphaned in his preteens, he decided to enlist in the Dutch army and was shipped to Batavia to fight the insurrection. He was awarded the service medal, the star for order and peace, the ereteken voor orde en vrede.

The above works complete my family narrative with my parents’ transit from Bathurst through Cowra [where I was born] to Scheyville Migrant camp. We were then released, our status changed to that of citizens, dad found local employment, we lived in a stone house outside Pitt Town, on the bank of the Hawkesbury River. My immediate visual improvement was to acquire a sailor suit [in honour of the PopEye cartoon?]; this features in my two button works that follow.

Mum, 30 cms H X W, 2008.

Mum, Cowra, 80 cms H X 50 cms W, 2000.

Baby Photo, 30 cms H X W, 2008.

Scheyville, 60 cms H X 40 cms W, 2000.

Scheyville 2, 80 cms H X 60 cms W, 2007.

Dad, 75 cms H X 30 cms W, 2007.

retrospective 1 mardi gras themes

I’d like to present my work of the last 15 years or so. The following pieces are similar to what preceded, shown in 2 Sydney solo shows and 2 Mardi Gras themed shows at the Object Galleries at Customs House, Age of Consent 1999, reviewed by Bruce James in the Sydney Morning Herald, and Material Boys Unzipped 2000, which then toured nationally [Vic, Tas, Qld].

[Adam] “& Steve”, uses a magnetic resonance image, the rib, to comment on fundamentalist based criticism of same sex unions. 30 cms H X W, 2006.

Desiring This, 2001, 95 cms H X W, [Desiring this man’s scope and that man’s art.]

Odalisk in the Object Galleries show Material Boys 2000, was reviewed by Ben Genocchio of the Australian, as a witty take on Ingres. 90 cms H X 60 cms W, 1999.

No country for old men, was my belated contribution to the Sydney Aids quilt project. I combined tapestry pieces, buttons, objects and print. 6 ft H X 3 ft W, 2008.

Harlequin, 2005 uses de-constructed Harris tweed yard, I dismembered a man’s jacket, bought in a vintage shop. Yes, its surface is hairy, it’s a bear of a work with a good heart. 45 cms H X W, 2005.

Manly Faery, 30 cms H X W, buttons and objects, quotes the 1980’s Australian Crawl song Reckless, As the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay. Circular Quay as the historians will narrate, was the site of Capt Phillip’s landing inside Sydney Harbour. It is by default the culture precinct with the Museum of Contemporary Art and the fabulous House of White Sails, the Sydney Opera House. 30 cms H X W, 2007.

Dragon Bite, woven in 2002, entirely in the beautiful city of Ljubljana, capitol of my mother’s country of birth Slovenia. The dragon, emblem of the city, features as exquisite wrought iron detail on the bridge in the old city, designed by that amazing renaissance man Jose Plecnik. The fallen figure of course is a homage to El Greco’s Laocoon. 30 cms H X W, 2003.

Diver, 1982, was acquired by the Sydney Textile Museum as the 1983 annual award. It is based on the Bronski Beat song Small Town Boy. When it was shown at the Craft Australia Expo Sydney Centrepoint in 1983 it reminded an eastern European viewer of Lenin. She was unamused. 80 cms H X 50 cms W.

An unexhibited work, You Bloody Poofs R Awol, Snarls Sarge, is a flashback to cadet training at boarding school, dies ires, annus horribilis. We had gathered in the late afternoon, when our sarge noticed two school mates creep out of the bush, wearing broad cheeky grins. He interpreted their absence angrily. 95 cms H X W, 2007.

There is a beautiful photo of Elvis enlisting and being given an innoculation shot. His white tshirt is lifted to the shoulder, he looks fragile, delicate. 60 cms H X 40 cms W, 2007.

Michael Jackson, 30 cms H X W, 2008.

bon mots

PBS had an interesting saying: an exasperated person being interviewed tersely announced [with his back to the wall] “The truth is not midway between right and wrong.” It caught the interviewer’s ear, he said he would use it daily.

An Italian restaurant where I had lunch yesterday on 138 Norton Street, Leichhardt had a banner which read: “yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift”. My lunch companion, who is completing a degree in the Italian language, set about translating it into the bocca romana. The restaurant is Underbelli, excellent courses, sensational desserts. We sat under a closeup of Michaelangelo’s daddy god & Adam playing touch finger.

Meanwhile, today’s SMH had an article on stallholders in Italy selling vulgar T-shirts: a cooking apron featuring David’s naked torso [!! 2 thumbs up!!] brothel scenes from Herculaneum, and worst [in the opinion of the style police] Pisa’s leaning tower on guys’ jock shorts. Makes a point.

a position of vantage

I once told a psychiatrist that I had a visceral realisation that I was gay when I read a detail of Oscar Wilde’s biography. Inside the cover of The Picture of Dorian Gray was a potted biog mentioning OW’s rent boys. As D H Lawrence used to say: my bowels warmed. The shrink dismissed the idea; I soon found out he was self-indulgent, self-important and homophobic, a wasted education.

Oscar Wilde ran contrary to the prevaling literary taste when I discovered him as a teenager; however he exalted the dreams I built of my budding sexual identity. I was an isolated teenager in central Qld, a frontier reality. It was an exponential improvement on being manipulated by a perfumed pedophile priest when I was twelve, and about to experience puberty.

The other school boys whom I joined, years later, in a court case against the priest were all hetero; I tried to imagine whether their experience was worse than mine. Implicit in that thought was a self-denigrating belief: that a str8 boy could be degraded by having gay sex. I’ve had sex with undergraduate women of my age at uni but would hardly say I was degraded by the experience. But I watched these guys in the courtroom and could see this realisation festering in their brains: that a poof had conned them into having sex. For me, the fact that my first gay sex was with two hetero individuals is ambivalent; the first with the priest was bewildering but flat, the second with a peer was intense beyond the capacity to express, either in word or colour. I guess all we can say at the end of it all, is that it happened to us; we have to own the scenarios that flourish behind our brows, behind our eyes, between our ears, ours alone, for love alone.

The above has simply been a runaway train: it was meant to convey a completely different message. I began by mentioning Oscar Wilde. I went walking on a Mardi Gras bush walk and overheard one guy tell another he could quote OW. A pickup line; I ran after him quoting reams, and was puzzled that he tried to escape me. His hoard of OW bon mots was the grand total of ONE line. But I digress. One of my fave OW moments is: I enjoy being misunderstood, it gives you a position of vantage. Apologies if I misquote.

In my case the misunderstanding occurs in my artistic career: painters, daubers, have been known to bolster their insecure masculinity by being contemptuous of craftspersons. Conversely, some tapestry artists dismiss the modernist tendencies of artists [intuitive, explosive, messy] and espouse the NEATness of tapestry construction. I find both positions reprehensible. In a previous chapter I quoted a new arts person [installation, video] who declared that passe means of expression [daubing, rock carving] should be relegated to craft status. Another commentator still in a similar mindset declared that the arts had exhausted themselves. This critic asserted that new art forms were being created even as we speak, that possibly we would not recognise them, video games for instance. Whole generations would be actively engaged in these activities, and only belatedly would the arts community recognise and fully appreciate the artistic achievement.

The vantage position of being misunderstood. I enter art competitions and clearly see the selection committee has had NO capacity to judge my textile images alongside painted ones; I simply cannot conceive of the extent of that blinkered-ness. It is a profound misunderstanding. Thank you OW.

We rarely understand others, and never ourselves. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. [Tho!] I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

What a mind.

living in camp

Tues Wed Thurs this week SBS has broadcast a reality-type show called GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM. This particular phrase is so apt. As I described in previous chapters, my mother and my half brother came to Australia by boat from a refugee camp in Italy. Prior to that my mother and her parents had been locked up in a concentration camp near her village by other villagers; because my maternal uncle had joined the German army during WW2, the newly Titoist villagers declared mum’s family collaborators. In France such women had had their heads shaven and were variously physically abused.

Escape as a ‘displaced person’ by boat from Italy must have been a preferred option to the assaults of socialist fervour. Her ship was held offshore from Fremantle harbour in a quarantine situation because of a smallpox scare onboard. Then she was conveyed by train to the central holding camp at Bathurst, where she met her future husband. My father had just been demobbed from serving as a Dutch army bloke in Batavia. His duty ended in Darwin, he travelled by train to Bathurst. Both of them were moved to Cowra, where they were married and I was born 9 months later.

I cannot go into the tortured minutiae of the experience; I read someone’s contribution to a collection of migrant reminiscences at Cowra; women went on strike in 1950, the year of my mum’s being pregnant with me. They demanded better food for their babies, to my benefit. We moved to Scheyville camp near Windsor in western Sydney, thence by train to Mackay.

GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM. I heard that phrase a lot as a young boy; ‘reffo kid’ being the other form of address. In my second year of primary school my older bro & I were attacked on the way to school. The perps were older kids at our school; they herded round, trying to pull my shorts down. My bro Stan fought them off with one hand, with the other he kept me clothed. It was all incomprehensible to me; perhaps I went into shock, retreated into a parallel universe during primary school, wrote poetry in high school and discovered the chemical retreat of herbal substances at uni.

Thus the three nights of tears this week watching other people go through similar experiences. However, in spite of the above, I would make one point as forcefully as possible. Several of the Anglo-Australians expressed negative views about refugees at the start of the series. After they met refugees in Australia, Malaysia, Africa and Jordan their views changed radically. My plea is for the word racist to be firmly discarded from this debate; it is too morally indignant, too self important, too divisive. Jesus the great teacher of our civilisation said: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. Nobody is faultless, and the admittedly irritating callous speech of culturally insulated people is just that: ignorant, limited, subjective. Racism as an accusation contributes nothing to the situation. It has been argued that people who adopt a holier than thou tone with this subject live in areas that might well be gated communities. They do not suffer the chaotic jostling of culture upon culture that is Liverpool Blacktown in outer Sydney, or Luton in outer London. We all need to just get on.

I made a button collage of a photo that the International Refugee Organisation took of my mum in an Italian displaced persons camp, the identity photo on her formal papers.

homage to El Greco

Homage to El Greco Sebastian [Never Felt a Wound], 2010, button assembly, 120 x 92 cms.

Homage to El Greco Sebastian [Never Felt a Wound] speaks of the human response to adversity: bushfire, flood or personal crisis. El Greco was born in a Cretan village, he studied the Italian masters, and settled in Spain, negotiating mannerist excesses and religious/political intrigue. His narrative resonates with the situation of refugees settling in Australia today, making difficult cultural adjustments.

Button assembly may be an unusual medium, but it is firmly grounded in textile process. Its three components: canvas, upholsterer’s polyester thread and buttons together enable a rigorous visual exploration. Its recent ancestor would be arte povera. But reconstituting discarded materials was also the basis of various Depression folk crafts, such as rag rugs. Dadaist collage and figurative sequin embroidery are referenced in this work. Homage honours El Greco’s atmospheric evanescence with an impasto of colour and texture, and scumbled luminosity. As a textile it expresses the human condition.

symbol

Just watched a Japanese movie Symbol 2009. Infuriatingly elusive at first; it needs repeated viewing. The auteur has read Dante and given it a playful naughty queer last decade touch, the putti peni.

It made me mindful of many things, the painful monastic life of an artist in the studio, grasping at semi-illuminated ideas. The movie uses a Buddhist structure of release, satori, rapture, illumination. We can argue the cutting edge in Buddhist cultures where philosophical practice became religious observance. Enough that in so many Asian cultures [just as Christianity did in the west] it takes over animist traditions and subsumes them into an intellectual structure. Often, sadly it does so with an arrogant ruthlessness; it seems a patriarchal takeover, no less decisive than that which occurred in western culture when the solar calendar replaced lunar rhythms. Subsumed, patterns within patterns. In Taoism the earth is dark, receptive, female; the mind is bright, male, active. Yet it warns: know the male but live in the female consciousness.

The movie made me think of certain stratagems of resolution in my computer games: the resolution never occurs where you want it to. Unless as in Tetris on rare occasions when everything flows one way, inexorably. Mindful of an anecdote about FreeCell; I was taught to play by a supervisor in CityRail. I finally got the hang of it; he asked what I thought. I said: “I understand. It’s like tidying up the house, putting everything in its rightful place.” He moaned despairingly: “Oh, no. You’ve just totally ruined the game for me.”

Guess the universe looks different for each of us.