Figures and faces have always been a feature of Sadie Chandler’s iconography. From her varnish-obscured portraits of an anonymous, genteel European ancestry to her pre-Mad men mad women strutting their stuff, and the latest forays into the group portrait as social document, art and life converge.

Most recently, Chandler worked on the Moreland portraits, a public art project in the Victoria Mall, Coburg, in October 2012. A related work is North, a 10 x 3 metre papered wall of drawings for North Cafeteria on Rathdowne Street, North Carlton, with opening hours more generous than your average art gallery or temporary art project.

Here, taking time out from the business of life, one can enjoy the view of people coming and going alongside those fixed to the wall more permanently. Going soft in the heat of a sultry afternoon I feel a bit like the mad woman in The yellow wallpaper disappearing into the background. Familiar figures and faces pop up in a seemingly endless array of frames, all different but somehow the same, reduced to an all-over signifying, simplified line. These figures stand tall, full frontal or in side view, cut-off like a portrait, or semi-inclined, stretched out like an odalisque or participating in some kind of action. With their pointed gestures, striking poses, look and dress and all the right accoutrements, a life in pictures is played out before my eyes.

I recognise a lot of them from art history: a Picasso portrait, a cubist still life, a Matisse interior (the one with the goldfish), a de Chirico scene in a Renaissance town square and what looks like a flagellation or some other dire scene from the Bible. There are culinary delights, scenes from nature, house portraits, people portraits, a boy dressed as Superman. Some of them more serious: a person standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, a statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled, a random person lying dead in the street and lots of women crying. This is a society portrait with everything possible brought into the frame. There’s genre and gender, and current affairs, and lots of art references to go on. And then there is the line, always the line, like studies in motion, composition, expression, and that characteristic Chandler curlicue flourish.

And here she is—the artist in person—joining me for cake and coffee. I just love that it’s Saturday.

Sadie Chandler, North, 2012, North Cafeteria, 717 Rathdowne Street, Carlton North.

In a country in which the dominant culture has a limited pre-history in terms of art and artefacts, one strategy is to recreate these models for ourselves. The culture of the ‘second degree’, as Paul Taylor put it, hangs on this persistent return to the centre or source of creative endeavour as always elsewhere or in a virtual space. Hence, the ground zero of the monochrome, visited again and again and again by so many Australian artists.

The life of forms is clearly not reducible to the more critical agendas of the 1980s. Even if you take to heart the end game of art and our post-colonial situation there is always something more desirous in this act of reclaiming or making one’s own mark.

This is the compelling moment, in a nutshell, of the art of Elizabeth Newman. In her recent body of work on display in the Monash University Museum of Art, this virtual space of art is made concrete in a variety of abstract propositions.

As pristine cut-out fields of colour—this one in green, that one in red … —these canvases are like the colour monochromes of Yves Klein’s first monochrome statements on paper made palpable as textured floating fields that you touch with the eyes. Or, take these assemblages, incorporating cut-out fabrics like Rauschenberg’s veils, anchored and muddied with paint. And this one, stretched over oddly assembled frame armatures to recreate the overall manifestations of painting burst out of the frame in line with those old Greenbergian restrictions.

The elephant in the room is the found object of a piece of old pipe, with attached masonry, bulbous like the Willendorf Venus. As both vessel and void, The origin of life (2012) doubles Courbet’s most famously explicit painting. Who would have thought that a Melbourne building site could reveal such riches? Art history in the hands of Newman is no sterile masterpiece but one that lives and breathes, stripped of old hierarchies, brought down to size, and created with loving attention to the detail of creation and selective dependencies. In her own way, she has thus brought into being something quietly personal and original.

‘The true collector looks for the work that is unfinished’ is a series of commissioned works by Elizabeth Newman, included in Artists’ proof #1, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 4 October – 15 December 2012.

I saw Rob McHaffie’s recent paintings at his studio preview in the Schoolhouse Studios, Abbotsford. Destined for his solo exhibition in September at Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney, this was a one-night only affair, like meeting up with an old friend, several of them in fact. Rob McHaffie’s inspiration, following his Asialink residency at Rimbun Dahan in Kuang, near Kuala Lumpur, brought up all those old flames: Matisse versus Picasso (and why I chose Matisse); the dark heart of Gauguin in Tahiti; imaginary encounters with Le Douanier Rousseau in the jungle; Chris Ofili, after he moved to Trinidad.

Going native is an arch suggestion to make of anyone, but in this globalized world, inspiration creates the only valid continuum. As a white man in the tropics, McHaffie continues a tradition but makes it more kindly and engaged, forging connections that are gentle and humorously self-effacing. Here, he is shown dancing like a puppet in Synchronized dancers holding hearts as in the portrait of Matisse practising his foxtrot. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as in the enchanting nocturnal reworking of a Rousseau dreaming, The first time I saw you was wild. And the one of ‘Eve’ holding out the apple is for me (Feeding the monkey but the monkey has enough).

Everything here is, indeed, excessively luscious, clean, colourful, inspired by the flora and fauna, and the artist’s encounters with the places and people he meets. These paintings work on a number of levels to create pictorial incidents and metaphors that McHaffie’s own written accounts richly fill in with anecdotal detail. I like the tension, also, that he creates in showing the presence of religious belief in everyday life, doubling the traditional role of painting itself as, in essence, a devotional art. These narratives are explored in works such as Mother and child     (a Madonna and child on a motorbike), The naturopath (sitting on the lap of Michelangelo’s Pieta) and Found him! (Christ, with his loincloth and halo, brought back arm-in-arm with two new friends).

Rob McHaffie, studio preview, Schoolhouse Studios, Abbotsford, Melbourne, 17 August 2012.

Rob McHaffie, Let’s see how we go, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 1–29 September 2012.

At one point in the pleasantly orchestrated conversation that was ‘An evening with “The New Yorker”‘, for the Melbourne Writers Festival, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl was likened to a large smoking squid. This reference to an outdated bad habit, and the old-school independence that one associates with art criticism in this age of institutional connections that pass as independent speech, had him up there with fantastic voyages to the South Seas to locate the elusive home of the giant squid. By way of reflection on the Antipodes, where such sightings might still be possible, Schjeldahl and his fellow New Yorkers—Henry Finder, David Grann, Sasha Frere-Jones and cartoonist Roz Chast—talked gallantly about a variety of themes. In my mind, there is no doubt that the island of long rambling essays in print about all and sundry are over unless you are the institution that is The New Yorker. With its quaint 1950s ambience and deservedly celebrated cartoons it is deliciously nostalgic, a form of guilty pleasure, like reading a Patricia Highsmith novel.

The giant squid came into its own for some more targeted critique in ‘The art game’, compered by ABC Radio National’s Michael Cathcart and featuring the recently anointed NGV director, Tony Ellwood. In this company, Schjeldahl shon as the bright light of free thinking on the fatal shore of institutional imperatives. Cathcart took the art versus sport line to frame the discussion around a series of ‘rounds’ about ‘art as a game’ or (with more arch implications) ‘art as a racket’, dwelling somewhat cynically on the comparison with combative sport, and relentless fixations on the score, time and money. And Ellwood, for whom I had more sympathy—promising at least to do something for post-1950s international art in the NGV collection—was also cautiously hamstrung by the need to stand up in defence of the realm (bolstered by comments about audience numbers and accessibility) in terms of celebrating our great national identity (most specifically, as Melburnian). By comparison, Schjeldahl, in a delightfully gentlemanly tone (over the course of the evening), said with glorious frankness, ‘I hate biennales’, ‘I hate museums’, ‘I hate all ideas of art as a form of civic virtue’, ‘I don’t have anything to say about the art market’, ‘I would go seek out a Rembrandt with flashlight in a subway toilet if that is where it is shown’. Beauty and high-mindedness, ‘You mean, like the moonrise over a Wallmart parking lot?’ Phooey, and hooray for the aesthete, for the risk in the thing—the critic as the elephant in the room, alias ‘The squid’.  Now there is a good idea for a cartoon …

The New Yorker ‘bringing Manhattan to Melbourne’ was a theme of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, 23 August — 2 September 2012.

Two of the works that are most memorable for me in this year’s Biennale of Sydney are Guido van der Werve’s film work Nummer acht: everything is going to be alright, and Lyndal Jones’s performance and installation at Cockatoo Island, Rehearsing catastrophe: the ark in Sydney. In the spirit of the biennale’s linked-in themes of establishing relations between works, peoples and things and the necessity of taking on board an ecological way of thinking, these works do for art what Slavoj Žižek has done for weighing up the state of mind of ‘living in the end times’. ‘Art and catastrophe’ can seem like a glib catchphrase exploiting the spectacle of disaster, but these two works are richer than that in harnessing the dilemmas of the relentless path towards progress bound up with the loss of frontier.

Van der Werve’s short-film piece, which already has a global cult following, shows the artist striding ahead of an ice-breaker like the twenty-first century version of Caspar David Friedrich’s intrepid explorer negotiating Das Eismeer. Seemingly just steps ahead of the vessel carving its path of destruction (due to the clever confusion of distance in a featureless landscape), the artist in a state of magnificent momentum channels a rather heroic last symphony as he strides through the landscape about to disappear. Like the somewhat over-employed metaphor of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, propelled into the future as it looks back at the ruins of the past, our man at the front (the artist himself) is a paradoxical figure of fearlessness.

In a work that is, in contrast, remarkable for its tentative steps in harnessing the very ordinary, everyday world of preparation for departure, Lyndal Jones’s Rehearsing catastrophe: the ark in Sydney creates a different kind of event space. This work, which has a Victorian origin in its first manifestation for the Avoca Project in 2010, is here cleverly restaged on Cockatoo Island, a place linked to former histories of maritime services and settlement. Rising to the occasion of this mythical space of embarkation, a motley crew of characters assembles in the courtyard by the wooden hull of the ark wedged into the wall of the ship-building precinct. Masquerading as animals, kitted out in simple handmade masks, they line up in pairs with suitcases in hand like postwar refugees to the new world. Intrepid, nervous, they look at us as we look at them before realising that (for today at least) nothing is going to happen.

18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations, Sydney, 27 June – 16 September 2012.

‘This is a country of many colourful, patterned, plastic veneers, of brick-veneer villas, and the White Australia Policy.’ Robin Boyd, The Australian ugliness.

The recent re-release by Text Publishing of The Australian ugliness by Robin Boyd, first published in 1960, provides an occasion to reflect on the prevailing views around cultural diversity. Written from the point of view of an architect and town planner, it is a hilarious read and a great work of social satire, according to which the aspirational drive for individualism and excess has been the downfall of any attempts at coming to some useful agreement on matters of progressive design in the post-colonial era. He has a point, of course, but it was and is a losing battle. I was thinking of this when viewing two recent exhibitions that dwell on the cultural life of the European expatriate.

In flotsamandjetsam, at Place Gallery in Richmond, Alex Selenitsch draws on his experience of being part of the first wave of European migration after the Second World War. Here, the memory of the singularly basic accommodation provided by the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre in north-eastern Victoria is reduced to the simple form of the box with a triangular roof (a dormitory hut from the side view). The kaleidoscopic refraction of textures, patterns and shapes, re-arranged like Cuisenaire rods, presents what for Selenitsch was evidently a childhood memory repeated ad infinitum.

Institutionalisation can do this, of course. As I know from my mother’s experience, life at Bonegilla, as the last stop in many years of migrant camp life, was no Bauhaus experiment. Living in a bare hut under a corrugated iron roof, hot in summer, freezing in winter, with men and women segregated etc. meant that the very suburbia that Boyd mocked must have looked like heaven with curtains. In such circumstances, away from such relentless utilitarian conformity, it is no wonder that the ‘new Australian’ would conform to type by filling the house with antiques and European folk art (as my mother did).

Responding in kind, the paintings of Elizabeth Pulie at Neon Parc lay claim to a northern Italian heritage and a predilection for old pattern books and what otherwise might be described as ‘Mixed Historical’. Here, Pulie brings together the exquisite flourishes of art nouveau, geometric art deco and those devolved stencilled botanicals in acculturated pastel colours and hieratic borders to signify this oddly eclectic heritage in her precisely numbered series of paintings, of which the small selection presents a representative few. Each one, in its own way, is reconfigured as a model of symmetry and harmony, lending hope to the possibility that even Boyd may have approved of the alternating template.

Alex Selenitsch, flotsamandjetsam, Place Gallery, Melbourne, 9 May – 2 June 2012.

Elizabeth Pulie, Mixed historical, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 6–30 June 2012.

Thanks to Narelle Jubelin’s reference to an obscure literary masterpiece, and those recent works of erotic fan-fiction by EL James currently topping the best-seller lists, this month’s posting continues on a theme.

The occasion is Jubelin’s occupation of the stairwell of the former Caulfield Technical School E Block (now the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University), designed by architect Percy Everett, c. 1950, part of her exhibition Vision in motion at Monash University Museum of Art. Quoting from Paul Scheerbart’s The gray cloth and ten percent white: a ladies’ novel (1914), this intervention is part of Jubelin’s ongoing heritage project of appropriating and revisiting modernist architectural sites, privileging her feminine fixation on the finer points of detail (through needlepoint, photographic archives etc.). These hand-written glass transcriptions in white, through which the grey urban vistas of the causeway and suburbs underscore her point, present a curious reflection on Scheerbart’s cautionary tale of submission towards an aesthetic principle of harmony.

Here the architect, Krug, uncannily doubling the eponymous Christian Grey, CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc. in Fifty shades of grey, presents his megalomaniac vision of a global enterprise to erect cities of coloured glass, and travel between them in glass-walled airships, accompanied by his wife, Clara. As a mandatory condition of their marriage contract, Clara must wear only grey and white to complement his jewel-like edifices, a role to which she submits, but not without some resistant moves and exchanges.

Vampiric (Twilight) associations aside, if Fifty shades of grey is the Barbie version of Pauline Réage’s Story of O, this novella by Scheerbart is even more lurid in scope; channeling what Jubelin quotes elsewhere in her show might otherwise be known as the Stendhal Syndrome (being overcome in the presence of a work of art). Walking up and down the stairs to grab the snatched quotes from a title I then felt compelled to get out from the library, I think I know what she means.

Narelle Jublin, Vision in motion, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 24 April – 7 July 2012.

Grey is the new blue, and Melbourne with its wintry aspect (for this last week at least) is my new Berlin, courtesy of John Nixon’s Black, white & grey. Photographic studies (photosheets), showing at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), and Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter—painting at the German film festival.

While Richter ruminates on history through his personal archive of old black and white photographs as source materials for his paintings, and whether (scandalously) he should throw them away, Nixon returns to the source to revel in the subtle and not-so-subtle gradations of tone, texture and contrast in the still-life photograph, with its roots in an earlier era of photomontage and cut-and-paste graphic design. Here, the techniques of Eisenstein, the Russian experimental cinematographer, meet the domestic world of Charles and Ray Eames in Nixon’s photographs of the black and white geometric patterned silk fabrics in the window of Job Warehouse in Bourke Street and the more natural environs of the artist’s house and garden in Briar Hill. The palpable materiality and archival sensibility of these non-objective compositions is further reinforced by their presentation as snapshot-size sample solutions mounted on cream manila folders to create ‘photosheets’.

As studies in form, that are beautiful in their effect—contrasting natural and synthetic forms, vegetation and the built environment, free-form and geometric or linear elements —Nixon returns to the pure essence of modernist photography. But (like Richter), this reflection on the past is not without irony, given the aura invested in the photographic print, now subsumed by the chicanery of the digital in the reprographic mindset. Just as Nixon goes down to the ‘self-serve’ Kodak Picture Kiosk at the local newsagent to make his prints after taking them through a Photoshop process to ‘restore’ them to the desired simplicity of black and white, Richter, with his machine arm squeegee, and relentless careful sifting and sieving of the mighty cadmiums, built up in layers, aspires to achieve the perfect photographic finish. All ways and means, to remind us once again how all that is old is new, and vice versa, like the passing of the seasons.

John Nixon, Black, white & grey. Photographic studies (photosheets), Centre for Contemporary Photography, 
Melbourne, 13 April – 27 May 2012.

Gerhard Richter—painting (dir. Corinna Belz), 2011, 
Audi Festival of German Films, Melbourne, April/May 2012.

‘All the world’s a stage, and all the people on it merely players …’

Elvis Richardson has, for some years now, built a body of work based on the found archives and stock images of a personal nature that people (apparently willingly, and sometimes for profit) present to the world. Whether it be the collections of slides found on eBay that contributed to Slide show land (2004–08) or the stacks of discarded home-video VHS tapes in Bastard love child from 2006 (more revealing than a bookshelf, you might say), there is a wealth of material out there that reinforces the need for self-projection and self-realisation through audio-visual documentation.

You don’t need to be a contestant for Ms Burlesque Victoria (another cultural event that I attended this week) or the producer of a home-school version of such an out-there display posted on YouTube to realise that we live in an age where the public–private boundaries seem to exist only to be transgressed. The domestic sphere has replaced the studio as the scene for many a documented gesture. The use of photography has never been more ubiquitous in this world of commercial and/or social media.

With this canvas in mind, and motivated by her own requirement for a place in the sun in the form of available real estate, Richardson has been undertaking online research into the regional and outer suburban property market to come up with an expanding gallery of images. Posting the results on Facebook, Richardson’s selection reads like the scenic backdrop to a familiar and much-loved soap opera that is real life.

Carefully presented and primped for the camera (with suitably soft lighting, selective angles, close-ups and focal points), many of these interior views of furnished domestic spaces have attracted comments that draw on their resemblance to Brides of Christ, Absolutely fabulous et. al. Like the catwalk models that ‘sell’ the clothes off their elegant, thin backs, these bedroom scenes, with their soft toys and colour schemes, ‘add value’ to the bare bones of the simple domestic interior and reveal a sense of personal pleasure and pride in their creation. So, too, in other images there is a strong sense of absence and loss—much like what we might associate with the sense of entering a crime scene. Either way, and with many shades of lifestylism in between, we become complicit in the spectacle as voyeurs and critics.

In this project, as in her many challenging and customised intrusions into the secret life of objects, Richardson has revealed a sense of the uncanny in their re-presentation for an audience. What makes this collection of images all the more elusive is their sense of suspended animation: in Low-Resland there is no download on a down-payment.

The bedroom is a work-in-progress by Elvis Richardson. Images below viewed March 2012.

As someone who keeps hopping cities, states and (most recently) countries myself I can identify with the ‘Home and Away’ theme of this exhibition. It’s been a while since I’ve seen recent work by Jenny Watson and I know she was a bit unfashionable for a while in Australia. This exhibition cleverly addresses this tall poppy experience to give a more experiential aside to the provincialism problem and the disadvantage of living far away from most major art centres and markets.

As an artist who made the switch to an international career by the 1990s, Watson’s figurative project cast in terms of biography but not reduced to it has always been a central aspect of her work. You don’t have to be an international art star to get the common ground here. Like the characters in Sophia Coppola’s film Lost in translation, the experience of being somewhere else provided a suitable sense of dislocation and estrangement, and of living in the moment that doubles the creative process, informing not only the passage but the content of the work.

As a survey show, there is a big leap from her early house portraits of Australian suburbia and views of Paris and London (like drawings for a fashion magazine) to the more casual, self-reflective recent works like A beautiful day in Delhi (2008–09) with its accompanying narrative about social dress codes and criminality. Similarly, there is an apparent change of heart from Alice in Tokyo (1984) and Australian artist in a bar in New York in 2016 (1986) to examples like Transitions: Tucson, New York, Italy, Belgium, Düsseldorf, London (2011) and 36 hours (2012), the latter starting out in Tokyo and ending up in Werribee Hospital with a dying horse. Endurance has proved Watson’s point and made many of the more academic narratives of the 1980s about the cultural cringe seem curiously sterile.

Jenny Watson: here, there and everywhere, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 18 January – 18 April 2012.