I enjoy the kinds of informal connections that you can make by simply looking at different artworks. Sometimes the brain has to catch up to the eye and try to explain away coincidences, or alternatively make a case for initial and perhaps superficial visual similarities to become more than that. It’s always positive to begin to think about the world view embodied in artworks, and for this to help you face down preconceptions about how things should or shouldn’t be. After all, what good is an artwork that simply reinforces the way you already see things?

Recently, while at the NGA in Canberra, I visited a work I like a great deal: Boxer Milner’s Milnga-Milnga, the artist’s birthplace, 1999. Someone talked to me about Milner’s work a few years ago, emphasising that once you get an understanding of his pictures they begin to work on you, but first you have to ‘get your eye in’. It’s true—before you know it you are really looking at them—thinking about where blocks of colour end, where outline becomes infill and about the multitude of decisions you can read in his pictures. They also raise broader questions about how content relates to these kinds of decisions, and where form might unhinge from an underlying framework of representation.

A number of days later I saw Nick Selenitsch’s show at Sutton Gallery. There’s a series of visual coincidences between the artists, but I would suggest that some of what the eye picks up represents more than this, and that connecting one with the other defines a mid-ground that both artists negotiate. Milner’s decision to render the winding paths of drying waterways as a striking geometry presents as a specific ‘painterly’ decision, one that’s about pattern-making and design as much as it is about representing country. Similarly, Selenitsch’s focus on the line markings that define areas of play places a geometric topography on the land’s surface and provides the crux of his work: abstraction’s signification of the real world. Each displays a tendency to adapt specific content away from literal or prosaic representation—frameworks shift and change in relation to the logic of each work.

Drawing these connections is nothing new. Comparison like this has a long (and often misguided) history, especially since Indigenous contemporary art has been established as an undeniable art-world presence. It often raises persistent and unresolved problems, both of categorisation and misrepresentation. But raising these problems makes us consider them more closely and, at an informal level at least, looking at paintings and thinking about what artists do will continue to suggest that practices can and do converge in unintended places.

Nick Selenitsch, Felt, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 20 April – 19 May 2012.

Boxer Milner, collection display, the Kimberley, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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.

When I was a pre-teen, it was the fully-fledged teenagers I knew who were able—as perhaps only teenagers are—to recount swathes of dialogue from the 1994 film Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith.

I can’t help but quote critic Brad Laidman (surely not his real name?) at length, since Laidman’s review/lament encapsulates both the film’s plot and the empathetic/envious fandom surrounding it since, well, Smith ‘made it’:

‘Clerks for me was kind of like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan were for so many nascent Rock stars. You’re stuck in a dead end town. You’re stuck in the purgatory of a job you hate. You love comic books, but you can’t draw. You love movies, but you barely know which end of a camera the lens is on. You squirrel away time writing a semi-autobiographical justification of your life, praying that somehow your quick wit and pop culture spewing point of reference will someday free you from the shackles of your own private hell. I was in the same spot. I had this novel that I referred to as an existential cartoon. I even titled its word processing file “God”, because it represented what I thought was my last prayer of a chance at living a happy life. Clerks … [depicts a] great love for twisted dialogue … and linguistic attitude are certainly abundantly present and ring out like gunfire, but when Tarantino made Reservoir dogs, he had Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, and Michæl Madsen to work with. Kevin Smith had a couple of buddies, a convenience store, and some black and white film.’

And I think this parallelism is appropriate because this is the stuff of Greatest Hits—which is immediately visible to us in their ironic collaborative title, but is also apparent in the quotation, outsourcing, editing and collaging in the construction of new work. Pinned down by their own art gods, has this work De facto standard become the footnote that out-played the text? Or the title that jumped the artwork?

For De facto standard, at Westspace, Greatest Hits gained prolific and—to state the obvious—unheard-of media coverage for an exhibition in an artist-run space. Here is the bibliography from their online CV: LA Times, LA Times Business, TIME, Fox News, Fox Business, Yahoo! News, Herald Sun, Desktop Magazine, NBC New York, NBC LA, USA Today, The Washington Post, Daily Style, Gizmodo, Daily Mail, The Age, CNET, Macworld, Art Info, ABC, ABC News, ABC World News Now, The Roast, The Project, Sydney Morning Herald, SBS World News, MX, the Conversation, Don’t Panic, Examiner, The Guardian.

Read all about it: ‘Art grabs headlines for depiction of prosaic uncertainty in terms of the contemporary existential’.

Greatest Hits’ De facto standard appealed media-wise because of its hipster tech-fetish factor. The main player being the perfume, which was made (to order) to smell like a newly opened MacBook, and pumped into the gallery space by a faux stainless steel contraption about the height of a CD rack. It’s funny, it’s wry. The supporting parts within the one-room exhibition included three identical copies of the film Avatar. The three Blu-ray Disc covers on the floor were leant up against the gallery wall, as well as a photographic transfer of a very realistic-looking slice of pickle stuck to the gallery wall. Angsty commentary on futurism, advertising, and machismo are the key components of this work. It’s all about quotation, careful selection, editing and complicated professionalism. (Read, like Clerks.) And employing a very different tone, compared with Dane Mitchell’s use of perfume to breach gallery, viewing and conceptual space.

It’s unclear though if De facto standard is also a reference to Mitchell’s work with scent in the gallery space or if the artists are aware of this work by Boris Dornbusch shown earlier in 2012 entitled Dimensions variable (described by Dornbusch as ‘The fleeting scent in the very moment between opening the lid and just before removing the display protection sheet from a MacBook Air purchased a few seconds ago’).

Perhaps the overly casual and not apparently entwined supporting objects let down the lead in De facto standard. As one meaning of the title of the work implies, De facto standard operates as a kind of manipulated shortcut, exaggerated as a result of the lite supporting objects.

Greatest Hits, De facto standard, Westspace, Melbourne, 20 April – 12 May 2012.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how we experience art. Mainly because my own ability to visit shows has become so limited for a time. Openings are out, studio visits impossible and any exhibitions I do get to are on the fly. My only conversations with artists of late have been more social, over coffee. While we are talking about various things, the only looking involved is at each other.

This is interesting to me because the art—physical/material stuff—is completely mediated and removed from my day-to-day. I’m hearing about it from those who have seen something and have something to say. I hear the gossip. I’m seeing what’s online. I’m looking at art in two dimensions, documentation-style on the iPhone, gallery websites, blogs, magazine reviews, email, Vimeo and catalogues posted in. I feel like I’m entering into a new relationship with art. And I’m not sure it’s healthy.

Experiencing art in this way is useful in the sense that it’s easy to access, broad in scope and, as the Internet tends to do, one thing leads to another—lands you in places of discovery that were not anticipated. You can repeat your visit, archive material for future reference and learn a lot without actually being there. But something in all this is most definitely missing.

I had a startling thought last week—it was still dark. What if I woke up and the Internet was broke? My art consumption would go down a good 90%. I couldn’t view documentation of shows I will never see, review archives of things I’ve already missed, email back and forth about this work or that space. I couldn’t even make an application to the Australia Council. I’d be paralysed.

Solution: next week I’m doing something I haven’t done in a long, long, long time. I’m taking me and my girl to the NGV and walking through every single gallery and viewing every single work on display. I’m going to saturate myself in the physical encounter one-on-one (maybe two-on-one). And in the process hopefully remind myself how individually complex the game can be. Or not.

Friday night, aged seventeen, sitting, waiting. I’ve had a Mars bar from the freezer, Dad’s reading The Age, Mum’s watching a documentary on the Queen, I’m waiting for them to go to bed so I can watch the SBS Friday night movie. No friend has called me. I don’t want to call around, it could be devastating, the pain could last through Saturday and on to Sunday and cause a nasty break-out on the oily parts of my face. It’s best to just wait this one out and pin my hopes on the movie for some relief. ‘OK Rob, we’re off to bed, have another Mars bar if you like’. ‘Thanks Mum see you in the morn.’ I tried gnawing on the Mars bar but it was too frozen so I sucked it. It’s an Argentinean movie. Bingo! At 10.07 pm I see a boob flash across the screen. They’re out there somewhere. I set the VCR and I’m off. 10.13 pm I brush my teeth walk into my room turn on the bar heater take off my clothes and hop in to bed. Mum has put on my electric blanket already so I turn off the bar heater. It takes a long time to fall asleep.

Amanda Marburg, Marking the pathway to corporeal pleasures, Rex Irwin Gallery, Sydney, 
1–26 May 2012.

Patrick Hartigan, Gone as before, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 19 May – 16 June 2012.

Suji Park, Former things, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland, 9 May – 2 June 2012.

Around 1994 Raafat Ishak and I were interested in the French word décadence and its local translation, which had been flipped to read ‘decline’, in the magazine Art & Text. The magazine’s usage was ‘The decline of the nude’. This became the basis for an exhibition where we re-flipped the title back to The decadence of the nude.

Installing though, Ishak didn’t focus on the nude drawings he was first considering but instead painted a design directly on the wall down low in a corner of the gallery. The image was very stylised in the way that he was used to working except for this section where you could clearly see a kangaroo humping an emu.

I’ve often thought Ishak divides up the concepts in his paintings. His art is a strange collision of facts and feelings, but it’s the facts he lays down most clearly first. With the Decadence exhibition he turned the sense of the word towards presumptions of contemporary nationalism and the identity cults and tropes around belonging that they oblige. (Not long after this show he painted ‘send me home’ in billboard-size letters on the outside wall of the same West Brunswick gallery.)

One of Ishak’s very earliest paintings he’s said is a painting of his mother and concerns another form of estrangement. I don’t have a reproduction of the work but my recollection is that it is something like the second image I’ve included below (a photo I took yesterday on the highway to Johor Bahru in southern Malaysia). Ishak based his painting of his mother on signage, very much like this, for a women’s toilet—although his was a red female design on a white canvas and copied from local toilets at the VCA or somewhere. The Ishak painting was a hugely sad existential work—something very hard to pull off these days—although I imagine some audiences could disagree and mistake the same components of the work as the product of a basic lack of empathy or inhibition.

Just recently, with his 2011 show at Sutton Gallery, Ishak has come back to nudes. They are hidden under the miasma of ‘a rigorous speculation on abstraction’ (did I ever understand what this means? I’m not sure!), and he’s named each painting after a soft-fleshed tropical fruit. The works are gorgeous but although it’s hard to see what is going on exactly I get the sense there is a bit of toilet humour here too: Mr Nude Descending a Staircase along with Mr Stinky R Mutt. And once again I think it’s actually lower down (beyond?) the chain of reasoning that we might find the work’s true feeling.