Failure is an option

A new exhibition by young artist Todd McMillan has just opened at GrantPirrie, a contemporary art gallery in Redfern. The show is notable for a very special reason – its a celebration of failure. Earlier this year McMillan attempted to swim the English Channel but he didn’t quite make it. He swam until he got tired. He then abandoned the attempt for the safety of a boat… still in sight of the shore. This new series of video works carries on from other recent McMillan videos that have seen the artist endlessly and pointlessly hitting golf balls down a driving range somewhere in Germany, or in another where he stumbles around on crutches with a plaster cast on one leg. Failure is his theme.

Todd McMillan, Swim 1 (from the series ague), 2009.
C type photograph, 131.67 x 87.78cm
Photograph by Michael Moran.

You’d be forgiven for wondering why an artist would take on failure and indeed, why it would be worth watching. Isn’t art supposed to be about success? The popular measure of artistic merit is a demonstration of the artist’s ability to use craft skills – to paint a portrait that looks like the subject, to take a lovely photograph, to convincingly chisel a head in stone – these are the things that make people say, wow, I wish I could do that. Failing to swim the English Channel is something that everyone can do. Or fail to do, if you know what I mean. No special skills are required not to be able to do something. We generally like to enjoy looking at things being done by people who have the ability to do unusual things in the same way we appreciate a monkey using the telephone. That is a very special skill, and it’s noteworthy. Oh look – the monkey is wearing pants!

McMillan is notable as a successful failure and his work is being taught in high schools as part of the Kaldor Projects video art package. But he’s just one of a whole generation of younger artists who strive to fail. The Melbourne-based performance video artist Anastasia Klose celebrates the fact that she has failed in romance, has failed to get a decent job or to make a decent living from her art. Another artist of note is the young Sydney painter Tom Polo, who combines frank admissions of failure with the ambition to win. There are many other examples of failure in contemporary art and it must be said that these examples are of intentional failure, an ironic kind of activity that isn’t truly a mistake, or a disaster, since the artists do manage to finish their works, exhibit them and, in some cases, sell them to people who appreciate failure when they see it.

The roots of this trend towards disgrace are found in the rich soil of Australia’s artistic legacy. Older artists such as the painter Adam Cullen or the performance artist Tony Schwensen have tackled the cold toed comedy of Samuel Beckett who, after all, wrote an entire play about a lead character who fails to show up. Blame for the popularity of the failure theme should also be placed on UK artist David Shrigley who has parlayed his unwillingness to draw “properly” into multinational mega art stardom.

There may be another reason why being crap is so popular now – and that’s the ugly tendency in Australian culture to revel in triumphalism. One need only think of the absurd and unreasonable expectation of success at every level of sporting competition to realise just how deep the need to win runs in the Australian psyche.

The much touted ANZAC spirit – based on an event that can be best characterised as a noble failure – is an exception that it is also sadly out of date. It’s not about how you play the game these days, it’s about winning. I like to think that Australia’s attitude to winning and losing is best summed up in the stunning victory of ice skater Steven Bradbury at the 2002 Winter Olympics. Bradbury, who’d managed to get into the final after a series of improbable strokes of luck, won a gold medal from last position when all the other competitors literally fell over. Bradbury is now a folk hero.

Todd McMillan’s inability to swim the English Channel is far more interesting that had he actually done it. Being a winner, a success, or a top sportsperson or artist, is incredibly overrated. To happily fail is an admission of the essential frailty of the human condition. We all should strive to fail again, and to fail better.

Published in a slightly different form here

The Ice Age

This selection of artists and their work comes out of an ongoing interest in the history of the sublime in Western painting, the genre of fantasy art and a conscious effort on my own part to engage with artists of a slightly older generation. This selection might in fact be an ideal group show too, although for full effect it would need to be experienced alone, in an off-season resort dining room, in the depths of winter. Please enjoy.

Alexander McKenzie, Priory, 2008.
Oil on linen, 76 x 76 cm.

In Alexander McKenzie’s paintings the viewer is a distant observer of cold landscapes. We see arrangements of rivers, lakes, roads and trees stretching out to indistinct horizons, all the elements seemingly natural in their settings, yet the compositions are deliberately unreal and openly engaged with the symbolic. His highly polished and technically proficient paintings feel cinematic in the same way that the work of painters such as Casper David Friedrich or Eugene von Guerard speaks across the centuries to a contemporary visual imagination, and paintings such as Blue Island [2009] and Priory [2008] restate elements of Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead [1880-86]. McKenzie’s paintings are conundrums – what does he mean to say with the creation of these distinctly odd places? The answer is left deliberately ambiguous, charting perhaps the painters own journey in search of their meaning, tantalizing clues left for the viewer to decode.

Rick Amor, The off-ramp, 2007.

Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm.

It feels like the end of the world is very much on everyone’s minds these days but Rick Amor has been camped out in the time after the end of time for close to 30 years. Amor’s paintings record the images of an aftermath, an imagined post-apocalypse where humans are ghosts in a landscape of monumental buildings, abandoned freeway off ramps and the depopulated centres of dilapidated cities. The On-Ramp [2007] and The Silent East II [2006] are particularly fine examples of Amor’s melancholic vision. Amor’s landscape paintings are connected to the work of De Chirico in their metaphorical language and Jeffrey Smart’s paintings in their use of scale and dramatic architectures, but where Smart’s works are like stage lit sets, and De Chirico’s early paintings simply schematic suggestions, Amor’s works lift up with an application of paint that adds depth, strength and emotion.

Peter Booth,  Untitled, 2007
Oil on canvas, 244 x 121.5 cm

Peter Booth’s paintings have been a source of fascination for me since I first became aware of them in the 1980s. A recurring cast of monsters and humans – coupled with a painting style that employs rich acres of oil paint on large scale canvases – set Booth’s work apart from the smooth and illustrative styles dominant at the time. But the most appealing aspect of his works were, and remain, their apparently unambiguous embrace of fantasy narrative. The early works evoked Hieronymus Bosch and suggested intense and hostile interactions. A change in style in the 1990s from darkness into lighter tones and a recurring stage set of snowy desolation provided a new interplay between Booth’s freakish menageries and their settings. The monsters and the humans now try to coexist, engaged in negotiations for survival, perhaps over bread and warmth in the chilly, endless winterscapes of the artist’s imagination. There may be hope for us yet.

James Guppy, Etiquette, 2008.
Acrylic on linen, 61x150cms.

James Guppy is a productive and imaginative artist – always trying new things, experimenting with techniques and presentations, not all of them necessarily successful, but impressively diverse and wholeheartedly committed to the surrealist project. As Andre Breton wrote, “beauty will be convulsive or not at all”. Some are born, some are not. A long admirer of his work, I was impressed by his Weather Reports exhibition in early 2007 and its embrace of the painful and still controversial memory of 9/11, its immediate aftermath and the symbolic representation of the spiritual malaise of the West during the war on terror through clouds and fire. Guppy’s next solo show in Sydney was the suite of works Fay that mined a personal fascination with Edwardian fairy tales and a frank eroticism. Guppy’s oddly shaped canvases, the Velásquez-via-Dali sheen of the surfaces and the disturbing conflation of fantasy with personal history proved to be his very best work. The show was a sensation.

Michael Zavros, Temple of Love, 2007.
Oil on board, 24.6 x 18.4 cm

Michael Zavros’s work shares a similar classical sensibility in both subject and execution with the work of the other artists in this selection. However, its Zavros’s use of irony that sets him apart. His most well known works are his sequence of equine paintings such as Spring/Fall 11 [2004] which, in its pictorial simplicity, seem effortlessly contemporary while simultaneously looking back to paintings by George Stubbs such as Whistlejacket [1762]. Zavros is a classical ironist utilizing multiple meanings to construct paintings that are as much about mood as they are engaged with an overarching thematic. Recent works have dealt with the ironies of wealth, its depiction and utilization in art – from runway images of fashion to miniature polished gems, to the erased faces of models and the infrared colouration of images of European palaces and gardens, such as his Temple of Love [2007]. It’s in these latter works that Zavros creates a parallel world of appearances that comments on the abundance of “beauty” and yet is equally lost in the very same imagery.

This article appeared in “Critic’s Corner” in Australian Art Collector Magazine, July-September, 2009.

Autumn someplace else

In my cheap hotel room in Rome the walls were decorated with floor-to-ceiling photo wallpaper of a fantastic autumnal scene. The effect was a disturbing trompe l’oeil that invited the viewer to leap off the creaky double bed’s headboard into a forest, wander along a path scattered with bright orange and yellow leaves, take rest on a conveniently placed wooden bench, and then regard this Silvan Glade with the detached melancholy of a Romantic poet. In reality, however, the brute physics of the solid wall resisted any attempt to physically enter the picture. The encounter was one for the eyes – and mind – only.

Craig Waddell’s latest body of work, grouped together under the title Autumn Frolic, reminded me of that experience in the Italian pensione all those years ago through a simple trigger – the colour orange. Like the man who loves chocolate but who ends up a diabetic, exposure to that giant photo mural put me off the association of colour and season forever.  The hotel experience was aversion therapy, yet the continual reminder of this association won’t go away. And it still upsets me.

Craig Waddell, Sunshine Flickers, 2009.

Along the street where I live there are trees in autumnal colours, non-native imports that reinforce our bizarre cultural need for a Northern Hemisphere winter. Between red and yellow there is orange, the visual sensation of the wavelength of light that clusters between 585-620 nanometres. We associate this colour with autumn because, in the odd default cultural memory of us non-Indigenous types, the colour occurs between summer and winter. The logic is simple but faulty; cause does not necessarily produce affect.

Waddell is a visual ironist. There is nothing in these paintings beyond the gesture, yet in the language of the expressionist, there is surface, and gesture, and much more – the ghost of the figure lurks beneath the great swathes of paint.

As a record of an experience we can reasonably think that Waddell, a citizen of Sydney’s north western suburbs – and a place noted for its Liquid Amber trees, Devonshire teas and olde worlde antique shops – is drawing on direct experience. But the titles of the works, with their playful evocation of paint sample names such as Swirling Leaves, Peach Dreams, Sunshine Flickers and Persimmon Delight, is far more knowing and playful that one suspect.

As a painter with an engaged understanding of art history, Waddell is offering a classical notion of irony; a double meaning or an incongruity between what is proposed and what is understood. It’s in this space that we find the lurking figuration suggested by the title. Instead of a literal rendering of faux experience, what emerges in this sequence of paintings is a far more bucolic – and erotic – version of nature. From beyond the detailed surface arrive a group of frolicking, naked women, proposing a connection to the master of expressionism Willem de Kooning and another artist-sensualist lost in an Arcadian imagination, one Norman Lindsay.

The narrative of these paintings suggests that the viewer can revisit even the most seemingly abstract pictures and detect the trace of figure. Waddell’s experiments with abstraction and figuration stretch back through his work taking paint to its very essence in sculptural lumps of left over paint to portraits, landscapes and seascapes. The continuity is Waddell’s apparent fascination with the physical properties of paint, but more interestingly, its suggestive properties too, deployed somewhere between the experience of the real and its phantom.