Drawing A Blank
Newcastle Herald
Saturday January 10, 2009
ON a wall of my home is a painting of a goldfish swimming between two green things. There might be a coloured rock as well. I forget.
I mention this to establish my artistic credentials after the emergence of a new Australian artist this week, whose works of "defined representations of something in abstract form . . . heavily reliant on figure/ground relations" have stunned the art world.The artist is two.But we'll get back to that in a minute. First, my goldfish painting.It was a gift from someone who said I had the artistic sense of a dead pot plant. I took that as a compliment and hung Goldfish and Two Green Things in a prominent spot. The gift-giver was horrified."I was having a go at you," she said."I think it's beautiful," I said. "It speaks to me on so many levels. I think the artist is saying we're just fish, swimming in a lonely sea before dying. Or he's inviting us to experience the environment from a seagrass point of view, with the fish as some kind of Christian motif. Or maybe it's a portrait of his pet goldfish, Jerome.""Shut up," the gift-giver said.As I said, I mention Jerome to establish my artistic credentials. I think stuff-all is the correct technical term.But I feel comfortable sharing my dead pot plant artistic sensibilities because when it comes to art, and particularly modern art, I think I'm just one dead pot plant in a big community of dead pot plants.Take the following conversation in a famous modern art museum only a couple of months ago between three people. I didn't know the others, but we shared a common . . . bewilderment.We were looking at three white canvases, side by side, each about 600 millimetres x 600 millimetres, by the same artist."Am I missing something?" I asked.I had my head turned sideways at the time. So did they, only in the opposite direction. I was hoping for some kind of hidden horizontal picture which could be seen only by getting up close, turning your head sideways and looking in a northerly direction. They were hoping for the same thing, only south. The canvases remained inscrutable."I suppose it prompts debate," said the woman."As in, 'How much did they pay for this, and why'?" I said."I think the one in the middle is a slightly different white to the others. I think there's yellow in it," said the man."Or it's an illusion," said the woman."Deep," I said.We moved on. The famous museum was the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which has rooms of blank canvases. Every so often one will have a line across it, sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical. One even had dots, although I might have been delusional by then.Sometimes the blank canvases weren't even art, I worked out. They were just spaces waiting for blank canvases. The blank canvases that were art had little signs under them, with helpful information.Under a series of seven coloured canvases was this little sign: "What the artist is looking for is moments of colour in which one loses oneself to gain the essential experience of the absolute."I looked for awhile, and felt the "essential experience of the absolute" of a dead pot plant, which is, nothing.In another room there was a shiny, red, presumably life-sized sculpture of a rhinoceros, with two skinny, long-haired Frenchmen in matching velvet pants and jackets and John Lennon glasses taking photos of it.I wasn't sure if the rhinoceros was the art, or the velvet dudes were performance artists. There were no signs. For all I know, the rhinoceros might have been the entry to the men's toilets.In the end I followed the velvet dudes until they had coffee and I realised they weren't art.Back in Australia this week we've discovered Aelita Andre, whose artist parents showed her abstract works to a gallery owner who included them in a group show, without realising the artist was a toddler."I was shocked and, to be honest, a little embarrassed," the gallery owner said when introduced to Aelita, who wears nappies and doesn't give interviews.Made my day.
© 2009 Newcastle Herald
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