Southerly Buster #2
The Melbourne art fair
Sunday, the last day of the art fair, we planned to head down and reconnect with the contemporary art zeitgeist, at least to see what was going down in Melbourne. I lived my formative years in this city from seven to thirteen, and family life drawing and Aussie rules was my milieux. The cake was set quite early, as I described in a video about favourite teachers, Mr Dixon set the icing on my creativity very early. You see I was marginalised in my early years. I didn’t speak the Australian lingo, and needed to learn English in grade four, when my French-German parents decided to remain in the southern hemisphere away from Europe for their forceable future.
So I grew up developing my drawing skill to gain acceptance at a Victorian public school, and then practically everywhere my disrupted existence landed me. So here I am, in my mid career still relying on these scribbling gifts. I passionately develop scribbling, relying on research and routine to express thoughts with every new materiality available. The framework was set early, exploring emotional responses to the evolving temporal surprises manifesting before me. Methodologies also evolved around these random thought scribbles, relying on draftsmanship allowed for much liberal exploration. I now know that the metaphor can carry an image with confidence.
So interestingly after a formative childhood, I’m coming back to an evolved Melbourne. It so emotionally different to the place I left in my youth, and I feel the disappearance of all my nostalgic ideal. Forty years without domestic familial daily conversations, I’m loosing my maternal French vocabulary. I only speak French, by tackling tourists at work as an Invigilator in a Sydney major Arts Institution, I can generate a lingering conversation interrogating their observations of Australia life, and describing the best way around the artworks on offer. The evaporating attachment to Melbourne, and imagining a productive connected existence in this continent’s southern town is also fading very true now.
But I was here to research the Melbourne Art fair, offering a consistent trade narrative, reinforcing my understanding of the power structure permeating through the business of domestic Art in Australia, and also internationally. To have a sustainable art practice within this paradigm requires creative and critical thinking, far exceeding the processes of making the art itself. By the way, I wanted to describe the next iteration of my thoughts around the SOUTHERLY BUSTER, when I started writing this at Melbourne airport on my way back to Sydney. As you can see I was way laid by all the previous thoughts and the past two days of experiences. I’m glad to reflect on them, to bring context to the opinions manifesting my temporal understanding of practice.
Back in Sydney, my plan is to monumentalise my process. So I will staple to the back of my front fence canvas which will be staying hung up until I adorn it with random thought scribbles, with the idea (re; Australian Gallery’s, John Wolseley inspired) to depict temporal and physical phenomena of the environment surrounding this little courtyard, facing inward from the public and in conversation with the elements, weather, and my daily thoughts. Like the Southerly Buster it’s a “clash of many competing systems”, to quote Brian Eno.
The lillypilly in the front yard surrounded by the 3x1.6m canvas adorned with my random thoughts painted in oils on the fence en plein air
My aim is to complete something monumental without deadline, and no preconceived notions. So It will be an iteration of the present oeuvre unless it accompanies me to another wider scribbling utopia.
I feel the system of the art world will find a use for this scribbled Utopia, if the mark making is true and honest and carries a tangible narrative developed through this process of artistic investigation, and maybe Mr Dixion’s gifted kindness will still serve me well once again.
Stay tuned for updated iterations…..