126trouble

All images Michael McWILLIAMS

In order of appearance: The Three Sisters 2015, synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 180 cm. Rainforest Dancer 2015, synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 150 cm. Tip Trip 2015, synthetic polymer on linen 120 x 100 cm. Lost in the Orient, synthetic polymer on linen 75 x 75 cm.

An Aussie Wally, an exhibition of new paintings by Tasmanian artist Michael McWilliams, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, 5 Malakoff Street, North Caulfield (VIC), until 29 August 2015 - diggins.com.au Download the illustrated catalogue with essay by Rod James here.

DIS IS DE DISCLAIMER! The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication. The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions. All content in this publication is copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior permission of the publisher. Trouble is distributed online from the first of every month of publication but accepts no responsibility for any inconvenience or financial loss in the event of delays. Phew!

Issue 126 AUGUST 2015 trouble is an independent monthly mag for promotion of arts and culture Published by Trouble Magazine Pty Ltd. ISSN 1449-3926 CONTRIBUTORS Ive Sorocuk, Jim Kempner, Cameron Rose, Inga Walton, Ben Laycock, love.

Find our app at the AppStore follow us on issuu , twitterSubscribe at troublemag.com

READER ADVICE: Trouble magazine contains artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and the names, images or artworks of deceased Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. Treat Trouble intelligently, as you expect to be treated by others. Collect or dispose of thoughtfully.

CONTENTS

AN AUSSIE WALLY: MICHAEL MCWILLIAMS Lauraine Diggins Fine Art .................................................................... 02

COMICS FACEIve Sorocuk ......................................................................................... 11

THE MADNESS OF ARTJim Kempner ...................................................................................... 12

LIFE UNLIMITED: ART, TECHNOLOGY & USSYNTHETICA | Gippsland Art GalleryCameron Rose ................................................................................... 14

DAYS LIKE THIS: MARY TONKIN Inga Walton ........................................................................................ 24

AUGUST SALONAbsolutely .......................................................................................... 34

KEN MCGREGORSocial Work ....................................................................................... 46

DITO VON TEASEDitology ............................................................................................ 50

GREETINGS FROM BEYOND THE PALE: FITZROY CROSSING Ben Laycock .................................................................................... 54

COVER: PEZALOOM, Dopa-kinesia #1- 2 2015, C-type photograph, 100 x 150cm. Photograph by Kim Anderson. Dopa-kinesia, The Lost Ones Gallery, 14 Camp Street, Ballarat (VIC), until 17 August 2015 - thelostones.com.au

How do you keepyour Face sogorgeous?

Gorgeous Face!

Apply face gorgeousisingcream once everytwo timesa day!

Smell and also taste

like allthe movie

stars!

Also good on yourchicken sandwich!

On account thatit is mayonnaise

actually.

webcomicsnation.com nonstopcomicsThis comic first appeared in Trouble issue #38 (September 2009)

visit: themadnessofart.com/

Season 4, Episode 9: “Sometimes a cigar ...”Jim’s new clients are not sure what they’re looking for but they’ll know it when they

see it. But will Jim? While their son enjoys an educational video in the back, Jim pulls out all the appropriate artwork he can think of ...

art comedy series

SYNTHETICA | GIPPSLAND ART GALLERY

Cameron Rose

< Kristin MCIVER, Divine Intervention 2011, neon light, metal, artificial plants. 180 x 150 x 150cm. Image courtesy of the artist and James Makin Gallery, Melbourne and Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney. Photograph by Christian Capurro.

Synthetica at Gippsland Art Gallery is a touring exhibition produced by BLINDSIDE and NETS Victoria. Curated by Claire Anna Watson, Synthetica examines the relationship between art, technology and us. It includes the work of seven artists – Boe-lin Bastian, Simon Finn, Bonnie Lane, Kristin McIver, Kate Shaw, Alice Wormald and Paul Yore – whose diverse approaches include painting, sculpture, video and 3D modelling.

Art and technology are by definition divorced from nature. Art is the product of human creativity and technique; it is an object, image, sound or movement that exists as a unique manifestation of our imagination. Technology comes from the Greek tekhnologia “a systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique”1, the key word is systematic, a repetitive application of method. A process that implies a denial of chance and serendipity as can be found in manual production.

However art has always reflected nature. From cave paintings to inspire the successful hunt, a fertility symbol to continue the tribe, cosmic imagery to understand the universe, or the abstract realisation of thought and philosophy, it is the physical translation of the nature of our mind.

Technology extends our nature; language stores our knowledge, sound is translated into electrical currents so we can hear voices from long ago and far away. The photograph captures light and movement, extending the gaze to the micro and macroscopic.

But there is a suspicion that art and technology mischievously thwart and corrupt nature. Knowledge itself was seen as the demise of the innocence of Eden, the forbidden fruit that would show us how things really are, subsequently revealing ourselves as naked. In the third of the Ten Commandments we are told “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”. These idols were thought to detract from the true essence of being, as if the image itself challenged nature and the authority of its creator.

The Protestant tradition Calvinism emphasised simplicity in worship, and sought the removal of anything that might distract from the contemplation of God, including the removal of icons, images and relics from churches. Ironically technological innovation allowed reformist Christianity to blossom with the introduction of the printing press, distributing the bible to the masses so they could make their own interpretation, allowing a personal and individual relationship with God.

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In the 16th century Islam regarded even the printing press with suspicion. Sultan Selim I of Istanbul punished with death those guilty of the dark practice of printing. Yet the Muslim world still found a way to practice art and technology, one has only to look at the exquisite patterns in the tile ceilings of mosques. Patterns based on geometry but manifestly beautiful in their design. And that perhaps is the key. No matter what confabulation of art and technology, the human race will find a way to relate it to our lives, our world, and our human nature.

But there is also a dialog between art and technology (though not divorced from each other they do sometimes need counselling). Photography was considered an inferior form of expression. At an early meeting of the Photographic Society of London, established in 1853, one of the members complained that the new technique was “too literal to compete with works of art” because it was unable to “elevate the imagination”2. The American philosopher John Dewey argued that where science stated meanings art expresses them. For example we can understand water as the molecule of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. But this definition evokes nothing of the experience of water. Think of Hokusai’s The Great Wave of Kanagawa (c. 1830), the Latona fountain at Versailles, or video artist Bill Viola’s Ascension (1996), The Crossing (1996) and Emergence (2002), showing figures immersed in cascading water from above, or emerging re-born from the baptismal font.

Now consider Jellies. Coupling Series (2010) by Boe-Lin Bastian. Wobbling provocatively on a washing machine, it expresses the jelliness of jelly far more effectively than understanding that gelatine is collagen extracted from the bones of beasts. This jelly writhes suggestively in slow motion to the domestic rhythm of suburban white goods. It may ask us if the conveniences of modern life are turning us to jelly, gyrating fruitlessly and flabbily to the monotonous beat of modernity?

This is art’s place. It is not there to blithely accept all technological advances as benign. Art interrogates technology as part of the landscape. Turner painted his smoke-belching steamers, Mondrian his grids inspired by the streets of New York. One can imagine the heady crescendo of twentieth century capitalism on the streets of New York, neon lights beckoning you into an artificial world of spectacle lit by the imagination. Bonnie Lane’s Make Believe (2012) suggests the glamour of this era, culture commoditised into the truncated legs of a Ziegfield dancer. Kristin McIver’s neon sculptures delivers a somewhat asinine hope, Divine Intervention (2011) uses neon text to proclaim “Life Unlimited” surrounded by fake plastic evergreen leaves. It is an electric garden of Eden with the promise of immortality denied by the synthetic flora that will never bear fruit.

The Dada movement created work from the excrement of mass production and Andy Warhol glorified it, celebrating the democratisation of mass consumption. Paul Yore’s WHEN WILL IT END (2014) also uses this detritus in a post-apocalyptic totem

4< TOP Boe-lin BASTIAN, Jellies. Coupling Series 2010, HD video (still), 4 minutes 13 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist. BOTTOM Bonnie LANE, Make Believe 2012, Single channel HD video | 1 hour 5 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne.

4Synthetica installation view. Counihan Gallery in Brunswick featuring Paul Yore’s WHEN WILL IT END (2014) in foreground and Kristin McIver’s Divine Intervention (2011) in background. Photograph by Claire Anna Watson.

that wouldn’t be out of place in the garden of Zebedee from the children’s television program The Magic Roundabout (1964-1971). Sticks strung together with plastic slinkies, fake flowers, rubber hot dogs, synthetic fur and feathers. Its elements desperately accrete to make sense of its fleeting existence at the end of an absurd technological food chain of petroleum, plastics and poisonous factories far away. We are disconnected from the origin of these objects; they arrive manufactured far away by unknown hands and processes.

Yet technology can be sublime. Quantum theory shows we can smash the atom to such an extent that it knows it’s being watched. The Hubble telescope extends our gaze into unfathomable reaches of the universe. Simon Finn’s Stages of Descent (2013) depicts the movement of a roving camera on Mars; a camera that explores not only a surface of a distant planet but also reveals the urge to see beyond the limits of our normal gaze. However his work is rendered in charcoal, a process that in his own words “re-links the corporeal with the aid of the machine.”3 It reveals a desire to humanise technology, bring it back to the body, and bring it down to earth.

For this is the conundrum — we enjoy the benefits of technology, but we don’t entirely trust it. We can go for long drives in the country, but consume un-renewable fossil fuel in the process. We adore the ability to call whomever we want, but miss being out un-contactable. We send emails whilst lamenting the lost art of correspondence. We accept the civilising logic of CCTV but despair at our loss of privacy. Like the goldfish in Bonnie Lane’s Life is Pain (2010), we either demure to the incessant gaze of technology or leap into unknown, flapping helplessly in the non-connected world.

But within the digital bosom of our age, we virtually experience phenomenon that was once myth and legend. Natural and human disasters are no longer recorded in epic poems or Biblical stories. Tsunamis fill our screens, the miseries of war banally stain our television, World Trade Centers fall like the Tower of Babel and we see it, over and over again. As in Kate Shaw’s The Spectator (2012) where silhouetted figure gaze upon an erupting but ultimately impotent volcano, we look upon the bizarre and tragic with a detached curiosity, for to be engaged would be to go mad at the wall of televisions like David Bowie as the Alien in Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), or enraged like Peter Finch in Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), who is as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Art, Technology & Us / Cameron Rose

But I argue that technology is nature. In the same way that termites build their nest or bees their hive, we create our own systems and environments. We can imagine impossible spaces, places beyond nature as in Alice Wormald’s paintings. These works challenge the conventional landscape, both as represented in painting through the technique of perspective, and the subsequent manifestation through the lens of photography.4 Wormald’s work embodies ambivalence in verisimilitude, purposefully creating an “unsettling hybrid”5 that suggests the real but happily breaks the conventions in its representation.

I wonder if that is our fear, a fear that would see us confuse the copy for the original. Walter Benjamin famously considered how art in the age of mechanical reproduction both destroyed and liberated the aura of authenticity from the work of art. Whilst for the “high-priest of post-modernism” Jean Baudrillard, the copy could be “more real than real” like the genetically engineered human replicant in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). I argue it is not that we are concerned with distinguishing between the artificial and the real; but rather we now wonder if we still care?

In Blade Runner, the leader of the replicants Roy Batty comes to grim terms with his synthetic mortality. Though a product of art and technology, he thinks and feels and at the end of his life laments his lost memories saying:

“I’veseenthingsyoupeoplewouldn’tbelieve.Attackshipsonfire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time ... like tears in rain. Time ... to die.”

Art and technology may extend beyond our natural selves, but they are also inextricably linked with our mortality.

Synthetica, Gippsland Art Gallery (VIC), 10 July - 20 September 2015. Wagga Wagga Art Gallery (NSW), 16 January - 13 March 2016 - netsvictoria.org.au or blindside.org.au

NOTE: This review is based on Cameron Rose’s presentation at Counihan Gallery’s public forum The Future is Now: The Role of Art and Technology.

FOOTNOTES 1. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=technology [Accessed 10 May 2015] 2. M. Prodger, Photography: is it art? http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/19/photography-is-it-art [Accessed 12 May 2015] 3. http://www.simonfinn.info/html/Bio.html [Accessed 12 May 2015] 4. It is curious to observe how we discovered the technique to accurately represent the natural world before a photographic technology that would do the work for us. 5. Synthetica Exhibition Catalogue.

4BACKGROUND: Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott. NEXT SPREAD: Kate SHAW, The Spectator 2012, Single Channel HD video (still), 4 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Fehily Contemporary.

MARY TONKIN | AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES MELBOURNE

Inga Walton

DAYS LIKE THISS S

4Mary TONKIN, Buffetted, Above the White Gums, Kalorama 2015, oil on linen, 73 x 182 cm.

ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST ACCOMPLISHED and vigorous landscape artists, Mary Tonkin works primarily from her family farm at Kalorama, surrounded by the Dandenong Ranges National Park. Established by her Grandfather in the 1930s, the farm supplies rare bulbs and cut flowers, and is protected from development by a conservation covenant.

Tonkin’s works are principally completed en plein air, a demanding but vital part of the artistic process, in order to capture the lyricism and vitality of the abundant bushland. “Working outside is physically and practically a pain in the neck! I work in quite dense bush and it is often a challenge just to get the work back without wiping the wet paint off. These problems can generally be overcome by planning, but weather remains the constant nemesis or companion depending on conditions and my mood”, she admits. “Because I tend to work on an image all day, sometimes for many months, changing light can be a difficulty. I tend to use that time period to its advantage and slowly work out which parts of the image require which light. I have no studio practice to speak of. I stretch canvases and have a good gander at the work in the studio, otherwise I put the marks down and mix paints on site”.

The artist’s latest exhibition, Two spots at Australian Galleries (4-23 August, 2015), concentrates on two distinct areas within this ever-changing environment she has come to know so well. “It is a kind of paradise. Mostly the attraction is that it is home, I have a deep connection to this land and it affords me privacy to work”. For Tonkin, entering the forest is an activity that allows her the space for introspection, to access and engage with deeper philosophical and emotional concerns. “I think landscape is a fabulous metaphor for our sensuous, sensate experience of life ... about a dissolution of personal boundaries, a glorious melding of self and surrounds that is a precious rarity in our cacophonous modern life”. Nonetheless, there remains something primaeval, unknowable, and foreboding about so much of the Australian bush; an intangible energy within the forest that both disturbs and entices. “That sense of ‘otherness’ concerning the bush is at the heart of a great deal of landscape painting ... perhaps it reflects a (white) Australian sense of unease about being in this relatively harsh Southern land, far from our ancestral roots”, Tonkin ponders. “Perhaps, more broadly, we do want to belong, but feel a physical or existential threat from the bush? I hope that my delight and sense of being coddled [by it] is conveyed in the works, and that they might somehow serve to dissipate those latent anxieties”.

Across Tonkin’s canvases we see a subtle dance of interpretation as she embeds multiple layers of seeing within the work while traversing the forest. “I really want a viewer to feel a part of the landscape I am depicting, I want that to be an almost physically tangible experience ... I do want to convey my sense of melding into the landscape. I want a viewer to smell the dampness, hear the cicadas, feel the presence of forms and the wattle blossom falling whilst they dream”, she stresses. Her work reflects this complex interplay of scale,

Days Like This: Mary Tonkin / Inga Walton

tone and variation, the struggle to communicate what being alone in that vast space is like at that particular instant. “What I consider the content of my work arises in different ways; sometimes I have a clear idea what an image might be about, but generally I am being guided only by an instinctive interest. A few forms, or an unprepossessing bit of scrub, with the content making itself felt as I work, on other occasions I only perceive it toward the end”, Tonkin relates. “Dreams Intrude, Kalorama (2014-15) was a puzzle for a long time. In that place, I only knew that I needed a shift of viewpoint, a looking up toward the light, then down, out and in. It slowly became clear that I wanted it to be about that strange, spectral dream-memory that can carry through the day, a half-formed image that haunts, alters mood and generally makes a nuisance of itself. On another occasion, with Wattle Stars, Kalorama (2014), in early Spring the wattle blossom was being dislodged by wind and had sprinkled everything‚ like golden stars, or the fireflies I saw sparkling on the grass one night ... and like those things it illuminated the space and gave it a mysterious beauty”.

A past finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (1998), Tonkin’s varied practice underwent a pronounced shift away from figuration in 2000. After a camping trip to Central Australia, around the Finke River (Larapinta) at Two Mile, just north of Glen Helen, she experienced something of an epiphany. “It became clear that I was more responsive, more engaged when outside immersed in the landscape. In truth, I had found content for my work. It had always been about being present and looking deeply, but being in the landscape gave me access to my internal life in a deeper way”, Tonkin contends. “It gave me a means of making sense of the world. I am constantly trying to find a way of working in the studio from my drawings, from still life or portraiture, but I have not yet found a way of making anything that is as consistently meaningful to me as working in the midst of the landscape”.

Although landscape is one of the most continuously referenced and revered subjects within Australian artistic and cultural discourse, artists working within the genre often contend with the perception that it is perhaps rather ‘traditional’ and static: landscape work is rarely mentioned in the context of shaping contemporary artistic discourse. “Is it the broad genre of landscape that is not ‘shaping artistic discourse’‚ or is it that painting itself is poorly received right now? I wonder if it isn’t that when the landscape genre is mentioned it is assumed, erroneously and narrowly, that one means painting. The trouble is that the whole culture of making and discussing paintings, what might be called the language of painting, has been deeply eroded”, Tonkin observes. “It is perhaps also an issue of quality; a self-fulfilling prophesy whereby students are taught by lecturers who have few painting skills or little painting culture to pass on. So painting, when not actively discouraged, becomes an autodidact activity devoid of deeper understanding of its potential. While landscapes (especially paintings) do not often grace the walls of contemporary art spaces, they remain some of the strongest and most pervasive images”.

4NEXT SPREAD: Days Like This, Kalorama 2014, oil on linen, 58 x 77 cm.

Tonkin is an artist who eschews publicity and finds the process of discussing her work distinctly uncomfortable. Despite her reticence, Tonkin’s insightful comments express both a thorough understanding of the field, and a refreshing irreverence towards the wider arts industry, and its shifting preoccupations. “Does landscape painting attract an audience? I’m not so sure about that. It is perhaps too quiet, and there is no ‘razzle dazzle’. I don’t think an artist can be too worried about that end of things, certainly they must be concerned to make the best work possible, but audience numbers are not an adequate measure of worth”, she believes. “We need landscape to ground us, to remind us in our dislocated modern lives that we are gnats in the continuum of life. Landscape serves as a wellspring of hope, beauty and spiritual renewal, it reflects our lives back to us. Work about landscape is unlikely to beep, move or speak, but given time I think it will become clear that any disinterest is an historical aberration. Landscape will remain a vital genre, and it will reward more deeply than trends toward fleeting entertainment”.

Tonkin was awarded the 2002 Dobell Prize for Drawing for her work Rocky Outcrop, Werribee Gorge (2000-01), a substantial entry comprising ten joined sheets of paper spanning over four metres. Held annually from 1993 to 2012, the Dobell came to be regarded as one of the country’s most serious and respected art prizes, one that conferred visibility on an increasingly neglected medium. A lecturer in Drawing at Monash University at the time, Tonkin recalls, “Winning the Dobell was a huge moment in terms of my career. It meant that students took what I had to say more seriously, my representing gallery was ready with a handshake and an invitation to exhibit, but more importantly the prize money (then $10,000) was halfway toward a studio/living space, and a means of continuing to work without having to earn a great deal”. The decision by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation to discontinue the open format of the prize, and replace it with a biannual curated exhibition based around a central theme, was met with criticism from both artists and commentators alike.1

The abrupt change of format for the Dobell also served to reignite a wider debate about the decline in ‘foundation skills’ (namely drawing) amongst fine arts/visual arts students, and an erosion of technical standards more generally within the core curriculum at art schools throughout Australia.2 Of her undergraduate experience, Tonkin comments, “I remember we had more contact hours in first year than medical students! It gave me a great sense of the seriousness and difficulty of the undertaking, practically it meant we had time to figure out a few things. I wonder sometimes if protestations of anxiety about the demise of ‘draughtsmanship’ are code for the demise of a rigorous kind of academic drawing that taught a student to construct forms but not to actually see. I think there can never be enough emphasis on learning to look, to understand how one subjectively sees the world”.

The importance of drawing within Tonkin’s practice was again recognised at the 21st annual Kedumba Drawing Award (2010), where two of her works were acquired. It is a field to

Days Like This: Mary Tonkin / Inga Walton

which Tonkin feels art schools should dedicate far more course time, “I firmly believe that the foundation year of Fine Art courses should be almost wholly devoted to drawing in all its forms, in a great variety of media. It is such a raw means of thinking, and allows such direct access to ideas and emotions, to play and perseverance. It would enable students to understand what content interested them, what their unique experience of the world is, before theories and fashions had time to override their inherent somatic intelligence”.

As a previous Dobell Prize recipient, Tonkin was one of ten artists selected by Anne Ryan, Curator of Prints, Drawings & Watercolours at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, to participate in the new format Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial. For the inaugural exhibition, Drawing Out (2014-15), Tonkin produced an immensely ambitious charcoal on paper work, Between Two Logs, Kalorama (2013-14). Spanning twenty-six sheets, the panoramic piece is a tour de force at fourteen metres long, and took over nine months to complete. The work offers a truly immersive experience of this small pocket of bush where there is a fern gully with two large fallen trees; it was later acquired by the Gallery. “I use drawing as a means to assess my response to forms and places, to sort out compositions, work through ideas and generally be in a place. The large-scale drawings force a very deep temporal connection and engagement with a small area”, she remarks.

For this new body of work, Tonkin sought to preserve the feeling of being ‘enfolded’ within the bush. The vibrant multiple-panel paintings Above the White Gums, Kalorama and Between Two Logs, Kalorama (both 2014) serve to transport the viewer into the dense forest environment. “I see huge changes in the forms – trees falling and the like – and witness the turning of the seasons. I have approached each of the recent large-scale, long drawings as preparatory drawings for a painting. I have thought of them as a means of sorting out what is possible, how much I can push changes of viewpoint whilst retaining coherency”, she says. “They have shown me how difficult it will be to make a (necessarily) long-term large painting equivalent, [as] I have ambitions to produce paintings that make the temporal engagement very physical ... where there is no single monumental image, but a series of interlinked and overlapping experiences”.

Despite the considerable scale of some of her works, Tonkin prefers to focus on a meticulous exploration of several distinct areas of foliage and undergrowth at any one time. “I am not interested in painting grand vistas or views. There needs to be a feeling of response to the land and vegetation (an excitement about a particular spot), and a certain level of intimacy (physical closeness to the forms drawn or painted). I am most at ease when the closest forms are within my space, within my reach”, she explains. “I am somewhat compelled to realise (make real) the forms I am looking at, to convey their visceral ‘otherness’, their particularity and beauty. I don’t like to make things up, but am not averse to moving about, changing viewpoint and scale when it serves the image, and better conveys my perceptual experience of the space or an emotional state ... My

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Inga Walton is a writer and arts consultant based in Melbourne who contributes to numerous Australian and international publications. She has submitted copy, of an increasingly verbose nature, to Trouble since 2008. She is under the impression that readers are not morons with a short attention span, and would like to know lots of things.

work is very much about what it is to be physically present to the motif, to be a motile, binocular and sensate being. I don’t often paint in local colour, but use colour as a means of constructing forms and spaces, rhythms across the surface and primarily, for conveying the emotional content of the work”.

There is a somewhat deceptive aura of timelessness about the landscape genre, and yet it cannot fail to express, however latently, our often fraught relationship with the natural world. Consistent attempts to master and control the environment, whether for housing and business, farming or resources, and our fear of its potential extremes in the form of bushfires and drought, inevitably shape our response to artistic depictions of it. In recent decades, forests and waterways have increasingly become contested zones, as conflicts between ideologically opposed groups play out at the site and in court rooms, as the demands of industry and population grow ever more insistent. An artist working so concertedly in this area cannot fail to be cognisant of these various factors, “I am very conscious of how lucky my family is, of how precious is the land over which we have custodianship. Having tried to work in the remnants of bushland in Melbourne, I am also aware how degraded they are, what urban pressures have done to those spaces”, Tonkin agrees. “I do not think consciously of a political relationship to the landscape whilst I make work, but I seek to make paintings of sufficient emotional weight and presence to move an audience: activism by stealth!”

Tonkin’s work presents us with a pictorial window whereby the interior of the forest is filtered through the interiority of the artist, as if she were mapping both the place, and to some extent, the person. To hold something so unknowable and unpredictable so dear is to place yourself in its power; this inscrutable landscape is both Tonkin’s companion and abettor. It is an idea quite bizarre to most people in this day and age who spend their time glued to screens of various sizes. Yet there it is on the wall, a testament to the emotional connection one artist has to this wilderness; whose task is to notice, to care, and to observe. “No matter how long I spend in a place, how familiar each frond and branch becomes, it still surprises and is in a constant state of flux. All of my work is about what it feels like to be in a place; the sensations it produces”, Tonkin maintains. “They are a means of vivifying inchoate emotions, giving form to all the joys, frailties and anxieties that make a human life. I love the wonder and mystery of the bush, which for me is a metaphor for the mystery of lived experience itself ”.

Mary Tonkin: Two Spots, Australian Galleries, 35 Derby Street, Collingwood, (VIC) 4 - 23 August 2015 - australiangalleries.com.au All images © Mary Tonkin. Photography: Matthew Stanton.

ENDNOTES: 1 Sharon Verghis, “The Lost Art?”, The Weekend Australian (‘Review’ section), 8-9 November, 2014, p.6-9. 2 see also, Christopher Allen, “Drawn in by the Enigma”, The Weekend Australian (‘Review’ section), 21-22 June, 2014, p.10-11.

< TOP TO BOTTOM, Wattle Stars, Kalorama 2014, oil on linen, 54 x 64 cm. Between Two Logs, Kalorama 2014, oil on linen, 54 x 487 cm. Into My Arms, Kalorama 2015, oil on linen, 59 x 296 cm. Above the White Gums, Kalorama 2014, oil on linen, 54 x 447 cm.

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THIS SPREAD: Robert HAGUE, Blue Claude (after mccubbin) 2015 lithograph 70x70cm. Robert Hague: Erasure, The Art Vault, 43 Deakin Avenue Mildura (VIC), until 3 August 2015 - theartvault.com.au NEXT SPREAD: Kane RICHARD, Romina Soul 2015, photograph. Phi, by the Diploma of Photo Imaging students at CATC Design School, Work-Shop, 195 Argyle St, Fitzroy (VIC), 7 – 15 August 2015 (closed 8/9 August) - https://www.facebook.com/PHITheExhibition

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: 1. Tony AMENEIRO, Big Night Skull 2006, colour linocut, 180 x 91cm. Multiple Choices: 40 Years of the FAC Print Award, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle (WA), 25 September – 15 November - fac.org.au 2. Sam HARRIS, The Middle of Somewhere. Part of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Ballarat (VIC), 22 August – 22 September 2015 - ballaratfoto.org

Also THIS SPREAD: 3. Richard MILLOTT, Chickory Kiln. 4. Dave TACON, Shanghai Decadence. 5. Boryana KATSAROVA, Freezing. 6. Alejandro CHASKIELBERG, Dark Passage. And NEXT SPREAD: PANG Xiangliang, Checking Screws on Rotary Table. All part of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Ballarat (VIC), 22 August – 22 September 2015 - see ballaratfoto.org for more details.

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7. Jack STAHEL, Information Chart IX 2015, ink on Paper, 28 x 28cm. Photo courtesy of Document Photography, 2015. Diagrammatic Organ: Jack Stahel, MOP Projects, 2 / 39 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale (NSW), 19 August – 13 September 2015 - mop.org.au 8. FINUCANE & SMITH proudly present GloryBoxLaRevoluciόn, created and directed by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith. Melba Spiegeltent, 35 Johnston St, Collingwood (VIC), 20 August – 13 September, 2015 - finucaneandsmith.com

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Ken McGregor

Ken McGregor (left) pictured with artist Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett)

SOCIAL WORK÷

Philanthropist, consultant, manager, curator and collector of contemporary world art, Ken McGregor, has made an extraordinary impression on the Australian art world over the years. He is the author and producer of more than thirty art related publications, including John Olsen’s last five books, and has led exhibitions around Asia, the US and the UK. He is credited for bringing to Australia three of the greatest international street artists: Blek Le Rat (France), D*face (UK) and Swoon (USA). In 2011 he organised his own ‘Desert Walk for Dialysis’ – a 27-day, 1300km trek from Alice Springs in the NT, to Kiwirrkurra, a remote community in WA – and raised more than $100,000 in funding to help keep a mobile dialysis unit running on the remote roads.

We invited Ken to do some Social Work with us this month.

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How similar are your political beliefs to those of your family?Ken McGregor: I have the same political beliefs as my mother but not my father.

How do your values differ from those of your family?KM: Difficult question, I guess they are the same.

Do you have a favourite family story?KM: My Grandfather fought in the First World War and was a gunner on the ground when the Baron Von Richthofen (The Red Baron) was shot down.

What do you hope for?KM: Just to keep doing what I’ve been doing and to stay heathy.

What do you think is your main purpose in life?KM: To look after my family and to support the arts.

Do you think its ok to lie?KM: I would say no, it’s not ok; however in some difficult circumstances it’s probably necessary.

What does freedom mean to you?KM: Oh, absolutely everything.

What do you think are the most important social issues today?KM: The most important social issue is to try and stop people from killing each other because of their religious beliefs. Who cares what country you come from or what you look like or what belief you follow. We are all human, just get along.

Do you think things happen for a reason?KM: Everything happens for a reason.

What beliefs do you have that you think will never change?KM: Just to do the best you can

÷ SOCIAL WORK

Do you believe in the supernatural?KM: Supernatural is a scary word, but I would have to say yes, because I have seen and heard things my eyes and ears can’t explain.

Is any religious text important to you?KM: None at all.

Have you ever come close to dying?KM: On my travels I’ve been struck by two snakes at different times but not actually bitten, so it felt like I was close to dying.

What do you like the best about your body?KM: At my age I still have my own teeth and a good crop of hair.

What do you think would be the best thing about being the opposite gender?KM: Carrying a handbag.

Who is the best teacher you have ever had?KM: My father.

Have you ever been lost?KM: No.

What was your favourite book as a child?KM: I didn’t have a favourite book until I was a teenager, and that was Namatjira – Wanderer between two worlds by Joyce D Batty.

If I asked a good friend of yours what you were good at, what would they say?KM: Sport.

What stays the same in your life, no matter how much other things change?KM: My work ethic.

What is stopping you?KM: Time.

A selection of Ken McGregor’s books are available through Olsen Urwin or McMillan Art Publishing.

DITO VON TEASEDITOLOGY

“I started the Ditology project in 2009, when I created my Facebook account. I wanted this to become a virtual space free from my relatives, colleagues and not-very-friends, so I created an avatar.

“In Italian someone could say I wanted to ‘hide myself behind my finger’ (nascondermi dietro un dito); it's a popular metaphor to indicate a not-very-effective hiding place. I choose the nickname Dito Von Tease, inspired by Dita Von Teese, the icon of burlesque style and expert in disguises. I’m known as Dito, that’s Italian for ‘finger’.”

5.

DITOSOPHY“In the ‘digital age’, our fingers are the tools we use to keep in touch with the world through touch-screens, mouse pads and keyboards. In a sense, we are all ‘hiding behind a finger’ while surfing the internet, and this mediation often makes us feel free to express our ideas, opinions or sensations. ... Even in real life we hide ourselves behind an image, a mask we create to protect the uniqueness of our fingerprint. This is true especially for celebrities, who live in their masks. For this reason I disguise my fingers as famous characters taken from the news, historical events, arts, politics, and so on.”

DITONOMYFrom 2011 to 2015, the project Ditology has obtained: more than 1 million unique user to the Ditology blog, more than 50 reviews in newspapers, journals, TV and radio, more than 1000 reviews

on blogs, websites and online newspapers. New of the project has been spread in more than 150 countries. The art finger-prints

can be bought in London and Paris.

All images © ditovontease.com

4

GREETINGS FROM BEYOND THE PALE

Ben Laycock

PART 10 – FITZROY CROSSING

We bid a fond farewell to the Mary River and head south till we hit the Fitzroy River; the longest river in the Kimberley and one of the last wild rivers on earth: No dams, no diversions, no vast irrigation projects sucking it dry, no factories filling it with toxic waste, no cities filling it with human excrement. In the modern world, a wonder to behold.

The Fitzroy escapes from the mountains and heads east into the pitiless desert, (gravesite of many a mighty river in this unforgiving land) but soon comes to its senses. Realising it will never reach the sea that way, it makes a turn to the south, then the west, then the North, deftly skirting the mountain ranges and finally reaching its most cherished goal, the wide open sea.

The bitumen road that circumnavigates our vast continent, hugging the coastline, lest it too is lost in the endless desert, also skirts the insurmountable obstacle of the Kimberley, so inevitably the road and the river must cross. That spot has the imaginative name of Fitzroy Crossing. A wild, unruly place. The one hotel was once notorious for its segregated bar. The front bar for Whites of course, and the back bar for Blacks, with a grill in between. The grill is long gone but few brave souls dare to cross that invisible line.

These days the blackfellas much prefer to drink outdoors in the surrounding scrub (they are outdoorsy kind of people) where they can express themselves more freely and flake out under a shady tree. Alas, they tend to have a rather lackadaisical attitude to littering. VB cans are strewn hither and yon as far as the eye can see. For those of us brought up to believe littering is one of the seven deadly sins, the site is a most unsightly sight. The story goes that the glint of so many shiny cans is visible from the space station as it passes over this part of the world, no doubt making those Russian astronauts thirsty and homesick (all Russians being pisspots, as we well know). Fitzroy Crossing has never won the Tidy Town Award, but, luckily, upon the arrival of the monsoon the Fitzroy breaks its banks and washes the whole place clean.

It is a truly depressing sight to see so many blackfellas drinking and fighting in public (civilised people prefer to do their drinking and beating behind closed

Greetings From / Ben Laycock 4

< BoreTrack by Kdliss - Own work.Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In medieval Europe a white picket fence was all that separated the village from the heathen savages beyond ...

Ben Laycock grew up in the country on the outskirts of Melbourne, surrounded by bush. He began drawing the natural world around him from a very early age. He has travelled extensively throughout Australia, seeking to capture the essence of this vast empty land. In between journeys he lives in a hand-made house in the bush at Barkers Creek in central Victoria - benlaycock.com.au

< BACKGROUND: Geikie Gorge. Photo by Ben Laycock

doors), but it’s important to note that the town is a magnet for drinkers from a wide array of communities where grog is banned. These are the invisible places that never make the news. If you want to drink you must go to town and join a whole mob of fellow drinkers. It’s a recipe for trouble and an enormous burden on the townsfolk who must put up with this constant influx of drunkards. Statistics have shown that most blackfellas actually drink less than us Kartiya, but those that do, drink to excess. They drink to get drunk, ever seeking the sweet peace of oblivion. This is true of all oppressed and disenfranchised people the world over.

You see, it’s all about power. Before Captain Cook arrived on his world tour, every indigenous clan was completely autonomous; the law was inherited from the ancestors and administered by the elders. No one else in the whole wide world could tell them what to do. This immense power over their own lives was suddenly, violently taken from them and replaced with absolute servitude and total humiliation. They were given the unenviable choice of accepting their place at the very bottom of a vast hierarchy of power that went all the way up to the king of a seemingly mythical land far across the sea, or be exterminated. It is this complete reversal of control over their lives that indigenous people have been battling ever since, with little success.

But all is not lost, as they still get to go hunting bush tucker. I tag along on a fishing expedition for cherabin, a large freshwater prawn caught with a throw net, the casting of which is quite an art. Ideally it is thrown with such dexterity that it makes a perfect circle as it plops into the water, and is then hauled out with a rich harvest of crustations. After many fruitless attempts I finally make a decent throw and am rewarded with a seething haul of thrashing fish. Alas they are baby catfish, dozens of the little blighters, fouling the net and pricking me with their poisonous barbs. I cannot say that l enjoyed the experience but l did come to a deeper understanding of why l don’t like fishing.

NEXT STOP: DERBY (pronounced Derby), the one time bustling capital of all the Kimberley, now but a faded replica of its former self; eclipsed by the new kid on the block, Broome, with its swaying palm trees and endless beaches.