ARCHIE'S SEA CHANGE
Sydney Morning Herald
The grand old men of the nation's stuffiest portrait prize
will be turning in their graves.
ARCHIBALD PRIZE 2000
Art Gallery of NSW
Until May 7
NUDGING 80, the daggiest award in Australian art is
beginning to look serious, even a bit dangerous. Adam Cullen's avant-garde win
in the Archibald Prize signals a sea change in the event, not least because his
subject, David Wenham, starred in the television series of that name. In
securing the $35,000 purse this year, and to such resounding popular acclaim,
although missing out on the Packing Room Prize, Cullen becomes a cultural
player at a stroke.
While some maintain a stroke is all it took to capture
Wenham's likeness, a misconception Cullen doesn't much bother to dispel, the
portrait bumps the attention-seeking, difficult, unpredictable, gifted young
painter into a category of notoriety that will astonish him and aggrieve his
competitors.
He ceases to be an art-world also-ran, a peripheral or
minority taste, suddenly assuming his place beside the likes of Judy Cassab and Bryan Westwood. If his natural predecessor is
the combative Keith Looby, whose portrait of the
journalist Anne Summers is the sleeper of Archibald 2000, Cullen brushes up
with considerable authority in the more conservative company of colleagues such
as Robert Hannaford or William Robinson. (Hannaford's absence from the gallery
walls this year is concerning, with his Morrissey-clad Leah Purcell in ignominy
at the Salon des Refuses.)
The doors of the academy have parted. Cullen the bad boy of
grunge has entered, wearing the smirk of a battler who finally has the
wherewithal to pay off some of those niggling credit card debts and buy a few
quality provisions for heaven's sake, perhaps even take that long-postponed
sabbatical in Noosa Heads. Where will it end? Will
the Goya of Leichhardt be commissioned to paint the
Queen in a wattle-yellow evening frock in the manner of another Archibald
regular, the legendary Sir William Dargie?
Having made his beloved cattle dog, Growler, the subject of
a ferocious painting recently on view at his
This isn't Cullen's maiden attempt at taking out a
prestigious portrait award. His thirst for mainstream certification has raised
eyebrows in the politically censorious enclaves of the avant-garde, not that
Cullen cares. Sensitivity to the expectations of others, he admits, is not his
strong suit. It's one of the qualities that predisposes
him to memorable portraiture.
You wouldn't approach him to be flattered; flattened maybe,
and flayed and defamed for good measure. His vision verges on misanthropy. He
is a painter of society who, praise be, will never
make a society painter.
His biting interpretations of Mikey
Robins, Catharine Lumby, Max Cullen and others from
the world of entertainment and letters emerged over the past couple of years in
the Archibald, the Salon des Refuses and the Moran Portrait Award. If his
portrait of the surfing champion Mark Occhilupo is
the wipe-out of the one-off 2000 Sporting Portrait Prize, run in tandem with
the Archibald, it fails to ruin the remarkable success rate that Cullen can
claim for his portraits, notwithstanding his hit-or-miss technique or his
crazily blokey approach to the patrician conventions
of face painting. In Portrait of David Wenham, Cullen deploys a newfound
confidence as a painter, as opposed to a drawer or graffitist. He's always been
a designer of conviction, boasting powers of pictorial organisation
and placement which his fiercest critics, surprise surprise,
are coming to recognise as prodigious. But here his
compositional strengths play second fiddle to a diagnosis of character through colour, and the materiality of the paint.
The Wenham of the portrait is not the adorable anti-hero of SeaChange, Diver Dan. Instead, Cullen catches his sitter in
the no-man's land between two of his most significant actorly
characterisations: that of the collector's gormless friend in the imported hit stage play ART and the
ice-cool, pathological thug in the devastating Australian film The Boys.
The veneer of the painting is extremely true to life in the
sense of being true to Wenham, a performer who underplays his feelings,
subjugating moodiness and melodrama in favour of a
moral, or at least emotional, blankness that can be somewhat unsettling at a
distance, utterly spine-chilling up close. Wenham has never shown signs of
wanting to chew the scenery. Without being cliche-ridden,
his features represent a mask, a disguise, threatening to slip away from his
face to reveal an unpalatable reality: blackness, the void, a Gorgon. Cullen's
household pigments collude in this effect, seeming to leak down the picture
plane and off the register of meaning.
The surface may be seductive, and the sitter seemingly
inoffensive, but Cullen hints at the hidden levels of derangement and
malfeasance which we know to be within the psychological repertoire of actors
and assassins.
Many have detected the phantom of Van Gogh behind Wenham's
cornflower eyes and carrot-coloured outcrops of hair,
so that the portrait reads as a reference to art history. If this is
intentional and in the work of a well-read art-school graduate, why shouldn't
it be? it adds to the complexity of an already highly
visually loaded depiction.
Van Gogh's interest in Japanese prints of the Ukiyo-e school, including brilliantly coloured,
mask-like portraits of celebrated actors, feeds through the graphic
simplifications that characterise Cullen's work. That
it reproduces so well, both in print format and via the medium of television,
is an achievement that comes with eerie ease to Cullen. A child of his age, he
factors mass mediation into his practice without even thinking about it.
In an older artist, it would be cynical. In Cullen, it's his
landscape.
On two occasions in recent years, the AGNSW trustees came
close to an equivalently imaginative decision. In 1986, they awarded the
Archibald to Davida Allen's Dr John Arthur McKelvie Shera: my father-in-law
watering his garden, an ungainly serenade to the sanctity of suburban man; a
decade later, in 1996, Wendy Sharpe's subversive Self-portrait as Diana of Erskineville, a joker in a bright brassiere and eye-popping
harem pants, took out the prize. These were the sorts of works likely to have
Archibald stalwarts of old take your pick from W.B. McInnes,
John Longstaff, George Lambert, Max Meldrum and Ivor Hele rotating in their tombs.
Entrants of late have included such exploratory painters as Imants Tillers, Caroline Williams and Su Baker. Cullen's
win can be seen in the context of this softening of the conservative resolve of
the prize. This year, Michael Snape, Nicholas
Harding, David Fairbairn, Barbara Licha,
Robin Lawrence, Julie Fragar and Ann Thomson
contribute further to the amelioration. The 21st century can't be far away.
Thompson and Fragar join Jenny
Sages in supplying self-portrait images of extraordinary distinction. Fragar includes herself, Chuck Close and a security guard
in a tripartite conception deserving the closest scrutiny. Thomson's Portrait
of the Artist as a Painting proves the first law of the genre: that portraiture
honour the art of painting before the ego of the
sitter. Sages understands this, exhibiting one of the
most oblique, self-effacing portraits ever to have hung in the Archibald.
Pushed to the edge of the canvas by text of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and by the force of her own familial ruminations,
she is only secondarily present in the work. Artistry, not the artist, is her
subject.
Judging by the disappointing remnants in the Salon des
Refuses at Observatory Hill, artistry of any kind was in short supply for the
selectors. Among the handful of paintings that should have stayed in the
Archibald are Anita Rezevska's
haunting Self-Portrait in the Land of the Dreaming, Robert Barnes's marvellous Margaret Olley,
Stephen Lopes's quirky Tom Gilling
in the Coat of Mr Kidney and Peter Rodd's beguiling self-portrait.
For the gentlemen, it's T-shirt season at the Salon. In
their portrait representations, Charlie Cuming, Max Markson,
Ian Gentle, Chris Rochester, Kyle Vander-Kuyp and
Greg Crowe all sport casual tops. More flashily, Robert Denich
wears a Hawaiian blouse of thermo-luminescent intensity; Martin Sharp models
sailor's stripes; Stuart Diver boasts mustardy ski
apparel; Jiawei Shen dons
Chinese gear, circa 1900; while Richard Roxburgh,
painted by Evert Ploeg,
goes the whole rock-star hog in a leopard-skin-printed ensemble reprised in a
furry wallpaper motif with a capacity to make one's flesh crawl.
Tom Carment's Kathleen Stewart is
superior to his Presbyterian self-portrait, which made it through the Archibald
cull. Ann Grocott's tiny self-portrait warrants a
better position. It might easily have been swapped for the bombastic
inaccuracies of Shaun Clark's Ruth Cracknell
Australian Treasure in one of the main bays. Or Maurice
Schlesinger's Elinor & Fred Wrobel,
Keepers of the Flame a shocker.
Bruce James is the subject of a portrait by Barbara Licha entered in the Archibald Prize.