July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Bent Western
By Tracey Clement
Sydney’s Western suburbs get a bad rap. The inner city intelligencia tend to subscribe whole heartedly to a stereotype which paints a bleak picture of the burbs. Out west is seen as a culture free zone dominated by twin mechanical gods: the testosterone driven, fuel injected motors favoured by petrol heads and their smaller cousin the lawnmower, wielded by weekend warriors, busily subjugating nature on their 1/4 acre chunks of the great Australian dream. This landscape is punctuated by otorways, cul-de-sacs, Westfields and drive-thrus: a bland territory populated by 21st century Aussie battlers and their 2.5 kids, struggling to pay the mortgage on shiny new McMansions. Or so the cliché goes.
Arthur McIntyre, Art and Man, 1986, acrylic and collage on paper, 150 x 106cm. Courtesy Macquarie University Art Collection.
Reality of course is more interesting and more complex. The wild west isn’t just home to a posse of Marlborough men and their wives playing happy families round the Hill’s Hoist. Naturally the burbs breed their fair share of gender-benders, radicals, intellectuals and even artists; a dynamic mix, just like in the big smoke. With this in mind, group show Bent Western shines a spotlight on the region’s vibrant and creative queer culture.
The Sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras turns 30 this year, and Bent Western is a pointed reminder that there is more to queer culture than the camp spectacle of a parade up Oxford Street. The exhibition’s curator, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, presents works covering three decades, by 16 artists with links to Western Sydney, who have “made important contributions to queer culture in the region and beyond.”
For Cunningham, Bent Western also pays a kind of melancholy tribute to the almost defunct art school at the University of Western Sydney (UWS). He acknowledges the importance of the faculty that not only fostered his own development as a practising artist and curator, but which also kick started the careers of more than half of the artists in the exhibition. Cunningham feels certain that its loss will be widely felt saying, “A lot of the work out of UWS, and not necessarily by just the queer artists, was really edgy and set apart.”
Born and raised in Melbourne and later Perth, Jessica Olivieri instinctively chose UWS for these reasons. She admits, “I wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t a sandstone uni; somewhere fresh, new and contemporary.” Olivieri finds it difficult to pin down Western Sydney’s precise influence on her work, but she does acknowledge that location has had an impact, “Every time I do a residency
somewhere… I always come back from that place and do very different work.” She goes on to explain that, “It was great to make work where it was such a blank canvas …you weren’t surrounded by beautiful things, so I felt like it was more appropriate to make something beautiful in that environment.” And Olivieri’s quirky videos of choreographed amateur dancers do have an awkward beauty, tinged with the deliberate pathos of vulnerability.
Lionel Bawden was raised on the West’s fringes and spent his teenage years roaming the lower Blue Mountains. He describes growing up in a fairly conservative environment and admits that, “I just didn’t really have any idea that gay people even existed.” Despite inevitable feelings of alienation, Bawden credits this environment with giving him a creative push saying, “Part of the reason I really pursued art was because I felt like I was on another planet.” His creativity was (and still is) driven by a need to “make sense of what the hell is going on in my life.”
One of Bent Western’s strengths is that artists who have been practising long enough present both old and new work. Bawden is now well known for his large, organic, abstract sculptures constructed from thousands of coloured pencils, but this exhibition provides a chance to see his early work, charged with an overt sexual intensity which evokes a period in his life “when it was really, really necessary to make it.”
For others in the show, like Kurt Schranzer, the imperative need to explore the ins and outs of sexuality never really dissipates. Born in Penrith, Schranzer is technically a true blue Westie, yet his elegant recent drawings, and older paintings, transcend links to any particular place. For Schranzer, they also extend beyond the label queer and would sit most comfortably within a modernist framework. While acknowledging the fact that being homosexual now is more accepted than it once was, Schranzer is aware that, “Despite a few thousand years of erotic art history” his work remains “subversive and difficult.” As he says, “People can’t get over the sexual aspect…. they cannot see that all these other stories, meanings and metaphors are being established. It’s my big frustration; they can’t see past the dick and the balls.” Bent Western offers a wonderful opportunity to rise to this challenge.
Lionel Bawden, the comforts of anonymous paper men (studded mattress), 1997, (detail), mattress fabric, enamel spray paint, wooden fram. Courtesy the artist and GRANTPIRRIE Sydney/
Bent Western is at Blacktown Arts Centre until 12 April
Tracey Clement is an artist and writer
