Heads
March 31 - April 18, 2009
The Head ‘I haven’t finished with heads. A person’s whole life passes through his head.’ Heads as we know them take many forms. By looking at representations of the head we are able to find difference, perhaps newness; but what binds us to an image of the head, and to the works of this exhibition, is a commonality of perception. The marker here is empathy. We as viewers empathize the form of the head, the particularity of nose, brow and eye; the sitter looks out, or elsewhere - we internalise this gaze - and fixedly we stare back. Damien Hirst’s The Skull Beneath the Skin 2005 takes us inside the head. It is a skull, certainly, but one which polarizes our thoughts about value. That is, the value of one’s life and what is possible, and the value of works of art in the marketplace. The Hirst head conflates both, with its full set of teeth, resplendent, and liberally sprinkled with diamond dust. The teeth in essence mock our eventual death; their brilliance suggests that, although we have left, the party will continue without us. Damien Hirst’s insouciance and insistent conceptualism have been a constant since his earliest vitrines. It was Hirst’s piece, A Thousand Years, 1990, with its rotting cow’s head, maggots, flies and zapper that proved to be both prescient for a then stuttering economy and a metaphor for the cycle of life and death. Francis Bacon was fascinated by A Thousand Years as was Lucian Freud who remarked, ‘Damien, I’ve seen the fly piece. And I think you started with the final act.’ 2) The perception of Lucian Freud, and to a greater extent, Frank Auerbach, is inextricably tied to the expressive use of paint and to the primacy of the mark. Auerbach’s etching William Feaver, 2007, has a monumental sculptural feel about it. This is down to the mass of the head which sits weightily on the crescent of the shoulders. There are quadrants marked across the overall form and the lines that skitter on the surface play against those deeply gouged. As a painter of portraits, Lucian Freud is arguably without equal in contemporary art. Now in his eighties, Freud continues to produce paintings and prints of the human figure with compelling results. In the last twenty years etching has come to occupy an ever more important place in Freud’s work and can be seen to be in dialogue with his paintings, one medium informing the other. In Freud’s etching, Portrait Head, 2001 likeness is achieved through observation but ultimately it is the inner life of his model, not appearance, that Freud strives for. Likeness is also of issue when considering Jim Dine’s self portrait, Blue Watercolour, 2005. Dine is noted for Happenings and Performance Art, iconic hearts and bathrobes. More recently Dine has rediscovered the figure through drawing and the history of mark – making. Self - portraiture can take many forms but for any artist it is an ongoing dialogue between self and the perception of self that remains constant. Gavin Turk’s oeuvre channels identity through the looking glass of culture. The silkscreen, Hasta La Victoria 2004 is one of the guises Turk has assumed in print and sculptural form: Sid Viscous, Che Guevara, Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley and Joseph Beuys. Hasta La Victoria is Turk thinking about the defining and iconic images of the 20th century. Less interested in the revolutionary Che, or the messy Sid, Turk is literally after their image. The David Hockney lithograph, Henry in his office, 1976 and the Tony Bevan drawing, Portrait Boy, Study for Meeting, 1992 are both images in which the expression of speech and breath is key to the representation of the sitter. A parallel may be drawn between these artists and the Baroque sculptor Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini revolutionized marble busts, lending a new dynamism to the once stilted art of portrait sculpture. In Bernini’s portraits of Costanza Bonarelli c. 1635 and Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1632) Bernini carved the open mouth of the sitter, their breath as to animate each head. This ‘instantaneity’ is something to consider in Bevan’s Boy with his open mouth and upward exclamation of the head, and in Hockney’s Henry, whose mobility is suggested by the set of the eyes and the deep aperture of the nostrils. An expressive commitment to paint and to the figure is something which is common to the following three Australian painters. Nicholas Harding’s, The man in the opposite bed, 2009 is taken from small pencil sketches Harding made while he lay in a hospital ward last year. Being prone and engirdled by tubes Harding had, ‘mortal thoughts’,3) about his predicament. In observing his neighbour and making the sketches that went towards The man in the opposite bed, Harding experienced a transference, ‘a contemplation of my future self.’ 4) Paul Ryan’s painting, The Wild Colonial Boy, 2008 is part of an ongoing series about the earliest days of settlement in New South Wales. We do not know the identity of the sitter but there is likely an association to officers of the Corps or the convict jailor of the 1780’s. The swaggering impressionism which Ryan brings to the painting accounts for the suggestion of ruff and epaulet and finally the muffled gaze of the sitter. The key to any Peter Booth painting is humanness, what Saul Bellow has called, ‘faulty humanity.’ 5) It is everywhere in the landscape of Booth’s paintings and no less in the predicament of his characters, skewered as they are on their own subjectivity and alienation. The subject of Booth’s Painting (Head) 2008, is grizzled and bluntly expressive but the gold background adds an allegorical and perhaps redemptive note to the painting. Mimmo Paladino’s art has always been keenly symbolic and his approach to iconography tempered with a romantic naturalism. ‘On the one hand’, Paladino has said, ‘I feel close to Giotto and Piero della Francesca, on the other, I pay attention to Byzantine and Russian icons…’ 6) The two lithographic prints in this exhibition are portraits of the Russian film director, Andrei Tarkovsky. The first Tarkovsky head is embellished with gold leaf and the other, almost identical head, is surmounted by tesserae mosaic and a steel frame. The Jane Burton photograph of this exhibition, Morphée 2009, also creates an interesting parallel to Tarkovsky and Jean Cocteau whose reflective and dreamlike cinema has been of influence to Burton. Burton has used abandoned urban spaces and the wilds of Tasmania as settings for her photographs. The figure is always present, even if not seen in the pictured space. In Morphée 2009 we have two heads seemingly suspended. It is likely the god of dreams, Morpheus, who appears to our subject as she crosses into sleep, her eye lids weighted with tree like tendrils. The figure and the way that individuals might relate to those around them are central to the sculpture and drawings of John Davies. Realism as can be seen in Davies’s Head of PW, 1983, is the vehicle by which Davies is able to work from particular observation of a head to greater values. On this point, John Davies has said, ‘My work has carried me closer to people - in a kind of circle. My sculpture seems to have that function for me.’ 7) Christie Brown is a sculptor much immersed in the practice of ceramics. Her interests lie with archaeology and our relationship with objects in museum settings. No less the symbolic values of clay, wax and bronze. Head from ‘The Glyptotek’ 2001 is based on Brown’s research in the Glyptoek Museum in Munich where she encountered a large number of ancient heads set very high on plinths. We are fortunate to have a variety of heads from Vanuatu in this exhibition. The Ambrym and Malekula ‘ancestor’ heads come from a culture with distinct values and artistic traditions. The skull of our exhibition is over modelled with a coconut fibre, clay and the sap of fig trees. In essence the Malekula head is a portrait and the paint markings applied to the face correspond to the rank (suque) of the ancestor. The veneration of the skull in Melanesian culture extends to a variety of ranks and to tribal settings within Vanuatu, indeed in some tribes food may be laid out for the skulls of ancestors to eat. The issues of identity, mortality, and animation are those which the heads in this exhibition raise. A discussion across time and culture hopefully confirms something all cultures know and share; that life’s values are held similarly, and although forms of the head may differ in their representation, it is the head itself that remains the seat of the soul. Brett Ballard 2009 1) Elisabeth Frink, from Frink - The Official Biography of Elisabeth Frink, by Stephen Gardiner (1999)
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