6. CONCLUSION …and then – she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flowerbeds and the cool fountains (Lewis Carroll ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) In the introduction to this thesis I suggested that my study of four contemporary Western Australian male artists might enable me to answer, among other things, the following questions: How do these artists interact with a site often so strongly associated with the female and with female histories? Are they drawn to the site by memory or personal need (or both)? What sort of art do they produce as a consequence of interaction with the domestic? Are they concerned that the contemporary art world still tends to marginalise the home/ domestic space as a site for serious art? Further, this investigation would allow me to compare their essentially male attitudes to domestic space(s) with my own. Regardless of the implied specificity of these questions and their relationship to the memory of the historical antagonism between domesticity and modernism, things have changed. The ‘post-modern era shift in attitudes’ to the domestic, as identified by Haar and Reed, is indeed a real condition, and many well known artists, male and female are energising contemporary discourse with the products of their engagement. Figure 36 Rachel Whiteread House 1993 (destroyed) London Figure 37 Cornelia Parker Thirty Pieces of Silver 1988/89 80 Figure 38 Mona Hatoum Homebound 2000 Tate Gallery London 81 Figure 39 Fiona Hall Window of Opportunity 1994 Queenstown Tasmania Figure 40 David Watt from The Virtual Handyman 1998 Art Gallery of South Australia 82 This small sample of contemporary practice is only an indicator of the depth and breadth of the emerging primacy of the domestic condition as a site. A review of art monographs, Turner Prize winners and international biennale catalogues published since 2000 shows that for contemporary artists, the domestic has returned. (3). In this sense this thesis has also confirmed that the Haar and Reed proposition is as real today in Western Australia as in the Euro-American sites of their earlier academic speculations. In fact, Reed’s much quoted anthology, ‘Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture.’ could be describing the range of interests of the four artists interviewed. [the post-modern era] has witnessed a kind of home coming in high culture, as artists and designers have (re)turned their attention to domesticity […] Specifically, the idea of home today is caught between the stasis of nostalgia, historical fantasy and dynamism of activist engagement with the future; on one hand, the home functions as a potent image or symbol, on the other it exists in all the complexity of daily experience in a three-dimensional world. (4) Regardless of our four WA male artist’s (re) turn to this domestic site, modernism’s ‘domestic spectre’ still has a contemporary regional presence. ‘Spectre’ is an appropriate descriptor. The matter of the marginalisation of the female artist and her domestic muse is at once part of and outside the terms of this study, yet there is considerable anecdotal evidence to suggest that such ‘woman’s’ practice is still located some way from the centre. (5) There is also the matter of status and the relationship that domestic spaces, or more accurately ordinary suburban spaces and their inhabitants, have to contemporary art. This relationship is a corollary to that which establishes the value of the domestic as a site for attention from serious artists and for serious art outcomes. The acknowledgement that art works are a desirable contributor to the creation of ‘homeliness,’ and to the making of a home within the architectural spaces of a house is examined in Chapter 1. But what the optimistic burghers of seventeenth century Holland began, by commissioning artworks for the walls of their homes is today still a characteristic displayed by a minority of urban/suburban dwellers. Sadly, very few Australian (or English, or American) suburban homes have original contemporary art works on their walls. It has to be said that the majority of contemporary artists and the art that they make has little or no contact (in a physical sense) with suburbia. English academic Colin Painter, writing in the At Home with Art catalogue in 2000 considers this dilemma from an interesting perspective. A major reason for this is that the contemporary art world has tended to marginalise the home as a serious location for art. It has been viewed as trivial – not as a subject for art, but as a location for it. (6) 83 Figure 41 Robert Bell Porcelains 1981 84 However, towards the end of that practice (c.1985) Bell made a series of small ceramic objects that do acknowledge an intellectual response to post modern theory. He describes them as ‘my reaction to post-modern attitudes to architecture, although they were small and intimate, unlike some of the corporate structures being built at that time, they were domestic in scale.’ (8). Theo Koning’s conscious attitude to the gendered domestic actually prevents his male/artist engagement with mother child relationships. He drew attention to his awareness of what he perceives to be the special nature of this bond, ‘its something that exists only between them, if I try to do [comment on] those things it will be completely false’ (9). This attitude does not extend to interrogating other domestic relationships or the domestic periphery, and many of his most successful works reveal both the joy and the potential dangers of the suburban life. Caporn fits somewhere between Bell and Koning in his stated awareness of theoretical positions, of gendered sites and of family relationships. His work is a rigorous commentary on the contemporary suburban/domestic condition and while it may reflect a male attitude in certain later works, there is no overt theoretical agenda informing his practice. On the other hand, John Teschendorff was for many years working in the shadow of feminist theory. Much of the Still Life and Altar series was predicated on his attempts as a male artist, to comment upon what he perceived to be the prevailing (c.1980s) male attitudes to women. The story of media responses to the naked torso in Still Life II Altar when it was exhibited in Adelaide in 1983 (see Chapter IV) is indicative of the passion and power of the feminist movement in Australia at that time. Teschendorff’s studio practice was dramatically altered by that experience, forcing him to change in the later Still Life works to use ‘invented’ domestic symbols/icons in order to continue the series. He was certainly aware of the earlier academic debates, and of the rejection of the domestic by the American abstract expressionists. He states ‘I suppose my admiration for Pollock, Motherwell [and Greenberg too] concealed the artist/hero thing. I did not consider [then] that the outcomes denied the domestic, and when Warhol came along it seemed just like some sort of reaction, a natural progression if you like.’ (10). Whilst Teschendorff’s response may have been somewhat naive, it is fair to say that none of the four Western Australian artists have been concerned by the fact that their practice may be devalued by its association with the domestic and its objects. In fact, the inherent power of their outcomes may draw upon their singular and conjoint rejection of modernist theories and marginalised domestic histories. I am equally certain of their understanding and awareness of the subtle tensions felt by many local female artists regarding marginal practice. If there is an identifiable response to the presence of history, it is to attempt to reshape its definitions to ensure equal access to any future domestic reality. 85 This altruistic attitude goes someway to explaining why they have been drawn as male artists to a site ‘so strongly associated with the primacy of female histories.’ (11). I sense that there is inherent in the works of Hatoum, Whiteread and Carter, and also with that of Hall and Watt, a feeling that their involvement with the domestic is because of its potency to describe, in an accessible form, universally understood aspects of the human condition. Similarly, the best of Koning, Bell, Teschendorff and Caporn moves with equal authority from the level of a local domestic inquiry to that of a serious engagement with the very way we live. There is something about the domestic space that transcends the specificities of place and culture. Something about the tools used to construct it, and the objects within it that have immediacy for the artist and for the audience. Both responses are based on familiarity, on knowing. It is almost as if there is the latent potential for democratization of the contemporary art process in tools and in domestic utensils. American curator Carolyn Laray, writing in Tools as Art: […] they offer a means of expression open to all, for tools and mankind are inseparably bound. It is this intimate relationship that informs each piece [in the Hechinger Collection] and affords accessibility and an immediacy of response of viewer to work not often found in art today. (12) Laray’s comments are specific to hand tools in a major American collection, yet they offer an entry point to understanding the real power of the re-emergence of the domestic. For it is the same entry point: whether confronted by Rachel Whiteread’s concrete London E3 masterpiece, a Fiona Hall sardine tin, John Teschendorff’s boxes of black tea pots or an Andy Warhol soup can. Given that the speed of accessibility and immediacy of response may be determined by content and complexity does not in reality, deny access to all.