Juliana Engberg History, Heresy and Hearsay: Greg Creek’s Desktop Drawing

In all the ways that Greg Creek’s paintings are tightly structured, densely allegorical, realist and programmatically thought through, his desktop drawings are not. They operate an opposite strategy: one that is loose, light, drifty – scatologically so – even while they pertain to certain structuring principles. And if Creek’s paintings tend toward the historical allegorical with the appearance of veracity, then his desktop drawings drift purposefully towards an apocryphal apprehension of things. They acknowledge history as a subjective collision of events that move perpetually between the private and public, the authoritative account and heresy, time and space, and often the elusive and ineffable.

Creek’s Melbourne Desktop Drawing, a near 30 metre long unfurled scroll, is the latest creation in a sequence of desk top projects made over the past eight years. It shares a number of recording methodologies with it’s predecessors – diarist, mapping, doodling, architectural sketches and schematics, landscape painting, listing, portraiture, writing, scribbling, lettering – and a number of performative episodes – the accident, the incident and the demonstration. In Melbourne Desktop Drawing Creek has also added the structure of a narrative that cross-references places with people who are offered as signposts along his journey stretching between Alphington and St.Kilda. And he has activated a working process of the cut, the excision, the edit, the montage; a methodology that destabilises the ground of drawing and brings it, ruptured, into the world. Numerous sections of the drawing, some as small as a sentence, others as large as his body have been removed from one part of the drawing and inserted elsewhere or replaced with fresh material. The back of the paper scroll appears as a heavily repaired site, criss-crossed with linen tape bandages. The front bears the scars and incisions of change, as present to us as sign as any other graphic mark. Thus the chronology of the work is non-linear - time and space intertwine. The memory of an incident from years before sits adjacent in space to present experience.

Locality and its history, and how this history pushes time and space between past and present is important to Creek’s construction of his passionate and deliberately parochial strip-atlas. And he uses this construct of the atlas to make visible connections that exist in that invisible monad of experience. Creek’s drawing enters into a history of depiction that might be called collective history. But it is also, and deliberately, a selective history. For all that it includes many things, and quite radically causes them to create a frisson of recollection, Creek excludes other, perhaps better-remembered events and things that would generally accord with a version of ‘official’ history. In this way Creek agrees with Walter Benjamin when he references Leopold von Ranke’s idea that to ‘articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it as it really was’. In his passionate devotion to drawing another historical map Creek also seems to be aware of the need to save certain things from disappearing altogether, perhaps also referencing Benjamin when he wrote: ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized… For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’ 1 Invariably Creek engages in a critical debate between those parts of Australian art and history that disappear through a lack of recognition in the present.

Throughout Creek’s drawing faint ghost images appear as phantasmic historical figures and places to reassert their position within the linearity of things. The distant image of the city, now dominated by skyscrapers, rather than the industrial chimneys of the 19th century boom-town Melbourne, which lurked in the backgrounds and peeked through the bush in the works of the day-tripper Heidelberg painters, appears as a schematic outline in Creek’s drawing. It reminds us of a Melbourne art tradition set in place at the rural fringe, which never departed far from the urban grid. Indeed we might note that Creek’s trajectory takes us to the approximate two markers of our ‘Golden Summer’ of art – the pastoral and frontierist fantasies evoked near Heidelberg and the Riviera fantasies delivered from the resort town St.Kilda.

In part, Creek follows the journey of Louis Buvelot, offered in basic Australian art history courses as the first European artist to really grasp our landscape and its weird, melancholic, down-turning trees. Buvelot, like Creek, also sketched the bending route of the as it detoured to the Merri Creek and Darebin, crossing the Banksia Bridge and Johnston Street Bridge. One of the lovely landscape moments in Creek’s odyssey is the pause that opens up to deliver the vista of the Punt Road silos, which mark the intersection of the exit, South Eastern freeway and Hoddle Street Bridge. Creek has updated the site of Buvelot’s idyllic Yarra pastoral. He has made it more dramatic and modern: more here than there, more now than then. The billboard on the silos, monuments of advertising since the 1960s, telegraphs ENVY. We might assume it is a Calvin Klein perfume ad, but equally it could be a pang for a previous, gentler, quieter time. Creek’s works force us to encounter nostalgia and either recuperate or refute its power over us. He challenges us to forget or remember.

In Creek’s drawing there are constant references to amnesia and erasure, and occlusions are performed and presented as voids or obscuring mess. The theory of cartography, which increasingly proves the deliberately manipulative semiotics and politics of mapping, gives such gaps, or voids the designation ‘silences’. Things that are perhaps known, even seen, but not given official prominence or cannot be spoken about. An example of such ‘silence’ was the omission of ‘living’ churches on official Soviet maps, even while the buildings and congregations still existed, albeit unofficially. In the history of time and space that stretches between Alphington and St.Kilda in Creek’s version of things there are also such silences and official omissions. Equally there is a plethora of information, which is delivered in the forms of malapropisms, neologisms, linguistic and artistic conflations, jottings, hearsay and miss-heard information. Inside the private space of the studio, where Creek assembles his local picture, the world enters in the form of snippets of information. The radio delivers part heard tunes: politics and news insinuate themselves in talk-back. The tormenting events of recent times fit between the other parts of life, which include family, child-care, social interaction, mundane chores, reminiscence and dreams.

Creek moves fluidly between quotation and fabrication. Aphorisms, poems, and observations that float in the meta-spaces of Creek’s landscape are pulled together to form new mottos: other people’s words become entangled, indeed entwined with Creek’s own commentary. Invective is combined with the inventive. Creek’s critique can be sharp, and acerbic and to find oneself in the midst of such a diatribe can be alarming to say the least. When we read ‘Virginia Trioli spoons politicians spit’ we are affronted somewhat by the violence of the alliteration which seems to perform itself in spoon and spit. This dedication balances on the edge of vitriol and respect. We are left to ponder if radio presenter and journalist Trioli is a hero who must endure the explosive discharge of politicians, or someone who offers them a way to clean up their act. Perhaps both. When we read ‘the dead are outside time we float astygmatic before their jealous eyes’ we are confused by the profundity of such a thought wrapped around the enigma of a neologism.

Creek’s drawing invariably becomes literature in parts, and links in ways to the meandering urban of James Joyce who was also an inventor of language. Jacques Derrida’s sense of Joyce’s language as a form of hypermnesiac machine, capable of integrating all the variables, all the quantitative and qualitative factors, seems an apt description of Creek’s own approach. Other writers of the city also seem appropriate companions for Creek’s journey: Baudelaire, Genet, Rimbaud – romantics and rebels all – who have each etched their way across the urban scene of their place and time, testing aesthetic and moral limits.

While in some ways Creek’s referencing of things offers acknowledgment of the contribution made by male artists who have previously trodden his path, it becomes clear as we move along this meandering trip, along rivers and streams, over bridges and down freeways, that Creek’s bias in this cartography, is to maneuver women into the picture, rather than out of it as history has been inclined to do. Seven women appear in this crossing of space and time. Each in some ways have influenced Creek, some artistically, others personally, some notoriously.

The worldly, wise babe, is a local ‘Alphington’ artist identity with whom Creek identifies. Like Creek, who with partner Carolyn Eskdale started the artist run space, Temple Studio to offer opportunities and support to fellow artists, Bryans was both a creator and a facilitator. Bryans set up an art colony in Alphington in the old Darebin pub, where she and lover William Frater, and sometimes and others (Ada Plante and Isobel Tweedle for instance) pursued their modernism and lives. Frater is often given status as the ‘father’ of Victorian modernism, whereas Bryans, immortalized by Frater as The Red Hat, whose own works were fresh and unrestricted by a tight adherence to Cezanne (unlike Frater’s) was mostly mentioned as an adjunct, part-timer, good-time gal. A lady painter. Creek adds the sketch of her house to his landscape and offers a lively colour tribute.

The artist and teacher Pam Hallandal is also in Creek’s trajectory of influence. It might be observed in Creek’s own devotion to, and clear skill in maintaining the importance of black and white figurative drawings that he has been much effected by Hallandal’s own zealous credo of art from observation, and art from one’s own local community. As a teacher at Prahran, where Creek studied at an undergraduate level, Hallandal’s instructions can be seen as formative and sustained in Creek’s own perceptive and often piercing observations of those around him, including friends, colleagues and those in the public realm, such as politicians and celebrities.

Other ‘portraits’ are of women who have passed through Creek’s life in various ways: ‘Bronwyn’ a fellow student at one time, who mysteriously died; ‘Irene’ an unknowing victim in the passionate, and propagandist demonstrations of anti-abortionists outside the Bertrum Wainer Clinic; ‘Dorothy’, a patient from Bendigo in the Royal Women’s Hospital in the Oncology Unit where Creek had an artist's residency; ‘Colleen’ a koori woman shot by police in Fitzroy Street, St.Kilda during a spate of police shootings involving homeless and medically incapacitated persons.

Claudia Wright, the legendary Truth journalist who suffered a debilitating loss of memory through Alzheimer’s disease is linked to Creek through his friendship with her son. In Creek’s version of history her status as a journalist known for dealing with the hard facts is combined with a list of names of the Hoddle Street shooting incident. The names of those murdered and injured, now almost forgotten except by their nearest and dearest, seem erased from history while the perpetrator Julian Knight, lives on in notoriety and dreadful celebrity. In a sad memorial Creek writes: ‘Claudia Wright who interviewed Julian Knight or so she thought can’t remember’.

What is recalled and remembered, and what is valued as history are continuous themes that insinuate themselves through Creek’s complicated narratives. Footballer, fallen from grace, Gary Ablett can’t remember either. Neither can Peter Reith whose role in the children overboard incident will be swallowed by history. The big fish eat the little fish. Creek’s commentary sometimes comes in the form of a gentle visual homily.

Swallow/Vomit: a certain viscerality enters throughout Creek’s landscape. There is a sense of commemoration in many of his portraits for those lost, those misplaced, and those forgotten. There is undoubtedly a kind of melancholy in Creek’s picture. Trees turn into anatomies, eyes float: paint blobs and bleeds become intestinal. T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ which begins: ‘Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table’, seems an appropriate other reference. Creek stretches our view along an anatomy of place where certain things cannot be seen, or told yet. He offers an opportunity to examine.

For all that Creek’s work is deliberately public in its pursuit of the diatribe and the settling of accounts there are always the ‘silences’; the gaps to be filled in, the things not yet known because history has its way of flitting past things and rewriting as it goes. Some things must be left unsaid, private things that remain hidden behind facades. Perhaps we are all like the lone rower who glides peacefully, beautifully, for a moment out of the murk and messiness of confusion to seek some clarity, some distance. Such a tender moment appears almost by accident in creek’s drawing, but it is redemptive all the same.

Some things are inconclusive and Creek does not confine himself to local history in an insular backward glance, as does the politics of the day. We are in the time and place of history, which situates the Yarra and its bends at intersections such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, Bali and Manila. The world floats in Creek’s sky. We remain in the grip of cover-ups and forgetfulness in respect of our global participation in wars. Terrorism remains hidden in the clotted networks that we cannot unravel. At the end of the drawing Creek writes ‘we make a decision not to know…’ and perhaps he is right.

Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books, New York, 1968, p25

Melbourne, July 2003 Australian Centre for Contemporary Art