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

Juliana Engberg History, Heresy and Hearsay: Greg Creek’s Melbourne 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 Yarra River 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 Domain tunnel 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 modernism 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, Lina Bryans 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 Ian Fairweather 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.

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