Ben Quilty Education Resource Self-portrait smashed Rorschach (installation view) 2009 Oil on linen Collection of the artist Education Bookings General Education email [email protected] Education Officers: Helen Attrill e: [email protected] t: 5434 6082 Margot Feast e: [email protected] t: 5434 6080 Resource prepared by Helen Attrill, Education Officer Bendigo Art Gallery wishes to acknowledge the support of the Department of Education and Training in providing funding through the Strategic Partnerships Program. Self-portrait smashed Rorschach 2009 oil on linen Collection of the artist Introduction Ben Quilty is undoubtedly one of Australia’s best-known and highly-regarded contemporary painters. His work is characterised by a gestural painterly style and is widely known for his quick working method, which deliberately leaves smears, smudges and almost three-dimensional brush marks on the canvas. This exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery brings together the works shown in London at the Saatchi Gallery in 2014, alongside Kuta Rorschach No.2, a work recently acquired by the Gallery. His paintings depict rural Australia and some of the more challenging aspects of our culture and history. European settlement, the rites and rituals of masculinity, nationhood and the plight of Indigenous Australians are ongoing themes. The exhibition includes a selection of paintings from his acclaimed Rorschach series, which mimic the ‘ink blot’ tests introduced in the 1920s as a tool for psychological testing. Each of the paintings depicts picture-book landscape scenes that belie their more sinister history. For example, Fairy Bower Rorschach (2012) captures the New South Wales tourist attraction Fairy Bower Falls, which is also thought to be the site of an horrific massacre of Aboriginal people. While Kuta Rorschach No.2 shows the famous Kuta beach in Bali – a popular holiday destination for Australians and inextricably linked to the ‘Bali bombings’ of 2002 – a terrorist attack which claimed the lives of 202 people from 22 countries, including 88 Australians and more recently, the jailing of the Bali 9, a group of young men and one woman who attempted to smuggle hard drugs from the country in 2005. 2 Quilty appropriates the Colonial painter HJ Johnstone’s 1880 painting in Evening Shadows, Rorschach after Johnston 2011. In 1881 JH Johnstone’s Evening Shadows, backwater of the Murray South Australia was donated to the Art Gallery of South Australia and is the Gallery’s first recorded acquisition. This work is thought to be one of the most copied paintings in Australia – with at least 90 known copies. Quilty’s work was created for the 130th anniversary of the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2011 and highlights the artist’s ongoing concern for the destruction of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The original painting depicts an idyllic natural setting – three Aboriginal people are camping alongside the winding river. The painting appears almost timeless and makes the viewer ponder whether the scene is meant to represent a time before European colonisation. The only clue in the painting is the woven blanket wrapped around the shoulders of one of the figures – undoubtedly given by the colonisers. Quilty’s contemporary interpretation of this work, in particular his use of the Rorschach technique, affords a different interpretation. The figures of the people are all but obliterated – the figure possible to see on the right-hand panel is barely visible in its ‘reflection’. Furthermore, viewing this from a contemporary framework we know the appalling state of the River Murray, its destruction from over use and pollution – a picturesque view of this river is hard to come by in the 21st century. In Inhabit , 2010, Quilty interrogates the history of European settlement in Australia and attempts to come to terms with his own habitation of the lands of Australia’s Indigenous cultures. The series travels from a depiction of Captain Cook as the Devil, to a self-portrait. In the final paintings, the human figure all but dissolves. The ornate black birdcage was originally intended to house a Myna – a bird introduced from India and southern Asia which is now recognised as an invasive species in Australia and other parts of the world. In Self-portrait smashed Rorschach 2009, we see Quilty depict himself in a drunken state, mirrored using the Rorschach technique; he has often commented on the differences in rites of passage between indigenous and non-indigenous Australian males and he reflects on his experiences as a young, risk-taking male. His studies into indigenous culture raised awareness of these differences. Kuta Rorschach No 2 2014 Oil on canvas Collection Bendigo Art Gallery Image courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 3 Themes The artworks in this exhibition address three of Quilty’s most widely explored themes: Australian masculinity , national identity and mortality . Australian masculinity Ben Quilty is a fifth generation Australian of Irish descent. He spent his childhood and youth in north-western Sydney, an area which he did not consider to be of great stimulus for art until later in life. Although he enjoyed art at school, his youth was spent doing what he felt was typical at the time as an Australian male, engaging in risk taking activities such as bonding with mates through drinking, drugs and cars. He considers himself both an observer and participator in these rites of passage, and recent events such as losing one friend after a buck’s party mishap and another to pancreatic cancer throw such behaviours into question. Through his postgraduate studies into indigenous cultures, he has developed a deep appreciation of the lack of acknowledgement of indigenous history and culture. For example, he learnt that for many Aboriginal males, becoming an adult involves around thirteen years of serious initiation which was in direct contrast to his own experiences of coming of age which involved drunkenness and vomiting. Quilty has said that the way he paints “mirrors the attitude of the young male” “We used to go out and get into fights and drive like absolute maniacs and knock things down as we drove along and that application of paint represents those kinds of ideas in another way.” 1 His ongoing investigation into themes of masculinity and mateship have led him to visit convicted drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran in the infamous Kerobokan prison in Bali. Quilty mentored him with his art and was greatly impressed at the development of his artistic talent and how reformed he was as a now mature male. Quilty considers that most Australian men do not gain maturity until around twenty four years of age and that this has impacted on the poor decisions made by Sukumaran and the other Bali nine captors. Although Kuta Rorschach No.2 , in the exhibition, does not depict Sukumaran directly (Quilty has also produced portraits of him that are not in the exhibition), the inclusion of Kuta Beach in Bali as a subject, touches on the temptations faced by Australian tourists who frequently fail to see the consequences of their risk taking activities in this tourist mecca. National identity and Landscape A major component of the exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery consists of Quilty’s recent exploration of landscapes using the Rorschach method of sandwiching one side of a painting onto another to produce an almost-mirror image. In Postcolonial investigation, Quilty takes scenes from well-known places made popular as tourist destinations or as subject matter of iconic artworks that all have a darker history behind them. He reworks them using the Rorschach method on a very large scale to deconstruct or ‘destroy’ the image. These landscapes could be seen as allegorical as they initially have the surface meaning of a luscious, idealised landscape but this belies their sinister history or association. Evening Shadows, Rorschach after Johnston and Fairy Bower Rorschach both depict landscapes showing peaceful scenes, with only minimal figures, whereas both locations would have been more heavily populated with indigenous people prior to colonization. “By the time of the original painting by Henry James Johnstone, Evening Shadows was made all the inhabitants of that land had been murdered or died of smallpox. Johnstone instead depicts a tranquil scene of homely bliss with aboriginal man and woman with tiny baby - a colonial utopia. Quilty reinvestigates this paradox and through the use of his Rorschach* technique playfully forces the viewer to re-evaluate their own role in the history of colonisation.” 2 4 In Inhabit he also considers himself as an Irish born Australian as being part of the Colonial ‘invasion’ of Australia and includes himself in the sequence of what could be seen as the beginning of the end. As Quilty created this series of paintings five years after the infamous race riots in Sydney’s Cronulla beach between white and largely Lebanese Australians, he considered Australia’s identity in a contemporary sense. Quilty has said that Inhabit is a commentary “on a country taken by storm a little over two hundred years ago…a response to the young Caucasian men who aggressively wrap the Australian flag around their shoulders and whose war cry is one of racism and bigotry”. 3 Mortality Overlapping the themes of Australian masculinity and identity through use of the landscape, Quilty also investigates notions of mortality in a personal sense, and also through investigation of contemporary and historical events. Throughout the years, he has challenged the idea of presenting the heroic in male portraiture by depicting his mates, renowned alcoholic musician Jimmy Barnes and himself in states of drunkenness. In Self-portrait smashed Rorschach, Quilty we see the artist look upwards, as if questioning himself in this state. He has recently lost two friends through alcohol use – one who drowned after falling off a boat at a bachelor’s party and one who died of pancreatic cancer so the reality of these self-destructive behaviours is very personal to him.