Mirror Images of Male Rage
Rosemary Sorensen, May 21, 2009.
Article from: The Australian.
GERMAINE Greer's provocative essay On Rage, which fuelled heated debate about male violence in indigenous communities, was a revelation for Ben Quilty. "Others say that On Rage is less about masculinity and more about indigenous culture," says Quilty, a young, white Australian from a suburban background.
"But I read it in the broader context of all masculinity. The most visible form of the rage Germaine Greer is talking about is indigenous culture: easiest to see and the most confronting to consider. But using that as a model, I found it has particular relevance to me and to everything I've worked on."
Quilty is famous - perhaps notorious - for his excess in the use of paint as well as his full-on depictions of male excess. His work is all over the walls of the University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane, the colour thick and shocking as the inevitable coming-of-age chunder after a boys' night out. Quilty has also curated for Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane a group show titled On Rage, in homage to Greer.
The centrepiece of that show is one of Quilty's Smashed self-portraits, another of which hangs at UQ Art Museum. These astonishing works are part of the artist's experimentation with what he calls Rorschach painting. He creates an image in oily gobs, then presses another piece of linen or canvas down on to it, resulting in a second image that is like a slightly decayed, less precise mirroring of the first.
Reproduced in catalogues, Quilty's Rorschach artworks are vivid and almost crude, tending towards the abstract. Seen on a gallery wall, they are disturbingly beautiful and, if you place yourself at the right distance from the canvas, realistic. There's the artist's head pitched backwards in drunken stupor, as strong an image of masculine pathos as Caravaggio's gloriously repugnant depiction of Holofernes's head newly sliced from hismuscled body by the seductive and vengeful Judith.
Quilty claims he hadn't intended the connection to the archetype to be so strong, but he's just being careful not to rile any feminists who may be lurking. He admits to a strategy of trying to win over people (feminists included) to his way of thinking rather than putting people (feminists in particular) offside. But make no mistake: for Quilty, feminism has much to answer for.
"Feminism did happen, and then the whole thing with gender studies and women's studies," he says. "But back at university, I was the only man in a course studying it, even though it made more sense that, post-feminism, men should be studying it.
"That's what should happen after feminism, that men should rediscover themselves, but there's no way men were able to have any input.
"Let it happen, feminism, then let men talk about it, but men are hopeless at talking about it, and that's why there are not a lot of men making work about what it meant to be masculine in the pre-feminist days."
Even before he read On Rage, Quilty was keen to put together a show by men about men, but Greer's book firmed his resolve. He says many people misread Greer, "particularly when she's branded as a feminist".
"I don't think she is even a feminist any more," he says. "In On Rage, there's a sense of sympathy about why the young men (in Aboriginal communities) behave like they do, and she is saying there has to be some responsibility taken by them, too.
"I looked at that and thought: the position of those young men in that (modern) indigenous culture is only 100 years old; and then, from my perspective, for the young men who are dealing with their role in (white, suburban) culture, the timeline is even less, it's only 30 or 40 years old." That is, it's only as old as feminism.
Quilty, 35, is a tall, comely fellow whose friendly openness could charm the socks off, say, a feminist.
He is married to Kylie, a scriptwriter, and the couple have two small children. They moved out of inner Sydney a few years back to live in rural NSW, where Quilty has enough space for his exacting practice.
He is full of stories about what it was like to grow up in Sydney, going through the long hair and death's-head T-shirt period, the booze and drug-fuelled partying that ended in death-defying idiocies behind the wheels of souped-up cars.
Even back then, he recalls, he would occasionally, between the guffaws and belches, focus his bleary eyes on his mates and ask the taboo question: Why are we doingthis?
Now an established artist whose work commands serious prices, he still seeks out the company of men with whom he can talk about that same question.
The original idea for his group show by men about men came when he was travelling in Europe in 2003 on a Brett Whiteley scholarship. One of the artists he met at that time was Ingo Gerken, a young Berliner.
"We got on really well, partly because there seem to be so many similarities between the experience of being a man in Germany and in Australia, to do with innate guilt," Quilty says. "Ours is only bubbling and simmering under the surface while theirs is more blatant. We had some fabulous frank conversations, as friends, drinking cheap beer on the River Seine, talking about the fervour of patriotism."
Quilty's thinking took him down the path of examining why, in Australia, people are so patriotic about sport. (He says it's a relatively quick way to feel good about your country.) He wonders why our male role models are likeliest to be sportsmen who, of course, then let us down when they prove to be morally weak. What men need, the artist says, are "new ways of being masculine, ways that are not tied to your body but tied to a way of being. The role models we have are ridiculous. Football players, they're not good rolemodels.
"And where are the initiation ceremonies for new masculinities?"
Quilty went to his group of male artists - Gunter Christmann, Todd McMillan, Daniel Boyd, David Griggs, Gerken, Alan Jones andLeslie Rice - and asked them "to explore exactly what your experience of masculinity is".
"I don't want it to be about guilt, I don't want you to make work trying to find ways of how we should be," he told them. "I want you to show the way it is and how this culture you come from, your masculine culture, fits into what Greer talks about."
Curator Lisa Slade worked with director Nick Mitzevich on the Ben Quilty Live! show at the UQ Art Museum. She also has chipped in with notes for the Jan Murphy Gallery show, fascinated not only by Quilty's painting technique but also his project of "reflecting on the state of masculinity in Australia".
The artist's work is about "the cult of masculinity", Slade says, "expressing the rage, boredom and oblivion of growing up as a white male in Australia". She describes the huge Smashed self-portraits as "the death wish of the Aussie male played out in paint".
In McMillan's video Ague (Preparation), which shows the artist preparing to swim the English Channel, doomed to fail because he is not physically up to the challenge, Slade sees the image of a "contemporary Hamlet, impotent and hopeless".
Quilty loves McMillan's work because, like the man himself, it so starkly pits masculine roles against male realities. McMillan's work, he says, is "about failure, in a self-deprecating way". There's his mate Todd, setting out to conquer the English Channel, "this skinny white man who might have super powers but no, he has to swim back".
Unlike the work of another mate in the show - Jones's soft sculpture of barbecues sprouting grotesque heads - McMillan's is "very beautiful, very soft", Quilty says. There's an element of the "sensitive new age guy thing", he says, but only in the sense that such a fellow is doomed to fail. Sensitive new age masculinist art, in fact, enrages Quilty.
"There's a really fashionable thing for young men to make very soft work, often using watercolours, exploring sensitive men, with young men, naked, lying around," he says. "It's sort of homoerotic, even homosexual, although most of the guys making this work are not homosexual themselves.
"I don't respond to that work at all and this show (On Rage) is a response to those works. Finding the new male position is not about giving up masculinity. It's about redefining. Men are not going to change to become more female, in the same way as women are not going to become more male to fit in with the ideas of feminism."
On Rage, curated by Ben Quilty, is at the Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, until June 6. Ben Quilty Live! is at the University of Queensland Art Museum until July 19, then at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, August 15-November 15.