The Menstruum 25: Knights-at-arms

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE 27.04.2011]

 

There are a series of objects and events, and they seem to want to make sense of each other. 

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. Courtesy Penguin Group.

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is sitting on an upturned box in my living room – a bone white block looking like the telephone directory of a small but perfectly-Protestant Alabamian town. I have yet to collect the nerve to open the thing.   

In 1996, Wallace spent three days on the set of Lost Highway, to watch David Lynch work and to furnish an article for Premiere magazine. When Wallace arrived he was met by the sight of Lynch taking a piss on a stunted pine tree – it turned out D. Lynch was a chain coffee drinker and the production couldn’t afford the time it would take for Mr Lynch to trudge back to the toilet trailer every time his bladder maxed out. Lynch made his film and he watered the plants. Wallace wrote his piece and about the pace that David Lynch worked, “exponentially busier than everybody else”, and in his three days on set Wallace never once spoke to his subject.  

Two weeks ago I stepped into a small depression in the road while trying to get into the passenger side of my car; it was dark, I rolled my ankle and put my weight on the wrong side of left foot. Cursing, holding the bones like a busted Easter egg, I fell inside the car to the sound of the driver’s roaring laughter. Looking back to the road I saw the shadow of something I must have dropped, and picking it up and into the weak interior light, I saw it was an enormous pair of dirty blue underpants, certainly not mine. This made the laughter louder.

On the twenty-first of April, 1819, John Keats wrote the first version of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ in a letter to his brother George. “Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms / Alone and palely loitering?” An editor would later, amongst other defendable changes, switch “knight-at-arms” to “wretched wight”, and so watered-down the unfashionable gothic image. Keats wrote of a dream, of being visited by a lover and by “pale kings and princes”. The pale here was death-pale. 

John William Waterhouse, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1893.

Returning home on 12 September, 2008, Karen Green found David Foster Wallace, her husband, dead, having hung himself. A long while later she made a Forgiveness Machine. It was seven feet long and made of plastic, and worked by feeding a piece of paper into a vacuum pipe at one of its ends. You wrote what needed forgiveness on the paper. Karen never used the contraption herself.    

On the twenty-first of April, 2011, Jamie Hutchings’ new record, Avalon Cassettes, is in my letterbox when I arrive home. I put it on and he sings to me – so perfectly he sings, “I get sick of lighting candles to look impressive in the dark.” 

I’m going to carry my broken foot to the living room and begin to read The Pale King: a simple book.  

The Menstruum 24: "When All Our Cities Are Dust..."

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 20.04.2011]

Film Still from F For Fake. Courtesy of Madmen Entertainment.

A broken foot provides nothing if not the opportunity to dig into the persistent stack of unwatched DVDs.  The Thin Blue Line, Mark Gatiss and his History of Horror, When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors. For a week I consume nothing but beer and dip, accept the sensation of my arse perceivably widening, and eat 34 episodes of The World at War like a tray of my beloved Classic Barbeque Sakata. Pink-eyed, white-tongued, possessor of still broken footsy, I crack the plastic wrap on Orson Welles’ F For Fake (1974), and later congratulate myself on this moment of unknowing acumen.

I realise the vision I cling to is of Orson as that premature  genius: 23 and behind the mike of War of the Worlds – whipping Citizen Kane together after blowing out the candles of his 25^th birthday cake. I’m reluctant to the reality of him growing aged and round and canonised in the 1960s and 70s, but it’s here we find our old mucker, revered but understood to have nothing to offer the film world but reliably-voiced narration and a useful past benchmark to which to be compared. F For Fake is a stick in the eye to that view – a baffling bit of work and the punch line to a joke that Orson set in motion decades earlier in which we are the subject.      

  

  

It is difficult to be certain, even after repeated viewing, as to where this thing begins and ends. It is a documentary, it is a film, it is grindingly sincere and an utter piss-take. Christ. Like an excited friend clicking you through link after link of Youtube clips, spoiling, never letting a riotous subtitled cat video finish before jumping to the next, Welles drip feeds the story of F For Fake via a succession of short pieces, stock tape, interview footage, and winking commentaries to camera.

Our subjects are real. We have Elmyr de Hory, a twitchy bon vivant famed and notorious as the world’s most accomplished art forger, then, a fellow-travellor, Clifford Irving, the composer of Elmyr’s biography (and confusingly, the writer of a famously faked biography of Howard Hughes), front and centre at an unending cycle of Ibiza society parties. The story of Elmyr is revealed in fragments, as too is the claim that his forged works of the Modernist masters hang happily on the walls of the world’s preeminent art dealers and gallery.   

Film Still from F For Fake. Courtesy of Madmen Entertainment.

      

The tale’s veracity is asserted with a bewildering mash of re-enactments and filmic diversions. Orson is the composer of this reality – his turns to camera taking place from behind an editor’s desk, reels of film stack and unspooled around him. Though unstated, the bulk of the film’s footage is not Orson’s, it has been claimed from an unrealised documentary of Francois Reichenbach.

I rub lotion into my dumb foot and watch F For Fake, over, and over. I sit amazed at its brilliance and hopelessly imagine that I am not just another of Welles’ stooges in all this.

The Menstruum 23: Red Dog, Red Dog

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE 14.04.2011]

Will Sutherland and his painting, Coyote?, appear to have simply risen from the very earth.

Will Sutherland, Coyote?, 2011.

It’s a very unsexy hour for an exhibition opening, well before midday on a Wednesday and I’m standing on the third level of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia amongst a congregation of journalists and nervously energetic high school students. Top Arts, the annual show of VCE high schoolers’ best, is about to have its ribbon cut and the speeches are rolling on, but I can’t draw my attention away from the two tables of chocolate brownies and my confusion as to why no-one else is eating them. I’m chewing and thinking perhaps it’s like a school dance and once the first couple braves the floor they’ll all be at it.

The doors shuzz open and the students are directed in and asked to stand by their works and it’s hard not to feel somewhat emasculated on their behalf. The photographers have found their subject before even setting eyes on the art; a young man is sporting a decent pastel-tipped Mohican and a suit made from his grandmother’s floral bedspread and the succession of camera flashes render his tanned skin pale.



Damien Ward, Beaked Warrior (detail). Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria.



Elizabeth Griffin, Untitled. Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria.

Philip Hickingbotham, Edge of Darkness. Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria.

Stepping just inside, the first painting I see is also the one which will leave the heaviest mark on my mind. I am awed, properly awed, and have to force myself to continue. The show is sprawling and varied in focus and quality, as it always is and should be. ‘Issues’ run very close to the surface and there are the reliable and sincere iterations on body image, the environment, and the question of identity, but there are works too of real foresight, by artists reaching well beyond their experience. I do three laps and am convinced something has been in the water this year gone – this is the best Top Arts I’ve seen by a country mile. I think of when I was seventeen and my greatest achievement being the ability to watching X-Files and scratch my arse simultaneously. 
 

Satisfied I’ve played my part, I return to that first work, the one that’s sunk a skewer into my eye. It is Will Sutherland and Coyote? and I can’t shake the idea that I’m in the presence of something and someone very special. The Satan red figure of this canine hovers in that inspiring  space between the instantly recognisable and the untouchable. It is this same territory explored by Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and Patrick White, and in the moment of seeing Coyote? it seems not ridiculous or an exaggeration to imagine that Sutherland has just joined this remarkable lineage.

With a calm authority, the master is standing at the side of his unreal dog and the two of them seem a pair. Will appears a part of the painting and together they seem drawn from the dirt and ground stones of this country.

Will has created and drawn himself into a glorious myth and this work must be the start of something. It just has to be.