Facing the music
Perhaps
it was just me, but Australia’s best-known and most prestigious
art award seemed to happen in a blur this year. The announcement
of the Archibald Prize winners came with such apparent speed,
it rather caught me unawares. I’m sure the august persons
who control the prize didn’t intend that to be the case,
but perception, as they say, is everything.
This year’s crop of 40 finalists in the nation’s
biggest portrait prize were, as always, an eclectic bunch; although
perhaps not as eclectic as some would prefer. I seemed to detect
something of a drift towards the traditional in the selection.
Although there were exceptions (see below), many of the finalists
wouldn’t be out of place on the boardroom walls of the country’s
big corporations.
They don’t come much more traditional than
Roger Boreham’s ‘Dad, what a smile’ or Paul
Newton’s ‘Portrait of Donald McDonald AC’. Indeed,
even after last year’s rather contentious “very big
heads” comment from Edmund Capon, easily more than half
the finalists’ entries could be seen as fitting that very
description. One might be so bold as to suggest that the Archibald
has become an end in itself for many artists, and that pushing
the envelope is very much a secondary consideration.
That said, there were some examples of risk-taking
amount the final selection – and none more so that Leslie
Rice’s ‘Quartered, drawn and hung: Adam Cullen on
public display’. In fact, one could (with some conviction)
get into the age-old Archibald argument about whether it was a
portrait at all – but for present purposes, let’s
not go there. The piece consists essentially of dark rectangles
on a white background; the title referencing the well-known “grunge”
artist Adam Cullen.
James Powditch too embraced popular culture in his
work, ‘Aden Young in “Once upon a time in the inner
west”’. The portrait cleverly used the format of a
movie poster, plastered over other posters on a wall to convey
a sense of the rather enigmatic actor. Alexander McKenzie’s
portrait of Sarah Blasko had the singer sitting in an almost surreal
landscape, her armchair resting in the tidal pools on the seashore,
near a jetty while the light from a lighthouse pierced the stormy
backdrop.
Rodney Pople perhaps said it all with the title
of his work ‘Art is what you can get away with – self
portrait’. The picture requires a little art history knowledge,
referencing as it does Goya’s famous ‘The Third of
May 1808’. While shamelessly derivative of the Goya painting,
and playful in a perhaps rather gruesome way, the piece vividly
makes the point about defining what you can “get away with”
as the yardstick of some contemporary artistic thinking.
Arguably
the most striking piece in the exhibition – albeit maybe
for the wrong reasons – is Vincent Fantauzzo’s ‘Heath’,
a portrait of Heath Ledger. The piece shows the actor staring
at the viewer, while two incarnations of himself whisper into
his ears. The picture could easily be interpreted as showing the
torment of the subject; something made all the more (morbidly)
attractive by his untimely death. As it is, the picture is a stunning
piece in its own right; and remains a favourite for the as-yet-unannounced
People’s Choice award (the winner will be revealed on 8
May).
As for the awards already announced, the big winner
defied the trend to the traditional. Del Kathryn Barton’s
‘You are what is most beautiful about me, a self portrait
with Kell and Arella’ took out the judges’ choice
for the Archibald Prize. The highly stylised self-portrait shows
the artist with her two young children. The facial expressions,
elaborate clothing, flattened perspective and stylistic background
appear to owe a debt to the artists of the Vienna Secession, notably
Klimt and Schiele. Amongst so many “very big heads”,
it’s easy to see why the judges were drawn to this joyous
and inventive portrait.
The Packing Room Prize, as voted by the workers
who unpack and re-pack the works, went to Martin Ball’s
portrait of Neil Finn. The realistic and pensive rendering of
the musician seems to fit fairly nicely into the history of that
particular prize; and few would begrudge the workers their choice.
If you can't make it to the AGNSW for the exhibition,
all the finalists - including those in the Sulman and Wynne Prizes
- are available online at the official
Archibald Prize website.
David Edwards
