Towards A Unified Theory of Everything

We had this thought that something was happening in contemporary art. Describing it has the same qualities as chasing a mirage - the closer you get, it starts to evaporate - yet we kept seeing it in galleries at home and overseas and wanted to describe it. This thing that is happening, we're pretty sure [and at the risk of appearing as completely unreconstructed Modernists] is in an unexpected area. But before we can explain it, we need to take a quick detour back over the last few decades.

The arc of contemporary art since the 1970s saw an increasing engagement by artists in framing their practice as a 'project'.   The 1980s Australian generation of 'conceptual painters' for example - artists such as John Young, Lindy Lee and A.D.S. Donaldson - sought a critical context for image making within the history of painting and contemporary art theory. An artist's practice was not so much about the work itself - the aesthetic nature of the object - but the way in which the object negotiated its phenomenological complexity within, and outside of, the context of art. Of course, painting was not the only form in the 1980s to be lassoed into "the project of post modernism" - photography, film and video were all part of the artist's arsenal for interrogating the nature of the image - but the decade was significant for the rehabilitation of the form as a critical practice.

Where contemporary art in the 1970s was largely a conceptually based, non object oriented avant garde concerned with process, the move towards objects was significant. The art of the 1980s was ironically smooth, frictionless, cool, art historical, referential and international in aspiration. It is easy to forget what a huge change that this approach brought but it's just as easy to forget how it too became passé. The arrival of Grunge in the early 90s articulated a tendency among artists such as Adam Cullen, Hany Armanious and Mikala Dwyer towards a combination of Neo Expressionism and Art Povera that was strategically transgressive, rough, defiantly parochial and oxymoronically subjective.   Grunge was a paradigm shift away from the aesthetic approaches of the artists of the 1980s, if not a philosophical one.   It was also essentially a sculptural practice that eschewed what had become - courtesy of the 1980s painters - an art scene dominated by superficially beautiful objects.

These two strands of contemporary art practice - the smooth and sleek descendents of Post Modernist art making and the rough and ready Grunge mess makers - are the still the most pervasive in the Sydney art scene. You can find in artist run galleries many examples of a highly conceptualised form of art making sitting alongside willfully subjective, faux expressionism. In September 2005 for example, First Draft had several shows running concurrently including Dinner with Hopp by Matthew Hopkins , Tough Nuggets by Vicki Papageorgeopoulos and Ella Barclay and the group show MFD with Adam Norton , Kyle Jenkins , Ron Adams , Manya Ginori , Anna Peters and Reuben Keehan . Hopp's work utilised chewing gum arranged on paper plates.   Papageorgeopoulos and Barclay's extensive installation incorporated gold leaf covered objects reminiscent of giant elongated turds, toilet paper, crude cutouts, a video projector and bathroom vanity units. In complete contrast, MFD was a show of highly aesthetic and minimal pieces ranging from Anna Peter's take on David Shrigley style cartoons and Kyle Jenkins ' sliced canvas to Reuben Keehan's white canvas called Bibliography of a Painting (It's Your Move Comrades!). On the one hand, you had an anarchistic anti-aesthetic of digestion and mastication, on the other the cooler climes of an ironically self aware pop avant garde mining the history of art.   These contrasting shows are just one example of what is a very common experience for gallery visitors to Sydney's artist run spaces.   There have been many other similarly contrasting shows in the past year - Halinka Orszulok's show of photorealistic oil paintings called Unhomely next to Cash Brown and Adam Cullen's found object water fall sculpture called Special Affects at MOP Projects, or Nigel Milsom's muscular, expressionist paintings exhibition Vaseline/Gasoline next to Ken Yonetani 's Underwater , an exhibition of pristine and painstakingly constructed sculptures made of sugar at Phatspace.

Over the past two years, as the Art Life team has made their way around Sydney's galleries, we have begun to notice a significant shift. The causes of this shift are hard to pin down. It may be as simple as the ripple effect of a different generation of artists making their presence felt in exhibitions or perhaps we are detecting the influence of particular art schools on recent graduates, but much to our amazement, there is a definable 'something' happening in art making. Given the lock hold of the two approaches we outlined above, it shouldn't exist, and yet it does and it has come in a most surprising area - painting. There are two identifiable styles. For the sake of expediency, let's call one style New Irrealism and the other Ironic Expressionism.

The New Irrealism is based in a loose, pictorial figurative painting style that often utilises loose drawing, simple colours, naïve elements, appropriated images and often features scenes of nature coupled with symbolic elements. A recent show that featured the work of Marisa Purcell called Slowly, Slowly at Kudos Gallery was a perfect example. Purcell's paintings mixed gestural washes of colour - purples, greens and greys - with simple elements inked over the top, dots and lines that formed the shapes of trees and branches, bells and fleeting images of furtive nature. Next to recent shows by Nell [at Oxley], Sally Ross and Sérpahine Pick [both at Kaliman] Michelle Hanlin   [in Rectangular Ghost at Oxley] not to mention the line up of paintings selected by Mike Parr for the 2005 Sulman Prize - this approach to painting is a significant development.   The paintings made by these artists draw on a colloquial style of image making that appears in many respects to be naïve but are nevertheless highly sophisticated and calculating. Hanlin's work in Rectangular Ghost, for example, were a series of contemporary heraldic crests - little birds, elephants, native animals - painted in soft yellows and oranges. Irrealism   also seems to be an international style and could connect wildly disparate artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Lisa Yusksavage, Neo Rausch and Manfredi Beninati, but we're inclined to think that it has roots in Australia as well, drawing a loose stylistic affiliation from work of Noel McKenna and Jenny Watson. Interestingly, the practitioners of this style of painting in Sydney tend to be women.

Ironic Expressionism is the name we've given to another stylistic surge in recent painting but where the New Irrealism tends to be made by women, the ironic expressionists are all men. These artists appear to be acutely aware of the masculine imperative of both American and European neo expressionism and recall painters such as Frank Auerbach, Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer . Where the painters of the New Irrealism have a distinctly non confrontational, low key approach to making images, these young Sydney painters conjour with the ghosts of capital P painting. Recent exhibitions by Nigel Milsom such as the group show Stars of Track And Field in 05/06 and solo outings such as Vaseline/Gasoline chart an acutely self aware artist whose subject is that self awareness. Where Milsom's work is a shifting set of approaches that ranges from scribbly drawing to pattern painting to faux Grunge realism, painters such as Ben Quilty and Craig Waddell use large amounts of paint to invoke in equal parts the Wedderburn painters and the European expressionists with a subject matter that is far more urban - trucks, cars, skulls, tractors and the bucolic landscapes of Sydney's outer suburbs. We'd also include the painter Todd Hunter in the Ironic Expressionists, an artist who summons up the ghost of another equally unfashionable painter, Francis Bacon. It might be a little difficult to detect high grade irony within Hunter's paintings, but considered alongside the likes of Quilty, Waddell and Milsom, there's an undeniable continuity.

Some might argue that what we've described here is just the most recent manifestation of the endless tussle between abstraction and figuration, or an artist's conceptualised practice versus the expressionist impulse. Perhaps these are partly those things, but both approaches that we've described here are acutely self aware. We should also acknowledge that even the most expressionist approach to painting is the result of a reasoned position in the first place, but given the setting for these the appearance of these two styles, and the pervasive nature of the sorts of art being shown in galleries, the simple difference of New Irrealism and Ironic Expressionism is enough to mark a shift in contemporary art.

The Art Life
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