MORE ART CRITICISM : ON CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE'S KIND OF BLUE

CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE, Kind of Blue
Gallery 101 [Ground level, 101 Collins Street, Melbourne];
November 4-28th, 2009

At Christopher Heathcote's opening the other night at 101, red in hand & generously at hand, the trio smoothly dipping in & out of Coward, Brubeck, Monk, Miles et al, not yet 'playing the paintings' as I fancied could be done when we first noticed the adjacency of jazz band to paintings --Mondrian/Malevich topographies but just as likely musical staves--, I deliberated with Stephen McLaughlin on how many local art-writers also painted & actually exhibited? Jeffrey Makin; Robert Rooney for a long time; Bernard Smith? --but not too many more (that's a statement not a plea). We did see an exhibition by Bernard Smith? I say to Retta, doubting myself --she nods in the affirmative, yet for some reason Tucker's in my mind now --portraits after photographs? --or Smith's portrait of Tucker, or vice versa? --golden opportunity with McLaughlin & Heathcote both in the room to corroborate, but we're having a conversation, folks, not writing a thesis!
I remember Christopher telling me the show had been hung according to palate, and perhaps the groupings & progressions did peg back the large white, albeit divided, space to a series of harmonic clusters, which is what the paintings are. A moot point, I suppose, whether there's greater or lesser aesthetic coherence in studio or gallery (or do I mean 'explication', implying that the environment for the art's literal making is the fuller context)? Telling, though, that Christopher's invitation is a photograph of his studio in the Nicholas Building, and one can imagine that the pipes & windows opposite his studio, through his similarly partitioned window, is the model for the canvas on the floor leaning against the sill. There too are his brushes, a painting on an easel, objet d'art, two small framed portraits, &, instructively, piles of books propped against which is a Readers Feast shopping bag bulging, probably, with recently acquired booty!
He's a scholar-writer, a reader-painter. Expect correspondences, then, between the monographs he's written --in recent years there's Roger Kemp & Yvonne Audette --& his own painting? Well, the references exist, but no should or shouldnt about it. To converse people employ the same language, simple as that?
Exhibition launching, as with book launch & reading, is sometimes like the mega-, meta- artefact often promised. For me, Christopher Heathcote's 'artist reception' was the expanded painting --jazz trio fulfilling the paintings' jazz titles (Around Midnight, Twentieth Century Blues, Kind of Blue), encouraging one to see the paintings' grids as fretted with the whimsical points & angles which have denoted City & its Sounds since ever art made virtue of the naturally traducing popular culture!
I recall looking back down the room, to the right of the gallery entrance, at a particular work which then opened up to me as red base (the painter getting down his initial energy & excitement), overlay of grey squares (reflections : thinking aloud the problem of what to say), gathering details (or story subsumed to & expressed as pattern). Generalizing, I could say Heathcote's paintings elicit ideas from emotions, ultimately presenting or, dare one say, expressing a state of mind, a mood, a kind of blue! According to the notes, the paintings have accrued over a long period of time spent in the inner city, and maybe that explains their combination of movement & tranquility --both states rely on repeated signs & lines for their effect.
Writing these words, Ben Shahn is suddenly in my head, --exemplary of a calligraphy that's also choreography. Shahn & Saul Steinberg both? 50s, early 60s motifs, decor, design... And confirmed easily as I turn up the copy of Perspectives (Autumn, 1952) which my late uncle Dennis gave me, my last family summer holiday before I came away to Australia, first as a one-voyage mariner then an assisted passage migrant,1965 & '66 --a magazine which introduced me to Shahn's pictures &, as it happens, W C Williams' poems & prose, & much else besides, Rexroth, Barzun, Jarrell, Dahlberg --resonating forever after!
There it is : Shahn's Composition for Clarinets and Tin Horn (1951), in which a figure of anguish, face hidden in bent fingers & forearms, & mocked by the clown face on the horn, might even be missed in the strong line of instruments, which almost indicate a kind of grid. And grid it is that's foremost in Paterson (1950) & World's Greatest Comics... Selman Rodman commented, "Shahn has not been unaffected by the drift toward nonrepresentational abstraction in the past decade. The emphasis on background pattern in such transitional pictures as World's Greatest Comics (1947) and Convention (1948) has assumed a dominant foreground position in the more recent May 5 and Paterson. The latter picture was inspired by a passage celebrating 'invention' in William Carlos Williams' strictly 'nonrepresentational' poem with the same title and has been criticized by some of Shahn's admirers as 'arid,' 'empty,' and 'too abstract.'"
I'm not sure if the discussion around abstraction & realism that Rodman reports of 1952 is or isnt passe in 2009. Certainly no reference to Ben Shahn in Heathcote's exhibition note, though Leger's La Ville, Wyndham Lewis's The Crowd, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie, & architects Van der Rohe & Gio Ponti are all acclaimed. And the jazz goes without saying.
In the exhibition note, Christopher Heathcote doesnt talk about abstraction or at all abstractly --quite the opposite. And he could easily share Shahn's axiom that form is only ever an expression of content...
Resoundingly then, a cool event, a cool show; two weeks left to dig it some more!

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--Kris Hemensley,
November 6th-15th, 2009--

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 20

LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR LITERARY CREATURES
[Literary Creatures : Drawings, Poetry, Group Terms : A book of animals in alphabet; edited & drawn by Raffaella Torresan; published August, 2009, by Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Vic. 3204]
+ Raffaella Torresan's exhibition, Book Animals (8-19 August,'09)]
Saturday 8th August,'09 at the Victorian Artists Society, 430 Albert Street, East Melbourne.

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[Not all of the following notes were used in the speech, nor do some of the spoken comments appear in these notes, as is the way of speeches!]


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Congratulations to Hybrid Publishers on the publication...
And congratulations to Raffaella on bringing her idea for the book through to this gorgeous fruition!

I was explaining to a colleague recently my continuing reticence to publish in what can be called authorised anthologies, but had to say I did have a couple of poems in an animal anthology... The 'Contemporary Australian Poetry' perspective gives me problems but 'Animal Poetry' evidently doesnt! There are reasons for this, which I'll touch upon in a moment...

All of us grew up with 'literary creatures' in the poems we encountered at primary & secondary school... For me it was the likes of Shelley's Skylark --"Hail to thee, blithe spirit! / Bird thou never wert...".
And D H Lawrence's Snake, which I'll always remember for giving me the word 'expiate'; that final stanza --"And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of Life. / And I have something to expiate : / A pettiness."
And, of course, G M Hopkins' The Windhover --"I caught this morning morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." --Hopkins whom I didnt understand at the tender age but in my young 30s finally got!

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The poets in Raff's book are mostly not the Australian canon --apart, say, from Bruce Dawe & Les Murray... And there's Bernard Smith from the highest echelon of Australian art --his Place, Taste & Tradition written when he was 21 or 22 years old, published 65 or so years ago? --as legendary, I suppose, as Phar Lap, the subject of his own poem in the book... But no Judith Wright & co., or what the wider Aussie net could catch.
Literary Creatures is Raffaella's own anthology, a personal anthology of predominately Melbourne & Victorian poets, invited by Raff... As Alan Wearne says in his introduction, "What really grabs me about this book is the wonderful off-the-wall combination of contributors she has been able to assemble; from Les Murray to the late Geoffrey Eggleston via Robyn Rowland and Lynn Hard is quite an accomplishment."
Alan distinguishes between 'big survey' or 'state of the art' anthologies & such a collection as Raff's, the genre collection...
Well, it's the season of the big numbers --the Nicholas Jose Macquarrie, the John Kinsella Penguin, Jamie Grant's 100 Australian Poems, Geoff Page's 60 Classics, but the genre anthology is something else...
I've been thinking about this recently, in another context, & came up with the notion of the affection for the subject propelling the work (the poem, the painting) into whatever expression... As Alan says of the genre collection, "that's when we really get to discover plenty [of works] that are refreshingly different, be they naive or sophisticated... a lot like discovering a new species"...
Readers are in for a treat...

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At the risk of offending by omission I'd like to mention some of the poetry to delight me...
No better place than here to quote from Jen Jewel Brown's Nest of Vipers, beginning "Like a hiss of poets snaky at being overlooked / their unpaid brilliance rears / Glittering scales of justice rattling inflate / bare fangs spit venom angst ennui" etc
Becca Kellaway's Ode to a Wombat had me in fits, especially "O! for a cool slab of VB, that hath soaketh / In an esky, chilled by its icy embrace / tasting of angels' piss; but it so inebriateth / Mine mind, that I no longer see her face. / Instead tis thee, Wombat...."
A different kind of poignancy with Kerry Scuffins' Totem Horse, especially the last line, "Let her run, let her think she's free." --which raises enormous & philosophical issues, & the relation of reality & conceit in which we humans hold all animals...
Bruce Dawe's "This dog and this cat / weave their lives / within our own..." ; "we have by now been thoroughly integrated / into their mutual strangeness / (as they into ours)" might extend Kerry's thought...
I liked two kinds of beautiful poem --Eric Beach's wonderful vernacular ear, rhythmic & tonally perfect --"they would've laughed marco polo out of town / if he'd tried to describe a flock of emus / as busy as a fat lady's bum in a tight pair of slacks / in an egg & spoon race..." ; "larrikin bird, disdaining fines, eating fences / strange to see you smoke through an exercise yard / wheeling in humped, broken ranks, one eye cocked / to a sun drilled like a rifle bore..." --And Lorin Ford's courtly, romantic pantoum, Like Bees in the Lamplight, "Too beautiful to put away in the wardrobe, / the Chinese silk dress on the wooden hanger / caresses the mind as water soothes the skin. / Gold butterflies swarm like bees in the lamplight." etc
Many, many others... Robyn Rowland's cuttlefish & sea-horses, Les Murray's Two Dogs, Jenny Harrison's Showering Together, Aileen Kelly's Domestic Geese, Jenny Compton's hens, Phil Motherwell's Cuckoo-bugger sitting in his gum tree, Alex Skovron's possums, Patrick McCauley's platypus, Jordie Albiston's Whale Song...
Some of which we'll hear very soon from the poets themselves, though most are for the readers of the book to discover...

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So, let me repeat my congratulations to Hybrid Press, to Raphaella, & to all the poets for a lovely book --which I hereby declare launched!

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[Bernard Smith spoke about poetry & painting, & read from memory some of his poem, followed by Jordie Albiston, Kevin Brophy, Barry Dickins, Jennifer Harrison, Marietta Elliott-Kleerkoper, Ian McBryde, Patrick McCauley, Grant Caldwell & Kerry Scuffins. Raffaella Torresan's thank yous closed the formalities.]

[Extras :
*One Summer holiday, when I was about 10 years old, my father & brother Bernard & I, visited Sandown Zoo on the Isle of Wight (then part of Hampshire, in the UK). Mum must have been with the babies. Dad was a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories, which enthusiasm Bernard & I inherited. I had learnt the word 'kadoga', which was how the great apes demanded surrender when they fought their enemies. As we walked around the zoo we passed a pen of llamas. I cant remember whether we were talking about Tarzan, but I looked over the fence and caught the eye of one of the llamas. "Kadoga!" I said threateningly. The response was swift & violent. The llama spat at me full in the face. My hair was matted in llama vomit! My father & brother fell about laughing. We returned to the chalet for me to wash & change my clothes! What is the moral of this story and how does it relate to the relationship of poets & animals?

*The Victorian Artists Society is situated in Albert Street not far from where the offices of the AEU (the Amalgamated Engineering Union) used to be on a terrace in Victoria Parade. I would visit the gallery in 1967 in the company of Loretta Garvey & sometimes Peg Cregan, who worked in the office at the AEU and needed such a place as the VAS to repair their spirits at lunch-time! A particular painter impressed me greatly with his water-colours --wet looking earthy landscapes. McAlpine?

* With Raff's anthology in mind I looked at the beautiful edition of Judith Wright's collection of poems, Birds, republished by the National Library of Australia, illustrated by historic paintings from their own natural history collection. Judith Wright & her lorrikeets... "On the bough of blue summer / hangs one crimson berry. / Like the blood of a lover / is the breast of a lory." Once upon a time when I was a poet, I read on a bill with Chris Wallace-Crabbe & Judith Wright at the May Daze poetry festival at the University of Melbourne, 1974. Her poetry-speaking voice that day reminded me of a crow. She wore a hearing-aid of course but I didnt immediately think of deafness, rather, my English ear registered Judith's caw-caw as essentially Australian --as (Anglo) Australian as the long, long faces of the figures in Drysdale's paintings. "But 'The heart's red is my reward,' / the old crow cries / 'I'll wear his colour on my black / the day the lory dies.'"

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-Kris Hemensley,
August 7/8th, 2009-