robert macpherson, ania walwicz
This unlikely coupling of Robert MacPherson and Ania Walwicz took its cue from MacPherson who has known Walwicz’s work since the early 1980s when both artists exhibited with Art Projects, Melbourne. Since then, Walwicz has maintained a practice in both visual art and literature; her written work has been variously described as expressionist, stream-of-consciousness, and appropriative. In the same period MacPherson has retained a strong conceptual foundation for his work both in and out of painting and much of this, unlike the process-based paintings from the seventies, makes explicit reference to language. Curator Ewen McDonald has worked previously with both artists, producing a CD for Walwicz and writing frequently on MacPherson in addition to including him in several exhibitions, among them the 1998 Adelaide Biennial. While ‘act’ was prompted by MacPherson’s enthusiasm—in Walwicz’s practice he recognised a kindred enterprise—it was McDonald who conceived the show.
The exhibition opened with one of MacPherson’s suites of Robert Pene drawings, here a four-part full-length portrait of the eponymous fourth-grade pupil of St. Joseph’s Convent, Nambour, his feet floating above the ground. This work slyly encapsulated many of the show’s concerns—the production of self, autobiographical invention and bodily inscription, the procedural nature of both Walwicz’s and MacPherson’s production, the authenticity of gesture and line—but much of this was contained by the overall cuteness of the Robert Pene conceit and to that extent, at this point in the show it was almost invisible. Only in conjunction with Walwicz’s drawings and selections of other work by MacPherson—a 1976–77 process piece called Lip Ritual and a contemporaneous three-part Scale from The Tool—did it become apparent.
The disarming quality of the Pene work, its overload of narrative