Julie Fragar
The Departed 2006 was Martin Scorsese’s return to the theme of masculinity as learnt on the streets. The film was full of little rhetorical interplays that revolved around the male’s relationship to his father, partner, work, death, and the lies that keep everything working together. The plot was tight (it was adapted from the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs 2002) and allowed Scorsese to work with themes to which he has consistently returned. In a review of The Departed an online critic stated that ‘what lingers long after sitting through it is that, in terms of a point-of-view, Scorsese’s fingerprints are nowhere near this film’.1 It is an odd thing to say given that it was an obvious return to his blurring of the good guy/bad guy characters pursued in Taxi Driver 1976, King of Comedy 1983, Goodfellas 1990 and numerous other films. Yet something about that quote rings true. Scorsese’s old themes are presen but The Departed is also a pretty conventional action-cop-suspense film without a dominant sense of the author or auteur. Julie Fragar’s art practice operates in a similar way—a pretty odd conclusion to make, I know, given that she appears in a lot of her own work. In her latest show at the Griffith University College Gallery she was depicted riding a motorcycle in six large oil paintings as well as in ink paintings of family snapshots. But within her practice something is happening that makes me wonder where she is exactly in her work and why she does not give greater prominence to herself beyond an idiosyncratic formal presence?
The title of the exhibition was ‘DADISLIKEITTOO’ but, whilst there were two or three references