Draguerrotypes, the most recent body of work by Gary Carsley, synthesises the artist’s interest in and celebration of inauthenticity and unoriginality with brilliant clarity. This series of large digital prints, their surfaces as smooth as Laminex, extend Carsley’s ongoing investigations of parks, gardens and vernacular architecture as sites of invention and interaction, where bodies and cultures come together in a form of rhetorical—and often erotic—performance. Rather than style over substance, Carsley’s work argues convincingly for style as substance, an acknowledgement of imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, so sincere in fact as to offer a logical way out of Australia’s postcolonial endgame, and its cultural position as a global footnote. The land of drag queens and cover bands, the birthplace of influential shape-shifters Dame Edna and Leigh Bowery, Australia, Carsley contends, should no longer be described as the site of Paul Taylor’s (after Barthes’) notion of the ‘second degree’, but is instead a first-rate originator of mimics and lip-synchers, who are then aped worldwide.1
Carsley’s interest in drag, masquerade, copies and fakes is fuelled by his own experience, shuttling between what he refers to as ‘Holland and New Holland’, the original and its imperfect facsimile. And like so many Australian artists, Carsley’s suburban upbringing provides a base element for his work; not only in its content, such as the recurrent motifs of breeze-blocks and chintzy domestic interiors, but also in its notion of escape, of searching for ‘something more’.2 Australia’s suburbs, so far from the old-world density of European cities such as Amsterdam (where the artist has maintained a home for many years), may be derided in some quarters but are highly desirable to those who... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline