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The pigment is already in place when Jewel Mackenzie starts a painting. She uses textiles that have the pinstripe pattern dyed and woven in, just as wood has a grain running through it that contains its history and identity. Her work explores and expresses the variety of meanings and connotations offered by pinstriped fabric, principally its association with business suits, but also its resemblance to the early paintings of the American abstract artist Frank Stella. Strangely, the two turn out to be not unrelated.
Mackenzie is one of several Australian artists (the others include Debra Dawes, Richard Dunn and Kathy Temin) who have underlined the resemblance between textile designs and hard-edged abstraction, particularly stripes and plaids. Each has his or her own reasons for doing this, but a certain degree of irony seems inevitable in the notion of minimalism by the metre. One aspect of minimalist art that is brought under scrutiny by these artists is the principle of its sublime aloofness from content. When Frank Stella’s starkly elegant stripe paintings were first brought to wide exposure by a 1959 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Carl Andre commented in the exhibition catalogue that ‘Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic’. His stripes may have been intended not to represent anything except themselves, but like international-style glass-box architecture, they now seem to be plugged into the same geometric power grid that fuelled a phase of Western visual culture in which the ‘silly’ ‘sentimental’ tastes of the ignorant masses were to be purged by a new utopian rationalism. Adding the word ‘economic’ before the word ‘rationalism’ gives this phenomenon particular resonance in our own times.
Mackenzie is greatly... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline