In the Shadow of Forgetting
Viewing the exhibition ‘Mix Tape 1980s: Appropriation, Subculture, Critical Style’ at the National Gallery of Victoria (April – September 2013) brought it all home—big hair, druggie chic, power shoulders and appropriation, appropriation, appropriation. But there was more, that sudden realisation that the ’80s was really over. Goodbye to originality and marginality. Let’s worry about globalisation for a change. With this sense of release from caring about the significance of this era came the idea that it was now time to revisit it in the spirit of a fossicker working the tailings. A recent engagement with Aldo Iacobelli’s art, courtesy of his exhibition In the Shadow of Forgetting, provided the compass coordinates.
Iacobelli burst onto the scene in Adelaide in the 1980s with very large drawings which essayed ideas about the blight of industrialised society, patriarchy’s darker side and the corrosive behaviour of unquestioned political and religious systems. The artist inflated emblems of power and religious ritual, such as cannons, classical columns and chalices, to bloated states which stripped them of dignity and mystique. The satirical rhetoric which characterised Iacobelli’s work at this time found echoes in the work of a diverse number of Mix Tape works. This same exhibition revealed another strand, a desire for narrative involving species of creatures which prowled the shadow lands between the human and animal world. Consider in this mix Peter Booth’s neo-expressionist drawings of the mid-1980s, Roar Studio’s menageries of hybrid creatures, Howard Arkley’s Tattooed Head (1988), and edgy portrait drawings by Scott Redford (1982–85). Edginess and Iacobelli’s art are synonymous, as indeed is narrative. This combination is most clearly evident in his Wallpaper series, of around 2000, in which the selvedge carried texts