The Parents
George Gittoes
To judge by two very different Perth Festival exhibitions old time realism is back in style with a vengeance. George Gittoes war zone note books and crusty, comic-book coloured paintings shown at Greenhill Galleries, and Colin Gray's finely wrought cibachrome photograph and collage images of his parents in their natural environment in Hull, Yorkshire, UK, which were exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, both appeal to a growing need for an art that appears to deal directly with the real.
In both cases, however, the reality involved is far from the everyday or the incidental. It is both invented and maintained by its human subjects. Gittoes' souvenirs of Ruanda and other foreign massacres are, self-avowedly, exercises in making real the ghastly events he has witnessed both for himself and his audience. Gray's far more subtle work attempts to engage the no-man's land of memory between his parents and himself, mapped out over the physical territories of their home and the bleak streets of their working class outer suburb.
Since both artists ask the viewer to engage the world through social circumstances they are, by definition, old fashioned social realists. The shock value of war scenes and 'working class ' environments was always central to that almost totally discredited artistic position. Both are a long way from the experience of the average young middle class gallery goer who is, consequently, prone to mistake the merely alien or the 'authentic' real.
Gray emphasises the relationship between his parents and the things around them so that their presence and actions fill each image. In an early work, The Sitters, 1983, the mother stands to the right holding a bulky old