The Scene
In Robert MacPherson’s Where are you now Sylvia Holmes? (1982-83) a typewritten text accompanies two found paintings. The text is a thinly disguised (but immensely entertaining) rave against the politics and hypocrisy of the art scene. Here is an excerpt: ‘Did you start to notice the popular images around you had more power than most of the paintings you saw…’.1.
Geoff Newton’s recent exhibition alludes both to urban landscape paintings and to the machinations of the ‘art scene’, with each painting based on the view from the entry to an Australian state gallery. Gertrude Contemporary is a fitting venue for this project; it was here that Melbourne artist Dan Moynihan recently recreated the interior and façade of Newton’s gallery Neon Parc.
What are we to make of these views from the steps of our major art institutions? On one hand, a project of this kind is more likely to be framed in low-key materials associated with conceptual contexts (think Robert Rooney’s and Ed Ruscha’s works in snapshot form). Instead, Newton reclaims brightly coloured figurative painting, so that the works waver between the traditions of conceptual art and grand history painting. That the artist is situated on the verge of each building indicates the influence of the German Romantic tradition, particularly Caspar David Friedrich. Both artists employ the device of the threshold to express broader existential concerns. These paintings proclaim a renewed social purpose for history painting too. In an era where the stockpiles of history are relegated to the haphazard archives of social media, Newton, through the painterly reproduction of spontaneous snapshots from a phone, historicises our flimsy attempts at recording personal experiences.
The exhibition provides a chronicle of