From humpty doo to angatja: The snakes and ladders series
In what has by now become a landmark essay, Yve-Aiain Bois enjoined us to understand that whilst the end of painting is built into the modernist project as an operative premise, painting is not thereby rendered pathological. Bois wrote that piece ten years ago, in response to a turn, on the part of a group of American painters (Taaffe, Halley and Blackener amongst them), towards analysis of the Baudrillardian simulacra, producing a form of appropriation art which was likened not merely to the mourning over a corpse but to an "orgy of cannibalism". Bois' voice emerges from the gloom in prophetic tones to say: "[Painting's] vitality will only be tested once we are cured of our mania and melancholy, and we believe again in our ability to act in history: accepting our project of working through the end again, rather than evading it through increasingly elaborate mechanisms of defense...".[1]
I invoke these thoughts as introduction to the latest series of paintings by Peter Adsett partly because he works in Darwin—a place which, for many, seems unlikely to harbor a painter engaged in the universal task posited by Bois—and partly because Adsett has managed to evade the "mechanisms of defense" and cynicism in general, no doubt as a result of living well outside centres, both geographical and institutional. What, perhaps, is most intriguing about Adsett is that his awareness of the present, historically determined condition of painting by no means undermines his faith in the act of painting. Nor does this signal a simple, uncritical return to a former position within modernism. Borrowing Hubert Damisch's analogy, Bois highlighted three "matches" in the "game" of twentieth century painting, characterised by negation