Picturing our children and art...

School children sitting outside Parliament. 24 August 2016. Photo: Julie Clarke (c)

I began the week attempting to work through several issues, the first being the fact that I was surprised female commentators were shocked about a website in which young men hold a cache of naked or partially naked photographs of young women swapped or traded between members of their web community who also own and distrbute surreptitious photographs or ones taken by the girls themselves and posted on social media sites. Apparently, in this flesh market, young women can be easily identified by their name or school they attend and they are served up to the male viewer as a catalogue of bodily positions appealing to their sexual fantasies. Given that male and female teenagers are sending each other dick or vag pics via text messages and by nature of digital imagery the photographs can easily distributed to other friends not in the boys or girls original circle, the occurrence of such a phenomenon as outlined above does not surprise me at all, for erotic postcards and the distribution of such has been around for centuries. What does surprise me is why young men and women feel they need to show their genitalia in a glut of already pornographic images on the internet. I am aware and many young women are aware, that women, particularly pop culture singers rely heavily on the sexualisation of their body in order to gain attention in their video clips and, facial and bodily beauty is prime currency in this era in which the body IS everything. Is trading photographs of their genitalia a way of separating one site of their sexuality away from their real body; objectification a way for them to hide their self and identity, whilst simultaneously associating themself with the raw base of what they are trading? Could this trade be an assertion of an uncomfortable knowledge known by teenagers that ultimately each of them are only interested in sex and that many relationships no matter how wholesome end in the sexual act. Alternatively, could the revealing of genitalia, divorced from the individual be an aggressive act to dissasociate self from gender? Perhaps the girls are saying that they know what the boys want and they will give it to them virtually, but there is no way that they will get it in actuality.

My second preoccupation over the past week is my inability to like the art I've been viewing. I didn't really enjoy the Painting exhibition at ACCA last week, however, having said that I did enjoy some of Roberty Owen's digital color paintings I viewed with Leonie Osowski today and I did enjoy Jessica Rankin's poetic piece Could I Just Have the Sober Hand, just one of her works currently showing at Anna Schwartz Gallery. Leonie and I did a gallery hop down Flinders Lane and we had to admit there was little to like or challenge us although Leonie liked some of the sculptural pieces at ARC Gallery. Lisa Minogue's The Coloured Girls at fortyfive downstairs was too literal and the devise of covering black skinned women with colored face masks was trite to say the least. Lunch in the sun at Signature at the Paris end of Collins Street was good, as was coffee at Federation Square late in the afternoon even though the day had turned cold again. I thought of Mark McDean several times during the day. He was a friend (now deceased) that would regularly accompany me on a gallery hop around the city. In the end the most praise Leonie and I had during the day was the tesselated tiles on the floors of St. Paul's and the stunningly beautiful stain glass windows.

RIP MARK MCDEAN + TROUBLE SET ME FREE 2010

Here is he review of Mark's exhibition Trouble Set Me Free that I wrote in 2010. Images from the exhibition may be found at this link

MARK MCDEAN: TROUBLE SET ME FREE

Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Southbank

Julie Clarke © 2010

I'm looking at Mark McDean's artworks in an exhibition entitled Trouble Set Me Free (Curated by Catherine Bell) at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery at Southbank this afternoon. Mark is beside me and I'm aware with every comment that I make, that it is HIS experience and pain contained in the works I view. Each a remnant of his past trauma, each holds a special place in his memory.

The skull guard that he wore for protection after craneo-surgery, the pillow-slip bloodstained from a small puncture drain hole at the base of his head, a crocheted shawl in muted colors given to him by friends and the Walter van Bierendonck T/Shirt that he wore that night, two and a half years ago when he fell into an unmarked ditch in the road.

The terror, the blood clots, the operations and Mark had to learn to walk and talk again. The T/Shirt cut from his body in the emergency room is sutured together like the chest cavity of an autopsied corpse ~ the stainless steel staples form a scar on this disembodied skin that hangs in the gallery space like a body spent. They are emblematic of the staples that held his fractured skull together whilst it healed. Part of the 'Gold Team' bold type imprinted on the lower edge of the shirt depicting footballers, disappears in the folds and so the text presents as 'Old Tear' ~ a reminder of past anguish. The eyes fill and it's a strange absence, one we also witness in the oval void in the middle of the shawl carefully folded, in half and in half again to form an uneven square ~ evoking the four facilities of the mind ~ the Will, the Mask, the Creative Mind and the Body of Fate. They're all depicted here in one way or another either through the artifacts or, the conspicuous shadows on the wall. But there's protection too, in the solace that things from childhood bring. The whirly windmill, a bright and cheery hospital gift, is transformed into a six-petal contraption covered in another skin ~ a silvery coat~ a prima material of clarity and rebirth that resonates strongly with the tiny kitsch buttons and gaudy icons stuck to the helmet scaffolding. We all loved those things when we were kids, they made things 'all pretty' again. The homely comfort of the shawl crafted in soft baby hues, its yellow layer referencing the sour lemon yellow of the plinth, speaks to the first color that Mark remembered when he woke from his coma. There's a raw, honesty and integrity in the materials Mark has used in this exhibition. The pillow case, with an almost perfect circular dried blood stain shrieks of rationality against the erratic marks made in an attempt to trace the scars on Mark's damaged head - here, they are sewn and inscribed on the almost white surface of the pillow case. I immediately thought of CyTombly ~ his erratic scribbles, his ambiguous mark making and this took me back to being at RMIT two decades ago, where we were told never to use large blocks of the color yellow in our paintings because it was associated with madness, sickness or fear. And yet, how can this be so, think of Van Gogh's yellow wildflowers or the speckled dots in his Starry Night. I left this exhibition feeling like I'd witnessed something precious and fragile ~ the exhibition, which also contains the works of five other artists is on until 3 July, 2010.

RIP MARK MCDEAN

I am absolutely utterly distressed, I just found out that my friend Mark McDean died in his sleep yesterday in Brisbane. I was his Associate Supervisorr for his PhD at Victoria University in 2011 and I worked on a collaborative art project with him called Collisions in 2011. I feel so sad, I haven't seen him since 2012 when we attended the Art Fair in Melbourne together. He was a friend and a face book friend and he had planned to visit me in Melbourne this March. He will be sadly missed. He was a talented artist. I'm sadened very much by the fact that one of his last Face Book posts was that he needed a job because he was feeling lonely in his studio. My condolences to his family and his other friends. I'm still in disbelief.

Stephen Gallagher wrote this on Face Book and I'm sure that he will not mind if I put this here. I quote: 

Mark was active in the Australian art scene, as artist, writer, curator, gallery director. He gave support to many established and emerging artists through his involved in the Midsuma cultural program, leadership on gallery boards and recently his involvement in the Curve Gallery in Newcastle. Always a pleasure to work with and with subtlety Mark was able to combine textiles and fine art with finesse. Mark’s presence would fill a room and transformed many a dinner party into a hoot.

Mark graduated from RMIT with a MA Fine Art by Research in 2000, and spent the more ten years working across a number of institutions including Monash University, RMIT University [Fashion] and [Art] and Victoria University. Mark has an extensive exhibition history including Ian Potter Museum at Melbourne Uni, NGV Fed Square, Sutton Gallery, and QUT Gallery in Brisbane, along with a number of commissioned public art projects. His recent work was some of his best.

Here's a link to the review I wrote of his exhibition Trouble Set Me Free.
Google Analytics has shown that by the 13 February 2014,  2011 people had read this blog post, which shows how much Mark was loved and respected.  There is still no news as to why he died suddenly, but he did have many health complications that may have been a contributing factor.

Collision and Skin - Julie Clarke/Mark McDean

This is my response to Mark McDean's present to me, which I described in a previous post My artwork is formed from a white envelope, covered with cotton wool (I tore up cotton wool balls, joined them together and flattened them out). I then scattered the rectangle with small pieces of imitation gold leaf, (which I've had since I was at RMIT in 1997 and which I used over a series of images at that time) and placed it all inside a plastic cover. In total the artwork measures 18 x 13.5 cm. I've called it 'Skin'. It collides with Mark's artwork in that although he honors his mother's words and the uniqueness of her handwriting, as well as the message she imparts, in my piece I am honoring memory/correspondence, since I see handwriting as relating to an era prior to email and text messaging, a time in which we told people of our love and our news through the postage system. The message then becomes something precious (gold leaf) - a memento mori, whilst at the same time acknowledging that memories themselves are a form of skin that cushion us. Indeed I might have called the piece 'cushion' for that's exactly what it looks like. That this skin is transparent revealing what lies beneath is primary. But even these memories may, in time, become corrupt, counterfeit. Fraudulent to the extent that we consistently define and redefine our personal narratives. The piece coincidentally resonates with the piece of writing about gender that Mark posted on the blog today; in that I've used soft materials, thus in some way substantiating Winnicott's notion that girls generate towards soft things, but I obfuscate the issue by placing these malleable objects inside a hard and secure casing.