WHAT TO DO ? WHAT TO DO ? WHAT TO DO ?

Alan Muehler at Gallery East

Helen Smith at Perth Galleries

 

The urge to paint, like the urge to sex, exists independently of any object. It just is. What this says about relations between the infinitely malleable nature of paint and the fluid indeterminate consistency of our primary desires is beyond my scope, but its not too hard to guess what they might be. The point is that all painting, perhaps all image making is the same act. Forget abstract, figurative etc, its all about getting your rocks off one way or another. The major implication for art talk is that we might be better off describing all painting, all art work even, as an orgiastic downhill deposit of energy - mountain stream or avalanche its the same basic form. Given our current indifference to any particular object or ethos in art, the painter’s choice of what to do is at once impossibly banal and subject to an extraordinary crisis of relevance or, at least, of interest.

One solution might be to return to the relation between poetry and painting that was made so much of by Baudelaire. Can useful poetic criteria for painting be elaborated in the context of uniformed desire, without descending into the black swamp of self expression or vanishing in the void of popular surrealism ? Certainly the idea of the appropriate - a poetic idea - might give painting a leg up. On the other hand poetry largely because it has insisted on an autonomous relationship to experience, has almost no audience left, .

Two very different current exhibitions prompted this. At Gallery East Allan Muhler marks his return to Perth with a show of his favourite views of Perth from the CBD skyline to swimmers at Cottesloe. At Perth Galleries Helen Smith is showing large paintings with small, double square, works in glass stained at the back, plus a large series of small shiny coloured photo details from the decoration and amenities of brothels in Perth and bordellos in Sydney mounted skin tight on aluminium plates.

Muhler is a competent painter who can rise to most occasions but even he can’t make the dreary line of buildings viewed from Art Gallery precincts any less boring than they are. Even the more baroque views of town from north Perth. His solution is to concentrate on skies, white clouds piled up or spiralling across fading dessicated blues. For the most part this is a good choice. I often glance across East Perth from my deck, the skies certainly deserve better than the banal monstrosities beneath them. Only occasionally, as in A Big Cloud Over la Motte’s does the a decaying urban scene harmonise with the drama above it.

Muhler’s clouds are far less meteorological in observation than say Constable or Turner. They are, however, a visual chronicle of the fluid processes of painting, thick and thin, as an analogy for the weather. The same fluidity dominates his images of bathers floating in a field of agitated azure - thick and thin lines, floating stains shifting in a steady rhythm. It is the discharge of these liquid energies that fascinates the eye, not the rather fragile topography.

Smith, too, is interested in what paint can do but in her large paintings it is the void between huge single flat swabs of neutral colour and the grid of tiny globes or marks that run or rather float across them like flecks of salt on a margarita, that points to the paint as paint. Glass, of course, is frozen liquid. Smith’s glass Translucent Views work like solidified paint, the off set geometry of the pink or green stain on the back surface of the glass. This almost absolutely timeless medium is the very opposite of Muhler’s milkshake treatment, but its all about liquid passion.

Which brings me to the brothel details. A lampshade is a lampshade, a shower curtain a shower curtain so why brothels and not, say, Myer’s furniture department ? Part of the point is that brothel interiors are mysteries for most of us. They are also the locus of dislocated volatile desires, something pried, willingly or not, from the daily round. Maybe these lustful chiaroscuro images are intended to invoke the same optical erotic as the glass pieces. They are just as hard and glossy. Like Muhler’s clouds, they tangle pure painterly vision in process, even, as in the case of the shower head, in memory of sex as a job of work. Are they poetic ? It depends on whether you think an unmotivated detail can be totally redolent of its environment. From Degas to Kitaj artists have seen brothels as a poetic cross roads of desire but they made complete images not details. These details look more like the fringes of pleasure, the suburbs of disconte, what we see when we open our eyes.

There’s a lot more to this but for now its enough to ask whether painting should bother to avoid or deny its essential characteristic as a passionate smear, a condensed stain. Everything else seems only suitable for the Titanic. What to do?