Mark Datodi, New Works at GalleryEast.

One the edge of Esperance, last year, I stumbled over an inhuman desert.  Acres of sterile blocks gleamed sandy white in the sunset, all the way to the horizon as if a passing fleet of alien spacecraft had blasted away the homes of a few farmers and the delightful bush animals and scrub that surrounded them, leaving in their place a sterile grid fit only for intergalactic parasites. You can find deserts like this all over the outback and on the fringes of every city.

Subdivision

It seems Australians can only be happy if they live like serfs in a suburb, chartered out to them by the people who really ruin, sorry run, Australia  - the Real Estate Agents a k a the Unreal Estate Agents, the androids from somewhere else, whose greed for an extra quid, or ten, will help them decide exactly how well you can live and in what style. I've seen shoulder-rubbing suburbs in Hedland and outside Broome, sitting on the edge of an infinite empty landscape. 

Grasslands

Why is this so? There 's no excuse for it. We could live out there perfectly well, indeed much better, without recourse to the disintegrator ray. Apart from greed the only explanation is that deep in the Australian psyche there is an unregenerate suburban moron who wants everyone to live exactly the same life, so that they can all feel secure in their paranoia. These people have 'TheVote' and, as John Howard's persistent regime proves, there are very slightly more of them than there are of the rest of us.

That excellent artist Mark Datodi has taken this alien gridding of Australia as the subject for his new works. You will search high and low; however, for a portrait of a Real Estate Agent, or Dodgy Architect, a picture of A Hundred-Dollar Bill or a For Sale sign or indeed a homeless family. In other words Datodi's images have nothing to do with causes of the situation they present. He simply juxtaposes two rhetorics, two codes, each with two modes of imagery, in an attempt at a sentimental elegy for the lost open environment. He might, instead, have made eloquent monuments to the unlooked for death of the imagination.

New start

So far so good, Datodi's work is as savage as a dead sheep. It will not impress the Unreal Estate Agents, in fact they might quiteenjoy it, but does it contain any poetry, anything to make us weep for the loss of a hundred black boys, a thousand banksias and a few emus?

Well sometimes, in a way:  perhaps, but at a price.

Datodi's first rhetoric is a simplified graphic photography, using images of open land or grimly crowded suburbs. One letterbox shaped view of tiled roofs, crowded together in a mean grimy grey environment was particularly impressive.  Even so, it was weakened by the appearance of an element of Datodi's second rhetorical mode  - diagrams or balsa wood models of house plans and alternatively town planning schemes for suburban blocks neatly arrayed in curving cul de sacs. You can see examples of this second rhetoric in the portfolio of any architecture student, screaming out that they are good design or at least, very, very neat and the devil take the emus.

Datodi often just pushes the two artfully together and in the hope that the viewer will make the connection as required. Otherwise the link between them remains formal and his work appears as ingenious decoration for the ingenuous. Occasionally a misplaced poetry surfaces as when a a house floats over apattern of ripples on sea surface this is a poetry of home and water not of thedestruction of land by greed and stupidity - for that you need a few besuited Unreal Agents leaning out of the window in a suburban reprise of Bosch's Ship of Fools.

There are a fewsimple plans down out all in white à la Howard Taylor as seen in the image below,  a decorative success but a critical failure.  

Datodi's poetic impotence springs from a problem that appears to be almost universal. At its simplest it concerns the difficulties of bringing together an image and a structure derived from the technical logic of the medium or the practice through which art is made. Richter's obsession with the apparently gap between painting and images as ready-made objects in the 'real world'is probably the best example of this dialectical dilemma.   In addition there is the dumb/arrogant theoretical position that visual practices can be divided up into closed predictable systems  of representational   which leads to the conclusion that simply bringing these "systems" together will produce artwork. This is a recipe for deadly complacent boredom, art with all the commitment of  a hamburger chef .

This disaster can be avoided.   I will say moreabout that next week .