Farewells. I thought last year was tragic but 2024 has been even worse. We’ve lost Guy Warren, at the age of 103, which is a good innings by any reckoning, but Guy is only the most prominent departure. He used to complain, jokingly, that the problem with being 100 is that people only want to talk to you about your age, as if that were your sole claim to fame. Guy would have preferred we talked about him as an artist rather than a centenarian, but he was one of the most unfailingly positive people you’d ever meet. He met the infirmities of old age with the same cheerful spirit that he met every other challenge. In a field that produces narcissists in abundance, he was genuinely modest, devoted to his work rather than his career. It’s a distinction that’s lost on many (more successful!) artists.
Watching Joe Biden stagger through the Presidential debate this week, I couldn’t help thinking that Guy would have put up a better show, although 20 years older. Age is very far from being ‘just a state of mind’, as the popular spin has it, because your genes are more likely to play the decisive role, but the importance of an active mind and a positive attitude shouldn’t be underestimated.
One hopes the public art museums do the right thing by Guy and put his work of display by way of a fitting tribute. They may, however, be pushed for space if they try and do the same with every artist who has recently left the land of the living and is now settling accounts with their place in local art history.
Within the past few months, we’ve lost Jan Senbergs, Richard Dunn, Bruce Armstrong, Rosemary Laing, Destiny Deacon, and art historian, David Hansen, to name only the ones who struck me most forcibly. There are bound to be plenty of others, but I’m not pretending to be comprehensive.
Jan Senbergs was the one I knew best. Although he had been ill with Parkinsons for a considerable time, it was still a shock to hear he had died. What made Jan so special was that he remained a figurative artist during an era when Australian art had gone wholeheartedly over to abstraction. He was true to himself in a way that few artists manage and was a genuinely big-hearted person.
I’m not going to speak about the others, apart from noting that no-one actually asked me to write an obituary for any of them, including Guy and Jan. I’ve never much liked writing these notices, but neither have I ever refused to write one when I was acquainted with the artist. There are always lots of other people who may be in a better position to summarise someone’s life and achievements, but it’s surprising to see how few artists received a proper obituary in the national press. If Destiny Deacon did better than most, that’s a reflection on our current priorities, as her brand of Indigenous, activist satire is viewed as being intrinsically more important than work by artists with different agendas. Nevertheless, when one reads Marcia Langton praising Destiny by saying her work was “free of heteronormative restrictions”, it would have been nice, instead, to read that she was larger-than-life with a wicked sense of humour.
Am I wrong to believe that a good obituary gets its strength from what it tells us about the person rather than their work? That’s why these pieces are so hard to write, and so necessary. It’s why you never feel as if you knew the person well enough, even if you saw them every other week. It’s impossible to sum up a life in a thousand words or so, but essential to convey what was special and unique about the individual. For an artist, their work will live on, to be reinterpreted and revalued in many and various ways, but the experience of the actual person needs to be recorded by those who knew them, partly as a way of putting a check on the fanciful rereadings that come with time. I’ve already seen it in some of the bizarre rewritings of recent art history that I’ve witnessed at first hand. Each generation imposes its own obsessions and preccupations on figures of the past. We need firm foundations to resist those rogue interpretations, made in a spirit of malice or over-adulation. Vale, Guy, Jan, Richard, Bruce, Rosemary, Destiny and David. May future historians treat you with rigour and respect.
To this list of the deceased, I’m tempted to add the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo. The museum has been systematically undermined and destroyed by successive NSW governments. The Coalition started the process as an obvious land grab, but the Minns Labor government has added the finishing touches by betraying their election promises and continuing the process of officially sanctioned vandalism. The rationale seems to be that things are too far advanced to turn back now. This is roughly equivalent to seeing a truck careening towards a schoolyard and refusing to hit the brakes. No point in stopping now.
The truth is that Labor never halted the destructive processes they inherited. They allowed the flawed, unpopular plans to be developed, they watched as works were siphoned out of storage in Ultimo, hauled onto trucks and shipped to Castle Hill. The result was many pages of damage reports, brazenly denied by the PHM director.
Although the government has gone through a farcical process of public consultation that saw an overwhelming number of closely argued objections, this has not stopped the vandalism. Neither has the knowledge that a heritage order may still be slapped on the so-called “revitalisation”. This week saw large items such as the governor’s railway carriage moved by heavy machinery in the dead of night. It was done in this way to avoid protests and accountability. Those who have complained strongly have had no response. The media, as usual, has been utterly inert – which merely emboldens the vandals.
There’s a lot more to be said about the PHM, but it looks like we’ll have years to watch this mess grow and fester. By continuing the bad ideas of their predecessors, NSW Labor has created an ongoing cultural and financial catastrophe that no amount of spin will be able to disguise. Two billion dollars will have been spent transforming a publically owned cultural icon into an expensive three-headed monster unloved and unvisited by all. The big question is: “Why?”
Speaking of “why?”, it’s the word that springs to mind whenever I view the annual Salon des Refusés at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, that brings together works rejected from the Archibald and Wynne Prizes at the Art Gallery of NSW. Why include thiswork but reject that one? And this year: Why boast on your website that the Wynne includes more Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal artists? Ethnicity is not part of the criteria for entry, and affirmative action is not part of the Wynne’s stated aims. I need not pre-empt the argument any further.
The film being reviewed is A Silence – a dark tale from Belgium, made even darker by the fact that it’s closely based on real-life events that seem too gruesome for fiction. Although those events don’t feature in the movie, we watch the way the reverberations play out in the lives of the prosecuting lawyer and his family. It’s not one for Fast and Furious fans. I’ve also slipped in a few words about this year’s Spanish Film Festival, which has no shortage of quality films and more than a few dark moments. A sad phase for the visual arts, a sombre but good week at the cinema.