Fashion as it’s wont to do, seems to have come full circle and left us clasped in the talons of a semi-ironic Ken Done-esque, colour heavy and hyper colour state. I’ve one friend who will wear Ken Done garments almost exclusively and I’m not even angry, I think I kind of like what’s going on. It’s a dismissal of form and a celebration of pattern and contrast with simplicity the order of the day. All that said, seeing the prints everywhere always makes me wonder if the obsession could be pushed any deeper than a mere Ken Done fad.
I can easily visualise something (which is to say pretty much anything) from the canon of Australian painter John Perceval as an all over print on a sweater or tee and if that’s the route that need be taken to put his name in the sights of today’s young adults then, well, let my photoshop speak for itself:
Here then is Perceval’s Lightning Bolts At Williamstown that easily trumps any of the tee prints that you’ll find in any overpriced Ken Done store.
I think, maybe, I’m more fond of Perceval though, because he belonged to one of the coolest collectives of Australian artists and literary types that’s been. Their clique was called Angry Penguins, a reference to a poem by Max Harris as well as the name of the magazine to which they all contributed (and Harris founded) and they featured some pretty damn noteworthy sorts. I mean, it was half collective half movement but it revolved around people rather than style so I’m calling it a group.
Arguably (but not that arguably) the most significant of the bunch was Arthur Boyd who in my opinion is one of the true big dogs of Australian art. He’s probably not as t-shirt friendly as Perceval but if that’s the meter stick by which you judge art then you can GET OUT NOW. He made several trips to Alice Springs and rural Australia and was taken by the plight of the native and thus his bride series was birthed.
The bride images are iconic australian works and have achieved their degree of canonisation (the image above now lives in the Tate Modern), though perhaps not so much as those of fellow Angry Penguinite Sidney Nolan whose works adorn many a rural Macdonalds and the AGNSW in turn.
Admittedly, his work doesn’t do much for me but I’m pretty alone with that and he (posthumously) fetches some severe prices for his work.
There were obviously others involved in the movement such as Danila Vassilief or Albert Tucker (both of whom were pretty forward thinking in their work) but that’s for another post for another day
The group weren’t really defined by any unifying technique but had surrealist leanings (in both their literary and visual outputs) that gave rise to their share of detractors. Most famously, and this was a beautifully Australian moment, in the case of the Ern Malley Hoax.
The crux of the tale is that James McAuley and Harold Stewart sent Angry Penguins magazine a bunch of semi-nonsensical poems they’d koncoked together in one day, pulling words at random from the Webster’s Dictionary as they went. The full body of work of “Ern Malley”. They worked together a backstory will blue collar ideals, wrote as Ern Malley’s sister Ethel, duping Max Harris and Angry Penguins into publishing the entire batch of ‘Ern Malley’ poems and effectively setting back the progress of modernist poetry in Australia by tens of years by undermining it entirely. They effectively showed that the key tastemaker actually didn’t know real poetry from fraud.
Nolan even cited the poems as his inspiration for the Ned series and the late Robert Hughes argues for them as legitimate works of art. Potentially the most influential hoax of Australia’s history?
If you’re after Australian painting with a visual immediacy, these are your boys. I’d take these cats over the Heidelberg gents any day of the week and I’ll be waiting for my Perceval print t-shirt to come from a Japanese fashion house any day now.
- Tommy Faith
