Micro Masters / Action Heroes

Perhaps because artists are invisible in most people’s lives, they are often popularly imagined through their moving image representations. On screen we witness the spiritual birth of Picasso and Pollock masterpieces. We feel the The Agony and the Esctasy of creation and experience the artist’s Lust for Life, as well as its inevitably tragic end. We see Steve Martin become a part time performance artist and witness Homer Simpson’s meteoric rise as the outsider/conceptual art cover boy of Art in America. Julian Schnabel helps us understand his genius by championing the genius of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The artist is the protean protagonist in the legends of inspiration and invention that as much script their variously fictionalised representations in film and television, as they do the history of art. Struggle, suspense, and sensation – these are the moments of drama that tell the story of artistic creation. Artists win or lose; the good ones fight for all that is good. They are impoverished (at least to begin with), misunderstood, usually eccentric, sometimes tortured, and often strangely sensual. They have special powers that mere mortals cannot hope to understand.
So briefly sketched, this character study starts to sound like a caricature. And it doesn’t take much to extend the idiom of the artist as hero, which has become a kind of critical shorthand for the tropes of artistic mythology, to the artist as superhero. This is the premise of Micro Master/Action Hero. The exhibition gathers recent works by Australian artists where the artist figure is transformed into a fantastic character: a combat figurine, an adventurous hero or an idolised pin-up.

Alasdair Macintyre’s dioramas heighten the theatre of artistic enterprise. Macintyre’s amplified art-world scenarios might be strongly suggestive of film narrative, but they are usually inexplicable. Regularly set in the studio, galleries and museums, Macintyre’s casts plenty of big name art-stars in his meticulously made models. Warhol and Duchamp have made multiple appearances. Many inject art world drama with science-fiction spiritualism, resulting in intergalactic cultural tourists, spaceship sculpture galleries, android art heists and alien sketching classes. The works always show-off the artist’s superbly sharp wit and his vast knowledge of, and fanatical interest in, popular art history. They are often at their most poignant when they feature modelled self-portraits of Alasdair himself, amplifying the struggles of an emerging artist to spectacularly cinematic moments of dramatic conflict. Now that his work is receiving national attention - included in the National Sculpture Prize at the NGA, he responded with a work featuring him sleeping in the NGA titled I love the National Gallery of Australia (and the National Gallery of Australia loves me) - it will be interesting to see how Macintyre synthesises critical success in his sharp-witted re-imaginings of artistic identity.

Two new works by Nick Devlin represent the apocryphal struggles of making art through the specific qualities of the gallery site. Hidden in false pillars between the windows of the gallery, Devlin’s backlit miniature scenes visible only through two small peepholes. In After Caspar, Devlin reworks Caspar David Friedrich’s 1817 The Wanderer Above the Mists to propose a somewhat less romantic image of a lame artist clambering over a pile of rubble, bordered by back-alley debris, to look over to the Melbourne’s newest cultural behemoth, Federation Square – the very same view visible from the windows of Blindside. The other peephole is equally site specific. Taking his mallet and chisel not to a block of Carrara marble but to the brick walls of the Nicholas Building itself, the other work depicts an artist carving out a space inside the brick wall. Titled If These Walls Could Speak in reference to the extraordinary history of the Nicholas Building as a haven for artist’s studios, the scene suggests not only the not only superhuman lengths to which artists will go to make work, but the sometimes even more enormous struggle to find a place in which it can be made.

Over the past five or so years, Adrienne Doig has pursued a unique portraiture practice. Using the form of the doll, and more recently the materials of homely feminine kit-craft, one of Doig’s central interests is the stylistic performance of self-fashioning. For My Life as a Doll, Doig commissioned ten porcelain doll artists, sourced over the internet, to create 1/12 scale costumed dolls of herself from a photograph.

Individually, they are peculiarly detached portraits; collectively they are both a witty erasure of authorial authority and a compelling self-portrait that evades artistic archetypes for something decidedly sexier. Doig emerges as one chic chick: decked out in Jackie O-style ensembles, her blonde coiffure set off by Pillbox hats. The effect is more Bewitched than it is Barbie. The bombshell persona is even stronger in The Spy Tapes, a new work made from footage shot in 1999, where she is revealed to us as a part James Bond vixen, part Sesame Street plaything. In these and other works, Doig alludes to the possibility of using pop culture prototypes to model a new type of feminine artistic heroine.

In The Most Beautiful Boy in World, a collaborative painting by Hazel Dooney and Jeremy Kibel, Pablo Picasso is used to interrogate the relationship between abstract painting and the cult of personality. Even the powerful control over sexual femininity in Hazel Dooney’s glossy self-portraits – known to many through her remarkably leggy and rifle-toting contribution to the much-publicised Lake Eyre Project – only just can compete with Kibel’s seductive flood of milky cubism. The addition of tentative and raw portraits by Dooney suggest a quietly determined effort to pursue new possibilities with painting – no matter what PP or any other father’s of painting might say. Submerged under and in the painting, the effect not only suggests Picasso’s mythically misogynist attitudes; it also cues the more recent allegation that his representations of women suggest his own sublimated sexuality. His image, rendered through via a familiarly mask-like self portrait, and his name, indicated through the PP initials scrawled on the canvas, form the nexus for converging stripes in white and yellow that suggest lines of vision. They emerge from ‘The Showman’ like some kind of mystical infrared emanating across the canvas from his protean persona and unavoidable artistic influence.

In his Ultrabot series, Charles O'Loughlin undermines the heroic humanism of abstract painting. Letting a battery-powered robot loose on a blank canvas, the works add an anthropomorphic appeal to the painting machines made by Richard Jackson. The robots eye might be innocent, but the O'Louglin's Svengali act ensure that this is definitely not art without an artist. More precise than paintings by elephants or cats, Ultrabot's work suggests the pastel palette and woven layers of a sixties de Kooning. Ultrabot moves to and from the canvas, loading his brush (rather than gun) with paint, pausing to adjust the location of his preferred vertical and horisontal brushstrokes, and absorb the gestalt of the emerging painting. In a state of repetitive, undistractable, mechanical obsession, the artist threatens his canvas: as its surface comes under his control, it chants 'You are Under Arrest' and 'I Will Shoot'.

Batteries are not included in Michael Lindeman's series of paintings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle characters. Like enlarged pages from a well-completed colouring book, the series is called The Old Masters – for those to young to remember, or too old to have noticed, a reference to the choice of Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo as the monikers for the kick-boxing sewer-dwelling reptiles. Lindeman’s distinctive practice has pursued both nostalgia for the banal detritus of cultural trends, and an effort (notably his involvement in the nineties collective Michael and Michael Visual Art Project Management) to play with art world puffery. Combining both interests, the works in Micro Master / Action Heroes remind us that the heroes-in-a-half-shell and art history’s ultimate heroes are both part of the same history of images from which artists can learn and borrow.

Recent interest in the past, present and future of the superhero suggests that its application as a cultural model for the idols and leaders of society. Fictional or not, its tropes continue to allure. For the artists in Micro Masters / Action Heroes, to decide to make art is to inevitably grapple with the way that the artist is popularly imagined. Because the form and look of these works often straddle the art object and the toy, their miniature scenes and figurines undermine the earnest profundity of important contemporary art with a humorous awareness of the artistic myths they play with. The fashioning of artistic persona itself becomes artistic material – confronting, confusing and generally messing with the cult of personality that defines the mythology of the modern artist.

Alex Taylor