Portraiture that looks like a snap to paint in Archibald Prize

THE loss of homely security guards is the least of the Archibald Prize's worries.

IT seems rather bad timing, but just as the Art Gallery of NSW was preparing to announce its vision for the future, it was also replacing its long-serving guards with contract staff provided by an external security firm.

For those who have known the gallery for years, the old guards were friendly and familiar faces; they could tell visitors where works were hanging too, and often knew quite a bit about the collection. But above all they gave the place a human feel that it sadly lacks now, as I noticed for the first time on visiting the gallery to preview the Archibald Prize.

No doubt the trustees considered this change an example of what is called in managerial jargon "best practice", one of those weasel expressions that almost always seems to mean that money is being saved for expediency.

GALLERY: 2013 Archibald Prize finalists

These are the same trustees who have come up with the ambitious building plans (which I will discuss in more detail next week in The Weekend Australian) while managing to lose a disconcertingly large proportion of their curatorial talent. They are also the same ones who select and judge the Archibald prize, Australia's premier annual art event for people who know nothing about art.

This year's show is, arguably, no worse than usual, perhaps even a bit less bad than last year. There are fewer colossal heads, and more painters seem to be realising that life-size is the best scale for the human features. On the other hand, the reliance on photography is still an overwhelming and crippling problem. The most extreme case is in Vincent Fantauzzo's massive head of an actress, his girlfriend Asher Keddie, an elaborate oil rendition of a photograph that trivialises the art of painting and that of photography, as well as apparently contravening the rules of the exhibition. Fantauzzo's work serves as a touchstone of aesthetic judgment: if you like this, you don't like painting.

In other cases, the ubiquity of photography is less apparent to the inexperienced eye. But even John Emmerig's portrait of Justice Stephen Gageler, which has some merit, is betrayed as photographically based by the gimmicks that attempt to camouflage the fact, such as the way that the mouth is an absence, the black underpainting showing through, or the squiggles of paint that make up the shoulders and hair. Next to it, Warwick Gilbert's portrait of Don Walker is not only painted in a pedestrian, almost commercially illustrative style but transparently based on a snap - reproducing one of those "Do I look OK like this?" moments with no attempt whatsoever to penetrate beyond the surface.

It is for this reason that Xu Wang's large series of heads in the first room is interesting, for he acknowledges and engages critically with a reliance on photography that was presumably imposed on him by circumstances. The work is titled Self-Portrait (Interviewing Maoist Victims) and, among all the individual likenesses, a double panel is devoted to a self-portrait holding a video camera, implying that the artist has sought out his subjects and interviewed them on video, basing his painted portraits on the footage he had collected.

There is a significant contrast between the style of his own self-portrait, which is matter-of-fact and even platitudinous, and that of the various subjects, which is much more painterly, animated and moody. This difference partly speaks of the gulf between China today and China then, between prosperity and suffering; but it may also reflect the fact the self-portrait is painted from a single shot, while the others are based on the moving video image and synthesised by the artist in a process that is closer to the experience of painting from a living model.

One of the few painters who really works, predominantly at least, from life is Wendy Sharpe, represented by Venus Vamp, the portrait of a burlesque dancer or stripper wearing fishnet stockings, a corset, an impressive array of tattoos and a top hat; a kind of Sally Bowles of the early 21st century, seated in front of a mirror that doubles her into back-to-back Janus figures. Sharpe's work is always full of verve, but here it is a lesson not only for the frigid painting of Alexander McKenzie adjacent to it but for many others that they should have the courage to let go of their photographic security blanket and try painting instead.

There is a subtler lesson here, too, for a couple of artists - I am thinking particularly of Marcus Callum and Joshua McPherson - who are worthy of consideration because they are manifestly working from nature and are not lacking in feeling. The trouble with artists such as this is that they have internalised a certain photographic sensibility, a kind of inert literalism that is the bane of all the contemporary neo-traditional schools of realist painting. Working from nature and relearning traditional skills are intrinsically admirable goals, but a deeper self-critique and knowledge of art history are required to free oneself from a vision deformed by the habits of photography.

There are a few other things with occasional points of interest and many that are extraordinarily ugly, but one of the most thoughtful works is a self-portrait by Imants Tillers. It would be oversized by normal standards, but the scale is less intrusive in this case because of the self-effacing and conceptual nature of the image. The shadowy and elusive rendering of the features is inscribed, in a way characteristic of Tillers, with two sets of texts. Around the outside are the words "a throw of the dice will never abolish chance", the title and part of the text of an 1897 poem in which Mallarme used unusual typography and layout to emphasise this paradoxical or rather enigmatic proposition. The text in the middle is from Borges: "there is no whole self" - an apt meditation for portrait painters and especially for those who naively imagine they can capture the self in a snapshot.