A few days ago, I was writing in a cafe in Sydney, when a young woman, expensively dressed, sat down a few tables away. I had seen her twice before, and this time it was the same ritual: she ordered breakfast, then propped up her phone and started taking pictures of herself, primping, posing, putting on winsome expressions. Then she would anxiously flip through the resulting snaps and start again. This went on for a full hour.
GALLERY: See all 55 finalists here
It was like an allegory of our relation to images in the age of smartphones, Instagram, and social influencers, which is presumably what this poor girl thought she was. Pictures of faces have become ephemeral and disposable snaps, taken again and again until the desired illusion is produced. The idea that the features might reveal some kind of depth or intimacy of experience is all but inconceivable.
This helps to explain the desperate superficiality of so many of the pictures in the Archibald Prize, like the huge but vacuous head of Stan Walker by Edward Humphrey — there is no expectation of anything deeper. And of course there is very little idea of the painting process as one of engagement with another person, of gradually coming to know their features and the person whose character is manifested in those features. Instead we most often encounter copies of photographs, if not paintings over printed photographs, which one could call photo-kitsch for short.
There are many ways to serve up these mechanical likenesses. At the simplest level it’s a bit like peanut butter: you can have smooth, like Jonathan Dalton’s breathtakingly banal Angela, Wendy Spindler’s even more blatant Deborah Conway, Angus McDonald’s Behrouz Boochani, or Nick Stathopoulos’ Ngaiire; or crunchy, like Julie Fragar’s Richard. You can have smooth with a camouflage of decorator abstract daubs, like Kim Leutwyler’s Brian, or crunchy with an extravaganza of gratuitous doodling in Craig Ruddy’s Bruce Pascoe.
Photographic literalism can be combined with gimmickry of various kinds, as in Abdul Abdullah’s self-portrait, Katherine Edney’s David, Teena and the black dog or Charles Mouyat’s Matt Kean. But none of these pictures gets beyond the surface of the skin that they obsessively and painfully copy in every pore and blemish. In addition, there are works so incompetent or deliberately ugly that their inclusion seems incomprehensible until we remember that the curatorial rationale of the Archibald is not to assemble a harmonious exhibition but a freak-show for a visually illiterate audience.
Leaving aside freaks and fakes, there are a few pictures worthy of closer attention. One of the most appealing is Guy Maestri’s little portrait of Jennifer Byrne; the artist’s careful and attentive engagement with his subject results in a work that in turn elicits our attention and draws us in to look more closely. Alex Thorby’s portrait of Will Gollins, although barely more than a sketch, is also compelling because she has captured something of the man himself, the reality through and behind the face. There is a human being too in S.R. Condon’s portrait of Adam Spencer.
MORE: See all 55 finalists here
Among well-known artists and regular finalists, there is Nicholas Harding’s perceptive and well-composed David Marr, Wendy Sharpe’s Magda Szubanski and Lucy Culliton’s Charles Maslin, a farmer standing in a field. Peter Wegner once again paints his old friend and regular model of more than 30 years, Graeme Doyle, this time in the guise of a chef; the white-buttoned tunic emphasises the flesh hues of the hands and face and is variegated with reflected colour, reminding us of Baudelaire’s observation at the Salon of 1846 that “great colourists can make colour with a black suit, a white tie and a grey background”.
In this case it is a black background, and dark backgrounds are rather overdone in Jun Chen’s Philip Bacon (the figure is almost lost in the gloom for no apparent expressive meaning), Paul Newton’s Maggie Tabberer, and Marcus Wills’ portrait of Jack Riley. This last figure, full length, is too big and, considering the subject is a dancer, strangely inert — overbearing rather than alive.
It is fitting to end with Tsering Hannaford’s Self-portrait after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Painting (c. 1638-39), because it is not only a fine self-portrait, but a reminder that painting is in fact an art, and one that demands the greatest skill and judgment, not the debauched commercial process that you might assume from the works that I discussed at the outset.
As I have said before, the Archibald could be a much better exhibition if the Art Gallery of NSW Trustees did their job and selected the best works submitted. Instead they select on the basis of sensationalism, jarring contrasts and shock value. The show is a bad show, year after year, because the Trustees make it a bad show.
The winner of the Archibald Prize is announced on September 25. The Archibald Prize exhibition opens at the Art Gallery of NSW on September 26. Timed tickets can be purchased online.
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