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David
Williamson is widely regarded as one of Australia’s greatest playwrights. He is
especially praised for his skills as a social satirist – for his ability to deftly
stereotype representative characters from all walks of national life. However,
as time and fame have taken Williamson further and further away from the
counter-cultural milieu of his youth, some of his caricatures have become
increasingly skewed, unreal, even a bit hysterical. This is particularly so
when it comes to those who Williamson obviously regards as weird, pretentious,
inner city types – like intellectuals, politicos and feminists.
To a
jaundiced observer of Williamson’s urban panorama, one character stands out
above all: the artist created for Tim Burstall’s 1981 film Duet for Four. This was Burstall’s attempt to remake his ‘70s
classic Peterson for the ‘80s. In Duet for Four, Mike Preston plays a
rugged, proletarian, authentically Aussie bloke – a toy manufacturer – who is
at sea in a scary world. His daughter (Sigrid Thornton) is lost in a decadent,
bohemian ghetto of university education, drugs and loud music, while his wife
(Diane Cilento) has left him for the lure of – horror of horrors – the art
world. She runs a gallery, and has ensnared a dependent, foppish young painter,
whose name pretty much says it all: Cliff
Ingersoll – part dandy, part foreigner. All it takes is one glance at his
dress style – a florid wing-like structure rising from his shoulders over his
weedy, exposed chest – and another at his suitably weird artwork, to know that
Cliff is an evil artist, and absolutely no match for Mike.
Beyond
Australia, and even when all the characters in a film are artists, the dramatic
diagram of Duet for Four tends to
assert its paranoid, philistine viewpoint. One of the liveliest cinematic
representations of artists and their milieu is provided by Martin Scorsese in
the opening “Life Lessons” episode of New
York Stories (1989). This story pits a supposedly Real Artist – Nick Nolte
as Lionel Doblin, an abstract expressionist in the tradition of Jackson Pollock
– against the cold, slimey world of art dealers and apparently fake young
artist-operators in the Warhol tradition, the latter symbolised by one Gregory
Stark, played by Steve Buscemi. (Again, note the character names.)
When Lionel
paints, he lives – using a trash can lid for a rough palette and a selection of
classic rock tunes for stimulation, he gets worked up, splatters himself,
spills his guts and bares his soul on a vast canvas. Gregory is, like Cliff in Duet for Four, the hero’s rival in the
affections of the gorgeous, aspiring painter played by Rosanna Arquette. He is
also – and this is the evil part – a performance artist. Near the start of the
story there is a dialogue exchange that sums up perfectly the film’s attitude
towards this unnatural species of artist, as Nolte quizzes Arquette about her
other man:
He: That
kid, the comedian?
She: A
performance artist.
He: A performance
artist. What the hell is a performance artist? A person’s an actor, a singer, a
dancer. I mean, do you call the guy who picks up your garbage a sanitary
engineer? A performance artist ...
This little
soliloquy is very expressive. For this bear-like, all-American artist, there
are two noble creative vocations: either being a real painter, or else an
honest-to-god entertainer. Both vocations are unpretentious, hard working,
straight down the line. This is in fact a recurring theme in Scorsese’s movies:
in After Hours (1985), the running
joke about the latest fancy Soho art is that it’s “not hard to do”. And
performance art, apparently, takes even less work.
Neither
artist nor entertainer, Gregory Stark in “Life Lessons” is a pallid stage
presence whose act verifies the suspicion of Edward Colless that “‘Performance’
is surely one of the most impoverished conceits of late modern and postmodern
art” – a conceit in which the slightest evidence of showbiz flair would be
quite an embarrassment. Indeed, when we at last get a snippet of Stark’s
performance art – a sub-sub-Spalding Gray rap on urban paranoia delivered under
an exploding light bulb in an abandoned train tunnel – it seems like a poor
simulacrum of a bad stand-up comedian’s routine.
Reflecting on
this short movie by Scorsese in the annual British publication Projections, the great French film
director and historian Bertrand Tavernier commented on the palpable unease of
American filmmakers when depicting acts of with artistic creation. They tend to
“portray creators and artists as if they were normal people, as unintellectual
as possible, who laugh at the interpretations other people place on their
works”. And those who “transgress these taboos are shown as depraved,
dangerously sick people whom society has to eliminate”. In the Old Hollywood film noir era, as Tavernier reminds us,
such Cliff Ingersolls were usually played by Claude Rains, James Mason or
Vincent Price – evil, European dandies one and all.
These days,
it is predominantly artists of an experimental persuasion – conceptual,
performance, installation or multi-media artists – who bear the mantle of evil.
It is certainly curious that, at least three decades after Pop Art, such
suspicious stereotyping can still so readily cloak these art forms and their
practitioners. The phenomenon bespeaks a continuing resistance to any cool,
cerebral or theoretical art, and a corresponding nostalgia for the most
simplistic conceptions of the Romantic Artist.
In Backtrack (aka Catchfire, 1990), director Dennis Hopper,
disguised as a hit man, rails at Jodie Foster for her cool, postmodern,
neon-sign text pieces – actually borrowed for the occasion from Jenny Holzer.
He clinches his argument by pulling the plug on them and delivering a tirade
against “wall-socket art”. In Paul Cox’s Man
of Flowers (1983), we find an even more ancient dramatisation of this great
divide: Norman Kaye as the painter of the title, quiet, patient and classical,
versus a Pollock-style action-painter of mid-’60s vintage, played with
typically deranged exuberance by Chris Haywood. No wonder one commentator
called Cox’s schematic narrative “a somewhat uneasy tilt at ‘modern’ art’”.
If the
attitudes reflected in these depictions of evil contemporary artists seems
strangely dated and skewed, the attempt to capture the essence of their actual
work in a nutshell is usually even more ludicrous. In Joel Schumacher’s
multicultural comedy Cousins (1989),
a teenager defiantly announces to his assembled family that he is a
“multi-media performance artist” – and then presents a crude pastiche of the
‘scratch video’ genre, juxtaposing happy family snaps and starving Biafrans.
The Roger Corman-produced thriller Body Chemistry (1990) contains a twist on a popular anti-intellectual joke –
“what do you get when you cross a mafioso with a performance artist? An offer
you can’t understand” – and follows it with a snatch of performance art that
looks like a grotesque jazz ballet from 1955, accompanied by musique concrète squawks, squeaks and
glissandos from 1925. Continuing in a musical vein, Men Don’t Leave (1989) gives us a few bars of an earnest
experimental ensemble in full flight – playing a phalanx of typewriters and
cake mixers.
Further
examples abound: the alienated young sculptor (Diane Lane) in Lady, Beware (1985) who attracts psycho
killers with her disembodied mannequins displayed in department store windows;
the wacky young experimental filmmaker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in The Big Picture (1989) whose efforts
seem mainly to consist of murky shots of her jumping up and down with teddy
bears, until she finds her niche in music video; the priceless glimpse of a
“radical student film” from the psychedelic ‘60s that appears at the climax of Dirty Tricks (1992), a frantic montage
of jerky, hand held shots shot through star filters of militants screwing under
the American flag. But the most popular instance of this phenomenon is surely
the ultimate: Daryl Hannah’s presentation in her loft, to an audience
consisting solely of Robert Redford, of an entire performance art piece in Legal Eagles (1988).
This one
deserves a close description. Hannah – playing Chelsea Dearden, a flighty
performance artist going on trial for avenging a crime committed long ago
against her painter father – has a minimalist set, and a complete barrage of
audio-visual equipment, up and ready to be performed in at any time. She begins
her act by whispering into a microphone and activating some kind of sampled
sound mix, backed by a monotonous drum machine track. Laurie Anderson seems to
be the main reference point here, as Chelsea breathlessly utters phrases that
are meant to be casual, banal, chilling and profoundly meaningful all at once –
“piece of cake”, “old flame”, “brush fire” – and toys with objects that
transform from painting utensils to explosive weapons.
Every image
that flashes up during this performance is an image of Chelsea, and every
gesture or symbol refers to the ‘primal scene’ surrounding her dear departed
daddy. It’s as if whoever devised this nutty set piece had quickly skimmed
Rosalind Krauss on the “aesthetics of narcissism” in postmodern art, for a bit
of deep background research. After the show’s over – Chelsea’s effigy going up
in flames, and Redford grabbing for a fire hose – the artist writes her own
review: “I’m trying to challenge your perspective, and make you uncomfortable”.
Naturally, this is the cue for a romantic clinch between performer and
spectator.
Contemporary
artists and their art are not always so badly served by the cinema. In the
realm of adventurous avant-garde fictions, one should be grateful for Babette
Mangolte’s extraordinary and little-seen The
Cold Eye (1980), in which a first-person, subjective camera takes us
through the treacherous, interpersonal maze of the New York artworld, or Yvonne
Rainer’s films including The Man Who
Envied Women (1985), with their intimate, skeptical reflections on artists’
lifestyles and their shifting social place. Even those films which take a stand
on the romanticism of the tortured artist in the midst of a heartless world can
do so with passion and conviction – like Jacques Rivette’s masterpiece La Belle Noiseuse (1991), with its
intense focus on (as Tavernier puts it) “creation and its torments”. Even the
more outlandish visions of artistic creation can have unforeseen positive uses:
according to Bob Colacello in his book Holy
Terror, it was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s wild image of a demented painter urinating
on his canvases in Teorema (1968)
that provided the direct inspiration for Warhol’s ‘piss paintings’ of the ‘70s.
However,
back in the fantasy realms of Hollywood, the reigning representation of matters
artistic is perhaps best summed up in a thriller aptly called Paint it Black (1989), handled with
undeniable flair by River’s Edge director Tim Hunter. This little-known film contains virtually every crucial
element mentioned so far. The artist as ordinary bloke: Jonathan Dunbar (played
by hunk Rick Rossovich) has a sign flashing NOT ART in his garage/studio; he
disparages pretentious artspeak and refers to himself with modest heroism as a
humble welder. Sexual intrigue: Jonathan is in the spidery grasp of a
predatory, nymphomaniacal, money-grubbing art dealer Marion Easton (Sally
Kirkland). Evil conceptual artist: the psychotic villain of the piece is Eric
Kinsley, a weedy guy who “can’t draw a straight line”, and is compelled by his
“life as art” theories to sadistically kill people and create grotesque
sculptures made from their corpses, spray-painted in jet black.
And last
but not least there’s the Cliff Ingersoll-type fop figure. His name is George
Hector (two first names – not very manly). The moment he has taken Jonathan’s
place in the gallery owner’s lustful affections, he immediately gets a show on,
titled “White on White”. An exercise in “minimal abstraction” – criminal
abstraction, Jonathan calls it – we see the entirety of this exhibition in a
suspenseful montage at a high point of the action: a car, and various other
clunky, artless, everyday objects, spray painted snow white and set obtrusively
within an all-white gallery space. We see less of George himself, but one quick
mid-shot is quite enough. He is the spitting image of old Cliff, except he goes
one better: along with the crazy shoulder wings, the mad, bulging eyes and the
bare, ugly chest, his hair comes at you in tiny, babyish curls.
But
finally, as I scan all these lurid, perfectly formulaic art world scenarios of
noble and evil artists, crooked dealers and soulless buyers, sexual slaves and
perverts, creation damned to oblivion or raised to heaven, I am struck by an
obvious, recurring omission. Where are the art critics? Surely there’s a few
evil, obsequious, pretentious, murderous psychopaths from that breed who could
be easily and logically fitted into these narratives. One thing is certain,
however: if such critics start appearing in mainstream movies, they will surely
talk in the same up-to-the-minute lingo and with the same fey mannerisms as the
gentleman in an ad on Australian TV for potato crisps – expounding in front of
an obscure painting about its “existentialist hurdy gurdy” before a helpful
member of the general public steps in and turns the picture around the right
way.
© Adrian Martin
August 1993 |
