199. Jordan Stokes | Changing skins

The latest Covid 19 lockdown prevented Jordan Stokes from visiting SLOT. His work arrived by courier. From his emails I can tell you that he “was relocated to Canberra for work recently” but little more. He wrote that by Changing Skins he means the “endless processes of change underway in large cities…a component of their nature and success…a process that is never ending.” His idea supersedes the need for a beginning, or an end and, perhaps very much along the way. Reason here is in the passage from one thing to the next. Sold to us these days on catch phrases like - new, technologically responsive, environmentally self-sufficient, and politically correct.

Looking at his work I notice the pediment of a building across the road. It’s a fine building, Long ago the balcony was removed but all the while the paint kept pealing, as it has done while I’ve watched the Plane Tree grow in front of it. Skins, like most things around here are waiting, waiting for the developers accountant to signal GO.

Jordan’s suite of photographs feels like a journey across town, a window, the new facade on the TNT Towers, a pedestrian crossing and a stairwell, too elegant for Kings Cross but the single fluro light is about right. There is nostalgia here that leaves the Joan Baez song, Diamonds and rust in my mind, “Now your smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square, our breath comes out in white clouds and mingles in the air, speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there.” 

But I don’t think Jordan has a journey in mind. There is no nostalgia here for him and no sequence to his images. It is all the same time. He comments, “The atmospheric shift of twilight is a key moment in the city’s relentless change, when urban life adapts and people venture out to play and explore. Nightfall casts the city in shadow, when familiar views become disguised.” In the endless passage of the present moment there is only now for Jordan.

SLOT shares Taring Padi’s ethos. The street is our venue. Our audience is the people who pass us there. And we share their ambition, to hijack your eyes and twist your brain.

Taring Padi is a loose collective of artists who formed during the late 1990’s in the highly politicised contemporary art world of Yogyakarta, the traditional heartland of Javanese culture. Central to their project is a strident opposition to the idea of art for art’s sake that they codified in their “5 evils of culture”. Here they identified the absurdity of government funded and there for sanctioned, socially progressive art forms that purport to be critical of social norms. In contrast the views of 

Taring Padi embrace the struggle of the worker in their artfully expressive political posters, made as un-editioned and unsigned woodblock prints that range in size from the modest examples 

exhibited here to billboard size. The artist is of no consequence here – the message is the single issue.

Rather than lift a context free translation of these works from Google 

translate SLOT offers photographs of works expressing a similar sensibility that are pasted on the building across the road. The struggle for social equity is universal although given different names in different places. 

In these works by Taring Padi social evil is defined as the patriarchy. It robs both men and women of their freedom their labor and their sexuality. The prints were made in the first few years of this century. And in them I cant help noticing the plumes of smoke billowing from chimney-stacks. They seem to offer a sub-text to the various subjects of the works. Should those plumes be read as an expression of industrial modernity as they might have been in the 19thcentury or a cruel 21st century legacy of the patriarchy? Industrialists guilty of their workers rape first and our environment simultaneously.

The Kama Sutra entry in Wikipedia begins… “The text acknowledges the Hindu concept of Purusharthas, and lists desire, sexuality, and emotional fulfilment as one of the proper goals of life”. It discuss “methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics.” 

Wikipedia also notes that the first European edition, self-published by Richard Burton in 1883 did not reflect the Sutra accurately because he revised it to suit 19th-century Victorian tastes. Similarly we might assume that any contemporary translation would recount the poetic passages of this religious text with reference to the rubric of our time. Conveniently for the present this millennium old religious code divides people into four genders, male, female, males who dress as females and females who dress as males. 

Accommodatingly, gender as self-realisation is counted among the goals that we might seek in life with virtu.  Here the Kama Sutra seems to question our idea of the sacred. Is the function of a religious code to identify conduct that has been sanctioned by a divinity for humanity? Or does religion codify humanity in a form that will be sanctioned by a divinity? It may or not be a complex theological question but it is self evident that our existence is a function of an ancestor’s sexual desire. 

Irrespective of the moral limitations we may imposed on desire the images that accompany the Kama Sutra bring a vision of devotional calm to its articulation of desire. A vision that contrasts equally with the sexual code of 19th Century Britain and the sexual rubric that our society is currently struggling with.

Jack Frawley’s work Pandemic is on the money. It marks the resumption SLOT’s exhibition program, which was suspended in response to the recent covid lock down. Jack’s work was devised as a satire of “buz words”, invented to describe the paralysing catastrophe that is Covid 19. By identifying these “catch phrases” with jockeys racing silks on the eve of Melbourne Cup, the race, as the cliché has it, that stops a nation; Jack has poetically observed our Prime Minister’s much parodied assertion that Covid 19 vaccination is not a race. 

It is probably cynical to wonder at the lifting of “lockdown” just in time for the Spring Racing Carnival. Or that international travel will recommence immediately prior to Christmas. But it isn’t cynical to identify our media’s normalisation of confronting situations by over familiarising us with the words, expressions and images used to describe them. Words are rendered clichés when meaning is leached through over use leaving us with only an appreciation of their annunciation as content. This is the essence of news as entertainment.

The behemoth of our materialist culture rolled on throughout lockdown.

We ate drank and net-flixed our way through it. Now we are being coaxed from isolation and back into a “robust” consumerism, not through an eradication of the virus, not by the sudden and jubilant partying portrayed on television, but through an easy acceptance of what was once portrayed as perilous. This is the work of clichés, those artfully identified by Jack Fawley that permit us to face the future of the pandemic “armed” with a vaccine, the so called “jab”. 

Robert Hawkins’s abstract paintings look like something lifted from the 1920’s.  They speak to the works of Piet Mondrian, Kashmir Malevich, Fritz Glarner and Sophie Taeuber-Arp who along with others invented the idea of geometric abstraction. This is a kind of Modern Art or Modernism wittily referred to as the isms – stretching from Impressionism to Post Impressionism, to Pointillism, Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptualism, right up to Post Modernism. Now new art is referred to as Contemporary Art.

In our contemporary world, Robert Hawkins’s paintings offer something that his celebrated and Modern antecedents didn’t – humour. Its playfulness is why a collection of neatly rendered rectangles, triangles and lines leave us smiling! Even grinning at these glorious abstractions in sheer delight.

It might have something to do with the frames that Robert has used. While his impeccably rendered high art paintings are rigorously consistent, his frames are not, they are chipped, low art discards and incongruously pretensions.

Looking over the notes made as I listened to Robert speak about his paintings one statement is repeated, “the frame comes first”. This is the reverse of the usual order, where the art work is finished then a value adding frame is attached. He commented that “35 years ago (I) got the idea of making art while playing with framing offcuts…frames come from reverse garbage…the frames come first…they are a metaphor…frames because I like being scared of the outside…everything is done with the frame coming first…the frame is the home the work sits in…THE FRAME COMES FIRST…I don’t see it in a kitschy way.” 

It is clear that the frame proposes the artwork to Robert. And we might wonder, is it the leftover frame of Modernity that proposes the idea of art in this world that is contemporary with our being? Robert articulates this complex idea with such lucid simplicity that we are left delighting in his clarity, smiling – even chuckling a little as his gently concise paintings are considered.