I did not see Ben Quilty’s art exhibition in Sydney but in Adelaide, which, though intended in 1836 as a city for colonialists with intellectual leanings, is now better noted for its mind-numbing substances: wine in its adjunct, the Barossa Valley; weed, as its vape and hydroponics shops suggest; whatever it was that afflicted early risers on the hazy morning after my wine tour as I crept, dejected and hungover, down the city’s central mall and towards the Art Gallery of South Australia. The tour had been troubling, not least because our tour guide had been all thwarted actor’s hopes bound up in gruff machismo, and at one point a sommelier with bottle-blonde comb over had confided that a Nazi hideout used to be nearby. The place made me uneasy; then, causation or corollary, I found that I had totally obliterated myself.
That the sommelier had shared with me alone his juicy titbit, in which, if memory served me right, he took a certain relish, was something inextricable from how I felt that morning in my shambling state of self-recrimination and regret. It was in this attitude I saw the Quilty show my second time, only to be confronted by a picture with new relevance: the artist’s ‘Self Portrait Dead (Over the Hills and Far Away)’ (2007), in which his own intoxication takes on national significance. Like twisted, totalled chassis, another of Quilty’s subjects, it takes a shape that blights our landscape, though our psychic one; with its frontal lobes foreshortened and its looming gob foregrounded, it invokes that damning proclamation made by Patrick White, that ours is a country in which “the mind is the least of possessions... the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak... and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves.” There are parallels, also, with Quilty’s unofficial portrait of Tony Abbott, ‘The Goldilocks zone (Banksia Man)’ (2015), where the face is dominated by the wanton, wobbly mouth, the head tapering upward in a clear evocation of May Gibbs’s patriarchal Proteaceae.
But in the time that has passed between these two paintings, Quilty has made a quite telling development, something akin to the way that his face morphs suddenly out of a hovering void in a series of portraits entitled ‘Inhabit’ (2010), which also includes, more tellingly still, the proprietary mug of Captain Cook. From renderings of symbols of our glut and inebriation, Quilty has emerged as a humanist-progressive, dedicating paintings to war veterans and refugees, the latter of whom are given striking, vibrant tribute in his still lifes of disembodied ‘Life Vests’ (2016-2017). There is a world of difference between the emptiness of life vests and that of a white face depleted by the piss. Quilty knows this now, but rather than the realisation giving inner peace, it seems that his time looking outward, not in, has brought on a certain form of self-recrimination. This is a product of sobriety, no less, of displeasure with the legacy of one’s own people when confronted in the full light of day. Its face is the polar opposite of that of the twitterpated sommelier.
So what is its face? In ‘Inhabit’, after the artist’s visage has emerged from the burrs of nascent sketches and a starkly white void, it does not ascend in its enlightened progressiveness but morphs, instead, into the face of Captain Cook and then into the Devil incarnate. Were the paintings hung in the other direction, we – or rather I, in my reawakening consciousness – might have found consolation in a tribute to wokeness as transcendence over one’s past Anglo-Saxon sins. But the paintings, as hung, are a sliding spectrum of what every white man is: the spiritual descendant of the imperialist explorer whose ‘discovery’ deracinated the indigenous people. Elsewhere, the face of this white self-hate finds its expression in another self-portrait, here in the elongation of Quilty’s nose, a travesty of notions of aquiline beauty, as palely prehensile and invasive as a tapeworm.
The nose grows longer the more one lies to oneself. It is interesting to note that Adam Cullen, a contemporary of Quilty’s, died of both self-hate and substance abuse. Throughout his career, Cullen hid his confusion behind icons of Australian machismo: mongrel dogs, horse’s heads, pinups, Ned Kelly. These symbols betoken the nation’s perception of men as inviolably strong and self-assured. Quilty pokes holes in this fallacy, perhaps most effectively in his ‘Captain S, After Afghanistan No. 2’ (2012), where the oils are rendered vulnerable and wraithlike in depicting a returned soldier’s naked flesh. In his splayed recumbence, the subject recalls Leigh Bowery in Lucian Freud’s ‘And the Bridegroom’ (1993), but where Bowery is fleshy, this man is lily-white, laid bare to the dark black halo of his trauma. Indeed, there is a sense of the captain’s being crushed by the weight of his complicity in a national lie; here we have, in essence, another victim of imperialism (or vicarious invasion at the USA’s behest). With its suggestion of a force bearing down from above, the painting also recalls ‘Self Portrait Dead’, Quilty’s earlier depiction of Australian machismo as a form of masochism. The whiteness of the captain’s body burns a lasting imprint.
Whiteness, machismo, imperialism, masochism, self-recrimination: the longer Ben Quilty paints our national identity, the more inextricable these qualities appear. Few artists remain in this country in order to investigate its nature, and few of those who do remain stay sober very long. We are lucky to have the clarity of Quilty’s vision.