Greg Creek
Paris Desktop Drawing
Canberra Contemporary Art Space
29 April - 3 June 2000
Canberra
 
 
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Greg Creek, Paris Desktop
Drawing
installation view  
Canberra Contemporary Art Space  

Physical and perceptual acts of journey along with attendant psychological transformation (or bewilderment) re-occur as theme, motif and condition in Australian art. This much is constant. For every artist working here with cyber technologies or espousing a re-figuration of global time/space experience in an electronic age there’s another pondering the slow surface traffic of history in specimen form back and forth between hemispheres. Or one excavating the perplexing sediments of word and image deposited by peoples passing through. And others perhaps looking to induct themselves, however momentarily, within the dislocating frames of cross-cultural exploration. Greg Creek’s Paris Desktop Drawing straddles a network of such projects. It is material artefact as well as both trace and evocation of that sense of displacement, anxiety, wonder and above all heightened self-consciousness familiar to any traveller conditioned by an antipodean frame.

Creek’s ‘drawing’ spans a single sheet of paper 18 metres long displayed under glass. It was undertaken during a residency in Paris where Creek set up a portable table in his studio across which he scrolled sections of the paper (right to left), marking it most days. The final work consists of small sketches and diagrammatic notations in conventional graphic media, as well as “accidental scourings, spills and abrasions”. Superbly rendered anatomical, architectural, and botanical studies float amongst smudges of charcoal, a child’s hand and footprints, and casual colour washes. The work abounds with diaristic musings and observations; often acerbic doodlings on subjects ranging from artworld politics and personalities to European attitudes to Asian and Pacific cultures; lists of daily tasks, activities and contacts; personal admonishments; fragments of poetry, dream descriptions and quasi-correspondence; and often frivolous wordplays within and across French and English. The work acts as field of play; as record of daily activity and observation; and as trace of the meanderings of a visiting consciousness constantly enlivened and perplexed by the forms, conventions and languages encircling it, as well as occasionally anxious of its own function within such an environment.

Perhaps the most intelligent feature of Creek’s work is its knowing occupation of temporal and spatial coordinates quite different from those more conventionally associated with either drawing or travel record. The refusal to separate out components into discrete works bounded or framed upon the wall both subverts any sense of finitude and refuses any severing of image or texts from the fluid experience and consciousness that constitutes a key subject of the work. Although Creek compares his travelling drawing table to such apparatus employed by European scientific explorers of the Pacific region, his final work bespeaks the very antithesis of their impulse to collection and cataloguing. Rather, all the elements within, all the registers of record and discourse, blur into and contaminate one another in a more holistic, inclusive evocation of investigation. Furthermore, the work is not portable in the same manner as sketchbooks, diaries or photo-albums. So whilst designating an engagement with elsewhere the work demands a space in the here and now to span, its humble metallic frame supporting an evocation of temporal and spatial passage that demands reconstitution by the viewer strolling up and down its length. Finally, the progress of the drawing right to left proffers a metaphorical inversion of sorts of the passage between ‘old’ world and ‘new’, between beginning and endpoints. In its viewing however, the drawing is open to traversal back and forth in either direction, preferably both. Its meaning is therefore constituted in a persistent act of exchange that serves finally to threaten collapse of the very antipodean relation from which it has emerged and in turn sought to pressure.

Blair French
2000

© The artist and
Photo: Courtesy of the
artist and CCAS.