|
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 theres
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 Creeks 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. Creeks
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
childs 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 Creeks
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.
|