Jane Trengove, Plague,
detail, oil on board,
50 x 30 cm, 1991.

In Trengove’s earlier works the painted subjects are not really themselves. Still and implacable they possessed an alternative existence within a narrative of cultural misrecognition set in play by the artist. Painted with close obsessive attention to detail — carefully wrought, even jewel-like — they are either deliberately displaced, dysfunctional or (almost) mort. The artist's strategy is to privilege speciality visual effects like sponging, scumbling, fine-brushing and patinating in order to more completely imitate the wooden, woolly, furry, horny skins and filaments of her object/subjects (these are mimetic techniques paraded not only in the Still Life and Trompe l’Oeil genres of the 17th century but also to great effect in portraits of the costumed exotic other demanded by European markets in the late 19th Century). The effect is the production of highly desirable objects, lending a chillingly hysterical cast to their failure as subjects within a milieu of cultural and economic misappropriation.

The gorgeously soft and curly cowlick ornamenting the lustrous (but skull-like) brow of the Sheep in Form Follows Function cannot fail but blind the animal, required in greater and greater numbers by an expanding colonial (and constitutionally rural) outpost in an arid and ecologically fragile land. Not to worry though, when the imperial demand for wool dries up we've still got our mutton, and the wealthy sheep-breeders can have their's served up on the tip of an elegant carving Knife with a handle made from the bereft foot of the self-same animal who provided the carcass.

Another diabolical catalogue of severed selves is elaborated within a context of fraudulent cultural memory in Souvenir, Trengove's own black armband take on Australian history. The painted domestic relics, sourced from the shipwreck museum at Port Campbell, belie a nostalgia, even though the old-fashioned colours, loving detail and easy handling of paint may elicit a desire for recognition (and recuperation) of loss in the viewer. These little remnants are a lamentable lot: pots of ointment for gout and sore breasts, limbs of the bodies of drowned dolls, a porcelain monkey fiddler, a stringless violin, and mournful crow. Comic in their incapacity to recall anything more than disappointment, superstition and misfortune, they speak of another loss, wrought by a colonising process which did not understand the land and which endeavoured to obliterate those who did.

One could argue that the political project of these earlier shows — the exposure of false economies — is undermined by the artistic intent of fraudulence; the deliberate conceit of attracting and trapping the viewer through the allure of the painterly method. But this would be to misrecognise both the complex self-reflexivity of Trengove's strategy as much as the regard, bordering on reverence, she extends to her audience. Trengove "thinks the work" before beginning production. She envisages every possible and probable audience transaction with a hard-nosed appreciation of popular taste and the marketplace. She makes the paintings work as hard as they possibly can, so that viewers can piece together all the clues and get the (other) bigger picture. Trengove's attitude toward the audience in these earlier shows may be contrary, and always ironic, but it is never contemptuous. More importantly it is a relation that is manifestly politicised by the artist's self-aware status as an outsider in a society that equates bodily disability with disqualification. As Trengove has remarked:

People misrecognise disability. All they see is immobility or failure to function properly. They fail to understand that disabled people are privileged in different ways. They become ‘high achievers’. Because of my disability I have become, in a sense, a trained observer. Which has given me an interest in the way cultural meanings operate at different levels, and how representation can be used to interrogate these meanings.

One may read Trengove's project tangentially, as a critical intervention where the societal projection of disability onto the lived experience of other-inhabited bodies (including her own) is destabilised by the picturing of a social body which operates along mistaken lines of identity, category and use value. Within these same terms, one may also read her project as engaged with transformative desire, and her intent is revelatory as much as it is antagonistic. She invites us to look hard; beyond the easy specular appearance of things to the way they manifest inappropriate public meanings. She asks us to consider how vision can serve to bolster what we already think we know and allows us to live as extremely as she does, to see in a dis/engaged manner.

You can never underestimate just how seriously Trengove takes her audience, serious enough to wonder at the artist/audience dialectic in Rim and Sight Gag. Those familiar with Trengove’s signature-style may feel distinctly at odds with the non-image that confronts them on entering the gallery. The myriorama of tiny painted canvases appears as a thin brownish line doodling its way along the wall. On closer inspection, the horizontal band of murky brown is painted in an agitated manner, reminiscent of the recklessly infantile, with indecipherable streaks, swirls and smudges.

The strip is placed at eyelevel. Scanning the gallery space, the floating band assumes the proportions of an horizon (water below and sky above) and specific characteristics emerge — lagoons, beaches, rocky knolls, gently rounded hills, palm trees stretching to the sea, perhaps as seen from a fast moving cruiser somewhere in the Pacific. We imagine that we know this invented landscape even if it has never been visited, for it has been played through so many cultural scenarios and inherited memories: Gauguin's native reveries, McHale's Navy, The Blue Lagoon, Lord of the Flies, Ocean Girl, Bikini Atoll, Bali-Hai, Club Med, Maralinga. But these miniature vistas, no bigger than a thumbnail, oscillating between painted mark and discrete feature. They disallow the commodification of the landscape and do not allow the viewer the advantage of encultured otherness. The slick delicate strokes of Rim may reference Joseph Bank's gentlemanly topographic renderings from the deck of The Endeavour, and in their rapid detachment they may match, measure for measure, his willingness to scan, realise, and construct a reality hitherto unseen and unknown, or at least uncharted. Yet they do not betray any anticipation of possession or infiltration. They are not records or descriptions of an incipient domain or empty 'alienable' foreignness. In the end, the landscape exists purely as painted time and space, almost as if the artist has slipped us into an alternative historiography, a regional state of mind. Not so much maps for knowing and possessing, but cartographies for locating oneself within the landscape where one resides, for however many moments, on the Pacific Rim.

In Sight Gag, on the other hand, Trengove gives very little away to the audience. Stepping into Sutton Gallery was like entering a hall of mirrors. Like Rim, Sight Gag is conceived as a circumfluent installation. Clusters of white-framed squares of white-opaqued glass encompass the gallery. They are heraldic, sublimely democratic presences, each bearing what appears to be a pair of scratched-out eyes. There are spheres, pips, crosses, circles and brows, arraigned in couplets, and scratched/stroked with the easy fluency of a cartoonist. The glas avec yeux hover strangely between malevolence and ingenuousness, each genuinely idiosyncratic — circumspect, lazy, loopy, cute, forlorn, insolent. The viewer is left in a quasi-metaphysical bind: Do I view or am I viewed? The urge to resolve the quandary is played out for the benefit of the paintings. Initially, one attempts to read them in purely formal terms; to objectify the shapes and their serial modality within a minimalist pop aesthetic. However, the glaring duality persists, and the harder you attempt to abstract these works the more they exist as dematerialised presences. When one can no longer resist the temptation to eyeball these cartoony orbs or, go a step further, and peer into the peepholes, any last remaining residue of the things-as-objects must be obliterated, and your status as viewer cancelled.

Looking for the clue to read these uncanny presences, Trengove uncharacteristically provides us with nothing. The traditional painting device of the window-as-opening is appropriated only to be doubly undermined — as window on the world because you can’t see out — and as surrealistic voyeuristic (shop) window because you can’t see in. There is nothing behind, nothing inside and nothing to hide; just irretrievably empty shapes masquerading as eyes, bringing us spookily back to ourselves. Sightless when you look straight at them, and as soon as you avert your gaze, they are running over you, sussing you out, saluting you.

Issues of audience reception are to the forefront of another recent Trengove show, this time in her capacity as concept deviser, curator and participant of Body Suits (Arts Access National Touring Exhibition, 1997-1998). Body Suits was conceived along the lines of an inclusive thematic project with contributing artists "chosen for their involvement with the notion of the ‘body’ as a site for exploration", and invited to investigate "preconceptions of the ‘normal’ body in our culture". The thematic component of the exhibition was indicative of Trengove’s drive to pre-empt the devaluation of art exhibited by socially marginalised groups.

Trengove’s own contribution to Body Suits — Self Portrait in Bright Blue — was a reworking of an earlier work Self Portrait in Bright Wool (In Advance of a Broken Arm), 1994. The original self portrait was laconic in style, colliding Dada readymade technologies, folk art, and kitsch style. A cast of the artist's caliper was hand-bound in brightly coloured wool and mounted on painted board studded with gaudy wool pom-poms. The piece paid wry tribute to the persistent reality of brittle bones, accidental falls and lost time. It functioned as both invitation and refusal, courting complicity in the feminisation and (suspect) eroticisation of the object, but only at the expense of the absent, fragile (de-eroticised) subject.

The Body Suits version was a more severe affair; the bobbles have disappeared and the caliper is now wrapped in blue mohair wool. This new covering rephrases the object as a fetish of a different calibre — more cult or votive with mystical powers, than ornamental accessory. As well, the 2D panel accompanying the earlier version — an abstract pastel-coloured distortion of the ‘golden section’ (a dig at the reification of the ideal (body) underlying both Renaissance and modernist principles) — is replaced by a bonus ‘bonafide’ self-portrait of the artist as a little girl. It is an old black and white photograph (coloured the same bright blue as the wool) of young Jane, c. 1954, aged 18 months, recently disabled by polio, and incarcerated in a home-made wooden "spine-straightener". Strapped at the shoulders, waist and hips, cuffed at the feet, skull held in a perpetual state of straight-aheadedness by a brace, her gaze is directed sideways at the camera lens. Here, Trengove (deliberately and not a little tongue-in-cheek) betrays her status as the visibly observed and (invisible) observer, repositioning her outsider status to the dread and mutely hysterical point of iconic martyrdom. The artless contraptions for correction of polio victims in the 1950s and the (mundane) disabled body become woven into art historical and popular culture narratives of other transgressive and transgressed bodies. These are played and replayed with horrible delight upon countless other stages of submission, humiliation, and languishment — the torture chamber, the den of inquisition, the gallows, the S&M dungeon, the stake in the desert/jungle and, of course, The Cross. There is a melancholy shock in this work, but Trengove’s irony does not allow it to slip into an economy of sentimentalised effect. It performs as a defiant re-presentation of self as the site(sight) of self-production rather than banal specularisation.

Trengove's penchant for seeking out and serving up art with a critical twist, for looking for clues to another artist’s intent while assiduously planting her own with the ingenuity of a serial killer is given another turn of the screw in Rim, and Sight Gag. Both exhibitions trade on ambiguity and ambivalence. In Trengove's work things are never as they seem, but in her two latest shows it is not the meaning of the represented image that is at stake but the means of representation itself. Sight, up until now the privileged sense, is made slippery and unreliable. As the grammar of representation recedes, the process of representation is privileged. In the delicately manipulated smudges, streaks and upheavals of Rim, Trengove fashions a paint-scape which one imagines to recognise as it rises from the primeval sludge of her Whatman’s Brown Ochre No. 2. In Sight Gag, the viewer is set further adrift as Trengove orchestrates an ensemble of strangely disembodied images which serve to disable the mastery of the viewing subject in the field of representation. Masquerading as minimalist abstraction, they compel the viewer’s participation in an inexplicable and escalating interplay of glances and counter glances, locking them into a drama of confrontation and non-confrontation, implicating them in the traumatic codes of visual culture. Both these shows lead double lives, crossing the line between pure materiality and representation, between realness and imagined reality.

Kate Reeves
1999

© the artist
Courtesy of the Sutton
& Bellas Galleries &
the artist.

Jane Trengove, The old bush
hut, from Souvenir,
screenprint, oil on
board & porcelain,
dim. var. 1995.

Body suits, work by
Bronwyn Platten, EAF,
1997-8.

Jane Trengove, Self-portrait
in bright blue, from
Body suits, wool & metal,
180 cm in length, EAF,
1997-8.

Jane Trengove, Sight
gag, paint on glass,
15 x 10 cm 1998.