Taken at Face Value

Self Portraits and Self Images

by Janine Burke

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Artists make images of themselves and others not merely to speculate on, Is my nose too small, my eyes too close, my smile too wide?', but to try and 4see' themselves in their own world. And they themselves get in between their mind and their eye.

Alfred Leslie

Duchamp came in (wearing) a raccoon coat that he had got when he was out in Chicago. He was very proud of that raccoon coat and wore it on every possible occasion. He came in, walking briskly around the room. It was a very large room and I saw him walking round. He came up to me quickly and said, "But where is your self-portrait? Everyone has a self-portrait in their first show."

Georgia O'Keejfe

Alice B. Toklas did hers and now everybody will do theirs.

Gertrude Stein

I suppose that almost every artist has made a self-portrait at some time or another. Self-portraits are fundamental forms of artistic expression; they are self-reflective because they create the creator in his/her own image, be it literal or allusive, and they are fascinating because they enlarge understanding, for the audience, of the artist and for the artist of who and what he or she is.

Self-portraits tell stories, they play games with identity and they can be humorous, narcissistic, metaphorical, descriptive and obsessively analytical. They capture, or at least pursue, a desire for self-knowledge that has flooded the twentieth century and determined the content of much of its art. In the last decade, dubbed the 'me' decade by American satirist Tom Wolfe, self-portraits have taken greater licence with how and what they tell an audience of an artist's life. An interest in increasingly personal, diaristic, autobiographical art has altered the kind of art that is being made and the suggestion or statement that is conveyed.

In one sense all art is autobiographical but the paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, video and other media represented in this exhibition try to delineate what it means to isolate aspects of one's own life, environment and feelings about the world. This exhibition is meant to extend an appreciation of the self-portrait, not batten it down to bald description but broaden it to the more commodious and inclusive 'self-image'.

Bea Maddock has said that she sees all her work as a self-portrait, no matter how removed the images she makes may be from her own features. This is because she expresses themes and symbols in her prints that, though they may undergo great outward changes, remain consistent reflections of her philosophy and sense of herself.

Gareth Sansom has gone further and stated that all artists' work is about 'self-image'. He feels that the term 'self-portrait' is limiting. Gareth Sansom's paintings and studies have for many years been concerned with aspects of his own personality and life; he has often been brutally frank in these images though his statement that 'all art is about self-image', should make the viewer realize that he uses photographs/information about himself both as a formal and visual device and to explore his own personality. In fact, the way that Sansom structures his works, with photographs, paintings, collage providing a layered, faceted, ambiguous surface is a correlation with the inconsistencies and mysteries of personality, even one's own.

While I cannot make claims for any one, specific response by the.artists in this exhibition to the issue of self-portraiture/self-imagery, certain directions emerge.

One of the most interesting features of the work of the fourteen artists represented here is that none of them deal with the artist-as-artist; in the studio, palette in hand, squinting into a mirror or boldly facing the audience. It is as though this time-honoured view of the artist is no longer relevant, understanding who you are is more important than being seen to be operating in a certain role.¹

Personality has become the subject, not its trappings.

Nor do artists, anyway, exist in a society that gives them a real role to play; they must invent it.

Over the last century the most convincing self-portraits are those that give alarmingly direct information about the state of mind of the artist and through this they become self-reflective; they indicate what it is like not only for the artist to live in a particular time but also what it means to be an artist at that time.

Edvard Munch's frightened and frightening visions of himself relay some of the anxieties that beset men and women around the turn of the century, when they ceased to see themselves as beings who lived harmoniously within a coherent society. Francis Bacon goes further than this, as does Egon Schiele though Schiele is obsessed with his role as victim, of his own sexuality as much as anything else.

Schiele's drawings of himself masturbating have no parallel as self-exploratory sexual icons until Vito Acconci masturbated under a platform in a New York gallery in 1971 and, wired for sound, let the audience share his orgasms several times a day. Many male artists, particularly those associated with the German expressionist group around the turn of the century, expressed their self-portraits as manifestations of their own sexuality.²

This is, of course, the fine line that self-portraits must always walk; between self-indulgence and self-obsession and an authentic, self-aware view.

The artists in this exhibition have confronted such issues in a variety of ways. They are not the only artists in this country making self-portraits but they do, I feel, try to express a new response to themselves and through themselves to the world.

None of them are interested in making their own image beautiful or glamorous though they are concerned to modify, distort and alter it, like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle, in order to create or conjure a representation. I find this a particularly admirable quality given, since the popularity of the camera, the special image that each person has of him or herself. "That's not me", someone will say when presented with a photograph that presents an unusual or unflattering view, affirming that the concept of self-image is much more real than a self-portrait even though a camera is not supposed to lie'.

For women in particular, images (read: stereotypes) have been manufactured to preserve some of the most negative aspects of their sexuality; glossy, brainless beauty, slim, attractive bodies, flawless complexions and eternally smiling mouths. Many of the women artists represented here set about making new images of themselves and of other women.

Two of the earliest works in the exhibition are Aleks Danko's Dankorub Portrait (1971) and Alberr Shomaly's Self Portrait (1976). Few artists feel relaxed enough about their image to parody it or to use humour, however lightly, when they interpret it. Danko not only laces his work with humour, he revels in it.

In Dankorub Portrait there are ten photo-booth-type snaps of the artist that catch him as a mock-serious salesman, selling, in this case, himself. Thus the title is a pun on his own name and his own image is the 'product' — there is even a mandatory smear of 'Dankorub' beneath the photographs like a greasy signature. The photographs are reminiscent of stills from a film or, in this case, a television advertisement: the gestures of rubbing and touching his face significantly alter his expression and even the shape of his face as though it is being moulded afresh for each new shot. Danko made several other self-portraits around this time like Self Portrait Three (1970) and Self Portrait I Remember You (1970) that are nostalgic, memento pieces and that do not share the same self-assured irony evident in Dankorub Portrait.³ As in Heavy Aesthetic Content (1971), he uses a thick, wooden frame that is both well-crafted and sturdy and manages to echo and thereby cock a snook at traditional, framed works of art.

Danko parodies his own image and his name — the last being the most intrinsic 'self-portrait' any-one has — with artful, tongue-in-cheek wit.

Alberr Shomaly's prints and this photograph/ painting from the mid-1970's concentrate on his physical appearance: there are few works that Shomaly made during this period that did not figure his face or his naked body, stretched odalisque-like on a couch. They are sensuous, almost narcissistic portraits, the reflections of a private world where the major discoveries are those to be made about oneself and the endless fascination for and with one's appearance.

In Self-Portrait he has painted over a photograph of his head and neck 'retouching' his own face. It is whimsical, and gently inclined but painted so thickly that the face is expressionless and masklike, beautiful and remote.

This self-exploration is not simply about Shomaly's absorption by his appearance: these works state with great clarity the shock of discovery of one's own image and the desire to describe the features again and again, to imprint one's being on paper or whatever, to fix oneself in time. It is this underlying urgency that gives these studies a haunting and memorable quality.

Like most of the artists represented here, Jenny Watson uses photography but as a reference and a starting point rather than as a chosen medium. Her Self Portrait: Tiger Lounge Version (1979) and Self Portrait: Light Fire Version (1980) are based on photographs which form an important part of her stock of visual images.

Jenny Watson's work has, over the last five years, been concerned with a progressively more personal world. In 1975 she began to paint life-size portraits of her friends and family that combined a powerful, often centralized and deliberately expressionless figure with a flat, monochromatic ground. Since then she has painted endearing, carefully observed and witty 'portraits' of her cats and a major series of paintings, the Houses (1976-77).⁴

The Houses were a history of Watson's life in various Melbourne suburbs, a kind of photo album of her past, with two versions of each house she had lived in: one a large painting and the other, a smaller one, carried the address of the house, rather like a post-card. More recently she has turned her attention to her immediate circle of friends and she has created some truly contemporary portraits, that reveal quite lucidly the enormous possibilities for this tired genre. The dreary images touted in each year's Archibald Prize as portraits show how uninspired and unambitious this genre has become. Jenny Watson's portraits, on the other hand, convey not only the style of some of the personalities of the late 1970's but also the new ways of expressing themselves, of being, that may be available to men and women in the next decades.

Her self-portraits are similarly frank appraisals, though she always relieves the intensity with an edge of humour that is an undercurrent in all her work. In Self-Portrait: Tiger Lounge Version Watson looks out at the audience with a knowingness that capitalizes on her rather debauched air for its disconcerting impact. Looking the femme fatale in a black dress she parodies the seductive come-hither glance with a penetrating, ascerbic expression that indicates she is not fooled — and certainly not by herself/image.

This drawing examines Watson's role at a particularly difficult and trying period of her own life and also in a chosen social situation. The Tiger Lounge was a section of an inner suburban Melbourne hotel that featured local punk bands like The Boys Next Door — subjects of several portraits by Watson. This meshing of her personal/musical interests is referred to in works that try to include as much of her daily and immediate life as is useful and inspiring. By drawing images (including her own) from her present tastes and social milieu, she captures with fine observation, aspects of current personality, life-style and behaviour.

This diaristic or autobiographical method has received greater attention and emphasis in the last decade particularly from women artists. They have approached different media — performance, video, photography, painting — with a concern for what is personal and particular to their experience as women. This has had a pervasive effect on art in the last eight or ten years and there is no denying it. Whether or not it has really shifted sexist attitudes in the art world or just sent them underground is worth considering. Currently there is a backlash against a progressive women's movement and this, too, will finally be reflected in the art that is made and how it is seen.

The domestic situation has been (unsurprisingly) a feature of a great deal of women's work though it undergoes very different interpretations as 'self-image' by three of the artists in this exhibition.

Rae Marks has chosen the details of her home and garden as the continuing subject of her art. She has, wrongly, I think, been labelled a naive painter unless naive is taken to mean an utterly clear delight in her world and a patient joy in recording it. Rae Marks lives on a farm in lush, idyllic countryside near Melbourne and her paintings and drawings are a homage to this environment. The Vegetable Garden (1976) shows the cultivated order of the garden itself tended by Marks and watched over by a cat: beyond the fence the natural bush grows in wild profusion.

It is these boundaries that suggest the limits of Rae Marks' world: she puts her own house (and garden) in order and she further coheres that world by painting it as a place of domestic peace and spiritual contentment. That Rae Marks actually appears in her own paintings is almost immaterial because the images she creates are a faithful record of who she is and how she expresses herself through the environment in which she has chosen to live — this is the basis of her art and it is from this it derives its embracing harmony. I know of no other Australian painter who conveys domesticity and its pleasures with such conviction.

The Kitchen Table (1979) is the traditional meeting place in the home where the family gathers to eat, communicate, read, play, warm themselves by the pot-bellied stove and gain a sense of unity. Marks observes toys scattered on the floor, cats curled into fantastic shapes, objects and oddments, colours and patterns that seem to float in the space assigned them: with such a holistic world view all the objects that fill Marks' interiors are generously treated, one thing is not seen as more deserving of attention than another and this gives her paintings a rich, decorative quality, an all-over pattern.

There is a mood of fairy-tale peace and happiness that emanates from her paintings as though the home with all its associated and traditional values of security and harmony is indeed the right and fitting place to be. The two affirmative and optimistic final lines from Robert Browning's poem 'Pippa's Song' summarize the spirit of Rae Marks' work: 'God's in his heaven/All's right with the world!'

Domenico de Clario's installations have been made, quite literally, from the domestic situation. They have included pieces of broken china, toys, hand-written notes on scraps of paper, photographs of his children, string, plastic and household flotsam and jetsam. While Rae Marks stresses the order and contentment found in domesticity, de Clario reflects a more contemporary view — that while home and family can be the centre of life, that centre can be both problematic and chaotic. His sculptures are fragmentary and transitory in both style and spirit; they are also allusive, nostalgic and romantic.

The objects that comprise these sculptures are rarely new or unused and this gives them a certain significance as if they are meant to represent times and places past: the objects that describe or suggest the matrix of de Clario's life then become memorabilia, humble (but important) treasures from daily life. Several of his works have conveyed a sense of loss through their fragmentation while others have incorporated string that has delicately and tenuously tied together what looks like the remnants of some domestic tidal wave.

The placement of these objects seems casual even arbitrary but the organization is intuitive, careful and an attempt to unify and cohere things that are, physically and psychologically, at odds with each other. His sense of identity is connected both with the process of making the works and the content of the works in a very real way: de Clario's installations are tableaux vivants in the most literal meaning of the words. They suggest the complexity, difficulty, messiness and mutability of life and the continuing battle we all have to find some way of ordering the chaos.

While de Clario attempts to salvage what he can from the wash of objects and emotions that surround him, Robert Rooney observes the patterns and rituals of daily life with irony and detachment.

An artist who during the 1960's concentrated on abstract, decorative paintings that were large-scale serial images derived from the cut-out shapes on breakfast cereal packets and knitting patterns, Rooney abandoned painting in favour of photography in 1970. The serial nature of his work continued as did an over-riding interest and delight in the banal, commonplace aspects of everyday suburban living.

If Jenny Watson's Houses were an affirmative (if slightly nostalgic) view of the suburban situation, then Rooney is equally affirmative but he is also fascinated by the order and structure to be found in seemingly meaningless domestic tasks. Both the composition and the content of his photographs reflect this. Like Rae Marks and Domenico de Clario his domestic environment forms his self-image and Rooney isolates, in a most fastidious way, the elements that focus his interpretation of the world around him.

In Garments Rooney has taken 107 photographs of clothes folded after each day's wear and this is related, as Robert Lindsay has pointed out, to personal discipline.⁵ Photographic sequence works like Garments also have the quality of a game, played with the same 'parts' that are re-arranged and re-constructed for endless, obsessive pleasure: it is the minute shifts and changes in what appears a bland routine that Rooney celebrates, the slightly different placing of objects of clothing day after day, not flux or upheaval.

The 'art world' has become, in the last two or three years, the subject for Rooney's photographic work. In a series of portraits taken from colour slides, Rooney again documents his immediate world, this time dominated by personalities, more fragmented and lively than the monastic order of his home. Initially attracted to photography through Ed Ruscha's 'dumb' photographs of gasoline stations, Rooney has said, "they were like ordinary photographs.. .and they appealed to me more than arty photographs, which I can't stand.⁶

This deliberate lack of concern for technical prowess has led to many 'bad' photographs but for Rooney who sees the camera as a recording device rather than a vehicle for emotional/intuitive interpretations of his friends and acquaintances, the technique is certainly secondary. Rooney does not escape, however, the 'romance of the camera', that is, the relationship that is pictured and caught between photographer and subject, no matter how 'objective' that relationship may be.

Rooney calls his photographs 'portraits' which indeed they are: they are posed, not casual, they are also funny {Allan Mitelman being Robert Hunter), traditionally 'beautiful' {Kijfy Rubbo and Ron Radford) and structured {John Nixon). They are, unlike his earlier paintings and photographic sequence works, rarely ironic — perhaps the art world is too close to home to be seen with humorous detachment. These photographs are full of in-jokes (for the cognoscenti), homages to friends, references to art and to personality. For Rooney as an art critic for a Melbourne newspaper, these people are more than ever the matter of his world and these portraits are once again Rooney's way of ordering that world and identifying his place within it.

The four photographers in this exhibition Micky Allan* Virginia Coventry, Sue Ford and Ponch Hawkes, have all been involved in the women's movement and with exhibitions of women's work. Both Ponch Hawkes and Sue Ford have produced strongly autobiographical series and all four artists are engaged in consciously attempting to make 'new' images related to their own politics. They are four of the best and most innovative photographers working in this country at present.

Sue Ford's series like Time (1973), Faces (1975) and Boyfriends (1975) describe change — in her friends* in herself and in her relationships. Her film-making activities also bear this out. The Time series photographs compare the effects of time on the faces of Ford's friends: one earlier shot is placed next to a more recent one. Marriage, child-birth, travel, altered living circumstances, hair-cuts and wrinkles have all taken place in the mean time transforming, in some instances quite astonishingly, the visages.

Ford examines her own features in Faces with passionate attention and and dispassionate choice of image: they tell, in narrative fashion, Ford's psychological history, etched on her face for everyone to see. They are as honest as one can ever be about oneself. Boyfriends is an extension of this appraisal, in the manner of a photo album, of her relationships with men: the men, like her previous records of her friends, are seen identified with specific periods in her life, with unfolding and changing Time.

This preoccupation with time and its minute physical effects on those around her is suspended in her untitled photographs in this exhibition. Personality is made anonymous, time is rendered immobile and Ford creates images of female sensuality that are voluptuous, relaxed and expansive. I find these photographs startling because they provide a rich alternative to those endless 'arty' photographs of nudes in the landscape, women crumpled or perched on thoroughly uncomfortable looking rocks/ruins/ roofs and the whole image permeated with a quasi-surrealist air.

The nude in the landscape has been the staple of a great deal of twentieth century photography. Sue Ford sees the woman-in-landscape quite differently: she is separate from the lush vegetation she inhabits, both texturally and psychically, she related to her environment without overpowering it, she is not contained, described or symbolized by nature. It is her background and it complements her sexuality, it does not suggest it. Women's 'natural' or biological role has identified them as inseparable from nature, as being nature. Ford creates a new Garden of Eden where woman meditates on her environment in splendid isolation; solitary, self-sufficient and sensuous.

Ponch Hawkes has taken photographs of herself photographing herself and of her friends and their mothers (Our Mums and Us, 1977). This last series extended the same interest in the immediate lives of one's milieu that informs the work of many contemporary women photographers: it is also pursuing new images of women's lives/work/ relationships/experiences that are important to document now, as they are happening. Ponch Hawkes' photographs are not glimpses of some fabled New Woman but perceptively assess the changes women are encountering in their relationship to their mothers, their work and themselves.

In her series for Women and Work: a kit for schools (1970)⁷ Hawkes has placed women securely within their role as workers; teaching, under-water diving for marine specimens, training as chefs, checking computers and typing up articles for publication in a Melbourne newspaper. They are refreshingly unstereotypical, in image and job-orientation, and images such as these seen in the context of the secondary education system will hopefully provide female students with some of the role models they have lacked or that have been denied them for so long.

Ponch Hawkes' Birthday photographs (1975), a series taken in her bedroom from her reflection in the mirror are a humorously self-deprecating 'self-portrait'. Beneath the photographs is written a tale of failed seduction: the man she invited home to spend the night of her twenty-ninth birthday decided to give it a miss. They are brave and funny photographs: brave because Hawkes let us share a personal failure that very much affects sexual self-image and also as she photographs herself naked, it is a double exposure (excuse the pun). They are funny because they parody sexual/emotional nakedness or vulnerability and affirm that to be alone and unloved may be lousy on a Sunday morning but that one's 'image' can remain positive, even inspiring.

Her flamboyantly life-size photograph in this exhibition is utterly affirmative: Ponch Hawkes has recreated herself as a trapeze artist (she is currently on tour with Circus Oz), a daring, glamorous and highly skilled task. Hawkes has reacted to the small-scale intimacy of much women's art and she takes on a thoroughly public and theatrical role and champions strength, suppleness and balance. She is literally as large as life.

Micky Allan has been hand-painting photographs for five years: her first photographic series produced in this way was Laurel (1975). Since then she has exhibited Babies (1977) and the Old Age (1978) series. Though Micky Allan rejects any specific social commentary in her choice of images⁸ the installation that accompanied her Old Age series and the implications of the images themselves suggest new ways of viewing an art work and the ageing process. Allan transported her bedroom into the gallery⁹ and then placed the photographs on the wall. The artist stayed in the gallery each day, talking with visitors about the technical processes involved in her prints/paintings while the visitors could make cups of tea, lounge on her bed, chat, look at the work or listen to the radio.

By sharing her personal space with gallery visitors, Micky Allan challenged the cool, impersonality of the gallery environment: she created her own environment for her work and controlled it. She not only introduced aspects of her self-image into her work, she constructed the ambience in which she wished her work to be seen.

Her two self-portraits in this exhibition Sydney (1979) and Bendemeer (1979) make sensitive use of hand-colouring the images. Bendemeer shows the artist in a bush setting but one that has been enhanced and delicately transformed by greens, mauves and browns, a fine web of brush-strokes that captures the density of the undergrowth and the changing patterns of the river's surface. The artist's pale, smiling face becomes the centre in a muted background of green.

Sydney, on the other hand, is bold, brash and strongly coloured: the mount and the wooden frame echo this decorative feeling. Micky Allan is seated in front of a mural-size image of a laughing kookaburra: the colours are denser and brighter than previous works and the scale of both of these photographer/ paintings is larger than series like Old Age or Babies. Perhaps this relates to Micky Allan's feeling that the personal, diaristic, autobiographical aspects of women's art need to be broadened¹⁰ as this is not the only means women should have to express new or positive self-images.

Virginia Coventry's photographs have been about correlation and contradictions — between the 'man-made' world and the female/feminist view-point expressed in perspective-based photographs, between "corporate and bureaucratic decisions and the nature and texture of people's individual response."¹¹ Her presentation usually includes hand-written text/ information on/instruction how to approach the work and a collage-style arrangement of photographs.

From the Ground Up (1979) a series of eight photographs published in Lip are arranged so that empty, concrete, 'man-made' roads, buildings and nature strips sit above ground shots of earth, water and leaves, literally, a female perspective. Coventry addresses her "assumed female audience" who "no longer sees 'man-made' as a neutral, cliche term". She explains that "these images are intended as the start of a game where you go on adding frames from your own vantage point".¹²

Again the notion of a new way of looking at the world that impinges on and surrounds us is paramount to Coventry's image of herself — and of her responsibility to relate what she comprehends of the contradictions apparent in situations that directly affect people or, as in From the Ground Up, women. In her chilling work on nuclear power stations that was shown first in the Sydney Biennale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1979, Here and There (1979) Coventry planned to photograph "nuclear power stations/adjacent environments in the U.K. and West Germany.. .starting from the strong feeling that storing up lethal nuclear waste around the earth for thousands of years wasn't a sane answer to the 'energy crisis'".¹³

She accompanied these photographs with hand-written information that takes on the quality of 'writing on the wall' and an attendant feeling of urgency and alarm.

In this exhibition Coventry is represented by At/to a Point, a book and a series of 36 photographs: the two works relate to and complement one another. On each alternate page of the book there is a hand-mounted photograph of Coventry, several of the head and shoulder shots seen serially in the larger wall piece. On the other pages are offset-printed drawings on opaque white paper. The drawings are about "the inner feelings of body-position and line of sight from my point of view... or that of 'the subject' in the photograph (the drawings are not of the photographs)."

They can also be seen to explore head and shoulders portrait convention "expanded/unravelled by the camera positions" and the "outer image/inner feeling".

The wall piece of 36 photographs examines features from every angle and, taken in sequence, it is like a film in slow motion where the subject is turning with imperceptible movement. Like From the Ground Up these two works are about position, perspective and an attempt to make clear certain relationships. In her book the drawings (of interior, abstracted self-image) correlate with Coventry's facial features and, opposite the head shot, is a rubber-stamp 'diagram' that indicates her physical position in space.

The 'real world' is represented by the circular diagram that 'places' Coventry, the head shot shows what she looks like from a succession of angles and thus describes her while the drawings suggest the world of the imagination and the feelings with the freedom and energy of the lines. Like Ponch Hawkes, Coventry controls her image and the space she occupies — even the interior space.

Mike Parr's viedo-tape Cathartic Action/Social Gesture No. 5 (1977) and Gareth Sansom's. Study for Painting I and II indicate a very different kind of exploration of personality and of identity. Both artists have been concerned with pain and violence as themes — explicit in the case of Parr, implicit in Sansom's.

Through the disturbing images thus created they have confronted and challenged conventional attitudes regarding suffering both of a physical and a sexual nature.

Mike Parr has been doing performance works since 1971 in Australia and overseas: he has completed around eighty works. Parr has written that he wanted to "make pieces done substantive in terms of my own history (childhood and memory) and as interactions with other people".¹⁴ Cathartic Action/Social Gesture describes these aims in an immediate and initially horrifying way. In the video-tape's opening shots Mike Parr apparently chops off his left arm before a shocked audience at a Sydney art gallery; he then 'removes' the false arm which was attached to his body and filled with animal offal; his sister rises from the audience and presents him with a pink, knitted arm that is then attached to replace the former 'arm'.

The audience is then engaged in discussion with Parr related to the performance, its impact, the position of the disabled in society and Parr's rationale for the piece. As many people will know, Mike Parr has one arm and this is virtually the only time that he has made a performance that sets out to confront this as an issue, one that is no doubt difficult and painful for the artist.

What Parr does in the performance is to control the loss of the arm himself and to relive the experience of the loss in a seemingly violent and masochistic way but the title of the performance is the clue: it is indeed a cathartic action for the artist and a necessarily public one, so a 'social gesture'. It is a most direct way of involving the audience in problems of a personal nature, in the physical presence of Parr's identity, not just his appearance. This identity is not distanced, palatable, ironic or playful but tangible, painful, alarming and intense.

It is the most raw of the self-portraits/self-images in this exhibition and one of the clearest: it brutally extends the limits of what an artist can tell his/her audience about private trauma, it makes the audience share this trauma and confront its implications. Perhaps Mike Parr also seeks by distributing private agony in a public way to relieve part of the burden the disabled must undergo in this society.

Many of Mike Parr's filmed performances have been about endurance and pain, literally about bloodletting, in some cases. He has commented on these works:

"If an artist is to become socially integrated and able to produce socially committed works, then the point of entrance is through the individual artist. These violent works exist not just to record aspects of my self-awareness but to actively modify that awareness. I want to put myself through a stress situation to learn new aspects of myself. Whether I like it or not, the origins are manifestations of latent obsessions. It doesn't matter how vehement your personal morality, it's terribly flimsy if it isn't grounded in self-knowledge."¹⁵

Unlike Mike Parr, Gareth Sansom does not give away his secrets so easily. It is worth remembering that many of Sansom's paintings done since 1965 use photographs or images of himself and his friends that suggest past roles and relationships and provide hermetic information about aspects of his life. Many of his photographic or predominantly photographic works like Figure Studies (1977) and Siccolam (1977) depict the artist as a heavily powdered and painted bewigged 'female', a transvestite.

These images are self-explorations of a radical and unnerving kind: they cast the artist in a traditionally illegitimate role, as outcast and misfit, both socially and sexually and they force the viewer to take on the position of the voyeur. Such works challenge a wide range of assumptions about art, sexuality, audience-expectation and response.

The two Studies for Painting that represent Sansom in this exhibition contain familiar features of pictorial composition and material (Sansom often chooses to use enamel on hardboard). He combines drawing, photographs, paint, masking-tape and words in a frenetic and seemingly chaotic fashion. While Sansom includes some startling and sometimes funny images of himself (in the bath wearing a shower-cap, for example) the images are not arranged or accreted in such a way to give precise information about his state of mind or feelings about himself.

Instead Sansom presents a jumble of 'portraits' either included in photographic form or painted onto the surface. Jostling these images are painted shapes, areas of blank hardboard, a photograph of his father and, dominating one of the studies, a portrait head of one of Sansom's friends, artist Stuart Black. Though the organization of the composition and the choice of images seems fortuitous it is carefully planned to build a tantalizingly mysterious self-portrait.

Sansom has distanced himself from the explicit sexual confrontation of his 'drag' photographs and what he conveys in the current work is that personality is not one, monolithic, unified whole but that self-image is a fractured, fragmented, unbalanced and contradictory thing. This notion of self-image being contradictory or multi-faceted is shown in the variety of ways Sansom presents his own face: smiling and holding a child, looking imperiously down at the viewer, coy and uncertain in the bath, grinning enigmatically from the centre of a work. Some shots are from several years ago, others more recent: Sansom has a selection on hand to include in the painting or to inspire or modify a drawn image.

Time, in Sue Ford's photographic series, unfolds and with it so does the physical image but time in her work is linear: in Sansom's, time and the equivalent changing self is grasped in a continually present moment. The 'self Sansom was or was seen as ten years ago is depicted alongside the 'self he was in 1977 or is in 1980. It is a creative way to deal with aspects of the ego: to admit to change but not in an evolutionary progression towards a 'better' self, rather the self is seen as a continuum, altering constantly, absorbing influences, emphasizing different roles that express its variety, available to and fascinated by change rather than resisting or categorizing it. Sansom suggests all this in the compelling and deliberate disorder of these works.

Vivienne Binns' work has, over the last decade, been concerned with a 'personal' history that extends through her own family, or, at least, its female members¹⁶ to a far wider 'family' of women. She is a feminist artist who has worked as a craftswoman engaged in techniques such as silk-screeening on vitreous enamels as well as completing architectural commissions, design projects and performances, the last usually with other artists. More recently Vivienne Binns has worked as artist-in-residence at the University of New South Wales where she initiated a project called Mothers9 Memories, Others' Memories (1979) and she continued this project during 1980 as artist-in-community in Blacktown, a Sydney suburb.

The Mothers' Memories project was to encourage the participation of students, staff (at the University) and men and women to recall "the lives of women and their means of expression in the domestic sphere".¹⁷ This was done through the "collection of memories, family albums and through the discovery of those activities practised in the home which provide a medium for creative expression".¹⁸ Like Sue Ford and Ponch Hawkes, Vivienne Binns is concerned with fresh, relevant imagery of women (and therefore her own self-image) and not with emphasizing the negative.

She is constructing through her research into the lives of women, alternative female history and new images and understanding that arise from such history. 'History' usually connotes men, wars and governments: Binns, by operating in the community and interacting with people who do not have 'art skills', is collectively collating and forming another kind of history: a history of daily work and life, the unnoticed and often disregarded pattern of women's activities in the home.

This is presented in a collage of visual image and documentation with the involvement of many people who contribute in form and content to the work. Vivienne Binns' work in this exhibition reflects the interests that have engaged her for the last two years.

Bea Maddock is the only artist in this exhibition whose entire oeuvre has been devoted to self-portraits. From her earliest paintings, through her woodcuts, silkscreen prints and photo-etchings Bea Maddock has used her own image (as in Passing the Glass Darkly) or objects that belong to and represent her (Coat). In other prints like Square (1972) or Nowhere (1974) she suggests the problems of contemporary society: alienation, confusion, fear of the future, loss of identity. But all these issues cohere into self-image for they all express Maddock's own world-view, one that is often conveyed with black humour.

As in Gareth Sansom's paintings Bea Maddock's self-image is ambiguously expressed in many cases: there are usually several layers of meaning to be decoded before the final 'message' is revealed and even then, the message is open to interpretation. Bea Maddock plays with questions of identity and personality and resists the ready answer.

In Coat she depicts her own striped jacket: two blocks of writing above and below the image balance its dense sculptural form. The writing is a transcription from Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. As it is placed vertically to the image it is extremely difficult to read. Bea Maddock's interest in existential philosophy has determined this inclusion but the quotations themselves have the quality of a private notation, written carefully on the plate but virtually inaccessible to the viewer.

A print like Coat both describes a real object with its connotations of wear, use, comfort and personal possession and it also incorporates reference to a particular philosophy that has deeply influenced the artist. While the jacket can be seen to represent or 'stand for' the physical being of Maddock (a possible pun on the title of Sartre's book), the hand-writing suggests a private journal, a very different kind of possession, made tentatively public.

Bea Maddock uses her own features in Passing the Glass Darkly. The three images are progressively obliterated as the grid beneath correspondingly expands: the less distinct her own features, the simpler the grid structure becomes. Most artists do not wreak havoc on their own image this way: for Bea Maddock the notion of playing with identity is paramount and in this print she uses aquatint to dematerialize her face, create it then disintegrate it, so it is ghostly, distanced and veiled.

As with all the artists in this exhibition, photography is used as a basis for most of Maddock's prints or paintings. She has been a great hoarder of newspaper cuttings seeking out disasters — demonstrations, violence in an urban situation or in war, funeral crowds, rockets crashing earthwards, survivors of the Titanic, racial conflict.

Correspondingly she is fascinated by the myth of Icarus, the boy who tried to fly to the sun on homemade wings, and many of her early paintings carried titles such as Icarus Running (1963) or Icarus in Flight (1963). While the world represents the chaos that the 'disaster' images convey, for Maddock herself the Icarus myth both symbolizes such violent defeat and absurdly quixotic idealism in the face of it: it also symbolizes her own position. It is an image of struggle against odds that can come from without or within: either way one must confront them, and from the confrontation, Maddock delineates her self-image.

I suppose the issue that emerges most clearly from this exhibition (apart from the use of photography by almost all the participants) is the way the artists/ individuals have sought autonomy and control throught their self-portraits. In Mike Parr's video-tape control is gained through exorcism of pain and physical disability in public, for Virginia Coventry control of her space, internal and external, is notated carefully like some map of the self, for Rae Marks her domestic environment is lovingly described down to its last detail so she possesses it utterly, for Robert Rooney fastidious recording of the minutiae of daily life captures and holds its relevance for the artist.

Not all of the artists display their self-image through this process but it is a fundamental form of expression. Amongst some groups of tribal people the photograph of a person or his/her image is believed to steal the soul and while magic is not the business of the contemporary artist, the power involved in creating one's own image relates to the definition of the self, to mirroring face/feelings/being and to controlling what we, the audience, are allowed to see and understand of the artist's persona.

Footnotes

1. Brett Whiteley is one of the few Australian artists who pursues and glorifies such an image.
2. See Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in early twentieth century vanguard painting", Artforum, December, 1973.
3. For further discussion of Danko's work see Gary Catalano, "Aleksander Danko", ART and Australia, vol.12, no.l, 1974.
4. See my "Homes Beautiful: Jenny Watson's Houses/Lynn Hershman's Dream Weekend", Arts Melbourne, vol.2, no.2, 1977.
5. Robert Lindsay, "Robert Rooney", ART and Australia, vol.14, no.l, 1976.
6. As above.
7. Women and Work: a kit for Schools, produced jointly by the TTAV, VSTA and VTV Sexism in Education project and the Working Women's Centre, 1979.
8. Suzanne Davies, "Micky Allan — Photographer", Lip, 1978/9.
9. Micky Allan mounted her one-person exhibition titled "Photography, Drawing, Poetry — A Live-in Show" at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries, Melbourne University Union and at Watters Gallery, Sydney, in 1978.
10. See Davies, Lip.
11. Artist's statement, European Dialogue: Sydney Biennale, (exhibition catalogue), Sydney, 1979.
12. Virginia Coventry, From the Ground Up, Lip, 1978/9.
13. Artist's statement, European Dialogue: Sydney Biennale (exhibition catalogue), Sydney, 1979.
14. Artist's statement, European Dialogue: Sydney Biennale (exhibition catalogue), Sydney, 1979.
15. Barbara Hall, "Hello Artfilm, Farewell Inhibodress", Art Forum, (Australian), vol.1, no.l, 1972.
16. See my "Experiments in Vitreous Enamels", Lip, 1976,
17. Tharunka, vol.25, no.5, April, 1979.
18. As above.

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