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A Bachelor Stripped Bare, Even, Grasping Desert(ed) Signs I've been exhibiting my paintings, as a self-taught artist, for about a quarter of a century. Since my first show in 1976, 'Seven Young Wellington Artists', I have held or participated in around 20 exhibitions in New Zealand, divided more or less equally between Christchurch (where my wife and I moved straight after that first show) and Wellington. In 1987, having finally completed a Bachelor of Arts degree (which the title of this article alludes to), I was fortunate to get a job in the University of Canterbury Library. It didn't take long to discover just how useful the library vocation can be for artists, for the easy access it gives to art books and journals. Gaining a reputation amongst my colleagues for being an artist, albeit a decidedly unconventional one, I went so far as to hold an exhibition in the Central Library in 1988. I called it 'Sign, Signature, Significance' (the first solo show I boldly gave a meaningful title to) and had a leaflet printed for it. There was quite a lot of interest in that show, and a well-considered review in the student newspaper. I was aware, however, of the incongruity of a self-taught artist exhibiting in such close proximity to the School of Fine Arts. After gaining my Diploma of Librarianship at Victoria University, Wellington, in 1989, I was re-appointed back at Canterbury to the position of Art Cataloguer; and three years later, in 1993, became Music and Fine Arts Librarian, in charge of administering a physical collection and small staff. When the Music and Fine Arts Collection was finally restructured out of existence at the end of the decade, my position transmuted to 'subject librarian', now with the official title Fine Arts and Humanities Librarian (as it presently stands). I consider myself privileged that my profession has turned out to be so compatible with my creative interests, speaking as a self-perceived humanist as well as artist. My artistic life fluctuated a great deal during the '90s, as art librarian dedication encroached more and more into my leisure time. There was a whole lot of questioning going on, concerning the right level of professional commitment. This concern underlay a paper I presented to the 1995 ARLIS/ANZ Conference in Sydney.1 The 24 hour commitment claimed by some (assuming that such unswerving dedication to librarianship is even possible, let alone desirable!) was not for me, yet even so I gave up painting completely for quite some time. Still, I did manage to hold three solo shows during the decade: 'Structures of Identity and Influence: Grid Paintings' (Christchurch, 1992); 'Figures and Lovers' (Wellington, 1994); and 'Revealing, Concealing: Works on Paper' (Christchurch, 1996). Though with the last of these it seemed that a significant breakthrough had been made, it took me a while to pick up the pieces and take the next steps on my artistic journey, and much longer to even think about another exhibition. The threat of an organisational review was looming, with restructuring to follow, and the times were not only interesting but changing. Cut to the beginning of the new millennium, and there seems to be a positive new energy in the air. For almost a year I had been crystallising my freethinking views on art on spark-online,2 a webzine based in Canada, and had gained, in consequence, a globalised awareness of being part of the wider world. But the more I wrote, the more I found myself being drawn back to painting, and it dawned on me (not for the first time, admittedly) that I'd rather make my own art than waste precious time writing about somebody else's. Finally I wrote about my own art, and 'came out' as an outsider primitivist, a quasi-follower of the CoBrA movement.3 (Accompanying the article is a virtual exhibition.) My intention was to stake out the territory I sincerely believed I inhabit, once and for all, and stop pussyfooting around. As it turned out there was far more debate on the webzine discussion board about the heretical 'outsider' tag than about anything I'd written in previous issues. To claim to be an outsider in the postmodern art world is supposedly a contradiction in terms, an impossibility, because it smacks of inverse elitism I suspect, i.e. self-privileging authenticity. Aside from the discourse, I remained aware that the work itself has its own momentum, to a large degree independently of how I communicate about it. The first stage is always the painting process, generating a work which takes on a life of its own; only later is a title arrived at which ascribes my intended meaning. My first proper exhibition since 1996 was held in June this year, at the Gadfly Gallery in Perth. This was a joint show with my sister Julie Podstolski, a University of Canterbury-trained photorealist who has lived in Australia for around 20 years, who now resides in Fremantle. We titled the overall exhibition 'Poles Apart' referencing our shared ethnic background, widely-separated geographical locations, and totally opposite artistic styles. Within that, we each presented a separate body of work, Julie's 'Time and Tide' and my 'Strips' the latter so-called because each work consists of horizontal or vertical painted strips, with the intentional double-entendre of baring one's body or metaphoric soul. In his exhibition pamphlet essay for 'Strips'4, Wayne Lorimer emphasises the seminal influence of the CoBrA group (1948-51) on my painting (coincidentally, I was born in the year following the group's dissolution): its rejection of "surrealism's dogmatic approach for a more direct expression of subconscious fantasy, with a style that could be described as spontaneous, instinctive and colourful." The CoBrA influence became overt in my work from 1992 onwards. Kindred spirits in Australia include David Larwill and the ROAR Collective. Lorimer pinpoints an underlying conflict between human desires for freedom and for domination both universal characteristics as intrinsic to my work: "Birds, animals, demigods and other recognisable forms abound, mapping out a pictorial representation of humankind's most basic desires and fears. We want to fly, we want to commune with nature, and we want to be free. Yet we also want to dominate and place our mark upon the land." This essential human paradox he regards as 'stripped bare', in a literal sense, by the best of my work: it somehow "'strips' away these layers to reveal the genetic make-up of our primeval selves, and in doing so, offers us a chance for redemption through art." Such a literal exegesis, while thought-provoking and intriguing, makes a much stronger assertion than I myself had in mind in using the 'strips' metaphor. I chose titles like Bachelor Stripped Bare (a pun on Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even) and Strip Search to suggest a range of ambiguous meanings, and regarding some paintings, anyway, Lorimer acknowledges this: "With works like Pictographiti and Ornithosophy he presents us with a road-map of ciphers and symbols that we must navigate through, forming our own connections and conclusions as we go." My intention is to provoke or inspire viewers to create their own meanings, invoking the same spirit of free play that the works were created in. Freedom is the theme that runs through art critic David Bromfield's review of 'Poles Apart', and two other exhibitions, in the West Australian.5 Describing me as "essentially optimistic", he concludes: "Perhaps artistic freedom is only possible for optimists." Elsewhere in the review Bromfield attacks mainstream contemporary art's "nauseating practice of seeking authenticity in institutional agendas, politically correct comments and opportunistic illustration." The freedom exhibited in my work comes from not being part of the mainstream, from seeking authenticity on my own terms. Freedom (not in any absolute sense) is important to me not just in the artistic realm, but more generally in the human. As Bromfield sees it, I am engaged on a "half-forgotten humanist adventure [which] is fully present." I take that as a compliment, though I also quite like the sense, perhaps unintended, of the quixotic adventurer foolishly tilting at windmills. The freedom I'm thinking of is the freedom to create individual significance in one's own life, which is how I see my prime function as an artist. To achieve this, I'm happy to remain an outsider relative to the mainstream, contentedly blazing my own quirky trail irrespective of changing art world fashions. At the very least it's my own choice of folly, freely chosen. Donald Kuspit's notion of 'idiosyncratic artistic identity'
comes very close to the way I perceive my situation as an artist:
Art can become personally significant when one finds life illuminated by it. While touring Western Australia, a number of my paintings seemed to become vividly real to my wife and me via experiences we had. One work, Outblack, a pun on 'outback', came to mind repeatedly because the evenings were so short, growing dark much more quickly than we were used to like a sudden negation of the continent's colourful vibrancy, an unexpected premonition of its dark side. We were reminded of the painting Desert(ed) Signs several times when the road signs (or our challenged navigational skills) seemed to desert us, and we got lost. More than once we became unnerved by the experience, sensing the limitless expansiveness stretching away to nowhere. Later we heard of similar sagas of people going astray, sometimes dangerously so, through taking just one wrong turning. Australia's incomprehensible vastness fascinates those from a small country like New Zealand, and you could say that all roads lead to the desert, the interior, the dreaming, the forgetting. Characters at the top and bottom of this painting point in opposite directions, and scattered signs throughout might be hieroglyphics long ago bereft of their once authoritative meanings. I regard Desert(ed) Signs, and the desert, outback
or wasteland itself, as a metaphor for the human predicament.
The desert is like the void within everyone the part of
us which is 'stripped bare' which we try to 'a-void' through
all varieties of activity.
References 2. http://www.spark-online.com/ 3. Podstolski, Max. Steppin' out: insights of an outsider artist, spark-online issue 16, January 2001, http://www.spark-online.com/january01/miscing/podstolski.html 4. Lorimer, Wayne. Max Podstolski strips, exhibition catalogue pamphlet, May 2001. 5. Bromfield, David. As seen in London and Paris, West Australian, June 23, 2001, 'big weekend' section, p. 6. 6. Kuspit, Donald. Idiosyncratic identities: artists at the end of the avant-garde, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 4. 7. McGrath, Judith. Review of Poles Apart: Julie Podstolski &
Max Podstolski, 7-24 June, 2001 at Gadfly Gallery, http://www.artseen.vbw.com.au/podstolski.html
This article appeared in *spark-online issue 25.0, October 2001,
at: It was also published in the ARLIS/ANZ Journal, no. 52, 2001,
p. 26-29. |