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At my solo show, “Venus In Hell,” in Melbourne last year, I overheard two young women, both artists, discussing my work. The graphic sexuality and undercurrent of violence in many of my images visibly unsettled one of them. She wondered aloud about my emotional stability, “God, how messed up can one women be?” “I guess we all feel that way from time to time,” her friend replied. “It’s just that we don’t feel the need to paint it like she does!” If an artist wants to avoid the conflicts and contradictions of their interior life, what’s the point of making art at all? Jeff Koons insists that art has been too subjective in the past, too concerned with the messy, emotive sprawl of self-expression as opposed to what he calls objective art—art that can be so sanitized of the germy, interior life of the artist that his or her only role in its creation is an idea lying somewhere behind the scenes. |
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Hazel Dooney
At my solo show, “Venus In Hell,” in Melbourne last year, I overheard two young women, both artists, discussing my work. The graphic sexuality and undercurrent of violence in many of my images visibly unsettled one of them. She wondered aloud about my emotional stability, “God, how messed up can one women be?”
“I guess we all feel that way from time to time,” her friend replied. “It’s just that we don’t feel the need to paint it like she does!”
If an artist wants to avoid the conflicts and contradictions of their interior life, what’s the point of making art at all? Jeff Koons insists that art has been too subjective in the past, too concerned with the messy, emotive sprawl of self-expression as opposed to what he calls objective art—art that can be so sanitized of the germy, interior life of the artist that his or her only role in its creation is an idea lying somewhere behind the scenes.
In this context, being able to draw or paint or shape a material are drawbacks; traditional skills are a distraction from the process of artistic conception. They are too easily subverted by the awkward, unrefined impulses of inspiration that dance at an unpredictable tempo within an artist’s heart and psyche.
I first gained attention in Australia with large, highly structured and accessible, Pop-like imagery produced mainly in enamel on canvas (and, later, on board). It was inspired by a desire to confront the increasing commoditization of art with stereotypical depictions of women derived from advertising and entertainment—a kind of glossy, “anti-art.” Sexy, colourful, imposing, and yet devoid of emotional engagement, these depictions meshed perfectly with today’s hyper-mediated, high-end consumer-driven art market.
My new work is very different. It embraces an atavistic, narrative impulse from primitive art using a variety of media from pencil, watercolour and acrylic, to collage and “found” objects embellished with diarist texts, poems and primitive incantations. My most recent work involves a huge Polynesian double canoe, a gigantic mnemonic map and images and writings that are often sexual.
This new work is forensic, a study of my inner self, my psyche, my nomadic inclinations and even (or especially) my sexual impulses. There’s a preoccupation with my physicality, with both its grace and its decay—a thematic constant in a lot of female artists’ work, both now and in the past. At the same time, this physicality questions the meaning of a sense of place, of belonging.
To get at all this, I needed to strip away the impenetrably shiny, candy-coloured façade of my old work. I needed to be more honest and confronting, less reassuring to the viewer. So, I began creating work—drawings, paintings, installations, photographs—in an almost stream-of-consciousness way. It’s as if I had to rip up the surfaces of everything I’d done before to get at what was really going on beneath them. As a result, my work is a hell of a lot more raw, and more confronting. It’s nowhere near as easy to deal with—or as easy to dismiss.
Maybe because my old work was so self-consciously bound by ideas of (and objections to) how women are represented in traditional figurative art, advertising and mass media, especially in its early conceptual stages, I recently allowed myself to be photographed nude for a series of collaborative, collage-like works.
I saw it as an extension of a process of ruthless self-examination to which I’ve been subjecting myself. Being photographed by someone else (I’ve often made photographs of myself as studies for my own work) introduces some scary but energizing variables: I am, by nature, a perfectionist, a control freak, a relentless obsessive-compulsive, and yet here I have to agree to surrender to someone else’s perception of my identity and somewhat ill-defined sexuality in what have been largely unfamiliar, discomforting contexts.
The results are necessarily intimate, intriguing to look at, with different layers of intellectual, psychological and emotional intensity. I don’t recognize myself. But then I don’t really recognize all the disparate fragments of myself that end up in my own works. Nor, thank God, do others.
