The Incident 1992-93

JOHN KELLY born 1965

The Incident 1992-93

oil on board
85.5 x 202.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: klly[sic] 93

Provenance:
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
John Kelly, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 8 - 26 June 1993, cat.3

Estimate: $38000 - 48000

Result Hammer: $38,000

John Kelly burst onto the international art scene when his Cow Up a Tree, 1999 was chosen for display on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, for an international exhibition of fifty sculptures celebrating the end of the millennium in Champs de la Sculpture 2000. Kelly’s was the sole Australian sculpture, and his work was displayed alongside that of Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder. His work drew enormous attention from the media and remained a crowd favourite throughout the exhibition. While cows are not native to Australia, flash floods, the most likely reason for one to be in a tree, certainly are. Australia retains this treasure, on permanent display in Melbourne’s Docklands. 

Kelly was born in Bristol, UK in 1965 and emigrated with his family to Australia the same year. He grew up in Sunshine, a suburb in Melbourne’s west. Kelly describes himself as an Australian, English, and Irish artist and his work reflects Australian, English, and Irish influences—in that order. He began to seriously pursue art at an early age, as the result of an unusual stroke of luck. In 1982, his mother, who would have otherwise been unable to afford to send her son to art school, won the opportunity when she entered a ‘win a wish’ competition on a carton of milk. This ‘outside’ status may have stuck with Kelly, leaving him with the wry humour and anti-establishment temperament for which he is known today. In his own words: 

Ideas derived within an evolutionary framework, beginning with William Dobell and the strange camouflage scheme that he was involved in during WWII, are what drive my work. Through using this narrative and adding new elements I have created a multi-layered structure of ideas. This evolution works on a slow time scale that is at odds with today’s fast consumer culture where products need to be refreshed and changed on a continual basis. Paradoxically we have reached a point where if anything becomes ‘fashionable’ it is immediately unfashionable because of its fashionableness.1

The ‘camouflage scheme,’ involving William Dobell of which Kelly spoke occurred during Dobell’s service with the Australian Defence Force. His duties included making life-sized papier-mâché replicas of cows and moving them around Australian airfields to mislead Japanese bombers. 

Of the four distinct motifs in Kelly’s continuously evolving oeuvre, the cow series is far the most widely renowned, and The Incident shows us why. In this early incarnation of the series Kelly depicts an airplane crash. This ‘incident’ however, cedes the foreground of his work to a papier-mâché cow and farmer, the work’s true subjects. 

In The Incident, the ‘cow’ is left necessarily incomplete. It is stencilled plainly into the foreground, but bears only a trace of the bovine pattern that will appear later in the series. The sky, too, appears less textured in this early work than it will in later incarnations. 

Each of the pieces in the series is a thought exercise, but unique to The Incident is the exploration of consistency and stability. The human attempt – and subsequent failure to fly-causes little effect on the flat and apparently endless airfield to the cow or to the farmer. Each of the subjects, to varying degrees, has achieved a certain symbiosis with the land and in The Incident, it is with the Australian land, flash floods and all, that Kelly
allies himself.  

Footnotes

1. Kelly, J., ‘John Kelly – Artist Profile’, Artlink, Volume 22, No. 1, (unpaginated)

Alison Burns BA (Hons); MA