Untitled (Stillife [sic] Petunia) 1998

HOWARD ARKLEY (1951-1999)

Untitled (Stillife [sic] Petunia) 1998

synthetic polymer paint on canvas
150.5 x 110.0 cm
signed, dated and inscribed verso: Name Howard Arkley/ Title Stillife [sic] Petunia/ Date 1998/ Size 1100cm 1550cm/ Medium Acrylic on Canvas

Provenance:
The Artist
Private collection, Queensland

Estimate: $40000 - 50000

Result Hammer: $44000

Howard Arkley aestheticises the ordinary. Arkley’s airbrush techniques don’t deliver any gestural flair or surface texture. This gives his paintings a certain distancing ‘cool’ street cred that bears comparison with the screen prints of the American artist Andy Warhol in the New York of the late 1960s and the billboard inspired images of Warhol’s contemporary Roy Lichtenstein. This is exactly the appeal of Arkely’s Stillife [sic] Petunia of 1998 – it has all the suggestions of popular images, yet it mirrors a suburban visual slang that is distinctly Australian.

 

Arkley’s artistic imagination was first prompted by a visit to the 1967 Sidney Nolan retrospective exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria when it was still in Swanston Street. Its ‘Australianness’ stayed in the mind of the sixteen-year old. For him, even then, it was a matter of local identity.

 

One year later, he visited the inaugural exhibition entitled ‘The Field’ at the new National Gallery of Victoria at its present location in St Kilda Road. Arkley came away impressed with the artists’ close attention to the physical surface of their paintings and the way they unashamedly adopted a non-recessional and non-illusionist approach to painting and approached it as a flat picture plane with patterns.

 

Arkley’s untimely death came at the crowning point of his artistic career. He was Australia’s representative at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 (a year before the present work was created) with a brilliant exhibit, and his solo exhibition at the Karen Lovegrove Gallery in Los Angeles was a sell out, with every painting sold before the opening. The American art critic Dave Hickey, writing in Artforum magazine in its ‘Best of the ‘90’s’ issue, summed up many feelings:

 

Arkley’s goofy-smart paintings of petty-boo suburban paradise have ranked high on my list of secret pleasures in recent years, and I was looking forward to more. Unfortunately, two weeks ago after the opening of his first show in LA, Arkley died of an overdose in Australia. The show at Karen Lovegrove, happily, sadly, was just splendid, at once fresh and austere. Ars longa, vita brevis, dammit.1

 

Arkley’s neon-lit images and patterned visuality spilled out of a ‘televisionised’ aesthetic of a pre-digital age; broken patterns, rolls and scrolls, lollipop transmission bars, visual splashes, flashing neon adverts and late night shopping offers. Most people were blind to Arkley’s highly original impartial views and regarded the visual clutter of suburbs as somewhat inferior and ‘kitschy’. To Arkley, it all had a different appeal:

 

The subjects that I choose are very impersonal. It’s about the Australian suppressed experience in the suburbs. Being not very expressive, and tight, and kitchens having plenty of Omo, and Laminex, and it’s all neat and clean, the lawns are mowed.

 

Ordinary houses are full of patterns, there’s no art … but it’s filled with all kinds of second-degree imagery – the patterning around the fireplace, on the curtains, in the carpet; and the different bricks on the different houses, and the pattern between the gutter, the nature-strip, the footpath, then you have the fence, then you have the lawn, the house, the tiles … it’s rich.2

 

Looked at in Arkley’s way his Stillife[sic] Petunia of 1998 presents as a patterned spin-off from a coloured coir door mat – its image is abrupt, drawing skills are rudimentary, its vibrancy is overly-vivacious and its social association and lack of so-called ‘taste’ make some wince. Yet, to Arkley these social niceties and judgemental quibbles were all totally irrelevant; all that really mattered was the aesthetic potential, the patterns and, of course, the optical richness of the commonplace.

 

Footnotes:

1. Hickey, D., Artforum 38, December 1999, pp.112-113. Cited in Gregory, John, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, London, 2006, p. X

2. Howard Arkley cited in: Gregory, John, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, London, 2006, p.9, 10.

 

Literature;

Crawford, A.; Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Melbourne, 1997.

Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, London, 2006.

Smith, J., Howard Arkley, Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006

Trioli, V., ‘Head Show is a Myth You Can Take at Face Value’, The Age, 26 October, 1990.

 

Associate Professor Ken Wach

Dip. Art; T.T.T.C.; Fellowship RMIT; MA; PhD.

Emeritus Principal Research Fellow and Head, School of Creative Arts

The University of Melbourne.