Simon Barney
The New Vernacular

As a genre the catalogue essay probably finds its level somewhere between advertising copywriting and the pitch given you by a bloke trying to sell you a car. Nobody even seems to expect much of it anymore. I met a writer recently who was complaining about her difficulties trying to write a catalogue essay about an artist she didn't think much of. Everyone in our little group sipping wine was quick to reassure her that nobody imagined a catalogue featured the actual opinions of the writer. There was an expectation that it would be promotional, that's what was being paid for.

So think of this essay as a Hollywood musical. To borrow Lars von Trier's line about musicals in his recent film 'Dancer In the Dark' - 'Nothing bad ever happens in a catalogue essay'.

Post-Trash

The artists in this show represent a section of the Sydney scene, based largely around the small circuit of artist-run galleries and other transient venues. This leaves room for a wide range of art practices but a generalisation is worth venturing. It's a post-trash generation for the most part, making art out of the cultural ephemera of which they are a part, rather than attempting to put something more refined in its place. It's an urban art with a composite locale in which geography collapses and Sydney is only as far away as anywhere else.

An explanation of this takes us down the muddy byways of cultural yearning. So let's be brief, lest we get stuck. There is an ad for an expensive watch in the US edition of Vanity Fair. A woman is catching a plane to...Sydney. Cool place.

Wow. We're not used to this sort of thing. More used to the mood swinging between an aggressive pride in every aspect of culture and geography, and a kind of unexamined self-loathing. The cure for the latter used to be a trip to Europe. Now it's Art.

National Identikit

The Olympic Games gave every pundit with a keyboard or a microphone the chance to air out their views on the Important Question of the national image. The consensus seems to be that it has now been updated, releasing an air of confidence previously unknown. We no longer rely on sun, surf and sheep. We've apparently re-presented ourselves as a sophisticated urban culture, distinguished by its easy-going manner and with a healthy concern for the somewhat distant problems of aboriginal dispossession and environmental degradation. This smug self-assessment probably doesn't wash so well out in the countryside. Out where people live who used to have jobs working for companies whose shares are traded by people in the city. But globalisation's divisiveness isn't unique to this country, so it doesn't find its way into the revised national image. This image contains a yearning - one that moves simultaneously in two directions: a move forward towards apparent sophistication; and a return to some kind of relationship with the land, with something real, something spiritual. What's left unwanted between these poles is pictured as a kind of barren and ubiquitous mall culture. That isn't so unique either. The whole world complains about being overrun by US materialism.

OK, something about the sun

Obviously there's more in that gap than a second-hand American culture. But what has kept it out of the picture is its lack of exclusiveness. Its messy, it's the half-baked and borrowed cut through with the peculiarly local. It's the improvised and the accidental, the unthought and the conventional. It's not just ours; it's a shared condition on a global scale. It's fracture and disconnection, unlikely meeting points and unimpeded flow. And it's the stuff of this show.

So what's with the SUNBURN? The thing is, when the weather gets really hot Australians head for the shopping malls as much as the beach. Malls have air-conditioning.

Which is why Germans always have the best tans. Aussies have stand-up tans - which means mostly on the shoulders and nose. You can get them in car parks. If you're sophisticated you don't have a tan - unless it's out of season. But the Germans. Honey brown. Flawlessly even. No strap marks. They have to be travelling with sun lamps.

Or do they go outback first and work on their tans before they turn up at the beach? This is likely. When I travelled round the Top End a couple of years back the instructions in the 4WD I hired were in German. Why did they need instructions anyway? In the Northern Territory there's no speed limit. So it's just like Germany really. I met a cab driver in Darwin who'd gone all round Australia on a one-week holiday. Proud of his driving.

Possibility

The vernacular in Australian art has long been used as a way of looking international without seeming derivative. But it's generally a circumscribed vernacular, a nostalgic vernacular. Worn timber, flaky paint, rust, masonite, linoleum and the stuff of early consumerism. The surfaces of a more innocent time. It's as though there is some kind of truth in the materials you might find down the back shed. But not in the ones you'd find in the modern world, in the kitchen, in the car, or in the mall. In this tired story Art is supposed to offer an escape from that world, a refinement, a higher quality. In this you find the loathing.

The artists in this show are part of a generation that have dumped such limited taxonomies. Art can instead be made out of the cheap crap around them, out of ordinary experiences and common knowledge. It's a casually inclusive approach, an informality that's at ease with discontinuity, with the ill matched or badly fitting - the unideal. A pre-occupation with 'place' - long an Australian cultural talisman - drifts into the background. This is a contested issue, for that loss of predictability is often keenly felt. But this can also engender optimism, nicely described by Sven Birkerts, writing in the Atlantic Monthly online,

"For more and more people that regional solidity, that concrete centrality of place, has vaporized, and been transformed into a great transparency. There is a sense, via screen and wire, that the entire world is now a space traversed by signals, more a climate of pure possibility than a geographical elsewhere, and that it envelops us wherever we are, whatever we are doing."

"A climate of pure possibility." So what's Sydney's weather forecast?

First, there's a cold front. Images of an exotic elsewhere cloud the scene. They're useful enough as a way of marketing art, both locally and overseas. The recurring dream of environmental isolation slips into other areas of thought. In art it becomes a now familiar means of exclusion, of ranking art and experience on a precious scale running from native down to feral.

But a dirty big high-pressure system is elbowing its way over from 'the bight'. It's full of nice hot air and it's pushing that cold front out to sea. It's lazy weather. You know the feeling. It's recycled air, blowing in dreams from Africa, or from Southern China, or somewhere out over the ocean. And we're all imports here. Rummaging in our bric-a-brac. Bolting bits of old worlds onto the new. Wondering what else we can come up with. Getting a stand-up suntan.