A quick heads-up: in this series we talk about drug use, mental health issues, and there's a bit of swearing.
Welcome to the Brett Whiteley Studio. Have you been here before at all?
I'm Fenella Kernebone and this is 'Art, life and the other thing'. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was made, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. In this series I sit down with some of Australia's most exciting contemporary artists and curators at the Brett Whiteley Studio to talk about his work and how it's impacted their own careers.
In each episode so far, we've focused on one of Brett's artworks, and by looking at that work, we've unpacked bigger issues about the wider Australian arts landscape. Well, in this final episode, we're talking about one of Brett's greatest works and one of his biggest, and I mean in scale, but also in terms of ambition, intention and legacy. It's a piece that he had several attempts at over the years, and it took him a long time to finish what we
now see hanging in his Surry Hills studio. I'm talking about 'Alchemy'.
This is a painting that's so large it actually goes around the corner of the gallery space. It's a very ambitious painting.
This is Anne Ryan, curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
It's the painting of a young artist in his thirties who is really of the belief that art can change the world. He'd just come back to Australia after living in New York for a period of time where he had tried to paint a similarly ambitious painting that failed. It was a personal and artistic point of crisis for him. It ended up with him retreating from the great art centre of New York, coming back to Australia and having to recalibrate and reassess.
The painting is made up of 18 separate wood panels. It's big - 16 metres long in total. And it's full of Brett signature, confident flowing brushstrokes along with an assortment of symbolic ephemera. To see the piece online, go to agnsw.art/bwspodcast.
Like much of his work, it's really very much about him, and it's autobiographical. It's read from right to left, but equally you could read it from left to right. So it's a painting that you can journey along and find all sorts of stories. It's not just a painting. Of course. There's all sorts of elements in this picture, including stuffed birds, magazine collage, electric lights. There's even a little window containing
some of his own hair. If you read the work from right to left, we have a blue, watery world and an image of conception, of a carnal image, of the beginnings of human life, right through to the end, where we end up with an ethereal, abstract, white, almost winged-like form on a golden background, quite 'Oriental' looking in aesthetic. But as you journey through the picture, you see all these little clues as to the things that made him tick.
There are artistic references to artists that were meaningful to him, such as Vincent van Gough, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch - a great Flemish painter who's endlessly fascinating. You can find references to the Australian landscape, the landscape beyond the Blue Mountains - the area where he went to school around Bathurst - that sort of yellowy dry, grassy, rural landscape of Australia. You can
see references to musicians, politicians. There are so many little clues throughout this work to the key ideas and influences and obsessions that drove his work, particularly around this time.
Painted over 11 months in 1972, this is very much an autobiographical work. Wendy Whiteley points out that even the baby in 'Alchemy' looks like Brett.
It's a kind of portrait of Brett's life, really. There's the conception, there's, you know, the birth, which is obviously him being born with a red, little, red-headed baby. Though if a baby had been born with all that hair, it would have been remarkable, and then we just go through it. It's a painting that needs to be looked at from a distance first and then to be moved right in close up to it so
that you start to see all that. The details, which are often quite surreal in the sense of being very influenced by Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'. Little things from the mind, references to people Brett either admired or hated, another self portrait, but of the little door that gets covered up. There's a plug, which implies the whole thing could go
down the plughole at one stage. However, it's an extraordinary picture and I think the more you look at it, the more you get involved in the actual what's going on in it. When you get up close, the more you're able to like it. You know, it's really it's a trip. It's an organised excursion. He had a theory that the best way to have a life story told would be for him as an artist to have a three-mile-long gallery . So he just started at the beginning of a life
and went to the other end. This is a kind of smaller version of that idea, and it's interesting to watch people actually walking along the front of it and what catches their attention and what draws them into it, like a magnet to peer very closely at what goes on with it. So you can see people actually living the experience as well, which is interesting because everything it refers to is still going on today and went on
thousands of years ago, and will go on forever. It's love hate, the beauty of the landscape, the fears of everything going on in one's personal life and relates to everybody. I think it's both very intensely personal, but it also relates to most people looking at it. It's a language that's understandable in the end.
Barry Pearce, the former curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, once wrote that Brett Whiteley was envious of the power of pop musicians, and he dreamt of 'Alchemy' reaching a mass audience. Currently, the piece is on display in the corner across two walls at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills; it needs a big space to exhibit it, but Barry Pearce says 'Alchemy' should in fact be displayed on a curve.
I'm burning for that painting to be shown in a proper way. Because, you see, he was on about endlessness-ism and what is the place of infinity in our way of thinking about life and art. And he painted 'Alchemy' on an arc, on a curve. He was on about [Albert] Einstein's theory of relativity that if you go out into space, you don't follow a straight line, you actually go on a curve. And what happens if you stay on the path of a curve for a long, infinite, but a
long time you come back to where you started. And what he wanted to do with 'Alchemy' was have a narrative going from birth to death and enlightenment. On the left you see the sexual thing, the birth pains, and on the other end it's based on [Yukio] Mishima, a Japanese painting about enlightenment. And when we're through and done, we see gold, the gold of enlightenment all around us. It's like a view
of heaven, I suppose. But if they hung it like it was meant to be on a curve, then if you follow that line at either end - either end in your imagination - will meet again. So and that's infinity and it's endless and that's what that painting is all about.
What are you seeing in 'Alchemy', what is he trying to convey?
Well, it's like the [Charles] Baudelaire idea that you know to get to heaven, you have to go through hell. Baudelaire said, you know, flowers grow from shit like, and so it's about all the pain and the violence in the world, and you go through it and you go through it. And finally, if you can get through it, if you can get your way through it, you come out into enlightenment and a peaceful view. It's a very, I suppose, a traditional ...
It's like a kind of religious picture, in some ways. But a kind of a secular religious picture, if you can, if that's possible. It's a journey, and the journey of the painting as a painting is that the beauty of it is you can go back and forth. Either way, you don't have to start with birth and and finish up with the end, the end of days. I suppose it is through all the nightmare and the
pleasures and everything in between. You can actually track back, and it tells us that Brett thinks history has much to tell us.
Considering where Brett fits within the culture or the pantheon of Australian art, where do you think he sits within our cultural landscape?
He delivers us very brave ideas about what it means to be alive, and the, you know, the pleasure and pain of life. And I think there are artists who can give us the pleasure in small things, and if you're lucky, you can bring them both together. Brett had this romantic kind of idea about painting that if you, if you are bold and you have a serious purpose, you can achieve something that's good for the world, good for people.
In that sense, what the challenges he faced and he had the guts to do it even against a lot of hatred and envy for me puts him up very high in the pantheon. He persisted.
He did persist. But as we've spoken about already in this series, it came at a cost. To understand more about what was going on in the background for Brett at the time of making 'Alchemy', here's Anne Ryan again.
He is an artist trying to change the world, and he thought he could do that throughout. And a lot of artists - especially young artists - think that that's possible. They think that
art has the potential to change the world. Most of the time it doesn't, but you can't fault the ambition of this work, and to sustain something over such a scale is enormously difficult, So the thing that comes out of this is not just the ambition but also the raw talent of this artist and the kind of hard work and thought that went into an object like this is fascinating.
Why was he so impacted do you think at the time to want to create a work such as this? What was really going on for him at the time?
Brett Whiteley made this work having had his wings clipped a bit. He got success internationally, very young. He was extremely talented, but he was also extremely fortunate in being at the right time and meeting the right people and having the right personality to get his work in front of an audience that for Australians at that time really mattered and that was in England. And his work got picked up
by institutions really early. It was collected by the Tate, which is the big, important contemporary collecting institution in London at the time, in his early twenties, almost unheard of. So he had a start, unlike most other artists as a young man, and I imagine it would have really boosted his confidence at a time when he was still trying to work stuff out. So he had this moment of great success and great creativity a great flourishing of his
voice, a kind of development of his voice. And he goes to New York thinking, 'Okay, I've made it in London. Now I've got to make it in the centre.' And that was New York and he failed. And he tried to make this great picture while he was there that would solve the problems of America. It would make America and therefore the world kind of figure out what was going on and sort it out. A kind of a fool's errand, if you like. The failure of that picture was concurrent with
difficulties in his personal life. He was married to Wendy. They had a small daughter and they were making a life over there. But he was sinking into drinking too much and getting involved with stuff that wasn't helping his work and certainly wasn't helping his family life. So it
was a, really, a crisis moment for him. He left, pretty much just upped and left New York and disappeared, went to Fiji and Wendy was left to kind of tidy up the life and move the family to follow him, [they] had to leave Fiji and had to come back to Australia and really, I think it was at that moment when he came back here and he thought, 'Right, I'm from here, this is my place, I've got to make work about this place.' And so it's kind of where he
felt he had to start on a new path. And this picture is like a very loud declaration of that.
We know now that Brett made it work here in Australia, artistically, at least. 'Alchemy' is firmly part of the Australian canon. But what did people think of it at the time?
Well, nobody had ever seen anything quite like it. And when it was shown commercially in Sydney after it was made in 1973, it was shown with a whole bunch of other materials, notebooks and things. His thoughts, his ideas, quotations, lot of which didn't make sense. A lot of what he wrote was - for a reader that wasn't him - is hard to understand or fathom, and some of it feels really deep and some of feels shallow, and it's because he just got it all out there and wrote it
all down. And he used to have ... the exhibition openings he used to have at the time were events, they were happenings you know, there'd be all sorts of things going on. So, of course, people thought it was amazing. Of course, it's the kind of picture which is really, really hard to deal with. You can't buy it for your house. You can't. You can't stick it above the fireplace. Doesn't match my couch. It's bigger than most museum walls, so it's kind of
a problem as well. And so having the ability to display it in this form, in the Brett Whiteley Studio in Sydney, is a rare thing. It demands a lot of space. Some artists kind of demand a lot of space, and this picture certainly does that.
So how does Brett Whiteley's legacy sit within Australia's contemporary art landscape? And how do Australia's contemporary artists view this legacy? Many of the artists who have spoken to in this podcast studied Brett Whiteley at school. In fact, lots of school students did, even I did when I was at high school. One of those is Abdul Abdullah, who we spoke to
in episode 4. As a seventh-generation Australian Muslim, his work tackles the big themes of what it means to be Australian in a contemporary multicultural landscape.
Brett Whiteley was the first artist I was introduced to when studying art in high school. He was the Australian name that we're all familiar with and we all had some idea of the type of work that he produced.
And did you like his work growing up? Can you remember your feelings about his work, if you had any?
I certainly had an aesthetic connection to his work. It's an interesting story 'cause that relationship has shifted and changed. The first thing that I was introduced to were his 'Zoo' series or the ink drawings, the 'Zoo' series. And I remember particularly a drawing of a, like a, it would have been a baboon, like a very angry looking baboon that I looked at in high school, and I was quite enamoured by it. And that image has stuck with me ever since I think.
What is it about the image, the fact that it's just so visceral, angry, whatever?
Yeah, there's a way that he painted it. I think, in brush marks, the way it was almost a caricature of a baboon, but it was very aggressive in the way that the baboon was reacting, I guess. And I hadn't seen much drawing like that outside of comic books and that sort of thing. So I guess that was an appeal for me, especially like when I was, like 13 or 14 when I was looking at it.
Abdul's recognition in the art world has some similarity with Brett's - he's a five-times finalist of the Archibald Prize, a finalist of the Wynne landscape prize and Sulman Prize, and he won the Blake Prize in 2011. So what does he think when he looks at 'Alchemy'?
Looking at it, it's sort of, it's hard not to relate it to recent works that I've done. So I had a show at the Armory Show in New York at the beginning of the year [2020], which was a multi-panel work that went across three walls, sort of all encompassing in a similar way that 'Alchemy' is exhibited. And there was a correlation in the way that it was made.
It's interesting because if you think about 'Alchemy' and you think about some of his other works - obviously, 'Alchemy' is a case in point, you know - it has a lot of mixed mediums that is in it. He's drawn on it, he's put sculptural bits on it, the whole 'kit and caboodle', as they say, is part of it. And that's something that you also do, to a degree.
Yeah, I guess I really appreciate the freeness in the way that he produces a work. Like the fact that he feels unencumbered by a particular medium and he can move across things. And what I can really appreciate is the idea of him wanting to communicate an idea and not being limited in the way that he's going to communicate it. He's still working on it like a 2D surface was sculptural form but there's a freeness to the way that he works that I really like and I can really relate to
in the way that I produce work. I like to have an expanded practice in terms of materials and not feel sort of tied down or totally married or attached to specifically paint.
When you look at a work like 'Alchemy', it's clear that Brett is trying to get something down on the canvas or rather, a whole lot of things down. It's his story his legacy, of course, that's now interpreted through the lens of the current cultural landscape. So as a contemporary artist, I'm curious to know where Abdul thinks Brett and his legacy fits today.
That's a really interesting question, 'cause I think there's good and there's bad. Aand this is only theorising again, I'm not telling you how it is, but I don't know how it is, but I've got plenty of theories about it, and I thought about it a lot, about the legacy of an artist like Brett Whitely. And it's difficult to separate the man from the from his practice. So to isolate those paintings and go, 'This is what they're about'... It's hard not to include his life as context for
that work. But on the other hand, his legacy as an Australian artist is, sort of, that lineage has gone in all sorts of different ways through art schools and the way that people approach... Like I have to, looking at his ink drawings of those animals, like that has still stuck with me. And every Australian artists that I know has been sort of at least, if not directly influenced, there's an implicit influence in the way that they make
their work as 'the Australian artist'. There's also that dangerous legacy of 'this is what an Australian artist is', this sort of 'tortured genius', and 'this is what you have to be to be an artist', which I think is pretty archaic.
That was really interesting. This idea that to be an artist and to have legacy, you have to be kind of tortured. Tell me a bit about what your thoughts are on that.
Yeah. Like thinking about the legacy of Brett Whiteley and that perception in Australia of what an artist should be or how an artist should behave and how you have to be that tortured genius to sort of express yourself.
And for the audience, there is this voyeurism that's attached to it where you're seeing almost a person spiralling or act or behaving in a way that either they wish they'd want to behave like or they could behave like or just out of, like watching a rock star damage themselves, and they need to be that damaged to create this genius work. But for me, even the idea of genius is really problematic. That idea of someone being elevated intellectually or otherwise above everyone else is,
I think, at it's very base, kind of wrong. And as far as legacy, it's hard to say with established Australian artists but like, I've you know, spent a lot of time in different art schools, and it's funny you're seeing especially young male painters like mirroring him and the way that he painted - the craziness, the hair, everything about him - that was who they wanted to be and who they thought they had to be. But I don't know if that's necessarily the best way to communicate, and I don't
know how that fits in the 21st-century context. I think we are responsible - not that the people then had any less responsibility - but we are certainly responsible for everything that we're saying that we do.
Do you think we need to create a new legacy? And if we do, what kind of new legacy would you , could you imagine?
A new legacy? I think artists like Richard Bell are creating a new legacy for how Australian art is seen, especially how Australian art is seen from the outside. Richard Bell is an Aboriginal artist from Brisbane. He's one of the founding members of a collective called ProppaNow , which I think is the best group of artists, the best group of artists in the country. He works mostly with painting, but he's also done a
lot of video installation. He's travelled a tent embassy, which is an artwork but also a point of of protest. He calls himself an activist masquerading as an artist, and I really like that. His visual literacy, his visual language is not something that can be copied. And I see him as a mentor, but I'm not trying to emulate his practice or his language or his style or anything like that. I just see him as sort of like someone that I could look up to in the way that in
the way that he practises. And I think that he's got a lot to offer to the Australian conscience. For me, he's the best. Richard's having an exhibition at the Tate Modern either next year or the year after, and Brett Whiteley was acquired by the Tate Modern, but I can't think of an Australian artist who's had a solid presentation in a space like that. I even joked around with Richard that there's an Australian in Venice every two years, but there's never
been an Australian at the Tate Modern. So this is for me is a rawer legacy of Australian art, what Richard represents. His life experiences and how he articulates that Australian experience and that uniquely Australian experience. I think that is really, really valuable and valuable to how Australian art is perceived going into the future.
And I think without that context - and it's hard because like I said, I don't know Brett Whiteley, I don't know his personal experiences - but it's hard to see art that was made in Australia or art that was made by an Australian artist in the sixties and seventies that didn't explicitly or even, in my eyes, implicitly consider like an Indigenous experience. It seems to be a big part
of the puzzle that's missing. And that's very frustrating. And then when you see Australian artists now from that generation, who are still working, who are dismissive of Aboriginal practices, like the artist [Betty Kuntiwa Pumani] in the Wynne Prize - I think John Olsen said that he didn't consider [the winning work 'Antara' 2019 a landscape - that sort of thing is, yeah, it's hard not to be cynical.
Brett Whiteley's legacy is inescapable. His images are ubiquitous and his paintings recognisable to many Australians. But his biographer, Ashleigh Wilson, says Brett himself was always struggling with that question of where he would fit within the history or legacy of art, often referencing his own mentors and influences within his own paintings.
Brett was very conscious of his role in the journey of art and in the timeline of art in general - Australian art and art globally. He was very conscious of the Australian art tradition. And he was very conscious of being a part of it, and the responsibility and the weight of carrying that, you know, was very heavy upon him.
He was a great student of history, of art history and he knew where ... the heroes of the past, his visual heroes of the past he was acutely conscious and respectfully aware, I think of jumping into that timeline. And so his relationship with Lloyd Rees at the end of Lloyd's life at a personal level, but especially at an artistic level,
was profound. But really early in Brett's career, when he was still in Sydney, he decided to go to Sofala [NSW] one day, a big boozy weekend, probably with a couple of mates, Michael Johnson and others. And he created a picture which is called 'Sofala'. But in doing so, he was very consciously putting himself in an artistic tradition.
As someone who has spent a great deal of time studying and writing about Brett - not as an historian or a critic, but as a writer and a journalist - Ashleigh has his own ideas about Brett's legacy.
It's always for other people to assess his own significance and legacy. But I think what's important is that his life story - and this is funny for a biographer to say - but is largely irrelevant to some extent; it's irrelevant without without presence of his art. Because if we were just talking about a charismatic drug addict who had a number of famous friends, it would have a limited interest, but interest all the same.
But the fact that he still captures the imagination of so many people is not something to be ignored, and it speaks to the enduring legacy of his work. And if we're going to continue to to talk about him, think about him and think of him as an important figure, then it will be on the basis of his work
and his life that that happens. One of the things that I like about him and about his legacy is that you can hardly help wandering past Sydney Harbour on a rainy day or sunny day, either way, it doesn't even need to be outside Lavender Bay but when you just notice out of the corner of your eyes the streaks of white at the back of ships going past or a bird flying past and you realise that you're kind of looking at a Whiteley coming to life, and it's like the landscape bending to his vision.
It seems fitting that rather than leaving behind a written autobiography, Brett instead left us with an artwork to tell the story of his life. And like the man himself, the artwork is incredibly complex, slowly drawing you in to show you a world filled with joy and turmoil. In keeping Brett's legacy alive, his mother, the late Beryl Whiteley, established and generously allocated funds to administer the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship.
Its goal is to encourage excellence in painting, but it's also about offering young artists the same opportunity to develop their careers as were afforded to her son. The scholarship is a painting prize for artists aged between 20 to 30 with an established body of work who are best able to demonstrate the use and benefit of the scholarship to further their art education in Europe. If you want to find out more information about that scholarship, head over
to the Studio website. While some parts of Brett's legacy may be best left in the past, his works and the impact of his art will always hold a special place for many of us. And I'm sure that his way of approaching art will continue to inspire future generations of young Australian artists, pushing them to follow in his footsteps to create art that continues to push the boundaries.
Brett Whiteley is part of the canon of Australian art - if there is such a thing, I think there still is - so he's an artist that will be remembered as an historical figure I have found. When I've looked at artists from the past that there is this situation where an artist is contemporary, then they're no longer relevant. Then they're historical. Then they're rediscovered, and I think that Brett Whiteley and
his work will be part of that trajectory. I think there are generations of young people who don't know his art like my generation did when he was alive. The great thing about the Studio, of course, is that people can discover him for the first time or return to
him as a familiar friend. And so I think his legacy, because the highest points of his career were iconic works in the story of Australian painting, he will always have that place, but his relevance will depend on each successive generation and how they respond to what he does.
Thank you to this episode's guests, Wendy Whiteley, Anne Ryan, Abdul Abdullah, Barry Pearce and Ashleigh Wilson. Throughout this series, we've talked to Brett's family, peers, curators, writers and contemporary artists, but still, we've only peeled back a small layer of the Brett Whiteley's catalogue to explore the alchemy that goes into creating great works of art. So if you want to find out more, the best thing you can do
is head into the Brett Whiteley Studio yourself. It is incredible to see those works up on his walls, where he used to live and work and create art. You can visit Brett's studio in Sydney from Thursday to Sunday. Admission is free. This podcast was recorded live in the
Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills. We would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which the Brett Whiteley Studio stands, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging. From our location here in this art museum, it is important to acknowledge those sites that stood before. The Sydney region has more rock engravings than any other city in Australia. Some of these sites depict an intimate knowledge of the stars,
seafaring relationships with Pacific neighbours and complex social systems. Many more have been desecrated and lost beneath shopping centres, roads, houses. As we cherish and protect those works that hang on gallery walls so too, should we be advocating for the awareness, maintenance and protection of some of our nation's oldest art forms. Thank you to the Brett Whiteley Foundation and the benefactors of the Brett Whiteley Studio who have made this podcast possible.
Concepts, themes and episodes were developed by Michaela Angeloni, Alacoque Dash, Alec George and Jennifer Macey. The producer is Jennifer Macey, with production assistance by Alacoque Dash and Lizzie Jack. Production supervision by Leonie Jones. Special thanks to Lucy Luo, Holly Forrest and Grace Crivellaro, and Audiocraft for production support. The Brett Whiteley Studio is managed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Free admission is made possible by J.P Morgan.
For more information about the Brett Whiteley Studio, you can go to their website where you can listen to audio guides of current exhibitions. Go to artgallery.nsw.gov.au/brett-whiteley-studio 'Art, life and the other thing' is brought to you by the Brett Whiteley Studio in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales. My name is Fenella Kernebone. It's been wonderful being your host. Thanks for joining me.