The joyful art of sedition

By Rhonda Dredge

Screen shots don’t offer the best images of an artist’s work but they are slowly entering the culture as their own art form.

Take this image from Greg Creek’s recent art seminar at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).

It’s a photograph of an installation of work from an exhibition Creek held in Vienna before the pandemic.

The exhibition comprised an installation of print transfers of 183 Austrian politicians. “Fun portraits,” Creek called them.

The photographs, mostly publicity shots off the internet, were doctored by Creek in Photoshop and visitors were invited to add their comments to the butcher’s paper mounts.

Some added speech bubbles such as, “I’ve got a small dick”. One visitor wrote, “no way” beneath a picture of the future Prime Minister and another added horns.

Creek said the responses showed how “banal and unknowable these people (the parliamentarians) were.”

Works such as these do not depend on faithful reproduction. Quite the opposite. They show the wear and tear of being part of a dialogue between the public and the artist.

In this case, the exhibition provided opportunities for the public to engage in the tribal joy of sedition and the portraits had strong historical antecedents in the art of caricature.

At the beginning of the talk, Creek showed a drawing of Marie Antionette’s decapitated head done in 1793, followed by four caricatures of King Louis-Philippe in which his head was slowly transformed into a pear.

Caricaturist Charles Philipon was jailed in 1831 for his irreverent pear-head drawings.

“The viewer is complicit in this satire,” Creek said. He or she internalises the seditious image, as thoughts are dismembered from the body.

“We internalise 200 years later the fundamental image idea that the king can be transformed away from his authority state,” he said, but in fact the drawing was “just a squiggle of lines.”

He said this example demonstrated the way drawing processes internalised elements in the viewer through an encounter. The homunculus in medieval times was the model of the little figure that was internalised through a cognitive image such as this.

Artists had also reversed the idea of the homunculus, Creek said. Claude Gandelman suggested in 1989 that behind any potential political action there was an image of a huge political body as a watermark.

In a work called Bodies Politic, Creek used these ideas to make prints off his own body and combine them with small doctored photographs of notorious heads of state, most with missing eyes.

Art provides a commentary of the political process, allowing the viewer to decode some of the artist’s markings. The talk ended with a quote that supported the idea of art as a means of remaining critical.

Greg Creek works in the drawing department at RMIT University. He tried twice to show his latest paintings at CBD gallery Sarah Scout in April and June but the openings were cancelled because of the pandemic.

Art Forum, Victorian College of the Arts, 12.30pm every Thursday: finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/events •