gullybogan

10-02-08_1331
Uploaded by Gullybogan.

The Potter @ Fed Square
Level Three
Admission free
Closes February 24

I’m afraid i don’t know much about sculpture.

Which is a pity, since it turns out that, as far as the world is concerned, Australia’s best known artist is a sculptor.

But wait, you say. I can’t remember a single one of them Heidelberg School dudes doing sculpture.

Well, no. None of them did.

Or not any worth mentioning, anyway.

No, not one of those horse-fetishising ubernationalist cryptofascists are as well known internationally as this guy.

Bertram Mackennal.

Oh, yeah. Give it up for Bertie.

Despite all we hear about the lads from (Heidelberg||Box Hill||Mentone) and their affectedly ideological smearing of oil onto cigar box lids, the guy who was the biggest hit in the art world was not McCubbin, not Streeton, not even Roberts. And forget about Whiteley and Nolan.

Bertie Mackennal was so successful that not only did he do sculpture for the God-King-Emperor of the British Fricken Empire, he also got called upon by His Majesty to design stamps and war medals.

Yep. You know the British War Medal for the First World War? The one that everyone who’d been in the War on the King of England’s side wore (until they all died)?

That was Bertie. He done that.

But what you really want to hear about is the nude statuary he did of women.

Trust me. You do.

Most of the statuary that i’ve come across up to this point in my career as a bogan has been, like, huge slabs of steel painted orange, or enormous stylised eagles, or lawn chairs arranged in mandalas with bowls of jelly nestling in their canvassy seat slings.

So it was a revelation to see statues of real ppl.

Real ppl who weren’t sitting on horses, taking their handlebar moustaches into battle.

The first time i saw Circe, i knew nothing about her.

Plus, as previously mentioned, i know very little about sculpture. So it meant nothing to me, the way she was standing. I felt none of the existential funk that gentlemen a century earlier would have felt, viewing her stance.

Statue figures are meant to be shown with their weight on their back foot. Or, at best, with their weight spread, and in an open stance.

When Bertie designed Circe, the Enchantress, he had her standing upright, her elongated legs as straight as legs can be, her arms and those dreadful, terrifying, spider hands extended in command and domination.

It said only one thing: girl power.

And the menfolk were scared.

So scared that they had the lurid scenes of debauchery that surround the base of her pedestal shrouded, to protect the viewer from their sexual ambiguity – were the male figures enjoying sexual congress with the female figures they were entwined around, or were they being attacked and destroyed?

Wanting emancipation is one thing, but now this?

Contrasting with Circe is the much less threatening figure of Oceana.

I must admit i stood transfixed in front of Oceana for what was probably a little longer than would befit a cool person.

Mea culpa.

The transfixing power about her – for me, at least – is that she is so stunningly lifelike.

I stood there in awe of her precision. I found myself sneaking my hand beneath my own t-shirt to check the details of ribs, the musculature beneath the passage of skin between the hip and the rib. I checked the crook of my arm for the extra tiny line that Bertie put there, just above the major crease.

Of course, she’s a girl and i’m not, but i have – i hope this doesn’t shock you – seen a girl with her jeans off and her blouse unbuttoned, so i have a fair idea of what one of them is supposed to look like without any clothes on.

So i checked all the highlights you’d expect to find on a young woman who’d left the house in a real hurry that morning.

He had done the bottom, the dimples on the small of the back, the shoulders… everything just right.

But, the knees!

It’s strange how you rarely notice a girl’s knees. Bertie made me notice.

He does his knees just exactly right. He is a master draughtsman of knees.

You have to see this exhibition, just for the knees.

He also does spines pretty well.

A lifesize figure called ‘the dancer’ is a frank, contemporary nude, with none of the pretence of a mythologised context. When you view this figure, make sure you walk behind her, and examine the way he captures the sinuous snaking of her spine.

And notice her castanets, too.

I saw the exhibition uninformed on my own, and then with the aid and insight of a tour guide.

Among other things, she told us that Bertie met his wife when he was twentyone and she was fourteen. Anticipating the story of the long wait that their love needed to endure before they could be together, it was a bit of a surprise to find that, no, he married her straight away and she had their first child when she was fifteen.

Nowadays, the guide smiled, we might look down on that.

Well, nowadays, actually, we’d call it ’statutory rape’.

But at least he had a ready model for his young nymphs.

Bertie also did male nudes, and they were likewise anatomically remarkable. Except for one thing.

Whereas the female genitals are airbrushed out of Bertie’s statuary incarnation – he declines to show that frontal cleft, even though his posterior clefts are masterpieces – he has no option but to show the male genitalia.

Maybe it was due to a certain extent of airbrushing and stylisation, but his scrota didn’t really convince me, and his penises all had the appearance of the model having recently stepped out of a quite cold bath; not withdrawn, but constricted.

His main male nude was a War Memorial commission for Eton College. As an Australian, Bertie’s experience of war was informed by Gallipoli. Whereas Eton was probably expecting a heroic and staunch figure in khaki-become-armour, Bertie gave them a naked boy, his arms outreached, saying to the viewer (the Empire) ‘take me as a helpless sacrifice to your bloody ends’.

Unfortunately, Eton reportedly saw it as a little homoerotic, and probably thought it was saying something more along the lines of ‘take me up the bottom’.

His other male nudes celebrated the physique of the male at just that time in history when that was the preferred artistic strategy of fascist governments.

His career was dogged by some bad timing.

Like, Nellie Melba commissioned him to sculpt the coverpiece of her tomb, which would have really tattooed his name into the history books. Sadly, he died the same year she did, so he missed out.

But he’s done well, nonetheless.

He knocked off a score of smaller Circe maquette-style figures, and the tour guide confided in us that she’d seen one of these foot-high figurines for sale at the reasonable sum of eighty thousand dollars.

Not bad for an Australian artist who never painted a single horse.