Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories/ Valley Nights 2008 by Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

jen cattapan possible histories: valley nights

Dell Gallery at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University 4 October - 16 November 2008

jen

cattap a n

Since he began exhibiting in Brisbane during the late 1980s, Melbourne-based painter Jon Cattapan has observed the gradual shift of the city into the realm

appear to coalesce amid the haze and viewers can

of an Australian metropolis. Those shifting dynamics, where a city undergoes urban and social reinvention

heightened by the cover of darkness.

in response to inundations of physical or intangible forces, and ways by which these are registered by inhabitants, are central to Cattapan's painting. He wants us to consider as contested the actual, cultural and social spaces between buildings, under streets, around people, amid the intermingling of groups that occupy, and previously dwelt in the cityscape. Over the past two decades in particular, Cattapan has visualised these places as virtually liquid in their capacity to morph according to massive flows of information, via such things as communication technologies and gentrification. In his worlds, the faux order signified by city grids and skyscraper lines is drowned out by the white noise of civilisation's progress. While the works tend to register

conjure their own, free of any specific connections to place referenced in the work. It is a feeling, like many,

Cattapan visited Brisbane during September 2008, on an artist-in-residence program organised by the Fine Art Area of QCA and Griffith Artworks. His studio at Metro Arts, situated in the CBD, was a hub of activity, acting as a working laboratory for QCA painting students to observe and discuss Cattapan's way of working. The project culminated with the unveiling of a major new work, his largest painting to date, at the exhibition 'JON CATTAPAN: Possible Histories/ Valley Nights'. Flanked by over 25 works on paper, the Valley nocturne, as visualised by Jon, was shown to have many lives, enacted and framed by its many players. In his painting the river tracks under a mirage-like impression of The Story Bridge, flickering with light deflected from the city's business district. Off in the distance ghostly

something of known architectural forms, or landmarks within his immediate environment, often they are

remnants, like the shimmering gasometer at Newstead

charged by an anonymous atmosphere, set against the infinite backdrop of darkness, or void, of night. Things hidden by the nocturnal, or only dimly illuminated, allude to something of the mystery and randomness of the city's underbelly. Possible narratives, or histories,

immersed in the shroud of night. Meanwhile, among the works on paper, youths gather in parking lots or skate

and golden facade of the McWhirters building. Each is

through, flashing the bling and brand of their preferred status. Various couplings prevail, even the huddle of elders on their way home takes on a sense of the herd's

In Valley #3 2008 Alkyd modified oil paint, acrylic and chinagraph pencil on paper, each 57 x 76cm protective cloak. Here the 'homied' and the homeless co-mingle with the socially mobile, amid the ecstacy and anxiety of a typical Valley friday night. These images operate just below the point where actually knowing the name of a particular place is paramount to understanding what is at stake. The fact is the same for Brisbane as for anywhere else; in the transformative process of becoming, all cities have histories and stories that are obscured, hidden, shadowed. We thank Jon Cattapan. Curator: Simon Wright

john

artists in conversation - saturday 4 october 2008

conomos & jen cattapan

Chris Handran - John Conomos is someone you will all be familiar with as an artist, critic and theorist. His work is currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, for Video Logic, and we are very grateful that he is available to be with us today...

I i 1111

John Conomos - I have known Jon as a friend and admirer of his work for over 24 years. He has this cognitive capacity to question the role and place of art in society. Not many artists do that. So his art is suffused with this continuing narrative, not only of his own life trajectory but also making commentary

about art in general. This self-reflexive commentary is throughout all his works - his installations, paintings, his digital media works etc. He's a storyteller, and that's very important for an artist in these days. To tell stories cogently, poetically and lyrically, and if you look at the conceptual style of his paintings it's a kind of a dark lyricism, a dark lyrical

Rear wall: In Valley 1-20 2008 Alkyd modified oil paint, acrylic & chinagraph pencil on 20 sheets, each 57 x 76cm Right wall: The City Submerged #23: the lie of the valley 1992-2008 Oil paint on various supports, blue wall, dimensions variable

voice which has this kind of sharp edge poetry to it. So without further ado I would like to initiate the dialogue with Jon about what brought him here to Queensland to do· his residency here at the College and

Jon Cattapan - I have been coming up to Brisbane, for I guess about 20 years. I would come up at least once a year. And from the first time I came up here when

to talk about the processes of his work.

I was introduced to Fortitude Valley I had this very strong impression that it was like a St Kilda from my past... the same kind of narrative flows, the same kind

So Jon, why the residency here, at this particular time in your trajectory as an artist?

of edginess, that same kind of dark urban quality was

there in the valley. And I've seen it slowly transform, it transmogrified as all of these kinds of spaces in urban cities right around the world have done. It's perhaps a little more gentrified, but it still has this kind of strange undercurrent that has really held my attention now for a very long time. I can't really think of any other place in Australia, not St Kilda, not Kings Cross,

jen

cattap a n

Since he began exhibiting in Brisbane during the late 1980s, Melbourne-based painter Jon Cattapan has observed the gradual shift of the city into the realm

appear to coalesce amid the haze and viewers can

of an Australian metropolis. Those shifting dynamics, where a city undergoes urban and social reinvention

heightened by the cover of darkness.

conjure their own, free of any specific connections to place referenced in the work. It is a feeling, like many,

something of known architectural forms, or landmarks within his immediate environment, often they are

remnants, like the shimmering gasometer at Newstead

immersed in the shroud of night. Meanwhile, among the works on paper, youths gather in parking lots or skate

and golden facade of the McWhirters building. Each is

through, flashing the bling and brand of their preferred status. Various couplings prevail, even the huddle of elders on their way home takes on a sense of the herd's

john

artists in conversation - saturday 4 october 2008

conomos & jen cattapan

I i 1111

Jon Cattapan - I have been coming up to Brisbane, for I guess about 20 years. I would come up at least once a year. And from the first time I came up here when

to talk about the processes of his work.

I was introduced to Fortitude Valley I had this very strong impression that it was like a St Kilda from my past... the same kind of narrative flows, the same kind

So Jon, why the residency here, at this particular time in your trajectory as an artist?

of edginess, that same kind of dark urban quality was

not really anywhere in the large urban centres where there is on a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night this intense concentrated carnivalesque quality. As an artist there is this kind of prerogative to be in the land of big ideas, and that out of a big idea will proceed a big work. I am the sort of artist who sometimes begins with a rather small idea. It's a small idea to make a painting about Fortitude Valley. But finally something

flooded with possibilities, flooded with transmissions. It's almost like there is too much going on. So this work does indeed come out of that, because what it presents, apart from being loosely about Fortitude Valley, and indeed about Brisbane, are a few architectural icons to pin it down as a place. The Story Bridge, McWhirters

must come of the idea. The feeling I have is that out

Building, and the Gasometer, these all act as locating devices... like a system of data flows and information grids, just those sorts of signs of any city.

of a small idea something large can grow in terms of the methodology, which is to say, that sometimes you

Conomos - Do you see yourself as having the

start with something as simple as 'Tm going to make a painting about Fortitude Valley, because the idea of the valley won't actually leave me alone" , and it becomes larger and larger, not necessarily as an idea, but as a making of works. So that kind of idea transforms itself

Cattapan - Maybe. That notion of the flaneur is an interesting one. At the time I went to live in New York,

into practice. In this case it has resulted in the large painting called "Valley Nights".

consciousness of a flaneur?

which was in late 89, my reading had become much more developed. I emerged as an artist in the very early eighties, and I emerged in a period that is very loosely now known as trans-avant-garde or neo-expressionism.

Conomos - And do you see this work as a continuation,

It had a lot of different names, but what it was about

a continued chapter of the City Submerged works?

was a return to figuration, a return to painting and a return to the artist working in a quite intuitive way. Into the nineties that slowly gave way to a much more considered way of working. Around that time I began to look for writings that I felt specifically could help me

Is it a continuation, or has it been refigured? Cattapan - Well, I think that's an interesting question. In 1990 I went to live in New York City for about 18 months and I came up with this initial body of work called The City Submerged. This was a way of actually

develop this idea of the fragment, floating over the city. A couple of writers I would mention in particular would

beginning to archive my experience of a new city, a

be Walter Benjamin, and his take on the idea of the

much bigger kind of metropolis than Melbourne, in a

city. Also, the surrealist writer Louis Aragon, who wrote

way that I could manage, to break it up into a series of smaller vignettes, that in a sense a fragment that

this amazing little book called The Paris Peasant. It is a wonderful surrealist narrative about floating through the city at night - drifting across things and seeing them in this magical way. He talks about the idea of

experience so that it wasn't such a continual narrative. The scope of it is really to do with this idea of our cities being, in a sense, flooded with information,

coming across a petrol bowser, but in his mind he sees

the atmospheric condition, the light of the piece, the

Conomos - It's a political act to sit down just to

'mood piece' of film noir?

ruminate and think in our day and age! But I think

Jon Cattapan - I think that whole feeling of film noir and the fact that in a whole lot of film noir cinema the city becomes a character of the film - that was pretty influential. Also that idea of a darker narrative is something that has always interested me. It wasn't like I'd suddenly come up with this idea that I wanted to make pictures about the dark underbelly of the city. That idea had in fact already seeded itself, very early on, for me as an artist. But through a gritty urban narrative I'd found a f o rm for it. There is also a personal sort of politics in there and a particular kind of poetry that I look for. That kind of subjectivity might come out of the migrant experience. It's no surprise when I look back in retrospect to the work that I made in early 2000 which dealt with the children overboard issues and that whole very sorry episode in recent Australian history of the way recent arrivals were treated. And I think that does proceed out of this urban background and being of migrant stock myself. Conomos So is it important for you to notch out a kind of culture politics of painting, as a painter-activist, a citizen seeing our society becoming a democracy? Cattapan - Well I think one can register a form of protest through one's work. It might be a very reflective and very private f orm of that act. But I think it is there, I think it is a political act for anyone to make art. Any kind of art.

In Valley #11 2008 Alkyd modified oil paint, acrylic and chinagraph pencil on paper, each 57 x 76cm Griffith University Art Collection. Gift of the artist 2008-9

it as a magical, primativistic totem. This triggered for me an idea of thinking about space, perhaps the space of New York, which in my conception is absolutely a nocturnal metropolis, as a set of points that you can alight on. And I remember in the very late eighties the work of Raymond Carver became very important, this beautiful poetry, little ideas made very large through these wonderful short stories and poems. And also the work of Italo Calvino, the whole idea of the city becoming invisible, being multi-layered. Conomos - Other than people like Aragon and Ballard, and people like Nabakov, in terms of a cinematic legacy, did American film have a big influence on the shaping on how you see city space, in terms of nocturnal light, what the German Expressionists called the stimmung-

That simple act, of recording it, and bear in mind the way I make a painting can take a very long time; it's a

your work has become more politicised in a very quiet, private way. From the more bohemian, raw energy narratives of the late seventies and early eighties,

very slow, subjective and private recording. It's not an

influenced by punk music and a do-it-yourself attitude etc, to the more contemplative global narratives of our times, in terms of social and political questions ...

Fortitude Valley, although that is the premise of the work. It's a slow recording and preceded by a gestation over many, many years.

Would you agree with that? Cattapan - I think that is a good kind of synopsis really. I don't think that it's possible to be an entirely formal artist. In some ways the relationship to the real world has to be there for your work to have a kind of currency within it. Conomos - So to quote the late Edward Said, you believe that art should have a worldliness about it, that it should be anchored in the socio-cultural fabric of our dailiness? Cattapan - Well I think you should have a go at it. I don't know if it is possible entirely. I'll give you an example. When one tries to take on a political subject like 'children overboard', the sense immediately is that perhaps you shouldn't because it's already being dealt with so broadly in media commentary, and in the theorising that surrounds such an event. The comment that often arises is 'what could possibly come of it, it's not going to change anything'. But from my perspective if you don't do it, you live with the knowledge that you could have borne witness in a way to what you saw, and what you were a part of. Although it may not change anything, at the very least you have recorded it.

instant snapshot. And so too, if I come to a painting like Valley Nights, this is not in a sense a painting of

Conomos - It hasn't been microwaved. Cattapan - It hasn't been microwaved. It's a fabrication that has simmered very slowly. It's slow cooking. Conomos - Can we cast your mind to those drawings over there to my left, could you explain some of the textural processes used to create the iconography? They're like little vignettes, are they a continuation of your vignettes from Valley Nights ? Cattapan - I wanted, I suppose to get into this project some of the initial research. So those works are largely drawn from photographs that I have taken in and around the Valley. At my peril, I have to add. Because I have discovered that people don't like to have their photographs taken much anymore. And nor should they. The system of making the drawings is that I would take photographs, photocopy them a number of times in different sizes. I would draw over the top of them, so that a figure that is male may turn female; a figure that is crouching may become standing. But I have certain basic sort of elements that you will find repeated in these works, and I then paint the back of these photocopies with oil paint which has been modified

must come of the idea. The feeling I have is that out

Building, and the Gasometer, these all act as locating devices... like a system of data flows and information grids, just those sorts of signs of any city.

of a small idea something large can grow in terms of the methodology, which is to say, that sometimes you

Conomos - Do you see yourself as having the

Cattapan - Maybe. That notion of the flaneur is an interesting one. At the time I went to live in New York,

into practice. In this case it has resulted in the large painting called "Valley Nights".

consciousness of a flaneur?

Conomos - And do you see this work as a continuation,

It had a lot of different names, but what it was about

a continued chapter of the City Submerged works?

develop this idea of the fragment, floating over the city. A couple of writers I would mention in particular would

beginning to archive my experience of a new city, a

be Walter Benjamin, and his take on the idea of the

much bigger kind of metropolis than Melbourne, in a

city. Also, the surrealist writer Louis Aragon, who wrote

way that I could manage, to break it up into a series of smaller vignettes, that in a sense a fragment that

experience so that it wasn't such a continual narrative. The scope of it is really to do with this idea of our cities being, in a sense, flooded with information,

coming across a petrol bowser, but in his mind he sees

the atmospheric condition, the light of the piece, the

Conomos - It's a political act to sit down just to

'mood piece' of film noir?

ruminate and think in our day and age! But I think

In Valley #11 2008 Alkyd modified oil paint, acrylic and chinagraph pencil on paper, each 57 x 76cm Griffith University Art Collection. Gift of the artist 2008-9

That simple act, of recording it, and bear in mind the way I make a painting can take a very long time; it's a

your work has become more politicised in a very quiet, private way. From the more bohemian, raw energy narratives of the late seventies and early eighties,

very slow, subjective and private recording. It's not an

influenced by punk music and a do-it-yourself attitude etc, to the more contemplative global narratives of our times, in terms of social and political questions ...

Fortitude Valley, although that is the premise of the work. It's a slow recording and preceded by a gestation over many, many years.

instant snapshot. And so too, if I come to a painting like Valley Nights, this is not in a sense a painting of

with various additives but in particular an alkyd resin additive that I use quite a lot. And over the years I have learnt how to control the way that I can then release that image. And the way it's released is that if you apply that photocopy gently to the paper and actually trace through the drawing that I've made or the photograph that I've used and peel that layer off, you release the paint underneath. It can be a fuzzy, very smudgy line, it can be quite a clean line. There is always a bit of hit and miss, but this is very much part of the process. I don't quite know what I am going to get until I peel some of these sheets off-that's actually very exciting to me. It's a kind of collaging process, because I can take many types of different photographs and in a sense stitch together an invented narrative that might be Valley-like, but it's a complete collaging of these different elements. The story with the painting was that I began four abstract panels, and I had no pre-mediated idea. I can honestly say to you that I begin in a completely intuitive way and it's just about the joy of squeezing out paint, using my hands smearing it on, finding' colours and so on. I've reached a point in my life where happily I don't have to think through that part of what I'm doing too much. It's a kind of bodily memory. It happens though that I feel very often I can create something that looks very vaguely landscape-like. But having done four panels I didn't know whether they would go sideways or vertical, which side was up, which side was down. What order they would go in, and it was only when I got them up here to the studio at Metro Arts that I began to configure an order for them. With this work I saw

Audience - Did the music have an influence on you at all, you know, wafting out of the buildings around the Valley; the live music scene. Did you notice that at all? It comes out in the work. Jon Cattapan - Well you can't not notice it. In the drawings there are allusions to a couple of things that are not necessarily a part of the narrative but are like a felt-thing-that kind of digitised sort of bubblelike mark making that's in the work. The orange and the green, alludes to other kind of static. It could be music; it could be staccato sound of a boom-box in the car driving by. There is also in those drawings, these other forms that are not quite so readily identifiable. I'll just have to point to them; these skull like forms, skull and crossbones, these heart shapes. What they allude to is the kind of logo culture that's really out there as part of youth culture now. One of the things I'm kind of interested in is how the wearing of a logo can denote belonging. John Conomos - Community? Jon Cattapan - Sort of, I don't quite understand it. This is an intuitive thing, but certainly as part of the photographs that I took there are many photographs of t-shirts hanging in shops, of shop logos and I found them very interesting. There is this kind of repeated logo that has an almost skull like quality. Now what's intriguing about that for me is if you look at contemporary art right now there are so many artists, young artists out there dealing with the skull. As a motif, when you talk about that whole idea of

these passages of blue, these lighter passages of blue and immediately I thought "Ah, this could be the River". That gave me a very big opening in the work, and so from there the next thing that happened was I knew that there would have to be the bridge in this painting because it is such a defining icon in Brisbane, as is the river. I also wanted some very localised elements to the work and I was already thinking about the McWhirters Building, I've loved it from the first time I came to the Valley 20 years ago. The Gasometer and how that area has transformed was always going to be in the work. So there were some givens, but then I didn't really know how beyond that this kind of layering process would start. So the rest of the paintings are pretty well a fabrication of layers that look city-like, or data-like. And what happens next once that underpainting is done is that the work is gridded up and a number of these sort of city-like photocopies that I had, which are also gridded up, are replicated by hand on the large canvas. And at that point to go from something that's on a tiny scale to a large scale, puts it right into the land of painting - it's actually a painted subjective mark. When I'm up close making these marks they're very physical and if you look at them there's a sort of crudity to them. I don't actually have the very fine motor skills to do them absolutely precisely, and nor would I want to. When you stand back from the work there is this kind of layered quality to it. I really felt that once I ordered the panels I kind of knew what I wanted to do. It came together relatively seamlessly, which generally is when I know a painting will have its own energy.

neo-goth. It's right out there, and I'm not sure what came first because a lot of designers have been using the skull as this kind of kooky sort of almost ironic, comical motif for a very long time. Now it's been taken up and given back to them in another way, it's very interesting. I'm not necessarily a skull man myself! The role of art is to provide a window back to the society as to what it is. I think that is a very great function art has always had and is germane to any society that it belongs to, and with that, it should be able to provide a platform of questions. If I felt that I was providing an absolutely finished work that was delivering a kind of sermon that would make me very unhappy. I'm not interested in being didactic. But I'm offering up some possibilities, and if that opens up some questions that, to me, is a very good thing for art to do. The other thing I think art should do, and I'm a little bit at odds with a lot of my generation in this, is that I think that art should be out and out beautiful. It should seduce people in, and hold them. Then, if it has a story to tell, perhaps through being held by its beauty or its interest or whatever, that is what gives people a way into the work. We all lead incredibly busy lives. It's hard to hold people's attention. It's hard to make work that that is still, that doesn't snap, crackle and pop, if you know what I mean. To try and make something that's beautiful, that's an interesting thing to still be thinking about for me. Audience - It's interesting you say that, because I feel often what attracts me to a painting is beauty. It's only afterwards, after that initial attraction, you may or may

It's hard to explain this, but sometimes as an artist you can force your work into existence. And sometimes you feel you're the conduit for it, or that you're channelling. This is a work that just came of its own accord; it was quite a joyful work to do. I should also just say, in part that happened because I just came back from East Timar where I've been following the Australian army around for a couple of weeks. As much as I loved that experience I was very disturbed by some of the things I saw... the sadness of the kind of social landscape that is there in East Timar. And it actually stopped me working for a while. I've been back for a few months, and it was only actually when I got here five weeks ago that I really felt charged up to really get into it. It's actually the largest painting I've ever made, the longest expanse. This is a re-imagining of things I've digested over many years of coming to the Valley, and not just this valley. You know every city has 'a valley' of sorts. I remember, for example, when I was living in New York one of the studios I had was in Williamsburg on the corner of South 5th and Berry Street. That area now is all completely gentrified; it's a very, very nice place. But when I was there it was a very, very dark, gloomy and quite dangerous place. Whenever I walked from the train station-the subway is above ground-to the studio, I would sometimes really feel like anything could happen here. I saw so much stuff, that I thought "is this really happening? Am I ever going to be able to put this in a painting? Nobody would believe me." So, there is that kind of scope to digest it slowly, and then re-issue it in a way.

not start thinking about what the artist is trying to say. Initially you may be attracted by the beauty of the painting, but it's only when you come closer that you start looking. Cattapan - I guess I completely agree. When I was at Art School in the seventies largely the work that was in the 'real' art world was completely conceptual. You'd go into exhibition after exhibition and there would be type-written sheets on the walls, or it would be a kind of version of New York abstraction. Those were the poles. There weren't many artists out the working with narrative, well there were, but they weren't the artists that were being featured. At art school the artists that I became really interested in were people like Bosch, and Goya and a little later all that Venetian painting. I find the work of Bosch incredible in its beauty, and yet the narrative depictions are sometimes quite grotesque. When one looks at the work of Lucas Cranach, the painting is extraordinary, and yet they're pretty vile sort of subjects at times. That repulsion/ attraction is very interesting for me. Conomos - There is a wonderful book, a little book, a wise book by Elaine Scarry, Harvard University Professor of Aesthetics, where she talks about beauty, and the question of it being just in modern society. I recommend for you to read it, it's an excellent little book. And I think beauty in my time was a dirty word, conceptually. I have always been a believer in beauty; it's a fleeting thing to describe. It's a thing of intuitive, poetic sense. And beauty quickens the pulse of life, gives another reason for being on this planet earth.

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Above: In Valley #17 2008 Alkyd modified oil paint, acrylic and chinagraph pencil on paper, each 57 x 76 cm Griffith University Art Collection. Gift of the artist 2008 Front: Valley Nights 2008 Oil on linen, four panels, each 190 x 170cm

1�4• GriffithuNtVERStTY �'ll Queensland College of Art

A residency, exhibition and publication by Griffith Artworks. Director/ Curator: Art Collection Manager: Exhibitions and Public Programs Officer: Administration Officer: Installation:

Publisher: ISBN: Design:

SP Wright Jo Duke Chris Handran Karen La Rocca Eric Rossi Trevor Moore Christian Flynn Gabriella Szablewska Griffith Artworks 978-1-921291-63-0 Liveworm Studio Ashlea O'Neill

Griffith Artworks would like to acknowledge the support of: Research+Postgraduate Area, and Fine Art Area at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, via Associate Professor Ross Woodrow, Or Deb Porch and Associate Professor Paul Cleveland; METRO Art via Liz Burcham; and Milani Gallery. The project was opened by Doug Hall AM, Commissioner for Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale. John Conomos received support from The University of Sydney as part of the public programme of events. Jon Cattapan received support from the Faculty of The Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) at The University of Melbourne.