Exhibition

Tony Schwensen

artist statement July 2008

The last three months of 2007 I spent in Paris, at the Power Studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts.  My original intention for this residency had been to have a European vacation, eat a lot of quality bread, drink a lot of low quality wine and look at Millet's at the Musée d'Orsay.  Before leaving Sydney though, I became somewhat obsessed with John Power's paintings, which always struck me as a poor melange of early twentieth century avant garde practice.  For me the most revealing of all of his works is a self-portrait in a beret, where he looks a bit like James Joyce, which reeked of Francophilia.  The work functioned as a portal to a time when Paris was the centre of global artistic endeavours and is indicative of the romanticism that absorbed Power. 

I was listening to the remastered Iggy and The Stooges Raw Power and began to think of remaking Power's work as Iggy and remaking Raw Power as John Power as my project in Paris.

However, on arriving in Paris this all slipped away somewhat.  Walking around it became apparent how right Walter Benjamin had been. Paris is a city of the nineteenth century, frozen into a vitrine like existence, hawking its past as its present sits in precarious balance between the future Sakorzy is attempting to drive and the realities of life in the suburbs. 

A colleague from Wales had completed a residency in Sydney and had commented to me about Brett Whiteley as being a perfect example of the Australian condition, vaunted for his overseas odysseys, which in reality do not amount to much, and descending into deluded mediocrity in his later years.

This forced me to reconsider Whiteley who I had ignored since turning 15, apart from nursing a desire to take a chainsaw to his matchstick sculptures outside the AGNSW. I returned to the Whiteley studio, looked at the works at the AGNSW and watched a documentary on Whiteley produced by the ABC, which is titled Difficult Pleasures, and is indeed a difficult pleasure to sit through, and bought and wore a wig to try to understand what it meant to be Whiteley a bit better.

Walking along the Seine's banks I began to understand that ultimately there is not much separating Power and Whiteley.  An unbridled romanticism drips from both of them, redolent of a vague desire for something and somewhere else.

I then proceeded to make a series of actions over the next 8 months that culminate and are collected together in this exhibition.