.
In 1988, New York artist Barbara Kruger had a big show at Wellington’s Shed 11. As part of it, she presented several billboard works around town. The top photo shows National Art Gallery Director Luit Bieringa catching Mark Roach (Wellington City Art Gallery’s Exhibitions Manager) and Nicky Hager (later to become the famous investigative journalist) in the process of amending, vandalising, or adapting one of her billboards, shifting its message from the generic ‘Surveillance is their busywork’ to the particular ‘Waihopai: Surveillance is its dirty work’, bringing its message home. (At that stage, the Waihopai spy base was still being built and was not yet operational.) It was a brilliant intervention. In 1996, Hager would publish his first book, Secret Power, an exposé of New Zealand’s engagement in international electronic espionage.
•

.
I’ve just been in Sydney, where I kept bumping into Australian painter Imants Tillers and his work. Tillers is famous for colliding imagery appropriated from other artists on arrays of canvasboards. He’s been making these works for almost forty years now. In Sydney Contemporary, his work was in the Arc One booth. He also had a solo show at Roslyn Oxley’s Paddington gallery—work produced in the wake of his recent survey show in Riga. (I attended an event at Oxley’s, where Tillers spoke with Power Institute Professor Mark Ledbury—Power published the book for the Riga show.) Tillers also has an installation at Art Gallery of New South Wales, in connection with their show Making Art Public: Fifty Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects. That work addresses the first Kaldor project, Christo’s Wrapped Coast at Sydney’s Little Bay, in 1969. Tillers, then an architecture student, was a helper on the project, and the experience inspired him to become an artist. In Making Art Public, Tillers is also name checked as one of the three artists showcased in Kaldor’s eighth project, 1984’s An Australian Accent show at PS1, New York, and the Corcoran, Washington DC. In Sydney in September, there was no getting away from Tillers.

Tillers is an enduring figure in Australian art. His project has surfed and survived art-world fashion waves and paradigm shifts and it’s still standing. Discussion around it continues, although not as furiously as in the 1980s. Indeed, from the outset, Tillers’s work was engineered to be hardy—to escape irrelevance. It bridged antithetical tendencies—conceptualism and neoexpressionism. It deconstructed Australianness while epitomising an Australian condition. Peppered with references to Tillers’s Latvian-refugee heritage, it was ‘death of the author’ appropriation with an identity-politics twist. Etcetera. Tillers always had it both ways—with wiggle room. That’s why he complicated so many arguments, and why he continues to be relevant as arguments turn.

Tillers frames art history as much as being framed by it. His work makes me think about how we all read art in our own way. There’s the canon, the more-or-less shared story of art—the map we all refer to. However, each of us makes our own personal journey through art, based on what is to hand, coming to this or that artist or work in our own time in our own way, in a peculiar order, making our links for ourselves, tracing our own personal art history. Tillers’s work reifies his personal journey through art, as driven by his curiosity and idiosyncratic sensibility. He collages and entwines canonical art that everyone knows (Georg Baselitz or Giorgio de Chirico, perhaps) with the local (Aboriginal desert painting, say) and with art particular to his own background (Latvian art). Tillers’s art is akin to psychogeography; his sensibility is revealed even as he drifts, gets lost and distracted. His work is made entirely of other artists’ imagery, but the distinctive web of connections is uniquely him—a fingerprint.

One of Tillers’s new paintings at Oxley—Nature Speaks: GQ (2019)—features a quote from Buddha: ‘You cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself.’ You could say Tillers has traversed art history by becoming art history.
•

.
My friend Angela Goddard, Director of Griffith University Art Museum in Brisbane, is in hot water. Christians are attacking the Gallery for including Juan Davila’s 1985 painting Holy Family in its current show, and the media are all over it like a cheap suit. Davila’s work is based on Michelangelo’s iconic sculpture, the Pieta, which shows the Virgin cradling the dead, deposed Christ. In Davila’s painting, Christ’s body is replaced with a man-sized penis.

The media—as per usual—has amplified a storm in a teacup into a flood of biblical proportions. The rhetoric is ripe, the reports overblown. The idea—that Christianity and Christians are so fragile that such images need to be removed for their safety—is silly. No one is being forced to view the work. It’s in an off-off-Broadway, campus gallery, seen by a small art-world audience entirely familiar with such things—with trigger warnings added for anyone who isn’t. The claim that the Gallery shouldn’t show the work because the University gets millions from government is bogus. First, the Gallery is a tiny part of the University, and admirably run on the smell of an oily rag. Second, if that logic was applied across the board, no one working anywhere in any major university would be able to say anything that offended any taxpayer—universities couldn’t function.

Of course, the irony is that media coverage has given the work far more exposure and status than it would ever have enjoyed in the Gallery alone. Plus, I suspect, far from being genuinely injured, the plaintiffs are revelling in the spotlight opportunity that this engineered controversy has afforded them—milking it for more than it’s worth. Meanwhile, to the art world, it’s a yawn. We had the blasphemy debate in the early 1990s. The work itself is now almost forty years old and Davila part of art history.

But, putting all that aside, I don’t see how the work is even anti-Christian. What do the critics think it means? In The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, published two years before Davila painted Holy Family, Leo Steinberg drew attention to the frequency with which old masters once depicted Christ’s genitals. This highlighted the incarnation, the core Christian doctrine that Christ was God made flesh, made man, with all that entails—sexuality included. Artists deliberately exposed Christ to affirm his connection with humankind, with us all. Reiterated and monstrously exaggerated by Davila, this idea is surely the crux of Christianity, not a threat to it—even if Davila is out to offend.
•