When Alison Kubler asked me to write on American painter John Currin for this, Vault’s special ‘sex issue’, I jumped at the opportunity, but then I started to fret. Why did she imagine I was the man for the job? Was I a natural fit somehow? Was I being typecast? Who else was being covered in the issue, and who was writing about them? And why do a sex issue now, in this woke moment? Isn’t that asking for trouble?

With his paintings of women, Currin has been asking for trouble since day one. He made his name in the 1990s with his bawdy views of breasty girls, based on the sexist cartoons so popular in our dads’ day, and for his studies of sullen post-menopausal women, suspended, as he explained, ‘between the object of desire and the object of loathing’. Both screamed ‘wrong’. Currin was called out for shameless chauvinism and attention-seeking bad taste. Village Voice critic Kim Levin called for a boycott, though later changed her tune. Of course, Currin’s works were not blind to political correctness and decorum, but knowing affronts to them—parasitic upon them.

Currin is a social satirist—part of a long tradition in art and beyond. His work plays with social types (them and us) and social expectations (theirs and ours)—it is as much about class as sex. It combines high and low, the ideal and the real, the conservative and the transgressive, the prim and the pornographic. It ranges from affected ‘bad painting’ (in the beginning) to virtuoso work (subsequently). Currin engages popular sources: Frank Frazetta fantasy art, Playboy and Mad, retro girlie comics and Danish porn, Norman Rockwell cover art and 1970s alpha-male magazine ads. And he mashes them with references to elite (male) art history: the mannerist distortions of Parmigianino, the rococo frolics of Fragonard and Boucher, the neo-classicism of Ingres, the gnarly realisms of Courbet and Manet, the anti-modernism of Balthus, and the vulgarity of vache-period Magritte and pinup-period Picabia. It’s all a game. Currin shuffles and deals his cards again and again in endlessly surprising ways, until we don’t know which way is up.

Critics wrestle with Currin’s pastiches. Do they exemplify or ridicule the male gaze? Should they be lauded or condemned? Currin is not a stationary target. As his works combine idealisation and caricature, sentiment and schadenfreude, we can never be certain which way or how far to go with our reading. Whatever criticisms his works call forth, enough wiggle room is factored in to permit a counter case. In his wildly ranging oeuvre, he even had a textbook feminist moment. In his 1997 series The Jackass, he détourned ads from old Playboy magazines, so their largely female supporting cast were no longer smiling at the antics of the alpha-male protagonists, but scowling grotesquely, spoiling the affect.

Currin may nod to the old-master tradition, but our relation to the old masters has changed. In the TV series Ways of Seeing (1972), made when Currin was a boy, John Berger introduced his mainstream audience to a feminist critique of male-gaze, old-master paintings of the female nude. He famously observed, ‘… the mirror became a symbol of the vanity of women. Yet the male hypocrisy of this is blatant. You paint a naked woman because you enjoy looking at her. You put a mirror in her hand and you call the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have depicted for your own pleasure.’ But Berger was talking of a time—and still in a time—when male viewers were on firm footing, lurking in the shadows outside the frame, their bad faith unchecked, enjoying their boudoir paintings in peace. Now, by comparison, male viewers walk on eggshells. We don’t look at Currin’s paintings of women and judge women. Instead his paintings hold up a mirror to us, judge us, chewing away at our complicity. We can feel vulnerable standing before them in galleries, and think twice about blurting out our gut responses to them, lest we expose ourselves as part of the problem.

Currin’s critics have to watch what they say. If they attack Bea Arthur Naked (1991), saying—as some did—that it’s a misogynist joke because no-one could possibly find the topless golden girl sexy, they risk coming across as dicks themselves. Of course, the truth is that someone somewhere will find Bea Arthur Naked sexy. While feminism targets normative representations that express what’s supposedly generally desirable, Currin’s works operate more like niche pornography, made for ‘connoisseurs’ hankering for specific things, for reasons they can or can’t explain—gaunt faces, odd noses, big bellies, misshapen legs, wrinkles, walking sticks, regal interiors, fur. They make me realise that those fetishists may be standing next to me in the gallery, enjoying the works in a different way. 

That said, now and then a Currin painting speaks to me directly and I wonder why. When I saw his 2010 New York Gagosian show, I was entranced by Big Hands (2010). Its subject was a buxom blonde with big eyes and a tiny head. But I think my interest had more to do with the way Currin’s cruel title reduced her to her disproportionately large hands as if they were a stigma, granting her a pathos she wouldn’t have had otherwise. It was a honey trap. Having lovingly painted her for me, Currin then pretended to pick on his creation with his title, so I might rush to her defence (in my head). Later, I remembered the Victorians, and their penchant for paintings of pathetic, damaged children. They loved them, because their tearful responses confirmed that they had heartstrings to pluck. Sympathy is laced with self regard.

Sometimes people find themselves amused and attracted by things they shouldn’t be. They laugh and love instinctively, before they can check themselves. Humour and desire are certainly traps for critics who seek to remain above the fray, making their sober judgements on behalf of the World Spirit, not based on unfortunate childhood experiences or whether they were breast fed. I think that’s why some critics can be merciless with Currin; not wanting to betray an iota of engagement, lest they become tainted. Not that it matters to him. Criticism is key to his button-pushing project, making his most vitriolic critics his most valued collaborators. His project is unimaginable without them.

Norman Bryson provided a negative but nuanced reading of Currin’s work in his essay ‘Maudit: John Currin and Morphology’, written for the artist’s 2006 Gagosian monograph. Bryson calls out Currin for his misogyny, homophobia, and general odiousness, while trying to account for—even appreciate—how he works his magic. Bryson works hard to keep Currin out of his head. ‘My main difficulty in viewing the image lay in its ability to recruit me into its own offensive perspective’, he wrote, of Currin’s 1997 painting Cripple. However, Jennifer Higgie, reviewing the book in Frieze, felt the need to offer some balance: ‘What Bryson doesn’t address … is how surprisingly tender a painter Currin can be. He paints his wife and child as though he has just kissed them, flowers as if they’ll always bloom and golden curls as if they’re more valuable than diamonds.’ And, if Currin were simply loathsome, would Jennifer Lawrence let him paint her portrait for the cover of Vogue, with her neck like a giraffe’s and in a silly fur hat? 

Some critics condemn Currin, while giving his Yale-art-school friend Lisa Yuskavage—who ploughs the same field—a free pass. Ian Alden Russell, for instance, casts Currin as the problem (‘a brazen manifestation of late-twentieth-century chauvinistic objectification of the female body in American culture’) and Yuskavage as the solution (‘where Currin is complicit in the aesthetic objectification of women, Yuskavage attempts to disrupt this process’). As a woman, they presume, Yuskavage must see the argument from the other side, but it’s a bit of a line call. I wonder if she tires of being co-opted as a rod to beat Currin.

Currin doesn’t do denial, probably because the criticism works for him. He basks in the attention. When questioned, he tends to admit to problematic attitudes, WASPy ways, and privilege. He makes provocative comments, like, ‘When I hold a brush, it’s a weird object … As if part of the female sex has been taken and put on the end of this thing that is my male sex to connect with a yielding surface.’ Hmmm.

Currin’s latest show Memorial—which opened at Gagosian in New York, late 2021—was at once his most obscene and his least sentimental, least sexy. And it was unusual in presenting a series, when he generally offers a miscellany. The seven paintings pull in opposing directions. On the one hand, Currin amps up the vulgarity, representing distorted, mostly nude females with often absurdly inflated breasts in porno poses, splayed for inspection. On the other hand, he presents them as lifeless, cold, colourless marble statues in illusionistic niches, their legs joining their high heels, all apiece. The look is a flagrant steal from those Jan van Eyck grisaille paintings that ape the appearance of sculpture, with Currin swapping out Van Eyck’s devotional figures with slutty ones. Some of Currin’s figures are more cartoony, others more realistic, with attitudes ranging from gymnastic to weary, from sex doll to crone.

The Memorial works have been promoted as ‘monuments to lust’, but Currin’s female figures aren’t Renoir ripe, more Cranach creepy. Does he cue the male gaze only in order to pull the rug, with morbid morgue associations canceling out musky brothel ones? Or is he simply bolstering that classic misogynist memento-mori theme, the transience of (female) beauty—woman understood from a male viewpoint as sex and death, beauty always ready to turn? Does he get away with his hedge this time? I’m not sure. I’m waiting for the jury.
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[IMAGE: John Currin Big Hands 2010]

In 1998, I was among the team of curators who put together a suite of shows called Action Replay: Post-Object Art, at Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland’s Artspace, and New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. We wanted to revisit 1970s post-object art as a luminous ‘missing chapter’ in New Zealand art history. The show included Wellington-born artist John Lethbridge, who had been in the heart of the post-object scene in Auckland, as one of the precocious students in Jim Allen’s Sculpture department at Elam. Lethbridge presented a solo show, Formal Enema Enigma, as part of Auckland City Art Gallery’s famous 1975 Project Programme. However, in 1976, he headed to Australia. The following year, he bought a Hasselblad medium-format camera and devoted himself to photography. The photos he made from the late 1970s into the early 1980s had one foot in the literalism of performance-art documentation (they are performances for camera) and another in the glitz of fashion photography. What interested me was not just that Lethbridge had been part of a neglected moment in New Zealand art, but that this subsequent photography represented a bridge between it and the postmodernism that followed, and between New Zealand art of the 1970s and Australian art of the 1980s.

Many of Lethbridge’s photos from then feature his then partner, another Wellingtonian, Jane Campion, who had yet to become the famous filmmaker we know now. (Today Lethbridge wonders whether to call them collaborations, but Campion is happy to be credited as ‘performer-assistant’.) The series Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival (1978) was made while they were back in New Zealand, holidaying at Campion’s family farm in Peka Peka. In most of these images, Campion wears a disguise—a white pillowcase over her head, with sunglasses on top. (Perhaps it’s a reference to Lethbridge’s Auckland City Art Gallery show, which included photos of him with a paper bag over his head.) The rest of Campion’s outfit is a queer mélange of masculine (tie and waistcoat) and feminine (shiny leggings, gloves, and heels). In one image, she strikes a campy, limp-wristed pose, while sporting a white fur boa—pretending to be a rabbit; her ‘bent’ burlesque stance contrasting with the rectitude of a power pole standing beside her. Campion is an alien presence, looking like she’s stepped out of a nightclub rather than a milking shed. This image jabs at New Zealand’s rural ‘man alone’ ethos.

Birds figure in two shots in Farm Life. In one, Campion sidles up against a barn, as if avoiding the attention of a chicken in the foreground—despite her outstanding attire. In the other, she crouches, mimicking the pose of a turkey, as if trying to relate. In The Ride, she swaps her heels for cowboy boots and sits astride a saddle mounted on a step ladder in a mock-heroic ‘tally ho’ pose. She’s like a deity, embracing duality, with a carrot in one hand, a riding crop in the other—carrot and stick. Is she chasing her own carrot? 

A colour image, Water Well, is more fashiony. The shroud is gone, replaced by a peaked hat. Campion wears gold pants that seem inappropriate for farm chores. She strikes an overtly sexual, dominatrix pose, mastering a ribbed plastic hose with white gloved hands. It’s a look straight out of the Helmut Newton playbook, sexy but camp.

The Farm Life works were timely—Cindy Sherman started making her Untitled Film Stills around the same time. They were also suggestive. But it’s not clear exactly what Campion’s character represents, if anything. On the one hand, she’s shrouded, concealing her identity; on the other hand, she’s an explosion of contradictory identity signifiers. Lethbridge describes her in psychological and shamanistic terms, as a fusion of masculine and feminine principles. She’s a flaming creature, an impish presence, a disrupter.

Post-object art is often characterised as overtly literal—anti-illusionistic, anti-representational—presenting real materials, real processes, in real space, in real time. Indeed, that’s how we largely understood it as the curators of Action Replay back in 1998. But there were veins of post-object practice that were mythic, mystic, and magical—the Beuysian dimension. As early as 1978, Lethbridge’s work was being described as ‘post-conceptual romanticism’.

Returning to Sydney, Lethbridge and Campion continued to make theatrical photographs—performances for camera. Divination: Lost at Sea (1979) was shot on Sydney Harbour Bridge. Campion sits in an inflated inner tube (perhaps a nod to the inner tubes used in Lethbridge’s Auckland City Art Gallery show). She’s not at sea, but elevated, in a sea of concrete. Her inner tube is tethered by a rope, but it’s not dragging her; it’s slack. She wears a man’s suit, a bathing cap and sunglasses, gloves and heels. She extends a striped divining rod, as if seeking subterranean streams. Dried sardines—literally fish out of water—dangle from it. There’s a broken boomerang at her side—no return. Over the wall, we see a city—a world she’s perhaps oblivious to. Divination: Lost at Sea is a dream image. Variants on it were given similarly surrealistic titles, Mystery of Migration and Kangaroo Dream. On the one hand, Lethbridge was developing a personal mythology—the work was about his feelings on leaving New Zealand for Australia. On the other hand, he left the allegory open ended, for his viewers to meet half way. 

Joseph Beuys was one of Lethbridge’s heroes. His Searching for Beuys images (1979) were shot in Sydney’s Hyde Park, at night, with a flash. In the Park, the plane trees are pruned back, making them look like they’ve been planted upside down, roots up. Campion appears from behind one, in her signature suit and tie, bathing cap and heels—but, this time, she wears a Kato mask. She carries a souvenir-store boomerang and a suitcase trailing a string of sausages—a nod to Beuys. These works may be a homage to the German artist, but they have a more comedic, slapstick feel. In the catalogue for his 1990 Biennale of Sydney, The Readymade Boomerang, curator Rene Block describes them as a ‘metaphor for the artist as compulsive traveller’. But, as much as the image suggests an Australian artist venturing offshore looking for Beuys, the boomerang implies travelling inland, to outback Australia. 

As fate would have it, the boomerang would return. In 1980, the European performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay spent five months in the Australian outback as part of their own Beuysian grail quest. They returned to Sydney to present a performance, Gold Found by the Artists, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the following year. For its sixteen-day duration, they sat, still, silently, at either end of a long table, on which were placed gold nuggets they had found in the outback, a boomerang covered in gold leaf, and a live python. On the gallery wall between them hung a large, slick, studio-style photo of them dancing, taken by Lethbridge, who would also photograph the performance. These photos include one of the snake wrapped around the boomerang, recalling the Rod of Asclepius.

Around 1980, Lethbridge and Campion would go their own ways. He headed to New York for a few months, as the recipient of the Australia Council’s Greene Street studio, while she started film school in Sydney. For Lethbridge, New York opened a ‘Pandora’s box’ of eastern mysticism. He studied Kashmiri Shaivism and accessed alternative bookstores. He continued to make images featuring various performers, often himself, expanding on his interests in psychology, spirituality, and eastern philosophy. A sequence of three images, Intention, Retention, Rocket (1980), shot in his New York loft, find the artist naked on a ragged, womblike couch, his head covered with a black plastic bag. It looks like an S/M scenario, involving asphyxiation, a mirror, a Perrier bottle, some rubber hose, a cut-up doll, and a writhing male body worthy of Francis Bacon. In fact, it represents a Kashmiri Shaivist exercise, to channel energies through the chakras. Similarly, Dark Transmission for Pisces (1982)—made back in Sydney—is an astrological self portrait. Lethbridge—a Pisces—is blindfolded, floating. In one hand, he holds a steam iron; in the other, a fish, split open, flattened out. Iron and fish create a visual rhyme. Lethbridge says the work was his response to feeling psychically ‘flattened’.

Lethbridge typified the boundary-blurring ‘anything goes’ mentality of the day. His work was equally visible in art galleries and in fashion magazines, perhaps sitting oddly in both. He was friends with legendary Australian fashion designers Katie Pye and Peter Tully, and his images regularly featured in Pol, the too-cool moment-defining Australian magazine. In 1981, critic Paul Taylor championed his work as part of a new-wave Zeitgeist. In his seminal essay, ‘Australian New Wave and the “Second Degree”’—in the inaugural issue of Art and Text, the organ of Australian postmodernism—he wrote: ‘… punk was supposed to have had a social conscience (aggressively, working class, adolescent, and politically powerless) while disco, continually misunderstood since its emergence from the bars of black and gay America, represented glitz, gloss, and glamour; it was the epitome of superficiality and apt vehicle for vacuity. Stated simply, the accidental collision or crossover of punk and disco styles is now called new wave music and it is such a collision to which Lethbridge aspires, admiring both punk’s rebelliousness and disco’s formalism.’

While there’s truth in Taylor’s reading, it bypasses Lethbridge’s own interests. For the artist, these works were less new-wave glitz, more psycho-spiritual enquiry. Taylor didn’t mention Lethbridge’s interest in Jung and Gurdieff—in dream analysis, Gestalt therapy, Zen, shamanism, and astrology. Despite their fashionable sheen, his photos were about serious stuff: archetypes, animas and animuses, multiple and shadow selves. They represented spiritual philosophies and practices. And yet, what gave them their unique kick was how they conflated the superficial and the consequential, surface and depth. 

Around 1983, Lethbridge moved into drawing and painting, presenting his grand painting-installation project Hunt the Moon at Queensland Art Gallery in 1985. Throughout the 1980s, he would remain a key figure in Australian art, a staple of biennales and export shows. However, in the late 1990s, Lethbridge largely quit the scene, feeling out of step with the direction in which it was moving. He stopped teaching at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts, stopped showing, and ‘went bush’. But he continued making art for himself, making the unconscious conscious, exploring deeper layers of the psyche.

In recent years, Lethbridge has returned, quietly. He completed a PhD at UNSW Art and Design in 2016, presenting a show of new photographs, Imaging the Void, at UNSW Galleries. But then, in 2020, he lost everything in the Cobargo bushfire. In four hours, his home and decades of art were gone. He was, however, left with a hard drive, with high-res scans he had made of key early photographs. Printed from these scans, our show, Divination, recovers classic works from a key art moment—as the post-object pivoted into the postmodern. These images miraculously escaped the flames, literal and metaphoric.
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[IMAGE: John Lethbridge Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival 2 1978]