Of course, this person who shall remain unnamed (that’s you, John) says to me at the opening, She is being very unfashionable, it’s not about politics and it’s not conceptually based; this is just about painting. The “it” is the knockout show “Inventory,” a group of nine large paintings, sprinkled with a bunch of smaller pieces; “she” is Katherine Hattam, the artist who made the works.

A small town proviso

I have known Katherine for a while — it’s a small town, circling circles — but we’re acquaintancy friends, not “mates”; I like her, she’s a straight talker. I’ve looked at her work over the last 15ish years — I even bought a paper/collage painting some years ago, on impulse — I walked into a gallery, saw it on the end wall and said to the girl, Red dot, that one. Which was very annoying for S who had given me a lift to the show, as that was the one she wanted. Mm. I tell all this to disclose what there is to disclose — it’s simply unavoidable talking about the work of people you know, and I’m not going to try. Thus these grains of salt, sprinkle it over what follows, as you will.

Above: Walking track, 2010, oil, acrylic and pencil on linen, 160 x 120 cm

“The philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.”

Willem de Kooning: Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny — very tiny, content.

No politics, no conceptual attack. Is it possible to be a relevant artist today, to only be interested in aesthetics, to merely paint? That is a question that institutions and their curators might ask, but I can’t see that any of the people I know who collect would bother, and certainly not insist on. However, people do still ask what a piece of art means. You see a lot of that kind of work at state galleries, particularly in the contemporary sections. What does it mean, mummy? That’s the easy stuff, of course, you don’t need to look too hard at the artwork, just enough to check out how cool it is. You can read the wall labels for satisfaction and move on to the next puzzle piece. All these meaningful works.

So, like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, I’m going to drag Marshall McLuhan into the box office queue to back me up. Only I’ve asked the late Susan Sontag instead. Forty-four years ago, St Susan wrote:

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.

A couple of pages before that she frames the idea of content:

What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never-consummated project of interpretation. And conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

Yes yes, I know that she wrote in times charged with a particular current of politics, and that she may well have written in preëmptive defense of provocative works in an era when the authorities in America were inclined to casual censorship. But this is Sontag, so we can be sure that there are wider and more general readings to her essay.

All the messy details reduced to sudden shapes

In this group of Katherine’s works, we see her continuing use of the motifs gifted to her by daily life, all the mod cons and debris of home, enriched by grafting certain views taken from a visit to her sister in Brooklyn: the crazy paving mutated rhomboids are inspired by a stained glass window panel there; the pylons are in the view out that window. We don’t need to know this of course, but it is a charming detail — in the way that each detail in Katherine’s paintings inform us of the simplest kind of content, where a cigar is a cigar; so, the recurring Rodchenko pot, the spotty spectacle frames, the mask on the wall, the chairs and cords et al.

And we see the spaces, the scenery that she sees. Merri Creek parklands, cyclists, a jogger. Her two black and white dogs snuffling at the base of a tree. Pylons and treetops. The bridge. And all the effects that inflect them — shadows on branches and trunks reduced to the morse code of staccato black and white.

And that pinpoints her painting project: reduction to graphic simplicity; a graphic flattening then recomplicated by suggestive differences in distances; planes and angles that have their own rules of perspective.

Let’s look . . .

This is Inventory, the title piece in the show. It has mappish qualities, but isn’t so much a map as an illustrated list of contents.

It’s a room with view through an open door. On the wall — snakes and ladders, a mask, a dilly bag. And reproductions, I think, of Colin McCahon’s Six days in Nelson and Canterbury and Sidney Nolan’s Boy and the Moon. On the table: book, scissors, paintbrushes and tubes, drink cans and teapot and hairbrush. A laptop. Stained glass at the top, the two dogs on the crazy pavers at the bottom, and under the table and outside, a pair of chooks.

Above: Inventory I, 2010, gouache and pencil on board, 165 x 125 cm

So much, so simple. But … what we immediately recognise as scenery outside is really a fauve-smacked picture of hot pinks and oranges with black and white interventions — as abstract as any Willem de Kooning. Along with the lightbulb coil, the Rodchenko teapot is part of that picture too, its geometric figuration embedded into the flat beyond. To speak of picture is to realise that this painting could be cropped into four or five separate, self-contained pictures: one is the square formed by the table legs, featuring the bejewelled Klimt chickens; and we note the table legs are real wood! — which is the plywood of the painting surface. The view above the tabletop is another picture; as is the the tabletop itself. And the whole vertical strip of white wall on the right, from Nolan to dogs.

Tabletop and laptop exist in different worlds of perspective. As different as the perspective looking out the door, which is itself is only another view, to add to that of six views punched through the right wall by the 60-year-old inheritance of Colin McCahon’s kiwi imagination.

And yet, it holds together — a wild jangle and pop of bright colours and flat planes. All those primaries clashing against each other: ching! ching! ching! It reminds me of John Berger’s remark about Matisse’s saturated palette: he clashes colours together like cymbals, but makes the soothing sounds of a lullaby. I don’t think the Hattam effect here is of a lullaby, but maybe of a brilliant pop song with bars of Philip Glass and Steve Reich coded within it.

I could enjoyably blather on about any of Katherine’s works in this show, then again, why not look at them yourself at the gallery page, here.

But just a couple more then. Above, is Fed Square, perhaps the most challenging piece in the show, and I love it along with Walking Track at the top of the blog (though I think there are only a handful of pictures in the show I don’t find completely sexy). Fed Square is a large square picture, 150cm or five feet a side, that is nearly wholly abstract.

Above: Fed Square, 2010, oil, acrylic and pencil on linen, 150 x 150 cm

What are not abstract are the recognisable renderings of other people’s paintings on the right side — I think, from top: Rover Thomas; a Fred Williams landscape, of course; another McCahon?; what is this — makes me think of Robertson-Swann’s Vault aka “Yellow Peril”; and a sliver of a Nolan Ned Kelly. There is also a little bicycle, lower middle left, and in the lime green the words TODAY AT, in the middle.

If you know, as any art lover would, that Federation Square is the in/famous art gallery of many facets and angles — all the zing and zap begin to reconfigurate into the idea of a picture of a building and its surrounds — the organic shapes in orange and red are trees, the geometric shapes indicate the Fed’s facade, the  white walls the galleries within, the paintings on the right are … the paintings. So, this is a picture about pictures, and insists on its own pictureness, an entity not like any others it might reference, but then referencing any number of aspects about art making, from Australian art heritage to the building material of marine ply on which it is painted.

One might view it as an abstraction but it is the tension of its call back to life’s actualness that’s so exciting for the optical consciousness.

Three of the smaller paintings

From left: Powerlines, Merri Creek, 2010, oil and pencil on linen, 61.5 x 46 cm; Graffiti Merri Creek, 2010, gouache and pencil on board, 41 x 29 cm; 2 Blue helmets, 2010, gouache and pencil on board, 41 x 29 cm.

Among the many attractions of the pictures:

… is the use of exposed pencil marks — the pylons and powerlines especially glory in their naked structure — the confidence! (Katherine’s is a practised, unique hand, making fateful lines of a stylised simpleness.)

… the humming vibes from close, abutting tones, like the browns and reds of Powerlines, Merri Creek, or Walking Track, top. It’s a Japanese zone, the zen of emptied spaces.

… the flashbacks of hippie style — all those colour circles and party confetti; I think of Peter Max and Martin Sharp in the days of Oz.

… the colour palette that snaps and bangs, like a Jamaican steel drum player in your kitchen making a joyous racket with your pans. Blue rings against the rub of pinks and oranges, peels of lime and lemon  chime, blacks and whites punctuate — so elemental, so sophisticated. Mondrian in a blender.

“No idea but in things.” — William Carlos Williams

There is no politics in these pictures, no conceptual drag cloaking the images. This is art about art, art about a life in art. They are the best things I’ve ever seen from Katherine. She is making some of the most distinctive pictures around — ingredients assembled and reassembled by an unmistakable personality. Just on sixty, she’s entering her maturity with an armoury of bang and clang, and pop and sizzle. How inspiring!

+ + +

Katherine Hattam, “Inventory”
Until 4 December 2010
John Buckley Gallery
8 Albert St,
Richmond, Victoria
03 9428 8554