The Edge-cation of Joel Gailer

A short history of the edge of paintings on canvas. For most of history, they were covered by frames; then, sometime last century, the frames came off. In 1942 the art collector Peggy Guggenheim took the frames off the surrealist paintings in her Art of This Century gallery. What paint was on the edge of the stretched canvas was accidental. Some artists started to paint the edges. Then in 1958, Lucio Fontana used a knife to slash a linen painting, blurring the lines between painting, sculpture and conceptual art. The influence of Argentine/Italian painter, sculptor and theorist was a bit thing in Melbourne because the NGV had a single painting Concetto spaziale (1964-1965) of his. The gold metallic paint on the canvas stabbed with multiple holes incised in the gold metallic paint is “Luciano Fontana”.

Paintings in Joel Gailer’s studio

In his current paintings, Joel Gailer takes this further, filling the slashes cuts in the canvas with slivers, gobbets and nubbles of bright pigments. Wads of colour patch holes in the canvas. Sculptural blobs, clods, knobs and gobs of paint stuck to the sides of the stretched canvas. Cross sections rolled into cones, clots of eye-melting bright orange and fluorescent pinks, and globules of metallic paint adorn the edges, extending the edge of the art beyond the empty raw canvas.

I spoke to Gailer about these recent works at his Cozens Street studio. He was still on a high after a successful time at Sydney Contemporary with an Artbox stall and getting represented by Sketch & Co Gallery in Sydney.

His approach to these paintings is systematic and formal. The variations on the theme accumulate. There is a wall of them as he works through variations, finding new edges to explore or challenging conventions. “I prefer small canvases”, he repeatedly tells me.

For Gailer, the picture plane has been explored; it was an arbitrary choice of surface. The edge is beyond the picture plane; no longer a two-dimensional painting but a three-dimensional sculpture. Conventions are abstract choices that have been codified, which he points out in his work. It is not all about the edge; there are other conventions that he is considering. Like, should the canvas hang vertically, horizontally or on the diagonal? Or why don’t we use paint for its adhesive quality to stick down the raw canvas or glue two canvases together?

All these conventions about art provide an entrance, and this entrance could be a familiar first step or a medium to transfer concepts. Gailer wants to approach this in a conceptual rather than a formal modernist way. There are different ways to approach an edge: going over the edge, following the border, printing from a bite, and sticking paint to the edge. The side of the canvas is a different kind of edgy, not over the edge but edge-aware. (Gailer is not an Edgelord.)

I knew that we would have to get around to talking about side hustles, for Gailer’s attention to the side of canvases is another aspect of his many side hustles. Art Box, Cozens Street studios, Red Betty bar in Houdini Lane, his extreme printmaking (see my post on his Performprint). The side of things is part of his life, surfing and skateboard riding. Surfers, skateboard riders, and printers know about edges. Skateboarders, like Joel, use the city’s edges to their advantage, grinding their decks on curbs and rails. Surfing, riding the wave, balancing on the edge of a system just before the wave breaks, and becomes completely chaotic.

Black Mark and Joel Gailer reflected in Gailer’s Intermedia Machen IV

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Skateboards and art

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(All photos Mark Holsworth 1. Melbourne Stencil Festival exhibition installation, 2. Sunfigo decorated deck, 3. *scape park, Singapore, 4. Trev on skateboard 1977, 5. Claudia Moondoonuthi, 36 flip on country, 6. Hyunjun Koo decks, Seoul, 7. unpainted decks in art supply shop 8. Jud Wimhurst Van Gogh and Francis Bacon, 9. Viki Murray and Mandy Lane street art, Melbourne 10. Viki Murray street art, 11. Viki Murray and others, 12. skateboards and rollerblades prohibited sign, Melb. 13. Joel Gailer printing skateboard wheels, 14. 15. 16. Performprint skateboarders)

The symbiotic relationship between graffiti and skateboards making each one is stronger from the relationship. The painted concrete of skateparks, the boards, the streets… (I don’t have the photos for this one.)

Two examples of this interaction is Viki Murray stencils of skateboard riders (see my post about her), and Joel Gailer’s Performprint printing using skateboard wheels to print (see my post about Performprint). 

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Stuck on Stickers II

Kids love stickers. Bumper stickers and other self-adhesive messages have been around since 1935 when Stan ‘the Sticker Man’ Avery invented a machine to manufacture them. With street art stickers underwent a change in identity and context from promotional to person and from the bumper to the street.

Walk along any street, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Seoul or Singapore, you will see stickers. They may be on the backs of signs, on utility boxes, or elsewhere as local custom demands, but you will find them somewhere. And often in clusters.

There is a mystery to stickers because there is no way to determine what they mean until you look closely at them. Is it a kind of tag, street art or political, or is it advertising? Is it advertising or the logo manipulations, politics and puns of culture jamming? Maybe several, thinking about the politics around the “Sticker Lady” (aka Sam Lo) in Singapore. For these sets are not exclusive, and there is considerable overlap.

“Hello, my name is” one of the common kinds of stickers. An extension of tagging, slapping down an old conference name-tag sticker with the tag written on it, rather than risking writing the tag on the street. The linear progress along a route mapped by the placement of the same sticker.

Once identity became the stickers’ objective, like tags, a place with one sticker leads to more. The accretion of stickers in a location is like a dog pissing on a post to show other dogs that it was there. Sticker collects at way-posts. The collective greeting that stickers represent, gathering places around the city slowed down to the speed of sticker accretion. The Cherry Bar’s disused windows in AC/DC lane, the old elevator doors in the Degraves Street underpass, the backs of so many street signs, the supports for power poles…

I recognise many of the stickers in Melbourne, it is broader than just street artists and graffiti writers. There are stickers from people who are not street artists but are on the edge of street art: street art collectors, street art photographers and dog walkers. Contemporary artists join in condensing their philosophy down to an aphoristic slogan: “The truth is a copy” from Joel Gailer.

For more on stickers, there is my post from 2009 Stuck on Stickers.

Final Post for 2014

This is my final post for another year. May I wish Happy 10th Anniversary to Richard Watt’s SmartArts on 3RRR, the Melbourne Prize, Blindside, Brunswick Arts Space and Trouble Magazine; all of which have made an impact on Melbourne’s art scene in their first decade. Another milestone worth recording is that John Buckley Gallery closed at the end of this year.

Melbourne Art Fair 2014 at the Exhibition Building

Thank you to everyone around the world who has read and has subscribed to this blog. It has been a strange year for me as one of the least powerful people in the art world, an online art critic, an independent writer and researcher, a blogger. I have been trying to be more professional about this doing freelance writing for a number of publications. I have my ABN (Australian Business Number) number now. (See my About page for links to most of these publications and also a few of my oil paintings).

I have spent a lot of time in 2014 in the Melbourne’s Magistrates Court covering the Paul Yore case. I have been out of my depth and out of my areas of expertise but it was important to report on the events. (See my post Are You Experienced?) Although Yore was found not guilty and police were ordered to pay all legal costs it left me with this feeling of dread that this will repeat as Australian culture refuses to learn. That case along with so many other aspects of Australian culture, racism, crimes against humanity, lack of human rights, all make me pessimistic about the future.

Sally Fields installation at the Conspirators

It seemed as if some of the major themes of the year was exhibitions titled Wunderkammer and doing art with the idea of taxidermy. Amongst my favourite exhibition this year were the Conspirators curated by Carmen Reid, Performprint by Joel Gailer and Michael Meneghetti at the Meat Market, and In Your Dreams, curated by Edwina Bartlem and Victor Griss at the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick.

For a summary of Melbourne’s street art in 2014 see my previous post.

I would like to take a break, have some more time for reading, my own painting and just relax in the summer heat but as I contemplate a break I start to receive the first invites for exhibitions in the new year. Unlike previous years many Melbourne galleries aren’t closed for all of January, there is an opening at Kings ARI on the 9th of January. So I hesitate to forecast how long this break will be.

I am looking forward to 2015 as my book on Melbourne’s Sculptures is now planned to be released in April.

Cheers,

Mark

William Eicholtz, Courage, 2014

Performprint Spectacular

“Extreme printmaking and macho ritual fuel Performprint – a ten-hour exploration of masculinity, live art and print reproduction in the 21st century.” Publicity promised a spectacular event from 9am to 7pm at the Arts House/Meat Market as part of the Festival of Live Art on Sunday March 23rd in Melbourne, Australia.

The first question that I asked Joel Gailer, when I saw him a weeks ago. Joel looked relaxed, he was leaning on the cast iron lace railing of his terrace house veranda. “Are you in training for Performprint?”

“Yes, I did some training earlier today,” Joel replied. He had been in training. A few days later he and Michael Meneghetti, painted silver and orange, staggering through the Bourke Street Mall, in the centre of Melbourne with very large BBQs strapped to the backs. The ‘Stations of the BBQ’ was a live performance in the lead up Performprint. The masculine domain of the BBQ are locally believed to be quintessentially Australian; “throw another prawn on the barbie” comedian Paul Hogan would say in old Australian tourism advertisements.

At Performprint, in the historic setting of the old Melbourne Meat Market printer, Joel Gailer and his old friend and collaborator, performance artist, Michael Meneghetti were both in sunglasses, t-shirts, black jeans and boots. They were constantly working with a silent concentrated intensity for the ten hour event except when Gailer would, megaphone in hand, would climb to the top of a ziggurat of half finished copies of Warhol’s Brillo Box to announce his print manifesto and laugh at painters. Gailer proclaimed that “the truth is a copy”, “the copy is primary” and “Warhol is our god”.

Joel Gailer is an experimental printer; he presses hard up against the boundary of the definition of printing to get a good print of its relief. He has printed in many different processes from etching to commercial printing in art magazines for which he won the the Fremantle Acquisitive Print Award for Hot Process, a page of paid advertising in Art Almanac magazine. Action printing was the next logical step; the LPG gas fire in an iron grill for branding on slabs of pig skin. Branding is a form of print making.

Gailer and Meneghetti were using many different printing processes from the traditional cast iron printing press to using a lawn roller to make giant prints with large plywood letters. Printing on a giant scale you need a casking gun of tar for ink and a line of rope strung across rigging.

Meneghetti’s performance art a lot of stilt walking while wearing masks; see his YouTube page. As well as, assisting Gailer with the printing Meneghetti was occasionally walking around in several different versions of the stilts including one made crutches and broken surfboards. There was a video loop of two of his four legged creatures walking around on the rocks of the tidal zone as the water slowly came in.

Other looping videos showed Indonesian fighting cocks being prepared for battle, a man with a spectrum of coloured underpants and a hand holding sprigs of wattle flowers above a flame. The wattle is a reference to both the right-wing nationalist, Australia Natives Association’s ‘Wattle Day’, as a symbol of Australia, and Monty Python’s parody in their Bruce Sketch. Together Gailer and Meneghetti have refined and redefined ideas about Australia and country boy machismo into masochistic endurance performance art. Machismo and masochism are very close.

There was skateboarding on two ramps at your own risk, with t-shirts printed with legal waivers for the event. The skateboard wheels were carved with letters and the ramps were covered with the printed word. There were many carved wheels and tires that Gailer and Meneghetti pushed around printing words onto the bluestone cobbled floor.

It was somewhere between print making and rock’n’roll; smoke machines, spot lights, multiple TV sets, video projectors and Harley-Davidsons. This was an event with a bar, a coffee bar and a catering van.

At the end there was the cacophony of competing bands, MY ‘Michael Yule’ Band and Coffin Wolf, and the human branding. At 7:59pm Michael Meneghetti that night posted a photo on Facebook of Joel Gailer at the emergency ward. Gailer went to hospital on Arts House staff advice worried about alcohol poisoning after he consumed a bottle of gin too quickly during and post branding. He sat around for a while and then left before being examined.

A video of a 2013 outdoor version of Performprint.

A video on UStream of the Meat Market event that will make you head spin.