Shocker turns master
By Jeff Makin

Herald Sun
Edition 1 - FIRST
MON 24 OCT 2005, Page 089

GARETH SANSOM: WELCOME TO MY MIND
Where: The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Swanston St, Carlton, until February 5

THE position of Gareth Sansom in the Melbourne art community is ambivalent. To many he is an ageing enfant terrible whose early paintings in the 1960s brought anguish, shock and horror to the bastions of good taste and respectability.

To others, he is one of our unsung middle-generation masters.

Sansom is now a senior citizen and this overdue survey at the Potter begins with those controversial works of the early '60s and, three galleries and 50 works later, ends with his masterly triptych Sweeney Agonistes, painted this year.

In broad terms it is a development from a complex cacophony of heavily layered, semi-figurative painted collage around socio-political, trans-gender themes that, over the years, strips down to bare essentials. It is in one sense the diary of a brush that took the 40-year journey from participant to well-phrased aficionado.

Sansom's early influences included Picasso, Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet and David Hockney.

Two large key works from 1968, The Great Democracy and Tree of my Life, aptly illustrate Sansom's pictorial dexterity as they free-range over cross-dressing, eroticism, pop culture, art-isms and socio-political issues of the day.

In his Great Democracy we see George Washington in continuo across the top of the painting. The American Pop artist Larry Rivers also did a similar thing. Below there's a collaged atomic blast and to the right explicit photographs of radiation burns that illustrate Sansom's protest against the Vietnam War.

In his Tree of my Life the counterplay between the respectable and the unacceptable emerges with this artist as a young man cross-dressing in one corner and playing acceptable cricket in another. So begins the Jekyll and Hyde pictorial play-off that many of Melbourne's matrons loved to hate, and others hated to love.

As his personal idiosyncrasies matured, so did his paintings. Rubber began to appear. As did strap-ons and other unmentionables -- his penchant for the reality of Pulp Fiction pre-dates his soul-mate Quentin Tarantino by decades.

In The Keep we see Sansom's literary and filmic influences begin to broaden. A Gothic tree alludes to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and text citing the tormented Aschenbach besotted by his desire for the angelic Tadzio from Death in Venice are scrawled across the Sansom picture-plane.

In Religiosity a la Mode, a title echoing 18th-century British artist William Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode, Sansom's position regarding born-again new religions is made clear. The long, mauve, Cyrano-style nose of an evangelising apostle is cut off.

No doubt the missing bit is still stuck in business that it should have stayed out of, such as the iconographic references supplied by the artist in the same painting of heavy metal rock 'n' roll, and militant homosexuality.

Sweeney Agonistes 2005, oil, enamel and collage on linen, 3 panels, total size: 213 x 548 cm

As this survey unfolds, its autobiographical nature establishes the life and times of the artist as the leitmotif of his own movie.

It's clear that he is trying to put his artistic life in order, to identify his major themes and sum them up. Hence his masterpiece, Sweeney Agonistes, where we see Sansom reflecting on his past.

The Sweeney in the picture is Sweeney Reed, son of John and Sunday Reed of Heide, the artist's friend and art dealer, who committed suicide in 1979. He can be seen photographed at the bottom of the centre canvas. A little higher, the lettered INRI peppers the sacrilegious twist.

Like Sidney Nolan, Sansom works in industrial enamel house paints, which explains the extraordinary flatness of his technique.

Both artists have been mind's-eye imagists in the sense that they have drawn from a remembered, glimpsed or dreamt vision, unlike realists whose subjects are limited by perceived reality.

It seems probable now that as the stars of the over-ramped oeuvre of Nolan and Arthur Boyd descend (too many pot-boilers) those of the overlooked middle generation such as Sansom will rise to take their place.