Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

date 'Melbourne March 1962' is equally cubist in origin. The array of collage elements scattered across the surface of the work — a Colgate toothpaste packet, other discarded packets with their logos and brand names for licorice sweets, 'Victor' plaster patches, gin and cigar labels — mostly seem as random as any collage by the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters. Other additions include a series of childlike drawings in ink (or as Crothall has it, 'inspired doodlings') of houses, boats and domestic pets. Sitting above this entire collection Crothall has suspended a number of'readymade' objects, including a flower-decorated plastic tray that has been repeatedly stabbed and pierced. In the top left-hand corner hangs an equally battered red plastic dish drainer to which spanners and other tools are attached. Dedicating the work to Georges Mora, the artist added another note: 'Dear George, Often you think things about art and I suppose you know that this work which is presented here is part of a hidden underground movement'. However camouflaged Imitation Realism's intentions may have seemed, Crothall's contribution to the mural is a clearly stated homage to its cubist, Dadaist and 'naive' antecedents. Yet with its allusions to food and consumption, it is also vintage Crothall in remaining close to the world of tangible social experience. Against the weight of Ross Crothall's apparent 'brutalisin', Cohn Lanceley's panel on the opposite end of the mural acts as a counter-balance in its breezy lightness and colour. Figures float freely over its richly impastoed ochre surface. One such figure, fabricated from pieces of wood, even escapes upwards from out of the frame itself. Lanceley's undisguised debt to Jean Dubuffet acknowledges yet another of Imitation Realism's foremost interests — children at play, or more likely in this case, a portrayal of that quintessential Australian scene of towels, portable radios and sunburned bodies sprawled over a beach. Whatever its actual subject, the effect seems at once innocent and idyllic, and the treatment satiric and playful. Flanked by these two contrasting emotional notes, Mike Brown's central panel with its compacted mass of figures and dense patterns is of another order entirely. In place of Crothall's café scene and Lanceley's al fresco picnickers, Brown offers a claustrophobic interior, a room with a small window that provides only a glimpse of the outside night. At the bottom of the painting is a house bearing a collaged sign 'BALZAC'. Altogether more elaborate and highly charged than either of the other panels (and it is more painted than collaged) we should not be surprised to learn that Brown laboured over it for a further two weeks after the other two artists had returned to Sydney. Now working alone above the restaurant, he made slow progress, feeling that the work resisted his efforts to bring it to a conclusion, that it refused somehow 'to finish itself'.5 Eventually even the restaurant staff seemed to resent the intrusiveness of the artist's presence, and the chef refused to allow Brown any of the menu's more elaborate dishes. Was the injunction 'Make real orange jelly in only 9 minutes' inscribed on the work Brown's response to this churlishness? In any case, given the situation, the artist's other inscriptions appear apposite: 'At times it seems that the best thing to do is to just take some things for granted', and on the other side of the panel there is no doubt a further piece of self advice: 'There comes a time when all these minor details seem to be made irrelevant by circumstances'. Finally, a rather more poignant note is struck by the request: 'Take me home'. Crowded into Brown's pictorial space are over two dozen figures and heads — some tattooed, others mask-like and perhaps derivative of Oceanic sculpture, leading one writer to suggest that Brown had 'imagined the restaurant as a tribal meeting place'.6Other comic-strip balloons offer the sounds 'Yabba, Yabba, Yabba, Dabba, Hubba, Hubba, Wabby, Wabby', which might be a parody of 'primitive' speech forms — or simply the hubbub of the crowd. While there is no doubt as to the prominence of this primitivistic mode ('Mud Gothic' as Brown defines the style at the base of the work), its sources seem as much urban as they are tribal — derived from a world of advertising and mass marketing babble. Popular cultural kitsch is never far away ('Songs for swingin' lovers'). A party to end all parties? Brown has assembled an array of café society grotesques, denizens of the Sydney Push or the lost souls of any pub crowd in an era of 6 o'clock closing. Brown's panel was begun just weeks after the completion of his celebrated Mary-Lou 1962, a work that had been the centre­ piece of the Imitation Realist exhibitions,7 and it continued the ambitious direction in which he strove to encapsulate the chaos of contemporary image-ridden culture. In a similar fashion we can see how the Crothall and Lanceley panels also foreshadow the evolutions of their respective styles. After winning the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship in 1964, Lanceley was to spend the next sixteen years working in Europe where his assemblage paintings with their high- keyed colour increasingly gave expression to the pleasures of nature and landscape. Crothall's career was to follow a very different course: he all but abandoned art over the following years, holding only one solo exhibition (in Auckland in 1966) in which he seemed more than ever devoted to the wayward spirit of Dadaism. In 1968 he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and after a short period in hospital disappeared and is presumed to have committed suicide. The Café Balzac mural, now darkened with a patina that is a consequence of almost three decades of life in the Balzac restaurant, represents a key statement of Imitation Realist ideals and practices at a crucial moment in the movement's history. Even so, as the mural records so graphically, there was already a prevailing sense that the participants were bound to go their different ways, both artistically and personally, though there was as yet little sign of the disputes and incompatibilities that would cause the group to splinter and disintegrate within a year of its completion. Dr Richard Haese is senior lecturer in the School of Art History at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Is the author of Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art. 'PUT IT ANYWHERE!' 289