WAYDE OWEN

WHATEVER

The actor Russell Crowe was staying at the exclusive Mercer Hotel in New York promoting his film Cinderella Man when he discovered that the phone on which he was trying to ring his wife back in Australia wouldn’t work. After several attempts to ring the telephone company to see what was the matter, Crowe, a famously short-tempered man, ripped the phone from the wall and stormed on down to reception to see what they could do to fix the problem. After listening to the shouting Crowe for several minutes and being asked what he intended to do about his broken phone, the guy behind the desk replied merely “whatever”. It was then that Crowe threw his phone at him.

Whatever: it’s undoubtedly the reigning ethos of our society. It indicates a general indifference, a refusal to care or respond in any way. It speaks of an unwillingness to decide, to commit to any particular course of action. The French have a good translation for it – n’importe quoi: it doesn’t matter what. All alternatives will turn out the same. But for all of its seeming indifference, “whatever” is also sneakily passive-aggressive. It’s always directed against someone or something that does care. Like that bellhop who said it to Crowe, it’s always a reply, a riposte, a put-down coming at the end of a conversation. We would hardly say “whatever” at the beginning of a conversation: the expression doesn’t quite have the energy for that.

Contemporary art is certainly in its time of “whatever”. It’s a time when this goes with that, indifferently. The old rules of composition or selection or aesthetic taste no longer seem to apply, or at least no longer seem to offer any firm sense of guidance for artists (or for spectators looking at their work). Think of four of the big-name sculptors influential in the world today: Jason Rhoades, Isa Genzken, Jessica Stockholder and Thomas Hirschhorn. Their work draws attention to – is as much as anything about – its ad hoc and improvised quality. Think of four of the ruling spirits of painting: Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Neo Rausch and the Leipzig School. What their work shows – and again seeks to represent – is the juxtaposition of different painting styles and techniques without any attempt to reconcile them or produce any overall aesthetic.

It is this situation of “whatever” that the young Gold Coast painter Wayde Owen inherits. In Dead Head #3, we have a blurred ink portrait of the painter Sidney Nolan with for no discernable reason a gold lattice-like construction coming from his mouth. The painting Memory and Growth, a portrait of the artist’s father, seems almost indifferent in its execution: neither mimetically realistic nor identifiably expressionistic; off-hand and sketchy, but not meaningfully so. It is a putting together of different things (objects, styles) that Owen calls “mongrel”. An example of this can be seen in New Breed #1, in which the head of a quail is placed on top of the torso of a Staffordshire terrier, and in which the strange hybrid produced is echoed in the painting’s jarring brushwork (alternately loose, tight and dripped), unusual mixing of colour (black on top of yellow, dark blue brushed into purple) and dribbled and loosely filled-in background that at times crosses over the figure.

But look more closely at the work and we will see that connections continue to be made. In Rebirth, we have a self-portrait at the time both of the death of the artist’s grandmother and the birth of his daughter. Still Staffy is a depiction of a dog the artist once bred and showed. Son of Man #2 is an intimate close-up of the artist’s young son. Quiet Quails is a pair of quails, in the artist’s words “attempting to communicate” with each other; and even those lattices coming out of his figures’ mouths can be seen as something like words, the paintings’ attempt to speak to us. In this dead time for art, Owen seeks again the codes or conventions that would allow it once again to have meaning. He begins with the simplest things, which become allegorical of this slow task of piecing art together from first principles: two quails chirping to each other or the love a father feels for his children is like the problem of how to put one part of a painting (one object, one colour, one style) next to another. Like another Australian artist attempting to get in touch with his family, Wayde Owen is in effect throwing a phone at us.

- Rex Butler, 2010