Missile Story, page 2
Food, Shelter, Clothing, Fuel, series
Age 12 II
Alien Genital, page 3
A talk at the Stanley Picker Gallery, as part of their public lectures series, saw a discussion between artist Chad McCail and writer Esther Leslie. The discussion brought together the commonality of interests involving McCails interest in narrative sequential painting series, using invented narratives of Science Fiction allegory, or parody, along side Leslie's discourse on Marxist theories of aesthetics most prominently focusing on Walter Benjamin. The Talk seemed to have two separate strands, one focusing on the politics of aesthetics that McCail utilizes in his paintings, a aesthetic dealing with the visualisation of idealistic collectivist visions of freedom and equality as well as propaganda and its authoritarian nature. For this section a lot of the information imparted was McCail taking us through his works narrative, recounting exactly all subjective qualities in each framed story. This gave a precise background to his critical thinking and ideas behind picture construction, but as a result it was hard to read anything else about the work, and left not just me but many people puzzled about the works translation from artist to viewer in a more formal setting. Without his explanatory presence the paintings direct (and most importantly only real) meanings would probably have been lost in the ambivalent actions his graphically hard edged figures static performances. Aside from the work itself, McCail's presence and eagerness to put across his Orwellian politics was very enjoyable and constructively informative. Linking this more generalised interest with that of personal experience links to the second part of the discussion. This interest in politics idealism conflicted by human nature, put across from a detached sci-fi narrative, is married with a sense of personal experience put across from the angle of the artists reading of Psychoanalysis. McCail Linked his own childhood experiences of violence and sexual curiosity with those of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. How his sense of curiosity was tutored with a sense of violent repression informed his works sense of idealised freedom and how human nature has thus far prevented it. Utilising religious paradigms as narrative structures and symbolism his work became more involved with both text and image, crude cartoon figurative shapes and rigorous structuring of frames and sequence in comic book format.
Overall, his work was interesting in the sense that it invokes a didactic message in its obvious structuring in order to hint at something else in its aesthetic or title. However, a lot of this is lost in some of his more highly rendered works such as 'Spring', which gives a cartographic view of a revolution taking place, loses its inherent meaning due to the works visual inability to describe its own action. It is a work of immense detail on one level in terms of scale and density, but on another the abstract qualities of the perspective and the rendering of place in architectural layouts, mean the distraction that occurs between objects and symbols or signs leads to a convoluted mass of conflicting language. Most successful are his pieces detailing his childhood experience, where the layout losses its sequential series structure to become individual scenes of action in there own right. Maybe they are also successful due the losing of a graphic novel structure, informing its structure more from a high art heritage. I saw something more akin to early renaissance painting in the forming of its storytelling. Actions in different time spaces take place all in a single piece, something similar to the compositions of the likes of Fra Angelico and Perugino. The same thing takes place in 'Spring', as the course of the narrative in different parts of the work allude to different actions at various sage of a revolution. In his series '4-12' it is a far more successful language and far better informed as to where it is coming from.
