Robert MacPherson

(born 1937)

Mayfair: Cock O' the Walk, 1993-94 (overall)

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Collection of the artist
Yuill/Crowley, Sydney
Private collection, Perth

LITERATURE
Ingrid Periz, 'I Always Buy My Lunch at the Mayfair Bar', in Eyeline 36, Autumn / Winter 1998
Trevor Smith, Robert MacPherson, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2001, p. 196 (illus.)

First delivered as a lecture at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney in March of 1998, Ingrid Periz described Robert MacPherson's Mayfair Bar series and it's fundamental connection to cuisine. Periz notes of this work, 'In the eleven panel Mayfair Cock O' the Walk: 11 Paintings, 11 Signs for A.W., D.W., P.L. (Who dared dream), 1993-94, the makings of the Sunday roast are taken apart and transformed into a Picassoid eye staring down the highway. No longer a time-consuming celebration of the working week's day of rest when it was trussed, stuffed, basted and carved, the hot chook is now a compendium of pieces that may or may not provide the centrepiece of the meal. The simple tablecloths used in Red Raddle and the related Tear Arse might possibly suggest a humble gentility but beyond this class identity, and more importantly, the table cloth marks the consumption of food in a particular time and place, of time taken at table when the table was used for this purpose only, and when the act of shared consumption dictated its own temporality. In addition, the tablecloths relate to the human body, for each is sized according to the seating capacity of the table for which it is intended. As much as the text of Red Raddle and Tear Arse refers to specific habits of food consumption, the tablecloths also signal practices that are historically contingent and they link these practices to the needs of the human body.

Gastronomy holds that a genuine cuisine cannot develop without a lengthy apprenticeship to the land and its seasons. Given the continuing presence of the landscape tradition, we might ask whether Australian art is not the same. MacPherson's antipathy to the force of this tradition is well known but at the same time an important part of his practice has concerned itself with precisely the stuff of landscape and the mythology of place. Some of this work is approached askew, under cover of the hand of Robert Pene, a Nambour convent pupil busily drawing the heroes of the bush and the creatures of the country. The 'Mayfair' paintings are arguably more direct. Through MacPherson's tilling, their referents, and their construction, the Mayfair paintings are signs in and of the landscape, a landscape already written over by history, by human presence and practices. Cock O' the Walk's white-on-black mimics both the techniques of road marking and the decorative forms of Oceanic art, a combination that occurs almost parenthetically, reminding us of the way in which car culture has mediated the experience of the Australian landmass. By referring to particular visual elements in the Australian landscape - the roadside signs advertising produce-by recalling certain elements of traditional Aboriginal painting in the white-on-black or white-on-brown of their manufacture, by the specific content of the signs, the uniquely Australian terminology and the regionally specific foodstuffs, the 'Mayfair' paintings constitute a new kind of landscape painting. This is not an iconographic landscape of gumtrees, but one that is the product of soil and climate, and of geographically and historically specific processes, all those elements encapsulated in the French vintner's term for soil, for that particular quality of the land that can be identified olfactorially and gustatorially in wine - namely terroir.

Terroir is invisible, it registers on the tongue and in the nostrils but it cannot be seen. In the 'Frog Poems' using Latin species names, MacPherson kept his references distinctly local but this Australian content was distanced through the use of Latin - the world's first international language and one that is now "dead". Local content was invisible to most viewers yet these works were unquestionably Australian in their point of origin and their reference point. Perhaps, as MacPherson somewhat slyly suggests in the 'Frog Poems', the demand that Australian art be Australian, that it somehow "contain" local content, is best answered, indeed, can only be answered, invisibly.'