Archibald Prize 2000

Notes after the fact: 14 September 2000
Revised 28 November 2000

I have just looked at the Telegraph supplement which illustrates and describes all the pictures in the 2000 Archibald. With some months away from the show, with the benefit of that distance I can see clearly several aspects I chose to ignore or preferred not to have to deal with at the time.

My work was the work which acknowledged and did not ignore, did not pretend that the twentieth century and all of the discoveries made therein, existed. Let me say that again.

My work faced up. It did not hide in the safety of a simple, simplistic pre-twentieth century view. My work said thank you. I can handle that. We pretend that cubism was a glitch, a little mistake. People talk about the 'Cubist Style', for Chrissake.

Let's face up. Cubism allowed us to understand the world more fully. It was a bigger world finally. It was a world that did not mock our potential, our capacity. It provided a frame, a lack of frame which we could fill out and fill into.

Please if you can, look at the evidence. All of the pictures describe an edge, a division between the head, the personage and the world. Several or probably most of the works have a modernist veneer, a sloppy 'expressionist' method that adopts a modern look. Worse than that or just as bad are the neato expressionists. We must be more honest, more daring. That is not the shape of the world. It is not the way we see, the way we feel the way we think.

The edge, the division between us and the world exists in terms of the change in physical material. From flesh to skin to air, paint does not need to be an obedient echo of mere material difference. Within the head, within the body, there is no continuum of pure sacred bones and blood we need to represent, for Chrissake. Life is conjured up quite differently, more magically, more chaotically. If we cannot bring ourselves to look at that, to accept the way we really see and feel then we are truly lame. We must picture how and what we are.

We are not made up of a whole, whose parts configure like a jig-saw that when properly arranged add up. We are in essence bits and pieces floating. Bits of genetic material mixed with parts modeled by the sun and the gym. We are bits of how we see ourselves and how others see us. We are part now. We are part remembered and part imagined. We are, "God, look at my nose. My nose is all there is. I have no chin nor eyes nor ears nor balls. And outside my nose I am falling. Outside my nose there is no space but only time and I am only falling.

I ask you to look at this supplement. With such a plodding predictability, the faces are parked on plodding grounds. I am here and sitting pretty. My artist made me so.

There is a view that portraiture is what portraiture was, and evermore can be. We must be realistic and modest and work within those bounds laid out; that by accepting those we can finally begin. That view is cynical and negative. It breeds those big empty paintings which seek to impress with their confidence directness and humour. The trustees equally cynically look for those ones, only see them. Paintings don't come small. Nobody big is little.

It is great that we have The Archibald. It is a testament to the fact that we can conceive of ourselves as being pictured. We are as individuals worthy of being pictured. The Archibald is unique. Unlike The Doug Moran Prize it does at least give lip service to the modern. It must have the courage to use the license it has.

We cannot become ourselves until we embrace the discoveries of Picasso and Braque. To fail to rise to that challenge is to lose the opportunity there is. Or must we quietly sleep on?

One should not argue for one's work. Time and others must do that on our behalf. I would like to say that to break the frame of the face completely, as Cubism invites us to do leaves us with the pieces and the impossible task. The adventure is to somehow make a proper synthesis of those parts and come up with a portrait. It is only a portrait if the subject is unambiguously identifiable. You don't need to be au fait with contemporary art to get it. From a wild adventure you have to be absolutely down on the ground to get it.

The Archibald presents us with a path to the modern that we had abandoned. Now, when supposedly we are ready to get on with the present and the future, all we have is the past which has to be properly negotiated. The old future was a trick. It was so alluring, so tempting and promising. It turned out to be the waste product of a commodity-tainted expectation.

We always want to move on. We can, but it won't necessarily be picture perfect. It will be a bit ugly first.

© Michael Snape 1973-2008