Del Kathryn Barton`s

First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 38 October-December 2006
Del Kathryn Barton’s
heavy petting
Sweet, sassy and very sexy, the girls
in Del Kathryn Barton’s paintings
play with their pets in a way that is
as other-worldly as it is earthy. Story
by Edward Colless. Photography
by Stephen Oxenbury.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 38 October-December 2006
T
She lets the make-up run, dribble
like blood, slide and smear into a
flush of shimmering bruises.
Del Kathryn Barton, I have come to tell you that I
have freed myself. you too can do the same, 2005/06.
Synthetic polymer paint, gouache watercolour & ink
on polyester canvas, 183 x 302cm. COURTESY: KAREN
hey pout, they sneer, they leer. You can’t ignore them. But you don’t know
how to handle them. Some have the haughty, regal expressions of grand
dames who have been outraged by an obscure social insult. In others, the
vixen arrogance seems about to break like a wave into a petulant infantile cry. A
few stare past you from a somnambulant vacuum, their heavy-lidded almond
eyes askew or clouded over with a narcotic euphoria. Every now and then there
is a woodland nymphet – a feral at a rave or maybe an arcadian brownie – with
a darkly incandescent gaze that’s tear stained, opening her wet lips as she parts
her legs like a lap dancer. Elsewhere, standing in the halo formed by a sexual
radiation, a nude hairless macroencephalic alien with pixie ears offers a gesture
of benediction.
Del Kathryn Barton’s army of amazon lovers is a formidable crew. There’s no
question that they’re all female, even if occasionally they sport a weighty, solid
penis or sprout fur over their arms and faces. No matter what mutations extend
and trim the profile or shift the signals of gender or species, these creatures are
all too human and captivating in their girlishness. Whether their faces have the
plump composure of a baby, the anorectic lassitude of a bored catwalk model
or the remote severity of a bondage mistress, the figures that Barton has been
depicting compulsively for the past five years are manipulations and multiplications of a sensuality that anxiously shifts between narcissistic
self-satisfaction and the excitations or craving of an omnivorous appetite.
Within each figure’s confident and even elegantly sinuous exhibitionistic pose
there are nervous tremors of indecision, apprehension and expectation.
Embodied in the selfish or disdainful expressions of Barton’s odalisques is the
painful aspiration of an under-age beauty-pageant model ripe for abduction. It’s
a sensuality that divides between languor and wantonness, and oscillates from
decorativeness to violent demand.
“I’m not trying to project these images on women generally,” Barton explains.
“This work came out of a personal anguish … it began as something confessional.” What is said in this confession seems both explicit and also obscure. In
one of Barton’s large scale coloured pencil drawings shown at Ray Hughes in
Sydney in 2002 a female Tasmanian “tiger” observes a woman with funky braids
and make-up that looks like war paint who opens her legs to masturbate. The
“tiger’s” tail curls suggestively around the woman’s leg, like one of her own fingers stroking her and holding her open. In another image, a naked woman with
jet black eyes reclines unflinchingly with her legs apart as a kitten digs its claws
into her thigh while vigorously licking her out, as if it was at a bowl of milk. The
women strike poses that could be derived from a porn shoot, yet have the chic
detailing of a fashion shoot. The drawing is precise but tense, like Egon
Schiele’s. It traces the bony contour of a rib cage or leg as a faint, tenuous line
in a sea of unmarked negative space, and then ignites in the contortions of a
hand, or the intricate folds of a sheet or the recesses of a softly open mouth. The
women in this show – who are all variously in ecstasy as they lounge with and
caress their animals – seem transported into a paradoxically sexless state: an
almost mystical, magnetic symmetry rather than intercourse with their nonhuman partners.
While we can’t treat her imagery as a generalisation of the female psyche,
there is today a growing population of pro-active and dichotomous female figures – desirable and desiring – that have the elusive features, explicit passions
and polymorphous pleasures of Barton’s retinue. We meet them in teen movies
from Clueless to Ken Park. We see their self-portrait in the work of Japanese cult di-y photo-diarist Hiromix, or in the banal domestic digital porn of Natacha
Merritt, or in the daily appearances of thousands of web-cam girls. There is not
only a thriving global culture of medi-savvy “bad girls” who produce and market
their own image, but an industry that induces a voracious consumer demand for
them. They have become such striking lifestyle logos that, like the young-teen
WOODBURY GALLERY, MELBOURNE AND KALIMAN GALLERY, SYDNEY.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 38 October-December 2006
There’s no question
that they’re all female,
even if occasionally
they sport a weighty,
solid penis or sprout
fur over their arms
and faces.
merchandise devised around the sweetly psychotic goth character of Emily
Strange, they acquire the rhetorical immediacy of an emoticon. These days,
in galleries of contemporary art from Los Angeles to Munich, you’ll see
Bambi and bunnies romping with Heidi.
But while this may be the cultural habitat for Del Kathryn Barton’s art, her
characters have an idiosyncratic grace and a commanding presence that are
distinctive. Indeed, for all their fashionable contemporary allusions – and
there’s no doubting that they have a particular hip edge – they are also
strangely out of time. Those big, overstated eyes – which are hallmarks of
feminine vapid doe-eyed cuteness in Japanese manga – are in Barton’s faces
beady and penetrating and vampish, or else they resemble the unearthly gaze
often found in naïve art. Equally, the graphic precision of her figures outlined
against a high-key decorative background may seem initially reminiscent of
the contemporary Japanese pop style dubbed, by Takashi Murakami, “superflat”. But the energised and wildly fertile shallow spaces Barton puts her
figures in – and in which her figures seduce and are seduced by their
menagerie of familiars: the cats, dogs, monkeys, snakes, bunnies and deer
that lick, suck, paw, scratch, nuzzle and tongue their mistresses – this world
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This page: Del Kathryn Barton, thankyou for loving me, 2005.
Synthetic polymer paint, ink and gouache on canvas, 172 x 120cm.
Opposte page: Del Kathryn Barton, girl as sorcery figure, 2005.
Synthetic polymer paint, ink and gouache on canvas, 120 x 86cm.
COURTESY: KAREN WOODBURY GALLERY, MELBOURNE AND KALIMAN GALLERY, SYDNEY.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 38 October-December 2006
“This work came out
of a personal anguish …
it began as something
confessional.”
This page: Del Kathryn Barton, my inner television… I talk wildly…
what have we done?, 2006. Mixed media on paper, 245 x 117cm
(irregular).
Opposite page: Del Kathryn Barton, she appeared as a lover might,
2005. Synthetic polymer paint, ink and gouache on canvas, 121 x 172cm.
COURTESY: KAREN WOODBURY GALLERY, MELBOURNE AND KALIMAN GALLERY, SYDNEY.
w w w. a r t c o l l e c t o r. n e t . a u
is more in tune with the exquisite half-mad fantasies of fairies in the garden
painted in the nineteenth century by Richard Dadd or the naïf mania, a century later, of Henry Darger’s paedophilic panoramas of naked
hermaphrodite slave children than it is with the contemporary brash cartoon monsters of Murakami.
“I suppose the Pop elements in my work,” she explains, “are to do with liking flatness. But that has more to do with the fashion world than with
manga. I look at a lot of fashion to see the contrary ways society is celebrating and defining female beauty. I watch the fashion channel on cable.
It’s great, and ghastly of course.” This shallow space of fashion, its collapse
of life into a pose and collapse of character into a decorative appearance, is
also a fantasy realm of make-overs and of make-up. Beauty may be skin
deep but the skin can extend and fold and glisten or stain. Rather than
solemnly measuring the depth of her feelings, the artist in the shallows of
fashion joyfully and fantastically extends herself through pain and pleasure.
She incorporates fashion accessories as fetishistic embellishments –
corsets, chokers, knee high boots, bondage straps, masks, boudoir lingerie
and lacing that coils and curls agitatedly over naked skin like a vine or a ribbon around a precious present and that flicks out at its ends like a snake’s
tongue; that’s to say, she uses them as instruments of unrestricted sexual
fantasy rather than as idealisations of feminine beauty. She lets the makeup run, dribble like blood, slide and smear into a flush of shimmering
bruises. “When make-up runs it’s an unveiling,” says Barton. “The wetness is
like the unconscious coming to the surface. It’s the opening of an orifice. A
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 38 October-December 2006
The women strike
poses that could be
derived from a porn
shoot, yet have the
chic detailing of a
fashion shoot.
bruise is like that. A surface that can’t hide what is underneath.”
Perhaps the artist who illuminates Barton’s work most is one of the most
problematic of artists, Hans Bellmer, who spent a great part of his life rearranging and photographing the components of his life-size female puppet
into different phantasmatic postures of enticement and ravishment in the
rooms of his Berlin apartment. “I spent a lot of time looking at Bellmer’s work
when I was in art school,” reports Barton, “and I still find it amazing. The dark
intensity of drawings of women especially. It would be a mistake to reduce
them simply to an expression of misogyny. There is an abject physicality to
them, but also a feeling of something other, outside that.”
Perhaps, like Bellmer, Del Kathryn Barton’s art is an ecstatic vision induced
by an idiosyncratic obsession. A phantasm of epic repetition and addiction. A
fantasy of the fluid exchange of identity between human and non-human. If so,
it is her face that is being drawn again and again in the women and equally in
the animals; but a face that is never the same, no matter how repeatedly it is
made up. It can hide nothing. It is compelled to open itself infinitely and indefinitely. In order to recognise itself it must move to the brink of dissipation.
“When I used pencil,” she explains, “I could rub it back. I now draw with pens so
there’s no going back. I use architectural pens directly onto the stretched canvas. I need the energy, the anxiety in that very first mark, so I can only go
forward. The line embodies my own vulnerability in that precise moment.” I
Works by Del Kathryn Barton will be at Kaliman Gallery, Sydney from 6 to 28
October 2006.
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This page: Del Kathryn Barton, A is for.... (beauty before beauty), 2006.
Acrylic, gouache, watercolour, pen on polyester canvas, 220 x 180cm.
Opposite page: Del Kathryn Barton, I had borrowed his star without
asking… it had not brought me joy… 2006. Synthetic polymer paint,
gouache watercolour & ink on polyester canvas, 160 x 110cm.
COURTESY: KAREN WOODBURY GALLERY, MELBOURNE AND KALIMAN GALLERY, SYDNEY.
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