endless autumn - David Attwood

When I was growing up, surfing was all the shit.
Everyone wore surf wear. Ripcurl was the shit.
Quicksilver was the shit. I got a Billabong shirt for
Christmas every year.
All of my friends wore surf wear but none of us
surfed. Actually I didn’t know anyone that surfed.
But we all wore Billabong T-shirts, and had
Quicksilver pencil
cases and surfing
posters in our room
and surf logo stickers
on our mirrors.
Surfing was sick.
In Australia sometime
during the late
nineties or early
2000s, surfing – or
the image of surfing
– was absorbed by
popular culture.
The surfer was
romanticised and
idealised and held
above as socially
elite. The surfer was
bronzed and ripped
and long-haired and
got heaps of chicks. I
think that deep down
this is probably why
we all wore surf wear
even though we didn’t
surf. Because we
wanted to look like we
did.
My Dad started surfing when he was 13, he moved
down south when he was 30 to be closer to good
waves, my Mum grew up on the beach as well, our
whole family life was based around surfing. When we
moved to Margs I was 3, surfing was the thing, most
people I knew surfed or their parents surfed. I couldn’t
understand what people did if it didn’t involve surfing.
Everything else was boring.
When surfing became increasingly
popular in the early 2000s I didn’t
realise. I thought it was normal,
everyone grew up on the beach didn’t
they? Everyone knew who Occy was. They
didn’t – they just looked like they did.
No one wears shoes down the beach,
man, even if they are Quicksilver, I know
you’re from Perth.
Now I live in Melbourne, it’s near
the beach. There’s no surf. I haven’t
surfed in months. I try to hang on to
things which make sense back home,
I’m growing my hair again, I bought
a skateboard. I put on suncream, it’s
raining outside. I threw sand on my bed.
I waxed my car. I purposely stubbed
my toe on a rock walking to a cafe,
pretending it was Ellens. It didn’t work…
Surfing doesn’t make sense here. It
doesn’t fit. You give a Shaka to the guy
at Coles and he thinks it’s a gang sign.
I realised that removed from the beach
the surfer is just a dick head, it’s the
same as when you wear tight jeans on
the beach back home. It’s all context,
man.
It seems like today surfing is no longer as cool as
it was. It seems like there’s less surf shops around
now, and less people are rocking the Billabong T.
Actually I think I heard that Billabong was going
under or bankrupt or something. It seems like
surfing is no longer popular. Although City Beach
surf wear and other stores persist.
I went into a Waves surf shop the other day and
they don’t even sell surfboards. It’s basically a
floundering chain clothing store for touros and
unhip teenagers.
Despite being here for a few months
with no surf I’ve slowly transformed into
something else, something half Melbourne,
half Margs. Doing everything but surfing. I still can’t
understand what people do if they don’t surf. I’m
coasting until I go home,
but the next time I do I’ll
probably accidentally wear
jeans down the beach and a
15 year old kid will give me
the finger and tell me fuck off
back to Perth whilst he fades
me into the reef.
Dave Attwood
Oliver Hull
ENDLESS AUTUMN
In 1964 Bruce Brown produced the definitive surf movie: The Endless Summer. The movie follows surfers on their worldwide quest for the perfect wave.
It was the first ‘pure’ surfing movie – made by surfers, for surfers – which
crossed into the mainstream of popular culture. It marked a cultural moment; surfing became a hot new sport, associated with youthfulness and an
ideal Californian lifestyle, and shamelessly exploited by the media. The surfer
style and antiestablishment identity became a marketing tool to sell clothing,
movies and magazines. Surfing culture spawned a style of art which collapsed boundaries between art and design. Hierarchies became established
in the art world and the surfing world: between contemporary and kitsch,
between locals and wannabes. Endless Autumn uses humour to explore these
divisions in the context of the less desirable aspects of surfing: ‘waxed’ car
doors, broken thongs and the great white shark.
Confronting the viewer on first entering the gallery, Stalagmite suggests
aquatic shapes: gelatinous sea creatures, the accretion of salt on handrails
near the beach, or the sea itself as it swells to a curling abstraction of a
breaking wave. Its phallic symbolism punctures notions of the heroic male
artist, an idea underscored by the collective nature of the exhibition – David
Attwood and Oliver Hull share authorship of all the works.
Anti-shark abstraction serves up the hard-edged painting style of West Coast
geometric abstract painting, in this instance representing the shark-repellent
patterning of surfboards and wetsuits. The intense colour and bold unitary
forms draws on the human fascination with machine-made uniformity and
standardised experiences as contrasted with the thrilling unpredictability of
natural phenomena.
Tube, an air-conditioning vent painted the colour of Bunbury seas invests a
quotidian object with the mystique of the perfect tube. The item is offered as
an object of obsession – the hovering mirage a surfer might see if stranded
in an art gallery in a town with no waves. This all-too perfect tube can be
seen as commentary on the increasing popularity of surfing amongst the
general populace, where surfing is compartmentalised and packaged for a
mass audience.
Similarly, Freddo pokes fun at the ubiquitous surfing imagery in mass culture. Along with Blowout, it speaks to the hybridity of Australian culture –
appropriating American styles of footwear (made in Brazil) and presenting a
British candy as a mark of Australian identity.
Machismo and surf-wax recur in Waxed again, a work alluding to the practice
of local surfers destroying the car doors of out-of-towners. Surfers speak of
‘localism’, being the extent to which surfers mark out their territory using violence and intimidation. Although surfer Tom Trigwell recalls that in the 1960s
a certain break was known as ‘Bunbury Break’ in recognition of the number
of surfers who made their way down from the regional centre, the waves of
the south west now have some reputation as ‘localised’.
The exhibition as a whole plays on the motif of provincialism in its repeated allusion to the benchmarks of international modernism, referencing
Duchamp’s readymade, the monochrome paintings of modernism and the
mass cultural references of pop. However, in this instance, the artists engage
with modernism to entrench themselves all the more firmly in the regional.
Their artworks locate themselves firmly in this specific location, thus anchoring the hybrid, unstable identities of postmodernism firmly in the complex
histories, practices and identities of this region.
The two waxed car doors are paired with two paintings of local beach landscapes from the City of Bunbury Art Collection. The inclusion of these works
again raises questions of collective authorship of an exhibition, but also provokes viewers to question the forces that determine the course of art scholarship. Just as typical Surf Art incurs the disparagement of the art world, this
disdain is echoed by the hierarchy of genres in academic art, with landscape
towards the bottom. The question of authenticity and acceptance runs parallel in art as in surfing.
Alisa Blakeney
David Attwood is an artist based in Perth, Western Australia, where he has never surfed. In 2011 Attwood was awarded a First Class Honours degree from
Curtin University, where he is currently a PhD Candidate and Sessional Academic. Recent solo exhibitions include Suburban Similes, Firstdraft, Sydney (2015)
and Green and Gold, Fremantle Art Centre, Fremantle (2014).
Oliver Hull grew up in Margaret River Western Australia, and has been surfing for 11 years. He graduated from Curtin University with First class honours in
2012. Recent solo exhibitions include An Abyss II, Archive, Sydney (2015), What’s the time in Gotham City (∞ to ∞), Platform, Melbourne (2014) and A Meteor,
The Institute of Jamais Vu, London (2013).
Endless Autumn marks Attwood and Hull’s first collaborative project.
10
9
1
8
9
11
1. Classic
Plaster
7. Sunset
Bottle cap
2. Stalagmite
20 years of Surf wax
8. Bunbury Back Beach
Watercolour on paper
1979
John Turton
3. Venn Diagram
Charcoal
2
4. Blowout
Transparency, lightbox
5. Freddo
Poster print
3
6. Anti-shark abstraction
Wall painting
4
9. Waxed again
Car doors, surf wax
10. Anchored Off Bunbury
Oil painting on canvas board
2004
Brian Griffin
11. Tube
Acrylic paint, air-conditioning unit
All works by David Attwood and Oliver Hull 2015 unless otherwise stated.
5
6
7
www.davidattwood.net
www.oliverhull.com