Chips Mackinolty

Links to information about Chips

www.artcollector.net.au

themonthly.com.au

www.thereseritchie.com

cdu.edu.au

www.abc.net.au

www.togartaward.com.au

cdu.edu.au

The greatest concentrationof artists in the world per capita is not in Paris or Manhattan, but in the Northern Territory in Australia. What is not widely acknowledged is that they are not only Indigenous artists, but also include non-Indigenous artists, making the whole place into a creative crucible of hybridity.

There are three major art prizes in the Territory: the Alice Prize established in 1970, which is open to all Australian artists; the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs) established in 1984, and which is again a national award, but open only to Indigenous artists; and the Togart Contemporary Art Award, which is now in its fifth year, and which is open only to Territorians, or those who have had a lengthy association with the Northern Territory, and is open to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. It is the only art prize that can be viewed as something of a litmus to what is happening in the visual arts scene in the Territory.

This year’s Togart finalists, displayed as the inaugural exhibition for the brand-new Chan Contemporary Arts Space, betray a strong Top End bias with fewer artists from the Central and Western Deserts, and with the non-Indigenous artists outnumbering the Indigenous ones. That said, it is a strong show sparkling with quirky hybridity. Aly de Groot literally weaves forms out of discarded steel wool dishpan scrubbers as in Legend of the white dingo, while Merran Sierakowski, in The pointy end, has cut out quite a large aeroplane shape out of perforated galvanised steel to which she has attached, with wire nail scissors, nail files and other pointy objects which had been confiscated from airline passengers. The plane is shown precariously plunging downwards, bringing to mind all of the connotations of terrorism and the futile struggle to contain it. Rob Brown, in a naïf style with a touch surrealist flavour, shows Smoky Dawson as rocking horse hero, and Bryan Bulley, an artist of growing stature, has a sprawling landscape full of episodic humour. One of my favourites is Therese Ritchie’s Out of the window, a large triptych in the form of a digital collage, which explores in a real sense the idea that ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. In the work there is just an echo of Michael Riley. 

David Hancock in his aerial photograph, Two paddocks one fence, contrasts two paddocks separated by a fence, one side grazed out by a passing herd of cattle, the other remains relatively untouched. It is a very simple and effective environmental statement. There is a brilliant 

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painted bark by Barrupu Yunupingu, Gurtha, with a great sensuousness and freedom of touch, a striking acrylic canvas by Kawayi Nampitjinpa, an accomplished bark painting by Samuel Namunjdja, Goannas, as well as a great Rerrkirrwanga Mununggurr Gumatj Larrakitj, a hollow tree trunk rendered with exquisite detail. There are two signature acrylics by Lily Kelly Napangardi and Nancy Nungurrayi. There is also one of Chris Barry’s Performing Aboriginality digital photographs with their powerful sense of presence. Barry has the unusual ability to create photographs which ambush the beholder through their understated naïve innocence but which, with further viewing, pack a considerable impact. One of the popular crowd pleasers is Anna Reynolds’s Awesome Atrocity 4 (2010), a giclée print which in a tongue-in-cheek manner laments the overdevelopment of the Darwin foreshore. 

This year’s award went to a long-term Darwin resident, Chips Mackinolty, for his large digital inkjet print, Neta, Darwin 1950. Mackinolty was an important figure in the 1970s poster collective movement, where his Make life impossible poster of 1976, featuring the face of Malcolm Fraser caught with an arrogant sneer on his face and made in response to the sacking of the Whitlam government, helped mould the political sympathies of a generation of Australians. Mackinolty as an artist has maintained his rage, with a brilliant huge retrospective exhibition of his and Therese Ritchie’s prints at the Charles Darwin University Art Gallery showing the full range of their art over more than forty years. Anita Angel, who curated this exhibition, went for an effective strategy of largely avoiding wall captions to allow the posters to do all of the talking, with a checklist available for further investigation.

Mackinolty’s winning entry harkens back to an age of innocence when in post-war Darwin Neta performed in a domestic setting on a ukulele. It is a striking image of warmth and innocence with an arresting presence. Mackinolty, who is mainly known as a screenprint artist, has mastered the digital process to simulate perfectly the screenprint’s crisp flat planes of colour and subtly fading colour hues, which are a hallmark of Mackinolty’s screenprints. He explained to me his process: 

It’s down to using Photoshop at a probably very basic level … I tend to work with only one or a limited number of layers in general, and often just a single one for the main image … [I] work at a very fine level – down to the use of pen tools at as little as three to nine pixels wide to achieve the ‘sharp’ edges … rather than the more painterly/photographic way most others do it. It’s bloody painstaking. I tend to use distinct and simplified CMYK colours [cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black] that are consistent across a whole image, rather than random shades. A lot of people use RGB colours [an additive colour model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours] but as I always think about what it would look like as offset, I tend to go for what I know. 

It is interesting how many comrades associated with the radical poster collectives of the 1970s are now finally receiving recognition. Alison Alder, who heads Megalo Print Studio in Canberra, was awarded the Alice Prize in 2010, while Michael Callaghan has just completed his term as Creative Arts Fellow at the ANU.

No sooner than being awarded the prize, the startled Chips Mackinolty promptly returned the cheque asking that the $15,000 prize money be distributed to three struggling live music venues in the Northern Territory: Happy Yess, the Railway Club, both in Darwin, and Winanjjikari Music, a Barkly Arts project in Tennant Creek. 

Togart was the brainchild of Ervin Vidor, the chairman of the Toga Group of companies (best known for their Medina, Travelodge and Vibe hotel chains), who decided to donate 1% of their total building budget from their vast multistage Darwin Waterfront development to public art programs, including Togart. This will amass over the years to a multi-million dollar contribution to the arts. Arriving amongst the postwar refugees from Hungary, he has become a significant benefactor of the arts in Australia. On hearing of Mackinolty’s generosity, Vidor immediately decided to throw in another $5000 to the live music venues nominated by the artist. Could this happen anywhere but in Darwin? b

The Togart Contemporary Art Award 2010 was exhibited at the Chan Contemporary Arts Space, State Square, Darwin, 2 September to 7 October 2010. The winner of the People’s Choice Award is Darwin artist Anna Reynolds for her digital photograph Awesome Atrocity 4.

Professor Sasha Grishin is the Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History, Australian National University, Canberra.