It has embedded itself in my brain, this painting has, taken up residence like a visual earworm, its heartbeat reverberating off the walls of my skull. It is perhaps an odd work to be so drawn to. It is neither especially large nor especially attention seeking, but it is hypnotic, a finger-snap that wakes me in a new state and space. Dominated by a crisp, bone white form mostly surrounded by soot black, the picture faintly recalls schematic images for young babies. As with so many works by Brent Harris, there is a dance between foreground and background, positive and negative. I could be contemplating a white body seen against a black ground. Or I could be looking through a dark frame at a field of light—a poor fool staggering out of a cave, squinting before the bewildering sun.
The painting is Apron of Abuse (1992). Its title runs down the right-hand edge of the pale shape, each word picked out in black letters and enclosed by a cloudy box in a nod to Colin McCahon (1919–1987). “I am an apron,” the shape declares, unequivocally. It is a dainty apron, fringed by naturalistic purple pansies rendered with a delicacy that is made more pronounced by contrast with the hard-edge black and white elements. The flowers look printed, as if they slid off a tea towel or cup. They look pressed, as if they fell out of the pages of a book. They call to mind conventional notions of domesticity and femininity. Mum in the kitchen baking something sweet. Son surreptitiously trying on her apron like a dress.
Harris has explained the origin of his work thus: “In 1992, as I was walking down Brunswick Street in the Melbourne inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, a man coming toward me spat out his abuse, calling me a ‘fucking pansy’.”[01] The pansies in the painting were taken from Slip Covered Armchair (1986–87) by Robert Gober, an artist who often plays with household objects and explores questions of sexuality. The idea for the apron form came from The Large Cloth of Abuse (Das große Schimpftuch, 1968), a painting by Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) that is festooned with German pejoratives. Harris had seen an image of Polke wearing the work like a cloak and was attracted to the notion of turning an applied insult into a protective garment.
Apron of Abuse has come to represent to me something of a synecdoche for The Other Side, Harris’s new survey show at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. In keeping with the exhibition as a whole, which includes around seventy paintings and prints spanning the artist’s career to date, the work is distilled and rich. Although it was made in 1992, it was not shown until 2018.[02] It is rather like the artist himself, who has been hiding in plain sight where Aotearoa is concerned. Although he was born and raised in Te Papaioea Palmerston North, he moved to Naarm Melbourne in 1981 to attend art school. He has been based in Australia since then, developing a strong reputation. He remains less well-known in New Zealand; The Other Side is his first major survey here.
Difficult experiences contributed to Harris’s decision to leave Aotearoa and kept him from returning. He has noted, “I was married at nineteen and divorced at twenty-two. I came out as a gay man and moved to Auckland for three years before moving to Melbourne. I was also distancing myself from a domineering father who created a very complex family life.”[03] There are traces of suffering throughout The Other Side. Apron of Abuse can be read as a reference to domestic abuse as well as homophobia. I Weep My Mother’s Breasts (1996) relates to an incident that took place when the artist was eight. Following a day at the beach, he was snuggling into his mother’s chest in the car when his father tore him away, suggesting he was too old for such things.[04]
Further allusions to abuse surface in Harris’s ‘Grotesquerie’ paintings and prints (2001–9), which centre on organic shapes in flat colour that recall human figures. Grotesquerie 15 (2008) shows the artist’s father as a horned creature—perhaps a satyr or demon. Two bodies spread out from his nose like smoke or some liquid secretion. His extended tongue is red. Harris’s mother appears as a cap of yellow hair and an amorphous head, purged of ears and facial features, as if she is deaf, mute and blind. The forms are not exclusive to Grotesquerie 15 but are found in various other works in the series, emphasising that trauma revisits, haunts. Such iteration is common in Harris’s oeuvre; he often recycles or revises motifs across diverse works and media.
As Apron of Abuse attests, some of the forms in Harris’s works originate in the art of others. The mother from Grotesquerie 15 is in sympathy with figures in a painting by McCahon, The Family (1947), which made a deep impression on Harris when he saw it as a young man. Countless other artists ghost his works. Elsworth Kelly (1923–2015) and Mike Kelley (1954–2012), for example, are explicitly acknowledged in work titles. Francisco Goya (1746– 1828) is an ongoing person of interest. His series of prints ‘Los caprichos’ (published 1799) noticeably marks Harris’s own series ‘The Other Side’, from which the survey at Toi o Tāmaki takes its name.
Other forms in Harris’s pictures arise from improvisation. Such is the case with his ‘Appalling Moment’ works of the early 1990s, which came about when he was working on abstract drawings and “a ridiculous elephant head with trunk suggested itself.”[05] He went on to make extensive use of ‘automatism’, spontaneous creative processes associated with psychoanalysis and surrealist art-making. Automatic drawing strongly informs his series ‘Swamp’ (1999– 2001), with the resulting works depending to a large extent on the human tendency to find meaning in the random—to see animals in clouds, gods in bits of food, monsters lurking in shadows.
In Harris’s practice, improvised forms are worked up and refined. The motifs might continue to appear arbitrary, but they are not. Discussing the ‘Swamp’ series in the catalogue for Towards the Swamp (2019–20) at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Robert Leonard comments, “Harris has tweaked his dribbles to make them clearly suggestive, surely coaxing similar associations from all who see them. In this, they recall Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach’s famous inkblots, which were not random, but contrived to elicit specific associations.”[06]
Subjects often emerge as Harris makes, with the artist self-analysing, drawing out significances. Even when his works have more conscious reference points, they remain open and manifold. The pale shape in Apron of Abuse evokes both an apron and the head of a penis. It also resembles the upper bodies of the embracing couple in a print to which Harris has returned many times, Towards the forest II (Mot skogen II, 1915) by Edvard Munch (1863–1944). Best known as a source for the dripping forms in Harris’s work, the print has echoes in a range of pictures, including Sad Magdalen (2022), which shows Mary Magdalene as a great lump of lament—her face buried in her hands or a handkerchief—and suggests a pair of shrouded figures huddled before a tomb.
Christian subjects or motifs have repeatedly surfaced in Harris’s works, although he is not a believer.[07] In 1989, he created ‘The Stations’, a series of paintings and prints grounded in geometric abstraction that helped bring him to critical attention. (He produced a starkly different series on the same theme between 2020 and 2021.) The pictures spoke to artists from Aotearoa, namely McCahon, who had made a version of the Stations of the Cross in 1966 and had achieved a degree of renown on the ‘other side of the Tasman’, and Gordon Walters (1919–1995), whose meticulous hard- edge works naturally appealed to Harris.[08] References were also made to artists from further afield, most notably Barnett Newman (1905–1970), perhaps the best-known abstractionist to treat the Stations.
Harris’s 1989 prints are included in The Other Side. In line with their nominal subject matter, they are imbued with profound pathos. They are ascetically minimal, rendered in black, white and a few earthy tones, and they firmly resist conventional interpretation; you would be hard pressed to connect any one picture with any one episode in the narrative. They feel not merely mysterious but wittingly coded. Although he did not say so when the series was made, Harris intended ‘The Stations’ to allude to the HIV/AIDS crisis then devastating queer communities. He has since commented:
I have never really identified as a gay artist. I have lived in fairly tolerant countries and times. But the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s was a terrifying and sad time for most gay people. I was not involved in political activism around the AIDS crisis but was very active in care teams early on when things were at their worst. Around this time, I made my first series of ‘The Stations of the Cross’, and I approached the subject as a readymade narrative for a young person going to an early death: judged this morning, dead this afternoon.[09]
A death ultimately freed Harris to return to Aotearoa. When his father died in 2016, he felt comfortable making the journey. In 2018 he had his first solo show in this country, To the Forest. Held at Robert Heald Gallery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, it was composed of woodcuts from the 1990s and early 2000s. To the Forest was followed in 2019 by Peaks, also at Robert Heald Gallery. It comprised new paintings that featured undulating mountain forms dripping with snow—references to a fond childhood memory of standing on the roof of the house in Te Papaioea, from which Ngāuruhoe, Ruapehu and Taranaki could all be seen.[10]
Harris’s 2019 ‘Peaks’ paintings—three of which appear in The Other Side—are a natural extension of his work of the preceding decade or so, in which hard-edge forms collide with sketchy and richly atmospheric passages of paintwork. Allusions to spirituality are common. For instance, Begin (2014–15), with its glowing green snake, evokes Eden. The Prophet (2012) centres on an immense yellow shamanic figure, who preaches to a silhouetted crowd that doubles as a black fire. Peaks (To the River) (2019)—a work intended as a nod to an Otira painting by Petrus van der Velden (1837–1913)—suggests a whimsical wind god. Curlicues frosted with impasto unfurl from between the fingers of a figure described by little more than a hat, a hand and a wide-open eye.
An eye-like entity has long appeared in Harris’s work. Often it takes the form of a white ring around a black circle, like a bullseye, a cartoon eye or a googly eye from a stuffed toy. The motif can stand for other things: a mirror, a portal, a vortex sucking you into oblivion. It can suggest the presence of the artist in the painting, staring back at you. It can imply a father, earthly or celestial, who is always watching, always breathing down your neck. It can evoke the power of pictures to wriggle through your eyes and into your dreams. Does that sound terrible? It can be terrible. But it can also be the inverse. An endless chorus. A dazzling light. A faint lullaby. A cradle of night. One side and the other, miraculously at once.
[01] Jane Devery and Brent Harris, ‘The Other Side: Jane Devery and Brent Harris in Conversation,’ Art Toi 9 (March 2023), 28.
[02] Helen Hughes, Brent Harris: Monkey Business (Melbourne: Tolarno Galleries, 2022).
[03] Devery and Harris, ‘The Other Side,’ 20.
[04] Robert Cook, Swamp Op – Brent Harris (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2006), 24.
[05] Devery and Harris, ‘The Other Side,’ 29.
[06] Robert Leonard, ‘Brent Harris: Sincere Disconnect,’ in Towards the Swamp (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 2019), 39.
[07] Maria Zagala, ‘Shadow Worlds: The Monotypes of Brent Harris and Susan Wald,’ Imprint 51, no. 4 (2016), 41.
[08] Devery and Harris, ‘The Other Side,’ 26.
[09] Ibid.
[10] Kiran Dass, ‘On Swampy Ground: Painter and Printmaker Brent Harris Returns Home,’ The Spinoff, 18 January 2020.
Header image: Brent Harris, I Weep My Mothers Breasts, 1996, oil on linen, 57 × 96.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist
