Portrait 1

G'day Possums,

Back in the 60's German Historian Joachim Fest published his literary portraits titled "The Face of The Third Reich," an important work analysing not only the main protagonistsof the Nazi plan but the functionaries, wives and mothers and the intellectuals who supported this regime and I thought it timely given the recent dog-whistling of the far right and its tacit approval of neo-nazi "demonstrations" to pen a few myself. 

This portrait came from an earlier blog entry from 2016 when I was commenting on works from the Archibald Prize being exhibited in Ballarat with the Title "The Art of Lifting and Leaning"  which came from juxtaposition of the over life-size and cunningly adjacent portraits of Annie Smithers and Josh Frydenberg.  

Smithers is the chef/owner of du Fermier restaurant just up the road from our burrow, in Trentham; and in admirably succinct and honest utterance declared to artist Daniel Butterworth that,  "...the bottom line for her was that all her hard work ends up down the toilet." 

Camillo De Luca: "Polymath"

But no such profundity from Frydenberg. Smugly comfortable, depicted as artfully dishevelled in blue-tied banality, Camillo De Luca's portrait aims in its materials of charcoal and wood with copper frame to indicate this  faux Treasurer's ministerial position of that time, Resources and Energy with a white halo apparently symbolising his outstanding achievements.

Just what these achievements were or are I couldn't think then, and can't now which perhaps, is why as a large work, it seems so small.

Frydenberg, belongs to the Ruling Rabble which is systematically destroying the country's economy and degrading its social contract so effectively that we are becoming a pariah nation. This "rising star" of the Liarbril Party is painted on two sheets of plywood making a square which suitably approximates his ineffable dullness and by being split down the middle it asserts a closer truth of his real aspirations than the artist probably intended. 

Trees, Alice Springs

The rawness of the ply was to signify a work in progress though I think it more roughly indicative of the conceptual abyss and policy vacuum that Frydenberg's rabble are forcing Australia into. That De Luca considers him a Polymath is more cynical than I can bear. This is a person of achievements: utterly minimal. A public functionary flaccidly supporting  the most nasty, brutish, right-wing rabble of faux xtians this land has ever seen including those ex-IPA members who even advocate dismembering the arts and halting any funding; who mutely condones anyone offering frank advice being attacked, sacked or publicly denigrated and on hearing evidence of the only actions of excellence practised by  the Ruling Rabble: their near collective criminality of rorting their entitlements, lets the sounds glide by unheard.

That's pretty much what I wrote then..... and see little reason nearly three years on, to alter it. 

Hoo-roo Petals,

Shane.

Trees, Alice Springs