John Mateer

1992 PICA Show review

On the 5th July 1992, there was an exhibition opening at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). The work wasn't particularly striking; large abstract paintings on unstretched canvas. most of them were about (if anything can be about anything anymore) the relation between dots and colours. Other works showed the influence of Paul Klee and other metaphysical modernists.

But they were not the focus of attention. The artist of these bright and apparently naive works - the Englishman Bob Brighton, seemed to be taking great care to talk to all of the viewers individually. And once they had spoken, instead of milling around with a non-focused gaze, they walked to the gallery's foyer where they then waited.

Like many viewers, I didn't pay much attention to that. Then he came up to me and a friend. She told him that she had just been saying that if his works had been painted by a woman they would be compared to tea towels. And he replied "they would be missing a lot, wouldn't they?"

I suggested that he was in the 60s tradition of trying to demystify art. Then, this man, who was to give away all his works, who spent all the money he was given because it made him nervous, who claimed to be a 'world artist with totality vision' half humorously stated " why mystify something so mysterious?"

My aim in relating this incident is not to scetch out a character or demystify a 'demystifier'. Rather, what I want to show was that Bob Brighton demonstrated a way of thinking. The art reviewer for the only newspaper in Perth, David Bromfield of the West Australian, related the works of Brighton in his weekly column, contrasting them favourably with Mike Parr's exhibition of etchings, in which Bromfield (Parr's monographer) would have had an obvious interest. His review, in my opinion, was unfairly favourable.

A consideration of Brighton's work in an art context should reflect on how the artist and his ambitions are against that context. His ambitions might have been, in this order: to make art, to show that making art is self-realisation and to show that this self-realisation should affect an experience of the world.

 

John Mateer
Perth, Australia
1992