Whiteley's Nude

It’s inescapable.  You may be entirely indifferent to Australian Art. Like the Prime Minister you may don your baseball hat and feel impregnable from the taint of culture, that dynamic, disruptive emotional force that can’t be translated into dot-point and the dull metric of statistics. You might try and remove the entablature of Arts from the parliamentary memory, and bathe yourself in the afterglow of sport, beer and popularism but you cannot escape from the gravity, the impact, the presence, of Whiteley upon the Australian cultural landscape. To coin a well worn cliche; “Whiteley is iconic”.

Whiteley’s work is an affront to those who desire standardisation. Whiteley returns us to the basics of humanity. And its a humanity that is emphatically and expressively un-standardised. It is emotion, sexual and alluring. And it is the TRUTH!! It is also a testament. A talisman to that brief period in time, when the Australian body politic was radical. When Liberal Prime Ministers (excluding Billy Macmahon) were reformist and truly Liberal. Before the body politic was diminished by the sound-byte.  Before popular imagination was blanched, bleached, and boulderised by mortgages, superannuation and bracket creep.

This image represents that brief period in which a truly local spirit flourished, and the flame leapt out beyond our shores to proclaim an irreverent and boisterously self-conscious identity.  This exuberance of imagination posed innumerable opportunities. And from this a generation was inspired by the potential of EVERYTHING!  Before it was quashed by ‘Wowserism’, political correctness and the dull immutable logic of bankers and hedge-fund managers. This image says it all.  It’s “Dons Party’ rendered in a bravura of  ink and wash.

And why does it endure as THE SINGULAR and TIMELESS SYMBOL OF WHITELEY?

Because everything that captivates the soul and expresses the sinuous, supple, serpentining sexuality of the female form is presented in this nude. There are only 50 prints in existence. Each a remarkable entablature of Whiteley's capacity to capture what cannot be found elsewhere.  And the subtext is simple. “No more of these will EVER be MADE’!. This image palpitates with an eternal resonance. This singular image alone was chosen as the figurative signature of Whiteley’s oeuvre. This image graced the Art Gallery of NSWs retrospective catalogue. This image became embedded in the national psyche as a touch-point for an excursion into Australia of the mid 70’s.

 In as much as “Picnic at Hanging Rock” reconfigured Australian Victorianism as a pubescent sexualised mythical trance, this picture, adventurous, adolescent, provocative, imaginative and progressive, defined an ERA. A source of inspiration locked in parallel to the unfathomable mystery of the Australian landscape, native and yet evocatively steeped in the Dionysian rites of Ancient Greece. And as fun and thought provoking as the Lindsays' escapades in neo-classical garb at Creswick. Representing successive waves of locally derived and supercharged erotic visions.  All since quashed by the over-arching nemesis of an engaged free-form expressive culture, Puritanism.  Sadly, puritanism, and it’s bastard-child ‘wowserism’ have won.

In this image there is hope, renewed hope that we may collectively move beyond the imperative of our time, (Franking credits), and re-acquaint ourselves with the  beauty that surrounds us. Whiteley’s grasp of the nude, is more than a mere rendering.  It expresses the fullness of his vision. His capacity to draw and evoke,  as a neolithic rendered the perfect shape and expression of a Bison in a cave, his nude captures the eternal spirit of ‘woman-hood’. It embraces, the beauty, the mystery and the glory of feminine sexuality. This is his oracle. His place of worship. His tableau. His statement.

Whiteley is saying; “BEHOLD”. To “SEE THIS”,  is to see ‘LIFE’. This is the progenitor. This is the source. This is the universe.

We are but passers by.

We may mimic life, and some of us may even pretend to understand it. Whilst the reality is all-consuming. “Reality” (Whiteley proclaims), “is  the perfect symmetry at breasts drown round and full.  Of a waist and buttocks that sway voluptuously in all their bouncy flouncy luminescence, and the  cleft between the legs, Donne's “no-mans land” rendered as the evocative, sexualised fulcrum, the compositional perspective point to all that grows and glows outwards in this explosion of pure expressive form”.  To the artists gaze, the pyramid is up-ended. It is from that cleft in which the source of all humanity flows.  The cup, the source, is eternal. Like Waterhouse's “Circe”, there’s power in this symmetry. 

This picture proclaims…..“Look out patriarchy! This is RAW SEXUALITY! And….. it’s coming to get you”! 

And try as you might, that lightness of touch, the fluidity of expression, the serpentining, sexualised curves will overwhelm you and make you realise that we are animals ourselves. And as animals are ruled by NATURE! And the basic instincts of fear of envy of  lust and love.  This is ours, to embrace and exalt, under the all conquering power of WOMAN. This image is timeless, because it rekindles in all of us  the wonder the omnipresence of something that cannot be denied. Not  a line is wasted, not a sinew overdrawn. And the face, the temporal object we all like to see ourselves reflected in is rendered onto a firmament of unrecognisable form. Whiteley’s conceit is, to show us as we really are; sexualised beings rendered as one might see a cosmos, all awhirl with the incandescence of the the stuff we assemble our reality from. From the past, the future and the present. All of it, captured in this one instance, via the minds-eye of a gifted and extraordinary seer of visions.

Ours to enjoy, (and quietly), either alone or in public. And to admire and enjoy the incandescence of just looking.  

words by David McCubbin