Scott Fredericks, Normalcy, The Old Butchers Shop Gallery.
It has been getting more difficult to live as an artist for a few years now, ever since John Howard decided that artists should live by the market only. The Pandemic has emphasised this slow decline by cutting them off from galleries, audiences and collectors. Yet most now long to return to a mythic, pre-pandemic ‘normal’ of poorly paid work, a struggle for grants, sponsorship, recognition. Very few have taken the opportunity to rethink their practice. They mostly want the same old same old, for as long as they possibly can.
On the other hand, Scott Fredericks, encouraged by Diokno Pasilan, has renewed his art and his practice by pushing away the dead hand of the ‘normal’, which he rebrands as ‘normalcy’.
At the entrance to the show, in the window space, stands Sign Of Normalcy.* A row of what look like children’s alphabet play blocks have been lined up on a rod, like a kebab, so as to spell ‘normalcy’. Ahead of them a graphic hand with a pointing figure indicates the way to normalcy in the conventional fairground manner of a pre-war printer or sign-writer.
The visitor is invited to leave all the fun of the fair for the leaden dullness of normality. The sign sits on a wonderfully crafted, meter high, open tower of wood in which sits a red painted heavy weight which holds the sign down, a cipher for the omnipresent drag of the desire to be and do the ‘normal’.
‘Normalcy’ is an ugly word, coopted by a failed American Presidential candidate, in the 1920’s, from a term in pure maths, but it suited the Americans. It was probably brought to Australia in the sixties by US forces, who were busy trying to bring normalcy to Vietnam. It was barely noticed here until about 10 years ago when it appeared in our politics, business and other sites of power. Put simply it has come to be used whenever a coerced state of compliant servitude is required by the slave-masters who own and run our society. The key to this is the mystery of active compliance. It runs throughout Fredericks’ work. He wants to show:
The ubiquitous haze of the absurd hidden in plain sight, driving normalcy.
The Drinkers 1st Position.takes apart the plain sight vision of four males drinking, the way in which masculinity is willingly co-opted by day to day normalcy. Four figures, a metre and a half high, teeter on long stilt like legs. These give the group an anxious unstable poetry that Dali achieved in his burning giraffes. This, though, is a group of ambitious drunks acting out drunkenness in hope of oblivion.
Fredericks endows each figure with overweening signs of inadequacy. Despite the magnificent swing and sway of arms and torsos, there are holes in their hips and blockheads; their tightly grasped smokes become wizened phalluses and this is only their first position in the long night’s ballet for the salvation to be found in normalcy. These are monsters from long lost beer adverts whose best hope is to ‘Consume, Be Silent and Die.’
Eight works in the show predate the Pandemic. They had been around for a while. Fredericks knew they were important, but he never planned to exhibit them. In particular, the four Maquettes for Mr Reed (2019) show how long he has lived with the horrors of normalcy.
These are:
imagined evidence in the public trial of Mr Reed From a time when speculation could run rife when wearing a red tie to a dinner party was enough to create suspicion about a political ideology.
As with the whole exhibition, these works are all beautifully made In Washing Day, Mr Reed stands next to a Hills Hoist that holds washing in a luxurious shade of red. Maybe this banal shirt is evidence of his lack of commitment to normalcy The piece is wall mounted as are several others. So a wooden structure like those that hold houses to hillsides supports Mr Reed. This sense of the absurd in the every day recalls Giacometti’s early work, The Palace at 4.0 am.
Elsewhere, in The Hole, Mr Reed comes under suspicion from a neighbour for dumping rubbish at night in a hole in his garden. In another work he attempts to use a lawn mower to mow flat all the individual thoughts that marked him out. This presentation of normalcy as achieved by strenuous, if absurd, physical and mental housekeeping, self administered brainwashing, is one of the triumphs of the show. Of course one thinks of Kafka’s K, also on trial for a crime of which he has no conception. ‘Kafkaesque’, however, is a dangerous, politically loaded adjective, which should only be used with great care.
Another death march to normalcy, the social media, is exposed in The Hash Tag Winners. Fredericks coopts the almost universal iconography of the crucifixion. It is face book and twitter with their bogus competitive framework, not Roman soldiers, that are doing the winners over, very slowly. Three hollow disembowelled creatures are hung on crosses with the central raised highest. Each is fixed in a wood block that resemble a domino, presumably in reference to the media ratings which they have crucified themselves to achieve.
Fredericks’ work raises some very significant issues for current practice. His fascination with making was sparked by watching his mother make pottery when he was 14. He is a builder “by trade” - an iconic but ironic expression that hints at tension with his art practice.
He has made a series of five compelling paintings, Contract, Handover, Setout, Lockup, Poacher’s Paradise, in which his enamelled geometric, diagram-like style follows the process of building a property, which, inevitably, introduces an outbreak of normalcy in the natural environment.
Other works concern the bogus experience of freedom retirement after lives of normalcy, some relatively happy like the butcher whose sausages were famous in the district, others totally sacrificed the treadmill of survival as in An Independent Body, A man inspired by the radio to believe superannuation would set him free wheels his nest egg on an ever tilting seesaw slope, a modern Sisyphus whose burden is not a rock but normalcy.
It is worth asking whether art is intrinsically capable of engaging human experience to the full on its own terms, that is to say the terms of its making, without engaging the banal, romantic, rhetoric of 'self-expression versus sell-out’. Fredericks believes it does and I am with him. In London, however, and elsewhere a number of artists have become employees, or ‘mascots’, of private trading companies lending their works entirely for use as sophisticated corporate logos. They see no problem with this way to get their art done, or with being in hock to normalcy, because, as they would put it “there is nowhere else to go.”
Who knows one of them may survive, transcendent beyond normalcy. I doubt it.
Fredericks' work should be much more widely seen. I am sure it will be, quite soon.
*Full disclosure - Pippa Tandy and David Bromfield have acquired this work for their collection