Howard Arkley Howard Arkley (1951-1999)(1951-1999)

An An Australian Australian

PainterPainter

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OUR HOME

THE RITUAL (1986)

High Rise, Saint Kilda Road, 1986.

Nubrick, 1986

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• I appreciate the air of ambivalence inherent in Howard Arkley's suburban houses. These paintings both critique and celebrate, deride and revel in, middle Australia. They hate and they love, equally and simultaneously.

• For this reason, I would far sooner sit in front of one of Arkley's suburban houses than I would endure an evening of Barry Humphries' Dame Edna Everage, whose mean and malicious streak has for some reason always been misinterpreted in this country as self-deprecating instead of just plain deprecating, and who has never really done it for me as a result.

• A film like The Castle, which I enjoy greatly, is a little better in this respect, but also, ultimately, quite sentimental. It's probably television's Kath & Kim that comes closest to achieving the same ambivalence—and therefore complexity—of Arkley's work, but even it has a tendency to go one way or the other (which is inevitable really, given its obligations as a satire).

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• I ultimately can't help but feel that it's the medium (visual art), the discipline (airbrush, which is never quite 'there'), and the precise subject of Arkley's work (the buildings as opposed to people who live in them), which makes the ambivalence one feels in his images—and its potency—possible