Urban Anxieties

Images of decay, of instability and catastrophe have long had a place in Western art. The late twentieth century, however, has seen such images proliferate, as we face the inescapable evidence of our own potential for destruction. In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian artists such as Arthur Boyd, Yosl Bergner, Noel Counihan and Albert Tucker used their work to convey the psychological anguish and suffering of a generation confronted by war. Four decades later, these fears and anxieties continue as a major theme in Australian art. It is no accident that their arena is the city, for it is in the urban environment that the psychology of chaos and destruction develops most freely.

The sense of alienation endemic to the modern urban environment is a theme common to several of the artists represented in this exhibition. In Victor Rubin's City of polemic structure, 1986, a human figure is cast out, expelled from the brutal mass of concrete; others are dwarfed and obscured by their own creations. In Mandy Martin's Plant 8, no.2, redundant, 1982, a drawing of decaying factories, there are no people — only the severe, saw-toothed roofs cutting into the harshness of the landscape.

While Rubin and Martin show the post-industrial landscape as a moribund world, there is a helter-skelter energy in Beaconsfield Parade, 1984, Jan Senbergs's drawing of an industrial-residential section of Melbourne. This corner of the city has long been a source of fascination for Senbergs. A more recent interest is the Tasmanian mining centre of Queenstown, where the industrial activity of many decades has poisoned the natural vegetation of a large surrounding area.

Nicholas Nedelkopoulos uses his drawings to address the physical manifestations of an anxious society. His A garden path for the blind and The Nightmare of Motherhood, both of 1986, are works in which social pressures can be seen to rob the individual of the ability to function.

The fear of technology, or rather of our powerlessness to control it, is another theme that recurs in many works from the early 1980s. In Tim Maguire's Disorder and consequence no.IV, 1984, a flickering succession of images suggests pictures transmitted through the television screen, the most influential form of visual stimulation in contemporary society. The speed with which these images change from one to another seems to indicate that the pace of the modern city is sufficiently distracting to obscure its grim realities.

The ultimate focus of this fear of technology is the atomic bomb, whose mushroom cloud hovers over the dancing figures in Suzie Marston's Funeral, 1983. The gulf between humanity and technology is further confronted in Tony Coleing's Proposal for the journal Art Forum: What does this person have to do with computers?, 1984. The object of Coleing's rhetorical question is a native of the South Pacific. Against a collage backdrop that incorporates an aerogramme from New Caledonia, his presence indicates the theme of the work — the testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific region.

The concern that modern industrial society will lead to self-destruction is accompanied in several of the works on display by perceptions that society devalues the lives of its participants. Two drawings that address this notion of human degradation are John R. Walkers Deceit and desire and Narcissus, both of 1986. In Deceit and desire, the artist attempts to reinvigorate an image inspired by the bland expressionlessness of a pornographic playing-card. Narcissus, by contrast, takes its violent theme from a bizarre suicide case and its title from the Greek myth of Narkissos, the youth who fell in love with his own reflection. Suicide is thus presented as the ultimate form of self-gratification.

The oppressiveness of the contemporary social environment is more subtly explored in the works of Peter Booth and Ken Unsworth. In a series of drawings made since the late 1970s, Booth has created a macabre, nightmare world, whose inhabitants project a sense of the grotesque. In Drawing: Crowd with city towers, 1979, he depicts a towering city spewing forth a mass of brutish people. The image conveys an atmosphere of menace, as the city engulfs the viewer's space. Ken Unsworth's drawings, like his installations, are also claustrophobic — interior spaces animated by disturbing psychological dramas.

Feelings about the modern world, and a disquiet about humanity’s role in an increasingly technological age, are the themes of this exhibition. It is perhaps no surprise that the decade which produced these drawings has also produced in literature the ultimate representative of the urban condition — a man betrayed by technology, by those around him, and by himself. John Self, the hero of Martin Amis's novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984), shunts himself from city to city and from room to room within those cities. As he sits in a waiting room, he muses on the fate of the system that surrounds him: — 'l suppose all prisons are waiting rooms. All prisons – all rooms. All rooms are waiting rooms. Your room is a waiting room. You are waiting, I am waiting. Everything is getting nearer to being over'.

This exhibition was held at the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University.