Word: arkley
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...Having sent an Arkley kitchen canvas to Korea in a 1998 show and worked with him on an installation shortly before his death, Smith knows him inside out. Hanging the exhibition in loose chronological order, he places the 1992 painted interior, Spartan Space, inspired by Modernist De Stijl furniture design, amidst early white abstract works, making plain Arkley's influences. In the following room, he artfully arranges a 1983 suite of street-culture canvases, Tattooed: Head, Hands, Penis, Feet, in the form of a Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse, making the connection to Arkley's student days at Prahran College...
...Next he allows visitors to walk through the artist's 1991-92 collaboration with burlesque painter Juan Davila, to give an idea of his contemporaries. And in the final spaces, he provides the breadth of a suburban street for surveying Arkley's crowning canvases of the '90s, such as the almost radioactively-charged Family Home: Suburban Exterior, 1993, which made him justly famous. Along nearly 20m of nearby wall are hung the larger-than-life vignettes of suburban lounge rooms, many drawn from earlier works, which played like his Greatest Hits at Venice. Here, to walk before his Vulcan...
...those who can't wait for its tour of Sydney and Brisbane next year, there's Gregory's cleverly designed large-format book - as blocky as one of Arkley's hand-sprayed chairs. He'd surely approve. As his studio notebooks - and disco-colored De Stijl installation Muzak Mural-Chair Tableau, 1980-81 - attest, Arkley's vision couldn't be contained by the gallery wall. At various times he envisaged a home handyman show, inspired by the hardware stores near where he lived in suburban Oakleigh, and even started to design his own limited-edition furniture and crockery. Arkley...
...close in spirit to Keith Haring as he was to Klee, and if the book has a fault, it's that it stints on his formative punk years in the '70s and '80s, assuming everyone has read Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar's Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley (1997). As they documented, it was his 1981 mural Primitive, named after a song by The Cramps, that saw Arkley paint his way from an abstract to a figurative style. Perhaps it was his life-long love of doodling that drew him to the airbrush, but this isn't something...
...this way, his vaudevillean scenes of suburbia are the ultimate self-portraits, their bright exteriors hinting at shadowy, unknowable lives that the viewer can only guess at. In Arkley's case it was a long-term heroin addiction, which finally claimed his life. But his surviving work asks us to leave our final judgment open, which is what distinguishes him from that more cynical chronicler of the everyday, John Brack. Instead, we are left with a glimmer of mirth, irony perhaps, but not least of all affection for what takes place behind the masquerade of suburban life...