Artist Profile – August 2019

20

A BLUR OF

COLOUR,

GOOD MUSIC

AND BAD ART

HISTORY

Story

JOHN MCDONALD

Illustration

DAVID ROWE

E

ver since John Adams gave us

Nixon in China in 1987, the

possibilities for opera have been

limitless. Unlike the Greek tragedians who

were obliged to set every play in a mythical

age of Gods and heroes, contemporary

composers have drawn subjects from the

news cycle, and from the tawdry lives of

latter-day celebrities.

Elena Kats-Chernin’s Whiteley was never

going to be Greek tragedy. The closest

parallel might be Mark-Anthony Turnage’s

Anna Nicole (2011), about a celebrity

stripper who was never out of the tabloids.

Brett Whiteley (1939–92), despite his

reputation as an important Australian

artist, was another tabloid favourite.

The classic operas are often simple

melodramas with a clear, unmistakable

storyline. Madam Butterfly’s fate is spelled

out in the first Act, as Pinkerton reveals his

frivolous attitude to the marriage. From

the moment he meets Carmen, Don José is

set on a course that leads to ruin.

Whiteley’s life was neither a tragedy nor a

comedy, it was an indeterminant muddle

of alternating highs and lows. The all-time

highs arrived with his dazzling success as a

young expatriate artist in London in the

early 1960s, and in 1978, when he took out

all three annual prizes at the Art Gallery of

NSW – the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman.

The lows were his descent into rank self-

indulgence in New York which culminated

in his break with Marlborough Galleries,

and the heroin addiction that became his

other claim to fame. Whiteley the opera is

not a coherent story but a set of episodes

stitched together to form a disjointed por trait.