A tribute to David McComb
As far as love stories go, I hadn’t realised mine until I was in the dark of a movie theatre, the Astor in St Kilda, Melbourne, watching ‘Love in Bright Landscapes’. The film will screen again at the Astor on 21 June 2022. I already have my ticket.
The story behind my realisation began almost 40 years ago one stormy night in Perth, Western Australia, in the latter half of 1984. There was a small underground music bar through a single street-door off Hay Street in the city, down a long, narrow flight of stairs. The bar was on the left, dosed in sober light. The stage was on the right, saturated with dark expectation. Both of equal inebriation.
On this evening, my boyfriend’s band was supporting the Triffids. Unbeknownst to me, he had arranged for the Triffid’s sound engineer to instruct me on how to mix sound. Once the support act ended, I attended the mixing desk for instruction. The Triffid’s sound engineer was not the garbed groupie I expected. Instead, his pristine attention was more akin to that of an eager young architect than a devotee dulled by a subculture’s condiments. He wasted no time in pointing out parts of the mixing desk. Life, at that moment, felt extraordinary. I was soon to hear the Triffids clad in their new over-east fame as well as learn how to tame tearaway sound frequencies. Then my boyfriend interrupted with something urgent to say.
He ushered me through a black back door into a vacated room stacked with the splayed carcasses of two bands’ musical-instrument cases. Here, he told me of his affair; she was a musician; it wouldn’t happen again. We were to continue together, as usual. The storm that night then spilled its worst torment, even though the night sky remained free of any meteorological event as we headed into another cloudless summer.
The Triffids began. I returned alongside the sound engineer who continued with his instruction little noticing I was not the same. My attention faulted, then flunked as it clung for dear life upon every word by David McComb as he sang.
Red pony, it’s a gift from me/from me to you
— I am sure he sang ‘Red Pony’ that night;
Ride it well my love, hold your head up high/across this land
— the contrast could not have been starker. This spoke of giving and possibility compared to the earlier taking and treachery;
Sand in your eye, sun upon your back/Next to you my love/all colours turn to black. (Extract from lyrics by The Triffids)
David McComb chaperoned the betrayal just experienced into a pit that no longer existed. My stare, too full of relief, sought his attention while he looked the other way. Though—the sound engineer could see. He gave up on any further instruction. The music stopped too soon; the lights snapped on and left me nowhere to go. I said my thanks and sought to hide amongst the crowd queuing at the bar. While everyone poured past, I stood still. I heard my name. I turned — it was David McComb. Our exchange was brief. He walked away and my life forever changed.
I decided the next day to leave Perth, my friends, my family—everything I had ever known. The following few weeks found me alone in my decision and the anger it caused in others. Yet I would reconnect with my resolve still standing down those steep stairs each time, steadfast and strong. I would try for Vic college, an art school in Melbourne. After the first few weeks of dreading the journey’s trials on my own, an art friend since high school said she would come too. Thankfully, fear turned into adventure.
Retribution didn’t send me across the Nullarbor. It wasn’t revenge. Instead of being defined, it was defiance and the freedom to find life for myself — the right to define myself — that sent me packing. A different type of love had taken the stage that night. One enabled by a humble David McComb. A love that isn’t a means to an end, but an end in itself. A kingdom of ends, as they say in philosophy (a ‘ta’ to Jon Rubin for a timely reminder of Immanuel Kant), a place worth striving towards. It is a love in which we don’t use a fellow to reach an end. Instead, we treat them as an end, in itself, if not cherish them. This other love is the love of David McComb, a love far brighter than any sun-straddled landscape. In the film it is a love described as devotion to devotion.
In the first ten years after graduating from Vic college, I exhibited artworks striven with this other type of love. Within an art world punctuated by treachery that far outstripped my earlier experience, I expect these works seemed naïve if not embarrassing. Others thought me a romantic fool and my art boring. With the distance I now have, I admit surprise at my gumption to have pursued it. Until you experience a room’s space sapped by a supposed lover’s words that then return tenfold, in the next breath, through another’s—it is hard to realise how momentous this other type of love is.
Or whether it ‘is’ at all.
In the movie theatre’s dark, the Astor’s, I was ashamed to discover I had not stood by this love—when it still stands, steadfast, in the music of David McComb.
From me to you,
Gail Hastings
June 2022
SBS has Love in Bright Landscapes available for viewing: Watch film on SBS
space Tendency: Love
Room for Love 1990
A page ripped from a Mills-&-Boon type book became the exhibition invitation sent through the post. It listed the date, the time, and the place — Store 5. On entry, the space was empty of art on the walls. That was not common. A love chair was at the centre. In fact, a tête-à-tête chair. There is a difference. A tête-à-tête chair is s-shaped for two people to face each other while speaking. A love chair is a wider armchair so two people can sit close. There is a plinth on either side of opposite sitting positions. Thirty years had passed since sculpture first touched the ground without the symbolic significance of a plinth to declare it as art. On each plinth, a LoveSwept book is replete with a romantic couple in a full-colour embrace. In opposition to the colour of their embrace, the remaining artwork is in black and white. In opposition to the embrace’s fullness, the story inside is of empty pages made from a paper stock reminiscent of pulp fiction. Opposite to the book’s symbolic position atop the plinths, the artwork is on the everyday ground where viewers can sit on the tête-à-tête chair and turn their heads towards the centre to face each other, then turn away to face opposite directions to pause alone. (GH, 2022)
From flower power 1960s/1990s 1993
Five watercolours comprise the various rooms in this set of watercolours. From the viewpoint above, it is possible to see the pattern underlying the layout of rooms in each. Each is prompted in its own way by the childhood game of pulling petals off a flower while reciting ‘He loves me, he loves me not’ in the hope the last remaining petal fulfils the wish that ‘He loves me’. However, when inside a room, one is unable to see the alternating pattern from above and, consequently, an alternative to the room. For instance, in this one of the five watercolours, the rooms are without windows or doors. One would be able to realise there is another possibility to the room one is locked in.
The set of watercolours formed the beginning of what has since become the Primavera collection at the MCA. As MCA curators Isabel Finch and Clare Lewis explained in 2008: ‘The development of the MCA’s Collection began in 1967 through the University of Sydney’s JW Power Bequest which preceded the opening of the Museum in 1991. The decision to acquire the work of Primavera artists began in 1993, the first purchase being a suite of works by Gail Hastings, an artist included in the inaugural Primavera exhibition.’ (GH, 2022)
To make a work of thoughtful art 1995
In 1993 I received the University of Sydney Power Studio residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris for six months that I took up in 1995. While there, I travelled to Düsseldorf for the first time to build and exhibit ‘To make a work of thoughtful art’. The artwork begins with a watercolour page for the Encyclopaedia of Thoughtful Art reproduced on the gallery’s announcement card sent to prospective visitors. In the reproduction, we don’t see the page straight on but slipping from the two-dimensional plane to span the vertical and horizontal planes that form the coordinates of three-dimensional space.
On visiting the Encyclopaedia at the gallery, the page takes up the entire three-dimensional space. However, there is a process the Encyclopaedic page has had to undergo to become a work of thoughtful art. In other words, although everyday space is automatic — it already exists when we wake up and continues to exist when we sleep at night — the created space in these artworks isn’t automatic. Instead, it has to undergo a process to become ‘real space’; the artwork’s contents listed on the page outline this process. While the last step records the process as having taken place, the crucial moment in the process is step four, where, after anger has been extracted from a thought, the space of the artwork occurs by extracting its understanding from the thought’s remaining love. (GH, 2022)
Encyclopaedia of Thoughtful Art
To make a work of thoughtful art please follow the guidelines below:
- From the square above cut out a thought into a shape and lean it next to number 1.
- From this thought cut out its anger and place it on the plinth at number 2.
- From this anger cut out its love and place it at number 3.
- From this love cut out its understanding and return it to where the thought had first been taken, at number 4.
- Now ask a passer-by the time (21:57) and the date (Freitag 13.10).
page ’95
