Book forward to LANE CORMICK: NOHARDATTACK, 2017
Daine Singer
Lane bluffed his way into exhibiting with me back in 2012 in what I’ve come to know as his typically endearing fashion. He talked my ear off at an opening and let me know that he’d love to show with me and had an exhibition ready to go because his previous gallery had closed. Normally being hit up like this would send me running, but I was charmed, he’s an entertainer. Not long after, I had a show fall through at the last minute and took a gamble – I called Lane. You know how you have that exhibition ready to go, I have an opening that I need to fill in a hurry.
The work was hard to explain but he assured me of its brilliance. Naturally I wanted details and to see the work. By the time we were able to do a studio visit, the opening date had crept so close that I’d had to commit to the exhibition, despite not knowing what it would be. The time came for the studio visit, upstairs at TCB. I arrived to a simultaneously messy and empty studio. He kept me talking but eventually I understood... there was no work. There was no old work, no new work. What’s more, because people had come to expect it, he didn’t want to do a performance.
No worries though! He’d make something.
In the short time left I politely badgered him, trying to extract the basic materials that curators and
gallerists use to package artists.
Have I started (maybe, there’s stuff everywhere, little experiments everywhere)
Cut some wood up, try and build something, simple enough.
An image? He sent me a photograph of a smashed car window.
When to install? Sometime, could be early or late
Lane is utterly resistant to professionalisation. Fuck that I’m not one of those fucking artists! And so I work with him by learning the joys and frustrations of eschewing commercial and professional codes. He can pull off something brilliant at the last minute, but not always. To work with Lane is to take a punt. Risk is a part of working with Lane and also key to his way of working and the resulting works. Lack of planning is key to their vitality, but there is also a kind of double-bluff at play and improvisation occurs within an orchestrated environment.
The gamble paid off (not financially though – I don’t think Lane would mind me saying that he’s always been a money-pit). That first show was Club. A series of nailed up plywood panels wrapping the walls of the gallery, coated in black-dyed sawdust, with a design of silver spray paint. It looked like heroic geometric abstraction but on closer inspection was messy, imperfect, with bits of studio rubbish clinging on: a bit of green paint from a previous work, a water stain where the studio roof had leaked on a panel, a cigarette paper. It embodied the life of the studio, the process of its making, a crappy masculinity, an invigorating rawness. I still think this is Lane’s best work. I sold nothing, but I was sold on Lane, and have represented him since.
My key to working with artists is to find out early the thing that matters most to each of them – for some it’s speedy replies to emails, sales, staying on top of their CV or receiving feedback from audiences. For Lane it’s beer. By which I mean all of the things that go with that – being available for the three hour drop in, cracking a beer, ignoring the computer and talking; the personal connection, loyalty and friendship.
In compiling this book I’m struck by how our contributors continually draw on anecdote and speak as much about Lane as his work. In writing about Lane’s practice it is impossible to separate the artist from the work. Lane himself is quite a performance: a cult figure in the art world who could be a punter on the make, a spiv or a performance artist, a larrikin who is only playing a fool and is intensely serious about his practice, or as Masato Takasaka calls him, a method actor.
In the years of representing him I’ve come to realise that Lane’s work can’t be analysed in individual works or exhibitions, it’s difficult to package. It’s a practice that must be taken as a whole and that must include the artist himself, the studio, the bar, his loyal community, the long raves over beers. Works feed into each other and only start to make sense in relation to each other. Themes emerge in retrospect.
I’ve mentioned masculinity and this I should add is a reading that the artist recoils from – but it’s present. It’s there in the posing smoking boys in a performance at Bus Projects, the leather jackets in the photocopies of Chalmers, the stacks of homemade girly mags, dirt bikes, and staged threat of the young men in Cook Beale Mustard Swan. Masculinity, threat and risk are coded throughout many of Lane’s works. Increasingly these elements are staged to focus on their spectacle, repetition and performance – his subjects have become the states of fandom and performance themselves.
In Kalasaki Rose at ACCA there were receding spectacles: falconer of eagle, videographers of falconer, photographers of videographers and the audience simultaneously viewing the live spectacle and video feeds on screen. On a steamy night at TCB for the performance of Janis, the audience watched Lane watching Nina Simone riffing about Janis Joplin, projected onto the female dancer, who watched no one and made no eye contact.
In MBARZALONA this staging of layers of spectacle played out with an audience watching a guitarist, Rosie Mackay, repeatedly attempting to play a riff from a Causa Sui song while listening to it looping, and watching a projected mugshot, all whilst being filmed. The performance in this case evoked the teenage fan’s bedroom attempts to emulate idols, imperfect repetition, heroes, homages and aspirations. Just as Rosie emulated Causa Sui, Lane took to sporting a diamond ear stud throughout the exhibition in homage to an idolised friend from his youth, whose spectre was projected within the gallery space.
In these more recent performances – Kalasaki Rose, Janis, MBARZALONA – Lane has moved away from the expectations of performance and become steadfastly anticlimactic and under-rehearsed. In Chalmers an unplayed electric guitar sat within an installation comprised of laminated banners formed from photocopies of a leather jacket: motifs of performance and fandom, but an entirely absent performance.
Lane takes a casual production line approach to art-making, imbuing his work with degraded industrial aesthetics. Club was constructed out of a series of ‘prefab’ monochrome panels, a serial approach also utilised for the panels lining the walls of the Janis performance/installation, each bearing a subtly varied photocopy transfer of an image of musician Lee Moses. The cheap immediacy of photocopies and spirit transfer printing appeals to Lane and has also been used for the photocopies of an image of a Sergio Tacchini tracksuit in MBARZALONA and the leather jackets of Chalmers. Printmaking techniques are employed for subtle variations and imperfections rather than perfect reproduction.
Frequently the most seemingly cryptic elements threaded though his exhibitions will turn out to be drawn from Lane’s personal life and youth. Markers of suburbanism such as urban legends and dirt bikes (in Only One Way Out of Here); Bob Hawke’s union speeches in Unearthing the Hawke (a performance that stemmed from Lane’s uncle’s pub tale); making homemade girly magazines; cigarettes; Tacchini or Adidas tracksuits; and the mugshot of a friend from his youth in MBARZALONA. Often the appeal to Lane will be found in real world examples of art-like works or performances. Lane finds a formal beauty in suburban and industrial aesthetics and treats these motifs of personal significance and suburban life with reverence. Lane’s enthusiasm is infectious: he is a fan. He will rave about Brice Marden or the Bulldogs premiership or the last horse that gave him a big win (Kuro) with equal passion. You’ve got to see this he’ll say. And it could be a designer suit that he’s come to own by way of a convoluted path that I don’t quite follow, or it could be a Richard Diebenkorn painting, or a picture of his dog Audrey or a trucking sign. These all feed Lane’s vocabulary.
Lane’s work achieves the tricky feat of being intensely personal and suburban, whilst avoiding tropes of nationalism and identity. His work converses with international conceptual and modernist art traditions and Western suburbs concerns more than with Australian art practices. It is emphatically working class, hovering on the margins of the art world.
- Daine Singer, 2017
Lane Cormick: NOHARDATTACK, 2017
114 pages, 25.4 x 20.3cm
softcover with hand-printed dust jacket
edition of 100
hand-numbered and signed by the artist
NOHARDATTACK is an artist book on the work of Lane Cormick. It features texts by a number of artists and writers including Daine Singer, Amita Kirpalani, Irene Hanenbergh, Jordan Marani, Masato Takasaka, Lisa Radford, Thomas Jeppe, Harry Azidis, Michael Ascroft and Geoff Newton, and photography by Andrew Curtis, Warwick Baker, John Brash, Clare Rae, Paul Philipson and others.
NOHARDATTACK is published in a limited edition of 100. Lane Cormick handmade the covers for each book by laying all 100 covers side-by-side and printing them as a single over-sized screen print. Each printed cover is a fragment of the overall work, and therefore unique in design. A previous edition of this screen print was exhibited as a wall work at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2014. Purchased books will be randomly assigned.
NOHARDATTACK is edited by Daine Singer, designed by Daisy Watkins-Harvey and published by VERSION.