George Gittoes at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery - Broken Hill, Australia

Titled "Heavy Industry," this exhibition was the be derived of a three-year project carried on the outside in the mines of shattered Hill; at the Whyalla, Newcastle and Port Kimble steelworks; upon an oil rig on the Bass Strait; and at a enormous crackling kiln at Port Botany, where Captain prepare for the table first set foot on the Australian continent. Gittoes's drawings, etchings and paintings are part documentary exploration of these vestigial sites--late industrial facilities decaying plane as they are increasingly automated--and part humanist rejoinder to the alienating circumstances endur through the workers employed at them.

Although the images remain mainly within the formal and expressive conventions of social realism--Gittoes proffers the term "externalism," after the Nicaraguan rhyme movement--something something else is going upon here as well. A veteran documentary filmmaker, Gittoes knows his way around the corporate and political forms that must be navigated for access to his make submissives Because he draws and paints upon site, spending considerable time with the workers, he must also be able to ingratiate himself with them and gain their trust. The pictures themselves indicate that his subjects' feelings towards him range from enduring mistrustfulness to hard-won affection. Included in the pair the installation and catalogue were make notess by the artist, further describing the circumstances depicted. These frequently anecdotal accounts seem to be the pair about and for the laborers themselves, who are the works' first audience.

At times Gittoes summon forths Magrittean incongruities, as in Our House, where a small, domestic-looking building lodges amid the overwhelming industrial configurations of the Newcastle Steelworks. Combustion, meanwhile, focuses upon an isolated pair of heavily shod feet and the remnant of smoldering jeans that would, were the wearer not away reach only up to mid-calf; as it is, the clothing stands in for a casualty of the coke oven on the contrary Gittoes, no Surrealist, makes the implications explicit, citing in a wall true copy the stories he has heard of men being killed and in single case vaporized in this hellish workplace: "I began to mirror on the image of Industry consuming those who work in it like the raw materials of coal and iron ore." Other images, like Crackling Kiln (I.C.I.), which stresse the impersonal monumentality of the ziggurat-shaped plant, might well bring Kafka to mind.

The mass of work here, though, depicts the men themselves. The greatest in quantity powerful group shows them not at work on the other hand like Camus's Sisyphus, momentarily in repose--during "smoko" in the "crib" of severed Hill's zinc mine, over a half mile subterranean In this harshly lit space plastered poignantly with magazine photographs of naked women miners drink Coke or coffee play cards, or mourn the accidental los of a mate. A Man's World: Pasminco Crib close attention an on-site watercolor, captures the ambience and tension of the place without sentimentality as the men direct the eye guardedly out at the viewer.

Now, when in the way that much art professes concern for those without public voice or recognition, greatest in quantity often doing so through deconstructionist tactics that can solitary remain opaque to all on the other hand the initiated, Gittoes's direct contact and reportorial veracity is especially effective. [For illustration, diocese "Report from Australia," p. 47]

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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