![ANDREW MATTOCK - GIST OF A WINK WITH A SMILEPublished: The Age, Arts & Culture, July 12, 2010.
This work questions censorship - with a guilty giggle, writes Dan Rule.
DO YOU know what a plushie is?” asks Andrew Mattock, drawing a smirking halt to our conversation. No, unfortunately, I do not. An anticipatory pause, a broadening smile. ”A plushie is someone who dresses up in animal suits for sexual excitement!” he urges finally, cackles, sighs, cackles some more.
Aside from having a good old laugh, the 42-year-old artist is, in fact, in the midst of making a valid point. For Mattock, whose new collection of raw, mixed-media paintings shows alongside that of Cameron Lindsay as part of the Heavenly Bodiesexhibition at Green-Wood Gallery, pornography is in the eye of the beholder.
”If you take the dictionary definition of pornography, it’s something along the lines of ‘words and images to stimulate sexual excitement’,” he says. ”Some people find feet a turn-on, and then there’s the book by J. G. Ballard, Crash, where people find car crashes sexually stimulating.” Another laugh. ”The whole point of these artworks is about asking just how you define pornography.”
This is Mattock’s second series of paintings tackling historical and contemporary examples of the state censorship of sexually orientated material. Inspired by the pre-porn ”sleaze paperback” genre of the late 1950s and ’60s - many of which, including such salacious titles as Honolulu Snatch, The Lust Lobby and Sin Driver, compete for space in Mattock and wife Emma’s St Kilda apartment - the spray-paint and enamel works that compriseHeavenly Bodies make for a veritable orgy of bouncing bosoms and schoolyard innuendo.
A half-naked blonde gazes longingly over her shoulder, the words ”Up My Alley” emblazoned down the side of the painting. ”The affair had left a nasty taste in Samantha’s mouth” offers another work, in scrawled text. There’s the curvy negligee-clad seductress flaunting Hot Cargo; there’s Eaten Alive, Maid to Order and, of course, the splay-legged piece de resistance,Jungle Finger. It’s cheeky, crass and makes for a guilty giggle.
”I like the wry smile, you know,” offers Mattock, who hails from Melksham in rural England. ”I enjoy the reaction; I enjoy being cheeky. I guess I’m a product of my time in that sense. Before the zeitgeist of the ’60s, where everything seemed to change and so many censorship laws were repealed, in order to get around the laws all of this innuendo popped up.”
It is no mistake that the exhibition arrives amid controversy over the federal government’s proposed national internet filter and new regulations that grant customs officials the right to search incoming passengers’ luggage and electronic devices for undeclared pornographic material.
”To apply a filter, arbitrarily, across every strand of society and every strand of media just seems a ludicrous approach,” Mattock says. ”It seems like the shotgun and scatter-gun approach, like, ‘That’s wrong and we’ll censor you.’ These were issues dealt with in the ’60s and ’70s!
”You’ve got Australian Customs trying to make you declare pornography when you come into the country. It’s crazy - how can Customs define what’s pornography and what isn’t?” he says. ”I bet you can guarantee that everyone in the queue at immigration will find completely different things sexually stimulating.”
By mimicking the aesthetics and innuendo of an unliberated era, Mattock, who trained in ceramics before shifting to paint on his move to Australia in the mid-2000s, aims to warn of the potential reinstatement of drastic censorship. ”One of [American sexploitation director] Russ Meyer’s great quotes is, ‘Most censorship looks ludicrous when you look back upon it,’ and it does.”
But does this attitude ignore concerns about under-age access to adult material and the early sexualisation of children in the internet era? Mattock thinks not. ”People need to take responsibility and educate their kids,” he says. ” As a household, you can say, ‘I would like you to filter this [internet] content’, rather than having a secret government list of what you can see and what you can’t.”
Mattock, who works freelance in IT to pay the bills, says it’s the job of a modern democracy to regulate itself. ”Most people have an inbuilt ‘filter’,” he says. ”You can’t arbitrarily apply something to everyone in the country because of a few people who sit at the margins.”
That said, Mattock doesn’t see his paintings as the work of some kind of pro-porn crusader. ”At the end of the day, it’s all just fun and cheeky. There’s no point in doing it if you don’t have a smile on your face.”
Heavenly Bodies is on display at Green-Wood Gallery until July 18.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5zeb0hZmg1qa3c8ao1_400.jpg)
ANDREW MATTOCK - GIST OF A WINK WITH A SMILE
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, July 12, 2010.
This work questions censorship - with a guilty giggle, writes Dan Rule.
DO YOU know what a plushie is?” asks Andrew Mattock, drawing a smirking halt to our conversation. No, unfortunately, I do not. An anticipatory pause, a broadening smile. ”A plushie is someone who dresses up in animal suits for sexual excitement!” he urges finally, cackles, sighs, cackles some more.
Aside from having a good old laugh, the 42-year-old artist is, in fact, in the midst of making a valid point. For Mattock, whose new collection of raw, mixed-media paintings shows alongside that of Cameron Lindsay as part of the Heavenly Bodiesexhibition at Green-Wood Gallery, pornography is in the eye of the beholder.
”If you take the dictionary definition of pornography, it’s something along the lines of ‘words and images to stimulate sexual excitement’,” he says. ”Some people find feet a turn-on, and then there’s the book by J. G. Ballard, Crash, where people find car crashes sexually stimulating.” Another laugh. ”The whole point of these artworks is about asking just how you define pornography.”
This is Mattock’s second series of paintings tackling historical and contemporary examples of the state censorship of sexually orientated material. Inspired by the pre-porn ”sleaze paperback” genre of the late 1950s and ’60s - many of which, including such salacious titles as Honolulu Snatch, The Lust Lobby and Sin Driver, compete for space in Mattock and wife Emma’s St Kilda apartment - the spray-paint and enamel works that compriseHeavenly Bodies make for a veritable orgy of bouncing bosoms and schoolyard innuendo.
A half-naked blonde gazes longingly over her shoulder, the words ”Up My Alley” emblazoned down the side of the painting. ”The affair had left a nasty taste in Samantha’s mouth” offers another work, in scrawled text. There’s the curvy negligee-clad seductress flaunting Hot Cargo; there’s Eaten Alive, Maid to Order and, of course, the splay-legged piece de resistance,Jungle Finger. It’s cheeky, crass and makes for a guilty giggle.
”I like the wry smile, you know,” offers Mattock, who hails from Melksham in rural England. ”I enjoy the reaction; I enjoy being cheeky. I guess I’m a product of my time in that sense. Before the zeitgeist of the ’60s, where everything seemed to change and so many censorship laws were repealed, in order to get around the laws all of this innuendo popped up.”
It is no mistake that the exhibition arrives amid controversy over the federal government’s proposed national internet filter and new regulations that grant customs officials the right to search incoming passengers’ luggage and electronic devices for undeclared pornographic material.
”To apply a filter, arbitrarily, across every strand of society and every strand of media just seems a ludicrous approach,” Mattock says. ”It seems like the shotgun and scatter-gun approach, like, ‘That’s wrong and we’ll censor you.’ These were issues dealt with in the ’60s and ’70s!
”You’ve got Australian Customs trying to make you declare pornography when you come into the country. It’s crazy - how can Customs define what’s pornography and what isn’t?” he says. ”I bet you can guarantee that everyone in the queue at immigration will find completely different things sexually stimulating.”
By mimicking the aesthetics and innuendo of an unliberated era, Mattock, who trained in ceramics before shifting to paint on his move to Australia in the mid-2000s, aims to warn of the potential reinstatement of drastic censorship. ”One of [American sexploitation director] Russ Meyer’s great quotes is, ‘Most censorship looks ludicrous when you look back upon it,’ and it does.”
But does this attitude ignore concerns about under-age access to adult material and the early sexualisation of children in the internet era? Mattock thinks not. ”People need to take responsibility and educate their kids,” he says. ” As a household, you can say, ‘I would like you to filter this [internet] content’, rather than having a secret government list of what you can see and what you can’t.”
Mattock, who works freelance in IT to pay the bills, says it’s the job of a modern democracy to regulate itself. ”Most people have an inbuilt ‘filter’,” he says. ”You can’t arbitrarily apply something to everyone in the country because of a few people who sit at the margins.”
That said, Mattock doesn’t see his paintings as the work of some kind of pro-porn crusader. ”At the end of the day, it’s all just fun and cheeky. There’s no point in doing it if you don’t have a smile on your face.”
Heavenly Bodies is on display at Green-Wood Gallery until July 18.
