When Jane met Helen
In June last year, our museum opened an exhibition called Namedropping. David says that what he’s trying to do in this show is figure out what status is and why it is useful, in a deep sense—as part of our evolved biology. Namedropping is a light-hearted look at all that, with a few pauses for self-scrutiny. What follows is from the exhibition. Read more about Namedropping here.
One day last year, my colleagues Jane and Jarrod were discussing ‘Murray’s book’ about the Australian artist Ian Fairweather (that’s them namedropping Murray Bail, the writer). Jarrod found slipped inside the cover a copy of Jane’s exhibition catalogue about Fairweather, from her time at the NGV. Jane said, ‘Speaking of namedropping, that’s when I met Helen Garner.’ This was when Helen and Murray were together (which I know about because I devoured Garner’s collected diaries from that period, which are an extraordinary read and massively juicy). Helen bloody Garner!!! Now, you’ll have to imagine my fit of literary excitement and know that to me, Garner’s name reigns supreme. For years, my friend Mim and I have breathlessly exchanged news of Garner sightings in the wild; our adoration runs the gamut of forensically picking apart her sentences, to embarrassing fandom: one particularly dorky phase saw us exchanging selfie recreations of her classic author headshot. When one of us moves house, the other texts through Garner’s sage instruction: ‘Bin all mustards and chutneys.’ Our sense of her is proprietary, our ‘small grim figure with a notebook and a cold’.
Jane said she’d been at Helen and Murray’s house to pick Murray’s brains on Fairweather, and she was fangirling over Helen. Although: ‘I rather doubt she’ll remember the acolyte in her kitchen.’ Jarrod responded saying he once had breakfast with Murray in Potts Point, around the time he was writing the novel Eucalyptus. Bail’s name doesn’t mean that much to me, and in Garner’s diaries he comes across as a dominating and irritable presence (although Jane and Jarrod say they found him kind and generous). I’m team Garner. In my eyes, Jane’s status soared.
This is a narrowly cast anecdote of a narrowcast namedrop. It doesn’t hold universal, broadcast appeal, like the genius of Picasso (everyone knows Picasso) or the aesthetics of Brad Pitt (in an exhibition development meeting, David contended that Brad’s level of hotness is pointless, evolutionarily speaking, because it no longer sieves appropriate mates for Brad; he’s attractive to everyone, a universal spunk).1
What I’m getting at is that namedropping, as a behaviour, seems to give us pleasure because it sorts and unifies a community. Which is a nice way of saying that it’s a sorting mechanism contingent on some people getting it (hearing a meaningful name dropped and responding accordingly), while others do not. Pleasure rooted in exclusion, essentially, because ‘getting it’ means you can bask in the sunny knowledge that you’re part of the in-crowd. It’s no wonder namedropping runs rife in the artworld, a prestigious club that thrives on talking to itself in a language only its members understand (like the time I was basically forced to confess before the curatorial group’s horrified looks that I didn’t know what ‘gouache’ means. I still don’t). Like so much of our human behaviour, what you find meaningful and special, what makes you feel good, is specific to your context and things like age, gender, background and so forth—what we call identity. It’s tribal. And maybe, then, the possible pleasures of status have quite a bit to answer for.
So maybe you derive no meaning from Jane’s namedrop. Maybe it offers you no thrill of association, no sustaining pleasure—mere crumbs, if anything at all. But I’m a longtime Garner fan, a real Helen tragic. And this namedrop, to me, is a banquet.
1. Reading a draft of this text, David responded: ‘I hope I said: To his suitors, it marks his genes as well defined and well expressed, and his symmetry marks him as lacking consequential genetic and somatic mutations.’
Header image:
Gethsemane, 1958, Ian Fairweather
Gouache on cardboard on board
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Gift of Philip Bacon AM through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2017
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Ian Fairweather. DACS/Copyright Agency, 2024