Deutscher and Hackett

Arguably among the most enigmatic and compelling achievements of his late career, John Brack’s Walking Stick paintings of the late 1970s skilfully translate humble mobility aids into poignant metaphors for the fragility and precariousness of the human condition. Conceived at a moment when the artist’s attention had shifted from depicting people themselves to the objects that sustain – and ultimately come to symbolise – them, these unique compositions thus revisit the concerns of the celebrated Shop Window series while advancing a richer meditation upon balance, companionship and the ambiguities of existence. One of the more conceptually complex examples from this small but significant group, Promenade, 1978, encapsulates well such evolution, powerfully demonstrating Brack’s remarkable ability to elevate the banal into the universal – to distil the commonplace into imagery of extraordinary psychological and philosophical resonance.

Significantly, the genesis of the series lay in the artist’s encounter with the window display of a Melbourne chiropodist featuring a notice proclaiming, 'A walking stick makes a good companion’, surrounded by an assortment of walking sticks and frames. Struck by the unintended irony of the arrangement, Brack initially translated the display into the watercolour and pen-and-ink drawing A Walking Stick Makes a Good Companion, 1977 (Art Gallery of South Australia), before developing the motif further in Promenade and related paintings such as Tower, 1978 (private collection, formerly Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane) and Display, 1978 (National Gallery of Australia). Yet, unlike the earlier Shop Window paintings whose compositions often retained close parallels with their observed sources, here the display serves merely as the catalyst, with reality instead transformed into an autonomous pictorial invention in which the utilitarian objects assume a life entirely their own.¹ Suspended with improbable grace, the walking frames perform an elegant yet precarious choreography – their delicate equilibrium suggesting both poise and the ever-present possibility of collapse. As Brack later observed, these works were intended to be ‘both balanced and unbalanced... moving and still... coherent and incoherent’ – a series of deliberately ‘premeditated ambiguities.’² Perhaps not coincidentally, Brack also produced a group of drawings depicting gymnasts alongside the development of the Walking Stick series – their striking formal affinities reinforcing the artist’s sustained preoccupation with equilibrium, tension and endurance as both physical and existential conditions.

Central to such exploration of instability and uncertainty is Promenade’s complex spatial construction which compels the viewer’s gaze to shift continually between competing perspectives – from the suspended gold frame and frontally-viewed walking frames, downward onto the sloping floor of the display case, back to the boldly inscribed notice, and beyond to the wooden walking sticks receding into the depths of the window. Behind them, emerging almost imperceptibly from a dense, darkened void, ghostly wheelchairs echo the forms of the walking frames in the foreground, recalling the spectral presences inhabiting The Slicing Machine Shop, 1955 (private collection). Reconfigured into an intricate arrangement of advancing and retreating forms, at once independent and interdependent, indeed the walking frames are rendered with flesh-coloured handles and feet – becoming subtly anthropomorphic without ever relinquishing their identity as functional objects. Here, as in the Shop Window paintings of the previous decade, Brack dissolves the distinction between interior and exterior, merging the worlds of the shopkeeper and passer-by to create what he aptly described as a paradox illustrative ‘not only of shop windows, but the whole aspect of life itself.’³ The display accordingly becomes a theatrical stage upon which society performs while simultaneously observing itself.

As a young art student frequenting the streets surrounding the National Gallery of Victoria, Brack had long admired the inherent beauty of the hardware and machinery displayed in shop windows, later informing his conviction that ‘...everything, especially the manufactured things… have a peculiar beauty – not the beauty of flowers and apples, but the beauty of efficiency.’⁴ Appreciated by Brack  for their therapeutic function associated with medicine and healing, artery forceps, surgical lamps, syringes, wheelchairs and walking frames consequently became recurring protagonists within his paintings, challenging established notions of aesthetic legitimacy while investing the ordinary with profound symbolic weight.

Thus, what originated as the chance observation of a shop window and its reassuring advertising slogan becomes, in Brack’s hands, a quietly profound reflection upon human existence. The walking stick ceases to be merely an object of utility and emerges instead as a symbol of companionship, vulnerability and resilience, while the delicately balanced frames enact the perpetual negotiation between stability and collapse that defines every human life. Indeed, it is precisely this ability to uncover enduring truths within the most commonplace of subjects that distinguishes Brack’s greatest paintings – placing Promenade among the most profound and intellectually rewarding expressions of his oeuvre.

1. Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, p. 142
2. John Brack, Australian Contemporary Art Archive, No.1, Deakin University Media Production, Melbourne, 1980, p. 5
2. Grishin, op. cit., p. 122
4. John Brack cited in ‘John Brack Speaking on his Art’, Tony Morphett, ABC TV Documentary, 1965, p. 2

VERONICA ANGELATOS