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Incident and Anecdote

Robert MacPherson: The Painter’s Reach

Peter Anderson
Eyeline 84
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On entering the building the visitor to Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) is immediately confronted by two possibilities: veer to the left and examine the small selection of works in the long vitrine, or look up to the right. Here, in a towering hang that reaches almost to the full height of the building, is CHITTERS: A WHEELBARROW FOR RICHARD, 156 PAINTINGS, 156 SIGNS (1999-2000). It is a huge work (almost ten metres high by a little over seventeen metres wide) with each Masonite panel carrying a text linked to landscaping—painted white on black in Dulux Weathershield Acrylic. It is so big that it is difficult to take in all at once, there is no way to step back, and climbing the stairs to the upper galleries simply proffers angled or fragmented views. But you can put it together, bit by bit, perhaps the way it was made, in modular fragments: SMALL/LAND-/SCAPING ROAD/FILL. NAMBU/-CCA/RIVER/PEBBLE WATER/FALLS. Read this way, it is a painting and maybe also a poem: DRY/STONE/WALLS. BOBCATS/+/EXCAVA-/TORS. ASPHAL/T. DRIV-/E. WAYS. ROCKE-/RIES.

Like most of Robert MacPherson’s work, CHITTERS invites the viewer into a layered system, a play with language, process or form, often drawing on quite specialist knowledge—be it scientific, artistic, or vernacular. A quick search of a dictionary for the meaning of ‘chitters’ for example, is quite likely to come up blank, leaving you caught toying with the idea of a brief note, slip or voucher, a ‘chit’, or a bit of gossipy chit chat, a pile of words, rather than the coarse pebbly residue left over from coal mining. No doubt there is a story in this, not tailings, but a tale. But knowing just... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

CHITTERS: A WHEELBARROW FOR RICHARD, 156 PAINTINGS, 156 SIGNS, 1999–2000. Detail. Installation view, ‘The Painter’s Reach’, QAGOMA. Courtesy the artist and Yuill | Crowley, Sydney.

CHITTERS: A WHEELBARROW FOR RICHARD, 156 PAINTINGS, 156 SIGNS, 1999–2000. Detail. Installation view, ‘The Painter’s Reach’, QAGOMA. Courtesy the artist and Yuill | Crowley, Sydney.

SCALE FROM THE TOOL (SABCO), 1977. Enamel, gold foil on wood, paintbrush, five units 27 x 9 x 2cm (each). Collection the artist. Courtesy Yuill | Crowley, Sydney.

SCALE FROM THE TOOL (SABCO), 1977. Enamel, gold foil on wood, paintbrush, five units 27 x 9 x 2cm (each). Collection the artist. Courtesy Yuill | Crowley, Sydney.