Accepting the totality of humanity's spectacle of enlightenment and imbecility, Luke Roberts presents himself as an obsessed chronologist, encyclopaedist and museum curator of erratic human aspiration and its hysterical near-misses. Thus, his iconography veers between cosmic sublimity and Luna Park, secured to the constant bulwark of the Papacy. It diverts via American Indian, Egyptian and Japanese cultures in order to spin out an immaculately logical thread of personal and social interweavings by means of sound assonance and cross-played metaphor. His conceptualization displays the many natures of his persona, establishing them as valid and actual, rather than as play-acting masks and simulacra. In trying to free himself from the oppressive dualisms constructing norms of behaviour, Roberts aims to create an open space in his work; a space which is inclusive, non-judgmental but not lacking in discrimination. For this reason his work, like Salvo's and Dokoupil's, takes on a misleadingly eclectic appearance. At heart, it is celebratory of the populist.

By 1988 Roberts was moving away from an earlier density of texture in favour of a more reduced form1. In installations and performances2 materials were allowed to speak for themselves and the conceptual basis of his work, which had always been present, became clearer. Elements from arte povera gained greater significance: barbed wired, the surfaces of ruined walls, decay and fire processes.3

In fact, Roberts has always been more interested in the content of hardware and opportunity shops than in traditional artists' materials. His work may be seen as an objectification of Idea, rather than an interest in constructing surface for its own sake. He retrieves the halfformed and unresolved threads of early seventies conceptualism. Like Magritte, Roberts hovers around the edges of surrealism, however, quizzically, he introduces a razoring doubt against Breton's Freudian patriarchy: he flattens the seductive curves of dreams and is, far more than Breton, a philosophically inclined linguistician. He "paints words and writes paintings" in an extended disquisition about light, time and space.

In coming to terms with both the white and the Aboriginal histories of Australia Robert' s work explores earth, language, myth. The Ned Kelly legend is an increasingly significant part of this. Roberts has found one site for his practice in the discourse of photography/painting, however, he has entered its theoretical austerity on his own terms by eliminating the separation between sign and material and reading them as one level of signification. Thus, the one-to-one square of the negative becomes Kelly's visor and helmet.

The use of the square is a primitivizing reaction against the shapes of traditional academic painting, but it also sanctifies the mundane by recalling Malevich's icons of sublimity. A Popist reference inevitably creeps in, that of a record tucked into a square sleeve whereby a solution is offered to the ancient rational and mystical conundrum of how to square the circle. At the corners of the material square of Aristotle, the elements transform into each other. The image coincides with that of the four evangelists. Divinity and matter occupy the same space. Hence, the photographic negative becomes a field in which polarities assume the same identity: high art/ commodity, sacred/ secular, male/female. Finally, the negative becomes the opening syllogism in a logical procedure by which Roberts analyzes his relationship with European modernism and his white inheritance.

In his exhibition, Without Closure, he amplified theory and symbology. Paintings were blown up into banners threatening the art-marketed commodity of the old-master portrait. Ostensibly still lifes in dialogue with Magritte's word-plays these works are icons, selfportraits in the form of sacred shrines, or dream-gifts to the anima which present a feminine balance to masculine bowler hats, pipes and to dismayingly neutral lovers.

By analyzing the metaphysics of light, the paintings become theatres of the same idiosyncratic myths which Roberts has pursued from the outset. Into a complex autonomy of light-rays prismatically confusing reality, Roberts sets earth and language as a deviating space of action and of thought in his concern to integrate his own background in the central Queensland town of Alpha with his four years in Europe (1984-7).

The pivot of his investigation is the sybillic figure of 'Alice' who has become almost a linguistic science of her own as well as being Roberts' talisman and amulet. Partly based on the A/ice books of Lewis Carroll, she is distinguished from other kinds of post-modernist usage in that she is founded more on Roberts' personal history, most especially on his discovery in 1974 of 'Alice Jitterbug', an American Indian shaman. This combinatory personality appeared in Roberts' performance work of the late seventies as both Pope Alice and as Alice Jitterbug, as well as in his subsequent film work in the early eighties.4

The concept of Alice is that of a traveller experiencing the vicissitudes of an underground journey, like that of the souls in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The wickedly land-mined terrain explodes preconceptions, resurrecting the traveller who carries an oddity of artefacts by way of souvenirs and a baggage of disparate languages. Thus, in Roberts' latest exhibition Magritte's hieroglyphs generate forms which, like the beheaded puppets in Svankmajer's Alice , have swapped bodies but continue the card-game regardless. In The Heart of the Matter a Renaissance head muffled in Victorian Lenten purple props a traditional Aboriginal grass hat on its head in a transformation of the metal cones which have become a leitmotif of Roberts' work. They are monoliths of victory and distantly recall the horns of the bull-symbol which Roberts relates to his evangelist patron, St. Luke. Through archaic myths the horns lead back to Crete and thence to Spain and Mexico, to two of the figures whom Roberts has sanctified, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keefe.

These installations at Bellas Gallery were, in one sense, altars to the gods of the found land. Magritte's lions were turned into Chinese money-boxes, sandwiched among ochre, central Queensland rocks and brassy, op-shop army trumpets (The Only Human Attribute). In the Migrant (based on Magritte's Migratory Angel), the traveller (a sixties mannequin head) is deified, almost like a resurrected Kali skull. Thoth, scribe of the gods, and Thor, their shaman smith in Nordic myth, were symbolized by ink-wells and hammer: creation by sound, letter and hand. It is an Egyptian Psychostasia: the wanderer tried and sentenced. Her heart is inscribed: the hammer sounds her fate.

Theatres and rebus, iconic and iconoclastic, Roberts' works bear kinship to that well established logocentricity of the French philosophical tradition. Sound manifests images. Though an archaeologist of cultural memory, Roberts goes further and creates a topology of new associations which escape the hierarchies of mythology. In particular, the surfaces of meaning run counter to the spare geometries of Platonic reason and value. Roberts applies a logic of accidental qualities, of subjectivity, which spins through 'Alpha' and 'Omega' and through his own name in Latin as 'Lux' and its female form as 'Lucia'. Light implies darkness, bringing into play positive and negative oppositions. Lucifer, the light-bringer and morning star, becomes his own shadow (The Morning Star)5. The two eyes, St. Lucy's attribute, become a third, that of intuitive wisdom, symbolized by the sign for infinity. In Roberts' most recent work, Infinity, a luminous work in pearlescent silver, the eyes metaphorize an eternal circle of self-observation. Infinity is also 'zero' or the letter '0', Omega, the end of the track from Alpha in which all the stuff of Roberts' cosmos begins and ends.

The artworks are relics, sacred and pagan, commemorating human passing and metamorphosis. Roberts' retrieval of childhood, his own and others', partly accords with, but also differs significantly from that of Christian Boltansky who similarly incorporates others' histories 6. Boltansky denies either the possibility or the desirability of retrieving the child, but Roberts considers it to be his essential inspirational trigger as a positive assertion of the bond between disparate experiences, supporting life and play against alienation and despair. In formal terms, the corpus of his work, for all its initial bewildering variety, is similar to that of Jim Dine in the combination of reduction, monumentality, ironic humour, texture and kitsch. Roberts has a tendency to transpose the delicate into the raw and monolithic, to turn fragility into forcefulness, the particular into the universal. The confidence of his formal attack is further pronounced by his selective minimalism.

More especial influences, as in Roberts' rarely seen graphics, are from Jonathan Borofsky's installationist drawings. This can be seen specifically in a quality of reckless expansiveness. In the main, Roberts is attracted by other work which operates the high art/populist/linguistic axis: de Chirico (spatial hieroglyphics), Max Ernst (bird, flight and metamorphosis imagery), Dali (with reservations). An ideal of form, as well as of lifestyle, are Duchamp's travelling valises, Beuys' cases of energized paraphernalia and the greenplastic, carry-ails of bag-women: art as packaged commodity and as reliquary: the artist as travelling salesman. Further, Roberts restructures illustrations of art which he admires (Spanish paintings, Matisse, Klee, the Italian Renaissance) by laying on surfaces, curtains, of black ink in his series of artists' books. He 'censors' history, plays games with the forms and forces the texts (some of which are anathema to his own ethics) to speak against themselves and to echo his own desires. Beyond art history, anything is available for his act of appropriation. He has reworked children's books, tourist guides, charts of penmanship. The new images may be calligraphic doodles, distant recollections of McCahon, Kelly's visor, Malevich's crosses, American Indian rugs. Other black/white, positive/negative forms which have featured in both larger and smaller works have involved game fields, such as the chess-board from Alice Through the Looking-Glass and cross-word puzzles.

Populist play has always held great significance for Roberts. Throughout the seventies, his work not only kept pace with international developments in both high art and popular culture-the pop maximalism of Lucas Samaras, as well as earlier glam rock and performance- but it also produced a simultaneous independent growth. The current image of art in Brisbane in the seventies is negative. Nonetheless, advanced experimental work did appear. Admittedly, the city was isolated, with underdeveloped display facilities . Even the institutions one might have expected to support experimental art tended to be conservative, preferring formalist interstate work rather than local production. Roberts, as a result, drew most of his collaborators from outside the field of the visual arts, particularly from theatre and design. The experimenters assumed outrageous populist guises, as much to assure themselves of their own, thereby undeniable, existence, as to attract the attention of others. Roberts owned a shop in which such artefacts of current and older popular taste were restored and sold as cherished clues to Queensland's (and Roberts') unrecorded folk history. It is often forgotten that much contemporary experimental art in Brisbane has an ancestry not only in interstate and international art, but also within the city itself. Knowledge of such work was lost as the artists left the city. The destruction of the work and of its documentation has become almost a feature of Roberts' discourse: of memory and its failures, of loss of knowledge and, therefore, of power?

Roberts' exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in 1982, a maximalist serenade to kitsch, along with his participation in the No Names exhibition also at the IMA celebrated the peak of his populism and of his massive collecting of both artefacts and behaviour patterns of exaggerated style. It had all gone just about as far as it could. Untitled, his IMA installation took over two floors of the building in Market Street: its 'logo' being the grave-cross of his Uncle Kitch. Upstairs was a series of works entitled The Loved One (Mr Olivia Newton-John's Husband Miriam). They were focused around a centre piece of three plates of glass laid over seven female torsos on a chenille/ satin bedspread. The exhibition was both critical of the misuse of the feminine in media images and a tribute to its victims. Between the plates of glass were magazine photographs of well-known women of the fifties and sixties, such as Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn and Nancy Sinatra. On top of the glass beside the images stood hand coloured perspex boxes containing broken shards of rare china, cigarette packets and watercolour paint brushes. At the centre of the 'table' at which women were consumed by the media stood a shop-mannequin on a glass display stand (a nearly complete female form) . She wore a blue Mexican dress heavily embroidered with raffia and a black veil with a wreath of roses, and was casting a rose to the furthermost corner of the room. On that wall were fixed two 'altars', one to Marilyn Monroe, symbolized by a white-wedding dress and the other to Jayne Mansfield, signified by a black mantilla. The images of these 'stars' were placed onto wooden crate ends along with other accoutrements expressive of their public personae and private lives.

Downstairs the celebration and criticism of kitsch continued: Botticelli's Birth of Venus was reworked as a Kewpie doll in a clam soap-holder and the other figures of that classical painting were recast in contemporary toy-forms. The images were prototypical of the aesthetic of banality currently being preached by Jeff Koons. Get Frocked in the same room was a more aggressive joke at the expense of conventional imagery of masculinity. The usurping of advertising and its slogans, turning its own voice against itself, was a strategy similar to that adopted more recently by Barbara Kruger. Inside plastic record covers were pages cut in the form of the letters of the title . They advertised male commodities which Roberts had 'feminized' by the addition of make-up, nail polish, feathers, milk bottle top earrings and glitter. A record rack held LP covers containing soft-core porn images, some of these gay. Finally, on the other wall Roberts had shipped in domestic artefacts from his own house (Things from Home).

The No Names exhibition at the IMA (1983) in which Roberts participated was an historic land-mark for Brisbane experimental art in that it was the first time that such art had been exhibited anywhere in the city in an institutional space. It warrants more discussion that is possible here. Roberts' own installation continued the theme of upsetting conventional gender construction. Bag Woman referred to De Kooning' s Woman 5 in the Australian National Gallery. A brick Gothic window on the floor was filled with Kewpie dolls, plastic tubing from shopping-bags and bottle-tops. Above, a painted Egyptian cabinet wore stiletto shoes, while a mannequin was adorned with tulle and shopping-bags. Cellophane swept down from the beam of the roof. The shoppingbags were another reference to Roberts' concept of portable art: a self-portrait.

A comparative concept is that of Jonathan Borofsky who travels with suitcases of slides and sketches. But the image also referred to the endless collecting of objects in which Roberts at the time was engaged and to which he was bidding farewell in view of his imminent departure for Europe.

Nonetheless, he continued such interests in his years in Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam, creating performances under the auspices of Alice, Alles Alice Uber ...., as well as others involving Australian emigre artists, for instance Never Never Ending Lino Sky with Gary Carsely in 1987 at the Suzanne Biederberg Gallery in Amsterdam, and with experimental European musicians and vocalists.

The Chartreuse Emu, a studio collective which Roberts organized in Brisbane in 1979-80, aimed to canonize the folk-kitsch of Brisbane, but also to operate as a think-tank with a type of 'factory' production of artworks, somewhat on Warhol's model. The name referred to Emu Park, a township on the central Queensland coast. The studio also commemorated the deportation of Cribb Islanders from their homes, now replaced by the Brisbane airport. Cribb Island had been a self-contained centre of Queensland domestic taste, the acme of kitsch and plastic. Roberts recognized these as a valid type of 'folk' art.

In fact, the persona of Pope Alice and Alice Jitterbug eulogized the much loved and discarded trash of urban culture in order to construct a history both for Roberts and for Brisbane. These figures were related less to traditional drag than to the same questioning of gender construction which engaged feminists internationally In the seventies for example, the work of Linda Bengalis, or of Hannah Wilke. Apart from performance, many of Roberts' installations may be seen in the context of a feminist discourse: comparisons can be drawn from the textural surfaces of Rosemary Trockel and Eva Hesse, as well as the sculpture performance of Rebecca Horn. The victim as victorious, Frida Kahlo as priest at her own sacrifice, the power of knowledge gained through painful transgression are themes which Roberts shares with the feminists.8

Pope Alice was both a self vindication and an armoured vehicle of social protest. The images of Alice Jitterbug addressed an issue somewhat differently phrased from that of Pope Alice. Alice Jitterbug originates in a North American Indian shamanic tradition which completely accepts a duality of gender in the one person.

Seen in the feminist context of 1977, Roberts' series of photographs were an appropriate attack against the patriarchal construction of the masculine. Decontextualized historically, the series of nude photographs can be misread. In them Roberts investigated the field of 'significance' of masculinity (in Kristeva's terms), rather than the fixed signifieds of conditioned female sexuality.

Pope Alice was launched in 1979 at the Swish Ball at the Baroona RSL hall in Brisbane. Paradoxically, Roberts donned the heaviest possible set of clothing in order to reveal an aspect of himself: lampshades as tiaras, tulle, polythene, wedding dresses, copes, platform shoes, papal gloves and a weight of beading and diamante. The form was more like an Hispanic madonna weighted with propitiatory jewels and precious cloths, intended to be carried aloft in procession, (Fellini's inspiration was not a little responsible). The figure eventually became a 'business' corporation, Pope Alice Productions, issuing canonizations, decretals and pronouncements, punning postcards, images and titles.

Alice Jitterbug, in contrast, was stripped down to a series of stereotypical female photographic poses. She also appeared (garishly clothed) in street performances and at public venues. By appropriating a photographic form which aimed to commodify the TIME/Door To Dreams, 1989 female body, Roberts was able to subvert misuse of the human being and to turn such imagery into a political strategy which angrily denounced the patriarchy, the socio-political order of Brisbane and the conservatism of its then unsupportive art world.

Under circumstances where censorship is applied to vast areas of meaning in language, any superfluous discourse or unspoken pressure which escapes or undermines the syntax of the permitted can only surface as bodily gestures.9

Gender is constructed in consequence of the unseen, patriarchal gaze, primarily directed at the female. She mirrors a negative image of the positive masculine code. Irigaray argues that there is a possibility that this reflection can be short-circuited. The object of the look can acquire the gaze instead and, thus, change its own, as well as society's, image of itself. Alice parodied the patriarchy's gaze and the expectations of 'the look'. She gazed back. The gaze is powerful because it is anonymous (though gendered as male). Alice usurped one strong signifier of the hidden look-like Bengalis, she wore sunglasses. Usurpation is relevant to Roberts' later work. Frida Kahlo returns the look in her Self-portrait with cropped hair (1940) in which she is dressed in Diego Rivera's suit. Roberts, dressed as Frida, whether in his photographic work, or in his performances in Brisbane and Melbourne10 acquires the chasuble of the priest, a symbol of sacrifice but also the attire of the patriarch. Thereby, he so displaces the symbology of victim and predator in conventional gender codes that, like Frida herself, he queries the authority of the proprietorial look. Symbol is decodified and the gaze is repositioned against the onlooker. Personal history fractures the conventiop.al masculine perspective as Roberts/Kahlo survey themselves. They offer a multiple perspective insistent on individual experience as the basis of meaning.

Alice is the core of Roberts' politically subversive work which aims to retrieve both the true creative history of Brisbane and to engage at the international level with the oppressive cultural dualisms, the either I or, of patriarchal systems. Alice is a key to open the door of entrenched prejudice and to enable life itself to be seen as art. The mundane is canonized and the sacred, hidden by the sanctimonious, is enshrined.