interviewed by Graham Coulter-Smith
GRAHAM COULTER-SMITHYour latest work is quite shocking to a lot of people, and I must admit that my own very first response to seeing your new paintings was that they were quite simply in bad taste, or a bad joke. So of course I missed the point, I fell into the trap you are setting for us all.
DALE FRANK Maybe you did. In any case all the work I've been doing is concerned with the idea of extending notions of aesthetics. Australia has very rigid (can I say colonial?) attitude towards art, so if you find my work revolting one has to question the cultural and political stand in which you have established your own aesthetics.
I'm concerned with disintegrating the conventional aesthetic, and this notion of disintegrating the concept of art is very much in tune with the actual painterly disintegration in my work which I find quite interesting. I actually like the material of the painting to be moving and changing, and I've done a few paintings where the materials in the painting change over time.
Some of paintings I did two years ago developed a crystal structure because of the resin I used. It just started to grow and grow and grow and it ended up being like 1.5 cm thick, a quite large beautiful white crystal, in fact two-dimensional snowflakes one on top of the other. The painting's still doing that, and the collector was fascinated by it. And if one day it becomes a sculpture ... well, I like that idea. It's not an unserious playful idea, I take the work quite seriously, and I take people's attitude to it very seriously.
GRAHAM... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Edmond’s Delight - A Night on the Town, 1988. Mixed Media on canvas, 150 x 100 x 42cm. Courtesy Mori Gallery
