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Who framed "Mark Webb"?

Michele Helmrich
Eyeline 08
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Cynicism, laughter, the second husk into which the shucked man crawls, she seemed to know little or nothing about. She was one of those deviations by which man thinks to reconstruct himself. 
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 3rd ed., Faber & Faber, London, 1963, p. 81. 

When Barbara M. Reise asked "Who, What is 'Sigmar Polke'?" in a series of texts which appeared in Studio International in 1976, her essential struggle in replying involved the location of a "legend" outside the framework traditionally provided by connoisseurs and chroniclers.1 Her failure was admitted in her final confession to be still "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered by Polke", that figure who was "fascinating, terrible, magical, comically bizarre, and extremely important".2 Her text had merely confirmed a legend, as well as maintaining the central role of the author in providing meaning. 

In 1988 Mark Webb is hardly a legend, though he may be, already, an enigma. Is he, like Polke, set to cultivate the inscrutable facade, the trickster's wit, the leaven seriousness, and the unpredictable manoeu­vring of a legend in the making? Since Barthes, such considerations appear irrelevant; the reader gaining the more active role in the comple­tion of the text. 

The irony in this instance, however, is that we may need to return to the author so as to reclaim his work from the rather reductive readings which have been offered to date. For what is disturbing about the criti­cism which followed Mark Webb's 1987 and 1988 exhibitions at Bellas Gallery was that the critic as (public) reader appeared to assume the role of editor to a body of work. This, perhaps unwittingly, was achieved by the critics' refusal to acknowledge within... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Abstract Painting (The Thing I Have Forgotten With), 1988. Acrylic and oil on canvas ad canvas board, 225 x 200cm, two panels. Courtesy of Bellas Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Richard Stringer.

Abstract Painting (The Thing I Have Forgotten With), 1988. Acrylic and oil on canvas ad canvas board, 225 x 200cm, two panels. Courtesy of Bellas Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Richard Stringer.

Action Painting, 1988. Acrylic, oil and shellac on canvas and wood plus three cacti, 225 x 200cm., two panels. Courtesy of Bellas Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Richard Stringer. 

Action Painting, 1988. Acrylic, oil and shellac on canvas and wood plus three cacti, 225 x 200cm., two panels. Courtesy of Bellas Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Richard Stringer.