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Stephen Hall – AGES – Survey Exhibition

Grace Crossington Smith Gallery Sydney – June to July 2022

I first encountered a work by Stephen Hall downstairs at Coventry Gallery in Paddington in the early 1980’s, 1983,  I think.

The apprehension of the work, a nude full body self-portrait, induced a nervous response in me as if bolts of electricity were racing through my nerves in a kind of mirror image of the portrait with its limbs twisted like the subject’s face in a contusion, extrusion of existential self-realisation in a hostile world.

I was shocked and delighted by the work in much the same way as I was when I first encountered a self-portrait by the German expressionist Egon Schiele in 1977 at the AGNSW. It seemed obvious to me that Hall’s self-portrait was influenced by Schiele.

The work had a heroic intensity and intention but, I was puzzled, hadn’t the artist as hero been proclaimed dead in the 1970s? Perhaps this was a statement of defiance, a kind of self-immolation under the critical gaze of feminism’s critique of male ambitions to conquer and reign supreme.

20 years later in the final third of the first decade of the 2000’s I once again encountered artwork by Hall. This time in one of the Depot galleries at Dank Street Waterloo.

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Everyone come listen to this. I’ve got a story to tell you like you’ve never heard before.

I was just 13 years old and I was going to school in Sydney, Australia.

Sometimes Mum would pick me up after school, sometimes I’d catch the bus but my Dad never picked me up.

But on this particular day it was Dad who came.

When I got out of class and had walked to the exit gate, he was there waiting for me as if it was perfectly normal.

“Hi Dad,” I said and punched him on the arm like I always did..

“G’day sunshine,” he responded, and punched me on the arm like he always did. Just then a stranger in a black suit came up to me. He was wearing dark sunglasses and a white tie.

“He looks like he’s from the movie MIB,” I thought.

 “I hear you interested in traveling at near the speed of light,” he said, his voice a Keanu Reeves husky bass. 

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The first stretch will be vertical   

rumbly, loud and bad   

but I will have noise cancellation 

in my ergonomic pilot’s seat.

I won’t hear the car explode 

but you will. 

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