Lot 36

Sutton Gallery, Melbourne 2003
Private collection, Melbourne

Clemenger Award of Contemporary Art, The Ian
Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004

Working across a diverse range of media including performance art, sculpture, and works on paper, Aleks Danko creates artworks that challenge the social, political and cultural identity of Australia. Whilst his works often address a serious and thoughtful message, they are also full of irony, humour and wit. Danko is often described as one of Australia's most important conceptual artists, although he rejects that association seeing his art as a parody of conceptual art.

Born to Ukrainian refugees, Danko identifies himself as both Australian as well as the "other" or outsider. At the time of his graduation from art school in 1971, the Australian art scene was in a transformative state, breaking with formal terms of late modernist painting and sculpture to pave the way for a new generation of artists eager to service the mind, not just the eye. Danko did not abandon the object altogether, but rather reconceive how the object might reveal new ideas. Greatly inspired by Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades, Danko admired how he had managed to uphold humour and irony over artistic skill in his work, and so he began to draw humour out of dark situations.

Danko produced 16 Songs of Australia works beginning in 1996 following the election of John Howard when he said he was "looking forward to creating a caring, comfortable and relaxed society". Danko then began collecting slogans, statements, headlines, and comedic responses to address issues such as xenophobia, racism and nationalism, weaving these in throughout his Songs of Australia series. The decade across which Danko produced this series was marked by such occurrences such as the rise and fall of the One Nation Party, the Wik decision, the Tampa crisis, the Bali bombings and more.

Danko has long used the image of a stylised house in his work, a symbol of mindedness and complacency in Australian society. A house can be a home - a place of safety and love; but also a place of darkness and confinement. The House that John and Wendy Built alludes to the story of Peter Pan in which the Lost Boys built a small house around where Wendy had fallen after arriving in Neverland. A 'Wendy House' now typically refers to a playhouse for children.

The red face is also a recurring motif in Danko's work. First appearing in his work Taste in 1988, the face was originally inspired by William Hogarth's Plate 1, 'The Sculptors Yard', from the book The Analysis of Beauty, 1753. In the image, bottom right, we find Hogarth's childish face that Danko now appropriates within his works as the brainless, disembodied head of the village idiot. He especially utilises the face to signify a mindlessness, often grouped together to resemble the ignorant mob and conformity of the crowd.

Olivia Fuller
Head of Art