Dale Frank, Touching

Before visiting Touching at Neon Parc Brunswick, I dipped into the Dale Frank archive at the State Library of Victoria. I had already seen images and videos of this exhibition and thought it had the look of a living history or wax museum. I was looking for some sort of precedent in Frank’s back catalogue beyond his private taxidermy collection featured in the 2024 documentary Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie. Flipping through catalogue texts and interviews from the eighties and nineties, I was caught off guard by how consistent this supposedly “stylistically promiscuous” artist has been. A preoccupation also emerged with how he and his work are received, and with the loss inherent to communication: misunderstandings, garbled transmissions, things lost in translation. In the exhibition text for Touching, Frank writes, “In this marketplace that is ‘society,’ the crowd, the audience, is most often unwilling to understand your Art as you picture it within your own reality.” It echoes his interview with Sue Cramer in 1999 where we read “I have long felt that writers have written of themselves and their needs through a discussion of art (my work). Equally, viewers respond to works — whether positively or negatively — in ways that fulfil their own desires.” Case history in hand, I head for the operating theatre.

At the end of the corridor that usually leads to the capacious Neon Parc Brunswick space, a waiting room is set up. The immersive install for Dale Frank’s Touching sees a new wall cleaving the space in two, concealing the other half of the gallery beyond. Another entrance lurks ominously to the left of the dividing wall, marked by a blue medical curtain with a cardboard box full of blue medical gowns beside it. Rows of deep purple chairs are arranged around a coffee table with two small stacks of magazines topped by Scientific American and Ceramics Monthly, fake flowers and an ashtray with two flattened tailored cigarettes. I sit there for a while talking to Chelsea who is sitting in front of a computer at the gallery attendant’s desk. It has been relocated from its usual tucked-away locale, and a customary fake white orchid has been plonked on it.

A matching pair of framed decorative prints of lidded French faience jars on pedestal bases marked “Mimosa” and “Lavande” are the only art on the walls. The blue and white pastoral scenes at their centre are set against warm golden backgrounds and a painted crackle effect over the surface mimics aged glaze. Their silver frames are scratched in rather deliberate little patches, and I can’t figure out if they were urns (perhaps for some ostentatiously named lap dogs) or apothecary jars for mood-boosting herbs. I ask about them and Chelsea says that people keep asking whether they’re for sale. They’re not. Frank picked them up from an op shop. Only a certain number of visitors at a time are permitted to enter the “operating theatre,” making the waiting room genuinely functional. I spend longer than I normally would have looking at Mimosa and Lavande, waiting for another group to leave. The Scientific American issue has the coverline, “What Was It Like to Be a Dinosaur,” and I bend to pick it up, forgetting it belongs to the installation.

Frank’s paintings from the eighties and nineties often included found objects such as cardboard boxes and ashtrays. But a clearer parallel here is the complete mise-en-scènes and narratives he has created, particularly from the late seventies until the turn of the century, which he called “performance sculptures.” He created functional pool halls and discos that both “mimicked” the real and became “real” by nature of the audience actually dancing or playing pool (one 1996 disco was named Behaviouralism). In Chocolate Art (1996), Frank posted Cadbury’s chocolates to the gallery every day, which people could eat while watching films from a curated selection: Child’s Play, The Music Lovers, Altered States, and Loaded Weapon 2. The Lethal Weapon spoof, Loaded Weapon 1, underperformed at the box office so the sequel was never actually made, turning its joke about the sequel craze back on itself. Each film in this multi-genre selection sees characters in borrowed, phantasmal or ill-fitting roles or containers. They also concern possible futures and the attempt to will them into being. Every message, be it a confession, a musical score, experimental scientific evidence or a promised sequel, anticipates a future audience. Possible worlds are, in a sense, messages that never found their receiver.

The previous group exits with an apology for taking so long and an explanation: “Good selfie material.” I robe up and draw the curtain before walking down the long corridor leading to the operating theatre. Despite seeing online documentation prior to my visit, the first encounter is a bit of a jump scare. For a second I mistake the back of the silicone and fibreglass model for a real person. I turn the corner to see the whole scene unfold. All four characters are (older) Dale Frank, but the first you see is dressed as a “robust female Surgical Nurse” (according to the exhibition text written by Frank) in a wig, powder-blue eyeshadow, and mascara. She’s pointing at an ultrasound frozen in time with her finger hovering above the “A” key, wide eyes cast toward nothing in particular. The screen is meant to display Dale Frank’s name, date of birth, height and weight, but it’s not working when I visit. Behind her is a neonatal intensive care unit replete with circular access ports. This baby incubator contains the only “abstract” object in the space: a vaguely embryonic glass structure with a boiling flask appendage.

There is Patient Frank on the operating table staring blankly up at the ceiling, with both Chief Surgeon Frank and Surgical Technician Frank peering indistinctly over the top of him. I duck and dodge the assorted medical equipment to try to meet their unfocused gazes, but their lines of sight never seem to converge with any specific object or observer in the room. In the Instagram walk-through, Frank describes these characters as having “each stepped through to different universes,” and in the exhibition text as “other lives that could have been lived.” He writes of time travel in terms of a kind of many-worlds interpretation, where every decision produces multiple coexisting worlds that occupy the same spatial dimensions, superimposed on one another and unable to interact. Despite their undirected gazes, the Franks appear to be paralysed at critical decision-making moments. Chief Surgeon Frank’s mask hangs off his gloved hand, forefinger and thumb resting on his chin in a Rodin-like thinking position. Surgical Technician Frank points somewhere near the operating table, and his mask hangs off one ear. Although you might assume they’re throwing in the towel, Patient Frank’s fixed stare is much like the others’: alive but elsewhere.

I don’t suppose he means all this “other lives” stuff literally, as though in a parallel universe we worked a little harder in school and became surgeons. It is more like an appeal to the possibilities held in the unconscious. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud imagines Rome as a psychical entity “in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.” He pushes the metaphor until it collapses, since two buildings cannot stand on one site, then tries the body instead, only to concede that “the embryo cannot be discovered in the adult.” It’s as though Frank attempts this impossible task of giving mental life form.

In a 1988 catalogue text titled “Trusting in the Pipe-Dream,” written for an exhibition at Realities Gallery (1971–92) in Melbourne, Frank writes that “the negation of identity; the negation of function; the negation of art itself, is not negative, but rather, a drawing on art for the consideration of all other possibilities; the other infinite possibilities, to be taken too as art.” For Frank (like Freud), negation subtracts nothing. Contradictions persist side by side out of time and “coming events cast their shadows before” (the piece borrows many voices from unattributed authors such as this one by Thomas Campbell, from ‘Lochiel’s Warning’). There is also a clear fixation on how he is “read,” on how things are to be “taken,” and a desire for his transmissions to be received: that “the words, talk and theories of the future will come to welcome this work.”

I get up close, examining the Franks’s facial hair, veins, freckles, sunspots, and flakey dry patches of skin. His early obsessive drawings likewise saw the body inflected with stretched skin, musculature, genitals, and eyes. Here, the scene is more akin to anatomy-lesson painting. Recall the dramatism and naturalism of Rembrandt’s oil painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), where the interplay of surgical gazes, some directly at the viewer, implicates us as participants in the game of spectatorship, as curiously ghoulish dissectors of the patient (artist). It is, after all, an operating theatre. In Touching, however, each character, including the viewer, is isolated in their own universes. In fact, nothing seems to “touch” at all in this exhibition. They are at a distinct remove from other Australian hyperrealists, like Patricia Piccinini’s genetic-hybrid Chernobyl abortions being cradled or nurtured, evoking interspecies empathy or care. Or the Universal Human Experience of Ron Mueck.

The rhythmic squeaking of a real Stöckert S5, a heart-lung machine used to support extracorporeal blood circulation during cardiac and major surgeries, fills both rooms, pumping fake blood through clear plastic tubes attached to Patient Frank’s chest with the presumed open-heart wound covered in a square surgical towel. More accurately, it pulses up and down halfway through the tubes, trapped in stasis like the rest of the scene. The operating theatre is a place of perpetual presentness, particularly for the anaesthetised patient, where reality is constructed and reconstructed like fantasy. “In a painting,” Frank says in the walk-through, “there is always a balance between drama, reality and expectation … in this sculpture those characteristics have been transformed into 3D.” One display on the Stöckert S5 reads “Art Press -1 mmHg,” which I perceive exactly as you might expect. The patient (artist) survives only because the external machine (the art press) is doing the work of circulation. Or, because negative pressure works by suction, the machine (art press) is vacuuming energy and vitality out of the patient (artist) and still hardly extracting anything. Are we keeping the artist alive or sucking him dry?

There is a precedent here, too. For Ghost Story (2018), an exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Frank displayed petri dishes smeared with “personal bacteria” on brass and glass coffee table plinths alongside the epoxyglass-on-perspex paintings that have become art fair mainstays since at least 2014 (with clear aesthetic precursors in resin and varnish since the nineties). Frank’s exhibition textfor Ghost Story framed this in terms of painting being indexical of the artist’s life and labour time while remaining distinct: “the ideal candidate for value production in the new economy, the contemporary experience that is busy absorbing life.”

Touching includes a sister show of Frank’s abstract epoxyglass paintings by the same name at Neon Parc, South Yarra: the cash-cow collection of funhouse mirrors with layers of syrupy, bilious, slow-drying translucent colour (or more selfie material). Rex Butler once wrote, “It’d be pretty hard to convince somebody who wasn’t already interested that those shiny rebarbative surfaces, which distorted your appearance when you looked at them, were beautiful or significant or somehow made a difference to the world.” There’s no doubt that these works are expressions of wealth well suited to foyers and distinguished family homes, where I’m sure they will be enjoyed for generations. Nor that South Yarra is the external machine doing the circulation for the unsellable patient, surgical team, Lavande, and Mimosa in Brunswick. But the dual exhibition works conceptually, too, because this is another Frank in another parallel universe. After seeing Touching (South Yarra), I reread the glass embryo, which bears no resemblance to its father, as one of his paintings at an early stage of gestation: a homunculus in its phial, still unable to breathe on its own, longing to be fully born. I resist reading it as something extracted from his heart. Too touching.

I find out later that “Art Press” is the standard readout for “arterial pressure.” The mind loves to produce little stories. This is also the most charming element of Frank’s paintings. While I remain aesthetically disinterested in the paintings themselves, their evocative prose titles, each with their own humorous characters and narratives, transcend the gloopy surfaces of their referents. Once you’ve read them, you return to the painting with new associations. You perceive patterns, people or objects in the abstract stimulus like a Rorschach Inkblot. It induces the psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, a type of apophenia, or the tendency to draw meaningful connections or patterns from random data. After reading the title He said he could never have too many colonoscopies (2026), the bean-shaped blue blob on a milky silver backdrop becomes a hospital-blue kidney dish on a cummy stainless-steel trolley. He could not understand why sex was still so important to her after all they had two kids and she was now so overweight (2026) becomes two fleshy gummy bears who have forgotten how to spoon. As with Rorschach, this all probably says more about my own database of memories, fears, and desires than Dale Frank.

This is, of course, exactly the response Frank has spent his career complaining about and banking on. It may appear contradictory to call audiences “unwilling” to understand or to (ostensibly) deride them for seeing themselves in his work when Frank strives for a detached realisation of self and art, and so often insists his paintings live lives beyond him. However, Frank is very good at sitting with his contradictions. In the same 1999 interview with Cramer where he describes his paintings as living entities, he cites The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface to which famously declares, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” Read through Wilde, Touching extends Frank’s lifelong obsession with the alienating game of recognition. We speak to be recognised, yet our indifferent signs belong to the Other as soon as they leave us. With every utterance built to outlive us, we rehearse our own disappearance. Frank has been saying this for nearly fifty years, even if I’ve returned his signs, as Lacan would say, in inverted form. As he signs off the Instagram walk-through, “You’re not in control; that’s life.”