BEING DALE FRANK
He is famous for his iconoclastic works and notorious for his indifference to the outside world. So when Vogue Living was invited inside artist Dale Frank’s fantastical creative sanctuary in the Hunter Valley, we leapt at the chance.
From the first entreaty to photograph the Hunter Valley home of Australian artist Dale Frank to his final accord to let Vogue Living record it, more than a year has elapsed, which is hardly surprising given Frank’s withering indifference to social propriety and the press. Indeed, his disregard for the opinion of others is legendary and more than occasionally leaks into the subtexts that attach to his colour slicks. Only after did it occur to him that she was the bitch that wrote the nasty article on her blog (2014) snarls the title of one visceral contusion of black and blues. Such scathing little speech bubbles are meant to be nothing more than the mental input at the moment of Frank’s art-making, but they forewarn of a sharp sensitivity to the critics whose ‘clackers’ he refuses to kiss. We know to proceed cautiously with Frank, but we also know that this self-contained master — sanctified by Pulitzer-winning art critic Sebastian Smee as one of only nine living Australian artists “likely to be celebrated well after they are gone” — enjoys the mythos and the making of extraordinary private worlds. We’ve been there, done that and revelled in his decorative iconoclasm. So, when Frank finally gave the green light, VL summarily sped to a hill north-north-west of Sydney, where a sand-stock-brick homestead circa 1860s sits high above an 18-hectare property enveloped by a sweep of the Hunter River. Records reveal that the estate’s Georgian-inflected home belonged to a succession of significant early owners, including retail scion Edward Lloyd Jones (son of David Jones), who supposedly spun the purist structure into an Edwardian palace. The property’s decline into late 20th century ignominy was precipitated by a series of feckless farmers who sought to ‘modernise’ it. Or so says the moustachioed Frank when finally we meet in the soaring kitchen-heart of a homestead that acid-trips back to the mid- Victorian era. “They put old pipes under the floor to hold it up, removed the big cedar double front doors and installed aluminium-framed windows,” says Frank, in aggrieved high-pitch. “Aaaand they covered the walls in velvet fleur-de-lis flock to hold it all together.” Mocking this “piss-elegant” attempt to paper over quartz-crushed, hard plaster walls that once sparkled under gaslight, while protesting that his nine years of restoration efforts are not yet ready for the reveal, Frank offers coffee in porcelain cups while plotting the course of his day. “You can do what you want, go anywhere,” he says before decamping to his studio. “But your schedule started 15 minutes ago.” Dale looks to his watch, announces lunch will be served at 12:29 “on the dot”, downs the coffee that he says will later cause dyspepsia (it does) and waves a pink Perspex ruler at two pony-sized wolfhounds, who are working the crew for crumbs. Their “dinosaur bones” are strewn across a flagstone floor Frank says was brought back to brilliance by a bunch of teenage boys who chiselled away at its concrete cover for weeks. He parlays that ditty (Dickensian in its overtones) into details about the Union Jack that drapes high above his seven-oven AGA cooker. “It is the last whimper from the British Empire Club in Bombay,” he says, on the back of chatter about Britain’s Brexit from the EEC. “History has a tendency to repeat.” And that it does in a neighbouring dining-room that has been reinstated with the design bravura and Darwinian obsessions of the architecture’s originating era. Surprisingly Frank hangs none of his art on home walls, which may be the marker of gifting 85 of his ››
this page: two east-facing sitting rooms, off the entry of the original homestead; taxidermy by Rowland Ward and his modern counterpart, Gary Pegg. opposite page: in the guest bedroom, housed in a wing added in 2015, a four-poster oak bed with hot-pink sheer curtains; ‘Bourgie’ bedside lamp by KARTELL. Details, last pages.
‹‹ finest works (spanning a 35-year career) to the National Gallery of Australia in 2014. Or maybe it’s the measure of a minimum 12-hour working day drowning in it, but with typically abject Frankness the artist asks, “Why would I?” At the north end of this persimmon-flushed room, set-dressed with taxidermy penguins and basalt black Wedgewood urns, sits a crazed 30-centimetre-high eggshell. Frank identifies it as the egg of the extinct African elephant bird, a flightless creature that was hunted into extinction in the 17th century. This translucent ovum, said to be one of only 25 eggs remaining in existence, tells of the lengths and expense Frank goes to in search of the rarest exemplars of natural selection. They appear at odds with his avant-gardism. Or do they? Perhaps it’s all just one big exposé on the struggle for existence — a qualitative display of the universal search for being that is now abstracting into big bang theories. Frank screws up his face at the need to ‘nail’ him, but affirms his genuine interest in science and cinema, particularly when the disciplines converge in such sci-fi epics as Interstellar, the 2014 feature that idealises Einsteinian theory to spectacular effect. “I know all the detail, all the science of it,” he says, admitting to having watched the movie 27 times. “I replayed it over and over on a flight from London to Sydney — the music, the motion of the plane, you become one.” Having already dived into the deep end of Australian colonial furniture, Frank fully trains his obsession on taxidermy, the art and specimen pursuit of which peaks in an 18-metre-long family room (added in 2015) that fluoresces in a candy-floss pink. It’s not a colour traditionally associated with taxonomies (more hysterical than historical), but it renders the apex predators that feature in this frozen zoo soft and fuzzy. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: does Frank feel comfortable cohabiting with creatures hunted for the kill? “Australia is the only country in the world where, if an animal dies in a zoo, it cannot be taxidermied,” he says, dismissing any implication of unethical procurement or promotion of the hunt. “This attests to what has been lost — that Javan tiger was hunted into extinction, probably because it ate all the little local Javanese children. The paperwork is done and it is all government approved.” Collecting the work of the late-19th-century British master taxidermist Rowland Ward and commissioning Australia’s only internationally awarded practitioner, Gary Pegg, to apply his ‘dying’ art to the deceased discard of international zoos, Frank suggestively frames Homo sapiens as the noble savage; a genus so infatuated with its own self-importance that it is serially doomed to suffer it. The artist nuances this narcissism in his nearby studio, where massive Perspex mirrors are fissuring under his chemical pour. These pieces present the objectifying gaze as the source of infinitely variable subject and frame time as fluid. Are they piss-takes on ‘pious’ patronage and the need to reflect in big art, or genius reflections on the “mindlessness” of social media? Frankly, my dear, Dale doesn’t give a damn. He’s just using gravity’s effects to create wormholes that go way beyond the archaeologies of abstraction. From interstellar to historic interior, Frank theorises on deep space from his own astronomical dimension.
Dale Frank’s new exhibition at Pearl Lam Gallery in Hong Kong runs 19 January–19 March, 2017; pearllam.com. Visit roslynoxley9.com.au and neonparc.com.au.