Our twenty-fourth treasures exemplifies the meeting of art, architecture and the imagination, showcasing the ability to turn the mundane into the fantastical. From the James Cook University Art Collection comes S'labicated Monument 1 and S'labicated Monument 2 by Bob Preston
Jonathan McBurnie answers the question "why is this significant?"
Robert Preston’s 2010 drawings,
S’labicated Monument 1 and
S’labicated Monument 2, remain confident and lively drawings made partially on site at James Cook University, but it is the complex registers of meaning that the artist applied to the site that make the works compelling. Were they simply rendered in situ from the then-recent additions to the campus, these works would still stand as expertly rendered observational drawings. However, in many ways, these two drawings sum up— deliberately and otherwise— the complex emotions orbiting what was then the new School of Creative Arts for JCU.
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| Robert Preston, S'labicated Monument 1, 2010, charcoal and black chalk on paper, 55 x 75 cm. James Cook University Art Collection. © Robert Forrest Preston, 2010. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photograph by Michael Marzik |
The act of making these drawings imbues the forms with potential weight; implied meanings. This is sweetly ironic if, indeed, the structures were erected as mere architectural fancy. However, the artist’s own research into such forms— led instinctively by his own long-abiding interest in text, language and symbology— reveals many tantalising possibilities. By extending into Preston’s own fascinations,
S’labicated Monument 1 and
S’labicated Monument 2 elevates the work from being more or less an artistic exercise into works of continuing and evolving resonance.
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| Robert Preston, S'labicated Monument 2, 2010, charcoal and black chalk on paper, 55 x 75 cm. James Cook University Art Collection. © Robert Forrest Preston, 2010. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photograph by Michael Marzik
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Made in 2010 for the JCU-hosted exhibition, The Image Space, which itself was an attempt to engage the curated artists with the University campus as a site or subject, Preston decided upon the School of Creative Arts as a focus, for several reasons. At the time, the School of Creative Arts (SoCA, as it was known) was a new addition to the Douglas campus. Previously, the lion’s share of JCU’s creative arts courses were located at what was known as the Vincent Campus, which achieved what many separated art colleges manage: a sense of autonomy, and an insulated vibrance that is often impossible at ‘main’ campuses. The relocation of the creative arts was a contentious decision, and remains so to this day. With the knowledge that these disciplines have been significantly reduced more recently gives the works an additional register of melancholy.
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| Michael Marzik, Bob Preston, 2016, Giclee digital print on Archival Hahnemule PhotoRag 308gsm, 49 x 64 cm, Edition 1/5. James Cook University Art Collection. ©Michael Marzik, 2016. Reproduced with permission of the photographer. |
Preston’s notes made several years after he executed the two drawings reveal a layering of references. Even the title is slightly tongue in cheek, he indicates – a portmanteau of syllabary, slab and fabricated. Preston notes, ‘The title was intended to be discretely sardonic’, a response to the self-imposed challenge of finding a point of interest in, and responding to, a section of architecture with no clear motive beyond a point of interest. Preston reveals that he followed up with the architects in regard to the structure’s origins but no response was forthcoming. However, this is the point things got interesting. In lieu of a firm explanation as to what the architects were referencing, Preston was free to make his own explorations and find his own explanations, a quest for, as his notes state, ‘A search for meaning in the meaningless’. In certain ways, this is an entirely appropriate task given the context of the exhibition, of the structure itself, and more broadly humanity’s continuing efforts to impose order over the natural world.
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| School of Creative Arts, James Cook University. ©Andrew Rankin. Reproduced with permission of the photographer. |
The forms themselves evoked several quite separate reference points for the artist, most notably the Superbloc style of graffiti, and monumental avatars of lost cultures such as Stonehenge and, particularly, the Moai statues of Easter Island. Equating questionable (and unexplained) architectural flourishes to such culturally significant artefacts may appear erroneous, but circling back to Preston’s original goal with the pieces- to find meaning in meaninglessness- such conflations of form and meaning make sense. It is notable that the campus buildings themselves are only quietly suggested in the works through their small extensions toward the monolithic forms. It is almost as if the trees and bushes were slowly reclaiming these strange, fabricated forms. If a new viewer was not told of the curatorial goals of the Image Space exhibition, and had not seen the forms in person, it would
not be unreasonable to read the images as ruins of some description, the remains of a long-lost culture or civilisation, left to be slowly reclaimed by nature.
Perhaps this is the case, the final stage of an amorphous and evolving concept, indivisible from the fifty-year story of James Cook University, a tribute to its triumphs, its failures, and for an all-too-brief moment, one of the best art schools in the nation.
Over the course of 2020, JCU Library's Special Collections will be unveiling 50 Treasures from the collections to celebrate 50 years of James Cook University.
Author Biography
Jonathan McBurnie is an artist, writer and cartoonist presently based in Townsville.
McBurnie completed a PhD at the University of Sydney, charted the shifting role of drawing in the digital age, emphasizing the discipline's ongoing tenacity through tactility, adaptability and eroticism. Since 2018, McBurnie has been the Creative Director of Perc Tucker Regional Gallery and Pinnacles Gallery, and has been published in
Eyeline,
Catalogue,
The Lifted Brow,
Penthouse Australia,
Trip,
the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture and
Sneaky, where he was an editor and contributor. He is currently working on his fourteenth solo exhibition and a graphic novel.
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