Jan Murray
Head, School of Art and Honours Coordinator
Jan Murray completed her postgraduate qualifications at the VCA and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). She has received an Australia Council Project Grant and her Australia Council Residencies include Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Via Farini, Milan and in 2010 the British School at Rome, Rome. Since 1982 she has shown regularly in both solo and group exhibitions in public museums, commercial galleries and artist run initiatives. Her work has been included in national and international surveys of contemporary art in Australia, Germany, France, Italy and the USA. Her work is widely represented in significant Australian public collections and she has also been collected by the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 1999, she was recipient of a Nillumbik Shire Art Award. In 2003, the City of Glen Eira Gallery initiated a major touring exhibition, Southern Light: the art of Jan Murray, a twenty year survey of her installation and painting work. She is currently Head of the School of Art and Honours Coordinator and has taught at the VCA since 1983. She is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne.
Research interests
Since 1990 Jan Murray's practice has focused on certain relationships between painting and its internal and external architecture. Using a variety of means, she has presented the painting itself as subject or motif in seeking to interrogate the relationship between the painting and its primary support - the wall - and the architectural space in which it is placed. She has also expanded the investigation of these relationships through the introduction of three-dimensional representation - the creation and installation of plaster simulacra of paintings. This development added a sculptural dimension to the work and openly enhanced possibilities for play with altered realities and the dialogue between object and space. Recently she has tested the literal and metaphorical limits of painting as object and illusionistic vehicle. Building on previous work in which the paradoxes of perception and representation inherent in both looking and painting were acutely focused in an examination of the complex relationship between creative and destructive action.
Publications
The Art of the Deal
Chantal Faust, 2009
Desire projects onto the shop window. We stand before this seductive membrane. There is no way to conceal our own reflections. Duchamp knew this well and he recognised the sharp flood of remorse that gushes forth when a pane of glass is penetrated with the possession of the object of desire.
And what if there is no glass to break?
According to Amazon.com, your shopping cart lives to serve. Its symbol, a graphic of a supermarket trolley, is reliably found in the top right corner of the web page. Another icon, a blue tabbed folder marked ‘shopping’ is automatically supplied by web browsers, filed and filled for your convenience. The online shopping experience is an echo of the global economy, currently in a state of crisis, where monies that have never existed in the tangible world are being physically experienced in their deficit.
The ‘make believe’ was once synonymous with illusion but it no longer seems to be. In an odd rotation, its current interpretation is more true to its literal definition: we now believe in what we make. Belief. The edict of the make believe affects contemporary systems of production and influences both libidinal and art economies. In 2004, an auction house in New York sold Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (I Shop, Therefore I Am), a 1983 serigraph on vinyl, for the record-breaking price of $601,600. Dreams really can come true.
Jan Murray’s latest works are dream catchers. Painted with precision, the drooping handles that are traced by their own shadow offer the viewer just enough information to allow us to recognise this representation of a shopping container. The canvas-cum-bag carries the symbol of that final crescendo of desire: the space between consummation and release. Where the luxury shopper is mobile in its horizontal skip and sway from boutique to boudoir, Murray’s containers are fixed.
It is not a case of never being able to see inside, but a recognition that there is no inside nor outside: there is only side. These lustrous surfaces resist us with their cool beauty and ‘just looking’ - far from being the browser’s retort - is all that we are able to do. Within this salon of silvery surfaces there is no glass to separate us from what we want. The look of want has been codified into a colour chart as Murray presents us with a tautology: a shopping bag is a painting is a shopping bag. This is not art as consumer culture as with Oldenburg, Warhol, Koons or Hirst. Rather the collection of shimmering wrappings and holes signify the regenerative skin of culture itself. This is not a shop, it is shop: a pulsating, elastic organism that has no concept of limitation. Shop until you drop.
Jean-Antoine Watteau was mortally ill when he asked his friend Edme Gersaint, a famous art dealer in early eighteenth century Paris, if he could make a painting to be hung above the entrance to his business. L’Enseigne de Gersaint (1720) is a trompe-l’oeil decoration. The painting reveals the interior of the shop within, picturing finely gowned customers surrounded by a gallery of gilt framed oil paintings and mirrors. The shop resembles a theatre stage and yet these actors in their box are presumably reflecting the engagements of the characters below. The artist has deliberately chosen to dissolve any actual barrier between the shop and the street so that the gallery seems to spill out onto the pavement. A woman who appears to have one foot in each realm accentuates this lack of division. At the time, Watteau knew that he was dying of consumption. The self-commissioned shop sign was his final work.
Jan Murray’s paintings are not shop signs but they are signs of shopping. Just Looking presents us with the possibility of an enduring consumption. With both feet in one world, we can traverse the space of these paintings as spectators in a gallery or buyers in a store. The eroticism in these works lies not in the illustration of the affairs of consumers but in the distillation of this romance into a captivating binding. This surface wrapping harnesses the decoy on which this tug between the consumer and the consumed depends. It is that vibration between the lines, that momentary glint of opalescence and that second of suspended disbelief as to just what it is that you are looking at. Murray’s themes belong as much to the history of art as they do to the history of philosophy. This is the art of the deal.
