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Details
- Place where the work was made
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Melbourne
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Victoria
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Australia
- Date
- 1990
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- oil on canvas, found objects
- Dimensions
- 134.0 x 183.0 cm
- Signature & date
Signed and dated u.r. verso, black fibre-tipped pen "JUAN DAVILA 1990/91".
- Credit
- Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by Alex and Kitty Mackay 2023
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 150.2023
- Artist information
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Juan Davila
Works in the collection
- Share
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About
In 1943 two portraits by William Dobell were selected for the Archibald Prize – one of a burly blue-collar worker titled The billy boy, and one of Dobell’s lanky and well-groomed artist friend called Joshua Smith. While The billy boy was acclaimed as an iconic image of the Australian worker, it was the portrait of Smith that won the Prize.
With his typically incendiary mix of pornographic imagery and art historical citation, Juan Davila weaves an absurd homosexual tale out of Dobell’s two very different subjects. Naked in bed together under the text ‘The Man of Your Dreams is Back’, Davila invokes the famous court case that followed Dobell’s win, when his portrait of Smith was accused of being an ineligible caricature, and defended as an example of modern art. The battle directed public attention to Smith’s unusual physical appearance, which was mocked in the media.
Davila calls this episode in Australian art ‘a little novella of love in modernity’. By recasting Smith and the billy boy in the scene of a sex act, he slyly points to the insinuated love affair between Dobell and Smith, which at the time fuelled people’s interest in the case. Dobell’s portrait of Smith, Davila explains, was possibly the first Archibald-winning work that ‘was produced by this loving gaze of one [male] painter to another’.
Although the personal consequences for Smith and Dobell were diabolical, the controversy ironically lifted both their profiles as artists. It also increased public attendance to the Archibald Prize. Always attuned to how images are interpreted, valued and manipulated for differing ends, Davila attempts to outdo Dobell with his pornographic revival of Joshua Smith, as if challenging the perceived provincial mores and shock economy of the Australian art world, and the public’s sometimes malicious appetite for scandal. -
Places
Where the work was made
Melbourne
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Exhibition history
Shown in 3 exhibitions
Rooms of Australian Art, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 1991 -
Painting men: Dobell from a different perspective, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, 14 Mar 2001–08 Apr 2001
Juan Davila, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, 09 Sep 2006–12 Nov 2006
Juan Davila, Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, 30 Nov 2006–04 Feb 2007
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Bibliography
Referenced in 2 publications
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Guy Brett and Roger Benjamin, Juan Davila, 2006, 144 (colour illus.).
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Kate Briggs, Radical revisionism: an anthology of writings on Australian art, 'Of love and modernity: the lament of Joshua Smith', pg. 264-271, Brisbane, 2005, 262-263 (colour illus.).
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