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I have a confession to make: I am part of a generation that got hooked on contemporary art at the end of the 1990s. For us, the Melbourne art scene was entrenched firmly in Fitzroy and decidedly not in Prahran and Richmond. The artist-run space Store 5 was consigned to art history, while 'Popism', Paul Taylor's 1982 exhibition of postmodern Australian art, seemed an archaeological relic. And what we knew about Melbourne's 'painter of the moment', Howard Arkley, came to us mainly as myths: his legendarily enthusiastic and influential teaching, his high-profile drug overdose, even his celebrity as the scion of suburban dreaming. In the years since Arkley's death in 1999, it proved surprisingly difficult to rectify that situation of second-hand knowledge and to actually encounter an Arkley work. Solo shows, let alone an institution-based retrospective, were thin on the ground; our best bet was to visit a contemporary art auction and witness the rapid turnover of Arkley's paintings in the early years of his posthumous renown.

The National Gallery of Victoria's (NGV) touring retrospective of Arkley's career is therefore highly anticipated and long overdue. But this superbly presented exhibition, spearheaded by NGV curator Jason Smith, shows that our nearly decade-long wait provides unexpected benefits. It has given the NGV team the benefit of time to thoroughly research and collate the 130 or so works that comprise the exhibition and which span the breadth of Arkley's career from his first solo show in 1975 at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, to 1999's 'The Home Show' in the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This collation alone is an impressive feat, and one made more difficult by the numerous transfers of Arkley's works from one collection to another. Thankfully, this problem is largely redressed by both this exhibition and a new book published in conjunction with it, Carnival in Suburbia (2006) by Arkley's brother-in-law and Monash University academic, John Gregory. Through much painstaking labour, both the monograph and exhibition allow viewers to easily relocate and revisit works that risked being lost in the recent storm of sales.

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What emerges throughout this exhibition is not a facile narrative based on the artist's biography. Instead, Smith provides a sustained focus on Arkley's most important aesthetic trait: his cannibalism of (Western) art's histories and his attempt to question art's vanguardism when filtered through new, contemporary contexts. Does synthetic cubism maintain its significance when transposed through wallpaper patterning, as when chintz stands in for shrubbery in Arkley's many images of suburban houses? Can the rationalist utopias of de stijl survive their translation into visual forms of muzak, as in Muzak mural, 1980-81, where day-glo dots on canvas leach onto the three-dimensions of the chairs that stand before them? Pieter Saenredam's multi-perspectival views within Baroque Dutch churches, abstraction from before and after 'The Field', even contemporaries like Alun Leach-Jones and Brian Dunlop, get tangled in Arkley's web of allusions and illusions.
 
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the article in full in the Winter 2007 issue of Art & Australia.