Black Attack

The history of completely black paintings in art begins in the twentieth century with the Russian Constructivist Kasimir Malevich’s black square manifesting itself before the Revolution. Black, the absence of colour or any easily apparent subject, has been the theme of much twentieth century art. Numerous artists have explored the possibilities of the ‘colour’ and its significant associations in western society in which black symbolised the Church and the merchant, as well as power and death.

In the 1980s people began to talk of Melbourne’s ‘black attack’. While the phrase encompassed a sense of economic failure and an inability to rise out of the mire of social depression, it also described the colour to which its fashionable youth seemed permanently bonded. Long after it was unfashionable elsewhere, black jeans and T-shirts could be expected on the streets of Melbourne. Among the night-club set the black couture of Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake and other super chic Japanese designers was unrelenting. While no worthwhile explanation for the phenomenon has been offered, black remains Melbourne’s favourite colour.

Nearly all of the works in this exhibition have been made in Melbourne or depict or relate to the city and its life in some way. Whether or not a similarly potent group of works of art could be assembled from another city’s recent art would be speculation and is beyond the nature of this exhibition but that they do have an association with Melbourne as their unifying quality explains something of the ‘black attack’. All make extensive use of blackness, either as a colour or a comment upon the subject they depict or the artist’s vision of the human condition. Blackness is sometimes depicted as emptiness, at other times it is full of the wild imaginings of the artist and his audience. It represents the void as well as the mire; the horrors as well as the beauty of darkness.

Sourced from: Black Attack, National Gallery of Victoria, 1996