Geoff Lowe's visits to Vietnam.

Geoff Lowe's visits to Vietnam, in 1991 and 1992 are pondered in three groups of work: straightforward drawings and gouaches of Hanoi, Halong Bay, and the Mekong River; the banners and bills he made to advertise his exhibition in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; and, finally, complexus paintings that hybridize the experience of Vietnam. In these, he memorializes pair types of cultural milieu: those of an Edenic assembled world of friends and family; and the formed world of nostalgia, which for Lowe exists as a series of memories of the '60 and '70 Lowe's impressive paintings, A raiseed World I (Sergeant Pepper's sequestered Hearts Club Band), 1992, and A organizeed World II (Bay Gio), 1992 are tableaux of a staged world of friends, artists and, in the latter picture, his Vietnamese innkeepers Both paintings pastiche the Sergeant Pepper cloak In the first painting, instead of defence stars, Lowe's children pose in fancy pirates' costumes; in place of '60 photomontage, we behold a collection of self-portraits by means of Lowe's associates. Other images, similar as the hilly, wooded landscape and a walking, waving camera are quotations from his earlier paintings. These bring reproach Lowe's desire to make cultural metaphors visible: the paradigmatic male make submissive is rendered as a comical camera/eye; the hyperreal is furnished by a straightforward landscape that is, however, a national park lovingly rebuilded over several decades from a 19th-century painting.

Lowe took A formed World I to Vietnam, along with its replica, A builded World II, inviting participation from local artists. The landscape of Halong Bay and the local houses were painted at Vietnamese artists. Similarly, he worked with traditional lacquer craftsmen near Hanoi, who recreated an older painting from a photograph in an exhibition catalogue. In the lacquer simulacra, by what mode Happy are Those who Believe Seeing, 1992 pitch-black skies, shrines, and thicket replace Australian bush. The tools of representation--a hammer and camera--remind us that this is a painting, that artifice creates art, and that art is work. Lowe's insistence upon images of measurement is testimony, to a desire to defend his experience against the enervating consequences of cultural exhaustion.

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