DAY IN DAY OUT (second version) 1991 by Aleks Danko has recently been installed in the reimagining of the Australian collection at the Queensland Art Gallery. This important and enduringly captivating work is for the first time, given a place in a ‘permanent hang’ of the Australian collection in a context which is both diverse and relevant. It has been included previously in various iterations and thematic displays, but its inclusion in the new perspective for the collection is both timely and as topical as ever as Australia confronts increasingly shrill debates about home affordability, border security and social division. The power of Danko’s work is in its understated, unadorned directness in addressing issues that we all share. This blog is an extract from David Burnett’s essay published in Lynne Seear and Julie Ewington (eds). Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850-1965, Queensland Art Gallery, 1998.
It was, in fact, the installation’s title that had immediate resonance for me. My mother (and I suspect many others) had used this very phrase often when I was child. I recalled that it was after she took on jobs, first as a cleaner in a nearby motel, and then later as a cook at a nursing home, that this chant-like phrase entered our domestic realm. I remember the pattern of life changing with both parents working. There were adjustments to new routines and schedules for myself, my brother and my sister. Evening meals moved from the kitchen table to the lounge room, in front of the television to catch Flipper or Bellbird before the news at seven. ‘Day in, day out’ was a phrase I came to associate with my mother’s tiredness and seemingly endless chores — cooking, lunch-making, washing, cleaning and ironing — which she performed at times she never seemed to before. I grew to resent this routine as it came to dominate our lives. For me, it was through this portal of memory that Danko’s installation of little houses with their long shadows took on particular significance, and prompted a kind of gentle, backyard melancholy.
DAY IN DAY OUT (second version) incorporates a revolving theatrical light – an electronic sun which introduces and implies the element of time in the work. It has an effect similar to time-lapse photography, where the movement of clouds, light and atmosphere is compressed into minutes and seconds. The diurnal cycle defined in this work is measured by a clock that spins rather than ticks. It is mechanical time, factory time, ‘no-time-to-dream’ time — a time that is alienated from experience, indifferent, relentless — day in, day out.
Aleks Danko’s career spans a defining period of Australia’s recent history. His childhood was spent in suburban Edwardstown in Adelaide. In the early 1970s, he studied sculpture at the South Australian School of Art. Feminism and gender politics, the anti-uranium and conservation movements; the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government; the volatile passage of the Hawke and Keating administrations; and, more recently, John Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ euphemism of ambient anxiety and fear, have provided the background noise for Danko’s critical aesthetic strategies. From an era of reformist hope and optimism to one of nervous, timid quiescence, his art has engaged with debates through a mordant wit and irony, simultaneously disarming and activating issues.
From the early 1970s, Danko’s work embraced a neo-dada, conceptual dimension, but with its roots in the local. His work engaged with Conceptual and Post-object art to the extent that it critiqued the formalist, institutional aesthetic of the previous generation. It did not follow, for example, the more austere forms of Conceptualism, where texts and photographic documentation became the residual ghosts of ideas. The arrangement of DAY IN DAY OUT (second version) may reference the formalist grid of Modernism, however it does not assume the mute objectivity which characterised the minimalist aesthetic of artists such as Donald Judd or Carl Andre. Danko’s language of irony, Duchampian play and metaphor keeps the work circulating in an orbit of immanent possibilities and potential meanings. As a strategy, irony is open-ended — it has no end-game. It plays itself out by creating small ruptures in the fabric of language. It irritates, but never nullifies meaning, by having an alternative always at hand. It forces us to remain vigilant to the fact that reality is essentially provisional, equivocal and contestable.
DAY IN DAY OUT (second version) confounds notions of scale and time, the ordinary and the monumental. Its formality is deftly undermined by its installation at floor level — no enhancement, pedestal or plinth — just anonymous little houses resting on the indifferent floor and, by inference, the earth. While the work is composed of small, identical houses, it is less about ‘home’ than it is about time and a sense of alienation. The spaces between these houses are pregnant with the disconnectedness that characterises the Australian suburb. The irony of the work is amplified when we know that the multiple dwellings are cast from a house-shaped cake-tin mould. This dinky piece of domestic kitsch becomes the template for several of Danko’s important works and projects — works that take the idea of home into a wider political and philosophical arena. Its childlike facade is both cute and menacing. The suburban house on the quarter-acre block has traditionally been the primary foil against alienation and ‘not-at-home-ness’ for non-Indigenous Australians. It is here that we seek refuge and security.
To drive into, or out of, any major city in Australia by freeway is to traverse the zones of housing that have come to define everyday life in Australia. The older suburbs of humble red brick bungalows and postwar weatherboard cottages contrast sharply with the new wave of eave-less, double storey ‘McMansions’ squatting on freshly cleared plots ‘landscaped’ with pine bark and palms. Our coastal hugging population’s love affair with home ownership has been a social, political and economic indicator for decades. Australia’s boom and bust cycle is driven as much by the movement and relocation of...
With a population of approximately 480,000 by 1953 (when Kenneth Jack painted Grey Street Bridge), Brisbane in the 1950s still retained a relaxed pace of life compared to its southern capitals (Sydney's population was some 1,800,000), keeping its unique charm as ‘Australia’s biggest country town’ even later during a period of growth and modernisation.
Brisbane lacked any high-rise buildings at the time, the City Hall and its clock tower (illustrated) completed in 1930, was still the most prominent landmark that could be seen, dominating the skyline for 40 years until Brisbane entered the age of the skyscraper in 1970. To get around, people caught trams from the city centre (illustrated) out into the suburbs up until 1969. Shops opened on weekdays from 9 to 5, and closed at 1pm on Saturdays, Sundays were a day for rest or recreation. Saturday and Sunday all-day retail trading wasn't introduced until 2002.
View of Brisbane to the City Hall’s clock tower with the Commercial Rowing Club Boathouse in the left foreground c.1930
View across Brisbane City c.1950s
Trams in Queen Street, city centre, 1954
Watch | A portrait of Brisbane, 1954
Therefore, the serene print Grey Street Bridge, Brisbane 1953 by Kenneth Jack (1924–2006) fits perfectly against the backdrop of a laid-back Brisbane in the 1950s. The linocut shows the influence of the contemporary Japanese tradition of Shin-hanga ('New prints'), a movement that emerged in the 1920s in response to increasing artistic exchange with Europe and the United States. Jack has borrowed from the form to capture a corner of the Brisbane River that looks across to Kurilpa Point (now the site of the Gallery of Modern Art – GOMA) and the Grey Street Bridge (renamed the William Jolly Bridge in 1955) with the O'Connor Boathouse & The Commercial Rowing Club featured.
View towards Commercial Rowing Club Boathouse, 1954
Kenneth Jack Grey Street Bridge, Brisbane 1953
Commercial Rowing Club Boathouse
Denis O'Connor was one of the most prominent and popular business figures in Brisbane, a successful rower and administrator who served as President of the Commercial Rowing Club, and Queensland Rowing Association, he also assisted with the funding of the new Commercial Rowing Club Boathouse which was named in his honour. The O'Connor Boathouse & The Commercial Rowing Club (illustrated) located at North Quay replaced the original boathouse erected in 1897, and at the time of its opening in October 1905 was the largest in Australia.
Commercial Rowing Club, November 1905
Jack’s linocut captures a slice of Brisbane history and features the O'Connor Boathouse, which appears on the riverbank in the mid-ground of the print, announced by the sign 'BOATS & CAN[OES] FOR HIRE'. The building traded as a boathouse at river level, on the second floor a gathering place for spectators of regattas on the Town Reach, a space for functions, and a dance hall which became a hub for Brisbane’s lively dance-band scene in the 1950s and 60s.
Queensland Eights at the Commercial Rowing Club, 1911
Rowing regatta, c.1915
Lost Brisbane
The Boathouse, a Brisbane landmark for 63 years was lost to an arson attack on 1 September 1968, the same evening the nearby Supreme Court Building which opened in 1879 (illustrated) was severely damaged by fire and subsequently demolished. The boathouse was removed to make way for the Riverside Expressway which was opened in July 1976.
Margaret Olley Law Courts, Brisbane 1966
The Supreme Court building, c.1910
Commercial Rowing Club Boathouse & Supreme Court Building, c.1930
Edited curatorial extracts, research and supplementary material sourced and compiled by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA