High/Low. Junk/Not.

The Alice is an Australian TV drama series on the Nine Network that is set, not surprisingly, in Alice Springs, the famed 'red centre' of outback Australia. Initially this TV series was very popular but its ratings have plummeted drastically. 'The Alice' may be consigned to the junkheap of failed Australian TV shows and its creators will most certainly have experienced both the highs and the lows of working in a notoriously fickle creative industry.

But it's the branding of the show itself (seen above in the top panel) that reveals 'The Alice's other connections to junkheaps and the highs and lows of creative endeavour.

Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) is a highly regarded Australian artist that "created beautiful works from ‘bad type’ scavenged in the outback, turning abandoned road signs and drink crates into poetic evocations of landscape"*. I have to admit that her type-based assemblages such as 'Metropolis' (detail seen above, bottom of image), 'Big Yellow' and 'Slow Burn' (below) are some of my favourite artworks. Other artists may convey a sense of Australianness by depicting our landscape or by other means, but Gascoigne is perhaps the only artist who's done it with type (and chopped up soft-drink bottle crates).

So it was really surprising to see an appropriated version of Gascoigne's art turn up in the title sequence for 'The Alice'. The typographic treatment does seem entirely appropriate to the nature, content and location of 'The Alice'. In fact one of the show's characters is a sculptor and is often surrounded by scavenged, discarded junk. But that branding/show identity is, er, a very direct and blunt re-creation of Gascoigne's celebrated typo-assemblages.

Her 'high art' was created by using and reconfiguring stuff found on a junkheap – the very lowest rung of our capitalist, consumerist society – our offcasts and outmoded, non-functioning artefacts. A TV series appropriates her 'high art' made from the 'low' to make a new, glossy 'high', desired cultural event (well, not exactly high, but you know what I mean) – but like many consumer goods, it has a lifespan and ultimately ends up on the scrapheap (again). An interesting cycle of consumptive and creative events.

So, far from rapping the title designers of 'The Alice' over the knuckles for re-using her signature style and approach – I think Rosalie may even have approved.

Notes
Another interesting aspect, from the TV show's website: "The Alice is a series about fate, the search for yourself and the interconnectedness of all things".

The above statement is especially relevant to Rosalie Gascoigne's life. She was born a New Zealander, married an astromoner and then moved to the desolate environment of Mount Stromlo (where Australia's largest space observatory is located). She was not an academically-educated nor trained artist, but took up the Japanese art of Ikebana as a hobby and begun to explore the environs around the ACT (Australian Capital Territory, where Australia's capital city, Canberra, is located). Here she collected discarded material and junk and arranged it into Ikebana-related structures which later evolved into her celebrated art assemblages. Gascoigne had her first solo exhibition at the age of 52 in 1975.

* http://www.stbride.org/conference2004/papers.html#mcdonald

Comments

[Hester Gascoigne]

im rosalie's grandaughter, and i agree that she may have approved of the appropriation of her work, she may have even liked the show... she was great fan of soap operas, never missed an episode of days of our lives!