Barry William Hale
EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND UNTIL SATURDAY MARCH 27TH
The Chamber Of Pop Culture and Jack Sargeant presents
Barry William Hale
Heralding The Apocalypse
Exhibition
March 15th – March 20th 2004
Mon – Sat 12 – 6
Horse Hospital London
“Hale’s work invests the magikal and the occult with the spirit of the carny and sideshow. Excitement and wild hucksterism inform his work as much as the more recognisable elements of occult art. Here the high and low meet, and nothing is as it once was.�
Barry Hale: Spruiker of the Apocalypse.
By
Jack Sargeant
Barry Hale has been described as an occult artist, while a superficially germane term; on closer inspection it radiates a self-consciously unwelcome specificity. Too redolent of those early twentieth century outsider artists whose work depended on visionary states, specific knowledge of ancient mysteries, or some other Qabalistic obscurity. Hale, it should be noted, has certainly done nothing to dissuade such labels, mischievously luxuriating in such terms when fitting. It is apparent from his biography that he is, for example, an outspoken member of an OTO. But such groups encourage individual exploration, undoubtedly an attraction to Hale whose very genealogy radiates the outlaw.
Hale was born to hardcore hippy parents, who lived on one of the first Australian communes, according to the artist his biological father was allegedly involved in distributing LSD to a grateful Australian hippie community. Hale was raised by an adoptive family of staunch trade unionists, but maintains contact with his expanded family.
Barry is a student of – to the west – a relatively obscure form of Chinese martial art. If what has emerged as the cliché of the western mystic artist is true he should be interested in the hermeneutics of high ritual magic, but instead he gravitates to sorcery, to Haitian voudon, to Congolese palo mayombe, to folk forms of religious expression and ecstatic explorations that owe more to the oral traditions of the disenfranchised slave communities than to arcane studies in dusty libraries. This is not to suggest that Hale is not a scholar of the western esoteric tradition, but rather that he has explored and worked with other forms.
But folk magic emerging from the Mexican barrio and the New Orleans ghetto makes sense when considering Hale’s work, with its material emphasis on what is condescendingly referred to as ‘craft’ and that which many ethnographers would still in their arrogance label as ‘primitive culture’. From his experiences in Haiti and New Orleans, Hale has produced a series of voodoo bourbon bottles, their labels painted with the signs and images of Loa. A tribute to the culture and to the artist’s experiences both autobiographical and magical. Other works involve cutting paper silhouettes, a form of expression common in the magical rituals of the Mexican Limpas, but Hale’s paper-cuts depict the pantheon of plague demons of the Middle Ages.
Barry Hale’s influences are, however, far more than just variations on indigenous forms. This is not glib orientalism, smug tourism or hip voyeurism. Looking at his work it is unsurprising to discover Hale trained to be a tattooist, the bold graphic style echoing the classic flash-sheets of the old school skin-and-ink artist. And there is more at play here, sideshow art, underground comic books, fifties men’s magazines, industrial logos, and Tijuana Bibles are all evident in his iconographic reservoir. His predecessors are underground comic book artists such as Robert Williams and the Coop, as well classic occult artists such as Austin Spare and Rosaline Norton. Barry Hale immerses himself in popular art even while creating images that are bewildering in the occult complexity of their significance. Thus a design he produced for the Oceanic Lodge of an OTO depicts the delicious curves of a voluptuous naked pomba-gira, the delicate petals of indigenous Australian flower the warratta, the dove, and the radiating light of knowledge. This juxtaposition of images both sacred and profane formed the design for a t-shirt, a medium and form more often associated with the biker-gang or punk band than that with a magical order.
This embrace of outlaw pop-culture extends into the dissemination of Hale’s work. During his one-man exhibition in Sydney’s Front Room Gallery, at which Hale exhibited some seven hundred automatic drawings, which looked like a bastard cross between Austin Spare and Savage Pencil, Hale employed a Carney-style barker. The barker’s role was to cajole and rile the audience at the gallery, while swigging rum and hollering his-own version of the apocalypse to the surprise and entertainment of the assembled crowd.
The works collected in this volume were produced by the artist throughout the Antipodean winter of 2002. Ostensibly each image is the representation of a herald of the apocalypse, every picture a trumpeter blasting the subsonic mayhem of the last trump, a sound that heralds mayhem, chaos, finality, and oblivion. This is the end. But each of these figures represents something else, a combination of the traditions and beliefs that fascinate Hale. The demons and gods depicted here are deeply syncretic, fusing together various metaphysical forms and beliefs, creating a unique apocalyptic pantheon.
Stylistically these works play with the thematic of repetition, each form a variant of the predecessor, each form doubled and divided, mirrored, and distorted. Such doubling echoes playing cards, or some eclectic bastardisation of the tarot card. This repetition also recalls the advertisements in sixties underground comics for Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth t-shirts, depicting row after row of heavy black line images of drooling beasties driving hot-rods and low-riders.
If the apocalypse depicted here is imminent, it is also infinitely deferred. While Christianity embraces teleology, other beliefs do not share such end-time-certainties, and Hale’s angels and demons, with their iconographic nods to Confusionism, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al, belong to numerous traditions, or rather, to a juxtaposition of traditions and beliefs. In this work the artist is neither recognising nor advocating a universal Armageddon, instead these pictures must be interpreted as a celebratory final trump, played not for the end of the world, but for the end of Christianity, for Hale the apocalypse is specific, gleeful, and graphic.
