Peter Clague: 'Anyone can take, but not everyone can make', IB Art Exhibition Opening — 2024

9 February 2024, St Leonard College, Brighton East, Melbourne

Peter Clague is the principal of St Leonard College

Wominjeka and a very warm welcome to you all.

It is the proud duty St Leonard’s College to host this year’s Art Exhibition for graduates of Victorian & Tasmanian IB schools. Part of that responsibility includes providing the Guest Speaker who will address this formal opening tonight. You are doubly blessed as a result of that. Not only does it mean that you are shortly to hear from one of our inspiring Old Collegians (who speaks superbly), but that also means less time listening to me.

In fact, I only have two things that I want to share before Olivia speaks. The first is that this is a guilty pleasure for me. Along with my fellow Principals who are here tonight, I spend a lot of my time attending functions relating to school activities.  And the Big Book of ‘How to Be a Successful School Principal’ says that you must show equal enthusiasm and no bias in all College events.

People should never guess that you enjoy watching Basketball matches more than Hockey, or that you secretly like the Senior Jazz Band’s concerts more than you do listening to the Year 3 strings group torturing their violins. If you were a Geography teacher before you landed this job, you should always appear to be equally interested in Mathematics or French.  And so on. You mustn’t have favourites when you are the principal.

However, the St Leonard’s Art Department have already cottoned on to the fact that I have a huge soft spot for their endeavours. Which has a lot to do with the fact that, many years ago, my own son did Higher Level Art in his IB Diploma, and it changed his life. Which was remarkable given the fact that Year 11 was the first time he had ever shown any artistic inclination. 

Not only did he excel in his IB course, including in his Extended Essay, which was on whether the work of a little-known artist was actually art. (This was 15 years ago, and the newcomer was some fellow by the name of ‘Banksey’). He then went on to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts and then Master’s Degree with Honours. I am proud to say that he is, today, a fulltime artist. And before you all get too excited, he is penniless.  Poor as a church mouse. Although he wears that as a badge of honour, I might add.

He is also one of the most self-actualised, intellectually curious, and delightfully grounded people I know. And I lay most of the credit for that at the door of the IB Diploma Art programme.  So, this is my happy place.

The second thought I want to leave the young artists in the room with is this. Even in the 15 years since my son graduated, the world has changed enormously. Social media, incessant shouty texting, and the rabbit holes of the internet dominate almost every aspect of our lives.  Even those who strive to resist it have become consumers of vast amounts of content. Unimaginable volumes of ideas and imagery spill out of small screens and flood our lives every day.

I am not going to stand here and tell you not to be passive consumers – just about everyone is. But I would plead with you to continue to be creators. Because creators are a far rarer breed than consumers. Anyone can take, but not everyone can make.

I marvel at the magical, mystical process that happens between your neurons as you sit in front of a blank canvas or an inert lump of clay. It is wonderous to create something where once there was nothing.

In your Diploma portfolios and in your own private artwork, you have established the skill of being a maker. So, whatever you do from here forth, whether you become a professional artist or not, I would implore to keep on being creators throughout your lives.  It makes for far more interesting people and, if my son is anything to go by, far more content ones as well. You fill me equally with awe and gratitude. So, thank you, and please enjoy consuming one another’s creations this evening.  

Nicholas Gruen: 'Erwin Fabian’s magnificent portrait allows us to gaze back through time', unveiling of father's portrait -

Last night I attended the unveiling of a facsimile of a portrait of my father painted when he was fresh off the boat in 1941. Thanks go to Bruce Chapman above all, but to many others for organising. To Erwin Fabian, who pained the portrait all those years ago. It’s been over 16 years since Dad departed and I’ve made two other speeches reflecting on things, one at his memorial after he died, another, more general one using Dad as a foil to reflect on ‘the asylum seeker issue’. I needed to make another one!

I.

When Heinrich Schliemann unearthed a gold mask in Mycenae, he was reputed to have said “I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon”. In a more modest way Erwin Fabian’s magnificent portrait allows us to gaze back through time – upon the face of a very different person to the one we all knew.

When Dad arrived in England in 1936, he was 15 and alone. He must have been scared. Met by a teacher from Herne Bay College where he was to board, Dad had no English. “Salve” he said, greeting the teacher in Latin. No dice: He was the gym instructor.

The portrait was painted just four months after the Dunera arrived. To find him in those days you just followed the signs in the main street of Hay to the “Concentration Camp”. Dad must have wondered where his mother Marianne was; how she was. She was taken to Theresienstadt. It was a way-station to Auscwitz.

It also had creepy similarities to Hay. Theresienstadt was Hitler’s home for Europe’s Jewish cultural elite. So, as the inmates quietly starved, it doubled as a set for Nazi propaganda showing how well Jewish ‘resettlement’ was going. As she waited to discover her fate, Marianne would sometimes have attended lectures, recitals, poetry readings, and concerts, just as Dad was doing in Hay.
II.

I’ll return to the person in the portrait shortly, but I thought I’d list some propositions I take from my father’s success.

You make your own life
But look after people
Knuckle down. Work hard. Get on with things
But don’t be a workaholic
Take yourself seriously
But not too seriously
Don’t be shy. Chat with strangers.
If you’re nice to them, they’ll probably like you
Believe in, invest in, your own integrity and that of others.
Don’t get on your high horse or start a fight unless it really matters
You’ll know it really matters if, maybe only if, real injustice is done to someone who can’t easily defend themselves
If you want your intellect to make a positive contribution to people’s lives, the trick is to combine a warm heart with a cool head.
There is no shortage of people with exceptional intelligence and no damn sense
Listen carefully to those who disagree with you.
Listen like they might even be right.
Build, don’t destroy
But turn your back on things if you have to
Appreciate life
It ends

III

To me anyway, it’s important to remember that, however accomplished Dad was, however enjoyable his company, however much Max Corden praised his scrupulousness as a scholar, describing him as a one person Royal Commission, it was all built on the normal human difficulties and frailties.

In the last month or so we had plenty of long talks. In one he said “That’s the last time I really understood you. When you punched a hole in the wall of your room. That was the sort of thing I might have done at that age. Later I decided I needed to knuckle down. Work hard. Get on.”

The thing was . . . I’d not punched a hole in the wall. In a move that can only be fully appreciated with some understanding of adolescent AFL fans, in the dying moments of some unspecified Grand Final, I’d taken a magnificent ‘speckie’, descending from my ecstasy into the softness of my bed, only to learn that I’d not defied gravity by digging my knee into some obliging opponent’s back. I’d simply thrust it through the accommodating canite of my bedroom wall.
IV

At Dad’s memorial I read a Yiddish poem from the child of Holocaust survivors:

Sleep my dear parents but do not dream.
Tomorrow your children will shed your tears

I recall five years later – perhaps ten – sitting in a barber’s chair and some unusual – indeed ridiculous – facts came to mind. I fantasised again, not, this time the unheralded adolescent superhero. I’d become a great poet (again mysteriously undiscovered). I was composing a great poem that would uncover the sublime from the ridiculous.

The pity of it is, as you will appreciate, I’m no poet. I barely understand a lot of poetry. Still, sometimes a poem speaks for itself. As when I first heard this extraordinary fragment – a single sentence in eight lines of free verse – tossed off by John Keats in the margin of a page on which he’d been writing another, longer poem. Keats was 23, desperately in love with Fanny Brawne. And he knew he was dying:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –
I hold it towards you.

What did Keats mean by this last gesture, reaching across the chasm separating the living from the dead?

In any event, as the barber snipped away, tears swept down my cheeks, my mind flooding with grief for my father, rekindled by the beauty of this poem I’d never write. Self-conscious, I added to the surrealism of the occasion by managing to smile: Beatific, if somewhat zoned-out. The bemused barber asked if I was OK. “I’m fine” I said with such nonchalance that I surely convinced him, however momentarily, that his customers usually haemorrhaged tears, smiling blankly into his mirror.

The poem might have been called “Three moustaches: Three ages of man”. I expect moustaches were more important for the generation of my Dad’s father Willi than they were for Dad’s. In any event as a newlywed, Dad briefly experimented with growing a moustache. He and Mum both agreed it looked ridiculous.

Unable to grow their own, Dad’s young sons urged him to grow it once more. It was a long time coming. Then, with David and I in our twenties, on a cruise to Hong Kong and perhaps the last time we spent any sustained time together as a family, Dad’s moustache arrived unannounced; initially unnoticed, but then unmistakable, becoming quite the full huntsman spider in the middle of his handsome face, before yielding, perhaps to my mother’s conviction that it was as ridiculous then as it had ever been.

Then within a week or two of the end … the professor dying … that moustache crept up on us again, initially mistaken for some slip in Dad’s shaving routine. But after the second day and until his death, and in the coffin as he lay there, it stared back at us – as mysterious as it was unmistakable.

We can only speculate about what it meant – on what he meant. I guess like Keats, he was trying to say something across the chasm.

He was saying:

“See here it is. I hold it towards you.”

He was reminding us, that no matter how much we love someone, they always remain, as life remains . . . a mystery.

Roberto Lugo: 'This machine kills hate', NCECA Emerging Artist - 2015

25 March 2015, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Somebody once told me I would die before I be something, more likely to fry before I freeze something, more likely to sigh before I see something. You see, I'm not the one that's going tell you how you should feel. You may not know my pain but you understand how the sutures feel because when it rains you understood how a roof would feel. I see the act of making pots as a metaphor for my life. Somehow taking the ground that we walk on into something that we eat from, something that we prize, something that we wait all day in search for the perfect spot for.

 On a school trip, instead of going to the zoo or the library or the theme park, our school decided that we go to a prison, a local prison. And we walked down aisles of black faces and at the end of that aisle the warden asked our teacher to select two students that he would talk to. He selected me and he selected Mustafa Bourke. The warden grabbed me by the back of my neck and shoved my face into a toilet, and he said this is where you're going to shit. He grabbed me by my shirt, showed me the bed and he said this where you're going to sleep in for the rest of your life.

I was raised as a Christian boy. I went to church every day of the week. My father was a pastor. I never cursed. I never talked back. But somehow the teacher that knew me every day selected me as someone who was bound for trouble. I realised early in my life that people look at you for how you are on the outside and they make all these judgements, and I would have to sort of face that the rest of my life. I was a brown person.

The wheel, however, gives me an opportunity to take all those things, all the things that happened to me, before I sit down, before I even sit down, and make something out of it. Make something out of myself. I completely believe in the power that somehow myself and the people in this room can kill hate by allowing children from everywhere to have access to clay. By allowing them to get on the wheel and fail. Then go home later that day and look at a mug, and see how perfect it is and drink out of it. And say, "How did someone make this so perfect?" And then look at the walls around them and say, "Someone made that that way".The floors.

Everything around you changes when you're able to fail, when you have access to an education in the arts. I started off with that image of me with a wall in back of me, and what I wanted to show you is how there's all this trash in Philadelphia. I grew up as a graffiti artist and I would paint, and the city would cover up my paintings. Instead of removing the trash, they would paint over what I did. And that was another lesson that the things I was doing was some sort of threat. It was actually a positive thing and it was within my power to sort of create change somehow.

 One of my favourite poems that I've read is by Walt Whitman and it describes life as this beautiful play. And that we all have the ability to contribute a verse. So my case ... I get to contribute a verse and to add into the conversation an underrepresented culture, one of graffiti, one of people that want an opportunity to make art but don't. The only thing they can afford is a spray can. Sometimes they steal it. The only canvas they can afford is the streets around them and they paint places where everyone's forgotten about, where no-one cares about. And somehow that's a problem. Instead of the trash, instead of the poverty, instead of the people who have no food, that's the problem. I see art as an opportunity for me to be able to make change for that to change, and for children to be able to have the opportunity to do what I'm doing and stand in front of you right now.

When I look at this jar, I see a $5 food stamp. You might see Abraham Lincoln. With a $5 food stamp in Philadelphia, you can buy a turkey hoagie. And they were delicious. When I started in graduate school, one of the worst things happened to me in my life. My brother was unfairly incarcerated. Someone who I grew up with, who I always wanted to be like. And it challenged everything at that point that I thought was important. I always thought making art and becoming someone was important, but then I realised, "How can I make art when my brother, one of the people I love the most in this entire world, has to sit behind a cell every day.

My brother wrote me a letter and he signed it without wax. And he said, "Look it up", because he knew that even I didn't know what that meant. I looked it up and it was the way that sculpturs would say, with all sincerity, "I made this without wax". My brother was educating me from prison. My brother's locked in a state pen. I made art at Penn State. I'm a potter, I make plates. He's in gaol, he makes plates. I tried to be a student. You see I've got a home. I opened my cupboards and all I saw was student. I turned around, I got smacked, and all I did was student.

I said I'll join a synagogue. When it came to church, I just saw its walls crack by the cinder blocks. Words went over my head like a cinder shower. My weight left the world disappointed, like a sinner's pot. I said I'll be a veteran, but when it came to war I just saw my Pearl Jam like the Vetter Bay gunshots keep me up late at nights. Like Letterman, I can't be a Christian. I get confused, sort of thing, for these pots that I'm pissing in. Listen in.

Now, not only do I have a pot to piss in but I can make 'em. Graduate school ... Thank you. In grad school, a famous photographer came – Mr Richard Ross – and he was critiquing students in the photography department. And, man, he didn't hold anything back. He was a very honest man and the reason for that was is because he's making serious work. It was his life's goal to expose people to what happens to these kids. How do they get into the incarceration system? And all I can see when I look at this image is the art in the background. People are writing in the walls.

These kids want an opportunity to make art and it's up to me to give them that opportunity, because that's a Mr Richard Ross. Even though I made pots and had nothing to do with photography, I put my pottery in my backpack and I waited outside of the critique room. And I said, "Mr Ross, will you look at my pots?" He invited me to do a duo exhibition with him in Philadelphia where I had national exposure, where the funds from that went to expunge records of kids incarcerated to get them lawyers. To get them the opportunities that they deserve. That's the power of ceramics.

The things I make in my studio have to do with the hope that I have, you know? I talk about these things in order to give them precedence, to let you know that I can't make anything else because of my experiences. The person on the left you see, they're both me. They both have my face. But it's a Puerto Rican. Puerto Ricans have pride. Puerto Ricans are often Christian. And the person on the right, the person on the right is from the south. My wife's family. Not my wife's family in particular, but from the south. Southern people often have this stigma of being racist, of toting the Confederate flag.

What I wanted to do is put them both on a table and have them have a conversation, because in fact they'll find that they have so many similarities. So what's the reason to oppress each other? I made a series on the Bloods and Crips, a rival gang in Las Angeles, killing each. Predominantly people of colour. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to make an image of myself with a red bandana, and I wanted to have a friend with a blue bandana. My friend was white. I wanted people to confront that pot and I wanted them to look at it. It's decorative for a reason to sort of seduce you to come in to look at it.

I wanted them to see me and say, "That looks like a gangster". And then look at the other side and go, "That looks like a country girl, she's wearing a blue bandana. That's rather stylish". I put my face on pots because I want to put my face in a place that doesn't belong. I want you to get used to it. A hundred years from now I want a lot of people of colour to be on pots so that you see it every day and you become comfortable with it.

This particular pot has myself and Snoop Dog on the other side. This piece is called Latin Kings Jar. Latin Kings is a gang many of you may be familiar with, predominantly found in the north-east. The crown on top, however, is an air freshener that was used predominantly in the 90s when people would drive around with theirs cars and their systems. Later on, I found out through a little research that these crowns actually went to fund part of the Ku Klux Klan. And there's sort of this irony in that because of the fact that as a person of colour, I have to do things to not hurt my case. In many ways, I want to also be able to help my side, help the people of colour to be able to understand how we can do positive things to help each other.

Because black on black crime is not an option anymore. The things we do to each other are also important. I'm not a person who just deals with race and just deals with these issues. I have many happy moments in my life. I have the greatest parents in the world. I have a great wife. I have a six month old son. I love them dearly, but the things that I make art about often deal with more than just race. In this particular case, I've been dealing with obesity since I was a child. So in order for me to really reflect all of my different ideas, I need to make work about my weight as well.

I think eclecticism is under-appreciated within the arts because of the fact that I'm into the Wu-Tang clan and I'm into Worcester porcelain. Those are two things that I'm absolutely obsessed with. I love those two things. And you know what? And you know what, that what makes me unique. And that's what makes you unique. And that's what you could make art about. It doesn't have to be about one thing and, I'm sure, certainly not about one thing. This piece is about the day my belt broke.

The last thing I'll sort of discuss here is just the matter of how my painting and my pottery make sense together. Here's one of the vessels I made and here's the painting. This goes back to painting on a wall and having the city cover it up. I'm constantly painting over and over and over in my studio, and eventually I get to a point where I think it's satisfactory.

The last image I'll show reflects the experience I had. After all this work with community and social activism and trying to make a change in my world, I went to a gas station on the way to school at Penn State. And in that line, this man pulled up with a Confederate flag and a camouflage, souped-up truck. He asked the guy at the register, "Did you see who won the lottery last night?" And he said, "No, I didn't see". He goes, "Some fucking spick". I was there and the only thing I can think of is, "How can I get this guy to sit down with me and have a conversation, because that's how I think he could change". And I said I'll put the Confederate flag on a pot. I'll put something that represents him and something that represents me. We can sit down for tea and have a conversation, and at the end of it I think we'd both find out a lot. I'd stop assuming a lot of things about him and he would about me.

The last thing I want to say is just that I want to take Roberto Lugo out of the equation for a moment. The individual. And I want to say that I am proud to be a part of a community of people that honours the things I just talked about. That finds those things valuable. I like like as though we're an emerging culture. We're a culture that can change the world. The people in this very room that said Roberto Lugo is worthy of having up here. And I'm proud to be a part of you. Thank you.

Hedy Ritterman: 'I use his possessions, the objects of his life as my palette', 'One Man in His Time' exhibition opening - 2016

15 September 2016, Jewish Museum, St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia

I want to sincerely thank the personnel at the Jewish Museum  for believing in me and my work, giving me the opportunity, structure and support  to present'One Man in his Time' here.

This exhibition is the merging of all of my parts, as mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, in-law, aunt, friend, widow and artist - I thank all of you who are integral to my life for giving me the time, space and encouragement to explore what I seem to need. In other words, sorry for being so unavailable of late.

 I feel incredibly lucky to have art as a means, a language , to work through my endless feelings and  thoughts - there is a definite cathartic effect in addressing issues  of grief and mourning that can otherwise get swept away with the routine of life. Sometimes it has been so helpful to work at this and other times incredibly confronting. I won't pretend that there hasn’t been many a time when I've questioned myself as to why I keep doing this.

By bringing my private ritual of dealing with loss, into the public arena I struggle with exposing the intimate and personal, both for myself and my family. Being a very private person myself, this dichotomy between public and private is a constant tension, sometimes quite harrowing yet other times incredibly liberating

One of my favourite artists, Doris Salcedo, says that it is the role, even responsibility of the artist to rupture the natural course of forgetting and so delay death and ritualise life. This is my impetus, it compels me. I want to reaffirm life, the life of one Henry Ivor Ritterman - one man in his time - a time cut short but a time fulfilled.

Time in fact became the emerging theme of this show - I confront it - bring awareness to it and try and stop it

This exhibition gives memory a space, gives it sound and material form. It is my way to make the intangible tangible.

 And what better place to do this, than in a museum; the home of collective memory.

Those of you who knew Henry would agree that he would be rapt to be here, he would be so proud to have his medals on display, his achievements honoured and his warmth and love fill the gallery.

I use his possessions, the objects of his life as my palette. Henry kept his things meticulously stored - his childhood and schoolboy memorabilia lovingly placed in boxes, he kept trinkets from old girlfriends, and scrap-booked important clippings from his and his family's life. He collected and stored his history and I have displayed it - we are working in collaboration; partners again.

My display is my way of drawing him - A portrait as a memory landscape - not to depict Henry but to convey his essence and even in a strange way to evoke his smell. I have purposely displayed his things on the ground, in an almost garage-sale aesthetic, exposed and vulnerable, alive - in stark contrast to usual museum protocol of housing objects in precious vitrines situating them firmly in the past.

 For me, these hundreds and hundreds of objects are also archeological relics - each having their story and each serving my aim, my responsibility - to rupture forgetting.

They are markers of an era, of events, of emotions, of taste, of interests, of community and of time itself. These familiar ordinary objects are tangible evidence that once there was a body, a life that touched them and in handling them I have learned so much more than I expected about Henry and about myself. Strangely, I feel like I know, understand and appreciate him even more now than I did when we were sharing life.

Maybe there's a lesson here for relationships - take out your things from time to time and see what happens?

The new work, upstairs, that evolved from the first iteration of this show heightened my awareness of the honour in the act of making itself - the wonderfully slow process of contemplation, research, looking and labour which somehow helped to me to accept my reality of living in harmony with absence.

There is an obsessive nature to the new work - work that tries to give shape and structure to time itself. It reflects the need to find some concrete form at that time when the world seemed to float in an endless spiral of pain. Religious and cultural rituals help and I reference the 5 stages of mourning that the Jewish religion advocates

The first stage is between death and burial, then shivah, seven days of intense grief followed by shloshim, 30 days after the burial, where mourners are encouraged to rejoin society. The fifth and final stage is the twelve month period. After this year the bereaved are not expected to continue their mourning except briefly for the Yurtzeit, the yearly anniversary of the death. Jewish tradition, in fact, chides a person for mourning more than the prescribed period.

So here am I, almost 7 years after Henry's death, still performing my personal rituals, questioning time, asking if it is indeed the healer it is supposed to be and I am still not sure of the answer - Yes, I have moved on through the pull of time and life itself. But as an artist I have the means to delay death for as long as I can, to create that space of memory - to celebrate a life - to bring Henry back for us all to enjoy.

I could not make this space alone and I want to thank so many of you here. Without the support and encouragement of those of you who believe in me I could not keep going as I do. I am strong but not that strong - I take my strength from the love and  lessons gleaned from many  of you- family, friends, colleagues but there is oneperson to whom I dedicate this exhibition that showed me how to do it all- Rezi Ritterman, Henry's Mother ,the most courageous, unselfish, empathic, resilient person I know.