All the Clocks Have Stopped

All the Clocks Have Stopped captures the restless melancholia of the Australian Neo-Gothic, an artistic sub-genre of the late 20th and early 21st centuries bound to histories of dispossession, violence, and erasure. Influenced by global traditions of Gothic literature, horror cinema, and the gritty subcultures of punk, the Australian Neo-Gothic dwells in the liminal spaces between dreams and reality. Presence is constantly haunted by absence—that which remains is defined (and Othered) by what no longer is. Practitioners within this movement blend folklore, theatre, memory, and nightmares, resisting the confines of normalcy in favour of what lies in the peripheral. Encapsulating this, All the Clocks Have Stopped brings together the works of six contemporary Australian artists from the Michael Buxton Collection: Peter Booth, Tony Clark, Tracey Moffatt, Mike Parr, Ricky Swallow, and Louise Weaver.

The exhibition’s title draws a line from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ existentialist ballad Higgs Boson Blues 2013. Inspired by the all-consuming grief of British-American poet W. H. Auden’s Funeral Blues 1936, Cave’s song is littered with imagery that swims between England, the Americas, and the singer’s influential upbringing in rural Victoria. The song's hypnotic rhythm and surreal lyrics leave listeners unable to situate themselves, evoking the disorienting, languid heat of Australian summers and their ability to transform our encounters with place. Mirrored in the haunting landscapes of Booth’s imagination, Moffatt’s strange fervent dreamscape, and Swallow’s silent scream engulfed in darkness, this persistent sense of displacement is symptomatic of the Australian Neo-Gothic being innately without place, floating somewhere in between. The origins of the Gothic genre are rooted in medieval Anglo-European soil, oceans away from colonised Australia, and are therefore both aesthetically and narratively at odds with the landscapes here. The Australian Neo-Gothic becomes a ghostly hybrid, desperately attempting to find footing within the liminal space it occupies. The genre is weird and eerie, two words that have been defined in the context of art, writing, and music by critic Mark Fisher.

In his book The Weird and the Eerie 2016, Fisher defines the eerie as a failure of absence and/or a failure of presence, and the weird as the presence of something in a context which it does not belong in. The Australian Neo-Gothic encapsulates both of these terms, addressing the discomfiting presence of the colonial Other in stolen landscapes—landscapes haunted by the dislocating horrors of an all-too-recent history. All the Clocks Have Stopped invites viewers to sit uncomfortably in this nightmarish space, providing only clipped vignettes of half-told, half-concealed stories. This unpolished narrative jigsaw mimics the experience of living under colonial capitalist establishments such as so-called Australia. Collectivity and community are traded for para-social hyper-individualism, isolating everything into separate corners, disillusioned and lonely. To emphasise this, each work here is displayed in a disjointed salon-style hang, occupying isolated pockets of space in orbit around one another. Rather than being engaged in seamless, easy dialogue, the artworks in All the Clocks Have Stopped are self-conscious in each other’s company. The wild convulsions of Clark’s small, greyed landscape links tensely across the white gallery wall to Weaver’s ominous, hanging black and white spider, two images of nature frozen in movement. This is juxtaposed with Parr’s slowly flashing video works, sterile and measured in comparison. The emptiness that surrounds each artwork becomes a framing device rather than a vacuum, electric with meaning.

These artworks relate implicitly to one another not just thematically and aesthetically, but through their contextual proximities, all sharing space within the historical and contemporary artistic landscapes of colonial Victoria. In this location, the Australian Neo-Gothic adopts a distinct flavour – darker, moodier, colder—which is apparent in All the Clocks Have Stopped. The lands here are overrun by introduced (and invasive) flora and fauna, the bluestone streets of Naarm/Melbourne city are shadowed by towering Gothic Revival buildings, and regional bushscapes are still haunted by colonial fears and mythologies. In a country still named and governed by colonial powers, all that surrounds remains splintered and strange, slipping in and out of liminality. The artists represented here ponder this in-between-ness with a sombre yet theatrical flair. As was the original intention of patrons Michael and Janet Buxton, the works included in All the Clocks Have Stopped (and the collection they come from) showcase the unique, disquieting tone of Australia’s contemporary arts industry, as artists grapple with the eldritch realities and unrealities that exist here.

Artists: Peter Booth, Tony Clark, Tracey Moffatt AO, Mike Parr, Ricky Swallow, Louise Weaver

Curated by Raisa Mclean, Olivia McRae, Caitlin Mullaly, Sachi Orrock, Camilla Peffer and Gina Ramsay