Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie

The title Nobody’s Sweetie appears to reference Dale Frank’s 2013 show of the same name. At the time, it reflects a reality about Frank, one that can be vexing even for the artist himself.

Dale Frank is not an easy subject for a documentary. At the after-screening session at the Art Gallery of NSW, the film’s director spoke of the difficulty of filming and editing the project. According to Jenny Hicks, Frank’s documentarian, when the camera would roll, Frank would leave the room. It took a while for Frank to get used to the camera. Apart from the portrayal in the documentary itself, one could glean Frank’s trying-temperament by his absence from what was meant to be Q&A with the artist and Hicks.

But there are other reasons that Frank is a difficult subject. Indeed, Hicks revealed that there were two years worth of footage. This is not surprising. Like many of his works, he is immediately engaging to view but also elusive, layered, complicated. Quick-witted, caustic, self-deprecating, and unPC, Frank as presented, is both charming and aloof. Writer and curator Amelia Winata comments in the documentary, that Frank is “kind of like a likeable arsehole. If anybody else says some of the things he says, you’d be like, that’s it, you’re cancelled. For some reason he has the right level of charm and humour to get away with it.” However, while the subject is difficult, watching the documentary is not.

Manifestly viewable, the documentary adopts a conventional structure: we are introduced to Frank by an early work from 1980. The video art / performance piece involves Frank mumbling song lyrics and is fittingly entitled, Songs about Women (that I can’t remember). This is one of the merits of the film—its archival footage and images include photographs of works dating back to his high school days. After this initial hook and tease of Frank’s work, we are then introduced to Frank’s majestic estate in the bush. It is presented as a kind of repaired Antipodean Xanadu, with an extensive garden where Frank plants rescue trees and other botanic specimens that will continue to grow and soar long after his death. We see Frank’s distinctive, eclectic sensibilities when he shows us around his natural history collection replete with “monkeys, hyenas, Ethiopian kudu, lions, a rhino, a snow leopard . . . a vacuum cleaner.” The film follows the usual beats of a biographical documentary: archival footage, the artist in their studio, talking heads reflecting on the work and the artist, moments of soul searching by the tortured artist, drama around a forthcoming show (at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, that unfortunately coincided with COVID), and banter between documentary maker and the subject. The film even concludes with credits over photographs of Frank’s luminous abstract works.

Hicks spoke of her desire to use big, bold classical music to match the form, to accord with the imposing and dramatic artist and his work. Classical music is often employed in popular culture, not to evoke feeling, but provide a comfortable but numbing shortcut around feeling—”this is dramatic,” “this is cultivated,” and the like. Its function in adverts often entails a contrast between the grandness of the music and the banal product in an amusing way. In the documentary, this inclusion, especially of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, thus offers tepid humour rather than a sincere evocation of the stature of the art or its creator. The academic Edward Colless, featured in the documentary, mentions a punk sensibility to Frank, “a sense of DIY rebellion against entrenched and established protocols of culture” and Frank himself mentioned that he loved punk. So why not punk music? (That said, if one excised the cliché choice of classical music, especially Peer Gynt, Sergei Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, which constitute the worst offenders—the score otherwise works well, featuring a score by composer Alan John.)

There’s a long tradition of essay films and documentaries that adopt experimental, challenging approaches to their subject. Think Hans Namuth’s Jackson Pollock 51, a film in which we witness Pollock dripping paint from below through glass, accompanied by an experimental score and fragmentary narration from Pollock. In 1956 Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso also allowed us to see an artist’s process of painting. One may also consider Richard Leacock and Rolf Liebermann’s cinéma vérité-inflected documentary, A Stravinsky Portrait, or Chris Marker’s 2000 documentary, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, about Tarkovsky. Then of course there is Banksy’s famous / infamous hybrid of documentary and mockumentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010. Nobody’s Sweetie is not among these innovative documentaries. And on reflection, it is something of a relief that it isn’t. Sometimes a radical, ambiguous subject isn’t served by a daring approach. After all, Namuth’s striking and iconic work contributes (alongside his equally iconic and striking photographs) to the mythic stature of Pollock but not really to understanding Pollock. Indeed, when we see Frank making art, we see him ask his assistants to raise the work for the resins and paints to drip, to hold, and then lower, which offers a pronounced contrast to Namuth’s intuitive and frenetic Pollock.

While the documentary includes Jane Rankin-Reid’s assessment that Frank “is one of the greatest artists that Australia has ever produced,” there is something demystifying and de-mythologising about the documentary. We see Frank in pain as he struggles to get out of bed in the morning. At one point, Frank shares, “The latest x-ray is that there are five or possibly six vertebrae out of alignment. And the lower two vertebrae are corroding. This is creating nerve damage and the nerves are corroding in my hip and neck. It’s just going to get increasingly worse.” We see Frank drinking, smoking, and desiring morphine. Human, all-too human. There is also Frank filling out spreadsheets on the computer to work out finances and forthcoming shows. There is Frank’s admission that he ranks high on the autism spectrum, and we see Frank’s turmoil about the recent diagnosis as we enter an uncertain proximity with Frank, with the camera serving almost as a confessional or a therapy session.

“Now I understand,” he tells us, “why I didn’t attend those social functions. Now I understand why I don’t have friends. Now I understand why I don’t have relationships. Now I understand why so many things in my past happened.” He also confides that “secondary school was quite a nightmare with autism not being invented . . . you lived a crises day to day and week to week. No social skills so no ability to hang out in a playground.” His art teacher though, was supportive and thus gave him “the only life in secondary school.” Frank notes that he was very influenced early on by Robert Ryman’s work, which contrasted with the “boring white gums of Brett Whiteley.”

Yet while we learn of Frank’s poor medical condition and even that Frank’s English teacher viewed him as perverted, Frank’s focus on sexuality is not explored in any depth despite there being tantalising allusions throughout. The documentary acknowledges but does not dwell on the spiritual or mystical possibilities of Frank’s work. However, we do learn about the importance of time to Frank’s understanding of art, with Frank revealing his fears of not achieving enough. His main misgivings about dying, he explains, is that he will not have created anything. Tellingly, he argues that time is the most important thing an artist can have, since time affords the artist the ability to develop, and few artists have adopted and experimented with so many changes in form, medium, and style as Frank.

We can glimpse the significance Frank places on the work, which is elevated above his wellbeing. Art even forces Frank to socialise, with Frank explaining, “My role when the exhibition opens is to not embarrass myself and not insult others. That’s my role and I have to practise that.” The documentary thereby probes and reveals a tension between Frank’s drive to succeed and his desire to be left alone. Responding to a comment that he is the most driven person, he retorts, “but is it over a cliff?” Such Roadrunner (or Wile E. Coyote) instincts were present from a young age. Frank confesses or perhaps gloats that when he was young he would find out who was judging an art competition and then make his own painting appear “like it was influenced by the judge. I remember the first art prize I won. The judge was John Olsen. Anyway, I studied their work, added a bit of Fred Williams to it and had my cousin drive me down to collect the winnings. . . I was fifteen or sixteen I think.” Incredibly, we, the audience, even see the winning work appear on screen.

Yet the documentary does not detract from Frank’s genius or use his autism to explain or explain away his art. Moreover, some of the most enjoyable and human moments in the film come from Frank’s interactions with Roslyn Oxley as they exchange barbs. At one point, Oxley asks “Dale, what happened to the colour?” and he replies, “Took a holiday.” After Frank contends that the paintings sell themselves, Oxley quips, “I tell you what, we concentrate so much on selling your wretched work.” It is however clear that she esteems Frank highly, stating “I think Dale is a very nice human being. I think he’s shy. I think he’s tough on people, but I think the people that know him, know him well. They get a lot out of Dale . . . I think he’s a great human being.” Perhaps he is, deep down, a sweetie.

The interview segments also standout, especially those conducted with Edward Colless. In one perplexing moment, Colless contends that Frank’s work “doesn’t take you into other worlds. It undoes this world when you look at it.” Whether one agrees, Colless’ observations proffer substantive reflection throughout in a way that contrasts with the usual platitudes offered about a great artist’s oeuvre. Indeed, there is genuine artistic analysis of Frank’s works and commentary on currents in the art world featured in the documentary. As such, Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie is a service not only to those interested in Frank but also those interested in art. It is an important work of historical documentation, capturing stages of Frank’s career and developments in the art world, both national and international, including what is often characterised as the turn from modernism to postmodernism. But I suspect that even those who know nothing about art would be captivated by the documentary’s fascinating portrait of the man.

This article was originally published in issue 68

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