THE HOUSE THAT JOHN AND WENDY BUILT (breathless mix) 2004-05

Aleks Danko’s The house that John and Wendy built (breathless mix) 2004–05 reiterates the Monopoly-style house form that came to feature in Danko’s Songs of Australia cycle — his body of work made between 1996 and 2007, paralleling the years of John Howard’s Liberal–Coalition government and critiquing the conservative and insular social climate encouraged by the former Australian prime minister. The ‘John and Wendy’ of the title were fictional characters in a Government advertisement promoting the Goods and Services Tax introduced in 2000. In the original advertisement, the couple voice their concern over increases in the cost of living — they have a mortgage to pay off and a baby to feed — but a voiceover promising additional government assistance for families encourages them to relax. ‘John and Wendy’ were subsequently invoked in political debates as representative of the aspirational voters to which both sides of politics appealed. The couple’s house teeters atop a surging column that speaks of both early twentieth-century Constructivist sculpture and the graphic rendering of their apparently increasing comfort and prosperity.