David Lynch: cut to the films

David Lynch is not only a filmmaker. He was trained as a visual artist and has produced works throughout his career.

Cut to the films

One of David Lynch’s most important concerns recently has been to promote the benefits of meditation — specifically the method of ­transcendental meditation — and to help make those benefits available to people who suffer far greater stresses than the ­educated middle classes who, in the Western world at least, usually seek out and pursue such practices.

All meditation involves quietening the noise of the mind, not by suppressing thought but by sitting still and focusing on something else, like the breath or a mantra, allowing the mind to settle of its own accord as it ceases to agitate itself with desires and fears. The technique of transcendental meditation, formulated by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918-2008), is based on two 20-minute meditations every day.

For anyone, a practice such as this can offer an interval of peace in what may otherwise be a constant state of low-level anxiety and disturbance; such a state is all too often taken to be normal, but to escape from it even for a short period shows that it is not. Clearly if the same relief could be made available to people who live with chronic anxiety, fear or trauma of some sort, it would be of immense benefit to their wellbeing.

The Lynch Foundation is particularly concerned with the groups that are most stressed, materially and psychologically, in the US and around the world. These include women who have suffered rape or abuse, prisoners, ­Native Americans and war veterans. There is some interesting material on YouTube about his program to help men suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome — what we called shell-shock a century ago — after tours of duty in recent ­theatres of war such as Iraq and ­Afghanistan.

Perhaps most fascinating is to hear a group of eminent performers and filmmakers talk about their practice of meditation. Russell Brand expatiates with his usual animation about the way yoga and meditation saved him from addiction and self-destructive habits. ­Martin Scorsese, Paul McCartney and Jerry ­Seinfeld speak about their use of meditation through many years, and it turns out Clint Eastwood has practised TM for four decades.

Significantly, these are not people who have chosen to withdraw from the noise and distraction of the consumer world to lead an alternative way of life. They are all extremely busy men who have coped, across their careers, with far greater and more complex demands than most of us have to face. And they have found that meditation helps them because it shows we are not our own thoughts, let alone those of others: if we can learn to watch moods and feelings pass through the mind like clouds across the sky, without attachment, we can see more clearly and act more effectively in the real world.

Traumatised individuals, and those suffering from states such as depression and anxiety in general, are identified with their own thoughts, hemmed in and suffocated by them. There is no space between the subject of ­consciousness and the negative thoughts and emotions, the anger, shame or remorse; and because these pathological states of mind corrupt reason itself, attempts to escape through rational analysis only make things worse.

The solution is to stop thinking — not, as we already said, by struggling to suppress thought but by directing the mind elsewhere and ­creating a space of stillness, allowing thoughts to recede and the futile chatter of the mind to ebb away.

It may seem surprising, if not paradoxical, to find such practices not only followed but so actively promoted by a director whose best-known films include Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), and who is almost equally famous for the enigmatic television series Twin Peaks (1990-91).

All of these works, in their different ways, evoke intense and even obsessive psychic states that are antithetical to the calm and detachment that are the object of meditation. From the surreal horror of Eraser­head, the film with which he came to notoriety, to the physical nightmare of The Elephant Man, his first mainstream success, or the dark perversity of Blue Velvet, Lynch’s films take the viewer on a journey through the ­claustrophobia of neurosis and at times to the frontier of the ­psychotic.

Lynch is not alone in this apparent contradiction if we think for a moment of the films of Scorsese or Eastwood, and in all these cases an explanation could be sought in the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis: theatre, or in this case film, leads the audience through an experience of extreme passions, moral dilemmas, dangers and suffering, while preserving a detachment and ultimate equanimity that would be impossible if we were involved in these things in real life. The virtual and purgative experience of theatre is thus an instance of a broader and indeed ­fundamental principle: that art makes space for consciousness.

In Lynch’s case, though, there is also another dimension, especially apparent in a film such as Mulholland Drive. Without giving too much away, in case the reader hasn’t yet seen this film, we can say that it presents an absorbing and disturbing picture of experience in which reality is subsumed into dreams and fantasies to a degree ultimately revealed to be more extreme than we could have imagined.

This oneiric deconstruction of reality is not only cathartic and contemplative but is also consistent with the implicit lesson of meditation that passions and desires are dreams without ultimate substance.

But Lynch is not only a filmmaker. He was trained as a visual artist and has continued to produce paintings and works on paper throughout his career.

These, together with some short films and more recent work made for the internet, are the subject of a retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.

Some of Lynch’s earliest and smallest works are the most suggestive and ultimately memorable: there is a series of tiny drawings on used matchbooks that has always remained in the artist’s collection. Although one may take them for doodles done when sitting alone in a bar, there is a lot more to them than that. For one thing the competence with which effects of depth and space and volume are achieved reveals a training in drawing.

But, equally, there is an imaginative consistency even in the diversity of forms and motifs: time and again awkward or disconcerting spaces, a certain sense of menace, a quality of the enigmatic — all these are cognate with the later sensibility of the films.

There are works in many other media, too. Among the more successful are black-and white-drawings, paintings and prints, ­sometimes of houses and other buildings, sometimes of what happens inside, as in ­Interior # 1 (2013), where a figure with four legs and two heads — an allusion to the comic book device used to convey sudden motion — witnesses an incongruous explosion in a suburban living room.

Early works show the influence of Hans Bellmer (1902-75), the German surrealist whose best-known works are grotesque composite figures made of female dolls, and the spirit of Bellmer seems to inspire the more mature photographic montages of the ­Distorted Nude series (1999). The body assumes in these works biomorphic but inhuman shapes, metaphors for instinctual, preconscious drives that lead it to seek interaction and connection with other bodies.

Another prominent influence is clearly Francis Bacon, whose vision is echoed in the early untitled drawings of men’s faces associated with his first venture into filmmaking as a student, Six Men Getting Sick (1967).

Bellmer and Bacon, together with less sophisticated borrowings from the art brut and outsider art idioms, are recalled in partial, distorted or fantastically recombined figures in a variety of media. All these works convey a sense of human experience governed by incomprehensible instinctual appetites: the individual seems to have no stable identity but to be inherently fragmented and buffeted by internal and external forces beyond rational control.

Inside, consciousness is not the lucid space that meditation seeks to create but the dark, poisonous cloud that issues from the mouth of the woman in Face with Smoke (1992), which almost could be a still from one of Lynch’s films. A work such as this reminds us that Lynch is, for all the interest of his graphic work, above all a filmmaker, and in many cases — with the exception of some of the drawings and prints — the work in this exhibition is more successful in proportion as it is closer to film or photography.

The least successful pieces are those that present themselves as the most ambitious in this context — that is as paintings with extensive use of mixed media and collage.

Among the worst is Bob’s Anti-Gravity Factory (2000), in which Anselm Kiefer meets Antoni Tapies with unfortunate results. Here, an idea that would have been appealing, if whimsical, in a far lighter and more modest graphic expression, is made absurd by the size and implicit pretensions of its material form.

Worst of all are the huge painting-collages such as Boy Lights Fire (2010), which are not only far too big but marred by a crudeness of means and an obviousness of content that are completely at odds with Lynch’s films. In contrast, one of the most quietly suggestive and powerful suites of work in the exhibition is a set of photographs of abandoned industrial sites that Lynch has been making around the world for many years.

If the paintings seem to be trying to say too much with inadequate technical means, these photographs, in their humble, realistic, serial form, are resonant with a sense of history and memory.

The lesson here is an important one: an artist’s sensibility and insights are not necessarily translatable into other media; what they have to say may in reality be intimately connected to the range and means and indeed demands and constraints of a particular art form they have mastered. The ideas contained in a work of art, in other words, are not at all like a message that can be packaged in different forms at will.

One kind of insight may be able to take shape only through the painted image, fixed, ­motionless and executed by a single hand.

Another may be capable of realisation only through a medium such as cinema, in which countless artists and craftsmen are marshalled into a collective work. A film is produced under the guiding vision of the director, yet this whole process, by the necessity of accommodating and collaborating with others, may help the director rise above the idiosyncratic and give his vision a more impersonal and timeless ­expression.

Lynch’s paintings evoke the claustrophobia of the neurotic mind without creating the space to stand back from their overheated angst; it is above all in his films that he achieves the ­distance and perspective of meditation.

David Lynch, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, to June 7.