Mind turns to the beholder

Pheromones, space and our peculiar tastes are rich material for artist Lucy McRae.

Make your maker (2012), still from colour digital video, by Lucy McRae.

By an odd coincidence, Lucy McRae’s exhibition — actually a mid-career survey — at the National Gallery of Victoria comes up almost exactly a year after I discussed one of her works that was included in Perfection at The University of Melbourne’s new Science Gallery, which was then in temporary premises but will soon have its own dedicated home.

That exhibition dealt with the quest for perfect beauty, and raised many questions that have certainly not gone away in the intervening 12 months. A few things have changed, however. I mentioned in passing the phenomenon of transsexual models, but since then intersexual identity and gender fluidity have been much discussed in the news.

The inherent contradiction of the non-binary activists, however, is that they are so quick to encourage confused children to make irreversible changes; in other words, to push them into another binary role. Why not let the effeminate boy or the boyish girl live through their ambiguity and see where they settle as they mature? The gender zealots are in effect adopting the same line as the religious authorities in Iran, where homosexuality is illegal but sex-change operations are supported by public health.

Lucy McRae’s The institute of isolation (2016).

Meanwhile we live in a society in which so many people are obsessed with unrealistic images of commercial and Instagram glamour and spend a fortune on beauty products and ­services.

The deeper problem, perhaps, is that the consumer society has trained us all in a number of bad habits, including a crippling lack of belief in our ability to change our lives, as well as the sense that any augmentation of our wellbeing can only come through consuming and spending money. It is a vicious circle that can only lead to ever-increasing unhappiness.

Lucy McRae’s work ponders aspects of this society but uses the licence of artistic fantasy as well as scientific or quasi-scientific speculation to imagine where this may all end up in future decades. The results are sometimes grotesque or disturbing, but also thoughtful and ­unexpected.

First, there is the device that was included in the exhibition last year. This is meant to photograph your face as it is, then analyse it and reconfigure it on the basis of an algorithm to make it more beautiful. The trouble is that this algorithm appeared to be faultily adjusted so that it turned faces into a grotesque caricature rather than an image of beauty.

But perhaps this was no coincidence. This survey reveals a fascination with ugliness and the grotesque, which is an inevitable counterpart of the quest for physical perfection, especially as it is conceived in the contemporary commercial world. For while the classical ideal of beauty was closer to the average or normal — in the strong sense of the word — form of the body, the fantasy of desirability conjured up by the media is all made of extremes: long legs, large breasts combined with extreme slimness, a wide mouth, big eyes set far apart. One can’t help feeling that the artist’s understanding of all these themes was rooted in her early experience as a ballet dancer. Ballet is a beautiful but tragic profession, demanding everything of dancers, immense and virtually exclusive dedication and effort to achieve brief moments of transcendence, in a career doomed to end before reaching middle age, leaving former dancers with decades of experience, at best, as a long aftermath to their real life.

Detail from McRae’s Biometric mirror (2018).

Darren Aronofsky’s recent film, Black Swan (2010), brought out these themes with shocking vividness, including the kind of repressed and sadomasochistic sexuality fostered, especially in women, by the constant association of discipline, pain and joy. McRae would have suffered the same intense discipline and experienced the same exaltation, and only abandoned dance when she grew too tall for the corps de ballet.

One of the first works we encounter in the exhibition is a low-tech but almost disturbingly masochistic set of photographs in which McRae’s face is painfully tied up with string or wires. She is a beautiful woman, but here deliberately presents herself as grotesque and in pain. In other early works she is photographed in a ridiculously swollen muscle suit or with her whole body covered in glued-on folds of cardboard that look like shards of metal or glass.

These early pictures evoke sensations of self-consciousness, self-loathing or neurasthenic fragility, but at a relatively superficial level. Later works use various kinds of technology, often working with scientific collaborators, to engage in para-scientific speculations, in the process delving into darker and less familiar psychological waters.

One of these works is based on the role that our sense of smell plays in sexual attraction; we subliminally detect the pheromones produced by others, and many perfumes contain animal pheromones, to which humans also evidently respond very strongly. But McRae imagines a scenario in which we could swallow a pill that would make our bodies exude such a perfume; and her work takes the form of a sultry advertisement in which breathless close-ups, beaded perspiration and parted lips offer women the promise of becoming irresistibly desirable.

Still stranger and far less obvious is another video piece that is perhaps inspired by contemporary scientific experiments with cloning animal tissue as an alternative to raising and slaughtering livestock. Here though it is the human body that serves as the source of genetic material for cloning, although the result looks more like a jelly than anything else.

McRae’s Make your maker (2012), still from colour digital video.

But these jellies are set in the form of human faces, and even of female torsos; then they are cut with plastic blades or taut wires, like the devices used to slice hard-boiled eggs; and the disturbing spectacle of wires cutting through a woman’s face or breast is deliberately emphasised by coating them with ink so that the wounds leave dark, bleeding lines. Here the sadomasochistic sensibility evoked in the earlier photos with strings is taken to a far more sophisticated and poignant level, especially when a young woman sits down to eat a jelly one assumes to be made from her own substance.

McRae’s ostensible rationale for these works is that they are speculations about the future of the human body and the way that it may be developed in future by new technologies. One focus for these general ideas is the prospect of space travel or even the colonisation of other planets, and the anticipation of the problems these adventures would pose for a human body that has evolved to live in the uniquely favourable conditions of our planet.

The principal work in this exhibition is accordingly a nine-minute film work in which McRae performs the role of what we assume to be a future astronaut undergoing training at a specially equipped facility. The video is, as usual for such works in museums, shown on a continuous loop, but it has a clear beginning and end marked by an interruption and an interval of darkness.

At the beginning, then, the light comes up on an aerial view of a strange tower facility, from which we cut to the protagonist lying asleep on the floor. As she wakes, we read a label on a box of pills beside her head, “Institute of isolation”, which is also the title of the short film. Readers who are interested can find a short trailer, of less than half a minute, on Vimeo.

Next we see her climbing down a ladder into a sort of gymnasium; here and throughout, we can see McRae has maintained the figure, strength and flexibility of a dancer. She puts on a harness and steps into a device that turns out to be designed to simulate walking horizontally, as though in the gravity-free conditions of a space station. During this exercise her voiceover ponders “we can accurately measure the physiology of the body, but the psychological consequences of prolonged isolation are largely unpredictable”.

Next, she leaves this first building and enters a sound isolation chamber, now wearing a padded suit; here she wonders how the brain responds to “conditions below the threshold of hearing” and listens to her heart beat; in the next sequence she is riding an exercise bike and breathing through an oxygen mask: “the body is not designed to exist beyond the Earth’s edge; fundamental aspects of human biology will need to change”.

In another scene she is breathing a mixture of air that must be designed for astronauts, and is artificially hydrated, then she is in another isolation chamber while musing that “10 per cent of people who spend winter in the Antarctic develop serious psychological problems”. Further scenes follow as she floats down an artificial stream in an inflatable, and then runs along a raised walkway, in one of several scenes evidently filmed from a drone.

The second-last location appears to be the Glasshouse at Kew Gardens in London, including a security camera shot to convey the sense of surveillance, while the voiceover expresses one of the artist’s main underlying ideas: “we are in a different phase of evolution, no longer driven just by nature but by human intent”. Then she is seen in an aerial shot coming out of the entrance to the Glasshouse — and this is actually the point at which I came in and from which I watched the film for the first time.

The last scene is shot at Bad Fischau in eastern Austria, where there were mineral spring baths even in Roman times and which today still has a remarkable and historic bathing establishment dating from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the beginning of the 20th century.

The artist is seen in a changing room, stretching — and this is where her strength and flexibility are particularly striking — then she walks down the stairs and out of the building, in another aerial shot, towards the enormous bathing pool: she dives in and swims across and the screen goes dark. The film is engaging in its visual themes and supported by McRae’s own performance, with its appealing combination of curiosity and vulnerability. The reflections in the voiceover are suggestive rather than theoretically cogent in themselves, but we can accept that in the context of what is in effect a kind of fictional ­documentary.

The final rhetorical question — “could the design of isolation augment the self beyond genetic traits?” — is barely intelligible if taken literally, but can be understood in a general poetic way, and particularly when we reflect that this whole scenario of the preparation of the body for space travel is a metaphor for a kind of quest or ascetic journey that McRae also knows intimately from her own experience.

Lucy McRae Body Architect

National Gallery of Victoria. Until February 19