Glimpses into our darkest emotions

The very essence of humanity and our visceral reactions to violence and sex are explored in a new exhibition.

Tala Madani’s Mr. Time 2018. Courtesy: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

The Shield of Heracles is a work attributed to Hesiod, the contemporary of Homer, but probably composed a couple of centuries later, in the sixth century BC. Its title reflects the fact the most memorable section of the poem is an imitation of the famous Shield of Achilles passage in the 18th book of the Iliad. The later author has taken his cue from miraculous lifelikeness of the figures worked into Achilles’s shield by the blacksmith-god Hephaestus and has made his version even more spectacularly realistic — all of which makes a fascinating contrast with the art that was actually being made in the Geometric and even the Archaic periods.

But the most grimly memorable section of the later shield is the description of a city under attack from enemies. There is nothing chivalrous or heroic or even tragic about this passage: it simply and vividly evokes the horror and the sheer violence of aggression. Young men are fighting and dying; old men are praying to the gods, mothers are wailing in terror, seeing all too clearly the imminence of slaughter, rape and enslavement.

Charlie Sofo’s Undone. Courtesy Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Our forebears experienced such fear and such suffering, even as late as World War II; recent generations have been more fortunate. But in parts of Africa and elsewhere, warlords, criminal gangs, Islamic extremists or even national armies and paramilitary thugs continue to visit the same hideous cruelty on defenceless communities, so regularly that the rest of the world barely pays attention any more.

There are millions of people who live in fear of violent aggression and there are others who suffer from economic and environmental hardship. These people are all vulnerable, in the true sense of the word, which is from the Latin, vulnus; wound.

But what about us, the West, the developed world, wealthy societies? Apparently we feel vulnerable too, as the title of this exhibition suggests. And this even though we seldom have to worry about a safe place to sleep, or enough to eat, a stable environment in which to raise children, or even the freedom to behave as we like, believe whatever we wish and on the whole express our ideas to each other and in public.

It seems probable we are surrounded by more anxiety and depression than in previous periods, even if some proportion of the increase may be explained by previously undiagnosed conditions. The production of psychotropic drugs to allay mental stresses has become a huge business, and a vast number of people are seemingly getting by on mood-stabilising medications. What is particularly worrying is the prevalence of anxiety and depression among young people, and the widespread medication of children.

Ambera Wellmann’s The subject. Courtesy: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Nor are these conditions confined to the most disadvantaged parts of the community. Even allowing for almost certain over-diagnosis, it seems hard to deny that the most prosperous and fortunate classes, parents and children alike, are ridden with unhappiness. It has been observed before that only the rich can afford to be neurotic; other people have more pressing concerns, and perhaps this is why we are often struck, when we travel or even watch documentaries, by the greater cheerfulness of people who live without our level of abundance.

Some of the things they lack, like social media, are liberations, and some of their constraints, such as having to care for others, are remedies for narcissistic self-pity.

The other thing that supports mental stability is a clear sense of duties and values; in traditional cultures everyone grows up knowing what is expected of them. This can be limiting but it also promotes a sense of individual identity and community. Today, we grow up feeling that not much is expected of us beyond — depending on our social milieu — getting a highly paid job and displaying our status through an equivalent level of consumption.

And this brings us to the other part of the title of this exhibition: doubt. Uncertainty, lack of belief and the failure of traditional roles and social customs naturally lead to disorientation and unhappiness, especially when they are replaced by the nihilism of the consumer society.

What makes this difficult is doubt is also something we value: the very activity of intellectuals and philosophers is based on the licence to doubt, indeed, as in Descartes’s famous experiment, to doubt everything. But doubt is not for everyone; most people are philosophers and they are neither willing nor able to work their way through the process of doubt and reconstruction. Nor, like David Hume, who said he left his scepticism in his study, are they able to segregate intellectual doubt from the standards by which they run their everyday life.

Nietzsche was concerned with such problems and this is what explains his ambivalent attitude to Socrates. On the one hand he admired Socrates as a precursor and model for his own radically critical activity but on the other hand he also saw they were both engaged in a kind of questioning that could be profoundly corrosive to society if it spread beyond the specialised world of thinkers, and he often expressed this as hostility for Socratic rationalism.

This exhibition, though uneven in the quality and interest of the artists involved, does offer some striking and even disconcerting glimpses of both doubt and vulnerability. The latter is particularly evoked in a sinister little video animation by Tala Madani, an Iranian-American artist, all the more disturbing for being painted in a deliberately naive or childlike fashion.

For the whole seven or so minutes the screen is occupied by three escalators, of which the one on the left is going up and the one on the right is coming down, while the one in the middle appears to be broken. The protagonist of the dark fable is an ordinary middle-aged man. He goes up the escalator on the left and then comes down it on the right, and continues to do this automatically, the personification of a life locked in habit without consciousness. But then a group of thugs assembles at the top of the escalator. The protagonist goes up anyway; he is beaten up by the thugs and thrown down the other escalator.

He picks himself up, however, and like a migrating animal that has no ability to modify its behaviour or learn from experiences, he goes up again, and is mugged again, with even greater violence. This is repeated until he is gruesomely dismembered but still crawls, not so much stubbornly as mindlessly up the escalator to his tormentors. The title of this work, Mr Time, may clarify the work but it also rather detracts from the ambiguity of its horrific violence, if it is to be understood in the end as an allegory of the way that time gradually wears each of us down, while we have no choice but to keep going, to keep repeating the cycle of existence to the point of extinction.

Charlie Sofo’s work is much gentler and more subtle. Thus a video piece, Breath, presents glimpses of different streetscapes or interiors separated by clouds of smoke or steam, suggesting memory images or perhaps even better the intermittent awareness that we have of the world around us when we momentarily awaken from self-absorbed preoccupation.

Elsewhere, a series of lists tabulates some of the micro-reflections and insights that we all have in the course of everyday life, while another video looks at the way books in a library fall to occupy the space of a volume that we remove from the shelf. There is a set of tiny photographs of nipples seen through clothing, but so tightly framed that the shape of the breast is omitted and thus any potential eroticism is cancelled. On the other hand, perhaps the most interesting of Sofo’s works is a short video of less than one minute, titled Undone.

Readers can watch this on Vimeo if they wish and will appreciate the musical accompaniment online better than in the gallery. This short film shows a hand very slowly, and with cuts to several viewpoints, undoing the brass zip of a pair of jeans. The performer may be female, but it is not entirely clear. What is interesting, though, is that the unzipping is an action we tend to associate with men, and yet the slow and deliberate action and the focus on the opening suggests the image of a vulva.

Sexual ambiguity here and elsewhere in the show remind us that one of the sources of doubt, and of a kind of vulnerability today, especially for young people growing up, is the question of sexual roles and the behaviour and persona they are expected to enact. How is one supposed to be a girl or a boy, a man or a woman today? We can see the malaise and the ambivalence in an uneasy alternation between expectations of gender neutrality and the exaggerated play-acting of the macho and the vamp.

Ambera Wellmann’s pictures are effective in evoking the experience of sexuality, always hard to represent in painting or in writing without losing the ineffable quality of desire and fascination, actually something almost immaterial and intangible, even in such a corporeal experience, and sinking into the literal and the mechanical.

Truly erotic art requires a great deal of restraint, for it can only provoke the recollection and the imagination of the viewer if it does not make everything explicit and tangible. Wellmann achieves this by painting in a deliberately fluid and loose manner, which, in The Subject, for example, leaves out the faces of the lovers — in this case apparently two girls — but preserves the red nipples, the pubic hair, and significant actions of the hands and limbs, sometimes painted more than once, recalling the multiple limbs in tantric images of sexual union.

The disappearance of facial features is not fortuitous, but conveys the dissolution of self-consciousness in sexual union, while certain details, like the carefully painted head of the cat looking on at the scene, but with his body merely hinted at, reflect the selective but intense way that adventitious things can be noticed in such moments. Other images evoke perverse scenarios that may be fantasies rather than recollections, but the difference is not really important in the domain of the erotic dream.

What is interesting is that, unlike in some other work that evokes erotic themes in an overly self-conscious or merely fey manner, Wellman’s paintings are frank and searching in their attempt to represent the experience of sexual desire.

In this, she faces the particular kind of vulnerability that lies at the heart of intimate relations, the vulnerability of sacrificing the protective shell of identity and the self, which is our psychic armour in social life but a barrier to union with another.

On Vulnerability and Doubt

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, until September 1