Unreasonable Passion Continued...

Mark Jackson

 

If nostalgia for the absent in Pierre et Gilles is met with prolonged exasperation in Jenkinson, the works of Ian Breakwell concern most directly law as that which harbours the possibility of transgression and sovereignty within. This takes us to the God of Moses, to fallen spirit, to a vengeful creator. In The Sermon (1983) Ian Breakwell presents us with a pastiche of a religious sermon, a construction of duty checked by prescriptive law. The absurdity of this law is increasingly revealed and the carnality of the cleric increasingly divulged. In some respects this is little different to the mise-en-scene of the set constructions of Pierre et Gilles. However, the works by Pierre et Gilles underscore a reverie concerning what is precisely not depicted, the act foregone or not presented in what is a pastiche of religious iconography.

Breakwell, on the other hand, stakes his work on exposition itself as the communication of our finite limits. Each work in Votive, The Sermon, The Illusionist (2001) and Deep Faith (2001), is concerned with the failure of the law to transcend individuated subjects. Thus Breakwell’s work is closer to Bataille’s notion of ecstatic communication. This would be the inverse of the strategy of Pierre et Gilles. Rather than the doubling of radical absence, there is the excessiveness of the being’s finitude. And it would differ from Jenkinson, in as much as with Jenkinson it is precisely the stakes of the exposition of excision itself. For Breakwell, the body never ceases to double its own gesture thereby revealing the paradox of sovereignty, as that which must at the same time be both under the law and that excepted from the law. The Illusionist goes to the heart of the matter showing the significance of the letter, the word or inscription itself as that which mediates a radical absence of faith. Deep Faith is its obverse. It presents a bodily incorporation of tactile matter, faith caught literally in the physical.

Where the manifest content of Breakwell’s work seems particularly to reference acts of prohibition, Christopher Braddock fully explores this as a theme. Other works in this exhibition present a kind of theatre of the act of presentation: with Jenkinson exposing its machinery, Pierre et Gilles its luminosity and Breakwell its recognition. For Braddock the theatrical moment would be that of the prompt. We see a series of ritual objects (Slaver, 2001) and a series of images of tattooed bodies (Aaron, Mary, Jezebel, 2001). The objects are suggestive: something ecclesiastical, something for bodily pleasure. One cannot be certain. They are fetishistic, laborious and multiple. And something equally uncertain is presented with the images. At least three registers are present. The tattoo motifs are designs derived from Braddock’s long-standing encounter with anatomical ex-voto imagery. These tattooed designs, as if to amplify that uncertain distance separating the sacred and the profane, are inscribed on the skin proximate to the nipple or the buttocks or the lower stomach.

 

Christopher Braddock Aaron, 2001 Courtesy of Gow-Langsford Gallery, Auckland/Sydney and BartleyNees Gallery, Wellington

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But what is actually being exhibited here? Are we engaging with the photographic, or are these photographs merely the medium for exposing the bodies that are the work? Or are the bodies merely the medium for exposing the tattoo motifs? Or does Braddock fold three moments of exposition? And what of the relay between image/body/motif and the objects shown? If these questions arise it is because this work insists so crucially on the time of appearances, and the escalation of a time lost in acts deferred.

Braddock here brings to such proximity the sacred and bodily flesh, yet by the distancing act of photography renders this radically absent. This infinite deferral coincides with a supplement for that loss, that is the prompt, that both incites and censors. This would be Bataille’s possibility for transgression: that there is law, constituting prohibition. Without the possibility of transgression, there would never be law. Braddock never ceases to work on and within this paradox, which is the condition in general for an ethics of labour, of work. The prompt, if mistakenly heard would be something akin to an echo that precedes the voice, a simulacrum appearing before the original, a vexation with time and the time of appearance. This is how one may begin to engage with the movement between object and image, which coincides with the movement between act and contemplation of that act. For Braddock the fetish is the quarantining of the wound of the skin as image and the temporal distance between the acts of passionate bodies and their reception as artworks.

To reiterate, in Votive the pivotal issue is ambivalence: each work enacts a double scene of attraction and repulsion, the sacred and profane. Each also represents a disavowel associated with promise, faith, passion and reasoned articulation. While each work is absorbed in some way with ambivalence across sacred and ecstatic bodies, each is equally concerned with acts of fabrication: the shaping of metal, the hand-tinting of photographs, the cutting of perspex, the synchronised dissolve of images. Disavowal ultimately engages the works at this level of ambivalence, between considering the realisation of objects and images, and the sheer excessiveness that is their subject and characterises the labour of their making. This is especially brought into relief in Cathy de Monchaux’s Red (1999).

Red is, on the one hand, multiple in its connotations. At once, we engage with a thing that ambiguously encompasses something of medieval heraldry, something fetish- and bondage-like, something one imagines to be a partial object of ecclesiastic ritual, something that palpably invokes the fleshiness of genitalia. This is not uncommon for de Monchaux whose works generally read across this array of registers: heightened sexuality, the grotesque, the ritualistic, the sacred. On the other hand, there is another aspect of this work, absorbing, intriguing and utterly attractive. We are deeply engaged in the very manufacture and materiality of the object, the tracing through of the attachment of the various leather straps, the detailing of bolts holding things together, the juxtaposition of rich materials, the very undecidability of the object in the context of its most elaborately crafted completion.

We may engage this concern with materiality, and absorption in details, as an approach that runs against the grain of representational aesthetics, wherein the concern is with the artwork as idea, either centred on some version of classical mimesis or on the idea as form. The efficacy of Red lies in this openness to engage with material fabrication rather than deciphering an object to be read. If Braddock in some way opens a consideration of the question of an ethics of labour, it is de Monchaux who presents this as a question of the sacred. This would be the ruse of her work, a little like finding God in the detail.

Each of the five artists in Votive offer a folding onto the other works: a repetition of a complex reading of the sacred both deferring and offering a promise of ecstacy in all its corporeal materiality.

 

Cathy de Monchaux Worried about the Weather, 1996 Brass, leather, copper and chalk 330 X 400 X 70mm Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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