Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

December 2019

In this edition, a focus on anxiety. At worse, it’s the kind triggered by a dictatorial Australian Government’s sudden erasure of the Arts from the title of a new mega-department (see below). At best it’s in the form of The Big Anxiety. It’s a bold, even risky title for a festival that “brings together artists, scientists and communities to question and re-imagine the state of mental health in the 21st century” (website). But far from inducing anxiety, the recent UNSW event is liberating, bringing to bear new thinking, strategies and technologies with which to address trauma, depression, panic and pain across a broad spectrum of physical, mental and cultural conditions, not least in the event’s The Empathy Clinic (image above). Curation by Jill Bennett and Bec Dean is superb, as is the spacious yet intimate exhibition design by Anna Tregloan. Focusing on r e a and Judy Atkinson’s listen_UP, Eugenie Lee’s Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery and a selection of other challenging creations, Keith recounts his experience of immersive artworks that test preconceptions, heighten the senses and expand the capacity for empathy, often in works made by sufferers themselves. Also in this edition, Ensemble Offspring supports bold new Australian compositions with inventive staging, and Branch Nebula brings spectacle to public space with DEMO.

Very big anxiety. With Stalinist verve, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has disappeared the Arts, calculatedly refusing to name them as part of the new Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications; instead they are buried in the latter portfolio. This is perfectly in sync with secret trials, a secret Senate deal over Medevac, increasingly limited Freedom of Information access and suppression of unions and a free press. A government that cannot say to the world, proudly, we have a Ministry of the Arts, is in denial of art, possibly in fear of it. Let your anger be heard. Have a safe and happy holiday season. Keith & Virginia

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Top image credit: Entrance to The Empathy Clinic, The Big Anxiety, design by Anna Tregloan, photo Jessica Maurer

On a reflective golden floor, six tree stumps for sitting. Above, six small boat-like objects crafted from paperbark float serenely. A soft, blue cloth curtain gently encloses the intimate, circular space. The floor dips deep beneath the sitter, mirroring all that is above in the contemplative space that is listen_UP, an installation in The Big Anxiety’s Empathy Clinic. The work advocates and induces deep listening with which to understand the anger and underlying grieving born of serial trauma suffered by generations of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As a soft crackling suggests a gentle fire at listen_UP’s centre, a very present, lone female voice, pondering inherited and personally experienced suffering, is textured with heartbeat, the rumble of restless weather and a singer expressively uttering a mutating syllable sequence emotionally in tandem with the speaker’s narrative in a sound world of gently shifting perspectives.

The speaker struggles to begin—“I am… I am…”—but the words come—“I am without hope, without future”—revealing “a pain so deep, shame of what I am, what you have made me.” She is “a child unloved,” who has introjected her oppression: “I knew that I deserved not to be loved.” She briefly proffers an explanation for white listeners’ inability to empathise: “You cannot see me… because I mirror your pain.” While her plight is existential—“To be nothing would be preferable to being”—she is compassionate for children “raped in welfare, in a world where multinationals trade in weapons.” Unable to wait for revolution, she declares she will start with herself. The singer intones “reya, reya…”

Suddenly there’s particularity, the speaker revealing her profession, declaring “university a prison without walls.” As an academic, “I build walls of paper to bury my grieving soul while children are dying.” These children are close by, “crying down the street.”

However, a sense of purpose emerges with metaphor enriching the sense of passion inherent in the quietly controlled voice: “I am fire… I am stinging nettle.” “Will you accept the need for this pain?” she asks the listener. “Illy, illy,” sings the singer. Moving beyond metaphor, doubtless drawing on her spiritual heritage, the speaker declares herself owl, spider and “goanna full of healing.” Perhaps we can now travel with her: “I hear so many songs, I will wait for you.”

Finally, the speaker, no longer “I” but “we,” celebrates “the bliss of being completely a woman” through, she says, women’s shared words, dance and song. The singer’s “eeya, eeya…” becomes “eeya, eeya, num, num…” conveying a sense of both completion and eternal duration. I have no idea what these syllables (loosely transcribed here) mean, if anything literal, but the beauty of the intensifying ritual framing they offer lends choral power to the speaker’s path from anger and despair to survival through art, amid resonating wind, thunder and rain, distant bird call and the rattling of cicadas.

Keith Gallasch, listen_UP, The Big Anxiety, photo Virginia Baxter

The speaker is much admired Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson AM, a Jiman/Bundjalung woman of also Anglo-Celtic and German heritage. She is the author of Trauma Trails—Recreating Songlines (Spinifex Press, 2003): The transgenerational effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, and founder of We Ali-li, a Culturally Informed Trauma Integrated Healing training organisation.

The pioneering visual and media artist r e a has worked with Atkinson “to create an aural campfire—a place where stories are shared, listened to, understood and then reflected or meditated on. In culture the campfire is a creative learning and teaching space where elders pass on their knowledge and stories to listeners young and old” (program note). To focus and intensify this listening r e a has textured Atkinson’s voice with the artistry of Nardi Simpson (composer and singer with Stiff Gins), Missi Mel Pesa (audio-visual artist, musician and composer) and Andrew Belletty (self-described “vibro-tactile sound artist”).

Andrew Belletty kindly spoke with me about listen_UP’s embracingly natural sound design: the six small directional speakers encased in paperbark, keeping the technology invisible; the “grounding campfire” centre speaker; the two gently enveloping sub-bass speakers outside the circle; occasional sounds—birds, insects—including those from field trip recording in r e a’s country; and a realised desire to have the listener feel intimately and directly addressed by Atkinson, mouth to ear.

Listen_UP is a generous invitation to sense, via a contemplative space (exhibition designer Anna Tregloan) and aural magic, how Australia’s Indigenous peoples, as a young We Ali-li participant has put it, “we use our anger, we recycle it, we use it as power for us… to make beautiful things out of your anger, out of your hate, out of your sadness” (We Ali-li website).

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The Big Anxiety, first staged in 2017, is a festival that “brings together artists, scientists and communities to question and re-imagine the state of mental health in the 21st century” (website). Artistic and Executive Director Professor Jill Bennett (UNSW), Producer Tanja Farman, Senior Curator Bec Dean.

The Big Anxiety: r e a and Judy Atkinson: The Empathy Clinic, listen_UP, artists r e a, Nardi Simpson, Missi Mel Pesa, Andrew Belletty; UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 23 Sept-9 Nov

Top image credit: Installation, Listen_UP, r e a and Judy Atkinson, The Big Anxiety, photo Jessica Maurer

Two brute skateboard ramps dip face to face in the forecourt of Circular Quay’s elegant, mid-Victorian Customs House. Dimly visible beneath the slipways, squirming figures slither into harsh sunlight like emergent life-forms. Two merge organically with their boards, one with his BMX-bike. Three more emerge, one of them, entwined in black concertina-ish plastic tubing which she vigorously sheds, joins another as fellow dancer while the third is a parkour traceur. They learn quickly to athletically and aesthetically duck and weave between and beneath the increasingly dangerous speedsters, who fly high and swoop like predators to Lucy Cliché’s pulsing electronica.

DEMO, Branch Nebula, photo Mark Metcalfe

Once individual skills, male and female, have vigorously displayed genetic advantage, it’s time for emergent mutualism—paired flight high above the ramps for those on wheels, while the movers catch rides, share risk and celebrate collaboration with proud, cheesy tableaux straight out of circus. Suddenly, pink smoke pours apocalyptically from the BMX (scarily apt on a bushfire haze-filled Sydney day), the soundtrack roars and this seemingly robust world collapses. But out of stillness and silence, life resiliently returns in a series of virtuosic turns. At half an hour, DEMO is a brisk, cheerful, frequently thrilling parable of hope realised—with the most basic of technologies—by young bodies with trust in their collective strength.

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City of Sydney: Branch Nebula, DEMO, co-directors Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters; performer-devisors: dancers Marnie Palomares, Kathryn Puie, skater Sam Renwick, Aimee Massie, BMX Brock Horneman, parkour Antek Marciniec, composer Lucy Cliché, producer Intimate Spectacle (Harley Stumm); Customs House Square, Sydney, 30 Oct-3 Nov

Top image credit: DEMO, Branch Nebula, photo Mark Metcalfe

In front of me, a red brick wall. Nearer, hovers a large green ball. I hit it. It flies to the wall, knocking out a single brick and bounces back. I hit again. Another brick goes down. But the return is too fast, the ball flies past and I experience a sudden high frequency pulsing in the groin, not exactly painful, but certainly uncomfortable and even moreso each time I miss the ball and the vibrations escalate. I endure for only a few minutes (10 is the maximum), doubling up as what now feels like pain (the ‘cramping’ and ‘hammering’ sensations reported by pelvic pain patients) triggers body memory associated with hernia and prostate operations. The wall and the ball are components of an interactive animation inspired by the Breakout video game. I’m wearing a VR headset and, around my pelvis, a pumped-up inflatable belt holding two nodes to the lower abdomen. I’m spared simulated back pain because, on my visit, the tech is playing up. A blessing.

The work is Eugenie Lee’s Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery, part of The Big Anxiety’s The Empathy Clinic at UNSW Galleries. It’s an artistic creation rooted in solid multidisciplinary science exploring the experience, understanding and communication of chronic pain. Lee’s earlier works focused on externalising and objectifying it, crafting material metaphors with which to manage her own suffering. Now she offers others the opportunity to experience simulacra of chronic pain. At the first Big Anxiety in 2017, I experienced Lee’s Seeing is believing, a VR work conducted within in a padded anechoic chamber. I found myself suspended in a red void with an intensifying, grating soundscape, a barbed wire coil slowly descending around me and finally a large nail passing through the palm of my hand (wired for low-key vibration and heat). A subsequent conversation with the artist, as part of the work, involved putting the unnerving experience into words. The new work has none of the Gothic horror aesthetic of its predecessor, instead the participant is active, attempting to physically and mentally function in a simple physical-virtual game scenario while suffering ongoing and escalating bodily discomfort.

Breakout… is designed to help doctors, nurses and other health and related professionals to understand the nature and impacts of chronic pain: it’s an empathy training machine addressing the suffering regularly experienced by 20% of Australian women and possibly 8% of men. Lee’s collaborators are multidisciplinary, addressing the whole person: Dr Susan Evans (physician, pelvic pain specialist), Emeritus Professor Roland Sussex (linguist, University of Queensland), Dr Claire Ashton-James (social psychologist, empathy expert, University of Sydney), Peter de Jersey (mechatronic engineer), Warren Armstrong (VR media artist) and Big Anxiety producer Bec Dean. Lee has been aided by data from a scientific survey by Sussex, Evans and Ellie Schofield titled The Language of Pelvic Pain, produced by the Pelvic Pain Foundation of Australia.

Empathy: art & transfer of learning

We humans are innately empathetic—without fundamental mutualism, for example, our species would have been short-lived—but for the most part within highly determined cultural boundaries. It is often assumed that education and art in particular loosen those limits by nurturing understanding of others’ emotions and cultures. In recent years, there’s been a preoccupation with the virtues of storytelling, backed by data and theorising of various kinds, but short on an understanding of the transfer of learning required to convert empathy into application, let alone any acknowledgment of the devious narratives inflicted on us every day. The arts can arouse our sympathies, but to what extent? Nigerian-American novelist and essayist Teju Cole, while applauding the risks taken by many of his writer peers, believes only that “literature can save a life. Just one life at a time.” He writes, “After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Sometimes, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there.”

In her essay “The Banality of Empathy” Zambian writer Namwali Serpell also acknowledges literature’s limits: “Narrative art is indeed an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it.”

Citing Paul Bloom’s complexly argued Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (Bodley Head, 2016) in which the author argues for cognitive empathy (“understanding what’s happening in other minds and bodies”) over emotional empathy (“trying to feel like or even as someone else”), Serpell writes supportively, “Bloom shows that emotional empathy is often beside the point for moral action. You don’t have to feel the suffocation, the clutch of a throat gasping for air, to save someone [from drowning].” And, as Bloom argues, too much empathy may inhibit a doctor from taking radical action which will induce pain in order to save life.

However, this either-or argument would eliminate Lee’s and a growing number of projects like those encountered in The Empathy Clinic. Surely a synthesis of ‘understanding’ and ‘feeling like’ would be an ideal goal. Pain is intensely private but we constantly share what it is like, comparing another’s with our own experience. The notion that cognitive empathy is somehow free of the traps of emotion seems untenable.

The semantics of pain

One way of coming to understand others’ pain is through attentive listening to the vocabulary and narratives with which sufferers attempt to describe (to themselves, friends, doctors) and take some control of their condition. It’s long been recognised that using metaphor is the commonest means of describing pain (transferring associations from one domain to another). Susan Sontag invaluably challenged the use of metaphor in Illness as Metaphor (1978) for its reduction of the sufferer to Other (clinically and socially objectified in terms of their illness) and the deployment of emotionally negative analogies, especially stigmatising ones to do with cancer. To achieve this, she deployed numerous metaphors herself while, critics argued, denying those in pain the same means of managing it (see Richard Gwyn, Communicating Health and Illness, Sage Publications, 2002, an excellent account of professional medical and patient metaphors and narratives).

For Lee’s Seeing is Believing, psychologist Ronald Melzack’s McGill Pain Questionnaire (1975), which mapped sensory, affective, evaluative and other descriptors used by patients to describe their experience of pain, was a touchstone. However, in Australia Professor Roland Sussex and associates have freshly researched this terrain, surveying over 1000 women about pelvic pain in The Language of Pelvic Pain study, focussing, as Sussex says in a talk, “on the guts of the language itself.” The team discovered, surprisingly, he says, that conjunctive simile usage (eg “a stabbing pain that feels like a hot barb”) was the prevalent means of description.

The researchers also learned that certain sets of similes complemented specific pelvic conditions, be they period, endometrial, ovulation, bladder or vulval pain, the latter, for example, having no “cramping” descriptors common to the other categories, let alone being the most difficult to describe. It was this new study that Lee turned to formulate the kind of discomfort she would induce in her subjects.

The sharability of pain

In her classic work The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (OUP, 1986), Elaine Scarry wrote of the existential “unsharability” of pain and its resistance to language, if not necessarily to art. Pain itself cannot be shared, but the McGill Questionnaire and The Language of Pelvic Pain project point to the capacity of sufferers to use metaphor and simile as a means of sharing expression of their pain and to have their need to be heard acknowledged. It crucially underlines commonalities of experience between sufferers. For health professionals attentive to language this sharing provides indicators of the whereabouts and nature of certain conditions and the qualities of the pain, yielding a rational understanding, Bloom’s ‘cognitive empathy.’ But metaphor is potent; it’s only a short step to the listener drawing on their own experiences of pain to becoming ‘as if’ the sufferer, just as we can have a visceral response to hearing about bodily damage or seeing operation scenes on screen. We can move quickly from understanding to emotional empathy with little or no conscious effort, but to what degree comprehended and how enduring?

Screenshot of Animation (in development), Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery, Eugenie Lee

Metaphor, magic & science

With her VR translation of sufferers’ metaphors into very convincing simulacra of pain for non-sufferers of pelvic pain, Eugenie Lee synthesises rational understanding and affective experience, most tellingly for me when I attempted to describe what I felt, for a moment completing a loop between myself and those whose suffering prompted the making of Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery. In a video accessible on Lee’s website, gynaecologists testing Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery, speak enthusiastically of the value of the VR’s enabling them to feel something akin to their patients’ suffering.

Like a metaphor, Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery, stands in for and expresses Eugenie Lee’s own experience of pelvic pain as well as for the women who contributed their own metaphors to The Language of Pelvic Language project. Lee’s art is informed and driven by multidisciplinary science. For much of the 20^th century, positivist science saw metaphor as being loosely associative, subversive even and having no cognitive value; only literal language would do. The “sorcery” of the work’s title evokes Lee as VR conjurer of ‘pain’ and effector of balm, and a cheeky promulgator of a productive, magical tension between art and science, encouraging a potent dialectic of emotional and cognitive empathies. With further testing and collection of responses from participants, this work-in-progress seems, from my relatively innocent vantage, very promising. As Lee is aware, Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery not will not suit everyone; for some it will seem invasive. But for those happy to brave temporary physical or cultural discomfort it might be a venture into newly found or deeper empathy.

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Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery, artist Eugenie Lee, physician, pelvic pain specialist Dr Susan Evans, linguist Emeritus Professor Roland Sussex, social psychologist, empathy expert Dr Claire Ashton-James, mechatronic engineer Peter de Jersey, VR media artist Warren Armstrong, producer Bec Dean; The Big Anxiety, The Empathy Clinic, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 23 Sept-9 Nov

Top image credit: Eugenie Lee and Keith Gallasch, Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery, photo © Cynthia Sciberras

Lone Hemispheres, the curious title of Ensemble Offspring’s recent concert of works for solo performance at Carriageworks, suggests separation anxiety—what defines a hemisphere but a whole? The featured southern hemisphere composers—Australians Elizabeth Younan, Tristan Coelho and Damien Ricketson—are perhaps more akin to young planets in the gravitational pull of older ones—the Italian modernists Franco Donatoni and Luciano Berio—divided by some 50 years of negligible time-space. Whatever the significance of the metaphor, designer Michelle St Anne emphasises isolation with, in turn, each soloist half-shadowed at the base of a high cone of misty light and each of the six performances newly positioned amid small softly lit sculptural forms, lending the space a cosmological ambience, apt for lone voices in the vastness of the universe.

The organic naturalism of the cellular growth of Donatoni’s Soft (1989) for bass clarinet—warm, velvety, brief utterances, each progressively more expressive, with small swellings, flourishes, deep recurrent punctuations, numerous rippling ascents and a final vertiginous ride down—is deeply engaging in Jason Noble’s riveting performance. Later in the program Noble premieres Damien Ricketson’s Borderlines (2019) for clarinet, a very different work, although seemingly akin to its Italian forebears in its conversational ease, this time with much longer utterances but each, it seems, returning in chorus as the work progresses via a small blue tooth speaker placed in the bell of the clarinet and activated by Noble via the iPad graphic score. This other ‘voice’ is texturally unusual, soft, distant and haunting. In his program note, Ricketson describes this short composition’s structure thus: “A thought twists and frays, tangling in a lump. Knotted like a skein, the line coils against itself in search of open passage only to grind its body into wisp-like filaments. Permeable, formless and free.” The effect seemed less busy than suggested here, but the composition is quite magical, perhaps warranting greater duration so the listener might more fully register the performance’s internal dialogue.

True to the tenor of the concert’s Italian modernist influences, Elizabeth Younan’s Fantasia (2019) for flute, premiered by Lamorna Nightingale, has, writes the composer, a “free and improvisatory construction. The manipulation of small musical cells and their gradual development form the modus operandi of the work.” Fantasia flows like a burbling stream, bounding cell to cell and rising in sprightly ascents even when joined by asynchronous bass drum kicks (from the flautist’s heel) to evoke something like a quirky pipe band. Later, Nightingale eloquently met the challenging pace and pitch changes of Berio’s Sequenza I (1958), not least in the deep trilling and high fluttering, amid lucid long notes, in the thrilling last third or so of the work.

Claire Edwardes performed Tristan Coelho’s A line is a dot that went for a walk (2018) for vibraphone and other percussion. The title is a sentence from painter Paul Klee that inspired the composer; it fits well with Younan and Rickertson’s notes on structure. Coelho writes, “The piece, in two movements, counterposes a meditative and spacious style of music linked with nature against a groove/loop-based feel, playing with glitches and ‘hard cuts’, aligned with technology.” He adds “a nod to the classic vibraphone solo, Omar (1985), by Donatoni,” with which Edwardes will complete the concert. The first part of A line… feels gently conversational, lilting, sweetened with high note chiming and almost tripping into melody. It’s always spacious even when suddenly hesitant or urgent. Pronounced single drum beats, sharp loud/soft shifts and faster pacing make for a more driven, angular second part, until the last few minutes deliver a delicious return to the lyrical spirit of the contemplative first. Donatoni’s more wide-ranging Omar, a beautiful exploration of instrumental possibilities evident in Edwardes’ deeply engaged vibraphone playing, reveals Coelho’s ‘nod’ had been realised within a more formal structure, rich in variation, its dots walking and running in constellating lines.

Within the concert’s unifying stage ambience, Ensemble Offspring’s lone hemispheres were made whole with the soloists’ dextrous execution of Italian modernist classics and compelling Australian works by composers who embrace past innovations while cogently pursuing their own.

Carriageworks & Ensemble Offspring, Lone Hemispheres 2, composers Elizabeth Younan, Tristran Coelho, Damien Ricketson, Franco Donatino, Luciano Berio, performers Jason Noble, Lamorna Nightingale, Claire Edwardes; Carriageworks, Sydney, 7 Nov

Top image credit: Claire Edwardes, Lone Hemispheres, Ensemble Offspring, photo Nathaniel Fay

In addition to my accounts of experiencing r e a and Judy Atkinson’s listen_UP and Eugenie Lee’s Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery, here’s a cluster of other works in The Big Anxiety’s The Empathy Clinic by artists Sam Kerr-Phillips, Vic McEwan, Debra Keenahan and Jason Maling. In his clinic, The Physician, Maling wrily helps visitors find tools for coping with the challenges of the contemporary art experience; it’s not about empathy, but does reveal what we as gallery-goers can suffer. Elsewhere in The Big Anxiety at UNSW Galleries, Alex Davies and Michaela Davies’ VR work Edge of the Present also addresses coping, with the very struggle to want to live. At the Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab at UNSW Kensington, Rupture, a performative installation, searches for agency in the face of urgency in catastrophic times.

Despite spending many hours engaging with The Big Anxiety, I regret being able to access only a little of two VR works by fEEL (Felt Experience & Empathy Lab UNSW) and Uti Kulintjaku “an Aboriginal-led mental health literacy project that takes its name from a Pitjantjatjara phrase that means ‘to listen, think and understand clearly’,” formed by Ngangkari traditional healers and artists of the NPY Women’s Council, Alice Springs. The project uses an old story of a man trapped in a hollow log who is rescued by his wives as a healing metaphor for dealing with male depression and contingent violence and alcoholism. As Kim Mahood has written in The Monthly, “Embedded in cultural memory, the story of The Man in the Log provides a psychological traction that’s missing from Western approaches to Aboriginal mental health.” Accompanying the VR work is another representation of the story, the exquisite sculpture Ngangkari Tjukurpa (Traditional Healer Tjukurpa), 2013, by Ken and Naomi Kantjuriny from the MCA Collection.

An intimate, curtained space. A single chair. To the left a video, SO IT BEGINS (2017); to the right a large printed copy of the poem haltingly heard within a deeply textured soundtrack. The 11-minute video comprises a stream of photographs of the complex life of the artist flowing rhythmically towards a bitter truth: “a boy loses his father and his own life as he knows it” (program); as the closing line of the poem puts it, “So it begins…” The WA artist-filmmaker Sam Kerr-Phillips, who uses a powered wheelchair for mobility, wins our deep attention to trauma and enduring but considered grief with the interplay between everyday screen images and a vivid evocation of a twilight motorbike ride that would end fatally: “Blood orange brushstrokes stole our attention./ Two suckers for sunsets round the bend captivated./ BAM! Kissed the arse of a stubborn four-wheeled rhino!”

This intriguing installation, with its death mask-like sculptures, onscreen facial mappings and reflective voices, conveys a disturbing impression of the social stigma and psychological pain felt by sufferers of facial nerve paralysis. An apparent absence of responsiveness can be read as inattentiveness, indifference or hostility by those eagerly ‘reading’ for immediate meaning. If They Spend Time To Get To Know Me is part of PhD research by Vic McEwan, Artistic Director of The Cad Factory in regional NSW, in partnership with researchers, surgeons and patients from the Sydney Facial Nerve Clinic.

Arts, Health and Healing, a Sydney University Sydney Ideas and related Big Anxiety event held on 21 October, launched a major initiative, the NSW-ACT Arts Health Network with talks by Vic McEwan, Dr Clive Parkinson, Manchester School of Art, Dr Nicole Reilly, University of Newcastle (UON) and Akeshia Dart, mental health clinician and PhD candidate UON, chaired by Dr Claire Hooker, University of Sydney. These speakers provided fascinating perspectives on how artists work within hospitals, government misconceptions about what art can do, equity of (art) access issues for the ill, and strategies for improving the mental health of young Indigenous mothers through toy-making. Parkinson’s painfully personal, poetic account of the art and health terrain evoked hospitals as temples to culture, places where artists can provide succour if not cures, is especially worth a hearing. You can listen to the whole event here.

I’ve booked for a session with The Physician. The work is described as “a public health program developed and facilitated by artist Jason Maling. Through a client focused one-on-one process and utilising a set of bespoke tools Maling addresses latent issues of cultural anxiety.” At first sight the tools are a little alarming: a rich variety of straps, belts, pads, balls and tubes are laid out neatly on a table. And there’s a consulting room bed. Refined S&M? In the low-lit room these objects glow an intensely Kleinian blue, some reinforced with burnished leather, all crafted by the artist. On the desk are small, framed photos of the artist’s heroes, Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys, the eyes of each covered with a blue strip.

Maling, in Bueysean felt trousers, is a reassuring presence, eloquently introducing his tools and inviting me to feel their texture and shape and to try them out. Surprisingly, these are devices designed to help gallery goers cope with the art experience. As Maling writes on his The Physician page, “Contemporary Art Institutions are beginning to recognise the need to provide onsite services that address the gamut of contemporary anxieties, ranging from mild conceptual perturbation to severe relational deficiency.”

I admire a felt-padded leather headband with which, if distressed, you can lean your forehead against a gallery wall for pause. If meaning threatens to dissipate, with your foot you can push a roller ahead with a renewed sense of purpose. There are even soft hitting devices, presumably to encourage attentiveness, and a bag of offcuts (see image above). Unable to hit on any particular anxiety, I focus on the back pain inevitable in long gallery visits and choose a wide, tight tube with which I’m held erect and ready to go on an art stroll with the artist. We are linked by a skipping rope-like cord (blue handles) as we walk, discussing the meta-subjectivity of the already subjective aesthetic experience.

It should have immediately occurred to me that I’d been in the same Empathy Clinic room the week before with another belt around my waist, experiencing simulated pelvic pain in artist Eugenie Lee’s Breakout My Pelvic Sorcery. Perhaps Maling’s was the therapy I needed to “clear unwanted metaphoric deposits and restore full socio-poetic function.”

The same band can also be worn around the head to block out or restrict art intake. Photographs on Maling’s The Physican page and the one above reveal the extent Maling’s ‘patients’ will go to manage the contemporary art experience. Galleries and gallery-goers are taking on his “Beuysenklein voidal dematerialization.” Exquisitely crafted, The Physician, for all its drollery rings true as contemporary art grows more ‘experiential.’ Ironically, the work doubles as a gallery experience of that very kind and critique of same.

Debra Keenahan’s PhD research “focuses upon developing a Critical Disability Aesthetic through the representation of the female dwarf.” Being Debra offers users “an embodied experience of having dwarfism in contemporary Australian society, thus potentially increasing empathy for a physical difference not readily emulated.” It’s a VR work that reveals how vastly different the physical world and social relations are defined by height. In one frightening scene Debra is abused by a group of overbearing teenagers. In another, hospital staff discuss her in the third person. While in the previous scene we shared Debra’s eye-level point of view, here the camera is positioned at waist level so that her legs reach out before us as if they’re our own, an even more heightened subjectivity. With this comes a feeling of vulnerability that brings home Keenahan’s adroit use of VR to dramatically and, at times wittily, reconfigure perception and prejudice. Being Debra is doubly potent, as both an artistic expression of Keenahan’s experience and an invitation to enter a vivid simulacrum of it.

I enter a white room. VR gear is fitted and activated. It’s the same room, both actual and virtual. I open a real/virtual door to a not-real pine treed landscape; the scale and depth takes me by surprise. Back inside I notice rocks and growth on the floor. I look out a window at a similar view, turn and find the scattered grass is knee-high and denser. Snow is falling outside, and inside! I turn again and the room disappears. I’m fully outside on a vast snowy terrain. I gasp, briefly agoraphobic. Then comes exhilaration. An undefinable breakthrough. The work’s epic 10 minutes is over, but the sense of pleasure and release lingers long after.

The makers, media artist Alex Davies and artist and psychologist Michaela Davies hope that “by using technology in this novel [actual-virtual] way, the installation helps viewers to better engage with the present moment— and hence with the future—with openness, curiosity, and confidence.” They reveal a more precise goal: “[M]ade in collaboration with psychologists, mental health specialists and participants with lived experiences of suicide survival…this immersive experience invites us to ‘invent the next 10 minutes’—something that is a challenge when we find ourselves inhabiting the ‘edge of the present’.” The NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Suicide Prevention/Black Dog Institute also offered guided sessions of Edge of the Present. It’d be fascinating to hear what participants gained from this aesthetic experience, with all its multidisciplinary underpinnings.

At UNSW’s impressive new Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab, Virginia Barratt extended her text, vocal and physical presence on video in photomedia artist Jessie Boylan’s multi-screen installation Rupture (Bendigo Regional Art Gallery, 2018) into live performance as an unnerving shamanistic figure, eyes rolling up, the real body painfully in and out of sync with a quivering, unstable virtual self and in beautiful chorus with voices in flight. Made in collaboration with Boylan, media artist Linda Dement and trauma counsellor and psychotherapist Jenna Tuke, Rupture as performance dramatically evokes panicky transference between the individual and the natural and social world, each enduring serial trauma. Barratt roots her response in a recollection of her child self in horrified awe of the cosmos but feeling inextricably tied to it (“I am a star, the star is me”).

A sense of desolation, where not even friendship can console, is relentlessly evoked as smoke drifts through bush, hundreds of scrolling words spell out environmental and other horrors and we are drawn into an endlessly deep, metallic tunnel, while Barratt’s virtual body fragments and the real self fades into shadow.

What, in this panicky scenario, is the shaman’s message? I recall in particular one gnomic utterance: “Dissolution…is a gift that keeps giving but has to be taken.” Presumably, we surrender to our condition or learn from and manage it, as best we can. Revealing the extremity of that condition, a very personal one but shared to varying degrees, Rupture was cathartic for some in its audience, or, for all its hyper-expressiveness, was just too painfully real for others. I left oscillating between these states, unable to answer the question posed by the artists in their program note: “By considering panic as both urgency and agency, can we begin to see ways of engaging with our catastrophic times?” But I keep worrying at it; Rupture has that kind of power.

Andrew Stephens’ review for Artlink of the original installation in Bendigo will give you a more comprehensive sense of Jessie Boylan’s imagery than I have space for here. Take a look also at an excerpt from Ngurini (Searching), a collaboration between Boylan, Dement, Paul Brown and the Pitjantjatjara Anangu people about the legacy of trauma caused by Britain’s atomic testing at Maralinga in South Australia.

The Big Anxiety, The Empathy Clinic, curators Bec Dean, Jill Bennett, works by Sam Kerr-Phillips, Vic McEwan, Debra Keenahan, Jason Maling; Alex Davies and Michaela Davies, UNSW Galleries, 27 Sept-16 Nov; Rupture, collaborators Jessie Boylan, Virginia Barratt, Linda Dement and Jenna Tuke, Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab, UNSW, Sydney, 31 Oct

Top image credit: The Physician, Jason Maling, The Big Anxiety, photo courtesy the artist

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December 2019

Metaphor, magic & science

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