Darwin with Tears – Lyndal Jones at ACCA

When you enter the main gallery at the current survey of Australian video artist Lyndal Jones, sound hits you like an unexpected breaker. The cacophony of planes, cars, wind and human voices is overwhelming both physically – it’s loud, and mentally – the sounds of disparate pieces clamour for your attention. Added to this is the anxious chirping of a cage of finches, and the heady aroma of their faeces and feathers.   Scattered around the gallery are small televisions with poppies on them, like a strange field for our technological age.

Jones’ work centers on sexual relations, courting rituals of humans and wildlife, and the physical manifestations of emotion. Her fascination with the body is evident throughout the exhibition. Her camera often moves in close to the skin, in one work the rugged leather of a giant sea turtle fills the screen, taking the form of a rocky landscape, while in another, her camera watches a very ugly penis grow erect and then become flaccid again. This interest in the physical frequently extends from the image on screen and into the viewer’s affective experience. In a work where a camera has been fixed to the front of a stunt plane, the earth turns rapidly upside down in a way that made me feel dizzy and very aware of my body. In another room a man sobs loudly until you stand in a circle in front of him, thus giving you the feeling of having control over his emotions.

My favourite piece in this show is Freud’s Couch, a work where a woman’s voice speaks in stream of consciousness manner, as if she is in psychoanalysis, about her sexual fantasies and dreams, while a man performs various actions on screen. Sitting, moving his glasses, taking off his shirt, lying down on a couch covered with a richly patterned fabric, closing his eyes, getting up again. The actions are made in a ritualistic, meditative way, and the same shots are cut together in different combinations. At times, the camera wanders in close, moving out of focus, making landscapes of the creases in his shirt, the hairs on his hands, the curve of his elbow. The woman’s voice is hypnotic, too intimate to be trusted, as she spins first one fantasy then another, an invisible femme fatale ensnaring the child-like man with her desire.

There is a lot of work in this show and the sensory overload can be exhausting. It was only after my second visit that I began to enjoy the work. The exhibition ends tomorrow.

Alice Neel

I had not seen the work of American painter Alice Neel until I saw this film, and the desire on the part of her family for her to be more widely recognised is partly what drives the telling of her story. This desire is not misplaced. Neel’s expressive portraits are often powerful and technically developed, but as a female figurative painter during a period when abstraction and masculinity were all the rage, her work was obscured for most of her lifetime.

Over the course of her career she traversed a range of visual styles, however she adamantly retained a commitment to the exploration of the human psyche. I was most convinced by her mid period work. In Mady, 1948, the subject is seated in front of a red door, her deep blue skirt standing out from the rusty background. While this red background/blue foreground recalls Matisse, Neel’s colour is more solid, and she paints heavy noir-ish shadows that cut across one side of the face. In John, 1933, the subject’s ghostly face is painted in sharp profile. The shape of the head has a naive quality, a tender line tracing up the back of the neck, across the top of the head, over the forehead and down the long thin nose. The blood red tie set almost in the centre of the painting is like a long tear, or a cut in the image. For me, the sombre tones and the angular quality of these figures are more striking than the fluid style of her late paintings.

The film was made by Neel’s grandson, Andrew Neel, and examines her life through her family and friends as well as the usual array of other painters and art historians. The film uses Neel’s paintings as a departure point for each part of her story, and these are shot well, often using slow pans to observe the details of the work before pulling out to reveal the whole. There is also archival footage of Neel painting which gives an insight into the way she worked.

However it is the personal element of the film that gives it it’s voice. Neel’s commitment to painting meant she struggled financially, and she seems to have been prone to falling in love with unreliable and unstable men. Her sons reacted against this bohemian lifestyle, Hartley becoming a doctor and Richard a lawyer. Richard comes across as the most hurt of Neel’s two sons, but also as the most honest and accepting of his feelings. Hartley, Andrew’s father, avoids questions regarding their financial situation when they were children, and doesn’t acknowledge his father Sam, who is depicted here as abusive and unhinged. In a touching moment Hartley notices a family of birds outside on the lawns, and his enthusiasm for watching them with a pair of binoculars shows a man who copes with his pain by looking outside himself, and at the same time provides the film with an image of a nurturing family unit so unlike his own.

The Marks of War

The National Gallery of Victoria is currently showing a collection of etchings made by German painter Otto Dix after the First World War. These are dark expressionistic works, in part influenced by the reccuring nightmares Dix had after fighting in the ‘Battle of the Somme’ in 1916.

What struck me while looking at these images was how appropriate a medium etching is for exploring images of trauma. The violence of the strokes made by the acid eating into the plate seem to possess all the destructive energy of war. In many of the prints Dix used a hardground etching, aquatint, and drypoint, to create a rich spread of different lines and tones. The drypoint marks, with their wide, burred edges seem particularly evocative of horror – they are akin to barbed wire, rough unshaven whiskers, dry twigs and grasses, and hoarse, throat tearing cries.

These are works that make no concessions regarding the suffering caused by war, however Dix did not see himself as an overtly political artist. According to Dietman Elger and Hugh Beyer in Expressionism, Dix saw the role of the artist as an observer rather than activist. He said, ‘Artists should not improve or convert others. They are far too insignificant. But they must bear witness.’

In the above image, Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas (1924), the gas masks look like bare skulls, as the soldiers rush forward into death. In another image, a soldier gulps down food from a tin, surrounded by piles of bones. There are faces distorted by screams, by disease, by injury.

It seems that by expressing the personal, human experience of war, Dix’s images cannot escape taking a political stance. And I think it is the bearing of witness that is often a catalyst for change.

Richard Billingham – People, Places, Animals

ACCA is showing a retrospective of the work of British artist Richard Billingham titled, People, Places, Animals. Billingham was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001 and is best known for his photographs and videos of his alcoholic father Ray. Some of this work, including images from the series Ray’s a Laugh is exhibited here alongside his latest work Zoo, which features animals in captivity.

The work on animals is the first thing you encounter when you enter the gallery, and its an uncomfortable but absorbing experience. One of Billingham’s strengths both in this work and in the images of his family is his ability to present his subject matter with a compassionate and non-judgemental eye. His view isn’t detached, its clear Billingham loves animals and is sympathetic to the conditions they are kept in, but neither does the work hammer the viewer over the head with a message. His shots sometimes emphasise the animals captivity through tight framing, most strikingly in the video of a tapir, where only one close up eye and a foot is visible. In other videos he frames so that people visiting the zoo also appear in the frame.

While parallels can be drawn between this work and his early family work, particularly when they are shown together, the work doesn’t require this connection.

Amid all this emotion, the piece I found most engaging was a video work that in this context served as a sort of breather between the animals and people. Lasting for about fifteen minutes it is possibly constructed from a sequence of still images, put together to create movement much like stop motion animation. I don’t know if the day for night effect is the product of the old film stock Billingham often uses or a deliberate underexposure, but the resulting deep blues and blacks create a mysterious moody effect. The movement is hypnotic, the whole forest seeming to rotate around. I could imagine this piece as a four rather than one channel installation, allowing the viewer to be completely surrounded by forest.