written by Simon Gregg

There is something decidedly thrilling about being in the dark. A nervous energy, perhaps, associated with hiding under the covers as a child. It heightens the senses to compensate for the loss of vision, and brings other phenomena to our attention—the minutest sound, a breath, a whisper. It is these breaths and whispers that electrify the work of Eloise Calandre. Her images of women in interiors are held in permanent suspense, on a knife’s edge, as we await either further illumination of their obscured surrounds or the fall of absolute darkness. Until then we cannot fully know their situations, whether they be in play or peril, ecstasy or despair. The most likely scenario is an indeterminate middle ground, but the effect of the darkness pressing in from all sides is to exaggerate and amplify the possibilities.

In Excursus, for example, in which a woman sits eagerly forward, only a thin blade of light silhouetting her face, hair and arms, we sense her attentiveness. Like us, she appears to be straining her ears and eyes for any clue as to her surroundings. She is a small prone figure in an otherwise vast field of absolute darkness; her plight one of seeming desperation given these circumstances. She might simply be in the throes of a sleepless night, but in the absence of information to the contrary, our imaginations tend to fill the void with the invisible monsters that have woken her from slumber.

A quintessential feature of these works is their wilful disparity with the progress of civilisation, which is characterised by a constant move towards light. As a species we evolved beyond the apparent uncultured chaos of the ‘Dark Ages’ (though recent research is proving that this period was anything but) into the Renaissance and eventually the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. This banishment of darkness is consistent with the broad view espoused by religion— especially Christianity—that darkness is the source of evil, and that light represents all that is good and Godly. In this context Calandre’s work presents as a kind of cultural regression, in which darkness reasserts itself. That her work is produced in high fidelity and presented cinematically, using advanced contemporary technology, suggests a new form of image making that might be termed hi-fi archaism. The images propose a documentary exploration of the human unconscious, into the back rooms of the brain where the lights are always off. In conducting this tour of our uncharted psychological chasms Calandre shines the light on aspects of our deepest, darkest interiors.

One occasionally hears stories of fishermen who have discovered deep sea creatures in their netting, creatures that live below the photic zone of the ocean, surviving without sunlight and with minimal food and oxygen. They typically have a nightmarish quality about them, brandishing large eyes and teeth and strangely disproportionate bodies. It’s easy to forget such creatures have a place in the world, yet they are part of the delicate balance of life that keeps the planet in check. In the same way the fragile states of being caught up in Calandre’s netting, and dragged into the light, are an essential part of our own psychological makeup. We just don’t always want to know they’re there, but in confronting and addressing them we become richer and more rounded personalities. It’s how we deal with the lingering darkness and primitivism that inhabits us all that defines us as people.

As viewers we tend to hold our breath when viewing Eloise Calandre’s work. This is a remarkable effect, and a somewhat unsettling one. It’s as if we don’t want to be noticed by the figures at play, or that we detect and respect the precarious silence and stillness. The works are filmic in execution and presentation, but also invoke that moment before the film actually starts. We are in the cinema, the curtains have drawn, a narrow thread of light pierces the veil of darkness, and the narrative begins. Calandre locates that fractional moment between darkness and light, between void and presence, that is perpetually indeterminate, and raw with possibilities. We hold our breath.

The consideration of gender brings a fascinating dimension to this project. Are these innate insights, or instance, that only a woman could detect? Where are the men in these images? We tend to imagine them in the shadows, a cause of either threat or excitement for the women, or perhaps as banished altogether. Perhaps these are events, emotions, and sensations unique to women, where men must watch as outsiders. Indeed, anyone looking at these images is made to feel an outsider, or a voyeur. We are not meant to be part of these proceedings, and yet we feel an accomplice by our having witnessed this rapturous intimacy. Calandre explains, ‘I shot them with the idea that they are engaged in an activity which remains ambiguous to the viewer, eg. it could be tenderness or aggression. The viewer should feel invited to look and at the same time pushed away by the image’.

The loss of detail reduces our capacity to gauge these works in the usual way. We cannot be sure about time, date or place, or whom they depict. So while concerned with the most fleeting of moments and sensations, they also speak of all moments and all sensations. We bring our own baggage to fill the void and to complete the picture—as such the images will appear different to every onlooker. The artworks, in a very real sense, hold a mirror to the audience in what can be quite a sudden and shocking confrontation. By deftly blurring the actual, virtual and psychological realms we slip easily between what we are and what we imagine ourselves to be; the experience of viewing the works thus tends to be one of revelation rather than affirmation.

The psychological effect of the works depicting trees and scrub is, if anything, greater. Here the natural surrounds quiver and vibrate under our scrutiny, drawing in our gaze and holding it, unwilling or unable to let it go. We find ourselves immersed in these thick fields of foliage in a different way to the black images— in the blacks we must imagine what we cannot see, in the landscapes we see what we cannot imagine. They are the seething, writhing tentacles of our interiority made manifest, in forms that are both wondrous and horrific. The daytime images—Inside, Still and Echo—operate as soporific vignettes to the large nocturnals—Noon, Convergence and Chrysalis—which were in fact shot in natural daylight, using bright sunlit areas to throw the rest of the image into shadow. Calandre says of the duality between darkness and light: I like the idea of considering light, and where it comes from. Without light there is dark. Light permits us to see and the mechanics of photography exaggerate light and dark. Photography lies to us with a facade of reality. I like the idea that there is darkness in bright sunlight, and how this may change our perception of time and place.

Anyone familiar with crime fiction would surely identify these images of bushy scrub as prime locations for the discovery of murdered bodies; indeed even the most innocent analysis could only draw sinister conclusions. But let us not forget that these shallow panoramas are also breathtakingly beautiful, like Millais’ image of Ophelia without the floating corpse. At once exquisite Pre-Raphaelite visions and depictions of dour English ruralism, they find a bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

While Calandre’s static images and, to an extent, her so-called ‘moving image’ works are hauntingly still, they are far from inactive. To the contrary, they demand a great deal of participation from the onlooker whose cognitive capacity for memory and imagination is fired. But where memory and imagination might ordinarily dwell in separate abodes, here their threads are entangled and cannot be separated. To look at these pictures is to encounter a liminal space where recollection and invention become merged as one. The effect is of disorientation and uncertainty, of looking for familiarity where there is only fantasy.

A powerful undertow carries the many guises of Calandre’s imagery down our streams of consciousness. Sometimes we come up for air to catch fragments of our disappearing world, but we spend. most of the time below that photic zone where the strange monsters of the deep live. Approximating a heightened sense of primitivism these images bring us into proximity with the sprites that inhabit our unconscious, pricking our passage through the here and now with the alarming realisation of parallel, subliminal lives.

Gippsland Art Gallery is proudly owned and operated by Wellington Shire Council

with support from the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria

Gallery Patron John Leslie OBE

written by Simon Gregg

Darkness is everywhere. It lurks ever presently in peripheral corners, silently licking at the fringes of form. It waits patiently for the moment when it can swoop, consuming all that we know and hold dear. In a world claimed by darkness nothing is what it seems. We can visit this world in our dreams, nightmares and the unconscious, and return to the safety of light and reality. But what if the door snapped closed behind us, and there was no means of retreat?

Dreamweavers imagines such a world. It pitches us into an infinite space where the laws of logic and physics have miraculously dissolved, and chaos reigns supreme. Darkness, here, takes many forms. As an agent of obscurity, it leads us to speculate on what cannot be seen. It stimulates the imagination, and yields a world of dreams and nightmares, governed by the joint dictates of the Surreal, the Sublime, the Gothic, the Grotesque and the Fantastic. 

Fig. 1 Hieronymus BOSCH The Garden of Earthly Delights [right panel], 1480–1490 oil on panel 206 x 386cm Prado Museum, Madrid

Dreamweavers draws together six artists who gorge from these heady wells of inspiration. Aly Aitken, Eloise Calandre, James Gleeson, Adam Laerkesen, Sam Spenser and Joel Zika are but the tip of a greater body of artists who are mining the depths of darkness today, and will act as our guides through this contemporary encounter with the Fantastic. Each represents a unique position from which we might navigate this path, just as each presents us with unique findings. Throughout, however, is a common concern to give form to phenomena that is inherently formless. They present windows into worlds that are drawn from intangible personal experiences, framed so as to be meaningful to us all, and so fathom a means by which we may access our own unreachable places. The artworks here are bound by their boundlessness. Dreams and reality coalesce in a kaleidoscopic pageant of improbability. We cannot be certain if the forms we discern are appearing or disappearing, or where the empirical ends and the speculative begins. Reality becomes infected with ambiguity and doubt takes root. Senses become clouded by the nonsensical, and we enter a space without definition; the space of Dreams.

The contemporary preoccupation with the Fantastic is nothing new; the six practices under review are the latest in a lineage that can be traced back to Hieronymus Bosch in the fifteenth century. It has ebbed and flowed as cultures rise and fall, but has always been present in some form. In many ways Bosch provided the framework that has informed many of those who followed him. The Garden of Earthly Delights (1480–90) revolutionised the possibilities of art, as an agent through which dreams and the unconscious could manifest. Bosch’s medieval imagination was at once wondrous and horrific, and revelled in the full psychological spectrum of the human mind.

5  Cat.18 Joel ZIKA Façade #2 [detail] 2007

While our world has since become increasingly digitised, homogenised and sterilised, we may take comfort in the demons that dwell in our galleries. Here, things terrific and terrible abound. The unconscious takes primacy in unsettling hybrid forms, which are at once familiar and strangely alien. As the Surreal germinates in a hypnotic melange of illogic and disorder, we are struck by our artists’ enduring fascination with darkness and dark places. Each of the works, as we will see, are in their own way representative of a contemporary ‘Grotesque’. The Grotesque in art has little to do with ugliness — in fact it can be and invariably is very beautiful. The Grotesque is used to suggest ideas of the strange, the Fantastic and the bizarre, and is tied closely with ideas of revulsion and terror. We are concerned here with forms and emotions that exist at the very limits of our conscious being — forms and emotions that come by way of dreams and nightmares, from the Surreal, and from the metaphysical. We are concerned with phenomena that are at the cusp of reality, which defy explanation, and which could as equally provide the basis for a horror story as much as a fairytale.

Writer Philip Thomson argues that the Grotesque is a ‘fundamentally ambivalent thing’; a ‘violent clash of opposites, and hence, in some of its forms at least, as an appropriate expression of the problematic nature of existence’ [1]. The Grotesque has existed for centuries, however our understanding of it has evolved over that time. It appeared in the art of the early Christian period of Roman culture, manifested in the unnatural melding of forms where human joined with animal and vegetable. In Australia the Grotesque has a rich and enduring history, surreptitiously underlying many of this continent’s major art paradigms. Marcus Clarke, Melbourne’s bohemian extraordinaire and author of For the Term of his Natural Life (1870), stumbled over this peculiar facet of Australia’s natural world when writing about Louis Buvelot’s Waterpool near Coleraine (Sunset) (1869). His prose bears very little outward relevance to the actual work, noting that: ‘in Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird,— the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write’ [2].

6 

Australia has been rightly named the Land of the Dawning. Wrapped in the midst of early morning, her history looms vague and gigantic. The lonely horseman riding between the moonlight and the day sees vast shadows creeping across the shelterless and silent plains, hears strange noises in the primeval forest where flourishes a vegetation long dead in other lands… But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness [3]. As a ‘fantastic land of monstrosities’, Australia has nurtured a wellspring of artists who are concerned with the Sublime, which in this context connotes that which lies beyond the scope of human comprehension. While aspects of the Sublime may be described as beautiful (such as a sunset or a vast mountainous vista), it may also represent the antithesis of beauty; that is: the Grotesque, terror and fear, darkness and ugliness.

Fig. 2 Louis BUVELOT Waterpool near Coleraine (sunset) 1869 oil on canvas 107.4 x 153.0cm National gallery of Victoria

Edmund Burke was one of the first to suggest that what might be described as the ‘Grotesque’ could belong to or form part of the condition known as the ‘Sublime’. In his pioneering A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), he wrote that: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the Sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling [4]. According to Burke, if the Sublime is a condition aroused by the infinite, and ideas and emotions beyond our comprehension, then so too must it come into being with the ‘unleashing of passions like terror’ [5]. Similarly, the Sublime can be descriptive of states brought on by extremes of solitude, isolation and silence.

8  Fig. 3 Henry FUSELI The Nightmare, 1781 oil on canvas 101.6 x 126.7cm Detroit institute of arts, Detroit

The contemporary fascination with the Sublime, the Grotesque, and sensations associated with horror is exacerbated in Australia, by dint of its remoteness and its relative proclivity for — paradoxically — peace. There is a ‘human need’ for the excesses of the Gothic and the Horrible, as Martin Myrone has noted, and where it is materially absent the imagination will supply the shortfall. While writing of 1780s England, Myrone’s observations are just as relevant for Australia in the 2000s: The taste for the horrid in art and literature grew most rapidly among a generation less aware than ever before of the terrible fate of the body in war and disease, more comfortable, pampered and perfumed than their forebears, more culturally ambitious and needier — not least perhaps because the temporal self-consciousness which assured modern Britons that they had reached the apex of civilisation simultaneously warned them of their precarious position in history [6]. This era of ‘comfort’ in England’s history produced some of its most morbid art at the hands of Henry Fuseli and William Blake. Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) grew out of a period of uncommon quietude, which we are perhaps witnessing again today. It is significant that the work did not depict actual horror, but rather, the psychological effects of horror that were produced entirely by the imagination. The Nightmare was first shown at the 1782 Royal Academy Exhibition in London, alongside a multitude of morally-uplifting landscapes and traditional portraits, such as those by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Horace Walpole, a visitor to the exhibition, wrote simply in his catalogue next to Fuseli’s entry: ‘Shocking’ [7]. Blake’s visionary scenes of angels and demons grew out of similar psychological territory, revealing dark forces not seen by the art-going public since Bosch unveiled his lurid Garden of Earthly Delights almost 300 years later.

9  Fig. 4 Francisco de GOYA Saturn Devouring his Son c.1821–23 oil on canvas 146 x 83cm Prado Museum, Madrid

Working in Spain at the same time as Fuseli and Blake in England, and as part of the same milieu of late eighteenth century visionary art, was Francisco de Goya. Like those artists, Goya worked in isolation, fathoming a surreal twilight world from the monsters in his head. For Goya, painting was a tool for expunging his demons. We witnessed not dreams, hopes and aspirations, but nightmares, anguish and anxiety. While much of his art was politically driven (created, as it was, under the shadow of the Spanish Civil War), his best work told of his own inner turmoil. In 1819, at the age of 72 and with encroaching illness and deafness, Goya moved into a two-story house outside Madrid called Quinta del Sordo, or ‘Deaf Man’s Villa’. Here, Goya produced fourteen works subsequently known as his ‘Black Paintings’, in which his haunted evocations of despair reached their final crescendo. It is unlikely that Goya ever anticipated the works to be viewed in public being painted, as they were, directly onto the interior walls of his villa. They are representative instead of the desperate outpourings of a man driven to despair by the irrepressible voices of the subconscious. Goya’s home became an abyss of terror, and the works produced here are among the most fearsome produced in the history of art. The dark forces that drove Fuseli, Blake and Goya continued into the twentieth century, where a concern for the Gothic was propelled not by peace, but by war. The genre we know as Surrealism flourished in Europe in the wake of the First World War, when man’s unshakable faith in the progress of civilization was brought to a smoking ruin. It was with the Surrealists in the 1930s that the Grotesque gained widespread momentum, by dint of their shunning of a rational visual order, and their innovative alignment of beauty and terror.

10  Fig. 5 Salvador DALI Metamorphosis of Narcissus 1936–37 oil on canvas 50.8 x 78.3cm tate gallery, London

Salvador Dali exploited this interstice to the full, by developing a unique and iconic arsenal of motifs that spoke at once of profound beauty and sensuality, and of terror and the Grotesque. Many of Dali’s ideas that were common throughout Surrealism can be found echoed in Burke’s philosophy of the Sublime. In the present day, similar perils seem to infiltrate much contemporary art. It is as though the Romantic imagination of Fuseli, Blake and Goya, and that of the Surrealists, has been reborn in their early twenty-first century counterparts. ‘Perhaps it is a reflection of the world in which we live, which is pretty dark, intolerant, repressive and repressed at the moment’, writes Max Delany, Director of the Monash University Museum of Art. ‘The Gothic is a recurrent and oft-reinvented theme, related to repressed desire, the fear of the irrational, and the realm of the imagination. Artists tend to make these things live’ [8]. Adding to the puzzle is the ambiguity of labels. While the Romantics, the Symbolists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Surrealists, and even the Abstract Expressionists can all be said to inhabit their own epochs with concerns unique to their times, there is case for arguing that all these and more were motivated, in large part, by the same needs and desires. Might they all come under a larger umbrella of the ‘Fantastic’, which is flourishing again today? Writing on the broad tenets of the Fantastic, Walter Schurian has noted that: The Fantastic in the visual arts is a constant current, which manifests itself differently at different times: as an expression of social crises, of the uncertainty of an age, or of far-reaching upheavels… Fantastic works of art may come across as droll, or as mythic, sometimes as erotic or else as exaggerated; often they express something dreamily unreal, surreal or supernatural. They are characterised by premonitions of imminent woe, by a search for orientation, by murky imaginations or by the vision of a different, literally more “wonder-full” world

[9]. 13  Cat.12 James GLEESON

Perhaps Les Trois Sauvages [detail] 1988 And so to our six present artists — our Dreamweavers — who each perpetrate a unique self-mythologising art that speaks at once of no time and of all time. In the works of Aitken, Calandre, Gleeson, Laerkesen, Spenser and Zika, we detect the traces of the Visionary and the Fantastic that has passed before. Between them they range the full gamut of this enduring genre, from the spellbinding wonder of dreams, to the torrid and terrifying world of nightmares. James Gleeson (1915–2008) was Australia’s pre-eminent Surrealist. As a young artist he absorbed much of the ferocious iconoclasm that surged out of Europe in the 1930s — especially as funnelled through Salvador Dali — but he formulated a visual language that was very much his own. Gleeson continued to work within the Surrealist idiom long after it was fashionable, and reached the heights of his long career in the 1970s and 1980s. As his work increased in scale, he developed a new approach to landscape, which he christened ‘Psychoscape’. Massive, heaving and largely unidentifiable forms melded with apocalyptic skies and earth in biomorphic shapes, while recalling the homoeroticism of his earlier, more explicit work. In Perhaps Les Trios Sauvages (1988) Gleeson presents us with a fantastical panorama of dreamlike forms. Taken together, these forms suggest a cliff-face overlooking an ocean, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves as crustacean- like animals; their tentacles and claws oozing out of the picture’s orifices.

14  Cat.1 Aly AITKEN All the Comforts of Home [detail]

The work, like many of Gleeson’s from this period, transcends time and place and speaks of an eternal unrest between the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind. It speaks of an uncanny interplay between contradictory states, where material form is in an unending cycle of becoming and unravelling. Aly Aitken similarly occupies a zone that is poised precariously between dream and nightmare. She fathoms bizarre hybrid creatures from everyday materials, and employs a pre-industrial alchemy to charge them with life. These mutant, semi-biological forms elicit both repulsion and empathy, drawing us to them in spite of our abject horror. There is a scientific curiosity at play here; of ‘mix ‘n’ match’ body parts spliced together in an unnatural melding of animal, mineral and vegetable. Aitken’s Grotesque creations stir a violent visceral reaction. Assembled from diverse elements they recall Frankenstein’s monster — we imagine a mad scientist at work, and actions with terrible consequences. Born from our dreams and made palpably real, these biomorphic creatures are arrestingly awkward, like new-born babies of some monstrous new species. Through these ungainly curiosities Aitken assembles a new language of the absurd, spoken by beings that exist only in our imaginations. With little more than a strategically placed child’s facemask, a button or a set of teeth, Aitken invests her primeval hybrids with mute consciousness. Within a broader practice that addresses the otherworldly and the microcosmic, Aitken says that her work ‘is always about running away’.

17  Cat.2 Aly AITKEN From the Estate of Edvard Munch [detail] 2008

Most recently, my aim has been to evoke the hidden spaces of the psychological boltholes we build for ourselves, and the escape tunnels we use to reach them. My imaginary friends are inhabitants of a fabricated world; a world crafted from the in-between twilight spaces, cobbled together with bits and pieces of reality. They belong to a landscape in limbo; hybrid creatures, a mongrel mix of Art, human, animal and vegetable… In Sheep’s Clothing and Don’t Call Me Alice are natives of a secret place where everything is strange but oddly familiar. Constructed from absence and longing, they are snatches of things half glimpsed [10]. While arousing our sympathies the works elude any melodrama, through a static and emotionless display that recalls the museum of natural history. We are left with the sterile residue of the anthropological and the taxidermal, and detect the benign presence of the lab coat and glass jar. Aiken’s practice is situated outside the boundaries of the contemporary. Not of this time or any time, it extends beyond a measured, intellectual response, and communicates with the unconscious and our intuition. We cannot be certain if this is our dreams becoming real — or our reality becoming unreal. While Aitken’s ‘friends’ appear to be the product of a science experiment gone awry, no such rationalisation can account for the Fantastical forays of Adam Laerkesen. Here, our world has become inverted with the laws of science submitting to an altogether less empirical paradigm. To encounter a work by Laerkesen is to abandon all rational logic and enter a realm where anything can happen (and usually does). ‘I create sculpture out of instinct, intuition and vision’, says Laerkesen. ‘It is not until the art work is completed that I have any idea as to what my artistic intention was’ [11]. Indeed, in works such as Something In The Way and Mnemosyne, Laerkesen might be transcending what ‘art’, as it is traditionally understood, actually is. These extraordinary creations are less simple equations of aesthetics and form, than a total rupture of logic as we know it. Laerkesen bends and manipulates the known universe in ways that snap us out of the delusion that anything we thought we knew was right.

18  Cat.13 Adam LAERKESEN They Once Cut My Heart Down The Way They Cut A Tree [detail] 2008

Laerkesen takes the Fantastical and Visionary to new and uncharted territories through the application of a meta-Sublime, in which beauty and the Grotesque co-exist. Listing the individual components of each piece — foam, branches, resin, plaster — does not communicate the extent to which they defy explanation and transcend the sum of their parts. The works compel us to suspend disbelief, and arouse the uncanny sensation that we are lost inside a dream. ‘It is my intention that the viewer’s initial response is experienced through the body’, Laerkesen writes. ‘A haptic response, which initially bypasses the intellect, allowing viewers’ senses and imagination to reveal themselves through the art work’ [12]. In this way Laerkesen unearths a kind of archetypal language of dreams — a visual counterpart to what Freud sought through psychology. This language enables us to project our own unconscious thoughts and feelings onto a concrete form, to unerring effect. Laerkesen writes: In past exhibitions I’ve played with the idea of mutating nature through my sculpture. The gallery space in this context could be seen as a laboratory where experiments on nature have been carried out, albeit poetic ones. I use sculpture to reveal forces of nature, as Merleau Ponty said ‘making the invisible visible’. The combination of familiar and unfamiliar subject matter in my work asks the viewer to experience and think in new and divergent ways. This allows the possibility of the unconscious to manifest in my work, giving space for poetic possibilities and the unfurling of the mysterious [13].

21  Cat.16 Sam SPENSER Trophy Wall [detail] 2008–2009

Two British artists — Sam Spenser and Eloise Calandre — demonstrate that the contemporary fascination for the Fantastic is not a localised phenomenon. Just as it transcends time, so too does it bypass geographical borders. Spenser’s cavernous sculptural installations recall elaborate film sets, feeding all the senses and upending our traditional approach to art. His Trophy Wall is a single, large scale immersive work that simulates the exalted claustrophobia of dreams. Like the works of Adam Laerkesen, Sam Spenser’s spectral installations are to be experienced rather than explained. Trophy Wall confronts the viewer with ninety slip cast ceramic deer skulls, a tiled aluminium wall, a step ladder, strewn leaves and a haunting piano soundtrack. Reality trails helplessly behind as this hypnotic work casts its intoxicating spell, leading us to believe we have entered another world entirely. The multiplicity of deer skulls, mounted like game trophies, breaches the boundaries of the familiar. Each skull projects a foreboding presence, and we come to wonder if the multiplying effect is produced by our own disoriented senses, thwarted by the rupture of logic. The imposition of disorder is accentuated by Spenser’s attention to detail, which culminates in a complete inebriation of the senses. Again, we encounter a multi-sensory experience that transcends our traditional understanding of art. Spenser eloquently folds theatre, science, atmosphere and Gothic storytelling into one. Indeed, many of his works defy containment within the gallery environment altogether. He writes: My exhibitions are an ambience. I expect the suspension of disbelief from the gallery-goer much as a film director would of the viewer. Exhibiting in unconventional spaces eradicates ‘white cube etiquette’ and makes this suspension possible [14].

23  Cat.8 Eloise CALANDRE Disco [detail] 2009

While often encompassing mechanical or industrial elements, Spenser’s installations defy any specific time or place. They fabricate a Fantastical other-world — an ‘anti-historical space’ — in which an ethereal rationale takes hold. The alien, dreamy images of Eloise Calandre generate unsettling sensations through an opaque darkness. Her liminal photographs and videos are cloaked in a haunting stillness, where the imagination of the viewer is allowed to incubate. Calandre’s practice explores invisibility and spectral presence, by revealing fragments of figures within contained domestic environments, rendered uncertain and unfathomable. Calandre presents a world, adjacent to our own, whose logic we cannot compute. She speculates on a sublimity resident within the everyday, as her works project an invisible void into the space. Grappling with matter, they render material what is palpably immaterial and transparent. While various details emerge from her blanket darkness, it is the void that dominates, and ignites our imagination with fear, possibility and wonder. Whatever we imagine is lurking within these stygian shadows is a product of our mind alone, but Calandre nurtures this descent into drama with ambiguous fragments; limbs, ligaments and spectral lights that protrude tentatively from the dark, concealing all else within an interior of unknowable depth. Calandre’s imagery confronts us with a darkness framed by a psychological and cinematic lens. While the dark appears docile — through intimations of domesticity — we still detect peril. Where Aitken and Laerkesen lead us through a latter-day world of Goya’s monsters, Calandre shows us only the mouth of the cave from which they sprung. Here, she seems to be depicting not a physical, tangible darkness, but a turgid and opaque inner-blackness. Its incomprehensible depths are carefully framed by the details we can discern, in the way that stars demarcate the endlessness of the night sky. But here, the blackness is absolute. Our eyes fix upon the recognisable imagery we are given, and try not to look into the dark, in case we never re-emerge. 24 

Cat.17 Joel ZIKA Façade #1 [detail] 2007 New media artist

Joel Zika similarly mines the imagination, using imagery drawn from theme parks and rollercoaster rides to facilitate our encounter with the uncanny. In a practice that trades in the garish and the Grotesque, Zika combines the bizarre baroque of Surrealism with a spine-tingling mastery of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). Zika amplifies the psychological horror shown to us by Goya and, earlier, Bosch, by employing the tools of cinematic realism. He manipulates our willingness to believe the evidence of the screen in the service of his craft where, like a modern day Bosch, he imparts the psychological aspects horror. Through CGI and cinema he projects a decadent reality that, in spite of its candid fictionalisation, appeals to our want to believe. Zika’s thrilling theatre, where the Fantastic meets the Sublime, recalls Marcel Broodthaers’ definition of art, being: ‘…a prisoner of its phantasms and its function as magic; it hangs on our bourgeois walls as a sign of power, it flickers along the peripeties of our history like a shadow-play’ [15]. Prisoner it might be, but Zika’s art twists and writhes like a monster in its cave. On the surface we may recognise bizarre and incongruous forms, such as archways of light bulbs and shards of coloured light blazing hypnotically from strange openings, but here nothing makes sense — it is a world where irrational dreams and impossible nightmares collide. A powerful influence over Zika is a childhood lived partly in the gothic enfolds of Tasmania, and partly in the presence of European Gothicism: 27 

Growing up in Hobart I took the sublime natural surroundings for granted. Bored by giant rain forests and waterfalls it was the horror and the folklore of Tasmania’s history that sparked my interest. My father was an expert on the Baroque, I think I had seen 90% of all the Baroque churches in central Europe before I was 12 years old… To me it was sublime. I would sit for hours looking up at this enormous pre-Renaissance fresco. As I grew older I would understand the links between this image of judgement and those of the convicts in Tasmania [16]. Framed by these childhood influences, Zika invents a compelling world inhabited by the detritus of early twentieth century amusement parks — and in particular — ghost trains, haunted houses and pirate rides. Like the ‘dark rides’ he so reveres, at the core of Zika’s practice is the need to disorient the viewer. In ejecting us from our comfort zones, he elicits a garish twilight zone of wonder, horror and spectacle. Perhaps in time history will rightly judge this period of art as the continuation of a long and rich lineage of the Fantastic. Guided by earlier epochs when darkness and death was an everyday reality, the dark of today is no less prevalent, but needs to be coaxed from the shells of our collective unconscious. In spite of all our advancements in technology and illumination, we can take (dis)comfort in the darknesses that still lurk beneath our beds and inside our galleries, and will continue to do so for as long as people weave dreams from the fabric of the night.

Simon gregg is curator of gippsland art gallery, Sale 28 

NOTES

1. thomson Phillip, The Grotesque, Methuen, London, 1972

2. Marcus Clarke, ‘Preface to adam Lindsay gordon’s Poems’, reprinted in Bill Wannan (ed.), A Marcus Clarke Reader, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1963, p.36

3. ibid

4. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (ed. adam Phillips), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990 (originally published in 1857), p.36

5. Umberto Eco, On Beauty, Secker & Warburg, London, 2004, p.290

6. Martin Myrone, ‘Fuseli to Frankenstein: the Visual arts in the Context of the gothic’, in Martin Myrone (ed.), Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination, tate Publishing, London, 2006, p.36

7. Note in the Royal academy catalogue of 1782, formerly in the collection of the Dowager Countess Rosebery, quoted in ibid, p.10

8. Max Delaney, Australian Art Collector, 52, april–June 2010, p.109

9. Walter Schurian, Fantastic Art, taschen, Cologne, 2005, back cover

10. aly aitken, Melbourne Artist-Run Initiatives, art Fair Flyer, City of Melbourne, 2009

11. adam Laerkesen, artist statement, emailed to author, 24 May 2010

12. ibid

13. ibid

14. Sam Spenser, artist statement, website

15. Marcel Broodthaers, quoted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory, 1900–2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing, Massachusetts, 2003, op.cit., p.932

16. Joel Zika, email to author, 8 February 2010 29 

Cat.1 Aly AITKEN All the Comforts of Home 30  31 From the Estate of Edvard Munch 2008 31 From the Estate of Edvard Munch 2008

Cat.2 Aly AITKEN 

Cat.3 Aly AITKEN In Sheep’s Clothing 2008 

Cat.4 Aly AITKEN Don’t Call me Alice 2008 

Cat.5 Eloise CALANDRE Dark Sea 2009

Cat.6 Eloise CALANDRE

Cat.7 Eloise CALANDRE Five 2009 35 

Cat.8 Eloise CALANDRE Disco 2009 36 

Cat.9 Eloise CALANDRE Intermittence 2009 37 

Cat.10 Eloise CALANDRE Play 2009

Cat.11 Eloise CALANDRE Sibylteen 2009 38 

Cat.12 James GLEESON Perhaps Les Trois Sauvages 1988

Cat.13 Adam LAERKESEN They Once Cut My Heart Down The Way They Cut A Tree 2008 40 

Cat.14 Adam LAERKESEN Mnemosyne 42 

Cat.15 Adam LAERKESEN Something in the Way 2008 43 

Cat.16 Sam SPENSER Trophy Wall 2008–2009 44  45 

Cat.17 Joel ZIKA Façade #1 2007

Cat.18 Joel ZIKA Façade #2 2007

Cat.19 Joel ZIKA Pleasure Island #1 2008 46 

Cat.20 Joel ZIKA At Night 47 

written by Steve Proposch

The human soul will forever harbour the darkness and fear of its beginnings. Freedom from pain and horror, the seeking of shelter, is one of our most primeval drives, the equal of food and sex. Darkness holds the promise of infinite possibility, and therefore infinite danger. It represents everything that we don’t know. Here is where our fascination begins. ‘Children will always be afraid of the dark,’ writes Howard Phillips Lovecraft in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, ‘and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse’ [1]. 

Fig.6 Adam LAERKESEN Windsong 2008 Wood, cast resin 190 x 150 x 120cm

Fabulously gothic was old HP. To read him you’ve got to love that meaty, thick-edged prose, to take joy from his voluminous descriptions of enormity, the massiveness of what is unknown, perhaps unknowable. ‘Lovecraft’s guiding literary principle was what he termed ‘cosmicism’ or ‘cosmic horror’, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien’ [2]. This seems to be the opposite view of Voltaire’s ‘best of possible worlds’ where Candide, and especially his philosopher companion Pangloss, claim to know exactly how it all works. ‘It is demonstrable,’ says Pangloss (a metaphysico-theologocosmolonigolist, no less) ‘that things cannot be otherwise than they are: for all things having been made for some end, they must necessarily be for the best end’ [3].

Yet, following on from this assertion our two adventurers are promptly ejected from their idyllic surroundings and into the real world, where they are subjected to such horrible pains, miseries, and unfortunate circumstance as to test their theory to its limits. At the end of Candide, after plentiful suffering, our heroes end up once again in a beautiful place, a garden needing only their pleasurable attention. Here Pangloss proposes that: ‘If a single link in the great chain were omitted, the harmony of the entire universe would be destroyed… you would not be here to-day, eating preserved citrons and pistachio nuts’ [4]. His theory seems to be borne out after all, and with the onset of peace the story is ended. No one wants to read about that part, apparently. Peace is the destination, not the adventure. But the final lines of the book express Voltaire’s real ambition in writing this tragi-comic tale. Candide simply replies: ‘That’s very well said, and may all be true… but let’s cultivate our garden’ [5]. Ultimately Voltaire rejects Pangloss’ view that we might ever comprehend some universal plan to life. Candide is on the much wiser path than his poor tutor now. After all of the chaos and cruelty he has witnessed, how could Candide ever put his faith in certainty again? He knows only too well how tenuous our hold on the good life can be. 50 

Cat.5 Eloise CALANDRE Five [detail]

This is essentially a match to Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism, and a view that is extremely common in all human artistic endeavours. In order to be relevant, artists need to ask questions, often big ones, and the truth is that whenever we question anything in this world, darkness lurks close by. That which is visible can be explained, it can be known, and become familiar, but to be left in the dark promotes imaginings. Art critic Weiland Schmied defines as fantastic ‘anything that lies outside what a particular epoch takes for granted’ [6]. Sometimes we may need to look at a thing for a very long time to see everything there is to see about it, because we are naturally driven to get to the end of a task, to know all about it, before we can properly put it to the back of our minds. In this way darkness secretly obsesses all of us. We try to keep it out of our daily lives, but when the sun goes down it is always there, waiting for us, waiting for answers, and reminding us of death. Death is a darkness of the everlasting kind. Its effect on the human psyche cannot be underestimated. In the effort to understand we throw all the light in our possession at it — all the computers, science and medicine we can invent, and all the heavens and nirvanas we can think of. In Gothic architecture we see religious structures that were designed to appear as literal gateways to the afterlife, wielding light and height as their ironic wands to draw you into the arms of God. Technological marvels of their time, these buildings combined a number of existing or formative technologies such as the flying buttress, ribbed vault and pointed arch, to construct vast, impressive interiors filled with a light of uncommon beauty. The intent is so wonderfully conveyed that you could be forgiven for feeling like stepping into them is like stepping into an antechamber of heaven itself. 53 

Cat.4 Aly AITKEN In Sheep’s Clothing [detail] 2008

Despite such incredible efforts we may never hide the fact that beyond death lays the unknown. Our frustration at this is obvious. Modern art and culture abounds with images of everything that death may be, with ever more graphic representation of the kinds of monstrosities — both human and alien — that may cause it. The blues has become the black dog, in a sense, where the symbols and identities that used to define our fear or sadness are no longer potent enough to scare us. Where expressions of a lost love or a gained addiction once went something like: ‘Gee, but it’s hard to love someone / when that someone don’t love you’ [7], they are now expressed as guttural screams of emotional ache: ‘Didn’t take too long ‘fore I found out / what people mean by down and out’ [8]; or for a more pointedly vicious example: ‘red-neck burn-out Midwest mind / who said date rape isn’t kind?’ [9] These are different only in style, but it is a sign of the times. The modern vampire is certainly not as physically scary as the skeletal, creeping and otherworldly Nosferatu, transformed as it is into the boys and girls next door, who can run really fast, look really hot, like, forever, and get off by sucking your blood; but psychologically they more than make up for that lack in their closeness, and their abundance. These monsters are not lonesome creatures living halfway across the world, ensconced in gothic castles. They go to your high school. They are everywhere you go. Today we make more noise than ever in the attempt to block out the everlasting silence. 54 

Cat.16 Sam SPENSER Trophy Wall [detail] 2008–2009

The reason for this can be found in the tremendous tension that exists at the threshold of light and dark. Here is where we sit, between life and death, wanting desperately to know what is on the other side, to end the uncertainty, but at the same time knowing it pushes all the wrong buttons. Equally as desperate is the desire not to think about it too much, and to pursue happiness instead. Polite society still shuns dark subjects, so to choose gothic, or nihilistic punk, as a fashion statement is to reject the values of a homogenous lifestyle. Bringing attention to death by painting your face white, or piercing your body with pins, is anti-social. Humans are visual beings, we reason, and light is vision. If we are plunged into a bare, dark room, wide awake, we would find ourselves thinking more about the absence of light than we do about the dark. This is true. In the light I observe the bare walls and the absence of anything else, looking for chinks in the armour of nothingness. In the dark I find myself waiting for the light to return. In the real world there is no black and white, no absolute good or bad. What we call evil is really just the stuff that gets in the news because it’s ‘mediapathic’, as Neal Stephenson might say. It’s not the social norm. Instead we inhabit the threshold, and unconsciously most of us believe that if we were able to measure every big and little piece of good and bad that happens each minute, every day, exactly accounting for the countless greys — adding and subtracting maims and bonuses with perfect accuracy, truth and justice for all — that we’d end up with pretty much a fifty-fifty light and dark total. Of course there would be a little bit of light in the dark and, you know, vice versa. We like to believe in the symbol of Yin and Yang because it leads directly to another belief, that no side is more powerful than the other. We reason that neither side would exist without the other existing as a comparative opposite, thus we are safe from darkness ever overcoming us completely. 57 

Cosmically this may or may not be true, and is probably not a very important question anyway as far as the universe is concerned, but as a species our belief in this kind of universal balance is critically important. Without it lays madness and emotional ruin. All houses of Faith have been built to shore up these beliefs and help them from ever faltering, even after death. Yet however hard we strain we cannot absolutely know. Indeed it seems the more we discover the larger the darkness becomes. Bummer, the answer is always far away. All we can hope for then is to see and learn as much as we can about our chosen sport before darkness closes in on us forever. Perhaps there is good reason for this too. In the opening of his 1926 tale The Call of Cthulhu Lovecraft wrote: ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age’. I suspect that we want to know, even if knowing kills us, turning us into pillars of salt. The most amazing thing that art can offer then is a playground in which to freely exchange tantalising glimpses of the space between them and us. Steve Proposch is a writer and founding editor of Trouble magazine. 58 

NOTES

1. H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon and other macabre tales, Panther Horror (granada) 1969, p.143. First published in 1927 in the one-shot magazine The Recluse (S. t. Joshi and David E. Schultz, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p.255)

2. Wikipedia

3. andré Maurois, The Living Thoughts of Voltaire, Cassell and Company, third edition 1946, p.22

4. ibid, p.60

5. ibid

6. Weiland Schmied, Fantastic Art, tBa

7. Hunter/austin, Down-Hearted Blues, transcribed from Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, recorded November 18, 1931. From Cab Calloway and His Orchestra 1931–1932; The Chronological Classics, 526

8. Led Zepplin, Black Dog, Led Zepplin IV, 1971

9. Marilyn Manson, Cake and Sodomy, Portrait Of An American Family, 1994 

List of Works

ALY AITKEN

Cat.1 All the Comforts of Home, 2008 abandoned Christmas tree trunks, timber, padding, leather, found objects 147 x 124 x 43cm Private Collection

Cat.2 From the Estate of Edvard Munch, 2008 abandoned Christmas tree trunks, timber, padding, leather, found objects 185 x 90 x 36cm Private Collection

Cat.3 In Sheep’s Clothing, 2008 timber, pine tree branches, calico, velvet, antler, stuffing, zip, found objects 230 x 75 x 40cm Courtesy the artist Cat.4 Don’t Call me Alice, 2008 Christmas tree trunks, timber, calico, stuffing, found objects 210 x 87 x 35cm Private Collection

ELOISE CALANDRE

Cat.5 Dark Sea, 2009 DVD 3:43mins Courtesy the artist

Cat.6 Indigo, 2009 DVD 3:43mins Courtesy the artist

Cat.7 Five, 2009 type C-print mounted on aluminium 50 x 50 x 3.5cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.8 Disco, 2009 Lambda Print on black aluminium 27 x 27 x 8cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.9 Intermittence, 2009 Lambda Print on black aluminium 105 x 150 x 3.5cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.10 Play, 2009 Lambda Print on black aluminium 87 x 122 x 3.5cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.11 Sibylteen, 2009 Lambda Print on black aluminium 82 x 60 x 3.5cm Courtesy the artist 60

JAMES GLEESON

Cat.12 Perhaps Les Trois Sauvages, 1988 Oil on canvas 181 x 277cm Private collection ADAM LAERKESEN

Cat.13 They Once Cut My Heart Down The Way They Cut A Tree, 2008 industrial chair, plaster, cast foam 215 x 70 x 95cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.14 Mnemosyne, 2008 Resin, flocking, lantern Component 1 (deer head): 215cm x 75 x 73cm Component 2 (lantern): 40 x 30 x 30cm Private collection

Cat.15 Something in the Way, 2008 Plaster, wood, cast foam 150 x 190 x 110cm Private collection SAM SPENSER

Cat.16 Trophy Wall, 2008–2009 90 slip cast ceramic deer skulls, tiled aluminium wall, step ladder, leaves and soundscape 250 x 850 x 7.5cm Courtesy the artist and the Wapping Project, London JOEL ZIKA

Cat.17 Façade #1, 2007 Photographic print (mounted on lightbox) 100 x 200cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.18 Façade #2, 2007 Photographic print (mounted on lightbox) 100 x 200cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.19 Pleasure Island #1, 2008 Photographic print (mounted on lightbox) 100 x 166.6cm Courtesy the artist

Cat.20 At Night #2, 2007 Photographic print (mounted on lightbox) 100 x 166.6cm Courtesy the artist 61 

Item descript1. art Modern – 21st Century – Exhibitions

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4. grotesque in art – Exhibitions 709.05

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