I forgot all else: was this reading? No, it was dying of ecstasy.. 2002 human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other...we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.
– E.M. Forster
She Sings Love 2002 Floating Redundant was a small series I made whilst I was starting to work on the themes and practical solutions to Goddess of Flowers. So maybe it was a kind of breathing place, for when you compare it to the first Goddess of Flowers works, you can see these two drastically different programs going on. First, Floating Redundant is all stardust: blue and silvers, it is cold and modern and reserved. Goddess of Flowers is picked out in golden beams, crimsons and orange: it is chaotic, symbolic, laden with Paisleys and arbours and referents to craft and art. So perhaps Floating Redundant was simply a knee jerk reaction - a little project in avoidance - to the sustained associations and connections of content, themes and subject matter that was occurring with the Phoolan Devi story.
Goddess of Flowers was still really at the cross-roads of development where it could cut either way, grow or languish in vertical drawers for years. After a couple of failures in finding the right form in which to present those narrative tropes I had finally settled upon the foot template as a visual framework. I was on a second wind with but still hesitant as to how they might be read. In between I was making these 'other' pieces, I wasn't sure what they were 'doing', they just seemed to be coming out in blue. In fact, it was Stephen who focussed my attention towards the difference when he was in Melbourne one day and I was showing him through the studio. He was looking across the two bodies of work, when he signalled towards the blue pieces and said something like: 'Shit these are just so low. They're heavy downers. ...' or something like that. Perhaps if I try to recall that period I guess it could be said they were private outpourings of my feelings and thoughts about relationships at the time, personal and general. But as works in themselves, I think they come from that research which had been so integral to my work: the exploration of the forms by which cultures express their sexuality, and the shifts which occur in these depictions across time.
Either way I was thinking about how we approach intimacy in our personal lives and how this is built within social structures like culture, class, heritage and so forth. Moreover how these constructions influence and impact upon our actual ability to access intimacy with one another. And yet – flip side - underneath all this language and history and place, at the end of the day we are still as Julia Roberts character in the film Notting Hill so succinctly put it: just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her,.... or something like that! .... Nervous wrecks without moorings when it comes to love and attraction.
I love you too…. (I think) 2002
Thru the looking glass 2002Within the sexual act, from the initial attraction to the bed we each create our own beliefs, cultural connections which affirm our sense of self, of difference. We begin at this personal level: individual and intimate, and then align these feelings and emotional variances with communal and public morés. This is the crux - the language of sexuality is paradoxical; it attempts to describe a universal act that is anything but universal when encountered by the individual. So, in a way the language of sex becomes inexpressible, it is only through the representation of sex, and its’ connected signification that the discourse begins. But these signs grow and metamorphose across cultures and eras, gliding between triumphant exaltation and the descent to hell: the accepted and the taboo fluctuate with the cultural and social production of politics, religion and economy. The shifts are so easily wrought upon the sexual act, because fundamentally it cannot escape from its privileged position, it is too heavily connected with meaning, Eros, fear and other-ness. So finally we come to see that these definitions are double-pronged: they just as easily reverse back upon themselves and these forms of intimacy our sex and sexuality bleed into our conceptions and constructs of the other worlds we inhabit – politically, socially etc. From the magical intimacy between ourself and the other, we derive power structures that affirm our place within the interlaced framework of culture. Power of structures: perhaps that is what is desired in them, writes Barthes in A Lover's Discourse, and this is what defines for us the prostitute, the lover, the mother, in short the Other.
Snuff 2002I think now in retrospect, Floating Redundant, was an outpouring, an examination of trying to know oneself through Eros in all his many- faced games: loving the other, loving oneself and being loved. And to this equation of self-knowledge was also considered the abjection of emotions when they lack these focus' and/or satisfaction. What happens when loves overflows, and is not received. When your emotions in the rush to reach the other, trip over themselves tumble and fall dejected to the floor? What happens in the contemporary space where the lack is savoured in a rarefied loneliness? Where all we want is to sing the blues, and in crying our rivers silently take joy in the pain. And what about the tendency to mediate this strange sense of self in the shelter and excuse sought in objects of desire, rather than people?
Killing Me Softly… 2002This avoidance is laid bare when we think of what support groups like Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous deal with:
...sex and love addiction is a progressive illness which cannot be cured but which, like many illnesses, can be arrested. It may take several forms—including, but not limited to a compulsive need for sex, extreme dependency on one or many people, or a chronic preoccupation with romance, intrigue, or fantasy. An obsessive compulsive pattern, either sexual or emotional, or both, exists in which relationships or sexual activities have become increasingly destructive to career, family and sense of self-respect.
Borrowing from this language possibly provides another entry point into what these works may have been thinking. An individual displaying these attributes often adopts an obsession as a form of escapism or as an avoidance tactic. For the addict this obsession become fantasy, fantasy become reality and the realities of everyday life become unreal. Within the break down between reality and fantasy, there is the associated break down with love and sexuality and their related intimacies. This fracture is quite often seen as a taboo, but it proposes an interesting subversion to understanding intimacy, and seems to verify Forster’s quote that intimacy is only a makeshift bridge, a fantastical attempt to cover the reality of what is truly unknowable. So I think these works address the notion of the taboo within sexuality, either socially or culturally and in a way are an exploration of these contentious views of sexuality and its related psychological spaces and behavioural attitudes.
Swallow Me 2002 But then to take these works and their 'modern' malaise of the self to their conclusion, and in contradistinction to the pervading subject-hood of Goddess of Flowers, perhaps they were also an unwitting escape into the Baudrillardian reign of the object. In Fatal Strategies, we are led to consider that we define ourselves not through the object, but that it is the object “more shrewd more cynical, more brilliant” than us which controls our reactions and definitions. The fatal strategy is recognising this, taking the side of the object and surrendering to its strategies, ruses and rules.
The title for the series is derived from Milton’s description of the serpent in the Garden:
Floated redundant: pleasing was his shape,
And lovely.
Floated redundant: pleasing was his shape,
And lovely.
‘Floated redundant' is typical of Milton’s ‘magical fusing’, says A.S. Byatt, of two languages. Floating is Teutonic and to do with floods, redundant is Latinate and to do with overflowings. It is only recently due to the modern coinage of being 'made redundant' – sensible because there is an excess of people or workers - that the meaning has shifted to lean towards undesirability and irrelevance. So these works are to do with the overflowings and floodings of individual desires. But whether they are warranted and wanted as equally as they may be unwarranted or rejected flip along similar lines as the etymology of redundance. And that object of desire, that conundrum of Eve's temptation – pleasing and lovely in shape – for knowledge of oneself is once again set in front of us to consider.
Dead eyes, are you just like me? 2002
