2007

Against Nature

Towards the end of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ nineteenth century novel A rebours (Against nature), the aristocratic Des Esseintes makes a keen observation: a man of talent, condemned to live in a dull and stupid period, would be haunted by a yearning for another age, a yearning for the past, or the pursuit of dream and fantasy. Huysmans wrote of the condition: 

‘He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more at home.’

Des Esseintes, the leading character of the novel, and a thinly disguised self-portrait of Huysmans, rejected modernity and the ‘American’ vulgarities of his age. Instead, he sought to create an artificial – but real – space in which he could seek refuge and live his life as he wished. His dream-like, sumptuously furnished room, discriminating library and idiosyncratic personal preferences and vagaries eliminated any common or ordinary elements, leaving a heavily perfumed, artificially lit and cultured world. Here, poetry and naturalism competed as rivals, a conflict that reflected the debates in literature circles of the time. An observer of life in minutiae, Des Esseintes was the quintessential flâneur, one who strolled the streets, watching, but in Des Esseintes case, one who rejected strolling the Parisian streets in preference to wandering in a world of his own creation.

The four artists whose work is on display, Gordon Craig, Alan Hill, Martin Smith and Henri van Noordenburg, each share with Des Esseintes a keen sense of observing life in close detail, of being both alone within and apart from the action, of rejecting the activity of strolling to watch and edit the landscape into a more agreeable form. Each artist photographs the district in which he roams, selecting aspects of that environment to form what will become a tangible memory.

More than one moment recalled hints at a story worth telling. Gordon Craig’s images from Beijing, China depict lines of numbers sprayed or painted onto the walls of town streets. The numbers, elegant and abstract, are prostitutes’ telephone numbers, advertising exotic practices and dreams for those with the money to pay. They are also images of a vanishing group. When Craig returned recently to the same streets, the Beijing Olympics was making an impact on the streetscape and those who inhabited it. Any ‘undesirable’ activity has been censured, and the numbers, which had always been painted out (only to return the following day), were completely obliterated.

Martin Smith carves personal stories and lyrics of love and longing into his work. The stories recall epochs past, his own recollections of adolescence that survive intact – convincingly curious and cruel revelations of love among the ballads of suburban melancholia. Text and image blur. Like the rain on a windscreen, you need to focus on one or the other, and can’t see both at the same time. With Smith’s work, one reads through the image to understand the shape of the letters. The story literally punctuates the image, paralleling how one’s own memory of an incident from the past, indelibly imprinted, is nevertheless recalled with gaps and holes.

An image photographed can transform the mundane into the immortal. Alan Hill captures the oddities of everyday existence, seeing in the common streetscape the strange and curious, the absurdities of our shared spaces. His work hinges on the spontaneous moment, comparable to the American photographer Weegee, based on acute observation skills and the uncanny ability to see a ‘good shot’ where most of us would not. Hill’s work, taken with candidness and a clear eye for the ridiculous, transcends the personal to comment on the irrationality of the human condition.

Henri van Noordenburg, having migrated to Australia from the Netherlands, travels to exotic locations to photograph everyday people and their stories. His portraits are of this time, but not necessarily of this place. Gone is the light and light-ness of Queensland; in its place is the condensed, honeyed light of the Dutch masters and the rich detail of skin and surface – compelling poetry and naturalism to coexist. The images suggest another era, of focused lives lived with the same intensity and passion as Des Esseintes created his own world.

The works on display in these four exhibitions recall Huysman’s sentiment of Against nature. Over a century has passed, but there remains a desire to seek out poetry among the everyday perversities of the street, to recall potent memories of the past and to intimate the possibility of exotic practices in the future.


Robyn Daw
Brisbane 2007