Issue 6: Winter 2010
Alice Maher: Godchildren of Enantios
Sound by Trevor Knight
Galway Arts Centre
July 12- 25, 2010
In a specially commissioned exhibition for the Galway Arts Centre, Alice Maher explores enantiodromia, the Jungian theory that the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite. She combines sculpture, print, and five films, or film-drawings, which altogether form an animated bestiary where the human and non-human merge, mate, fight, consort, disintegrate or separate.
Godchildren (2010) consists of twin bronze statues of nude children with severed heads at their feet, under tall glass domes. The Classical-like aesthetic lends a mythological aura to the tableau; the polished bodies suggest an extraordinary, yet inevitable event.
A large intaglio print, Godchildren of Enantios (2010), occupies a wall. Enantios, Greek for "opposite", suggests the name of a god, the mythological embodiment or libidinal locus of a process or feeling, like Eros or Pan. Here a woman's halved body is hefted into opposite directions by two men. It is a still from one of the five films, perhaps from the one on this floor.
Like all the films save one, Godchildren of Enantios is a looped, short animated work, set to an ambient soundtrack provided by Trevor Knight. The film consists of charcoal drawings on a white sheet shot on film and thus animated. Erasures leave behind smudged traces of former drawings as nodes transform into mobile spheres that take on eyes and mouths and then butt, well, heads, and so on. Endless and swift transformations escape itemization, unless one should pause the viewing apparatus second by second. This is perhaps significant. The series of images work on the viewer; it left me unsure of the order of objects listed in my notes. What became what? Cacti sprout arms, then one bird, then two, then three perch, and then there are many, and they are cacophonous.
In Flora (2009), the geometric yet anarchic quality of nature, as well as the latent sexuality of objects, is plain. Figures double, branch, grow snarling roots. Palm trees transmogrify into the verdant posts of a bed, then suddenly defoliate. It is a melancholy sequence, hinting at the eventual decay of life.
Les Jumeaux (or The Twins, 2010) consists of two etched ostrich eggs, depicting Zeus's infamous rapes, the sexual rapture of Leda and Io as swan and bull. So we are reminded that the union between the divine and the human is inherently and polymorphously perverse, to use Freud's description of innate human sexuality. The eggs themselves are a modern example of the ancient art of egg-painting, not just a ritual of Easter, which is itself a younger version of pagan celebrations of the Spring Equinox, a time devoted to Oestre, the goddess of fertility. Material culture, here, is the delicate connector between the human and the divine; painted on the surface, the egg is, itself, still a receptacle of a mystery, what was not cracked open.
At the rear of the second floor is The Double (2009); the title reflects a recurring theme, of uncanny alters. Sphinx (2009), which is appropriately silent, unfolds in a stairwell landing and Sleep (2009), the final film-drawing, occupies a small room upstairs.
As noted earlier, motifs recur: doubling, gender-shifting, penetration and union. We are reminded of Ovid's The Metamorphoses, that shambolic quasi-epic consisting of crystalline vignettes connected only by the body's transformation into something strange indeed, as divine and human passions erupt into flowers, animal parts, showers of gold. As Marina Warner notes, "Ovid's picture of natural generation, assuming a universe that's unceasingly progenitive, multiple, and fluid, organizes the relationships between creatures according to axioms of metaphorical affinity, poetic resonance, and even a variety of dream punning." (1)
The films' lack of narrative suggests, perhaps, the airlessness of the hybrid's existence - neither here nor there, in the nowhere of utopia. The films' lack of stylistic distinction makes them inseparable in the viewer's memory - even as they differ in detail. But, regardless of what qualms that a viewer, familiar with more fantastic animation work, might have, the films work in regards to their subject matter; that is, film is the only medium capable of visualizing metamorphosis. Via a process of erasure, smudging and tenuous definition, the films suggest a universe composed of an unsteady, shivering and dissolvable divinity - Enantios, if you will, the governor of the crisis between opposites.
The films work due to the context of the show, punctuated as they are by non-filmic pieces that remind us of the continuity with the grotesque, not only as a general adjective for the strange and fantastically excessive, but also as architectural ornamentation, as fanciful arrangements of arabesques, interlaced garlands and fantastic human-animal figures, anathema for early modern architects, even as Surrealism took up the figure of the hybrid.
In an interview regarding this show, Maher said, "It's as much about fragmentary experience of imagery as anything else," reflecting "how we really experience the world."(2) In the final film, the incomplete erasures of bodies and eggs leave behind an ornamental pattern reminiscent of elaborately decorated wallpaper. In this fragmentation emerges the fantastic, like a spectre. The origins of the word ‘fantastic' is rooted, ultimately, in phantos, Greek for ‘visible'. What is visible in the fantastic is the tension between the real (the unornamented, perhaps) and the other, the submerged, the ornamental, or merging of the dream and the real, the human and the nonhuman (that other, ever-resistant sentience).
-Phillina Sun
(1) Warner, Marina, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5.
(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1CpkE68zI