Subcategory

The building is functional in obvious ways. The ceiling doesn’t feel much like a ceiling at all, with the daunting black grating barely obscuring a mess of piping and industrial fans. I don’t really understand how they built it all, but I am not a builder, so it’s not my business.

Insurmountably high walls seem taller when they’re painted such stark and sterile white. The deep corners—at the floor, at the ceiling—always seem deep enough to get lost in. You could burrow into them, forever sinking deeper, never feeling any less exposed. There’s an odd sense of dread, standing at the foot of artworks and looking up to the ceiling instead.

In the top left corner of this room there’s a security camera, plugged into the empty space. At the back wall, a temperature reader indicates that the space sits at 20.5 degrees Celsius. Everything’s painted a perfect white. This room could almost have you believing, that it’s not even there.

This place always feels a lot like a post-mortem. Always, the barren gravel and sand it sits in, a monolith to nothing in particular tucked between the backs of the city buildings and the West Gate Freeway. I feel hollow when I step inside. I don’t like buildings that echo because it feels like they go on forever. This room has a door but no exit; big walls with no windows.

Subcategory

I remember saying goodbye to my two dogs. They died months apart, but in the same medically sterile room so they feel closer together in retrospect, which I suppose is nice. I don’t recall if my little brother was there.

On the car drive home, I spoke to my mother; looking back I get the feeling we were talking past one another—talking to talk, so we wouldn’t have to be silent, like the dog we had just put down.

The loneliest I’ve ever been, was standing in an art gallery.

Subcategory

He wore his best trousers, the pair with only a couple patches stitched around the knees.

If these be the pants I die in, it’ll be a good death.

A clown doesn’t worry about things in the same way we do. He lies, still, splayed on the pavement. That crucifix is looming above at a distance; it has its back turned to the dead man. We’re prey animals now. We’re fruit in the garden.

I think on the eternal and wonder if something truly divine would feel the need to stand above everybody else. What good is divinity if you must ask to wield it?

Interlude

I took a train out to Geelong with my partner over the break, to visit an exhibition of Australian impressionist artwork. Avoiding the paths restricted to paying visitors, she spoke to me about the ways impressionist movements in the country were used to forge a national identity, an aesthetic culture to clarify how our hands had domesticated a lawless land.

Under fading pink sunlight, the rising between night and day, a man leads cattle down a muddy path.

Maybe a week earlier we’d been through the NGV, noting the lacking context of exactly how the items on display came to be there. Donated, loaned, in honour of, in agreement with. They put statues on display behind glass, and I know, always know, that they had once belonged to somebody.

What is an object without story? It’s lonely, I think; to be without function to a body, to a people. Our culture of art can valorise the mind. But we are bodies. We are people.

Subcategory

Our components parts

Subcategory

In certain strains of therapy, there is a process of thought known as parts work; the notion of several parts of the self, existing separately, adding up to a whole. I experience something and a part of me is scared, a part of me is angry, a part of me is relieved. Numerous parts operate independently, as a network of the self. The process is about negotiating these parts, honouring their differing concerns and agendas but conducting a greater, wiser rationale over them to better navigate your world—to help yourself reach some stability and control.

The corpus callosum is a collection of nerve tracts that run communications between the left and right sides of the brain. This is a rudimentary description, but I am not a scientist, so it’s not my business. Some severe forms of epilepsy have been treated with an operation called a corpus callosotomy, in which a surgeon cuts through the corpus callosum, largely severing communications between hemispheres of the brain.

The resulting split-brain syndrome is not life-threatening but manifests in a number of unusual side effects. Sensory stimulation by sight or touch is not properly communicated between hemispheres, causing a disconnect between conscious thought and action. Speech and comprehension of speech is disrupted. The body can react to stimuli without conscious control. It is the brain, decontextualised from itself and working out of order. The parts are again out of sync, but this is a structural condition. Neurological; irreversible.

Subcategory

The painting of the street stretches into and beyond itself and I’d like to step inside. I’d like to be swallowed up by the faded vintage pavement, feel my feet planted stark on aged oil paints. I’m reminded of family Christmas functions in sweltering heat and the associated pre-teen desire to be elsewhere. That feeling grew into the teenage desire to be nowhere. These days I often don’t feel certain where I am at all, and often, I think that’s better. I like to feel my subjectivity, to be known in some sense as fragmented.

Good art could be said to swallow you whole.