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"OK, then, story number two - did he dissect a cat for artistic purposes?
'For sure. Now here is the deal. Is this a sickness? Nooooah! In school, many classes will dissect a frog or salamander, maybe a fish. How many chefs are working with fish? It was important for me for many reasons to check out some real organic material. I called the vet. He asked me some questions to ascertain whether I was a nutcake. He determined that I was serious, but said at the present time he had no cat for me. Five minutes later, a cat had just come in, and he called me.' Did he turn it into art? 'No, it was just a learning experience.' "
Interview with David Lynch, The Guardian, Saturday February 24, 2007.
Medicine remains a central presence in Julian Meagher's biography, and not always a welcome one. There's an innate parallel - figurative art and medicine share scrutiny of the body as their defining element - and Meagher's mature work also shares an explicit link. His first subjects were medical or medically treated: x-rays, anonymous patients on the operating table, friends and lovers eviscerated, their abdominal cavities exposed. As Meagher's practice as a painter has become more divorced from his practice as a physician, his subject has changed, and so has his approach. You might say that he has exchanged representation of the real for representation of the symbolic. The common thread between the old work and the new, however, the conduit along which the transition has occurred, and what brought this show into being, is the artist's interest in and preservation of what Jacques Lacan called "ritual value".
The relationship between the gaze of the artist and the gaze of the physician is a fraught one. In Art and Fear, Paul Virilio, went so far as to claim one as a taint on the other: "this confusion of cold-bloodedness with a mode of perception that allowed the doctor or surgeon to diagnose illness due to the ability to suppress the emotion - pity - had contaminated the artistic representations of 'naturalistic' painters and engravers." Jacques Agoty, for example, working one the eve of the French Revolution, was "a painter and anatomist on the trail of 'the invisible truth of bodies', [who] wavered between an engraver's burin and an autopsy scalpel in his hand."
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Meagher has only performed autopsies in his work as a painter, and their result was to humanise his subjects, to invert this "cold-bloodedness" of the therapeutic gaze. In his last show Scrubs, (shown in Melbourne) his works challenged the rational economy of the operating table by focusing on its protocols, especially the ablutions that doctors have to perform. From this procedure, he constructs a kind of secular ritual, that somehow served to reaffirm the humanity of the covered patients.
This is his first show without an explicitly medical theme, the physician's protocol has been replaced with personal ritual, in a series of symbols whose meaning is unknown to the viewer. On spare white canvas, anonymous hands are presented with objects of personal significance. Right Hand with Plastic Ring, Left Hand with Norfolk Island Tattoo, Left Hand with Roman Coin and Plastic Watch, Left Hand with Dove Ring with Golliwog Broach. The subjects, and how exactly these objects are related to them, are unknown to us. The objects act as avatars for the subjects, asserting their spirit beyond the the corporeal, and what until now has been Meagher's abiding pre-occupation - the mortal.
The spare, white space that Meagher has used in his previous paintings is expanded further here, capturing the subjects' gestures in almost distilled moments, taking them somehow beyond the body. The title of the show -the best gesture of my brain - comes from the e e cummings poem 'since feeling is first': "the best gesture of my brain is less than/your eyelids' flutter which says/we are for each other: then/ laugh, leaning back in my arms/ for life's not a paragraph/ And death i think is no parenthesis." Death is no longer a parenthesis on Meagher's work, and the same cummings poem provides a fitting description of his new subject: the syntax of things. |