The Cut
(Images to come)
JULIE FRAGAR curated by AMANDA DAVIES In conversation with KYLIE JOHNSON
Contemporary Art Tasmania, 2020.
AD Julie, in The Cut your paintings chart your unusual experience of shadowing a gynaecological surgeon and witnessing surgery. You sent me a text message in January 2020 about the shock and exhilaration of this super intense spectacle you had just witnessed, the shock of that moment is evident in your paintings. Do you think about the work as a kind of witnessing to traumatic experience?
JF Not always traumatic but certainly felt experience. I’ve always made work about human experience and have become interested in what happens when we - individual people with individual needs - hit up against larger institutional systems like courts and hospitals. Some of the most deeply felt experiences of our lives take place in the context of big - necessarily ham-fisted - organisations. We haven't (until Covid) paid much cultural attention to the hospital, especially in art even though it is the place where we are born, give birth or die.
AD On a formal level, your paintings are phantasmic, ‘dizzyingly compressed’ spaces full of narrative. In both formal and thematic terms, they remind me of Max Beckmann’s The Night (1918-19). He experienced war as a medical orderly and this horror led him to develop paintings depicting multiple realms of experience. Your works seem to have both this intense and urgent expressionist field. Are they linked to Expressionism?
JF I haven’t thought about my work on those terms, probably because I have been working from the Realist tradition for so long, focussing on the everyday end of life. In more recent composite works though, I have been thinking about psychological affects. I used to start with an image/ photograph. Now I start with what the whole situation feels like and make a drawing that has that feeling. The more concrete imagery comes later. With Baby Dreaming (2020), for example, I saw the expectation women place on this very specific part of their bodies to produce a child and by extension an imaginary world of bliss and bows. So I wanted to make a painting that embodied that feeling of expectation where the image would visually and energetically erupt from that part of the body. But I try also to not get too carried away with expressive elements and to keep one foot in reality. I use tropes like the white sneaker in The Surgeon (2020), to root the psychological in the physical, because that's where our psychology lives.
AD During your time at St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital, you witnessed patients being anesthetised: being rendered insensible, moving through states of awareness, from sleep to wakefulness. Looking alive to ‘deadish’ under the glare of the theatre lights. I wonder how a painting can represent this rollercoaster of emotions?
JF Yes and under those conditions one has to ask where we actually exist. In the operating theatre I viscerally understood the flimsiness of a person. The very same bodies that were in one moment talking were, in another moment, meat objects. And that transition happens invisibly. There's no clear point at which the person is extracted and set aside. When the operating starts the surgeon goes inside the body, and inside the body is more body—Underneath is More Underneath (2020)—until they come out the other side. Throughout which the person is nowhere to be found. This seems like a basic clichéd idea—who are we?—but the operating theatre makes that question of what a human life actually is, absolutely palpable.
AD Could you talk about the slippages in your work? Was this a means to give form to witnessing of patients moving between states of consciousness in the operating theatre? You wrote to me about the overlapping and simultaneous stories, the ‘all at once’ as Greenberg said. Multiple perspectives and multiple layers rendering your paintings with a dreamlike appearance.
JF Yes like the Cubists already knew, we have to consider a multiplicity of perspectives in any given scenario. Of course all these perspectives are being funnelled and processed through my subjective eyes. I think today, in politics and in the world, we have become uncomfortable with slippage, and this is dementing to me that everything has to be named and argued from a dogmatic perspective. I am mostly interested in the flip side of everything and I want to insist that everyone and all experiences are far more multi-facetted and nuanced than we readily accept. The operating theatre at the centre of the show is a place where many subjects converge for the express purpose intervening in the body of one other subject. In a way the operating theatre is one of the most acute possible points of human connection or integration. At the same time, the scene is completely different depending on one’s place in it.
AD You have reflected deeply on Marlene Dumas’ work on death and, her ability to depict ‘deadness’ in paint and the limits of paint’s physicality. 1 Deadness is there in your horizontal planes of figures and monochrome colour, yet your paintings also move towards life, encompassing portraiture, individual gesture and temporality. You seem to be using the materiality of painting to play out those observed oscillations between life and death, using the single field of painting to show that irreconcilable simultaneity you suggest. At the same time you seem to be playing out this idea of the cut or the wounding of the ‘skin’ that has a long history in painting. Peggy Phelan writes about Caravaggio’s, The Incredulity of St Thomas, ‘the wound’ and the limitations of Painting’s ‘interiority’, which can’t be accessed though Painting’s body - its skin and its surface. 2 This for me is the issue, feeling is always represented through both the skin of the body and the skin of painting.
JF I wasn’t thinking about that when I went into the project but yes, I liked that parallel between the cut at the centre of the operating theatre and the material ‘skin’ of painting. The ruptures - wipes, scrapes or ‘patches’ 3 in the paintings ended up serving a combined purpose as both a visual analogue for the surgical cut and an affective kind of wake up call to one’s own corporeality. These kinds of visual interruptions can snap us out of the illusion of the image and bring us back to the real world and to our bodies. In these hospital paintings, that corporeal affect takes on another doubled layer of meaning. Referring not just to our own mortal bodies but to all those physical bodies at the centre of a hospital’s purpose.
[1] Julie Fragar, Kissing the Toad: Marlene Dumas and Autobiography, PHD Griffith University 2013 p107 - 108 [2] Peggy Phelan, 'Whole wounds: bodies at the vanishing point', Mourning Sex, Routledge 1997 p.35 [3] Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The art of not describing: Vermeer-the detail and the patch’, History of the Human Sciences 2 (2):135-169 (1989)
This exhibition was a part of a series of collaborative exhibitions at Contemporary Art Tasmania entitled Circumbinary Orbits.