'Libidinous Vigour'

Review of Stewart MacFarlane:
Riddles of Life by Veronique Helmsridge-Marsillian
Craftsman House $49.95hb 168pp, 55 plates in colour 9766410542

published in the Australian Book Review, no. 183, August 1996
 
IF IT'S A FILM, it's a road movie. Desolate urban streets alternate with expansive landscapes which offer no refuge. A bizarre snippet of narrative is illuminated by brutal daylight, nocturnal neon, or postcard-orange sunset. We are offered a voyeuristic glimpse of a variety of human agonies in comfortless rooms and anonymous public spaces. It's a world strewn with fetishistic film noir props; pointy shoes, guns, cars.

Here's the hook, and here's the hitch: inserted into this malaise of modernity is a woman; big eyes, big breasts, big hair; too young or too naked. Whether she shares her pictorial space or enacts some neurotic rite in solitude, she's offered up for unhealthy consumption. There are men here too, and they are vessels of morbid desires and melancholy vulnerability. The dramatic gestures, the teeter-totter on the edge of the abyss, the eye-lines that cross and don't meet, all are familiar tropes from narrative cinema. Welcome to the paintings of Stewart MacFarlane.

MacFarlane is an artist who confronts head-on contemporary anxieties over the depiction of woman's body as a suspect act of objectification. In The Late Show (1989), a naked man masturbates on a bed; in the same room a naked woman sits on a chair, watching television. Her breasts are large; her legs are open to us, exposing her vulva. Such moments of intense disquiet are nailed to the wall with every MacFarlane painting, disquiet aroused as much by his lascivious representation of flesh as by the teasing ambiguities of his pictorial dramas. Too close to pornography for comfort, yes; but the discomfort is interesting in a way that pornography is not. More concerned with the ruptures of spectatorship than with the raptures of sex, MacFarlane's is a joyless world.

MacFarlanes's pictorial lexicon is a re-working of imagery mediated and stylised through advertising and glamour photography, movies, pornography, the whole mass-media swirl. Some-times you get a glimpse of something heartfelt but it's all cleverly masked by the garish and artificial. He has taken the iconographic types of Pop Art — Lichtenstein and Wesselman or more recently Salle and Koons — and re-worked those flattened, comic-strip bodies into inflatable sex dolls. The female body which results is curiously armoured and impervious, a locus of masculine terror and inadequacy. The pleasures on offer, such as they are, are not able to be enjoyed unselfconsciously.

MacFarlane is a mighty colourist, as confident as they come. His is a palette of modernity which glows with petro-chemical vigour; no soupy old-masterly glazes here. The least worrying pleasures of these pictures reside in their physical manipulation of paint; in the bold stripes of pigment that model fabric and flesh, in the unsubtle vibration of colour contrasts. Who else in current Australian painting places figures in illusionistic pictorial space on this monumental scale, with this confidence? Manhattan Memory (1986), for example, is a painting grotesque, claustrophobic, and engaging; MacFarlane has honed his painterly skills to conjure up a majestic, mocking allegory of erotic disjunction.

Yet despite his technical mastery, areas of paint are disappointing. In The Frightened Gods (1987), the fleshly relish that the artist lavishes on a woman's body and face is not carried through to the modelling of boat, figure, or water in the middle distance. The same problem occurs in Thief (1990); the high-rise building behind the victimised woman is a botch-up job. The ambition of MacFarlane's historia is dissipated in these dislocations, when you can almost hear the crunch and grind of faulty pictorial mechanics.

At her best, Helmridge-Marsillian brings a sympathetic verve to her descriptions of fifty-five paintings produced by MacFarlane between 1974 and 1992. The colour reproductions in this book are vivid, accurate and generous. Stewart MacFarlane: Riddles of Life is a monument to the curiosity that MacFarlane's bad-boy attitude gleefully sets in train, but the result is a text chock-full of embarrassments. Helmridge-Marsillian speculates on the 'message' of each painting in a way that is both reductive and over-elaborate. She squeezes MacFarlane's oeuvre to illustrate a taxonomy of sexuality, where each work is conceived as the pictorial expression of some narrative crisis, a crisis which demonstrates that libido is displaced from healthy expression by the problem of modernity. This doesn't work as literature, it doesn't work as psychoanalysis, and it certainly doesn't work as an criticism.

Interspersed with these ill-conceived narrations are bizarre pronouncements on sexual psychology. For example, under 'Attempts and Failures at Bridging the Abyss [between the sexes]', I read that 'homosexuality (which is not represented in MacFarlane's work to date) includes genital activities indeed, but leaves each sex as firmly isolated as before'. I could quote many more in a similar vein. The index to Riddles of Life is a document of eccentricity in itself. Where was the editorial guidance that this book desperately needed?

It's too soon to write a book about MacFarlane; he's in his forties and I would guess that his best is yet to come. But if it's not too soon, then this is not the book. MacFarlane is not a solemn alienist of sexual pathology. The real problem of Helmridge-Marsillian's text is that, in seeking to flatter these works, she has done them a disservice. The paintings shrink from her clinging caresses. She forces false systematisation and false narrative closure on MacFarlane's work, so that Riddles of Life negates the menacing ambiguities that give his pictures such libidinous vigour.