Philip Brophy: art, sex and psychosis
Frames from Colour Me Dead—Chapter 5: The Hungry Vagina, 2013
synchronized high-definition animation displayed on 3 monitors, sound, 6 minutes
© Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Originally posted: Wednesday, 7 August 2013 at 12:05pm
For more than 20 years Philip Brophy has been contemplating the way sex, violence and dead bodies have been represented in cinema.
An artist, filmmaker, cultural theorist and musician, Brophy has explored many of these ideas in the broad scope of his art practice. He did so in 1988 with the 57 minute film, Salt, Saliva, Sperm & Sweat which explores how an office worker's existence is dictated by his bodily functions and now again in his exhibition Colour Me Dead, currently on show at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne.
"Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat is an essay film," Brophy adds, "a pretentious intellectual exercise to make that kind of point [...] that where there's going to be images of sex there's going to be violence in those images and whenever there's images of violence there's going to be sex in it."
Born in 1959 in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, in his late teens Brophy formed the post-punk band, cum experimental art group Tsk,Tsk,Tsk. By the 1980s he was collaborating with numerous artists in Melbourne's then dynamic art scene, staging events and creating experimental films, video and art. He also began to address what he describes as the 'rampant body-ness of contemporary times', in films like Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat and in his 1993 feature, Body Melt, a film about residents of a small town who unknowingly become test subjects for an experimental body eating drug. To this day cult movies fans, including Quentin Tarantino, maintain that Body Melt is one of Australia's finest 'Ozploitation' movies.
For the past three years Brophy has dedicated endless hours reviewing more than 3000 works of art. He has literally travelled the globe to look at paintings from Neoclassicism through to the post modern era, from 1700 to the 21st century. "You have to look at these works in person because you definitely can't get it from a book," Brophy explains.
At the end of this viewing odyssey, Brophy has come to the conclusion that the art establishment needs to re-evaluate or at least acknowledge that there is a psycho sexual overtone in the way men have visualised women.
His research has culminated in a large-scale exhibition of images, animations and films, shown across three large exhibition spaces at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. Colour Me Dead features six new digital works based on key motifs that run through the canon of art history. In his research Brophy has grouped together works that maintain certain elements across a period of 300 hundred years: women in nature, women in water and hybrid depictions of sexuality.
For example, the grouping The Morbid Forest illustrates how, for more than 300 years, the female figure has been portrayed, often in vulnerable states, in forest settings.
Brophy's research is attempting to counter a simplistic argument that somehow cinema was responsible for the violence that appeared to be permeating society. What he maintains is that the implied sexualised violence on the movie screen can be traced back to the work of artists over the past 300 years.
"In the 1980s there was a really naive idea that cinema somehow created that [sexual violence] phenomenon," he says, adding "I never really bought that argument."
Having worked as a director, Brophy has seen firsthand how works of art are readily referenced for inspiration during the production process.
At the The Louvre in Paris and London's Tate, Brophy found key works of art in his research often hung in obscure spots, away from the crowds assembled to view masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance or Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. It is as if these revered institutions are almost slightly embarrassed by these works of art. For Brophy, the art institution is part of the problem when deciphering the history of sexuality in art.
"When you read the background literature [of these paintings], or you try to find the authoritative voice, all they talk about is truth, beauty, nature, the artist's vision, but I'm thinking 'what about the nude women here?'."
"There's a lot of showing women in intensely bright light, then there's lots of women just lying in the forest, then there's this thing where the painting just seems to be a vagina," he says.
"I can't be the only person that sees these things, I don't think it's a revelatory thing to look at these paintings and think 'that looks pretty unsavoury', " he adds.
Brophy argues that the 'unsavoury' way the female form has been represented throughout art history didn't simply end with the dawn of Modernism. "There was [then] a general momentum in painting to slowly destroy the nude," he says. Modernism made a scapegoat of the female nude because it was a symbol of all art that preceded it. In the process of killing off the 'old art', artists often disfigured and dismembered symbolic representations of naked women. "Each artist did it in their own way," Brophy says, pointing out the work of Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.
Brophy suggests Duchamp very intellectually dismantled earlier modes of representation, for example his 1912 painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 features a female form literally split into a two dimensional plane as it appears to move through time, while artists like Picasso and Pollock attacked it in a more expressive and intuitive way. Recalling one of Picasso's later paintings, Nude Woman with Necklace (1968), that he saw in the Tate, Brophy says "it's a messy, contorted almost, kind of liquefied version of cubism, of a really ugly depiction of a woman that's naked and she's urinating and lactating at the same time... I mean it's like what are you doing here Pablo?"
According to Brophy, in the rush to champion Modernism, artists like Picasso were heralded as visionaries who exemplified the 'revolutionary spirit' of the times, and what fell to the wayside was an evaluation of what they were actually painting. "A lot of stuff was swept under the carpet of history," he adds.
Brophy says he's not critiquing art for simply objectifying women. "That's too obvious. Of course it's going to be objectification, because first off it's an image."
"Why does art history not acknowledge the broader psycho-sexual ramifications of men visualising women in this way?" he says.
If you accept Brophy's argument, Colour Me Dead, the associated lecture series and the forthcoming book, offer a alternate perspective on the origins of our body-centric image culture.
Art, sex and psychosis: Philip Brophy's final installment of the Colour Me Dead: Illustrated lecture series is on 6.00 - 7.00pm, Tuesday 13, August 2013 at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University.
Related Links:
Philip Brophy's website
Colour Me Dead is on at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University until September 8, 2013.