Melissa Coote’s work invites both intimacy and distance. A demanding and intricate technique produces pieces of large and compelling presence, unrelenting in their detail, contemplative in their relation to the subject matter. The work does not dictate to the viewer nor impose a particular history. Confident and haunting, the series put their subject matter under a meticulous and patient investigation. A cadaver seen in a longitudinal slice, a hand, the bone of an animal skull: the original images are studied, shifted, altered, repeated, until they seem both to disappear and to expand into all the available space. Modernism’s visual traditions are drawn upon, only to be extended and made strange. For the direction of the work has less to do with philosophical conventions of series and sequence than with a desire for pure reflection. The intensity of the painting’s materiality- layered, multiplying and complicating the medium, sanding, drilling and polishing the surface- leads into a domain that is more intuitive, somatic, visceral. The significations of an inner world offer themselves, call to the inner worlds of the viewer. But those meanings are also withheld, since this work wants to preserve its reticence. If it comments on the power of repetition in modernist and postmodernist practice, it is never content to play with the ironies or whims of our expectation. It leaves us suspended between recognition and doubt.
Melissa Coote speaks of her process as central to the outcome and effects of her work. It is a work that returns again and again to the structures and experience of subjectivity, as it does to the structures and experience of the body, human and non-human. She asks what it is like to live in a world attentively, not blinded by convention nor rushed into response by the need to perform. In these moments, which her art explores, subjectivity does not mean being imprisoned in the personal: we are not controlled by the meanings of the artist, nor are we free to indulge our own habitual expectations and interpretations. We can respond to an object, an idea, a work by using it as a bridge, a way of passing out of the ordinary, towards- what? Another state of awareness perhaps. Western culture, when it makes a place for such meditative moments, treats them as extraordinary, exceptional, for an elite. Coote’s art demands that we raise our expectations of what is ordinary.
Melissa Coote’s large, dark and troubling paintings occupy a space of ambiguity and seduction. They are interested less in bringing the act of representation to a successful conclusion than in observing changes and stillness within an inner world- that of the artist, with her reticence, her meditative reserve, her attention to the intuitive and the internal history of the body; that of the viewer, drawn into these mysterious still lifes detached from any commonplace context. Joan Grounds has said of these works, painted in Paris between 1996 and 1999, and in Sydney in 1999 and 2000:
| The subjects are longitudinal slices of a cadaver, skulls and bones of Australian animals, and studies of two hands drawn from a point of stasis, either between motion or rising to or falling from action or rest. The scale of the work is huge and the colour monochromatic. I hesitate to say monochromatic, because there is so much ‘colour’ in the black and white, but literally, they are monochromatic. There is a way in which these works could be the grist of a postmodern investigation through juxtaposition… where the works, in exhibition, can be read as an enlarged version of traditions of modernism. Even the stuttering images of a row of almost limpid hands could be read that way if read in a cursory manner. But a more subtle reading, and I believe true reading, is that the works are a very profound vehicle to an awareness in much the way a totem or votive is a vehicle to another state of awareness. |
Lisabeth During
June 2000, NY