Something for Your Mouth to Do
A companion essay for Anna McDermott’s exhibition, The Sunny State for Shady Characters, with Paul Hogarty (1960–2019) | Seventh, Wurundjeri Country.
I find myself bringing my fingers to my lips.
They twist slightly, with the lifted forefinger guarding the middle. I might be walking up Elizabeth Street at night, or sitting with a friend in a cafe — leaning back and listening. The fingers’ cocked posture and placement near the cheek mimics the holding of a cigarette. I inhale through the right side of my mouth in a juvenile fantasy. I snap my tongue against the back of my bottom teeth, picking the wet gum line like a harp as if to say, “You’re keeping me.”
I have never smoked before, though. My maternal grandmother died from an illness caused by smoking, so it is somewhat taboo in my family. Nana was first encouraged to start smoking by her doctor to deal with the stress of parenthood. Mum made us promise that we wouldn’t smoke after she died. I still haven’t.
The title of Anna McDermott’s exhibition comes from her uncle Paul’s journals. Paul wryly nods to some pleasant vista for a questionable underclass. Victoria, of course, is not known for its sun. Short of repeating that exasperating cliché about four seasons, I would say our sunny state is more famous for its miserable people than its weather.
Melbourne is a warm bath after all. People flock here because it appears to be so liveable and lovely, but also because nothing ‘moves’ here or changes. It is new but familiar, dressed up as a bullet yet immobile. It is a city that is easy to move to but difficult to leave, such is the tepid pleasure of loving-to-hate. Would-be icons of creative industry dive deep into said bath because nothing pairs with a VCA education quite like Cuban-heeled boots and endless whinging.
We are all cynics in Melbourne then, but only because we pretend to be. Earnestness is a dirty word, and we deflect any slither of sincerity through the prism of self-debasement and irony. We, the shady characters, relish in the performance of snark and bite and knowing sorrow to mask our genuine unhappiness.
Speckled like a quail’s egg, the prints from Paul’s journals are milestones from an intense journey. Leaving that tall glass of inner North sardonicism at the bar, McDermott presents these printed excerpts as unaffected missives from Paul’s uncertain afterlife. Smears of charcoal and oil pastel, dragged and caught on the thumbprint of the paper, swirl around thoughtful notes penned in black. The magnified grain of the scans hung upon the walls evokes a darkroom, and suddenly we are examining scenes fresh from the enlarger — the eye drifting in a chemical bath, reading chemical words.
The installation is intimate. I am reminded of those spotlit nooks at funerals and trite twenty-firsts, where an easel is erected with a photo collage of the newly deceased/newly adult. The similarity is not the content, of course, but the framing: a public vantage on a life rendered matter of factly yet imbued with private care. Why these images, these words?
Alongside these prosaic images, a video depicts a mouth plucking at an acid-green olive. Lanced with a silver pick, the fruit rolls between wet lips. A fixation point, and a departure from the text-dressed walls, the video complicates our approach to the work. The imagery is hot, and we are confused. Can I be horny at this wake; desiring at this intervention delayed by so many years and realised only now by careful, sober insight?
Many of us will relate to McDermott and by extension, Paul. We might reflect on our own lives as artists — burning brightly with short wicks and seeking refuge in bad habits, dissatisfied with the state of play. Like you, I know Paul. He reminds me of myself — the kind of man whose friends are never quite sure of him. They ask, “Are you doing ok?” They worry he will hurt himself, or kill himself, and can never quite parse the sincerity of his declarations and promises otherwise, or his ability to be honest without jokes and avoidant gymnastics.
My need for a ‘smoke’ was strongest during the lockdowns. I would look out at the city from my one-bedroom apartment in Northcote and wonder if something illegal would make my life easier. I recalled a former psychiatrist saying, “Your life is shit because you don’t put anything good in it.” I thought about red wine and black tars. I thought about sex, and cruising in Abbotsford near the river bend, or how I’ve never initiated an under-stall exchange (the choreography of foot-tapping eludes me).
More recently, I told my therapist that I feel like a ghost. I’ve told her that I feel like a ‘half-being’ that observes other humans in a fugue of depersonalisation. I am “half in the door, half out” — my suicidality represents my desire to leave the room entirely. I suggest that I have human likeness but not human responses. As in, I do not or cannot relate to or realise the depth of other people’s ways of living; things are and must be different for me. Kindness is for others, I must be punished. Rest is for others, I must persist. The internal logic is one of contrarian self-loathing, and it is deeply frustrating. Is this all life is: fighting with myself?
Freud called it the death instinct. This instinct, or drive, is the urge we feel towards destruction. Our drive towards living, or Eros, is affirmed by pleasure — by the pursuit of love and sex — and the opposite is true of the death drive. Self-destruction is affirmed by the impotence of love. Self-destruction is born of our frustration with love and pleasure as inadequate modes for existing. This is not to say that destruction is not pleasurable in some way, but rather to say that love is not enough; that Eros is imperfect.
I cannot assess nor vouch for the empirical merit of Freud’s claims, as they are frankly fanciful — even Freud admits as much (1). However, in their fancy, they remain helpful for understanding the romanticisation of substances and self-destruction that I pose here, and that McDermott and her uncle gesture to.
I am ashamed that I want to smoke, knowing that it is ‘bad’ for me, yet I equally crave the feeling of a svelte cigarette between my lips. I keep forbidding myself from engaging in this desire, though, and by enacting such a moralistic position against myself ostensibly extend my life at the expense of my ego. Life goes on, and I can only pretend to smoke.
And yet, in my sadness and frustration, I yearn for that small death. For something for my mouth to do, like Paul had: a cross.
According to Freud, when faced with a pacifying situation — with victimhood — we would sooner lash out and incur displeasure than endure without control. We would sooner risk unhappiness or even danger for the sake of dominion than sit with impotence; seek revenge against ourselves (or even others) than let our uncaring lives persist unpunished. As was the case for my grandmother prescribed cigarettes for stress, we engage knowingly or otherwise in behaviours that preserve the ego while shortening life, such that living becomes tolerable.
It is this urge towards a moderated obliteration that places the ego in its duet with the world and permits the former to aggress against the latter as a means of self-preservation. The death drive is the fury one feels at being, and wherein that rage might otherwise be displaced and focussed upon others, a recognition of the death drive permits an inward search:
The fateful question for the human race seems to be whether, and to what extent, the development of its civilisation will manage to overcome the disturbance of communal life caused by the human drive for aggression and self-destruction. (2)
How do we live if locked between smoking and make-believe; between the death instinct and the need to stay alive? McDermott generously circles some possible directions, or re-directions, born of her love for Paul and his dance with imperfect Eros.
The strength of McDermott’s show is its ambiguity and within that its sincerity. Ideally, art should gesture towards something that is beyond experience — something that rests in the realm of that most diabolic notion, Nature. Acknowledging that I sound like a fawning Classicist, I believe that art is most potent when it embraces its status as a knowable placeholder for that which is otherwise unknown (3). Art that seeks solely to proselytise or dictate or persuade is overt; is art that looks to the viewer as unintelligent and incapable of navigating the vagueness of reality. Though I would hesitate to call this ‘bad’ art, I would counter that stronger entries allow for readings into and through themselves. When art becomes a symbol, it sings.
Therein lies the function of ambiguity, and the tacit strength of McDermott’s work: permission to read, to listen.
When I say that we are seeking something for our mouths to do, I mean that we are looking for ways to live not despite the death drive, but because of it. We seek a mouth that renders the ghost material, even momentarily, to combat our ironic dislocation and impotence. We seek the knife, the glass, the bet, the wine, the needle that we might close our lips around and by doing so meet the need for a distraction from the imperfection of love and life. We seek something for the mouth to do that would bring us forward into the room, and herald our debut as the masters of our own lives. We seek a banner that would proclaim us ‘victims no more’ to time, banality, and boredom. We seek new pleasures beyond pleasure: fleeting domains and the means to die a little, lest we simply pass away. ▮
Notes
(1) Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), see 16.
(2) Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents. Translated by David McLintock. (Penguin, 2002), 106.
(3) Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, Inc, 1992).
