Catalogue Essay by Edward Colless

‘Heav’n & Hell’

Helen Gory Galerie, May 2004

Nothing happens in heaven. Heaven is beyond narrative, beyond any scene. An annulling transcendence of all the strife and the pleasure and pain of history, heaven is the end of the story. In hell, on the other hand, everything happens. Its punishments are the spectacular repetition – infinite in scale, but infinitely repeated in the one undying moment – of all our excesses. Hell is too much of a good thing.

Unlike the pious boredom and inertia of heaven, the bestial copulation involved in hellish torment is a fabulously productive activity, fascinating in the prolific detail of its violence and obscenity. Bodies savagely dissected, brutally deformed and lasciviously conjoined are multiplied to the – always panoramic – horizon of hell, in intricately extended, exquisite spasms. Evidently, hell is the ceaseless consummation and consumption of desire. In this sense, our commonplace inherited image of eternal damnation is a false hell. The true hell is uneventful, heavenly chastity.

What, then, is the sort of marriage of heaven and hell – of the true and false images of desire – proposed by Christine Aerfeldt? This conjugation of the gratification and the overcoming of desire, of torment and emancipation, results in an incandescent party world captured in a double take, saturated with candy colours and propped up by two-dimensional illustrations of religious ecstasy, mythological allegory and pastoral scenery. Its inhabitants have the familiar moral menace and erotic pathos of most dolls – their blank, open innocent eyes; their supplicant, masochistic expression; their smooth, congealed bodies ripe for sexual appropriation. But also, dressed in petite versions of traditional costume evocative of central European folk tale, they adopt the commercial uniform of tourist souvenirs, not only toys (with which one might playfully experiment) but inert signs of a trashed, commodified cultural identity.

Posed in front of reproductions of paintings by El Greco or Watteau from Madrid’s Prado museum that are used as stage flats, Aerfeldt’s figurines are like children playing out a mawkish pantomime for dutiful parents. This cross-cultural montage is allegory in miniature, a dress-up entertainment punctuated by illustrative, but deliberately inconsequential, inter-titles that imply narrative episodes of threat, of delight, and of mischief. Art historical narrative – with all its authority and ponderous, iconological significance – is abducted by a sequence of frivolously sentimental, formulaic captions. Angels swirl in heavenly radiance above some miraculous event, in front of which two giant pouting infants, waving their arms as if doing a little magic act at a party, “get up to childish tricks”.

These porcelain-like, robotic but tricky children eclipse the dramatic or scenic material in the “old master” imagery that drapes their backgrounds. They petulantly demand, and are joyfully given, centre stage; crowding out the art history that they parody and delightfully trash, while looming over us with the gargantuan scale and cute vivacity of a Japanese movie monster, like Godzilla, stomping through a Lilliputian city. Kitsch and cuteness inundate the artistic traditions of the sublime and the picturesque. Aerfeldt’s cast of children is like a gang of ornamental putti or greeting card cupids, pushing their way in front of the painting’s actual subject to steal scene. They are, in other words, both trash (devalued cultural debris or junk) and treasure (relics of childhood memories, mementos or promissory signs).

The conjunction that brings together heaven and hell in this imagery is an alternation of the object of desire as trash and as treasure. What is that object of desire? Art! Where can value and the valueless marry? In something like a Las Vegas chapel: a dream theatre where innocence can become equivalent to its opposite, experience; where love can be staged like child’s play. On one hand, we see art here as a commodity: endlessly reproduced, accessible and reduced to a poster-like backdrop. But we also see art as an elusive aesthetic phenomenon, the product of technique and dedication. In its commodity form, this art is a comic gesture, like the kids’ party trick. As an aesthetic phenomenon, this art is tragic since it deals with the loss and recovery (or vice versa) of cultural identity through the distortions and fallibility of memory. In this tragic cast, memory is more or less opaque representation. As commodity, however, the art of memory is a technique simply of duplication.

Aerfeldt’s children are both tragic and comic. Their robotic play is a repertoire of richly superficial theatrical effects, a sort of burlesque of autobiographical sentiment and cultural memory. Of course, by their play, these children also allude to an erosion of value, not just its transformation. The migration of signs from a cultural matrix onto the mantelpiece or into tourist shops is similar, for this artist, to geographical displacement: diaspora, exile. Identity and cultural value are diminished, producing a leering artlessness in their souvenirs. Yet one can’t help feel that, despite the impoverishment, there is a strong if alien figure being born out of this marriage of heaven and hell: highly adaptable and accepting of changed circumstances with no regrets, like Alice in her Wonderland. If we go down the rabbit hole with her we may go straight to hell. But it’s more fun than the other place.

Edward Colless

Senior Lecturer Art History And Theory

Victorian College of the Arts