title. Devotional Fetish Objects

Hooked on images of agony

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ALMOST anything can become an object of veneration if it is attached to the right story.

A believer will revere any relic- from a pop stars underpants to a piece of the True Cross if a piece of the real thing is unavailable a good copy will do.

There are now enough pieces of the True Cross in circulation to make an entire forest.

Since it requires silent longing and acceptance, veneration is nearly always visual.

It depends on the dissolution of the story behind an object into an unyielding contemplation of the relic itself.

Harry Hummerston explores this intense condition of vision and the state of mind behind it in his exhibition of assemblages at Fremantle Arts Centre.

Most of them invoke a clearly Catholic imagery complete with Latin titles.

However, the wall sculpture Unus Oclus Hamus deals with the pure existential agony of the gaze.

At its centre is a decayed resinous eyeball, complete with waxy lids, of the kind familiar in Italian baroque tableaux of St Lucy and other exotic martyrdoms.

From beneath the eyeball there protrudes an old iron hook, its point curved out to the viewer. The eye is so much a part of consciousness emptied by the desire for an object to contemplate that it will hook into anything that appears before it and never let go.

Its frame completes the viewer's discomfort. Normally a frame cases one into the image, the eye passes through it to the proposition within.

or resin through which they are

discomfort. Normally a frame

only part visible. Each is carefully

Hummerston has made his inner frame a fine grade black sandpaper to which the gaze and imagination stick fast.

It forces the viewer 1o take full responsibility for the work. Outside it is a fairground fantasy of red flecked with gold.

Unus Oclus Hamus is one of the finest statements about the pain of looking with longing that I have ever come across.

Objects of this kind were first made by the Dadaists and Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of this century.

Hummerston's Fragilitas recalls an aspect of Large Glass. A devotional print of the Virgin on glass has been cracked and repaired with bronze rivets, echoing the accidental completion of Duchamp's master work by fragmentation.

Hummerston's piece shatters the optimistic optical apparatus of religion. Behind the Virgin can be seen a frieze of crude plaster Christs in bright colours, lined up like fairground targets.

Many of his Fragmentum series feature small devotional images that have been set in cloudy wax or resin through which they are only part visible. Each is carefully framed, often with gold, to suggest its great value.

One image has a single gold brushmark over the resin, like a tiny tear of frustration that obsession alone cannot remake the world as we wish it to be.

Hummerston also arranges objects in boxes as if they have some special purpose, perhaps as a spiritual repair kit.

Reliquiae Arca holds an upper set of false teeth and a small length of thorn twig. In its lid is a heap of tiny plastic skulls behind glass. For some this could be a token of Golgotha. 1 thought of Pol Pot, Belsen and other irreparable crimes against the human spirit.

Occasionally Hummerston descends to simple irony. His Madonna Vachiculum is a toy articulated wagon tricked out like a touring shrine. Its trailer is packed with madonnas in white plastic.

This magical show should not be missed.

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David Bromfield

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