title. Portent

Harry Hummerston and the Gallery of Fear

 

'people react to fear, not love. They don't teach you that in Sunday school. But it is true'                                                          

Richard Nixon

 

There is an awful lot of fear about at the moment. It is palpable at all levels of our society. From our leaders to our children everyone seems to be worried that something terrible (no one knows what exactly) is about go down. This is nothing new.

 

The beginnings of the third millennium bear remarkable similarities to the end of the first when the Church put it about that the world was to end as the clock ticked over into the next thousand years. It did this as a perverse way of raising membership. People were scared - really scared - that everything they knew was about to be extinguished and only pious redemption could save their wanton souls. It worked well for the Church for a while but the let down was the beginning of the end for religious culture in Europe and ironically the birth of a new secular culture founded on reason and not fear.

 

The ancient Greeks kind of liked fear. They understood it not as a debilitating quality but as a motivating, moral and socialising force. According to Thucydides honour, interest and fear were the three strongest motives for human action. But of the three it is fear that is the most immediate and powerful because it is deeply natural and driven by the most simple and direct of all desires. To avoid death.  To the ancient Greeks death, while inevitable through aging, was always pending because of the constant threat of war and anarchy. This threat, the threat of uncontrollable anarchy and violent death, is at the heart of all cultures. Indeed our modern society is based on what its greatest theorist, Hobbes, saw as the wish for 'immortal peace'. The ancient Greek philosopher Thucydides was among other things Hobbes' most favoured writer but Hobbes disagreed with Thucydides on one fundamental point. The Greek saw war and anarchy as inevitable, uncontrollable and even natural, while Hobbes saw it as the reason for social contracting.  Basically we need to form social alliances to protect ourselves from the threats of lawlessness and despotism. It is through fear of our very lives that order is required to allow for what Hobbes called 'commodious living'.

 

So what has all this got to do with Harry Hummerston's skulls and roses?  Well it is pretty obvious really. The skull is the ubiquitous symbol for death. It is fear made visible. Without going into a massive listing of the use of this symbol it is suffice to say that no other image has the capacity to elicit as powerful an evocation of the fear of death as does the skull. It permeates the history of most cultures and is deeply present in our day-to day transactions with our social environment. The rose on the other hand stands for everything that is cultured and beautiful. The binary these two signs construct reflects the oppositions imbedded in Hobbes' social contract. The fear of death drives us to construct its opposite, namely the benefit of an ordered society.   

 

By juxtaposing and then morphing these two signs, Hummerston is able to point us to the deep dichotomies and fragility of our social order. Nowhere is this more explicit than in Rose Skull, his short animated video where a human skull morphs into a beautiful red rose. This bitter/sweet image is a perfect reminder that out of ugliness beauty can often be born and vice versa.  Similarly By Any Other Name conflates these two seemingly irresolvable images into a hybrid object trapped between two poles. While being neither one nor the other it is its own new image that suggests not a hiatus but a third space - where opposites collapse into a new possibility.

 

There is another beguiling aspect to Hummerston's imagery that is apparent when we consider what can be a fine line between high art and kitsch. So much of the history of art has been over reproduced to the point that it has lost its original meaning and has taken on iconic status within pop culture. The Mona Lisa is probably the best known example where the image has been drained of any of its original intention to become an empty signifier endlessly reproduced on every conceivable piece of consumer product. In a number of the images in this show Hummerston has pushed their reproduction to the point of saccharin excess. The large rose digital prints look like they are about to explode with an over supply of dramatic effect reminiscent of some kind of neo-Rococo wallpaper. This is most obvious in Rose Field which has the power to completely envelop the viewer. You almost drown in this overly rich field of blood redness. This experience is meant to reflect the power of religious imagery. Here Hummerston is rightfully critiquing the power and history of religious propaganda.

 

The religion Hummerston is aiming his barbs at is not that of Christianity as such, although there is plenty of room in this exhibition to examine that if one wishes to. No, it is the religion of globalised pop culture. A culture in which Minnie Mouse replaces the Virgin Mary as the object of devotion and veneration, and our new Astro Boy takes on the role of redemptive saviour. In Minnie, another digital print, the bleeding heart of the Madonna is replaced by the very scary image of Minnie Mouse, ghost-like, appearing to wave at us in a gesture of staged friendship through a veil of skulls and sugary sweet roses. This image is terrifying. It suggests all the weirdness and bizarre beliefs of an American global capitalist culture hell-bent on replacing any sense of moral perspective with the perverse pleasure of consumerist gratification. Minnie becomes some kind of 'grim reaper' inviting us to play with her in a game of life and death.

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Much of the imagery in this show reflects the rhetoric of religious iconography. There is a deeply unsettling effect in many of Hummerston's images that not only replicates the fear of religious damnation but also underlines our mortality in the face of meaninglessness. By using parody Hummerston is able to emphasise the lack of any sustainable belief system by which we may be able to conduct our daily lives. $10 Skulls illustrates this point with powerful pathos. These are off-the-shelf skulls, throw away consumer skulls, that can be bought for ten dollars and then chucked into the bin after they have supplied us with ten seconds of thought. This is a life where entertainment and distraction have replaced the necessity of making sense. Sit back and watch the show (Party).

 

Forty years ago advertising agencies would surreptitiously air-brush skulls into advertisements in a not too subtle attempt to dare people to buy goods like alcohol and tobacco which we knew were bad for us. This heavy handed Freudian tactic has given way to a practice today where a product like Death cigarettes has no hesitation in sticking its taunt right in our face. Today we are constantly being reminded of our vulnerability and possible eminent mortality by a culture that demands us to live while we can. To buy now and pay later. This is not that far from a culture obsessed with its own sense of decay and decline. Hummerston seems to underline the ridiculousness of this condition. In Self Portrait Minus Viscera Hummerston emphasises the veneer of our obsession with death. This grotesque image of an over-sized cut-out model is so exaggerated it loses any possible ability to frighten us. It is rendered benign by its artifice, resembling something more like a toy than a memento mori. 

 

Hummerston has learnt much from Hans Holbein's most famous painting The Ambassadors (1533) in which an anamorphic representation of a human skull sits smear-like across the bottom of the picture. One can not read both the picture and the skull properly at the same time. When you do see the skull it is at the expense of being able to see the painting of the two gentlemen in its correct perspective. This was not some kind of subliminal message that Holbein was trying to slip into the image. It was a tactical move to acknowledge that the awareness of death and its inevitability comes through a realisation that it is just that - something natural and normal. While it is to be feared, it is fear itself that is the real power. Hummerston knows this and by making light of death's signifiers he has made a show full of playful and enjoyable images that do much to deflate our pretensions and self obsession.

 

While Hummerston's imagery alludes to death it is his willingness to extend its significance into its appearances in everyday culture that gives his work a subtlety and menace that makes the usual and expected readings of this symbol even more powerful. This ability to remind to us that the languages we make and use underpin our everyday existence is a strength in his oeuvre that is the mark of an art that is engaging and articulate.  

 

Julian Goddard

December 2002

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