It’s only now striking me, several months after attempting to begin this project, how Tim said “there’s a lot of synchronicities” when speaking about both of our practices. He’d said this much earlier than when I first began (or failed to begin) this text, when I’d approached him about taking photos for the cover of an album I made, the latest in a long string of collaborations where his images were paired with my words.
Tim’s work that I’m writing (or not writing) about here – the series of box-triptychs exhibited in a show called Reliquaries – stemmed from him struggling with what to say. When he looked back on the photos he’d taken over the past year though, he found a story was actually there all along, albeit a subconscious and understated one. And now, here I am, struggling to find a way to write about it.
Tim has long been fascinated with Freud which led to his current study of analysis and was the catalyst for bringing Reliquaries into being. Since I continually lacked a way into writing alongside Tim’s work, I decided I’d go to an analyst and talk about this blockage, which I would record, transcribe, and then present as the essay.
Once I went to the first session with the analyst though, it was immediately apparent that I didn’t really have anything to say about not writing this essay. The full length of the first session was used to describe my long history with psychologists since having my first panic attack, and my various prescriptions which attempt to reign in this nervous disposition. A transcription of my words would be of no interest to a reader: both so uncomfortably raw at the same time as being narratively un-curated that it would resemble the most non-juicy parts of a teenager’s diary rather than an illuminating essay made to sit alongside contemporary art.
The analyst I saw (and continue to see) was recommended by friends, and is a Lacanian rather than a Freudian, though in our second session I was distracted and had somehow convinced myself that he was a Jungian, which then became the basis of our third session as I described how embarrassed I was for this slip-up. He ended that day saying I’d be better off if I stopped using the sessions to self-reflectively assess my experience of being under analysis.
***
I should be bringing a heftier notebook around in my little non-purse rather than the flimsy, palm-sized cardboard-covered one I currently use. It doesn’t encourage deeper introspection, only little notes to be passed around in class. Or, alternately, messages like “this is all about to end.” I can understand how writing something like that and leaving it prominently on the island of our kitchen made my parents interpret it as a suicide note, but it wasn’t, or at least wasn’t in a literal way. The situation was made worse, or more heightened, by the fact that a girl at my school had thrown herself off a bridge a few weeks earlier.
Her death occurred on the same afternoon I was reprimanded in class for watching old, digitised videotapes of real deaths uploaded onto the internet. I was experiencing real death at many removes – decades of time, filtered through a computer screen, the fuzzy resolution of the video cameras, the anonymity of the people being bludgeoned – while I could have gone five minutes down the road and seen the real thing happen to someone I vaguely knew.
Mum was called in to talk with the principal about the videos. They both kept telling me how since Dad was a cop, my actions (watching something doesn’t seem like an action to me) were especially bad because he represented the moral backbone of the community. I pointed out how illogical it was to judge me by this because I’m not him and it felt sexist, like a girl shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing. Both Mum and the principal really kicked off at this, and it was clear I hadn’t convinced them of anything.
For all my protesting about not being like Dad, I was at that point attempting to experience some kind of identification with him since I was undergoing rehearsals for the year 9 class production where I played a cop. It was a modern reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken: an 1899 play about a sculptor who leaves his wife for his previous lover.
To prepare, even though my role was small, I sat in front of the mirror in my bedroom and stared as hard as possible until I could see my dad’s face appear in place of mine, like I was willing his DNA to take over my own. I told myself this was for the play, but I think that deep down it was really for me, to see if I was able to become my dad, to try on his skin as a play-version of my own potential future.
***
As Tim was about to move to the US, he gifted me one of the works from Reliquaries. It’s titled Dora and, like the other works of Reliquaries, is a white, perspex-covered box about the size of a nondescript kitchen appliance, which can be adhered to the wall. Its three horizontal faces each display a different, framed photograph, and in mine: the centre image is a rack of countless headless torsos on Calvin Klein underwear packets, the right is a needle being threaded, and the left is a praying mantis Tim obsessively visited and shot weekly at a museum. It was named Dora, striking Tim as this was the name of a patient of Freud’s, the case study on her having recently come to mean a lot to Tim.
While mating, female praying mantis’ are known to bite the heads off their male partners, though this doesn’t stop them from copulating (as in, the men can keep fucking even without a head). Lacan spoke about the praying mantis, which I’ve heard referred to as both a thought experiment and a parable. From my very uninformed understanding, Lacan theorises that if you were a praying mantis and you were wearing a mask, but you didn’t know if that mask was male or female, you’d experience anxiety as you wouldn’t know how you were being perceived, therefore meaning you wouldn’t know if you were at risk of decapitation. This experience can be extrapolated to our non-insect lives where anxiety stems from not knowing how you/we/one is being perceived.
As a child, I had a fear of prying mantis’, though I can’t imagine I knew about their cannibalistic, psychosexual implications. I was scared because they were long and unpredictable and their heads looked like those of aliens. Arguably related though, I started having extreme panic attacks from age 10 or 11, around the same time I began to suspect I was a faggot, but this is also kinda meaningless as Lacan’s description of anxiety is not the same as a DSM-style definition of the word which has come to define it for me across decades of psychology and counselling.
***
I was grounded for the videos I watched in class, and while the hours confined at home were highly upsetting for my sense of agency, as well as just deathly boring, I decided to come out of my room and participate in Dad’s semi-regular ritual of inviting any and all colleagues from the cop shop to get plastered at our house after work. Maybe it was just to withstand it, but I saw this as an opportunity to observe what he and the boys were actually like. Their lack of inhibition would allow access into the psychology of the cop I was set to play on stage.
These marathon drinking sessions could take place any night of the week, regardless of how early Dad was supposed to be up the next day. If it was work night, he’d generally stay up drinking until morning and leave still fucked-up. It was fun when I was young enough that I was barely sentient, though by the time I’d gained any sense of self, I was smart enough to stay as well away as possible.
Apart from constantly offering me drinks (all of which I rejected), the night otherwise seemed routine for each of the men. My presence made no difference to them. It seems likely it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, but as it grew later and each became duller from their cheap beers, they didn’t notice all my time with The Colonel. I’d been around him when I was a little girl, but hadn’t seen him in at least five years. We re-met that night, which changed my life forever. I’d like to think that it changed his too, but I can’t really be sure.
***
As with all of Tim’s work, I loved the images of the strange boxes he sent me. I could immediately see meanings and connections amongst the photographs they displayed, though in his intimate and intuitive creation and sequencing, there were no didactic readings to be made. To have my text simply describe the boxes and my interpretation of them was to put too much significance on a correct outcome or reading. All of Tim’s evocations were understated and psychic.
It wasn’t until the Dora box arrived at my house that I realised I’d been imagining them all backwards. I don’t know how I came to this understanding, but I had originally believed the photo triptychs were inside the box, and that a viewer had to peer into this tiny private space, a metaphysical model or dollhouse domestic drama. I originally conceived in this text that my analyst was inside the box while we had our sessions over Zoom. But the artworks are not that way, they are empty inside. When mounted on a wall, you can’t see what’s beyond their surfaces. You can’t even touch the photographs since they’re protected by a hard plastic barrier.
Text by Angus McGrath
***
I was trying too hard to reach a clear conclusion, but the story is too big and I can’t contain it simply inside myself. I can’t cleanly resolve the emptiness and anxieties of the ultimate other, even though it emotionally made sense to me in the moment. There’s so much middle to the story, but a screenwriting book I frequently look to states that you need to know the ending, and from there instructs you to write the most boring (and in my opinion, unnecessary) beginning: the normal world before conflict is introduced to the central character.
I was tempted to make an ending where the girl turned into a giant praying mantis as a homage to the ambiguous and startling expressiveness of the movie Enemy. I had to be honest though that this was lacking in substance, too circularly pointing back to the key image of the praying mantis to provoke an unsolvable sense of mystery.
The writing never gets finished. She stabs The Colonel in the face so many times that his tongue is severed and he bleeds to death. From there, there’s no ending. The story dissipates and evaporates like the girl. She turns into pollen on the breeze.