Armstrong’s Anatomia

In olden times it was often believed that the egg or spermatozoon in the human reproductive cycle contained what was called a homunculus, a diminutive but fully formed human being. No doubt the earliest medical experiments to prove this fact would have led to some ghastly scenarios enacted on bodies retrieved by the resurrectionists – grave robbers – and a bizarre array of glass vessels filled with macabre attempts to prove this theory. As viewers and voyeurs we are both attracted to and repulsed by the grotesque; witness the hordes of visitors to Gaetano Zumbo’s infamous collection, Anatomia Barocca, in the La Specola museum in Spain, or the curiosities and grotesqueries of the Mütter Museum in the College of Physicians of Philadelphia or the jars of deformed foetuses in the war museum of Saigon. There is something about the flesh gone awry that pricks at some dark dread that is mixed with a visceral delight. There is something of this quality in the strange attraction that Benjamin Armstrong’s work inspires.

Armstrong’s weird, waxy distended eyeballs and strange hour-glass sculptures were standout works in such recent high-profile group exhibitions as A room inside at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, Before the body – Matter at the Monash University Museum of Art and Primavera at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. But it was with his first commercial exhibition, The Shape of Things to Come at Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries earlier this year, that Armstrong made his mark.

Writing in The Australian in 2008, critic Sebastian Smee waxed lyrical, describing Armstrong’s foray as “the most dazzling show of the new gallery season.”

“Armstrong’s sculptures sit on the floor like empty, inflated condoms or giant eyeballs. They are entrancing objects, eliciting physical responses that flicker between disgust and sensuousness… there’s no doubt that the sculptures are among the strangest, most beguiling works of art produced in Australia in the past 10 years.”

While this may be a slightly over-the-top statement, there was no disputing the visceral punch that the show threw. The exhibition featured ten intense sculptures and a group of singular, hand-crafted prints which featured line-work that felt decidedly instinctual and hinted at the internal body. Strange organic forms permeated the works, hinting at reproductive biology for an alien race, specimen jars containing mutated organs or the results of a mad alchemists’ bid to conceive new life forms.

Indeed Armstrong had managed to find a balancing act between the repulsive and the elegant, finally tuned grotesqueries that reminded many of the work of Louise Bourgeois.

“There is a paradox that has often come up during the exhibition, which relates to the feminine quality of the work – its sensual nature,” Armstrong says. “Some people think a female made the work. Maybe people are feeling this through the delicate nature of materials – or could it be the fragile nature of the work, or a sensual touch? I enjoy this paradox – I find it particularly interesting when contradictions or polar opposites are fused within one work, when the work opens up contrasting thoughts; birth-death, growth-decline, micro-macro, or things that slide between meaning; are they eyes, testicles or a lump of wax?”

Armstrong remains somewhat ambivalent about the comparison with Bourgeois “I think people can’t help but relate work to other artists and art. It’s the way they try to make sense of what is before them. It would be curious to see my work in the same space as Bourgeois’, the differences would become evident rather quickly.

“The artists I look too are many,” he says, citing the Italian Impressionist sculptor, Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) as remaining a major influence, “a pillar,” he says.

“Particularly for the way he thinks across the object and the image and the continuous dialogue between them.(he was one of the first artists to do so) I was lucky enough to see a significant exhibition of his work in Venice last year – including many things from his own estate. Rosso’s work is fabulous – it ‘touches’ you – it’s an example of sensation/thought outside of language.”

Armstrong is a tirelessly curious individual and an avid reader, but when asked if there was a literary equivalent to his work, then what would it be, he sounds somewhat baffled.

“Most difficult! I don’t want to ruin great literature…. I still think about Coetzee’s short talk about ‘thought outside of language’ – that one can think, feel and respond to things without necessarily articulating or understanding that sensation through words or language. Gut feelings can count for a lot. Music has to be the one of the better examples how one can feel that sensation. We have all had that extraordinary feeling music can shoot through you. There is a musicality in Thomas Bernhard’s writings, a rhythmic washing of text, it retains an intensity which becomes like a live feed into the mind – like you’re reading unedited but necessary thoughts. In relation to the prints, maybe the literary equivalent is this musicality in writing – the narrative within this is important – but never needs to be epic. Often the greatest writing is about the smallest things – think of the silly but revealing joke about Marcel Proust’s great book where in the first 100 pages all he does is roll over in bed.”

There is an inherent physicality, even potential sexuality, permeating Armstrong’s work, however if it is sexual it is an alien sexuality indeed. There were most certainly hints of phallus’ and vaginal cavities. Elsewhere eyes, which had an unnerving resemblance to testicles, stared out of glass-rendered urns, suggesting the notion of the voyeur and recalling the strange literary imagery of Georges Bataille.

“The sexual content is there – like it is in everyone’s body,” Armstrong says. “But it is only one aspect. There are so many aspects to us all and [to] the work. Maybe the ‘alien’ aspect could be a way of describing something that doesn’t immediately reveal itself? Something we don’t know exactly how it looks?”

That is certainly the case with Armstrong’s work. Nothing in this body of work sits comfortably with reality. There is the sense of the abject but it is presented with a strange delicacy. Materials, glass and wax, both share a sense of the temporal. Both materials at the right temperatures melt and of course it is heat that forms these cool shapes. But with their delicacy we find the warmth of the viewer – that side of the human race that wishes to preserve well-crafted objects, regardless of the fact that they cause disquiet, a sense of Freud’s Uncanny.

Armstrong’s carefully considered use of the gallery space created a garden of not-so earthly delights. Like Hieronymus Bosch, unlikely elements leapt out of this alien topography. It was at once fleshy yet cool, like the results of an odd autopsy. In an article penned for The Guardian newspaper in 2005, the English author J.G. Ballard speculated on the appeal of the television series CSI – Crime Scene Investigation. He concluded that: “I suspect that the cadavers waiting their turn on the tables are surrogates for ourselves, the viewers. The real crime the C.S.I. team is investigating, weighing every tear, every drop of blood, every smear of semen, is the crime of being alive. I fear that we watch, entranced, because we feel an almost holy pity for ourselves, and the oblivion patiently waiting for us.”