Achilles Heel (2005)

*The following blurb accompanied the exhibition "Achilles Heel" at Joan Ferneyhough Gallery in 2005.

“The historical reference to reductivist paradigms here is only a legitimizing façade, concealing what is, in effect, a secret caricature – an image of low intent masquerading in heroic garb.”
Mike Kelley from Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature

In perhaps one of the most celebrated instances of athletic failure, Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner let a routine ground ball go through his legs to lose the 1986 World Series. Buckner was an All-Star first baseman known for his defensive prowess. Given the same opportunity another 999 times, he would make it every time. But on that particular day in October 1986, with millions of New Englander’s prepared to celebrate their first Championship in nearly seven decades, Bill Buckner screwed up. His one time in a thousand, the defining moment of his career (and probably of his life) and he dropped the ball. His name alone has become synonymous with failure. There is a poetry to that sort of grand scale screw up, the great hero who fails to bring us to redemption.

Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary defines a “hero as: a) a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability, b) an illustrious warrior, c) a man admired for his achievements and noble qualities, d) one that shows great courage.” The more recent and politically correct, if decisively less elaborate, Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines a “hero as: a person who is admired for their courage or outstanding achievements.” In both definitions, the word hero is strongly tied to a sense of moral character. A hero is always the “good guy” who saves us, against all odds and at all costs, from some form of “evil”. Whether it’s Superman saving the world from Lex Luther or Albert Einstein saving the world from its own ignorance, our hero’s must survive great obstacles to achieve great results.

The idea of heroism is an important one to the history of Western painting. The heroic themes of Neo-Classical painting, the heroic landscape of 18th Century Romanticism, the heroism of the everyday person in 19th Century French Realism, the heroic scale of History painting and on a personal level the paintings assembled in this exhibition, consumed as they are with paintings history, represent a form of hero worship.

In Twentieth Century Modernist movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction, the idea of heroism becomes even more prominent. Modern artists saw themselves in heroic proportions, defenders of the avant-garde, great explorers of new realms and possibilities. Abstract painters fought stoically through social alienation and financial destitution in an epic quest for purity, transcendence, spiritual enlightenment and the abstract sublime. As a means of historically legitimizing their various practices, their work took on the heroic scale of European History Painting. In place of History paintings literal depiction of human figures engaged in heroic acts they placed the “heroic gesture”. David’s stoic revolutionaries were replaced by Pollock’s chaotic drips and Gericault’s beleaguered castaways replaced by Newman’s emphatic “Zips”. It is this sort of “abstract heroism” that my work draws upon. But somehow, like the work that it evokes, it seems to fall short. The heroic scale of High Modernism is made small and human and modest. Their heroic gestures are appropriated, manipulated and removed from their original context and significance. The romanticism and expressiveness of their grand intentions becomes flattened out, caricatured and made hollow.

As symbols, Modernist paintings epitomize an important era in Western History, signifying an era of unprecedented growth and ingenuity and “progress”; a time that promised to bring us all to salvation with a better life through plastics. But now, like most other products of Modernist Industrialism, the promises of Modern Art now seem empty and naïve. Like the story of Achilles and his infamous heel, the invulnerable hero with a tragic flaw or like Bill Buckner at the 1986 World Series, perhaps we too have dropped the ball.