The Influence of Anxiety

These six artists present works that consider the theme of anxiety. The art works in this exhibition not only represent various aspects of the state of anxiety but mobilise it within the work and the viewer. Anxiety refers to worry that is unfounded and when its manifestation is mild or infrequent it is considered a normal human emotion. When its effect are pronounced, acute or continuous it is considered to be a mild form of mental illness, classified as a neurosis (in contrast with the more serious type of mental illness: psychosis).

This exhibition does not treat the figure of anxiety within the art works as the appearance of a symptom and is not concerned to perform any kind of psychobiography. Instead, anxiety is considered as a rhetorical figure. This essay will mostly consider only how these artworks intersect with the theme, despite the fact that all of the works have other possible readings that might predominate in a different exhibition context.

A dominant tendency in recent international art is towards a disavowal of anxiety through a process of ‘desentisation’ towards those things that normally instill fear in us and one motivation behind curating this exhibition is to counteract this trend.
By this, I mean that art of the last two decades has often been concerned with making the private public and revealing the processes and materials of the body as if, by making visible what is normally hidden, we will gain mastery over our fears, even assuming such mastery is desirable.

Examples of well-known artworks that publicise the private include Tracey Emin’s exhibition of what she claimed was her own bed accompanied by bedroom detritus, My Bed (1998), and another work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 in which she lists the names of her sleeping partners. A series of photographs by Richard Billingham that portray incidents in the life of family members and serve to expose his subjects’ domestic life to public scrutiny operate in a similar way, as do Sophie Calle’s surveillance-based works. Sarah Lucas’ photograph Human Toilet (1996) which depicts the artist sitting on the toilet and cradling the cistern may be seen as part of the same trend.

Other cultural manifestations of this include webcams and blogs that seek to broadcast private thoughts, actions and habits in the public domain. And it is also a dominant trend in publishing with the recent rise of the sexual memoir (The Sexual Life of Catherine M by Catherine Millet, 100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed by Melissa P and The Bride Stripped Bare by Anonymous).

But perhaps we our strongest anxieties are those concerning the body and there exists a comparable tendency in contemporary art is to make the body’s tissues and processes (including death) as transparent as possible as witnessed by photography’s recent flirtation with Magnetic Resonance Imaging, by Orlan’s cosmetic surgery videos, Damien Hirst’s display of a bisected gestating cow, Anthony-Noel Kelly’s sculptures based on body parts nicked from the morgue (for which crime her received a prison sentence), Gunther von Hagens preserved corpses, Mona Hatoum’s imaging of the inside of the colon, Marc Quinn’s Self sculpted out of his own blood, and Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca, a laboratory recreation, within the art gallery, of the human digestive process by which food is turned into shit.Recent art’s obsession with confession, exposure, visibility and revelation operates as a defensive disavowal of anxiety and attempt to suppress it; a pre-emptive strike, if you like. But all of this presupposes that exposure to sources of anxiety may serve to alleviate it and such a belief is falsely premised on a misunderstanding of anxiety’s operation – its triggers are symbolic rather than literal. It also overlooks the fact that anxiety does not have to be a disorder but can be a normal, human, framework through which we experience the world and impact upon it.
An art of anxiety promises a sensitisation (or resensitisation) to problematic images and concepts. For the condition of anxiety is to be open to external influence, fine-tuned, expectant, alert to subtlety and nuance and capable of scruple and guilt.

VAN SOWERWINE
Van Sowerwine’s artwork What big eyes you have is an interactive box that plays like a mechanical toy. Inside the box, the scene that greets the viewer resembles one from a dolls house: a miniature bedroom interior in dim light, featuring a doll-child lying in bed with the covers pulled over their head and indistinct shadows cast on the wall by some unseen light source. When the viewer responds to the artist’s invitation to turn the handle on the front of the box, the shadows inside the room change in an endless cycle of indistinct circling creatures.

Night time is often associated with the magnification of fears and anxieties. For a child, this is because of a common fear of the dark, of shadows and of monsters and because of the association between sleep and nightmares. But the monsters that haunt the night landscape of the child give way to different obsessive worries and anxious fears when they become adults. For an adult, sleep may also bring nightmares but sleeplessness brings other torments. Worries seem worse at night because we are alone with our thoughts in the dark. The lack of external stimuli means our thoughts loom larger and we play out the same worries over and over. The endless parade of shadows in this art work mirror this experience of anxiety as an endless cycle.

Sowerwine’s art work borrows the form of a toy (a dolls house) and its means of operation (you wind it up) but subverts a toy’s purpose which is for pleasure and amusement. For instance, the mechanism of a wind-up toy relies on movement created by the release of tension (say in the compression of a spring) but this art work uses a crank to unleashes tension of an entirely different sort. And the carousel is a toy whose endless rotation, often accompanied by music, signifies endless pleasure while this particular carousel perpetuates only torment.

Usually, when a child is afraid of the dark, a lamp or night light offers a solution. Monsters are known to be afraid of illumination so throwing a little light into the dark corners of a room keeps them at bay. But here, the unseen light source does not banish the monsters but produces them, and frankly even eggs them on. If light is normally thought of as the banisher of fears the artwork makes a nice joke that the illumination, far from dispersing the fears, is their source.

A dominant motif in the artwork is vision and visibility. The peephole ensures the viewer’s gaze is highly staged and tightly framed. We are shown how to look, where to look and what to look at. The doll-child looks nowhere, at nothing, or more precisely uses the bedclothes a shield against seeing too much. The word ‘eyes’ in the title What big eyes you have is a further indication that the artwork is about seeing and being seen, including the anxiety that ensues when one is trapped in the gaze of another. Big eyes are the sign of youth and innocence when encountered on dolls, toddlers, stuffed toys and in Disney cartoons. But in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, they conflate the expression of sexual desire with the threat of predation and they operate as the proof by which the wolf is denounced to the reader as a malefactor.

The art work forces the viewer to adopt two subjective positions simultaneously: the all-seeing giant who commands the scene from outside the box but cannot enter it and the tiny doll-child who hides within it. We are the viewer and the viewed. To experience this artwork it is necessary to look inward both literally and symbolically for when we look inside the box we look at ourselves. In one sense (for adult viewers at any rate) this is looking at a younger version of ourself, looking back into or onto our childhood and trying to remember, adopt or recreate the subjective position of a child, although the enclosed box acknowledges that this territory is partly shut-off. But I think the artwork invokes a second, psychoanalytic interpretation as well: that the giant figure outside is the superego that besieges the smaller figure inside, the ego. Anxiety occurs when the superego becomes too dominant: the vigilance and criticism, self-hatred, guilt and inadequacy by which an overactive superego mobilises unfounded fears in the subject.

KATE JAMES
Kate James’ art works adopt the form of therapeutic devices or protective clothing that may be reached for at the first sign of anxiety or panic. These include a set of worry beads and a long, tubular garment (worn across the front of the body with one arm stuck in either end) designed to inhibit nail-biting. Both this hand device and the worry beads are elements from a larger art project of hers, the Anxiety Survival Kit.
Worry beads are intended to be both talismanic and therapeutic. Talismanic because they are thought to have a magic capacity to drain away a person’s anxious thoughts by absorbing them (perhaps they even have a symbolic capacity to ward off the threat of anxiety taking hold of the subject in the first place), and therapeutic because their function, to be fingered in an endless cycle, is intended to provide a distraction and an outlet for nervous energy.

In a sense, the beads may be seen to compress together the obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions that constitute a particular type of anxiety (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) for each bead could represent an anxious moment or anxious thought and running them through the fingers in an endless cycle comprises a compulsive action that accompanies it. The repetition of tiny stitches over the surface of some of the beads signals other obsessive compulsions at work
The proof that the worry beads have been successful in absorbing somebody’s anxieties is that physical signs of psychological suffering have begun to erupt on their surfaces. Growths, calcifications, tiny obsessive stitches and hairy eruptions are being wrung out of them. I think the artist is making the joke that there may be a limit to the amount of dread a strand of worry beads can reasonably absorb and these, pushed beyond their limit, are beginning to crack up.

The worry beads are themselves borne of anxious behaviour. They are manufactured from wool that has been felted, a process that requires moisture, heat, constant pressure and friction to enable the fibres to mesh. The artist rubbed and rolled the fleece around in her hands for interminable periods of time to make it felt. It might be said that the end-use of the worry beads reflects the conditions of their manufacture: the expenditure of nervous energy in a rhythmic pattern forming an endless cycle.

It is also fitting that the beads are made out of the soft fleece of sheep considering that Pan, the god of shepherds and their flocks, gives his name to the state of panic. In classical literature, there emerges no clear reason for why he should be designated the god of sudden and unexpected terror. Like when a State government minister is given two portfolios that sit together uneasily, say Social Security and Gaming, Pan somehow got stuck with Sheep and Terror. That the god of shepherds, sheep, pastures and woodland idylls should also have been co-opted by the ancients for this second purpose seems a non-sequitur. But it is the condition of anxiety to operate as the eternal non-sequitur for anxiety is the perpetual anticipation of the event that-does-not-follow.

These objects have ritual uses and sometimes ritual is a coping mechanism but just as often (as in the case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) ritual is a symptom of the illness. The strategies and preparations these devices depend on operate as typical manifestations of the illness. For the state of anxiety is defined as preparedness for disaster. Taking steps to ward off anxiety operates in the same way as a run on the bank: you create the very situation you were anxious (sic) to avoid. These devices are self-fulfilling in that they induce the anxiety and worse, may act as triggers for further anxieties thus perpetuating and escalating the problem. For instance, the restrictive hand-device may inhibit nail-biting but could also induce other anxieties during its wear and even precipitate a full-blown panic attack if the patient feels trapped inside it and is unable to release her or himself quickly.
And the worry beads can replicate the condition they might otherwise be designed to avoid: encouraging the subject to experience the same endless cycle of anxious thoughts married to the endless compulsive behaviour of fingering the beads. The danger with worry beads, then, is that all that ‘going round and round’ could wind you up tighter than a rubber band.
Of course they appear totally ineffectual as a treatment for anxiety but maybe this not matter when you are dealing with an enemy that is unseen and unknown; perhaps an irrational disease calls for an irrational response.

Indeed, some aspects of their appearance and function make you wonder whether they are a cure or a condemnation. The hand device that restricts movement like a straitjacket or manacles is equal parts deterrent and punishment. Even if it was successful at inhibiting nail-biting, we can’t help noticing how much worse is the cure than the behaviour it seeks to correct. Although worry beads are not worn like a necklace, they are displayed at head height like nooses. Sometimes, what we think of as protection is just restraint. Besides referring to a type of thought, one of the other meanings of the verb to worry is an action whose effects are tangible rather than abstract: to push at something repeatedly, to act upon it, to struggle with it, to gnaw away at it and to wear or grind it down. This reminds us that the long-term effect of anxiety on the subject is repression.

LINDA GOOD
Linda Good’s installation The Persistence of Tears recreates, within the space of the gallery, a closed irrigation system by which plastic tubing on the ceiling conducts water from an unseen source and tins placed on the floor below catch the slow, constant drips. The noise of the dripping is both melodic and, as the title suggests, melancholic. After a while its persistence and monotony becomes a source of discomfort or irritation; it achieves a magnitude of loudness and intrusiveness that is inversely proportionate to the degree of stillness and quietness in the space. There is an obvious joke, of course, that the drips may generate tension or anxiety by their resemblance to those of a dripping tap that induce torment at night when you’re trying to get to sleep.

The dripping water is a source of potential damage and hence represents a problem that needs to be solved. The solution - the placement of tin cans to collect the drips - is a temporary one. For there is no indication this is a short-term measure to cope with heavy rain or anything like that; the supply of water appears to be constant. It is a cycle that appears to have no beginning and no end. Far from solving the problem, the tins merely displace it so that the new threat created is that the tins will brim over and the feared flooding will occur. In other words, it is a system that requires constant vigilance. Its superintendent must monitor the levels, pour out the accumulated water, replace the empty tins, and check to see that no new leaks have formed. But as the viewer of the art work we witness the water level creeping up in the tins and become aware of a limit that’s about to be breached, with the attendant anticipation this creates. A new tension emerges. This system seems to operate around an inbuilt failure as if the efforts to stem the tide barely check the flow of some inevitable force. Like bailing out a sinking boat, the drips aren’t being stopped; they are just being isolated and contained in what appears to be compromise and resignation in the face of powerlessness.

Some aspects of the mechanism of this artwork model the very condition of anxiety. In the operation of anxiety, the coping mechanism (for instance the hyperventilation whose adaptive purpose is to flood the body with oxygen to prepare for so-called fight or flight) often constitutes, if not exacerbates, the problem. In the absence of anything or anyone to fight, and in situations where flight is difficult or impossible (anyone with claustrophobia knows it is a long time between stops on an express train and anyone with agoraphobia knows that regardless of where you are in an IKEA store its a long way to the exit) this hyperventilation with no physical release can lead to a full-blown panic attack with different outward manifestations including screaming, violent trembling, vomiting or collapse. Anxiety constitutes a self-perpetuating system where the emergency measures that are taken displace and exacerbate the problem and set up a regime of constant hyper vigilance in the subject as part of a strategy of containing and minimised harm to themselves.

The Japanese horror film “Dark Water” (2002; dir: Hideo Nakato) uses a comparable motif of persistent dripping through the ceiling of a flat in order to suggest the infiltration into a woman’s home of some creepy and insidious supernatural force. A common subject of horror films is the terror that comes from within. This takes the form of an unseen force that infiltrates society undetected (for instance aliens who adopt human form), substances that come through air-conditioning vents or viruses that multiply within the body. This infiltration always contaminates, either physically (a biological, viral, chemical or genetic threat) or psychologically (an inability to tell the real, genuine and harmless from the deceptive, mutant threat results in the main character encountering harm when they take steps to achieve safety). This slow and deceptive infiltration is insidious and represents a breach of the body, or of private space, that threatens the psyche of the subject.

Flooding, one of the motifs evoked by the art work, is the same name given to a type of treatment for phobia whereby the patient is suddenly exposed to the trigger object or situation in full strength rather than in increments through a strategy of gradual desensitisation. This connection is not emphasised in the work and may not have been intended by the artist but regardless of this, like the condition of anxiety itself, the work represents the egress of harm or disaster, the hidden conduits that channel it and the barriers that may be erected against it.

ANNE WALLACE
Anne Wallace’s painting Rehab is structured around a puzzling incident that the painting resists fully elaborating. The image elicits multiple readings and symbolisms depending on how we interpret the narrative elements depicted, particularly according to the meanings we give to the principal figure in the painting, an enormous supine cockroach.

The painting might be seen to replicate the elements of Franz Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis. It shares the bedroom setting, the open suitcase of the travelling salesman and the giant cockroach that is stuck on its back. There is nothing in the painting that jars with this reading so it cannot be totally dismissed. Yet neither is it definitive; there remain too many other possibilities.
The perspective of the room seems to be tipped upwards, with a slight tilting towards the viewer of the upper horizontal edge of the picture plane. The comparative proportions of the pieces of furniture are awkward and the chair appears to have been drawn out from whatever position it normally occupies and deliberately placed to face the viewer. This creates the impression that it has just been vacated or is about to be used at any moment. The open door tells us something has just happened, or is about to. The order of narrative events is unclear - for instance we don’t know how long ago the bed was slept in - and the artificial light means we are not even sure if it is day or night. These elements are structured into the painting as if they are forensic clues in need of sifting and measuring for weight and meaning.

The lack of personal effects in the bedroom, the sparse furnishings, the generic landscape on the wall, the single blanket on the bed and the open suitcase also suggest a cheap motel and the vermin in the foreground only reinforces this idea even if it fails to account for the cockroach’s magnitude.
The style of the painting, with its sharply delineated edges and crisp highlights, its use of artificial light and the spatial distortions in the furniture signals its unreality. These devices encourage us to see the image in symbolic terms, as the product of a dream or an hallucination. Like the interior setting of Van Sowerwine’s art work, the combination of this bedroom setting and the unnatural light reminds us that a bedroom is the site where dreams and nightmares are normally played out.

The principal cultural meanings that accrue to cockroach are of creepiness, contamination, and pestilence. Of all the vermin, the cockroach is perhaps the most repellent. They are widely feared and despised and may sometimes be the subject of phobia. If the size of the cockroach seems exaggerated, it may represent the symbolic magnitude of the disgust it invokes. But if the image is accepted as hallucinatory, then the enormous size of the cockroach is easily explained away as a delusion, the product of distorted perception on the part of the viewer (or some other implied subjective position created within the painting) for whom the cockroach symbolises paranoia or dread.
Because the cockroach is lying on its back, we know something has happened to overturn it. We assume there has been a struggle, and this is its aftermath. But the overturning of the cockroach may generate relief or tension: relief, because if we’re afraid of cockroaches (and who isn’t? - especially giant ones) there’s a chance it may be dead, and tension, because if it isn’t then it must still be struggling and equilibrium cannot be reached until it upturns itself and sets things to rights.

One interpretation of the cockroach is that it symbolises a real or imagined terror that has panicked the room’s occupant and caused them to flee. Equally it may be that a demon has been vanquished but the victor has fled. A further possibility is that we are the room’s occupant and the cockroach is an obstacle we must overcome, blocking the path that lies between us and our escape exit, the open door.

To some extent the cockroach in the painting operates as a human-substitute. Its placement on its back in front of the bed, and the fact that the length of its body is closely matched to that of the bed (even allowing for the painting’s distortions of spatial recession) encourages us to perform the mental operation of shifting the cockroach up the picture plane in order to imagine it lying in the bed, maybe after first having flipped it horizontally to ensure its head rests on the pillow.

The title Rehab privileges the reading that this is a bedroom in a treatment facility. The hallucinatory nature of the image might be attributed to a drug dependency or withdrawal from one. One clue that this is an image of somebody’s psychological health is the visual pun of the open suitcase. It tells us that the room’s inmate has come with ‘baggage’, which can refer to the burden of unexamined psychological issues.

The suitcase remains unpacked, or has been repacked, so we’re not sure if the patient is checking-in or checking-out, nor can we know whether the cockroach is part of the problem or part of the cure. If it represents the aftermath of a struggle, it may not have resulted in anyone’s victory. Perhaps the viewer is looking at him or herself. If the cockroach represents self-loathing was this part of the original problem or did it emerge during the treatment?

The image achieves only a partial resolution and it may be the resolution of hopelessness, of giving up. The lack of a definitive reading creates problems of its own; the inconclusiveness of the narrative produces anxieties by leaving us hanging.

PRUDENCE FLINT
By contrast Prudence Flint presents a painting that contains little narrative information but produces rich layers of meaning through its interplay of devices, symbols and quotations. A Fine Romance #16 portrays a woman of, or approaching, middle-age. In particular, it employs artistic, literary and sexual metaphors to represents some of the anxieties that may attend menopause (not all are personal to the subject of the painting: some are social or cultural anxieties) while simultaneously challenging and answering them. Flint does so with great invention and mastery, using and self-reflexively acknowledging such creative and productive insights and skills as can only accrue to an artist through experience and showing how they operate as a storehouse or as a kind of hedge against a fear of the future.

Flint places her figure within a library which is a metaphor for introverted space. Apparently absorbed in her own thoughts, the woman balances atop a flimsy ladder adopting a posture borrowed from Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker. The books surrounding her don’t appear to be specific titles. En masse they represent the entire accumulation of knowledge and language. If the books enclose her it is because within them she finds her rightful place; indeed like a character from literature, she may exist only within their pages.
Representations of middle-aged women are not very widespread in Western visual art. And the treatment of the theme of menopause in particular is conspicuously absent. It has been long observed that in the mass media representations of women middle-aged (or older) are often absent, unfair or just plain nasty. Anyone who doubts this need only look to the recent example of reportage on the romance, adulterous affair, courtship and nuptials of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. Behind all the degradation and ridicule to which Camilla was subjected (and it outstripped the disparagement of Charles a hundredfold) there persisted the cruel disbelief, despite all evidence to the contrary, that this woman – guilty of the double crime of appearing, by media standards, both ordinary and old – could be anyone’s beloved. It is perhaps only in literature (specifically novels) that women of middle age and above achieve fair representation and where they partake equally and fully of the pleasures, achievements, sorrows and disappointments of life.

In this painting about literature, by means of a witty substitution, literature is disguised as painting. There are rectangular blocks of colour that we read as books despite the fact that these books have no ‘bookness’ about them but are instead portrayed as paintings; every one of them is a monochrome canvas mounted on a deep stretcher (presumably tacked not down their sides but around the perimeter of the back as is the contemporary practice for stretched but unframed works). By structuring these ‘books’ within an abstract grid that is simultaneously a bookshelf, the artist demonstrates she is sufficiently at ease with both abstraction and figuration to move fluidly between the two.
The image’s composition achieves a careful balance between elevation and the pull of gravity. The woman’s body seems heavy and vast and she adopts a shrinking posture as if to apologise for its expanse. The ladder and the extension of her calves in their high-heeled pumps are an attempt to achieve elevation and stature. But the woman perches there with some trepidation; her pose seems impossible to sustain and to view the painting is to brace yourself for her certain fall.
Presenting the figure in profile is both a regal device and a means of asserting that while we look at the woman, she is not conscious of being looked at. Above all, the use of the profile allows the woman’s unmistakeable hunchback to dominate. The significations of this hunchback are numerous. It functions as a general sign of aging, particularly for women. In the last two decades, Australian health policy has emphasised the connection between menopause and the loss of bone density that in turn threatens women with osteoporosis (always portrayed as a curved spine) if they don’t consume enough of a range of calcium-rich products that are heavily marketed via this fear.

But the hunchback in literature is more generally the metaphor for some psychological burden, often the burden of unrequited love as in the case of Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris or Cousin Lymon in Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café (a burden that accrues to both the giver and receiver of such love; it exerts a ponderous weight on its subject and object alike).

As ridiculous as it may sound, the hunchback is also likened here to a camel’s hump: simultaneously a burden and a treasure held in reserve. It represents the various intellectual and artistic gifts of this woman’s maturity as a rich storehouse on which she may draw.
The title of the painting A Fine Romance #16 is a little joke. The presence of a single figure hints the romance may be one-sided. But the painting is about many loves: love of the painter for her subject, for her discipline, for literature, for abstraction and figuration.
Menopause’s prime signification is the cessation of a woman’s reproductive capacity, and the painting addresses this concept by using the metaphor of pregnancy. The woman’s body curls inwards in foetal position to alert us to this theme of procreation (She herself is a slightly monstrous child – the progeny of the artist). And I think the hunchback motif suggests a symbolic fecundity that is not married to literal biological pregnancy and deliberately displaces the swelling of the body to the region of the back and shoulders in order to make this clear. In this symbolic pregnancy it is thought, emotion, imagination, and artistic capacity, rather than flesh, which expand.

ELIZABETH BOYCE
Busytown by Elizabeth Boyce consists of two side-by-side silhouette images of mynah birds constructed entirely of staples on paper. The staples provide an infill treatment that adopts the form of post-and-gate counting notation. Some invisible office-worker appears to have embedded these staples in the paper in a process of counting the passing of time by filling it, and of filling the passing of time by counting it.

The staples continue off the edge of the page as if it is cut from a larger fabric. This greater field could be limitless, the stapling, the counting, and the time spent doing both, continuing thus to infinity. The neat staples, carefully measured, spaced and formed could be seen as a manifestation of some obsession-compulsion on the part of the imagined office-worker, each stroke formed by the staple registering as one obsessive thought and the entire series of stapler contractions signalling repetitive, compulsive – perhaps even manic – behaviour.

At first the connection between the motif of birds and the stapling seems unclear. Birds can have eerie connotations by being linked to the supernatural. They may function as avatars, like in the film The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) where they represent a malevolent spirit. And they can also be seen as portents: ancient augury often made pronouncements based on observations of birds, their movements, cries and patterns of flight. There is nothing to suggest these two birds are evil but could be seen to have a slightly brooding presence within the gallery all the same.
The artwork’s title has several significations. It could refer to the busyness of the industrious office-worker who had the time, patience and mindset to embed the staples into the paper according to this pattern of counting, counting down, or marking time. In fact the art work constitutes a lovely play on the etymological roots of the word ‘business’. It may also refer to the busy behaviour of birds, foraging and scavenging, building nests, feeding their young and fledging them. But its most direct reference is to the place of the same name in which children’s author and illustrator Richard Scarry sets his stories.

In Scarry’s books, Busytown operates as an entire cosmology but one that only capitalism (through the so-called Protestant work ethic) might conceive. Some of his books contain no stories but function like visual dictionaries, consisting of pictures with labelled parts including diagrams and bird’s-eye views. The world of Busytown is one of order and logic with a place for everything and everything in its place. In Busytown, there are no humans but the animal stand-ins act out the roles of productive individuals in a society in which everyone’s profession is clearly defined (for instance they raise children, grow crops, deliver the post, conduct traffic and work in retail). Scarry’s diagrams often capture scenes arrested amidst movement, activity and above-all, work.

Although these birds are not the kind that appear in Richard Scarry’s illustrations they engage theoretically with the logic of the world he constructs; this art work explores themes of work, idleness and productivity.
A bird has an ambiguous relationship to industry because, although it sets about busily in the pursuit of food and shelter, one of its habits is to spend long periods singing. Perching in a tree chirping all the day (like the song of the grasshopper in the story of The Ant and the Grasshopper which appears in the fables of both Aesop and La Fontaine) can appear as the ultimate sign of pleasure and idleness. And mynah birds can talk as well, an unproductive skill in a bird if ever there was one.

In Matthew’s gospel, Christ presents birds as exemplars when he preaches against storing up treasure in the following terms “Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them...” (Matthew 6:27) In fact most of Matthew can be seen as an anti-anxiety treatise for its advice not to store anything up, not to worry about the future, and live as if there is no tomorrow.

This work of art is about wasted labour. The staples are divorced from their function as fasteners for which they require two or more pieces of paper. They have no instrumentality but instead operate as pure motif. This art work likens the repetitive mono-task of the capitalist production-line to a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Partly drawing on the Marxist concept of alienation it characterises such work as a ritualistic, capitalistic, routine and compulsive.

While Busytown likens serial production to an obsessive-compulsive disorder, it cannot avoid also implicating the labour of producing art. To create these two images, the artist has laboured repetitively and mechanically. The unique mark of the artist’s hand is nowhere evident and yet the silvery lines of the staples are like the sharp sheen of graphite markings, reminding us we are looking at a drawing. This artwork is the product of incredible activity but such activity is equivalent to pure idleness: it is a form of filling space and marking time, forced into the pattern of labour, but creating or achieving nothing. Here the production of art is exposed as useless or suspect labour, likened indeed to birdsong. Busytown gives voice to anxieties about the status of a work of art under capitalism: a wasted or meaningless activity, pure effort for its own sake, self-referencing only the investment that went into its creation, in the pursuit of nothing beyond itself than passage of time and the filling of space. Every artist routinely confronts this terrible possibility, that their work has no significance beyond meaningless ritual or routine gesture.

Christine Morrow
May, 2005