FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
DON’T go looking for Lolita in Antoinette Murdoch’s debut solo show, Trane Trekkers. Unlike the nymphet in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Murdoch’s notions of the feminine are predicated not on precocious sexuality, but on transition; and her rites of passage are not trials by fire, but rather “fluid” journeys of purification.
A committed Christian (who paid tribute to Jesus during her opening speech as well as in the press release), Murdoch approaches the issue of female identity without adopting the kind of cerebral analysis put forward by Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva — two postmodern feminists whose views have exerted considerable influence on contemporary female artists. According to these theorists, women have historically been represented as metonyms — exterior representations either of something else (liberty, peace, nature) or as objects of male desire.
Yet, at the same time, Murdoch does not divorce herself from contemporary feminist concerns. In fact, she utilises probably the most popular thematic refrain running through contemporary feminist art — the body and bodily fluids — to depict the ceremonies and stages in a woman’s life.
Using disposable domestic materials such as facial tissues, toilet paper, pantihose and hairnets, she produces garments and objects associated with birth, christenings, weddings and national identity which are exquisitely crafted and poignantly ephemeral in effect. Silhouetted against the walls, displayed in boxes like precious museum pieces or suspended suggestively from hangers like gossamer mobiles, they are incredibly seductive, forcing the viewer to imagine the bodies beneath their wispy silhouettes.
And the metaphors that spring to mind from the materials and garments suggest the dualities, namely celebration and sadness, as well as the purgative processes involved, in all rites of passage.
But the thing is that even though Murdoch claims to explore “stereotypes of women”, she remains stuck in them. Her visually enticing installations and materials, while innovative, do little to unveil the history and ideologies behind female rites. Instead, she seems to accept that the rituals — and by implication female identity — belong to an absolutely fixed reality.
The garments are like uneaten wedding cakes, unworn — their pristine surfaces preserved — and unsullied by the female experience and its conflicts. Murdoch also shies away not only from using actual bodily fluids (with the tissues for tears metaphor, this could be highly effective) but from making reference to the most symbolically charged female bodily fluid associated with both sexuality and spirituality — namely blood.
A muted sexuality — based on vulnerability and childlike frailty — certainly permeates works like the hairnet installation and the pantihose dresses, but it is an unexplored sexuality, an articulation of femininity as opposed to femaleness. And the tissue roses cushioning her garments are like mothballs protecting the clothes, and by implication the “wearer’s” innocence, while perpetuating the stereotype of woman as object — to be looked at and desired, but never really known.