The exposition's main body lays on a heavy. "Fat Man - The Matrix of Amnesia," a large sculpture by John Isaacs, runs the risk of weighing heavily on your soul and stomach. The original meat dress by Jana Sterbak, which inspired Lady Gaga's haute cuisine couture for the VMAs, is central to the space and eats away at the impact of other works on the periphery.
This enormous pink blob with no hair is either unconscious or, more likely, dead as it lies on the lab floor. The limited perspective Isaacs enforced prohibits us from seeing any of the heads of this collapsed individual, who in some diabolical way appears to have been partially liposuctioned after having human bones filleted. As a result, the figure covered with fat that has oozed all over the floor. The blob appears to have been partially consumed by somehow predatory biological process because there are no punctures on its skin surface.
The other pieces are photographic pieces with a parasitological theme. One depicts the head of what looks like a tapeworm but is actually a fish with a mouth made for sustained suction and grasp. This fish appears to establish more or less lasting connections with sharks. The other depicts the artist's head with features obscured by a fungus that resembles a Rorschach test, which is psychiatry's equivalent of astrology. In an ironic reversal of the original tests' purposeful open-endedness, this fungus purposefully matches the expected facial features.
The laboratory where the spreading and dissolving human is located has filled with various biomedical equipment that functions on its own. A time-lapse loop of a flower opening and closing is displayed on two television monitors, a computer-generated graph, and a peristaltic pump. In fact, the boilerhouse at the Imperial sounds a lot like the repetitive noise coming from within the lab. It sounds like a large institutional boilerhouse. The tableau has the quality of a frozen moment, similar to the final shot in a cliffhanger before the credits roll, and we become hooked on the following episode, achieved with the use of too theatrical music like in a film or TV drama.
Isaacs is clever to use Hollywood devices, even if they are maybe overused, because he has pushed his belligerent posture of scientific disdain right into the heart of medical imperialism. Biomedicine and medical ethics are usually incomparably more interesting or stunningly terrible than the decorative dabbling of most artists on the subject, as was shown in the regrettable failures of Helen Chadwick's later works on medical science. The industrialized sophistication of modern medicine and its opulent professional privileges might diminish standing of artists to that of a war artists: a completely irrelevant anachronism who are primarily admired out of respect for tradition. If we can suspend disbelief, Isaacs' ass-kicking, Rambo-meets-Ivan-Illich approach appears to be uplifting and motivating. Ability to suspend disbelief is, of course, a hallmark of Hollywood, and Isaacs does a good job of it.
Thankfully, the works tend to operate more on a visceral level than on a cerebral, analytical, or scientific level. A genuine answer to why our chubby protagonist is on the floor gets withheld from us, despite the clumsy sketch of a predictable cautionary tale of the mad scientific experiment gone bad being present. More specifically, there are less examples of people being utter naked than people dying in labs, including maybe very overweight ones. In this sense, the reason the person is nude is more important than the mystery and repulsive attraction of what happened to the enormous amount of human flesh on the floor.
SUSAN AURINKO | 4:57 PM
Saturday, 20 November 2022
Sydney NSW, Australia
Artpendix Press
Comments