The Artist’s Surgery: A Constructed Reality
Rose Farrell and George Parkin

The carnal transfigured: new tableaux vivants of Farrell & Parkin

Rose Farrel and George Parkin possess the two symmetrical sides of the contemporary avant garde at its best: one is the invention of visuality and the other is the invention of iconological sense. In an unusually elaborate mixture of genres, Farrell and Parkin have created technically remarkable dioramas for their photographs which forge a new reflective beauty, mixing the visual languages of theatre, painting, antiquarian scientific illustration, sculpture and, of course, the lights and darks proper to photography.

Farrell & Parkin’s photographs often feature one of the artists performing in bandages or with limbs set in splints. The painted backdrop apparently envelops the artist’s body, which lodges between the props and parleys with the sculpted figures of the set. The haunting images have a strange pregnant ambiguity, which elaborates certain paradoxes of representation. An apparently real body is inserted in an artificial graphic environment, as if a man or woman like you or me had magically entered the virtual world of ancient scientific diagrams.

A breathtaking sentiment arises for many reasons, not just because something medically precarious may have happened to the body. Alongside an evocation of the frailty of the body, the normal western scheme of representation is inverted and restaged with a congruent sense fragility, echoing in moody darkness with baroque vanitas. The insertion of the real body into the feigned environment reverses your expectations. Photography is predicated on the assumption that the surrounding world pre-exists and is given to the lens for passive exposure: it is palpably there, but the person in the frame is a protagonist of the moment, an actor or model with an expression that betrays the instant of the shot. In Farrell & Parkin’s work, however, this premise is reversed. The figure is the only truly tangible presence while the world around is fictitious.

But then the world has been inverted before, as in the theatrical nature of Baroque medical illustrations. Seventeenth-century artists set their operations in classical stoas and halls, sometimes adding dramatic lighting as of the mysteries and martyrdoms of baroque painting. The idiom by which medical operations were pictured in scenographic terms is heightened in Farrell & Parkin’s restaging. As the ‘operating theatre’ and the photographic theatre are confounded, the surgical treatment becomes strangely ritualistic, accompanied by grave and umbrous old-master sonorities.

In the performative framework of the photographs, the painted backdrops respect the graphic style of engraving, evoking the printed page of the source material. But the real bodies of the artists ultimately win out as the object of our focus. In its imaginary environment, the human flesh takes on a paradoxical emphasis, an almost anomalous carnality, transfigured, offered up to science and performance in an almost sacramental spirit.

Engaging with the language of bodies and fictive spaces of previous epochs, the work presents new intuitions relating flesh, ritual, medical science and optics. In the diversity of associations—identifying the fantasy in the systematic and technical—the closest kinship may be with the collages of Max Ernst. But for photography, in spite of the long tradition of painted backdrops, the invention of a resolved and consistent imaginary world to rehearse such visual propositions makes a substantial contribution to this history of ideas.

Associate Professor Robert Nelson is Associate Dean Research and Graduate Studies at Monash Art & Design and is art critic for The Age.