THE ART OPENING

I look at Emma Roche’s paintings + wonder. The same wonder that seduces the eyes of the consummate capitalist consumer, what we call the window shopper, or the Instagram junkie. What would they be like without the wallpaper?

Composed of silk-screened editions of the artist’s drawings, that X the space in a paper barrage of ink + colour + splodge, Emma Roche’s paintings would exist quite nicely, quite efficiently, quite separately + sparingly like all painting against white walls. But here the paintings slot, nestled in backlit recesses against + within the wallpapered wall.

Most here at the opening cannot help but peek past the paintings’ margin into the recess beyond. I stand with others to take in the view from afar, looking at others peek. The view is panoramic, not periodical. The wallpaper, without the paintings, is just wallpaper. It’s Warholian, not just because it’s screen-printed, but in the sense Warhol needed to be filled by others to be full. Or perhaps the medium of screen-printing itself emphasises Warhol’s emptiness + Americanness?

The paintings are the reason we are here, why the wallpaper is here. Chicken or egg, doesn’t matter. There’s an asymmetry, no matter how hard the wallpaper spreadeagles its X’s like war barricades on the front line as pictured in a 1980’s Atari game. The wallpaper is Walter Benjamin’s ephemeral glass + metal Berlin shopping arcade of post WW1, through which academics like to channel Marx’s commodity fetish.

Later Benjamin admitted on a radio broadcast that he was inspired by childhood, & the 1920’s moment when the arcade, with its galleries of toys + collectibles, was a place of magic not cynicism, a place of immediate nostalgia before it had even aged a day.

Three of us talk about our kids' abject behaviour against the backdrop of wallpaper + paintings. The intellect can easily deflect Emma Roche’s paintings as a feminist statement. But there is something hard to detach in art via detached theory. The artist’s abject images of crying, pissing, dripping, suckling + vomiting children + mothers in all their indivisible vice versaness, is a portrait of natural asymmetry: motherhood.

We can look + consume motherhood at a distance, how Benjamin did the arcades as the inimitable twentieth-century flaneur, reflecting on his own toyless childhood, but the experience of motherhood from belly to lap is a seesaw, with one end of the plank stuck firmly in the playground mud. And yet, out of this abject asymmetry a kind of democracy is realised, which I know, is an oxymoron, democracy being the fight for democracy not its realisation… but bear with me… No matter our sexual identification or verbal designation, we are all born from the asymmetrical locus of the mother. “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”

As the small night draws to a close, one artist says, “Art openings are like funerals.” I quickly nod in agreement + leave.

Photos: Louis Haugh