TALKING THROUGH YOUR ARTS: IN LOVE = EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED

TALKING THROUGH YOUR ARTS: IN LOVE = EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED

True love leads in general to marriage, and it has always been accepted that mutual love should be the essential factor in all marriages. Jane Austen obviously held this view when she wrote Mansfield Park. Fanny Price reflects, “How wretched and how unpardonable, and how hopeless and how wicked it was to marry without affection!”

Like honey to a bee, in the Beehive Gallery, New Zealand parliament voted to make same-sex marriage legal. While debate still ensues in Australia the overwhelming popular vote reflects the value of society that is marriage. National MP Johnathan Young was quoted as saying “the debate is not about love because love could not be legislated against,” and that, “the human heart was too random and too romantic for that.”

Some form of love is essential to life. Every child is dependent on the love of parents, brothers and sisters. If the child fails to get ‘it’ as psychoanalysts remind us, its whole life is likely to go wrong.

It is true of course that love brings in its train of agonies as well as ecstasies, the agony of temporary separation, misunderstanding, the fear of the loved one encountering physical danger or suffering from some disease, the diminishing or disappearance of affection with the passage of time, or the love-making to a more physically attractive stranger which leaves the deserted partner in a vacuum of despair.

Brett Whiteley’s first investigation of nudes in the early 60s are a celebration of the erotic love of his new bride. Wendy can be seen in The Whiteley Nude Exhibition in various shifting poses in the bathroom as muse. The series conveys Whiteley’s inner-most expressions of intimacy between lovers. “Filtering down through civilisation is the urge to show this glimpse of beauty, where invention and skin become one, and the history of art marries the whole history of one’s sex,” writes Whiteley.

‘There are never enough ‘I love you’s’,” says Lenny Bruce on love, in a play written about the American comedian’s 13 day visit to Sydney in 1962 in which the outspoken freedom of speech fighter created controversy from an exchange with an actress in the audience, Barbra Wyndon, “F*** you, madam”. Lenny Bruce: 13 Daze Un-Dug in Sydney 1962, has been adapted by Benito DiFonzo, from Damian Kringas’s book Lenny Bruce 13 Days in Sydney. It’s a well-referenced account that highlights some of the more notable characters of the time and their relationships on both sides of the law. Frivolity and the jazzy-beats of music and language do not mask the conservatism of the time and as a consequence to the ‘unlucky’ trip down-under was ultimately the start of Bruce’s demise from an overdose in 1966.

It is common for the young to interpret the word love in repetitive ditties where each may call the other, “tootsie roll”, “smoochie-poo”,  “babylicious” or,”sugar free”.   In a short-film The Language of Love, a 17 year-old struggles to find the words to be true to himself as he encounters his first love. Written and performed by 16 year-old Kim Ho and directed by Laura Scrivano the film was first developed from a monologue titled, Transcendence, as part of Australian Theatre for Young people’s Fresh Ink programs, LoveBytes. Two other films were developed from stage to screen as part of the 2012 Voice Projects, The One Sure Thing written by Carolyn Burns and Brook Robinson’s Hunger, the films were premiered earlier this month at AFTRS.  The under 10 minute short can be viewed at freshink.com.au/thelanguageoflove.

Love enables us to reach the pinnacle of human happiness, but it is also capable of making us plumb the deepest depths of human misery.

In a group exhibition at AGNSW that featured 11 contemporary Australian artists, the curator Natasha Bullock, posed the question, “can pictures convey the mysterious enigma of love’s emotions?” We Used to Talk About Love was an emotional proposition that considered the diversity of love’s language through photography, collage, sculpture and multi-media installation in four parts beginning with the Flesh, Expressive abstractions, An archive of feeling and Filthy.  It was an impressionable attempt to answer Bullock’s question.

Either through the nature of experience or through the nature of language, no simple borderline can be drawn between sexual love and other loves, the love of yearning, wooing, gaining or losing. (AS)

The Nude Exhibition, Until Sep 1, Brett Whiteley Studio, 2 Raper St, Surry Hills, free, artgallery.nsw.gov.au

BY ANGELA STRETCH

You May Also Like

Comments are closed.