An essay to accompany Arterial Embolism exhibition by Anna-Maria O'Keeffe

at West Space 14 September - 6 October 2007.

By Simon Gregg, curator of City Museum at Old Treasury.

ANNA-MARIA O’KEEFFE Arterial Embolism

Go thou to Rome,—at once the Paradise, The grave, the city and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise… [1]

Anna-Maria O’Keeffe creates not landscapes, but entire ‘world scapes’. Where her previous work spoke of novelty, the miniature, the souvenir, Arterial Embolism expounds real world space in a cacophony of dystopian fantasy and apocalyptic entropy, where poetry is coerced from ruination, and aesthetic sublime from decay.

O’Keeffe’s work is infused with the anarchic and the gothic. It suggests a classical ideal, and then destroys it, carving out an elegiac disquiet from the pile of rubble. A section of dislocated roadway is implanted into the gallery space, broken as though dropped from a height. This symbol of failure (perhaps the failure of civilization?) is charged with exquisite nobility, infected with a visionary grandeur. Moving among these dignified ruins, we understand that death is not limited to the living.

That was the end of Fantasia. Only a few fragments of this once rich and beautiful world have been left by the Nothing. [2]

Any presupposition of states of ‘Nothing’ necessarily infer a state of ‘Something’; a context. The paradox of a ‘Nothing’ is typically unravelled by imagining a state of before, but it might equally be understood as a ‘Something’ that has been neutered, annulled, voided. The symbol for zero, ‘O’, was developed in ancient civilizations to indicate what had gone. A fragment of asphalt dumped in a gallery might just as evocatively intimate a zero – a void of context, utility, meaning. O’Keeffe takes this progression a step further. By depicting her displaced asphalt in a state of ruin, meaning is re-established in a decay that speaks of death – as experienced by inert, leaden materials.

The late photographer Wolfgang Sievers once said that architectural merit is best assessed by considering a structure as a ruin. In writing on the poetry of ruins, Umberto Eco noted that they were admired by Gothic architects for ‘their incompleteness, for the marks that inexorable time had left upon them, for the wild vegetation that covered them, for the cracks and the moss’ [3]. The nineteenth century aesthetic treatment of the ruin correlated mortality with nature and human existence. The traveller William Gilpin wrote, ‘a ruin is a sacred thing, rooted for ages in soil; assimilated to it; and becoming, as it were, part of it; we consider it as a work of nature, rather than of art’ [4].

So too, does O’Keeffe’s decrepit roadwork fathom a concrete refugee – a totemistic misnomer that seems borne of passion not of industry, an exponent of nature: vast, full of grace, poise and the attributes of the Divine. Unlike the Classical ruin, however, this post-industrial decay is still in a state of flux, its orders being broken down, and the nascent aromas of decomposition bleeding into the space around it. This crumbling paean to Modernist deconstruction is no tourist attraction.

Look at the symbols, they are alive. They move, evolve, and then they die [5].

Anna-Maria O’Keeffe takes what is real and makes it resolutely unreal.

The utilitarian object liberated from function takes on a new meaning. Like Duchamp’s urinal, it becomes a set of shapes to be synthesised, an array of conceptual possibilities. In a gallery the object becomes an extrapolation of the type: a sample extracted from its kind and made to perform as a barometer of a social or cultural eon. This is powerfully melancholic, in that the object is no longer able to realise the function or task for which it was conceived, but it is also ennobling – the object becomes immortal, surviving long after others of its kind have been used up and discarded.

To be functional is to belong to the family of merit, purpose, the future, capitalism, harmony and acceptance. The non-functional, then, is the antithesis of these things. Yet it is this dearth of utility, its system failure that courts florid and passionate prose. The absence of function is replaced with the enchantment of poetry. While, for instance, the aesthetic significance of Greek art is undisputed, it is its incompleteness that renders it melancholically sublime: completeness would retard the forms with perfection.

The cars looked like toys as they fell. And the noise… [6]

The rubble recounts the spectacular destruction of a bridge collapse. For many Melburnians, the memory of the West Gate Bridge disaster is all too fresh while, more recently, the footage and images relayed from the Minneapolis bridge collapse on 2 August 2007 suggested a visceral excitement, consistent with a state of decay described by Dylan Trigg as implicating ‘an aesthetic quality, which is as much bound with ontology as with visual splendour’ [7]. The rush, the horror, the spectacle of such an event, while immediately terrifying, has the capacity to symbolise a violent collision of human polarities: aspiration, failure and mortality. German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, exploited this potential in his Arctic Shipwreck of 1824. This painting was no doubt inspired by an event in the artist’s youth, where he witnessed the horrific drowning of his younger brother who had fallen through shattered ice while skating. Friedrich’s piles of splintered iceberg converge as though pointing to heaven, while the engulfed ship is further crushed and forced downward under the weight of the ice.

We might look at O’Keeffe’s monolithic ruin, and wonder what, or who, is trapped underneath. Asphyxiated, crushed, mutilated. Its immersive, enveloping environment invites such speculation – the heart beats faster, our breath becomes short.

Perhaps, too, we feel more consciously alive when anticipating disaster [8].

Modern ruins, as Trigg writes, ‘…are distinct in that they are temporally proximate to the present age, yet simultaneously able to gather the remnants of time’ [9]. O’Keeffe traverses typography and chronology with her ruin, which is all the more complete for its fragmentation. Like the art of ancient Greece, the roadway would lose its status as a ruin if it were presented in totality – reduced instead to the level of monument, subject to decreasing historical significance until it becomes a kitsch artefact [10].

Perhaps, as O’Keeffe herself says, this is less a decaying monument, and more a monument to decay.

1. Percy Bysshe Shelly, Adonais, XLIX, 1821, quoted in Umberto Eco [ed.], On Beauty, Secker & Warburg, London, 2004, p.285
2. Bastian [as narrator], The Neverending Story, 1985
3. Eco, op.cit.
4. Quoted in Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason, Peter Lang, New York, 2006, p.106
5. Stereolab, Wow and Flutter, Mars Audiac Quintet, 1994
6. Front page headline, The Age, 2 August 2007
7. Trigg, op.cit., p.xviii
8. Ray Cassin, Keeping Catastrophe Alive, The Saturday Age, 18 August 2007
9. Trigg, op.cit., p.xvii
10. Trigg, ibid, p.xviii


Simon Gregg
August 2007


Simon Gregg is curator of City Museum at Old Treasury and erstwhile author of a forthcoming book on the Romantic sublime in contemporary Australian art.