SEE LIKE A HERETIC: ON VISION AND BELIEF · Collection: Private Collection 2. Detail of Dusted By a Rich Manoeuvre, 2001, 49th Venice Biennale, chandeliers, acrylic rods, glass, pendulums,

S E E L I K E A H E R E T I C :

O N V I S I O N A N D B E L I E F

D R M I C H E L L E A N T O I N E T T E

Presenting new works by Suzann Victor, this solo exhibition is a provocation to perceive the world from a radical position – to See Like a Heretic. Created over 2016-2018, the works continue the artist’s long-standing fascination with the aesthetic qualities of light and theatrics for seeing, here exploring the ocular sense-experience of vision and its existential significance in shaping our experience and perception of the world. On this occasion, Victor explores the powerful visual legacy of Christian icons, and the profound significance of light in Christian image-making and the conjuring of belief. Alongside this is the presentation of numerous heart sculptures invoking the inheritance of scientific visual traditions with their claims to irrefutable truth and objectivity. The exhibition invites us to explore this twin politics of dominant vision in histories of Western culture and to explore its enduring and widespread influence on contemporary subjectivity, ideology and being in the world. If sight is the ocular practice of seeing, See Like a Heretic proposes that vision is always also the effect of a particular ideological basis and subjective perspective for seeing the world.

The materiality of stained glass is prevalent throughout the exhibition. While reminiscent of the translucent coloured light that gently filters through church windows, in See Like a Heretic the precious stained-glass medium is violently crushed from its sacred two-dimensionality and meticulously reworked into an array of shimmering sculptural forms. Throughout the course of history, stained-glass windows have performed a special purpose in the architectural design and rituals of religious worship. In Christian churches, beyond their utility to conjure aura-inducing beams of coloured light, the two-dimensional space of church window panes regularly become the sites of display for biblical story-telling, akin to religious drama. As Victor observes:

Even the cardinal direction of the East where these windows are positioned up high and strategically incorporated

Previous page: Detail of Pray Tell, 2017

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into and as walls (below which the choir and altar are positioned) is enlisted to stage a kind of religious theatre for preaching and spreading the evangelical message. The outside world is “edited” away, leaving the worshipper with one primary view – a tableau of pictorial Christian allegories that privilege the visual, a language that can be read at once by both the educated and the illiterate, thus bypassing the markers of status and/or privilege.1

For Victor, the stained glass windows of churches thus perform as visual apparatuses, facilitating a spirituality and belief in that which in reality cannot be seen, but only imagined into belief: “Like ocular features, … [they] function as apertures through which the Divine is channelled as a glow of coloured light beaming into the hearts and minds of worshippers via the portal of the human eye – window to the soul.”2 In so doing, church windows offer worshippers a particular vision for seeing and comprehending the world.

For this exhibition, the highly worked, stained-glass material has been especially selected for its particular hues, quality, and density, only to undergo a crushing violence and thorough transformation – the result of over two years of continuous experimentation and meticulous labour with Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta and Singapore.3 Hundreds of kilos of thick, two-dimensional stained-glass sheets have been pulverised into varying granular textures – from sand-like grains to larger particle sizes – and then “meticulously reconstituted as the very ‘skin’ of religious icons and discrete objects through hand-pressed embedding and layering techniques. Each sculpture is thus ‘recast’ as an atomised world where every grain of coloured glass emits light in multiple directions until the entire work presents as a concert of light.”4

Crushed glass is a feature of earlier works by Victor namely the ‘performative’ kinetic installations Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (1997) and Dusted by Rich Manoeuvre (2001), which both also include larger smashed glass fragments spread on the floor. Especially resonating with works in the current exhibition, in Dusted by Rich Manoeuvre (presented at the Schola di Santa Apollonia, Venice), the repurposing of larger glass fragments as pendants for an exquisite,

Fig 1.

Fig 2.

1.Dusted By a Rich Manoeuvre, 2001, 49th Venice Biennale, chandeliers, acrylic rods, glass, pendulums, control unit Collection: Private Collection

2. Detail of Dusted By a Rich Manoeuvre, 2001, 49th Venice Biennale, chandeliers, acrylic rods, glass, pendulums, control unit Collection: Private Collection

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hand-made chandelier, is central to a performative installation that is both seductive and threatening. An object of colonial inheritance, this precious chandelier hangs still and vulnerable to four other red, readymade chandeliers swinging in and out of its centrally-sited proximity. This theatre invokes a disorienting anxiety as the chandeliers threaten to collide and shatter at any random moment, unsettling any illusion of equilibrium in their unresolved tension. There is a similar tension in the current exhibition with works being both alluring yet unnerving, first appealing to our senses in their brilliance but then provoking us into an anxiousness as we register their violence and distortion to our enculturated visions. The collective of works presented in this exhibition is a reflection on the ritual function of light in the theatre of Christian worship, both to channel the Divine and to register reverential separation between the heavenly and the earthly corporeal. By contrast, this series refocuses the awesome qualities of light into more intimate and personal experiences for encountering the divine around and within us.

In 1996, Victor created Tintoretto’s Risen Christ Arresting Lazy Susan, a site-specific installation presented at the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane. Its site-specificity was unintended and responded directly to the adjacent presence of the Tintoretto painting The Risen Christ held in the Queensland Art Gallery’s permanent collection. Victor’s work also made use of the curved wall structures originally made for displaying the Tintoretto painting. Here, Victor was interested in the contradictions in the iconic male bleeding body in the figure of Christ, and the social, psychological, and religious taboos regarding the menstruating female body.5 Victor’s feminist concerns also manifested in the production of ‘hair writing’ (inscribing parts of the female reproductive anatomy with human hair, dyed in vibrant red) as well as in crushed-glass sculptures of the female reproductive anatomy – nipples, womb, ovaries, clitoris, tongue, and finally, heart.

Over two decades later, the crushed-glass heart repeats in See Like a Heretic but now appears to be growing and spreading

Fig 3.

Fig 4.

3.Tintoretto’s Risen Christ Arresting Lazy Susan, 1996 (Heart). 2nd Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia. Materials: crushed glass, curved walls, revolving platform, human hair, organza, velvet. Photo: Courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery

4. Tintoretto’s Risen Christ Arresting Lazy Susan, 1996 2nd Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia. Materials: crushed glass, curved walls, revolving platform, human hair, organza, velvet. Photo: Artist

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with an abundance of arterial extensions. Whereas the bulbous Sacred Heart is most faithful to Victor’s earlier crushed-glass heart sculpture, with its stunted arteries and likeness to common anatomical depictions, other hearts in this series rather suggest the artist’s curiosity in the heart’s exquisitely grotesque aesthetic possibilities and reveal our deeply enculturated aesthetics. Delicately cast from clear resin and manipulated acrylic rods, each heart sculpture is a different configuration of shapes and patterns, subsequently covered in a monochromatic hue of crushed-glass material.

For Belief, X My Heart and Immaculate Heart, a single ‘heart’ appears to be striking new root growths in all directions, taking on an untamed quality. As newly tentacled forms of brilliant colour, they are reminiscent of species of coral morphing into organic crystalline structures. In Heart to Heart 1, twin heart organisms delicately touch each other by more precise routes of arterial connection. Heart of Hearts introduces a third heart nodule within an expanding and complex arterial network, much like a wild mass of rhizomatic plant nodes and roots. Distinct from all others, a small shiny heart has been sculpted in wax, cast in silicon bronze, and polished to a mirror finish. It first presents as a precious mantelpiece object, but its ambiguously lumpish, solid metal form is also a disquieting manifestation of the hardened heart – perhaps a memento mori to reflect on human mortality. And yet, it might also invoke the everlasting life of a humanoid of the future in its cyborgian suggestion of inner human mechanics. Belief, the title for the turquoise heart, is telling – in actuality, the human heart bears closer resemblance to these unwieldy, beautifully grotesque creations but since the age of Western ‘enlightenment’, we have come to believe in its disciplined scientific representation, in order to behold of it as a contained object for rational inquiry. This tension between a presumed rational order and an alternative logic by which to perceive the world is a continuing thread throughout Victor’s practice, especially as means for revealing that which is repressed from common knowledge to create the myth of social order premised on consensual belief.

Fig 5. Fig 6. Fig 7.

Fig 8. Fig 9.

Fig 10. Fig 11.

5.Sacret Heart, 2018

6. Belief, 2017

7.X My Heart, 2018

8. Immaculate Heart, 2018

9.Heart to Heart I, 2017

10. Heart of Hearts, 2018

11. Gold Heart, 2018

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Victor’s interest in exploring Christian iconography is a reminder of her upbringing in Singapore, where Christianity can be traced as Western colonial inheritance – a repeating legacy across postcolonial Southeast Asia.6 For this exhibition, Victor sourced figurines of Christian icons from a religious shop in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.7 As readymade icons prepared by Indonesian Catholic craftsmen, their fibreglass surfaces had been previously heavily painted in dramatic shades and colourings, intended to be a focus for worshipping eyes in the sacred theatre of churches. But Victor violently sheds these icons of their glossy veneers by sandblasting their surface, returning them to their unadorned ‘pristine’ state, before re-rendering them in a monochromatic skin of crushed, stained-glass granules. In this three-dimensional “descent from the cathedral’s elevated and flat pictorial plane [of stained glass window narratives], they share the very ground that the viewer treads upon.”8

Significantly, the new glass skin recasts the figures as more abstracted representations, denying them their previously painted persona – ‘made up’ of eyelashes, lipstick, blush, skin colour, and other surface embellishments. While their forms lose definition, the abstracted icons are nevertheless compelling, even entrancing. With their once ‘open’ eyes transformed to ‘closed’ lids, their previously outward gaze is released and redirected to a poignant gesture of inward ‘seeing’. Counter-intuitively, as their own interiority is returned, they encourage a closer contemplation and possibly stir an unexpected introspection in us. Moreover, if these iconic forms are strangely familiar as Christian ritual objects, their abstracted surface now compels us to consider them as objects of art and artifice. As with John Berger’s famous critique of Western visual culture in Ways of Seeing, Victor compels us to deconstruct these iconic visual forms, saturated with religious significance, not only to uncover their hidden ideologies but also, to be able to see them again in their purer object status. In this abstraction, moreover, they dialogue with a series of three abstract painting sets in the exhibition bearing evocative titles: The Cross in 18 Moves, The Unreality of Blue When Walking on Water, and Wine of Transcendence. Arranged in varying rectangular and quasi-hexagonal configurations, each set explores the painterly possibilities and gestures of abstraction and is a composite of 16 to 20 smaller oil canvases awash in a dominant colour, interrupted by flashes of whiteness.

So iconic is the figure of Jesus Christ on The Cross that we need not ‘see’ the cross in order to be able to imagine it. In the current exhibition, Christ’s body is posed as if in a state of crucifixion, with arms outstretched and limply-

Fig 12.The Cross, 2018

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hanging head, yet there is no cross in this vision. Unfastened from the cross-shaped wooden beams that usually accompany this image, Christ now rather appears to be ambiguously suspended between falling and soaring. Ironically, the blood-red layer of crushed glass somehow more sincerely invokes the torturous and gruesome spectacle of crucifixion, which usually leads to death from exhaustion and asphyxiation – far from the stylised image of a dignified Christ in heroic suffering. The abstraction here further reveals the range of proxy pictorial devices that help to image Christ: his hair now seems too heavy for his hanging head, his ribs pronounce into an arch over a cavernous stomach, and his skin seems to ooze crystallised blood. Mothers, as a figure of the feminine, have been a regular motif throughout Victor’s feminist art practice. In this exhibition, the figure of the Christian Holy Mother, Mary, is a revisioning of her traditional dual roles, as saintly virginal mother and the pious woman Mary. As ‘mother’ she is resplendent in crushed gold glass, her head adorned with a bronze halo, the haloed baby Jesus clutched in her left arm while her right hand gestures downwards. Likely intended for positioning at a more elevated height, the Virgin Mother’s hand gesture is shaped to beckon the worshipper’s gaze. Now repositioned nearer to the viewer, her extended arm suggests an ambulant posture, humanising her into the image of mothers everywhere, going about their daily life with their young held close. Notably, in her abstracted transformation, the twists and folds of her dress become visually accentuated and gather to reveal the actual focal point intended for our attention: not her, but the baby Jesus. By contrast, as Mary she stands on her own with her hands this time clasped together, as if engaged in prayer, but is now barely recognisable as woman, doubly veiled in the turquoise crushed-glass surface and the original cloak form covering every part but for her hands and face. Without the femininity implied in her previously ‘maked-up’ face, she is returned to us here as an almost haunting spectacle of ghost-like resemblance, in fact almost impossible to recognise as the Christian icon Mary.

Fig 13. Fig 14.13.Gold Mary Jesus, 2017

14. Mary, 2016

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A recurring motif is the Archangel presented in multiple figurations. The two Archangels Michael and Gabriel are included, with Michael being a focal point for the exhibition. Four pairs of detached wings are also presented – in gold and purple – while a final pair of wings are carefully clasped together to form a manger-like object. As disembodied objects they invoke the angel’s hybrid making, cohering the bird-animal and the human into a wondrous angelic mythology, and registering the liminal status accorded to angels as intermediaries between the heavenly and earthly realms, divine immortality and human mortal flesh. The detached wings are also suggestive of ‘fallen angels’ in Christianity, those angels cast out of heaven for rebelling against God – after all, if they are no longer godly creatures, what need remains for such heavenly wings? Where do they go? Yet, the detached wings curved to form a manger also evokes a nestlike comfort as if wrapping around something in order to offer protection. Read alongside the lamb, we may also recall the exhibition theatre of the Christian nativity scene and its cast of characters and props, including a manger for the baby Jesus, who is surrounded by his mother Mary, father Joseph, angels, and sheep, among other characters and objects. The presence of the lamb also elicits the metaphoric ‘sacrificial lamb’ – the person or animal sacrificed for the greater good, as is believed to be the case with Jesus Christ, traditionally considered to have played the role of a sacrificial lamb (the Lamb of God) in dying for humanity, to take away the sins of the world.

Paradoxically the angels’ anthropomorphic quality is accentuated in the abstraction that occurs after their resurfacing in the crushed-glass skin. While the new monochromatic casing creates a seamlessness and consistency across the angelic form, it also brings into relief the angel’s fantastical binary composition as the coming together (and separation) of human bodies and bird wings. The ironically named Wing and a Prayer, and Pray Tell, both present the winged angel in blue turquoise, standing upright with hands clasped together as if in devout prayer. In the iconic posture of ‘hoping and praying’ that is Wing and a

Fig 15. Fig 16.

Fig 17. Fig 18.

Fig 19.

15.Gold Wing I, 2018

16. Purple Wing I, 2018

17.Gold Wing II, 2018

18. Purple Wing II, 2018

19.Wing Manger, 2018

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Prayer, the angel gazes upwards in the hope that his prayer is being heard from up above, his grand feathered wings folded in retreat. In Pray Tell, the angel strikes a commanding presence, gazing directly at us, his body draped in sweeping cloth folds, his face framed by the upward splay of his majestic wings.

Blood Angel is based on the Archangel Gabriel. While traditionally often represented with a horn in hand signifying his role as God’s principal messenger, here Gabriel’s horn is conspicuously absent, deliberately removed from the original icon to effect a radically new gestural intention. With his left hand held up high, now emptied but still shaped for holding a horn, Gabriel as Blood Angel rather appears to be hailing or shielding himself from something or someone from high up, especially when read with his transformed facial expression. The spiritual ecstasy implied in his original, painted facial expression has returned to an undetermined gentleness as a direct result of the crushed-glass abstraction. A further transformation is the resplendent display of lines and shades that is effected by the abstraction at Gabriel’s back: the angel’s sculpted feather wings shift dramatically from lighter to darker tones of blood red, and his long flowing cape gathers dramatically below his waist, in multiple sweeping layers. From this perspective, Blood Angel could be reminiscent of celebrity idols of contemporary popular culture who often grace the stage and the catwalk in fantastical costumes, but also brings to mind the peacock’s characteristically flamboyant display.

A signature piece for the exhibition is the commanding figure of the Archangel Michael in battle with Satan, enclosed within a large-scale, dome-shaped shrine. Famed ‘leader’, ‘protector’ and ‘warrior saint’, the New Testament records the story of Michael defeating Satan in the book of Revelation. Michael – ‘who is like God’ – is said to have led God’s armies to battle Satan’s forces in the war in heaven, leading to Michael’s defeat of Satan. Both Michael and the Devil are here rendered in hues of red, and presented in the iconic pose of Michael holding a sword in his right hand and stepping his left foot firmly on top of the Devil’s head. The Devil is crouched beneath Michael’s feet and moments away from being slayed by Michael. The pose recalls iconic 16th and 17th century European paintings

Fig 20. Fig 21. Fig 22.

20.Wing and a Prayer, 2016

21. Pray Tell, 2017

22.Blood Angel, 2017

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of St Michael such as by Dossi Dossi, Rubens and Guido Reni, where Michael wears a late Roman military cloak and cuirass with an orange-red cape billowing behind him, the drama taking place in threatening skies. In the current exhibition, Michael is detached from this dramatic setting and lacks the painterly detail that usually casts his face in a purer, gentler light. The violence of Michael’s action is here made starker in its abstracted form, emptied of its moral triumph. However, the abstracted effect helps shift our focus to what is perhaps the real site of the drama: the sweeping chiselled lines and edifying twists-and-turns that give dramatic texture to the rear of the sculpture, a turbulence usually hidden from worshipping eyes. Here the arc of Michael’s outstretched wings and their feather-like layering combines with dramatic twists of fabric at Michaels’ back, sculpted to wrap around the curve of the Devil’s wing, and in its abstract form is now an almost seamless convergence of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Constructed of almost 1,504 fractal plastic lenses, the dome surrounding Michael serves as a soft architecture that viewers can enter into through a small open archway, but it is also an architecture for viewing. The dome recalls a similar architectural logic and materiality presented in other recent works by Victor, in the installation Veil – See Like a Heretic (2017) commissioned for the Sunshower exhibition (organised and presented by Mori Art Museum & National Art Center, Tokyo), and the related site-specific installations A Thousand Skies (situated on the grounds of the historic Joten-ji temple in Fukuoka) and Rising Sun (sited at the Fukuoka Castle Ruins, Japan) both commissioned by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. The lenses were first used in Victor’s installation for the 6th Havana Biennale in 1997, Third World Extra Virgin Dreams, a ten-metre glass quilt comprised of three-thousand glass slides, draped over a metal bed suspended under a skylight in Cabania Fortress, Havana. Each glass slide contained a drop of human blood sealed behind a Fresnel lens, and lenses were also used at the site of the installation

Fig 23.See Like a Heretic, 2018

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“to pick up and re-distribute light from the skylight which was rumoured for dropping lead to make bullets.”9 Plastic lenses were also assembled for Victor’s 40-metre long, handmade quilt Bloodline of Peace (2015), commissioned for the Singapore Art Museum 5 Stars exhibition. Recalling the earlier Third World Extra Virgin Dreams, each of the quilt’s 11,520 paired lens units encased a drop of human blood, emitting a sense of connected yet multifaceted human experience. In all these works, Victor creates an architecture for relooking whereby the fractal lens device unsettles our expected vision and perspective, literally fracturing our ocular expectations to see the world in its totality. She reminds us that the physical act of looking is a play of illusory optics, where what we see as totality is a trick of the mind and in reality is a more dispersed arrangement. Indeed, moving from the walled spaces of museums and galleries, to diverse public spaces, Victor often provides us with actual or implied architectures for viewing her artworks – the museum-like vitrines for peering onto the female anatomy in Tintoretto’s Risen Christ Arresting Lazy Susan (1996) and the enclosures for Six Chambers (1995); the stage-like settings and theatrical devices for experiencing performance and kinetic works such as in Still Waters (Between Estrangement and Reconciliation) (1998), His Mother is a Theatre (1994, installed at 5th Passage, Pacific Plaza), Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (1997), and Dusted by Rich Manoeuvre (2001); and the monumental quality of installation and public art works such as Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (1997, at the 6th Havana Biennale), Bloodline of Peace (2015), and Skin to Skin (2005, World Square, Sydney).

From within the dome, the lenses alter our perception as one looks through them and out, onto other works in the exhibition; we see the external gallery space and other works reflected in each lens. By contrast, from outside the dome, the Archangel Michael is ironically only partially in view even though encased by a ‘see-through’ lens material. Counter-intuitively while we expect to be able to see through the dome’s transparent lenses and to make intelligible what is within it, Michael (and any viewers inside the dome) seems to ‘disappear’ from view, ‘reduced’ in size by the lenses. Instead, the perceptual effects of the lens appear to ‘cloud’ this heavenly vision and we are

Fig 24.

Fig 26. Fig 27.

Fig 28.

Fig 24.Veil - See Like a Heretic (Installation View), 2017Sunshower Exhibtion, Mori Art Museum & National Art Center Tokyo, Fresnel lens, nuts, bolts, framePhoto: Ueno Urihiro

Fig 25.Third World Extra Virgin Dreams, 19976th Havana Biennale, Cabania Fortress, Havana, Cuba, human blood, Fresnel lens, glass, clips, bed, cable, paperPhoto: Alwin Reamillo

Fig 26.A Thousand Skies, 2017 Sunshower Exhibtion Travel Program, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum at Joten-ji temple, Fukuoka, Fresnel lens, nuts, bolts, framePhoto: Martin Kirkwood

Fig 27.Rising Sun, 2018Fukuoka Castle Ruins, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka Asian Museum & Fukuoka CityFresnel lens, cables, polesPhoto: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum

Fig 28.Bloodline of Peace, 2015, Five Stars, Singapore Art MuseumFresnel lens, blood, metal pins

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Fig 25.

afforded a view of the actual ‘reality’ of this inner sanctum only through the gaps or ‘apertures’ between lenses. Moreover, Michael (and any viewers inside) appear as proliferating multiples across the external surface of the dome, repeating in every lens in their reduced size and creating an omnipresence. Significantly, the concave effect of the dome (when viewed from outside) and convex effect (when viewed from inside) alters the viewer’s vision in different ways, depending on both the viewer’s distance from the lenses and/or the positioning of the subject matter in relation to the lenses: magnification takes place when we or the subject matter are up close to the lens; the subject matter may appear to be fragmented; or the surroundings or subject matter might appear to be inverted. In effect, the positionality of the viewing subject and the subject matter are blurred, underscoring the viewing experience as an equation of relationality. As Victor’s work enchants us into experiencing this relation of seeing, we are at the same time provoked to recognise features that influence and act on our ways of seeing and perceiving the sensible. Thus, unlike the commanding singular vision of the stained-glass church window and its colour spectacle of religious guidance, this architecture is a deliberate unsettling of our usual perspectives and orientation. What we expect to be easily sensible and intelligible, based on our established ways of seeing and knowing, is not.

This reflection on viewing structures and experience recalls the work of another Michael, the twentieth-century French philosopher, Michel Foucault, whose theories helped bring into view the relationship between power and knowledge – in particular, his critical studies on the powerful influence of our social institutions in constructing social knowledge and shaping human thought and behaviour. The penal institution of the prison provided Foucault an architectural lens for tracing cultural shifts in the art of governance through the prison’s punitive institutional practices of discipline and punishment. In conceptualising the power relations of the modern institution, Foucault referred to Jeremy Bentham’s model of the Panopticon – an architectural arrangement of ‘unequal gazes’ designed to encourage ‘docile bodies’, the self-governance of the prisoner by the uncertainty of whether they are being surveilled. For Foucault, the panoptic gaze of the prison was replicated in other modern institutions including schools, military institutions, hospitals

Fig 29.

Fig 30.

Fig 29.Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame, 2002 Kinetic Sound Installation: light bulbs, mirrors, baby rockers, control unit, crushed glass Engineer: David Marsh Collection: Singapore Art Museum Fig 30.Still Waters (between reconciliation & estrangement),1998ARX 5, Singapore Art Museum, glass, water Photo: Jason Lim

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and factories. Related to the modern art of governance is the significance of knowledge formation. Specifically, Foucault enquired into how certain systems of thought and knowledge have come to dominate human thinking and behaviour at different times and places, exploring what has counted for socially-acceptable knowledge or ‘truth’ over the ages. One effect of this has been the social marginalisation of those who see and act according to a different worldview. The Renaissance valorisation of the mad figure as one possessed by unique wisdom was reinscribed at the dawn of the enlightenment, when the ‘rational’ confined the ‘mad’ to society’s margins, along with prostitutes, vagrants, blasphemers, and other ‘unreasoned’ and ‘sinful’ types, where they could be safely confined for the supposed protection of society.10

If the heretical worldview evinces commitment to another way of seeing and being in the world beyond accepted beliefs, then See Like a Heretic calls us to this particular action and positionality: to view, envision and believe from a perspective at odds with and outside of prevailing orthodoxy, conventions and traditions. In the context of See Like a Heretic, the regulation of thought and behaviour is suggested through two ‘civilising’ prisms: that of the Christian Church on the one hand, and scientific reason on the other. If the former alludes to earlier centuries and the latter to the modern era, they are nevertheless connected in the Foucauldian sense – as archaeologies of knowledge, in presenting an order of things, and in their respective epistemes of discipline and punishment.

Tracing the etymology of ‘heresy’ to its Greek origins sheds light on the heretical position as one of deliberate ‘choice’ and one’s ‘choosing’, that is, the individual agency to see and act from the vantage of a different set of principles not conforming and in contra to convention, tradition, properness and propriety. The heretical worldview and condition is therefore not one which reflects an imposed marginalisation on the non-conforming subject, but rather a self-determination to commit to another way of seeing and being in the world. See Like a Heretic is an invitation to see Victor’s art and the beliefs that sustain us, in yet another light.

Previous Page:Fig 31.Installation view of See Like a Heretic looking at The Cross

Suzann Victor, ‘See Like a Heretic’, Artist statement, 2017, unpublished.

Ibid.

Through the current exhibition, Gajah Gallery has greatly assisted Victor in developing the crushed glass medium as a sculptural material. Victor recalls how she first came up with this methodology over two decades ago in 1996, “painstakingly smashing thick coloured glass with a hammer to get the varying granular texture I needed to make the glass organs for APT [the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art]. I used adhering agents like glue to bind the grains together to shape the forms of the organs so it is basically the same methodology … but on a bigger scale.” For the current exhibition, Victor explains, “Gajah Gallery helped to source stained glass specialist expertise in Singapore, in order to supply the specific hues and high volume of glass in the hundreds of kilos required for the series in this exhibition compared to what I needed in 1996.” Personal communication with the artist, 12 April 2018.

Ibid.

Suzann Victor, ‘The Image Stammers’, Master of Arts (Visual Arts) Honours thesis, University of Western Sydney, 1999: 38-48.

The Singapore Art Museum, site of Victor’s celebrated performance art work, Still Waters 1997, as part of ARX5, is the former St Joseph’s Boys School. Catholicism also seeps into Singapore’s art in another important art institution in Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, where Victor and many other of Singapore’s renowned contemporary artists have undertaken art training.

According to the shop owner, in conversation with YAL foundry director James Page, the main clientele for these figurines are Indonesians residing in Australia, Netherlands, Italy, Singapore, and America.

Victor, op. cit. (note 1), 2017, unpublished.

Personal communication with the artist, 18 April 2018

Among others see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977; translated by Alan Sheridan from the French: Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, Gallimard, Paris, 1975); Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965; translated by Richard Howard from the French: Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à L’âge Classique, Libraire Plon, Paris, 1961); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Pantheon Books, 1970; translated from the French: Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1966); and The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, World of man, 1972; translated from the French: L’archéologie du Savoir, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1969).

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Dr Michelle Antoinette is a researcher of modern and contemporary Asian art. She is currently an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Art History & Theory at Monash University Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) in Melbourne. She joined MADA in 2017.

Michelle’s research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary Asian art histories, compelling examinations of the Euro-American biases of art history and highlighting the constituent role of Asian art and artists in larger world projects of modern and contemporary art history and theory. Her previous and ongoing research focuses especially on the contemporary art histories of Southeast Asia on which she has published widely.

Michelle was previously affiliated with the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra, where she was an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow from 2010-2013, and Convenor and Lecturer for courses on Asian and Pacific art and museums.

Her major publications on contemporary Asian art are Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 (Brill | Rodopi, 2015), and as co-editor with Caroline Turner, Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making (ANU Press, 2014).

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