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India Zegan, Museum of Fathers: Deals # 4-16 (inverted knuckle busters), 2012-2013. Epoxy resin, resin, builders' bog, wood filler, polymer clay, and water-damaged, recycled chipboard.
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‘[G]ambling can take possession not only of the future – in the form of feverish expectation – but also of the past… I sometimes believe that most gamblers are the stepchildren of love, whether of parental or sexual love, and that here at the gambling tables they are looking for fate to provide them with an adoption that ennobles them more than the origins that repudiated them.’ [i]
India Zegan has been creating her Museum of Fathers for the past two
decades. Her exhibits include her
sculpture, installations and performance pieces, as well as documentary
evidence. In a dialogue with conceptual art these works draw on autobiography,
gender theory and literary narratives of masculinity and fatherhood.
Zegan’s employment in art institutions informs her practice and the
scope of her ambition for her private museum. Her works are often mis-en-scènes
for both museums and domestic settings. And they are titled in a mix of the
conventions of collection registration and of family law documents. Her studio
consists of a workshop and a mutable gallery of exhibiting spaces. In a series
of conversations, personal and public, the walls and display units are
reconfigured with each new installation.
Zegan is the product of three Eastern European parents who immigrated
to an insular and uncomprehending Australia after their respective internments
in World War 2 camps. The two men who served as Zegan’s fathers were both
gamblers. Neither was able to sustain family obligations. One was a boxer and
the other was a punting addict. Zegan had several stints in Children’s Homes
and was fortunate to escape the forced adoptions still taking place at the time.
In the tradition of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Gregor Schneider who
return obsessively to their formative sites and relationships, Zegan’s themes
are renewed with each manifestation.
The French romantic painter Gericault is a key influence on this body
of work. Of particular interest to Zegan is his Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (1822), one of five pictures commissioned
to illustrate social and mental deterioration. For Zegan this portrait of an
unkempt and disenfranchised man is a representation of the unsayable: of the
truths we ignore or speak about in whispers. Another of Gericault’s works, Horses
Hindquarters (c.1814-15),
is an oil painting of the rumps of twenty-four horses. In Zegan’s reading there are
connotations for the unpalatable facts of lineage, and an insistence that we
stare down our histories to make visible what has been absent.
From the exterior of Zegan’s studio, viewers can look into a small
showcase in which thirteen objects are laid out in the precise manner of museum
display. Made up of a variety of builders’ fillers, Inverted Knuckle Busters: Deal Series #4-16, are individual, sculptural imprints of hand-grips. These moulds of
the interior of the artist’s fist, also refer to the positions a boxer’s hand
assumes in preparation for the sport. The materials evoke the domestic plugging
of gaps, but the strangeness of the resulting forms suggest that our most
intimate and familiar gestures might carry, and record, more than we can know.
The Deal works consider games of chance and the cards the gambler is
given to wager with. Zegan is drawing parallels between her fathers’ betting
and her own variety: the precarious finances, and the compromised paid careers
and status, which artists stake, with their passion, against possible futures.
Previous works in this series have included everyday objects sourced from the
deceased estate of the artist’s estranged, biological father. These former
possessions, now exhibits in the Museum of Fathers, are mementoes of past
gambles. Together the Deal Series make up an investigation of ideas of inheritance.
Zegan’s research into the bequeathal of trauma is evident in works like
the installation Playing Field, in which personal identity and responsibility is
displaced into that of a gendered group. The bulging, stuffed Y-fronts are
satirical portraits: sculptural caricatures of subjects who remain anonymous.
In an accompanying performance, Raspberry Slurpee, Zegan assumes the guise of a toppled
‘corner doll’ in the installation space. Also known as ‘sorry dolls’, these are
faceless, toddler-sized dummies, dressed in children’s clothes for the purpose
of home ornamentation. Designed to lean shame-faced into corners, they too are
effigies of unidentified scapegoats.
Hilarious, pathetic and creepy, the over-sized mannequin features in
another performance: No More Bing Crosby Christmas. This is set in a second installation, H, which is only visible through the
drain-hole of a sink mounted in an external studio wall. Inside is a corridor
with a broken, haphazardly decorated Christmas tree, rotating on its side. The
artist as sorry doll monopolises the viewing peephole for the duration of the
performance, and the audience is only able to speculate as to what is being
seen. This is the tragicomic territory of an especially warped family romance.
And it is on this fraught and shifting ground of solemnity and tongue-in-cheek,
of pathos and humour, that Zegan has constructed her Museum of Fathers.
Lynne Barwick, 2013
Salmagundi Studios, Marrickville Open Studio Trail, March 9-10, 2013
Salmagundi Studios, Marrickville Open Studio Trail, March 9-10, 2013
[i] Walter Benjamin,
‘In parallel with my actual diary’ from Walter Benjamin Selected Writings,
Vol2, Part 2, 1931-1934,
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999
