Neon Parc

In SNARES we might discern a Ballardian appreciation of the complexities of desire. Recently, bespeckled pop psychologists with the cadence of kindergarten teachers enjoyed a humble media frenzy by promoting a phenomenon dubbed “cute aggression”, describing the urge to squeeze or bite something that elicits extreme positive emotions such as a puppy or soft toy. The enthusiastic uptake of this theory by masses of mid-wit “fun facts” lovers not only evidences our culture’s debilitating allergy to nuance, but also the sanitisation of our understanding of desire and the troubling proximity of extreme emotions. SNARES confronts this proximity, and unravels its precedents.

We should note that, despite its geometric refinement and austerity, minimalism has always been horny. After all, one of the movement’s most celebrated artists, Robert Morris, appeared in an iconic promotional photograph donning a dog collar, Nazi helmet and shackles. Yet McLeish’s SNARES push this association into new territory.

Encouraging affective engagement, SNARES is scaled to obliquely reflect human proportions. Among less ominous resemblances to architectural features like mirrors or windows, these narrow bodies of compactly folded steel, sporadically pattered with monochromatic fluidic markings (a patina of violence and spent energies) might evoke morbid or messy associations. For example, the surface of a mortuary gurney, the glimmering expanse of a guillotine, or perhaps the ubiquitous public urinal.

The holes cut in their lower protruding panels might recall a drain, an eye, or an orifice. This conflation is more significant than it might initially appear. The infamous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) ends with a shot of blood and water merging as they swirl down the shower drain. This image then dissolves into a shot of the victim’s pupil. Indeed, the eye and the drain are significant: they are both witnesses to the perverse crime. The viewer perceives the murder only via fragments. In this “vortex of violence” Hitchcock demonstrates the potence of art and fiction’s indirect confrontation with the real. SNARES suspends this vortex. Fluidic impressions of oil paint, in spatters or downward oriented gestural strokes, threaten to slide off and disappear.

Aside from the detailed roses, McLeish offers little concession to figurative representation. The jarring exception is Caravaggio’s self-portrait Young Sick Bacchus (c. 1593) which features only in sporadic fragments (a bicep here, a hand there). An aggressive slither of the painting, shaped like an errant mirror shard, displays the sick youth’s hand and a glimmering mass of grapes. The roundness of the fleshy thumb and curled fingers compliment the bulbous orbs of the fruit. An aesthetic echo of this arrangement manifests in polyps of bronze blossoming from the rose stems, a result of the welding process.

Spontaneity and the organic flow of mediums are honoured elsewhere in SNARES, such as in the monochromatic dashes of oil paint that stain its surface. But McLeish plays upon these representational cues. Closer inspection reveals the farce to the trained eye. Some of these abstract, fluidic forms are the direct result of the artist’s hand, but others are screen-printed.

In a nineteenth century study of the hand, French writer Casimir Stanislas Arpentigny argued that the thumb “represents only the will of reason”. Without it, he claimed, “the most fertile and brilliant spirit would be a gift entirely without value … defective and incomplete … without moral force, logic, and decision [faculties of which the thumb in different degrees affords the indications].” Indeed, the thumb facilitates creative capacities; the translation of thought into art rather than an untempered expression of the id. Its appearance in SNARES via Caravaggio seems pertinent: a poetic sign of McLeish’s multifaceted acknowledgement of the intense calamity of representational, symbolic and suggestive potentials within art.

A snare refers to a trap, but also to a drum traditionally made from animal skin and intestine. Art and music are a kind of trap. We are often dismissively told that museums contain “dead things” as though art should be alive. Though it has been sacrificed for the didactic and philistine veneration of “the real”, art remains the realm in which we might make intolerable things tolerable, and perhaps preserve the immediate aftermath of climax, calamity, or bloom.

— Essay by Tara Heffernan