INSTINCT

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” —Kierkegaard

Is art instinctual, or is it the desire to announce and find ourselves, and art a catalyst for this drive? Certainly the need to question seems instinctive to most artists, and the links between Drew Pettifer, Owen Leong, Matt Huppatz and Juz Kitson are obvious; each of them uses the human body to explore and question aspects of sensuality, intimacy and identity; they all turn the perceived body into apperception, they use the human body as the necessary object-bridge to see themselves from outside, perhaps not for an absolute truth but for further views and perspectives, all of which are truthful and offer probity of intent.

It is intriguing that while the human body is mostly water and some smaller percentage of solid matter, on it’s own it is a harmless organism apart from the part inside the skull –the cerebral cortex, which plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, wherein consciousness kicks in, giving rise to complex, perplexing and even problematic relations between individuals and groups, no more so than when it comes to sexuality. Scores of texts delve into arguments about nature versus nurture: intimacy, sensuality, identity and desire from social, cultural, religious and political perspectives.

“The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.” —Stéphane Mallarmé

What our genetic coding may offer in term of our capacity to develop our actions falls short of the decomposition of this information into the realm of the symbolic, Zizek states that in order to cope with the trauma of living, we symbolise, this is not “in our genes.” Is then the instinctual ultimately a necessary construct of identity as a way of reacting to this trauma? This recognition and empowering of the ‘self-owned’ against the ‘self-belonging-to-the-collective’, is perhaps a form of sublimating the id to the world of consciousness. The personal narrative derived from this drive of awareness is a formula of identification in the Lacanian sense – the desire to recognise or be recognised, to market our differences, to amplify the presupposed individual freedom to the extent of the individual perceived limitations, and to do so before our time expires. Maybe this is the impetus that empowers these four artists.

Kant made explicit the role of the mind in the structuring of experience, no longer were humans seen as slaves of Nature's Laws, for the human mind was capable of creating and moulding the individual's experiences. This assumption didn’t just offer free will, but also burdened us with the realisation of our possible superiority to nature itself, giving way to the eternal Hegelian master-slave problem - who we are and what we want to be is now in the realm of our own propaganda against our own fears of consumption. Much of Kierkegaard’s philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a “single individual”, giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking, and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
Wilhelm Wundt first used the term “instinct” in psychology in the 1870s. By the close of the 19th century, most repeated behaviour was considered instinctual. Instinct as a concept fell out of favor in the 1920s with the rise in the study of ‘behaviourism’, but this also proved to be too simplistic to account for the complex emotional and social behaviour of human beings.

Sigmund Freud used the term instinct to refer to human drives such as sex and aggression, sometimes represented as Eros-life instinct and Thanatos-death instinct. Freud suggested the id is the unorganised part of the personality structure that contains a human’s basic, instinctual drives. The id contains the libido, which acts according to the ‘pleasure principle’, while seeking to avoid pain or displeasure aroused by increases in instinctual tension. Jacques Lacan, declared that courtly love “is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relationship by pretending that it is we who put up an obstacle to it… It’s impossible to find love through sexuality. It’s impossible to use your body to hide your emotional pain.”

Recently scientists working on the Human Genome Project have identified 90% of specific chromosomes in our DNA, genes that identify criminality, alcoholism, the ‘gay gene’ and countless others. Does this help us understand the fact that biology interacts with both the cultural context and the personal choices that people make about how they want to live their lives and does it put to rest the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate concerning the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits?

“What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.”
— Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

MATT HUPPATZ CV

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 Owen Leong CV 

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Stephen Grant and Bridget Pirrie, Sydney
Private collections in Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom ·

Drew Pettifer CV

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Shepparton Art Museum
Private collections in London, New York and across Australia