Deathgate

7 FOREWORD FOREWORD Dr. Lachlan Malone Art is inexorably tethered to context, which in turn is influenced, shaped, and ultimately determined by the components that give context its meaning. Broadly speaking, these components are historical, cultural, societal, and/or physiological. More specifically, they could be ideological, phenomenological, or existential. It is worth mentioning these components specifically because Elborne demonstrates throughout his thesis how it is these components that make up the theoretical scaffolding for his own practice. Likewise, it is the lens through which the artists he analyses represent the world: Adriana Varejão, Alex Seton, Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, Cornelia Parker, Fernando Botero, Ai Weiwei, and Leon Golub among others. Elborne shows through his own work, influenced by the works of artists such as these, how it is the artist’s role in society to marry aesthetics with concept in the creation of affective discourse, and that in doing so the artist becomes the archivist, activist, critic, and perhaps most importantly, collective consciousness of a society. In this setting, art becomes the vehicle for personal and societal growth, development, and improvement through first awareness and then contemplation. Of course, what precedes our awareness and contemplation of an artwork is representation, and prior to representation is imagination. In this sense, imagination is perhaps interchangeable with intuition, which means all artwork is the result of one’s sum and ongoing experiences in and with the world. I see this in Elborne’s practice, which to me is the result of his lived experiences with art, history, and individuals. At the core of these experiences is a profound sense of trauma, loss,and sadness, but rather than advocate solipsism, shock, provocation, or nihilism, Elborne instead champions the idea of a shared contemplation in the presence of the abject in the hope that we can better ourselves and in doing so better the world. This remedial notion of experiential horror as represented through art, or the aura of atrocity as Elborne calls it, is an important one because it is capable of communicating to audiences a sense of pain, suffering, and evil. To communicate this sense of horror is not to celebrate or fetishise such ideas, however, but to cultivate empathy in the face of an unknowable horror that can only be known by the individual who has experienced that horror. In short, artworks of this kind remind us that we must decide the person we will be in the moments that follow our experiences. In Elborne’s art there exists a veneer of abstraction that covers a rendering of a traumatic experience, which is perhaps comparable to trauma itself. For example, witnessing the physical deterioration of a loved one to a terminal disease or seeing someone jump from a burning building to their death is of course a different yet still profound experience to that of the individual dying from a terminal disease or the individual who jumps to their death. Although different, there is a shared trauma because of empathy, and yet these traumatic experiences can only ever be an abstraction without firsthand experience. Once experienced, these moments are capable of disorientating our Being with an other- worldly or transcendental quality whilst shackling us to that which is undeniably and terrifyingly present. Again, rather than explore this idea in relation to (or in advocacy of) trauma’s undeniable solitude, Elborne chooses to focus on empathy in ways reminiscent of Viktor Frankl, and in doing so reinforces the role of the artist in society by arguing that life’s meaning is (in part) fashioned by creative works; shaped by the values we derive from our experiences within the world, and determined by the attitude we choose to adopt in the face of horror vacui.