Published by Seventh Gallery [2020]



In the year 1960, the corpse of a monster emerged out of the ocean's depths and was washed ashore two miles north of Interview River in Western Tasmania. Like some otherworldly abomination disinterred from the murkiest recesses of the earth, the corpse appeared curiously lacking in any features which might have positioned it in some zoological category. The grainy photo of the monster which graced the front page of the local newspaper The Mercury attests to this unnerving inexplicability. .


Measuring 20 ft long by 18 ft wide with "soft, tusk-like protuberances" instead of eyes and a mouth, the creature's form appeared like a lumpen and primordial mass not far removed from the gelatinous nightmare depicted in Irvin Yeaworth's 1958 classic The Blob. But the experiences evoked by such impious anatomies is something much more radical than mere horror or revulsion. To view such abject messes is to feel our ontological coordinates blur into an indistinct haze, disabling us from integrating and situating these creatures into the logic of external reality. We might call this a rupture or a corruption of the Symbolic Order as both the Blob and the Tasmanian Sea Monster continually rebuff the processes of identification. Lurking outside our systems of representation, their inscrutable grotesqueness reveals the fragility of our phenomenological constructs. In this sense, their monstrous presence slashes and claws at our normative experience of reality, exposing those deep and haunting voids of unknowing which prowl behind the fabric of our subjectivity. To gaze at the Sea Monster's beached corpse is to peer into the occulted depths of the Outside.


Given that this odious cadaver of unknown origins burns through our concepts of perception, let's recast this alien beast as a 'pineal eye' of sorts. In George Bataille's luridly violent text, titled The Pineal Eye, he imagines a mythological eye placed at the summit of the skull. In an act of self-destructive conflagration, this third eye is forced to stare directly into the tortuous light of the sun, blinding itself in an eruption of bloody incandescence. Within this excessive consumption of the sun's radiance, the eye inverts from ocular to anal: it no longer sees but violently excretes in "a prolonged orgasm" of solar decay. For Bataille, this transfiguration of nature (where, in the case of The Pineal Eye, vision becomes defecation) enacted by such extreme acts of sacrificial excess allows one to access the "celestial spaces" and "infinite voids" of inner experience. Bataille loosely defines 'inner experience' as a convulsive stupefaction: a moment in which understanding and identity collapse into a blackhole of non-knowledge. It is within the dramatizations of disgust, ritual and sacrifice that inner experience can be properly expressed, as those practices tend to shatter discourse into an ecstasy of pre- linguistics. Through this degradation of language, the noumenal gap which exists within all forms of representation is suddenly revealed to us. In this sense, inner experience takes an individual to the limits of subjectivity, allowing them to face that deep chasm of unknowing which shapes and frames consciousness. As Bataille pronounced in his book Inner Experience, as existence moves from "the unknown to the known, it is necessary to invert itself at the summit and return to the unknown." Yet The Pineal Eye doesn't confuse this 'return to the unknown' as some deluded effort to purge society of its materialistic vices in some hippy, eco-conscious fashion. To go to the unknown is to be lethally overexposed, brutally expended and fatally accelerated until one simply devolves into something base...something abstract...something other.


The philosopher Martin Heidegger once remarked that despite our own dazzlement with being, man has no eye for Being. Perhaps we might take Bataille's mythical pineal eye and the marooned cadaver of the Tasmanian Sea Monster as a perverted response to this metaphysical complaint. Whereas Heidegger links existence to the temporal movements of understanding - which he articulates as a series of future possibilities for humankind - the pineal eye and the Tasmanian Sea Monster signify a suspension of knowledge or a limit to understanding. They are seductive expulsions of irrationalism, a seething mass of self-destructive drives and obstinate excitations which halt and overwhelm the symbolic processes of categorization.


But their obscenity is expressed not as some horrific mutation or abhorrent hybridity but more as a luxuriant bloat. They are profane magnifications of the natural world, exaggerated to the point that they become unstable and disintegrate in a surplus of information. Like the fetishizing close ups used in pornography and horror movies - where bodily excretions such as blood, sperm or sweat are shown in such concentrated detail they become unrecognizable - our perception of these entities feels unsettlingly intimate. They are simply too formless, too organically incoherent, too inordinately ocular to be viewed in an objective and distant manner. To engage with them you have to submit to their visual excess, allowing your own sense of self to be dissolved in an uninhibited blaze of jouissance. In Bataille's abysmal cosmology, that is the true essence of Being: to mindlessly and unreservedly discharge all energy to the point of exhaustion and loss. In this sense, the pineal eye and the Tasmanian Sea Monster are terrifying omens of our accursed destiny, emblematic of our inevitable collapse into smouldering waste. To witness these creatures is to violently splay open the rectum of reality and stare blindly into its inhuman glare.