Henri Papin: Lord of the Flies
One
might ask ‘who is Henri Papin?’ as with James Boag in the film
noir-styled advertisements for the eponymous Tasmanian brewery. Peering
through the keyhole, however, one is likely only to encounter the eye of
Papin staring back. He is a mysterious figure, a voyeur, he has been
revealing himself gradually through a series of exhibitions based around
his collections of human behaviour. His first was held in 2006 and
comprised six museum-style cabinets, five of which displayed discrete
facets of his collection. Each was built up from moments of voyeurism,
exaggerated and fictionalised according to his own psychological schema,
with the sixth cabinet documenting the original glimpses that had
inspired the contents of each of the others.
Papin’s
second exhibition was held the following year in Adelaide – up until
now, the only one presented outside Tasmania – and introduced his
divided persona: the conscious Henry Papin, who works as an engraver,
and the sublimated Henri Papin, who typically exerts the greater
influence over the exhibitions. This iteration allegorised certain
aspects of Henry’s past that had formed his identity, things, as
described by Tasmanian artist Tricky Walsh, that ‘stay with you, the
oddly defining moments often resurfacing at the least expected of
times.’(1) For Henry Papin, these moments are defined by the emergence
of Henri, who revealed on that occasion his study of the effect the
built environment has on human behaviour, specifically the nefarious
activities encouraged by the obscurity of laneways. This he grouped into
Marking (urination, graffiti) Inhabiting (sex, vagrancy) and Meeting
(for drug-related or other crimes). Papin documented zones that had the
highest incidence of such activities and collected samples of the
behaviour that took place there.
Henry
Papin’s meek exterior coupled with the peculiarity of Henri Papin
beneath are possibly the family resemblance he bears to his distant
relatives the Sisters Papin, the housemaids from the French town of Le
Mans who, with little apparent provocation, infamously turned on their
mistress and her daughter, gouging out their eyes and butchering them as
if they were rabbits, early in 1933. This macabre affair caught the
imagination of French intellectual circles: André Breton published
photographs of the sisters before and after their crime – appearing neat
and deranged respectively – in the December issue of Le Minotaur; he
also ran an article by Jacques Lacan, ‘Motives of Paranoid Crime: The
Crime of the Papin Sisters’ and the Papins were the inspiration for the
1947 play The Maids by that connoisseur of criminal activity, Jean
Genet.
With
The Processor of Circumstance, Henri Papin makes his seventh
presentation, his first in Melbourne, in which he has focussed his
attention specifically on human attraction. Having moved on from simply
documenting and collecting behaviour, Papin is attempting to understand
its impulses by devising a machine to measure this elusive quality.
Bio-magnetic deviations includes in its structure the form of a pig, the
animal whose heart may be swapped for our own. Inside this fabricated
carcass Papin has placed mechanisms built from minerals that exert
attractive and repulsive powers: iron filings, ferrofluid, lodestones
and neodymium magnets – all Papin’s metaphors for desire.
Alongside
the machine, Papin displays The rules of attraction, a collection of
fishing flies that he has tied from samples of human hair. Having great
significance as part of a person’s allure, as well as to practitioners
of Voodoo and forensic science, hair has featured in Papin’s collections
for some time. Earlier presentations were curiously reminiscent of the
anecdote Tricky Walsh recounts of squatting in a Hobart house filled
with a lifetime’s worth of hoarded articles that included samples of
hair taped to the wall above the bed that followed a chronological
sequence from blonde to grey.(2)
It
is difficult to address Henri Papin and his work without identifying
literary parallels; the flies of The rules of attraction might have
associations with Les Mouches (The Flies), a play by Jean-Paul Sartre,
written in 1943 but based on the Greek myth of the siblings Orestes and
Electra who murder their mother and step-father to avenge the deposition
of their father Agamemnon. In Sartre’s adaptation, flies plague the
citizens of Argos as punishment for their tacit role in the regicide and
as a reminder of the shame of their humanity. The flies in combination
with the pig carcass, also bring to mind William Golding’s 1954 novel
Lord of the Flies in which a group of British schoolboys are marooned on
an island and descend into anarchy. The head of a sow they had caught
to eat is placed on a stake as an offering to ‘the Beast’, a malign
presence they come to believe is on the island; Golding’s title, which
happens to be a literal translation of Beelzebub, refers to the vision
that Simon, the most sensitive and creative of the boys, has of the
severed head, now crawling with flies, where it reveals to him that the
beast is in fact within them all.
The
image in both literary works is one of flies drawn in, like iron
filings to Papin’s magnet, but his flies are lures in themselves.
Whether the essence he extracts from the hair they are tied with retains
the allure it had when still growing on his subjects or has turned
repellent as loosened hairs tend to do, Papin’s experiments remain as
inconclusive – as fugitive as the picture of him we might glean from his
projects. As we look, all we find is what intrigued Papin as he was
observing us.
Francis Parker
Curator – Exhibitions
Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA
