Residual paroxysm of unspoken and extended closures interrogated by a malady of necrogenic subterfuge with a nice exit

“As an object ‘Residual paroxysm…’ recalls bodgie hospital apparatus, some sort of amateur scientific experiment, or even a home-made distillery. The components, resembling an injecting apparatus and its circulatory tubes and elements, suggest a narcotics culture made manifest. The TV is the broken animus of the circuitry/circulation system, a key to the implied exchange of fluids through the plastic tubing and matter oozing around the work. Curator and academic Edward Colless described this sculpture as both ‘criminal and aberrant’ and went on to discuss it in highly sexualized terms as a failed reproductive drive, seeing the equipment as engaged in a potential exchange of bodily fluids, but one that merged the suggestion of human genitals and technology, co-joining television and human reproduction. Colless finished with ‘If this is an emblem of maternity, then it is one convulsed in abortion. If an emblem of paternity, then it is accomplished in a dry and vain copulation’. These dysfunctional medical and anatomical analogies are not inappropriate as Cullen has often been quoted as described his work as a form of palliative care, a way of making incurable problems bearable.”

From Wayne Tunnicliffe, ‘Let’s get lost’ in Wayne Tunniliffe (ed.) Let’s get lost, Art Gallery of New South Wales, (exh. cat.), Sydney, 2000, p 11