Pat Hoffie: This Mess We’re In

Pat Hoffie’s This Mess We’re In comprises three distinct bodies of work: the Ready to Assemble series, 2003, the Smoke and Mirrors series, 2016, and the Clusterfkk series, 2018–20, along with sketchbook studies produced over two decades, drawn together by two shared aspects: they’re all works on paper, and they all address some form of cataclysm, crisis, punctum, mess. The following is an extract from Carol Schwarzman’s catalogue essay focusing on the most recent Clusterfkk series.


Pat Hoffie, I Am Scared/I Stand Up, 2018, watercolour and gouache on architects’ paper, 220 × 330cm. Courtesy the artist and QUT Art Museum, Queensland

Meeting an Unruly Multiverse

Carol Schwarzman

When looking at the works in This Mess We’re In, a viewer should bear in mind that for Pat Hoffie, there is a reciprocity between visual and ethical discernment. That is, what we look at in art influences our orientation to our world, and what images do in the world matters. In much of Hoffie’s work, she has interrogated the terms of everyday existence from differing standpoints (workers, refugees, animals, environments and ecologies), aligning her methods and forms to identify inequities. However, in This Mess We’re In, the newest, large works’ focus on certainty has softened, even as their visual drama is ramped up. In provoking a sensation of shock and awe, these teeming landscapes entangle normal life with epic, symbolic, brawling babels of humans (teens, mums, children, soldiers) and nonhumans (trees, tsunamis, manga characters, totems, bunnies, bombs). What we see in the paintings are allegorical multiverses proffering no easy identification, or resolution, of guilt and innocence. Far from it: in several of these works, as intense conflicts swarm, mobile phone distraction proliferates. To my mind, many of the relaxed, sauntering human figures in paintings such as I Am Scared/I Stand Up (2018), and Force Majeure (Underworld Bunny) (2018), though surrounded by war, pollution, or an impending tsunami, could sport thought bubbles over their heads, saying, “Anyway, what can one person do?” Hoffie suggests that an ethics of truly seeing what’s in plain sight too regularly succumbs to the seductions of the selfie or the screen.

Pat Hoffie, Force Majeure (Underworld Bunny), 2018, watercolour and gouache on architects’ paper, 220 × 300cm. Courtesy the artist and QUT Art Museum, Queensland

***

I had a hunch that thinking about the term multiverse would be key to teasing out Hoffie’s concerns in these paintings. When I looked up the word, I found it was first coined in 1895 by the preeminent American psychologist and philosopher William James. Concurrently, James argued for the unavoidable principle that consciousness is a point of view. More specifically, he foregrounded the impossibility of one human being acquiring anything more than a biased vision of experience: in the realm of human consciousness, he argued, there is no all-knowing Absolute. James also originated the concept of stream of consciousness, and referred to the flowing experience of our combined physical and mental worlds as “that operation of knowing many things together”.1 The entirety of each being’s existence in this world, then, for James, is a multiverse; only when invested with greater meaning can this be apprehended as a coherent universe. Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary defines one meaning of the word as:

3. multiverse, n. figurative. A sphere of very varied possibility, such as the mind or the imagination.2

Bingo. The intersections of Hoffie’s inventive, willfully chaotic imagery (‘spheres of very varied possibility’) are meant to configure for us our immersion within complex sensations, ideas, and challenges encountered when we walk out the door in the morning. As James has written:

Out of what is in itself an indistinguishable swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts . . . of abrupt changes . . .3

Thus, for James and for Hoffie, “experience is re-molding us every moment…”4 But what makes life truly worth living is not to look away, but to take on the risks of fighting to try to give meaning to the mayhem.


 

Carol Schwarzman is a visual artist and independent arts writer based in Meanjin/Brisbane. Her writing focuses on contemporary visual arts, culture and nature. She contributes to publications in Australia and internationally such as Artlink, Art Monthly Australasia, Art + Australia, Sculpture, The Brooklyn Rail and Contemporary Ceramics. She is currently a PhD candidate in art history at University of Queensland.

 

QUT Art Museum
17 October 2023 to 10 March 2024
Queensland

 

[1] William James, The Principles of Psychology, quoted in The Oxford Handbook of William James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), unpaginated, https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34712?login=true. 

[2] “Multiverse”, Oxford English Dictionary Online, https://www.oed.com/search/advanced/Meanings?textTermText0=multiverse&textTermOpt0=WordPhrase.

[3] William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 274, as quoted in William J. Gavin, William James in Focus: Willing to Believe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 20.

[4] ibid., 21.

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