DAVID NOONAN: A HEARTFELT FAMILIARITY

‘nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy’

-       Virginia Woolf, Orlando

A wet-haired boy cradles a seagull against his chest. He stands in a strange, human-shaped doorway - the room behind caste in a yellow light redolent of 1970s suburban interiors. The boy looks directly into the camera as if he might be about to speak to us.

Though enigmatic, this image brings to mind a common childhood experience of finding and caring for an injured animal – which becomes a vivid memory, for as Gaston Bachelard points out, ‘Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.’ (Bachelard, 1990: 33) This establishes a delicate trust between us and the animal. At the same time such moments are usually accompanied by a sense of loss as the wild animal rarely remains, either recovering and returning to the wild, or dying. In this image, the boy’s direct gaze seems to acknowledge the encounter as fragile.

Love is haunted by the possibility of loss. Photographic images such as those in David Noonan’s collages try to evoke and hold onto the moment. Yet photographs are also a relic of what has passed. In a way, the boy holding a bird embodies the greater truth of this series: that each moment will become the past, and that the past is irretrievable. Here the image both celebrates the everyday and mourns its passing.

In a mix of black and white as well as faded colour recalling 1970s cinema – for which Noonan has a passion– the eleven collages comprising Images show golden-haired boys at play, children with shrouded heads, a girl entering a mysterious, futuristic space, and young adults in a grimy London street. Like much of Noonan’s work they draw from popular culture and unknown (anonymous) sources – cutting and pasting second-hand books, dated home-decorating magazines, film stills and memorabilia reminiscent of his childhood and adolescence in the regional town of Ballarat.[1]

Despite their derivation from magazines and books rather than from his own life, these works seem deeply personal. Each one could be read as a treasured photograph from the artist’s own life. However, Noonan does not give much away about his intentions: his nondescript titles are inscrutable, keeping the work open to interpretation and to the projection of our own memories and associations. Hence looking at them, we begin to wonder whether we have seen these people before; they become familiar.

The black and white image Leicester square shows an attractive young woman standing in London’s Leicester square beside an aging bust, surrounded by garbage and detritus. While the image has a timeless quality, an advertisement for the 1978 horror film Damien: Omen II in the background anchors it in a particular period.

The girl does not pose or smile for the camera. Her expression is unguarded; her gaze is frank and familiar. This apparent refusal to pose implies the kind of intimacy that the German philosopher O. F. Bollnow once defined as ‘a heartfelt familiarity.’(Bollnow, 2011: 114)[2] Infused with yearning for the once-familiar, Leicester Square reminds me of an old photograph of a past lover - remembered with both warmth and melancholy.

Noonan uses collages as a means of pulling the past into the present. The cut and paste of images from different eras folds time back on itself. In this sense, Noonan’s collages are analogous to memory: composite, partial and yet emotionally compelling. In old age, people remember particular moments vividly, without always being able to explain their context, or fit them into the narrative of their lives. When suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, my grandfather would return repeatedly to the house where he had grown up, seemingly looking for a way back into that past - or perhaps already inhabiting it. His earliest memories, which had become disconnected from his present life, were the most real and meaningful to him. These are the kinds of memories, and the emotional experience of memory, that Noonan’s works evoke.

We tend to think of the medium of collage as nostalgic because it recycles images. (Blanche, 2008: 27) Though the term is often used in the pejorative sense, nostalgia is a powerful emotion. Paraphrasing Milan Kundera, the collage artist John Stezaker counters the common attack on nostalgia as sentimental, holding that it ‘… is not a comfortable form of reverie but the opposite: it is a way of living with loss. It is not about an imaginary retrieval of the past but about the impossibility of return: a condition of exile.’ (Blanche, 2008: 27) This impossibility of returning to the past, coupled with an abiding love for that which has passed, defines Images. Here, Noonan reaches toward something that seems to slip further away as he approaches. At once celebratory and melancholy, Images embody an innate tension between love and grief, recollection and loss.

Cited references:

Bachelard, Gaston.1990. Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications.

Blanche, Craig. 2008. Collage: assembling contemporary art, London: Black Dog publishing.

[1] Cinema has been an enduring influence for Noonan; as he says ‘Inexplicable yet human moments in a film always stay with me.’ (David Noonan ‘ Life in Film’ in Frieze, October 2006, p 42) It seems that Noonan’s images attempt to capture these inexplicable and human moments.

[2] O.F. Bollnow, Human Space, (trans. W. Kohlhammer) Hyphen Press, London, 2011. p 114. This turn of phrase comes in the middle of a chapter titled ‘The wide world’ in which Bollnow explores human relationships to the world outside of home. In so doing, he sets up a dualism between the home (here defined as a social as well as physical space – populated by our loved ones) and the outside world. While we travel far, we also yearn for home – the ontological centre of our world – with which we have a ‘heartfelt familiarity.’ 

First published in Natasha Bullock (ed), We used to talk about love, Sydney: AGNSW 2013. Buy it here.