A note about this essay: This text has a polyvocal quality, which, bucking the normal conventions of art writing, we make no attempt to disguise. Appended to the main text, which can be read on its own as a conventional exhibition catalogue essay, are voluminous footnotes — these are used not to indicate textual hierarchy, but to allow a variety of voices to maintain their separate identities. At times the views of these voices exist in tension. Some of these footnotes are written by Eleen Deprez, who gives her own distinctive, and more personal, perspective. Other footnotes record relevant passages from Simone Kennedy’s PhD dissertation. The main text is by Michael Newall.
In Gerard Reve’s 1947 novel De Avonden [The Evenings] the young protagonist, Frits van Egters, has come of age in the shadow of WWII, and lives with his parents in a depressed, grey Amsterdam. He leaves at nights to wander and reluctantly meet with friends. Frits is cynical and aimless, achieving agency mostly through his acid remarks. The title of this exhibition is one such remark of Frits’s, directed to his mother as he leaves their apartment. It expresses both a disgust with his present situation, and a pessimism about finding meaning and value beyond that. And yet this contempt provides a powerful motive force, initiating Frits’s strange and memorable meanderings with which Reve’s novel is occupied.1
The reference to Reve’s novel, and the character of Frits, touches on various themes and motifs in this exhibition. Max Callaghan’s paintings explore a more familiar urban environment — that of Adelaide city and its suburbs. He too gives an impression of having meandered all its highways and byways, in life and in memory, and subjecting them to his mordant humour. Simone Kennedy’s soft-sculptures are images of her parents — their body parts scattered like those of the dismembered Osiris. In the context of Callaghan’s paintings, one might easily imagine Kennedy’s parents as tragic inhabitants of Adelaide’s suburbia. But in fact, they were residents of London’s East End, where Kennedy spent a traumatic childhood that has fuelled her art practice for three decades. For both artists, disgust and distaste at the kinds of circumstances that they — and many of us — find ourselves thrown into is articulated and shaped with a frenzied compulsion until it finds a redeeming pulse, rhythm and clarity.
In the north window of TLM are installed objects Kennedy associates with her father’s body. Lodged high against the window frame is a rounded, organ-like sculpture of wire and textile, titled Heart Attack. Facing it are a soft sculpture plaid brain, and plaid fabric fly wings arranged to echo the glans of the penis. Her father died of a heart attack, so Kennedy’s mother told her. Stolen unexpectedly away, his body is reimagined with a sensibility schooled in Surrealism and gothic horror. For Kennedy, her mother was a dominating figure, complex, enabling the most shocking abuse and yet also, occasionally, protective. The ‘mother-parts’ occupy the rear gallery space. Made for Kennedy’s Visual Arts PhD dissertation, this is their third exhibition, each a reimagining and refiguring of the persona of the mother in the artist’s psyche, and key moments in their shared history. An orange 1960s dress, embellished with pearl-like beads, stars in a gore-infused body-horror explosion. For this viewer, it recalls the climactic scene of Brian De Palma’s 1976 film Carrie. A soft sculpture umbilical cord and entrails lie in a pile beneath the dress. Within this tableau, objects become animate — an umbrella, deprived of its canopy, becomes a spider, and worms and flies proliferate, all aspects of the mother’s persona. Above, a complex orange grid incorporates the trajectory of a fly’s path through the air.2 At the rear of the space, a paw-like object crafted from felt gently cradles one of the worm-like forms, suggesting a momentary respite from the madness.
In the main gallery space, Kennedy’s objects are interspersed with Callaghan’s paintings. Kennedy conceives of a number of these objects as magical tools for surviving in the imperfect world we are thrown into. They have a shamanic quality, crafted from fabric and beading. There is something that appears to be a rabbit’s head and some other detached rabbit body part, each pullulating with beaded-life, including eggs and maggots. There is a branch coated in green wool — a mossy dowsing rod. In TLM’s other window hangs a doll wrapped in silver wire, its feet replaced by hands — a blessed monkey-like child acrobat, insulated by the silver from evil influences. In addition to her sculptural practice, Kennedy is a prolific painter — this exhibition includes just one of her paintings, an early work depicting her mother. It hangs high at the back of the main space, looking down on the exhibition with a dyspeptic judgemental expression, fag in mouth.3 It is as if Beryl Cook had got out of bed on the wrong side and painted a working-class version of William Dobell’s Mrs South Kensington (1937). Mothers in art are usually treated with warmth, love and veneration — or, in strands of contemporary art, as the occasion for a celebratory, ‘sticky-sublime’ encounter. Kennedy has another approach. She symbolically murders the mother, restaging this event over and over.4
I turn now to Max Callaghan’s paintings. These are part of a series, Mangaleep sieve, made in 2022. Rex Butler, in a recent review for Memo, observed of John Brack’s early paintings that it was rather too easy now to miss their satirical quality, taking them as merely good-natured documents of Melbourne city and suburbia in the 1950s.5 Something similar is true of Callaghan’s images of Adelaide, for it is easy to see them as celebratory, energetic, sometimes giving off a faux naivité or jazzy syncopation. But like Brack they are satirical and critical. And they go further than Brack, not only satirising individuals and types, but in their analysis of ideologies that shape our environments and constrain and shape our lives.
Starting with the small paintings, there is Mangaleep sieve, which gives the series its title. The mangaleep is an imaginary animal invented by Callaghan and a friend. The painting depicts a baited trap. A ramp permits ingress for the unlucky mangaleep, which once trapped, falls into the sieve component, where it is killed. Mangaleep sieve is an expression of the violent control to which animals and nature are subjected in suburbia. Another small painting shows a conservatory built in the backyard of Callaghan’s childhood home, an addition to a modest worker’s cottage, and a source of ire to the artist’s father when neighbours erected a corrugated iron fence right alongside one of its glass walls. Another, titled Door, grave, bus stop, bed, urinal, telephone, litter box, welcome mat, booby trap, depicts all these things: each, bar the last, stations in the life of the suburban dweller. The putty-beige and grey palette of the painting recalls the austerity of late André Derain and the Rappel à l’ordre, while its subject-matter puts me in mind of T.S. Eliot’s description of life “measured out … with coffee spoons”. To this, Callaghan’s booby trap — a brick balanced atop the door – adds a final, slapstick indignity. Another small painting, in a similar style, and showing a similar sly humour, is Glass containers for recovering in after a visit to the psychiatrist. The glass containers, set a few steps down from the psychiatrist’s office, seem a lovely idea at first glance, but they turn out to be drawn from the Cubist-like structures that cage the histrionically suffering figures in the paintings of Francis Bacon. Also playfully grim is Truck carrying chickens coming and then leaving. It depicts a toy-like semi-trailer laden with chickens. In the top half of the painting, it is shown heading west on Adelaide’s Portrush Road to the abattoirs. Below, the same truck reappears, carrying empty chicken crates in the other direction.
Among the paintings of intermediate size is View towards where writers’ week is held during off season, pie warmer with floorboards and cellar, sitting on scab spotted floral chair. This is comprised of, or assembled from three different canvases. An L-shaped canvas, painted with loose brushstrokes, does duty as the worse-for-wear floral-patterned chair. Atop it sits another beige-and-grey canvas showing a pie-warmer in a deli, and a canvas of coloured stripes depicting the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden in Adelaide Parklands where Writers’ Week is held. Another mid-size work, I know you, I see through, all of the pictures that you keep on the wall, shows a view of a rug from above, patterned like a colour-field painting, and stained with dog excrement. At the top is depicted the interior of a dollhouse-like green room hung with pictures. The disconcerting conjunction of viewpoints and scales make for a strange fever-dream of a painting. Another work with these unsettling conjunctions is Born violent fence footpath silhouette. Shadows of the typically eclectic suburban fencing of Adelaide cast jagged outlines on concrete, while a corner shows a screaming infant. This is loosely painted in gestural, expressive marks — its subject matter somewhat hard to descry.
Coming to the large paintings, there is We have the same palm tree penis. This brightly coloured complex image in two panels takes its title from a small, inverted scene of a toy-soldier–like figure facing a naked man in a shower. Both, do indeed, have palm trees in place of genitals. The scene suggests both institutional abuse, and something I can only describe as a vegetal eroticism. Another work, comprising multiple scenes assembled in the manner of a piecework textile, is titled All the chairs that I have sat on sitting on a fence made of grey stone people sleeping in their beds, Leave! Leave! Leave! White cardboard viewfinders focus on minimalist abstract details of beaches, suburbs and mental institutions. Toothbrush snapped in half. That sums up the subject matter, but leaves unsaid the syncopated energy of the work, and the Reve-like distaste at the grey, stone sleepers of suburbia. Perhaps the most powerful statement about the complacency of suburbia is found in a work that expresses a pessimism coupled with an almost incandescent anger, Waffenfarben arm of branch service colours, Dan Murphy’s wall, Adelaide Immigration Transit Accommodation, beige hailing at the bus stop, plop, plop, plop. The lower part shows figures hailing a bus, their arms outstretched as if in National Socialist salute. Above, in a loosely-painted grid are the colours of the corps of the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Beneath them are stripes showing the corporate colours of the Australian liquor store Dan Murphy’s, a fixture of suburban Australia. Alongside these is an image of the immigration detention centre in Kilburn, in Adelaide’s inner Western suburbs, taken from a photograph Callaghan took when he attended a demonstration there. The painting, made in 2022, seems to prophesy the crypto-fascism now very palpable in current Australian politics and culture. Finally, the large painting, Water comes as a cleansing relief, a piecework-style, largely blue work, showing images of water from Adelaide city to the Murray mouth, as well as other water-related imagery, including a tiny image of Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970). Yet it too contains critical details. In two small images a scientist speaking at a symposium on water at a local art space patronises the local Indigenous speakers, and in another part of the painting, little figures crouch over toilets, suggesting a more polluting flow.
Pessimism about the world and our situation within it is not a recent phenomenon. It has a long history in Western philosophy. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo (posthumously published in 1908 but written twenty years earlier): “truth is terrible”. In the absence of God, the outlook for humanity is poor, at best: pain, oblivion, injustice and ignorance are more or less inescapable. Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he describes in The World as Will and Representation (1818) is especially notorious:
“[E]very animal is the prey and food of some other … every animal can maintain its own existence only by the incessant elimination of another’s … till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as manufactured for its own use. … [T]his same human race reveals in itself with terrible clearness that conflict, that variance of the will with itself, and we get homo homini lupus [man, a wolf to man].”
Weirdly, Schopenhauer turns to a contemporary report of Australian wildlife, then new to Europeans, to illustrate the idea:
“[T]he most glaring example of this kind is afforded by the bulldog-ant of Australia, for when it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head attacks the tail with its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head. The contest usually lasts for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants.”
I don’t think Callaghan and Kennedy are philosophical pessimists in the vein of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but they both find themselves, like so many of us do, thrown into situations that can only produce a pessimistic outlook. For Kennedy it is surely summed up in Philip Larkin’s infamous line: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” For Callaghan, it is the complacent, senescent attitudes of suburban culture that inspire pessimism.
Both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer believed they had a cure for pessimism. The terms they used to describe this cure don’t communicate their ideas vividly today, but I think that for Nietzsche it meant something like this: To live life with a vengeance, to eat up pain and trauma when necessary, to be unafraid of transgression, to be true to one’s own perceptions and emotions. In short, to live life like an artist. Reve’s character Frits van Egters shows a glimmering of this in his acid remarks, and Reve (and here I add that I take the character of Frits to be partly autobiographical) went on to embrace these attitudes in his later work. Callaghan and Kennedy, their art amply shows, embody this spirit too, in their own distinctive ways.
That’s only one side of a cure for pessimism, for many will feel we need a different way out of the pessimist bind. We need a route back to hope, to believe that there is scope for something better, even if it is difficult, and the prospects for success unsure. Once one takes this attitude, philosophical pessimism will appear to invite defeatism and its own kind of complacency. Callaghan and Kennedy both reject pessimistic defeatism and complacency, but I will reserve evidence of this for a note, since it leads decisively away from aesthetics, and into the field of ethics. 6
NOTES
- I first read De Avonden when I was eighteen, five years younger than its protagonist. Duif recommended it; I immediately fell under its spell and quickly devoured all of Reve’s work. Frits’ snarky remarks, black humour, emotional detachment, deadpan cruelty seemed thrillingly intelligent to me. The novel’s atmosphere of bleak nihilism resonated having just moved out on my own. Wandering through the streets of Ghent at night, I shared Frits’s suffocating sense of ennui and his contempt for the polite rituals and bourgeois emptiness of adult professional life. Godfried Bomans famously called the novel “een schrikbarend boek” [a frightening/shocking book] saying that he had “never read a book so bleak, so utterly devoid of positivity, so dark, cynical, and completely negative.” “Het wurgt iemand de keel toe [It strangles your throat shut].” That darkness was precisely what attracted me. Duif and I quoted the novel constantly, repeating its morbid jokes, adopting its archaic wording, verbose speech. Frits is genuinely awful. He is cruel to his family, to animals, and to his friends. He mocks the old, the bald, and diabetics; he is deeply contemptuous of women; he calls cancer “a beautiful disease” and wishes openly for his parents to die. He homes in on the insecurities and weaknesses of his friends. His endless sarcasm is a defence mechanism and a symptom of profound emotional paralysis. I reread the novel every December, as many “Revianen” — devoted readers of Gerard Reve – do. Since the book unfolds over the final ten days of the year, with each chapter covering a single day, it lends itself perfectly to an end-of-year ritual reading. Over the years I have read it in Dutch and in English translation, listened to the eight-hour audiobook narrated in Reve’s slow, hypnotic voice, and even read the illustrated comic adaptation. Over the years I have gifted it, strongly forbidding recipients to read it outside the allowed period starting 22 December.
Reve himself remains far more difficult than the novel alone suggests. His work is provocative in countless ways: deliberately offensive, sexually explicit, often obsessed with sadism, humiliation, cruelty, and sacrilegious absurdity. He insisted that such writing was theatrical and not reflective of his real beliefs, and as Reve’s biographer Nop Maas observed, Reve was “an author one must take seriously, but not literally.” That ambiguity extends to Reve himself: a major figure in the gay liberation movement in the Netherlands, yet politically conservative; capable of tenderness and grotesque cruelty almost simultaneously. Even his insults towards public figures – calling Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands “een stomme eigenwijze trut van Troje”, for instance – were not designed to persuade but simply to scandalise.
Now I have surpassed Frits in age, watched one of my parents die, and fallen in love with someone bald and diabetic: exactly the kind of person Frits would have mocked mercilessly. Reading the book now, what strikes me most is no longer the cruelty or the wit, but the vulnerability hidden beneath them. In the final pages, behind all the cynicism and performance, we glimpse Frits’s emotional fragility: a frightened young man unable to connect to other people except through mockery and negation.
↩︎ - Kennedy records the following details about this work in her PhD thesis: “Initially depicted in soft sculpture and later replicated in steel, the flight path of the fly is based on … experiments by graduates from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo. Their recordings showed that distinct flight patterns of flies were produced prior to (low) and post (high) ‘feeding’ of a sugar solution. The low patterns form a spiral and the high patterns include sharp ascents and descents. … The spatial ‘drawing’ of the actual fly’s flight … provides an opportunity for imaginative flight, an open trajectory that dispassionately tracks the movements of the fly and, metaphorically, the symbolic function of the mother. The principal ‘line’ of the trajectory is formed in steel, developed as a line of memory/time, presence/absence. A line, cage-like, alludes to the constraints of structured language. In the making process of the sculpture, my imagination was able to traverse, balance and extend beyond the irresolvable emotional relationship with my mother and the ambiguity of childhood.” (p. 112)
↩︎ - Simone brings a small painting with her when we’re installing works in the gallery. It isn’t on the list, but she has brought it anyway. She doesn’t want it; she says she hates it. We unwrap it, I notice Simone does not bear to look at it. It feels less like she is not so much offering us a work for exhibition more than trying to simply get rid of it. Better still, she says, if we can sell it: then it can disappear entirely. This disdain is in contrast to the careful painting itself. Painted in 2000, it is a small portrait of Simone’s mother, Maureen. It is smooth, and carefully painted. It’s not a likeness but rather a caricature: a sneering face, melting and deformed into a grotesque expression. The eyes glance downward. A thin cigarette juts upward from the mouth, smoke curling up the stairs in the shape of a frail body. Simone tells us the painting is not only a portrait but a memory. Across the dress are the words: What are you waiting for? – words her mother used to urge the young Simone up the stairs, to the place she dreaded, where she was abused by her stepfather, while her mother knowingly allowed it to happen. Her mother’s eyes are empty, as though she either would not or could not see her daughter – could not see her resistance, her protest, her pain.
↩︎ - The beads on the dress spell in grade 1 Braille (supplemented with ‘decoy’ beads) the following: “If I should wake up with my mother in my bed lying next to me I should want to kill her until she be a bloody mass of swampy head cracking crunching bones and then I would press her flesh hard into the bed and mush up the blood so as to see it well up like a small sea between my fingers.”
↩︎ - Rex Butler, Review of wani toaishara, Everyday Raptures and Repairs, Memo, 9 May 2026.
↩︎ - To take just one example each: Kennedy has contributed writing to a book supporting survivors of sexual abuse, published by the Royal District Nursing Service. I have already mentioned Callaghan’s activism; he is also developing a thesis at Adelaide University, in Fine Arts, that in part analyses and critiques settler colonialism, an ideology that underlies many of the ills he diagnoses in the city and suburbia.
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