The Monsters of Brent Harris - Laurence Simmons Lecture

Monsters will be the central characters of this talk. Simmons will argue that they are the central characters of Brent Harris’s life’s work too. We will be concerned with the monstrous not out of sensationalism but in the sense of both the assimilable and the uncanny. The favourite haunts of monsters are the phantasmal boundaries between life and death, reality and representation. Places, as the popular children’s book advises, ‘where the wild things are’. Monsters subvert our established categories of the life-world; they ask us to think again. Monsters, in other words, force us to take a look at ourselves.

Harris’s monsters have forced him to look at himself. He knows that monsters also signal experiences of uncontainable excess and remind us that our self is never fully secure in itself. We are carriers of a primal unconscious they whisper. We are what you were and what you might yet become they insinuate. Monsters ghost the margins of what can legitimately be thought and painted. Harris’s monsters are unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory, heterogeneous, wacky even. To face the monster and acknowledge that it is an integral part of us — which Simmons will attempt to show that Brent Harris has and does — is to accept that we need not fear its otherness, nor ‘act it out’ by projecting our fear onto others.

Laurence Simmons is Professor of Film Studies in the School of Humanities at The University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau. Among his publications are Freud’s Italian Journey (2006), Tuhituhi, William Hodges, Cook’s Painter in the Pacific (2011), Victory over Death: The Art of Colin McCahon (with Rex Butler, 2021), Žižek through Hitchcock (2021). He also co-curated the travelling exhibition Gordon Walters: New Vision (2017).