Maestro

Todd Field’s magnificent new film

grows sensitive to invasive sounds, like the rattling of a car’s airconditioning or the hum of a refrigerator. She is sent mysterious packages. Field adorns his frame with eerie background figures and unsettling negative space. Externally bedevilled though she may be, it is Lydia who is the spectre at her own feast; her own reckless obsessions which threaten to unmask her, forcing what was private into public. This is how TÁR quietly asserts its position on the cultural arguments at its core, clarifying that while greatness offers prodigious opportunity for both altruistic and amoral behaviour, it is ultimately an individual’s choices which will cement either their renown or their ruin.

Surely there are no other artists quite so rarefied as maestros –those top-billed superstars who mount the podium, silently turn their backs on us, then remain that way all night. Their performance is measured by the power they wield over others. Perhaps this is why writer–director Todd Field chose to centre his new film, the magnificent TÁR, on the conductor. The role holds a unique and inherent duplicity; what those in the conductor’s inner sanctum see is not what the rest of the world sees. Their lives are a delicate balance between public and private performance.

TÁR is many things: a treatise on authority and its innate corrosiveness; a blistering satire of the classical music industry; a chilly European ghost story; and a career-best performance from Cate Blanchett. Yes, this is also a film about ‘cancel culture’. But TÁR trumps most stories that have attempted to grapple with this thorny concept in recent years. It is everything both the decriers and proponents of moralistic mob justice are not: nuanced, detailed, and painstakingly thorough.

Lydia Tár (Blanchett) is not a real person, and this is not a biopic. We meet her onstage at a New Yorker event, in conversation with real-life staff writer Adam Gopnik. The conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, she shares a home, and daughter, with the first violinist and concertmaster, Sharon Goodnow (the brilliant Nina Hoss). She wears suits by Egon Brandstetter, flies in private jets, and appears on Alec Baldwin’s podcast. She is about to release her memoir (TÁR ON TÁR) while preparing to record Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, her white whale, the crowning achievement of her life’s work. But her assistant, Francesca (a captivatingly strung-out Noémie Merlant), has been receiving troubling emails from one of Lydia’s ex-protégées, a young woman named Krista Taylor. When Lydia blatantly undermines a blind audition for a new cellist in order to hire the beautiful young Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), it becomes clear that this is a pattern of behaviour which Lydia’s status has thus far enabled her to indulge in unchecked – but which may be about to catch up with her.

Here the film shifts gears from poised character study to simmering psychodrama. Lydia is afflicted by phantom pains and

As an actor, Todd Field played the pianist Nick Nightingale in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), supposedly shadowing the great director on set and absorbing everything he could. It shows to this day – TÁR is nothing if not Kubrickian in its intentionality. As a film about control, every moment is fittingly deliberate, and technically flawless. Field and his cinematographer, Florian Hoffmeister, capture the brutalist environments of Lydia’s life and work with restrained admiration. Actors are arranged in compelling wide shots that build more and more tension the longer they are held (one early sequence, in which Lydia dresses down a Gen Z Juilliard student, unfolds in a single, breathless take). Hildur Guðnadóttir – referenced in the film itself as a trail-blazing female composer – oversees the original music. Every piece of furniture and item of clothing is beautiful, considered, and somehow insidious. Equally exacting are the choices Field makes regarding which parts of the story we see, and which parts we do not. Seemingly pivotal plot points are omitted in favour of moody, symbolic detours, and the back half of the film is cunningly constructed in such a way as to force us to see the world through Lydia’s eyes, through the lens of her self-aggrandisement. This could be misread as an attempt at forced empathy, but Field isn’t asking us to pick a side – simply imploring us not to look away.

When discussing the music of Bach, Lydia suggests that good composers understand ‘it’s the question that involves the listener – never the answer’. Todd Field understands this, too. It’s hard to remember a modern film which treated its audience with this much respect, or trusted them to do so much work to get at the heart of a movie – but in TÁR the clues are everywhere, both visual and sonic. When they are assembled the right way, not only do the film’s many thematic threads coalesce into a remarkable symphonic whole, but you realise, somewhat surprisingly, just how bleakly funny it all is. The closing stretch is a staggering grace note (or punchline, perhaps) which lands once the film seems to have wrested control from its own domineering protagonist. At the start of the movie, scenes last ten or fifteen minutes at a time – the audio is mixed in mono – the hermetically sealed interiors that Lydia frequents are perfectly and oppressively silent. But over its hefty 160-minute runtime, the film changes – imperceptibly at first, then more noticeably. The pacing accelerates and the sound mix opens up, letting in more of the organic noise of the actual, real world. TÁR moves with the serene, sickening pull of inevitability, taking on new life as Lydia Tár loses control of hers. It is a film in perfect sync with the medium, with its creator, and with our times. g

Heart and soul

The return of the Griffin production

Diane Stubbings

Since first being produced at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019, Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie – a legal drama about consent and sexual violence – has become something of a phenomenon. Awarded Griffin Theatre’s playwriting prize in 2018, the subsequent production was enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike. A 2022 West End production – propelled by the star power of Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) –garnered international acclaim. In 2023, the London production moves to Broadway, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s six-week remounting of the original Griffin production (until 25 March) sold out before its first performance. If that wasn’t enough, a screen adaptation of the play is in the works, so too a novel, both helmed by Miller.

Miller’s writing has long been concerned with themes of social justice and the equitable negotiation of relationships, whether those relationships be marital, familial, or sexual. In Prima Facie, these themes are actualised in the plight of Tessa Ensler (Sheridan Harbridge), a criminal barrister who finds herself on the wrong side of the judicial process. Here, Miller borrows a trope frequently employed in medical narratives: the surgeon who finds themselves under the knife, the oncologist enduring chemotherapy. Tessa’s accusation that she was raped by one of her colleagues exposes her to the deficiencies of a legal system in which she has, as a lawyer herself, invested so much faith.

In interviews, Miller notes that since she traded in her own law career for playwriting, she has been aware of the dramatic potential in the tension between (to quote from the play itself) ‘a woman’s experience of sexual assault … [and] the male-defined system of truth’ that underpins our system of justice. When she finally turned that idea into a script, Miller found few theatre companies interested in taking it on, and it wasn’t until it won the Griffin Prize and was championed by Griffin’s then artistic director, Lee Lewis, that Prima Facie was given its opportunity.

Prima Facie is an expertly crafted monologue, and a gift for any actor to play, but that in itself doesn’t explain the extraordinary response the play has received. Indeed, one suspects that the play may well have suffered the fate of most other fine Australian plays – a short run of performances and a flurry of favourable critical notices – were it not for the serendipity of its timing.

In 2017, #MeToo became a global movement. While feminists had been agitating for decades about defects in the way the legal system handled cases of rape, the amplifying effects of social media succeeded in focusing unprecedented attention on the profound power imbalance that drives sexual assault against women and the obstacles women face in bringing perpetrators to justice.

Prima Facie not only speaks to the #MeToo moment, it crystallises the experience of women who suffer sexual assault. Crucially, it also painfully demonstrates how, in enforcing the right of the defendant to a presumption of innocence, the law imposes an undue burden on women not just to prove their case but to justify their right to be believed. The experience of rape, as Tessa reminds us, is not remembered in the ‘neat, consistent, scientific parcel’ that the law demands.

Sheridan Harbridge’s Tessa begins all sass and confidence. In an expertly conceived opening scene, Tessa describes the adrenalin rush of cross-examination. It is a sport, a competition (‘You’re only as good as your last brief’), and Tessa takes a shameless delight not just in winning, but in winning in a way no one – not the prosecution, not the defendant, not the witness – sees coming. Unapologetic about her tactics, she doesn’t get emotionally involved: she just plays the game within its rules.

She is, Tessa tells herself as she probes holes in the evidence of a sexual assault victim, merely doing what she has been trained to do. If her client is found not guilty, she reasons, the blame lies with the police and prosecutors who have not done a thorough enough job of proving their case. She trusts in her mantras: there is ‘no real truth, only legal truth’, ‘defence is about human rights’, ‘he did not know there was no consent’.

If there is a question Miller might have interrogated more deeply, it is why so many women like Tessa are, consciously or unconsciously, complicit in the undermining of other women? Why, as Prima Facie suggests, do we need to find ourselves on the other side of the equation before we recognise the insidiousness of the particular social or legal structures we are upholding? Why are we persuaded to believe that trying to beat men at their own game is the only way for women to make their mark?

Miller goes some way towards answering these questions in giving Tessa a working-class background and a compelling need to prove herself worthy of her place in prestigious chambers, surrounded as she is by the offspring of judges and products of the private school system. For all her mockery of posh schoolgirls and ponderous judges, Tessa can’t shake the chip on her shoulder. While this impels much of her allegiance to the ‘legal truth’, it doesn’t entirely account for her refusal to acknowledge the full emotional toll being borne by the women she cross-examines. In allowing Tessa to doubt the law but not her own loyalty to it, Miller perhaps lets Tessa off too lightly.

As Tessa, Harbridge skilfully navigates the currents that carry her from exhilaration to confusion to despair. In a perceptively calibrated performance, Harbridge brings not only emotional heft to Tessa’s story but also a striking physicality, notes heightened by Lee Lewis’s sensitive direction. As Tess manoeuvres a single black office chair (set design by Renée Mulder), we witness the joy she takes in her own body, from her embodiment of those people she mimics and mocks to her abandoned dancing on a night out with colleagues. Not only does the sexual assault rob Tessa of her own agency in her body – her delight in her own sexuality – there is in Harbridge’s performance a palpable sense of the deadening shift in Tessa’s centre of gravity.

Watching Prima Facie in 2023, it is impossible not to feel the echo of what was, in effect, the trial of Brittany Higgins as she sought to press a case of sexual assault against her colleague Bruce Lehrmann. While Prima Facie deftly encapsulates the issues arising out of that aborted trial, there is now a sense that

Art

Looking at something

The enigmatic art of Peter Tyndall

Jarrod Zlatic

Praise Be by Peter Tyndall (Peter Tyndall exhibition, Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne, 2022–23, courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Collection: The artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne. Photograph by Christian Capurro)

Although Peter Tyndall’s art is littered with the breezy, post-pop imagery of cartoons and illustrations, there is a sparse and unrelenting quality to his work. When assembled together, as in the current retrospective at Buxton Contemporary (until 16 April), they threaten to blur into one. Though this is by design, every painting and print here is a fragment of a single work that has been unwavering in its consistency over the past fifty years.

Since the late 1970s, Tyndall has consistently made use of relatively limited means. Most of his works revolve around the same organising motif: an ideogram of a ‘painting’ (a square with two lines sticking out like prongs), usually arranged into an endlessly repeating diamond-like pattern. His palette is often restricted to black and yellow on white, and his paintings are all hung in a uniform fashion (suspended from the walls by two strings, this is a play running behind the news rather than ahead of it. Notwithstanding, both the play and its real-life mirror ask the same pivotal question of our judicial system: why are the women in these cases forced to lay out their heart and soul for ‘the law’ to pick over, while the men are permitted not only to remain silent but also to let ‘the law’ do their speaking for them?

Prima Facie may offer no answer as to how we might make the legal system more equitable for victims of sexual assault while still enforcing a necessary right to the presumption of innocence. Nevertheless, it is a forceful and moving argument against the status quo. g mirroring his ideogram). The exhibition labels also act as extensions of the works; each artwork shares the uniform title; ‘detail/ A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something … LOGOS/HA HA’. While this preoccupation with the fundamentals of art (viewership, material supports, institutional infrastructures, and so on) is indebted to both conceptualism and minimalism, there is little dourness to his project. Tyndall’s contemporary, the artist and critic Robert Rooney, compared him to a television comedy writer in his ingenuity in rewriting the same joke over and over again. The strength of Tyndall’s work is in the balance he achieves between an unwavering austerity and rigour, and his reflexive and subtle humour.

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

While there have been survey shows in the past dedicated to Tyndall, the current retrospective, curated by Samantha Comte and Simon Maidment, is the largest to date; it fills both floors of the Buxton Contemporary. The ground floor traces the development of Tyndall’s style from his early beginnings in abstraction through to the present (the earliest work is a small painting from 1972, the latest is his painting ideogram applied to the doors of the second-floor elevators). After various deployments of his ideogram across decidedly painterly works in the second half of the 1970s, he had settled on his signature approach with a degree of finality by 1980. After that it becomes difficult to determine when a painting is from, and it is only from small changes in his iconographic motifs that chronological clues are given as to when over the past forty years they were made.

The works themselves are unclear on their temporal status. Many carry two dates, often with large gaps of time between (the longest being 1974 and 1991). It isn’t clear what either date implies, the artworks usually lacking any obvious signs of amendments or additions. This timelessness is partly due to Tyndall’s abandonment of any obvious signs of painterliness. His works are decidedly ‘cool’ and non-visceral, and from a distance appear almost mechanically produced. Up close, the blocks of white and black retain visible brushwork, as do the stripes of yellow where paint pools at their edges. Yet this is of an anonymous character, and there is something of the signwriter in his paintings. Indeed, many are almost billboard-like in their size, spreading across two or three canvases.

While the exhibition is comprehensive in regard to Tyndall’s painting work, there are some notable absences. The section of the show focused on his Slave Guitars project is a case in point. The installation itself is not especially forthcoming; in a section on the ground floor, the instruments/props/sculptures are mutely on display. That Slave Guitars was an actual musical project – a novel attempt to combine the Australian hard-boogie minimalism of ACDC and Lobby Loyde with the New York hard minimalism of Glenn Branca – would be lost on many visitors to the show. This is not only due to the absence of explanatory texts throughout the exhibition (which in itself is not a negative), but to the curatorial decision to exclude any sonic component. Given that Tyndall is an artist for whom music was as an important influence and who was actively involved in the multifaceted Melbourne art/ punk crossover of the 1970s and 1980s, the absence is disappointing (I am reminded of a complaint once made to me by a former artist/ gallerist now musician that ‘nobody in the art world cares about music’).

Given the familiarity and stability of Tyndall’s signature style, it is the earlier 1970s works that are the surprises of the exhibition. The first room of the exhibition is dominated by two large paintings from 1973 and 1974 that are of a grotty, abject sort of abstraction that feels decidedly contemporary. This deflated, anti-heroic approach to abstraction continues in the earliest works, which Tyndall undertook as part of his unified painting project. These early works, part of an ‘Untitled’ series numbering at least one hundred pieces, are small parodies of painting. The emergence of Tyndall’s serialism is evidenced here, each work maintaining a uniform, modest size and design (the first version of his painting ideograph). Some are direct parodies of other Australian artists: Untitled Painting No. 58 a Fred Williams Painting raining (1976) miniaturises Williams’s style into something like smeared mud, possibly even scatological. As with his earlier abstracts, there is timeliness in their approach. It is only the wooden frames and large patches of unpainted, untreated brown linen that betray their age.

Although Tyndall was among the first wave of both postminimalists and post-modernists in Australia (he was included in the controversial 1982 Popism exhibition at NGV), these earlier works also point to his emergence from an older and more local painting tradition. Tyndall was in many respects one of the last contemporary Australian artists working in a European idiom whose trajectory was via a pre-war model of independent training; he studied art part-time through the Victorian Artists Society rather than at the National Gallery School.

There is also prescience in Tyndall’s repeated grid (what he refers to as a ‘matrix’). Although it appears at first simply a pastiche on minimalism and geometric abstraction, an appropriation of both Sol LeWitt and Piet Mondrian, it is the organising principle of Tyndall’s philosophy of art. While at one level this is a device that links each of his individual works into one single overarching work, there is also the implication that Tyndall’s work itself forms part of a wider grouping of all paintings (and images). No artwork is in itself isolated, not only within a wider scheme of art history (whether socially or formally related), but on the individual level. Each viewer brings to an artwork the sum total of all other artworks they have seen. Even the artworks are conceived as extensions of the audience with the medium for each work listed as ‘A Person Looks At A Work of Art/some- one looks at something … / CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCT’ rather than oil, acrylic, canvas, paper, etc. Here, Tyndall’s grid becomes something of an analog for our present network society. Tyndall’s painting ideograph is not unlike a diode, and his ever-repeating matrix itself starts to appear like a never-ending circuit board. Although Tyndall’s ongoing online blog-work bLOGOS/HA HA has not been integrated into the exhibition, the wall of works from 2018 on the second floor has something of the logic of internet content. There are more than one hundred individual works, painted quickly onto sheets of unstretched canvas (the dating suggests that he was doing one painting a day). Recalling the pithy and transient nature of online posting, these works form a scattered collection of cryptograms, fake band posters, art puns, poems, and cartoons that share the ephemeral quality of memes, user comments, and blogposts.

It could be that Tyndall views his matrix as a fishing net. There are several nods to fishing throughout the exhibition. A highlight of the show is a 1984/2008 painting that depicts the torso of a fisherman. The woodcut-like design has been overloaded with dizzying textures, while the twisting fish is overlayed with Tyndall’s yellow painting matrix. It seems possible that the hanging wires on every painting are fishing wire, and that, as in a scene in a cartoon, the audience and artist are two fishers who have both hooked onto the same old boot thinking they have caught a fish. g

Jarrod Zlatic is a musician and writer from Melbourne.

A longer version of this review appears online.