Tallest You’ll Ever Be

A selection of works by Liam James

Humans are obsessed with the idea of personal transformation. We revel in the triumph of its success, and bathe indulgently in its failure. The blind, insatiable sprint, or languid, pondering stroll of the middle ground that lies ahead has been the basis for numerous narratives; the most common being our own lives. We are expected to climb the ladder, and perhaps the first major rung is our transition into adulthood, celebrated with the title: to come-of-age.

Like gender, our understanding of youth and teenage hood is socially constructed. These ideas are built to serve purposes less intended for the individual, than they are for its surrounding society. Indeed, the very concept of ‘teenager’ is a western marketing invention of the early twentieth century. It tells us the young person is an object of relative social dislocation with heightened spending power, whose independence is most celebrated with the purchase of teen subculture. The teenager is eternal in her excess of youth, and at once painfully fleeting.  For the individual’s “natural” place within teen culture, with its various aesthetic nuances and pathea, has a rapid expiry date, which for some, comes all too abruptly. At eighteen, the child legally comes of age and the Australian adult begins, gifted with the burdens and freedoms of the model adult citizen.

Outside of legal convention, the body and cultural rituals in the home and media may posit a different time again. So when, if ever, does one come-of-age, and what does this really mean for the individual?  To come-of-age, a concept of such familiarity and expectation in our shared institutional narratives is abstract in the realm of the individual. Tallest You’ll Ever Be negotiates these moral, physical and psychological expectations of Australian society through the visual representations of Australian artists under 30. Where some linger in the domain of the mind (what are the mechanics of mental perception? What do internalized emotions look like; do fears and desires have a face?), others confront the external world. The varying representations of youth are determined by the ways of seeing of both viewer and subject. In some, the ideal moment of youth is captured in a natural, non-confrontational setting. Both subjects and viewer are comfortable in the organic, unassuming beauty of youth at play. In others, artificial backdrops canvas the objectified body. Aware of the imposing societal gaze, the body as vehicle of youth self-consciously manipulates and positions itself to fulfill requirements of gendered beauty and masculinity. Consequently, the artificial process makes it grotesque. In further works, the notion of gender is pushed to its conclusion of absolute absurdity: a hugely loaded and empty phenomenon, spinning in space.

Simone de Beauvoir has said: “Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it [1]”. Thus, Tallest You’ll Ever Be closes with The Void, a nod to that other dislocated subculture, trivialised and perplexed. Perhaps there are greater similarities to be realized between the person welcomed into society and the one pushed from it. In our anomaly, there is a distance between those dislocated (youth, the elderly) and those that drive the hefty load of “real life” below.  Standing on tiptoe, leering in, we dream, expansive, of what’s to come, and what has been. From that view, we are the tallest we’ll ever be.