Luke Roberts

Diego Velázquez’s Mars Resting (c.1638) depicts the Roman god of war seated on a dais. With shadowy head resting on loosely curled fist, the divine body is a little crumpled. Far from the virility of youth and glory of battle, Velázquez’s Mars is an ordinary man. Now idle, his weapons and armour are strewn about the floor, a motif in classical painting often taken to mean ‘love conquers all’. The dais, actually a soldier’s cot, is draped in uncharacteristically opulent bedclothes, suggesting that the laying down of arms might also be the taking up of something else. Either way, this resting god is weary. Luke Roberts’ new photographic performance, Mars Rusting (2018), amplifies Velázquez’s irreverence. Roberts’ now considerably aged Mars remains pensive and perhaps a little doleful, gazing out towards the viewer and evoking disdain, sadness or pity, even amusement. Mars has rested so long he has begun to rust and bulge and encourage ridicule. The god of war has become a tragicomic character, clinging to his relevance as he clings to his now-faux moustache and wooden club.

In Mars Rusting the accoutrements of war are somewhat updated. Warheads adorn Roberts’ dais, Game of Thrones–like. The lavish bedclothes have been replaced by flags: the US, UK, Nazi. Other flags also drape the sumptuously rendered and aging body of our Mars: the blues of a just-recognisable Israeli flag, the silky yellow of the almost-hidden Vatican flag. In such company, these colours locate Roberts’ lifelong friction with the hypocrisy of religious dogma within the frame of war. On this stage, religion is a perennial player in the drama of history, personal and collective alike.

War is not the only concern of a photographic object seemingly obsessed with it. Myth, whether religious, historical, national or gendered, is a sedimentation of different ideas, a way of trying to explain a world beyond knowability. But myth is also about cycles of time. Mars Rusting is the doom of repetition that comes when we experience the world and each other from a place of anxious paranoia, when the future that informs the present exists primarily under the air of threat.

Roberts’ focus on how we read, use and are seduced by history comes together in the real mythological character Her Divine Holiness Pope Alice. Extraterrestrial visitor, shaman and deity, Pope Alice celebrates The National 2019. HDH, often cited as one of Roberts’ performance personae, is a being unto herself and Roberts a self-confessed Pope Alice impersonator. This makes sense when you consider that Pope Alice stepped out of the past into the present, offering prophecies of higher consciousness – she is that cycle of past, present and future personified.

2019 marks the 40th anniversary of a pivotal Pope Alice earthly appearance in suburban Brisbane, presiding as guest of honour over the part-gay, part-bohemian, part-debutante, wholly (or perhaps holy) camp Swish Ball. Her appearance in The National 2019 speaks to the same moment in time as Mars Rusting with a significantly different orientation. While Mars Rusting may darkly portend our tendency to drag some of the worst parts of the past into the present, Pope Alice’s appearance prophesises alternate futures in which the defeat of arms succumbs to her personal motto, one we have encountered before: ‘love conquers all’.