Lilith

Vivienne Tetaz

catalogue essay, Cabinet Gallery, Melbourne, 2025

Lilith (2025) - installation view

Lilith is bad all round. Stewed from Mesopotamian demonology, her feminized vessel swirls through Jewish mythological narratives as a horned-up succubus, cast as a primordial (stud) Eve to an aspirational (dud) Adam. Bountiful essences and liquids have been distilled from her, poured into the manifold moulds of Evil Eves in biblical Apocrypha. Femme fatales, toxic ingenues, deadly Lolitas, fatal attractions, these filles d’Ève were detested by Christian acolytes and beloved by Symbolist painters.

Vivienne Tetaz laterally cites Lilith from Nabokov’s eponymous 1928 poem for her installation, Lilith (2025). Nabokov’s pre-Lolita Russian raunchiness stands in contrast to the Pre-Raphaelites’ British fantasy portraits of Lilith’s seductive allure. Nowadays, Lilith is the fodder of deviantart uploads and bad alt-mom tattoos.

Vivienne’s Lilith—like anything you’ll find in the Nicholas Building—is cryptic, dense, insouciant. There is no body presented in the antique cabinets of the building’s ground floor L-corridor. Their design and function seems to have been a determining factor in Vivienne’s take on the figure of Lilith. Instead of producing something to be displayed in their museographic box of delights for ARS flaneurs, she instead creates a rickety barrier that occupies most of the cabinet’s depth. Its exposed support structure and cross-beams are visible from the side window, as are a few inscrutable pinhole camera prints. It feels illicit, like you’re finding something meant to be hidden or deliberately discarded. Or like you’ve stumbled into the room hidden behind the false wall in some old dank apartment in Kansas. The viewer here is implicated in pondering: if Lilith was here, where is she now?

The real stuff of Lilith isn’t in the cabinets: it’s on the inside of the glass. An ingenious faux frosting coats the glass with impressive effect. Squint through its striations of simulated glacial foliage: all that can be perceived is the Bunnings-like hoarding inside the cabinet. Nothing to see; only something to be sensed.

Frosting is extreme condensation. It crystallizes life into frozen death. Fogged glass is the earlier marker of living breath, body temperature, heated ambience. It’s the misty grime inside the London Tube during winter; the undisclosed infractions occurring inside the lightly rocking panel van in summer. It’s the opacity of your house’s windows, past midnight, when you can’t see the serial killer lurking on your porch. Is the glass fogged from your breath inside or his outside? Will things soon turn frosty?

Boarded cabinets. Fake walls. Cheap cardboard. Packing tape. Pinhole photos. Frosted glass. It all makes for a slightly morbid bed for Lilith, fogged and frozen through her absence. Is she absent or missing? Gender here is unleashed; part-intuitively, part-uncontrollably. It’s creepy because it’s never clear. Like Cady Noland on a date with Thomas Hirschhorn—visiting Duchamp’s Étant donnés museum peepshow in Philadelphia. Maybe they got ice-cream afterwards. Maybe they’re in a van. In a forest. Past midnight. And you’re peering through the frosted window.

Philip Brophy - 86 tram, Friday night, May 9th 2025

Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Vivienne Tetaz.