An Opening Read online

  The monk in Friedrich’s painting is a Capuchin, an order of friars that began in 1525 as an offshoot of the Franciscan religious order formed by St Francis of Assisi around 1209. They pursue the simple life of contemplative prayer and poverty, chastity and obedience originally sought by St Francis. They are discalced, which means that they go barefoot, not even wearing sandals. I imagine that the monk has walked quite a way, kicking at the fabric of his long dark robe and feeling the sand slide beneath his feet. He stands there pondering, dwarfed by the sky which is in the process of silently shifting and tumbling with sea mist, cloud and light. For all its stillness the painting shows lots of movement, the slow rolling of the clouds, the steady back and forth and choppiness of the sea, the wheeling birds. It induces memories of breathing in the salty scent of sea air, as well as the noise and the commotion of walking in sand and then the silence of stopping to stand quietly in a place of constant movement. Some seagulls wheel around the monk, he contemplates air, a great silence, vast spaces, perhaps even, against his religion, a vision of death as annihilation or nothing, or as rejoining the continual flux around him rather than ascending to Heaven.

  The mystery of the persistent silence of the sky is strongly present in the work. Apart from thunder and aeroplanes the sky is damn well silent, and yet it’s so big. Each time you look at the sky if there are clouds and wind you see large movements carried out in complete and utter silence, a silence that somehow makes those movements even bigger and freer. This silent movement, whether slow, fast, twirling, circling or sliding, is both calming and expansive. You can lose your ability to judge distance while looking at the sky; and can travel great expanses with your eyes. Actually we all walk in the sky every day; the clouds share our space and we theirs. Sometimes they come and lie near us like pets and we call them fog, then they limit what we can see and they blanket sound.

  In the beginning we came from the sea and our pulse answers to its continual movement. We are filled and reflected by the sea and the sky and we open up to embrace their largeness. Les Murray has written something about this opening with reference to the Australian hinterland: ‘In the huge spaces of the outback, ordinary souls expand into splendid forms.’ The word ordinary is significant here – it is not the exceptional, the extraordinary, the clever or the talented, that Murray is talking about, but the ordinary that expands into splendid forms or realises its inherent possession of them.

  Yet the outback is not just huge space but also intimate space, plants and animals, and people, shadows and silences. Some need solitude, the sense of being unobserved by other humans, to feel free. In The Road From Coorain Jill Kerr Conway wrote about the country she grew up in, the western plains of New South Wales: ‘Here, pressed into the earth by the weight of that enormous sky, there is real peace. To those who know it, the annihilation of the self, subsumed into the vast emptiness of nature, is akin to a religious experience.’ And Randolph Stow wrote: ‘Alone in the bush, with maybe a single crow… a phrase like liberation of the spirit may begin to sound meaningful.’ These descriptions suggest a state of simultaneous oblivion and location, a finding and a losing, a connection and a dissolving. Religious experience, liberation of the spirit, splendid forms – how are these things connected to wide open spaces? Is there an inevitable human response to such spaces? If the space is not thought of as empty, does that make it more or less spiritual or religious? Is such a space one in which you expand both metaphorically and actually as you feel your equivalence or kinship with cloud, rock and tree?

  In Monk by the Sea there is an intense mixture of sadness and ecstasy in this confrontation of a religious person, a human who has declared their commitment to God, with the immense power of the sea and the sky. In 1810 when the painting was first shown poet Heinrich von Kleist famously described it as making him feel as if he had no eyelids. Later art historian Wieland Schmidt described it as an image of infinity, a painting that does not finish with its frame: ‘The shore, the sea and the sky extend endlessly on either side…’

  Another painting by Friedrich that is very intense in its evocation of a full emptiness is The Large Enclosure at Dresden, which also shows a great deal of sky though at least twice as much land as Monk by the Sea. The Large Enclosure was a swamp to the north-west of Dresden near the Elbe and the Weisseritz rivers. It was a hunting ground with three great alleys of linden trees planted in 1744 running through it. Today it is planted with factories and a large harbour. In Friedrich’s time in the 1800s the trees were still there, but it was also a piece of boggy land left open to the sky. In German the painting is called Das Grosse Gehege. The word Gehege means an animal enclosure; thus it has the sense of describing a piece of land preserved like a national park. Being so close to a swamp the land was liable to flood. And in the huge European floods of 2002 the Weisseritz river did leave its canalised bed near the inner city and flow in its old run right through Dresden directly towards the Elbe river.

  There is great spaciousness in The Large Enclosure, but for all this ecstatic openness it is very sombrely coloured apart from a band of yellow in the sky. It is that particular elusive shade of yellow with an egg-yolky orange tinge that sometimes hangs about for a while after the sun has set. Below the yellow is a dense bank of purple cloud and a series of smaller purple clouds which echo the shapes beneath them on the land of patches of water dispersed over dark olive grey mud. The colourlessnesses of darkness, the multiple greys that fill the night, have begun to fall on the earth but are not yet apparent in the sky. The water reflects the pale blue almost grey of the sky with a luminous white glow that is slightly more intense towards the centre of the painting. In the sky the new moon can just be seen in an edge of mauve cloud. The water on the earth curves towards the place where the sun has slipped beneath the horizon, while the long bank of purple clouds in the sky curve up from that place. Thus a series of rhythms, resonances, correspondences and reflections is set up and the viewer is embraced by the very curve of the earth made visible.

  The reflection of the sky in the water on the ground means that light both lies on and is reflected up from the ground, but there are patches of dark land in this skywater so that there is a perforation, a mixing up of solidity and fluidity, a balance between soft and hard. I think of this painting as an image of a heart – its interlocking of land, water and sky reminds me of diagrams of ventricles and aortas, veins and arteries, the blue and the red systems running next to each other, taking in oxygen, expelling carbon dioxide, precise, but full of the intense organic unpredictable irregularity of emotion. Near the middle of the painting a boat with its sail hanging down is becalmed in the water, a single tree behind it is like its companion. The boat cannot keep going but will have to turn back or stay and wait for the river to flow. It is a human presence in this quiet scene in which the slow beauty of the long moment of twilight is present, and in which the inevitable measured emerging of the stars is just about to occur. The low level of water means that the bed of the river, something usually not seen, is visible. Perhaps the boat has come this far just to see that light, and that darkness.

  Some of the mood of The Large Enclosure is echoed in Flood on the Darling 1890, by far the best painting ever made by W.C. Piguenit. The huge floods in 1890 in the west of New South Wales meant that the Darling River, normally a measly ten to twenty metres wide, spread to as much as sixty-five kilometres across. The painting does not deal at all with the human disaster of the flood but with the transformation of the land into a place of watery beauty and wonder. It shows distant trees reflected in water with a foreground of marooned grassy green islands. The late afternoon sky is overall whitish grey, with a sun hidden behind layers of grey clouds that it illuminates in a hazy intense way. On the water the light creates a silvery skin that almost merges with the sky in the distance. The reflections of the clouds stretch in white glowing blurs across the water. In the foreground waterbirds can be seen fishing and standing in the weedy shallows. On the horizon is a very signif
icant part of the painting, a line of pure white silvery light. So your eyes are held between grey-white clouds suffused with light and reflected silvery-grey light on water, and that long line of whiteness in the far distance where the sun hits the water in a moment of pure dissolving, of being unable to see anything at all. As if looking at a mirage, your eyes are suspended in light.

  These two paintings, made more than sixty years apart, one in Europe and one in Australia, induce the same physiological sensations, a deep breathing of the eyes, a movement and a release, travelling deep into painted space to connect with big impersonal forces and to feel them intimately. Friedrich’s The Large Enclosure was made in a swampy country prone to floods where water seeps up. Piguenit’s Flood on the Darling was painted in a dry country marked by dry riverbeds and very occasional floodings that mark the land with water patterns. Each of them connects water and sky, human and earth, in an ancient relationship of attachment.

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  We go early and enter the park by climbing under and through the two-rail wooden fence. Dogs are not allowed here but we come anyway. Some people say dogs should be allowed in national parks because the Aborigines had dingoes for the last 2000 to 3000 years. Today rainbow lorikeets are flashing green and pink at us everywhere as they fly sideways out of the dusty dry creekbed and through the grey-green trees. We stop to examine a dead, bearded dragon lizard body; its colour is the same as the white-grey earth, its scales so tiny they are like toast crumbs. I would never have seen its flat thin dry body without the dog to show me. Under a bush we see dog faeces which have become like pure white chalk in the sun.

  MAY

  the place of the dead

  There are many stars, more than we can count. We need the stars, they give us light. And people – we all need each other. There are many sorts of people: we need them all.

  Gulumbu Yunupingu

  Here and there propped up around our house among other things are images of Aboriginal art, mnemonics, memory notes, for what they make me think about and what I love in them; a postcard of Untitled 1989 by Emily Kame Kngwarreye from the Queensland Art Gallery, an image of a bark painting by Nanganaralil of the Djambarrpuyngu clan collected by Dr Helen Groger-Wurm from Milingimbi in 1967, and an out-of-date Art Almanac folded open on a page showing a bark by Wandjuk Marika in an advertisement for Sotheby’s.

  Emily’s work is of a type she did that I recall first seeing with a sense of aha! At the time that she began painting in 1988 there was a lot of talk about secret sacred meanings in Aboriginal paintings and the particular style of her work evident in the postcard seems to embrace the idea of demonstrating secrecy because patterns of dots and lines can clearly be seen to be covering other layers of dots and lines beneath them. What is hidden is not clear but it is clear that it is hidden. It’s a very clever work with multiple textures and densities of paint and colour. It is a kind of beautiful hiding in the light full of a mixture of transparency and opacity, movement and stillness. There’s a network of semi-transparent white lines like a series of walking tracks, and then there are semi-circular places where the white lines converge. There are green dots and grey dots and dark red and pale pink ones; the dots cover everything but the tracery of lines beneath them is visible. Also it is an early work made before Emily was slamming paintings out at a great rate, though a feature of her way of painting was always to work quickly and even impatiently. She began by painting batik, a medium much too laboured and time-consuming for someone with her temperament. In her retrospective where her work was arranged chronologically it was possible to discern the actual moment when she broke away from trying to be careful and neat and simply painted the way she felt like doing it.

  Cut from an Australian Information Service calendar of 1982, the complex untitled bark painted by Nanganaralil in red and brown ochre, and in black and white, tells a complex story of life and death involving a crow, a praying mantis, a lizard, a hollow log coffin and a cabbage palm tree, but one of the main reasons it appeals to me is because it includes a figure (the crow) with arms and legs like a human but the head of a bird so that it looks like a cartoon character or like an Egyptian god, thus embracing metamorphosis and species interchangeability, that hybridity shared by legends and cartoons. And it reminds me of the first screenprint that I ever made at Megalo International Silkscreen Collective Workshop in 1981. It was called Hard luck and troubles coming on after me (named from a blues song for the path that it was clear I was going to follow, as I decided to enter art school rather than the Public Service for which I was accepted at the same time). It included a bird-headed figure and a bear-headed one, the bird dancing and the bear seated in an armchair toasting with a golden cup, both wrapped in the joy of the moment and the certain knowledge of difficulty ahead.

  Wandjuk Marika’s bark called Djan’Kawu at Yalan’bara (1959) shows rows and rows of people and rows and rows of fish. Of course it is a creation story. It is painted in black and red and white, but there is an especially large amount of yellow in it and I like to look at it because to me it is as if the yellow might take over and the whole thing will dissolve in yellow ochre’s soft luminescence. I could learn more about it but don’t wish to right now. I just like to look at the vibrating energy of the yellow.

  I remember the excitement of visiting the ‘Primitive Art’ basement gallery of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the late seventies and early eighties and responding to the very strong sense of presences and spirits within the objects of Aboriginal and Pacific art displayed in that dim underground cave. It was a place which made you hold your breath and feel a bit scared that you might be possessed by some of the intense energy emanating from the works. This was clearly where the power and life in the gallery lay, and it was put below ground and in the dark in order to mute it and keep it under control. That basement gallery is no longer entered or used in that way, though the research library which now occupies the basement maintains the strange tradition of keeping Pacific culture underground. Marvellous shields, whose makers are unrecorded, hang in the foyer at the bottom of the white marble stairs that you descend to reach the library.

  In 1994 Yiribana opened as the official Indigenous Cultures Gallery at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Among the most famous and precious works that were displayed in a courtyard off Yiribana are the Tutini, seventeen pukamani or grave posts from Melville Island made in the late fifties by Laurie Nelson Tukialila, Bob One Galadingwama, Big Jack Yarunga, Don Durak Madjua, Charlie Quiet Kwangdini and an unknown artist. Commissioned and donated to the Gallery by Stuart Scougall in 1958, they were originally placed on show in the Art Gallery foyer by curator and artist Tony Tuckson before they were moved down to the ‘Primitive Art’ basement where I first saw them. The last time I saw them in 2010 they were right amongst the historic art collection, though not juxtaposed with contemporaneous works but with works showing the first encounters of Aboriginal and European cultures and the first European paintings of Australia made in the 1800s.

  If fulfilling their normal task of commemoration of a death on Melville Island the Tutini would have weathered and by now be a silvery-grey colour and rotting on the ground, but as they have been protected from the weather they are still vividly coloured. Their white, yellow, red and black painted patterns of circles, half-circles, dots and lines are fresh and lively, they communicate grace, integrity, immediacy, energy, qualities all found in the natural world and here turned into cultural objects that respond to it on those terms. Whenever I saw them there was no adjacent wall panel translating or explaining them in detail, yet as they are grave posts it is clear that there is some recording or accounting of life and death, and the transition between them, present in their marks; in other words the kind of reflections and feelings which attend funerals. Without any explanatory notes provided what is clear is that the paintings and carvings on the Tutini are human sign systems organising and speaking with great energy and graphic power. In the glowing primary natural earth colours of y
ellow and red, black and white, the designs are animated and rhythmical and speak of the structures of human thought as pattern-making. Here are multiple rows of white dots on a black ground banded with strong red stripes; here yellow dots alternate with the white reminding me of pollen, of rain, of stars; here red diamond shapes are linked by bars of white edged with black; here red lines criss-cross white, here black; here red circles are filled with yellow dots and surrounded by haloes of white. Here a wash of colour retains the marks of its application, thus making us think of its making by hand over time. Though the works are carefully made they are not at all laboured or painstaking but possess great freshness and lightness of touch. Though they are grave posts they are made with a sense of joy. They possess a lot of what curator Judith Ryan wrote recently about finding in bark painting: ‘The greatest bark painting contains a sensibility of design and surface texture, an inner life, a vital rhythm in the drawing… its power is not the result of technical facility or neatness, but the reverse.’

  The Aboriginal Memorial, two hundred hollow log coffins made by artists from Ramingining and surrounding areas in Central Arnhem Land, one for each year of European settlement in Australia, was first shown at the 7th Biennale of Sydney in 1988 at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, a place full of the scent and sight of the sea entering through gaps in the wooden walls and floor of the old wharf building, and flowing to and fro, catching and glimmering in the light. After this first historic showing The Aboriginal Memorial was bought by the National Gallery in Canberra. The log coffins, a powerful artwork commemorating death, echo the Tutini. Each brings part of a mortuary ceremony into a prominent position in a major art gallery, each affirms culture and connection to place, each is made from trees and is a vertical memorial linking sky and land. The Aboriginal Memorial is the first work on show in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, so the vitality of its earth colours and the teeming life-forms depicted on them are the first things you see when you enter.