An Opening Read online

  While in America and Austria, as a native-born Australian I knew enough to say where I came from when asked, however as I had left my birthplace in Melbourne when I was one year old I did not know for many years what it meant to be Australian, or even to be in Australia. Of course my grandmother sent us Vegemite, and there are photos and even a short reel of film of the first house I lived in that my mother and father built like many post-war young couples with the aid of their friends. It was located at Ringwood in Victoria and surrounded by bush. A feature of the house that the film especially dwells upon is the long dancing shadows of the gum trees on the white chimney.

  Art became a kind of homeland for me beyond and between countries, a place where familiarity and knowledge could be built up, where pleasure could be found and curiosity stirred. It was the ideas and feelings that I collected through art by looking at books and visiting galleries and sites in America and Europe as a child that made it attractive to me.

  I remember getting lost among the canals and bridges of Venice, watching hot glass being blown and stretched into horses, fish and vessels on the island of Murano, and in Pompeii being shocked and delighted by the roofless houses and the cobbled streets, and especially the painted walls with their rich colours and evocative textures. The ambience and idiosyncratic beauty, the sublimity and cultural complexity of these cities, the mystery and stubborn materiality of art present in them, rests in me like objects fixed at the bottom of a glass paperweight, magnified from some angles, diminished from others but always present as a foundation or base for everything that came afterwards.

  Like any child I received fragments of stories and visions from my reading, my experience and my parents. In Yugoslavia where the roads were white dust and full of potholes we carried a whole smoked ham as a gift to relatives in the boot of the car, and my mother pointed out the bitter aloe trees which flower once before dying. When the car, an old Hillman Minx, broke down and had to be repaired in a village, we ate some of the ham sitting by the side of the road playing cards using the folding table and chairs we were also carrying as a gift. My father had a broken leg in plaster and would shout each time we drove over a bump. A little later he and my mother went to East Berlin and when the car broke down in the middle of the no-man’s land between East and West he had to push the car dragging his broken leg behind him.

  In Venice I saw the Bridge of Sighs over which the condemned would walk to their deaths. I was especially haunted by the bodies of a dog and of a woman who died during the eruption of Vesuvius and whose shapes were cast in plaster and placed in the Pompeii Antiquarium. Plaster is an intensely evocative material – the luminous ground for all fresco paintings it delicately collects colours and impressions. Years later in Canberra Gillian Mann taught me to make plaster blocks as a printmaking surface, as developed in Poland when other materials were hard to get. Making plaster involves adding it as a fine powder in soft white handfuls to a bucket of water, judging the quantity required by both sight and feeling. Once it is mixed there is only a limited time to pour it before it goes hard. It goes through a chemical process a little bit like a miniature version of the creation of the world as it gives off heat while turning from a liquid into a solid. This is always very magical, silent and mysterious. Plaster is made from gypsum which was formed by deposits of salts in inland lakes over millions of years. When gypsum is ground to a fine powder and heated or calcined, three-quarters of its water content is lost, but when water is reintroduced, the mixture reverts to its original rock-like composition.

  We made the journey from New York to London by ship, out past the Statue of Liberty and across the Atlantic to the White Cliffs of Dover, then after two years living in Austria, there was another journey by ship, this time from Europe to Australia, past the Rock of Gibraltar to Pompeii, then through the Suez Canal, seeing pyramids and camels, drinking cups of beef tea on the ship’s deck and learning about Australia through colouring-in line drawings of flora and fauna. On each trip our luggage mysteriously vanished so that we had to buy new clothes on the ship or at ports. I remember having a new bathing suit of lettuce-green crimped cotton from the ship shop. While crossing the Equator I recall wearing this swimsuit on my spaghetti white body, being covered with melted pink ice cream, submerged and then carried fearful and tearful across the swimming pool by a sailor dressed as a mermaid.

  I had already nearly drowned while staying at Kolodeje nad Luznici in South Bohemia in Czechoslovakia with Alfred Radok and his family. We all swam down a river to go to the dairy to buy cheese, and as I couldn’t swim I was placed in an old rubber tyre which flipped over almost drowning me. Alfred was a theatre director and had small models of theatres in his office on which he worked out how plays would be staged. My parents left us there while they went to Berlin. I was certain they were never coming back and remember embroidering handkerchiefs with cross-stitch (they had the designs printed on them in deep purple ink) and then washing the ink out in the sink at night while weeping – water attracts water.

  When we arrived in Perth my sister and I wanted to know what was wrong with all the girls who were covered in brown spots, which we were quickly told were healthy freckles.

  How do we learn about art, do we swallow whole the tales we are told, or do we make up our own minds? Does something always mean what the experts say it means or does it mean what you think it means? How do we decide what art is? How does our own history affect our approach to it? Is art for specialists, insiders and outsiders, or can its ideas be made accessible to all comers or popularised, as now happens with science? I believe that there must always be an element of openness in art and in its interpretation. This is vital to the place that it occupies in human life. It is a space against conformity, rigidity and convention, a space of possibility and discovery, invention and creativity – an ever-renewing starting point for the ongoing development of human culture.

  In the mid-sixties I began to teach myself art stories. It involved a lot of reading and looking, at books, magazines and exhibitions, and making lists of names and movements, and learning to be able to tell one artist’s work from another, a woodcut from an etching and an oil painting from a print, a watercolour from a drawing, and so on. The names and types of all the different media and being able to tell them one from another really fascinated me. Many art stories were about people and their lives, their struggles and successes, but most were about what they made, the images and objects that they brought into being, the residue of their lives. There was something addictive about art stories as they were both heroic and sad. Like all biographies they ended in death with unrelenting monotony, but something was left, something remained, that dragged that person into the next century and the next. The art spoke across time and culture. The stories were about ideas and individuals but also about societies, civilisations and the disappearance of civilisations, and most of all about material evidence of existence, evidence which intermingled the individual and the social, thought and feeling, craft and concept.

  The study of art at secondary school had a peculiar licence about it, an intoxicating breath of freedom. The notion, a kind of jumbled suburban myth, was in the air that art could not be judged or taught. That people had judged it, and been found to be wrong, and since then no-one was prepared to be wrong in that way again. This meant that art could get away with anything. The artwork of Marcel Duchamp – the best-known example being a urinal that was first shown as a found object called Fountain in 1917 – and that of Andy Warhol – his Campbell’s soup cans were first shown in 1962 – were daring, almost absurd examples of this ‘anything goes’, ‘in your face’, ‘up yours’ attitude. The indefinable slippery quality of art and its purported uselessness made it an apt place for experimentation and risk-taking. It was a place of looseness where definitions might burst their boundaries and multiply.

  I remember going to an exhibition opening somewhere in Adelaide in the late sixties where large open boxes of cigarettes sat invitingly on tables and gla
sses of sherry and wine were endlessly served with yellow cubes of cheddar cheese and Jatz crackers. These gifts seemed the height of generosity and something like an initiation rite. Giving is a mysterious part of the art experience. Mostly you do not pay to go to exhibitions, and when you go to exhibition openings you are given free drinks and often food. The symbolism of thus getting something for free has metaphoric connections to the freedom of visual art itself. The gift of art requires something back from us, not necessarily the buying of the work but the gift of time, thought and feeling involved in taking it into our lives. But we do not need to own it to get something precious from it. And though our interpretation of it may be different from that of other people it is equally right.

  Notions of reciprocity and sharing lie at the basis of gift-giving. In Canada the custom of potlatch by the indigenous peoples on the Northwest Coast involved huge excessive feasts and gift-giving. Potlatches were banned by the British partly because they considered them a disruptive act against the idea of private property, for which all are meant to strive and which has at its base a need for inequality in order to engender competitiveness and envy. Yet rather than demonstrating a simple anti-materialism the sense of abundance and profligate generosity present in the potlatch is a working through of long-term relationships of reciprocity and status. The more that you give the greater is the debt owed to you. A version of this kind of relationship can be read into art which freely offers contemplation of ideas and materials, their transformation and placement, and the investment of time, thought and energy, by the artist. Being an ‘Indian giver’ in my childhood meant someone who took back what they had given. But the idea of a culture of sharing, to give away to others what is given to you, to not store up material goods but to share them and thus to live in the moment, is at the heart of indigenous thinking all over the world. The setting up of intricate obligations and a sense of being embedded in relationships is not about a romantic sense of oneness but is about responsibility, and extends to the natural and non-material worlds.

  When new ideas or technologies are introduced to indigenous communities they are often used in unpredictable and ingenious ways. Salvage anthropology got its name from the notion of saving/salvaging pieces, objects as well as concepts, of indigenous cultures shipwrecked on the shores of Western colonising cultures. The idea was that invaded cultures were pure and that their purity would be corrupted by encounters with the West. This would be followed by the commencement of an inevitable homogenising global journey for all peoples to become like the Western human, the ultimate link in an evolutionary chain of human development. But is global homogenisation of culture really inevitable or even likely? What if instead of ‘rescuing’ indigenous cultures we saw it the other way round – indigenous ideas being used in rescuing ways by non-indigenous cultures? And vice versa.

  Bernard Smith’s great book European Vision and the South Pacific shows how encounters with Australia and the Pacific influenced thought in the rest of the world, and ends with some words written by John Ruskin: ‘If you can paint one leaf you can paint the world.’ The sighting of unknown things on Pacific voyages in the nineteenth century introduced a lively freshness into the works of the artists recording them. Today we see the drawings and paintings that they made as both art and science. The world itself rather than any imagined place is freshly seen as extraordinary. There is ambiguity in Ruskin’s statement about the leaf. It can mean something moralistic as if to say: ‘Well if you can be accurate in a small thing then you can be accurate in a big thing, and as your skills develop you will be able to make exact copies of all of the world and this is what knowledge is – coming to an understanding of the world by copying (replicating) it.’ This is also one approach to art – a seizing of exact appearances in order to possess. Or Ruskin’s statement can be read as having a wider meaning in which painting is a special way of understanding what surrounds you and thus involves another kind of knowledge than can be achieved merely by seeing. In this way of thinking the world is recreated by the creation of art and made more humanly intelligible by this recreation.

  Many indigenous artists make art with this in mind. It is part of their ancestral traditions to paint, draw and make ceremonial objects, and these activities mean participating in the generative forces and impulses which keep everything in the world moving. There is frequently no word in indigenous languages that translates directly as art. The word for design, sign, pattern or meaningful mark refers to the designs on birds and fish and trees, stones and water, the earth and the sky, as much as to the designs made by people. Thus there is equivalence rather than a separation between life forms. This embeds people and their activities in a world patterned with significance and meaning, to which they contribute and from which they learn.

  The notion that everything in the world is made from variations of the same substance is common to contemporary science and to indigenous thought. The scales on a fish, the sparkle of the sun on water, the patterns on bark, feathers and lizards in their repetitive structures are signs of purpose and links to the Dreaming for Aboriginal people. Patterns that appear in Aboriginal art are shaped in imitation of such designs, though often reduced to a very minimal form. This abstraction and reduction has the effect of making the designs like hieroglyphs or proto-writing, suggesting the letters of an alphabet written in the natural substances of the world. Yet each sign has many layers of meaning. A circle can be a camp, a breast, a waterhole or something else. Parallel lines may be rain, sandhills or clouds. Concepts of trans-substantiation, metamorphosis, transformation, interchangeability are all evoked by the multiple meaning of the designs. But thinking about the world through correspondences between things is not the same as thinking about measurement and asking how many fish are in the sea or how many stars are in the sky. Or is it?

  The public purpose of Captain James Cook’s journey to the Pacific in 1768 was to observe the Transit of Venus which he did from Tahiti in the specially built Fort Venus on 3 June 1769. Then he circumnavigated and mapped the coast of New Zealand before opening his secret instructions which asked him to look for the unknown south land Terra Australis Incognita.

  You are likewise to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives, if there be any, and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them, making them presents of such Trifles as they may Value, inviting them to Traffick, and Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard; taking Care however not to suffer yourself to be surprized by them, but to be always on your guard against any Accident. You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the name of the King of Great Britain; or, if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors…

  Living in the north of Australia, Rembarranga man Paddy Fordham Wainburranga’s story about Captain Cook as graphically seen in his paintings and in the 1988 film Too Many Captain Cooks describes Cook as a figure who fought Satan and won, as well as bringing ceremony and lots of white man’s possessions to the Aboriginal people in Australia. According to Wainburranga the original Captain Cook was not warlike but his sons, the many Captain Cooks, who came later with guns, killed many Aboriginal people and took over Australia, definitely were.

  White people don’t know Australia. We know Australia. We’ve known it from the early times, when the birds were human beings. Captain Cook from a million years ago. All the birds knew him. Captain Cook was a lawman like Adam and Eve. Captain Cook came from Mosquito Island to Sydney Harbor. Aborigines didn’t have material things. Captain Cook had all material, white man’s things. No one can change our law. No one can change our culture. Because we have ceremony from Captain Cook. This story is for all time. Nothing can change it.

  I first saw Wainburranga’s paintings and the film in which he appears alongside paintings by Harry Wedge in the gallery at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cu
ltural Institute in 1992. Wainburranga retold the story of Captain Cook while Wedge retold the story of Adam and Eve. Here is part of the long text that accompanies Harry Wedge’s painting Adam and Eve getting evicted.

  God told them that this garden is theirs all they have to do is stay away from that tree, but Eve like a woman is curious. She nagged at Adam to have a look at the tree. Adam said we were told to stay away from the tree but she ended up persuading Adam to have a look at the tree. When they went over to look they found a beautiful snake curled around the fruit tree. The snake said in a cool soft voice, ‘Pick the fruit and have a taste.’ As Eve went to stretch out her hand for the fruit Adam said ‘no we are not meant to touch anything from this tree!’ Then the snake said to Adam, ‘Don’t be a square’ and Eve said to Adam, ‘This fruit won’t hurt us at all.’… When Adam took a bite suddenly there was a big electrical storm then a big raving voice to tell them to fuck off out of the garden. Adam told Eve they had to leave the place and never return. As they were walking away Adam said to Eve, ‘Are you fuckin’ happy now?’ Then Eve said to Adam, ‘Don’t start now.’ They left and two dark people came into the garden as the garden was dying off.… The beautiful snake said for them to have a taste of this last piece of fruit… Then they started to look for something on the ground and the snake was getting curious and he asked them what they were looking for. One of them turned round and said: ‘We are looking for a bundi, and we’re going to bundi you and eat you and the snake said its time for me to cut out of here. As the snake was talking a big black beautiful spirit popped out of nowhere and frightened the two dark people and he said to them, ‘This garden is your home for the rest of your generations to come.’