The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life 9780231541992

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Preamble
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Notes
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Index

Citation preview

The Work of Art

INSURRECTIONS:

Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

I N S U R R E C T I O N S : C R I T I C A L S T U D I E S I N R E L I G I O N , P O L I T I C S , A N D C U LT U R E

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion. For a complete list of books in the series, see pages 237–238

The Work of Art

R E T H I N K I N G T H E E L E M E N TA RY F O R M S OF RELIGIOUS LIFE

MICHAEL JACKSON

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

C O LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S PUBLISHERS SINCE N EW YORK

1893

CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

C U P . C O LU M B I A . E D U

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” from The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992 by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 1994 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jackson, Michael, 1940– author. Title: The work of art: rethinking the elementary forms of religious life / Michael Jackson. Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Insurrections: critical studies in religion, politics, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012706 | ISBN 9780231178181 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541992 (e-book). Subjects: LCSH: Art and religion. Classification: LCC N72. R4 J33 2016 | DDC 201/.67—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012706 Cover Designer: Catherine Casalino Cover Image: View of Wood Line by Andy Goldsworthy © James Forbes/Snapwire/Corbis

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In loving memory of Emily V. Jackson

FRONTISPIECE .

Emily V. Jackson in her studio, Auckland, New Zealand, February 1984.

When an art product once attains classical status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience. . . . A primary task is thus imposed on [us] . . . to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. John Dewey, Art as Experience Art . . . is the realm of “between” which has become a form. Consider great nude sculptures of the ages: none of them is to be understood properly either from the givenness of the human body or from the will to expression of an inner state, but solely from the relational event which takes place between two entities which have gone apart from one another, the withdrawn “body” and the withdrawing “soul.” Martin Buber, The Life of Dialogue

CONTENTS

Preamble

PART 1

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Worlds Within and Worlds Without 1 Melbourne Now 5 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 8 Art as Religion 12 The Interplay of Coming Out and Going In 14 Consciousness 21 From Joyce to Beuys 24 Production and Reproduction 28 Axes of Bias 32 A Visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel 35

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PART 2

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The Life and Times of Paddy Jupurrula Nelson 39 Ecstatic Professions 52 Art and Adversity: Ian Fairweather and the Solitude of Art 65 Transplantations: The Art of Simryn Gill 73 My Brother’s Keeper: The Art of Susan Norrie 84 Heroic Failure: The Art of Sidney Nolan 92 Une Vie Brève, Mais Intense 97 The Pare Revisited 109 A Man of Constant Sorrow: The Existential Art of Colin McCahon 116 PART 3

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Landscape and Nature Morte: The Art of Paul Cézanne 127 Art and the Unspeakable 139 Marina Abramović and the Shadows of Intersubjectivity 147 Exodus 158 Making It Otherwise 167 Art and the Everyday 174 The Work of Art and the Arts of Life 180 Notes

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Acknowledgments Permissions

219

221

Index 223

LIST OF FIGURES

Frontispiece. Emily V. Jackson in her studio, Auckland, New Zealand, February 1984 v Figure 1. Lirrara, Pat Lowe, 1990 17 Figure 2. Sled, Joseph Beuys, 1969 26 Figure 3. The Storm, Edvard Munch, 1893 34 Figure 4. Die Sturzbäche des Lauentales im Vorfrühling, Caspar Wolf, 1774/1777 36 Figure 5. Self Portrait, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889 37 Figure 6. Door 8: Yarlakurlu (Big Yam), Paddy Jupurrula Nelson, 1983 45 Figure 7. Sermon, Jerry Jangala, 1991 55 Figure 8. Pieta, Michelangelo, 1498–1499 62 Figure 9. Monastery, Ian Fairweather, 1961 69 Figure 10. Forking Tongues, Simryn Gill, 1992 75 Figure 11. Forest, Simryn Gill, 1996–1998 79 Figure 12. Pearls, Simryn Gill, Sydney, 2003 83 Figure 13. Convict and Mrs Fraser, Sidney Nolan, 1957 94 Figure 14. Lightsource, Philip Clairmont, 1978 99 Figure 15. Staircase Night Triptych, Philip Clairmont, 1978 102 Figure 16. Pare, British Museum, London 111

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Figure 17. Pare, University Museum, Philadelphia 112 Figure 18. Parihaka Triptych, Colin McCahon, 1972 124 Figure 19. Urewera Mural, Colin McCahon, 1975 125 Figure 20. Large Pine Tree and Red Earth, Paul Cezanne, 1890–1895 129 Figure 21. The House with the Cracked Walls, Paul Cezanne, 1892–1894 130 Figure 22. The Artist is Present, Marina Abramović, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010 149 Figure 23. Shoah, Carola Faller-Barris, 2005 159 Figure 24. Untitled, Carola Faller-Barris, 2014 160 Figure 25. Human Being, Li Wei, 2008 177 Figure 26. Up-On-The-Downs, Grahame Sydney, 2006 181 Figure 27. Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), Hieronymous Bosch, circa 1510 188 Figure 28. Christ Bearing the Cross, Titian, 1560 189

PREAMBLE

P A I N T I NG RU NS I N M Y FA M I LY, BU T NO T R E L IG ION . M Y MO T H E R ’ S maternal uncle, Walter Tempest, was a late nineteenth-century watercolorist and member of the British Royal Academy, and my mother was an acclaimed painter of abstract landscapes. In my early twenties I vacillated between painting and writing before deciding on anthropology as my vocation. In recent years my daughters have excelled in the arts I chose not to pursue. Heidi Jackson exhibits regularly in Sydney and teaches art for a living, while Freya Jackson, now studying art in college, already promises to follow in her sister’s and grandmother’s footsteps. Where some people bear witness to a religious tradition, sustained over many generations, I marvel at the artistic trait that has given my family a very present help in times of trouble. My mother’s accidented landscapes often appear to be outward expressions of her inward struggle with the pain of rheumatoid arthritis.1 The death of Heidi’s mother when she was thirteen, and her attenuated ties with her homeland following our decision to embark on a new life in Australia, undoubtedly found expression in Heidi’s New Zealand landscapes. And Freya frequently turned to painting and drawing when overwhelmed by the confusions of her adolescent years.

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In writing about art, I have drawn inspiration from my family history as well as from my ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Central Australia, focusing not on art as an expression of individual genius or as an aesthetic,2 but rather on the work of art, where work is to be read as a verb rather than a noun and understood as as a techné for making one’s life more individually and socially viable.3 Art opens up an artificial—one might say a ritual or utopian—space for trying to get around or beyond the mundane difficulties that beset us and the misfortunes that befall us.4 As John Dewey put it, “Art is thus prefigured in the very process of living.” 5 Or, in the words of Jim Carrey, “Painting is a way I free myself from concern . . . putting something out there rather than having it in here.” 6 Crucial to this point of view is the pragmatist assumption that art (ars) and techné are intimately linked, and that the work of art is a matter of making, acting, and doing before it is a form of knowledge, an object of contemplation, or a thing of beauty.7 As William James noted, “what really exists is not things made but things in the making.”8 As such, art and craft must be placed on a par. The creation of an efficient tool may contribute as much to our well-being as the creation of a religious icon or statue, a prayer wheel, a mask, or a musical instrument. Nor is the work of art simply a way of expressing inner experience; rather, it is a way of processing experience and working it through; not necessarily a means of changing the world, but an oblique way of changing our perception of the world, particularly when it becomes too much for us to manage by direct or mundane means. It is because the work of art makes our lives more viable that art or craft objects are often regarded as participating in our lives as social beings, 9 though the contrary is also the case, since the human body is commonly likened to a container such as a house, a suit of clothing, a cooking pot, a drinking vessel, that can be opened or closed, picked up or discarded, go to rack and ruin or be repaired. Elements of these metonyms and metaphors fi nd expression in Alfred Gell’s view that “art objects are the equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents” that mediate agonistic exchanges and manipulate social relations within “a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”10 But while I share Gell’s fascination with how art objects transform experience—bedazzling, intimidating, or mystifying us—my focus is less on outward effects than on the dynamic

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interplay of subjective and objective dimensions of reality. Art emerges in the space between oneself, standing apart from others (eigenwelt), and oneself as a participant in a world shared with many others (mitwelt). Philip Bromberg’s insights into dissociation are relevant here. Repudiating the common assumption that dissociation is necessarily a sign of mental disorder, Bromberg emphasizes the creative value of dissociation in managing unbearable experiences by shifting one’s focus to something outside oneself, something that can be regarded as objective rather than subjective, notme rather than me.11 Though there is a danger that this defensive strategy can estrange us from the very reality we are struggling to come to grips with, it provides the possibility of seeing one’s own world from the inside out, not from within but from somewhere other or elsewhere, thereby offering one some purchase on experiences that seemed both unthinkable and unendurable. This risk that we may lose our reason in the process of recovering our footing reminds us that the human condition is inescapably liminal. In D. W. Winnicott’s terms, art and religion are “transitional phenomenon,” emerging in the space between self and other and constituting a “third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore . . . an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate but interrelated.”12 Rather than identify religion with belief and liturgy, I prefer to focus on the existential situations in which divinities and spiritual entities as well as ideas about ultimate reality, fate, and natural justice come into play as potential means whereby human beings gain some purchase on shattering experiences and regain some measure of comprehension and control over their lives. Limit experiences, however, do not necessarily bring us to religion, as my own family history makes clear. Nor do post-Enlightenment notions of religion necessarily illuminate the African and Aboriginal lifeworlds I have described in my ethnographies. Nor are “spiritual” resources the only resources available to us in crisis, despite our tendency to use a quasi-theological language in recounting experiences that confounded us. For these reasons, many of the forms of life we refer to as “cultural”—including religion, art,

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ritual, ideology, and belief—may be construed as ways of circumventing and even subverting the world as we find it,13 ways of affirming “another nature,”14 ways of living by other means. As Louise Bourgeois put it, “Art comes from life. . . . Art is not about art. Art is about life.”15 To explore this point of view, I have divided this book into three parts. Part 1 introduces my ethnographic and intersubjective methodology and adduces perspicacious examples to illustrate my key themes: the dialectic of inner and outer; the shape-shifting character of consciousness; the relation of art, ritual, storytelling, and religion; and the symbolic links between natality and creativity. Part 2 focuses on several antipodean artists whose work has engaged my interest for many years, while part 3 explores the works and lives of several European and American painters, performance artists, photographers, sculptors, and graphic artists whose work speaks just as compellingly to my central themes.

The Work of Art

PA R T 1

Worlds Within and Worlds Without I N D E C E M BE R 2013 , W H I L E PA R T IC I PAT I NG I N A N E T H NO G R A PH IC workshop in Melbourne, Australia, on the subject of “spaces outside of domestication,” I found time to reacquaint myself with the city in which I had lived almost fifty years before. During my rambles around inner-city neighborhoods, my mind would become so clouded by memories that I felt as though I was uncannily living the phenomenon on which our workshop was focused. One morning, for example, I recognized the dilapidated green and cream tram grinding up LaTrobe Street as a last survivor of the fleet that plied the city thoroughfares in 1963 when I lived in Melbourne and worked for the Aboriginal Welfare Board. And when, in the course of a long walk through Fitzroy, I found myself outside the corner pub where I had been arrested, together with several Aboriginal drinking mates, and thrown into the Fitzroy Police Station cells for the night, I felt like a survivor myself—as estranged from the young welfare worker I had once been as from that moment in history when Aboriginals were persecuted, stigmatized, and denied basic civil rights. Brought before a magistrates court and charged with being drunk and disorderly, I took the advice of my Aboriginal mates, for whom this legalized degradation ritual was all too familiar, and pleaded guilty. Discharged, we gathered in a nearby park before going our separate

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ways, the Aboriginal men to cadge a meal and their welfare officer to tender his resignation to the Aboriginal Welfare Board. One of my companions clapped me on the back. “You’ve got a conviction now,” he said, as if I had earned a badge of honor. The double meaning of the word was not lost on me. It placed me solidly with them. It guaranteed I would be dismissed from a job that made me complicit in state policies I found abhorrent—removing Aboriginal children from allegedly dysfunctional families and fostering them in white bourgeois homes, breaking up Aboriginal camps and settling selected families in state houses (“pepper-potting”), giving tacit consent to police infringements of basic human rights. My resignation (another double entendre) presaged my departure from Australia and the second phase of my life in welfare—among the homeless in London—followed by a year in the Congo where I happened to discover my vocation as an anthropologist. Though now a stranger to the person I once was, I still recognize him, and regard him with immense compassion—wishing I could alleviate his loneliness and resolve the dilemmas that haunted his years in welfare and community development—his struggle to reconcile an urge to improve people’s lives with an equally strong desire to understand them. Both impulses are modes of domestication, of imposing on the radically other some kind of order—in the first case administrative, in the second academic. Even now, as I remember the demoralizing circumstances in which Aboriginal people lived in Victoria in 1963—in makeshift shanties (“humpies”) on rubbish dumps or riverbanks, in one-room bean picker’s huts or shanties in sawmilling towns, in trashed state houses or railway workers cottages—I wonder how best one may do justice to people condemned to the social margins or draw a clear line between the destructive and creative strategies they deploy in resisting the domesticating apparatus of the state. This mysterious interplay between the world within and the world without has preoccupied me for many years and constitutes the main theme of this book—namely how material impoverishment, social injustice, and psychic wounds often undermine our capacity to live as we wish, though they seldom preclude the possibility of finding ways of getting around or going beyond the limiting conditions with which we contend. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this integration of subjective and objective perspectives implies a balancing act, comparable to the way we move around an art gallery so that we neither view a painting from so close that it becomes a blur

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nor from so far away that it loses its detail and allure. To achieve this “optimal distance,” we must do justice to what is in the background as well as the foreground, while recognizing that one of these perspectives is liable at any moment to switch places with the other.1 Focusing on the transitional space between interiority and exteriority, I explore art as a technique, inextricably connected to storytelling, play, dreaming, and ritual, whereby we work out vital relationships between inner desires and external determinants.2 The primordial human need to see oneself from without—whether in the face of a significant other, in the surface of a mirror, or in one’s handprint on a rock face—also finds expression in forms of empathy and mimicry whereby one sees the world from the standpoint of another or simply comes to see it otherwise. What we call imagining has its origin in this intersubjective transference that may result in a hunter’s identification with the animal he has killed, a conviction that material objects can act like persons, a belief that ideas can capture the essence of reality, or a fascination with recurring natural patterns. If leaving the imprint of one’s hand on the wall of a Paleolithic cave initiates the evolution of art, then surely painting, inscribing, and adorning the surfaces of one’s own body are analogous practices—techniques whereby subjective imperatives are modeled as objective designs. This process of alter-ation or existential transfiguration involves endless essays in striking a balance between being an actor and being acted upon. It begins with imitating the voice of another and culminates in finding one’s own voice and it may be discerned in initiation ritual as well as in everyday life when the world comes to be experienced as my world, when what is determined from without is transformed into something felt to be determined from within, when givenness is experienced as choice, and a situation that befell me or held me in thrall is reconstrued as a situation I reproduce in my own time and on my own terms. Rather than suffering our situations in solitude and silence, art, ritual, and storytelling enable us to change the ways that our situations appear to us; we thereby come to feel that we possess some degree of free will, that the future is open rather than closed to us, and that our existence matters. In effect, we give birth to ourselves as proactive rather than merely passive participants in a shared world. A singularly moving example of this transformative process is Henri Matisse’s cut-paper collages. In 1939–40 a series of catastrophes overwhelmed Matisse: his wife left him,

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France was occupied, and the seventy-one-year old artist underwent several surgeries for duodenal cancer that left him a semi-invalid, bedridden or confined to a wheelchair. Yet out of these dark years issued some of Matisse’s most luminous work. For Richard Lacayo, that work was therapeutic. “Having endured so much at the hands of his doctors, was he drawn unconsciously to cut paper as a way to sublimate the pain of his surgeries, to gain control over the very idea of cutting? Now he was the one wielding the sharp edges, using them to produce movement and vitality instead of surrendering it, taking an instrument of pain and turning it into an instrument of pleasure?”3 Art, sociality, and religion involve a negotiation between accepting at face value the social situations, aesthetic styles, normative values, and raw materials that are given to us and actively making something uniquely satisfying to ourselves out of these givens. Inasmuch as every act—whether of parenting, painting, paper cutting, praying, or parlaying—brings something new into the world—even if that newness consists in little more than a changed sense of our own place within it—a mystery always attaches to such acts, for they can never be reduced to the conventions, experiences, and materials on which they were predicated or to the effects they have in the world into which they pass. Like a sacrifice to the ancestors, an appeal to a divinity, a ritual to bring rain, a magnanimous gesture, or a conscientious act of parenting, the origins and effects of a work of art cannot be fully fathomed. Only one thing is sure—the human imperative to live in the world as if it were in some sense singularly one’s own, even though it is never entirely one’s own creation and is held in common with countless others. Eugenio Montale observes that art has two lives—somewhat like the antenatal and postnatal existence of an individual. While the first life of art unfolds between the maker and the object made, the second life of art begins when the artwork passes out of its creator’s hands and enters the public realm. There it acquires a variety of meanings that reflect the relationship between the artwork and the consumer whose subjective preoccupations and susceptibility to public opinion will only accidentally converge with the meanings the art had for its original maker. For Montale, This second moment, of common consumption and even misunderstanding, is what interests me most in art. Paradoxically, one could say that music, painting, and poetry begin to be understood when they are pre-

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sented, but they do not truly live if they lack the capacity to continue to exercise their powers beyond that moment, freeing themselves, mirroring themselves in that particular situation of life which made them possible. To enjoy a work of art or its moment, in short, is to discover it outside its context; only in that instant does the circle of understanding close and art become one with life as all the romantics dreamed.4

While sympathetic to Montale (whose perspective helps explain why I interleave biographical and reflexive passages throughout this book), my focus is the indeterminate relationship between the two lives of art. This means showing that the “unsharable feeling which each of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel” is,5 despite appearances, connected to widely shared preoccupations and recurring existential questions, so that in visiting an art museum one will be struck by the intense concern with the afterlife in the funerary art of dynastic Egypt or Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China; the yearning for consolation that informs the depictions of the virgin in medieval art; the preoccupation with generative power in the images of predatory animals, jinn, and ancestors in African carvings; and the search for novelty, distraction, innovation, and individual branding in contemporary Euro-American art. This sense of a common humanity, abiding over many millennia, finding expression in diverse forms of art and transcending radical cultural differences, is, in my view, as significant as the identifications that separate and divide us.

Melbourne Now I have written elsewhere of the power of stories to transform our experience of being-in-the-world and of how storytelling, dreaming, and art making may be compared with the essays and explanatory models we produce in the academy—all imaginative and ingenious ways in which we rework events that have befallen or overwhelmed us and thereby recover a sense of our capacity to act on that which acts upon us.6 Even before we assign different names to these expressive forms (art, ritual, narrative, science, religion, philosophy), or decide the truth or worth of any one of them, they have answered one of the deepest human imperatives—to translate inner experience into

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some outward form. As André Aciman asks, “What’s in me that keeps wanting something out there?” and “What’s out there that keeps beckoning something in me?” Writing of his beloved New York City, he touches on the curious intersubjectivity in which we find ourselves through our relations with those we love, or with a favorite writer, an heirloom, a home place, a landscape, a religion, a work of art. “Suddenly,” writes Aciman, “I realize what this is all about . . . the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us that it is out there on the pavement, because there may be more of us projected on every one of its streets than there is of the city itself.”7 Obviously, cities are not the only objects in relationship to which we define ourselves. In the course of a long walk across Melbourne, in which I continued to ponder the oblique relationship between that which weighs on our minds or dwells in our hearts and that which finds expression in a physical gesture, a spoken or written word, a worldview, or an objet trouvé, I found myself outside the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, where an exhibition called Melbourne Now had recently opened. I was immediately enthralled by the work of several contemporary Aboriginal artists, including one from Gippsland—the region where I had been based as a welfare worker fifty years ago. Though the surname of this artist was unfamiliar to me, I imagined that his grandparents might have been among the young adults who, from the late 1950s, left the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Reserve and sought ways of supporting themselves and their families in the inhospitable and violent world of white Australia.8 Two things struck me forcibly about the Aboriginal artworks in the Melbourne Now exhibition. First, they were stunning testimonies to the human capacity to reinvent tradition—and double-cross history. Raymond Young’s earthenware shields, for instance, draw on photographs of Kunnai shields from the early years of contact in southeast Victoria to mediate what the artist describes as a recovery of his grandmother’s and father’s culture. This process, he said, “changed my life. For a moment I wasn’t in prison, I was with my mob.” But this paranomic ability to renegotiate the past and “shield the future” involves deliberately conjuring traumatic scenes of terror, death, and violation.9 “You create make-believe landscapes out of horrible situations”—police raids in the dead of night, the abuse of passers-by, poverty, homelessness, dis-

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placement—writes Destiny Deacon.10 For Young, the power of art enables one to connect with powerful forebears who survived such traumas and thereby strengthen one’s own capacity to face the uncertainty of the future. This was harrowingly conveyed by Ricardo Idagi’s sculpture, entitled False Existence Appearing Real.11 The sculpture is a bust of the artist, grimacing. On his head is a galah, holding a plastic mirror from which hangs a small silver bell. Here is Idagi’s description of the work in question: These works are an attempt to come face to face with myself and look inside my head to explore the physical and mental traumas. Only after a lot of thinking and contemplating can I say to myself “it’s ok, you can tell your story.” I would describe the method of working as a confessional. “As I built the head of this self-portrait it got bigger and bigger . . . I thought, ‘this art caper is making my head swell.’ So to put shit on myself, a galah is placed on top of the head. The galah looks into a mirror. Both the image and the galah have droppings beneath them. False evidence appearing real. . . . I ask myself the question why do I have this negative self-image of myself. The name-calling and insults have stuck to me all my life. I have looked in the mirror and seen that negative image of myself to be true.”12

Although Flaubert was of the opinion that “the more words there are on a gallery wall next to a picture, the worse the picture,”13 Ricardo Idagi’s comments brought home to me the difficulty of closing the gap between how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others. This gap suggests a double bind, as in Bindi Cole’s A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, which vividly communicates the agony of knowing that the religion that had “changed her life,” “brought her peace,” and “softened her heart” was the same religion in whose name Aboriginal people had been subject to draconian mission regimes that banned indigenous languages, enforced routines of cleanliness and order, and taught people to see their own culture as barbaric, if not satanic. If such artworks do not bring one to an impasse in one’s thinking, or to a state of emotional exasperation, it may be because inner conflicts and contradictions are brought from the shadows of intrapsychic space into the light of day and given perceptible, external, and objective form. Through art we

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make up our own minds. Emotional quandaries that cannot be resolved within the psyche are transferred to the space of art, ritual, or language where, to invoke Cole’s image of spurious domesticity (the wolf in sheep’s clothing), the lion is able to lie down with the lamb. Thus, despite Idagi’s comments on his sculpture as a mirror of the painful memories and emotional turmoil within himself, we might note the clues that suggest a distancing from self, a transcendence of the ego. I mean Idagi’s syntactical slippages—“the top of the head” (not my head) and the reference to “putting shit on oneself ” (rather than myself ), as well as the implied existential shift from passively having shit heaped upon him in the form of racial slurs and actively heaping shit on an effigy of himself—an object that can feel nothing but can inspire in those who look at it a feeling of empathy, compassion, or outrage. This recovery of agency is critical, both to the work of art and the art of life, for there are few people, if any, who get through a single day without experiencing some small slight, minor setback, or loss of face and who do not, in response, try to regain the upper hand and heal their wounded sense of self through artifice or artfulness. This is why existentialists insist on seeing life as a project—a matter of finding ways of doing “something” about a situation one cannot, initially, do “anything” about, of salvaging a sense of being in the face of nothingness, and of working out how it is possible to express one’s feelings and voice one’s thoughts, even under the most dire or degrading conditions. In the work of the Aboriginal artists that captured my imagination in Melbourne, I saw a shift in emphasis from bemoaning a situation presented to them by history to artfully re-presenting this situation in their own terms. But this creativity is not only critical; it is subversive. Speaking of one of her earliest works, entitled Blak like me (1991), Destiny Deacon explained that “she had grown up being called a ‘black c . . . ’ and decided she’d take the ‘c’ out of ‘black.’” Hettie Perkins adds, “In Destiny’s hands the tools of oppression are powerfully subverted.”14

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Because the Aboriginal artists whose work I saw in Melbourne frequently alluded to conversion experiences—reconnecting with ancestors, transcending the self, finding God—I decided to reread Émile Durkheim’s classic work

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on “the ever-present causes on which the most basic forms of religious thought and practice depend.”15 Perhaps these “ever-present causes” might also help me understand what motivates people to make art.16 What immediately struck me, however, were the contradictions in Durkheim’s approach to the elementary forms of religious life—contradictions that undoubtedly reflected an unresolved tension between widely held views of the primitive in early twentieth-century Europe and Durkheim’s more liberal persuasions.17 While admitting that “even the crudest religions that history and ethnography make known to us are already so complex that they do not fit the notion people sometimes have of primitive mentality,” Durkheim refers to Central Aboriginal societies as “simple,” “archaic,” and “primitive.” And though he writes that these societies “display not only a luxuriant system of beliefs but also such variety in principles and wealth in basic facts that it has seemed impossible to regard them as anything but a late product of a rather long evolution,” he also speaks of them as “belonging to the beginning of history.”18 I also found it curious that Durkheim’s avowed fascination with religious experience should be immediately occluded by a focus on religious “belief and ritual.” Despite drawing a distinction between “individual states that are wholly explained by the psychic nature of the individual” and “collective representations” that are widely shared, and saying that “one can no more derive the second from the first than one can deduce the society from the individual,” he insists that society is the “highest reality” in which “the individual naturally transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts.”19 Thus Durkheim tends to collectivize consciousness, implying that “human mentality” is a by-product of “collective representations” and ignoring the various ways in which collective representations are taken up, glossed, or acted upon by individuals in everyday situations.20 Compelling correctives to Durkheim’s sociological reductionism have come from several contemporary anthropologists of religion whose starting point is neither religious experience, construed as belief, faith, or settled views of reality, nor institutionalized religion, defined monothetically as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Animism, etc. Instead, they echo William James’s insistence that “the world of our experience consists at all times of . . . an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter,” 21 and emphasize the variety of religion

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experience and practice, as well as the quasi-propositional dimensions of religious experience in a “minor” rather than institutional mode.22 This nonreductionist, polythetic approach23 seeks to identify what Ann Taves calls the “building blocks of religious experience” 24 and Jonathan Z. Smith calls “the bare facts of ritual.”25 Ann Taves calls this approach “ascriptive,” because it avoids any sui generis model of religious experience; instead, it construes “religion” as those experiences we decide to import into a box we have predesignated in this way, or that scholarly consensus has agreed to label “religious.” It is this ascriptive approach that I use in exploring the work of art. Rather than research the defining characteristics of religion, ritual, and art, I seek to identify processes that are shared by the phenomena that we conventionally classify under these headings. What we call art or music is a function of whatever the art or music world accepts under such rubrics. Consider, for example, the urinal Marcel Duchamp placed in an art gallery and called Fountain, or John Cage’s provocative questions, “Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?” 26 To assign a similar arbitrariness to the term religion is to echo Mark Rothko’s view that art dramatizes the struggles of human existence, and though these struggles may find expression in religious texts and ancient myths they are grounded in recurring human anxieties and questions “no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail, but never in substance.”27 I’m not interested in relationships of color or forms. . . . I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions. . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!28

Yet, Rothko never defined himself as a religious painter. “He’d always say, ‘I’m not a religious man.’” 29 It is if the line between art and religion is never clear to anyone, so we are not surprised to find that fourteen of Mark Rothko’s paintings are displayed in an octagonal nondenominational chapel in

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Houston, Texas, or that there are six similar artist chapels in the south of France alone, dedicated to works of Chagall, Matisse, Cocteau, Picasso, Bonnard, and Le Corbusier. Nor should we find it odd that art galleries, like museums, are often hushed, reverential spaces in which art devotees move as in a shrine, attentive to the presence of sublime genius, in the same way that respect is paid to the divine in a church, temple, or mosque. As I write, a vandalized Rothko painting, finally restored and replaced among kindred works in the Tate Modern, is the focus of fervent discussion as to whether an art gallery should be allowed to become an interactional amusement arcade whose atmosphere incites irreverence or considered consecrated ground that demands that bodily functions, self-centered passions, and the trappings of mundane life be left at the door before one enters. To repudiate monothetic conceptions of religion is also to acknowledge that religion, art, and even personhood are not sui generis, coherent, internally consistent categories that hold true for everyone in exactly the same way, all the time, but are deployed as shorthand terms to mask the phenomenological diversity and multiplicity of experience. Thus in Kenneth George’s illuminating account of the celebrated Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous, the painter himself admits to a somewhat arbitrary relationship between his faith and his art. Who he is as an artist is both connected to and separable from what he is by dint of being born a Muslim in Indonesia. Speaking of his twenty-year friendship with Pirous, Kenneth George observed that “Islamic art and Islamic aesthetics are not settled matters, but arenas of intense debate, confl ict, and, of course, creativity,” by which he means that “Muslims ceaselessly rethink and rework their arts as they respond to the shifting currents of culture, politics, and history, and as they negotiate their varied allegiances to—and identifications with—nation, ethnicity, kin, and ideology.” 30 Something of this paradox of being faithful to a tradition, whether artistic or religious, while selectively and creatively making it speak to one’s particular life concerns is also captured in Naveeda Khan’s study of Islam in Pakistan where people may aspire to and espouse religious and national ideals though no “clear, consistent relation to Islam” or the state exists.31 The conclusion I draw from these compelling ethnographic studies is that we need to move our focus from cultural, religious, or ethnic diversity to a focus on human diversity and to see that human thought and action are never

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entirely reducible to the terms with which we classify, categorize, and conceptualize it.

Art as Religion If we are going to explore the elementary forms of religion, ritual, or art we cannot assume that these may be identified in so-called societies without history, whose worldviews are allegedly animistic, totemic, pantheistic, and anthropomorphic.32 Rather, we must turn our attention from what is evolutionarily prior to what is existentially ever present. This requires bracketing out some of the conventional academic language that fosters the illusion of mutually exclusive domains of reality—sacred/secular, art/religion, subject/ object, modern/primitive—in order to bring into relief some of the recurring questions, perennial quandaries, and basic experiences that characterize the human condition. James Davies puts this succinctly in a discussion of the fictive character of words like secular and sacred. “Surely it is the way a person lives and practices, or treats his neighbor or those in need, that is more expressive of religious living than the conventional markers of affiliation and action. Practices and beliefs, after all, are not primary phenomena, but are rooted in social and psychological processes that may or may not have as their central aim the full realization of the religious life.”33 The new cognitive science of religion comes to similar conclusions. Seen as aggregations of ordinary cognitive processes, “religious” concepts and “religious” experiences (whether ecstatic, visionary, transcendent, or otherworldly) are shown to be more “natural” than they are often made out to be.34 In The Palm at the End of the Mind, I focused on what Karl Jaspers called grenzsituationen (border situations)35—the situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, the limits of our strength, the limits of our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, new ways of connecting with others. Whether such border situations are quintessentially religious, spiritual, historical, social, or biographical may be beside the point, for though such terms help us describe the conditions of the possibility of our experience or help us retrospectively explain our experience to ourselves and to others, the meaning of all human experience remains ambiguous, containing within it both the seeds of its own comprehensibility and nuances and shadings that go beyond

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what can be comprehensively thought or said.36 To capture this sense of experience as occurring on the threshold between what can and cannot be entirely grasped—intellectually, linguistically or practically—I used the image of the penumbral (from the Latin paene, almost + umbra, “shadow”) with its connotations of a phenomenologically indeterminate zone “between regions of complete shadow and complete illumination, “an area in which something exists to a lesser or uncertain degree” and “an outlying or peripheral region.”37 This suggests a method of exploring works of art from neither a subjective nor objective standpoint. Rather than focus exclusively on an artist (her personal experience) or an art object (its aesthetic properties or its circulation in a socioeconomic world in which it evaluated and explained), I am interested in the interplay between what is deemed to be inside and what is said to be outside.38 This reflects my argument in The Palm at the End of the Mind that human well-being depends on a person’s relationship with or connectedness to an “elsewhere” or “otherness” lying beyond the horizons of her own immediate lifeworld. This “other” world is sometimes identified with the dead, and ritual labor enables the living to fuse their being with ancestral being in a life-giving union.39 Sometimes, as in traditional Christianity, it is a realm of divine power and presence, associated with the empyrean. 40 Sometimes it is identical to the natural environment of forest, bush, and stream.41 Sometimes it is the social field in which our sense of self comes into focus or fades away and in which we continually change in synchrony with our circumstances. Thus, when Louise Bourgeois speaks of art as her “religion,” 42 or the Arrernte painter Wenten Rubuntja compares his Dreaming to the Bible (as revealed truth),43 or the great Anmatyerre painter Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri identifies the Dreaming with God,44 or an Aboriginal elder in the Pilbara points to a rock on which the oldest sketch of a human face can be discerned and says “this is a bible for us,” we cannot conclude that Aboriginal religiosity can be understood through a Judeo-Christian lens. Indeed, it may be that the reverse is true—as one can see in the way Wenten Rubuntja emphasizes the complementarity of agnatic (aknganenty) and uterine (altyerre) kinship ties in his Arrernte version of the story of Jesus: “Jesus has two places—his father’s father’s place is Heaven and his mother’s father’s place is

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the world. The relationship through his father’s father is called Aknganentye. Jesus is related to Heaven through his father’s father. The world—his mother’s father’s country—is what he called Altyerre. . . . That’s a true story.” 45 If art implies religion, it is not religion in any orthodox sense of the word. It is religion as mystics might understand it—something one discovers for oneself through direct experience, and articulates in one’s own way.46 Consider Joseph Beuys’s views in this regard. Opposed to bourgeois Christianity, he sought “a religion of his own,” “not imposed from the outside, but . . . germinated from [his] own depths.” 47 Or Lucian Freud’s dilemma, seeking to distance himself from his mother, whose interest in his welfare the son found suffocating, humiliating, and oppressive. Only when his mother had been rendered ineffectual after a drug overdose did the painter take an interest in her—now as a submissive “model” that gave him the upper hand and whose image he could vicariously control.48 What is at play here is a struggle to bring some semblance of continuity, comprehension, and control to a person’s relationship with unknown forces, both within and without. One avails oneself of extant ritual, artistic, or narrative forms and has recourse to what is given in one’s particular tradition, but what is given is inevitably changed under the impress of one’s own existential needs. This is why it is never enough to declare that art is a process of creating coherence out of confusion or encouraging cognitive play.49 We have to understand what existential quandaries and questions compel these actions and come to terms with the distinctively human impulse to perennially re-create the world as if it were one’s own. In this process of world making, one avails oneself of whatever materials come to hand—fire and water, wood and metal, plastic and string, sand and ocher, hair and bodily exudations—as well as whatever experiences weigh on one’s mind—birth and death, separation and loss, sickness and health—and through bricolage reconfigure one’s sense of being-in-the-world.

The Interplay of Coming Out and Going In One of the most compelling articulations of what I refer to as “the mysterious interplay between the world within and the world without” is the Aboriginal worldview known as the Dreaming. Though practically synonymous with myth, cosmology, or ancestral law, the Dreaming often makes its ap-

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pearance in the nocturnal dreams of individuals, particularly women, and these manifestations are then played out in ritual performances. Past, present, and future are thus brought together, just as Sigmund Freud theorized in his notion of the dream work and Carl Jung recognized when he observed that “the dream . . . originates in an unknown part of the psyche and prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day.”50 Accordingly, as Jung also pointed out, “one cannot recount a dream without having to add the history of half a lifetime in order to represent the individual foundation of the dream.” 51 Such is the case with Aboriginal dream interpretation. In the course of fieldwork in Central Australia in the 1990s, I discovered that Warlpiri focused far less on static conditions—being and nothingness, life and death, presence and absence, subject and object—than on metamorphic processes, phases, or passages. In this sense they exemplified William James’s “radical empiricism.” Organic experiences such as gestation and birth, sexual intercourse, digestion and defecation, sleeping and waking, fullness and emptiness, were the basic ontological metaphors Warlpiri used in conceptualizing and naming these transformations through which all things pass. In the Warlpiri view, life is a continual interplay between what is latent (inchoate and invisible) and what is apparent (articulated and embodied).52 Thus the process of “coming into being” is compared with “giving birth” ( palka jarrimi ), and the quickening of new life in the womb, the greening of the desert after rain, the ritual performance of an episode from ancestral times (recaptured in a dream), and the chanting of ancestral song cycles to the clapping of boomerangs are all ways in which latent or potential life is “drawn out,” embodied, and realized in the here and now.53 The contrary movement is manifest in a person fainting, feeling homesick, accursed (“sung”), drained of energy, separated from kith and kin (who are out of sight and out of mind), or “passing away” (dying). Nancy Munn, whose fieldwork among the Warlpiri was carried out in 1956–1958, glosses this relational mode of thinking slightly differently. Examining Warlpiri statements and narratives about the Dreaming, Munn identifies “a particular kind of process in which phenomena ‘come out’ (wilibari ) and ‘go in’ ( yuga) [that] recurs in a variety of contexts and is figured in different concrete images.” A primary image is of the ancestors

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emerging from the ground, traveling about performing ceremony, impregnating the ground with their vital essence, before growing weary and reentering the earth whence they came. The process of coming out is not only associated with the ancestral creation of the world but with sexual intercourse (“the erection of the penis as well as birth”) and increase ceremonies,54 while the counterprocess of going in is associated with detumescence and death. But death is not the end of a life but the beginning of a period in which the name of the deceased is taken out of circulation and all trace of his or her identity erased from the earth and, ideally, from the memory of the bereaved. This period of latency is followed by a “rebirth” or reappearance in which the name is brought back into circulation. Just as the generative potential of the ancestors steeped the ground on which they walked or where they camped, only to be drawn out and made present again in ceremony and in the conception of children (the ancestral essence is genitor, not the actual father), so life itself comes and goes in a perpetual reproductive cycle. This explains why rituals to multiply animals and rituals to reanimate the ancestors avail themselves of the same sexual imagery. Nancy Munn describes how the interplay of coming out and going in is basic to stories of the Dreaming, the sand drawing that accompanies storytelling, conventional wisdom, and the “various visual constructions and enactments of men’s ceremonial dramas.”55 In one construction, created for the “increase ceremony” of a flying termite (pamapardu) Dreaming, uterine kinsmen (kurdungurlu) began the painting at the center: a hole was then dug and water poured on the ground. After blood had been rubbed into the wet soil, concentric circles of red-ochered fluff were laid around the sides of the hole and on the surface of the ground. Additional graphic elements were added and white fluff attached to complete the design. A post was then placed upright in the hole, painted red and decorated with white dots representing numerous ants. “Bloodwood leaves, which Walpiri always interpret in ritual contexts as ‘ life-giving ’ (gudugulu , childhaving ) were attached to its top. Men identified the post as the ant hill, while the hole was their camp.” 56 When the construction was completed, patrilineal custodians (kirda) of the site and its Dreaming crouched on the sandpainting and beat the ground with leaves as they shuffled toward the pole. These men were “flying ants crawling toward their camp” and then entering their hole. “This movement towards the centre (dying) is a procreative act.”57

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This drama encapsulates the thesis I am proposing—that art, religion, ritual, dance, and song are not essentially different phenomena but modalities, methods, or moments in which something hidden within is made manifest. Through this transformation of the latent into the patent, human beings realize their individual and collective capacity to act obliquely and vicariously upon the world—bringing it into being, in this instance, by increasing the flying termites (pamapardu) that played an important part in the desert economy. Worker termites build earth mounds (mingkirri ) that are common throughout the Tanami Desert. In the wet season, the pamapardu grow wings and fly off to make new colonies, following their queens to dry mounds, or to build anew. When they have found their new home, they drop their wings. In this stage they can be collected, lightly cooked in coals, and eaten. As they fall to the ground, women collect them to eat because they are tasty and sweet. Moreover, when certain species of acacia and grass are in seed, ants collect the seed for their own use, often carrying it great distances to their holes in the ground. Because the ants only eat the white thread by which the seeds are attached to a pod or grass stem, the discarded seeds can be found in great abundance around their holes.

FIGURE

1 . Lirrara, Pat Lowe, 1990.

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Nowadays, no one depends on termites to maximize seed gathering for food. But while the economic value of ceremony has changed, its existential value endures. Over the last half century, Aboriginal art has become a symbolic supplement to initiatory journeys, the performance of ceremony, and making a living—a way of articulating one’s imperiled sense of cosmological connectedness, of working through traumas of displacement and loss, and of ensuring that secret-sacred knowledge is passed on to the next generation. These changes belie the continuities that underlie them, such as the symbolic equivalence of different colored paints with menstrual blood, venous or urethral blood, semen, milk, urine, and excrement.58 The increase of natural species may be less important these days than ethnic survival and a regular income, and painting has become critical to the articulation of political claims to land, national recognition, and indigenous self-determination, as well as more personal quests for connectiveness with both country and kin. As Wenten Rubuntja puts it, “I can’t die for nothing! I’ve got to leave something back. . . . We can’t just let things die out, and the children get lost. The children will all lose themselves, and then they’ll go mad, being confused and not knowing what to do.” 59 Externalizing one’s inner experience as art is clearly tied to the creation and recreation of one’s bonds with a wider world. It is this affi rmation of “an invisible community, the spirit of a society in which the social substance, the ‘manna’ which holds the secret of our future existence, is crystallized” that explains, for Jean Duvignaud, “why a number of artists tend either to defi ne art in religious terms or to seek some political commitment for themselves.” 60 This regenerative process of coming out and going in also survives changes in media. Though painting with acrylics may have eclipsed some forms of ceremonial life, Warlpiri readily identify ceremonial sandpainting or body painting with acrylic painting on canvas.61 Whether retouching a rock painting, making a film, painting one’s Dreaming, or preaching a sermon, the same images recur, the same cooperation between patrikin (kirda) and matrikin (kurdungurlu) is required, 62 and the same consummation is sought. One’s intimate relationship with country and ancestry is brought to light and kept alive through the sweat and blood of ritual labor.

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All these media express iconographically a geomythological matrix that a person experiences viscerally, emotionally, and conceptually as the ground of his individual being—in Warlpiri, walya (earth, ground, or country).63 This anthropomorphic fusion of self and country is nicely captured by a remark by Wenten Rubuntja: “landscape painting is the country himself, with Tywerrenge (sacred object, Law) himself. Tywerrenge come out of there. Songs come out of all that body [of the country].” 64 We must not forget, however, that such statements about abstract cultural meanings sometimes obscure the full force of personal and emotional experience in the making of art. In rendering human experience intelligible, we tend to forget its sensible and sensuous qualities. In grasping things we may know, we tend to ignore things we can only feel. When asked about his crucifi xion paintings, Francis Bacon stressed raw emotions and expressed disinterest in the intellectual meaning of the work. “You’re working then about your own feelings and sensations, really. You might say it’s almost nearer to a self-portrait. You are working on all sorts of very private feelings about behavior and about the way life is.” 65 Richard Broxton Onians’s monumental study of the imagery pervading early European thought helps us recover a sense of the “primal unity” of cognition and affect that artists, musicians, and writers have emphasized throughout history, irrespective of their cultural milieus.66 In the case of Aboriginal artists, a recurring motif is of being part of an energy field that flows from the world around, through one’s body, and into a rock face or piece of wood, onto a stretched canvas or strip of bark. This inspiriting experience may give the artist a sense of empowerment or emotional fulfi llment that consummates an ideal of being consubstantial with her ancestral country. The Kuninjku bark painter and sculptor John Mawurndjul speaks of “tapping into the energy that flows through the freshwater rivers, forges and wetlands of his country” and of experiencing the energy of the rainbow serpent (Ngalyod) flowing through him. This sense of connection and continuity with an ancestral presence is so strongly felt that “sometimes that Ngalyod gets inside my head and makes me go mad.” 67 In a similar vein, the Ngaanyatjarra painter Giles Tjapaljarri says that “the energy [of his canvases] comes from the Tjukurrpa [Dreaming].” 68 Among the Yolngu, the same ancestral power and presence (maarr) that infuses sacred objects also infuses

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contemporary paintings on bark, so that the fine cross-hatching captures the brightness associated with ancestral power, while other designs suggest sunlight on water or the radiance of eucalyptus in flower, all of which exhilarate and increase joyfulness in both the painter and those who view his work.69 Fred Myers also comments on the “enormous pleasure” Pintupi find in making art and in the luminous effects they produce—shimmering dots evoking the dew on honeysuckle flowers in the morning or the desert blooming after rain.70 And while Martu women in the far Western Desert succeed equally well in capturing the glistening light on a salt lake or clay pan, their emphasis is often placed on the pleasure of working together and finding common ground. As Ngalangka Nola Taylor put it, “For these big [collaborative] paintings I feel safer. . . . You feel good inside when you’re doing it with someone. You got someone else beside you.” 71 Clearly, pleasure derives from aesthetic effects, culturally shared meanings, and deep intersubjectivity. When the Pitjantjarra artist Tjunkaya Tapaya paints her mother’s Dreaming, she recalls memories of her mother’s bedtime stories or of holidays when her family went hunting in the desert. As Ute Eickelkamp notes, “Dreaming, personal memory and affect are intertwined: the artist has not merely depicted a body of knowledge; rather she is re-charging herself in the act of tapping into and visualizing on canvas parts of her inner life.”72 Eickelkamp also reminds us that, for all the fullness of being that may be conjured in the performance of ritual or the practice of art, a sense of emptiness and enervation may also inform one’s work. Just as traditional ritual served to increase the life of plants and animals, and thereby sustain the life of human beings, so contemporary painting enables Aboriginal people to forget the dispiriting and demoralizing sense of being cut off from their ancestral sources of life and unable to draw sustenance from the world of whites. But these empowering transformations are not simply changes in the way one thinks about one’s place in the wider world; they are emotional and sensuous modes of experience that often lie too deep for words. This is why we must approach experience as having both objective and subjective aspects and of continually oscillating between a person’s inward-looking awareness and the external objects that draw his attention outward into the world. As William James put it, experience is a “double-barreled word.”73 It refers at the same time to what is experienced, who is experiencing, and how she is experiencing.

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Consciousness Whence is art conceived? Where does it first quicken into being? What is the ground (walya), as Warlpiri might say, of the very possibility of the objective forms that we differentiate as art, song, speech and knowledge? Setting aside notions of both the supernatural and the unconscious, let us begin with the most basic mode of consciousness of which one may be aware. For Jung, this relatively aimless, arbitrary, associative mode of thought is so similar to dreaming that he called it “dream thinking,”74 while James referred to it as “irresponsible thinking” and compared it to “spontaneous revery.”75 In this “pure state” there is no sense of a knowing subject separate from an object to be known.76 For many artists, this frame of mind is absolutely vital to the creative process. For Bacon it implies working “from the moment when consciously I don’t know what I am doing,” an art of “manipulating the marks that have been made by chance, which are the marks that one made quite outside reason . . . I feel that anything I’ve ever liked at all has been the result of an accident on which I have been able to work. Because it has given me a disoriented vision of a fact I was attempting to trap. And I could then begin to elaborate and try and make something out of a thing which was non-illustrational.”77 But consciousness is seldom settled in this dreamlike state. The random shuffle of sounds, images, emotions, and incipient ideas becomes directed and organized in words and through objects. We begin “thinking with directed attention,” talking to ourselves, making connections with past experience, entertaining ideas, sketching a picture, expressing ourselves outwardly.78 Yet the relationship between inwardness and the expressive forms of language, gesture, or art remains mysterious. One never knows whether the outward form mirrors the artist’s original intention or betrays it. And one can never predict what people will make of a piece of art when it begins its second life, circulating in the wider world. There is, moreover, always a discrepancy between subjective realities and objective appearances that makes it difficult to infer inner feelings from outward behavior or to know what is going on in the minds of others. Indeed, it is hard enough to know one’s own mind.

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At the beginning of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), we are drawn into the consciousness of Stephen Daedelus as he strolls across Sandymount Strand. He closes his eyes and hears his boots “crackling wrack and shells.” Like “signatures of all things [he] is to read here,” these sounds, like the objects he glimpses when he opens his eyes, trigger random associations, call memories to mind, remind him of things he must do or dreams of doing. Suddenly, then, his reverie is interrupted by a dog running up to him, only to be whistled back to its owners, strolling some way off. Clearly, Stephen’s stream of consciousness, like memory, cross-references and combines elements that flow between inner and outer space. Memories are like rain clouds. Just as a mountain range is needed for clouds to fall as rain, so the mind needs a familiar landscape, a piece of music, the smell of fennel, the taste of a petit Madeleine, if its hidden depths are to be revealed. So uncanny and surprising is this confluence of inner and outer worlds that we often have the impression that a landscape or valued object actually holds our past life in its hands, as insects are held in amber, or that past events remain perfectly preserved in our minds. But this flowing together of the debris of the past and what is now at hand is, like the confluence of two rivers, under constant revision. One day, it may seem as though the past is all we are, and that we merely echo events that have already occurred. Another day, it is as though there was nothing outside the present moment. Our entire existence, all that matters, is contained in the here and now.79 Although we cannot understand inner realities except through the words and actions that render those realities visible, audible, and shareable, we are aware that there is always more to a person than meets the eye or finds expression in what she says and does. Despite acknowledging the ways in which an ethnographer switches, often unwittingly, between experience-near and experience-distant perspectives, Clifford Geertz concluded that the former can only be inferred from the latter—which is to say from the standpoint of the collective representations, shared symbols, or webs of significance that constitute a given culture. But, by emphasizing these outward forms, Geertz, like Durkheim before him, not only ignores human consciousness (which can only be accessed indirectly); he fails to explore the lack of fit between immediate and mediated experience. Accordingly, he concludes

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that all Balinese experience time cyclically and experience themselves not as individuals but as cultural exemplars. Rather than make any one perspectives—the collective or the individual, consciousness or cosmology—foundational to a general theory of knowledge, I want to explore the conditions under which these different perspectives make their experience in the lives of actual people and how this interplay of the private and the public generates both objective forms—a work of art, a belief in God, a story or a myth—and transforms subjective experience. That is to say, my interest is in the complex and creative relationship between the processes and products of human consciousness, particularly the products we conventionally call art and religion. This relational view helps overcome the false antinomy between two dominant approaches to art. In the first it is the process of creativity that is emphasized, and the product of this creativity is regarded as less significant. Picasso’s fascination with Cézanne’s doubt and Van Gogh’s mental torment or his own inner metamorphoses exemplify this romantic view.80 The second approach to art focuses on the product itself, emphasizing either its aesthetic properties or its relationship to class and culture. John Berger’s preoccupation with the artist’s social situation at any given historical moment exemplifies this concern for the social life of things,81 as does Pierre Bourdieu’s view that it is not the intrinsic quality or originality of an artwork that determines its acceptance or compels our interest; rather it is the “the art field”—made up of agents, curators, gallery owners, patrons, critics, and driven by market forces—that produces art and determines taste. 82 In seeking to integrate this materialist perspective with an existential one, Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that the “real subject of history” is never simply an “economic subject, man as a factor in production, but in more general terms the living subject” existing and coexisting; “man as creativity, as a person trying to endow his life with form, loving, hating, creating or not creating works of art, having or not having children.” 83 By implication, our focus is less on the means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods and services as on the means of production, distribution, and exchange of life itself. Two crucial phases are involved here. While the “first life” of art is centered on the interplay between an artist’s consciousness and the work at hand, the “second life” begins when the work passes

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out of the artist’s possession and circulates in the wider world. But the meaning of an art object resides neither in the intentions of the producer nor the interpretations of the consumer. It is because meaning cannot be traced to one identifiable source that the work of art is always mysterious. As Alfred Gell observes, art creates the real world in an enchanted form, and the magical property of any work of art derives from the mystery of how and from whence such a thing could be brought into being.84 It is this enigmatic and mysterious quality of an artwork that leads us to associate art with religion and spirituality—words that conjure our relationships with the ultimately unknowable.

From Joyce to Beuys If only it were possible to access human streams of consciousness, like the angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire! If only for the cost of a penny it was possible to purchase a glimpse into one’s own mind or the mind of another. There is a photo of Joseph Beuys gazing out upon the snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea beyond Dublin’s Sandymount Cove. Is he imagining Leopold Bloom on the Strand, aroused by Gerty on the beach, or has he become Joyce for a moment, simply by standing where Joyce once stood (place made me think of that) or where Leopold Bloom took stock of his situation, wet shirt, little limping devil, beginning to feel cold and clammy? Beuys intrigues me because he couples a deeply autobiographical approach to art with a political vision that almost by definition precludes any focus on the self. He makes himself Everyman. He sees us all, in our various ways, participating in the same project of world making. For him, there are no hierarchies of high or low art. Even the concepts of “culture” and of the “artist” are called into question. “Creativity isn’t the monopoly of artists. This is the crucial fact I’ve come to realise, and this broader concept of creativity is my concept of art. When I say everybody is an artist, I mean everybody can determine the content of life in his particular sphere, whether in painting, music, engineering, caring for the sick, the economy or whatever. All around us the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped or created.” 85 What are to make, then, of Beuys’s relationship with James Joyce and of the artist’s 1964 claim in a Lifecourse/Workcourse chart that he had, three years before, extended “Ulysses by 2 chapters at the request of James Joyce”?

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Since Joyce died in 1961, this request could not have been made by the Irish writer, which broaches the question of how we construe this imagined affinity that Beuys continued to invoke over the next ten years?86 Clearly, the connection is deeper than the phonetic echoes of Joyce in Beuys. Let us take our cue from Beuys himself, who, in a 1969 interview, said, “I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it,” 87 but bear in mind the impossibility of ever accessing the past as it actually occurred. Although Beuys campaigned against forgetting the atrocities of Nazism (“All of Beuys’ materials are no doubt derived from the shambles of postwar Germany”),88 reality and recollection are always at odds. We can no more hold up a mirror to nature than we can avoid turning history into myth. What is true of history is also true of biography. In 1940, aged nineteen, Beuys was called up for military service. He trained as a radio operator, then as a Stuka (JU 87 dive-bomber) pilot. In the winter of 1944,89 while flying over the Crimea, his aircraft was hit by Russian flak and crashed. Beuys suffered severe injuries to his head and face and was pulled unconscious from his wrecked cockpit by Tartars. “Had it not been for the Tartars,” Beuys said in a 1978 interview, “I would not be alive today.” They were nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. “Du nix njemcky” they would say, “du Tatar,” and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital.90 So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in—I always preferred free movement to safety belts. I had been disciplined for that, just as I had been for not carrying a map of Russia—somehow I felt that I knew the area better than any map.

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My friend was strapped in and he was atomized by the impact—there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying “Voda” (“Water”), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep the warmth in.91

Beuys’s story, like the story of Van Gogh’s ear, quickly entered the hagiography of modern art and helped many mystified by Beuys work to understand the seemingly fetishistic presence of felt and fat (or tallow) in his installations.92 As his story morphed into myth and became a “key experience” to which all his work could be referred, Beuys struggled to downplay, and even disown,

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2 . Rescue Sled, Joseph Beuys, 1969. Used with permission by the Artists Rights Society (New York/VG Bild-Kindst, Bonn).

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the story, pointing out that one can never reach rock bottom in trying to identify, autobiographically or historically, the true source of one’s work.93 Walter Benjamin observed that “the origin of great works has often been conceptualized in terms of the image of birth.” This image is dialectical, he says, involving a “feminine” aspect, wherein the work is conceived and brought into the world, and a “masculine” aspect wherein the work, once in the world, “gives birth once more to its creator” whose home is not the maternal womb from whence it came but the world in which it has its second life.94 To this observation one might add that every work of art also has its origins in what occurred before it was first conceived. A person does not enter the world as a tabula rasa, for he is already bearing the imprint of experiences that go back many generations. Whether genetically or epigenetically, we carry the lives of predecessors into our own lives, just as we influence the lives of generations to come by what we do or do not do in the course of our own life spans. From this perspective, even our physical birth is a rebirth. And every person’s lifetime is punctuated by separations and losses in which we die a little and from which we are, in a sense, perennially reborn. Our relationship to earlier chapters in our life resembles, in this respect, the relationship between an artwork and the artist. The latter is never a mirror image of the former, and it may be impossible to read what has been from what comes into being, whether that new issue is a child, a reinvention of oneself, a personal story, or a work of art. From this arises the mystery of where art comes from. The Gola of Liberia find it so incredible that the marvelous Sande and Poro masks are carved by human hands that they declare them to be the “visible form of a supernatural being” (a jina or jinn) and impose a ban on speaking of the masks as having been made by ordinary men.95 Alfred Gell calls this “enchantment,” and he relates it to our inability to reconcile the object we see with a source we cannot fathom. “It is the way an art object is construed as having come into the world which is the source of the power such objects have over us—their becoming rather than their being.” 96 That this mystery is intimately connected to the mystery one experiences when one first takes one’s newborn infant into one’s arms and gazes into her face is beautifully captured in a Gola carvers’ experience of “intense and mysterious fulfillment” as he watches his masks “come to life.”

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I see the thing I have made coming out of the women’s bush. It is now a proud man jina with plenty of women running after him. It is not possible to see anything more wonderful in this world. His face is shining, he looks this way and that, and all the people wonder about this beautiful and terrible thing. To me, it is like what I see when I am dreaming. I say to myself, this is what my neme has brought into my mind.97 I say, I have made this. How can a man make such a thing? It is a fearful thing I can do. No other man can do it unless he has the right knowledge. No woman can do it. I feel that I have borne children. 98

It is not only the Gola who are filled with wonderment at the work of art or compare its appearance with the birth of a child, mystified as to how perfection can be produced by imperfect human beings. The readiness with which we call great music divine or sublime, speak of stories as spellbinding, and evoke the language of spirituality or even spirit possession when speaking of great art calls to mind Rudolf Otto’s notion of the numinous— the experience that allegedly underlies all religion. Hearing voices, divining portents, experiencing divine grace, being inspired, or being moved by the spirit may be compared to the process of creativity in art. As mysterium, the numinous suggest something “wholly other,” entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It takes our breath away. We become speechless with wonder. But the numinous is also a mysterium tremendum. It provokes terror because it presents itself as overwhelming power. Finally, the numinous presents itself as fascinans, as merciful and gracious.99 But can we understand the emergence of art without evoking supernatural agencies, spiritual sources, artistic genius, or the concept of the unconscious?

Production and Reproduction Let us return to that poignant moment in Joyce’s Ulysses when Gerty MacDowell and Leopold Bloom come together in a fantasized sexual tryst. Toward the end of this Nausicaa episode, Bloom discovers that his wristwatch has stopped, which leads him to imagine the watch hands as two lovers joined at the hip in sexual intercourse, then wonder whether Molly and

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Boylan have finished their real tryst (cat’s away the mice will play) and how she is feeling in that region. It is dark now, the shepherd’s hour, dew falling, all quiet on Howth, and far on Kish Bank the anchored lightship twinkling. And Gerty, now at home, recalls the foreign gentleman that was sitting on the rock at the same time as her clock coos cuckoo. But Bloom is not merely and unsympathetically a cuckold, for we already know that his son Rudy (named after Bloom’s father, Rudolf ) died ten years ago, soon after birth, and since that tragedy he and Molly have not made love. Though Bloom has struggled to accept this situation and its consequences, he has found it harder to live with the loss of his son and often imagines what Rudy would be like had he survived. At one point he fantasizes Rudy at Eton; at another he thinks he sees his son in the street and calls to him. Clearly, it is Bloom’s lack of a son and heir that contributes to his feelings of impotence and unfulfillment. And it is this gap that is filled by Stephen Daedelus, whose path crossed Bloom’s when Stephen was five and again when he was ten ( previous encounters that proved their preexisting acquaintance). But, on the day in question, Bloom narrowly misses meeting Stephen in the morning, encounters him cursorily a little later, before falling into conversation with him in nighttown and later walking back to a cabman’s shelter discussing kindred topics, until wearily the pair of them wend their way to Bloom’s house where their temperamental differences and divergent views become clear, as well as their common cause—Bloom’s search for a son, and Stephen’s for a father. More significant than any conjugal tie or sexual consummation is this bond between father and son. And though Ulysses ends with a woman’s “yes,” the book as a whole is an affirmation of life, of the perpetual regeneration of life over time. This point is crucial, for it reminds us that sexuality in literature, dreams, and art is more a matter of life than libido. Jung puts it succinctly. “Common speech, as we know, is full of erotic metaphors which are applied to matters that have nothing to do with sex; and conversely, sexual symbolism by no means implies that the interests making use of it are by nature erotic. But affects cannot be identified with sexuality inasmuch as they easily spring from conflict situations—for instance, many emotions spring from the instinct of self-preservation.”100 In this sense, Joyce’s Ulysses bears comparison with other banned books of the mid-twentieth century, such as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. All three authors

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used sexual imagery to celebrate self-realization and uninhibited artistic expression. Licentiousness was synonymous with poetic license, and sexual ecstasy with individual liberation.101 Accordingly, we may construe Gerty Macdowell’s sexual yearnings and Leopold Bloom’s sexual frustration as expressions not only of their inability to give birth to themselves but of their thwarted dreams of having children. Natality is a generative capacity to make something of what one was made—to realize one’s potential, and to live that which is given—genetically, parentally, or culturally—in ways that simultaneously reproduce the world and produce one’s own world. That sexuality implies natality and that natality implies many forms of symbolic birth means that the work of art and the labor of childbirth may be regarded as linked ontological metaphors. Rather than the narrow Freudian view of creativity as the sublimation of sexual drives, we therefore see creativity—whether in art, storytelling, ritual, or everyday life—as any world-making or world-sustaining activity. Such a view, however, flies in the face of widespread assumptions about an allegedly natural division of labor between men and women that defines women’s work as the bearing and raising of children and men’s work as making a living and, by extension, making art. If this assumption were true, why is it that male production—whether of food, ritual, or art, is so often couched in terms of reproduction? And why do initiation rites the world over involve role reversals in which men pretend to bring children into the world and women imitate men? In Central Australia, men’s ritual is analogous to coitus, conjoining human beings with natural species and uniting ancestral beings with their living counterparts.102 This process is vividly enacted by the erotic wriggling, trembling, and quivering that scatters feathers or down from a performer’s body. This symbolic semen (associated with the Dreaming ancestors) brings new life into being. What is most illuminating for our purposes, however, is that all secretsacred materials have, as Geza Roheim, puts it “a double aspect.”103 On the one hand, they represent the beings with whom life on earth began (the ancestors and, by extension, all parents) and the human beings who devote such care and attention to the correct use of these materials in ritual. Performing

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a ritual may thus be likened to creating a work of art; it involves, as Roheim points out, a narcissistic aspect.104 In both ritual and art, one is simultaneously channeling one’s forebears, projecting oneself into the world, and participating in the re-creation of the social order. One is, as it were, at once dutiful midwife, self-absorbed child, and parent-progenitor. Methodologically, however, I consider it imperative that we break a longstanding academic habit of reducing human actions to some unconscious meaning, ulterior motive, or hidden cause. For what the hermeneutics of suspicion all too often means in practice is not only an academic subversion of nonacademic perspectives but an interpretive license that avails itself of indigenous exegesis to justify its own excessive claims. That initiated Aboriginal men compare the subincised penis with a woman’s vulva does not necessarily mean that they envy women’s capacity to bear children or equate the bleeding penis with a woman’s menses.105 An analogy may be drawn between male initiation and childbirth without implying that men are at the mercy of an unconscious wish to arrogate the role of mothers to themselves. A similar argument may be made against the Freudian view that making art is a way of sublimating sexual drives. What is at stake here is our understanding of analogical thought. All communication involves saying one thing by way of something else. And metaphor is one of humanity’s original techniques for expressing one’s own immediate experiences in an outward form that can be grasped by others. In controlling patterns of sound, names for things, and images of exterior objects that capture the essence of some interior reality, sociality itself is born, for how would social relations be possible unless the state of an individual’s mind could be translated into a form—either gestural, graphic, or linguistic—that others could recognize and read? But to draw a distinction between tenor and vehicle, as if one term of the metaphorical relationship were prior or more fundamental, is a little like privileging one party to a conversation over the other. Rather than construe metaphor as a way of saying something “in terms of ” or “by way of ” something else—claiming, for instance, that Central Australia totemism originates as a psychic defense against “the primal scene,” or that all long objects are “basically” phallic symbols and all round objects “basically” breasts or wombs106—I prefer to place both terms on a par, each disclosing properties of the other, but neither regarded as prior or primary.107

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Only in this way can we avoid the kind of subject-object splitting that leads us to interpret art works as either expressions of unconscious subjective processes or of aesthetic conventions, market forces, and objective realities. If, as Lygia Clark says, “the inside is the outside” (the name she gives to her 1963 stainless steel sculpture in New York’s Museum of Modern Art), surely the reciprocal is also true—the outside is the inside? In fact, it is never a matter of either-or, nor of both-and, but of the mysterious and indeterminate relationship between what is deemed to be within and what is supposed to be without.

Axes of Bias We create both ourselves and our lifeworlds in many ways and with many materials, bringing children into the world and raising them, assembling substances like ocher, wood, stone, water, fire, sand, feathers, blood, urine, excrement—indeed, anything we can lay our hands on—to construct simulacra of inner experiences, visions, dreams, ideas, or beliefs. The work of art is an endless interplay between what we think of as lying within and what we think of as existing without. But it would be an error to reduce the meaning of any art object (or ritual act) either to the subjectivity of the artist (or actor) or to its aesthetic properties, its market value, or its social acceptability. The power or mystery of the art object—or of any ritual action—is a function of this irreducibility. In this sense, the work of art resembles the work of raising a child. No parent can fully account for the origin of their child’s physical appearance, personality, or character, though this is precisely what members of an extended family attempt to do when a newborn enters their world. And no analysis of a child’s behavior or outward appearance can ever fully explain a child’s nature. Crucial to the creative process is the existential imperative of acting upon the world to the same extent that it acts upon oneself—a process of converting what is given into what is chosen and transforming what was not of one’s own making into an assemblage over which one asserts mastery. This is why I repudiate hard and fast distinctions between subjective reality and objective representation. Such terms are best construed as rough and ready ways in which we attempt to capture moments in the unending interplay between experiences that seem to lie on the hither and thither sides

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of oneself.108 As Louise Bourgeois puts it, “Art is a way of re-cognizing oneself.”109 Aciman makes a similar point in his essay on Monet at Bordighera. “Monet was probably drawing from something that was more in him than out here in Bordighera, but whose inflection we recognize as though it’s always been in us as well. In art we do not see, we recognize.”110 Art involves an interminable working out of inner preoccupations—a struggle to bring inner anxieties and compulsions under some semblance of control. “When terror pounces, grips me, I create an image,” Bourgeois says, and she demonstrates what she means by drawing a charcoal circle on a white canvas. “I indicate my space and I put inside my fears,” she says. And as she speaks, she draws a series of circles inside the larger one. “In order to liberate myself from the past I have to reconstruct it . . . make a statue out of it, and get rid of it through making sculpture.” This relationship between inchoate and articulated aspects of experience is never fully or finally consummated. All expressive forms fall short of mirroring or communicating that which lies on the far side of one’s immediate experience, and thence springs their mystery.111 Yet artists and art theorists alike tend to favor one perspective over the other or vacillate between subjective determinations and objective explanations as if there were no transitional space or middle ground in which the lines were blurred and the ambiguity unresolveable. W. T. Jones refers to these extreme positions as “axes of bias.” One of the most pervasive is that between Inner and Outer, “which consists in the range of attitudes between a demand to get inside the objects of one’s experience and a tendency to be satisfied with an external view of them.”112 Consider, for example, the contrast between Edvard Munch and Lucian Freud. Munch’s commitment was to “a more subjective art.” His painting, The Storm, for instance, is less a depiction of bad weather than an expression of the artist’s inner state of mind, his “psychic distress.”113 In the face of family and community outrage at one of the earliest of his “soul paintings” (of his sister’s death), Munch’s friend Christian Krohg both defended him and spelled out Munch’s aims. He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he

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The Storm, Edvard Munch, 1893.

paints. For this reason Munch’s pictures are as a rule “not complete,” as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.114

In complete contrast to this subjectivist bias, consider the attitude of Lucian Freud, which uncannily echoes Flaubert’s famous line, “I have no biography.” For fifty years (1954–2004), despite “living a high-low life” Freud issued no manifestos, gave no interviews, showed no signs of introspection, and wrote nothing autobiographical. Only the art mattered. All this through a period when artists took over the colour supplements, and the easel painter seemed vieux jeu compared to the collager, silkscreener, installer, conceptualist, video-maker, performer, neon-signer and stone arranger. There was much art babble, and newcomers were expected to provide credos of fluent obscurity. . . . But having “no biog-

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raphy” is impossible: the nearest you can get is to have no published biography in your own lifetime. Freud, more than any other artist of his stature, came as close to that as possible.115

The truth remains that whatever the bias—toward subjectivity or objectivity— both must enter into our understanding of the work of art.116 One feels great poignancy for Freud’s paintings of his aged mother in her paisley dress when we learn that from an early age Freud found his mother’s solicitude repellent, and it was only after her health had been destroyed (by a drug overdose) that the artist felt free to take an interest in her, albeit as a model. The same could be said of Munch, for it is only when we suppress our awareness of the painter’s personal anguish over his sister Catherine’s incarceration in Oslo’s Ekeberg Asylum that we can fully appreciate The Scream not simply as a personal response to the demented or despairing cries of the asylum inmates, as Munch worked at his easel on the path overlooking Oslo from the Ekeberg Hill, but as an objective reminder of the specter of mental illness that haunts every society.

A Visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel When I visited the Kunstmuseum Basel in October 2014, I spent some time admiring and studying Caspar Wolf’s dramatic late eighteenth-century landscapes of the Alps. At one point I sat down on a bench where two catalogs had been placed, one in English and one in German. The catalogs contained essays written to accompany the exhibition, which was entitled Caspar Wolf and the Aesthetic Conquest of Nature.117 All these essays emphasized the emotional impact of the Alps on those who explored and painted them. The glaciers, seracs, scree slopes, waterfalls, cliffs, crags, torrents, and caves were at once sublime, awe-inspiring, and terrifying. But if any “conquest” was involved, surely it was not an aesthetic conquest of nature but nature’s conquest of the people who are dwarfed, in Wolf’s paintings, by its overwhelming presence. What intrigued me, however, were the inner preoccupations of these eighteenth-century Alpine tourists and artists and the possibility that personal preoccupations with transcendence, turmoil, and terror preceded their encounters with wild nature and not only resulted from them.

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4 . Die Sturzbäche des Lauentales im Vorfrühling, Caspar Wolf, 1774/1777.

After moving on from Caspar Wolf’s pioneering Alpine landscapes, I wandered into an exhibition of Richard and Ulla Dreyfus-Best’s private collection of mannerist and surrealist works entitled For Your Eyes Only. These works provided a complete contrast with the paintings I had just spent an hour peering at and pondering, for while Caspar Wolf’s work had been interpreted in the light of the effects of the external world on an artist, the surrealist works were construed as “a Weltanschauung in the quite literal sense of observing . . . an internal world.” The innermost spaces of dream, fantasy, anxiety, and trauma were supposedly exteriorized in images that did not correspond to any real-life form. This was an art born of art “that only talks to itself.”118 But what was I to make of the horrifying depictions of the Last Judgment in room 3? Surely these apocalyptic images of the end of the world issued not only from Christian eschatology but from the everyday experiences of men and women struggling to keep body and soul alive in medieval Europe? By the time I left the museum I was more convinced than ever of the importance of not polarizing inner and outer but of seeing these terms as equally significant and ever present aspects of intersubjective life. What mattered most was not the identity of the artist or the nature of the world, but the dynamic

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relationship between artist and world, whether this was a world of others, objects, texts, beliefs, landscapes, or paintings. This relational perspective enables one to avoid the fallacy of defi ning “primitive” or “tribal” art in terms of exteriority—a means of producing social effects, a mask to frighten, a figurine to instruct, a fetish to give protection, a shield to deflect an enemy’s spears—and of defining “modern” art, by contrast, in terms of interiority—a means of expressing an individual vision or making one’s mark in the world. It is a mistake to assume that “tribal” people are so steeped in social being that their private lives are undeveloped and they have no personal stories to tell. It is equally erroneous to characterize the “modern” artist as a triumphant individualist or self-possessed genius who is not wholly of this world. Both perspectives may contain grains of truth, but both are implicated in any work of art. Every portrait is

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5. Self Portrait, Vincent van Gogh, 1889.

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a synthetic product of the relationship between the painter and his subject; it is neither a faithful representation of the sitter nor a pure projection of the painter’s state of mind. Even a self-portrait is more than a mirror image of the artist; it is a perpetually renegotiated response to the artist’s relationship with the world in which she is living. Thus, as I contemplated Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait in the Kunstmuseum Basel, I was moved by the way this sketchy, almost fading, image captures something of his agonized relationship with a world he is suffering almost without seeing and of which he cannot bring himself to speak.

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The Life and Times of Paddy Jupurrula Nelson I N M A RC H 1990 M Y W I F E F R A NC I N E A N D I W E R E S TAY I NG I N A C A R Avan park in Alice Springs while we negotiated a contract with the Central Land Council and prepared for a sojourn of several months in the Tanami Desert. The caravan park was a short walk away from the Old Telegraph Station where Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer carried out pioneering ethnographic research among the Arrernte in the 1890s and early 1900s— research on which Émile Durkheim would draw extensively when writing The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. One Sunday morning I took a stroll along the sandy trails of this totemic landscape (known as Tyuretye), ghost gums spectrally white, rock wallabies observing me from the safety of a sandstone hill, a flock of rose-breasted cockatoos rising into a cloudless sky. The breeze flips back the pages of my notebook as I write. I’m sitting in soft grass along the riverbank, in the dappled shade of a river gum. The waterhole is almost dried up. Slabs of red rock glisten in the sun. The hill is a jumbled pile of boulders slipped from the original stack. A few mulga bushes have found purchase among the rocks. Kites circle something dead. A light gray bird skims the sandy creek bed, its shadow

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momentarily accompanying it along the ground. The wind hot now. Sugar ants scamper up the creamy trunk of the gum, its knotholes like rust, its drab brittle foliage shaken. I can’t get over how at home I feel in this landscape, how untroubled I am in it. The rocky hills give me the measure of my own body; I feel my rib cage, my backbone, through them.

Two days later, I continued writing in a similar vein: The landscape grows on me, possesses me. I come under its influence. I find it easy to understand how one can be enthused, impregnated, replenished by it. It is animate and dynamic—the stones heaped and clustered, rust-red, the river gums like aluminum in the last light, patched with copper. You enter into the land in more than just a physical sense; it is as though you become continuous with it, a part of it. I never have the sense that it is merely mineral, inorganic, inert. A vital connection exists between me and it. And this regardless of anything I’ve read about sacred sites.

In retrospect, it is uncanny to see how well prepared I was to experience country as Aboriginal people experienced it: where knowledge is not held in a library, but in the ground, in trees, in landforms and rocks;1 where people are autochthonous—born from the ground—the reincarnation of totemic ancestors; where the destruction of a sacred site precipitates the same grief as the death of a close kinsman. Little wonder, then, that when older Warlpiri spoke of “country” it was synonymous with a space/time when one was secure and never sick or hungry. To speak of longing for one’s camp ( yirraru-jarrimi karnarla ngurraku) was also a kind of repining for the people who brought one into the world and had since passed away. For Warlpiri, country is not an object of contemplation—as a European aesthetic of landscape might suggest. Rather, it is potentially as inspirited, fecund, and fleshed out as any living person. This is why ritual sandpainting on the ground or acrylic painting on canvas are so readily compared with the labor of giving birth, of bringing nascent life into fully embodied existence. As Harry Nelson Jakamarra explained to me, not long after our arrival in Yuendumu that April, “We call the country mother. The mother gives everything, like the land. When you think of where you were born, you think of the country.” In painting one’s country one bodies it forth. Merleau-

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Ponty’s thoughts on this process are immediately relevant to understanding Aboriginal art. “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.” 2 Understandably, men of Harry’s generation (he was born in 1944 at Pikilyi) complained that young men had no deep regard for their traditional country. But as a young Lajamanu man (Martin Johnson) explained, “We’ve got more feeling for communities now than for our mother’s and father’s countries. We couldn’t just pick up our swags and shift now. We’re attached to this land now; we were born and raised here. We still keep in touch with our traditional land, going hunting there, visiting. But we really love this land now, so its hard to go back.” One thing that older Warlpiri men would impress upon me, time and time again, was the importance of firsthand, embodied knowledge over abstract, secondhand understandings. A man of knowledge ( pinangkalpa) knew his country as he knew the back of his hand or his own close kinsmen.3 Knowledge came from from/consisted in (alonga) physical undergoing. As Zack Jakamarra once observed, “just listening and looking takes you only half way.” To arrive at a full understanding (milya pingka-jarrimi) of one’s relationship with one’s country, to “hold this walya” (earth, ground), to “know it properly,” you have to cover it on foot in the course of initiatory journeys as well as hunting and gathering. Zack poured scorn on maps and scoffed at my need to write things down in order to remember them. And when, a few years later, Francine and I began fieldwork on Cape York we heard the same refrain. As one old ringer put it, “We don’t need pieces of paper. We don’t use maps. We got the country in our minds. Like old people didn’t have watches to tell the time; they just watched the sun.” Though dependent on maps to get my bearings, and unable to dispense with fieldnotes, I took these lessons to heart, for they confirmed my longstanding conviction that understanding cannot be reached through ratiocination alone, but demanded a sustained empirical immersion in another lifeworld. Map is not territory. Preunderstandings may be brought to the field, but they must be abandoned if understandings are to emerge from one’s participation in the everyday lives of others. And for this to occur, one must

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live with people, travel with them, and allow oneself to engage bodily with them. I know of no better illustration of this sensuous, grounded way of knowing, this “knowledge of the body,” than Yasmine Musharbash’s account of sleeping in the jilimi (women’s camp) at Yuendumu. Having shared blankets with them, I know how Tamsin will wind her legs around mine, I know what Greta’s arm over my hip feels like, and Monroe snuggling under my arm, I know that Zack will kick off the blankets in the middle of the night, that Marion grinds her teeth when dreaming. Having slept many times next to them, I can imitate Joy’s snore, can pinpoint when Camilla will turn her body around after a particularly loud snore. I know Kiara’s little grunts, and I would be able to identify Celeste’s breathing anywhere . . . I know all these things about all these people because I have co-slept with them. This knowledge is part of the reason why today I, too, can tell who is approaching our fire at night, or, even with my eyes shut, who has just entered the yunta windbreak, sleeping place, or, just by their breathing, who is asleep and who is awake.4

I cannot boast such a sustained experience of intimate sociality in Central Australia, but numerous forays into the desert, traveling, tracking, hunting and gathering, camping, sleeping, and sharing food with Warlpiri brought home to me the effects of close copresence in forging bonds and afforded insights into the way that others experienced their world. I first met Paddy Jupurrula Nelson at the Warlukurlangu Art Centre at Yuendumu. Established in 1985 and given the name of a nearby fire Dreaming, Warlukurlangu was already renowned for the vibrant colors and fluent style of its leading painters. Often using large canvases and working collaboratively in the spirit of traditional ceremony, which required the custodian of a particular Dreaming to be supervised by matrikin (kurdungurlu), the senior Yuendumu painters had two aims. The first was to generate an income for the community. The second was to offset the influence of the local school by introducing local children to their Warlpiri heritage and encouraging them to care for their country. This concern for cultural continuity had inspired the so-called Yuendumu Doors project in 1970, when a small group of older Warlpiri men painted their Dreamings on thirty doors at the Yuendumu school and adjacent teacher’s houses in order that “the children should

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learn about our Law.” Though these men, whose names were destined to become internationally known,5 had painted on a small scale before and were all well grounded in the law, the size of the doors and the acrylics provided by the school enabled them to expand their palettes and experiment with style. But fidelity to their Dreamings remained uppermost in their minds. In the words of one of the initiators of the project, Paddy Japaljarri Stewart,6 “The children do not know these Dreamings and they might become like white people, which we don’t want to happen. We are relating these true stories of the Dreamtime. We show them to the children and explain them so that the children will know them.”7 When Francine and I camped in Yuendumu in early 1990, the painted doors were already showing the effects of wear and tear, from schoolchildren and from desert wind and sun. Five years later they would be unhinged and restored before being exhibited at the South Australia Museum and sent on tour around the world. Thinking back to that time, I am astonished by my indifference to the desert art then flourishing at Yuendumu. Though Harry Nelson Jakamarra had given me a tour of the school and shown me the painted doors, I paid them little mind. Even on the day I went to the art center to see Paddy Japaljarri Sims, it was not his painting that interested me but his knowledge of a place in the desert that I was researching for the Central Land Council. Japaljarri was sitting on the ground outside the aluminum-sided building that housed the office of the art coordinator and a large storeroom filled with painted canvases. He was painting in a desultory manner, assisted by his brother-in-law, Paddy Jupurrula Nelson. Loitering by the fence was a psychotic woman that Francine and I had met a few weeks before in Alice Springs when she tried to sell us some crudely drawn pencil sketches of hills. When I introduced myself to the kardiya (white) art coordinator, she said I had caught her at a bad time. She was sick of being a “slave” to these old men, fetching paints and carrying canvases, constantly at their beck and call. She broke off to issue a brusque instruction to the two Paddys, her manner autocratic one moment and patronizing the next. She referred to them as “her old men,” telling me how deeply versed she was in their Dreamings, how well she knew the way they thought, only to complain bitterly about their chauvinism. And, as if the old men were not difficult enough, the psychotic woman at the gate was impatiently trying to attract her attention. When she lost her

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temper and told the woman to go away, I withdrew. I sat on the ground some distance from where the two Paddys were working, discretely watching and waiting. But the art coordinator was not done. She now stood over the old men, telling them what colors white buyers preferred, what aesthetic tastes they should cater for. She even took up a brush and retouched the red ocher ground of Japaljarri’s painting where it had been smudged, then ordered him to wash off a piece of dried bird shit from another part of the canvas. I felt sorry for the old men. I had glimpsed the environment in which they now worked, an environment that was not their own, a kardiya world of art coordinators, agents, middlemen, markets, 8 consumers, and connoisseurs that, despite all the recognition they received, profited them little. Word quickly got around that Francine and I were about to relocate to Lajamanu, the other long-established Warlpiri settlement in the Tanami Desert. I was not surprised, therefore, when Paddy Jupurrula Nelson turned up at our guest house one afternoon and asked if we could give him a lift to Lajamanu. I immediately agreed. I had taken a liking to him—his grizzled face, wry smile, unassuming manner. But having seen him at work at Warlukurlangu, my interest in his painting was piqued and before leaving Yuendumu I asked him if we give me a guided tour of the school doors and introduce me to his own work. Paddy’s first door depicted elements of a Big Yam (Yarlakurlu) Dreaming, associated with sites in the Yurmurrpa area, north west of Yuendumu. The Dreaming story, which Jupurrula recounted in a very abridged form, concerned an ancestor who traveled eastward following the pink trumpetshaped flowers, heart-shaped leaves, and underground tubers of the bush yam (Ipomoea costata) and, in the course of his travels, propagated and spread the yam throughout a wide expanse of the desert over which JupurrulaJakamarra/Napurrula-Nakmarra had custody. His second door was painted in a far bolder and more fluent style and depicted the great snake, Yarripirri, that traveled from Wirnparrku (Blanche Towers) in the Dreaming, moving from soakage to soakage and performing ceremonies. Like many non-Aboriginal people who have been given a glimpse into the mythical world of the Dreaming, in which ancestral figures are coalesced with animals, plants, birds, rain, and fire, I was moved to hear more. At the same time, however, I was well aware that, yapa way, I would have to exer-

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FIGURE 6 . Door 8: Yarlakurlu (Big Yam), Paddy Jupurrula Nelson. Used with permission by Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association and Eric Michaels, Kuruwarri Doors (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1987).

cise patience, picking things up as I went along and only “gradually come to an understanding” (milya pingka-jarri). Like the passage from conception to birth, or the growth of yams, everything had to unfold in its own good time. And so we drove north, Francine at the wheel, myself beside her, and Paddy Jupurrula Nelson in the back with a fellow painter, Shorty Jangala. I’d planned to break our journey and camp that night at Mission Creek, but, when we prepared to turn up the creek, Jupurrula and Jangala panicked. “Too many dead fellas there, we got no room,” Shorty exclaimed. At such moments, memories of the dead cut close to the bone, as if one was mourning not only age-mates who have passed away but also age-old ceremonies that one was obliged to perform yet could not because the sites were too remote and

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one no longer lived a nomadic life. In perpetually painting such rarely visited places, was one honoring these old obligations to bring the Dreaming back to life, albeit on a canvas rather than a rock face or the ground? Paddy was born in the desert in 1919 or 1920, Shorty some five years later. Both grew up as hunters and gatherers, traveling with their families through country to the south, west, and northwest of Yuendumu. As young men, they were initiated into the rituals and stories associated with their respective Dreamings. For many years, periods of desert foraging and ritual labor alternated with unpaid pastoral work for white bosses or stints at the Granites gold mine. It was only after Aboriginal stockmen were laid off pastoral leases in the 1950s (after petitioning the government for wages and better working conditions) that they were forced into a sedentary existence in the two Warlpiri settlements that whites had established on the fringes of the Tanami Desert.9 Around 1950, Shorty was separated from his mother and taken to Hooker Creek (later called Lajamanu), but his mother tracked him down and they traveled on foot across the desert to his birthplace at Jila (Chilla Well). Though he and his family often stayed at Yuendumu, especially in times of drought, Shorty only settled there in 1967. We drove on and camped that night near another dry creek bed where the Two Kangaroos traveled in the Dreaming. As Francine and I set up camp—spading away spinifex, laying out our swags, lighting a fire of mulga wood, brewing a billy of tea—Paddy and Shorty wandered about, eyes focused on the ground, looking for the spoor of animals or telltale signs of what may have transpired there in the recent past. It was the same intense way people searched for kuruwarri—signs, marks, traces, vestiges of events that had occurred in the Dreaming. I lay in my swag, listening to the old men discussing names and places associated with the spectacled Hare Wallaby (Wampana) that traveled along Mission Creek in the Dreaming.10 Wampana was one of the first beings to emerge in the Dreaming at Wirnparrku (Blanche Towers), and he accompanied Jarripiri (the snake) and other closely associated totemic ancestors on a long journey north, performing ceremony at significant sites along the way. As I fell asleep, Paddy was singing an episode of the Hare Wallaby Dreaming that touched on events that transpired when Wampana camped at Mission Creek. What struck me then, and would continue to fascinate me, was the way in which biographical time coalesced with genealogical and

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mythological time, as if personal memories were experientially fused with one’s knowledge of one’s ancestry and of the Dreaming. As dawn broke, I rekindled our fire. The sky was deep red in the east, birds were beginning to sing, and the flies were waking with the warmth. Soon Shorty was up, dragging branches to his fire, while Paddy stretched one hand from under his blanket and scratched at his mosquito bites. It was about sixty miles to Jila, and Shorty wanted to visit his home place before we went further. The outstation was deserted, following a death. Paddy and Shorty inspected the ground, identifying the spoor of a snake, commenting on the abandoned hearths, a chipped unfinished boomerang, unpicked bush tomatoes. A warm wind played over a plain of bleached grass. Flocks of birds flew up like flung grain. The windmill creaked. A door banged. Shorty would return in due course, but for now he had seen enough. But we were in Shorty’s proper country now, and he was clearly in his element. We stopped often, to identify an old campsite, to inspect the soakage at Puyurru, or to dig for bush yams (cracks in the caked surface of the earth indicated that tubers were eighteen inches down). Though I was moved by his evident attachment to, and memory of, these now uninhabited places, I was astounded when he asked Francine to stop the vehicle, and he quickly clambered out and retrieved a knife he had left under a small tree “a long time ago.” As I wrote down the names of ridges and low hills on the horizon, Paddy set fire to the porcupine spinifex—a gesture toward caring for the land, fostering new growth. Later, he would compare passing on his Dreamings to his sons and the cycle of life in the desert—“Something that goes on forever,” he said, “like the grass grows up again.” We drove on to the Granites. There were pools of “rubbish water” among the heaps of slag and tailings. “Bugger im up the country,” Paddy said. Neither of the men wanted to look into the great pit where excavators tore at the red earth and trucks toiled up the long inclines toward the surface. The circularity of the roads struck me as a parody of the circle in Warlpiri art—a symbol of womb, belly, generative potentiality, and home. We covered another hundred miles before we stopped again, at Pikanniny Bore. The Ngarliya and Warnayaka areas so familiar to Shorty and Paddy had given way to the Pirlinyana area. “This different country now,” Shorty said laconically, “we don’t know this one.”

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A few days after our return to Lajamanu, Paddy’s classificatory daughter, Liddy Nakamarra, who also had ties to the Yam Dreaming around Yurmurrpa, assigned me her late father’s ancestral name. My skin name was already Jupurrula, she told me, therefore I was both Paddy’s “brother” and her “father.” To underscore the connection, she mentioned that Harry Nelson Jakamarra was her “full brother.” Francine and I were acquiring a second family, being drawn into a web of kinship. This meant that certain people began to open up to us but also make demands. Liddy wanted us to take her to Yurmurrpa. And her ten-yearold granddaughter came by one morning and said, “You’re looking after my grandmother, aren’t you?” It was an overture to asking for kuyu (meat) and money. A month passed before we made the trip to Yurmurrpa with Liddy and her sisters. Paddy and his brother-in-law also accompanied us. We camped at Jila and drove out every day through spinifex country, guided by Paddy’s unerring sense of direction, stopping at sites associated with various Dreamings and acquiring more and more detail about events that seemed at once ancient and recent. We bush-bashed for hours on end, negotiating mulga, looking for breaks in the thickets, ranging as far at Wapurtali (Mount Singleton) and Yirntardamururu in the south, and returning to Jila every afternoon, heads spinning, skin grazed and caked with dirt. On the morning before we left, I woke early. The air was cold. Dew covered the green canvas of my swag. Nearby, Liddy was softly singing songs of Wapurtali (pencil yam) where a fight had erupted in the Dreaming with Yurmurrpa (big yam), caused by jealousy over women. As we packed swags and bedding into the roof rack of our Toyota, Paddy beckoned me over to where he was standing. He wanted to shake my hand. Then he said I should come to Yuendumu at any time, pick him up, and travel with him to Ngurripatu—another Two Kangaroo Dreaming that we had not been able to visit this time around. “No women next time,” he said. It wasn’t until July that I saw Paddy again. He and Jimmy Jangala turned up in Lajamanu one day and came to our camp to talk. They wanted to put me straight on details of the Hare Wallaby Dreaming, to help me understand which Dreaming ancestors traveled together (Hare Wallaby and Snake in one part of country; Hare Wallaby and Rain in another), where different groups

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of Hare Wallaby men split up and went their separate ways and where one pair of skin groups “handed over” custody of a Dreaming to another pair. “Like we change clothes,” Paddy said. Perhaps this is why Paddy promptly asked me for a pair of trousers, though I was by now accustomed to the incessant demands of my adoptive kinsman. I had only two pairs, but was willing to relinquish one. Paddy held them against his legs, and declared that they would be too small for him. Later that morning, Paddy’s wife, Daisy, turned up and asked Francine to buy her sodas and chicken wings at the store. Liddy announced that she was working for Francine, which gave her the right to be fed. As July passed into August, we made plans to return to Alice Springs. Paddy and Daisy would come with us as far as Yuendumu. It saddened me to say good-bye. And I could tell that Paddy had enjoyed sharing his knowledge with me. “Young people know nothing,” he lamented. “They don’t even want to know.” He explained that when I returned he would show me places that were secret. We would go to Ngama and Ngurripatu, places I was already in awe of. He drew a Dreaming track with his fingers in the red earth, then stabbed and chopped at the designs, suggesting that their deeper meaning lay beneath the surface. We returned the following year with our newborn son. At Yuendumu, Paddy greeted me with a smile and shook my hand. “I bin thinking about you, Jupurrula,” he said. But all was not well. Paddy’s son was in jail in Alice Springs, charged with murdering his wife in a jealous rage. For the next two months, I was based in Lajamanu, on a fact-finding mission for the Central Land Council, and it was not until late October that I returned to Yuendumu and sat down with Paddy again. He was going to Alice Springs as often as he could, to visit his son. Our plans to travel to Ngama and Ngurripatu would have to wait. Francine and I took Paddy and Daisy with us when we drove to Alice Springs. Paddy asked me to go with him to the Gallery Gondwana in Todd Mall. In our battered Stetsons and grubby clothes, Paddy and I looked and felt anomalous. Given his reputation, I could not understand why he would choose a tourist shop to sell his painting. It was full of kitsch—garishly decorated boomerangs and didgeridoos, dot-painted key rings, coasters, and T-shirts. And the dealer was not in. Clearly Paddy needed hard cash. He

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said he would wait. “I will have to go,” I told him. “Wirrarpa,” he said, a word saturated with the emotions of pity and empathy. “When will you be back?” he asked, and mentioned the trip we had planned to Ngurripatu. “Maybe next time, Jupurrula,” I said. The following day, I happened to walk past the Papunya Tula Gallery. In the window, on a floodlit easel, was a painting that took my breath away. I wondered why Paddy had chosen to take his canvas to a tourist shop rather than to the Papunya Tula Artists Cooperative. But the painting in the window so captivated me that I came back to see it several times during the weekend and on Monday morning asked who painted it and how much it cost. It was a wild orange Dreaming, painted four years ago by Polly Watson Napangardi, who hailed from Yuendumu. The asking price was $4,000. “One of her early works,” the gallery assistant gushed, “it’s magic, just magic . . . she’s a high profile artist . . . won the Alice Springs Prize last year . . . it’s a one-off, she’s gone on from painting in this style . . . you just don’t fi nd pieces like this any more . . . it’s one of a kind . . . can only increase in value . . . and it’ll reproduce well, too . . . ” The word increase brought me to my senses. And I wondered if Paddy had not brought his painting to Papunya Tula because it would mean a delay in selling the work and receiving his cut. “Does the artist work on commission?” I asked. “You can’t sell paintings on commission. The Aboriginals operate on a day-to-day basis. We take all the risks.” I left the gallery and tried to put the painting from my mind. But I thought I now knew why Paddy had been so indifferent to the fate of his painting. As an object, it had no intrinsic value. It could be discarded or sold once its work was done—the work of sustaining body and soul by keeping one’s connection with one’s country alive and by generating an income. Expressed otherwise, one might say that the art object is never fetishized as a form of capital; rather it is a physical trace of the labor of bringing life into the world. For men of Paddy Jupurrula Nelson’s generation, enshrining an artwork in an art gallery makes no more sense than depositing knowledge in a book and shelving it in a library. Whatever knowledge the work contains only has meaning when put to use—bearing, raising, and initiating children, affirming one’s ties with significant others through intermarriage and through collaborative ritual.

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This is dramatically conveyed in Ute Eickelkamp’s account of visiting an anthropology museum in Leipzig, Germany, in the company of several Pitjantjatjara women. In the middle of a spacious, well-lit room, the visitors encountered a diorama depicting a family of naked “Australian Aboriginals” camped in the desert. Ute felt such shame and disorientation that she could not bring herself to look at the tableau. By contrast, her Aboriginal companions could not look away. “The spell was broken when one of the younger women made a move. Pushing the headphones of her Walkman behind her ears, she tiptoed forward, straight ahead and right into the exhibit. She let herself drop down next to the clay woman and took the baby out of the coolamon into her arms, rocking it gently.”11 Ute goes on to explain that portraiture, for Aboriginal people, is an unknown category of representation. By implication, fi xity or permanent states of being are incomprehensible, since everything is caught up in a process of coming into or passing out of being. To pick up and rock the baby and bring her back to life is an obvious response to the troubling three-dimensional image of this family trapped in a time warp. What struck me again and again as Paddy and his countrymen spelled out in song and sand drawing the critical events of their particular Dreamings were actions of bringing forth from interiority the wherewithal of life itself. The generic term for a sacred site was miyalu (womb/belly), and just as new life appears in the desert after rain, so ritual brings back into embodied being the ancestral potentialities in the ground, and birth brings back to life a kinsman who has passed away. Creation is not once and for all, but is continual, which is why anything that is brought into being— whether a child, a canvas, an episode from the Dreaming—will inevitably slip back into dormancy again. This perpetual exteriorization of something that is within, followed by a reinteriorizing of what has been taken out, is captured by a bewildering array of images—of bloodletting and disembowelment, of extracting objects from the body or putting them back in (as one might take objects from a pocket), of singing something into existence, of getting seeds out of a husk, of pulling “wichetty” grubs or wild honey from a tree, of squeezing pus from a boil or excreting feces.12 But in the final analysis, nothing is forever.

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Ecstatic Professions When I worked as a welfare worker in the mill towns of Gippsland, southeast Victoria, my sense of marginality found expression in a perverse identification with Aboriginal people. I hung out with them, not to improve their lot or understand their lives, but to degrade and efface myself. Though I rationalized this identification as a protest against the government’s assimilationist policies, and as a penance for European crimes against Aboriginal people, the truth was that I was driven by a need to erase the difference between myself and them and thereby escape the obligation of my job and the claims of my conscience.13 In this respect, I was not unlike Vincent van Gogh, who wrote to his brother Theo in the winter of 1880 that his “only anxiety is: how can I be of use in the world?” At this time, he is preparing himself for evangelical work among the coal miners of the Borinage region, west of Mons. In order to commit himself body and soul to the poor, he feels he must cut himself off from his family, and “cease to exist” for them. He neglects his appearance, goes hungry and cold, and gives the little he has to peasants and workers. But what good can come of this identification with the oppressed? Vincent feels imprisoned and melancholic. Thwarted in his efforts to alleviate the misery of mankind, he ends up seeking to annihilate his anguish by immersing himself in the misery around him. But no one is helped by this self-abasing sympathy. Nothing is really changed. In this act of martyrdom, the martyr has simply made his guilt disappear by a sleight of hand, donning the sackcloth of those he had set out to save.14 What has always moved me about Vincent’s letters to Theo is the metamorphosis they so painstakingly chronicle. Although his first letters indicate a passionate devotion to the holy trinity of God, nature, and art (in his imagination they are often merged), it is God and good works done in His name that dominate his twenties. At twenty-eight, however, he concludes that “work . . . is not everything in life” and he falls in love for the first time.15 His love for Kee Vos is unrequited, and a year later he meets a “pregnant woman, deserted by the man whose child she bore”. Vincent takes Siem off the streets and devotes himself to her rehabilitation. But “art is jealous”, and, by the time he is thirty, Vincent’s “soul’s struggle between duty and love” has been resolved. He now decides that he will be “dead” to everything but his art. Though struggling with depression, doubt, and loneliness, as

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well as the fear that his life will be cut short, he consecrates himself wholly to the work of art, which depends as much on “the feeling for the things themselves, for reality,” as on the labor of learning how to paint. Appearances—both personal and painterly—mean nothing to him; it is the “inward” life that counts. “What am I in the eyes of most people?—a nobody, or an eccentric and disagreeable man—somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low. Very well, even if that were true, then I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.” Whether his eyes are turned toward God, a woman, a model, or a landscape, Vincent continually aspires to transcend himself, so that his “conscience . . . becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is the servant.” Who he is becomes eclipsed by what he creates. In this respect, can we not recognize our own lives in his? Our desire to express ourselves in ways that conjoin our projects to the projects of others, so that in realizing ourselves we also realize our place in a matrix that is, however we name it—the social, the ancestral, the divine, the historical—always felt to be greater than the sum of its individual parts? This subjugation or absorption of oneself in an object or an-other, this transformation of inner experience into something that goes beyond oneself and touches others, finds its most fundamental expression in the biology of birth.16 Conception consummates one of the deepest human bonds—between genitor and genitrix. The labor of giving birth suggests an intimate connection between pain and creativity. And raising a child to adulthood not only guarantees the continuation of life; it is one of life’s most rewarding accomplishments. Is it any wonder, then, that art is so often seen as an imitation of natality, and that the relationship between parent and child is a universal metaphor for the relation of God to man, and of the ancestors to the living? With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its

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impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative.17

Art and religion provide conduits between our individual lives and the life of the world, enabling us to be reborn into an artificial realm that precedes and outlasts us—ultimate reality, the brotherhood of man, the kingdom of God, the Dreaming, tradition, or nature. In this sense, there is a family resemblance between Christian notions of being reborn-in-Christ (John 3.7) and Warlpiri notions of regeneration through ritual. In both worldviews, initiation is a kind of death—the painful price one must pay for exchanging one form of life for another that is potentially more bountiful and fulfilling. Thus, life and death are mutually entailed. Mortality and natality beget each other; each calls forth its antithesis.18 For Georg Simmel, the quest to preserve, enhance, increase, and augment one’s own life runs parallel to a quest for “more-than-life”—the creation of objectified forms, such as religious doctrines, political ideologies, moral codes, and great works of art, that are considered sacrosanct. Though born of the life process itself, these transcendent forms take on a life of their own, coming to have such a tragic hold on us that “life often wounds itself upon the structures it has externalized from itself as strictly objective.”19 To avert this tragedy, in which we become slaves to ideas and creatures of custom, we must fi nd ways in which life itself reanimates the frozen forms that it has thrown up. Rather than blindly reproducing what others have made at other times, we must produce new forms that speak to our changing circumstances and needs. This is why Warlpiri gradually turned from rituals for the increase of animal and plant species to painted canvases that generated the money to buy food, drink, clothes, and even vehicles, while serving to keep the new generation in touch with ancestral traditions. This same spirit of innovation may be seen in the ways in which Warlpiri assimilated Christian doctrines into their own worldview. While living in Lajamanu in 1991, I became acquainted with Jerry Jangala, a pastor in the Warlpiri Baptist Church. Jerry was born in the desert around 1935. “We had no clothes, no shops, no schools, and we had never seen white people. We didn’t know what they

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looked like. But we lived happily and had all we wanted. The men hunted, kangaroo, wallaby, possum, and the women gathered goanna, blue-tongue, yams, all kinds of bush tucker that they could find.” 20 The first white person Jerry met was Missa Pink (Olive Pink), the anthropologist who lived at Thomson’s Rock Hole (Pirtipirti) in the 1930s and campaigned to protect Warlpiri from the depredations of white miners and missionaries. It was at Pirtipirti that he had his first taste of tea, damper, and treacle. A few weeks later, he and his family met some of the white gold miners at the Granites and rode in a truck for the first time. “I was afraid. I saw all the trees, hills and rocks moving and I thought they were moving to me, trying to hit me. It looked to me that the truck was standing still and the country was running! So I sat there quietly in the middle and hardly dared to look.” 21 The moment was portentous, for within a few years (around 1951) Jangala and his immediate family settled in Lajamanu (then called Hooker Creek) where Jerry received some basic schooling and was introduced to Christianity. In mid-October 1991 Jangala invited my wife and I to attend a church service in Lajamanu at which he would be preaching a sermon on the theme of “One family in Christ.”

FIGURE

7 . Sermon, Jerry Jangala, 1991.

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When Jerry began his sermon, I was both intrigued and surprised to see how cleverly he used Warlpiri iconography to spell out the gospel message and how adroitly he adapted the message to Warlpiri social values. In this drawing, God the father (wapirra) is depicted with God the son ( jajiji) and God the Holy Ghost (pirlirrpa) sitting on either side of Him, while dotted lines are “rays of love and authority” emanating from God (“God boss for us all”) and touching the Christians sitting together as “one family” (warlalja).22 I was impressed by Jangala’s skill in bringing two worldviews into alignment without one overwhelming the other. This was, I already knew, consistent with the emphasis Jangala placed on reciprocity. Just as you had to respect other people’s Dreamings as “their business, not yours,” so you had to respect other people by showing restraint—always asking, never shaming others by presuming to know what was good for them, never infringing their autonomy. “Things had to be square and square” (kujajarra kujajarra)— level, balanced, paid back. And it was this ethic that underlay Jangala’s philosophy of coexistence. Though preaching the Christian gospel, he advocated education in Warlpiri values, and in exchange for respecting white Australian law, he expected white Australians to respect “yapa law”—which had not been the case when white miners from the Granites recently destroyed a desert walnut tree that embodied the Dreaming spirit of an important ancestor, a criminal act for which Warlpiri were now seeking justice through payback.23 How can one obey two laws, embrace two religions, or see the world at the same time from one’s own and another’s point of view? In practice, these contradictions are more apparent than real, since one constantly switches between different perspectives depending on the situation at hand. Thus the narrator of a Dreaming will at one moment describe an ancestor as if he were an animal and the next moment describe the ancestor as if he were a person. This was exemplified by Zack Jakamarra’s mimetic enactment of an episode in the Two Kangaroo Dreaming, playing the roles of kangaroo and marsupial mouse, yet at no instant ceasing to be himself. Indeed, when recounting Dreaming myths, it is not unusual for a narrator to slip inadvertently between third-person and first-person perspectives, introducing personal memories into an account of ancestral travels.

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Similar juxtapositions occur in Warlpiri accounts of the fate of the spirit (pirlirrpa) after death. While some people insist that the spirit returns to its natal place, sinking back into the earth, just as the ancestors did after their exhausting journeys in the Dreaming, most people claim that after lingering among the living for a while, the spirit dissipates into the ether (wapiti ). It is difficult to determine whether this reflects Christian teaching or precontact knowledge.24 Perhaps, however, this is a spurious contrast. Rather than try to identify which elements in a particular worldview are “traditional” or “modern”—in this instance, Christian or Aboriginal—I prefer to identify the existential questions that both worldviews address and, in their own peculiar ways, resolve. The compelling question, as I see it, is how we conceive of the relationship between our own immediate lifeworld and a world that surrounds us, whose extent in space and time is unfathomable and whose impact upon our lives is largely beyond our power to control. Because we cannot negotiate the same kind of relationship with this macrocosm that we negotiate with our immediate families and friends, we have recourse to magical and ritual strategies that make it seem as if we can, albeit momentarily and partially, enter into a reciprocal relationship with the macrocosm. Whether we conceive of this macrocosm as a divine realm or as the Dreaming, as a political force field or as the natural environment, the existential issue remains the same—of working out a relationship with it that enables us to draw on its potential to enlarge our lives without fi nding ourselves completely overwhelmed by it. This means that people often switch between different ways of conceptualizing the macrocosm as they search for a relationship with the wider world that fulfi lls rather than degrades them. The renowned Arrernte painter Albert Namatjira (1902–1959) was both a mission-educated Christian and a conscientious upholder of the lifeways into which he had been initiated as a young man. Though Albert was the Mission-assigned “public name he would carry through his life,” his Arrernte name, Tonanga, was “not revealed in print until the early 1950s.” As Martin Edmond observes, Namatjira was “a man of multiple identities folded seamlessly into one: less a wanderer between worlds than a progressive sojourner in a sophisticated manifold reality.” 25

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Shape shifting does not necessarily imply inner conflict or multiple personality disorder. As we have seen, Van Gogh first sought fulfillment in evangelical work (serving God), but when thwarted in his mission to save the world, he sought salvation in art. Religion, art, travel, social networking, and political activism all offer potential means of broadening one’s horizons and engaging the world beyond oneself. This may be seen in soteriological terms (as salvation), Darwinism terms (as survival), or political terms (as revolution), though all may be implicated in a single life course. Consider the life story of the Aboriginal painter Linda Syddick (nee Tjungkaya Napaltjarri). Born in the bush, Tjungkaya lost her father while still an infant when he was speared to death in a revenge expedition and his body thrown into a fi re. Though subsequently raised by Shorty Lungkarta, “the first Pintupi modernist painter,”26 she soon turned her back on Shorty’s traditions and began painting Christian themes and even tapping into Western popular culture. Linda Syddick’s story is also an allegory of overcoming traumatic separation and loss. It is the story of the loss of her first father and her life being cleansed and repaired by her second father, Shorty, who gave her—in his adoption and in the transmission of his country—a new life. Unexpectedly, it is also the story of . . . ET, the extraterrestrial figure in Steven Spielberg’s fi lm of that name: the alien estranged from home. She watched this Hollywood film absorbedly over twenty times.27

Feelings of homesickness, pining, and grief often pervade the stories— both mythological and biographical—one hears in Central Australia. When researching the destruction of a sacred site in the Tanami Desert in 1991, I became all too familiar with the deep sorrow that follows the death of persons and of personified places, trees, and objects from the Dreaming. When I asked one informant to tell me how he felt about the destruction of the tree he called his father, he reeled off several verbs—mari jarrimi (to grieve for someone), wajampa (to grieve, to worry about), luyurr-ngunami (to be sad). As I wrote them down, he commented quietly, “We got too many words for sorry.”28 These are the feelings, Fred Myers notes, that find expression in songs and ceremonies that bring rain and new life to a parched land. “And this,” he adds,

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“is the story of Christianity, offering similarly a salvation from [Linda’s] loss and estrangement—the loss of her children, of her father, and to some extent now of her culture.” 29 That no one “cultural” perspective holds true for every individual in the same way, and that an “Aboriginal” perspective never precludes the possibility of a “non-Aboriginal” one, each occupying a different place in a person’s life, may be further illustrated by the biography of the great Anmatyerre painter Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Born around 1930, he inherited the name Possum (Upambura) from his grandfather and took the name Clifford from a Lutheran pastor who visited his natal country in the 1950s. When still a boy, however, his family visited Jay Creek, twenty-seven miles west of Alice Springs, where the Lutheran pastor F. W. Albrecht had established a ration depot in 1937. Though Albrecht was based fifty-four miles away at the Hermannsburg mission, he happened to be at Jay Creek when Tjapaltjarri’s family came in from the desert for rations. Albrecht saw that Tjapaltjarri was seriously malnourished and took him back to Hermannsburg for treatment. He remained at Hermannsburg for a year before rejoining his mother, who had waited for him at Jay Creek. Over fifty years later, Albrecht’s daughter would say that her father’s medical intervention had saved Tjapaltjarri’s life. It was, as she put it, “One of our Heavenly Father’s miracles, that he was the child who was saved.”30 Indebted to the man who had saved his life, Tjapaltjarri also accepted his savior’s worldview. “He teach me. Teach’m all the Jesus way. I want to be Father too.”31 But Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri did not become a Lutheran pastor; he became a painter. And while none of his paintings would show evidence of his faith, he would allude to Christian doctrine when talking about his work. Thus, on one occasion, when asked how he decided which Dreaming he would paint in his next canvas, he replied, “Most of it. God give idea—thinking. Do it this way, that way. Even whitefellas. You got only this. But this Dreaming, that ’s God for us.”32 It’s a telling phrase. While Aboriginals draw on two traditions, Europeans have only one. And the sentiment echoes Jerry Jangala’s remarks about the ethical imperative of respecting two laws, one drawn from the Dreaming, the other drawn from the European world. Each has its place. But when Tjapaltjarri paints, it is his Anmatyerre world, the world of his forefathers, the world he holds in trust and must pass on to the next generation, that he

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paints. And even though he uses whitefella materials—acrylics on canvas— the work of art remains the same. “That Dreaming carry on. Old people carry on this law, business, schooling, for the young people. . . . [They] did sand painting. They put down all the story, same like I do on canvas.”33 The question arises, however, of how an Aboriginal painter can prevent the product betraying the life process. In the past, when a ritual was finished, the ritual materials were returned to the earth from which they had been taken. The pounded ochers, the down derived from native daisies, the decorated poles, the cleared and moistened ritual space itself were all swept away, just as a sand drawing is erased once a story has been told, with a single sweep of an open hand. But if paintings are made permanent— put on permanent display in art galleries or put on the market as commodities to which a price can be attached—how can they keep faith with the age-old principal that the action of bringing the world into being did not happen once and for all in the Dreaming but must occur perennially, generation after generation? Here we return to Simmel’s paradox—that in our quest for “more life”— whether this be raising children, earning an income, or ritually increasing the plants and animals on which human life depends—we inevitably create forms of symbolic capital that are “more-than-life,” including worldviews, religious beliefs, and works of art. To resist reification, the artist must continually distance herself from what has been accomplished and start again from scratch. This may involve a complete repudiation of past work, an indifference to what becomes of it once it has passed out of the artist’s hands, or a continual reinvention of oneself and one’s subject matter. One has only to leaf through any book in which the work of a master painter is amply illustrated to see not just a “development” of technique or style but a relentless return to the original source from where the artist embarks once again on a journey toward a place that may never be reached. In Simmel’s terms, the artist reimmerses himself in the life process and thus turns away from the objectified form he has already produced in order to make way for another. Not only one’s own art must be forgotten, swept away like a sand drawing once a story has been told, but all forms of morality, religion, and politics must be shelved or made secondary to one’s commitment to the never-ending task of creating a viable life.

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In understanding art, we must, in a sense, do the same thing. We must put from our minds the reified categories with which we customarily treat art history as a series of schools, periods, styles, and subjects, and enter a penumbral zone that lies outside these categories. Here again, we may find ourselves in agreement with Simmel when he writes that “there are countless life-circumstances, partly intrapsychic and partly interindividual, that have a religious character immediately of themselves, without being conditioned or defined in the least by a preexisting religion.”34 This is certainly true of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, who, as a child, appreciated that his life had been saved by Pastor Albrecht without, however, embracing the Christian doctrine of salvation. And I believe it is also true of Michelangelo, whose religiosity may have been less compelling for him as an artist than his relationship with matter. When I saw Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel for the first time, I was stunned. Having seen hundreds of tourists enter the museum ahead of me, I expected to find the Sistine Chapel too overcrowded to allow me to contemplate the frescoes. But, looking up, I was instantly and utterly absorbed, and the people milling around me ceased to exist.35 I was completely alone and profoundly moved. Was it recognition of images seen in books for so many years, but on a scale and in a setting no book could possibly match? Was it awe at the technical, artistic, and physical achievement of a man in his sixties, working on scaffolding sixty feet above the ground, often alone, day in and day out for more than three years? Or the breathtaking conception of the hand of God reaching out to Adam, the vision of the Last Judgment, and the biblical narrative, its panels capturing the passion and pity of human existence, striving upward, seeking a wild and beautiful beyond, yet borne downward by blind error, unbridled appetite, indifference to others, or the forces of mortality itself? As my eyes moved from scene to scene, I became dizzy and I felt my way to one of the benches around the chapel walls where I sat, dwelling on this work, the like of which I had never seen. It was some time before I came to my senses, aware of the people around me, the silence enjoined by the angry shushing of a Vatican usher, and the rapt and marveling responses that the ceiling elicited from almost everyone who entered the chapel. I had scarcely noticed the frescoes by Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and other fifteenth-century

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masters that covered the lower sections of the chapel walls, perhaps because they conjured an uncomfortable sense of crowdedness, so that you became conscious not only of how many people had made the pilgrimage to make eye contact with Michelangelo’s masterwork but of the overwhelming sight of lost souls rising or falling in the vertiginous vault between heaven and earth. Confronted by this teeming mass of floating, disoriented, contending figures, it is a relief to let one’s eyes rest again on the moment of creation, in which Adam lies languidly on a mountainside, surrounded by a swarming entourage that suggests that the advent of human life on earth is also the beginning of procreative excess and the Malthusian specter of overpopulation. There are also overtones here of Michelangelo’s preference for solitude

FIGURE

8 . Pieta, Michelangelo, 1498–1499.

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and his aversion to the crowded stream of mundane life. Here was an artist who in an unfinished sonnet from around 1550 imagined himself enclosed in a boulder high in the mountains, then dragged from the mountain to suffer the weight of wagon wheels on the thronged thoroughfares of the human world. When I saw Michelangelo’s Pietà in Saint Peter’s Basilica later that morning, I was again struck by the delicacy and fragility of the sculptures that animate and transcend the white marble from which they have been fashioned or freed. If Michelangelo imagined stone as a place of refuge, he also saw it as a living thing from which a self-sufficient, imperishable and pure ideal could be born. The history of Rome is the history of a human relationship with stone. The ruins in the Forum testify to a sustained attempt to transmute the ephemeral triumphs of men into something enduring—the mutable made marmoreally permanent, personalities given an adamantine form that would carry them into eternity. Michelangelo subverts this tradition. In his hands, stone is humanized, one might even say feminized. As a baby, he was sent to a wet nurse who was both the daughter and wife of stonemasons, and he believed this explained his predilection for sculpture. But his natural attraction to stony madonnas, Dante’s stony poems (rime petrose), and marble as white as breast milk may have had more to do with the many years he spent in the marble quarries of Carrara. Michelangelo embraced Petrarch’s view that anatomy and quarrying were similar activities. Just as dissecting cadavers helps one understand human anatomy, so exploring the hidden depths of marble enables one to discover the spiritual properties of the human form. Petrarch and Michelangelo were both echoing what quarry workers had known for centuries. Even today, the Carrara quarry workers speak of the mines as agri marmiferi or “marble fields” that grow and renew themselves like cultivated plots or farms. 36 In his Natural History Pliny made similar observations—of scars on the mountainside that underwent natural healing and of marble that reproduced itself. Anthropomorphic metaphors still permeate the miners’ vernacular. “Marble which breaks easily like ‘glass’ is thought of as being more ‘alive’ or as having greater vivezza. Marble ‘sings’ and has ‘nerves’ that make it strong. It ‘sleeps’ and ‘wakes,’ and is sometimes

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described as containing an anima or ‘soul.’”37 Mining is also sexualized, so that the rock chisel ( punciotto) is likened to a penis and drilling to sexual intercourse, while mining itself is viewed as a source of masculine pride. Moreover, the mountain is a living body. As one worker observed, “You see the mountain moves. It recreates itself. Some quarries however move while others grow. You can see the way they grow by how much the marble is broken at the bottom. It gets more solid at the top. So it must be growing from the bottom to the top. If you lighten the load at the top some quarries solidify at the bottom.”38 Moreover, it is thought that while quarrymen can to some extent protect themselves from the dangers of using heavy machinery, they can do little to defend themselves against the mountain itself, which is said to be capable of vengeful retaliation for the miners’ daily attacks on it. Thus flaws in a block of marble are known as peli nemici or “enemy faults.” “The mountain reacts!” said one man. “It makes a noise like a living person. The mountain wants its share.” Yet men talk to the mountain, cajoling it, “looking after it,” appeasing it, paying it respect, in the hope that the mountain will reciprocate. There was something else that I found arresting about Michelangelo’s work with marble: the frequency with which he left work unfinished. Rather than conclude that he set himself impossibly high standards or was constantly distracted by new commissions, it may be that Michelangelo was simply paying his respects to stone that begrudged him only a glimpse of a human form, holding back what it did not wish to yield. Moreover, might the artist also be mindful of his own uncertain relationship with a world of political intrigue, patronage, and religious dogma and his resolve to withhold that part of himself that he identified as singularly and securely his own. What moved me, I think, about Michelangelo’s art is summarized by that space between God’s and Adam’s fi ngertips—a gap that Michelangelo refused to close, a circuit between the sacred and the secular, the individual and the crowd, that remains broken. Great art gestures toward an order or purity with one hand while reminding us with the other of the rough, unready, impure, and incomplete nature of life. Marble’s solidity is juxtaposed with the fragility of the figure that has been carved out of it. Wittgenstein asked if one could speak of a stone that causes pain as having “pain patches” on it. Michelangelo’s unfinished sections represent the rough that always goes with the smooth— the aspects of our life that we cannot wish away with either art or intellect.39

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The life process and the abstract products that artists, philosophers, anthropologists, mythmakers, and storytellers draw out of life and give a life of their own are always in tension. For all the ingenious techniques we come up with to control and comprehend existence—religious, ritual, aesthetic, intellectual, practical, and academic—the gap between life itself and the particular forms it takes is never closed. Anthropomorphism is a gesture toward a possible fusion of separate forms of life and at the same time a defense against our anxieties over the radical alterity of the extrahuman. Whether we confront the unresponsiveness of matter, a person whose will is stronger than our own, a God who is silent when we most need his intercession, or an animal that will not do our bidding, we are returned again to the limits of our humanity, to life itself, which holds at one and the same time no one meaning and all possible meanings.

Art and Adversity: Ian Fairweather and the Solitude of Art I am sitting in the kitchen of Kathy Golski’s house in Sydney, Australia. On the table is a plate of sliced black bread, a pile of unpaid bills, and a wrought iron wax-encrusted candelabra. Kathy is stir-frying some potatoes, kale, cauliflower, and tomatoes in olive oil as we talk about the book I am writing on the work of art. I venture the opinion that art involves turning oneself inside out. Our inner preoccupations get translated into an outward form, which is momentarily liberating. Kathy agrees. She speaks of the difference between painting a landscape from a commanding position that keeps it at a distance and painting from one’s emotional and visceral experience of being in the landscape, surrounded by it. She points to the large landscape hanging on the kitchen wall—charred and spindly trees, as if a firestorm has scorched the earth, against a lurid sky. She painted this landscape during a period when her daughter was living in Paris. One morning Kathy received a collect call from Nadya. It was 11:00 in the morning Sydney time, but 3:00 AM in Paris, and Kathy braced herself for bad news. Nadya said that a monkey had bitten her on the upper thigh, and the wound was “sore and swollen.” But, before Kathy could ask for details, Nadya suddenly said, “Sorry, Mum—got to go. I don’t like the look of these types outside the phone box.” Then the line went

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dead. Images streamed through Kathy’s mind—of the risk of rabies and of predatory men about to abduct her daughter. Unable to call Nadya back, Kathy was in a panic as to what she could do. She told herself to be calm, assuring herself that Nadya would call again. In the meantime she would distract herself by returning to the canvas she had been working on, “painting with heavy strokes, a workout, saving bits of light in the dark landscape, bits of light in which my daughter could hide, be warm, seek refuge. It made me feel a bit better.” Three hours passed, and Kathy continued with her landscape. “Prussian blue, Paynes gray—I was mixing them into the shadows, giving the darks their own mysterious life. And then I found the beginnings of a cold dawn light. I pushed some red into the cold glimmer. That was better. It was the beginnings of daytime now in Paris. The terror of the night was over. Light would be seeping into all the little dark nooks. Perhaps even a watery sunlight. Sometimes, I thought, it must be sunny over there.” 40 Nadya called four days later. She had had tests done at a Paris hospital and the results were negative. She had already forgotten about the episode and had other things on her mind. I mentioned to Kathy a documentary I had recently seen in which Tracey Emin was in conversation with Louise Bourgeois, talking about art as a way of dealing with adversity. “How many times in our lives has a really terrible thing happened that we didn’t understand?” Tracey Emin asks, alluding to one of her mentor’s last canvases on which is written, “Something atrocious must have happened that I don’t understand.” “How many times in our life we felt something happening behind the scenes that we just feel awful?” Tracey Emin asks. “This is what [Louise Bourgeois] is dealing with.” Another line from the same canvas reads, “When terror pounces, grips me, I create an image.” Tracey Emin comments, “So it’s almost like she responds to the fear, she’s ready for the fear. She captures it, she makes something of it. . . . Paralyzed, immobilized by the horror, and yet again Louise has analyzed that fear by actually making work about it. . . . If you kept positive references, people say get over it will you. . . . But of course, in life how you get over things is to readdress then, reevaluate them, and that’s constantly what Louise did, it was her own psychoanalysis through her work.”

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One might argue that ritual is a way in which we preemptively and virtually address a situation that we are afraid or unable to address directly— like our own mortality or the persistent memory of a traumatic childhood. Just as children enact the terrors of sudden loss in games of cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, doctors and nurses, or Halloween masquerades, so adults watch horror films or stage dramas in which families fall apart, love turns to hate, and trust gives way to revenge. It as if though we are compelled from an early age to practice events we know we will have to face in the future, playing out scenes we hope will never happen but preparing for the worst. In all these ways, art resembles ritual. A space is created where our inner anxieties can find expression not as forces over which we have no control but in forms that we determine. “In order to liberate myself from the past,” Bourgeois said, “I have to reconstruct it . . . and get rid of it through making a sculpture. Afterward, I’m able to forget it. I’ve paid my debt to the past and I’m liberated.” Later that day, I met Kathy for coffee at Rushcutters Bay. Kathy wanted me to meet two of her oldest friends, both of whom had made films about well-known Australian painters. During our conversation, Aviva and Sandra described a retrospective of the work of the great Arrernte painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye that they had attended at Tokyo’s National Art Center in 2008. A Japanese man would come to the exhibition every day and stand in front of the paintings for hours on end, often in tears. Aviva and Sandra had been moved to ask themselves what it is about great art that transcends cultural differences and makes it possible for such moments of recognition to occur. Because Aviva had made a fi lm about the Australian painter Ian Fairweather, I asked her if she recognized something of herself in Fairweather— an affinity that might be compared to that solitary Japanese man’s absorption in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings. When Aviva brushed my question aside, I was relieved. For what I had really wanted to know could not be broached in that setting: whether a recurring theme of Aviva’s documentary film—the contrast between Fairweather’s alienation from people and his deep attunement to the natural world— echoed anything in her own life. Changing the subject slightly, I asked Aviva if she painted.

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She drew and painted when she was young, she said, but did not take it seriously enough to be taken seriously by the art world. Perhaps its not a matter of taking art seriously, I thought, but of it taking us seriously, of it possessing us, so that we have no choice in the matter of whether we do it or don’t. It holds us in thrall. We lose ourselves in it. It decides our fate. Born in Scotland in 1891, Fairweather spent a solitary childhood with various aunts after his parents returned to India when he was six months old. When he was ten, his father retired from the army and settled on Jersey in the English Channel. But it was too late for this lonely child to form the bonds he had been denied. His sister Rose, remembering him in 1905, would write, “Ian is a strange child. He likes to be away by himself and can never be found when he is wanted.41 Without a close relationship with his mother, he could not develop a sense of himself through her, or with an-other, and was driven to fashion his identity alone. In the absence of mirroring, his self-image was negative. And because he probably did not like himself very much, he was loath to seek in friendships and social contacts the affi rmation that might change this view. Unwilling to take a chance on the future, he fell back on the past, imagining he might slough off his own mundane skin and so retrieve the paradise found in a mother’s love or a close-knit family. The Orient would become this imagined Eden from which he had been expelled. At nineteen he was a commissioned officer in the First Cheshire Regiment. Taken prisoner on his second day on the Western Front, he spent World War I illustrating a POW magazine and doing ink drawings inspired by Japanese art. After the war he enrolled at the Slade, found it stultifying, and escaped to Canada and then to China (in 1929). I saw my first Fairweathers in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in the early 1980s, and was immediately captivated by them. The work refused categorization. Cubism, Chinese calligraphy, and even Aboriginal sandpainting were all suggested, but the paintings—made of synthetic polymer paint and gouache brushed onto sheets of cheap cardboard and allowed to drip or run—had a presence and mystery that compelled me to return to them again and again. While Turtle and Temple Gong suggested an oriental origin for the abstract images, and Monastery and Marriage at Cana had Christian echoes, I could find no facts about the artist except that, before his

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FIGURE 9 . Monastery, Ian Fairweather, 1961. Used with permission by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Artists Rights Society New York/ DACS, London.

death in 1974, he had lived a life of poverty and solitude on an island off the North Queensland coast. For many years, I kept postcards of two of Fairweather’s paintings on my writing desk,42 recognizing in this restive and reclusive individual a profound affinity. Perhaps it had something to do with my own life at that time. I had recently lost my wife. I lived on the dole. Devoted to the welfare of my teenage daughter, I found it hard to make ends meet, though never rued my austere existence, writing every morning, taking long walks around a nearby mountain, shopping and preparing meals, being there when my daughter needed me. Did I somehow divine in Fairweather’s distinctive paintings a similar marginality, an echo of my own hermetic life? Was his down-to-earth palette of dull blues and grays, rust red, smudged lilac, and yellow ocher evidence of some nameless loss or his abstractions, his fascination with the East, a sign of disenchantment with the West? Could

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one even make such connections between art and reality when art conjured places and forms that bore no resemblance to what we know as the real? This was the burning question for me. For, while I lived a fairly isolated life, often alone with my thoughts or unsure of myself in the company of others, I wanted art to do justice to the world—not by mirroring it but by entering deeply into it—and I wondered whether this could be achieved through solitary meditation as much as through social engagement. As with art, so with the intellectual life—one has recourse to artifice, abstraction, and the arcane, to be sure, but this distancing from the empirically immediate could only be justified, in my view, if it led to an enhanced or novel understanding of the world that lay around us, so familiar that it is forgettable, so pedestrian that we all too readily dismiss it from our minds. And so, as I enlarged my knowledge of Fairweather’s oeuvre, I grew even more admiring of the ordinariness of the subjects that had compelled his attention—fish traps in a river, a house yard, a market, a birdcage, a gateway, a bridge over a canal—and the unstable materials on which he worked—plywood, butcher’s paper, and cardboard. All this corresponded with my own fascination with the imponderabilia of everyday life and the illuminating potential of the most banal events or objects. As the Japanese moved south from Manchuria in the early 1930s, Fairweather began to search for a place of refuge. He stayed in Bali until his meager funds ran out, then came to Australia in February 1934. His fi rst impressions of Melbourne presaged my own, thirty years later, walking the dismal and deserted weekend streets like a lost soul. “I seem to have done nothing but pursue with burning feet (my sandshoes are wearing rather thin) a way through endless Finchleys and Golders Greens seeking a break— an open space—any let up in this colossal monotony. There is no break—it is a whole—a matriarchy—a million perfect homes . . . and the Sundays—oh the Sundays—the Salvation Army prowl the empty streets.” 43 Fairweather was lucky. He fell in with a small group of modernists who admired his seriousness and superior draftsmanship. But within a year he moved on—to the Philippines, Shanghai, Peking, Japan, all the while sending work back to London where it was exhibited in the Redfern Gallery to critical praise. In 1938 he returned to Australia, but when war was declared he traveled to Thailand, Malaya, Indochina, Singapore, and Calcutta in the hope that he might be of use, even at forty-eight, to the

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British Army. Back in Australia in 1943, he did odd jobs, lived rough— often among other outcasts—in a makeshift shack, a derelict house44—until, in an old lifeboat he had bought for a song, he made landfall on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, where he lived and worked, on and off, for the rest of his life. Patricia Anderson suggests that Fairweather’s nomadism was born of a need to transmute direct experience into memory. It is not real places, people, or events he paints, but his recollections of them. He moved in order that only the memory of his previous life remained, purged of the hardships he had endured, metamorphosed into abstract images.45 Here was a man who described himself as “selectively gregarious,” who others would call “pathologically reclusive,” “profoundly melancholy,” “a strange, shy man with a cultured voice,” 46 who painted at night in the penumbra of a hurricane lamp as though his Sisyphus-like task was to screen out the dross of his earthly existence in order to illuminate or protect an image of a world that could not be touched by the brutality of war, the cruelty of his fellow men, the drudgery of daily life, and the relentless passage of time. The more I read of Fairweather’s ceaseless travels, his complete indifference to his personal appearance or home comforts, his penury and solitude, and his ability to paint under the most appallingly difficult conditions, the more I wondered whether this was a form of madness—though whether the blessed insanity of the maenad and the bacchant or the cursed insanity of the psychotic I could not say.47 Who in his right mind would have attempted to cross from Darwin to Timor on an improvised raft, as Fairweather did in April 1952? Murray Bail calls it the act of a paranoid person. Hell, for this artist, was other people who exhibited his work without his knowledge or consent, gloated and jeered at him, or wished him ill. Like the hapless Hurtle Duffield in Patrick White’s The Vivisector, Fairweather was the crook-necked white pullet that the other hens pecked at because it was different.48 To leave the hen house seemed the only solution. And so, after months of research in the Darwin Public Library, but with minimal navigation skills, he found materials in rubbish tips and scrap yards to build his raft. With three aluminum aircraft fuel tanks, a sail made from half-rotten hessian food parachutes, and ropes, wedges, fencing wire, and other bric-a-brac, he assembled his imitation Kon-Tiki, stashed his supplies of tinned food and water, and set

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sail. Sixteen days later, and already given up for dead, he made landfall on the island of Roti, west of Timor. The hallucinatory visions that came to him as he lay, near death on that drifting raft, would inform his paintings thenceforth. No longer figurative, they issue from the penumbra of the world as we ordinarily know it. And like hallucinations, the paintings are not made to last. Even the painter embraces this impermanence—indifferent to his reputation, or to posterity, and even the survival of his works, which he stacks between sheets of hardboard before driving nails through the improvised package and dispatching it to his dealer. Whenever possible, he avoids his own exhibitions, disparaging his work and bent on destroying it before anyone else can. Perhaps, as Norman O. Brown suggests, madness is not the word we need here, but mystery. Whether the artist favors Dionysian excess or Apollonian discipline, he craves what the sedentary life of suburbia or academia cannot give—what Ezra Pound referred to as the mysteries that lie beyond the doors of “the outer courts of the same.” 49 Yet, for we who spend so many hours writing, thinking, painting, sculpting, weaving, or practicing music in solitude, setting worldly concerns aside in order to conjure the voices, images, and forms that come unbidden only when we open our minds to them—do we not risk falling into fantasy and losing touch with the world in our haste to praise the ineffable, in our attachment to contemplation, in our search for the secret, the esoteric, and occult? As Nance Lightfoot puts it, upbraiding Hurtle Duffield for being an “intellectual no-hope artist,” indifferent to other people: “While you’re all gummed up in the great art mystery, they’re alive, and breakun their necks for love.”50 Fairweather made no bones about his disenchantment with the Western world. In a letter to Lina Bryans in 1943, he wrote, “The painting I have done has always been an escape from our Western world—surrounded by it I seem to get sunk.” Like the islands on which he found temporary refuge or relief, Asia seemed to be a haven into which he could sail in his imagination, so that the quasi-calligraphic motifs on many of his works resemble screens or bars that give sanctuary to the vulnerable and indefi nite figures within—mother and child, family groups, children, dancers, bathers, monks, and even the artist himself—all of whom possess the luminosity of stained glass.

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Transplantations: The Art of Simryn Gill To live in exile is to find yourself one minute repining for the country you have lost and the next preoccupied by the quotidian difficulties of creating a new life in the country in which you have resettled. This constant oscillation between nostalgic longing and active engagement in the here and now may be evident in objects arrayed on a mantelpiece, jottings in a personal journal, letters home, and confidences shared with those whose experiences seem comparable to your own. For a painter or poet, this process of reconstructing her life will inevitably fi nd expression in her art, for a painting or poem is always more than a mirror image of what she feels within or observes without; it mediates a radically revised mode of relating to the world. Consider the shattering experiences of the First World War. As the great European powers became embroiled in open conflict, Switzerland remained neutral and provided a haven for many seeking refuge from the overwhelming chaos. But the trauma and shell shock of the Western Front would reverberate in the art to which the Dadaists gave birth in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in early 1916. Among the most influential of these nihilistic and revolutionary innovators was the Jewish Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, whose adopted name (“sad in the country”) suggests a desire to become more than a member of any one class, country, or ethnicity. This he achieved in the cosmopolitan clique that assembled in the Cabaret Voltaire for absurdist revelries and scandalous performances. The first Dadaist manifesto described the aim of the movement as “to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals” and to foster an international literature. But whether such radical departures from the norm can be sustained, either in art or in life, and whether any artist or individual can really transcend national frontiers or traditions is another matter. My interest in these questions was piqued when I met Simryn Gill in Sydney in 1995. At the time, my situation was precarious. I had resigned a tenured academic job in the United States to take up a half-time temporary position at the University of Sydney, fully expecting that the position would become permanent. But there was a change of government within weeks of my return

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to Australia; federal funding for tertiary education was slashed, and though my job would continue for a year, my contract could not be extended. One of my colleagues at the University of Sydney was the SingaporeAustralian anthropologist Souchou Yao. Souchou was married to Simryn, who was born in Singapore of Punjabi Sikh parents in 1959, but spent most of her childhood in Malaysia before going abroad for schooling in India and the UK. Souchou’s and Simryn’s children were the same age as ours, and our two families became close, though after eighteen months in Australia my family was obliged to relocate again as I went in search of employment, first in New Zealand, then in Denmark, and finally in the United States. Like my wife and I, Simryn would occasionally speak of herself as an “outsider” and regard this as, “not a particularly unusual experience in such a mobile and constantly shifting world.”51 Indeed, when she fi rst came to Sydney she made an embroidered sampler with the question “Who am I?” repeated in many different fonts.52 Though being unsettled is stressful, it provides common ground with others who, for various reasons, lack any one place in the world that they can call home. That postmodernism celebrates this globalization and fragmentation of identity does not, however, make it any easier to embrace the condition as a way of life. One may don the mask of cosmopolitanism, but beneath the mask one’s expression is often anguished and uncertain. At times this makes one feel insubstantial; “knowing oneself as being nothing: empty and invisible like the wind, or water.”53 For Simryn this has been both a strength and a weakness. “If you are empty, nothing, you only exist through the things around you, and if these things shift in their qualities and values, in relation to you, each other and other things, then the sense of self is always moving too.”54 To get her bearings in Sydney, Simryn spent many hours each day exploring vacant lots and demolition sites around the city, scavenging for pieces of rubble that still bore traces of the original building—a painted surface, a fragment of lettering, a human sign. After bringing these found objects back to her home in Marrickville, Simryn glued carefully typed verbs onto each piece in recognition that it was not, despite appearances, an inert object but a part of a broken mosaic, a means of generating a new arrangement or pattern. If diasporic existence makes one’s identity painfully disparate and even incoherent, the act of deliberately assembling tokens of this scattered life in a

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10 . Forking Tongues, Simryn Gill, 1992. Used with permission by Simryn Gill and Tracy Williams, Ltd. Photo by Jenni Carter.

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work of art not only gives to that life a semblance of coherence; it makes it communicable to others and pleasurable to contemplate. Thus Simryn writes of place as a “verb rather than noun, which exists in our doings: walking, talking, living.”55 She might have added that place is also a way of doing art. In this act of verbalizing, she not only lent meanings to the things on which she pasted a “doing word”; she ceased to be a passive observer in a place of devastation and loss; she became an active participant in a ritual space where she called the shots and determined the order of things. This was not Simryn’s first time in Australia. In 1987 she lived in Adelaide, where her first show featured objects she had picked up at tag sales and second-hand stores. In her next show in 1991, she laid out in a spiral on the gallery floor hundreds of knives, forks, and spoons purchased from thrift shops, calling the arrangement Forking Tongues. In one version she includes a circle of chilies that she grew in her own garden, delighted to discover that something so exotic could thrive so far from home. In all these works she appears to be searching for a way of arranging disparate and disconnected things so that they are given new meaning rather than reminding us of their original function. As she puts it,

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the question for me was, “how can this thing from another place make sense here?”56 In making sense of what she has found, Simryn effectively infuses objects with her own life; she brings the objects back into being, albeit on her terms, and they, in return, give fulfillment to her. “But this does not mean,” Merleau-Ponty reminds us, “that there was a fusion or coinciding of [the artist and the object].” There was simply an “overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things.”57 Simryn’s preoccupation with the “shifting and mutating and contingent” nature of being-in-the world is not only a reflection of her own cosmopolitan existence, or of the several languages she has acquired in negotiating the different cultures in which she has lived; it was born of her early childhood experiences in Singapore. Her grandfather founded the Ginder Singh Transport Company in Port Dickson, Malaya, originally a charcoal-producing township, but expanded by the British as a harbor during the Straits Settlement period. That Simryn grew up in the shadows of colonialism and in a world of mercantile exchange may explain the accidental and displaced character of the objects that wash ashore in her installations—shards, pieces of glassware, leaves torn from a book, derelict buildings, discarded utensils, abandoned houses, found objects, seed pods, cones, shells, fruit parings, old envelopes, flotsam and jetsam from the sea. Gathering up these leftovers from another time, another place, another person’s life, Simryn treats them as miniatures, toying with various possibilities of how they might be assembled and interpreted. In these respects she resembles an intellectual bricoleur who, as LéviStrauss points out in La Pensée Sauvage, makes do with “whatever is at hand”—the “remains and debris of events . . . odds and ends . . . fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society”—to transform the given into something chosen, while acknowledging that any pattern imposed on these materials will be thrown back into chaos again, as time, history, and circumstance work upon them.58 No permanent order is aspired to. Experience has taught the bricoleur that whatever order she may bring to the brica-brac she has picked up along the way will not last. She grows accustomed to not being at home in the world.

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Simryn is very clear on this point. Art subverts the systemization of life, even as it seeks some new pattern, an alternative order. “Art can free us . . . but as soon as you have it, art, you want to lose it. It is a quality we would like to hold lightly in our hands, and not to be held by it.”59 In notes on her photographic exhibition Standing Still, Simryn touches on the double entendre of her title. The deserted and ruined structures she documents are as silent and still as tombs, yet inasmuch as they have survived the ravages of time they invite our imaginations to breathe life back into them, recollecting the lives they once sheltered and supported, contemplating a future they may yet have. On various visits back to Southeast Asia (2000–2003) I have been struck by the large numbers of ambitious development projects that seem to have been simply abandoned before completion and are now slowly starting to crumble back into the humid landscape. These remains are shells of what might have become shopping malls or apartment buildings, even entire housing developments. The economic uncertainties of the times changed these fantasies of ultramodernity into lonely ruins. From the future to the past without a present. I started looking at these strange giants in relation to the older abandoned buildings that punctuate small and large towns in Malaysia where these photographs were all taken. Empty and derelict buildings—houses, shops, hotels—many of which date from before the 1957 independence from Britain, but some are more recent. It’s hard to know why they have been left to rot. One hears stories, of activities during the wartime Japanese occupation of the kind that can make places inconsolably haunted, or of family disputes about inheritance and such like, or of owners leaving their old homes untended in the drift to cities and larger towns. But I wonder if many of these places are allowed to fall apart simply because they are old.

In a 1999 interview, Simryn Gill spoke of “the many confusions, pleasures and contradictions of being in one’s particular present.”60 As her work makes very clear, the “particular present” is a noisy intersection where a past that is both personal and historical converges on a future that is both a potential source of hope and a dead end. Perhaps this explains why so many of her

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compositions are simultaneously playful and poignant—eucalyptus pods attached to tiny wheels that give them mobility but will not enable a new tree to grow from them, shells that once housed a living organism or held a pearl now littering a beach, a colonial-era home going to rack and ruin in a weed-grown lot. Against the nostalgic melancholy that may come of contemplating a phase of life that has gone for good, Simryn Gill proposes the possibility of renewal. In her 1996–1998 photographs for Forest, she uses images of books cut up and pasted into tropical settings, including Fort Canning, Singapore, and her family bungalow in Port Dickson. “In Forest,” she says, “I was fascinated by the idea of planting books and seeing what would grow out of them. I viewed these texts as having become part of the landscape . . . so that bodies of texts literally became part of the landscape and texts literally became embodied as plants.”61 But there are never any guarantees, either that an old book may speak to someone generations after it has passed out of circulation or that a ruined house may be made habitable again or that a work of art may give new life to a random collection of found objects arranged in a gallery. Might one say of all Simryn Gill’s work that it is deliberately ambiguous? That it is charged with the artist’s own ambivalence toward relics and remnants? That her art is symptomatic of a homeless mind? If these conjectures are true, they must be qualified by the observation that the indeterminacy of her images is carefully crafted. Strings of words from a Javanese translation of the Ramayana inserted into the nodes of a coconut tree, strips of typescript pasted on the nodes of a bamboo stem, domestic interiors photographed in the absence of their inhabitants, banana plants dressed in white shirts, a weathered chair and table photographed on the lawn of an abandoned bungalow (though the table is set for tea and cakes), paper strands made from a world atlas arranged on a cotton string and called “pearls,” banana skins braided like a woman’s hair. These recurring classificatory contradictions call to mind the classical figure of chiasmus, best illustrated by Quintilian’s famous example—non ut edam vivo, sed ut vivam (I do not live to eat, but I eat to live). A chiasmus is made up of two halves that are turned against each other, as if inverted and reversed in a mirror. In drawing opposed terms together in apparent unity, chiasmus may be one of the oldest forms of human thought.62

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11 . Forest, Simryn Gill, 1996–1998. Used with permission by Simryn Gill and Tracy Williams, Ltd. Photo by Jenni Carter.

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In his analysis of chiasmus in Samuel Butler’s fiction, Ralf Norrman coins the term existential chiasmus to denote crossovers that deploy the verb to be, as in Shakespeare’s line from the beginning of Macbeth: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” If “fair” and “foul” are at all separate entities to begin with, they should be different; yet the chiastic existential formula implies that they are the same or similar, partly because they are capable of taking each other’s places and roles and partly because the verb to be expresses identity or identicality. Existential chiasmus creates conceptual chaos, which, in a line from Macbeth, is a linguistic parallel to the political and emotional chaos in the play.63

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What, then, are the key terms in Simryn Gill’s work, and how are they chiastically combined and recombined? The first antithetical pair is nature and culture. In images of wrapped trees, fruit necklaces or hats, and pods on plastic wheels, nature is assimilated to culture, but in images of decaying houses, and human artifacts along a tideline, culture is assimilated to nature. And just as the boundary between natural and cultural identities is transgressed or blurred, so too is the distinction between persons and things (I am thinking here of Simryn’s photographs of figures in a landscape, their heads obscured by a bundle of brushwood or a piece of fruit). In her artful puns and chiastic rearrangements, Simryn Gill may be regarded as a natural heir of Lewis Carroll and Samuel Butler whose greatest chiastic works were published within a year of each other—Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) and Erewhon (1872). Whether one can speak of a chiasticistic personality may be beside the point, even though Simryn admits that her affection for double entendre echoes her desire to coalesce written and graphic art, her deterritorialized sense of self, and her existential doubt. Art is, almost by definition, a transitional space where objects, images, and ideas are gathered together before being ritualistically moved around to create new combinations and permutations. This process may involve memory, but it is perhaps best regarded as the practice of what Barbara Myerhoff calls re-membering. “To signify this special type of recollection, the term re-membering may be used, calling attention to the reaggregation of members, the figures who belong to one’s life story, one’s own prior selves, as well as significant others who are part of the story. Re-membering, then, is a purposive, significant unification, quite different from the passive, continuous fragmentary flickerings of images and feelings that accompany other activities in the normal flow of consciousness.”64 This process of re-membering avails itself of whatever comes to mind or is at hand—salvaged objects, half-forgotten books, an old neighborhood, a revisited place, a vivid dream, a flash of insight—in order to undermine conventional wisdom as to the intrinsic nature of these things and open our minds to the arbitrary and illusory character of the value we assign things. Thus, the European romantic conception of nature as “the embodiment of spiritual beauty and moral authenticity” is a far cry from the Malaysian view of the tropics as an environment where “laundry turns mouldy on the clothes line in the monsoon

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months, as fungus grows inside camera lenses, and as ants, acutely sensitive to the coming of heavy rain, migrate by their thousands across the kitchen floor.”65 It is not that art renders everything insignificant, or even produces new forms of signification; rather it destabilizes received views of reality, surprising us, taking our breath away, blowing our minds, and filling us with amazement that delight is not dependent on certainty and may, in fact, occur when we can be sure of nothing. In his autobiography, Lee Kuan Yew captures this shock of the new, not in an encounter with a work of art but passing through the Suez Canal on the Cunard liner Britannica before the Second World War. [The ship] proceeded slowly so that the waves would not wash down the loose sand on the banks. As we passed, a group of Arab workers on the shore started shouting obscenities and lifted their gallabiya—long garments like nightshirts—to fl aunt their genitals at the British servicewomen, who were watching the world go by in the torrid heat. The women shrieked in surprise and disgust, much to the delight of the Arabs, who put their hands on their penises and shook them. I had seen monkeys in the Botanic Gardens in Singapore do this to visitors who refused them bananas. Later, I learnt that they hated the British. Why, I did not know. It was the first time I had left Singapore to go overseas. I was being exposed to a new world of the hates and loves, the prejudices and biases of different peoples.66

Singapore happened to be my first port of call after leaving the antipodes when I was twenty-three. I felt like Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad’s Youth, coming from the sea and feeling “the first sigh of the East” on his face, “impalpable and enslaving, like a charm.” 67 I left our ship in the company of an American Jewish friend whose uncle ran a watch-importing business in the city. The hospitality of this family and the details of the day I spent with them are engraved in my memory. From the kitchen a succession of small servings of Malaysian food were brought to the table, each one to my Anglo palate a gift from the gods. After marveling at my appetite for the keropok lector, kuih, pisang goring, chai tow kway, and nasi lemak that I put away with such relish, my host later asked if I would accompany him along the lane behind the house to buy some fruit for dessert. The fruit seller had a stall in the lane,

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and my host made sure he bought a sample of everything. And so I tasted rambutan, mangosteen, jackfruit, soursop, and durian for the fi rst time. When it came to the durian, my host expressed amazement that I did not turn up my nose at it. But I told him that it reminded me of the smells of the open drains in the city! It was a sign of my indiscriminate enthusiasm for everything I saw, smelled, tasted, or touched that day—an auspicious beginning, as I wrote in my journal, to my real life. But that life would be lived between two hemispheres, betwixt and between, and I would find myself always of two minds as to where I belonged and where I wanted to be. In an essay inspired by his wife Simryn Gill’s installation, Forest, in Sydney’s Rosslyn Oxley Gallery in June 1998, Souchou Yao recalls his own first journey away from his native Singapore. In the silence of university libraries in foreign cities, “we discovered, besides financial accounting and international economics . . . other works and ideas—those of Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Emerson, Goethe and Schiller. For some of us, such a discovery marked us forever like some Conradian character fatally marooned in some place which can never be home.”68 But instead of speaking of being marooned, or washed up, like the flotsam and jetsam in Simryn’s installations, can we not find consolation in what she makes of this raw material, arranging and transfiguring it in the space of art? In Pearls she plays with the paradox that a highly prized and beautiful thing can emerge from the irritated flesh of a humble bivalve. By extension, we are made to ponder the paradox that in creating something new we destroy, or at least eclipse, something that has existed before. Each strand of “pearls” comprises paper hand-rolled from pages torn from books given to the artist by friends and acquaintances. In the strand she made for Michael Taussig, various writings by Walter Benjamin—“Unpacking My Library,” “Letter to Gershom Scholem on Franz Kafka,” and “Berlin Childhood around 1900” were torn to shreds and recomposed before being returned to Taussig as a gift. The implication is that in every transaction something is forfeited and something found, just as in every translation certain words lose their meaning only to fi nd others. In giving up their books, academic friends gained ornaments and suffered a sea change—including her husband (on the right of the picture) and John Clark from Sydney University’s Art History Department.

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12 . Pearls, Simryn Gill, Sydney, 2003. Used with permission by Simryn Gill and Tracy Williams, Ltd. Photo by Jenni Carter.

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“Can we consider art itself to be a gift of some sort?” asks anthropologist Michael Taussig in his essay “Pearls.” 69 He follows his question by suggesting that this gift consists in “an alternative meaning for art,”70 and in elaborating on this statement he recounts the many musings it inspired—including the history of the red calico in which his gift was wrapped, the Spice Islands in the Banda Sea, and the pearls that Columbus prized above gold when he voyaged to the Americas in the late fifteenth century. Art takes things whose life has ended—books that are no longer read, cutlery that is no longer used, houses that have ceased to be habitable—and puts them into circulation again, utterly transformed. As Ariel sings in The Tempest, death is not, therefore, an absolute arrest, but the beginning of a sea change “into something rich and strange.” The genius of art is not only to realize that every ending is a new beginning but to enable us to experience this possibility for ourselves. For in that moment of wonderment when we first encounter a strange and new work of art, our eyes are opened, our mindsets challenged, and our senses come alive.

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This brings me back to my epiphany in Singapore when I was twentythree. Not only did this day affirm something I had always known—that I would never find complete fulfillment in the country in which I had been born and raised; it made me realize that in the places where I yearned to go I would always be a stranger. If Simryn Gill’s work seems like a gift, it is because it helps me accept this indeterminate identity. It goes some way toward teaching me to live in negative capability and make a virtue out of the necessity of living globally. Simryn’s work also reminds me that, whatever our situations, we are all bricoleurs—working within the limits of what we have or what we find, rearranging the raw materials of our lives, both past and present, in an endless attempt to make our existence more fulfilling, for ourselves and for those we love. Writing this chapter, I have rummaged in libraries, downloaded items on the Internet, and pillaged all the relevant publications I could lay my hands on, piecing these elements together, creating a narrative that reflects Simryn Gill’s preoccupations and, reciprocally, my own. Art not only originates in life; it aims to transform our lives. It is therefore fascinating that, after avoiding politically motivated performance art in Singapore (fearing for the security of her family), Simryn followed her move to Sydney with a return to political critique in a work entitled Carbon Copy that drew parallels between Italian fascism, Mahathir bin Mohammad, and the Australian anti-immigration politician Pauline Hanson. At the same time, she and the cultural historian Kajiri Jain mischievously planned to insert a new Goddess into the Hindu pantheon—to serve as a “patron deity for overseas Indians.”71 Her rationale was that because migrants are uprooted and transplanted, a seedheaded god was called for who could disseminate herself across the globe. “Art,” she wrote, inadvertently echoing Theodor Adorno, “remains a utopian project.”72

My Brother’s Keeper: The Art of Susan Norrie Simryn Gill’s utopian aspiration echoes the spirit of several other artists whose work I have explored in this book, among them Joseph Beuys, who sought to break with tradition and find “the right level for the revolution and evolution of all human development,”73 Vincent van Gogh, who wanted to

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“be of use in the world?”74 and the German expressionists’ use of art as a weapon against vice, war, and corruption.75 But, in every instance, the political impulse to effect radical social change is inextricably connected with a personal drive to transform oneself. Beuys is quite explicit here. “The whole thing [i.e., starting “a new life”] is a therapeutic process . . . [and] this relates to medicine, or what people call alchemy or shamanism.”76 Accordingly, Robert Hughes’s “shock of the new” refers simultaneously to the biographical and historical conditions under which we live. Another way of making this point is to say that though we live in the shadow of historical catastrophes, we revisit and avail ourselves of these catastrophes in articulating griefs and grievances whose immediate locus is our present life. The violence of colonization is felt a thousand times more acutely by those who suffer violence and oppression in their present lives. But the reverse is also true. For those who carry the wounds of a tragic childhood, the historical tragedies unfolding around them take on a deeply personal significance. Jet-lagged in Sydney, I reread those passages in The Rings of Saturn where W. G. Sebald describes becoming waylaid in a labyrinth on Dunwich Heath before finding his way to the house of his friend Michael Hamburger on the outskirts of Middleton. Sebald is overwhelmed by a sense that he once inhabited the house that his friend now occupies. The poet’s untidy study reminds him of his own. He is convinced that the spectacles, letters, and writing materials on the desk had once been his. And this déjà vu leads Sebald to further imagine that Hamburger’s years of exile, in which his German childhood had became reduced to disconnected fragments, no less haunting because they were incoherent, corresponded to his own. Sebald brings his reflections to a close by remarking his friend’s uncanny relationship with Hölderlin, who he had translated into English, and how such elective affi nities transcend time and space, so that one is sometimes drawn to certain historical figures as though they were kinsmen. How it is that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one ’s own precursor?77 Marking these pages with a slip of paper, I placed The Rings of Saturn on my bedside table and slept for a couple of hours, waking just before first light to the staccato of an unidentifiable bird that I took, for a moment, to be a decipherable code. Then the incessant tapping attained a higher pitch, answered

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by the equally urgent syllables of its mate. I lay in the darkness listening, but with the first murmuring of traffic on King Street and the gray light infiltrating the sky, the birdsong ceased. That morning, a hot wind was blowing and the sun was hot on my back as I trudged through Woolloomooloo on my way to Susan Norrie’s studio in McElhone Street. Climbing the McElhone Stairs from Cowper Wharf Road, ginger brick apartment buildings above the great sandstone cliff continued the vertical into a cloudless sky, reminding me of Dogon dwellings along the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali. The cliff also marks the old Sydney foreshore, echoing Edmond’s remarks on the last page of Luca Antara that every modern city “carries traces of the first city,”78 and as I approached Susan’s studio above an Italian barbershop I was mindful that this neighborhood was where many human casualties washed up, limping like the grizzled wreck of a man in front of me, his stained Salvation Army clothes, heelless shoes, and unkempt hair seeming to single him out as another species, though any one of us might fall on hard times and drift into the same Sargasso. Indeed, I had read in the paper only that morning, following Remembrance Day, that 40 percent of young Australians aged between eighteen and fortyfour enlisted in World War I, and that many of the survivors were so physically damaged by gas and wounds, or psychologically traumatized, that they never became loving fathers, successful workers, or adequate husbands. Shadows of their former selves, these shell-shocked men transmitted to their children more misery, perhaps, than the war itself. Susan also lived in the shadow of a family tragedy—the death of her elder brother Richard following an epileptic seizure. “From early childhood, he had experienced periodic fits,” Susan told me, “and at age nineteen he underwent brain surgery, which appeared at fi rst to have been successful. But for some reason—perhaps he was discharged too early or the medication was inappropriate—Richard suffered a major seizure, and the effect of the operation was nullified. It was catastrophic for my parents. They had seen a glimmer of the son they had lost for many years. Subsequently, he was only able to do work that did not tax him. My uncle suggested he work at Grace Brothers where my father had been general manager. At one level it was a reasonable suggestion, but quite cruel as well. Richard wanted to become a draftsman as he was very good at drawing up plans, but no one would risk employing him because of his epilepsy! You

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can see why discrimination and human rights have always been of interest to me. “In any event, Richard’s health deteriorated over the next few years. And though our family life was privileged, it was also dysfunctional. The impact of Richard’s regular grand mal seizures took its toll on us all. I remember when I was ten or eleven, my mother had gone down the road to get some food, and I was at home with the flu, and so was Richard. As you can imagine, I was quite petite, but at sixteen he was fully grown, a hairy six-footfour-inch man. He had a grand mal seizure outside my bedroom, and I rushed to assist. Even though it was the first time I had experienced one of his fits directly, I was aware of the need to stop him swallowing his tongue. I almost had my fingers bitten off! After he was settled, I placed a blanket on him. But I was in a state of shock. It had been so violent, and I was terrified by the thought that he was going to die. I know that the incident changed me forever. I was entering puberty but I was also transported into the world of the possessed. Lewis Carroll was an epileptic. “I was always brave from that point on, but often drawn to the dark side of life. Of course that night when I heard my parents talking about Richard’s seizure, they thought they should give me an aspirin or something. But I pretended I was asleep. I didn’t want any help—a kind of stoicism or denial, perhaps. These days it would be dealt with as a traumatic episode, but I repressed the incident only to play it out time and time again through my art. I also developed an abnormal empathy toward people. I was probably consumed by survivor guilt. “Richard’s epilepsy destroyed our parents,” Susan said, “though he imparted his resilience and will power to his three children. Richard’s oldest child was twelve when his father died and was the one who found him dead, but he grew up to be a wealthy and successful banker.” Susan’s work had enthralled me for more than twenty years. I was fascinated by the interplay of biographical and political allusions in her work. And I found in her deep ambivalence toward painting an echo of my own mixed feelings about the discursive conventions of the academy. It wasn’t simply that painting was passé; for Susan it was a more a matter of painting’s inability to portray and process the overwhelming realities of late twentieth century life—the growing gap between haves and have-nots, the destructive impact of colonization on Australia’s indigenous people, the repercussions

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of global warming, and the pollution of the environment through mining and nuclear testing. Like John Berger, Susan was in revolt against art’s entanglement with the interests of the bourgeoisie—whose passion for pastoral scenes, ethereal images, and grandiose portraits masked the social violence that secured their privileges. For too long, painting had been at the service of this bourgeois cult of respectability and good manners; now the time had come to face the unvarnished truth, to confront the grim realities that had been swept under the rug of history. In satisfying her “reality hunger,” Susan gradually turned from painting to video ensembles, film, and installations. But she was not entirely alone in breaking away from conventional conceptions of art and the artist. As David Shields observes, the twentieth century was marked by a series of radical attempts “to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art . . . breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work,” even if this meant being deliberately “unarty.”79 “Rather than using film as passive consumption, I am interested in making it into a state of active discussion. The autonomy of art and its connection to social history is a contradiction, a tension that runs through the discipline of visual culture like a fault line.” 80 In Susan’s video installation Undertow (2002), the viewer is surrounded by images of environmental catastrophe—a forest fire, an oil-polluted ocean, a city shrouded in toxic dust—as well as provoked by images from Orson Welles’s movie of Kafka’s The Trial and a rumbling soundscape that includes the somber tolling of a bell. Susan’s most recent work was an installation called Havoc, created for the 2007 Venice Biennale. Susan played a DVD of Havoc for me, in which the Palazzo and Grand Canal are visible beyond the windows of the room where the images are screened, reinforcing a sense that East was East and West was West and never the twain shall meet. In May 2006 a blowout of hydrogen sulfide gas at an exploration rig operated by PT Lapindo Brantas near Surabaya caused an unstoppable mudflow around the gas well. Escaping gas sprayed into the sky, and upwelling mud engulfed paddy fields, fish farms, homes, schools, and roads. Within a month, seven thousand people were homeless. But the hot toxic mud continued to erupt from deep within the earth. After seeing a photograph of the disaster area in a Sydney newspaper (Susan’s husband, Ewen Macdonald, brought it to her attention because it

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resembled an image from Undertow), Susan showed it to her friend, Juliana Engberg, who had been to Indonesia. Engberg encouraged Susan to explore the possibility of creating an artwork based on the calamity in East Java. Susan was hesitant. Given her earlier work on man-made and natural disasters, she did not want to give the impression that she was voyeuristically drawn to human misery as a source of art. She needed to strike a balance between testifying to an injustice and keeping faith with her artistic aims. “That’s why three rooms were crucial for this installation,” Susan said. “One for art, one for documentation, one for fi lm. And the sound mix was important, too. That’s why I personally paid for my own sound engineer to come to Venice and deal with the acoustical problems associated with the many various surfaces in the Palazzo.” In 2006, Susan embarked on her first trip to East Java. “The story was being repressed, not only in local Indonesian newspapers,” Susan said, “but worldwide, through the syndicated press, which is often controlled by corporations and governments. I thought it was crucial to take the story to Venice and reveal what was happening to these people in East Java. But Havoc was not a project about people as victims. This was a project about redemption, hope and resilience. People struggling to coexist with the forces of nature.” On her first trip, Susan documented “mud boys” building a wall to stabilize the local train line that had been affected by the mudflow. On her second trip, she wanted to film a live goat being cast into the boiling mud volcano by a Sumatran mystic, but her camera failed. She later discovered, however, that the footage would have been inappropriate, for the sacrifice was deemed un-Islamic, the mystic sentenced to six months in jail, and the event written off as a media stunt. Following the Venice Biennale in 2007, Susan learned that more and more people were making a pilgrimage to Mount Bromo to stop the flow of mud, and she decided to go back to East Java. Although she found no evidence of animal sacrifices directly into the volcano or of an increase in the number of pilgrims to Mount Bromo, she was deeply affected by people’s desire to continue this ritual even though they were desperately poor. Footage from this visit was included in her Kasada exhibition at the first Asian Contemporary Art Fair (curated by Lilly Wei, who had been interested in Susan Norrie’s work since Enola in 2004) and in New York City in December 2007.81

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Traditionally, the Kasada festival lasts about a month, during which time the deity of Mount Bromo is offered rice, fruit, vegetables, and livestock in return for blessings. The festival dates from the fifteenth century when, following the collapse of the Hindu Majapahit kingdom, the king (Jaka Seger) and queen (Roro Anteng), with their people, sought refuge in the Tengger mountains. But the royal couple was childless, and in desperation begged the god of the volcano for help. The god promised them children on condition they sacrifice their last-born to the volcano. Now men toil in mud up to their armpits, fill plastic bags with stones, and sacrifice animals in their attempts to stem the mud tide. “There are already fifty thousand refugees,” Susan said, “but their hopes are fading that they will ever reclaim their lands and livelihoods from the polluted earth.” Watching the DVD of Havoc with Susan, I understood the anguish she felt at her powerlessness to act in the face of this tragedy. “The life of an artist is insane,” Susan said. “You are always running ahead of yourself. Wanting to go beyond what you are able to do, politically or artistically. Sometimes I think that bearing witness is what is important. At other times I think it’s only the work that matters.” I suggested to Susan that we are like the young man cradling a white goat in his arms and standing at the crater rim of Mount Bromo. Nothing may come of his actions, whether he throws the animal into the gas vent or not, whether he keeps it alive for its milk or slaughters it for its meat. Perhaps what really matters, I said, is that the Tenggerese act as if the mountain will answer their petitions, as if it is a moral being. And so, in dance and trance, young men chew on hot coals and lightbulbs, inflicting pain upon themselves rather than endure passively the pain and injustice of the world. As with ritual, our creative work may not mitigate social injustices or turn back any tide, but it constitutes a mode of action nonetheless, and our lives are made more bearable because of it. By the time I left Susan’s studio I was, however, unconvinced by my initial response to the questions posed by her work, and I walked across the city in a daze, stopping only to jot down my disconnected thoughts or to sit in a coffee bar staring out the window with little sense of my whereabouts or even the time of day. In Genesis, Cain is a tiller of the ground, Abel a keeper of sheep. Cain offers a portion of his harvest to God; Abel offers the firstlings of his flock

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and the fat thereof. God accepts Abel’s sacrifice but ignores Cain’s. In a fit of jealousy, Cain kills his brother. To God’s question, Where is thy brother Abel? Cain responds, Am I my brother ’s keeper? Thus is broached one of humanity’s first existential dilemmas: do we have a responsibility to care for and protect others? And where, if anywhere, do we draw the line between those we are obliged to look after and those we are not? There are times when we are so disturbed by our inability to alleviate the suffering of others that we visit suffering upon ourselves in a blind gesture at narrowing the gap between our own fortunate life and theirs. But Susan’s preparedness to inhale toxic fumes, or endure disorientation and exhaustion, in order to document the plight of the Tenggerese was not merely a magical tactic to lessen her own distress. Her actions fused biographical and political purposes. Thus Susan’s profound sense that the untimely death of her brother may have been preventable was linked to her equally strong sense of outrage at inequalities and injustices in the poor world—concomitants of global capitalism—and the rapacious exploitation by the first world of the raw resources to be found in the third world: oil, natural gas, lumber, precious stones, minerals, and cheap labor. Susan has made art not only a vehicle for expressing her political emotions but a metaphor for all miscarriages of justice, in which silent assent, studied indifference, or ignorance enable the well-heeled beneficiaries of distant atrocities to justify business as usual. My wanderings finally brought me to Blackwattle Bay where I ordered fish and chips and sat at a wooden table on the quayside, shaded by a blue umbrella. Seagulls waited for crumbs. Young Korean men, wearing white rubber boots and rubber aprons, sluiced plastic bins from which fish had been unloaded from the boats that now rocked gently at their moorings among private launches and cruise boats with such names as Capricorn Queen, Kemo-Sabe, Blue Moon, and Bella Vista. There was even an Aboriginal boat, the Deerubbun, that offered “Cultural Cruises and Tribal Warriors.” The water in the bay was murky. Oil slicked the surface. Dead jellyfish and eucalyptus leaves floated in the shallows. This detritus brought me to reflect on the history of the bay and ask myself whether this history could still be read in the polluted water, the sludge on the harbor floor, and the surviving factories on the foreshore. Were the potsherds, fragments of bottle glass, and broken bricks, now dimly discernible among the submerged slabs of sandstone, evidence of the kilns and glassworks that once lined the bay,

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or had the past become invisible and irrecoverable? After lunch, I crossed Bridge Road in order to walk in the shade of the Morton Bay Figs that fringed Wentworth Park. It was hard to imagine that this reclaimed land, now divided between a greyhound racing stadium and an open field used for rugby matches, carnivals, art shows, and antiques auctions had, one hundred and fifty years ago, been a swampy no-man’s-land where the lowlife of Sydney congregated for rat baiting, prizefighting, whoring, and trading stolen goods. Art shares with capitalism a capacity for transforming banal and profitless experience into something of value, and I was struck by how the once outlawed neighborhood of the Blackwattle Swamp precinct, “notorious for its disregard for God and disrespect for order,” 82 metamorphosed into prime real estate, with landscaped parks, paved walkways, and pricy apartment buildings among groves of casuarinas. An escarpment may lay bare the successive layers of sedimentary rock from which we can deduce the geological history of an entire region. An archaeological midden, carefully excavated, provides a glimpse into our cultural past, each epoch defined by the pottery that was made, the food that was consumed, the catastrophes to which people had to adapt or die. But sometimes it is simply impossible to fathom our origins. Even if one is able to delve deep enough, the fragments of shell, pottery, bone, or jewelry that come to light do not permit us to know the experience of those who once inhabited that site. And so we are left with our present selves, aware we are a part of this blurred history yet powerless to complete the genealogy or identify the precursors that would, we suspect, appear to us as a hall of distorting mirrors in which we rush about desperately seeking a single affirming image, a single abiding form.

Heroic Failure: The Art of Sidney Nolan In late 1835 a brigantine called Stirling Castle, out of Sydney and bound for Singapore, ran aground on Swain Reef off Australia’s Queensland Coast. After a six-week, two-hundred-and-fifty-mile voyage in a longboat, the ship’s crew of twenty reached Great Sandy Island, though not before the ailing fiftysix-year-old captain Fraser was speared to death by local Aboriginals, his wife Eliza giving birth to a child who died almost immediately. After reaching the island, ten of the crew abandoned the others, who sought the help of local Aboriginals to survive. Bereft of clothing, blistered by the sun, and

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obliged to forage for fern roots and bush honey with their reluctant hosts, only seven survived the eight weeks it took to reach Moreton Bay where, legend has it, David Bracefell, an escaped convict living with Aboriginals, rescued Eliza Fraser from an Aboriginal “corroboree” and brought her back to “civilization.” 83 One hundred and twelve years after the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle, thirty-year-old Sidney Nolan left the artists’ colony of Heide, near Melbourne, Australia, where he had been living in a ménage à trois with John and Sunday Reed, and traveled to Great Sandy Island, now called Fraser Island, with his friend Barrie Reid. Here biography and mythology merge, much as figures blur into the landscapes of Nolan’s most famous paintings, for there is no certainty about either the nature of Nolan’s relationship with Sunday Reed or Mrs. Fraser’s relationship with David Bracefell, though the theme of betrayal recurs in both. According to some accounts, Mrs. Fraser and Bracefell became lovers, but she later reneged on a promise to help the convict secure a pardon. And there are stories that Nolan regarded both Sunday Reed and Eliza as women who had betrayed their lovers. In a 1987 interview, Nolan spoke bitterly of the year he left Heide. “I’d just been through an experience in Melbourne which had gone on for some years in which I’d felt . . . this lady had not been up to scratch. Done me wrong. Which I still feel.” But Nolan may have been referring to Sunday’s determination to retain the Ned Kelly paintings he had done at Heide and not to any sexual or emotional betrayal.84 What does emerge as a perennial theme in Nolan’s work, however, is the theme of heroic failure.85 Perhaps this reflects his youthful ambition to reinvent art, as Cezanne and Picasso had done. Perhaps it reflects a peculiarly antipodean complex. Even before the Mrs. Fraser paintings, Nolan had transformed Ned Kelly into an archetypal Australian—a man whose ignominious beginnings would be redeemed not by glory but by martyrdom. Though up against overwhelming odds—the elemental forces of nature that Burke and Wills encountered in Central Australia or Mrs. Fraser endured in Queensland; the police deployed in the manhunt of Ned Kelly; the Turkish troops looking down on the Anzac troops entrenched on the indefensible slopes of the Gallipoli peninsula—Nolan’s battlers acquit themselves like heroes, even though they are on the losing side of history, always under the gun, besieged or backed into a corner, derided as ex-convicts or mere colonials,

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13 . Convict and Mrs Fraser, Sidney Nolan, 1957. Used with permission by Bridgeman Images.

FIGURE

falling prey to their fears of the primitive, and dismayed by all forms of sophistication and sophistry. “I paint Kelly as part of Australia’s culture and mind,” Nolan said. “I don’t know what to say if people say I paint Kelly because that’s all I can do, because it’s like saying Giotto used Biblical scenes because he can’t read the Koran . . . it wasn’t part of his culture.” 86 Great art is, in its very nature, a heroic failure. In its aim to imitate nature, it can at best achieve a simulacrum of life. In reaching for abstraction, it risks gratuitous obscurantism. And in invoking revolution, either political or spiritual, it contradicts its purpose by becoming institutionalized, marketed, and revered. Yet we are moved, time and time again, by the nobility of this lost cause, because we nurture in ourselves a desire to go beyond the world as we find it and lay bare experiences that ordinary language and mundane means are unable to touch. What William Faulkner once said of his literary peers could just as well be said of any great artist, when he ranked Thomas Wolfe ahead of his contemporaries because he had tried the hardest

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to do what Cervantes and Dostoevsky had done, “to put inside the covers of a book the complete turmoil and experience and insight of the human heart . . . to try to put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin.” Faulkner loved best his own masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, for the same reason, “that it was the most splendid failure.” 87 Hurt by Faulkner’s remarks, Ernest Hemingway, nonetheless echoed them in his 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed.” And when asked, in an interview, which artists she liked, Louise Bourgeois said, “I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them. . . . All art comes from terrific failures and terrific needs we have . . . to be able to express yourself properly, to express your intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it . . . to be recognized.” 88 Ars longa, vita brevis. Art always falls short of life. It fails to do it justice. And life is never long enough to perfect one’s art, let alone the art of living. These allusions to the impossibility of ever completely closing the gap between aspiration and achievement suggest that the artist, more than most people, suffers from failing to realize his vision of the world. There is, however, no essential difference between the unconsummated relationship between inward yearnings and outward expressions in art, religion, philosophy, love, and everyday life. Heroic failure is as endemic to our relations with others, as it is to our relations with divinities and with the worldly goods on which we set our hearts. It is only when one looks at the world relationally that we become acutely aware of the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability in our lives. Werner Heisenberg pointed out that when we seek knowledge of the nature of subatomic reality our understanding will be affected by the instruments we use; while some will reveal reality to be particular, others will reveal it to be wavelike. Something similar is true of religious experience, for while we may pay lip service to revealed truths and established beliefs, the history of religion is replete with examples of doubt and uncertainty—the struggle to keep faith. “Augustine agonized. Anselm despaired.” Believers typically

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“come to their religious commitments slowly, carefully, and deliberately, as if the attitude they take toward life itself depends upon their judgment. And they doubt. They find it hard to believe in an invisible being—let alone an invisible being who is entirely good and overwhelmingly powerful.” 89 Doubt is, however, intrinsic to all social interactions: we can never be sure of intentions or feelings of the other, and mutual understanding is intermittent at best. Moreover, what is on one’s mind or in one’s heart influences what one says and what one does, and vice versa, but there is never complete overlap, fusion, or synthesis between the inner and outer aspects of our existence. Yet, in everyday life as in philosophy and religion, we persist in isolating relata from the flux of relationships and attributing to them intrinsic properties that remain constant over time—individual personalities, ethnic identities, national characters, political ideologies, religious faiths, schools of thought, art movements. We then single out exemplary fi gures and make them altars to an unknown god; empty pedestals “still marking the place of a hoped-for statue” 90 —religious saints, political heroes, great artists, scientific geniuses—because they bolster our tendency to make individual terms or figures subsume a diverse body of characteristics, though in truth they simply privilege one trait over others in order to create the illusion of a perfect fit between signified and signifier. 91 Fetishizing fi xed beliefs, brilliant ideas, great souls, or great art risks the kind of fundamentalism that has always been humanity’s last refuge in its search of certainty. But, as Derrida reminds us, “The logocentricism of Greek metaphysics will always be haunted . . . by the ‘absolutely other’ to the extent that the Logos can never englobe everything. There is always something which escapes, something different, other and opaque which refuses to be totalized into a homogeneous identity.” 92 Or, as poet Jack Gilbert puts it in “The Forgotten Dialectic of the Heart”: How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it wrong . . . What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.93

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Perhaps what is truly heroic about the art of painters like Sidney Nolan is their ability to accept that which always escapes, whether this be Mrs. Fraser, Ned Kelly, social justice, or human happiness.

Une Vie Brève, Mais Intense When I was twenty-one and an undergraduate at Auckland University, I saw Colin McCahon’s paintings for the fi rst time. 94 The paintings were exhibited in a small gallery off Symonds Street, and they affected me deeply. Angular and globular shapes, adrift in fields of light. Figures against ground with no fi xed point of view. Afterimages moving from the frames and out of the room into a city that I reentered with all my senses altered, as though I were high on hashish. I walked in a daze. Horizons were overturned. At times I did not know whether or not the pavement was on the same plane as the sea. I was seeing Auckland as I had never seen it before. I saw houses in windows and windows in the sky. In Freeman’s Bay the gas tanks were like tin cans floating between pylon and lattice, disobedient of gravity and perspective. I walked without knowing where I was going. I would learn that McCahon regarded these tilted, unhinged, or floating blocks as “obstructions” to one’s hope for a world unmenaced by nuclear annihilation, oblique expressions of his search for “a way through” when these gates would swing open and “beat . . . with a human heart.” 95 Inchoately, perhaps, I glimpsed in these paintings my own struggle to break free of the stifling, censorious, and unimaginative middle-class world that had impinged on me for as long as I could remember. It was not the end of the world that I feared, but the prospect of never escaping the world in which I had been raised, never truly coming into my own. Where some of my contemporaries sought escape in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, I found my answer in poetry and travel. That both these options merged in my mind may have had something to do with my high school poetry textbook, the title of which came from the first line of John Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” Much have I traveled in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

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Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. An equally plausible explanation is that two of the most uplifting experiences of my childhood had been journeys away from my hometown in rural Taranaki, during which I had been moved to write my first poems. Three years after my epiphany in that Symonds Street gallery, I left New Zealand and began my travels in earnest. Living in remote corners of the world, I hardly noticed the advent of the Sixties, and when I fi nally did return to New Zealand the trappings of the counterculture seemed to me narcissistic and faintly ridiculous. When old friends urged me to try acid or smoke dope, claiming that true reality lay on the far side of conventionality, I agreed with them. But I had already found my bedrock—in Aboriginal Australia, among the homeless in London, in the interior of the Congo, and on the margins of Europe. If I wanted to alter my consciousness, I knew what to do and where to go. Growing my hair long, donning Carnaby Street fashions, and getting turned on was not my path. It is possible that my determination to do my own thing kept me from recognizing other ways of reaching the palace of wisdom. Indeed, it look me many years before I discerned the parallels between myself and Philip Clairmont, and when I did it was partly through reading Martin Edmond’s illuminating biography of this artist with whom he too felt “a weird sense of kinship.”96 Strange how our lives can run along similar but separate tracks and never converge—or collide! In 1973 my wife, and daughter and I were living in Palmerston North. Philip Clairmont, with his wife and daughter, were living in a beach house at Waikenae, ninety-five miles to the south. I was teaching anthropology at Massey University; Clairmont had taken a job as a postman, and his art consisted mainly of ink and wash drawings. My marriage was stable, despite my wife’s battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Clairmont’s marriage was “tempestuous,” and husband and wife sometimes came to blows. Edmond describes the images in Clairmont’s paintings from this time as devouring the frame. “You get a sense of the painting moving out beyond the edge of the canvas or the board. It is as if the artist felt constricted by any limit upon his activity and thus moved to challenge the physical boundaries of the work, just as he constantly attempted to push through into the domain of the

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FIGURE 14 . Lightsource, Philip Clairmont, 1978. Used with permission by Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Rachel Power, and Orlando Clairmont.

forbidden in moral and intellectual inquiry, and into uncharted psychic territory.” 97 Edmond is alluding to Clairmont’s experiments with drugs as “tools of the trade”—means of opening up new vistas of consciousness, other dimensions of time, and “seeing the world from a radically different point of view.”98 Ethnography was my drug of choice—my means of achieving a displacement of the self and becoming like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes

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He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent on a peak in Darien.99 In West Africa I had been stretched to the limit, my consciousness altered, my imagination surfeited. Fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone had cast me ashore on an island of otherness from which I had returned transformed. Every morning, in the old washhouse I had converted into a study, I worked on Allegories of the Wilderness. My window framed a view of the Ruahine Range. In the foreground a solitary cypress tree and corrugated iron fence separated the grounds of Freyberg High School from an abandoned quarry, now paved with basketball courts. But my mind was not on what could be seen outside the window. I was back in the Kuranko village of Firawa, in a landscape of tawny grasslands and sparse acacia scrub, with the bluish haze of the Loma Mountains on the horizon, or ensconced in a crowded mud-plastered room where, night after night, I would listen to fabulous tales of jinn and were-animals, of men who could detach and exchange their genitals, of hyenas that could change into seductive women, and of mortars and baskets that could speak. Every evening, when I came home from the university where I taught classes based on my African research, I would practice yoga, exploring new possibilities of using my body and breath, stilling my mind. Had I met Philip Clairmont, would we have had anything to say to each other? The parallels are compelling. I spent my childhood longing to escape the provincial town in which, by some accident of fate, I had been thrown. My bookish entrancement with travel and adventure in tropical regions presaged my fascination with ethnography. As a boy, Clairmont “wanted to be a bull fighter or a painter . . . nothing else.”100 Whether he had discovered bullfighting through Goya, or vice versa, he was unsure, but in an interview in 1981 he said it didn’t matter. “It didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t in Spain.” And he goes on to speak of the “dingy surroundings” in which he grew up and his need to escape. “Life had to be something more than just living, it had to be painted.” He also needed to escape his mother’s influence and find a way of living on his own terms, not hers. As a boy, I escaped into a Wordsworthian infatuation with landscape. “When I thought of the world to which I was naturally heir I did not think

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primarily of family or lineage, but of a quiet bend in a local river, a pine plantation, a remnant stand of native bush, a hill from which, on a clear day, I could see the mountain. These elements defined a social macrocosm of which I felt intimately a part.”101 By contrast, Clairmont would become a painter of interiority, by which he meant both the inside of a house, with its miscellaneous furniture, and the inside of his own mind. “I’m not consciously trying to do anything except paint. The more the unconscious comes in the better.” In a television documentary, he is shown working on a painting of a window. “I’ve taken quite a few liberties with the window,” he says, “but that’s the basis, that’s the starting point. Its an internal view of the inside of my head perhaps.” But the house he inhabits is shared with his wife and son. “Every day there’s things that intrude. Somehow you’ve got to accommodate them, I think.” There are times when he thinks he should live like a hermit, because the painting demands all his time and attention. “Because you can’t just stop in mid-stream . . . when you’re creating something . . . and yet, on the other hand, painters and artists are people, and human beings, and have the desire to do the same things that other people do, and have children and families and a house, and all that rubbish.” But you can tell from his embarrassed tone of voice that he is reluctant to dismiss his family life as “rubbish,” even though he is often under pressure from male friends to see it as inimical to the full flowering of artistic genius.102 And when he confesses that “a painterly relationship to an aesthetic object, like a chair or whatever” is sometimes to be preferred to a relationship with a person, you know that he wants to have it both ways—giving objects life through his painting and giving his wife and children life through his devotion to them. Even though his wife Rachel says, “I often feel its just Orlando [her son] and I, rather than Phil and Orlando and I,” and admits to sometimes feeling “annihilated” by “the chaos of Phil’s unconscious,” she speaks of his generosity. Others, too, would attest to his attachment to hearth and home and his commitments to his “creative partnerships with women” and his two children.103 But his affection for objects was equally intense. Most of my paintings have been concerned about a specific object. No matter how battered or old it may be, over the years it can develop, it can have a certain mana, a certain essence which becomes important. The objects around me become very dear to me after a period of time, or

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repeated abuse. I often fi nd it pretty hard to part with these things. Of course I have parted with some of them through necessity, and I quite regret it now. I’d like to have an area big enough to hold them all. . . . Because they’re around you get to know them. They’re intimate things, we use them. . . . Eventually they become part of our own obsessions. . . . Hopefully people don’t end up like that.”

The poignancy of this statement derives not from Clairmont’s vision of inert objects as vibrant matter, but from his awareness that human beings can become mere things. His fascination with household objects—a chair, couch, table, bed, ironing board, lightbulb, door knocker, window, mirror— may have been born of a desperation to avoid the vexations of intimate relationships (“you don’t have to confront people”)—carving out an artificial space in which he could exercise complete control. But whatever biographical truth there may be in this, the truth of his art lies in its power to make objects mediate transformations in our experience and the reciprocal power of our experience to bring objects to life. How else can we understand his declaration that “Art Is My Life” and his repeated references to painting as askesis. “People do change. I think I’m changing every time I

15 . Staircase Night Triptych, Philip Clairmont, 1978. Used with permission by Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Rachel Power, and Orlando Clairmont.

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paint. Painting can bring about change. I mean, that’s part of the idea, that’s why you do it.” If the painter changes, so do the people and things on which he depends. In recognizing the animate properties of things, one paradoxically deprives them of their power to provide us with a sense of security-in-durability. Just as relationships atrophy and love dies, so lightbulbs burn out, mirrors break, houses fall, upholstery gets torn, things wear out, and even paint decays. One can only delay this entropy by throwing oneself back, time and time again, into the task of bringing things to life in words, paint, or repair work. With things and persons alike, this can only be achieved through energetic interaction. As Heidegger observed in his famous essay on “The Thing,” we only become aware of a jug’s function when we fill it with liquid and pour the liquid out. Our actions alone reveal what a jug is.104 Its identity as a vessel for holding liquid is a product of our interactions with it, from the moment of its manufacture to the various moments of its use, when we pick it up by the handle, tilt it, empty it, and refill it. Etymologically, the Old High German word thing means a gathering (the Icelandic National Parliament is the Althing , or general assembly) in which land, people, gods, sagas, and life stories come together. Like things and persons, each depends on the other for its own existence. In Maori thought, this vital connection is explained in terms of the hau (breath, wind, spirit) that inheres in a valued object (taonga). When the object is given as a gift, its hau constrains the receiver to pass it on until, ultimately and ideally, the gift returns to its place of origin. That we sometimes speak of putting our hearts and souls (or blood, sweat, and tears) into our work, or that Maori should speak of the hau of a treasured object, suggest that the value that accrues to a product is a function of the intense and timeconsuming labor of producing it.105 Dancing vigorously on the land may be likened to carving an ancestral mask, giving birth, or making a farm. The intense labor of the dancer, carver, mother, or farmer is felt to flow into the object or other, which becomes imbued with subjectivity. It then appears to speak to the human subject in response to the human subject’s action on it. The distinctive stomping of Aboriginal men’s dance sends vibrations into the ground that are taken as evidence of the stirring into life of the ancestral essences (kuruwarri ) that steep the earth underfoot. Among the Bamana of Mali, the “energy of action” is reified as nyama—a vibrant force that animates all living things and whose strength is correlated with the stress or intensity

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of the effort put into the vital activity.106 Thus the “arduous labor,” skill, concentration, and effort involved in ironworking entails the “release” of nyama, as does the work of formal speech, hunting and circumcision.107 Indeed, so overwhelming is the nyama released from such practices that an unskilled worker may be blinded or killed by the force.108 This notion that inept labor may create a negative force in the object worked upon is similar to the Maori notion that the vital force (hau) inherent in every fabricated object may be “turned aside” (whitia) and cause illness and misfortune if it is not continually given away or exchanged.109 The generosity with which Maori will often give you an object or article of clothing that you admire is not simply motivated by regard for your need; the object itself demands that it be passed on. Insofar as labor transfers vitality and spirituality from the laboring subject to the object worked upon, labor creates an intersubjective bond between people and things. This is why artists in many societies experience themselves as channels through which divine inspiration flows into the object. Gola mask carvers in Liberia believe they are inspired by jinn who appear to them in dreams,110 and throughout Africa the notion that some inner force fi nds expression in the object carved leads to elaborate precautions being taken to ensure that the carver is in the right frame of mind when sculpting a figurine or mask or in a good relationship with his spirit allies. Among the Anang of southeast Nigeria, the carver relinquishes other commitments, avoids working to the point of exhaustion or in the heat of the day, and abstains from sexual intercourse, lest he create an imperfect work or risk injury to himself in the course of the carving.111 Yoruba carvers are equally sensitive to the ways in which an art object may imitate its creator’s personality. One master carver, Owoeye Oluwuro, told William Bascom “that a traditional Èfòn sculptor, before he initiated any important commission involving the carving of human eyes, mouth, and nose, had to make a sacrifice of sugarcane, dried maize with red palm oil, and pigeons to prevent the entrance of ugliness into his carving.” These sweetening, smoothing, and uplifting images help guarantee that no clumsy adzing will despoil the carved face or create ugly features that might then be transmitted to the face of the sculptor’s next-born child.112 Explaining how he transforms logs into art, the Tanzanian wood-carver Lugwani observes, “I do not impose my own ideas on the wood—it tells me

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what to do; it helps me to think creatively.” And in commenting on the carving of one particular abstract sculpture, Lugwani noted that at first the log seemed resistant, but after two week’s work he was able to say, “I am no longer fighting the wood; it has revealed itself to me and we are working together.”113 If I have strayed into cross-cultural comparison, it is because I believe that while every artist, like every human being, is unique, everyone shares common human experiences—in this case, the experience of the fungibility of objects and subjects—their interchangeability as well as their interdependence. Clairmont shares with these other artists, working in very different cultural settings and with very different materials, a strong sense that vitality inheres in our relations with materiality. More compellingly, perhaps, he also shares the view that the source of this vitality lies beyond our immediate world, on the far side of both persons and things. In seeking to access this elusive realm of light and power, the things of this world are not only channels but impediments. Clairmont’s paintings are filled with things that bar the visionary’s way—the grate of a fireplace, the muntins of a window, the rails of a chair, the bannisters of a staircase, the frame of a painting. He is hell-bent on breaking through to the other side. But the other side is not without, but within. This is why the interiors that he paints so passionately and unrelentingly are psychological rather than domestic. The world at hand matters to him, of course, but what obsesses him is the world beyond, which is not so much a location as another dimension of time.114 “The hardest part of living with Phil, or being with Phil,” Rachel says when interviewed on film, “is possibly the chaos [she laughs], you know, manifested in the domestic area and from himself, really. In his case, individuality and creativity can assume an easy and sometimes proud indifference to shabbiness and squalor.”115 But if chaos reigns around and within him, Clairmont’s work presents us with images of order. As Edmond suggests, the space of the painting provided a space in which Clairmont was in control. “He would relieve his feelings by cutting up and reassembling images, literally remaking the world.”116 In this way, disassembling and reassembling objects from the interior of his house had, as its magical corollary, a disassembling and reassembling of the subjects in the interior of his own mind. During my ten years in the Manawatu, I explored the region with a passion. But my mind was so often in Sierra Leone, and so absorbed by my experiences among the Kuranko, that I lived a kind of double life. So too, it

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seems did Philip Clairmont, for whom the bric-a-brac of the rooms in which he lived and painted were magical means of transcending his circumstances, so that he, in effect, entered so completely into his paintings that they became his alter egos. Such transferences of self into art call to mind Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), in which Alice fi nds herself in a world where the “normal” order of things is reversed. Some characters are mirror images of each other (Tweedledum and Tweedledee), while others are contrary or contradictory (Humpty Dumpty). Time moves toward the past, texts are read backward, seasons are reversed, objects spring to life, reality and dream are confused, and the faster you move the slower you progress. Curiously enough, Through the Looking Grass itself has a double. Within a year of this book’s publication, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon appeared, not under a pseudonym, but anonymously. And where Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) conjures an underground or mirror world, Butler creates an antipodean one in which churches are banks, money is God, invalids are criminals, and universities are Colleges of Unreason. In this antipodean world, houses are built facing north for the sun, not south; east and west are reversed. Moreover, people are drawn through life backward, their faces turned toward the past rather than the future. While Charles Dodgson lived his entire life in his homeland, Samuel Butler exchanged the gentility of bourgeois England for the wilds of New Zealand. This transplantation introduced him to animals, vegetables, and minerals that called familiar identifications into question. In Canterbury, he could not decide whether the rocks were sandstone or slate, whether masters enjoyed a greater social advantage than their servants, or vice versa, and whether farmers were creatures of routines determined by the sheep they farmed. Butler’s images of reversal suggest not only a contrarian disposition; they are evidence of his personal disorientation, struggling to find his feet down under and to come to terms with a society in which the familiar and the foreign are juxtaposed as incongruously as the coinages that will pepper his fiction—Arowhena Nosnibor, for instance, and Kahabuka, also known as Chowbok—words spelled back to front, portmanteau combinations of Maori and English phonemes, peculiar anagrams. If my ethnographic imagination bears comparison with Butler’s desire to see the world from a contrary point of view, then Clairmont’s “occult transference of essence from self to art” may be likened to Lewis Carroll’s attempts

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to escape mundane reality.117 But it is a third late nineteenth-century work of fiction that perhaps captures most dramatically the implications of Clairmont’s dissolution of the line between his art and his life. In Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), a beautiful young man declares that he would gladly “give everything” if he could remain young forever and have his self-portrait grow old in his stead. This story of the “strange affinity” and “horrible sympathy” between Dorian Gray and a painting of him that takes on “a life of its own” ends when Dorian stabs the portrait with a knife and immediately dies. I have always been fascinated by the parallels between Wilde’s story and ethnographic examples of the affinity between persons and animal familiars. For instance, among the Kuranko some individuals have the power to transform themselves into their totemic animal and, in this guise, kill, or injure their enemies. But should the shapeshifter be shot by a hunter, mistaking him for an animal, the shape-shifter also dies. Among the Highland Maya, a person’s existence is mysteriously linked to an animal spirit—his nagual—whose life, though lived in distant mountains, runs parallel to his own, so if his nagual weakens and dies, he, too, wastes away. When Philip Clairmont hanged himself, the painter Tony Fomison used gallows humor to comment on the tragedy. “You can’t be a painting, you can only do it.” Though it is tempting to pursue the idea that Clairmont’s enthusiasm for painting was on the wane, plunging the artist into depression, Edmond wisely turns his attention to other events that preceded the suicide. In 1981 the New Zealand government refused to bow to widespread public appeals to call off a Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand on the grounds that it breached the Gleneagles Agreement, signed by Commonwealth Heads of Government in 1977 to take “every practical step to discourage contact or competition by their nationals with sporting organizations, teams or sportsmen from South Africa or from any other country where sports are organized on the basis of race, colour or ethnic origin.” Philip Clairmont, along with tens of thousands of other New Zealanders (myself and my wife included), were active in the antiapartheid movement and found themselves embroiled in the violence that followed street protests against every tour event. Clairmont was even more militant than I was, probably because, as Edmond perceptively remarks, “He had inherited from both his parents

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and his uncle a siege mentality.” He was so convinced that he was caught up in a war between the individual and the state that he believed that when “you were cornered, and there was no way out, rather than become a prisoner you took your own life.”118 It is likely that Clairmont was a marked man. The riot police had files on high-profile activists and sometimes singled them out for arrest or bashings with Monadnock PR 24 long batons. Three years after the Springbok tour had divided the nation, Philip Clairmont was beaten about the head and body by police using these same long batons, though not on the street but in the kitchen of his house. Traumatized and disoriented, he took his own life four days later. Sometimes the transformations that occur in life are more surprising than the transfigurations that are effected in art, and so I was stunned, when seeking permission to use images of Philip Clairmont’s art, to receive an e-mail from his son Orlando, who had been four years old when his father died. Although Orlando had only vague memories of his father, he had recently made a television documentary,119 partly to get to know Philip Clairmont “through his work, the relics he left behind, and the people he knew, as well as things he had written and interviews he gave.” Orlando approved my exploration of the religious imagery in his father’s paintings, and he sent me several images as evidence of Philip Clairmont’s fascination with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Shamanism, and animism, including Head of Christ, Self Portrait as the Ayatollah, Lazarus Emerging from the Wardrobe, and a painting of a vase of flowers in which a miniature reproduction of Gauguin’s Yellow Christ appears. None of these images was proof of a strong identification with any one religious faith, and I explained to Orlando that this was partly why I had placed his father’s work alongside the work of Colin McCahon, Mark Rothko, Louise Bourgoise, Vincent van Gogh, Ian Fairweather, Joseph Beuys, Paddy Jupurrula Nelson, and Paul Cézanne, all of whom “transcended orthodox or institutional religious frameworks, yet whose visions and understandings touch the archetypal core of human religiosity.” Orlando responded to my e-mail by saying that his father’s art had not yet been given its due. In many ways he remains quite mysterious. Well, maybe the art is more mysterious than the man? As you can tell, I had to grapple with many a

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question sorting The Man from The Myth! I gather that there are many reasons why he remains partially submerged in the river of forgetting (perhaps: small NZ art scene issues/art market issues/unfashionable figurative expressionism/colour palette/use of drugs/use of religious imagery/use of Fascist and Nazi symbolism/being a man painting domestic interiors/being a man in the feminist ascendant early 80’s painting large bold full frontal Nudes/being anti-Tour and anti-War and generally against the politicians of the day/access to images of his work IS A BIG ONE, there is still no Clairmont Art Book . . . and committing suicide didn’t help). Yet for all that I was so moved by the impact that he (and his work) had on so many people I spoke to . . . and especially other painters/poets and visual artists . . . among whom there was a general consensus that Clairmont’s work was difficult. Confronting. Powerful. Strong. Psychedelic. Scary. Dynamic. Resplendent. Orgasmic even.

The Pare Revisited In the months before leaving New Zealand in 1968 to embark on doctoral work at Cambridge, I became absorbed in research on Maori art, particularly the carved lintel pieces, or pare, that dynamically embodied key motifs and compositional principles present in all forms of Maori carving. Several of the finest pare were on display in the Auckland Museum, and I spent many hours studying them from every angle as well as reading whatever literature I could find that might shed light on the meanings these compellingly detailed lintels had for the people who had carved them, often with stone tools, and their place in the houses and communities where they were originally installed. I brought to my interpretive work the insights of Claude LéviStrauss, whose brilliant essay on split representation in the art of Asia and America explored, without recourse to notions of diffusion or borrowing, the uncanny similarities between historically and geographically diverse traditions.120 Unlike Lévi-Strauss, however, I found little intellectual satisfaction in reducing these inverted symmetries and binary patterns to unconscious processes. I wanted to see what existential imperatives might be identified in Maori social life that would help explain what governed a carver’s thinking or guided his hand.

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When I arrived in London that autumn, several weeks before I was due to go up to Cambridge, I continued my research in the British Museum. Although there were no pare on public display, I was allowed to study pieces that the museum kept in storage. Clumsily shelved, covered with dust, and an appalling testimony to two centuries of colonial pillaging, these objects were like human remains crying out to be returned to their home marae where they would be welcomed like long-lost kin. Dusting them off, turning them over in my hands, and giving them my full attention filled me with regard for the men who had carved them as well as intense curiosity about their provenance and significance. In writing about them, I hoped I might do them justice, putting them back into circulation, even bringing them back to life. My essay on the pare was published in the Netherlands in 1972,121 by which time I was about to leave Cambridge, doctorate in hand, and return to New Zealand to take up a senior lecturership in a department of anthropology and Maori studies. Only then, as I renewed my friendship with Te Pakaka Tawhai, did I learn that my anthropological analysis was largely consistent with Maori exegesis and that I had captured in writing something of the spirit of the pare, especially its powerful invocation of the ever-changing interface between the contrasted processes of tupu (unfolding, growing, coming into existence) and mate (ailing, wanting, being defeated, overwhelmed, fading away). Forty years after the publication of my essay, I revisited the Auckland War Memorial Museum where I had carried out my initial research. The intricately carved Maori pataka, pou, pare, and wakahuia were all familiar. But what claimed my attention was the massive war canoe, Te Toki a Tapiri, carved from a single totara tree in the 1830s and now the most forceful presence in the Great Hall. For unfathomable reasons, I was in tears from the moment I began walking the thirty yards of its length, touching its wash strakes, imagining it on the gulf, dolphins plowing the water under its latticed prow. Was I grieving the violent history of my homeland and all that had passed away? Or was I dimly aware that all my peers from the decade I lived in the Manawatu—my first wife, Pauline, my friends Te Pakaka Tawhai, Hugh Kawharu, and Bill Maughan—were dead? Our lives splinter and fall apart, but after every fragmentation, every separation, the pieces are reassembled, as if in answer to some inner injunction

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Figure 16. Pare, British Museum, London.

to go on in the face of loss, to pick up the pieces, and move forward into a new phase of life. Hinga atu he tete, ara mai he tete kura (as one red frond falls, another red frond rises). The pare is a powerful condensation symbol of this process. Compressed into this single carved object that is placed above the doorway of a meetinghouse is a graphic description of this cycle of loss and recovery, disintegration and reintegration. Pare composition is invariably symmetrical, and this symmetry is centered on a confronting figure flanked by two others that are transposed profi les of the central one.122 The bilateral symmetry suggests a split representational design. The central figure is split by a line down the center of the head and may be envisaged as two profiles joined together. These profiles are called manaia. The left manaia is transposed to the right side of the pare while the right manaia is transposed to the left. The interstitial areas are sometimes filled with the “dismembered” parts of the central figure (as in many East Coast pare) or with takarangi spirals (as in the example of figure 17). In both cases, however, the effect is conjured of a dynamic process of disintegration and reintegration in which human joints—

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Figure 17. Pare, University Museum, Philadelphia.

particularly shoulders and knees—are crucial energy points. These joints are usually marked by takarangi spirals. Pare typically have three levels of relief, and the process whereby the central or integral figure is split, and its two halves transposed to opposite ends of the pare, is counterpointed by a process whereby other parts of the manaia figure, carved in lower relief, reinforce the effect of a reciprocal movement between disintegration and reintegration—a continuous cycle of coming into existence (tupu) and passing out of existence (mate). These structural features suggest cosmological, existential, and social processes. Let us begin with cosmology. In the words of Maori Marsden, the original state of the universe (te kore or te korekore) was an indeterminate state between nonbeing and being—a “realm of primal, elemental energy or latent being.” In this phase of pure potentiality, “the seed-stuff of the universe and all created things gestate. It is the womb from which all things proceed.”123 In the second phase of the universe (te po, the darkness), duality appears in the form of Rangi-awatea and Papa-tua-nuku—“the male and female principles out of which all things derived.”124 In the third phase, Te Ao Marama, the world of light, the six sons of the primal parents argue over whether sky (Rangi) and earth (Papa) should be separated, slain, or allowed to cleave together in primal darkness. Five of the sons finally agree on separating their parents, and one after the other endeavor to do so. Only Tane-mahuta, father of the forests and all that dwell in them, prevails. However, his brother, Tawhiri-ma-tea, father of winds and storms, who had opposed separating Rangi and Papa, now rises up against his brothers, who, with one exception, flee or cower before his

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onslaught. Tu-matauenga, father of fierce human beings, who alone endured Tawhiri-ma-tea’s vengeful assaults, now turns on his cowardly brothers and devours all except Tawhiri, who is strong enough to defend himself. The brothers who were devoured include Tane-mahuta, Rongo-ma-tane (father of cultivated foods), Tangaroa (father of fish and reptiles), and Haumia-tikitiki (father of uncultivated foods), and these food sources now become noa (common), the opposite of tapu (spiritually restricted). In its compelling embodiment of both creative and destructive forces, the pare captures the oedipal drama and sibling rivalry that figure in the Maori creation myth. As Te Pakaka Tawhai notes, life is a constant struggle between progression and regression.125 In this struggle between the processes of tupu (unfolding, growing, strengthening) and mate (weakening, dwindling, dying), an individual or a kin group will seek whatever will augment rather than diminish its being. Sometimes this will demand being welcoming and open to the outside world; sometimes it will demand closure and opposition. Hence the saying, Ko Tu ki te awatea, ko Tahu ki te po (Tu in the daytime, Tahu in the evening ).126 Though the passage from Te Kore through Te Po to Te Ao Marawa may be understood lineally, as an evolution from a primordial phase of potentiality to a phase of embodied human presence, it must also be seen as a process of continuous creation, exemplified by the life cycle of plants (particularly a fern frond unfurling and dying), the waxing and waning of the moon (and the menstrual cycle), the succession of the seasons, the lighting and dying of a fi re, and the human cycle of gestation, birth, death, and rebirth.127 This existential passage from undifferentiated life to differentiated life—from potentiality to presence—is explicated in myth and continually realized in everyday social life as tapu is imposed and lifted, mana is gained and lost, and destruction is countered by creation.128 Not only does the pare embody these alternating rhythms of fusion and fission, and union and division, that inform creation myths and cosmology alike; its location on the threshold of a meetinghouse effectively brings these abstract meanings down to earth. The mixture of red ocher and shark oil with which the lintel piece was dressed had significance in itself, for kura (red) was associated with Te Po, the liminal realm between To Kore and Te Ao Marama. Identified with blood, redness invokes death and dissolution as

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well as rebirth and new life. Not surprisingly, red also signifies a state of tapu—of restriction or suspended life. This is also consistent with the way in which the central figure is carved. Some pare call to mind the mythological moment when Tane-mahuta separated sky from earth, admitting light into the world and creating a space for humanity to live and breathe. Other pare depict a female figure in a state of parturition. But, in both instances, ambiguity is of the essence. By separating the primal parents, Tane created a world of light, but also a world of perpetual turmoil, caused by wind and storms (the forces of Tawhiri-ma-tea) or by war (the forces of Tu-matauenga). This ambiguity also obtains for the female figure, since the vagina is associated both with childbirth and with death because the trickster hero Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga was squeezed to death between the thighs of Hine-nui-te-po (the goddess of Te Po) as he tried to reenter her womb and thereby reverse time and make humanity immortal. These multiple allusions to Te Po and Te Ao Marama—darkness and light, death and life—are not the arbitrary by-products of a baroque imagination but a direct reflection of the social dynamics of precontact Maori social existence. One of James Cook’s first impressions of the New Zealanders was that they “must live under perpetual apprehensions of being destroyed by each other.”129 Their largely nomadic summer life, the relatively small size of economic groupings, and the pressures of population growth on scarce resources made division and competiveness inevitable, quite apart from the oedipal and sibling rivalries to which myth and history so often allude. Yet extended families (whanau) would periodically come together as a single hapu (kinship group), children were regularly given in adoption to other families, and several hapu would be drawn into political alliances, economic cooperation, and bonds of marriage, suggesting that tribal unity was a transcendent ideal—a plaited rope, entire from source to mouth (he taura whirikotahi mai ano i te kopounga tae noa ki to puau). Significantly too, a death would bring dispersed or estranged kin back to their home marae and often rekindle ties that had grown cold. On this theme of kinship amity and solidarity (manaaki ), the Maori scribe Hoani Te Whatahoro (1841–1923) writes, “It is a bad sign when the door (in the front gable) turns against the back gable and kills. If the house collapses, where is then a shelter from wind and storm? The house keeps human

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beings during the gale, the food keeps them alive behind the palisades of the fortress. By solidarity (manaaki) between human beings their power (mana) is maintained.”130 This association between a dwelling house and the caring warmth of close kinship helps us understand the emotional resonances of entering a wharenui or meetinghouse. It also helps us understand the significance of the pare. Placed above the doorway through which one enters the ancestral space of the house, it serves as a vital reminder that one is now passing from a world of strife and separation into a world of ancestral presences and genealogical unity. In many cases one is moving from death to life. When the Taupo chief Te Heheu decided to end a long-standing feud with another chief, he built a new house, named it Te Rira ka Wareware (“the forgotten quarrel”) and invited his former enemy to visit him. His guest was entertained in the new house.131 A similar story is told of Uepohatu Hall, named for a renowned Ngati Porou chief. The building was the inspiration of Sir Apirana Ngata who supervised its construction at a time when the Maori battalion was suffering calamitous reversals in the North African desert. No family in Ngati Porou was spared the anguish of loss. To help share the grief and reaffirm the value of life, Ngata brought people together in night schools to receive instruction in whakapapa (genealogy) and to recover the waning arts of carving, weaving, and poetry. To give material form to this spiritual renaissance, Ngata proposed that a great hall be built as a permanent memorial to all who had fought for freedom in the two world wars. But for succeeding generations, Uepohatu Hall would become not only a memorial to warrior ancestors but a place pervaded by the spirit of those who built it. Te Pakaka once told me that Uepohatu was one of the few places that brought Maori and European traditions together without compromising either. The interior of the hall is carved and decorated in the style of other Maori meetinghouses, but the outside is unembellished and resembles an ordinary European community hall. Within the body of the hall, biblical motifs are juxtaposed with images of the rivers, mountains, and shoreline that sustained the soldiers far from home. And in its dedication to Uepohatu the hall harks back to Maui who, using his grandmother’s lower jaw as a fishhook and clotted blood from his own nose as bait, hauled up the North Island (Te Ika a Maui), with Hikurangi emerging first from the waters—a place of salvation and newborn life. As Te Pakaka expressed it, Uepohatu “embraces to itself the mana of all the peoples

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of New Zealand . . . ” its purpose “to concentrate the mana of all New Zealanders under the one roof.”132 To cross the threshold of a meetinghouse and to pass beneath the pare involves a rite de passage between present and mythological time that evokes the cosmological cycle of difference and sameness, disunity and unity, darkness and light. In the words of Victor Turner, one might say that the pare gives “an outward and visible form to an inward and conceptual process.”133 Building on van Gennep’s insights into the organic imagery of transitional processes, Turner notes that liminal processes are “analogous to those of gestation, parturition, and sucking. Undoing, dissolution, decomposition are accompanied by processes of growth, transformation, and the reformulation of old elements in new patterns.”134 These observations, born of fieldwork in Europe and Southern Africa, bear an uncanny similarity to the way in which Maori carvers incorporated natural symbols into their work. Such echoes and reiterations testify to the existential commonalities of peoples whose economic, political, and cultural lives are radically different and remind us that people everywhere confront identical issues of dealing with difference, overcoming division, and accepting the inevitable passage from life to death. While art depicts, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, these existential imperatives, it also enables people to address them and experience, if only for a moment, their power to transcend them, even though the world is never really changed by their imaginative endeavors.

A Man of Constant Sorrow: The Existential Art of Colin McCahon For the New Zealand painter Colin McCahon, Mondrian presented an insuperable barrier—“the painting to END all painting.” How, McCahon asked himself, “do you get around either a Michelangelo or a Mondrian?” His answer—“the only way is not more ‘masking-tape’ but more involvement in the human situation.”135 McCahon’s words rang true for me when I first read them, and they echo Francis Bacon’s remark, twenty years later, that “its going to be much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all.”136 Such comments not only dismiss the idea of fame and fashion out

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of hand; they suggest that the wellsprings of art and of religion lie beneath discourse and doctrine and that the human condition is only partially encompassed by such labels. McCahon’s words are as relevant for those who make art as for those who write poetry, practice religion, pursue philosophy, or do ethnography. For whatever path we choose or craft we cultivate, the burning issue remains life itself—how we address its intractable dilemmas, endure its heartbreaking disappointments, and cope with its impossible demands. I have always seen an elective affinity between McCahon’s vision and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy. While McCahon’s word paintings recall Benjamin’s theological conception of language, and his view that all experience, including perception, is essentially linguistic, his millenarian messages echo Benjamin’s messianic interpretations of history. Both men saw the work of art as more than the expression of artistic genius, aesthetic values, or technical mastery; it explores the redemptive and transformative power of art to change our lives. And Benjamin’s notion of “profane illumination” (profane Erleuchtung ) applies equally to McCahon,137 whose “visionary” work— unlike, say, Philip Clairmont’s—did not depend on narcotics, alcohol, orthodox religion, or politics. Dawn breaks on a bleak hill horizon or light cuts through the darkness like a waterfall or gravel road, and these glimmers of hope at once lift our spirits and reveal the dispiriting wilderness in which we wander—“a landscape with too few lovers,” a Pacific atoll devastated and poisoned by atomic testing, a gannet colony under siege, a cross that cannot be borne, faith undermined by doubt, a bridge under construction, an artist who has seen the light only to find himself vilified and willfully misunderstood by those with whom he attempts to share his vision. “McCahon came to see himself as a man to whom society had no wish to listen,” writes Gordon Brown. “People were unwilling to contemplate the truths his pictures contained: they found them visually unbearable [and this] adverse reaction to his work . . . hurt him . . . deeply. The combination of real and imagined grievances also made McCahon a victim of himself. His increasing consumption of cheap, sweet wine provided an allusion of escape, but such temporary oblivion carried no lasting solution: it only brought on the disease of alcoholism.”138 In the last canvas he painted, McCahon drew on Ecclesiastes 4:1–8 to speak his mind. The unfinished, undated painting came to light when his

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son and daughter went into their father’s studio a few hours after his death. Painted seven years before he went into psychological and physical decline and loss of faith, this black canvas with its white cursive script lay, symbolically, facedown on the floor. I considered all the acts of oppression here under the sun; I SAW the tears of the oppressed and I saw that there was no one to comfort them. strength was on the side of their oppressors and their was no one to avenge them. I counted the dead happy because they were dead, happier than the living who were still in life. More fortunate than than either I reckoned man yet unborn, who had not witnessed the wicked deeds done here under the SUN. I considered all toil and all achievement and saw that it comes form rivalry between man and man. This too is emptiness and chasing the wind. The fool folds his arms and wastes away. Better one hand full and peace of mind than both fists full and toil that is chasing the wind. Here again I saw emptiness under the SUN with out son or brother toiling endless yet never

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Reading these poignant lines, I am reminded of a comment by the poet James K. Baxter, with whom McCahon felt a deep kinship—“the sense of having been pounded all over with a club by invisible adversaries is generally with me, and has been with me as long as I can remember”139—and it occurs to me that both men felt like prophets crying in the wilderness, seeking community and care in a cold and inhospitable country. As Baxter put it in 1955, speaking of the unhappy relationship between poets and the New Zealand public, “On the side of the public there is indifference or the resentment of those who feel that the modern idiom is unnecessarily highbrow and obscure; on the side of the poets there is isolation, and often the touchiness of those who feel that their best labour goes unappreciated, or the aggressiveness of those who must raise their voice to be heard at all.”140 Thirteen years after writing these grim comments on the plight of the artist or intellectual in a provincial and plebian society,141 Baxter had also reached a point of physical and moral exhaustion. “He had lost faith in himself as a parent and a husband” and imagined that he was being called to Jerusalem, a small Maori settlement on the Wanganui River.142 In a cryptic poem he wrote me in early 1968, six months before I left New Zealand to pursue doctoral studies at Cambridge, he alluded to his own immanent break with the world that had brought him such grief. one must still go Another journey to another place Where without kisses, without the clasping of fingers, The snake-haired women will appear Naked, clothed in our own deformity, And take us singly through the gate in the rock To the paddock of the slavegirl Blandina, To whom the soul is broken or else becomes A bird, born out of blood, another creature. McCahon’s paintings are also replete with images of gates, paths, and journeys and, like Baxter, McCahon would turn to Maori traditions as a way of escaping what he saw as the spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy of the Pakeha (European) world. But the religiosity of both men was a far cry from the

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bourgeois Christianity to which others paid lip service. The cross that appears in so many of McCahon’s paintings had its origins in pre-Christian Sumer and Egypt,143 while Baxter’s faith was a heady mixture of Catholic, Maori, Greek, Celtic, and Hindu mythology. For both men, moreover, their quarrels with the status quo entailed a kind of martyrdom in which hardship, grief, and moral chaos were accepted as the conditions under which “the soul is too destitute to be able to lie to itself ” and one’s own unique artistic understandings could arise.144 Although many critics have spoken of McCahon as a “religious painter,” and his son William has stated explicitly that his father’s paintings “reflect a committed Christian perspective,” McCahon was skeptical of “formal Churches and their rules of worship” and eschewed liturgy in rather the same spirit in which he called himself a painter, rather than an artist.145 When I first saw McCahon’s cartoonlike paintings of the annunciation, crucifi xion, and resurrection in the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1958, I regarded them as allegories of what McCahon called “the human condition”146—coincidentally the title of Hannah Arendt’s monumental study of the vita activa, published that same year. For McCahon, “sin” was not what separates us from God; it was “anything that separates us from reality . . . whether it is the reality that is called God or the reality called Man (who created God in his image!) or the reality of the world about us.”147 This stark and earth-bound vision resists the etherealizing tendencies of orthodox religious thought and helps one understand McCahon’s comment to his son William: “I only need black and white to say what I have to say. It is a matter of light and dark.”148 This vision came early to McCahon, as the following childhood epiphany suggests. In his hometown of Timaru, “two new shops had been built next door.” One was Mrs McDonald’s Fruit Shop and Dairy, the other was taken by a hairdresser and tobacconist. Mrs. McDonald had her window full of fruit and other practical items. The hairdresser had his window painted with HAIRDRESSER AND TOBACCONIST. Painted in gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold, with shadows, and a feeling of being projected right through the glass and across the pavement. I watched the work being done and fell in love with sign painting.

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The grace of the lettering as it arched across the window in gleaming gold, suspended on its dull red field but leaping free from its own black shadow, pointed to a new and magnificent world of painting. I watched from outside as the artist working inside slowly separated himself from me (and light from dark) to make his new creation.149

Though McCahon was loath to endow this “day of splendor” with too much significance, his paintings of dark hills with embers dawning or dying along the horizon, over which he inscribes passages from the Bible, return continually to that iconic window of plate glass in which gold, black, and ruby lettering overlay shadowy landscapes and scattered cloud. For me, the moment is pivotal. As a boy, in Inglewood Taranaki, I used to walk past E. MAETZIG AND SON WATCHMAKERS AND JEWELLERS most mornings and afternoons on my way to and from school. This lettering was also large and bold, with shadows, and painted in gold and black on a stippled red ground, and you could look through the plate glass window to where shelves and cabinets were arrayed with ticking clocks or switch your focus and dwell on the reflections of storefronts across the street, or scudding rain cloud, momentarily caught off-balance between the wild sky and the orderly interior. Ernst Maetzig senior (1882–1952) had immigrated to New Zealand from Landsberg, Germany, and he and my grandfather (himself an immigrant from England) were close friends and bowling partners. After the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, anti-German sentiment in my hometown intensified. Patriotic committees and drunken youths hurled abuse at locals with German names, and German shops were attacked and looted, including Maetzig’s. As the only policeman in Inglewood, my grandfather was stretched to the limit, trying to control the violence. When Parliament passed legislation for interning German-New Zealanders on Matiu/Somes Island in Wellington Harbor, my grandfather had no option but to detain his friend Ernst Maetzig and put him among others on a special train that took them under police escort to Wellington. His shame at this episode never left him, and he related the story to me so often that, years later, when I read reviews of Colin McCahon’s paintings in which the artist was reviled and stigmatized, I wondered whether the bigotry and defensiveness of my countrymen might also, if I stayed around, be the end of me.

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“I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land, and not yet to its people,” McCahon once wrote. “My work has largely been to communicate this vision and to invent a way to see it.”150 Something of the same disenchantment pervades John Mulgan’s 1947 Report on Experience when he speaks of the country “so old in itself that none of us have dared touch it; we have only just begun to live there. . . . We could leave it ourselves now. In a few years the red-roofed wooden bungalows would rot with borer and crumble into the earth . . . ” Mulgan goes on to speak of the emptiness of the land and of the conflict that rises in New Zealanders because of it: Because there have never been enough of them nor have they had sufficient confidence in themselves to take over the country, so that they live there like strangers or as men might in a dream which will one day wake and destroy them. . . . This is one reason why New Zealanders, a young people but already with a place in history, are often wanderers and restless and unhappy men. They come from the most beautiful country in the world, but it is a small country and very remote. After a while this isolation oppresses them and they go abroad. They roam the world looking not for adventure but for satisfaction.

Unlike Mulgan, McCahon did not go abroad looking for satisfaction, except once in 1958. When he came home to Titirangi after several months in the US, he found his suburban bungalow “cold and dripping and shut in.” Recalling the tumbleweed blowing across the Nevada desert, and the “open land round Ox Bow & the nothing, endless land around Salt Lake & out of Colorado,” McCahon “fled north in memory and painted the ‘Northland Panels.’” He described what he was trying to do as “like spitting on the clay to open the blind man’s eyes.” McCahon painted the eight strips of canvas that make up the Panels in the space of a single afternoon, working on the sundeck of his Titirangi house and retouching the canvases over the following weeks. The canvases remained unframed. McCahon intended us to walk among them as we might journey through a landscape, glimpsing it from the window of a train or car. Rain falls, the weather clears, a gravel road disappears into a dark green hill,

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clouds are bundled along a ridge in the wind, the sky is sometimes black against the white of the sea. One of the panels bore the inscription “a landscape with too few lovers.” Was this intended as a criticism of New Zealander’s failure to appreciate the wild and distinctive physicality of their country or a response to the social isolation that oppressed so many of us? The first interpretation is supported by comments on Northland that McCahon made in 1977. “It’s a painful love, loving a land, it takes a long time. I stood with an old Maori lady on a boat from Australia once—a terribly rough and wild passage. We were both on deck to see the Three Kings—us dripping with tears. It’s there that this land starts. The very bones of New Zealand were there, bare yellow clay-slides running to the sea, and black rock.151 The second interpretation, which is not incompatible with the fi rst, is made clear in James K. Baxter’s 1966 assertion that Love is not valued much in Pig Island Though we admire its walking parody152 At about the same time that McCahon was producing his Necessary Protection paintings (1971–1975), he developed a sympathetic identification with the great Maori prophetic leaders Rua Kenana, Te Ua-Haumene, and Te Whiti-o-Rongomai. His own quest for a promised land coalesced, in this new work, with the struggles of these Maori spiritual leaders to reestablish Maori sovereignty in their own land.153 In mythological terms, the common cause was to move from Te Po, the darkness, to Te Ao Marama, the world of light, and thereby usher in a world inhabited by the sons and daughters of man, reconciled and at peace. Even before the end of the Second Taranaki War in 1869, two prophetic Te Atiawa leaders and close kin, Te Whiti-o-Rongomaia and Tohu Kakahi, had established a community at Parihaka and declared their intention of negotiating a peace with Pakeha based on the principal of coexistence. Europeans could remain on the land they now occupied, but there were to be no further encroachments on Maori land and no freehold titles, since chieftancy (tino rangatiratanga) of the land remained with the people of the land (tangata whenua) and was inalienable. In 1878, despite Maori petitions and protests, the government began surveying Central Taranaki, determined to

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open it up to European settlers. Te Whiti and Tohu, now leaders of the largest and most prosperous Maori settlement in New Zealand, led a campaign of passive resistance—fencing and plowing occupied farmland, pulling up survey pegs, and escorting surveyors from the land still under their control. Though hundreds of these ploughmen and fencers were arrested and imprisoned, others took their place. Settlers feared that the resistance campaign was a prelude to renewed armed conflict, and, under pressure from Native Minister John Bryce, whose hatred of Maori was no secret, the government ordered Parihaka to be shut down. At first light on November 5, 1881, one thousand six hundred troops stormed the town, only to be met by two hundred skipping and singing children offering them bread. Maui Pomare was one of these children. He was five at the time and lost his big toe after a trooper’s horse stamped on it. The soldiers then rushed the women, calling them bloody black niggers, threatening to cut off their heads. Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested and jailed for sixteen months. Sixteen hundred Parihaka inhabitants were expelled and dispersed throughout Taranaki without food or shelter, and the remaining six hundred residents were issued with government passes to control their movement. Two hundred and fifteen years after the destruction of Parihaka, the Waitangi Tribunal noted that “it cannot be assumed that grievance dissipates with time. Witness after witness described the numerous respects in which they, in their view, have been marginalized as a people and how the burden of the war is still with them and their dispossession has preoccupied their

FIGURE 18 . Parihaka Triptych, Colin McCahon, 1972. Used with permission by the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust, held in trust by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery for the people of Parihaka. Image courtesy of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand.

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thinking. When a grievance of this magnitude is left unaddressed, it compounds with time and expands, as do generations, in geometric progression.” There is a tragic irreversibility about colonial violence. While one celebrates gestures toward reconciliation—such as the 1999 Heads of Agreement, involving a public apology for land confiscations in Taranaki, recognition of cultural associations with sacred geographical landmarks and land areas, restoration of tribal access to traditional food gathering areas, monetary compensation totaling NZ $34 million, and commercial redress for economic loss due to land confiscation—some losses cannot be made good; some scars cannot be healed. Moreover, every slight and injustice in the present will be referred back to the past, fuel for a fire that might otherwise die. Indeed, the power of history over us is so great that I sometimes think that, despite the need to redress old injustices and promote a bicultural future, we are deluded in believing that we can sink our differences and unite on equal terms. And for all the rhetoric of reconciliation, the apologies and payments, the status quo remains unaltered—the poor get poorer; Maori youth languish in prisons; Maori health and education statistics show no signs of improvement. The unresolved relationship between the Te Whiti and Tohu factions at Parihaka, the nineteenth-century confrontations between Pakeha militias and the community, and ongoing tensions in Maori-Pakeha relations all find oblique expression in McCahon’s Parihaka Triptych.154 Here as elsewhere, he uses a gestalt of solid, contending blocks and a cross of light, so that one’s

19 . Urewera Mural, Colin McCahon, 1975. Used with permission by the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust. Reproduced with permission from Tuhoe Te Uru Taumatua and Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai.

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focus constantly switches between the obdurate masses and the redemptive figure of the cross. Whenever I return to my natal country, two questions preoccupy me— whether today’s New Zealand is the kind of place in which Baxter and McCahon might find acceptance and whether the country will realize the bicultural ideals—historical injustices addressed, inequalities overcome, reconciliation accomplished—that for McCahon and many Maori coalesce with issues of personal recognition and acceptance. When one’s soul is sundered by grief and doubt, one becomes prone to see these wider problems pessimistically. And so, as one gazes upon McCahon’s triptych, Urewera Mural, one contemplates the conflicts associated with the history of this work—the violent police assault on Rua Kenana’s new Jerusalem in 1916 and the theft of the painting in 1997 by a Tuhoe activist in a protest against the “removal of the lakes and mountains from the Tuhoe people”—and asks oneself if a balm will ever be found for the constant sorrow that besets the people of Aotearoa-New Zealand. Both political grievances and personal tribulations find expression in this sense of separation and loss. In April 1984, only six months after the death of my wife Pauline, I went to see an exhibition of McCahon’s paintings at the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art in Sydney. One painting in particular, of a tau cross illuminating the space between abutting blocks of darkness, brought me to tears. But they were tears of joy as much as tears of grief. The painting lifted my spirits and fi lled me with an overwhelming sense of life’s bounty and promise. But almost twenty years would pass before I learned of the strange irony of that moment—for at the same time that I was discovering a new lease on life in the wake of my devastating loss, Colin McCahon was wandering, alone and bewildered, through the streets of Sydney and was not found until a day later, two miles away and with no memory of who he was or where he had been. Moved by this sad story of a great artist, confined to a hospital while a major retrospective exhibition of his work opened to wide acclaim, Edmond researched and wrote his Dark Night Walking with McCahon, in which he attempts to retrace the painter’s steps that night in 1984 and find a way of affi rming that, even when disoriented and in despair, there is light in the darkness, meaning in the void, peace in the feud, love in enmity, new life in the face of loss.

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3. The Storm, Edvard Munch, 1893.

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5. Self Portrait, Vincent van Gogh, 1889.

FIGURE 6 . Door 8: Yarlakurlu (Big Yam), Paddy Jupurrula Nelson. Used with permission by Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association and Eric Michaels, Kuruwarri Doors (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1987).

FIGURE 9 . Monastery, Ian Fairweather, 1961. Used with permission by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Artists Rights Society New York/ DACS, London.

FIGURE 10 . Forking Tongues, Simryn Gill, 1992. Used with permission by Simryn Gill and Tracy Williams, Ltd. Photo by Jenni Carter.

13 . Convict and Mrs Fraser, Sidney Nolan, 1957. Used with permission by Bridgeman Images.

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FIGURE 14 . Lightsource, Philip Clairmont, 1978. Used with permission by Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Rachel Power, and Orlando Clairmont.

FIGURE 15 . Staircase Night Triptych, Philip Clairmont, 1978. Used with permission by Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Rachel Power, and Orlando Clairmont.

FIGURE 18 . Parihaka Triptych, Colin McCahon, 1972. Used with permission by the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust, held in trust by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery for the people of Parihaka. Image courtesy of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand.

FIGURE 19 . Urewera Mural, Colin McCahon, 1975. Used with permission by the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust. Reproduced with permission from Tuhoe Te Uru Taumatua and Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai.

FIGURE 20 . Large Pine Tree and Red Earth, Paul Cezanne, 1890–1895. Used with permission by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin.

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21 . The House with the Cracked Walls, Paul Cezanne, 1892–1894.

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26 . Up-On-The-Downs, Grahame Sydney, 2006.

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Landscape and Nature Morte: The Art of Paul Cézanne N O A R T C A N C OM PL E T E LY C L OS E T H E G A P BE T W E E N T H E U N PR E DIC Tability or refractoriness of life and the order we so artfully impose upon it in the name of art, ritual, or religion. Our awareness of this gap is never completely extinguished.1 There is always something that eludes our grasp, some experience that cannot be tamed and symbolized in language, and the memory of this remainder haunts us.2 As Wallace Stevens puts it in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the singing ends, and, as we turn toward the town, our “blessed rage for order,” “the maker’s rage to order words of the sea,” gives ground to “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” In this view, art, like poetry, lies at the limits of language, on the threshold of what can be securely apprehended or embraced—an absent loved one, a dead friend, a country from which we have been exiled, an unrealized ambition, a utopian vision. No artist better captures this inescapable tension between the world as it is and the artificial worlds we create in our attempts to mirror or master lived reality than Paul Cézanne. It was during the winter of 1963–64 that I saw my first Cézanne. I was working among the homeless in London at the time, and art galleries were places of warmth where I took refuge from the streets and let my mind wander.

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The painting is of Mont Sainte-Victoire (1887), and it hangs in the Courtauld. There’s a pine tree on the left, leaning away, with a single bough extending across the top of the painting. You can feel it moving in the wind, actually see the effect of the wind on the pine needles and smell the resin. And then, across this breathtaking plain that reminded me strongly of the Wairarapa in my native New Zealand, the lilac mountain with its magical presence . . . Did I realize, through this painting, the impossibility of ever finding such an idyllic region, of having to accept that the mistral is always buffeting, driving people to distraction or violence, the world a permanently unsettled place in which we struggle for refuge only to find there is no real shelter from the storm? In retrospect it is easy to read my own cross-purposes into this work, identifying with vagrants even as I searched for home, compelled to go to the ends of the earth in search of a place in which I could be happy yet nostalgic for the place I had left behind. For forty-five years now I have returned, time and time again, to the paintings of Paul Cézanne, fi nding in them analogues of my attempts to artistically assemble the fragments of my experience without reaching for synthesis, closure, or final truth, since the whole, observed Adorno, turning Hegel on his head, is the false.3 On the wall in front of me is a framed reproduction of another of Cézanne’s landscapes from Aix-en-Provence. A distant, arid, and sun-drenched landscape is glimpsed through overlapping pine boughs that extend beyond the frame of the painting. The trunk of the tree establishes a solid vertical to the left of center. In the words of one writer, the work seems to be conceived as a search for rhythm and perfect composition, a sort of intellectual abstraction.4 But this is to suggest that Cézanne was looking for a balance he found difficult to achieve, rather than deliberately choosing to convey a tension between order and chaos—the carefully painted planes that hint at houses,5 the edges of fields and lines of trees juxtaposed with gnarled and entangled branches, blurred patches of undergrowth or scrub, seemingly haphazard brushstrokes. Cézanne worked on this painting for almost five years—evidence of the uncertainty and care with which he painted—but his difficulty in completing his work quickly did not reflect his striving for geometrical order, symmetry, or tonal balance but a desire to capture the unstable relationship between the solidity

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20 . Large Pine Tree and Red Earth, Paul Cezanne, 1890–1895. Used with permission by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin.

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of the tree and the wind that bends its branches and sweeps through its leaves, between the order of art and the wildness of the world. With Cézanne, order is provisional and tentative, never certain. Cézanne gave his all to depicting existence as ambiguous. Our being-inthe-world is neither a stable state nor completely fluid. A person can resemble a stone and the rocks in a quarry can resemble the naked bodies of a group of bathers. For Cézanne, we live betwixt and between consoling illusions of order, provided by our religions or our conventional worldviews, and experiences that befall us like bolts from the blue or seismic shocks, reducing our lifeworlds to ruins and leaving us shattered, uncertain, and afraid. Consider Cézanne’s masterpiece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, entitled The House with the Cracked Walls (1892–1894). When I visited the Met in the summer of 2010 and entered the room where the Cézannes are hung, this painting stopped me in my tracks. The wall of the two-story house is painted with the same care with which a plasterer would work, creating an unblemished surface. Blinding sunlight is reflected

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21 . The House with the Cracked Walls, Paul Cezanne, 1892–1894.

from the wall, in which is set a pitch-black window. From the tiled roof to the rocky ground on which the house stands, a dark gaping crack descends, cleaving the canvas in two. And while the left foreground is composed, in Cézanne’s usual manner, of curving planes, it comes up against blocks of granite on the right so that the crack in the wall of the house continues, as it were, into the accidented landscape below it. Behind the house there is a line of trees, agitated by the wind. I would later discover that Cézanne often painted abandoned buildings and quarries near his studio outside Aix, though he depicted this house only once. I would also read that this period of the artist’s life was marked by a series of crises. In the spring of 1885, the man who his friend Zola once described as passive in the face of love,6 not given to amorous conquests, fell head over heels in love. Cézanne was forty-six, with a reputation for being afraid of women,

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yet he enlisted Zola’s help in writing love letters to a young woman whose name and situation we may never know. Here is the draft of one of his love letters.7 I saw you, and you allowed me to kiss you; from that moment, I’ve been agitated by a profound unrest. You will forgive the liberty of writing you taken by a friend tormented by anxiety: I don’t know how to excuse this liberty, which you may consider an enormous one, but could I remain in this depression? Isn’t it better to show a feeling than to hide it? Why, said I to myself, keep silent as to the source of your torment? Isn’t it a solace of suffering to allow it to find expression? And since physical pain seems to find some relief in the cries of the victim, is it not natural, Madame, that mental griefs seek some assuagement in confession to an adored being? I know that this letter, whose foolhardy and premature posting may seem indiscreet, has nothing to recommend me to you save the goodness of . . .

For six months Cézanne’s obsession brought misery to the artist, his common-law wife Hortense Fiquet, and his family, although there is no evidence that Cézanne’s love was requited or consummated. All we know is that within a year the distraught painter repairs his relationship with Hortense and marries her, though neither of them ever found happiness. Then, after four years of moving from place to place, Cézanne retreats to Aix, where he was born and raised, and absorbs himself in the landscape, as if this is his compromise between the emptiness of his domestic and religious life and the passion he’d felt for this unremembered girl. The second crisis that year was Cézanne’s estrangement from his childhood friend, Émile Zola, following the publication of Zola’s novel, L’Oeuvre, in 1886. Rightly or wrongly, Cézanne regarded the central character of Claude, a doomed painter, consumed by self-doubt even as he dedicated himself to the creation of a new kind of art, as a mean-spirited commentary on himself. Given the painter’s distress and vulnerability at this time, and the domestic tensions of the summer of 1885 when the Cézannes imposed upon the hospitality of the Zolas in Médan, it is easy to see how misunderstandings could arise.

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Then the third blow fell. Cézanne’s father died in October 1886. It is striking how often commentators and critics describe Cézanne as an unstable man, racked by self-doubt, who sought to escape the chaos in his personal life by creating monumental and immutable forms with paint.8 But I see a man living in what John Keats called “negative capability,”9 simultaneously acknowledging the fractured, fragile character of the human world while applying himself to the repair work we may do through art, thought, and faith. If Cézanne came to be consumed by his art, it was not because he sought perfection or succumbed to despair, but because he sought to strike a tolerable balance between the disorderly forces of human existence and the ordering powers of art. But consumed he was—by doubt in his ability to strike that balance. Like the Seated Peasant (1892–1896), the portrait of Mme. Cézanne in a Red Dress (1888–1890), and the apples rolling off a plate in Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants (1893–1894), or the pine boughs stirring in the wind in his numerous depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the painter himself is always caught off-balance, upset, destabilized. In his Letters on Cézanne the poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes the impact of a memorial exhibition of Cézanne’s work in the autumn of 1907, a year after the painter’s death.10 Rilke immediately embraced Cézanne as his tutelary spirit, returning to the exhibition day after day and writing to his wife Clara about his reactions. A few years before, Rilke had stood in front of an archaic torso of Apollo and been so moved that he resolved to dedicate his life uncompromisingly to art. He was convinced that if he expended all his love in his work he might one day produce something possessing the purity Cézanne had achieved in his. But it was not purity that Cézanne sought, but images that captured the interface between contending impulses, between opposing forces. Ironically, and perhaps tragically, to achieve this, everything had to go by the board—home comforts, intimate relationships, even physical health. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of how Cézanne struggled to “make visible how the world touches us,” it is necessary to remember that the world touches us in contradictory ways. But it was not simply the copresence of stillness and movement in the world before his eyes that concerned him, but the division within himself between the demands of life and the demands of his work. Cézanne removed himself from everything that could “hook” him. Often he

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was so spent at the end of a day’s work, so angry, mistrustful, and frustrated at his failure to achieve what he calls la réalization, that he would take to his bed before six, after a “senselessly ingested meal,” and seek oblivion in sleep. He even stayed away from his mother’s funeral in order not to lose a day’s work—a precursor of Camus’s l ’étranger. At the end of his life, he suffered from diabetes, headaches, and bronchitis, yet he painted outdoors every day, relying on his son to take care of Hortense as well as the day-to-day chores at home. Eight days before his death he collapsed while painting in the rain. He was brought home in a laundry cart. But even at death’s door he got out of bed and went to his studio, determined to work. There’s a phrase in one of Rilke’s letters to Clara that I find particularly moving. The poet has just returned from another visit to the Cézanne room in the Salon d’Automne, and he’s describing how he usually finds the people walking about an art gallery more interesting than the paintings they are looking at. But the Cézanne room is an exception. Here, he says, reality is on his side, and he goes into detail about Cézanne’s dense quilted blues, his reds, his shadowless greens, and the reddish black of his wine bottles. The humbleness of the things Cézanne paints: the apples that are cooking apples, the wine bottles that belong to the bulging pockets of an old coat. It’s almost as if the painter has become one of the homely, shabby objects in front of him. As if his entire being has gone into his art, leaving only a shell behind. The tragedy was that he gave more life to these things than he gave his wife and son or the people he painted. “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness,” he once said.11 And so his landscapes are really abstract portraits—worlds not of rock and pine but of the flesh. Look at Cézanne’s portraits of his wife Hortense Fiquet and you’ll see that the reverse is also true. This man who could not bear to be touched, and whose passion for landforms was stronger than his desire for human company, turned Hortense to stone. He spoke of “nature” almost as if it were a person— a person who was giving him “great difficulties.”12 It wasn’t simply that Cézanne treated persons as objects; he treated objects as persons. And all the while he was becoming an object himself, pursued by the local kids each day as he trudged to his studio, stones thrown at him as if he were a stray dog, a butt of jokes, treated like the village idiot. Meyer Schapiro has argued that Cézanne’s turn from persons to apples was born of a need to find a way of displacing, and later disguising, his erotic

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yearnings.13 Shy, fearful, and anxious in the company of women, he projected his sexual desires onto still lifes that calmed and disciplined his mind and gave him a sense of being in full control of himself. Subjective confusions were transmuted into objective forms.14 In my view, however, it is the copresence of sensuality and rationality—the flesh of the fruit and the geometrical arrangement of domestic objects on a table—that lends these paintings their power. It is not that erotic impulses are symbolically disguised, as if they had priority over the painted image; rather these two embodied forms are given equal weight, and it is this juxtaposition of things we normally regard as essentially different (organic versus inorganic), that stirs and surprises us when we see them brought so intimately together. One might say that Cézanne has it both ways. He can express and repress his amorous longings in a single brushstroke, a single image. He thus asserts control over a simulacrum of his real life. By drawing on intrapsychic elements, on the one hand, and external materials, on the other, he simultaneously paints an image and generates an experience of being a creator rather than creature of circumstance. There is a long-standing romantic view of the artist, the scholar, or the priest as individuals who sacrifice their personal lives in order to create enduring works of art, scholarship, or spiritual perfection. Zola’s L’Oeuvre belongs to this tradition. But Claude was not Cézanne, even if Zola drew on Cézanne in creating the storm-tossed obsessional character of Claude Lantier. One can see the similarities—the ambivalence toward women, the perverse conviction that family life is inimical to art, the search for some transcendent object or idea that will outlast the centuries, the notion that art requires absolute devotion, and that a man must, therefore, choose between art and women. Why should Claude distance himself from women, distrust them, feel contempt for them, fear that they will sap his creative power? Why should his mistress have to choose between caring for the child she has borne him and caring for him, “her big child?” And this glorious ideal of the masterpiece, the masculine justification for the neglect of children, the sacrifice of our lives! Poor Christine, Claude’s mistress and model. She begins to feel trapped in a ménage à trois. The painting is her rival. Claude prefers the counterfeit to the real person. Only the masterpiece matters. When their son dies, he paints the dead child and exhibits the painting in the Salon des Refusés where it is met with

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indifference. She implores him: If you can’t be a great painter, at least life remains to us. But for Claude, nothing exists beyond art. She makes herself beautiful for him, seduces him, shows that the living flesh is more real than any painted figure. You’ve made me pose for you; you wanted to make copies of my body, but why? Surely I’m worth more than all the copies you could ever make! At best they’re ugly, besides being cold and stiff as so many corpses. . . . But I love you. I want you. Don’t you understand? Why do I have to tell you all the time? Can’t you feel it when I’m always near you, when I offer to pose for you, when I’m always wanting to touch you? Do you understand now? I love you. I’m alive and I want you. . . . You can go on living because I love you. But he replies, Ah, but you’ll never love me enough! . . . I know that because I know myself. The only thing that could make life worth living would be something that doesn’t exist, the sort of joy that would make me forget everything else . . . You’ve already proved you couldn’t give me that, and I know you never will.15

The difference, as I see it, between Cézanne and Claude is that while Claude sacrifices his well-being (and those he loves) in an impossible attempt to create a perfect work of art, Cézanne ironically loses his grip on reality by attempting to strike a balance between the masterful artifice of art and the turbulent reality of life. That this motif is often overlooked, both in cursory accounts and critical commentaries of great art, may attest to our all-too-human desire to find in art, the intellect, or religion a means of transcendence so that the world as it is rendered in paint, in words, or in ceremony eclipses the world as we know it in our everyday lives. Consider, for example, Pieter Bruegel’s Northern Renaissance masterpiece The Hunters in the Snow (1565). Taking her cue from Eli Siegel’s principle of “aesthetic realism” (“All beauty is a making one of opposites”), Nancy Huntting emphasizes the way Bruegel brings near and far, sharpness and softness, stillness and movement, into a single harmonious composition.16 But does this do justice to the work? I purchased a fine Austrian reproduction of this painting in Wellington, New Zealand, when I was twenty. It was on display in an art supplies shop in Panama Street and cost me ten pounds—all the money I had in my pocket.

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I have lived with this painting for fi fty years—as I have lived with the landscapes of Paul Cézanne—yet this painting, celebrated for its artful composition and visual power, points to a divided world. The people skating, fishing, or curling on the frozen ponds, or stoking an outdoor fire, are—like the peasants in The Fall of Icarus17—oblivious to the tragedy unfurling in the world beyond the mountains or outside the frame of the painting, though it was a tragedy that the painter himself was all too grimly aware of. About suffering, the old masters were never wrong, W. H. Auden famously observed; “it takes place,” as in The Hunters in Snow, as children are “skating on a pond at the edge of the wood” or people are “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Even as we tend a fire, plow a field, herd animals, hunt game, carry faggots home to a hearth, or feast at a table, a tragedy is unfolding somewhere, to someone. How do we know that we are not also skating on thin ice? Is Bruegel intending to communicate this paradox to us? Is it not only Auden who sees the poignant copresence in our lives of events occurring outside our comprehension or control and pedestrian events that so absorb us that we are blind to all else? Some scholars have argued that, for Bruegel, the events beyond ordinary grasp belong to a realm beyond the senses, beyond the reach of rational thought, and outside our everyday understanding of space and time.18 This interpretation rests on evidence of Bruegel’s close association with a “heretical” Flemish school known as the Family of Love that repudiated the religious rivalries among Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists in favor of a humanist and mystical vision of an “invisible church” unfettered by rites and doctrines. But when Bruegel’s friend, the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, expressed the view that Bruegel painted many things that cannot be painted,19 was he alluding not only to a shared commitment to Perennial Philosophy but also to the difficulty of holding in tension two perspectives on the world in the same frame? The tower of Babel aspires to join earthly and heavenly realms, but the tower is always unfinished, falling short of its goal. In the same way, the order we create in art is contradicted by our worldly limitations, our unbridled appetites, our foolish ambitions, our stupidity, intolerance, and shortsightedness. Look closely and even The Hunters in the Snow betrays these disruptive forces. The sign outside the inn hangs from a single hinge, angled so as it

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lead one’s eye down the snowy slope into the frozen valley. But the sign’s placement is not solely determined by compositional requirements, for it depicts Hubertus, patron saint of the hunt, standing before a stag or hart that holds a crucifi x between its antlers. Not only does the image recall Saint Hubert’s conversion in the Ardennes Forest in the late seventh century; it suggests that God may have withdrawn His blessings from the hunters in Bruegel’s painting. The unhinged sign is thus an oblique reference to the religious turmoil of the late sixteenth century on which Bruegel’s God must surely have looked askance—the excesses of the Protestant Reformation inspiring violent countermeasures by the Catholic Church, repressing heresies, and reestablishing papal authority. At the same time, a little ice age had descended over Europe. Glaciers expanded, warm summers were few and far between, winters were long and harsh, harvests were poor (1565, the year Bruegel painted The Hunters in the Snow, was particularly bad), and epidemics swept the land. Bruegel’s vivid depictions of death and of hell must surely have come from direct personal knowledge of the rape, killing, and pillaging that swept the Flemish countryside during this period. People are playing on the frozen rivers and lakes. But hunger and death stalk the land. Crows fly overhead as if waiting for carrion. Hunters return from the wintry woods, their dogs’ morose expressions and exhausted demeanor giving us a glimpse of what their masters were feeling as they trudged home with only the emaciated corpse of a fox to show for their labors. These ciphers of an unsaid suggest that hell is on earth and heaven unattainable unless it is through the lens of art,20 which creates the appearance of a well-tempered geometry in a world where death and disorder are, nonetheless, always present and impinging.21 Michel de Certeau’s analysis of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights holds true for the work of Pieter Bruegel who, as a young man, was hailed as a new Hieronymous Bosch.22 The strictly ordered mise-en-scène coexists with an elsewhere comprising pathways of nonmeaning, disorderly combinations, and space without beginning or end, exits or entrances.23 If there is mystery in the work of these sixteenth-century Flemish masters, it is in the negative dialectic that obtains between the order humanity brings to the world through language, geometry, or art and the world’s complexity, contradictoriness, changeability, and confusion that subvert that order. One hand gestures toward design—geometrical, theological, or cultural—while the other hand stays

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the first, pointing to all that prevents the completion or consummation of the initial impulse. In W. H. Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles,” an idealistic young woman looks over the shoulder of the Greek hero, expecting to see on his shining metal shield vistas of vines and olive trees, marble, well-governed cities, and ships upon untamed seas. She finds instead an artificial wilderness, a sky like lead, and a weed-choked field where unspeakable scenes of violence and depravity unfold. The genius of artists like Paul Cézanne, Wallace Stevens, Wystan Hugh Auden, and Pieter Bruegel lies in their capacity to create a space where opposites can be held or contained. To show all sides of the human condition without attempting to resolve the quandary of how we can accept the blind forces of history and circumstance even as we search for certainty and control in our lives. How, to quote Keats, we can live in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason?24 I left the Metropolitan Museum and strolled up Fifth Avenue toward the Guggenheim. The day was hot, and tourists were milling around the gallery entrance, some eating snacks, others examining the postcards they had bought in the gallery shop or staring up at the facade of the building. A young woman asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking a photograph of her and her friend. They were anxious that the photo should have the Guggenheim in the background, proof, perhaps, that they had been there. What experiences they would take away of the art inside the museum I could only guess. A friend of mine, Tyler Zoanni, knowing of my interest in Cézanne, had recently sent me a postcard from the Guggenheim—a reproduction of Cézanne’s Still Life, Flask, Glass and Jug (1877). Tyler suggested that if I was ever in New York City I should make sure I saw this painting, and he mentioned a mysterious female figure reflected in the jug. My first thought was that Cézanne might have smuggled a miniature portrait of his lover into the still life, but the dates were wrong and the surmise implausible. Nonetheless, I was eager to get a closer look at the image on the jug, which in the postcard reproduction was too ambiguous to decipher. The jug is a Provençal olive jar, half-covered in a viridian glaze, and it appears in several of Cézanne’s still lives. Within this dark-green glaze is a rough square of reflected light, and on this light-blue ground a small silhouetted figure appears to be wading through waist-deep water, the reflection

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streaking the water in the foreground. The figure is exquisitely painted, left arm and hand outstretched as if pulling the body forward against the weight of the water, right hand trailing behind. And yet, one cannot be convinced that Cézanne intended to paint this miniature, but simply daubed some cobalt on the light-blue ground just as he smudged the reflection on the flask to add to its verisimilitude. After leaving the Guggenheim, I found a place on Lexington and 88th Street where I ordered a lentil soup, organic bread, and espresso. I ate in silence at a communal table not unlike the one in Bruegel’s Village Wedding Feast. I was thinking of how the carefully prepared food in front of me carried no evidence of the place where the wheat was harvested, the environment in which the vegetables were grown, or the people who made their living out of growing them. Culture belies its origins in cultivation. Domestication denies the wildness of the world. Art abstracts itself from life. And even the food on our plate bears few traces of the fields and gardens from whence it came. Yet every day nature resurfaces, reminding us in the form of flood, drought, hurricane, or earthquake that it coexists with what we call culture and cannot be quelled. At that moment my thoughts returned to the paintings I had seen that morning, particularly the blue figure in the Cézanne still life that appeared to be wading through water. This minor ambiguity—a random brush stroke giving the impression of a carefully painted figure leaning into a body of water—captured my wider theme, of how we live betwixt and between opposing moods, moments, and emotions, always in two minds, aware that there are always two sides to every story, the order we bring to the world confounded by the world’s invasions of our most carefully cultivated spaces, not to mention to perennial oscillation between our sense of being a part of and being apart from the landscapes, the lives of others, the still lifes, that encompass us—abandoned quarries, cracked walls, unfinished towers, broken hinges, ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Art and the Unspeakable An accusation is sometimes leveled against artists and intellectuals that, lacking the courage and commitment to engage with the real world, they seek asylum in painting, writing, or thinking. William Faulkner underscores this

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point in The Unvanquished. “I realized then the immitigable chasm between all life and all print—that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.”25 A corollary of this observation is that, despite being drawn to reality in all its harshness and seediness, artists hesitate, like voyeurs, to become too deeply immersed in it or inhibit the impulse to identify with the suffering of others lest this compromise their higher calling. For John Ruskin, fidelity to one’s artistic vocation entailed the ruthless assumption that no other human being exists but oneself. As the great painter is not allowed to be indignant or exclusive, it is not possible for him to nourish his (so-called) spiritual desires, as it is to an ordinarily virtuous person. Your ordinarily good man absolutely avoids, either for fear of getting harm, or because he has no pleasure in such places or people, all scenes that foster vice, and all companies that delight in it. . . . But you can’t learn to paint of blackbirds, nor by singing hymns. You must be in the wildness of the midnight masque—in the misery of the dark street at dawn—in the crowd when it rages fiercest against the law. . . . Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but to note the colour of his lips; does a woman embrace her destruction before you, your business is not to save her, but to watch how she bends her arms.26

There are troubling similarities between the voyeur’s desire to keep his distance, the concept of sublimity in religion, and the role of abstraction in art. For whatever reason we extoll the view from afar, it often implies a denigration of the view from within or from below. To become too involved in mundane existence is, allegedly, to risk losing one perspective and become a tedious literalist. While immanence is identified with vulgarity, distance lends enchantment, and transcendence entails truth. Historically, it is difficult to disentangle this emphasis on what Wallace Stevens called “supreme fiction”—wherein “we collect ourselves, out of all the indifferences, into one thing,” and in which “God and the imagination are one”27—with the rise of the bourgeoisie. The etherealizing effects of this emerging social imaginary were felt in all aspects of middle-class life— comfortable furnishings of the home, the idealist cult of inwardness, reveries

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of romantic love and spiritual adoration, pure images of angels, the doctrine of art for art’s sake, the cultivation of exquisite manners, a taste for refi ned foods, disdain for physical toil, and the repression of bodily functions, sexuality, and passions.28 This critique of the Western tradition of art fi nds its most compelling expression in John Berger’s thesis that post-Renaissance European painting is increasing entangled with class snobberies and market forces, even though this mercenary determination of value is masked by a rhetoric of beauty, truth, genius, and taste.29 Berger takes great pains, however, not to see art solely in terms of what happens to it when it enters the marketplace. The meaning of art lies, first and foremost, in the mysterious process of its gestation and birth within the experience of an individual artist. Although Picasso became wealthier and more renowned than any artist in history, he remained “single-minded,” working “like a man possessed; and all his relationships [were] more or less subservient to the needs of his art.” 30 This uncanny detachment, this apparent immunity to the world in which he lived, seems connected to Picasso’s tendency to see everything through the lens of his own imagination. Guernica is not simply about the destruction of a Basque town on April 26, 1937, by German bombers carrying out Franco’s fascist mission. Picasso did not try to imagine the actual event. There is no town, no aeroplanes, no explosion, no reference to the time of day, the year, the century, or the part of Spain where it happened. . . . Guernica is a painting about how Picasso imagines suffering; and just as when he is working on a painting or sculpture about making love the intensity of his sensations makes it impossible for him to distinguish between himself and his lover, just as his portraits of women are often self-portraits of himself found in them, so here in Guernica he is painting his own suffering as he daily hears the news from his own country. 31

If we are to speak of great art, we must reckon with this peculiar form of dissociation in which the objective world is so utterly subverted by the artist’s subjectivity that its forms of expression become irreducible to anything that might be said to lie without or within. This is the mystery of art, and perhaps of madness. If the Dionysian imagination throws up outrageous metaphors, provocative images, and radical ideas, it is not necessarily because

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the artist has decided to defy convention, for this is, despite himself, the only way he sees reality. That artists are so often identified with an otherworldly sensibility may explain why they are regarded so ambivalently—dismissed as impractical and amoral, heads in the clouds, eyes turned upward or inward, indifferent to the claims of others or the tenor of their time. In 1891, some six years after leaving his Danish wife and five children, Paul Gauguin embarked on his second voyage to French Polynesia, in flight from bourgeois Europe. Yet his paintings depict almost nothing of the disease, depravity, and cultural disenchantment of Tahiti at that epoch; they are, instead, works of imagination, expressions of his repudiation of colonial rule and his nostalgia for a lost Eden. It is to my sister, Bronwen, that I owe many insights into Gauguin’s life and work. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that her scholarly engagement with Gauguin might account for some of the exotic vegetation that she has planted in her Auckland garden, including bromeliads, distantly related to the pineapple family, whose thick, waxy, multicolored leaves hold water for days. Some years ago, in the course of researching her book on Gauguin, Bronwen discovered that Gauguin had visited the Auckland Art Gallery and Auckland Museum during a ten-day stopover in the city in August 1895. The French painter was particularly intrigued by a wooden Maori bowl (kumete), the work of Patoromu Tamatea of Rotorua. The intricately carved kumete is flanked by two clasping figures, while the lid is surmounted by a handle that comprises two entangled figures. Gauguin made no sketch of the vessel, though his notebooks contain numerous other drawings of Maori carvings. He may, however, have acquired a photograph of the bowl, which would help explain the fidelity with which he reproduced it six years later in a series of still lifes. In these paintings, European sunflowers are placed in the carved bowl, while mangoes lie on the table around it—signifying the fusion of two very different worlds. A year earlier, in Te Reiora (The Dream), Gauguin referenced the bowl as part of an infant’s cradle. “The child sleeps beneath a headboard which is the profi le of an observing face whose head has hair which, on closer inspection, turns out to contain a number of figures in a configuration that comes directly from the Tamatea bowl. Likewise, the foot of the cradle is shaped into the form of a crouching figure which echoes the

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sleeping figure and is perhaps related to the two in the lid of a different Maori bowl.” 32 In making a garden or painting a picture, we have recourse to a fund of objects, plants, and images whose places of origin are eclipsed by the context we assign the borrowings and the meaning they take on for us. For Gauguin, all religions and cultures were essentially similar; they stemmed from a single primeval source. This was why he could juxtapose, with no sense of travesty, Christian iconography, Italian quattrocento painting, Maori carved art, and elements taken from Buddhist temples such as Borobudur. All pointed to an aboriginal source of all traditions. Contemporary Maori writers resist these unauthorized appropriations, questioning the right of “this French bohemian” to drag “Maori imagery into a primitivist mythology and iconography of his own imagining . . . his placement of Maori imagery within exotic, tropical pictorial settings painted in sweet, high-key colour harmonies entirely at odds with the more earthly coloration of taonga Maori.”33 One cannot declare that cultural mixing is a creative act when the terms on which this syncretism has occurred have been determined, historically, by one party muffling or muting the voice of the other. It is no good evoking equality and mutuality in the exchange of traditions when one tradition has always been dominant, and when the powerless have seen the very wherewithal of their being stolen, derided, and destroyed over one hundred and fi fty years of colonial history. But one can, perhaps, make a plea for understanding Gauguin that sees him not as a typical colonizer, with disdainful views of the primitive Polynesians he made into objets d’art, but as a man oppressed by a longing that he could never assuage. He was born in Peru in 1848, the first child of a liberal Parisian journalist who fled France with his wife and children after the failure of the 1848 revolution. His father died at Port Famine before the family even reached Peru, and for seven years Gauguin, with his mother and sister, lived in Lima in the home of a maternal uncle, Don Pio de Tristan Moscoso. “Don Pio had remarried at eighty and had several children from this new marriage, among others Etchenique, who for years was President of Peru.”34 Writing in Atuana, Marquesas, only five months before his death, Gauguin would remember his Lima childhood with vividness and affection. That he had found fulfillment in the South Seas was because its luxuriant, Edenic, and sensual nature

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echoed the South American world in which he fi rst came to consciousness. Indeed, one of his fi rst Tahitian paintings included a portrait of his part-Peruvian mother as Eve in paradise. Of those days in Lima, that delicious country where it never rained, Gauguin recalls with poignant acuity the large family of which he was a part, the lunatic who was kept chained on the terrace, the carved dome of a nearby church, a little negro girl who carried the family’s prayer rug to church, a Chinese servant who did the household laundry, an earthquake, and a picture of a traveler, with his stick and bundle over his shoulder, that inspired the nine-year-old child to leave home—the first of many radical departures. I have no intention of condemning Gauguin for exoticizing Polynesia. But the questions may be asked: whether an artist’s fertile imagination may blind him to seeing things as they are, and whether there is a potentially tragic connection between his alienation from, or disenchantment with, his natal environment and a dissociative faculty of mind that dooms the artist to idealize or mask reality. It is not simply that the raw materials with which the artist works—ochers, words, objets trouvés—are artificial, for his way of seeing is itself a filter that fabricates and falsifies. The paradox of Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 is that the events and experiences they document are actually occluded by the aesthetic demands of the paintings, so that, while passions are stirred by the art, we cannot really engage with the realities that occasioned it. In brief, the art depoliticizes the events it depicts. “For many millions of people now, the name of Guernica accuses all war criminals,” writes John Berger. “Yet Guernica is not a painting about modern war in any objective sense of the term.” The same may be said of Goya’s Third of May 1808. Though Robert Hughes writes that “with this painting, the modern image of war as anonymous killing is born,”35 the melodramatic lighting, in which the man in the white shirt resembles Christ on the cross, and the contrast between the heroic Madrilenian and the robotic French riflemen distance us from the shocking reality it appears to chronicle. As such, we have been made spectators, even voyeurs, but not participants. “Thinking men and artists have not infrequently described a sense of being not quite there, of not playing along, a feeling as if they were not themselves at all, but a kind of spectator,” writes Adorno.36 Undoubtedly, this sense of detachment is exacerbated by the aesthetic impact of the work of art, which, while encouraging us to believe that it is doing justice to some human

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reality, is also persuading us that it is only a painting, a sculpture, an artifact, an abstraction. Art thereby reinforces what Adorno calls bourgeois callousness—“the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above things,” often with the support of the rationale “What does it really matter?” or “What difference could I make; what can one really do about it anyway?”37 Again we encounter the question of voyeurism. Presented with a graphic depiction of human suffering, we become so focused on our emotional reactions to it that our feelings for the true sufferers are partially eclipsed—a phenomenon that emerges in late eighteenth-century Europe as intellectuals engage with the problem of human inequality.38 That this habitual indifference to others is occasionally transcended may momentarily restore our sense of what we sometimes call human goodness, though such ethical moments cannot be perpetuated or institutionalized as moral imperatives. In the early evening of May 7, 2014, “NYU food service employee Joshua Garcia was standing on a Union Square subway platform with his coworkers and hundreds of other commuters when a teenage girl blacked out and fell onto the subway tracks. While everyone else gawked and documented the frightening incident, Garcia jumped down onto the track bed. “God put me in that situation,” Garcia later told reporters. “It was where I was supposed to be. It was adrenaline and the power of the Lord.” The girl, Stephanie Xue, was unconscious on the tracks with a six-inch gash on her head she incurred from the fall. “You could see her skull,” Garcia recalled later. “It was terrifying to look at.” But apparently it wasn’t terrifying enough to stop everyone else from taking photos and videos with their cell phones. “It was amazing seeing all these people doing nothing,” Garcia said. “It was an eye-opener.”39 It would seem that photography is often implicated in this kind of alienation, as if the camera’s viewfinder—like an artist’s overactive imagination— comes between us and a world that might otherwise draw us into a direct relationship with it. As Arthur and Joan Kleinman argue in their reflections on Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a vulture perched near a Sudanese child who has collapsed from hunger, images carry ethical demands that we ignore at our peril. “How did Carter allow the vulture to get so close without doing something to protect the child? What did he do after the picture was taken? Was it in some sense posed? Inasmuch as Kevin

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Carter chose to take the time—minutes that may have been critical at this point when she is near death—to compose an effective picture rather than to save the child, is he complicit?” An oblique answer to these questions is suggested by Carter’s depression at the work he did and his suicide a few months after winning his 1994 Pulitzer Prize.40 But if images and concepts are, by dint of their very artificiality, always inadequate to the life they purport to represent, surely there are circumstances when they do not simply fail to justice to life; they actually betray or destroy it. During the twelve years in which he fi lmed Shoah, Claude Lanzmann struggled to find a word for “it.” “The truth is that there was no name for what, at the time, I did not even dare call ‘the event.’ To myself, almost in secret, I said ‘the Thing.’ It was a way of naming the unnameable.” 41 Nor would Lanzmann allow himself even one word of commentary or any voiceover to prompt the audience what to think. Everything is conveyed obliquely. No historical footage is used; instead, Lanzmann filmed stelae and stone in the fields where the camps had been. These “became human” for him; “the only trace of the hundreds of thousands who died [there].” 42 Just as Walter Benjamin bemoaned the fate of art in an age of mechanical reproduction,43 so we might claim that great art recognizes the impossibility of representation. By contrast, documentary filmmakers and historians often persist in the illusion that meticulously researched reenactments of events and photographs of human beings in extremis may bring us to a cathartic and edifying understanding of them and even inspire us to prevent such events happening again. Lanzmann resists these assumptions. In a particularly damning account of a photographic exhibition in Paris, entitled Mémoire des Camps, Lanzmann describes how all-too-familiar Holocaust images were aesthetically lit, with sweeping spotlights panning slowly over “four photographs, ripped from hell itself,” in “an immoral attempt at deconstruction with pedagogic pretensions, like some silent son et lumière in Birkenau, intended to piece the visitor’s heart at the end of his tour.” 44 But does this mean, as Adorno once said, that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz or simply that there can be no poetry about Auschwitz? Do areas exist that are, by their very nature, off-limits to art, because nothing we might say or do can grasp the truth of the experience or prevent such events recurring?

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One may admire Art Spiegelman’s Maus for its comic-strip fusion of humans and rodents—its play on the Nazi view of Jews as vermin—and be moved by Vladek Spiegelman’s story, but the question still haunts us, whether irony, testimony, allegory, or even memory can recapture the truth of those who “bled history.” 45 Spiegelman’s response to this dilemma is not unlike Lanzmann’s. Both studiously avoid any pretention to represent past experience or draw any moral lesson from the original events. Although I set about in doing Maus to do a history of sorts I’m all too aware that ultimately what I’m creating is a realistic fiction. The experiences my father actually went through, there’s what he’s able to remember and what he’s able to understand of what he articulated, and what I’m able to put down on paper. . . . Maus is so many steps removed from the actual experience, they’re so distant from each other that all I can do is hint at, intimate, and try for something that feels real to me.46

As for “squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victim’s fate,” 47 Spiegelman is adamant that no “pedagogic impulse” motivated his work. “Are there lessons to be learned from the Holocaust?” an interviewer asks him. “I have no idea,” Spiegelman replies. “See, I would find it a cheap shot to try to give any moral to it. It would be kind of diminishing what happened.” 48

Marina Abramović and the Shadows of Intersubjectivity Psychological studies of face-to-face interactions between mothers and infants confirm our intuitive sense that reciprocal eye contact, smiling, laughter, touch, speech, and other modes of mutually affectionate engagement are essential to the development not only of an infant’s capacity for sociality but also its inner sense of well-being. To explore this interactional reciprocity, Ed Tronick and his colleagues asked mothers to interact normally with their one- to four-month-old infants for three minutes, and then, following a thirty-second interval, to look at their infants with a neutral face. The effects of the mother “remaining

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unresponsive and maintaining an expressionless face” were instantaneous and dramatic.49 Initially, the infant would try to engage its mother with eye contact and smiles, but when the mother’s deadpan expression did not change, the infant would look away and become quiet, somber, and withdrawn. The infant would check back to see whether the mother’s mask had dropped, only to avert its eyes again, its body curled over and head down. Looking wary, helpless, and hopeless, the infant would then remain turned away from its mother. “None of the infants cried, however.”50 The human infant’s response to the still-faced mother resembles a pattern that has been observed in other primates, suggesting that our need for affective reciprocity is innate and that denial of response in early infancy has psychologically crippling consequences. Moreover, the unresponsiveness of matter may also be traumatic, for human beings typically need to imagine that the world at large—in its material, social, and spiritual dimensions—is amenable to the same kinds of mutual interactions that characterize relations with caring parents and significant others.51 All these observations came to mind as I watched a documentary fi lm on Marina Abramović’s retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 the famous performance artist sat all day and every day, for three months, in the museum’s atrium as visitors to MoMA took turns to sit opposite her without talking, touching, or gesturing. It would be the most physically and emotionally grueling performance of Abramović’s long career—a bravura attempt to distill the meaning of her art into a single event in which, in her own words, “performance becomes life itself.”52 If one is to take seriously this view that performance art, ritual, religion, and life itself are all of a piece, then we have to dispense with conventional distinctions between reality and appearance. Let us return, momentarily, to Tronick’s research on primary intersubjectivity. As Tronick explains, the mother’s deadpan face violates the infant’s basic ontological assumption that the mother will invariably interact playfully and affirmatively with her infant. Yet she is simultaneously present and absent, there and not there, and this makes the infant feel trapped in a contradiction it cannot resolve except—should the mother continue to be indifferent—through a kind of displacement in which the infant effectively

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22 . The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Used with permission by the Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY., and Artists Rights Society. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar.

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makes himself a transitional object and interacts with it in lieu of the mother. Thus, confronted with the mother’s still face, the infant “begins to finger his mouth, sucking on one finger and rocking his head, looking at his feet,” and “curling up into himself.”53 In many ways, this behavior conforms to what D. W. Winnicott called the “false self,” in which a person compensates for a sense of being empty, unloved, and worthless by developing a mask or defensive armoring that hides her deep-seated narcissistic wounds.54 Psychoanalysis sometimes fails to recognize the fine distinction between maladaptive and adaptive behaviors. In other words, we must be wary of seeing the masks and artifice of performance art as pathologies simply because they resemble behaviors we readily write off as neurotic. But what bearing do these digressions have on the art of Marina Abramović? Let us begin at the beginning. Her parents were ranking officers in Tito’s Partisan army during the Second World War, and following Marina’s birth in 1946 they imposed on their daughter a strict military regime. Her mother never kissed or touched her (“It would have spoiled me”).55

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I was punished so often as a child, I developed blue spots on my body, and very often after being slapped in the face, my nose would bleed. . . . My mother would come into my room in the middle of the night when I was asleep to make sure the bed was in order and not messed up. Otherwise she would wake me up to straighten the bed sheets. . . . In my family, most of the time my mother and father didn’t talk to each other. They both slept with pistols on their bedside tables. . . . My father always came home late at night. My mother would always wait and wait for him. When he finally came home, she would ask him questions that would in turn lead to them having a physical fight. He would start beating her, and to protect herself she would run into my room—never my brother’s— and haul me out of bed in front of her as a shield. . . . I was twenty-nine years old and I still had to be home by 10 P.M. every night.56

This loveless, violent, punitive environment was redeemed by the presence of a caring grandmother who possessed a deeply spiritual sensibility, and Abramović speaks of her as constitutive of the person she became (“This is what makes me now”).57 So basically you are looking at many Marinas. You are looking at the Marina who is a product of two Partisan parents, two national heroes, no limits, will power, any aim she put in front of her. And then right next to this one you have the other one who is like the little girl, mother never give her enough love, and very vulnerable, and unbelievably disappointed and sad. And then there’s another one who has this kind of spiritual wisdom and can go above all that, and this is actually my favorite one.58

In Abramović’s artworks, she relives her past experiences in order to release their hold over her. Through abreaction, her thralldom to the past is momentarily broken, if only because she is now determining the terms on which that past will be played out. Insofar as the past is associated with bodily pain, she will make her body the metaphor with which this ritualized reenacting and release will be achieved. Drawing an explicit comparison with the role of pain in Aboriginal initiation, Abramović says, “Pain is like a door. You have to enter through

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pain into that other space.” In tribal societies, this “other space” is the space of adulthood that one enters by overcoming fear and achieving control over one’s own emotions. But unlike the pain experienced by the uninitiated, who readily succumb to the vicissitudes of life, the pain of initiation is willingly embraced and decisively mastered. In the words of a Bagisu initiate (Uganda), “No one has asked us to do it. No one is forcing us. We ourselves have overcome our fear. Now it is my heart which wants it. No one is forcing me. Father has not ordered me. It comes from my heart alone. Let me explain it this way, even though I am here talking with my friends I feel like a spirit-shadow (cisimu).”59 It is through her body that Abramović will give birth to this second self— a self that simultaneously conserves a memory of the ordeals she endured as a child and surpasses those earlier experiences because she is now calling the shots. Body as object in different situations Examining frontiers of pain Examining frontiers of heat Examining frontiers of cold Examining the instinct of self-destruction Examining the possibilities of getting the body into a trance state / state of trance Carrying out the idea of switching personas for a certain time period60

When asked in an interview whether her early sound pieces were concerned with control, Abramović immediately recalled her childhood experiences of being under her mother’s thumb. “My mother always used to give me sets of instructions for what I should achieve every day—to learn a certain number of French words, for example, or what I should eat, what kind of books I should read, what time I was supposed to be home. That time of my life was based in a frame of discipline.” She then recalls the way in which she turned the tables, in her dreams and in painting her dreams. This dream work was, she says, “my earliest work . . . I had a kind of destruction in my head that I dreamt about, and then I would paint the dreams.” 61 Soon, however, bodily gestures and rituals became the focus of her work. In her first performance (Rhythm 10, 1973), Abramović used twenty knives

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and two tape recorders to play a Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation. After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body—the pain and the sounds of stabbing, the double sounds from the history and the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never do.” 62

In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas suggests that inner turmoil or disorder may be managed by “ritually” reorganizing one’s mundane environment—cleaning or redecorating a house, rearranging furniture, weeding a garden, buying new clothes.63 In all these cases, transformations in one’s inner experience are “induced” by working on an aspect of one’s environment, including one’s own body, that is amenable to manipulation. But in all these cases the action is supplemental. It offers temporary respite, assists focus, and gives one a sense of being in control of one’s circumstances, even of transcending them. However, should the ritual action become an end in itself, consuming all one’s time and energy, then, and only then, can we begin to speak in terms of pathology—for what defines an action as “obsessional” rather than normal, magical rather than realistic, is not the form of the action per se, but the extent to which one has lost oneself in it, leaving, as Freud puts it, one’s “whole world . . . under an embargo of ‘impossibility.’” 64 Indeed, obsessional neurosis implies that the means whereby one tries to vicariously reorganize one’s relationship with the world has become an evasion or flight from the world rather than a way of engaging or interacting with it. One gets stuck on the ritual, unable to move beyond the repeated ritual simulation of a reallife situation that one cannot cope with. A pubescent girl is oppressed by all kinds of external expectations as to how she should look, how she should behave, how she should feel, how she should think. These expectations as to

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how she should comport herself in relation to others might be visited upon her by an overbearing mother, by popular images of svelt fashion models or media celebrities, by the physiological changes taking place in her body, or by her peer group. Feeling she has no power to determine her own destiny, feeling she is a creature of forces outside her control, she falls back on her own inner emotions, her own body, her relationship with herself, as a domain that is within her control. She effectively makes her body a substitute for the external world and, by starving herself, or gorging and vomiting, she becomes an actor again, repudiating the social reifications that have reduced her to the status of a “mere appendage,” a mere thing, though in the process she may die. Looking back on her earliest work, when still in Yugoslavia, Abramović, recognizes this danger. I was always thinking that art was a kind of question between life and death, and some of my performances really included the possibility of my dying, you know, during the piece it could happen. I remember one of the performances which I never really got permission to do, though I proposed it to a few institutions in Yugoslavia. The idea was this: I would come on stage dressed like my mother wanted me to look; I would have my hair cut in a certain way, wear a certain kind of skirt or dress, gloves, the whole idea of being decent. I would stand looking at the public, then put one bullet in a pistol like Russian roulette, put it to my temple and shoot, and if I didn’t get shot then I would dress again in my own way and leave. That would be a kind of radical change of identity and would, I hoped, change my life.65

Perhaps the most compelling thing about Mary Douglas’s work is that it reminds us that the building blocks of ritual and art are derived from the taken-for-granted activities of everyday life. Abramović defined her art in just these terms: “to create a cultural dialogue about and to reconnect with our need to ritualize the simple actions of everyday life . . . walking, standing, sitting, lying, eating, washing, drinking, dressing, undressing, sleeping, dreaming.” 66 These activities also provide the basic ontological metaphors we deploy in art and conversation alike, to redress the imbalance between the way the world is felt to act on us and the way we act on the world.

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Mary Douglas points out that when we clean a house or hospital ward this does not necessarily make the place antiseptically clean; rather, it ritualistically effects a transformation in the order or arrangement of things that we signify as purification. A similar illusion obtains with bottled water. Even though the water we buy is biochemically no superior than water from the kitchen faucet, the bottled water has been subjected to a symbolic makeover, so that it no longer appears to be simply water but a sign of ecological order, personal health, purity and even holiness. The commercial labeling of bottled water and the religious blessing of water add surplus value to it in the same way that saying grace before a meal, or consecrating an animal before it is sacrificed to the ancestors, intensifies our sense of the wider web of relationships of which we are a part, including our relationships with the Gods. These processes that transform mundane objects into valued life-giving, even sacred, symbols, radically change the way the world appears to us. This may be a marketing strategy, an advertiser’s way of pulling the wool over our eyes, but it is often something we submit to voluntarily, especially at critical moments in our lives, when our sense of ourselves has been undermined, our security threatened, our minds confused, our control over our circumstances momentarily lost. When overwhelmed by events that subvert our ontological security, stability, or standing, we tend to be initially uncomprehending, dumbstruck, thrown, and immobilized. Part of this response is incredulity and denial—this is not happening, this can’t be happening, it is a nightmare, a hallucination from which I will soon wake and find my life, my world, just as it was. These responses are, strictly speaking, unrealistic, for the lost object, the lost childhood, is irrevocably lost. But withdrawal into the imagination, or intense focus on one’s emotions and one’s body, are often not just symptoms of such trauma but means whereby the trauma is worked through, moving one from self-absorption to a reengagement with the world of others and a recovery of social bonds. Sartre’s phenomenology of the emotions throws light on how, when we cannot act on the external world realistically or effectively we have recourse to magical actions, engaging with our own bodies, with our inner feelings, or with objects immediately to hand as a way of regaining agency. Sartre’s argument centers on the strong emotions that are stirred in us when we feel that the world around us proves refractory to comprehension or control and we feel victims of circumstance. This emotionality may be consid-

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ered in two ways. First, strong emotions spontaneously arise when we are frustrated in our attempts to comprehend and control others or objects. But second, and most importantly, we work on and play up these emotions, making them the means whereby we “magically” recover our sense of lost power over others or objects. Nursing ill-will toward an enemy, cursing an errant computer, kicking a flat tire, agonizing over global warming, or pitying oneself for one’s inability to stand up to a tyrant will not necessarily effect any change in the behavior of the object or other, but it may reverse one’s experience of one’s relationship with it. One becomes, imaginatively and retrospectively, the center of the world that one has in reality lost one’s grip on, a determining subject of the events that reduced one to the status of an object, even though, from an objective point of view, one may seem to have lost touch with reality and even lost consciousness. Thus Sartre speaks of the way a novice boxer will sometimes shut his eyes and throw himself at his opponent as a way of “symbolically eliminating” or neutralizing a situation he cannot bear to think about and cannot control. “These are the limits of my magical action upon the world,” Sartre writes. “I can eliminate it as an object of consciousness, but I can do so only by eliminating consciousness itself.” 67 In Abramović’s early work, these ritual stratagems are compellingly evident. She lies inside a blazing communist star, but loses consciousness as the flames consume all the oxygen she needs to breathe. She takes a pill that paralyzes her body. She invites members of an audience to manipulate her body and her actions, only to be alarmed at the violence that is visited upon her. Gradually she learns that performance is not a forfeiture of control, but an intensified form of “total control” such as yogis achieve after years of disciplined and dedicated practice.68 In this respect, performance art and ritual are not merely social phenomena but ontologically “primitive” modes of action that play upon the emotions, manipulate the body, and change consciousness. One effect of such action is to transform subject-object relations, such that a person comes to experience herself as an actor and not just acted upon—as a “who” and not merely a “what.” In Sartre’s discussion of such “emotive behavior,” he gives the example of a bunch of grapes that is out of reach. “I shrug my shoulders, I let my hand drop, I mumble, ‘They’re too green,’ and I move on.” In this “little comedy,” played out beneath the bunch of grapes, Sartre argues that a person’s frustrated

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desire for the grapes is transfigured by the magical effect his gestures and words have upon him. In repudiating the grapes as “too green,” he “magically confers upon the grapes” the quality he desires and thereby changes his relationship with them. But, Sartre notes, the grapes are not really changed by this person’s actions, and his “emotive behavior” is, strictly speaking, ineffective. Though we “magically . . . invest real objects with certain qualities,” Sartre concludes, “these qualities are false.” 69 With this conclusion, I disagree, for, insofar as these ritual or artistic alterations in consciousness have real effects, surely it is beside the point to ask whether they are in essence real or illusory? Abramović makes a similar observation when speaking of the difference between acting and performing. “For me acting is taking on the role of somebody else, and you’re pretending to have the feelings that you are showing in front of an audience. Whereas performance is real . . . it is real every time.”70 But since Abramović confesses to being “many Marinas”—from the discipline-hardened child of callous parents to the spiritual progeny of a grandmother who really cared for her—are we not entitled to ask which reality she is performing? And, given that her art gradually moves away from narcissistic and masochistic performances to dramatic enactments of the ambivalence that inheres in human bonds, may we conclude that her collaborations with Ulay (real name, Frank Uwe Laysiepen) began a process of healing and rebirth in which the focus was less on the past than the present, less on herself than on her relationship with significant others (in her own words, she ceased to take herself so seriously)?71 But intimacy with another is not only a source of energy and joy; it may presage the loss of one’s own sense of self. In Relation in Time (1977) Marina and Ulay sit for sixteen hours, facing away from each other yet tied together by their hair. In Breathing In/Breathing Out (1978), they kneel facing each other, her knees between his thighs. With nostrils blocked, they lock mouths as if in a deep and passionate kiss, inhaling each other’s exhaled breath. In this exchange of life-giving breath, their lungs fill with carbon dioxide and they risk unconsciousness and death. In Nightsea Crossing (1980–1987) they sit opposite each other for sixteen days, seven hours a day, without moving. Though they appear to be together, they are cut off from each other. Seemingly mirror images of each other, “each of us functions alone . . . within, there is a separation.”72

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In 1988 Ulay and Marina performed the ending of their relationship by walking the Great Wall of China for three months from opposite ends. “We walked until we met . . . at Er Lang Shan, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi Province. We each took a 2,000 kilometer walk to say goodbye.” Why am I moved by images of these two individuals, walking alone along this serpentine barrier of stone that has partially withstood centuries of weathering and warfare, crossing ridge after ridge in an apparently uninhabited landscape of rock and scrub? Is it a poignant reminder of our journey through the wilderness of this world, occasionally in the company of someone we love, occasionally alone, but always moving toward a rendezvous that might prove to be a new beginning or a dead end? I think it is our vulnerability in the face of this perennial uncertainty that moves me, and that explains why, as I watched Marina Abramović lifting her face and opening her eyes to yet another stranger, seated opposite her, in the “square of light” in the Museum of Modern Art, I felt I was bearing witness to a meeting between lovers, one of whom had returned from the dead. Being apart and coming together, falling out and making up—these are rudimentary and familiar rhythms of human existence. We have all lost a loved one. We all lose touch with the past while remaining haunted by it. We recover what we thought we would never see again, surprised by a piece of music, by the smell of cedars in the rain, by a photograph found in a forgotten drawer. But nothing is more overwhelming than the face of another human being, utterly open to us, unconditionally accepting of us, allowing us to bare our souls and be recognized for who we are. At such moments, time hangs fire. Words are not spoken. Gestures are not needed. Physical contact is out of the question. “There’s so many different reasons why people come to sit in front of me,” Marina said. “It’s not about me any more. Very soon, I’m just the mirror of their own self.” The average time visitors spend in front of the Mona Lisa is thirty seconds. At least 750,000 saw The Artist is Present. Many people spent hours watching Marina Abramović in her Square of Light, and scores camped overnight in the street, hoping for a few minutes in her presence. Klaus Biesenbach (director of MoMA) explained Marina’s connection with her audience in terms of the “extraordinary lack she felt as a child. She desires to be loved, she desires to be needed. . . . She needs the audience like air to breathe.” He added, “She’s not in love with any one person. She’s in love with

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the world,” though every single person in the atrium felt that she was there wholly for him or for her. And so we are brought back to the face of the mother, the face that is open to us, in which we come to see ourselves, and without which we are lost unless, through art, ritual, or religion, we find a face in the clouds or a form of communion that enables us to finally experience the meaning of that loving recognition that was withheld from us when we needed it most.

Exodus For several years, one of Carola Faller-Barris’s graphic images has graced our house—a gift of the artist. Though this dark dendritic mass has reminded me of the stranglehold of vines or roots over the stone temples of Borobudur or a nest of compacted tendrils from which there is no escape, I am also aware that Carola has struggled with depression for many years and quit her teaching job in 2003, in part because of it. It was therefore impossible for me not to discern in her painstakingly drawn images a sense of being buried alive in a black hole and the defensive attitude of someone in retreat from the world. In the fall of 2014 I happened to be in Basel, attending a conference. Since Carola and her husband Craig lived across the Rhine in Freiburg, only forty minutes away by train, I took the opportunity to visit them. It was All Saints Day, and when Craig met me at the station he commented that the unseasonably warm weather might dissuade some people from visiting cemeteries and remembering the dead. This offhand remark came back to mind five minutes later when we reached Craig’s apartment and Carola opened the door to us, relaxed and smiling. That a cloud seemed to have lifted was confirmed as I looked at Carola’s recent drawings, framed and behind antireflective glass in the living room. Whereas her images from the early to mid 2000s are tightly woven skeins of root, impenetrable balls, interior spaces defended by thorns, in her more recent work the entangled masses had been loosened, allowing the light to pass through. The woven containers were now open at either end, their sheaths were thin rather than thick, light in texture, and riddled with holes. Marveling at this sea change, I mentioned to Carola that I had sometimes compared her skilled and surreal drawing technique with Escher, but while

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23 . Shoah, Carola Faller-Barris, 2005.

his metamorphoses were conceptual in character hers were heartfelt and profoundly organic. Carola acknowledged the changes in her work, using the word Entfaltung (development, gradual growth, opening) to describe it, though a recent exhibition had been called Metamorphosis. “To what do you attribute these changes?” Carola had been in analysis for several years. This had made a difference. But her religious sensibility had also played a significant role. She had been raised Catholic and still kept the faith, though her interests had ramified and diversified—a headlike shape encased in a network of brushwood or briar, entitled Christus; a ball of entwined twigs resembling an enclosed nest, called Shoah; two standing cylinders woven from similar material, respectively called Oratory and Jacob ’s Ladder (Himmelsleiter).

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24 . Untitled, Carola Faller-Barris, 2014.

Carola’s studio was in a building that had been a barracks for French troops after the Second World War. Another metamorphosis, I thought, as we entered the building. Indeed, I would soon realize that allusions to the Holocaust occurred in several of Carola’s works, as if the suffering of the Jews, of Christ, and of refugees from Gaza, Syria, Libya, and sub-Saharan Africa were deeply connected and echoed her own existential struggles. After Craig had carefully unpacked several large drawings (the dimensions are generally about 4’ x 3’), Carola unwrapped a sculptured work called Entbindung (birth, delivery). Suggestive of a broken egg or skull, it is made of wax and fleshlike in color. Across the top of the egg is a stitched wound; on one side is a gaping red wound from which a carelessly applied bandage (binde) has come away. There is also a tattooed number, such as were inscribed—Carola said—on the forearms of the inmates of Auschwitz. “I find it fascinating,” Carola said, “that people who see this work are irresistibly drawn to touch it, as if in sympathy or out of compassion, as if they wanted to make whole what had been so cruelly broken.” I too touched the surface of the broken egg, moved by what Carola had shared of her own experience of emerging, unbound, from a dark and con-

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fined space and by the historical analogues of rebirth—a nation returned to life and redeemed or refugees escaping tyranny or a war-torn homeland and finding a new life. Earlier that morning, Craig had pointed to a line of dark hills beyond the spires and roofs of the city and told me that Feiburg lay on the western edge of the Black Forest. Naturally, I thought of Husserl and of Heidegger, who had taught at Freiburg. Of Heidegger’s three-room cabin (Die Hütte), some sixteen miles away, where he wondered at and pondered the nature of being and wrote the bulk of Zein und Zeit. A few months ago Heidegger’s socalled Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) had been published, raising anew the vexed question as to how an edifying philosophy could issue from the same mind that harbored racist fantasies and became infatuated with National Socialism. It isn’t simply that light and shadow are mutually entailed, as Carola’s drawings compellingly demonstrate; it is our naive conviction that a person is or should be a seamless whole, and tell a single consistent story, that makes it difficult for us to accept that each of us, as Fernando Pessoa observed, “is several, is many, is a profusion of selves.”73 As Carola leafed through a photographic catalog of her work, I was arrested by a piece that made use of the Trinity (God as three consubstantial persons or essences) to communicate her compassion for the migrants who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean in the hope that a new life awaits them in Europe. Though originally entitled Lampedusa, after the Italian Pelagie island where thousands of migrants first set foot in the promised land, Carola now called this work Exodus in order to make explicit the connection between this migration and the biblical migration of the Israelites out of Egypt. The work involved three elongated shapes, placed side by side. Carola explained that the one on the left was a blue sleeping bag and intended to evoke a migrant sleeping rough somewhere in Europe, homeless, perhaps in fear of his life, and vulnerable to the cold, the hostility of locals, and the police. The middle shape suggests a coarsely woven shroud, slightly torn open (has the person escaped or been discovered and taken away?). The right-hand image resembles a mummified body, wrapped in bandages in preparation for burial at sea. “Those that drown,” Carola said, “are often never found, and never receive a decent burial.” I told Carola that my most recent fieldwork had been among African migrants in three European cities, and I had often been told that suffering was

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the price a human being has to pay if he is to enter paradise or even receive his due in this world. The sentiment was reminiscent of Nietzsche’s conception of freedom—that “the value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in which one pays for it—what it costs us.”74 “In many ways,” I said, “we are all migrants, metamorphosing from one self to another, but often—as in these recurring images in your work—cocooned or wrapped in a chrysalis, waiting for release [Waiting for God is the title of one of Carola’s pieces].” Another image in Carola’s catalog was of an upturned boat in winter. “In spring,” Carola said, “the boat will be turned the right way up and people will take it out onto the river.” I wanted to connect many of the comments Carola made about her art to her own biography, observing that the black raven had flown, that she had come out of her shell, left the nest, taken her boat out into the stream of the world. But I did not want to risk reducing her work to a form of personal therapy, because it clearly transcended her own situation and spoke compellingly, one might even say archetypally, to the human condition—these images of the reversibility of things, dark forms diffusing into pure whiteness, tightly woven forms being teased apart, cocoons opening, wounds unbandaged, threads unspooled. In Carola’s work, religious, mythological, and metaphorical figures merge. Trinity morphs into triptych, while three shrouded shapes mark an anonymous migrant’s passage from birth, through going to and fro on the earth and walking up and down on it, to death by misadventure in a place far from home. In another work, entitled Jonah, the vague shape of a whale encloses nothing, as if the scapegoated sailor who has spent three days and three nights in its belly has been freed from his confinement. It was Craig who enlightened me as to how Carola’s graphic work was a devotional practice, whose work recalls the story of Abba Paul, the desert father who spent the whole of Lent alone, eating only one measure of lentils, drinking one small jug of water, and working at a single basket, weaving it and unweaving it. This method of religious mindfulness in the midst of ordinary work was known as syntaxis. “What seems like a senseless repetition of labor is a description of his constant prayer, his keeping close to Jesus. His ‘work’ is a timeless action . . . as he prepares for the feast of the resurrection.”75

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Craig’s comments resonated with Carola’s comparison between her own devotional act of repeating, in minuscule writing, a single verse of Psalm 130:6 (“My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning”) and her reference, during our conversation to Penelope’s fidelity to Odysseus, fending off suitors and arresting the passage of time by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father by day and unweaving it at night. These fusions of religious and mythological figures helped explain why I had always regarded Carola’s imagery as archetypal—or, in Durkheim’s terms, “elemental.” Spinning and weaving are perhaps humanity’s oldest images of intersubjectivity—the ambivalent interplay of self and other and the dynamic relationship between one’s own inner world (eigenwelt) and the worlds that surround and impinge upon one (mitwelt and umwelt). Carola’s knotted, entangled, and woven forms have analogues in cultures ancient and modern. Relationships with other people, with gods and spirits, with material possessions, and with abstract ideas such as history, society, fate, and destiny all tend to be conceptualized as bonds, ties, or strings, while wider fields of relationship are compared to networks, webs, and skeins or the warp and woof of woven cloth. Even anthropologists have recourse to such images in their analyses of social relations. One reason for the ubiquity of these images may be that spinning and weaving are closely associated with clothing, which is itself a core metaphor for social being, as in the cognate terms costume and custom. That these same metaphors are commonly used of luck or fate also suggests an intimate link between a person’s destiny and her primary relationships with parents and close kin, a link that begins with the umbilical cord through which nutrients flow from the mother to the fetus and continues as a symbolic “tie” or attachment after the cord is “tied” and severed after a birth.76 Among the Yaka of southwest Congo, the person “is seen as a knot of kinship relations.”77 Becoming a person (wuka muutu) involves “tying together or interweaving” the various forms of exchange that transmit life, emotions, energies, and knowledge among agnatic and uterine kin, as well as between the living and the dead, human beings and nature spirits, people and nature.78 Among the Kuranko, a person’s most immediate social field is compared to the network of ropes that is placed over a rice farm when the crop is nearing maturity. One end of the main rope is tethered to the foot of a high platform on which children sit with slingshots to scare

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birds away from the ripening grain. When this rope is tugged, the tributary strands shake, frightening the scavenging birds. So it is said that “one’s birth is like the bird-scaring rope” (soron i le ko yagbayile) or “one’s birth is like a chain” (soron i la ko yolke), since one’s fate is inextricably tied to the fate of others. Alluding to kinship relations, it is said that the main rope is the father, its extension is the mother, and the children are the secondary strands. Kuranko also share a well-nigh universal belief that kinship, fate, spells, curses, and duty are binding. Such bonds often derive from one’s birth. They are in the nature of things. They cannot be revoked. One’s duty (wale also means “work”) is “that which you have to do”—the actions and obligations that are alleged to follow naturally from being male or female, chief or commoner, father or mother, fi rst-born or last-born, etc. But while Kuranko invoke the notion of innate essences to explain why certain roles are binding and inescapable, classical Indo-European thought takes the notion of human bonds more literally. In Homer, for instance, fortune is “a cord or bond fastened upon a man by the powers above.”79 At birth the gods or fates spin the strands of weal or woe that a man must endure in the course of his life as invisible threads.80 And man is bound to die. Comparable images appear in Norse mythology, where the gods are called “the Binders” and the Norns spin, weave, and bind the fates of men at birth. 81 For the Anglo-Saxons, too, fate was woven, while pain, age, and affliction were spoken of as bonds.82 Yet in all human societies we find a dramatic contrast between necessity,83 conceived of as that which a person is bound to do or that which is bound to happen, and freedom, construed as the possibility of loosening, unbinding, or escaping the constraints placed upon a person by virtue of birth and situation. Intersubjectivity is vexed and unstable—a matter of both bonds and double binds, of fulfi llment and frustration—a point that Carola made in referring to her parents’ indifference to her talents and her struggle for recognition. But even a breakdown of communication, a loss of contact, a violation of trust and an absence of love are elements in human bonding, as Aristotle reminds us, citing Heraclitus’s adages that “it is what opposes that helps” and “from different tones comes the fairest tune” and “all things are produced through strife.” 84 As Craig began rewrapping the framed drawings and returning them to their racks, I told Carola a little about my book project and how I hoped to

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include a chapter about her work. Not only was I fascinated by the religious elements in her work; I had been moved by the strongly autobiographical preoccupations that also found expression in it. Craig had mentioned to me that the compacted nestlike forms that she developed in the early 2000s were at once “protective” and “imprisoning,” and it was this ambiguity that I found compelling, for it spoke to the anxiety that inheres in all human relationships as we seek to be open to the world while defending ourselves from its dangers. For Freud, this “anxiety” is present in the most primitive singlecell organisms. Even the lowly amoeba needs to draw nourishment from outside its body boundary, yet it also needs to be able to filter and control traffic across this boundary, defended against invasive and life-threatening forces.85 Human beings, of course, may imagine external dangers where there are none or live in fear of invasion because of some trauma suffered early in their life. Psychological anxieties also spring from social inequalities. There are few situations more demoralizing than when one finds oneself in an unequal power relationship with someone who acts as though he has the right to invade one’s privacy, make demands on one’s time, or determine the course of one’s life, leaving one no option but to suffer in silence, denied the right to react. In such situations, one has recourse to ritual or magical strategies for recovering a sense of being in control of one’s own destiny and changing one’s experience of an oppressive relationship. Storytelling, drawing, and writing “magically” alter things as they are, as in Carola’s repetition of a line from a psalm and the playful way in which, shortly before we left the studio, she took a small swaddled bundle, loosely bound with twigs, and placed it in lap of a porcelain Buddha she had recently purchased. As we prepared to go, I cast one last look at the abstract wooden crucifi x on the wall, the miniature icons of the virgin and child, and the papier-mâché “papyrus” that Carola had folded over on itself to resemble a chysalid. Over a lunch of cheese, prosciutto, ham, salami, artichoke hearts, and focaccia, Carola said that she would like to spend some time in New Zealand, Craig’s homeland and mine, to inspire her creative work. Perhaps she might study Maori weaving. I liked the idea of Carola learning tukutuku weaving, which requires two weavers, seated on either side a latticed panel, passing strands of dyed plant fiber through the lath to create intricate patterns, named

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for various landforms, fish species, bird life, dance forms, weather patterns, star formations, and moral values. And I was tempted to speak of the reciprocal movement of the weavers as an image of harmony—between inner and outer, past and present, self and other. What I did say, however, was how important it was for my own work to acknowledge the plurality of the human condition, the dialectic at the heart of all experience between what lies within us and what we project beyond ourselves in spoken or written words, in works of art, in marriage, and in collective endeavors. “This,” I said, “is why Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys have been seminal influences in my present work.” Hardly had I said this than Carola moved to a pinboard on the dining room wall, moved aside a cloth that had obscured it, and showed me the portraits of these two individuals that she had pinned there—figures equally important to her. And it was then that I remembered that in Carola’s studio she had taped to the wall a sketch she had done of one of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, which Bourgeois once described as “an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” With its resonances of spinning, weaving, nurturance, and protection, Bourgeois’s Maman also recalls the Greek heroine Arachne, a skilled weaver who challenged Athena’s own abilities at the loom, only to be cursed and transformed into a spider. On the train back to Basel, scribbling notes, recovering snatches of conversation and fleeting impressions, I kept coming back to Heidegger’s comment on Dasein as always understanding itself “in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself,” 86 and of his image of a clearing (Lichtung ) and of the spaces of light and illumination that sometimes appear in the darkness of our lives, moments when we can lower our guard and fully accept, and perhaps wholly embrace, the world in which we find ourselves thrown. As the train crossed the Rhine, I put my journal back in my briefcase and made my way to the carriage door, ready to alight as soon as we pulled in to the main station. Two blue-shirted border guards (Grenzwache) were stand-

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ing over a young African woman who was struggling to insert a tiny key in the padlock of her bulging suitcase. One of the guards held the women’s passport in one hand and his cell phone in the other. Spelling out the woman’s name, letter by letter, he then waited for a response from his controller. The other guard continued to observe the woman, now wrenching open her suitcase in the cramped space so that it could be rummaged through. I thought of the thousands of individuals risking death to cross the Mediterranean from Syria or West Africa, desperate to leave a place of darkness, danger, and despair and fi nd their way into a promised land, a world of light. Will they make it? Will they see the land of milk and honey of which they have dreamed? And who will be their Moses, leading them out of bondage? I had observed this humiliating scene many times before, but this time, possibly because Carola’s Exodus was still fresh in mind, I found it unbearable to remain passive as this woman suffered the indignity of being searched and suspected of being illegal, while I crossed the border as though innocent of any crime. But was I not complicit, simply by being white, in some great travesty of justice and was I not guilty of shrinking back into my self, lips sealed, hands tied, safely cocooned like the invisible pupae in Carola’s art, while another dark age descended on the outside world?

Making It Otherwise Arguably, artists are affl icted by a more than ordinary inability to accept things as they are.87 This is not simply the result of an unusually critical or skeptical cast of mind, for its source is often some traumatic experience that has broken one’s trust that life will give one at least as much joy as grief, as much acceptance as rejection, and on balance be worth living. Disappointed in the shortcomings of the external world, one may draw solace from the world within, and what one creates for oneself by other worldly means— including the work of art. If the artist is like a refugee from the world where most people find a secure niche, then art is her sanctuary. If the artist is compared to someone who risks madness by living beyond the pale, then art is her asylum. And if the artist is someone whose devotion to work takes precedence over everything else, then art resembles the monastic life. In its methodology, however, art resembles ritual.

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Consider, the collaborative work of Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon. Their invention of wrapping as a form of art has its origins in mundane activity. “Babies are swaddled, corpses have shrouds. Mummies are wrapped. We are wrapped, in clothing. Bandages wrap. And, really, since Christo, many of us have come to see our cities in different ways, as life imitates art. . . . Every time we see a giant building wrapped in plastic, our attention may well have been alerted because of Christo.” 88 Art and ritual share one compelling element: they avail themselves of mundane images and activities in order to transform the way the world appears to us. Eating and drinking provide a basic repertoire of behaviors that are elaborated in rituals from the Eucharist to animal sacrifice and libation. Washing, weaving, spinning, stitching, and masking are primoridal metaphors. And inducing vertigo through swinging or swaying is a means of altering consciousness among children in playgrounds everywhere, as well as Turkish dervishes, krishnaite swingers, and South Italian tarantists. The Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) beautifully illustrates the way in which the kinds of heightened states of awareness that we associate with transcendence and religious awakening have their origins in everyday practices—in this instance, preparing, pouring, and drinking tea. 89 Thus the injunction “just heat water and prepare tea” resonates with key expressions in Buddhist thinking such as “just sit” in Zen practice, just implying actions free of all instrumentality and worldly distraction. In this vein, one might remark the way in which the host sprinkles water on the shrubs and flagstones outside the teahouse just before his guests arrive, so that the first sensation for the guests will be the aromatic smell of rain-rinsed cedar leaves. As for the details of the ceremony itself, every gesture and moment assists the consummation of a sense of intimate being-with-others, of harmonious relationship and an appreciation of mindfulness and simplicity. A cardinal rule of tea preparation, for instance, is that heavy, sturdy utensils should be handled as though light and fragile, and light utensils as though they are heavy. This method imparts a quality of momentousness to the handling of the bamboo tea scoop and ease to the taking up of the iron kettle or filled water jar. The implication is that the utensil and the practitioner are united in the act of lifting, so that the conjoined act is a reality in which they coexist. In this very Heideggerian view, the essence of the object is revealed in

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the way it is taken up and deployed, while the essence of the person is revealed in the way in which he handles the object. A late sixteenth-century poem by Sen Sotan captures this mode of apprehension in this way: If asked The nature of chanoyu Say it’s the sound Of windblown pines In a painting. With gongs and incense, the warmth and bitterness of tea, and the sounds of steaming kettle and whisk against bowl, chanoyu engages all the senses, and every movement in the enclosed space of the tearoom is felt in the subtly changing air currents and shifting shadows. Sotan’s poem suggests that the heart of the experience of chanoyu lies in moving beyond a one-dimensional, intellectualized grasp of things. An ink painting, when regarded as a work to be viewed, remains simply a perceptible object, distant and impersonal. What Sotan appears to be saying, however, is that when one ceases to externalize the object as something to contemplate and enters fully into it, one may savor it as an extension of one’s own body and soul. The sound of the wind in the pines suggests an elusive depth beyond the surface of the paper and the ink. Chanoyu is neither ritual for ritual’s sake nor art for art’s sake; it is an art of life that may transform our sense of objects and of ourselves in relation to objects, as well as our sense of ourselves and of ourselves in relation with others. In chanoyu the immanent is fused with the transcendent. The everyday becomes, through mindfulness and care, something so unfamiliar and extraordinary that we feel disposed to speak of it in spiritual or religious terms. But this transcendent experience is not, and cannot be, arrived at through conceptual thought or even put into words. It requires the suspension of thought and complete immersion in the actions themselves, such as using a whisk with minimal expenditure of time and effort in order to preserve the temperature of the water and the fragrance of the tea. Attention to bodily movement, posture, gesture, and the senses—which are the basic building blocks of all ritual—helps us understand that ritualization

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works largely outside reason and cognition. Indeed, the goals of ritual could not be attained through logic and language, for what ritualization enables are transformations in our experience that may be rationalized after the fact, and even put into words, but are not predicated on cognitive certifications and verbal scripts. “Rites,” observes Pierre Bourdieu, “more than any other type of practice, serve to underline the mistake of enclosing in concepts a logic made to dispense with concepts; of treating movements of the body and practical manipulations as purely logical operations; of speaking of analogues and homologies (as one sometimes has to, in order to understand and to convey that understanding) when all that is involved is the practical transference of incorporated, quasi-postural schemes. 90 Ten years before Bourdieu penned these lines on the force of habit and of practical mimesis, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott also argued against the notion that an activity springs from “premeditated propositions about the activity” such as the grammar of a language, protocols of research, canons of good workmanship, or moral codes. His example of the cookery book succinctly summarizes his view: The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cookery can spring; it is nothing more than a retrospective abstract of somebody’s practical experience of cooking; it is the stepchild, not the parent, of the activity, and already presupposes a knowledge of how to boil or braise, how to mix and measure, how to dice or slice, how to stir and season, how to judge when a meal is done.91 Can we see art as the stepchild, rather than parent, of an activity? Some years ago, the ethnographer Stefania Pandolfo met a forty-one year old Moroccan man who was suffering from a psychotic illness that had lasted two years. During his months of “despondent seclusion,” Ilyas had painted murals on the walls of his room depicting some of the hallucinatory images that had seized him during his periods of madness. When not ill, Ilyas painted “ordinary things”—realistic scenes, landscapes, and geometrical motifs—but during his bouts of illness, serpents, swords, jinn, and mermaids drawn from Maghrebi mythology dominated his murals. Ilyas gave Stefania to understand that he painted in this way when not in an ordinary state of mind, though the Arabic term hala (condition, state) can imply mental illness, spirit possession, or a state of trance. While susceptible to mythological suggestion,

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Ilyas would speak of the paintings as “his,” albeit in an altered state of consciousness. “Ilyas says: ‘ kan ‘abbar fi l-luha,’ I express, give form, in the painting, to what agitates inside me.” Art is a means of recovering a life—a struggle, as Stefania says of Ilyas, for an ethical life ( jihad al-nafs)—under conditions in which one’s life has become compromised or has failed one or been unfairly denied. Though one cannot fully accept the world as one finds it, or even as one suffers it, it may be accepted under the terms that one imaginatively responds to it. This transition from passivity to activity is crucial. Consider the work of the environmental artists Christo and JeanneClaude, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy. None of these artists has sought to put a stamp on the world as he or she finds it—whether a bridge across the Seine, an extinct volcanic cinder cone in Arizona’s painted desert, or yellowing elm leaves in a Scottish wood. Rather, the aim of these artists is to reveal aspects of the world that most of us never notice. “The best of my work,” writes Andy Goldsworthy in a Zen vein, “sometimes the result of much struggle when made, appears so obvious that it is incredible I didn’t see it before. It was there all the time.”92 The artwork is, however, transitory. “I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain,” observed Christo who, with Jeanne-Claude, wrapped in synthetic fabric the coast of Little Bay in Sydney, Australia, the Reichstag in Berlin, the Pont-Neuf in Paris, and created a twenty-four-mile fence across Sonoma and Marin counties in California. Curiously, a disarming modesty accompanies these monumentally difficult projects. For Goldsworthy, his ephemeral sculptures of snow, ice, bark, stones, leaves, grass, petals, and twigs are not ways of making his mark on the landscape but of working out how one may collaborate with nature to reveal its essence. “By working large, I am not trying to dominate nature,” writes Goldsworthy. “If anything, I am giving nature a more powerful presence in the mass of earth, stone, wood that I use.”93 Turrell’s philosophy of art is almost identical. Of his work at Roden Crater in Arizona, he said, “I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I did not want the work to be a mark upon nature, but I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces.94

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Art visits on nature a momentary order that nature will ultimately reject. “Process and decay are implicit.”95 And though the artist seems, for a moment, to be in command, it is the nature of things that she will also disappear. Not even photographs will bring back the immediacy of that moment when iris blades were pinned together with thorns and five sections were fi lled with rowanberries, for even as Goldsworthy created this delicate arrangement fish and ducks were trying to get at the berries. The appearance of Roden Crater changes with the seasons and the weather, and the impact of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental wrapping is blunted when all one can see of them now is between the covers of a coffeetable book. In our struggle to accept transience and loss, religion and art are copresences. Consider, for instance, Turrell’s memoir of his father, whose love of birds was equaled only by his passion for aeronautical engineering. “He loved to call in the birds,”96 Turrell writes, in order to feed them, and he succeeded in mastering a variety of complex calls. In 1942, not long after America declared war on Japan, antiaircraft gunners around Los Angeles opened up a barrage, thinking that their city was under attack. It was in the midst of this real or imagined air raid that James Turrell was conceived. Around this time, Turrell’s parents were putting the finishing touches to a bird-feeding room that would later become James’s bedroom. “I had to surrender my room to my father when he needed to call in the birds. The room was inhabited by my father’s presence and the birds’ song” (11). Because of the fear of air raids, blackout shades had to be placed over the windows at night, though as James grew older he could draw the shades during the day, to darken his room. “When I was six years old, to assert my own presence in the room, I took a pin or needle to these curtains and pierced them to make star patterns and the constellations . . . These weren’t just holes in the curtains, they were holes in reality. By changing the reality of the conscious-awake state of day, one could see further into imagined space to the stars, which were actually there but obscured by the light of the sun” (12). As the years passed, the curtains, riddled with many holes, became torn and tattered. When his father died, Turrell returned to the room to find it “no longer vital. But I heard a mockingbird. It sang my father’s song.”

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If I have cited Turrell’s memoir at length, it is to make the point that though we carry the past in our genes and in our memories no one can know for certain what will endure of any individual life. Turrell inherited his father’s passion for flying, his parent’s Quaker faith in “the possibility of direct, unmediated communion with the Divine,” and a desire to see the world with the same lens he had used to see the stars through his tar paper curtains as a child—to create spaces “with a similarity to the camera obscura. I wanted the spaces entered to be an expression in light of what was outside” (21–25). Roden Crater was the culmination of a life’s work that Turrell describes, not as a process of making art out of nature, or even of communicating his vision, but of enabling people to place themselves in contact with nature— its ever changing light and weather, its diurnal and seasonal cycles—so that it becomes their experience (61, 62). For some, this experience will undoubtedly be construed as religious or spiritual; for others it will be aesthetic or place them at a loss for words. But, for all, it will mediate a novel understanding of familiar things, natural events, and unanswerable existential questions. A great sadness descends on me when I think of the artworks I have studied and revisited in the course of writing this book. Those who created them have, for the most part, passed away, and many have been indifferent to the durability of their work or deliberately made it degradable. What lifts my spirit, however, is the awareness that even as one artist’s work crumbles or fades from our memory, or ends up in an archive or museum, new work appears, drawing on whatever materials come to hand—whether these be dead leaves in a wood, ochers in a jar or tube, blocks of marble, heaps of scrap metal, discarded clothing, pages torn from a book, iPhones, or video recorders—addressing someone’s inner imperative to enter the world not merely as physical presence but as a creative figure who contributes to making that world new again. This is a process in which we participate, for it is the nature of being human to seek ways that our inner lives can find adequate expression in relation to others and our environments. Despite our occasional disenchantment with other humans or with nature, the world around us offers raw and renewable material for helping us think through our lives in a language that transcends the personal. But it is only in the world beyond us that we can ever know or find ourselves, let alone be redeemed.

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Art and the Everyday In the antipodean spring of 2014, I visited Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery with my friend Souchou Yao to see an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art called Commune. The first work that captured my attention was a visual diary compiled over a nine-year period by Xia Xing (b. 1974) from pictures he had clipped from the Beijing News. With the extraordinary technical skill one associates with Chinese art, whether classical or contemporary, Xia Xing had reproduced sixty of these images in oil paint. Each documented a dramatic event that, despite having made headline news, had been quickly forgotten as the “blind river of history” swept them into oblivion—a man whose lower arms had been amputated in an industrial accident; two woman holding up a photograph of loved ones who had disappeared in the Cultural Revolution; a man arraigned in the street by plain clothes’ police; an elderly man with an indecipherable petition; a man staring into a polluted pool; a wall being erected down the middle of a suburban street; a group of dispossessed farmers haplessly watching developers occupy their land; a woman sitting on the ground, the debris of her demolished house behind her, clutching her knees and crying in anguish. Though these images suggest a critique of the political and economic landscape of modern China, they can also be seen as a kind of disinterested witnessing. Westerns who flock to see the terra-cotta warriors entombed with Emperor Qin Shi Huang as part of his grandiose scheme to perpetuate his earthly power beyond the grave, do not, as a rule, reflect on his totalitarian regime, the sacrifice of so many other lives in creating his necropolis, or the hubris of his dream, for the abstracted and breathtaking beauty of the art precludes such political reflection. In a similar vein, as Souchou pointed out to me, the Ming dynasty treasures and the blatantly political art that attract so many contemporary buyers deflect attention onto the past, targeting Mao and “historical” events like the Cultural Revolution rather than the present party or politburo. Generally speaking, artists avoid visiting ignominy on their nation by feeding the West’s appetite for cases of human rights abuse or social malaise. The critic or protester is tolerated as long as he does not attract a mass following or seek to implement his vision through revolutionary action. Ai Weiwei is more of an exception than the rule; few artists are prepared to follow his example and “pull the whiskers of the tiger.” Besides, Souchou explained, most people are

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struggling to cope with quotidian adversities and to meet familial demands; they have little energy or time for the politics of the state. As in life, so in art—abstraction is a luxury the poor cannot afford. “My parents are always incredulous,” Souchou said, “when I share with them anecdotes about my anthropology teaching, the talks I give in China and abroad, and the books I have written about my childhood in China or colonialism in Malaya. Practical matters have governed their lives. Like peasants everywhere, the focus is on survival, not introspection. They are suspicious of newfangled things.” Something of this stoic attitude informed the comments of workers in a cloth-dying factory in Shanghai as they shared their workaday experiences with Li Xiaofei. Speaking against a backdrop of deafening machines, conveying screeds of fabric at high speed across immense rollers, one woman said that she had worked in this factory “since the beginning” of its operations. Choosing her words carefully, she added, “I wouldn’t say that I like it . . . I just go along with what I’ve started.” Can one take these words at face value and question whether Marx’s “immiseration thesis” holds true for every worker within a mode of production that she does not own and from which she derives no profit commensurate with her expenditure of time and energy?97 That this worker “owned” her own story and had evidently found a life of her own within the limits of a factory worker’s lot suggests that there is always more to an individual’s experience than is captured by the discourse of social science. If, as Marx argued, the creator is consumed by his creation, then might not this be the case for artists as well as factory workers?” May we therefore draw an analogy between Li Xiaofei’s Assembly Line project, which “highlights the interplay between human and machine,” and the anonymous workers who talked to him about their jobs, their lives, their hopes, and their dreams? Can we sustain a distinction between the creative genius and the mere drudge or between the soulful character of art and the soul-destroying nature of labor? For me, one of the arresting things about Commune was that such distinctions were bracketed out. Artists and workers alike were seen to be engaged in their livelihoods, generating life through whatever they turned their hands to, whether this was a machine one tended, a household one maintained, a meal one prepared, or a painting, photograph, or installation one produced.

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A recurring motif in Commune was the place of the personal in a social field that Westerners are all too prone to see as prevailingly collective. Despite the collectivization of land under Mao and communal living (in which possessions were shared and even private cooking was banned), people found ways and means of doing some things on their own terms and in their own time. It was a little like the ostraka produced by ancient Egyptian workers who toiled all day on the strictly traditional tableaux of pharaonic temples or tombs but in their spare time sketched magical formulae or witty, freestyle, irreverent images of a mouse, not a sun God, holding the reins of a chariot or portraits of a favorite dog or of a beautiful, slender woman in a see-through dress, her dark hair falling across one shoulder as she plays a lute. As Alastair Sooke puts it, this particular image resembles something Modigliani might have done.98 There is a tendency for academic thought to find more truth in sweeping generalizations than in the minor details of lived experience. Undoubtedly, this tendency has its origins in the universal human bias to perceive the world stereotypically, rather than idiosyncratically, and explains why scholars of religion so often reduce religious experience, in all its variety, to monothetic categories (Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, agnosticism, etc.) and why social scientists persist in assimilating the personal into the collective. But art resists such reductions and assimilations, and Commune offered moving examples of this. Li Wei’s uncannily lifelike fiberglass figure, for instance, testifies to the artist’s need “to place herself as someone else . . . to become that somebody else completely.” While traditional Chinese art seldom portrayed human individuality, preferring “stylized emperors, warriors and Buddhas,” social realism favored triumphant and heroic caricatures of peasants and soldiers. By contrast, Li Wei creates unique figures, “with posture, hair, wrinkles and freckles rendered in meticulous detail.” Naked before the world, these figures seem self-absorbed and utterly alone. But they are “real people—human beings different from us in every way, yet in essence just like ourselves.” 99 Gao Rong (b. 1986) is at pains to recover personal memories from the austere and impersonal period through which her grandparents lived. Using her superb skills with needle and thread, she reconstructed the cramped thirty-square-meter house in northwestern China where her grandparents lived and raised their seven children. In this labor of love, Gao Rong brings

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25 . Human Being, Li Wei, 2008. Used with permission by David Williams, Li Wei, and White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney.

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back to life the joie de vivre that permeated this house; in recreating it, she said, “I’ve enabled [my grandparents] to live forever.” In Jiang Jian’s Orphan Files, a similar resistance to the forgetfulness of history and the depersonalizing discourse of the state fi nds expression in his photographs of one thousand orphan children juxtaposed with photocopies of the bureaucratic documentation for each child that effectively writes their individual lives and experiences out of existence by providing only spare details of name, date, and place of birth, state of health, date and cause of parents’ death. Not simply content with bringing these children back to life in his art, Jiang Jian regularly visits them all and takes an active interest in their welfare. Finally, Michael Lin (b. 1964) rebels against the “timid neutrality of contemporary décor” by assembling 320 wooden stools in the form of a large table painted

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with bright peonies. But the stools on the perimeter of the table have been displaced and jumbled, suggesting that the collective assemblage is unstable and perhaps illusory. “What is the individual’s relationship to the community? it seems to ask. Are we part of the pattern whether we like it or not? If we are shunned or exiled, so we still belong?”100 There is an intimate relationship between the personal and the everyday, for both evoke experiences or events that do not wholly conform to any general worldview, whether this be historical, theological, or sociological. Indeed, both the personal and the everyday often subvert these overviews. A graphic example of this was Wang Cheng’s installations of a pigsty and a communal oven that had been built with mud bricks taken from the Great Wall of China. Even the most monumental expressions of statist thought and practice cannot endure for all time. But in the quotidian ingenuity and creative energy of ordinary people the old is made new. In bringing these structures to Australia, Wang Cheng participates in this perennial capacity of the work of art to mediate transformations in the way the world appears to us, converting what is given into something we alone choose. When I shared with Kathy Golski my impressions of the Commune exhibition, she observed, “One cannot find much interest in people who represent themselves as perfectly happy or secure. Who hide their uncertainties and vulnerability. The human condition is imperfection and struggle, not perfection and rest.” Kathy then asked me if I had seen Song Dong’s Waste Not when it came to Sydney. If I wanted to explore the personal and the everyday, this was a work I really would have to see. The backstory to Song Dong’s installation is as moving as the artwork itself. Song Dong’s mother (1928–2008) was born into a wealthy family that fell on hard times after the communists seized power in 1949. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution brought even greater hardships on the family, and Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, “adopted the habits of frugality and thrift in order to make the best of what little she had.” Song recalls that, when he was a child, “my mother always brought scraps of fabric to make clothes, because they didn’t need to be purchased with the government-distributed clothing coupons. She continued to collect them even in better times because she feared that the shortages might some day return, seeing the habit of ‘waste not’ as a fabao—literally a ‘magic weapon’ to guard against a return to poverty.”101 In the wake of her husband’s death in 2002,

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Zhao’s hoarding became compulsive and obsessional. Song saw this as his mother’s way of filling an emotional void. After initial efforts to break his mother of her habit, he accepted her survival strategy and, with Zhao’s blessings, began to create a work of art that incorporated ten thousand of the everyday objects his mother had collected over half a century, and which chronicled one woman’s struggle to make a viable life for herself and her family in the face of grinding poverty, persecution, and social suffering. Art, like life, avails itself of almost anything in achieving its goals. The clothes, books, cutlery, school supplies, shopping bags, rice bowls, dolls, medicine bottles, umbrellas, bottle tops, ballpoint pens, toothpaste tubes, old radiators, and bars of soap that Song Dong included in his installation testify to how mundane objects, like ordinary people, can have a second life, born again through some kind of transfiguring event or process of re-membering and displacement. Song said that when his installation was opened in Beijing in 2005 “many people came who had a similar life during the Cultural Revolution and talked to my mother for half a day at a time. They told her: ‘It’s not your home, it’s my home.’ It got my mother out of her sadness—she said she had a second life.”102 But the second life of art is ultimately no more permanent than the first. Though it prolongs memory, sustains connections, and promises transcendence, its orderly arrangements of found objects or its painted images on canvas are subject to the same processes of entropy and loss that obtain in nature. Perhaps more arresting than the art of saving and recycling things that the Chinese call we jin qi yong (waste not), is the Taoist principle that from nothingness all things come and into nothingness all things pass. In 1995 Song Dong began keeping a diary, writing a brief account of his daily life on a flat stone. But he chose to use water rather than ink. Consonant with this acceptance of the ephemeral nature of things, he arranged to have himself photographed in Tibet, repeatedly striking the surface of the Lhasa River with an archaic Chinese seal whose stamp of authority left no imprint. A year later, on a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve in Tiananmen Square, he bent over the pavement for forty minutes until his warm breath had created a thin sheet of ice that shimmered on the dark pavement for a few hours before disappearing. He later attempted to do the same thing on a frozen lake called the Back Sea (Houhai) in a Beijing park, but his breath made no impression; one cannot create ice on top of ice.

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Something of the spirit of Song Dong’s evanescent work is present in Angela Zito’s compelling documentation of a group of retirees that meets every morning for several hours in a Beijing park to practice calligraphy. Using long-handled, sponge-tipped brushes, they write not in ink but in water. Does calligraphy only count as art, asks Angela Zito, when it is written in ink? And she “poses the question of where cultural tradition takes shape and where it acquires value, in the writing hand or on the thin, crackling paper in ink,” or in the “imitation” of an ancient art in a mundane, contemporary and “amateur” form.103 Closing the gap between what we think of as art and not art, work and leisure, religion and reality, these works deconstruct our hackneyed intellectual categories into the common soil of human existence. The characters that are rhythmically drawn on the pavement with water-soaked brushes are metaphors for the human body, flowing from the practitioner as naturally as blood flows from a wound, language from the mouth, or a gift from the heart.104

The Work of Art and the Arts of Life I can imagine no greater contrast with the crowded and driven urban-industrial life of contemporary China than the landscapes of Central Otago, although, as I would discover, Song Dong’s Taoist-inspired artworks would resonate with many of my experiences in the Ida Valley. After hiring a car in Dunedin, I headed north with my old friend Vincent O’Sullivan to spend a few days exploring a part of New Zealand that I had never before visited and to look up our mutual friend Brian Turner. At Oturehua Brian’s close neighbor, Jillian Sullivan, generously offered Vincent and me her straw bale house for the three days and nights we planned to stay there, and each evening the four of us gathered before a roaring fi re of pine logs to drink wine and share stories. Though we were all published poets, our interests were as diverse as our personalities. Yet we readily found common ground, Vincent regaling us with irreverent anecdotes, Brian sharing his concerns for the natural environment, threatened by wind farms and irrigated dairy pastures, and Jillian explaining how she had built her house from hay bales, earth, mud, river stones, and timber.

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26 . Up-On-The-Downs, Grahame Sydney, 2006.

On our fi rst morning in the valley, we clambered into Brian’s fourwheel-drive vehicle and traveled to the foothills of Mount Saint Bathans to meet Brian’s and Vincent’s friend Grahame Sydney. I considered myself fortunate—reunited with two kindred spirits, driving through a breathtaking landscape of tussock plains and snow-covered ranges, and about to meet a painter whose work I had long admired. Within seconds of stepping into Grahame’s living room, I was introduced to a hale and engaging individual some seven years younger than myself who, without prompting (or so it seems in retrospect) spoke of the postpartum sadness that sometimes oppresses a painter who, having labored on a work for many months, will dispatch it to a dealer or buyer only to rue the day he parted with it. “You writers always have your books,” Grahame said, “but we painters have only a photograph or a few catalog details to remind us of what we worked so hard to create, then lost sight of forever.” Grahame thought it would be a good idea if paintings could be leased for a few years and returned to the painter from time to time. But prospective buyers had not taken kindly to this idea. “They need to possess the painting,” Grahame said. “They want the security of legal ownership. For them, it’s often an investment, and they like to feel that no one else can gain access to what they have.” I told Grahame that his nostalgia for work that has passed out of his

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hands reminded me of the Maori concept of the hau of the gift—the spirit of the maker or giver that enters into and imbues the object so that, as it is transferred or traded far beyond its place of origin, it yearns to be returned one day to where its life began. “I certainly feel this way about New Zealand,” I said. Despite having made my home and formed lasting friendships in Australia, Denmark, Sierra Leone, and the United States, I admitted to a perennial need to touch base with the country where I spent my first and formative years and revisit the friends I made before I went out on my own into the wider world. Later, writing in my journal about this moment, I would fi nd myself reconsidering Umberto Eco’s notion of the second life of art, not only as signifying a transition from interiority to exteriority but as connoting a transformation within the artist himself whereby he passes from being a producer to being a consumer of his own work, appraising it as if he had not made it but it had been made by someone else. It is through the eyes of others that we come to see ourselves. As I strolled around Grahame’s living room, its shelves crammed with books and walls covered with his paintings, lithographs, and etchings, its large windows affording a view of the Cambrian Valley and the Hawkdun Range, I was struck by the recurring theme of emptiness and desertion in his work: a group of letter boxes in the middle of nowhere, light from a window falling on a chair that appears to have been only just vacated, a glint of sunlight on the wall of an unfurnished room, a red shed on a tawny plain; a flight of birds in an empty sky. I was also overawed by Grahame’s technical mastery, so reminiscent of Chinese art. “So Sydney’s a realist?” asks Brian Turner in an essay on his friend’s painting. “Yes,” he answers, if that means that “he faithfully records and represents what most of us believe we have seen. I’m not sure about that, personally the more powerful reality is in the feelings his work evokes and releases in me.”105 Continuing this train of thought, Brian questions whether “Sydney’s world, his wilderness where the spirit is tested and strengthened by a pure airiness, great space, is almost always unforested?” Again, his answer is illuminating: “If you can locate yourself here it is in a forest of loneliness, temperamentally, where you are exposed to yourself and everything else. You need strength of purpose, of character; you need courage to stand up here and not avert the eyes. Only through distance can you find your-

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self. Beyond the far blue, gold, or dun hills and mountains, beneath cirrus edged with gold, there’s a self to be reckoned with.”106 The remark is reminiscent of something Marc Chagall said when he first came to Paris. “What I wanted was a realism, if you like, but a psychical one.”107 Such insights would sink in later, when I learned more of the biographical background to Brian’s and Grahame’s lives in the Maniototo (from the Maori Mania-o-toto—plain of blood), and reread Janet Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo, in which an analogy is drawn between a writer’s compulsion to explore the innermost mysteries of a person’s life and the Central Otago landscape itself, whose surfaces have been stripped away to disclose jagged schist and water-polished graywacke stones.108 But right now it was time for a cuppa, and we sat around a long table as Grahame and Vincent discussed the contemporary art market and poured scorn on art theorists who decree that painting is passé and realist painting even more so. Though Grahame sells well, he has dispensed with an agent. Art galleries are reluctant to add to their few examples of his work. And art writers largely ignore him. When we had finished our tea and cookies, Grahame invited us to see his studio—a short walk away from the house. The wind off Mount Saint Bathans was bitterly cold (fresh snow had fallen on the ranges overnight), but I found myself looking up at the cloud-swathed peaks as if I had never seen their like before. Only a few times in my life have I experienced this particular altered state of consciousness. It was as though Grahame’s paintings, that had so absorbed me only minutes ago inside the house, had opened my eyes to an outside world that I had allowed myself to take for granted. Landscape and sky were utterly transfigured by the art. On the wall of Grahame’s studio I glimpsed a Vermeer reproduction. On his easel was a canvas just begun of one of his recurring motifs—a hawk impaled on a barbed wire fence, its freedom to take wing lost for all time. This potential of art to transform our perception of the world—even though, paradoxically, art draws its raw material from some external reality—had been one of the leitmotifs of my book. In speaking of “the work of art,” I did not want to focus on the object produced by an artist but the process of producing it—the mysterious interplay of inner and outer realities and the existential imperative of finding some way of integrating these realities lest one become either alienated from oneself or narcissistically self-absorbed. In

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exploring the hidden forces that prefigure our everyday lives, I had sought to show how art and religion share, with such mundane practices as building a home or sharing a meal, the power to change our experience, so that we come to feel that we can do something about things we also believe we can do nothing about. For me, no writer has better captured this paradox than Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, where he touches on the difference between being oblivious to the absurdity of our condition and becoming lucidly aware of it. It is in Sisyphus’s clear knowledge that his task is interminable that it becomes his task and no one else’s. The great stone ceases to be a curse placed upon him by the gods; it is a human burden that he takes up, and in doing so he becomes more than the rock; his life belongs to him and he “silences all the idols.”109 I continued to ponder these questions as we drove back to Oturehua across a ceaselessly changing landscape, tussock to pasture, vast river terraces and stone river beds, eroded hills above abandoned gold diggings, cottages among trees. That Grahame had so vehemently defended his work against those who would write it off as merely realist,110 made me more keenly resolved than ever to acknowledge the infinite variety of artistic techniques, mundane materials, ecstatic visions, subjects, and styles that characterize the world of art. While theorists create finite categories and credos, insinuating their own prescriptive and limited understandings into this diverse world, the artists themselves are working at the limits of what is deemed possible or fashionable, struggling to articulate their diverse understandings and help us see our world as if for the first time. Indeed “the shock of the new” is more likely to be felt when those making “art” are not self-conscious “artists” but people compelled to create, against all odds, the conditions of a viable life. I would experience this within days of my return to Sydney when I went to see an exhibition of Martu women’s paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art. These women had resisted the desert painting movement for many years, doubting they would be able to control the presentation and representation of their work in the world beyond their Western Desert communities.111 The paintings are eye-opening—in their originality, their incandescent colors, their large scale, and the skill with which underground, surface, and ethereal dimensions of Dreamings are depicted on a one-dimensional linen canvas. Executed collaboratively and painstakingly over many weeks or months, the paintings also attest to the remarkable way

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in which idiosyncratic and collective understandings of color, country, style, and substance can be brought together and harmonized. Another thing that struck me about the Martu paintings was the family resemblances between the Aboriginal notion of the Dreaming and classical Chinese notions of “emptiness” or “nothingness” (koan). Moreover, both these visions of ultimate reality converged with the afterimages that still haunted me of Grahame Sydney’s Central Otago landscapes. In every case the art leaves “the wind and dust of our lives behind” and enters into that nature from which we emerge and to which we will return. It therefore addresses the indescribable—things beyond our empirical reach, things that cannot be grasped conceptually but may be hinted at obliquely. Seeing the Martu paintings also brought me back to the elemental forms of religious life. Just as many writers seek to classify, categorize, and compare art movements or individual artists, as if the identity of each is quintessentially different, so many students of religion will work with conceptual definitions that belie the infinite variety of religious experience, even among those who identify with a particular faith. Credos and cultures are widely shared, and our inner struggles all bear a familiar resemblance to the struggles of others, but the relationship between these external and internal realities will always differ from one person to the next. Moreover, if we expand our conventional notions of art, religion, storytelling, and ritual to include practices we often regard as too banal to dignify with such labels—building and furnishing a house, writing a letter to an absent loved one, listening to a piece of music that moves us to tears—we may arrive at a way of understanding our humanity that does not reduce its nature or worth to the words with which we represent it. It was this deeper, existential realism that I had glimpsed in Grahame’s paintings and that echoed the theme of my book. In seeking to go beyond conventional, institutionalized, or monothetic conceptions of religion, some scholars prefer the more neutral term spirituality. But if religion is too restrictive, spirituality errs in the other direction by being too diffuse. How is it possible, then, to avoid focusing solely on experiences that can be conceptually grasped and, without necessarily abandoning conceptual thought and language, hope to capture experiences that lie on the margins of what can be definitively known? While a cogwheel and a prayer wheel are both wheels, engineered to maximize efficiency, their ends are very different.

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My argument is that the phenomena we label religious, ritual, rational, or spiritual may be understood as sensible technologies for making life more fulfilling and more viable, both for ourselves and for others. They are, accordingly, arts of life. Despite the legitimacy or warrant they acquire from being associated with a divinity, a charismatic individual, a liturgical form, an empirical method, a scientific or a faith tradition, they all have one thing in common; they heighten, deepen, and expand our relations with others and with the world in which we live by engaging, cultivating, and altering the senses. Working within the sensorium, these strategies and practices often bypass conceptual thought; they privilege emotions, not ideas, the body rather than the mind. Whether it is a matter of a gourmet’s sophisticated palate, a painter’s revolutionary palette, a healer’s sensitive touch, a perfumer’s highly developed “nose,” or a musician’s “ear” for original sounds, we acquire the means to savor, see, smell, touch, and hear things hitherto unremarked, unappreciated, or undeveloped. We become, as William James might have said, radical empiricists, for whom the conventional horizons of what is discernible and doable are pushed back, and the mundane is rendered strange, while the old is transfi gured by the new. The art of life is thus an art of making the world appear perennially new by what Rimbaud called “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens”—an endless play of light and dark, bitter and sweet, sound and silence, hard and soft, acrid and fragrant. Against the grain of inscribed habits of thought, action, and perception, art—whether graphic, sculptural, musical, verbal, gestural, or kinesic— involves a honing, a practicing, a play of our sensibilities, which bring us to a place that seems to surpass the familiar, the known, and the expected, surprising us, taking our breath away, opening our eyes, transforming our understanding, and, ultimately, re-creating ourselves. When we got back to Oturehua, Vincent and I went out onto Jillian’s porch to absorb the view. A small creek ran through some marshland. Beyond was a stand of pines. On the horizon the Hawkdun Range defied description, though, since words are my métier, I attempted to do just that. Unlike many mountains, the Hawkduns do not rise steeply from the plain or jaggedly become a series of peaks. Rather I was reminded of figures lying on their backs, knees drawn up into their chests, shrouded by snow. The tops formed a tableland under the impress of a cerulean sky in which strange clouds

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shape-shifted before one’s eyes, now flour-covered loaves, now wisps of smoke, now misty plates. Out of the blue, I asked Vincent if he was still a Catholic. He had been raised in an Irish Catholic home, but what had become of his faith over the years?112 “I’m not a Vatican Catholic,” Vincent said, and he recalled the words of the New Zealand painter Tony Fomison, who said, “I judge a religion by its compassion,” regarding it as a means by which one evolves and takes “a journey through life.”113 For Vincent, an institutional order, with its theology and decrees, were less real to him than religious experience, which may take its point of departure from doctrine, but is, more imperatively, grounded in the struggles of our everyday lives—to make ends meet, to survive a broken marriage or the death of a dear friend, to withstand the degrading effects of prejudice or willful misunderstanding, and, yes, to repudiate those ideologies that do violence to life as it is lived. “For me,” I said, “what matters is not what one believes in, or even what one thinks one knows, but the existential question of how one can cross the threshold from our singular and solitary humanity to something greater than ourselves and to feel not only that this engagement fills us with more life than would otherwise be the case, but that this fusion with otherness remakes and redeems us.” And I was thinking, at that moment, of the Hawkduns under their coverlid of freshly fallen snow and their blue shadows; of Grahame’s allusions to the hidden histories and past lives he discerned in the seemingly empty land; of Brian’s indefatigable commitment to preserving the environment he so loved; of Jillian’s devotion to finishing her straw bale home; of Vincent’s celebrations of the divine spark of love in the smallest gestures and most fleeting things (“joy’s the word I want, and say it . . . ‘Joy’ catches the sun”).114 A question had been running through my mind every day I spent in Maniototo—could I live there? I had only to gaze at the mountains to close the gap between my life in America and the life I led in New Zealand so many years ago. An occasional vehicle went down the road. A bird piped up in the marshland. A dog barked in the distance. And then the enveloping silence. Grahame Sydney and Brian Turner were at home in this environment and fighting to protect it. But could I endure the isolation without falling into

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27 . Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), Hieronymous Bosch, circa 1510.

melancholy, pining to be elsewhere? Vincent had described Brian as being “wedded to the place,” a phrase that recalled my own childhood, when, lacking friends, I found solace in the physical landscape, a surrogate society of spiritual presences, even as I yearned for a cosmopolitan world of intellectual companionship far away. Vincent had a similar sensibility, and we talked at length about the wilderness in which Colin McCahon wandered most of his life, his paintings mocked and reviled by critics as well as the common man. I told Vincent that I so deeply identified with the plight of men like McCahon, Lowry, and Mason,115 that when I went to London I would frequent the National Gallery and glimpse their troubled lives in the face of Christ, as painted by Hieronymous Bosch, surrounded by leering bullies—an image echoed in Lovis Corinth’s Ecce Homo, painted in the last year of his life (1925).

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28 . Christ Bearing the Cross, Titian, 1560.

Vincent responded by showing me a reproduction of a Titian masterpiece in which Christ, weighed down by a cross on the road to Calvary, looks out at us from the painting as if to ask why we are not coming to his aid. This sense of vulnerability and bewilderment can be felt in Samuel Butler’s writings from the period following his purchase of a sheep run at the Rangitata Forks in 1860. Though the twenty-four-year-old English emigrant is exhilarated by the harsh light, the open horizons, and the prospect of living “beyond the pale of civilization,” he experiences moments of desolation, longing to see “some signs of human care in the midst of the loneliness,” some glimpse of Europe. Even more onerous is his intellectual isolation. New Zealand seemed “far better adapted to develop and maintain in health the physical than the intellectual nature. The fact is,” Butler wrote, “people here are busy making money; that is the inducement which led them to come in the first instance, and they show their sense by devoting their energies to the work.” While admiring the shrewd, hardheaded intelligence of the

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settlers, and their freedom from the pretensions of the old country, he missed his Handel and Bach and grew weary of conversations about “sheep, horses, dogs, cattle, English grasses, paddocks, bush, and so forth.”116 Isolated in his cob cottage at the Rangitata Forks, he found that “the solitude was greater than I could bear. I felt increasing upon me that dreadful doubt as to my own identity—as to the continuity of my past and present existence—which is the first sign of that distraction which comes on those who have lost themselves in the bush. I had fought against this feeling hitherto, and had conquered it; but the intense silence and gloom of this rocky wilderness were too much for me, and I felt that my power of collecting myself was beginning to be impaired.”117 In Grahame Sydney’s paintings there is a Zen-like acceptance of the contradictions and paradoxes that Butler struggled to reconcile and that confront you throughout New Zealand. The almost deserted Cambrians where Grahame lives was, during the gold rush days of the 1860s and ’70s, a populous and boisterous mining town called Welshmans Gully. The predominantly empty and iconic landscapes in New Zealand art galleries are, ironically, evidence of how profoundly generations of painters have peopled those landscapes with their quiet thoughts and wild imaginings. As Grahame Sydney observes of his own work, “although the painting’s subject matter is landscape, they are fabrications in a great many ways. They are like this because of the sort of person I am. Paintings, like first novels, are always primarily autobiographical. They’re not so much a sense of the place but a sense of about me.”118 One must insist, however, that both perspectives are entailed. The mystery of the work of art arises from the indeterminate relationship between one’s external environment and one’s inner world. When these are integrated or balanced, one becomes at home in the world. But where a painter like Grahame Sydney or a poet like Brian Turner have found a physical environment that enables them to articulate, albeit obliquely, their personal preoccupations, others—among whom I include myself—have felt the need to seek an environment abroad, even though the old adage will hold true that “you can take the boy out of the country, but you cannot take the country out of the boy.” Not long before he committed suicide, the New Zealand writer John Mulgan wrote to his friend Charles Brasch from Northern Ireland. “What a

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lonely desolate place NZ seems now. I fell [sic] sense of tragedy in all the people I like there much more keenly than anything over here.”119 Katherine Mansfield died among Russians, saying she had found her people at last. And, toward the end of his life, Tony Fomison elected to do “something few contemporary Pakeha considered attempting. He would undergo the physical trauma of extensive tattooing, and immerse himself in Samoan cultural values and custom, as a bridge towards what he most respected and was drawn to in the Pacific he shared with them. It was not a claim for identity, but for a shared communal bond.”120 In these words, Vincent O’Sullivan sums up the course of action that made me an ethnographer and took me to the remoteness of Northern Sierra Leone and Central Australia—where not only the physical landscape would leave its impress upon me; the people whose lives I shared would change me in ways I could never have been changed had I remained in my natal country. In order to feel at home anywhere, I had to go elsewhere. In order to be someone, I had to become no one. In order to practice art I had first to learn how to live.

NOTES

Preamble 1. 2.

3.

4.

Michael Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 62–102. Pierre Bourdieu argues that the social construction of these autonomous fields—“the heroic figure of the struggling artist” and “an intrinsically aesthetic modes of perception which situates the principle of ‘creation’ with the representation and not within the thing represented”—is, like “the invention of the intellectual,” a late nineteenthcentury reaction to institutionalized bourgeois art. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 132–33. In his avowed aversion to “grand theory,” Bourdieu is obviously sympathetic to the key figures he writes about—Baudelaire, Flaubert, Manet, and Zola (177–78). Although James Scott, following Martha Nussbaum, argues that techné is analogous to episteme, and prefers the classic Greek concept of métis (cunning intelligence and practical know-how), I use techné (see note 7) not as a synonym for systematic, abstract knowledge but in just this more vernacular sense of the word as “knowing how and when to apply rules of thumb in a concrete situation.” James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 425, 316. “Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation.”

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

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Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 2005), 25. htt ps://w w w.mum.edu/whats-happening/graduation-2014/f ull-jim-carrey -address-video-and-transcript/. Techne, or techné, as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word IJȑȤȞȘ which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective. The means of this method is through art. Techne resembles episteme in the implication of knowledge of principles, although techne differs in that its intent is making or doing, as opposed to disinterested understanding. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne. In developing this point of view, I have been inspired by John Berger’s The Sense of Sight (New York: Pantheon, 1985) and About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1991); John Dewey’s Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 2005); and Jean Duvignaud’s The Sociology of Art, trans. Timothy Wilson (London: Paladin, 1972). William James, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), 263. In Sónia Silva’s brilliant ethnography of divination baskets (lipele) among the Luvale, we learn that these baskets occupy a transition space between things and persons. They are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding; they communicate with and interact with persons and other objects, punish wrongdoers, assist people in need, and, much like humans, go through a life course that is marked with an initiation ceremony and a special burial. Sonia Silva, Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). In an equally compelling study of ‘biographical objects’ among the Kodi of Eastern Indonesia, “objects are important foils for self-definition” and lifestories not only implicate such prized personal possessions as a betel bag, bamboo lime container, or spindle; the stories are told through the objects rather of than their owners. Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1998); see also Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 7, 6. Philip W. Bromberg, Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys (Mahwah, NJ: Analytic, 2006), 8–9. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 3. James Faubion, “Paranomics: On the Semiotics of Sacral Action,” in Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson, eds., The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 189–209. Duvignaud, The Sociology of Art, 30–32. Louise Bourgeois, interview with Donald Kuspit, in Bourgeois (New York: Vintage, 1988). Reprinted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists ’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 30.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 302. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 15. While Winnicott attributes the origins of this stressful interplay between me and not-me to the infant’s relationship with its mother (specifically her breast), I prefer to see this relational uncertainty and instability as intrinsic to every human encounter—with other selves, with our pasts, and with the material world—and mediated by an infi nite number of scarce or symbolic goods, from food and water to recognition and dignity, for no one can never be certain of the outcome of any encounter, and every relationship is typically subject to perpetual revision and renegotiation. Richard Lacayo, “The Paper Chase,” Time, November 3, 2014, 45–46 (45). Eugenio Montale, “The Second Life of Art,” trans. Jonathan Galassi, New York Review of Books, April 16, 1981. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Signet, 1958), 377. Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Variations of a Theme by Hannah Arendt, 2d ed. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), 14–18. André Aciman, Alibis: Essay on Elsewhere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 157, 154. In 1957 the Victorian government accepted the recommendations of a report it had commissioned into Aboriginal affairs. Named after its principal author, retired chief stipendiary magistrate Charles McLean, the McLean Report argued that Lake Tyers in southeastern Victoria should be closed down and that such an action would hasten the assimilation of Aboriginal Victorians into the mainstream community. The government promised better-quality houses as an inducement for people to leave Lake Tyers. The major drawback was that the houses were scattered around country towns and often a long way from home. Colin Tatz, a member of the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board, disparagingly referred to this strategy as “pepper potting.” The cost was high for those who moved—social isolation from friends and relatives. And once they left Lake Tyers, they were not permitted to return. Raymond Young, in Melbourne Now Exhibition Guide (National Gallery of Victoria, 2013), 224. Cited by Hettie Perkins, art + soul: A Journey Into the World of Aboriginal Art (Melbourne: Miegunah, 2010), 52. Ricardo Idagi (Meriam Mir), b. 1957. From the artist’s statement accompanying “False Existence Appearing Real.” Cited by Julian Barnes, “Heart-Squasher,” London Review of Books 35, no. 23 (2013): 3. Perkins, art + soul, 56. These comments reinforced my long-standing commitment to Sartre’s conception of human freedom as an expression of the indeterminate relationship between the forces that shape us and our reciprocal capacity to shape our world. “For us man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he

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succeeds in making of what he has been made—even if he never recognizes himself in his objectification.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), 91. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1963), 49–50. Wilfred Cantwell-Smith proposes that “elemental” is a more accurate translation of Durkheim’s élementaire since Durkheim’s work is “about the fundamental ingredients of which religious life is to be seen as constituted” and concerned with “the elements of humanity’s religious life.” Wilfred Cantwell-Smith, Modern Culture from a Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 52. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 1, 7. The notion that art and religion are intimately connected was central to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetics and Matthew Arnold’s criticism. See George Whalley, Poetic Process, or A Critique of Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), xxix. Even today, forms of social Darwinism dominate popular and academic thought alike. It is widely assumed that human culture is progressive, proceeding from darkness to light, simplicity to complexity, a state of savage ignorance to civilized knowledge, and that contemporary indigenous peoples exemplify modes of thought and behavior that have remained unchanged over the last fi fty thousand years. Historically, such assumptions have led Europeans to either romanticize primitive peoples as noble savages or derogate them as mere brutes, systematically ignoring archaeological evidence of the extent to which Aboriginal societies and cosmologies have adapted over many millennia to environmental changes and political challenges. For a brilliant account of the archaeological record of these changes in Aboriginal social organization and worldviews in Australia, see Bruno David, Landscapes, Rock-Art, and the Dreaming: An Archaeology of Preunderstanding (London: Leicester University Press, 2002). Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 45. Ibid., 15–16. Ibid., 9. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 377. See for examples, Dan Sperber, “Culturally Transmitted Misbeliefs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 534–35; Albert Piette, Le Fait Religieux: Une Theorie de la Religion Ordinaire (Paris: Economica, 2005); T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012); Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec, eds., Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion (New York: Berghahn, 2012); Sónia Silva, “Remarks on Similarity in Ritual Classification: Affl iction, Divination, and Object Animation, History of Religions, 53, no. 2 (2013): 151–69. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 1–18. According to the Aristotelian system of classification, all members of a given class share one or more defining features or discrete characteristics,

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and each characteristic is held by every member. This monothetic approach means that we deploy reified categories such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam from the outset and assume that everyone who identifies with one of these labels shares or subscribes to a fairly similar worldview. If they don’t, they do not belong or they are heretics. The polythetic approach switches our focus to what Wittgenstein called family resemblances or what Jonathan Z. Smith called maps of characteristics, common threads that shape our experience without entirely determining it. This approach recognizes the variability with which certain beliefs are held, the fact that not everyone shares identical characteristics either of feeling or faith, and that one can be of two minds at the same time without necessarily feeling a contradiction (possessed by a spirit yet still oneself ). Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 4–5, 13. Smith, Imagining Religion, 53–65. These recent explorations of the indeterminate relationship between normative schemes and “how people actually live [their] religious lives” (Schielke and Liza Debevec, Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes, 2) reflect earlier critiques of reification and Eurocentricity in religious studies. Wilfred Cantwell-Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Cited by John Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36. Cited in S. Polcari, “Mark Rothko: Heritage, Environment, and Tradition,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2, no. 2 (1988): 34. Cited in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn, 1961), 93. Cited in James R. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 484. Kenneth George, Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 11. Naveeda Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 5. Unfortunately, even the most trenchant critiques of the post-Enlightenment bias in the ways we frame our understandings of religion continue to invoke pejorative notions of primitiveness, simplicity, and lack of sophistication when describing religions among “the noncivilizational peoples of the world” (Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 53–54). Derrida speaks of a “globalatinized,” Greco-Roman bias. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2998), 4, 30.

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34. James Davies, “The Rationalization of Suffering,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 39, nos. 1 and 2 (2011): 49–56 (56). 35. Justin L. Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, no. 1 (2000): 29–34. 36. In Karl Jaspers: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed., trans., with introductions by Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper (New York: Humanity, 2000), 97. 37. Michael Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), xii. 38. The American Heritage Dictionary. 39. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, neither the painted image nor the external world has a reality in-itself. Images, designs and paintings “are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in James Edie, ed., The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 164. 40. Among the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land, for example, maarr is the invisible and ancestral power “necessary for the health and fertility of the Yolngu world, including the environment in which people live.” Through ritual labor, members of Yolngu clans cooperate in drawing this power out from the totemic sites where it resides, so that it “can be spread wide and be beneficial and bring a sense of well-being to all who participate with a good heart.” Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 103. For the people of the Daly River region of northern Australia, ceremony and wangga songs “provide the primary locus of human engagement with the ancestral dead,” and this ceremony and song is associated “with liminal states of being—dream states, and the states of being in the twilight zone between life and death, or between childhood and adulthood.” Allan Marrett, Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 3, 5. 41. Note that the Indo-European word for a deity is deiwos, from the root diw/dyu (the bright sky or daylight) and designating a sky god. 42. In the Upper Amazon, the forest stands in the same relationship to people as the moiety from which they receive wives. While the forest provides food, allies provide women, which helps explain why the forest is said to smell like women and entering the forest is compared to sexual intercourse. Rules governing the exploitation of forest resources—game, medicines, fruit, and narcotics—are also analogous to rules governing correct sexual conduct. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Forest Within: The World-View of the Tukano Amazonian Indians ( Dartington, Devon: Themis, 1996), chapter 6. 43. “I have a religious temperament. . . . There are 140 religions or so, so one more doesn’t matter. My religion is art. It allows me to make sense of everything.” Robert Storr, with Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzmann, Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), 183.

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44. Wenten Rubuntja and Jenny Green, The Town Grew Up Dancing: The Life and Art of Wenten W (Alice Springs: Jukurrpa, 2002), 128. 45. “But this Dreaming, that’s God for us.” Cited in Vivien Johnson, The Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (East Roseville, NSW: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 17. 46. Rubuntja and Green, The Town Grew Up Dancing, 173. Myers recounts an equally compelling biography of the Aboriginal artist Linda Syddick (Tjungkaya Napaltjarri) whose work obliquely references Christian motifs, traumatic childhood experiences, and her participation in Pintupi ritual life. Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 304–10. 47. “Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.” Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914), 68. 48. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, The Felt Hat: Joseph Beuys—a Life Told (Milan: Charta, 1997), 23–24. 49. Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain ’s Great Modern Painter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 55–61. 50. Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Brian Boyd, On the Origins of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 3–4. 51. Carl Jung presages this current understanding of the process of dreaming. “The dream, we would say, originates in an unknown part of the psyche and prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day.” C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 7. 52. Ibid., 8. 53. Nancy Munn’s famous essay is very relevant here: “The Transformation of Subjects Into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth,” in Ronald M Berndt, ed., Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1970), 141–63. 54. Michael Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 26, 57–58, 113. See also Myers on Pintupi notions of “making visible” ( yurtininpa): Myers, Painting Culture, 5. Peter Sutton draws an analogy between the body and ceremonial knowledge. Both have “an outside, more or less readily available to perception, and an inside, which becomes grasped only with revelation.” Peter Sutton, “Dreamings,” in Peter Sutton, ed., Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, 76. 55. Nancy Munn, “Spatial Presentation of Cosmic Order in Walbiri Iconography,” in Anthony Forge, ed., Primitive Art and Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 193–220 (200). 56. Ibid., 208. 57. Ibid., 208–9 (emphasis added).

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58. Munn 1973, 209 59. Geza Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Australian Myth and Ritual (New York: International Universities Press, 1969), 219–20. 60. Rubuntja and Green, The Town Grew Up Dancing, 94, 150. 61. Jean Duvignaud, The Sociology of Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 20. 62. In the “Afterword” to the 1986 edition of Warlpiri Iconography, Munn alludes to this transition from “traditional graphic forms” to acrylic painting. Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 223, footnote 3. As noted by Fred Myers, Pintupi also draw analogies between painting designs on the body and painting on canvas or canvas boards. Myers, Painting Culture, 58–59. 63. See remarks by Michael Nelson Jakamarra in Sutton, Dreamings, 102. 64. It should be noted that I am less concerned with the aesthetic or semantic interpretation of a work of art, or its commoditization or classification; my focus is on the relationship between works and lives. 65. Rubuntja and Green, The Town Grew Up Dancing. 66. Cited in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 46. 67. R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought, About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1988), 16. 68. Citations in Perkins, art + soul, 50, 51. See also M. Garde, “Ngalyod in My Head: The Art of John Mawurndjul,” in John Mawurndjul, Exhibition Catalogue (Sydney: Annandale Galleries, 1997). 69. Perkins, art + soul, 114. 70. Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 102, 194–95. 71. Fred Myers, “Emplacement and Displacement: Perceiving the Landscape Through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting,” Ethnos, 78, no. 4 (2013): 435–63. 72. John Carty and Ngalangka Taylor, “You Don’t Go Out in Country by Yourself: Collaborative Creativity in Martu Art,” in Martu: Art from the Far Western Desert (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2014), 30–35 (32–33). 73. Ute Eickelkamp, “Changing Aesthetics at Ernabella: The Life and Art of Tjunkaya Tapaya,” Tjunkaya Tapaya: First Solo Exhibition (Melbourne: Alcaston Gallery), 2012. 74. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 10. 75. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 18. 76. William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1950), 2:325. 77. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 12–13. 78. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 53–54. 79. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 11.

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80. Michael Jackson, Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes (Dunedin: Rose Mira, 2012), 12. 81. Alfred H. Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946). 82. John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965). Fred Myers’s is the best example of this approach in the anthropology of art. 83. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). 84. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 171. 85. Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment,” in Eric Hirsch, ed., The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (London: Athlone, 1999). 86. But our idea of culture is severely restricted because we’ve always applied it to art. The dilemma of museums and other cultural institutions stems from the fact that culture is such an isolated field, and that art is even more isolated: an ivory tower in the field of culture surrounded fi rst by the whole complex of culture and education, and then by the media which are also part of culture. We have a restricted idea of culture which debases everything; and it is the debased concept of art that has forced museums into their present weak and isolated position. Our concept of art must be universal and have the interdisciplinary nature of a university, and there must be a university department with a new concept of art and science.

87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

92.

Frans Haks, “Interview with Joseph Beuys,” in Museum in Motion? The Modern Art Museum at Issue (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Government Publishing Office in Association with the Stedelijk Museum, 1979), 184–92 (184–85). For a chronological account of Beuys’s references to Joyce, see Friedhelm Rathjen, “Review” of James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys, by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (New York: Georg Olms, 2001), James Joyce Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2003) 621–25 (621). “Interview with W. Sharp,” in Joseph Beuys in America, compiled by Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), 85. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Reconsidering Joseph Beuys: Once Again,” in Gene Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (New York: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2001), 75–90 (86). The date is often given as 1942 or 1943. For the now known facts, see Peter Nisbet, “Crash Course,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 9. That Beuys may only have been with his Tartar rescuers for a day and not longer does not mean that he was lying; rather, it may reflect his confused state of mind at the time. Ibid. Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, exhibition catalogue (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979), 16–17.

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93. Robert Hughes, “The Noise of Beuys: At New York’s Guggenheim, the Guru of Düsseldorf,” Time, November 12, 1979, 89. 94. 1976 interview with Georg Jappe in Beuys Packen. Dokumente 198–1996 (Regensburg, 1996), 206–20. Cited in Nisbet, “Crash Course,” 10. 95. Walter Benjamin, “Little Tricks of the Trade,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1931– 1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), 728–30 (730). 96. Warren L. d’Azevedo, “Mask Makers and Myth in Western Liberia,” in Anthony Forge, ed., Primitive Art and Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 126–50 (140). 97. Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment,” 166. Paul Ricoeur speaks of this as “the enigma of anteriority”—our sense that nothing in existence is wholly unprecedented and that while beginnings may be dated (Joseph Beuys was born on May 12, 1921; he reveals his relationship to James Joyce in 1964), “the origin always slips away, at the same time as it surges up in the present under the enigma of the always-already-there.” Paul Ricoeur, “Politics and Totalitarianism,” in Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 95–115 (100). 98. Neme is etymologically cognate with the Mande nyama—life energy, “energy of action.” Patrick R. McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988),15–16. 99. D’Azevedo, “Mask Makers and Myth in Western Liberia,” 148 (emphasis added). 100. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). 101. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 8. 102. Lambasting moralists of letters who write Henry Miller off as a pornographic writer, Lawrence Durrell speaks of Miller as “really on the side of the angels; . . . his work, regarded in its totality (as he wishes it to be) is simply one of the great liberating confessions of our age.” Lawrence Durrell, “Preface” to The Best of Henry Miller, ed. Lawrence Durrell (London: Heinemann, 1960), ix. 103. Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, 101. 104. Ibid., 100. 105. Ibid., 99. 106. Ibid., 166–67. Cf. Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954). 107. Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, 195; Munn, Walbiri Iconography, 199. 108. Michael Jackson, “Thinking Through the Body,” in Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 137– 55 (1142). 109. “Whatever it may be on the farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on the hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.” James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 386.

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110. Storr, Louise Bourgeois, 125. 111. Aciman, Alibis, 49. 112. “Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are.” James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 35. James’s relational view of reality anticipates D. W. Winnicott’s work on “transitional phenomena,” replacing notions of ontologically discrete domains like self and other, object and subject, inner and outer, with the image of “transitional” or “potential” space as an indeterminate zone where various ways of behaving, thinking, speaking, and feeling are called forth from a common pool, combining and permuting in ever changing ways, depending on who is interacting and what is at stake. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. 113. W. T. Jones, The Romantic Syndrome: Toward a New Method in Cultural Anthropology and History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 36. 114. Notes on The Storm, the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 115. Arne Eggum, Edvard Munch: Paintings, Sketches, and Studies, trans. Ragnar Christopherson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 52–53. 116. Barnes, “Heart-Squasher,” 3. 117. Steinberg makes this point succinctly. “Though we all hope to reach objectively valid conclusions, this purpose is not served by disguising the subjectivity of interest, method, and personal history which in fact conditions our work.” Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 302. 118. Caspar Wolf und die Äesthetische Eroberung der Natur, Kunstmuseum Basel, October 19, 2014–February 1, 2015. 119. Andreas Beyer, For Your Eyes Only, Kunstmuseum Basel, September 20, 2014–January 4, 2015, 3 (emphasis added).

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For Wenten Rubuntja, “the ‘apwerte stone, rock culture’ is parallel to the whitefella’s culture, where knowledge is held in a library. The painting works as an historical text in which parallel histories may be found.” Wenten Rubuntja and Jenny Green, The Town Grew Up Dancing: The Life and Art of Wenten W (Alice Springs: Jukurrpa, 2002), 161. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James Edie (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162. Michael Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 166–70. Musharbash also comments on how one acquires knowledge of significant social relationships in the same way. “I discovered these personal networks through participation rather than being told about them. Warlpiri people do not generally teach the anthropologist by answering questions; they insist on one doing things. ‘You did this and now you know’ were words I often heard. Yasmine Musharbash, Yuendumu Everyday:

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Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008), 73. Musharbash, Yuendumu Everyday, 99. A dilemma arises here, for while custom decrees that a person’s name, property, and idiosyncratic features be erased from public memory when he dies, and photographic images of him taken out of circulation, the names of renowned Aboriginal artists continue to be celebrated. It is for this reason that I have not used pseudonyms in this chapter. Of the thirty doors, seventeen were painted by Paddy Japaljarri Stewart, while he had a hand in the painting of three others. Paddy Japaljarri Stewart, “Yukanjakurlangu—the Doors,” in Warlukurlangu Artists Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1987), 3. For detailed accounts of the marketing of Central Australian Aboriginal art, see Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) and Adrian Newstead, The Dealer Is the Devil: My Adventures in the Aboriginal Art Trade (Blackheath, NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger, 2014). Yuendumu Aboriginal Reserve was established in 1946 on the newly opened stock route from Alice Springs to Mount Doreen. Hooker Creek was established in 1949. M. J. Meggitt, Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1962), 28–29. The hare wallaby is a small, nocturnal marsupial. “Spectacled” refers to the orangecolored fur surrounding each eye. Ute Eickelkamp, “Mapitjakuna—Shall I Go Away From Myself Towards You? BeingWith and Looking Across Cultural Divides.” Australia Journal of Anthropology 14, no. 3 (2003): 315–35 (327). Cf. Nancy Munn, “The Transformation of Subjects Into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth,” in Ronald M Berndt, ed., Australian Aboriginal Anthropolog y: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1970), 197 (141–63). “If we examine Walbiri statements and narratives about the Dreaming, we find that a particular kind of process in which phenomena ‘come out’ (wilbibari) and ‘go in’ ( yuga) recurs in a variety of contexts and is figured in different concrete images. . . . As we shall see, ‘coming out-going in,’ with its correlative positions, ‘outside-inside,’ is extended as a general principle over the whole of existence.” Michael Jackson, The Accidental Anthropologist (Dunedin: Longacre, 2006), 73. Michael Jackson, Pieces of Music (Auckland: Vintage, 1994), 43. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Mark Roskill (London: Fontana, 1963), 138. Alfred Gell has noted a similar theme in the anthropology of Marilyn Strathern who is concerned with processes of “extracting and bringing outside”—itself “a function of the way in which relationships are ‘contained’ within other relationships, fractal fash-

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ion, and the way in which objectifications (appearances), can be made to signify the prizing away of a ‘cover’ (say the solidarity of the all-male clan) to get at different, subjacent, relations. The process of birth is quintessentially such a process of extraction.” Alfred Gell, “Strathernograms,” in Eric Hirsch, ed., The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (London: Athlone, 1999), 69 (emphasis added). Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 176–77. Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, trans. John A. Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 70–71. Ibid., 61. In a very similar vein, Wilhelm Dilthey insisted that the analysis of “the lifeunit, i.e., the psychophysical individual,” be made fundamental to the human sciences, and that “abstract entities such as art, science, state, society, and religion” are all too often “like fog banks that obstruct our view of reality.” Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 80, 93. “Jerry Jangala,” in Stories from Lajamanu (Darwin: Northern Territory Department of Education, Professional Services Branch, 1977), 1. Ibid., 6. Jangala’s theology is not unlike Wenten Rubuntja’s where the four-generation Arrernte model of kinship is used to identify Jesus’s place in the scheme of things. “Jesus has two places—his father’s father’s place is Heaven and his mother’s father’s place is the world. . . . Jesus is related to Heaven through his father’s father. . . . He is [also] related to [his mother’s father’s] country. . . . The place where the little one was born is called Bethlehem, where he grew up—and the River Jordan as well.” Rubuntja and Green, The Town Grew Up Dancing, 173–74. For a full account of this episode and its aftermath, see Michael Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 137–55. Tony Swain reports a similarity disparity of views in A Place for Strangers: Toward a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119. Martin Edmond, Battarbee and Namatjira (Artamon: Giramondo, 2014), 83. Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 304. Ibid., 309. Jackson, At Home in the World, 142. Myers, Painting Culture, 309. Hélène Burns, interviewed by Vivien Johnson, Adelaide, November 1992. Cited in Vivien Johnson, The Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (East Roseville: Gordon and Breach Arts International, 1994), 17. Ibid. Ibid. (emphasis added).

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33. Ibid., 7. 34. Simmel, The View of Life, 54. 35. Though many would agree that the art of Michelangelo Buonarroti “tends to obliterate everything in its vicinity,” Pope Paul IV threatened to destroy the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel because it was indecent, and for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Michelangelo’s work was criticized for its coarseness and incompleteness. James Hall, Michelangelo and the Invention of the Human Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), xv. 36. Alison Leitch, ‘The Life of Marble: The Experience and Meaning of Work in the Marble Quarries of Carrara,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 7. no. 3: 235–57. 37. Ibid., 242. 38. Ibid. 39. Hall, Michelangelo and the Invention of the Human Body, 233. Henry Moore makes a similar point, speaking of a contrast between opposites: “like the rough and the smooth, the old and the new, the spiritual and the anatomical.” Cited ibid., 232. 40. Kathy Golski, My Two Husbands (Sydney: Viking Penguin, 2008), 191. 41. Nourma Abbot-Smith, Ian Fairweather: Profile of a Painter (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978) 1. Cited in Murray Bail, Fairweather (Sydney: Murdoch, 1981). 42. I discovered, years later, that Patrick White acquired Fairweather’s Gethsemane in 1958, the year it was painted. It hung over White’s writing desk in Martin Road, Centennial Park, for many years, until he gave it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1974. White visited Fairweather on Bribie Island in 1961, and his fictionalized version of Fairweather (Hurtle Duffield) is the central fi gure in his 1970 novel The Vivisector. 43. Cited in Bail, Fairweather, 29. 44. Later, in Darwin, he lived in a concrete mixer, then an abandoned, rat-infested railway wagon, showing, as Murray Bail puts it, “a peculiar preference for discomfort, difficulty.” Ibid., 94. 45. Patricia Anderson, “Ian Fairweather: A Web of Memory and Feeling,” Art and Australia (Summer 2006): 252–55. 46. “Ian Fairweather: A Reclusive Australian Painter,” Economist, April 16, 2009. 47. In Roman mythology, maenads were the female followers of Dionysus. Their name literally translates as “raving ones,” for Dionysus inspired the maenads to ecstasy through dancing and drunken intoxication. As they lost self-control, they would shout excitedly, engage in uncontrolled sexual behavior, and ritualistically hunt and tear animals to pieces, devouring the raw flesh. “Blessed is he who has the good fortune to know the mysteries of the gods, who sanctifies his life and initiates his soul, a bacchant on the mountains, in holy purifications.” See Norman O. Brown, “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” Harpers Magazine, May 1961, 47.

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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The same questions inform Patrick White’s account of Hurtle Duffield, for whom his paintings are more real than the people he paints. White prefaces The Vivisector with quotations from Rimbaud, Blake, Saint Augustine, and Ben Nicholson to suggest the intimate links between art and the mysterium tremendum of religious experience. Patrick White, The Vivisector (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 9. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur ( New York: New Directions, 1970), 144–45. White, The Vivisector, 197. “Suhanya Raffel in Conversations with Simryn Gill,” in Simryn Gill: Exhibition Catalogue (London: Organisation for Visual Arts, 1999), 20. Simryn Gill, unpublished MS, 2012, cited by Catherine de Zegher, “At Home Between Dream Shells, Stardust, and Shell Jetty No. 3 PD,” in Simryn Gill, Here Art Grows on Trees, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Australian Pavilion, Fifty-fi fth International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia, 2013), 35–76. Here Art Grows on Trees, 36. Ibid., 36–37. Simryn Gill, “May 2006,” Off the Edge, Merdeka 33 (September 2007): 87. Russell Storer, “Simryn Gill: Gathering,” in Simryn Gill (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), 41–58 (45). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 123. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 17. Gill, Here Art Grows on Trees, 46. “Suhanya Raffel in Conversations with Simryn Gill,” 7. Ibid., 8. Rodophe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 273. Ralf Norrman, Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus (London: Macmillan, 1986), 15. Barbara Myerhoff, “Life History Among the Elderly: Performance, Visibility, and Remembering,” in J. Ruby, ed., A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspective in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 99–117 (111). Yao Souchou, “Procrastinations: Or How I Relearn the Pleasure of the Tropics,” parallax 5, no. 1 (1999): 76–78 (77). Cited by Kevin Chua, “Simryn Gill and Migration’s Capital,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (2002): 4–21 (21). Joseph Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether: Three Stories (London: Dent, 1946), 37. Yao, “Procrastinations,” 77. Michael Taussig, “Pearls,” in Simryn Gill (2008), 101–12 (103). Ibid., 104.

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71. Cited by Ray Langenbach, “Malaysiatropia: The Art of Simryn Gill, Liew Kung Yu and Wong Hoy Cheong,” in Yeoh Seng Guan, ed., Media, Culture and Society in Malaysia (New York: Routledge, 2010), 211. 72. Cited ibid., 212. 73. Cited by Lucrezia de Domizio Durini, The Felt Hat: Joseph Beuys: A Life Told, trans. Howard Rodger MacLean (Milano: Charta, 1997), 24. 74. Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. Mark Roskill (London: Fontana, 1963), 109. 75. Edmond, Battarbee and Namatjira, 186–87. 76. Cited in De Domizio Durini, 25. 77. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Harvill, 1999), 182 (emphasis added). 78. Martin Edmond, Luca Antara: Passages in Search of Australia (Bowden: East Street, 2006), 270. 79. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010), 3, 5. 80. Susan Norrie, cited by Juliana Engberg, in Susan Norrie, Daniel von Sturmer, Callum Morton (Australia Council for the Arts and Melbourne University Press, 2007), 17. 81. Susan Norrie’s memory installation ENOLA (2004) was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art during the 2004 Sydney Biennale. Lilly Wei, “South by Southeast,” Art in America 92, no. 11 (2004): 58–65. 82. Max Solling, Grandeur and Grit: A History of Glebe (Sydney: Halstead, 2007), 70. 83. Barrie Reid, “Nolan in Queensland: Some Biographical Notes on the 1947–48 Paintings,” Art and Australia, 5, no. 2 (September 1967): 446–54. 84. David Rainey, “Nolan’s ‘Mrs Fraser’: Reconstruction and Deconstruction,” http:// acomment.com.au/2012/04/nolans-mrs-fraser-reconstruction-and-deconstruction/. 85. “If there is a crux in Nolan’s work, it is perhaps the theme of failure.” T. G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 14. Nolan “prefers man beleaguered rather than triumphant.” Elwyn Lynn, “The Painting of Ned Kelly,” in Elwyn Lynn and Bruce Semler, Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly: The Ned Kelly Paintings in the Australian National Gallery and a Selection of the Artist ’s Sketches for the Series; Elwyn Lynn’s Story of the Paintings with Sir Sidney Nolan’s Comments; The Life of Ned Kelly and the Story of the Kelly Gang (Canberra: A.C.T., National Gallery, 1985), 8. 86. Lynn, “The Painting of Ned Kelly,” 11. 87. Interview with Frederick Gwynn, February 15, 1957, http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/ display/wfaudio01_1. 88. Interview with Donald Kuspit, cited in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press,1996), 41. 89. T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012), xiii, xii. 90. William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1950), 2:671.

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91. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 6,7, 80–83. 92. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” interview with Richard Kearney, in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 105–26 (117). 93. Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires: Poems 1982–1992 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 5. 94. The title of this section are the famous words spoken by Amedeo Modigliani to Jacques Lipchitz in defense of his disorderly and self-destructive lifestyle. 95. Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988), 72; Gordon H. Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1984), 125. 96. Martin Edmond, The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999), 21. 97. Ibid., 147. 98. Ibid., 197. 99. John Keats, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” Poems (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1817). 100. Profi le—Philip Clairmont. http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/profi les-philip-clair mont-1981 101. Michael Jackson, The Accidental Anthropologist: A Memoir (Dunedin: Longacre, 2006), 281. 102. When Clairmont came home from Hamner Springs “after his fi rst attempt to dry out in 1979, his mates organized a welcome home party for him where he was supposed to get right back into this drinking.” Clairmont’s mentor and oldest friend, the painter Tony Fomison, seems to have been part of the problem. “From Rachel Power’s perspective, he was the archetypal feral male, out to wreck the domestic arrangements, trying to drag her partner away, back, into the mayhem and madness of all night drinking sessions.” Edmond, The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont, 177. 103. Ibid., 220. 104. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 165–82. 105. This, in a nutshell, is Marx’s labor theory of value. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1964), 81–91. 106. Charles Bird with Momadou Koita and Bourama Soumaoro, The Songs of Seydou Camara, vol. 1: Kambili (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). 107. Patrick R. McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 16. 108. Ibid., 69–70. 109. Anne Salmond, “Maori and Modernity: Ruatara’s Dying,” in Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values, ed. Anthony P. Cohen (London: Routledge, 2000), 40. 110. d’Azevedo, “Sources of African Artistry,”140.

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111. John C. Messenger, “The Role of the Carver in Anang Society,” in Warren L. d’Azevedo, ed., The Traditional Artist in African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973),109. 112. William R. Boscom, “A Yoruba Master Carver: Duga of Meko,” in The Traditional Artist in African Societies, ed. Warren L. d’Azevedo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 33. 113. Lugwani, Web document (2005), MS on fi le with author. 114. Edmond, The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont, 51–52. 115. Rachel Power’s comment uncannily echo those of Amedeo Modigliani’s friend Paul Guillaume: “His haughty aristocratic soul will long float among us in the shimmer of his beautiful versicolor rags.” 116. Edmond, The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont, 11, 135. 117. Ibid., 205. 118. Ibid., 228. 119. Clairmont on Clairmont, TV1, 2007. 120. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 245–68. 121. “Aspects of Symbolism and Composition in Maori Art,” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 128, no. 1 (1972): 33–80. 122. Lintels from ancient, tribal and contemporary European societies uncannily reiterate and echo this symmetrical pattern in which the central fi gure is often a parturient female flanked by two other beings. Douglas Fraser cites numerous examples of this motif of the “heraldic woman,” interpreting it as a symbol of fecundity/creativity that has diffused throughout the world. Douglas Fraser, “The Heraldic Woman: A Study in Diffusion,” in The Many Faces of Primitive Art: A Critical Anthology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 36–99. 123. Maori Marsden, “God, Man and Universe: A Maori View,” in Te Ao Hurihuri: The World Moves On: Aspects of Maoritanga, ed. Michael King (Wellington: Hicks Smith, 1975), 191–219 (216–17). 124. Ibid., 211. 125. Te Pakaka Tawhai, “He Tipuna Wharenui o te Rohe o Uepohatu,” M.A. thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand, 1978, 16. 126. Tu is the god of war, and his spirit (Mauri Tu) governs the space in front of a meetinghouse where visitors to a marae are met with aggressive displays; tahu (to light) symbolizes “the milder and quieter reception within the lighted house at night.” Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck), The Coming of the Maori (Wellington: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1966), 373. 127. Marsden, “God, Man and Universe,” 216. 128. If a person drowns in a river, that stretch of water cannot be fi shed until the tapu (restriction) had been lifted. If a person of rank is captured in war, he loses his prestige and moral strength (mana), as does his community (hapu). Food cannot be passed over

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129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

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the head of a person or consumed inside a meetinghouse or a bedroom or in the presence of the dead. And transferring genetic material across species boundaries constitutes a dangerous, unprecedented, and irreversible intervention in the natural order of things, for, like mixing waters from different catchments or sources, moving genetic material from one species to another outrages tikanga Maori (the Maori way of doing things), disrupts the whakapapa (genealogy) and mauri (life essence) of those species, destroys a primordial balance between Ranginui (sky/father) and Papatuanuku (earth/ mother), and, by infringing these tapus, threatens the world with illness and degradation. James Cook, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780, parts 1 and 2, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: University Press, 1967), 71. S. Percy Smith, The Lore of the Whare-Wananga: or, Teachings of the Maori College on Religion, Cosmogony, and History; Written down by H. T. Whatahoro from the teachings of Te Matorohanga and Nepia Pohuhu, priests of the Whare-wananga of the East Coast, New Zealand, trans. S. Percy Smith, Memoirs of the Polynesian Society, vol. 4 (New Plymouth: Thomas Avery, 1915), 236. Elsdon Best, The Maori, Memoirs of the Polynesian Society, vol. 2. (Wellington: Harry H. Tombs, 1924), 578. Te Pakaka Tawhai, “He Tipuna Wharenui o te Rohe o Uepohatu.” Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 96. Ibid., 99. Colin McCahon/A Survey Exhibition (Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972), 28. Ibid., 29. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Refl ections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 179–80. Gordon H. Brown, “The Autobiographical Factor,” in Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, 14–15. The poet A. R. D. Fairburn wrote off McCahon’s innovative work as “graffiti on the walls of some celestial lavatory.” A. R. D. Fairburn, “Art in Canterbury,” Landfall 2, no. 1 (1948): 50. James K. Baxter, The Man on the Horse (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1967), 121. James K. Baxter, The Fire and the Anvil: Notes on Modern Poetry (Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1955), 13. “Our intellectual climate is singularly infertile.” Ibid., 13. Frank McKay, The Life of James K. Baxter (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1990), 236. Martin Edmond, Dark Night Walking with McCahon (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011), 16. Baxter, The Man on the Horse, 122, 17. William McCahon, “A Letter Home,” in Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, ed. Marja Bloem and Martin Browne (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum and Nelson: Craig Potton,

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146.

147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154.

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2002), 29–37 (29). Cf. Gordon H. Brown, Towards a Promised Land: The Life and Art of Colin McCahon (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010), 179: “Although McCahon talked of ‘his God’ and of a world endowed with mysteries beyond the ken of reason, a more consistent dimension relates to the depiction of existential situations where his approach is allied to ‘practical religion.’” McCahon, “A Letter Home,” 37. Cf. McCahon’s comments elsewhere about landscape “as a symbol of place and also of the human condition.” Colin McCahon/A Survey Exhibition, 19. Murray Bail, “I Am,” in Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, 39–50 (41). McCahon, “A Letter Home,” 29. Colin McCahon, “Beginnings,” Landfall 20, no. 4 (1966): 360–64 (361). Colin McCahon, Victory Over Death, directed by Judy Rymer (Meridian Film Productions and New Zealand Film Commission, 1988). Colin McCahon, statement on “Necessary Protection,” in Patricia Sarr and Tom Turner, “Artists and The Environment, Derived from Interviews,” Art New Zealand 7 (AugustOctober 1977): 45. James K. Baxter, Pig Island Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 4. Brown, Towards a Promised Land, 132–33. Extended inscriptions: 1: an ornament for the Pakeha // TOHU / I stand for / Peace, 2: a monument / to TE / WHITI // I / Te Whiti // to people / throughout / the world / and to / the people / of / Parihaka, 3: war shall cease / and no longer divide / the world. // Adam’s race has fallen / over many cliffs, but the / cliffs have disappeared/by numerous landslips / and none shall fall over those / cliffs again. The one cliff / that has not been / leveled is / death.

Part 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 15. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 61. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 50. Philip Conisbee and Denis Coutagne, Cézanne in Provence (Washington: National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University of Press, New Haven, 2006), 159. Plans, or “animated planes” was Rodin’s expression, adopted by Cézanne. Zola’s exact description: he had “un comportement amoureux plûtot passif que conquérant.” Cited in Ruth Butler, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 56. Paul Cézanne, Letters, ed John Rewald, trans. Seymour Hacker (New York, 1984), 215, cited in Butler, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master, 56. Conisbee and Coutagne, Cézanne in Provence, 150.

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 1:193. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke (New York: Fromm International, 1985). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le Doute de Cézanne,” Fontaine 47 (December 1945), cited in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patrician Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 17. Butler, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master, 53. Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries—Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 2012), 5, 11–12. Ibid., 13. Émile Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 350–52. Electronic document: http://www.nancyhuntting.net/Bruegel-Talk.html. Long attributed to Pieter Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus is probably a copy of a lost original. R. C. C. Temple, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Esoteric Tradition,” Ph.D. diss., Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, University of Wales, 2006, 22. Cited ibid., 263. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. M. B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 51. Ibid., 65. Temple,“Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Esoteric Tradition,” 243. De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 69, 67, 66, 50–51. Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1:193. William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 262. John Ruskin, “Appendix” to The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903), 4:388. Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber 1955), 524. Herbert Marcus, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Allen Lane, 1968). John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 9. Ibid., 169, 168. Bronwen Nicolson, Gauguin and Maori Art (Auckland: Godwit, in association with Auckland City Art Gallery, 1995), 63. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, “He Ao Weherua: Gauguin and Taonga Maori,” ibid., 76. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), 65–66. Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Knopf, 2003), 317. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 363.

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37. Ibid., 363. 38. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 39. http://gothamist.com/2014/05/09/subway_hero.php. 40. Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 1–23 (4–5). 41. Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonia Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 506. 42. Ibid., 485. 43. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51. 44. Lanzmann, The Patagonia Hare, 467. 45. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 7. 46. Graham Smith, “From Micky to Maus: Recalling the Genocide Through Cartoon,” in Art Spiegelman: Conversations, ed. Joseph Witek (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 84–94 (87). 47. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361. 48. Chris Goffard, “The Man Behind Maus: Art Spiegelman in His Own Words,” in Art Spiegelman: Conversations, 136–42 (141). 49. Ed Tronick, The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children (New York: Norton, 2007), 262. 50. Ibid., 269. 51. George Devereux, “The Trauma of the Unresponsiveness of Matter,” in From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 32–34. 52. Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present (HBO, 2012). 53. Tronick, The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children, 268, 269. 54. D. W. Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), 140–52. 55. Abramović, The Artist Is Present. 56. Excerpts from “Small Stories” (c. 1970), in Kristine Stiles, Klaus Biesenbach, and Chrissie Iles, Marina Abramović (New York: Phaidon, 2008), 120–21. 57. Abramović, The Artist Is Present. 58. Ibid. 59. Suzette Heald, Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence and Ritual in Gisu Society (London: Routledge, 1999), 14. 60. “My Work with the Body, 1974,” in Stiles, Biesenbach, and Iles, Marina Abramović, 122. 61. Interview with Klaus Biesenbach, ibid., 8. 62. Janet Kaplan, “Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramović,” Art Journal 58, no. 2 (1996): 6–19.

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63. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 64. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 27. 65. “Stages of Energy: Performance Art Ground Zero?” Interview with Thomas McEvilley, in Marina Abramović. Artist Body: Performances, 1969–1998 (Milano: Charta, 1998), 15. 66. Cited by Kristine Stiles, “Cloud with Its Shadow,” in Stiles, Biesenbach, and Iles, Marina Abramović, 73. 67. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 62–63. 68. Interview with Klaus Biesenbach, in Stiles, Biesenbach, and Iles, Marina Abramović, 22. 69. Sartre, The Emotions, 61, 62, 60, 72. 70. Interview with Klaus Biesenbach, in Stiles, Biesenbach, and Iles, Marina Abramović, 25. 71. “Stages of Energy,” 17. 72. Stiles, “Cloud with Its Shadow,” 87. 73. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 327–28. 74. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 92. 75. David G. R. Keller, Desert Banquet: A Year of Wisdom from the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2011), 22. 76. Kuranko refer to the umbilical cord as bara yile (“the maternal cord”). Only when the umbilical stump had dried is the child said to have passed from the spirit to the earthly world. 77. René Devisch and Claude Brodeur, The Law of the Lifegivers: The Domestication of Desire (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1999), 51. 78. Ibid., 54. 79. R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 331. 80. Ibid., 336. 81. Ibid., 381. 82. Ibid., 356. 83. The Latin term necesse is related to necto and nexus and refers originally to binding or being bound. While there is no obvious relation between necessity and kinship, “both have a natural point of contact in binding which implies not only constraint but also union and proximity.” Onians cites, in this regard, the Sanscrit bándhu-h, “kinsman,” and the widespread idea that kinship ties are given in nature and cannot be changed. Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 333. 84. Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1059 (1155b).

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85. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 30–35. 86. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 33. 87. The title of this section is from Michael Jackson, Wall (Dunedin: McIndoe, 1980), 14. 88. Marina Vaizey, Christo (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 14. 89. My description of Chanoyu is based on Dennis Hirota’s remarkable study, Wind in the Pines: Classic Writings of the Way of Tea as a Buddhist Path (Fremont, CA: Asian Humanities, 1995). 90. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (orig. 1972), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 116. 91. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), 91, 119. 92. Andy Goldsworthy, A Collaboration with Nature (New York: Abrams, 1990), 1. 93. Ibid., 4. 94. James Turrell, Air Mass (London: South Bank Centre, 1993). 95. Goldsworthy, A Collaboration with Nature, 3. 96. Turrell, Air Mass, 9. 97. Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker: . . . all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become a means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment, they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process; . . . they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: The Process of Capitalist Production, printed in The Cambridge Companion to Marx, ed. Terrell Carver (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 269. Alastair Sooke, Treasures of Ancient Egypt, BBC documentary, 2014, episode 3. Commune, exhibition catalog, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, August 27, 2014–February 1, 2015. Ibid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Not. Cited by Alex Needham, “Chinese Artist Brings Five Decades’ Worth of Clutter to London Exhibition,” Guardian, February 14, 2012.

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103. Angela Zito, “Writing in Water, or, Evanescence, Enchantment and Ethnography in a Chinese Urban Park,” Visual Anthropology Review 30, no. 1 (2014): 11–22 (11, 13). 104. Ibid., 16. 105. Brian Turner, “Humanity and Nature: Thoughts on the Art of Grahame Sydney,” in The Art of Grahame Sydney (Dunedin: Longacre, 2000), 91–118 (94). 106. Ibid. (emphasis added). 107. Chagall by Chagall, ed. Charles Sorlier, trans. John Shepley (New York: Abrams, 1979), 104. 108. “Otago Region,” in Encyclopedia of New Zealand (Wellington: Government Printer, 1966). 109. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 98. 110. Kevin Ireland speaks of Grahame Sydney’s “painterly ‘truth’” as “a kind of fabricated realism” in which “bravura skills . . . are deployed only incidentally to represent place and time, for his purpose is always to record an inner journey.” Kevin Ireland, “Grahame Sydney,” in Grahame Sydney Down South: Recent Paintings, 2001–2011 (Porirua: Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures, 2011), 6–10 (6) (emphasis added). 111. Anna Davis and Megan Robson, “Kujangka-laju palyarnu (We did it together),” in Martu Art from the Far Western Desert (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2014), 14–27 (15). 112. In a recent poem entitled “Not Included in the Footnotes,” Vincent declares that he is “a Catholic as much by repute as by mundane choice.” Vincent O’Sullivan, Being Here: Selected Poems (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015), 214. 113. Tony Fomison talks with Denys Trussell, Elva Bett Gallery Newsletter, no. 7 (November 1978): 1, 3. Cited in Vincent O’Sullivan, “You Could Tell Them This,” in Mark Adams (collector’s edition), Tony Fomison: A Portrait of the Artist, 1971–1990, ed. Kriselle Baker (Parnell: Baker and Douglas, 2014). 114. Vincent O’Sullivan, “On the odd eventful morning,” from Us, Then (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2013), 100. 115. Bob Lowry was a New Zealand book designer, typographer, and printer, for whom I worked in 1962, until he was driven out of business by bankruptcy and illness and subsequently committed suicide. The poet R. A. K. Mason was Lowry’s contemporary. 116. Samuel Butler, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, ed. A. C. Brassington and P. B. Maling (Auckland and Hamilton: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1964 [1863]), 48, 59, 50, 35. 117. Samuel Butler, Erewhon or Over the Range, ed. Hans-Peter Breuer and Daniel F. Howard (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981), 74. 118. Cited by Christopher Johnstone in his “Introduction” to Landscape Paintings of New Zealand: A Journey from North to South (Auckland: Godwit, 2013), 12. 119. Letter from John Mulgan to Charles Brasch, postmarked August 20, 1940, Hocken Library (Te Uare Taoka o Hākena), Dunedin. 120. O’Sullivan, “You Could Tell Them This.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I A M G R AT E F U L T O T H E C E N T E R F OR T H E S T U DY OF W OR L D R E L IG IONS (Harvard Divinity School) for a research grant that covered the costs of my travel and fieldwork in Australia and New Zealand in 2014–2015. I owe particular thanks to Anne Monius, Cory O’Brien, Matthew Whitacre, and Charles Anderson who administered this grant so efficiently and expeditiously. In the USA, my children, Joshua and Freya Jackson, and my wife, Francine Lorimer, engaged with and supported my research, while Wendy McDowell, senior editor of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, offered encouragement and generously published an account of my work in progress. In Germany, Craig Barris and Carola Faller-Barris offered warm hospitality and gave me penetrating insights into Carola’s graphic art. In Australia, my daughter Heidi Jackson provided crucial references, accompanied me to galleries, and made incisive comments that reflected her experiences of painting and of teaching art. Simryn Gill, Kathy Golski, and Susan Norrie gave generous feedback on draft essays about their work, while fellow anthropologists and writers Martin Edmond, Ute Eickelkamp, Rachel Perkins, Denis Taylor, and Souchou Yao shared their own parallel work with me and helped illuminate my own path. In New Zealand, my greatest debt is to Vincent O’Sullivan whose friendship and support have, for almost fifty years, been a spiritual mainstay. The hospitality he and his wife Helen extended to me in Dunedin was only equaled by

220

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the warm welcome given to me in Central Otago by Grahame Sydney, Jillian Sullivan, and Brian Turner and in Auckland by Bronwen Nicolson and Brian Boyd, who welcomed me into their home and offered timely scholarly assistance. In Sydney and Melbourne, conversations with Ghassan Hage triggered my initial interest in this project. I also wish to thank Angela Zito for sharing her work on Writing in Water with me. It helped bring my work to a close and give it the Taoist touch I had sought from the outset. In the production of this book, I am grateful for the expertise and input of Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, and Susan Pensak at Columbia University Press as well as for Will Morningstar’s assistance in securing permissions and preparing images and Jennifer Conforti’s help in preparing the final draft of the manuscript.

PERMISSIONS

T HE

AU T HOR G R AT E F U L LY AC K NOW L E D G E S T H E F OL L OW I NG C OP Y-

right holders for permission to reproduce images and use materials in this publication: Pat Lowe for Lirrara; Artists Rights Society (New York/VG Bild-Kindst, Bonn), for Joseph Beuys’s Rescue Sled; Warlukurlangu Artists, Yuendumu, Central Australia and AIATSIS, Canberra, for Big Yam—Door 8, Yarlakurlu, in Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association and Eric Michaels, Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1987), p. 45; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Artists Rights Society New York/DACS, London, for Ian Fairweather’s Monastery (1961); Simryn Gill and Tracy Williams, Ltd., for Forking Tongues (photo: Jenni Carter), Washed Up (photo: Hiram To), Forest, and Pearls; Susan Norrie for Havoc; Bridgeman Images for Convict and Mrs Fraser (1957); Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Rachel Power, and Orlando Clairmont, for Philip Clairmont’s Staircase Night Triptych (1978), and Lightsource; the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust for Colin McCahon’s Urewera Mural (1975), reproduced with permission from Tuhoe Te Uru Taumatua and Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai; the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust for Colin McCahon’s Parihaka Triptych (1972), held in trust by the Govett-Brewster Art Galley for the people of Parihaka (image courtesy Govett-Brewster Art Gallery,

222

PERMISSIONS

New Zealand); the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, for Paul Cezanne, Great Pine Near Aix (photo by Vladimir Terebenin); Museum of Modern Art/ licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY, and Artists Rights Society, for Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present (photo Jonathan Muzikar); Carola Faller-Barris, for Untitled (2014) and Shoah (2005); David Williams, Li Wei, and White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, for Li Wei, Human Being; Grahame Sydney, for Up-On-The-Downs (2006).

INDEX

Aboriginals, 20; Aboriginal Welfare Board, 1, 2, 195n8; art and, 18, 19, 40–41, 51, 54, 55, 55–56; civil rights and, 1–2; Lake Tyers Aboriginal Reserve, 6, 195n8; Ngaanyatjarra people, 19; painting and, 18–20, 42–45, 59–60, 185; with religion, 7, 8, 13, 59; Yuendumu Aboriginal Reserve, 204n9. See also Warlpiri people About Looking (Berger), 194n7 Abramović, Marina, 148, 149, 155; family life, 149–50, 151, 153, 156; pain and, 150–51, 152; public realm and, 157–58 Aciman, André, 6, 33 Adorno, Theodor, 84, 128, 144–45, 146, 193n4 Agnatic kinship, 13, 163 Ai Weiwei, 174 Albrecht, F. W., 59, 61 Alcoholism, 117–18, 209n102 Alienation, photography and, 145–46 Allegories of the Wilderness (M. Jackson), 100

Alter-ation, process of, 3 Altyerre, 13–14 Anang people, 104 Ancestors, 4, 5, 40, 46, 53, 115; Dreaming and, 44, 48, 56, 57; rituals, 16, 154 Anderson, Patricia, 71 Animals: animal spirit, 107; rituals to multiply, 16, 17 Anthropomorphism, 63–64 Antiapartheid, 107–8 Appropriation. See Maori people Arendt, Hannah, 120 Aristotle, 196n24 Arnold, Matthew, 196n17 Arrernte people, 13, 39, 57, 67, 205n22 Art, 45, 203n117; Aboriginal people and, 18, 19, 40–41, 51, 54, 55, 55–56; “the art field,” 23; birth and, 28, 30, 40, 53–54; Buber on, vii; culture and, 23, 67, 201n86; death with, 153, 156; defi ned, 80; Dewey on, vii, xiv; with life, escape

224 Art (continued ) from, 139–47; life and, xvi, 95, 200n64; with life sacrificed, 134–35; narcissism with, 31; possessiveness, 181; reality in, 88, 127; as religion, 12–14, 18, 198n3; religion and, 10–11, 23–24, 54, 108, 119–20, 161–63, 184, 188–89, 196n17, 199n47; ritual and, 67, 153, 167–70; role of, xiv, 3–8, 10, 18, 19, 33, 40–41, 42–44, 66, 77, 81, 83–84, 90, 116–17, 120–21, 122, 171; solitude of, 68–72, 101; two lives of, 4–5, 21, 23–24, 32 Art as Experience (Dewey), vii, 194n7 Art galleries, as reverential space, 11 “Art Is My Life” (P. Clairmont), 102 Artist Is Present, The (Abramović), 149, 157 Artists, 60, 101; with art to escape life, 139–47; public realm and, 157–58; social situation of, 23; world and, 36–38 Art objects: with class and culture, 23; maker with, 4, 7, 8, 27–28, 104; mystery of, 27–28, 32; in public realm, 4–5 Ascriptive approach, to religion, 10 Assembly Line (Li Xiaofei), 175 At Home in the World (M. Jackson), 203n3 Atrocities, 25, 66, 91 Auden, W. H., 136, 138 Augustine (Saint). See Saint Augustine “Axes of bias,” 32–35 Bacon, Francis, 19, 21, 95, 116 Bail, Murray, 71, 206n44 Balinese people, 23 Bamana people, 103–4 Barnes, Julian, 34–35 Barris, Craig, 158, 160, 161, 162, 164–65 Bascom, William, 104 Baskets, 100, 162, 194n9 Baxter, James K., 119–20, 123, 126 Being-in-the world, 5, 12, 14, 76, 129

INDEX

Benjamin, Walter, 27, 82, 117, 146 Berger, John, 23, 88, 141, 144, 194n7 “Berlin Childhood around 1900” (Benjamin), 82 Beuys, Joseph, 26, 84, 85, 108, 166; Everyman and, 24; religion and, 14; Tartars and, 25–26, 201n90 Bias. See “Axes of bias” Bible, The, 36, 61, 90–91, 117, 161, 162 Biesenbach, Klaus, 157–58 Big Yam. See Yarlakurlu bin Mohammad, Mahathir, 84 Biographical objects, 194n9 Birth, 15; art and, 28, 30, 40, 53–54; childbirth, 30, 31, 114; Maori people and, 113; postpartum sadness, 181 Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) (Heidegger), 161 Blake, William, 206n47 Blak like me (Deacon), 8 Blood, 16, 18, 32, 51, 113, 115, 119 Body, 151, 152, 153; body painting, 18, 200n62; with surface adorned, 3 Bonnard, Pierre, 11 Border situations, 12 Bosch, Hieronymous, 137, 188, 188 Botticelli, Sandro, 61 Bourdieu, Pierre, 23, 170, 193n2 Bourgeois, Louise, 67, 108, 166; with art, role of, 33, 66; art and life, xvi; art as religion, 13; on Bacon, 95 Bracefell, David, 93 Brasch, Charles, 190–91 Breathing In/Breathing Out (Abramović and Ulay), 156 Bromberg, Philip, xv Brown, Gordon, 117, 211n145 Brown, Norman O., 72 Bruegel, Pieter, 135, 136–37, 138, 139 Bryans, Lina, 72 Bryce, John, 124

INDEX

Buber, Martin, vii Butler, Samuel, 79, 80, 106, 189 Cabaret Voltaire, 73 Cage, John, 10 Camus, Albert, 133, 184 Cantwell-Smith, Wilfred, 196n15 Capitalism, 92, 216n97 Carbon Copy (Gill), 84 Carrey, Jim, xiv Carroll, Lewis (Dodgson, Charles), 80, 87, 106–7 Carter, Kevin, 145–46 Caspar Wolf and the Aesthetic Conquest of Nature, 35 Catholic Church, 120, 136, 137, 159, 187, 206n35, 217n112 Central Land Council, 39, 43, 49 Ceremonial dramas, 16 Cervantes, 95 Cézanne, Paul, 23, 93, 108, 129, 130; being-in-the world and, 129; family life, 133, 134; love letters and, 131; nature and, 127–39; objects and, 133–34 Chagall, Marc, 11, 183 Chiasmus, 78–79, 80 Childbirth, 30, 31, 114. See also Birth Christ Bearing the Cross (Titian), 189 Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns) (Bosch), 188 Christus (Faller-Barris), 159 Cinema, 88 Civil rights, 1–2 Clairmont, Orlando (son), 101, 108–9 Clairmont, Philip, 98–99, 99, 100, 102; alcoholism and, 209n102; antiapartheid movement and, 107–8; legacy, 108–9; objects and, 101–2, 105–6; on painting, role of, 102–3; suicide, 107, 108 Clark, John, 82

225 Clark, Lygia, 32 Class, art object with culture and, 23 Classification, Aristotle and, 196n24 Cocteau, Jean, 11 Cognition, “primal unity” of, 19 Cole, Bindi, 7, 8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 196n17 Collective consciousness, 9 “Come out” (wilibari ): Dreaming with, 15–16; “go in” and, 14–20 Coming into existence. See Tupu Commune exhibition, 174, 175–78 Conrad, Joseph, 81, 82 Consciousness, 9, 21, 22, 23–24 Convict and Mrs Fraser (Nolan), 94 Cook, James, 114 Cookery book, 170 Corinth, Lovis, 188 Cosmology, 14, 18, 23, 112, 113, 196, 196n18 Country. See Walya Creative process, 38; approaches, 23, 32; “dream thinking” and, 21; Everyman and, 24; natality and, xvi, 30, 53 Crowning with Thorns, The. See Christ Mocked Cultural Revolution, 174, 178, 179 Culture: art and, 23, 67, 201n 86; Everyman with, 24; human culture as progressive, 196n18; loss of, 58–59; nature and, 80 Cyclical: life as, 29, 47; time as, 23 Dadaists, 73 Dance, 17, 72, 90, 103–4, 166 Dante, 63 Dark Night Walking with McCahon (Edmond), 126 Darwinism, 58, 196n18 Dasein, 166 Davies, James, 12 Deacon, Destiny, 6–7, 8

226 Death: with art, 153, 156; Dreaming and, 58; “go in” or yuga and, 16; “passing away,” 15; spirit after, 57; suicide, 107, 108, 146, 217n115 De Certeau, Michel, 137 de Guillebon, Jeanne-Claude, 168, 171, 172 Depression, 106, 158–59, 179, 181–82 Derrida, Jacques, 96, 197n33 Dewey, John, vii, xiv, 194n7 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 205n19 Dionysus, 206n47 Disaster. See Environmental disaster Dissociation, xv, 141 Divination baskets, 194n9 Dodgson, Charles. See Carroll, Lewis Domestication, 1, 2, 139 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 95 Douglas, Mary, 152, 153–54 Dream, The. See Reiora, Te Dreaming, 3, 57, 184; “come out” and “go in” with, 15–16; death and, 58; “dream thinking,” 21; dream work, 151; Hare Wallaby Dreaming, 46, 48–49; men and, 42–44, 46; role of, 14–15, 18, 19, 45–47, 51, 199n51; Two Kangaroo Dreaming, 48, 56; Warlpiri people and, 204n12; women and, 15, 20, 43. See also Aboriginals Dreyfus-Best, Richard, 36 Dreyfus-Best, Ulla, 36 Drugs, 99, 117–18, 209n102 Duchamp, Marcel, 10 Durkheim, Émile, 8–9, 22, 39, 163, 196n15 Durrell, Lawrence, 202n102 Duvignaud, Jean, 18, 194n7 Earth. See Walya Ecce Homo (Corinth), 188 Ecclesiastes 4:1–8, 117 Eco, Umberto, 182

INDEX

Edmond, Martin, 57, 86, 108, 126; antiapartheid and, 107; on Clairmont, Philip, 98–99, 105 Egypt, 5, 120, 161 Eickelkamp, Ute, 20, 51 Eigenwelt, xv, 163 Ekeberg Asylum, 35 “Elemental,” 163, 196n15 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The (Durkheim), 8–9, 39 Elsewhere (somewhere other), xv, 13 Emin, Tracey, 66 Emotions, 10, 19, 154–55. See also Fear Emptiness, 20, 118, 122, 131, 182, 185 Enchantment, 27, 140 “Energy of action” (nyama), 103–4, 202n98 Engberg, Juliana, 89 ENOLA (Norrie, S.), 208n81 Entbindung (Faller-Barris), 160, 161 Environmental disaster, 88–91 Epilepsy, 86–87 Episteme, 193n3, 194n7 Erewhon (Butler), 80, 106 Essays in Radical Empiricism ( James), 203n112 Étranger, L’ (Camus), 133 Everyman, 24 Excrement, 18, 32 Existentialism, 8, 57, 109, 113, 116; existential chiasmus, 79; existential transfiguration, 3 Exodus (Faller-Barris), 161, 167 Experience, as “double-barreled world,” 20. See also Inner experience; Outer experience Exteriority, 3, 37, 182 Failure. See Heroic failure Fairburn, A. R. D., 211n138 Fairweather, Ian, 68, 69, 70–72, 108; living conditions, 206n44; White and, 206n42 Fairweather, Rose (sister), 68

INDEX

Faller-Barris, Carola, 158–60, 159, 160, 165, 167; family life, 164, 166; intersubjectivity and, 163; religion and, 161–63 Fall of Icarus, The (Bruegel), 136 False Existence Appearing Real (Idagi), 7 “False self,” 149 Family life, 101; Abramović, 149–50, 151, 153, 156; Cézanne, 133, 134; Faller-Barris, 164, 166; Gauguin, 144; Maori people, 114–15; mothers and infants, 147–49, 195n2; Song Dong, 178–79; Turrell, 172–73 Family of Love, 136 Faulkner, William, 94–95, 139–40 Fear, 33, 66, 94, 97, 134, 151 Fiction: realistic fiction, 147; “supreme fiction,” 140 Fiquet, Hortense, 131, 133 Flaubert, Gustave, 7, 34 Flying termites ( pamapardu), 16–18 Fomison, Tony, 106, 187, 191, 209n102 Forest, 112, 137, 161, 182, 198n42 Forest (Gill), 78, 79, 82 “Forgotten Dialectic of the Heart, The” (Gilbert), 96 Forking Tongues (Gill), 75 For Your Eyes Only, 36 Fountain (Duchamp), 10 Frame, Janet, 183 Franco, Francisco, 141 Fraser, Douglas, 210n122 Fraser, Eliza (wife), 92, 93, 94, 97 Fraser, James (Captain), 92 Freedom: civil rights and, 1–2; human rights and, 2, 87, 174; in life, 2, 30, 35, 195n14 Freud, Lucian, 14, 33, 34–35 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 30, 31, 152, 165 Galah, 7 Gao Rong, 176–77

227 Garcia, Joshua, 145 Garden of Earthly Delight, The (Bosch), 137 Gauguin, Paul, 108, 142–43, 144 Geertz, Clifford, 22–23 Gell, Alfred, xiv, 24, 27, 204n16 Gender, role reversals, 30, 31 George, Kenneth, 11 Gethsemane (Fairweather, I.), 206n42 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 61 Gilbert, Jack, 96 Gill, Simryn, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84; with being-in-the world, 76; as outsider, 73–75; on “particular present,” 77–78 Gillen, Francis, 39 Giotto, 94 Gleneagles Agreement, 106 “Go in” ( yuga): “come out” and, 14–20; death and, 16; Dreaming and, 15–16 Gola people, 27–28, 104 Goldsworthy, Andy, 171, 172 Golski, Kathy, 65–66, 67, 178 Golski, Nadya (daughter), 65–66 Goya, Francisco, 144 Great Leap Forward, 178 Great Wall of China, 157, 178 Ground. See Walya Guernica (Picasso), 141, 144 Guillaume, Paul, 210n115 Guilt, 52, 87 Hanson, Pauline, 84 Hare wallaby, 204n10 Hare Wallaby Dreaming, 46, 48–49 Hau (spirit), 103, 104, 182 Havoc (Norrie, S.), 88–89, 90 Head of Christ (Clairmont, P.), 108 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 128 Heidegger, Martin, 103, 161, 166 Heisenberg, Werner, 95 Hemingway, Ernest, 95 Heroic failure, 92–95

228 Hirota, Dennis, 216n89 Hoarding, 179 Holocaust, 146–47, 160 Homer, 164 Homes: homelessness, 2, 6, 78, 88, 98, 127, 161; homesickness, 15, 58 House with the Cracked Walls, The (Cézanne), 129–30, 130 Hubert (Saint). See Saint Hubert Hughes, Robert, 85, 144 Human Being (Li Wei), 177 Human rights, 86–87, 174; police and, 2; politics and, 88–91 Humans: human culture as progressive, 196n18; as imperfect, 178; life imperatives, 4–5, 6, 14 Hunters in the Snow, The (Bruegel), 135, 136–37 Huntting, Nancy, 135 Husserl, Edmund, 161 Idagi, Ricardo, 7, 8 “Idea of Order at Key West, The” (Stevens), 127 Ilyas, 170–71 Imperfect, humans as, 178 Indeterminate space. See Spaces Infants, mothers and, 147–49, 195n2 Inner experience: “axes of bias” and, 33–34; indeterminate space and, 13; into outward form, 5–6, 17, 18, 21, 33, 36, 65 Insanity, 35, 43, 71, 90, 141, 170 “Inside Is the Outside, The” (Clark, L.), 32 Interiority, 3, 37, 51, 101, 182 Intersubjectivity, 6, 20, 163, 164. See also Abramović, Marina Ireland, Kevin, 217n110 Islamic art, 11 Jackson, Freya (daughter), xiii Jackson, Heidi (daughter), xiii

INDEX

Jackson, Michael, 12, 13, 100, 203n3 Jackson, Pauline (wife), 110, 126 Jacob ’s Ladder (Himmelsleiter) (Faller-Barris), 159 Jain, Kajiri, 84 Jakamarra, Zack, 41, 56 James, William, 20, 21, 202n109, 203n112; creative process and, xiv; with objective and subjective perspective, 9; “radical empiricism” and, 15, 186 Jangala, Jerry, 54–56, 55, 59, 205n22 Jangala, Jimmy, 48 Jangala, Shorty, 45–47 Japaljarri Sims, Paddy, 43, 44 Japaljarri Stewart, Paddy, 43, 204n6 Jaspers, Karl, 12 Javacheff, Christo, 168, 171, 172 Jesus, 13–14, 205n22 Jiang Jian, 177 Jonah (Faller-Barris), 162 Jones, W. T., 33 Joyce, James, 22, 24–25, 28–30 Jung, Carl, 15, 21, 29, 199n51 Jupurrula Nelson, Paddy, 45, 47–50, 108; Hare Wallaby Dreaming and, 46; Warlukurlangu Art Centre and, 42, 43, 44–45 Kafka, Franz, 88 Kawharu, Hugh, 110 Keats, John, 97–98, 132, 138 Kelly, Ned, 93, 94, 97 Khan, Naveeda, 11 Kinship, 13, 16, 163, 215n83 Kirda. See Patrikin Kleinman, Arthur, 145 Kleinman, Joan, 145 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame, 67 Knowledge, Warlpiri people and, 41–42 Kodi people, 194n9 Krohg, Christian, 33–34

INDEX

Kuninjku people, 19 Kunstmuseum Basel, 35–38 Kuranko people, 107, 163–64, 215n76 Kurdungurlu. See Matrikin; Uterine kin Labor: division of, 30; ritual labor, 13, 18, 46, 198n40. See also Birth Lacayo, Richard, 4 Lady Chatterley ’s Lover (Lawrence), 29 Lake Tyers Aboriginal Reserve, 6, 195n8 Land, 39, 43, 49; forest and, 112, 137, 161, 182, 198n42; landscape, symbolism, 212n146; Maori people and, 123–25; rituals, 47; unappreciated, 122–23 Lanzmann, Claude, 146 Large Pine Tree and Red Earth (Cézanne), 129 Last Judgment, 36, 61 Last Judgment (Michelangelo), 205n35 Law. See Tywerrenge Lawrence, D. H., 29 Lazarus Emerging from the Wardrobe (P. Clairmont), 108 Le Corbusier, 11 Lee Kuan Yew, 81 Letters on Cézanne (Rilke), 132 “Letter to Gershom Scholem on Franz Kafka” (Benjamin), 82 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 76, 109 Life, 8, 9, 39, 102, 132, 138; art, two lives of, 4–5, 21, 23–24, 32; art and, xvi, 95, 200n64; art to escape, 139–47; art with sacrificing of, 134–35; as cyclical, 29, 47; freedom in, 2, 30, 35, 195n14; human imperatives in, 4, 5–6, 14; public realm, 4–5; with Warlpiri worldview, 15–16. See also Family life Life of Dialogue, The (Buber), vii Lightsource (Clairmont, P.), 99 Lin, Michael, 177–78

229 Lintels, 109, 113, 210n122 Lipchitz, Jacques, 209n94 Lirrara (Lowe), 17 Living in the Maniototo (Frame), 183 Li Wei, 176, 177 Li Xiaofei, 175 Lorimer, Francine, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 Love letters. See Cézanne, Paul Lowe, Pat, 17 Lowry, Bob, 217n115 Luca Antara (Edmond), 86 Lugwani (Tanzanian wood-carver), 104–5 Lungkarta, Shorty, 58 Luvale people, 194n9 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 79 Maenads, 171, 206n47 Maetzig, Ernst, 121 Magic, 57, 91, 106, 165, 178; art, magical properties, 24; magical action, 154–56 Majapahit kingdom, 90 Maker. See Art objects Maman (Bourgeois), 166 Mansfield, Katherine, 191 Maori people, 106, 212n154; appropriation of Maori imagery, 143; birth and, 113; family life, 114–15; hau and, 103, 104, 182; land and, 123–25; pare and, 109–16, 111, 112; worldview, 210n128 Mao Zedong, 174, 176 Marble, 63–64 Market forces, 23, 32, 141 Marriage at Cana (Fairweather, I.), 68 Marsden, Maori, 112 Martu people, 20, 184–85 Martyrdom, 52, 93, 120 Marx, Karl, 175, 209n105, 216n97 Masks, 37, 74, 149; mask carvers and ritual, 104; as “supernatural being,” 27

230 Mate (passing out of existence), 110, 112, 113 Matisse, Henri, 3–4, 11 Matrikin (kurdungurlu), 18, 42 Maughan, Bill, 110 Maus (Spiegelman), 147 Mawurndjul, John, 19 Maya people, 107 McCahon, Colin, 97, 108, 124, 125, 126, 188; alcoholism and, 117–18; on art, 116–17, 120–21, 122; Fairburn on, 211n138; on land, unappreciated, 122–23; on landscape, symbolism, 212n146; religion and, 119–20 McCahon, William (son), 120, 211n145 McLean, Charles, 195n8 Melbourne Now exhibition, 6 Mémoire des Camps, 146 Memory, 80, 179, 204n5 Men: ceremonial dramas and, 16; Dreaming and, 42–44, 46; role reversals and, 30, 31 Menstrual blood, 18 Mental illness. See Insanity Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2–3, 23, 40–41, 132, 198n39 Metamorphoses, 15, 23, 52, 71, 159, 162 Metamorphosis (Faller-Barris), 159 Métis, 193n3 Michelangelo, 61–64, 62, 116, 205n35 Miller, Henry, 29, 202n102 Miners, 63–64 Mitwelt, xv, 163 Mme. Cézanne in a Red Dress (Cézanne), 132 Modigliani, Amedeo, 209n94, 210n115 Monastery (Fairweather, I.), 68, 69 Mondrian, Piet, 116 Monet, Claude, 33 Montale, Eugenio, 4–5 Moore, Henry, 206n39

INDEX

Moscoso, Pio de Tristan (Don), 143 Mothers, infants and, 147–49, 195n2 Mulgan, John, 122, 190–91 Munch, Edvard, 33–34, 34, 35 Munn, Nancy, 15, 16, 199n53, 200n62 Museums: Kunstmuseum Basel, 35–38; as reverential space, 11 Musharbash, Yasmine, 42, 203n3 Musicians, 19, 186 Myerhoff, Barbara, 80 Myers, Fred, 20, 58–59, 199n46, 200n62 Mystery, 4, 24, 27–28, 32 Myth of Sisyphus, The (Camus), 184 Nakamarra, Liddy, 48, 49 Namatjira, Albert, 57 Napanangka, Daisy, 49 Narcissism, 31, 98, 149, 156, 183 Natality, xvi, 30, 53, 54 Natural History (Pliny), 63–64 Nature, 35; Cézanne and, 127–39; culture and, 80; environmental disaster, 88–91; Goldsworthy and, 171, 172 Nazis, 25, 109, 147 Necessary Protection paintings (C. McCahon), 123 Negative capability, 84, 132 Nelson Jakamarra, Harry, 40–41, 43, 48 Ngaanyatjarra people, 19 Ngata, Apirana (Sir), 115 Nicholson, Ben, 206n47 Nicolson, Bronwen, 142 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 162 Nightsea Crossing (Abramović and Ulay), 156 Nolan, Sidney, 93–94, 94, 97, 208n85 Norrie, Richard (brother), 86–87 Norrie, Susan, 86–91, 208n81 Norrman, Ralf, 79 “Not Included in the Footnotes” (O’Sullivan), 217n112

INDEX

Numinous, 28 Nussbaum, Martha, 193n3 Nyama. See “Energy of action” Oakeshott, Michael, 170 Objective perspective: “axes of bias” and, 35; subjective and, 2–3, 9–10, 32 Objects, 19, 199n53; biographical objects, 194n9; Cézanne and, 133–34; Clairmont, Philip, and, 101–2, 105–6. See also Art objects Oeuvre, L’ (Zola), 131, 134–35 Oluwuro, Owoeye, 104 “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats), 97–98 Onians, Richard Broxton, 19, 215n83 Oppression, 8, 14, 52, 118, 122, 143; body and, 152, 153; of postpartum sadness, 181; violence and, 85 Oratory (Faller-Barris), 159 Orphan Files ( Jiang Jian), 177 Ortelius, Abraham, 136 O’Sullivan, Vincent, 186, 188–89, 191; Catholic Church and, 187, 217n112; Sydney and, 180–81, 183 Other. See Elsewhere Other Criteria: Confrontations with TwentiethCentury Art (Steinberg), 203n117 Otto, Rudolf, 28 Outer experience: “axes of bias” and, 33–34; indeterminate space and, 13 Outward form. See Inner experience Pain, 150–51, 152 Painting, xiv, 102–3, 123; Aboriginals and, 18–20, 42–45, 59–60, 185; body painting, 18, 200n62; Martu women and, 184–85; Munch and, 33–34, 34; sandpainting, 18, 40; Warlpiri people and, 18–19, 42–45, 54, 55 Paleolithic cave, 3

231 Palm at the End of the Mind, The (M. Jackson), 12, 13 Pamapardu. See Flying termites Pandolfo, Stefania, 170–71 Panels (C. McCahon), 122–23 Pare. See Maori people Parihaka, 123–25 Parihaka Triptych (C. McCahon), 124, 125 “Particular present,” 77–78 Passing out of existence. See Mate Patrikin (kirda), 18 Paul IV (Pope), 205n35 Pearls (Gill), 82, 83 “Pearls” (Taussig), 83 Pensée Sauvage, La (Lévi-Strauss), 76 Performance, rituals and, 155 Perkins, Hettie, 8 Perspective. See Objective perspective; Subjective perspective Perugino, Pietro, 61 Pessoa, Fernando, 161 Petrarch, Francesco, 63 Photography, alienation and, 145–46 Picasso, Pablo, 11, 23, 93, 141, 144 Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 107 Pieta (Michelangelo), 62, 63 Pink, Olive, 55 Pintupi people, 20, 58, 199n46, 200n62 Pirous, A. D., 11 Playing and Reality (Winnicott), 195n2, 203n112 Pliny, 63–64 Police, 1, 6, 93, 121, 161, 174; human rights and, 2; violence, 108, 126 Politics, human rights and, 88–91 Pomare, Maui, 124 Poro masks, 27 Postpartum sadness, 181–82 Pound, Ezra, 72 Power, Rachel, 101, 105, 209n102, 210n115 “Primal unity,” of cognition, 19

232 Primitive, 37, 143, 155, 165, 196n18, 197n33 Production, reproduction and, 28–32 Protestant Reformation, 137 PT Lapindo Brantas, 88 Public realm: artist and, 157–58; art object in, 4–5; “the art field” and, 23 Purity and Danger (Douglas), 152 Qin Shi Huang (Emperor of China), 5, 174 Quintilian, 78 Racism, 107, 121, 124–25 “Radical empiricism,” 15, 186 Reality, 7, 195n2, 203n112; in art, 88, 127; dissociation and, xv, 141; realistic fiction, 147 Reed, John, 93 Reed, Sunday (wife), 93 Reid, Barrie, 93 Reiora, Te (The Dream) (Gauguin), 142–43 Relation in Time (Abramović and Ulay), 156 Religion, 202n109, 216n89; Aboriginals with, 7, 8, 13, 59; art and, 10–11, 23–24, 54, 108, 119–20, 161–63, 184, 188–89, 196n17, 199n47; art as, 12–14, 18, 198n3; ascriptive approach to, 10; Catholic Church, 120, 136, 137, 159, 187, 206n35, 217n112; classifications, 196n24; conditions for, 4; Family of Love and, 136; primitiveness and, 197n33; Protestant Reformation, 137; role of, 7, 8–10, 56, 96; with spirit after death, 57. See also Bible, The Re-membering, 80, 179 Report on Experience (Mulgan), 122 Reproduction, production and, 28–32 Rescue Sled (Beuys), 26 Ricoeur, Paul, 202n97 Rights: civil rights, 1–2; human rights, 2, 86–87, 88–91, 174 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 132, 133

INDEX

Rimbaud, Arthur, 206n47 Rings of Saturn, The (Sebald), 85 Rituals: ancestors, 16, 154; animals, multiplying, 16, 17; art and, 67, 153, 167–70; land, 47; mask carvers and, 104; narcissism with, 31; performance and, 155; ritual labor, 13, 18, 46, 198n40; role of, 3, 20; sexual imagery and, 16 Roden Crater, 171, 172, 173 Roheim, Geza, 30–31 Role reversals, gender, 30, 31 Rothko, Mark, 10–11, 108 Rua Kenana, 123 Rubuntja, Wenten, 13–14, 18, 19, 203n1, 205n22 Ruskin, John, 140 Sacred object. See Tywerrenge Sadness. See Postpartum sadness Saint Augustine, 95, 206n47 Saint Hubert, 137 Sand drawing, with storytelling, 16 Sande masks, 27 Sandpainting, 18, 40 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 154–56, 195n14 Schapiro, Meyer, 133 Schwarze Hefte. See Black Notebooks Scott, James, 193n3 Scream, The (Munch), 35 Seated Peasant (Cézanne), 132 Sebald, W. G., 85 Self Portrait (Van Gogh), 37, 38 Self Portrait as the Ayatollah (P. Clairmont), 108 Semen, 18, 30 Sense of Sight, The (Berger), 194n7 Sen Sotan, 169 Sermon ( J. Jangala), 55 Sex: sexual imagery, 16, 29–30; sexual intercourse, 15, 16, 28; sexual symbolism, 29

INDEX

Shakespeare, William, 79, 83 Shape-shifting, 58, 107 “Shield of Achilles, The” (Auden), 138 Shields, David, 88 Shoah (Faller-Barris), 159, 159 Shoah (fi lm), 146 Siegel, Eli, 135 Silence, 3, 165 Silva, Sónia, 194n9 Simmel, Georg, 54, 60, 61 Smith, Jonathan Z., 10, 196n24 Social injustice, with freedom in life, 2 Sociality, 4, 31, 42, 137 Social situation, of artist, 23 Sociology of Art, The (Duvignaud), 194n7 Solitude, 3; of art, 68–72, 101; insanity and, 71 Somewhere other. See Elsewhere Song Dong, 178–80 Sooke, Alastair, 176 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 95 South Australia Museum, 43 Spaces: indeterminate, 5, 13, 32; of pain, 150–51, 152; reverential, 11; transitional, 3, 33, 80 Spencer, Baldwin, 39 Spiegelman, Art, 147 Spielberg, Steven, 58 Spirit, 210n126; animal spirit, 107; after death, 57; hau, 103, 104, 182 Sports events, racism and, 107 Staircase Night Triptych (P. Clairmont), 102 Standing Still exhibition (Gill), 77 Steinberg, Leo, 203n117 Stevens, Wallace, 127, 138, 140 Still Life, Flask, Glass and Jug (Cézanne), 138–39 Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants (Cézanne), 132 Stirling Castle (ship), 92–93 Storm, The (Munch), 33, 34

233 Storytelling, 3, 16 Strathern, Marilyn, 204n16 Sturzhäche des Lauentales im Vorfrühling , Die (Wolf ), 36 Subjective perspective: “axes of bias” and, 35; objective and, 2–3, 9–10, 32 Subversion, 8, 31, 63, 77, 137, 141, 178 Suicide, 107, 108, 146, 217n115 Sullivan, Jillian, 180, 186, 187 “Supernatural being,” masks as, 27 “Supreme fiction,” 140 Survivor guilt, 87 Sutton, Peter, 199n54 Swain, Tony, 205n24 Syddick, Linda, 58–59, 199n46 Sydney, Grahame, 181, 183–85, 187, 190; Ireland on, 217n110; postpartum sadness and, 181–82 Syntaxis, 162 Tamatea, Patoromu, 142 Tanami Desert, 17, 39, 44, 46, 58 Tane-mahuta (father of the forests), 112 Tapaya, Tjunkaya, 20 Tartars, 25–26, 201n90 Tattoos, 160, 191 Tatz, Colin, 195n8 Taussig, Michael, 82, 83 Taves, Ann, 10 Tawhai, Te Pakaka, 110, 113, 115–16 Tawhiri-ma-tea (father of winds and storms), 112–13 Taylor, Nola, 20 Tea ceremony, 168–69, 216n89 Techné, xiv, 193n3, 194n7 Te Heheu (Taupo chief ), 115 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 83 Tempest, Walter, xiii Tenggerese people, 88–91 Te Ua-Haumene, 123 Te Whatahoro, Hoani, 114–15

234 Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, 123, 124, 125 “Thing, The” (Heidegger), 103 Third of May 1808, The (Goya), 144 Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Carroll), 80, 106 Time: as cyclical, 23; Dreaming and, 46–47 Titian, 189, 189 Tito, Josip Broz, 149 Tjapaljarri, Giles, 19 Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum, 13, 59, 61 Tohu Kakahi, 123, 124, 125 Transcendence, 5, 8, 9, 35, 54, 108; art transcending culture, 67; Clairmont, Philip, and, 106; tea ceremony and, 168, 169; Van Gogh, Vincent, and, 53 “Transformation of Subjects Into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth, The” (Munn), 199n53 Transformative process: fear and, 66; Matisse and, 3–4 Transitional space, 3, 33, 80 Trial, The (Kafka), 88 Tronick, Ed, 147, 148 Tropic of Cancer (Miller), 29 Tu (god of war), 210n126 Tuhoe people, 126 Tu-matauenga (father of fierce human beings), 113 Tupu (coming into existence), 110, 112, 113 Turner, Brian, 180–81, 182–83, 187, 188, 190 Turner, Victor, 116 Turrell, James, 171, 172–73 Turtle and Gong (Fairweather, I.), 68 Two Kangaroo Dreaming, 48, 56 Tywerrenge (sacred object, law), 19 Tzara, Tristan, 73 Ulay, 156–57 Ulysses ( Joyce), 22, 24, 28–30

INDEX

Umbilical cord, 163, 215n76 Undertow (S. Norrie), 88 “Unpacking My Library” (Benjamin), 82 Untitled (Faller-Barris), 160 Unvanquished, The (Faulkner), 140 Up-On-The-Downs (Sydney), 181 Urethral blood, 18 Urewera Mural (C. McCahon), 125, 126 Urine, 18, 32 Uterine kin (kurdungurlu), 13, 16, 163 Van Gennep, Arnold, 116 Van Gogh, Theo, 52 Van Gogh, Vincent, 26, 37, 58, 108; creative process and, 23, 38; influence, 84–85; martyrdom and, 52; transcendence and, 53 Varieties of Religious Experience, The ( James), 202n109 Vermeer, Johannes, 183 Village Wedding Feast (Bruegel), 139 Violence, 85, 155; Catholic Church and, 137; family life, 150; police, 108, 126 Vivisector, The (White), 71, 206n42, 206n47 Vos, Kee, 52 Voyeurism, 140, 144, 145 Walya (earth, ground, country), 19, 21, 40, 41, 47 Wang Cheng, 178 Warlpiri Iconography (Munn), 200n62 Warlpiri people, 199n53, 203n3; Dreaming and, 204n12; with knowledge, 41–42; painting and, 18–19, 42–45, 54, 55; walya and, 40, 41, 47; worldview, 15–16 Warlukurlangu Art Centre, 42–45 Waste Not (Song Dong), 178 Watson Napangardi, Polly, 50 Weaving, 163, 165–66 Welles, Orson, 88 Wenders, Wim, 24

INDEX

White, Patrick, 71, 206n42, 206n47 Wilde, Oscar, 107 Wilibari. See “Come out” Wind in the Pines: Classic Writings of the Way of Tea as a Buddhist Path (Hirota), 216n89 Wings of Desire (fi lm), 24 Winnicott, D. W., xv, 149, 195n2, 203n112 Within. See World Without. See World Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 64, 196n24 Wolf, Caspar, 35–36, 36 Wolfe, Thomas, 94–95 Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing , A (Cole), 7 Women, 28; Dreaming and, 15, 20, 43; Martu women and painting, 184–85; role reversals and, 30, 31 Wood carvers, 104–5 Wordsworth, William, 100 World, 20; within and without, 1–5, 14, 167; ancestors with world creation, 16; artist and, 36–38; being-in-the world, 5, 12, 14, 76, 129 Worldviews: Balinese people, 23; Maori people, 210n128; Warlpiri people, 15–16 World War I, 73, 86, 121

235 World War II, 81 Wrapping, 168, 171, 172 Writers: with “primal unity” of cognition, 19; role of, 95 Xia Xing, 174 Xue, Stephanie, 145 Yaka people, 163 Yao, Souchou, 74, 82, 174–75 Yarlakurlu (Big Yam) (P. Jupurrula Nelson), 44, 45 Yellow Christ (Gaugin), 108 Yolngu people, 19–20, 198n40 Young, Raymond, 6, 7 Youth (Conrad), 81 Yuendumu Aboriginal Reserve, 204n9 Yuendumu Doors project, 42–43, 204n6 Yuga. See “Go in” Zein und Zeit (Heidegger), 161 Zhao Xiangyuan, 178–79 Zito, Angela, 180 Zoanni, Tyler, 138 Zola, Émile, 130–31, 134–35, 212n6

I N S U R R E C T I O N S : C R I T I C A L S T U D I E S I N R E L I G I O N , P O L I T I C S , A N D C U LT U R E

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Peter Sloterdijk Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Udi Aloni A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Stanislas Breton, edited by Ward Blanton, translated by Joseph N. Ballan Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event, Clayton Crockett Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts / L’Incident d’Antioche: Tragédie en trois actes, Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, Jacob Taubes, translated by Keith Tribe

Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism, Tyler Roberts Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity, Antonio Negri, translated by William McCuaig Factory of Strategy: Thirty-three Lessons on Lenin, Antonio Negri, translated by Arianna Bove Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralism Philosophy, Katerina Kolozova A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life, Ward Blanton Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life, Tracy McNulty Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglements, Catherine Keller What Does Europe Want? The Union and Its Discontents, Slavoj Žižek and Srećko Horvat Nietzsche Versus Paul, Abed Azzam Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening, L. L. Welborn Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God with James Wood, Catherine Keller, Charles Taylor, Julia Kristeva, Gianni Vattimo, Simon Critchley, Jean-Luc Marion, John Caputo, David Tracey, Jens Zimmermann, and Merold Westphal, edited by Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics, Ward Blanton, Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey W. Robbins, and Noëlle Vahanian