by David Malouf
The viewer, however, is not mocked. These are works for the eye. They give us that pleasure that comes to the whole of our sensual body through the act of seeing, through the business of putting our real, four-dimensional bodies in the same space as these made, two-dimensional objects – given that these works of art compensate for their lack of the other dimensions by playing subtle games with them, and by imposing themselves unforgettably upon us.
Such tricks of technique and illusion are meant, in the fullest meaning of the phrase, to take us in, to change our sense of ourselves, our seeing bodies, and to make us discover, in the absolute presentness of such vital shadows, our own impingement on the surrounding dark. Which is to say that they affect us not as records of a pre-existing reality, nor as illustrations of some held view, but with the immediate otherness and mystery, and powerful if puzzling reality, of objects from another Nature: that is, as works of art.
Introduction to Bill Henson, photographs, 1988
‘THE CAREFUL SURVEYOR’, MANDY MARTIN, PERIPECIA
WHEN THE WORD ‘LANDSCAPE’ began its life in the sixteenth century, first in Dutch then in English, it was a technical term that applied only to painting. It was another fifty years before it was applied to stage scenery and then, in time, to scenery in general. That is, its reference to a way of organising and objectifying what we see, of ordering space within a framed view, preceded its use as a descriptive term for something out there in nature that a painting might represent. This tells us something, perhaps, of the extent to which our reading of a tract of landscape, even now, may be determined by what we see in it of a ‘picture’; on our ordering of it, consciously or unconsciously, within a frame.
Agriculture is what we use to shape the land to our physical needs and uses; landscape is how we appreciate it from the point of view of culture. It should be no surprise, then, that an artist of Mandy Martin’s quality should have as a major concern of her art the inclusion in the geographical scene of the ways in which it has previously been presented; that what she should seek out is the layering of a landscape with its previous history, including its previous cultural history.
The painterly qualities of Martin’s landscapes – the grandeur of the land-forms she deals with, her management of space and light, the colour and texture of the materials she uses to bring us close to the actualities of earth – all this makes an immediate appeal to the senses and will be more than enough to satisfy most viewers. But others, recognising that her landscapes in this exhibition are, quite literally, ‘inscribed’, and that these handwritten (hand-painted) quotations are more than mere ‘sub-titles’, will want to explore the way the associations they carry draw the various images of Peripecia into a whole.
Landscape as the Romantics envisioned it was not simply a book of geological forms, or as Goethe might have put it, a record of earth-history. It was an objective reflection both of men’s ‘home’ and the theatre of continuous human labour, and contentions, and play: a world, also, to which Man had been exiled from the place of his first habitation and most innocent existence. A place where he was at once in his own sphere and from which he was existentially alienated, the scene of his apprehension of all that was grand and terrible: the universal, the sublime.
Confronting Nature in its most elevated form was for late eighteenth-century Englishmen like Walpole and Thomas Gray a way of coming to terms with elusive states of soul. Hence their interest in the Italian painter Salvator Rosa (1615–73), in whom they saw a great precursor, and of early Romantic poets in the grand and awful scenery of the Alps; the Simplon Pass for example, where for Wordsworth, in 1799,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light –
Were all the workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
The early explorers of New South Wales, especially the two Surveyors General, John Oxley and Sir Thomas Mitchell, were men raised on Wordsworth and the sublime, eager to find, in the as yet undescribed new world of Australia, landscapes that would reflect their own notions of the grand and terrible; that is, to gather these new lands into a world of feeling that would be continuous with the culture they had brought with them.
To inscribe the blank page of an unfamiliar landscape with meanings that would allow it to be read, to bring it within the realm of culture, was the beginning of the great work of taking it into our human consciousness, of discovering for it a range of feelings that would allow it, in the largest sense, to be seen, and also of course settled – made a new version of ‘home’.
Moving through the Carnarvon Range in what is now South Western Queensland, Mitchell reimagines the great landforms he is confronted with by relating them to the same painter that Gray and Walpole were so impressed by, Salvator Rosa.
Mitchell, himself an eager exponent of the picturesque, both as draughtsman and prose stylist, inscribes this new landscape with the names that will allow him to enter it as a realm of feeling, a place where the imagination, as Paul Carter puts it, may be ‘enticed to settle’: Mount Salvator, Lake Salvator (nonexistent, as it happens, but necessary to Mitchell’s conception of the scene), the Claude River, named for the seventeenth-century French painter, Claude Lorrain, Martin’s Range, named for his contemporary, John Martin. Mitchell then goes on to evoke, as any one of these painters might, the enabling figure who stands so grandly behind them, the Roman poet Ovid.
Identifying himself now as the enabling presence who will bring this landscape into existence, Mitchell produces a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Mandy Martin finds so apposite that she inscribes it on one of the grandest of her own paintings: ‘And the ground which had hitherto been a common possession like the sunlight and air, the careful surveyor now marked out with a long-drawn boundary line’.
What Mitchell is doing is importing into the wild and previously unsurveyed (unmeasured, unregarded, unmeditated upon) landscape of the Carnarvon Range what Rosa had imported into the wild and craggy terrain of Central Italy: a set of classical references that would give this otherwise uncultured place meaning and provide a means of responding to it in cultural terms – and it is worth emphasising what Rosa was doing lest we believe that it is only New World places that need to be ‘cultivated’ in this way.
In fact Ovid himself was doing pretty much the same thing in his own New World: providing, that is, for his own crass, contemporary era, all commerce and military adventure, continuity with an age – a ‘classical’ past – when gods and men were still in direct contact, and the world of natural forms was still coming into miraculous existence.
This is the sphere of ‘making’ into which Mandy Martin, in this exhibition, makes her own intervention, and whose diverse but interrelated sites she sets out to explore: the Carnarvon National Park (including that imaginary lake Mitchell found so necessary to his visions); the ruggedness of Central Italy that Salvator Rosa re-created in his evocative images of savagery brought close; the lakes, peaks, volcanoes of Mexico and Peru that constitute another ground of acculturation, and another indigenous world (‘which had hitherto been a common possession like the sunlight and air’) brutally dispossessed; another land stripped and exploited (to go back to an earlier preoccupation of Mandy Martin’s work) by the dream of El Dorado.
Peripecia is a collection of large and impressively achieved forms, all of which both extend and consolidate the practice of landscape painting and Mandy Martin’s own very personal exploration of it, her investigation of the long history of how we see and live with the land, and of that great soul-drama that is played out between the Nature we have been set down in and our own human nature; most of all for Australians, of the long history here of how, to repeat Paul Carter’s phrase, we entice the imagination to ‘settle’. By establ
ishing a continuity of feeling between the present (and with it, many provisional and possible futures) and a multiple but coherent past.
WILLIAM ROBINSON
SOME TIME AGO, in writing about the way first places shape the way we read and map the world, I suggested some ways in which the topography of Brisbane, which as we know is a very hilly place, all steep ascents and gullies, may have influenced the sensibility and thinking patterns of those of us who grew up here. You climb to the top of a street in Brisbane and there is a view. You climb to the top of the next and the view is different. In such a place you come to expect landscape to provide a variety of views, and maybe you extend this and expect the mind itself to produce a variety of views. What I wanted to suggest was that growing up in Brisbane may have created a particular mode of perceiving in the writers who grew up there (Peter Porter, Gwen Harwood, John Blight, Thea Astley, to mention just a few) and the word I hit on to describe it was ‘baroque’.
Bill Robinson grew up in this city at pretty much the same time I did, in the late thirties and early forties; we are close contemporaries and I have for a long time been an admirer of his work. But till tonight we had never met. That too says something about Brisbane.
Artists here, and writers ever more, tend to grow up in isolation, without in most cases ever discovering those who, at the same time, are moving round the city in pursuit of the same interests. They go their own ways, develop their own idiosyncratic tastes and enthusiasms. And this seems especially true of an artist as original, as one-off, as much his own man as Bill Robinson.
So, to begin with that word ‘baroque’.
It can, as we know, mean wayward, elaborate, theatrical, playful, and Bill Robinson’s work, I think, is all these.
Think of the comic ‘dressing-up’ of the self-portraits. Think of all those feathery angelic forms we get in the landscapes and skyscapes; the upward gaze into a sky-space that is a theatre of extravagant happenings; the soaring effects; the energy that swirls around inside the paintings and sometimes pours out of the frame; the frothy turmoil and fluid interchangeability of forms – of water, rocks, sky, or of up for down – and the way the process of growth in a Robinson landscape, as in the real vegetative world here in Southern Queensland, seems so rapid that we feel we can actually see, in a moment of slowed-down time, the transformation of one stage into the next. All that we might very easily call ‘baroque’. But I am thinking of something different.
One of the minor masters of the Italian Baroque is the priest painter Andrea Pozzo. Pozzo specialises in ceiling paintings that embody a special effect – some of you may have seen his masterpiece, which is in the Jesuit church of St Ignazio in Rome.
Looked at from any but one particular point on the church floor, Pozzo’s painting reels and swirls and makes no sense. But the moment the viewer, in moving round the church, finds the one right spot to stand in, the space in the painting reorganises itself in a flash. In a remarkable coup d’oeil, which is also a coup de théâtre, the flat surface rears up and becomes a three dimensional dome on perspective columns through which we look clear into Heaven.
The theatre in which this takes place is the eye of the viewer. The viewer, in collaboration with the painter, is the initiator of a unique event. But all this depends on the painting having a single point of perspective. Only when the viewer finds it, only when the painter has drawn him to a particular place on the floor below, does the painting come fully into existence so that its miraculous vision appears.
I’m reminded of this in some of Bill Robinson’s landscapes, but only by contrast.
Here too it is hard to find a point of view from which the painting, perspectively, will cohere and produce a single effect, for the very good reason that there is none. What there is are multiple views that exist in the same moment, and what the viewer is invited to do – just as Pozzo forces his viewer to find the single integrating view – is to become a multiple viewer, to become capable of seeing things from several places at the same time, or from the one place at several times simultaneously, and to find this truer perhaps to real experience – the experience of being in the landscape and part of its process of continuous becoming – than what we get in more conventional paintings.
Pozzo asks his viewer to give up his subjective world to the revelation the painting offers, and the moment of revelation is in the discovery of the source of all meaning as outside him; in the one true objective view of God.
Robinson takes us in the opposite direction. He invites the viewer to move inward. To discover how subjective vision is. How multiply the world can be seen, and how multiple the viewer himself may be – I’m thinking again of the self-portraits – how multiple he may need to become if he is to see the world as it really is.
I don’t think any of us would deny an element of the sublime in Robinson’s work, and of the religious in the feeling his works inspire in us; or at least of the revelatory. But they are also highly theatrical, and in the sense that theatre involves play, they are wonderfully playful. The Baroque too found theatre, with its dependence on illusion, a place for the enactment of religious feeling, and playfulness – play – a natural activity of the religious spirit. As if there were no difference, in the way spirit impinges on us, between what belongs to profound revelation and that lighter business, that play of mind, we call wit. Bill Robinson would appear to have grasped this instinctively, and from the start.
Lightness, in every sense, seems to me to be essential to Robinson’s work; but for all its playfulness, its obsession with sky-forms and sky, it is wonderfully down-to-earth. That is the paradox that is so compelling in him and brings us back and back to the mystery of what he does.
In this version of Eden, Bill and Shirley have chores to do, their days are tied to the needs of their beasts. It is a place of comic desperation. The cows seem never to have got the message about gravity; they are forever threatening to levitate and float off. The corrugated-iron sheets of the huts seem animated by a spirit of centrifugal devilment. What grounds them, since gravity can’t do it, is lightness – humour. Or is it simply the thickness of the paint? And surprising and challenging as this may be, it also seems right. This is the way things are, down here in this bit of Eden. Sublime but haphazard. And the one thing we have to hang on to is our lack of gravity. Lightness is all.
Opening address at William Robinson exhibition, June 2005
A SLOW DANCE TO UNHEARD MUSIC
LANGUAGE MUST HAVE BEEN part of our lives long before we moved on to the making of pictures. Storytelling preceded picture making, and picture making, when it appeared, had a different purpose from the one the storyteller was pursuing when he offered his listeners adventures that took them out of themselves, across time and into other skins.
Picture making, image making, has always sought the essence – the life energy of the creature, the crystallisation of an action – by making it, in both senses of the word, present. It exists in real space and has a single tense; presentness, presence, is all.
Storytelling exists in no space at all, and because its concern is with what happened before and what happens next, it works not with one tense but with the whole range of tenses that are implied in such narrative formulae as ‘once upon a time’ or ‘next morning’ or ‘some years before’ or ‘ten years later’, or, with even greater sophistication, ‘when he looked back on this in later years’, or ‘how could he have known that a year from now …’
Sometimes a picture will try to capture in the same frame the various stages of an action – the Way of the Cross, for example, or episodes from the life of a saint. But the result is awkward, and all but the most naïve painters avoid it. Painters see their business as presenting – making present – the climax of an action, a single moment in which before and after are ‘understood’.
Western painting, as it developed, became more and more interested in using perspective to create the illusion of movement either into the depths of the frame (as Tintoretto does
in such a virtuoso way) or in a rush of energy from one corner of the frame to the other. But the frame itself is always there and the movement remains illusory; the picture itself is still.
When moving pictures appeared they were caught in the uneasy position of having not a single moment to present but the unfolding episodes of a story – but since they were silent, of being limited, like painting, to what could be shown. Unlike painting, they could show the before and the after, but they could show it only in the present. The capacity of verbal storytelling to reminisce (that is, to move backwards) or leap forward and speculate, still eluded them; they had to make do with one-word signs of explanation or scraps of printed dialogue, both of which broke the visual flow and ran the risk of being merely comic.
Eventually the most inventive filmmakers, D. W. Griffith, Eisenstein, the Abel Gance of Napoleon, the Carl Dreyer of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, developed in montage their own filmic language – a highly sophisticated art of editing, of argument by juxtaposition, that became a new form of visual poetry. But lack of words in this version of drama was always a lack, and once technology filled it, the silent film, for all its highly charged emotion and the beauty of its imagery, was dead. Or was it?
In Bill Viola’s video Observance, a ten-minute moving picture without words, some twenty figures of varying ages, mid-twenties to late sixties, all aglow with the luminous colours of, say, a Pontormo, pass in slow slow-motion into and then out of a smallish vertically rectangular screen. Sometimes alone, sometimes linked, they emerge from the crowd behind, occupy the foreground for a moment, gazing with a troubled look out and downward a little towards the viewer, then slowly, with a last glance back over their shoulder, move back into the group.
Their expression as they gaze down out of the frame (at what? something that belongs to the space we occupy but which is invisible to us) is solemn, sometimes distressed, like the shared grief of the figures in Pontormo’s Deposition: it is an expression of infinite pity, of deep personal loss. What they appear to be observing, and paying their respects to, is a body in its coffin, which would be standing precisely where we stand in observing them. (Is that what it is? Is it my body they are looking down at, lying there and looking up, open-eyed, at the mourners who have come to grieve for me?)
