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

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-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 long-standing 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 trumpet-shaped 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 Jupurrula-Jakamarra/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 exercise 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 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 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.”

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.”

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 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.

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 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.

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, fixity 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.

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 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?

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 world-views, 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 find 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 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.”

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.

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 finding 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 fulfills 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

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.

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 fire. 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.

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, “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 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.

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 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 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 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 fingertips—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

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.

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 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.”

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.”

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.

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 affirmation 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 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 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?

As the Japanese moved south from Manchuria in the early 1930s, Fair-weather 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 first 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 British Army. Back in Australia in 1943, he did odd jobs, lived rough—often among other outcasts—in a makeshift shack, a derelict house ⁴⁴—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 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 indefinite 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.

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 find 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 to Australia; federal funding for tertiary education was slashed, and though my job would continue for a year, my contract could not be extended.

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 first 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 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, 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 Lévi-Strauss 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 bric-a-brac she has picked up along the way will not last. She grows accustomed to not being at home in the world.

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 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

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.”

What, then, are the key terms in Simryn Gill’s work, and how are they chiastically combined and recombined?

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 remembering. “To signify this special type of recollection, the term remembering 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. Remembering, 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 remembering 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 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 flaunt 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, and my host made sure he bought a sample of everything. And so I tasted rambutan, mangosteen, jackfruit, soursop, and durian for the first 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 find 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.

“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 mind-sets challenged, and our senses come alive.

This brings me back to my epiphany in Singapore when I was twenty-three. 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.

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 seed-headed god was called for who could disseminate herself across the globe. “Art,” she wrote, inadvertently echoing Theodor Adorno, “remains a utopian project.”⁷²

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 “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 affinities 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 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 forty-four 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 first 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 can see why discrimination and human rights have always been of interest to me.

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 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 mud-flow 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 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 film. 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.”

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

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.

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 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?

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, 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 profit-less 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.

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, 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 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 “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 figures 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 fixed 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”:

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.

When I was twenty-one and an undergraduate at Auckland University, I saw Colin McCahon’s paintings for the first 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 fixed 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.”

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 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

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 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.

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 time-consuming 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 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 finds 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 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 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 finds 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.

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 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 shape-shifter 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 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 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 Lévi-Strauss, 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.

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 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 profiles 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—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 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 fire, 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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, crucifixion, 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.”

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.

“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, 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 first, is made clear in James K. Baxter’s 1966 assertion that

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 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 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 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 filled 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 affirming 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.