The Papunya paintings are based on ancient designs for the ground, the body and objects, designs that are modified and transformed by the materials with which they are made. In the very beginning the artists used ground ochres, house paint or poster paints mixed with PVA glue to make a fragile watery painting medium just like we did at school. The supports for paintings, which were primed black like skin or red like the earth, were, in the beginning, just pieces of masonite or composition board, old pieces of wood left over from building, or even tiles. In the early days the enthusiasm and urgency of the painters saw them paint eagerly on these makeshift supports. The poverty of means of these vivid works, their irregular shapes, thin paint and urgent marks gives them enormous gravitas, and a sense of necessity. Canvas and acrylic paints were introduced at the end of 1972 partly because canvases could be rolled up for storage and bigger works would not be so heavy.
In the work of several artists painting at Papunya in the early days of 1971, there are clear responses to painting on a hard surface, which is so different from painting on a body, on three-dimensional objects or on the ground. The especially radiant Water Dreaming (1972), a painting made by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula which, in many tiny dots and thin lines, stoppings and startings of white lines and yellow lines, over red and pink patches and lines, creates a veritable festival of water around a U-shaped symbol of a man sitting in a cave, is a good example. Such fine layered painting feats are sustained developments from ground or body paintings rather than reproductions or copies of them. They exploit the hard surface, the quick-drying paint and the fine work possible with the new media. They are a new language of art. And they are responses to what the artist has seen and knows.
As Bardon pointed out: ‘Contrary to popular belief it often rains in central Australia and on this western desert. Aboriginal mythology concerning the spectacular effects of rain and hail in the desert, and the waterholes that survive in dry times, are profoundly lyrical.’ And the year the painters began working, in 1971, in Central Australia there was much rain and normally dry rivers were twenty-four kilometres wide.
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In Michael Perry Reserve where Second Creek runs through a series of small waterfalls into a large pool of water I sometimes fulfil my craving for seeing tadpoles. Here are growing a great range of trees: Bunya Bunya pines from Queensland, palms from all over the world, pines from many nations, and right at the top, on the other side of a cyclone fence dividing the park from the quarry where the hill is blasted, dug and taken away in trucks as quartzite sand, an immense oak tree. As South Australia began to be settled by Europeans in 1836 it can only have been there for about 170 years, but it looks really ancient. This area, the foothills to the east of the city, has five creeks running down as tributaries to the River Torrens. The plantings along and around the creeks of avenues of trees, of palms and bamboos, sometimes even now suggest the fertile valley of the Nile, a place where water makes possible an oasis of strong green growth, and the creation of gardens draws together all the countries of the world in their flora.
The dog rushes into the reeds at the edge of the pool and brings out a pale blue duck egg in his mouth. It is cold and must have been abandoned some time ago. He is very proud of his find and as I crouch down to study it we exchange bemused glances.
SEPTEMBER
written on the skin
The real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.
Franz Fanon
When Ah Xian won the National Sculpture Prize in 2001 with Human human – lotus, cloisonné figure 1 (2000–01), a life-size female figure covered with cloisonné, I tore the image of the sculpture from the newspaper and put it on the side of the fridge where it stayed for years, as I found it so intensely mesmeric and fascinating. A human figure covered in pattern like a fully tattooed or painted body has a particular resonance in part because it echoes the cultures of people who wore or wear no clothes. It has a link to first things, it emphasises our essential nakedness by drawing attention to our skin. It has associations with magical transformations and metamorphoses. It is like a ghost or a spirit figure exactly human in its dimensions. The body is asserted as a canvas or blank page and drawn into a wordless communion with the rest of the world like poetry in which a hand possesses the tension of a leaf, a mouth opens like a flower.
Cloisonné is a highly sophisticated technique first devised in the Near East and introduced to China by skilled craftsmen fleeing Constantinople in 1453. It involves the creation of a design on a three-dimensional metal form with a lattice of thin walls of metal, often copper. Powdered coloured glass called frit is packed into the spaces of the design formed by the lattice, the whole piece is then fired in a kiln at a high temperature and the glass powder melts and turns into vitreous (glass) enamel. Several layers of frit and several firings may be necessary to totally fill the spaces between the wire. Then the whole is ground smooth and the exposed metal is lightly electroplated with gold. For many centuries cloisonné has been associated with China, though the first known examples of it were found in Cyprus around the twelfth century BC. In the purity of its opaque colours and its smoothness it resembles polished semi-precious stones and the exquisite feathers of birds, the wings of butterflies or the petals of flowers.
A few years before I saw Human human on my first trip away from my son when he was eight, I bought some pieces of cloisonné for him and for my mother at a shop in Chinatown in Sydney. Those two small objects are in front of me now, a blue and pink egg that hangs in the window and a mostly turquoise container about the size of a small apple; both are covered in flowers in an ecstasy of intricate decoration. On that same trip to Chinatown I also recall eating a clear fragrant soup full of semi-transparent wontons with pink prawns nestling inside them which gently brought me back to life when I was exhausted and lonely.
Human human was made by Ah Xian in collaboration with traditional craftspeople at the Jingdong Cloisonné Factory in Hebei Province, east of Beijing. Production of this large work was a lengthy, labour-intensive process; three sculptures were attempted and only one survived the process. At the beginning of his career in China Ah Xian painted nudes, a controversial choice considered pornographic and morally corrupt in China at the time. He first came to Australia as a visiting scholar in 1989. After witnessing the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 he sought political asylum in Australia in 1990 and turned his concern with the human figure into three dimensions by making first plaster then porcelain busts painted with traditional Chinese designs at the Sydney College of the Arts. Later he was able to work with Chinese craftsmen at the Jingdezhen Porcelain Sculpture Factory in 1996 and in 1999. I first saw the series of porcelain busts called China China in Brisbane at an Asia-Pacific Triennale in 1999. Their combination of ancient hand-painted designs speaking of refined sensibilities and connoisseurship with actual human faces, mostly Chinese, brimming with vulnerability and thus somehow a vivid sense of the complex past of their country, is striking. In one way they are like living people embalmed in their culture, their mouths and eyes are sealed as if removed from connection with the outside world. In another way they are like beautiful chrysalises waiting for the right moment to emerge.
The female figure of Human human is decorated in a traditional overall pattern of tiny white and gold cloud shapes over which pink and white lotus flowers and veined green lotus leaves are twined. The fading of the colours from pink to white on the petals of the lotus, from dark green to light green on the lotus leaves, is especially lovely. The lotus is one of Buddhism’s most significant symbols. It is customarily celebrated as a symbol of enlightenment, purity and a sign of hope in the journey towards enlightenment. The roots of the lotus are in the mud but its flowers rise above the water, a simile for the progress of the soul. As with Ah Xian’s busts, the decoration covers all of the body with no special attention to the eyes or the ears, the mouth or the nose, but simply treats all of it as a shape, a vessel, to be covered. The effect of muten
ess that is thus created has a peculiar eloquence. Because her eyes are closed and all her senses are covered the Human human figure appears to be meditating, to be folded inside herself. At once a decorative object and reminiscent of a religious figure like a Buddha, she belongs to a world of contemplation and reverie yet is very human in her shape and demeanour.
Ah Xian makes casts of the bodies of his models in plaster before handing them over to the workmen who do the cloisonné or other processes. His models need to find great calm within themselves for the demanding task of having their bodies cast. In such a process the naked body is covered with a release substance like vaseline, straws are inserted in the nose, wax in the ears, the eyes and mouth are held firmly closed while multiple layers of plaster-soaked bandages are wrapped around the body. Because they are cast the figures are not idealised but hold on to small imperfections and variabilities, thus emphasising human vulnerability, frailty and individuality. There is an echo in them of the life-size terracotta warriors buried with the Emperor of Qin in 210–209 BC, each of which is different by virtue of having an individual head and hands.
Both ancient Greek sculpture and the work of Michelangelo and Rodin are evoked by Ah Xian’s work as sculpture focusing on the naked human body, yet the pattern totally covering Human human’s surface marks it as connecting with a decorative art tradition rather than a figurative one – it is the combination of them that makes it powerful. In 1877 because of the lifelikeness of his work, its verisimilitude to skin and flesh, Rodin was accused of surmoulage, casting from a body rather than carving his plaster sculpture The Age of Bronze. Ah Xian does use surmoulage; his artistry is not so much in the making of the work, he did not carve or model the body, he does not make plaster, clay or marble take on the form and texture of living skin like Rodin did. His skill is in the casting and the concept but also in commissioning the right traditional people to make his art. Thus his negotiating skills are present in the work, the skills of a Chinese person living in Australia getting Chinese craftspeople in China to create artworks which bring together Chinese and European art traditions.
Each culture that comes to Australia brings along its own customs and ways of doing things. Sometimes new ones are invented. Sometimes traditions which keep changing in the homeland, the ‘Old Country’, become rigid here as it is in that form that they represent connection to the past. This is most noticeable in language where the dialects brought over and taught to grandchildren are considered archaic and extraordinary in their place of origin. Artworks that tap into customary or traditional knowledge can renew or recreate the past. The experience of exile, of moving, of being a foreigner, of strangeness, is the flip side of a deeper understanding of what belonging and familiarity mean.
Sharing food, the open hand of welcome and hospitality, is universal human behaviour, but has different levels of elaboration in different cultures. The acts of cooking have great emotional resonance. A video by Paloma Ramos shows her Spanish mother making paella and tapas. The work is filmed in the kitchen, the centre of the home, the place of secret and unwritten recipes, time-worn movements, the sacraments of herbs and wine, of talk and method, aroma and vision, where all the senses of smell and touch, taste and hearing are paramount. A woman’s hands move over a frying pan and she speaks incessantly in her own language. There are no subtitles and it is a chaotic scenario quite unlike a cooking program. The woman’s face is not visible. Steam rises in front of the camera. The voice is muffled and the camera goes in too close to see what is happening, yet an immense sense of rhythm and of ritual is conveyed so that even as you watch with initial impatience there is a crucial shift of recognition, of familiarity and acceptance after which you are happy to stay on in this kitchen and let the video play over you, even if it is not clear what is happening. It is mesmeric and comforting, seductive and illuminating. Next to the video Ramos hung a wreath made of bay leaves and a bowl of red wine beneath a collection of light bulbs with crosses inside them. The light bulbs hang on the wall like a plait of garlic cloves warding off vampires.
A second-generation migrant, Bette Mifsud grew up on a market garden in New South Wales. Her photographic series The Living Room shows fragments of rural Australia – naked hills, a sole tree in a bare paddock, the artificial border created by a barbed-wire fenceline where stock have been kept out and masses of weeds have greened a field which sits hard against an acreage of dry yellow stubble, a dam sitting in the elbow of a tufty rocky hillside, a dry straw-coloured featureless hill stretching like a giant shoulder behind a house crouched among dark trees. Though completely unpicturesque the photos possess an immense emotional weight and are, in their emptiness, like vessels for feelings.
Stories of migration begin with home before they talk about homelessness. They circle around translation and broken language. The recurring presence in Australian art of stories of exile and migration, cross-cultural journeys and the creation of home in the midst of strangeness is an important part of a country where the question of origin is a constant. ‘Where do you come from?’, ‘Where did your parents come from?’, ‘Why did they come here?’ are everyday questions in Australia, no matter what you look like. It is almost a game, to guess, to tease, to fabricate, to draw out the final moment of identification and classification. Any appearance can hold a surprise, almost nothing is certain. Everyone knows that we all came not that long ago from somewhere else, except the indigenous, and often they have ancestors from other countries. We know that we are all somehow linked to some other place or places. And that often we are made of complex and exotic comminglings and couplings which make unexpected connections between Australia and other countries in the world. Yet many of these connections are not based on direct experience, but on stories and objects, photos and rituals, imagination and dreams. The view from Australia of other places is loaded with evocative words, sights and symbols. Sometimes they are misreadings that lend us the ability to cross cultures creatively on an everyday basis and, indeed, to move into the space between them which is not only a transit zone but a new place.
Do you need to experience homelessness to be able to empathise with others or can you learn it through your imagination? Some identities are more complicated than others; some people have very little to identify with. In secondary school English one of our books was The Prussian Officer and other stories by D.H. Lawrence. As my father came from East Prussia, a place that no-one knew much about and that no longer existed as it became part of Russia after the Second World War, some of my classmates at least briefly called me The Prussian Officer. Was I really that bossy? What comes to mind as a national characteristic of a Prussian? Apart from Bismarck and militarism, the two most significant and well-known people connected to the capital of East Prussia, Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), where my father was born, are Immanuel Kant and Käthe Kollwitz.
Kant, world-renowned philosopher, spent his entire life in and around his hometown, never travelling more than a hundred miles from Königsberg thus showing that travel may not be necessary for a broad or celebrated mind. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a German craftsman, while his mother, Anna Regina Porter, born in Nuremberg, was the daughter of a Scottish saddle/harness maker.
Kollwitz, who lived a lot of her life in Berlin, made intense and forceful drawings and prints about love and grief, war and hunger. She is considered by many to be one of the greatest printmakers of all time. She was born in Königsberg. Her father, Karl Schmidt, was a radical Social Democrat who became a mason and housebuilder. Her mother, Katherina Schmidt, was the daughter of Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was expelled from the official State Church and founded an independent congregation.
The third well-known thing about Königsberg starting with k, are Königsberger Klopse, meatballs in white sauce with capers.
The whole question of nationality and where it comes from, how it is invented, discovered and passed on, is endlessly complex. For every person with a solid trail of ancestors there is one with a broken
string. My father escaped from Germany to England in 1939 after the Reichskristallnacht to avoid going to a concentration camp like other Radoks who went to Theresienstadt, a ghetto and transit camp for Auschwitz. In 1940 with two of his older brothers he arrived in Australia on the Dunera along with other refugees, many of whom went on to be influential people in Australia and elsewhere. He would always say that he hated Germans, yet German was his mother tongue and Germany his homeland. His father’s family was Jewish though not orthodox. His mother was German and named him Rainer Maria after the poet Rilke. My paternal grandparents were always known as Ranee and Rajah because of the honeymoon they took in Africa in 1913, from which I still possess the souvenir of three bristles from an elephant’s tail plaited together. Along with my father’s sister his parents eventually escaped from Germany and via the US ended up living in Melbourne.
My mother’s family was a mixture of Scottish, British and Irish. Her father was Irish but her mother left him in 1920, leaving behind a one-year-old daughter Peggy but taking my two-year-old mother with her. Forever after Gladys would voice her hatred of the Irish, or so my mother told me. They went to live in the Mallee after Gladys married a dentist. My mother only found out she had a sister when she was in her fifties. (As we never lived in the same city I remember only a little about Gladys. She took us to see The Sound of Music at the palatial Forum Cinema in Adelaide, introduced me to the delights of drinking tea and bought us Fruchocs at the movies. The one saying handed down to me by my mother from Gladys is: ‘Never do any housework after twelve noon.’ After she died and I asked what she left me my mother said it was a small aluminium teapot and its knitted cosy, though I suspect that was my mother’s idea.)
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