There was a lot of hate and escaping in my background and little continuity in places where ancestors have lived and died. It is a state of deracination leavened by research and scattered connections. How many people live like this? How many avoid rather than seek out family? How important is nationality and its determination by history, by birth, by mother tongue, by personal choice?
Innocent Reading for Origin is an artwork made by Elizabeth Gertzakis whose parents came to Australia from Greece in 1956 when she was two. The work is based on snapshot photos from her parents’ lives. They are the sort of images often kept in a shoebox somewhere, in this case an Italian one under the bed, and brought out regularly in order to revive and share memories from other times and other places. The work consists of a series of very large black-and-white photographs. Though they were originally ordinary hand-sized photos from a family album, for exhibition they were enlarged as big as posters and each was flanked by an equally large block of text making a comment on it. The blocks of text voice a child’s naïve commentary on the images. Their questioning tone exemplifies every child’s ambivalence about the world that preceded their existence. This is the seeking of origin. The words are vivid and active. This is not the sanitised good family voice of respect, memory, recognition, genealogy and explanation but a rude voice of provocation and dissatisfaction, curiosity and even hostility. Thus it is shocking, private, and unexpected. As well as the child’s innocence and misunderstanding it reveals some of the unsaid dimensions of family photos, the unspoken tensions and events underlying bodies and faces, clothes and demeanours. For example, next to an image of a woman dressed as a bride standing next to a man it says: ‘Who is this lady I can’t see? She is being dragged along. A cloth is pulling on her face. She looks full of mystery. She is all covered. I want to pull away the white to see her face, to see her eyes. It is all unclear. They are walking, she is being dragged.’
Gertzakis composes a new mythology from her family photos but it is not a neat handed-down and handed-on story; in fact there are no remembered family stories told here, rather a child’s own jumbled and distorted version of events making unexpected connections and strange suggestions. It communicates the child’s longing for information and sense. But somehow this personal story becomes exemplary of anyone’s story, and also evidence that the way that stories or even accounts of historical events are told is often wilful or arbitrary. The artwork copes with awkwardness and strangeness, with disorientation and the unknown. It also – and this is its most telling point – uses ordinary everyday experiences as the subject for art, which is to say it reveals commonplace personal experience to be culture.
The work does not discuss place, migration or Greekness, it is simply presented as having happened, but clearly the photographs are tied to a particular time and place reminiscent of a post-war 1950s neo-realist aesthetic. The work tears open a corner of a container, an Italian shoebox, of stored feelings and memories, stored both against and for retrieval. And in this act it establishes an intimacy with the reader so that their interior voice too is felt as potentially shared or shareable. Translation and the movement of language across cultures distorts and fractures meaning. Yet it also leads to its potent multiplication.
Another artwork foregrounding language and translation is Simryn Gill’s Tree of Enlightenment (1994) which combines leaves from the Bo tree (Ficus religiosa), famous for shading Gautama Buddha at the moment of his enlightenment, with dictionary definitions of words. Gill is a Malaysian Indian born in Singapore who spent her childhood in Malaysia and was educated in the UK and Australia. The work consists of seven glass bottles stoppered with corks and with cursive writing cut into their clear watery surfaces. Light catches in the engraved lines, white lines on transparent glass. They are the flat clear bottles used for spirits. The bottles sit on a long-legged metal table painted a dull grey. A skeleton Bo tree leaf has been rolled up and then released inside each bottle and lyrically occupies that space with its semi-invisibility. Going close to the bottles you look through the glass to the leaf which is filigreed and lacy, almost as if it has been written on, then you refocus your eyes to read the spidery writing incised into the surface of the glass. It isn’t possible to focus on the leaf and the writing at the same time. The leaf is as long and as wide as the bottle. As you focus and refocus your eyes you sense the erotics of language, as the sensuality of the work, the unfurled leaves, the layerings and distortions draw your body in so that you look with your neck and back as much as with your eyes and mind.
The hand-engraved cursive writing is a series of definitions from a ‘legendary dictionary of British India’ of the apparently random words – Cheese, Muddle, Chop, Jack, Interloper, Solar and Sudden Death. Their complex and unexpected provenances reference Hindustani, Malay, Dutch, Tamil, Indian, Chinese, Bengali, English and pidgin English. They demonstrate the overlapping of cultures and the difficulty of tracing origins and even meanings in language. They encompass enormous passages of time and history, information and experience. The dictionary is clearly a colloquial one for a specific audience, and the implication may be that all dictionaries are equally regional.
The most unexpected definition is that for the word ‘cheese’. On the glass is written:
CHEESE, ‘Any thing good first rate, genuine, pleasant, or advantageous’ (slng Dict.). The most probable source of the word is Hindi ‘Chiz’, ‘thing’. For the expression used to be common eg: ‘My new Arab is the real chiz’; ‘These cheroots are the real chiz,’ ie the real thing.
The historical and cultural events of colonisation loom large in the ripple effect of reading these definitions as they imply the journeys of people and habits, and words and power relationships, and transfers of knowledge and information. Worlds within worlds. One of them suggests the book was written by the Indians, not the English, as it refers irritably to the ‘English people, led astray by the usual striving after meaning’. Gill’s works hold both the tenuousness of meaning and the flexibility of language. Like items from a Tower of Babel they demonstrate the intertwinings of language that have come about throughout history and continue to affect what we say and what we think. The work holds out knowledge and enlightenment as illusory, but quite possibly beautiful. It shows that although you may expect a dictionary to lead you calmly through a linguistic trail it may be neither conclusive nor satisfying. But each time we learn another language, even just a few words, we expand our understanding of possible meanings and sounds waiting to be found.
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Today the dog and I walk in Chambers Gully. A short drive from our house off Waterfall Gully Road, it is an old quarry and dump site currently being replanted with indigenous vegetation. It is full of huge fig trees, towering fennel plants, and blackberries crowding the path of the creek that winds through. It is alive with bees working overhead, butterflies and birds swooping around, as well as small lizards and bugs darting about on the ground. The stillness of the air and the golden light slanting through from the west makes it seem as if we are in Paradise. As I stand still for a moment struggling with my genetic and environmental burden – Teutonic gloom and Celtic fatalism, Jewish chutzpah and an Irish tongue, mixed with the weight of American literal-mindedness and Australian irreverence, a butterfly comes to sit on my hand, not fresh but slightly tattered, its wings wave open and reveal bright blue eyes on each side. It lightly scratches my hand and stays there, giving me a small gift of presence and acceptance.
OCTOBER
reconstituting the ordinary
… it would be better for us that all the pictures in the world perished, than that the birds should cease to build nests.
John Ruskin
There is something that I used to do regularly that I haven’t done for a long time – lie down on my stomach on the ground outside and look at a tiny piece of earth in front of me, a place where nothing is happening. By staying still and watching, feeling the sun on my back, the wind in my hair, the sound of birds or bees, I
usually find there is much activity happening on the ground. There are tiny blue flowers, and ants climbing the flower stems, slaters rushing through grass tunnels, yellow bugs drying their wings and launching off into first flights, cicadas vibrating with sound or crawling out of the earth, large brown stick-like grasshoppers disguised as twigs, millipedes making many-footed patterns as they flow along, seedpods splitting open and distributing their seed, ants collecting the seed plus a dead companion, and so on. The plants and the ground fill my view rather than being a block of colour somewhere below me. My next act is to roll over on my back, perhaps in a slightly different site where I am not quite so familiar with the teeming life beneath me and don’t have to think too hard about bugs walking into my ears. Then I make contact with the earth, feel its curve beneath my spine and see nothing but the sky above me. This double-sided encounter with the earth has the effect of creating a small zone of calm within me, of putting things into proportion, though it is not about rational thinking – rather the experience fills me with a sense of belonging and a kind of contentment. It is also a sensation of opening, and doing it as a child at the centre of the oval behind our house, a place fringed with large trees and roofed by a wide sky, is an experience fundamental to my ideas.
It is the sort of act that a child performs without reflection, opening to the world and finding it opening back. Becoming a parent and having to answer my own child’s questions was a catalyst for me to think about issues of origin and belief. How far back can we, do we, go? How do we define origins and belonging? How do we learn about our ancestors? How do we define them or find them? Can we go on finding them all our lives? How do we decide what is important? To declare belonging may be one of the biggest declarations we make; it may happen inside a book, after a moment’s acquaintance, or over thirty years.
Answering the big questions posed by children is an opportunity to know what we have made of what we have learnt through living, to find out what our position is while declaring it, but it can be a very complicated business. What we get, what we give, may not patch together into a cohesive universe. Nationality in particular can be like a basket of mixed fruit, including both insects and vipers. When people talk about the humourlessness of Germans it annoys me, as my father was quite good at telling jokes. He could be full of charm, though he was impossibly arrogant and rabidly paranoid, and when he was young, I have been told, was often ‘deprassed’. He had a German accent which I never noticed till one day when he gave a talk at my school, and then all of a sudden in that context I heard it. Now he has gone, whenever I hear a German accent I feel great tenderness which arises somehow from my unknown affectionate feelings for this man who was so difficult to love. In general I like accents a lot as they make language sound new, they colour it and give it different shapes. I am even keen on misunderstandings in language as they also make life and thought richer. Often when I asked questions as a child my parents would reply, ‘That’s a very Jewish question’ and not answer it. I learned a few Yiddish words like kibbitz, kvetsch and mensch. Both parents also always said that I must have kissed the Blarney Stone. My mother’s father was Irish, purportedly a deserter from the Indian Army, sure a charmer. She on the other hand was pragmatic to the point of nihilism, something that always bugged me with my inexplicable shining store of hope and idealism, some of which I must surely have imbibed from attending primary school in America. I never recognised her approach to life as Celtic fatalism till hearing writer Alex Miller talk about his Irish mother and how once, when he told her the secret deep feelings that were in his heart, her only response was ‘never mind, Al’.
All people are born with a sense of interconnectedness to the world. They may lose touch with it and then it has to be re-learnt or re-discovered or reinvented. Thinking that creation stories are important is not the same as creationism, the fundamentalist adherence to the Bible which is set against the teaching of evolution in schools in America. Actually evolution is a really good creation story packed full of wonder, and miracles. New creation stories might refer to how a person was made, how their point of view of the world was formed and how they are connected by history and knowledge, and by incidents and relationships, to other beings. A creation story might refer to how an artwork is made and to all the ideas and issues drawn into its fabric. An important aspect of contemporary Australian art is its vivid and urgent engagement with history and with nature. The opening of language and thought to correspondences and metaphors provided by nature connects all of us to everything else, putting us into perspective as creators, storytellers, namers, guardians, caretakers and custodians of the world.
I have often reflected on the words of anthropologist Peter Sutton about the potential influence of Aboriginal culture on Australian culture. He suggests that it would be valuable for Australians to re-imagine the suburb as the site of epiphanies and attachments:
It’s possible that turning some of the intellectual lessons of Aboriginal art back onto how we understand the suburbia of the Fifties (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s) might help shift the balance towards something more firmly grounded in reality, for most Australians. It also might flesh out Australia’s national self-representation with a little mainstream self-exoticism, reconstituting the ordinary as the powerful, as something we think we understand but seldom do without revisioning, without ritual.
Learning from Aboriginal culture does not mean all Australians embracing a whole series of Aboriginal beliefs and stories about the land, and taking over a spiritual landscape which is not theirs. It means paying attention to your locale, and understanding that everyday acts and events, even those which are not generally considered particularly cultural, are significant. Thus rather than seeing only big historical events as being ‘real’ history and ‘real’ culture, it means seeing history and culture as part of each individual and their life. As anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose points out, the sentiment of home is not dependent on perfection. ‘Everywhere one goes in Aboriginal Australia, people describe their own homeland as “good country”. From the bleakest sandhills to mosquito-infested swamps, each homeland is “good country” for the people who belong there.’ Indigenous people bring to a wider society not only the richness of their diverse cultures and ways of organising and conceiving the world but above all a belief in and the practice of the importance of joining thought to feeling, to connect knowledge and emotion. This is becoming more and more relevant in our ecologically stretched times. All indigenous people regard the earth with great emotion as if it is sentient, a member of the family. So do many non-indigenous people.
Papua New Guinea artist Michael Mel has written about indigeneity as something open to all human beings. His description of it, through talking about his people, the Mogei, and their concept of kanamb, involves a notion of embodied knowledge meaning the dissolution of the binaries of observer and observed, individual and world. It means dropping divisions between objective and subjective, structure and meaning, inner and outer, material and spiritual, feelings and thoughts, culture and nature. In this way of thinking the self is experienced not as a container to be filled but as a series of relationships with all people living and dead, with people as individuals and with the physical world and all things around us. Any self is not separate but is engaged in and part of the world in an interconnected and interwoven whole. Making the intellectual and emotional leap to think about and maybe understand or feel this way of being and seeing contributes to an opening of the way we view the world and how we act in it.
Fiona Hall’s art has been concerned for some time with ecology, with scientific taxonomy and with connections between all species. She says: ‘We have discovered not only that we belong, as with all other living things, to a vast, genetically interrelated community but that we are direct descendants of the first replicator molecules.’ Her artwork Dead in the Water is displayed inside a glass vitrine with a sheet of glass running horizontally through the middle of it, cutting the space in two as if the top half is air and
the bottom half is water. It is an imaginary slice of the sea, lifted from that ever-moving vastness and placed in a typical museum case like a science diorama. Using small clear glass beads and silver wire Hall has recreated the forms of various marine creatures, spectacular transitional forms on the border of animal and vegetable life. They hang down in the water section of the case. Some of them have multiple openings, some of them have none; it is hard to tell whether they can see or which way is up. At the water level their bulbous extravagant bodies are joined to pieces of white plastic plumbing pipe that she has perforated into a dense sieve-like net of holes. The pipes sit above the glass like lacy periscopes.
This artwork expresses a complex hybridity as well as being a homage to the fertile and mutable ability of nature to incorporate and to encompass. The incapacity of the pipes to hold water contradicts their function. It suggests metaphoric leakages between life-forms, movements from culture to culture, gene to gene, the cross-infiltration of languages and thought. This permeability emphasises the interdependence and symbiosis of the world. Plastic plumbing pipe is very ordinary. In most places it has replaced metal pipes with its generic plain smooth whiteness and relative indestructibility. While metal corrodes and cement rots, plastic’s longevity is unknown, ranging hypothetically from a hundred to a thousand years. The artwork’s title Dead in the Water draws attention to the destructive work carried out at sea by plastic. More than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles die globally each year from entanglement in, or ingestion of, plastics. On remote islands, inside tiny and large creatures, at the bottom of the sea and trailed along its many kilometres of beaches there are pieces of plastic. When you walk on the beach and sometimes think you have found a bright treasure, a rare shell or marine beast, often it will be a piece of plastic, its vivid colour and inert texture made almost lifelike by the weathering of the elements.
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