Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  The solution proposed in Ecclesiastes is there in Gilgamesh. It is in the advice given to the hero as he prepares to cross the Waters of Death in search of immortality. The tavern keeper, Shiduri, tells him: When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping … fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man. McCahon at the end of his painting life entertains the idea that we should eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow we die; then rejects it. His selection from Ecclesiastes emphasises that theme introduced in the second verse: Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty. What does man gain from all his toil and labour here under the sun? Gilgamesh, too, ignored the wise woman’s advice and went on into the east in search of immortality; yet returned, a mortal man, to restore the walls of his city, to die and to go under the earth, in some versions there to become a judge of the dead. McCahon is here a Gilgamesh, rebuilding the walls of his city with words.

  McCahon’s four last paintings have been read as unrelievedly dark. The first of them, The emptiness of all endeavour: triptych (1980) is all white on deep black until the vertical ochre band at the far right of the third panel, suggesting some kind of equivocal light to come: a hellish red or else the first glimmering of dawn? The next two, Is there anything of which one can say, Look, this is New? (1980–82) and I applied my mind (1980–82), both have a flat triangular sliver of cloudy grey land in the bottom left-hand corner, making a sky of the black above. Each of these paintings is structured around a vestigial tau cross, reduced to dotted lines but nevertheless present: McCahon’s Egyptian god was still with him. The last painting, I considered all acts of oppression (1980–82), has no landscape, no horizon line; but the dotted tau cross remains, now with a base making it an I. This work was not exhibited until after the painter’s death in 1987; it was found face down on the floor of his studio and is thought by some to have been unfinished: much has been made of the empty black oblong to the right of the dotted vertical and between the two horizontals. To represent, Francis Pound has written, the unrepresentable: Death.

  All my painting is autobiographical, McCahon said when younger and he must be taken at his word. But the autobiographical will not help us much when reading these last works. The ravages of alcohol, illness, paranoia and – most critically – a loss of faith, however persuasive, do not constitute a full explanation. The works remain as a testament of I, the Speaker, which is the voice of the anonymous author of Ecclesiastes. The ancient wisdom McCahon channels in these last works is a denunciation of a way of life that cannot continue without shaking the foundations of heaven and earth and it remains valid whatever his personal state of mind may have been. It is, without exaggeration, the end of the old quest to find the zone of the marvellous, no longer posited as an elsewhere. Here and now, the quotidian, is all there is; and we have to make of it what we can.

  This does not mean an end to the work of the imagination. McCahon shut the studio door on his last words, emblazoned below that black void: toiling endless yet never, a paradoxical formulation that sums up the bundle of contradictions his work presents: doubt and faith, affirmation and negation, black and white, life and death, all twined together in an endless Celtic knot. There’s dignity in falling silent once there is no longer anything more to say. Alongside McCahon’s ultimate negation – that closed door, that upside down painting, that black void – there is the last image Sidney Nolan left us of himself, an ultimate affirmation: the painter suspended from a harness in his studio, spray can in hand, hovering like a dragon fly or a honey-bee over the canvases on the floor below him. His last works are mostly to do with China, which he visited many times, and they have a gauze-like quality that suggests mist on a river, mist on the mountains, perhaps even the Misty Poets of the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of whom were exiled after the events in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989.

  Nolan first used a spray can in his teens when he worked in advertising. His adoption of it as a primary painting tool towards the end of his life thus has resonances in his personal past as well as in the collective future, where it would become the universal tool of graffiti artists and taggers. McCahon’s work was also sometimes accused of being graffiti – most famously for the walls of some celestial lavatory – an accusation he might not have taken as the insult it was intended to be. Both he and Nolan posited their work as accessible to the common man and woman; both assumed the widest possible audience for what they were doing.

  NIETZSCHEANS, USING concepts derived ultimately from the Persian fire religion, Zoroastrianism, talk about the Holy Yes and the Holy No as equal and opposite paths to enlightenment. It may be fanciful to identify Australasia’s two twentieth-century ancestor painters in these terms but the idea nevertheless has some plausibility. Certainly a view of the world from an antipodean perspective became, through their work and the work of others, both necessary and sufficient as a way of making sense of that world: as if the riches discovered in the Great South Land turned out to be intellectual capital, artistic treasure, a way out of the endgame of empire. The strategies used by both artists – Nolan’s globalisation of vision, McCahon’s stubborn insistence on an individual conscience as the way to fix our disintegrating polis – have opened a vast field of possibilities for their inheritors to explore. McCahon’s work, perhaps because of its use of the written word, has been sampled variously and inventively on both sides of the Tasman; Nolan has achieved iconic status while his work is not much revisited by contemporaries, although there are exceptions.

  One is Aboriginal Australian artist Gordon Bennett who in his Haptic Painting Explorer (The Inland Sea) (1993) sourced Nolan’s images of the disintegrating body of explorer Robert O’Hara Burke burning as he drowns in a sea of his own territorialising imagination. There was no inland sea, only a kind of vortex in which dreams of domination went down the drain. Bennett has used an impressive array of techniques to focus upon the effects the colonial enterprise has had upon indigenous peoples and in doing so has made some breath-taking discoveries: for instance finding in the dots of digital or photographic prints analogies with the dot painting of Aboriginal art; or suggesting that the Aboriginal other disappears in the vanishing point of the kind of perspective taught since the Renaissance as a means of constructing three-dimensional illusions in two-dimensional space.

  Bennett’s de- and re-construction of ways of seeing, with their explicit and/or implicit tropes of possession and definition, have extended to the uses of language as a tool of power. In a long autobiographical essay he speaks of the schizoid experience of listening to white workers ritually disparaging Aborigines such as himself and feeling at once outraged and condemned to silence: Bennett was raised white and spent many years working for a telco before committing himself to the practice of an art that speaks out, that will not remain silent. The double vision of one who is both Aborigine and Australian, both oppressed and oppressor, continues to inform his work with rage, humour and a coruscating irony.

  AROUND ABOUT THE same time Bennett was redrawing the inland sea as vortex and void, on the other side of the Tasman in New Zealand Māori artist Shane Cotton began to show a series of extraordinary paintings. They used a restricted palette, mostly red and yellow ochres, browns and blacks; the space of the paintings was often cut up in such a way as to make big objects look very small and small ones big; and the objects themselves were an assemblage: cowboy boots, old trypots used to melt down whale blubber, other vessels used as pot plants – Maori images (mere, wooden fishhooks, the crosses and stars of Maori war flags, and palisades) were accompanied by the paraphernalia of imperial rule (coastal profiles, surveyors’ pegs, scrolls, numerals, copperplate script and flagstaffs). These paintings of Cotton’s are said to be derived in part from painted wharenui on the east
coast of the North Island of New Zealand, especially the very beautiful house called Rongopai (Peace). But the tradition on which he was drawing is complex and has a deep history; moreover his strategy in co-opting these images into his work was itself historically informed.

  The famous Rapanui (Easter Island) rongo rongo boards, once thought to be written in an ancient script, now seem more likely to have originated at a precise point in time, for a precise reason. When in 1770 a Spanish expedition of two ships under the captaincy of Felipe González de Haedo set out from Peru to find the mythical Davis Land, they fetched up at Rapanui, which they took possession of in the name of Don Carlos III of Spain. A prepared document was displayed on the beach and three elders of the Rapanui people were persuaded to ‘sign’ it. They drew scribbles, perhaps in imitation of the writing already on the document, geometric shapes and copies of a couple of the petroglyphs they were in the habit of inscribing on to rocks. Steven Roger Fischer has argued that the genesis of the rongo rongo boards was here and that they developed subsequently not so much as a form of writing as a means of commanding political and ritual power. The appropriation of the symbols and techniques of the coloniser by the colonised is always mirrored by a reverse process, in which the colonisers take what they can use or what they admire from those they colonise: tattoo is a Pacific example. It might also be argued that the European idea of the Good or Noble Savage has been appropriated by indigenous peoples as a way of asserting or contending for the rights they lost during colonisation.

  Shane Cotton’s insight is that this process of exchange is never ending and that its transferred symbols – including writing – may be reconstituted as a system of signs resembling hieroglyphics which can then be made to say something that not only has not been said before, but that cannot be said in any other way. His remark, quoted above, that the theft and recovery of McCahon’s Urewera mural changed forever our perception of the work is a reliable guide to the way he works as an artist. Although the paintings he has produced since those early, sepia-toned, so-called folk art works do not much resemble them in terms of palette or imagery, the later works nevertheless continue to deal in signs/symbols that are extracted from a previous context then reassembled in a new arrangement in such a way that they must be read as new statements – rongo rongo boards for once and future generations, objects of power as much as they are, or may seem to be, aesthetically pleasing.

  The folk art motifs Cotton sourced from Rongopai and from other places like the Ua Rongopai notebook or associated documents of the Pai Mārire movement such as the notebook of Aporo, are usually thought of as naïve art, innocent in intention, perhaps confused, certainly intuitive; Cotton’s use of them has a backwards effect on the intentionality of the original material which, in the new and knowing context he gives their imagery, make the sources seem not just sophisticated but also prescient: the artists who painted Rongopai and other houses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the earlier Pai Mārire writers and draughtsmen, were anticipating Shane Cotton’s elaborate cross-cultural scripts a hundred or more years before they came to be.

  ANOTHER VERSION OF hybrid history is found in the work of contemporary artist and print-maker Marian Maguire, who revives a style of vase painting from Classical Greece and conflates it with episodes from the colonial and contemporary history of New Zealand. In the strange world she evokes Herakles, the hero of Greek myth, dressed in his lion skin, has the face of Ngatai, a chief of one of the northern iwi as drawn by Louis Auguste de Sainson, the official artist aboard Dumont d’Urville’s L’Astrolabe during the ship’s three months of voyaging round New Zealand in 1827. It was not uncommon for early European navigators in the Pacific to compare the Polynesians they met to figures from Classical antiquity: Maguire makes Herakles, Athena, Odysseus and others from Greek legend contemporary with Māori and European of the historic period and displaces both the recent Polynesian past and that of antiquity into a contemporary New Zealand where bridges are built, farms made, the land cut up for settlement. The process is not dissimilar to that used by Shane Cotton – Maguire’s amphora resemble some of Cotton’s vessels – but the result is rather different: James Cook, for instance, is overlaid upon the figure of Odysseus and New Zealand, in this imagining, becomes an Ithaka, a home to which the wandering hero returns – but who is this hero and to what home can he return?

  Maguire’s inversions suggest that the world in which we live today is one in which all times are contemporary. Herakles might have to wrangle a chariot out of number-8 fencing wire; the cattle dog he trains could be the three-headed dog Kerberos who guards Hades. In his lion skin (which Gilgamesh also wore), with his club leaning against the table, he signs the Treaty of Waitangi while Queen Victoria, with flag, and a Māori warrior, with tewhatewha and a dogskin cloak, stand either side looking on. These prints, which are beautifully executed, are on one level humorous, perhaps even whimsical; on another they speak of and to a common history, which is always active in the present. The epic tribal conflicts of Māori in the contact period might indeed have some structural resemblance to the famous war between Greeks and Trojans towards the end of the fourth millennium BP, albeit with weapons of stone and wood not bronze. Cook’s voyages can be seen as a kind of Odyssey, a wandering in search of home which for the man himself becomes Kealakekua Bay on Hawai‘i but for those who follow – the largely British settlers who went to New Zealand – is home in a different but equally permanent sense.

  Samuel Butler, who believed The Odyssey was written by the woman who appears in the poem as Nausicaa, called his sheep station Mesopotamia, again suggesting that far distant periods of historical time may collapse into a present where all times are contemporary. Nausicaa, whose name may mean burning of ships, tells Odysseus: Never forget me, for I gave you life, as if she were indeed the mother of the poem in which he continues to live. Whether Marian Maguire would admit to being a kind of Nausicaa figure herself, rewiring Classical texts with their male heroes and female goddesses in antipodean historical and contemporary contexts, is unknown; but the kinds of analogy her work draws have been echoed elsewhere. Robert Duncan wrote We have come so far that all the old stories / whisper once more. That poem ends with lines that can be seen to body forth an image of settler societies: In the dawn that is nowhere / I have seen the wilful children // clockwise and counter-clockwise turning.

  AMONG THOSE WILFUL children is artist Fiona Hall. She is Sydney born, lives in Adelaide but travels constantly: her work, exquisite and delicate, is portable and in most cases able to be made outside of a studio. One of her projects, unfolding since 2002 as a work in progress, is called When my boat comes in … The conception is simple and striking. Hall assembles banknotes into an arrangement that can act as the ground for a painting; then, using gouache, she paints upon that ground the leaf of an economically significant plant that has been taken from its native place to another, most often for financial gain. Each plant depicted is indigenous to the state or entity whose currency it is painted upon; and every banknote features in its imagery a boat of some kind. Thus, for example, a leaved twig of Agathis australis, the New Zealand kauri, is painted across half a dozen one pound notes with Cook’s Endeavour bellying canvas across Pacific waters and island shapes looming behind.

  Each work in the series is thus an ideogram which contains knowledge that seems disparate but is not: currency itself is endlessly fascinating as a clue to the very many entities that have, over time, issued it: state and private banks, armies and navies, railways and shipping lines, strike committees, rebels, tyrants, forgers, utopians and so forth. Plants too – Hall points out that her gouaches are botanically accurate and her research into the world of plants is extensive and meticulous. Plant species that are taken from one place to another come under the label of portmanteau biota. Introduced species frequently thrive in the new place, not least because they leave their common pests behind. They may also outbreed and suppress native plants and often become pests themse
lves. The taking of plant species from one place to another is a simple act with complex consequences; it is not something that can easily, or perhaps ever, be undone. Ecological imperialism is one way of describing these unintended consequences, though sometimes intention is part of the act. The Dutch in the East Indies deliberately cut down nutmeg trees on islands they did not control in order to enforce a monopoly on the trade.

  Gouache, from the Italian, means veil and in these works the pigment does veil the currency, the crop superimposed upon the cash. Hall’s ongoing work is beautiful to look at but she has said in an interview that the aesthetic quality is there as a lure, an invitation into the work, not as an end in itself. When my boat comes in … is as much an inquiry as it is a work of art; a kind of dictionary or encyclopaedia. It contains a vast amount of information that is classified according to relatively simple principles; each ideogram – leaf plus currency, cash plus crop – can be decoded in such a way as to restore a piece of lost, forgotten or neglected history. There is art in the way it is put together but the emphasis of the piece is really on the work: her classification is a new way of ordering knowledge.

  Hall has also said that she presently has banknotes without corresponding plant species and plants without corresponding banknotes, emphasising again the ongoing nature of a project which may ultimately end up between the covers of a book. As such, it will constitute a work of reference that can then be used as a means of understanding the multiple transactions of empire over the last 500 years. When my boat comes in … is thus both a testament to the marvellous and an interrogation of the zone in which the colonial enterprise took place; both a deconstruction of the processes of empire and a reconstruction of its dominion from a point of view that is at once culturally and naturally determined, both general and specific. If we are ourselves a portmanteau biota that has yet to become fully conscious of itself but may still achieve consciousness, then When my boat comes in … is a tool for attaining such consciousness.