Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘Of course it can. The artist as prophet. Why not?’

  ‘I mean, art isn’t just reflective,’ said Anna, ‘not just a portrait of the age. It’s predictive. Though even here, hope is challenged. I mean,’ she said, scooping a tee shirt from a pile on a souvenir stand. ‘Look at this!’ She held it up. Size medium in red with an image of the Golden Gate outlined in sequins. ‘Not even made here. Some town in China produces millions, billions of these things. You can buy this exact same tee shirt in Paris with the Eiffel Tower on the front, or in Venice with a gondola, or anywhere really. The exact same! I mean, look at it!’ She waved the tee shirt as if it were a banner. ‘Some kid in China was paid less than the price of a cup of coffee to make this!’

  The man behind the till was watching her narrowly. ‘Lady!’ he called. ‘Lady! You want that shirt?’

  ‘Some kid working sixteen hours a day and sleeping in a cell with eight other kids — no union, no collective representation — and we tolerate it, we have no sense of international solidarity …’

  ‘You mark that shirt, you buy it!’ said the voice from behind the till. ‘You hear?’

  ‘… we buy this stuff because it’s cheap, we don’t care. We don’t give a damn. We walk straight past people like those guys down there round the city fountains, and don’t even notice them any more. They’re a nuisance, they make a mess, like the fucking pigeons. And where are the artists now? Where’s the new New Deal? We’ve given up on the vision. And for what? So we can watch twenty-four-hour TV and buy this cheap crap!’ She flung out her arms at the densely packed shelves of mugs and snowball figures and pens and lapel badges and notepads and key rings. Her shoulder bag knocked a stack of stuffed-toy golden eagles to the floor.

  ‘Hey you!’ said the man. ‘You! Lady! Watch what you doin’!’

  ‘I mean, look at this place. It’s filled with the most beautiful art. It’s unique. It’s extraordinary! But there’s no commentary, no interpretation, no proper guide book. So far as ninety percent of the people who come here know, it’s just another tourist stop with a nice view and a souvenir shop full of crap. It’s like America is embarrassed by it. By the vision.’

  The man had emerged from behind the till. ‘This not school for talking,’ he said. ‘This a shop.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be a shop,’ said Anna. ‘It should be a place for talking. Do you know anything about these paintings? What they mean?’

  The man was picking up eagles.

  ‘You wreck my stuff,’ he said. ‘See? It marked. You buy.’

  He held out a stuffed eagle. It had googly plastic eyes and some dust on its fluffy golden wings.

  ‘Sir, do you know who painted this place? Or why?’ said Anna. People were peering in the doorway, attracted by raised voices, the sound amplified by the curves of the tower. ‘Do you even care?’

  The man pushed the golden eagle against her arm. ‘You buy,’ he said. ‘You buy or you get out my shop!’

  Anna shrugged as she was backed by a golden eagle with googly eyes towards the doorway.

  ‘You see?’ she said. ‘This is where we’re at. No one gives a damn any more.’ She raised her hands as the man shoved at her hard. ‘All right! All right! I’m going already!’

  The man was small and yapping like a furious terrier, teeth bared. ‘You owe ten dollar!’ he said. ‘You buy!’

  ‘No I won’t buy!’ said Anna. ‘I’m not going to buy your mass-produced globalised crap!’

  The man looked as though he would combust.

  ‘No crap! No crap!’ he yapped. ‘You buy! Ten dollar!’ He pursued them into the foyer, yelling, waving the stuffed toy. A Japanese tour group parted to let them through, drawing back timidly from the shouting, the explosion of incomprehensible rage. This, after all, was a country where people carried guns. They called in big bulging cops with big bulging holsters. They went on rampages in suburban malls and high-school corridors. They shot people. The tourists had seen it on the news. Clare fumbled for her wallet.

  ‘Here!’ she said to the man. ‘Take it.’ She thrust ten dollars into his hand.

  ‘Don’t give him that!’ said Anna.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Clare as the man snatched the note. ‘I’ve always wanted a stuffed eagle.’

  The man retreated into his shop where some of the tour party were already checking out the key rings, holding the tee shirts up for size, trying on the baseball caps, turning their heads this way and that in the skinny mirror. Clare stuffed the eagle into her bag and followed Anna out into the clear Pacific light. They stood on the cracked and stained terrace looking back up at the tower which leaned out at a crazy angle above their heads, its fretwork crest tangled in rags of white cloud like the shreds of a sail after a mighty storm.

  Anna sighed with satisfaction. ‘Isn’t this just the best place?’ she said. ‘Isn’t this just the best place in the whole entire world?’

  They walked back into the city, where the spindly street trees were budding as if this were Camelot, and the young mums sprinted past, babies bounding along in strollers equipped with special ergonomic wheels, and the cafés had their windows open to the spring sunshine, and it was a perfect afternoon. The kind you don’t forget. The kind that persuades you to put a ring round a session at 11 a.m. when Anna Leov will speak for thirty minutes on the work of Maxine Albro.

  Clare rings the session, jostled by the crowd gathered in the foyer like kids at a picnic, delighted with their three days away from the office at the end of the corridor with its heavy-duty broadloom the colour of stale mustard, its posters of exhibitions long dismantled, its tutorial lists and reading lists, all differing only in the fine detail from the carpet and lists and posters she has left behind in Christchurch: the Holbein to Hockney poster fading to a cyanosed necrotic blue beside the noticeboard sprouting its lush seasonal foliage of lists. The core of the discipline she had encountered for the first time when she arrived at university in 1976, freshly broken from the shell of a childhood where art was swans rising above a misty lake on the Gibraltar-board walls of a house that had never thought of itself being anything so refined as architecture.

  The core remains intact. Here it is, catalogued, listed and pinned to the departmental walls: Venus on her cockleshell, Michelangelo’s muscle-bound sibyls, Bramante’s bubble of faith in the physics of stone floating above the heads of the believers. Here are the saints, kneeling, tortured, hung, sleeping, pierced, preaching, writhing in ecstasy. Here are the Parisian bar girls fresh as country flowers, and the noble heroes standing in for hereditary monarchs with advanced syphilis. Here are all those bodies splayed for close inspection, polished to a high sheen or chopped and rearranged like a salad of parts. Here are the Byzantine chapels glistening with golden mosaic and the lily-pad spans of nineteenth-century railway stations dedicated to the glory of steam. Here are the Greek temples and their eighteenth-century descendants, all high-minded Elysian purity above a warren of dark kitchens devoted to the satisfaction of more primal needs. Here are the portraits, still lifes, landscapes, abstract collages, oils, watercolours, marbles, bronzes, classical, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, nineteenth century, modern. All those dabs of paint, all those peckmarks on stone, laid down like fragments of shell in a warm ocean, century after century, till they formed the solid labelled stratified sequence called culture on which she had learned to stand.

  Then there is the topmost layer of tukutuku, whakairo rakau, the women artists in their pre-war berets, paintbrushes in hand, the bare black and white waterfalls, the bird-headed men, the long golden Canterbury grass tossed by a nor-wester, the Chinese imagery of wild geese alighting upon a sandbar, a mountain village under snow. The newcomers whom she and her contemporaries back in the seventies had forced through the doors into the academy. They had occupied the building, gawky and defiant, and left their mark upon its walls, among the reading lists and tutorial timetables.

  They seem unremarkable now, like all
the other middle-aged revolutionaries: like Fidel snoozing, or Germaine Greer adjusting her bifocals, or those old rockers who keep returning for what is promised to be their Final Ultimate and Definitely Last Chance Tour, in the company of a replacement drummer who wasn’t even born when that distinctive screaming riff first ripped into the collective psyche. There is something almost repugnant about their loss of youth and fervour. The audience is restive, up there in the circle with the best seats in the house. They tap their knees and wonder if they have remembered to lock the car. They feel a little sad. They had come hoping to find something else: that reckless boy, perhaps, who dived head down straight into the beating heart of the music, that girl who was lost there already, her wild hair swinging, her whole body crackling with static.

  That’s how the women in their berets, the waterfalls and the tukutuku seem today. As if they have forgotten entirely the youthful fury that prompted their break-in in the first place. It seems unthinkable now that it could ever have been otherwise. They hang there, pinned to pitted corkboard, as rumpled as the rest, in a dingy corridor on the second floor of a structure that in its day had also caused a furore for its dramatic modernism. That was in the era before its brutalised concrete blocks and aluminium-framed windows had been imitated by a thousand motels and schools and suburban malls throughout the country, and it too had become ordinary.

  To the students it is all the same anyway. Old stuff. McCahon could have been their grandfather, Robyn Kahukiwa their grandmother. They select their courses of study from an op shop full of scuffed ideas and fraying imagery. And all the time, art, the actual breathing, living impulse, is out there somewhere beyond these walls, flying about city streets and dingy flats, morphing and shifting shape and busy at its self-appointed hero’s task to constantly frame and re-frame the vision.

  Today here in Cork, Clare too has flown over the wall, at least for a time. She has left behind the corridor with its notices and posters and its rows of doors, each making a little visual statement about the person who inhabits the office behind. Hugh’s door directly across the corridor from her own has a skinny medieval saint with narrow pointed feet and a neck like a swan’s, raising his hand in languid blessing on the first-year student handing in an essay ninety percent downloaded from the work of some dodgy graduate in Houston. Then there is Ra’s intricate tukutuku panel, and David’s misty silken landscape and Chinese calligraphy. Saskia has a postcard clutter of New Zealand classics: The Virgin and her glass of pure water, the smooth grey pebbles of a Taranaki beach, the railway shelter at Cass and that doe-eyed Sam at Bottle Creek. Morgan favours a changing assortment of cartoons clipped from the New Yorker, currently a map of the USA with the border of blue Democratic states around a central red region labelled ‘THICKFUCKISTAN’. Mildly provocative cartoons that might once have drawn official rebuke but not any more. Not in an era of mild indifference and six billion co-creators. Elizabeth has Bellini angels in gilded halos, while Max next door attempts a soupçon of portal elegance with three architectural elevations for some eighteenth-century folly, a Temple to the Four Winds erected by a slave-trading profiteer on a hillside in Hampshire. The theme continues within, where Max has created a cramped approximation of a gentleman’s study, with leather armchair, rare volumes on chipboard shelves, and more prints of Palladian fancies framed on flimsy walls through which every word, every phone call, every student interview is clearly audible. He fights back with earphones, Bach maintaining a measured resistance to the whine of assignments missed or failed and the irritating racket of his colleagues arranging meetings or dinner dates or a possible time to drop off the car for its warrant.

  Then there is the door devoid of all decoration, save a timetable pinned dead centre and a notepad with pen attached for urgent messages.

  Her office.

  Clare has sometimes considered pinning up something more ornamental. A print perhaps? Something contemporary? Or something very, very old, so old that it is not usually included within the canon as art. So old, so obscure in its purpose, that it has become more the preserve of the scientist.

  She could pin up one of her postcards. She has been collecting them for years. There’s a postcard of the reclining women from the walls of the cave at Les Combarelles. She could pin that to her door. Or perhaps one of those plump Gravettian figurines with looming breasts, her face masked by a woven cap. Or that goddess figure from Çatal Höyük, seated on her lion-headed throne with the head of a baby bursting like a spring bulb from between her massive thighs. Or that divine figure from the museum on Sardinia, her body a perfect cruciform of smooth rectangles, her face a serene abstraction.

  From time to time she has tipped them all out from the shoebox in which they are stored, and spread them over the living-room carpet. Dozens of images of female divinity reduced to the standard international postal format. Here are the massive black pubic triangles painted on the walls at Chauvet under an overlay of profiles of bison and a cave lioness. Here are the figures they call the Three Graces — though there are actually four and they’re a crude bunch compared with Zeus’ pretty daughters: four female torsos incised breast to kneebone around the dramatic cleft of the vagina on the rock shelter at Angles-sur-l’Anglin. Here are all those little headless torsos carved from mammoth ivory or soapstone or limestone, with their bulging buttocks and pregnant bellies. Here is the exquisite bewigged head from Brassempouy. And here are those massive lower limbs of the elephantine idols that tower over the Neolithic temples of Malta. Here is the woman holding aloft a crescent horn with its thirteen lunar tally marks from the shelter at Laussel.

  Thirty thousand years of faith. Maybe more. Thirty thousand years of beliefs that can only be guessed at, rituals that can only be imagined, cling to their carefully delineated sex, their calm sculpted forms.

  They still have the power to astonish her. She has looked at them many times, and still they overwhelm her with their age and the strangeness of their origins and their simple beauty. She has sat on the carpet looking at the little pottery figure of the sleeping goddess from the ossuary at Hal Saflieni, with her head peaceably resting on her bent arm and her tiny feet placed just so beneath the curve of her massive hip and its embroidered skirt. She could pin that to her door …

  But really it wouldn’t do. It was, for a start, too old-fashioned, all this goddess stuff, so out of date, so seventies. The dawn of the new millennium was not going to be marked after all by a return to the worship of the feminine. Far from it. This was an era when ‘I am Woman’ had become the accompaniment to a TV ad for incontinence pads. Some quisling sang about being invincible, to footage of a woman cycling between flower beds, camera shifting to close-up on perky buttocks untroubled by unscheduled leakage. The last of these goddesses exited stage right two thousand years ago, and they were not about to stage a comeback, all wonky lipstick and weird rituals. This was an age too pragmatic for such absurdity.

  She didn’t pin the sleeping woman or any of her sister goddesses and idols to her office door. It would mark her as irredeemably old-fashioned, and, more importantly, it would also seem, in an odd way, disrespectful. Pinned to her door on their postcard, the reclining women from Les Combarelles would be no more than a curious footnote, interesting for the contoured perfection of their line and their similarity in art-historical terms to the images of Matisse. There was nothing to suggest the astonishment of their context, the damp lick of cave air, the arch of stone overhead, the brisk little guide picking out the figures with the red spot of her torch, the twisting route they had followed to find them here, hundreds of metres from the exterior world of ticket booth and carpark, and thousands of years distant from its certainties. Context is all. These were images that belonged on stone, not on the office door on the second floor of a concrete-block building erected to a strict budget back in 1972.

  But her plain office door is far away, like all the other office doors. Today, in Cork, she has only to decide who she wishes to listen to and who she will talk
to at lunch, and if she will attend the AGM this afternoon. She feels a little giddy still, after the long flight and a fitful sleep. Her dreams had been an interrupted collage of Filipina maids and the departure lounge at Heathrow and a twisting alleyway and voices at the end of a phone saying, ‘No, sorry love, never heard of him.’ But the morning sun as she walked to the conference venue along Washington Street past the shops and the building sites had been reassuring. The dark labyrinth of the night before had disappeared and in its place was an ordinary city, with freshly groomed commuters queued at the lights and a man singing loudly from the top of some scaffolding, and a girl in overalls washing down some restaurant windows. The university was in a leafy park, with low stone buildings ranged about a hillside overlooking the river and trees so fresh they looked as if you could snip them and add them to a salad, and every tree had its drift of daffodils.

  It all looked so European, the kind of thing those city architects were aiming for in Dunedin and Christchurch with their Gothic arches and mullioned windows laid down on a muddy site cleared of flax and tussock and replanted with oaks and elms and daffodils and bluebells. Though the imitation never quite convinced, did it? The oaks and elms grew too fast and became spindly and had to be pruned, leaving scabs on their calloused skin and great rings of scar tissue. And the daffodils and bluebells were overwhelmed by onion weed which found the conditions to its liking, being a cruder, more vigorous immigrant, so the sweet scent of spring was composed largely of garlic. And the yellow of the daffodils always looked a little odd in a place where the natural palette is deep and dark and a thousand gradations of moody colour strong enough to counter that clear Pacific blue, a subtle place where even when a plant throws flowers of spring yellow it’s that kowhai gold with its acid sheen.

  Daffodils at home were a bit of a joke. They belonged on cake-tin lids and placemats. They spelled out the names of farms on country hillsides. They lined the path to the dunny long after the dunny had rotted and gone, along with the cottage and the settlers who had built them. The daffs that are left grow wild like all colonial interlopers, alongside plants they would never mix with socially back in their place of origin: the glossy white trumpets of arums, lipstick-pink naked ladies, stinky onion weed.