I didn’t do Dadda any favours in the eyes of Stella’s people, the Mottes, however, by being the second girl in the family. I was a mistake – one girl was adorable, but plenty. What they needed were men. They were on the land and Stella was their brood mare. They looked down on Dadda – he failed as an Australian. Lovely to look at, but he didn’t cut his hair or polish his shoes and he painted pictures no one understood. All right if he’d painted heroes or horses or woolsheds but he painted naked women made out of vacuum cleaner parts!
Poor Dadda! He did his best to be pleasing to the Mottes but the Mottes thought themselves way above him and regarded him as a person without dignity or prospects.
I hate to say it, but it was little wonder that when Viva came back into his life and Dadda had two teenage daughters and was starved for intelligent company in the arts, he left Stella, and Viva left Harry, and they were married. It was then that his career took off.
While he was courting and marrying, Allegra and I, having inherited some money from Stella’s big sister, began our gallery, Mad Meg. We named it after Breughel’s Mad Meg, a print of which we came across under the bed of our aunt’s drunken husband. It seemed appropriate – both the way we found the print and the image itself.
I’ve since seen the painting, where it hangs in a dark museum in Antwerp. It’s hard to see the whole thing all at once because the light glares variously from the old surface – but I suppose this is appropriate, too, because you can never see all of life at once, just parts of it – comic and tragic sequences; mayhem as the giantess, strung about with pots and pans, sword in hand, charges the mouth of Hell while her minions thwack and bind the devils to cushions in her wake. There is only one area of seeming calm in the painting – an almost unnoticeable island, right in the middle, where a pair of people sit, one with a raised hand, as if to say, ‘This is what it’s like; this is how it is.’ ‘It’ could be ‘life’ or ‘death’. Allegra and I chose ‘life’. We chose to see Meg giving Hell a thumping. We thought it described something about us: we were women trying to make our presence felt in a hostile world. We were going to use cooking pots and cauldrons as our weapons. Stuff bloody men! Our father, we claimed, was an old-style left-wing misogynist with his white-goods women. We were new – our art and the way we showed it flew in the face of the Laurington’s Siècle and what we thought of as its pretensions.
Mad Meg lasted a number of years as a cooperative showing young contemporaries; it caused a lot of controversy, was a lot of fun, but in the end, it imploded.
Dadda and Viva were together for fifteen years and Dadda was very famous by the time he died, suddenly, of a heart attack, without leaving a will.
Almost as soon as she’d dealt with his remains, Viva started pushing Checkie’s claims on his estate with such ruthlessness that they would eliminate ours. But for the efforts of Harry Laurington, and another painter and friend of Dadda’s, a man named Reg Sorby, who took over when Harry died, we wouldn’t have inherited anything.
Dadda’s death came to us as a terrible, unexpected wound. He was still quite young and Allegra and I still adored him even if we pretended we didn’t. Afterwards, with Reg Sorby bellowing injustice in the background, the widowed Viva gravitated back to Siècle and the Trust, deposited Dadda’s work there and began to push Checkie and promote her as the Australian expert on Henry Coretti, his life and work. Harry Laurington was dying and Checkie was poised to take over.
Nin had recently been born to Allegra and her husband, a crazy artist called David Silver. We all lived together in a large house without any furniture, except for Eli’s bed – I got into breeding early and inopportunely on the rebound from Dadda’s leaving us.
Eli chose to sleep under, rather than on, his bed – he liked to pretend we lived on a barge – without furniture, the possibilities are endless.
In our shared digs, we had our feminist meetings and decided what we were going to show at Mad Meg and what agenda we were going to follow. David mocked us mercilessly, saying we couldn’t even speak English, let alone create art – he was possibly right about the English, as the politically correct do tend to destroy language as a means of communication, preferring to use it as a means of clan identification. But David was also jealous of what we did and the way we did it.
We’d just hung a show of mine when he got very drunk, picked a fight with another painter on the opening night in the gallery and proceeded to lay waste to everything. It was too much for Allegra, and to make matters worse we were completely broke. Allegra realised the world wasn’t going to accommodate her dreams and marrying David had been a blunder committed because we were very fond of his two uncles – dear chaps called Bart and Miles Turner – who were in the gallery trade. Notwithstanding that she was the mother of a little child, she sank into a fatal depression and eventually took an overdose. Never in my life will I be able to reconcile my beautiful brave sister with the person who turned on her and took her life away, the person who killed the mother of Nin…
Her suicide drove Stella out of her mind. For a while I was convinced that Stella had Alzheimer’s and would never again be her silly, funny old self. But I was wrong. We stayed out of Melbourne in Reg Sorby’s retreat in New South Wales while he managed to cobble together enough written material to make a case for us to inherit the paintings done by Dadda between 1944 and 1961, which was the life of our family unit. Once we had a court ruling, it was safe to come home, but while we were away, Viva had tried to win David over to the Siècle Trust side of the argument. She tried to get him to stake his claim as Allegra’s widower. But David doesn’t do anything complicated like dealing with the legal system and in the end, although she persuaded him to come into her fold, she had to fall back on putting caveats on the work, which meant that we couldn’t sell them or break up the collection without her say-so. She wasn’t able to name everything we had, so a few items escaped notice and we did sell those in order to be able to afford to come home. Her caveats lapsed when she died five years ago.
Owning artworks carries some responsibilities, but these can be very hard to meet if you do not have any money to keep your collection in good nick. All I can afford for mine is insurance. I have always been custodian on Nin’s behalf, she being too young when Allegra died to be a custodian herself: nowadays she says she’s too busy to share the responsibility. I keep the paintings in storage, except when asked to provide work for exhibitions.
In the years since Allegra’s death, David has become close with Checkie – not in a sexual way (Checkie is so precious it’s said she is allergic to sperm except when it brings money with it) but in a business sense. Although David is chiefly an artist, he is also an archivist by default and keeps the Siècle archives. David and Checkie make a relentless pair – in addition to their claim of the Siècle Trust’s ownership of the paintings, they maintain Siècle is better able to care for them than I am and that they will deteriorate if left with me. The paintings, they aver, are of value to the nation and should be made available to the nation through the Siècle Trust. It has become a famous dispute with photos of the warring parties appearing from time to time in the papers when there’s nothing else to write about. The most famous event in the history of the dispute is the hijacking of the paintings from the Trust in the 1980s by Reg. Reg was a very flamboyant man and his actions were somewhere between a publicity stunt and an act of righteous generosity. There’s always footage of the rambunctious Reg whenever the matter comes up again – it makes for public entertainment and for refreshing the memories of the TV viewing public.
Marian pops her head around the door. ‘You nearly ready?’ she asks.
‘Just a sec.’
‘I’ll tell them to wait.’
‘I’ll be there in a minute.’ Even without Checkie on my back, I’m as nervous as hell about going public and being judged for my own work as I will be in the next few weeks. I try to tell myself that there’s no reason to feel nervous; nervousness is just a neurotic symptom in a
person who lives in a first-world country with the luxury of having a fine arts industry. Imagine, I say to myself, being transported to your situation direct from one of those countries where Eli goes to pen his reports. In those places women can be murdered simply for showing their faces or for walking out without a man to accompany them. Eli’s always reminding me how well off I am and how nerves are a first-world luxury.
And yet, nerves I have and I can’t seem to outwit them.
Today you can create a picture with the click of a button and all it will do is join the trillions of other images that people make unless you push it and prompt it and encourage it to belong to that set of images – millions of them rather than trillions – that might be worth looking at twice. Painting images often seems futile when you think of this. Futile and immoral in a world of suffering and out-of-control climate. Or then again, just an old habit that has hung on in spite of losing its value…
In a moment or two I will have to go before the cameras and I will have to create a positive impression – I will have to be the image myself, although I don’t know for whom. I don’t even know what a positive impression is any longer: over my lifetime the idea of making a positive impression has moved from being a person with compassion and tolerance for the displaced of the Second World War to the idea of refugees as invaders against whom we need to arm ourselves to impress in a world where it’s winner takes all. How on earth does someone like me behave like a winner? And winner of what?
In my case, it seems to be a precarious art collection without a wall.
I only agreed to talk to the television if they conducted the interview at my launch and gave me a brief opportunity to explain my work. So here we are.
The eyelashes are black, not that they weren’t already, and the lips are on, but not so garishly that they’ll go bounding around TV screens in advance of my face. Here’s Eli now, beaming at me round the door and holding out his hand for me. You wouldn’t know it was the bogan of fifteen minutes ago – against the current sartorial trend for the open-necked shirt that makes it look as if you’ve been working hard, Eli is wearing his shirt with the collar done up and the splendid yellow tie he wore to his wedding. Thank God he shaved his beard off after he came home this time. To my proud eye, he looks great. He kisses my cheek and says, ‘Get in there and sock it to ’em, Mum.’
Actually, I feel the presenter is on my side, but you never really can tell with the press. And on side today does not mean on side tomorrow. Thankfully we are not being recorded live. I don’t think I could maintain my composure live.
But here we go: need for money, Stella still with us in an old folks’ home, Allegra dead and Nin having been brought up by me. Nin’s rights because half the paintings are hers. The settlement. The challenge. What Nin and I would lose if we acceded to the Siècle Trust.
So far so good.
Nin has refused to appear on TV. She has asked for privacy, but blasted David is trying to manipulate her into joining the Siècle Trust. So…next comes his statement that I have influenced Nin away from asserting her own best interests. To that, I reply, truthfully, that I do not believe in standing between young folk and their futures and that it is for Nin to decide what she wants to do, not for David and Cecilia. It is pointed out that as things stand the settlement gives Nin and me equal shares in an unequal number of works. We have between us at least seven major works which would enhance the Trust collection greatly. I agree that they would enhance the collection, but if the Trust really wants them, the Trust should buy them, and buy them at an open auction with Nin’s assent. That way, we would be compensated and retain on-selling rights if the Trust should change its mind and sell them.
Although I do not say this, tonight’s exhibition speaks for all my savings and if I sell no work, then I will have to sell the house and my studio and, as soon as I am eligible, apply for the pension. What I will do between selling the house and qualifying for the pension, I do not know because the rules of Social Security state that one cannot apply for the pension within five years of selling one’s place of abode. Thinking of that makes me ask for a drink-of-water break with a you’re-doing-great-Mum from Eli. ‘No, I’m off track,’ I whisper to him. ‘I need to sell some of my own work.’
Anyway, I avoid the destitution and devastation line to say that the paintings under dispute were painted when Dadda was living with Stella and Allegra and me. Where the Nice Girls Live is a series of paintings of our teenage milieu. We were a pair of brats who drank Kahlúa with boys behind the cricket pavilion and thought we were being splendid and having a good time. We also played on children’s equipment in a park over the road from where Allegra’s boyfriend lived and the pictures show two lascivious teenagers with beehive hairdos draped over the kangaroo and elephant rockers. Everybody smiles at this point.
Our upbringing was very different to Cecilia’s. She was a private schoolie with the lot. For all intents and purposes, her assumed father was the rich and entrepreneurial Harry Laurington. When she was growing up, she was Cecilia Laurington. She had a name that carried clout, while the name Coretti barely passed the lips of the rich. Allegra and I were Corettis.
Your own paintings, now, what are they all about? At last! Well, they are quite relevant to what we are talking about tonight and I think they would please my father, although I paint to please myself. My father’s theme was often commodities and how they fill up our lives, dominate our thinking and even end up, through landfill, being the very ground upon which we build the houses in which to put them. To him, it was as if commodities were alive and we were their servants. I’ve tried to take this idea further through an interest in advertising and how it has turned us into commodities.
Some years ago I was in Milan to acquaint myself with the city where my father grew up. Reflected in the dark windows of Galtrucco in the Piazza del Duomo were the bits and pieces of the bodies from a giant hoarding advertising the United Colors of Benetton. It was the family advertisement, the black, dreadlocked father, the Asian baby and the European mother, who was the image of Madonna, the rock star. Madonna’s lips rode dimly in a fanlight above a narrow doorway and just underneath it in a panel of glass, the baby’s fist, bright against her cleavage, seemed to be punching its way out. In the next window, a column obliterated the baby’s body so that one fist shot out towards the father and the other from under the mother’s chin. I could see, reflected from the opposite direction, the ghost of the golden Madonnina riding her pinnacle on the top of the Duomo and I thought Madonna Madonnina, two icons. What has the Madonna come to symbolise in this shopping-mall world? In Milan, the capital of fashion, she rides around in all those shop windows, feasting her eyes…so I gave her a shopping trolley.
Stuck in the middle of the Piazza del Duomo is the statue of King Victor Emmanuel, his horse’s tail caught forever in a Garibaldian gust – is he sheathing or unscabbarding his sword at the feet of the Mother of God? Should he honour and worship her or run her through? How ambivalent he looks at the feet of the tiny lady with a golden shopping trolley, who is not looking at him, but craning her neck, searching for merchandise – or then again, being searched for by merchandise. I sling a Louis Vuitton handbag over her arm, some Prada shoes on her golden feet – the entire historical piazza now is glazed in the shopping moment.
I’m glad the interviewer likes the immediacy of painting reflections but they do take a long time to do. Victor Emmanuel was especially hard because I wanted him to be both monumental and fluid simultaneously. I’ve been realising this project for years, keeping myself going with less ambitious ones. In the meantime I’ve become older and the gallery where I used to show has closed and my dealer has retired. Since then, I’ve shown here and there until, unable to get support for my work, I rented this space for a fortnight to coincide with the Italian Cultural Festival going on just now in Melbourne. Yes, they were to include me in their program and the show was going to run for a month but somehow or other it didn’t happen. And what
I don’t say is that the city council cancelled my booking for a public space without telling me, in order to put on an impromptu literary festival featuring the overflow of foreign writers from a big Sydney gabfest. But for the existence of this place and the kindliness of Marian, I wouldn’t be having an exhibition at all.
Go on, smile, Isobel, smile. Sell, Isobel, sell. And for God’s sake, don’t complain.
I smile. I’ve done my best. And when I come out of the interview room, it’s clear that the gathering has suddenly realised that the artist is actually me, the short person in her best black frock who was briefly serving out the drinks. And they’re showing a bit more interest in the work – arms are pointing upwards and over and wrists are performing circuits.
Marian has sold a picture. That is something, even though it is the smallest picture in the exhibition. Mick is as pleased as punch.
Dear Mick, he doesn’t know that selling a single picture on the opening night of an exhibition one has been working up for years counts for zilch. He thinks it’s great. He thinks that during the exhibition, which will be up for two whole weeks, all these paintings will sell; I’ll clean up and get ready for the next famous occasion.
It’s de rigueur to send critics invitations, but that doesn’t mean they’ll come and even if they do, it doesn’t follow that they’ll write the exhibition up, let alone write it up before it’s finished. They’re always much too busy to attend launches, of course. There are the young and promising and the old big-name exhibitors to deal with. There are the blockbusters and the big events. There are the faculty in-crowds to please. A sixty-three-year-old female descendant of a prominent dead white male just isn’t sexy. Nevertheless she will keep at it. The cow will jump over the moon from the middle of the Slough of Despond. It’s in her. It always has been.
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