Elizabeth Woodhams Thesis (PDF 1MB)
Application for the Award of Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Thesis Title
Memories are Not Silence: the trauma of witnessing and art making. A Phenomenological exploration of my lived experience as an artist.
Candidate Elizabeth Jean Deshon Woodhams, BTh., MA 2004
Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with the Creative Industries Research and Application Centre (CIRAC) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
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TITLE OF THESIS: Memories are Not Silence; the trauma of witnessing and art making. A phenomenological exploration of my lived experiences as an artist.
ABSTRACT This research investigates formative and definitive lived experiences as two narrative forms - art works and writing. The research seeks to uncover the essential features of these experiences (dominated as they are by my experiences of AIDS and the after effects of war) and bring the two narratives together as a reflexive and reflective dialogue. The 'lens' of my art practice (both written and visual) is predominantly that of a landscape painter -be it 'landscape of faces' (portraits), landscapes of the human form (figurative) or the more traditional descriptions of landscape (especially deserts). Phenomenological research is a particular mode of describing and understanding the contours of lived experience. By a process of self-reflection and critical analysis this research explores various understandings of landscape so as to uncover their structure and meaning and to come to a deeper understanding of how those elements influence my art making.
KEY WORDS: memories, silence, art, artists, women artists, art making, trauma, witnessing, phenomenological research, lived experience, writing, HIV/AIDS, hetrosexual voices, war.
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Contents
Title of Thesis i Abstract i Key Words i List of Images vi Statement of Original Authorship viii Acknowledgments ix
1. Introduction 1
2. Background to Study 5
3. Theories of Art and Theories of Ethics that Underpin this Study 11 Introduction 11 Art 13 Ethics 16
4. Objectives of the Program of Study and the Relationship to Published Research in the Same Field 20 Unpacking Some Particular Terms 22 Trauma 23 Landscape and Trauma 25 Trauma and Time 25 Obsession, Trauma and Grace 27 An Exercise in Obsession or Making to Our Heart's Content 28 Trauma in My Experience 30 The After Landscape of Trauma 30 The Responsibility of 'Seeing' 32 Bushfires, War and Phenomenological Research 34 Relation to Other Published Work 35
5. Research Methods and Design of the Study 43 Introduction 43 iii
Phenomenology as the Most Appropriate Research 'Method' for this Research 47 Research Within One's Own Practice 47 The Conduct of Phenomenological Research 50 Essential Elements of Phenomenological Research and their Relationship to Art Making 52 Phenomenology and Me 54 The Design of the Research Project 55
6. Review of Related Literature 58 Introduction 58 Artists and Lived Experience 58 Artists, Plagues, Wars and Epidemics 61 Artists and War 65 Art and Descendants 68 War Artists 71 Artists and the Holocaust 73 Artists and AIDS 78 Artists and the Experience of Art Making 81 Phenomenological research 82 Artists, Aesthetics and Ethics 82 Artists and Autobiography 85
7. Conduct of the Study 88 Zones of Desire - or Themes in Phenomenological Research 88 'Themes' and 'Essences' 88 'Themes' and the Birthplace of Art 91 'Themes' 92 Conduct of the Study or the Interweaving of 'Texts' 93 The Language of the Books 94 Relationship to Works Produced 96 Analysis of Themes 99 Art works. Book 1 of 12. 100 iv
7a. 'Themes' of Compassion/Empathy, Sameness/Difference and Witnessing 102 Introduction 102 Compassion/Empathy Sameness/Difference 103 Sameness/Difference 107
7b. 'Themes' of Blackness, Despair and Helplessness 112
7c. 'Theme' of Contemplation and Solitude 118
Introduction 118 The Trinity 120 Insights 121 Solitude 122
7d. 'Theme' of A Sense of Place 126
Introduction 126 Memorials and Art 126 The Place of Cemeteries 129 Funerals 130 Mourning and Art 131
7e. The 'Theme' of Intimacy, Art Making and Trauma 134 Trust, Surprise, Trauma and Betrayal 135
8. Exhibition Works 137 Introduction 137 Art Works and Phenomenological Description 138 Reflection on Some Particular Works - the Drought Paintings 142 Ceramic Bowls 144
9. Conclusion 146 How A Dying Baby Became A Waterfall 146
10. Appendices 154 v
Appendix 1 Books 1- 12 with Footnotes 154 Appendix 2 Letters to Keith (After his Funeral, Letter from The Gulf, Letter After Ethiopia and Eritrea) 178 Appendix 3 What was it like to sit beside a dying man? 189 Appendix 4 Selected Exhibitions 194 Appendix 5 Details of Images 196 Appendix 6 Selected Papers, Conferences and Publications 198
11. Bibliography 200
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List of Images Figure No. Facing Page No.
1. The Quilt, 2002 5
2. Ricko, Portrait of a Vietnam Veteran, 1999 6
3. I didn't expect it to be like this,1999 7
4. A Man With AIDS 11, 2000 8
5. My Father's Dreams, 1999 9
6. The Roots and Threads of Meaning, 2003 12
7. Rabbit Trap, 2002 20
8. Figures in Shellac, 2003 21
9. PTSD - So Bloody What? 2002 23
10. Robed Women and Drought, 2002 34
11. Red Blotches, 2002 56
12. Blue Gate, 2002 57
13. Cream Robed Woman, 2003 93
14. So Still, and Silent, and Enduring, 2003 94
15. Sienna Hills of Home, 2002 95
16. Glued writing, 2003 96
17. Ma and the Nurse, Book 1, 2003 98
18. Bundles of Rags, 2003 99
19. Woven Landscape, 2003 102
20. How a Dying Baby Became a Waterfall, Book 10, 2003 111
21. If I start Crying Now, 1999 113
22. Skeletal Man, 2002 114
23. Grief Viewing Grief, 2002 117
24. Duo Becomes the Trinity, 2002 120 vii
25. No Grave/Crosses, 2002 126
26. Beside the Bed, 2002 141
27. Drought Sheep 4, 2002 143
28. I've Always Hated Maggots, 2002 148
29. Dad's Leg and Spoon, 2002 150
30. Dad's Leg/ Keith's Sore 11, 2002 152 viii
Statement of Original Authorship
The work contained in this document has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief the document contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Signed: …………………………………………………..
Date: …………………………………………………….. ix
Acknowledgements
The list of those to whom I owe debts of gratitude would be like the Litany of Saints from boarding school when, after the name of each saint, we would respond 'We give thanks' or 'Pray for us'. I do both for my family, friends and colleagues who have enabled me to embark upon this program of study. I owe particular gratitude to those (apart from my sisters and brothers) who have provided a roof over the head of the student, her books, computer and paints during the conduct of this research - Sybil and John O'Keeffe and Russell and Susan Richards. My thanks are grossly inadequate for the gifts they have all bestowed on me.
'Sometimes we hear and see things and we feel as though our hearts will break and we don't know why'. Some of my experiences of my mother and my father, the wounded soldiers, the wards full of those dying of AIDS - and dying babies - have all, at various times, made me feel as though my heart would break. The ways in which our heart thinks itself capable of breaking may be a mystery but the causes of the suffering to which our heart 'listens' are not so mysterious - they are simply the result of our not understanding and not caring in the 'right' ways. Many have said that 'art cannot change the world' - but neither can science, psychology or economics unless they are employed by creative caring human beings who use whatever gifts they may have to assuage the suffering of others. I here acknowledge my debt to those artists who so clearly 'hear' the 'voices of silent suffering' and by so doing give succor and encouragement to those of us who might be '50 years' behind.
It is commonplace in pages such as this to acknowledge the support, assistance and guidance of one's supervisors. My supervision, by Associate Professor David Hawke, Ms. Jill Barker and Mr. Donal Fitzpatrick has never been commonplace and has matched - even surpassed - the level of support offered by the University to its Post Graduate students which I have experienced as outstanding. It has taken me some time to allow myself to stop and to ‘rise to the occasion’ of this program of research. I am enormously grateful to my supervisors that, when I did stop, my study was welcomed, supported and guided with humour, great patience and wisdom. 1
1. INTRODUCTION
As will be argued in this study, art arises from conflict, a disjunction between what we do and do not understand. 'Conflict' as it is used in this study does not always allude to negative experiences because we can be as puzzled by experiences we describe as 'beautiful' as we can be by those we describe as 'awful' and 'terrible'. That conflict and disjunction can give rise to 'trauma' that can be experienced as along a continuum from moderate to severe. In the context of this study, art could be described as the negotiation - a search for an understanding of the meaning - of that conflict. This search for understanding and meaning is the bedrock focus of a program of study.
Any study has three essential components. First, to identify the puzzle or problem that one seeks to understand. Second, how one solves those problems and who and what assisted in the task of resolution, and third, what result or conclusion emerged from the study. To return to the first component - the experiences I needed to understand concerned my working with people with AIDS and my father as an ex- POW. More particularly, it could be said that I needed to understand the after effects of AIDS and war, and, even more specifically, I needed to understand the silence that surrounds some memories, some experiences and the suffering that is often implicit in being silenced - not being able to speak and not being heard - and how those experiences have influenced my art practice. The lived experiences I sought to understand are described in Chapter 2, Background to the Study. Some further background is contained in Chapter 3 where some particular understandings of the notions of 'art' and 'ethics' as used in the study are discussed. As 'trauma' and 'landscape' are central elements of the thesis topic, those are discussed in some detail in Chapter 4, the Objectives of the Study and the Relationship to Published Research in the Same Field.
Second, the choice of methodology that I employed to unravel the puzzles is discussed in Chapter 5, Research Methods and Design of the Study. I chose phenomenology because its philosophical nature is particularly suited to a study of the lived experience of a visual art practice and it was the only way in which I could 2 research my practice from within. The processes of phenomenological research so closely resemble those of art making that it made this way of conducting the study a perfect fit for me - and for me at this particular time. The objectives of a phenomenological study can appear quite commonplace and insignificant - to gain a deeper understanding and awareness of the meaning and significance of a phenomenon as it reveals itself in our ordinary lived experiences. Yet, it is only when we begin to comprehend the 'cost' of a lack of understanding and awareness that the full import and radical nature of a phenomenological approach is also revealed. As will be detailed throughout the study and, in particular, in the discussion of trauma, it is precisely the lack of understanding the meaning and significance of some of our lived experiences that can lead to so much suffering, dislocation and even death. Throughout this study I use the term 'healing' to denote a return to 'flourishing' rather just 'existing'. I do not use it to mean leading to a 'cure' because I do not believe there is a 'cure' for trauma. Other terms used in the study, for example the notion of `beauty`, are to be understood both existentially and aesthetically.
The work of those who have assisted this study - the philosophers, artists, writers, and scientists - are discussed in Chapter 6, Review of Related Literature. This Chapter also, inevitably, identifies critical gaps in the literature concerning many of the questions that arose during the course of the study - the experience of descendants of survivors of war, the experiences of war artists after their service and the paucity of literature concerning artists researching their own practice - are just a few of the missing pieces. In a phenomenological study the reflection, the 'following of threads' and the weaving of found wisdom (or otherwise) of a review of relevant literature is considered a critical part of 'the doing' of the research.
How a phenomenological study (and thus this one) is conducted is discussed in Chapter 7. A phenomenological study is conducted by a close description of our lived experiences - we write them and re-write them (and paint and re - paint them) until, after reflection and critical analysis, we discern the meaning of that particular experience and we can rest in a 'contentment of understanding'. From those written and painted descriptions of lived experiences certain 'themes' are discerned (themes 3 of enduring, patience, blackness, contemplation for example) which, in phenomenology, are conceived of as active rather than passive. They are both our ardent desire to understand a phenomenon and the vehicle by which we come to an understanding of it. Themes assist in illuminating the essential elements or essence of a particular phenomenon - in my study the phenomenon of creating for me as a visual artist. Chapters 7a - 7e contain a more detailed analysis of some of the themes that have emerged during the course of the study - 'contemplation', 'blackness', and 'intimacy' for example.
This program of research is a weaving together of three different languages and texts in a reflexive and reflective dialogue. Throughout this study I have often used 'text' and 'language' interchangeably. However, one text or language is that of the written descriptions of certain lived experiences. Some of these descriptions are woven through the analysis of particular themes in Chapter 7a - 7e. When only extracts of the descriptions are included in the main part of the thesis, the full text is contained in Appendix 1 and Appendix 3. Second, the paintings, drawings and monoprints completed during the course of the study I also consider 'texts'. Some are presented in a traditional format - on canvas and paper - and others are interleaved with the written phenomenological descriptions and are contained in a series of twelve hand made Books. A transcription of the Book texts are to be found in Appendix 1 as well a woven throughout the thesis as indicated above. The third text is this more formal written thesis interleaved with some of the most pertinent images. All the written texts are contained within this bound volume whilst the paintings and drawings will be unpacked from a major piece, a desk, and shown as a final exhibition. Some reflections on the exhibition works are contained in Chapter 8.
The third element of the study, the conclusion is found in Chapter 9 with some reflections on directions for further research.
There are several particular elements of a phenomenological study that make it different from other qualitative research methodologies. Many of the terms used in phenomenology ought technically be encased in parenthesis because their use does not conform to a conventional one. As phenomenology is concerned with questions 4 of meaning - of being and becoming - a process which is forever unfolding until our death - a phenomenological study does not have 'results' and 'conclusions' as normally understood in an academic study. Furthermore, there is no fixed form of a phenomenon - each experience we have of it can deepen our appreciation of its complexity and the many threads it weaves throughout our lived experiences. It is because phenomenology is concerned with discerning the meaning of our experiences (which are always bigger than our language) that it is, perhaps, more useful to regard many of the terms of a phenomenological study as poetic and metaphorical rather than literal.
This research, then, is not a study of phenomenology and nor is it concerned with a detailed exploration of theories of beauty or of art nor with theories of evil nor with schools of psychology. Phenomenology is characterized by a particular equality. Descriptions of lived experience (written and painted) share the same level as a variety of theories and other writings - all are employed for the sole reason that they assist me to 'make sense' of my experiences as an artist which is the singular purpose of the study. Consequently, this research does not elaborate extensively on any single aspect of theories or contexts of art that might pertain to any particular period.
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2. BACKGROUND TO STUDY
This phenomenological study describes formative lived experiences in two narrative forms – painting and text. The research will uncover the essential features of these experiences and bring the two types of narratives together in the form of a reflexive and reflective dialogue so that the dominant themes that have influenced my work are revealed.
The context of the research is connected to my experience as a professional visual artist. Sometimes I have worked as an artist in residence – in a Day Care Centre for People Living with AIDS, in the Sacred Heart Hospice, Darlinghurst, as National Convenor of the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project, in an Acute Psychiatry Unit at Toowoomba Base Hospital, in a Dementia Unit and Aged Care facility in Victoria and with various community groups. However, the direction my life and work took in the late 1980’s into the lives of people living with AIDS was intimately related to my experience, as a Catholic woman, of being virtually excommunicated whilst living in a small country town in far western New South Wales. During my time in Balranald (as an 'ex-communicated' member of the Parish Council) I was the recipient of what I termed 'behind the bushes compassion'. I was told 'I was quite a good person' and the way divorced people were treated within the Church was 'not right'. That compassion, however, never publicly challenged traditional thought and nor was the traditional teaching brought into dialogue with practical cases where, on the face of it, the traditional teaching was quite simply wrong. However, the idea of having a rope cast around my neck and being thrown into the sea (a Biblical response to giving scandal) was sufficiently threatening for me to realize that if I were to challenge orthodox ideas my own should be thoroughly tested. These various experiences of being considered 'an outsider' 'an evil presence' directly led me to studying for my theology degree – to see if my ideas of a compassionate God held up to philosophical and theological questioning. They, in turn, also led to volunteering to work with people with AIDS. In Australia at that time it was the homosexual community that was being devastated by AIDS - and in some traditional Church teaching gays and the divorced were lumped together in the need for a 'pastoral' solution to their existence. At that time (and still now by some) gay people were 6 considered to be beyond the pale, outsiders, their illness a consequence of an evil lifestyle, excommunicated by many in their Churches, their families and by many sections of the general community.
That time in Sydney was one of the best and one of the worst times of my life. Certainly it was a definitive time and has determined the direction of my life and work ever since. In the later section dealing with Trauma I will further discuss the impact of this time. For now suffice to say that I now have two selves - a 'before AIDS' self and an 'after AIDS' self. At that time HIV/AIDS was not a 'manageable disease like diabetes'. My clients, my friends, my colleagues, my acquaintances died one after another and frequently it seemed as though I was surrounded by unrelenting death and grief. Which I was. At the same time I met some extraordinary 'ordinary' people - several of whom have become enduring 'teachers' of mine.
Then, when one too many had died, I left Sydney and came home to the country and set up a studio in my brother’s old shearers' huts. I live in a fairly traditional rural area where most grow wool. I learnt very quickly on my return that some topics were taboo. I could not talk about AIDS, nor about 'gays', nor about death and nor about grief. I could not talk about how my stomach heaved for years whenever I saw a Band-Aid or blood.
I am predominantly a landscape painter. I love remote and sparse landscapes where I feel my soul can breathe. A few years ago, however, I did one of my first portraits – of a Vietnam Veteran who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.1 His view, that this was a 'normal' response to the experience of war, may be true but it did not help their wives, children and friends cope with the silences, the withdrawals, and the 'missing parts'.
Even though one of my brothers had been called up for Vietnam I had never read anything about that war. I had read much of prisoner’s experiences of the Second
1 'Ricko' (1998) first exhibited in 'As a Lizard Drinks', Sydney 1998, then as part of 'Down the Track - the After Effects of War', Veterans Affairs Conference, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 1999, then 7
World War. My father was a Scot. He came to Australia as a jackeroo when he was 18 and returned 'home' only twice in the next 60 years. He was a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway during that war. My mother lost a brother in New Guinea. Other members of her family returned 'never quite the same'. It was always my father’s experiences, however, that dominated my early childhood and adolescence. His nightmares were such a constant presence that they became 'normal'. He used to talk about the funny – and noble – experiences of the war. But he never spoke about the awful. And nor did we ask.
The painting of the Vietnam Veteran triggered a massive upheaval in myself. I read, obsessively, anything I could get my hands on about Vietnam. Finally I read Samuel Hynes The Soldiers' Tale. Bearing Witness to Modern War' - an overview of soldiers' narratives from World War 1, 11 and Vietnam (1997). What arrested me was the continuity of the major themes disclosed in that work - 'I didn’t expect it to be like this' 'Jesus will it ever end' 'It was the best time of my life'. They were themes (apart from the terror of being shot at) that could have come from my narratives of living in that time of AIDS2. I bought a book from the Auckland Museum detailing some of the works by New Zealand artists on the impact of wars on their country3. Coalface paintings and paintings reflecting down the track. I went to the Australian War Museum in Canberra and discovered there were very few paintings dealing with the after effects of war. It was as though, for the most part, the various wars stopped in 1918, 1945, and 1975 and all went back to normal. Shortly after that I completed a series of works called 'Down the Track – the after effects of war and AIDS'. One of its first showings was at Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery in conjunction with an exhibition of memorabilia by the local Vietnam Veteran’s Association. At one time I looked around the Gallery. The women were looking at the drawings, reading the texts, many sobbing, and the men appeared to be looking at the guns and bullets
Stanthorpe Regional Gallery 2000. The Portrait is now part of Viet Nam Voices a National Travelling Exhibition curated by Casula Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 2001 - 2005. 2 Some of these 'themes' were included in works exhibited in Down the Track - the After Effects of War and AIDS whose exhibition details are detailed above. 3 Martin, T., & Phillips, W.A (1990). New Zealand Images of War. Palmerston North: The Manawatu Art Gallery. 8
I had left Sydney, and although I 'resisted' and tried to repress many of the memories of that time, I came to realize that I had not 'left' AIDS. Then, for a number of years I wanted to 'do something' as a visual artist concerning people living with AIDS. In Australia it was as though AIDS had disappeared. But I did not know what I wanted to do. Then I saw an article in the Weekend Australian about AIDS in Ethiopia4 – a ward full of men dying of AIDS in a hospital in Addis Ababa and beneath it a photograph of grave diggers digging graves for the dead. To be honest I think it was the gravediggers that captured my imagination as much as the ward full of dying men. Part of the unresolved dilemma of my time in Sydney was that many of my friends had no graves. No place that marked their presence and their passing. Not like the War Memorial with its Roll of Honour Wall – white granite, brass names and red poppies - and not like the endless acres of gravestones in France and Egypt where, most times, bones are buried as the dead. At that time, in Sydney, I scattered ashes in the Harbour, dug them into gardens. It was what people wanted and it seemed appropriate at the time. Another challenge to the way it always was. But over time I worried about the missing sense of place and the importance of graves and gravestones.
So I travelled to Ethiopia and Eritrea because AIDS knows no frontiers and because they had so recently been at war I could not go to one without going to the other. I did not expect the trip to be easy and it wasn’t. Parts of it, however, were incredibly beautiful. Most of the time it was tough. I had seen many adults die before but I had not seen babies die. I did not expect it to be tougher when I got home than it was when I was away. I took a studio and shut myself away to paint out the images that haunted my mind. A blanket of blackness fell over me for months and when it was over it seemed such an inconsequential contribution to trying to make a difference. I called the exhibition 'suffering knows no geography'.'5
Recently I read 'the silence – how tragedy shapes talk' by Ruth Wajinryb, published 2001. Most of her interviewees were adult children of Holocaust survivors. Many
4 Tatlow, D. (2000, May 6). Ethiopia digging its own grave. The Weekend Australian, p.18. 5 Exhibited Warwick Regional Art Gallery 2001 and Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville and Townsville Art Society Gallery, Townsville also in 2001. 9 had children of their own. Most had grown up like I had with great pages missing from the family history. 'The thing' (be it the Holocaust or being a POW in Burma) permeated every part of their lives but was never mentioned – except in passing or in extenuation. One of the interviewees had decided to adopt children from overseas. Not to have children of her own – so that 'the genes of grief' (and guilt, I think) would stop with her generation.
On my return from Ethiopia I gave a Seminar at the Centre for the Study of Ethics at Queensland University of Technology, Carseldine, on some of the ethical questions that had arisen for me during my travels and in the development and exhibition of the works. During the course of the Seminar a comment was made that, in general, ethical discourse had privileged the written word and what ought to happen is that the art works and the stories be considered an indivisible part of an ethical endeavour6. VanManen (1990,p.5) has written that research can be a 'caring act: we want to know that which is most essential to being. To care is to serve and to share our being with the one we love'. To care and to serve is why this research takes the form that it does. An analysis of finished works does not provide an understanding of the full ramifications of an art practice. To care responsibly is to be aware of the presence of grief and suffering. And so much of that, as I have already mentioned, is hidden.
My work dealing with the effects of war and AIDS is, I believe, part of what artists are called upon to do – to reflect upon the urgent social issues of their time. This study has already uncovered widespread, long-term grief and suffering (from the effects of war and AIDS) that is still largely hidden and unacknowledged. As one of my fellow students remarked only recently my parent's generation was 'doubly traumatized' - by their experience of the First World War followed closely by the Second World War. (Bourke 2002,pers.comm.) It does matter that the effects of these experiences are encountered as 'silence' because unless they are 'spoken' we do not know what happened to our parents and our friends as a result of their war service. It is then difficult to understand the connections between the traumas they
6 I am indebted to Dr. Peter Isaacs for this comment. 10 experienced and the impact those had on their relationships, communities and work down the track. To have a just and caring society it is necessary to have some appreciation of the suffering experienced by its members and their particular needs. Increasingly, the health, wealth and security of all societies is intimately connected with matters of justice and care - and most acutely with respect to the issue of HIV/AIDS (Beyrer 1998; Dupont 2001; Yunus 1998). As with our ANZAC heritage, many of the stories that came out of the early responses to the AIDS epidemic were of the heroic type (and rightly so in many cases) but there is a dark vulnerability to the heroic as well - the pain, hurt and suffering that continues on well past the parades. It is an incomplete rendition of history if those stories are not painted and told as well. 11
3. THEORIES OF ART AND THEORIES OF ETHICS THAT UNDERPIN THIS STUDY
Introduction
My understanding of my art practice has obviously changed over the years and more dramatically since I became 'living with AIDS'. The term 'living with AIDS' is used equally to describe those who are HIV Positive or who may have AIDS (neither of which is me) and those whose lives have been affected by AIDS (which does include me). In Australia, where AIDS has largely affected the gay community, there are some subtle, and not so subtle, distinctions within these two categories that I will address later in the Study. One of the distinctions that does immediately affect me is that, here in Australia, exhibitions concerning AIDS are usually curated as a 'gay response' and thus my work is not included. Suffice for this time is an explanation of a term I commonly use in this study - 'living with AIDS'.
Andréa R. Vaucher in her study Muses from Chaos and Ash, AIDS, Artists and Art (1993) has identified changes in the way some artists have viewed their practice after their experience of AIDS (most of the artists of Vaucher's study are either HIV Positive or have AIDS and many are gay). For the most part, Vaucher says, these artists have identified that they are less concerned with aesthetic considerations, for example, than with what they need to say. The function of art to communicate is more important than a perfection of form - although, it must be said, form communicates as well. Cyril Collard, a novelist/filmmaker, could well be talking about phenomenology when he says:
You start to question the efficacy of the work of art, maybe there is less emphasis on the aesthetic. I'm more centered on the core of the work, on the significance of it, the authenticity of it, much more than the formal, aesthetic pursuit. For me, the importance is to show the essence of things. The form, the packaging, is superfluous, unnecessary (ibid.p.178)
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I, too, have noticed a change in how I perceive my art practice since AIDS. Before, as an impressionist, somewhat traditional landscape painter, I was obsessed with not only painting in situ, but in getting the tones of colour that I saw in the landscape 'absolutely right'. And I still do have some of these obsessions. More, however, have I become aware that I use my art as an integral part of how I 'make sense' of my various experiences - particularly as they relate to the after effects of AIDS and the aftermath of war.
With respect to war artists there is so very little information about how they lived after their service, a point I will explore more fully in the Chapter 'Review of Related Literature'.
Trauma, as will be more comprehensively outlined later in the Study, can threaten the integrity of our being - our flourishing. It metaphorically 'throws us off our perch' of normal existing and we are left in the aftermath of traumatic experiences with the feeling that, not only do we have no words to describe what has happened to us, but no 'tools' with which to repair our wounded selves. (The feelings of 'helplessness', 'despair', 'blackness' 'hopelessness' and so on engendered in ourselves during those times I will explore in more detail in the Analysis of Themes). Art, in its various disguises, has always been central to my life. After AIDS it is not only central but also critical to the recovery and maintenance of a sense of flourishing. I hesitate to use words such as 'recovery' as they can imply that a 'recovered' state is the end of all suffering - and the end of a need for art. That, certainly, is not true in my case - nor, I think for most. My aversion to a modern usage of the term 'closure' stems from the same place. The fact is that for some (most) there is no closure - no end to suffering because we cannot reverse loss and death. Caputo (2003,p.176) would even assert that we ought resist most strongly the notion of closure - 'the last thing I want is closure, bringing the question of who we are to a close, instead of keeping it endlessly open, which allows for an endless reinvention of ourselves'. What seems to be demanded to enable a life of flourishing is that we have to learn some particular skills of living with and within our traumatic experiences - acknowledging that, in time, there may be more periods of peace and happiness but even those times will not eradicate all suffering. During the course of this study I 13 completed a series of books - text interwoven with paintings and drawings. In Book I wrote of a session of making where I felt the need to 'paper over the cracks' - until it dawned on me that the 'cracks' can never really be papered over. Furthermore, a caring society is one that will accept and listen to the voice of the cracks. Such a society may be a utopian dream but what has characterized the artists of Vaucher's study (and myself) is that they no longer attempt to paper over the cracks.
This study, as a phenomenological exploration of my lived experience as a visual artist, is not directly concerned to argue the relative merits of various theories of art nor of ethics. In the last analysis, theories of any description (be they theories of art, psychology, psychoanalysis or spirituality) are useful only to the extent that they assist us to understand our own experiences and those we have witnessed of others. They help us to make sense of our experiences. I have come to realize that theories of art and ethics (like a religious belief) are tested in the 'ordinariness' of extreme situations. We may discern traces of their usefulness during times of minimum stress but it is whether they can hold up to (and help us to understand) the demanding questions of the extreme times that is perhaps the most important thing. A brief outline of the theories I have found most useful in my work (understood very broadly as my life) is here included as they provide a further background text.
Art
Ellen Dissanayake, in her several works, most notably, What is Art For? (1988), describes a bio-evolutionary theory of art that I have found stands up well to the questioning I have thrown at it, particularly during my residencies in health care institutions and in working with people living with AIDS. Put simply, Dissanayake's theory posits that, in primitive societies (the primitive function of art), art making arose to enable groups within a society to have a greater chance of survival (and, as importantly, flourishing) in the face of danger and uncertainty. Art making with its rituals, repetition, rhythm, pattern making, playing and so on is innately pleasurable and engrossing. It makes us feel powerful, in control and pleasured in the face of the dread and fear occasioned by uncertainties - and it is because of those feelings which are engendered in us that we have a greater chance of survival and flourishing - not 14 necessarily the art work that is produced. The artwork (and this is my pondering) may serve other different functions - as a 'mirror' 'teacher' (just as mine are for me) but, more importantly, perhaps, as a well of memories that remind us that it is possible to 'live' differently. At one health care institution where I served an enjoyable and flourishing art program was destroyed by a new director/psychiatrist who believed 'cricket and computers' were more valuable to the patients than art. I was asked (after the event) could anything be done? 'Not in the immediate future' I thought. What cannot be destroyed, however, are the memories that people have of good, valuable, enriching and pleasurable experiences. These memories not only provide 'a model' against which future programs might be measured but they will often fuel a desire to recreate that which has been lost. This well of memories is akin to Agnes Martin's (Von Dieter Schwarz Ed.1991, pp.68 -69) 'moments of perfection' which she has as the impetus for art making:
These moments in which we feel the joy in living. To some, these moments are very clear and to others a vagueness that can only be described as below the level of consciousness. Whether conscious or unconscious they do their work and they are the incentive to life. A stockpile of these moments gives us an awareness of perfection in our minds and this awareness of perfection in our minds makes all the difference to what we do. At such times we are suddenly very happy and we wonder why life ever seemed troublesome …Such moments…are called sensibility or awareness of perfection in the mind….The function of the art work is the stimulation of sensibilities, the renewal of memories of perfection.
'Moments of perfection' - what does that mean? I am not a Quaker but I have wholeheartedly embraced the maxim of Amish quilt makers - where they always leave a small patch 'less than perfect' to remind themselves that 'perfection belongs only to God'. When I reflect on those times when I have felt 'happy' or 'at peace' they are times when I have felt an overwhelming 'fullness' that is replete of beauty - even when the 'beauty' is 'ugly'. Martin's theories of art have, however, been very helpful in understanding more fully the complexities of 'themes' such as 'helplessness', 'despair', 'desperation', and 'blackness' - elements of the notion of creating that will 15 reveal themselves in Book 1 (Appendix 1) and to which I will later return. Her understanding of these dread (and commonly felt) emotions is that they are not only inevitable but they are the 'presence' of an awareness of 'absence' - the absence of perfection. Positively understood, inevitability ought to mean that energy is not wasted wishing their eradication. It is a somewhat different telling of an ancient wisdom - that before periods of personal growth or some breakthrough into enlightenment and freedom - there are times of massive discomfort, dislocation and despair (Crosby n.d.). However much I welcome the light that Martin's discussion throws on these elements of 'creating' I do not find her explanation of art as far- reaching, full and persuasive as the bio-evolutionary schemata put forward by Dissanayake.
One of the difficulties of Dissanayake's theory is the presence of 'others' - the members of the group or community. In primitive societies where art making was more communal than it is now, the pleasure of art making is easier to discern because we derive more pleasure from moving in rhythm with others than we normally do alone. In Western cultures such as Australia the conception of artists as solitary, particularly gifted individuals creating in isolation apart from others is deeply imbedded. For myself (and many other artists Leslie 2003; Wolseley 2002) the need for solitude is critical to my flourishing and art practice. There might not be such an either/or division if solitude is thought of as instrumental - frequently necessary - not always so. As Riley (1998) has pointed out, even reclusive artists need or desire their work to be exhibited and to communicate with others. Others, John Brack, for example (Hawley 1993,p.117) go so far as to suggest that a work is not finished until it is exhibited. I shall deal with the role and function of exhibitions in a later Chapter dealing with the 'Theme' of Intimacy.
I was initially hampered in my reflection on theories of art because I was looking for a theory that would explain a necessity for art that would apply to all. This is somewhat akin to the 'joke about the economist' quoted by Imre Salusinszky 'who conceded that an idea worked in practice but was unwilling to accept it until satisfied it also worked in theory' (The Australian, 27 October, 2003, p.12) I had seen 'art working in practice' in people who did not call themselves artists and who had not 16
(for the most part) picked up a paintbrush since kindergarten. It did not make sense to me, if, as I believe, art is an essential human characteristic, that it was only evidenced in those of us who call ourselves 'artists'. Or ethical reasoning only in those who call themselves `ethicists'. What had complicated my thinking was a presumption that art should be 'used' all the time not just in those times of extreme need. And perhaps it should. Drama-therapist Sue Jennings (Jennings Ed.1992, p.1) would assert that 'if there was more drama in peoples' lives there would not be the same need for drama-therapists'. However fascinating the question of art and art therapy might be it does not form a significant part of this study, except in so far as I challenge some of the 'therapy' understandings of the notion of 'trauma' as set out in Chapter 4. Even in an individualistic modern Western culture like Australia I believe that Dissanayake's 'primitive' function of art still holds true - and still is capable of explaining its attraction, enduring necessity and its healing validity. It is in those times when we are confronted by 'things we do not understand', when we feel as though we could 'break', and our flourishing is under threat, that art making comes into its own in some form or another.
Ethics
If any study is to be considered as part of an ethical endeavour then it is necessary to pose the question 'What is ethics? And how does ethics relate to phenomenology?' There is no fixed form of phenomenology any more than there is a fixed form of a phenomena (van Manen 1990;Scott 2003). They are always shifting and changing as, indeed, the circumstances of our lives shift and change. To complicate matters still further there is not a prescribed 'way' or 'method' of doing phenomenology - in the sense of set of rules that one must follow. Not only must our understanding of a phenomena be gained from the conduct of the study (from within 'the doing') but the emerging understandings can send us in directions not even dreamt of at the beginning - and to 'results' (of which phenomenology has none) that are provisional and partial at best. There is always something more that we can come to understand about any particular phenomenon (Merleau-Ponty [in Johnson Ed.] 1993;van Manen1996; Levinas [in Hand Ed.]1992). However, as the same conditions apply to 17 art making, it is one of the reasons that phenomenology is such an appropriate research method for an art practice.
In both art making and ethical reasoning, however, our own experience of constantly making a whole range of decisions indicates that we employ some standard to our decision making - even though it is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to fully articulate what those standards might be. What those standards might be - for both art and ethics - are, I believe to be found in a very commonplace expression 'making sense' (Kuspit 1996;van Manen 1990; Caputo 2003). Caputo's theory of ethical reasoning as Against Principles: a Sketch of an Ethics without Ethics (2003) asserts that there are no hard and fast rules or principles that we can apply to all our ethical dilemmas. In each case one has to work out the best thing to do at that time, that is, we have to make it up as we go along. It is, however, precisely in those conditions of unknowing - where there are no rules to guide us nor any guarantees against failure - that we are, or ought to be, at our best (ibid.p.175). This we can check by reflecting on our best work which seems to emerge when we did not know where it came from nor how it ended up as it did. Caputo's reasoning ends up with the recognition that, essentially, the only thing we have to rely on is our own sense of 'responsibility' and 'integrity'. Which is where art (and phenomenology) begins and ends as well.
More particularly referring to art, Donald Kuspit (1996, p.3) suggests that in a post- modern world the values by which we judge something to be 'good' no longer exist or are hazy and difficult to 'prove':
Since there is no deep reason to choose among different kinds of art, one becomes an indiscriminate consumer, while unconsciously remaining uncommitted and aesthetic. All one trusts is a strong critical stomach, one's gift for gut assimilation. The critic may try to be fastidious and precise in his or her preferences, but the more he or she does, the more unexpectedly important what they exclude seems to become. One is always looking over one's shoulder at what seems to be beside the critical point, even though one no longer knows exactly what it is.
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In this situation, in which every kind of art has been assimilated into the mainstream and seems 'relevant', only the idiosyncratic artist appears to make sense - indeed, the only kind of sense that can be made; personal sense
While this emphasis on 'personal sense' is directly in line with an ethics without principles (and phenomenology), it also obscures the fact that the ethical notions of 'goodness' and 'rightness' cannot be proven because the results of our reasoning cannot be predicted in advance. Their particular colours have to be discerned anew in each individual circumstance - and the appellation 'good' or 'right' can only come after the event and upon reflection.
If, in the final analysis ethics (and art) is essentially concerned with responsibility - to what is it responsible? Again, in ethics, as in art, it comes down to integrity - and grace - those 'helping hands' of insight which we can no more command than demand. We then have to query 'What is integrity?' It is the one of the themes that has emerged during this study which throws light on what it means to be human - and what it means to create. The notions of 'responsibility' and 'integrity' relate to our Being, and to our becoming; to how we rise to the occasions that life demands of us (May 1994) and which occasions are always multi-facetted - individual, interdependent and interrelated; and to the choices of modes of being that best allow us to do what we need to do. I have chosen art because it gives me the best tools to make sense of how I respond to what life asks of me. Some of the qualities demanded of a phenomenologist - the ability to remain open to insights, flexible, rigorous in thought and so on are the same as those demanded by the notion of integrity. Integrity also demands that we resist the desire to make insights absolute, forever definitive and universal. That does not mean that we cannot hold strong opinions as to their value and to their pervasiveness but to also recognize that they provide no guarantee of success in dealing with other occasions. Nor does integrity guarantee that our work will have any particular desired response - although I would argue that what viewers respond to in an artwork is precisely this quality. In the end, as the inscription 'He did his best' on a gravestone at El Alemain taught me yet again, once we have done our best it is a matter of chance, luck and fate.
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So many of the imperatives of phenomenological research (indeed any study) come down to basic human qualities of courtesy, consideration for others - and for oneself, thoughtfulness, patience, responsibility, integrity - and a sense of irony or wit. It is these very human qualities that are employed in both art making and ethical reasoning so that neither operates in a nihilistic vacuum. On the contrary, I would say along with Caputo with respect to ethics (2003), Martin with respect to art making (Von Dieter Schwarz Ed.1991) and van Manen with regard to phenomenological research (1996) it highlights just how difficult it is in the 'nitty gritty messiness' of the ordinary circumstances of our lives to work out the best thing to do. However, despite the difficulties of not having proscriptive rules, it would make little sense to endorse an ethical framework that did not take account of the particular exigencies of both art making and phenomenological study - neither of which have 'rules' that can be proscribed nor results predicted in advance.
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4. OBJECTIVES OF THE PROGRAM OF RESEARCH AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO PUBLISHED RESEARCH IN THE SAME FIELD
The objectives of a phenomenological study are deceptively simple - to gain a deeper appreciation and awareness of a particular phenomenon as it reveals itself in our lived experience. To gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of creating for myself as a visual artist is similarly deceptively simple. No phenomena, however, exist in isolation anymore than I can define my identity without reference to others and the Other (Taylor 1993). Furthermore, any exploration has certain reference points from which one begins a journey and others that serve as markers along the road. Some of those reference points and markers have already been described in the Background to the Study. This Chapter further sketches the landscape of the Study by describing how some of the particular terms are used in this research - notably 'trauma' and 'landscape' itself.
The experiences referred to in the Background to the Study have been some of the most defining and transformative of my life and work as an artist. The Review of Related Literature in Chapter 6 will further detail the paucity of literature concerning several of the fields of experience explored in this Study. For now, however, the experience of the descendants of ex-servicemen and women is relatively untouched (Wajnryb 2001). Second, the experience of artists after traumatic events - for example, service as a war artist - is again largely missing from the literature. I do not call myself a war artist although with some of my experiences of AIDS and the after effects of war I felt as though I was in a war zone. I have been irrevocably changed by those experiences - even 'traumatized'. Third, artists' research of their own practice is comparatively rare and there is, as yet, scant literature by visual artists (Hunter1999). By researching the deeply personal, an artist might give rise to both the production of significant works and a penetrating understanding of the meaning of the process of art making. The value of this lies in several directions. First, the only way that we can apprehend a universal or objective value is by and through the personal. As Stewart and Mickunas (1990,p.65) have explained (so pertinently for a phenomenological study):
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In pre-reflective experience, the subject and world are not distinct; they are rather the givens of concrete experience which can only be separated by a process of abstraction. Any reflection - whether theoretical or practical - already assumes man's prereflective experience of the world and his activity in the world.
Second, as Asker (a performance dance artist) (1997,p.19) has said ' what characterizes my research is its focus on processes underpinning creative and artistic work. I am not concerned to contextualize a body of existing work or even work that is being made, but I am investigating the "experience" of art making.'
A phenomenological study of art making does not only expose what happens when artists make art, it exposes its moral dimensions as well in that both maker, viewer and reader are encouraged to think and act more 'rightly' (Midgley 1989). There is an ethical and transformative character to research (van Manen 1990) and, perhaps, especially to research into art practice in its several dimensions (Sullivan 2003) which might lead to a reclamation of art as a 'vocation' where 'the artist (is at) the service of a vocation which penetrates (artistic activity) to its very core' (Levinas in Hand ed.1992, p.151). This is an important consideration when others expect much from us (Edschmid in Buenger Ed.1997; Kramer in Bull Ed.2003). Lyas (1997,p.109) speaks about the role of art after Auschwitz:
..some have said that in the face of the Nazi death camps art must be silent. They must feel that to make art out of that suffering is to make an object for aesthetic enjoyment out of it, and that seems (as) obscene
However, he goes on to say:
Those who produced art in the camps wished to articulate how it was with them, partly to get that inchoate burden clear. I, too, have my burdens, inchoate and struggling to be born into clarity, about those horrors. I need artists to articulate these. When that happens the pain of these things will not be eased, but the burden of the inchoate will be lifted by that expression. 22
I am more acutely haunted by an observation by Larry Kramer (in Bull Ed.2003, p.xv) in a volume of essays marking the twentieth anniversary of the AIDS epidemic - that it would appear many writers have abrogated their responsibility to witness to their own times - they have never written about the global impact and implications of AIDS. When Kramer reels off renowned name after renowned name - 'Arthur Miller… Philip Roth..A.S. Blyatt…Harold Pinter…Umberto Eco…Salman Rushdie…Stephen Spielberg…Gabriel Garcia Marquez' (p.xv) I found myself thinking 'Who are the visual artists who have ''spoken'' about AIDS in their work?' Apart from some gay artists like Greg Leong and David McDiarmid (and perhaps George Gittoes obliquely through his documentation of wars) I could not think of any of our renowned Australian artists who have addressed the issue of AIDS. Not John Olsen, not Judy Cassab, not Tim Storrier, not Jeffrey Smart …..
I share Kramer's belief that artist's have a 'responsibility to witness to their own times' and, I believe, that responsibility is more onerous if one's witnessing has been as intimate as his (and mine) was and will continue to be. To properly discharge one's responsibilities sometimes demands a 'right' time and a 'right' vehicle - be it painting or text - otherwise the experiences we seek to honour can crush, overwhelm and silence. As they did me for some time. What I seek from this research is some release from the burden of memories kept silent like a rabbit trap around my foot so that I may continue to 'account for my responsibilities as a visual artist'. That release will only come from a greater understanding and a deeper awareness of how I and my practice have been irrevocably changed by those experiences of AIDS and the aftermath of war. Again, Lyas (1997,p.109) expresses the paradoxical situation so well: What was done was done not merely to lift the burden of the unarticulated, but done also that others could know how it was.
Unpacking Some Particular Terms
To clarify the objectives of this research and make clear its links to other research some of the essential terms will be explored, notably 'trauma', its relationship to 23 some of the themes of my research and their relationship with notions of 'landscape'. (' Themes' as a notion will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 5) Personal experience, as previously mentioned, illuminates the universal and as I have a passion for landscape painting these are my personal responses. Other artists obviously might have a different view of landscape. However, as Gittoes (in Brims 2001, unpubl.p.10) has said about stories intertwining with art works:
I try in every way possible to make the background source material of the art available to the audience, and this, I feel, shows respect for the audience as well as enriching their experience of the art.
In Chapter 4 the theories of art and theories of ethics employed in this study were explored in some detail to provide the lens by which I view my lived experience.
Trauma
Some of the terms used in this study are extremely slippery - as befits a phenomenological study of lived experience where the phenomenon under discussion has no fixed form. Commonly, in this study, in daily life, and in art practice in all its dimensions, there is a slippage or interchangeability about using words literally and metaphorically. In a very real sense it is impossible to define in one way even some of the critical terms such as trauma. 'Trauma', one of the key words of the title and a central notion of the study, is a word that has become so widely (and imprecisely) used that much of its power has been lost. The notion of trauma, however, can be understood as being experienced along a continuum. Some traumatic experiences may be quite easily understood. Some are of such a nature that one emerges as being like a different person – commonly described as 'more ordinary' but essentially different. This feature might go part of the way to explaining some of the 'silences' or 'inability to speak' encountered in the literature (Bragg 1999; McKernan 2001; Amishai-Maisels 1993; Carthew 2002) It might not be that the memories are too gruesome to speak of (which they often are) but more an inability to find language to express what it is like having to come to know oneself as a different person. Different to what one had previously imagined and often with little idea of what to 24 do with that new person and what the repercussions of the change might be. Suicide is not uncommon in soldiers returning from war service (McKernan 2001; Miller Ed.1992) It might not be, for some at least, that suicide is the result of a life experienced as meaningless but rather an overabundance of meaning but a lack of adequate framework in which to site their experiences. Trauma understood in these terms is essentially concerned with life and death – perhaps not always physical death (which may be less frequent) but emotional and spiritual death (which is much more common). I still shudder at Dewey’s description of what happens when 'an organism' is dislocated from its normal surrounds. If it cannot find a way to accommodate itself within the new order, it dies (1980).
Trauma, then, in this study can also be visualized or conceptualized as a 'wound' - a wound to our psyche and to our souls. To refer to trauma as producing a 'troubled soul' is not to enter into a theological discussion but to move the appreciation of trauma more to the whole body where, in common daily usage, 'psyche' seems to be used to refer to our head and when people say 'soul' they generally put their hand to their heart. Thus it could be suggested that 'trauma' is a dislocation between our hearts and our heads - and a 'primitive' 'healing' function of art is to bring them both together. The notion of a 'wounded healer' (common in theological and spiritual writing - and specifically in the work of artist, Joseph Beuys [Temkin and Rose Eds.1993]) is however extremely pertinent to a discussion of trauma because, as already mentioned, one of the key themes emerging from the experience of the traumatized (myself included) is the inability to relate to those who have not 'been there' (Caruth 1995, 1996; Anissimov 1998;Crowe 1999;Greene Ed. 2000). Or, to put it more positively, those who 'have been there' can 'hear' and recognize the voice of others like themselves - other wounded. The implications of this for an understanding of themes such as compassion, empathy, sameness/difference will be dealt with more fully in the Analysis of Themes in Chapter 7.
In this study, then, I use the term 'trauma' to also mean 'wound' and the term 'psychic shock' is, I believe, more usefully descriptive in some cases than 'trauma'. 'Psychic shock', for me, goes some way to describing the undressing of our Selves that can result from traumatic experiences. It is as though we have been left naked, 25 vulnerable and powerless - our normal clothes of capability have been stripped off. Given the very real distress and suffering occasioned by our experiences of trauma it is ironic that these very same qualities - of vulnerability, openness, helplessness and so on - are the same as are necessary for art making. I will further discuss this ironic paradox in the Chapter dealing with the Analysis of Themes.
Landscape and Trauma
'Landscape' is another central theme of this study and it is introduced here because, as a landscape painter, I commonly use the word both literally and metaphorically even when referring to notions such as trauma. It is difficult, however, to generalize about the role of landscape in how people experience the aftermath of trauma. The Australian war literature, for example, is replete with references to returning POW's 'taking to the scrub' perhaps because the bush has a certain place in the Australian identity - a place of romance, of testing, of refuge, a wilderness (Fussell 1975; Gammage 1974; Goodwin n.d.; Grossman 1996; Matsakis 1988; McKernan 2001; Lahey 1984) And it is empty. A common theme in the war literature, as already mentioned, is an inability to speak with others who 'have not been there' (Lomax 1995). Dealing with the effects of war there is comparatively little in the literature concerning the experience of women (McHugh 1993; Green 1984; Delbo 1995) save as partners or wives of ex-servicemen or prisoners of war (Peters 1996) or mothers (Carthew 2002). The place of 'solitude' with regard to both trauma and art making is dealt with in some detail in the Analysis of Themes.
Trauma and Time
It is one thing to say that a common theme in trauma is that of retreat and shutting oneself off, it is another to understand why this is (almost) an inevitable response. On one level this retreat is quite easy to understand because we generally avoid touch to a wound because it may cause additional pain. With a traumatic wound I would suggest that the impulse to retreat (leave) is somewhat the same as it is for dogs who, when hurt, crawl away under a bush to lick themselves before they will allow anyone near their wound. However, the notion of 'leaving' and 'return' is, I believe, central to 26 an understanding of traumatic experience (Caruth 1995,1996). When we have experienced a severe shock it takes time to comprehend just exactly what has happened to us - what is the nature of the wound - because in the immediate aftermath much is 'blanked out'. The death of my mother, for example, though long anticipated, was a shock when it came. It was not until I was reading the condolence book some weeks after her funeral that I realized there were some people present (who I must have spoken to) but who I could not remember seeing. It is for this reason - the need for time to comprehend the exact nature of the wound that has so shocked us - that I have grave reservations about the almost ubiquitous use of trauma counsellors where often, as one of my friends proudly boasted of her workplace, the counsellors arrived before the ambulances.
My reservation concerning counselling in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic experience stems, as I have indicated, from a growing awareness that one needs a certain amount of time before we can exactly identify what is the traumatic wound. As with art making, the exactitude or rightness of identification (understanding) is critical. To take as an example, during the early part of the AIDS epidemic I was surrounded by unrelenting death. In dealing with the aftermath of that time I have come to realize that some of the trauma I have experienced since lies no so much in the multiple deaths (as I previously had thought) but may lie elsewhere - as Crimp (in Caruth 1995,p.257) has suggested 'in the socially produced trauma' of few being willing to listen to the stories of my experiences. 1 Furthermore, a too early 'cure' (or the dreadful modern 'closure') might solidify our early misinterpretations of the nature of the wound so that it is more difficult to unravel them in time to come. We need time to process and think through the implications of what has happened to us
1 There is a double bind in this as Laub (in Felman and Laub 1992) has remarked of Holocaust survivors 'there is never enough right words, never enough right time, never enough right audience' to recount their experiences. On the other hand Lomax (1995) identified in a woman from the Trauma and Torture Foundation precisely this quality of endless time which was one of the catalysts for his return from debilitating trauma. Perhaps the value of the arts in dealing with the aftermath of traumatic experiences lies in this question of time. The open-ended-ness of art making means that we are not dependent on others finding the right time and enough time to listen to us. Therefore, not only can we make 'till our hearts are content' but perhaps it is only then in that more collected form of an art work that others can finally comprehend what is our world. Laub's observation that there are never enough words, never enough right time mirrors, in a sense, the fact that the import of our experiences is always bigger than we are able to describe in any mode of communication. The goal of 'living' then might be 'to make manageable' rather than the mythic 'closure'. 27 and the demands of counselling - or its lack of intimacy- might send us in the wrong direction - at least for a time2. Then, perhaps, the enduring obsessions or repetitions (so characteristic of the aftermath of trauma) might be indicators that the import of a traumatic event has been misinterpreted, cannot therefore be understood and thus cannot fit into the pattern of meaning that is unique for each individual.
It could be suggested, then, that one has to leave the site of the wound (which is in ourselves) before we can return to a healing (which is also within ourselves). What happens when we have to leave or avoid our wound? For myself, I attempted to 'blank out' my head using a variety of devices. But the need to return to the wound - or to answer its invitation - was manifested in reoccurring images that refused to go away and this introduces the notion of 'obsession'
Obsession, Trauma and Grace
Some years ago, in reading Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat (1985.p.4) I was most taken by one remark - that the manifestations of different ways of 'being' following a trauma might better be regarded as an organism's desire to find a different way of living and flourishing rather than as evidence of a pathology. That is to say, if one mode of expression, for example, has been destroyed by trauma, the Self that desires to flourish seeks another way of replacing it. Then, it might be more useful to regard an obsession as the 'voice of the wound' calling us to return so that the wound might be healed. If one of the qualities of expression that has been lost in trauma is the authority of our voice (because we cannot speak authoritatively of what we do not understand) and its intimacy (which is concerned with knowing and being known - but we cannot know that which we do not understand) what happens in the leaving and the return? It is, I believe, the 'writing and re-writing' of
2The element that is present in those who 'have been there' - and which is missing in those who have not - is a particular flavour of intimacy. In it root meaning 'intimacy' means knowing and being known. There is a reciprocal relationship and equality between one and the other. In a professional relationship one side is missing - the counsellor is not available to be known. That is not to suggest that the counsellor may not 'have been there' themselves (quite often they have and it may be the reason that they have chosen the profession of counselling) but their knowing is silenced, forbidden or not acknowledged. There is then an inequality in the intimacy of allowing ourselves to be known - which is one of the reasons I believe counselling more often than not does not work. 28 phenomenology (van Manen 1990); it is the repetition and pattern making and so on of art making (Dissanayake 1988); it is the sifting of the 'nots' to find the 'is' (Taylor 1993) and it is the 're-search' that is the quest for understanding and meaning as outlined by so many writers in the literature of research theories and methodology (van Manen 1990; Sullivan 2003).
An exercise in Obsession or Making to Our Heart's Content
'To your heart's content' was an expression frequently used by my mother. It has only been since her death that I have connected her maxim with van Manen's rule of phenomenological research - we continue seeking 'until our heart is content' that is, full of the contentment of understanding (1990). As will become evident from the analysis of some of the Books of this study my heart's desire at one stage involved the use of shellac on greaseproof paper to make my canvases and books. Shellac flakes are gossamer fine and only a small number of grams are required to turn a litre of methylated spirits into paint. This exchange was one of the triggers for my re- thinking the notion of obsession:
For some time I had been fascinated by the colour of shellac flakes. Eventually I purchased some and started experimenting with painting and writing on shellacked greaseproof paper. After consuming five kilos of shellac flakes, four hundred meters of greaseproof paper and numerous litres of mentholated spirits I asked a dear friend of mine if, perhaps, 'perseverance might be another way of saying "obsession"?' 'Only if an obsessive says it', he replied.
That chance remark 'Only if an obsessive says it' started me thinking about the nature of obsession and, perhaps, its unacknowledged value in achieving understanding and, thus, regaining a measure of health and flourishing - a challenge as I have said to the presumption of obsession as pathological. In writing this I am not seeking to diminish the suffering that obsessive behaviour can beget in ourselves and thus for others.
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What if, however, (to paraphrase a story told by Caruth 1996) we consider obsessions as like the 'voice of our beloved' addressing us - and we ignore them at our peril? It may appear insensitive and crass to illustrate this point with a story about rabbits. However, I have included the rabbit story precisely because in our lived experiences - and in a phenomenological study - we cannot predict where (or in what form) the healing insights might emerge. Further, for writers such as Anton Chekov (in Hellman Ed.1984, p.20) - and I would suggest phenomenologists -'there is nothing unclean in this world. A man of letters should be as objective as a chemist; he has to renounce ordinary subjectivity and realize that manure piles play a very respectable role in the landscape'. At one point in this study, as I was writing, re-writing and painting my lived experiences, I kept thinking, writing, painting references to rabbits. On and on went the rabbits until I thought I was going quite crazy and I imagined my study as being characterized as a 'PhD of Rabbits'. In my personal history there are several real stories that concern rabbits - mustering rabbits as a child during the rabbit plague; migrant girls crawling under our home trapping rabbits and cooking them; my description of memories as like a rabbit trap around my foot and so on. None seemed to be quite right in describing the import of their repeated presence in my writing and remembering. Then it dawned on me that the meaning of the stories was not their surface structure, their topography, 'the stories about rabbits' but their underlying mode of being - the mode of rabbiting where one digs out burrows, follows footprints and so on. The mode of being was the meaning hidden in the obsession with the rabbit stories. Once I had comprehended that insight not only did the rabbit stories cease but that understanding showed me a different way of appreciating the other re-occurring images and stories that I encountered in my work. My heart was content (as van Manen and my mother would say).
The painting and re-painting, writing and re-writing involved with the exploration of my lived experiences as a visual artist will be discussed in the Conduct of the Study. Suffice for this stage of the discussion to say that how I used to deal with re- occurring images was not helpful in the long run. It is not uncommon for my paintbrush (my hand) to somehow take on a life of its own. When I first came back from Ethiopia and Eritrea every time I picked up a paintbrush out would come these 30 robed and wrapped figures of women. I painted some of them and then went on and painted something else. And the images would later return. During the course of this study I determined to follow the insistent and reoccurring images until their meaning has emerged - I have understood what they have been trying to teach me.
Trauma in My Experience
My own experiences of trauma are varied and many I would not classify as negative. My experiences of AIDS in particular have irrevocably changed me and now it is as though I have acquired a new layer of skin - of memories - and a new set of lenses to my eyes which sees all refracted through those experiences. Some of the changes have built up over time (like the passion for painting) with the evolution so very subtle that it is not until the change had already taken place that I become aware that things are different and I was different. Sometimes, when the psychic shock has been severe I do not paint. I cannot paint - simply because I do not have anything to paint with. It is as though I have been disemboweled - there is nothing left - or there is too much but it is in an inchoate form. The inspiration and the ability to paint is not there because it belonged to the other time of Self - the 'before' one. And the weariness of trying to work it all out and understand what has happened is immense.
The After Landscape of Trauma
Once, on a bus traveling from Hay to Balranald in far western New South Wales, the bus driver warned his passengers that they would be traveling through some of the most boring country in Australia and they may as well go to sleep until Mildura. Vast empty spaces are not boring to me and nor are sparse denuded hills. I have come to realize that my love of deserts and sparse landscapes has another dimension as artist Zoran Music (in Peppiatt 1988,pp.22-23) has described of his before and after Dachau painting self:
When I got out (of Dachau)….I went back to the same themes of life, of joy in living, but my way of seeing had changed completely. My experience of death had transformed my experience of life. I was only interested in images 31
that were stripped down to their essence. In time, as an artist, I became grateful for having been forced to look at the core of things. If I'm attracted to dry, stony, mountainous landscapes, it's because everything has been worn down. In terms of form, the hills around Siena, for instance, are like the cadavers. They've been reduced to essentials.
After I completed the portrait of the Vietnam veteran and the obsessive reading of the Vietnam War I felt empty and stripped. Shock had piled upon shock until I was like a punch-drunk boxer. Even in that denuded state, however, I knew that there was 'something more'. I had to answer the question the face had asked of me. I had to answer for the having come to know and see the pain and vulnerability of another. I did not go in and paint more veterans to record their despair for the simple reason I could not. Later in Ethiopia I did (paint wounded soldiers) but the landscape had restored me by then. At the time I used the landscape (like some veterans did) to escape and to record the despair of my helplessness. The anguish of 'The Eyes Haunt Me'3 was scrawled on the sparse full hills of Nelson in the South Island of New Zealand where I had gone to paint. And that is the essence of it. I use the landscape and the landscape uses me. Landscape is like the 'essences' that phenomenology seeks to describe - it just 'is' and there is no compulsion to do, just 'be'. That is its greatest comfort. Human beings ask something of us by their very presence and because of our shared humanity and sometimes that demanding presence is intolerable.
My landscapes of retreat and refuge are also buildings and chapels. Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, for instance, was, for me, the desert with walls around it - a place where I felt 'plumped up' again. The blue light of Chartres Cathedral in France I wrote to Keith was like a balm for my soul or like being in the womb of God4.
After the initial shock has worn off somewhat the awareness of being 'a different person' is quite strange. There is a clarity, a sense of purpose (even though the
3 'The Eyes Haunt Me' is one of the works exhibited in 'Down the Track - The After Effects of AIDS and War whose exhibition details have already been described. 4 Letter from the Gulf to Keith, Appendix 2. 32 direction of the purpose may be unknown), a sense of authority and solidity - and yet a sense of lightness which can be intoxicating at least in the initial stages. There are times, however, when there is also a very real danger that one could choose to stay in that increadibly heightened state and lose touch with reality altogether which is one reason why all spiritual traditions advocate a gradual working towards enlightenment. During the course of this study the parallels between phenomenological research, art making and spiritual 'growth' have become very marked. In each of these endeavours one must train and practice so that the honed skills of disciplined awareness are available to stay grounded and yet take advantage of the moment when it comes and not 'lift off''. To lose touch with reality in a heightened sense has the same effect as Dewey's organism losing its harmonious anchor. It can lead to both literal and a metaphorical death.
The uses of landscape in both art making and phenomenological research could be described as being literal, metaphorical and symbolic. To take as an example David Hockney's The Big Grand Canyon. His objective in creating that work (a fascination with different notions of perspective and so on) could be said to be different from his experience of landscape around York in Northern England in the 1990's. The York landscapes might be described as both literal in that they were a return to his roots where he had infrequently painted; as a refuge in which he drove as he visited a dying friend; and as a symbolic celebration of that man's life (Weschler 1998). Some of my landscapes of refuge, rest - and benediction - would primarily be the arid landscapes around Broken Hill 5and western Queensland, the deserts of central Australia and, as already mentioned, the chapels, cathedrals and landscape of France.6
The Responsibility of 'Seeing'
Metaphors of 'looking' and 'seeking' are replete in the literature concerning art making. New Zealand artist Colin McCahon (in Auckland City Art Gallery 1988)
5 Works from this area formed the exhibition 'Hot Rubber Red Dust', Gallery Agua, Noosaville,1996. 6 'The Colours of Light and Desire', Toulouse, France 1997; 'Landscapes of Desire', Brisbane, 1998; 'The Earth which Breathes The Sun', Townsville, 1999. 33 speaks of looking for a 'gate', 'a way through'. Wittgenstein (in Midgley 1989) speaks of 'looking to find his way about'. What is also required, however, is T.S.Eliot's (1983) map of 'returning to the place where we first began' because we are not like snakes, lizards and geckoes. We cannot just walk off and leave a skin behind. The old must be reincorporated within the new but seen from a different perspective. The destructiveness of some traumatic experience perhaps lies in the permanent dislocation where a way back has not been found - and may never be.
Entering the exhibition 'Don't Leave Me This Way. Art in the Age of AIDS' at the National Gallery, Canberra in 1994 I was shocked by a sign warning (from memory) that 'Some works may disturb or offend'. However angered I then was by such a warning, the presence of the sign acknowledges that there might be a cost to our seeing. In this research, where the art works and the stories are brought together to be considered an indivisible part of an ethical endeavour, the question of our responsibility for seeing is an integral part of the exploration. An analysis of finished works does not usually provide an understanding of the costs of an art practice – nor the costs of viewing. Implicit in painting is the request to 'see it like this'. 'See it as I see it'. But what are the ramifications of seeing it like this? Wajnryb (2001) remarks at one point in her research that she came to know things she would prefer not to have known. 'How can you unknow what you have come to know?' she asks. The uncomfortable truth is that we cannot 'unknow'. Further, it could be said, that unless we can ascribe an adequate understanding to what we have come to 'know' it will fester, ferment and disturb – as is witnessed by Hester’s work after she had seen a newsreel of the concentration camps at the end of World War 11. Some images from that film she drew constantly until the end of her life. (Burke 1983,2002). Clendinnen (1998) draws an important distinction, however, between a vicarious experience and one where the artist has 'been there'. 'Normally', Clendinnen says (ibid.p.185) 'we expect the magic of art to intensify, transfigure and elevate actuality. Touch the Holocaust and the flow is reversed. The matter is so potent in itself that when art seeks to command it, it is art which is rendered vacuous and drained of authority'. Furthermore, as Clendinnen continues to note, our responsibility to the
34 characters of a fictional work are essentially different from those toward a human being:
This fictional world, however, contains a curious absence. The reason for its exhilarating freedom is that it is a kind of game, a circumscribed place of play. Once inside I have no responsibility beyond my responsibility to respond to the text….Contrast this with what happens when I read a story which claims to be true. I will know very much less about the protagonists. There is no creator to strip away their veils, so they will be somewhat opaque to me. Nonetheless, I engage with them differently because I stand in a moral relationship with these people, because they are my fellow-humans, whose blood is real and whose deaths are final and cannot be cancelled by turning back a page (ibid.p.191).
And that, in a very real sense, is the crux of it all - we, with the authority of our Being shaped as it is by the experiences of our lives, stand in a moral relationship with others. This critical element has already been discussed in Chapter 4 dealing with Theories of Ethics and will be further explored in the Review of Related Literature, Chapter 6.
Bushfires, War and Phenomenological Research
Bushfires have been a constant presence during the course of this study - as they have been during my life. What has been illuminating is how the landscape of a bushfire metaphorically mimics the conduct and purpose of this research in that they challenge the perception that the beautiful is always good and trauma is always the horrendous. Furthermore, as previously indicated, art arises in precisely this paradox between what we previously thought of as one thing (the good and beautiful for instance) and the reality we experience and vice versa. Bushfires contain many of the same paradox in that they are ugly in the suffering and destruction they cause to human beings, to livestock, wildlife and the environment. At the same time they are undeniably beautiful in their sheer power, in their extraordinary colours and in the way they reveal a different way of seeing a landscape (both human and natural). 35
During World War 1, Beckmann (in Buenger 1997, p.165) describes the disjunction between beauty and destruction - and the pleasure we can take in both:
I spent a long time in the totally ruined church. It was humid and close, just before a thunderstorm, and the pale gray columns of the church contrasted wonderfully with the violet sky that could be seen darkly through holes in the church roof. Add to that the explosion of the grenades that sounds much like lightning striking. Standing there in the middle between life and death gave me a delirious, almost evil sense of joy.
Phenomenological research (and thus this study) seeks to see the ordinary and everyday from a new perspective of understanding. With sufficient distance or detachment to enable us to 'see', yet intimate enough to be aware of minute details. In Carnarvon Gorge I watched a bushfire roar through the National Park. After the flames had passed I noticed contours that I hadn’t seen before – gullies and creeks that had previously been obscured by trees and shrubs. The different colours of ash pointed to what was there before. Later I read a report on the Canberra bushfires that mentioned 'paper barks with their bark hanging down in strips – just begging to be burnt'. 'They need it'. In the later chapter Conduct of the Study these paper bark strips begging to be burnt will be another lens with which to appreciate the function of themes in phenomenological research. They beg us to notice and flag a way into an understanding of the essential elements of a phenomenon. In the same way that some Australian native trees and shrubs need fire to continue their life cycle, so does phenomenological research apply such a fire to our lived experiences so that the bare bones of the experience are revealed (the essences of the phenomenon). Linking this more directly with artistic practice, Klepac (2001, p.20) has said 'the artist is his own work of art; the works he produces are the ashes of his great fire'.
Relation to Other Published Work
All research, indeed all artistic endeavours, could be described as the desire to bring order out of chaos. In a very real sense the content of the chaos is not the important thing -even research into death, dying and grief. What is important is uncovering the 36 processes of understanding and becoming aware how the practice of my art making - in all its dimensions – contribute to that understanding. Any published research that deals with uncovering meaning structures will be valuable and useful and this study will find its place there. Dils and Crosby (2001,p.78 –79) have quoted Kaeppler (2000) 'the focus of dance ethnologists is often on dance content' as opposed to an anthropological focus on understand[ing] society through analyzing movement systems…What we call an attention to the experiential process of dancing’.
A similar situation pertains in the visual arts where there is a great wealth of literature about the content of finished art works but there is not a corresponding wealth of research concerning the meaning of process in the production of those works. As Klepac (2001) has pointed out with reference to the work of William Robinson:
The comments and notes (provided by William and Shirley Robinson) provide a special insight into the work of this remarkable artist. It is not often that we are allowed the privilege of following an artist, painting by painting, hear his comments on how they were created or what they might mean to him (Acknowledgments).7
This is not to say that the content of a work is irrelevant. However, it is a mistake to confuse the content of a work with its meaning (Auckland City Art Gallery 1988,p.42). The meaning that might be attributed to a work by the artist might be different to that felt by a viewer. As essayist Schefer (Smith Ed.1995, p.xix) enigmatically puts it:
Theology, linguistics, art history, archaeology, music, moments of humour; what's the linkage among these things? - well, it isn't the theme, and it isn't the things themselves; it resides, more than in myself (which is the most unknown thing), in the very act of gathering of what I steal and appropriate for myself and for my pleasure.
7 Lloyd Rees 1987, 1990 would be one of the few artists who has published some of the moods and sentiments behind some of his works. 37
It is, however, the 'most unknown myself' that must conduct a phenomenological study and the fuller ramifications of this will be discussed in Chapter 5, Research Methods and Design of the Study. For the moment it is pertinent to compare and contrast the essential nature of phenomenology with that of autobiography with which it shares some features. With respect to Australian autobiographers Colmer (1989,p.4) notes that, because of the pragmatic and secular nature of our society, (they) 'rarely compose their works so as to illustrate the extreme complexity of the creative process by which a writer constructs images of self and society out of language'. By extension, it could be said, many visual artists, are more concerned with the process of 'doing' - making art than they are about explaining what the process means to them. Thus, it could be said that autobiographers primary concern lies in the construction of a (generally) linear story with some of the defining roots made apparent. Such a story does not normally encompass a detailed exploration of the phenomenon of 'story telling' for example.
The defining feature of a phenomenological study is that it uses the fruits of research from a number of fields but those 'fruits' are not the central focus of the study. 'What is creative thought?' is a question which may fascinate those in fields such as psycholinguistics and psychology and their research findings can throw valuable light on the processes of creativity. Vera John-Steiner (1997, p.79) could well be talking about the benefits of phenomenological research when he says, of the 'creative enterprise':
(It is) that which gives meanings to experience, and however demanding such a task may be, it is this sense of purpose that confers dignity to the life of those struggling towards understanding. The contradictory pulls of joy and discouragement, of sudden bursts of insight and tiring efforts of execution, of process and product, are the necessary tensions that fuel creative thought
Excellent though the above passage may be it is still essentially different from the rigors of a phenomenological study which seeks to explicate the particular colours of the phenomenon of creating as they are revealed in a particular experience. 38
Beckmann's (in Buegner 1997) series of letters written during the First World War are more illustrative of the elements that go towards the creation of an artwork. Over a period of days, weeks and months he describes the terrible details of trench warfare - the smells, sounds, the dead being carried past and 'in the semi-darkness of the shelter, half-naked, blood-covered men that were having white bandages applied. Grand and painful in expression. New visions of scourgings of Christ' (p.167). But the sketches he did (of corpses blown out of their graves, farmers tilling the fields):
all of that is really not essential for what I want to do. Many of these actual details will be useless for me, but slowly the atmosphere does trickle into one's blood and provides me with confidence for those images that I saw earlier in spirit already. I want to work through all this internally in order to produce these things in an almost timeless manner later: that black human visage gazing out from the grave and the silent corpses that come toward me are the stark greetings of eternity, and it is as such that I want to paint them later.
Tomorrow the field hospital plans a big parade (p.163)
It is the revelation of the thought processes as they are intimately connected to the art works that Beckmann would later produce that make the above passage so valuable to a phenomenological study such as this. Beckmann's sketches, for example, are not preliminary studies for a later work as normally understood (and as seen in David Hockney's preliminary studies for his Big Grand Canyon) but they are more the authoritative foundation for the way in which he moves from his experience of the particular into an understanding of the universal significance of those experiences for all. As Clendinnen (1998,p.185) observes with respect to the Holocaust:
The most effective imagined evocations of the Holocaust seem to proceed either by invocation, the glancing reference to an existing bank of ideas, images and sentiments ('Auschwitz'), or, perhaps more effectively, by indirection.
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And this stricture applies as much to witnesses (such as Beckmann and myself) as it does to other artists. It is the distillation of the meaning of an experience that is the fuel of an art work not so much its descriptive features. It is here that some of the dangers of research into art practice might lie. Art and phenomenological research both demand a 'poetic' and 'literary' mode of thought and language (van Manen 1996):
The poetic language of the poem does not just speak of things, rather the poem lets something be 'heard' or 'seen'. It is possible to speak much but to say little. In the act of 'saying' the poetic text produces meaning that shows or points to something. Meaning then is that aspect that makes something 'understood' (ibid.p.15).
As van Manen (ibid.p.16) further emphasizes phenomenological research does not just use literary and poetic texts as a more interesting 'device' - a phenomenological text is necessarily and inescapably poetic because it is always dealing with questions of meaning that go beyond the powers of ordinary language.
Obviously there is a huge amount of material that has been written about artists in general and about individual artists. There is a further vast amount of literature concerning the various theories of art. Writing about art and writing about particular works is a very different task to an artist trying to research their own practice. As Asker (in McCulloch 1997) has said 'the process (of research) is accompanied by all sorts of questions. There is 'a call to say something' and in the past I haven’t really stopped to think much about where that call was coming from (ibid.p.21). A parallel drawn with the art form of dramatic monologues may shed some light on the paucity of artists 'giving an account of themselves'. Exhibiting one's work is one thing. However, as Peterson (1997) explains, monologues (one person speaking, controlling the attention of a group….) challenge the 'normal' political practice where others (especially in a high-art context) speak for you'. The possibility of phenomenological research to subvert this paradigm is not to denigrate the valid role of critics and theorists but merely to point to the presence of another different voice. As Beckmann (ibid.p.189) says 'I consider criticism to be necessary. It makes no 40 difference whether it comes from a layperson or a professional…All friction with the outer world is instructive, and this includes criticism'.
It is important, however, to consider the implications of the historical absence of the voice of the artist. First, as Peterson (quoted above) highlights the world of 'high art' (and academia to a certain extent) privileges being spoken about rather than the artist speaking with the obvious implication that those in the privileged position determine what will be spoken about. With respect to art critics and art historians this has contributed to some of the large gaps in the literature concerning, for example, the experience of war. In some cases these gaps have not always existed as Gavin Fry (1989,p.28) has asserted when he drew a comparison between the analysis of Australian art published in 1934 by William Moore and those published by Bernard Smith (1962) and Robert Hughes (1966). The earliest work reflected a view that:
The war was seen as a powerful force in the development of art in this country and the work done by the official artists a significant contribution to the nation's artistic experience (ibid.p.28)
With respect to the two later works 'the first world war did not even rate a single entry in either work's index and was barely referred to in the texts' (ibid.p.28).
Comparatively few artists have written autobiographies (Judy Chicago, Paul Cox, Patrick White, Barbara Blackman). More have had biographies written about them (such as Frieda Kahlo, Stella Bowen, Grace Crossington Smith, Albert Tucker, Wilfred Owen) have been the subject of monographs and published their diaries (Donald Friend, Judy Cassab, John Olsen) and had their Letters published (Joy Hester). A closer examination of these forms of literature is contained in the Review of Related Literature. In spite of this wealth of material it is still difficult to find the work of artists who have had the time and the opportunity to reflect on their own experience, how it has shaped their practice (Foss 1998) and write of those processes. The journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938 - 1941 of John Steinbeck (DeMott 1989) would be one of the notable exceptions to some of the above comments. Steinbeck's reflections, however, share the same media (words and writing) as the work being 41 reflected upon which is different from utilizing another (say painting) to explore the processes of the first. The journals (written concurrently with the novel) are, however, a fascinating insight into the pragmatics of the novelist's mode of working - and its frustrations (many of which resonate with my own experience) as this entry of August 1, 1938 (ibid.p.50) makes clear:
Panic sets in. Can't organize. And everybody is taking a crack at me. Want time, want to use me. In aggregate it is terrible. And I don't know where to run. Ought to go into the wild somewhere but I am needed here.
The elements of the journal that were most useful for this study, however, were not the recorded frustrations - nor the mapping of the character's development - but the disclosure of the peculiar relationship that a creator has with what they have created. Speaking of one period of work when the whole book was reviewed in his head, Steinbeck records:
And that was a good thing, for it was a reunderstanding of the dignity of the effort and the mightyness of the theme. I felt very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again to love the story which is so much greater than I am. To love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am (ibid.p.36).
The humility of Steinbeck's words brought to mind my struggles to honourably account for my experiences of the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea - and all those suffering the impact of AIDS and war. My work is undeniably my creation in that I write the words and hold the paintbrush - and yet what I try to paint (as Steinbeck recognizes) 'is so much greater than I am' that I am loath to say they are 'mine'. The bigger story which novelists and painters alike try to construct from the minute details of the particular is one that we hold in trust to be treated with the utmost respect, rigour and tenderness. Yet, fundamentally, how (and why) we account for our glimpses of the grand story and the little stories has as much to do with mystery and grace as it has to do with technical expertise.
42
One of the few sources of material that is directly related to my program of study are the papers from a conference Double Dialogues Conference with a Difference 1996 at Deakin University edited and compiled by Ann McCulloch in 1997. Several papers given at the conference are extremely important to my field of study in that they were given by practising artists researching their experience using a phenomenological method derived from the work of Max van Manen.
The inability of most artists to paint and write at the same time has already been alluded to and will be discussed more fully in Chapter 7 - Conduct of the Study. Eric Avery, a printmaker and doctor working with people with AIDS, commented (pertinently during an interview with Walker 1994) that his artwork proceeded in an inverse ration to his medical work. When he was working in hospitals he did very little printmaking and vice versa. When I reflect back on my own practice as artist/researcher it follows the same pattern. I find it nearly impossible to write in an academically acceptable fashion (indeed any fashion at all) when I am in the midst of wrestling with the process of painting. One stage has to come and then another.
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5. RESEARCH METHODS AND DESIGN OF THE STUDY
Introduction
The choice of a particular research design is as much part of the ethical endeavour of research as is the content of the study for, in a very real sense, the methodology determines what 'voices' - what experiences - are able to be heard. In line with a bio- evolutionary understanding of art and an ethics 'with no principles', I should like to here deepen that notion of art by exposing some further dimensions - that art is essentially concerned with 'justice' - and witnessing as an integral part of that justice.
Justice, like the notion of trauma, can be conceptualized in many different ways. Essentially, justice is concerned with 'rightness', 'truthfulness', 'integrity' and 'responsibility' and 'care'. In the practice of art making these several notions are employed constantly when we stand back from our work to determine its 'rightness' - or otherwise. It is a paradoxical notion because, as already discussed in this Study, there is no predetermined standard or rule that can be applied in advance to judge whether some particular work, line or action is 'right' or 'wrong'. And yet, in practice, we know when a work is 'out of kilter' or when it is facile or when it is a stale rehash of something already done. Then it is possible to say we have not done justice to ourselves, our gifts or to our subject. The way that we become more just in our work is by becoming more aware of the intricate webs of meaning that connect all dimensions of our lived experience - including our art making.
The notion of 'justice' introduces the interconnectedness and interdependence of lived existence - the 'so that'. We research so that we are able to live more fully aware and, therefore, more justly. We research so that we gain understanding because, as Clendinnen (1998, p.8) says of the Holocaust, 'in the face of a catastrophe of this scale so deliberately inflicted, perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford'. We research as artists so that, as Kramer (in Bell Ed.2003, p.xv) says of writers confronting the subject of AIDS (or not confronting it) we honour our primary responsibility to bare witness to ourselves and to our times. A series of paintings I did of the women in the Fistula Clinic in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia illustrates, in part, 44 some of the intricate, yet interconnected, threads of their 'just' existence - and mine as artist/witness. The Fistula Clinic, begun by two Australian obstetricians and gynaecologists, is a place of great hope because the operations carried out there are generally successful and most women will again be able to have children. At the same time, it is a place of mourning as most of the patients have already suffered the grief of having given birth to a stillborn child. Behind all this hope and suffering is injustice - sometimes stemming from cultural practices that condone giving children in marriage - and the obscenity of war that diverts the scarce economic resources of a country into fighter planes and bombs while their women and children have no adequate access to pre-natal health care, education and so on. All these other factors are, of course, not immediately apparent from a cursory visit when we might be captivated by the beauty of the women's flashing smiles and the colourful bravery of their patchwork shawls and look no further. Like identifying the 'not good enough' elements of an artwork, a just gaze demands that we see beneath the surface to avoid Clendinnen's 'indulgence of perplexity'- and yet keep in proper balance the lightness of the hope and the blackness of helplessness and despair experienced in the face of injustice.
That art and research can (and does) impose upon us a weight of several responsibilities ought not conceal or diminish the very real pleasure and delight that is also implicit in art making and research because both are firmly located in the body. It could be said that we have a corresponding duty to make these delights and pleasures as transparent as the angst and suffering. Phenomenological research, as embodied, is intimately concerned with beauty and pleasure - the beauty of craftsmanship - a precision in thought and expression (even if the feeling described is one of puzzlement and wonder). Indeed, in the same way a beautifully crafted object begs to be touched, a phenomenological description invites and leads us to follow the drama of an unfolding interpretation. The 'negotiation of meanings' which Crosby (2001) identifies as essentially 'a dialogue' between the researcher and their material (the written and visual texts) can be an immensely difficult enterprise, but the resolution (the still point of understanding) can be correspondingly pleasurable (even ecstatically so). Ecstasy, an extreme form of an 'existential pleasure' as Florman (1994, p.147) terms it, is comparatively rare which is precisely why those moments 45 are so precious. However, on a more mundane level the pleasure of satisfaction is an essential element of a research project which John Dewey calls this 'immersion in the material world, by (an) engagement in activity which is often mundane, 'satisfactory' as opposed to the merely 'satisfying' "(ibid, p.147)
These various preliminary needs provide a perspective within which a research methodology is chosen. To understand why I have chosen phenomenology as the most appropriate research method I will briefly sketch an outline of what is involved in a phenomenological study. Phenomenology is, very simply, the study of a phenomenon as discerned within lived experience. Phenomenological research is concerned to describe a phenomenon's essential features - its 'essence' or 'nature' - so that its significance (meaning) 'sings and reverberates'. The research is carried out by 'an attentive practice of thoughtfulness' in describing an experience (van Manen 1990, p.i). By attending to (listening to, 'seeing') the complex, ordinary, everyday features of our lived experiences we are able to discern the shapes, textures and colours of the phenomenon emerging from the exploration. The choice of which phenomena to study is determined by our own deep interest and concern (van Manen 1984,1990,1999; Munhall 1994; Crotty 1996; Madjar et al. 1999; Cohen et al. 2000). I am a visual artist. My study is thus focused on the various elements of the phenomenon of 'creating' - the creation of artwork and the creation of meaning. It can be said that creating is an essential characteristic of what it means to be human. It has, however, some particular and rigorous contours when used to describe the experiences of a visual artist whose work it is to create art works and those of a researcher who must paint a transparently meaningful picture of their study using words as well.
Some elements of creating are obviously common to all research projects, for example, the central place of observation, interpretation, reflection on experience, the centrality of insights and so on. My study is concerned to discern how those essential elements of the phenomenon of creating emerge from within my lived experience as an artist.
46
Phenomenological research is concerned to study a phenomenon in a very particular way – in the life world as we immediately experience it – in our ordinary, everyday lives – pre-conceptually, pre-theoretically, pre-reflectively (Husserl in van Manen 1990; Stewart et al.1990). With philosophy (and thus with phenomenology) we obtain the data or material for our examination, exploration, research by means of a close examination of the lived experience of human beings. There is no other place to find the material because of the very nature of what philosophy is – an exploration of the 'is-ness' of things (phenomena) which only exist within an experience of 'the life world'. One needs to know the essence or nature of a phenomenon before they can be sorted into categories -as, for instance, we say this is an example of 'thoughtlessness'. It is in this pre-categorical state that new insights and knowledge can arise. The immediate closeness of our description to the experience can subvert our normal mode of categorization and leave open the nakedness of the experience - which may, to our surprise, become clothed in a category different to what we might normally expect. It is a difficult mode of thinking and research because, as Midgley (1989) explains, it is necessary to keep the mind focused on how we are thinking not on what we would like to be thinking about. Our normal use of language might be termed topographical and descriptive as, for example, we describe the appearance of a painting as being made up of various colours, textures of pigment and so on. And such a description might be very colourful and engaging. The purpose of a phenomenological description of a painting is very different because we are concerned to illuminate our experience of it - as a viewer and as its creator. For both viewer and creator the experience of the work might be one of puzzlement - we do not understand it. We are then obliged to keep returning to our conversation with it to try and unravel its meaning - not of the painting per say (because it can only enter our 'life world' through our dialogue with it) but with our experience of it.
As previously discussed, phenomenology is concerned with the study of essences. It is an examination and exploration of what are the essential elements that go to make a 'thing', a phenomenon, what it is. Like regarding a good artwork, phenomenological research seeks to identify those elements that are essential to its composition, and those elements that cannot be taken from it. The way phenomenological research is conducted is by and through the attentive practice of 47 thoughtfulness. That is we puzzle and wonder with all our being – all our attention, care and love about what it means - the significance of this phenomenon in the ordinary, day to day experiences of our lives.
Phenomenology as the most appropriate research 'method' for this research.
As outlined earlier this research seeks to uncover the meaning and significance that some lived experiences (particularly as they relate to the after effects of AIDS and War) have had on my practice as a visual artist. There is a difference between comprehending the project of phenomenology intellectually and understanding it from within the practice that I will discuss further below (van Manen 1990, p.i). The conduct of a program of research is situated in the 'being' of the researcher. To judge its appropriateness – to the task and to the researcher – it is necessary to examine some of the personal needs and characteristics of the researcher. In so doing, inevitably, the essential elements of phenomenological research are revealed.
Research within one's own practice
The topic of my research program is 'Memories are not Silence; the trauma of witnessing and art making. A phenomenological exploration of my lived experiences as an artist. As the notion of 'silence' is central to this study it would be well to link it to the choice of research methodology. In a very real sense silence is experienced when we are forced into a way of being that does not fit the fullness of our particular being and thus, we are obliged to 'leave bits out'. Those 'left out bits' could be described as hidden or silenced. I have said that I do not know whether I paint to think or think to paint. The two are so intertwined that it is difficult to separate out one from the other or to choose one as more important as the other, and, perhaps, they are essentially the same thing - even though I cannot do both at the same time as I will discuss later. Suffice to say at this stage that if I am seeking to understand some particular aspects of my lived experiences I cannot leave out my painting anymore than I can leave out my writing - both have to be applied to the practicalities of my study. Samuel C. Florman (1994, p.118) is here discussing the 48
'existential pleasures of engineering' but he could well be speaking of myself as a visual artist:
'homo faber does not merely putter around, nor is he interested only in survival and comfort. He shares the values and ideals of the human race - mercy, justice, reverence, beauty and the like. But he feels that these abstract concepts become meaningful only in a world where people lead authentic lives - struggling, questing and creating'.
It is primarily because phenomenology is anchored in the complex realities of ordinary lived experience - described in everyday language - that it is an ideal method for this study - for me. Many people can experience some modern architecture as barren, harsh and un-welcoming in that the spaces intimidate and thus curtail their feelings of freedom, comfort and safety. In much the same way as Midgley (1989) notes of some modes of philosophical inquiry, obscure and technical jargon that is incomprehensible to those 'not in the know' operates as an inhospitable space - throwing up barriers to intimacy (knowing and being known by another) and trust. For this reason I am distrustful of ungrounded theorizing that is not constantly checked against lived experience (and vice versa) because it can neglect the reality of how we use language. As van Manen (1990, p.10) points out 'virtually every word we utter ultimately derives from some image thereby betraying its metaphoric genesis'. This assertion was made in response to an observation by Nietzsche that 'all language, and therefore all truth and error, is metaphoric in origin' (ibid, p.10) However, that we are left with metaphors to describe the lived structures of meaning is not a critical deficit but merely mirrors the manner in which we commonly use language. To take an example, when confronted by experiences that go to the heart of what it means to be human - be they of joy or of sorrow - we feel that our experiences 'overflow' 'they are too big ' for our physical bodies, our ordinary language reaches its limits and we reach for another - that of poetry with its metaphors, similes, different rhythms and so on. What is of more importance in so far as a phenomenological study is concerned (or any study for that matter) is to be aware of what image we have consciously or unconsciously attached to a particular word or phrase. It is only by being aware of these hidden images that we can 49 properly attend to and describe the lived experience we are seeking to understand. (see van Manen 1990, p.9; 1996)
Second, in our lived experience insights are gleaned from many sources - from novels, biographies and autobiographies (van Manen 1996), from an experience of music and from cookery books (Vella 2000), from conversations with others, from viewing photographs (Clendennin 1998) and so on. Yet, at some earlier times in my academic career I felt an immense frustration because these many ways in which I had come to learn had to be excluded from my work - resulting in an impoverished (and, to my mind, dishonest) mono-dimensional bibliography. Phenomenology, on the other hand, welcomes a practical wisdom from whichever source - and, in fact, the researcher is encouraged to read 'widely and deeply' the experiences of others (especially 'sensitive artists'!) so that we can 'vicariously' live 'the truth experiences' of others (van Manen 1990, p.13). The eclectic mix of aids to assist the journey of discovery is especially appropriate for an artist/researcher because in art making the only constraint in the material used in the construction of an art work is whether it works or not (see Kiefer's use of straw, lead and paint [Rosenthal 1987] Gascoigne's feathers and used roadwork signs [Bush Ed.1997] Simcock's blown tyres and smashed reflectors [Warwick Art Gallery 2003]).
Third, I have chosen phenomenology as a research method because the puzzles that I needed to resolve and to understand concerned my lived experiences. Put simply I needed to research within my own practice as it had to be from within that practice that the sense must come. A close and detailed exploration of lived experience is a particular province of phenomenology and this was one reason that this mode of research was chosen. Last, a phenomenological study involves the being of the researcher - and its aim is to enable us to live more attentive, more aware, more meaningful, more responsible lives as human beings. As such it is essentially a moral and ethical endeavour. As van Manen has it 'phenomenology is a philosophy of the unique, the personal, the individual which we pursue, against the background of an understanding of the logos of Other, the Whole, or the Communal' (1990, p.ii). To grasp the meaning of my lived experiences is a task (like painting my paintings) that I cannot devolve to any one else except myself. That, of course, does not mean 50 that I cannot look to others for inspiration and guidance - and I have (to many) but the ultimate responsibility for making sense of my lived experiences is mine and mine alone.
The conduct of phenomenological research
The conduct of a phenomenological study is one fraught with contradictions in that the writing ought to reveal the ways by which one comes to a deeper and deeper awareness of the phenomenon under examination. That transparency of process I count as one of the invaluable aspects of a phenomenological study. It is like seeing all the preliminary studies - the pencil and ink sketches, the photographic collages, the written musings and so on of David Hockney's The Big Grand Canyon - in company with the finished work. However, in a study such as this (as far as the majority of the written thesis is concerned) the 'finished' work is the last draft of the exploration where much has already been edited out so we are left with a relatively polished work. My growing into this study was not so seamless and mirrored, to a certain extent, the 'prior state' of historian Inga Clendinnen before she began her series of essays 'reading the Holocaust'. Clendinnen writes that she had considered herself well versed about the Holocaust having read much about that tragedy 'for much the same reason that (she) read the memoirs and poems which came out of the trenches of World War1, as a matter of moral and social duty: attention ought to be paid to extreme human suffering and we must do what we can to make some human sense out of it' (1998, p.2). However, Clendinnen was still 'baffled' by the Holocaust and:
I felt guilty about my bafflement because I suspected its origins: that it arose because my reading of the Holocaust had been no more than dutiful: that I had refused full imaginative engagement. (ibid. p.3)
I cannot say if 'I refused full imaginative engagement' with my lived experiences but I do know that, at one stage early in the study, I found myself frustrated and bored by what I was writing and painting. I thought 'Is this all there is to it?' 'I know all this'. In the same way as Clendinnen had read much, I had read much phenomenological 51 literature and I knew that phenomenology was philosophy - but at another level I did not know - yet. I had not 'dropped into' a philosophical mode of thought that I knew from my earlier studies of philosophy was very different from a normal mode of thought - and an extraordinarily difficult one at that. However, it did happen and then it made the whole enterprise of a phenomenological study not only comprehensible but also possible - and fascinatingly enjoyable (mostly). What came more slowly was the realization (yet again) of just how radical the nature of phenomenology was - that it only has validity when it is concerned with being and becoming - how we live, how we think, and how we take responsibility for what emerges from those processes. Van Manen (1990, p.2) asserts 'in phenomenological research the is always implies a possible ought. So, in addition to the fact that it is not possible to do phenomenology with only halves (or quarters or tenths) of ourselves, there is a moral imperative to be changed by what emerges from the conduct of our study - the 'transformative' element of research that Sullivan (2003, p.10 -11) has identified - that is, what we create 'has the capacity to reveal, critique, and transform what we know'. As human beings our flourishing is interrelated and interdependent with others and the Other and, thus, what we know and understand directly and intimately affects how we live our lives with responsibility and integrity.
One of the most attractive aspects of phenomenological research is its lyrical sensuous quality. The renown phenomenological writers frequently speak of singing - 'a language that sings the world' (Merleau-Ponty as quoted in van Manen 1990, p.2) 'gifts that call us to make a response' (Marcel as quoted in van Manen 1990, p.15) 'phenomenology like poetry is a poetizing project: it tries an incantive, evocative speaking, a primal telling, wherein we aim to involve the voice into an original singing of the world' (van Manen 1990, p.2) It brings to mind Le Corbusier's desire for his chapel at Ronchamp when he wanted 'the stones to sing' or Bruce Chatwin's Songlines (1987) there so that we can sing our way through the desert. The image of research as 'singing' has an immensely human quality about it - as though the experiences we seek to understand have a voice and language of their own (which they have) and to listen to their song we have to learn to listen not only to their words but to their silences. Singing, of its very nature, carves out a space that is different from our ordinary mode of being in speech. As it is within this 'sacred' space that our 52 understanding will come, it is the task of the researcher to cultivate the 'phenomenological virtues' of patience, tact, perseverance, courage and so on that enable us to create and sustain those enabling spaces.
Some mention is made in the literature of phenomenological research of the notions of 'gift' and 'mystery'. I cannot bring to mind a reference to the notion of 'grace'. Rarely, in what I have read, have these several notions been given due prominence. Yet, in view of what has just been discussed, it is necessary to think of our paintbrushes, for instance, sometimes having a song of their own. In fact, the language of artists is replete with such references. At the end of a particular period of painting, for example, Lloyd Rees has said 'it was as thought the Spirit behind Nature took hold of my brush. And I can only bow my head in thanks' (Hawley1993; Rees 1988) On the other hand Olsen swears because he feels 'the muse' has abandoned him (Olsen 1997) Occasionally I have completed works that have 'sung'. They have a particular quality that is different even from my normal 'good' works. Yet, as I cannot will such works into existence, they must be considered gifts that could be said to sing to me - and call for some response from me.
As I have already briefly discussed a research method must fit not only the task at hand but the particular person of the researcher. Phenomenology is, as I have said, the only way that I might research my own practice from the 'inside out'. Of equal importance is the fact that, in many ways, the practice of phenomenological research closely resembles the way of art making. These similarities will be briefly sketched here and will be discussed in greater depth in the analysis of the various themes as they have arisen in the course of the study.
Essential Elements of Phenomenological Research and Their Relationship to Art Making
The most defining feature of phenomenological research in relation to art making is the fact that there is no predetermined picture at the beginning and there can be no predetermined picture of the completed work. It therefore requires an openness to ambiguity, fluidity and open-ended-ness. Like an artwork, the form emerges in the 53 doing. (van Manen 1984,1990) This is very different from other forms of research methodologies where it is possible to formulate a precise question at the beginning, and measure the success of the study by how well the question has been answered at the end. To a certain extent some parts of that type of research could be contracted out to others. The aim of phenomenological study, however, is not to achieve 'a result' as such but a deeper and more profound awareness of the meaning of a phenomenon being explored - with the process of the research (in all its stages) being anchored in the being of that person. The process of research cannot, therefore, be separated from the researcher and 'hived off' onto others (van Manen 1990). It could be suggested, then, that a phenomenological study is one of the more demanding modes of research in that the diffuse openness to the gathering of material; the intense and sustained reflection; the pondering and the construction of the intricate webs of meaning cannot be devolved to any one else. Nor, obviously, can the listening to and learning from the 'song' of the lived experience.
The experience of being surprised by what we have written or painted is a common one for artists. As artists and researchers there is a need to learn from what we have created – to listen to our work – and to let it teach us. 'Listen to it with your eyes and your stomach. It will tell you what it needs if you listen to it' is what I teach. 'Listening' 'Learning from what we have written' 'Dialogue' are fundamental and key notions of phenomenological research - but sometimes at a different level. A common element in an artist's experience of art making is an absence of the awareness of thinking. (Beckmann in Buenger 1997; Robinson in Klepac 2001) I say I do not think about anything when I paint. I just paint. Obviously that is not strictly accurate. I must think (at least subconsciously) but I am often not aware that 'I am thinking'. This paradox will be further explored in the section discussing some of the themes that have arisen in the study.
Art making requires a different way of 'seeing'. In phenomenological terms it is called asking questions of our lived experiences, dialoguing with them – as van Manen (1990) would call it having a 'phenomenological conversation'. This is as distinct from an ordinary conversation when the minutiae are so taken for granted that they slip from consciousness and awareness. Such a conversation is more akin 54 to Henri Nouwen's (1979) 'intimacy of letter writing' where, relieved of the distraction of a physical presence, we often feel more freedom to reveal ourselves. Having said that it is also true that in our seeing and listening we often do not check our assumptions until confronted by the unease of a misunderstanding (Munhall 1994). A lack of understanding blocks the next stage of enlightenment that requires that the meaning of a particular phenomenon must fit into a larger pattern because:
no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns; the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it (Alexander et al.1977, p.xiii).
Phenomenology and Me
Munhall (1994) asserts that phenomenology is not the appropriate research methodology for everyone - nor for every stage of a researcher's career. If I have found it not only appropriate but engaging and exciting, why is this so? I was heartened to read van Manen quoting the Dutch psychiatrist van den Berg (in Bachelard 1964, p.xxiv) who said that 'poets and painters are born phenomenologists' (van Manen 1996, p.22). What it is, though, about poets and painters that make them suitable for a phenomenological study? The first thing I love about phenomenology is that it has given me the opportunity to reflect on and research my own practice, and it has given me the way for which I have been looking for years. The choice for a phenomenological study has also explained why other systems or methods have been unsatisfactory. To mention 'trauma', for example, has almost invariably been met with a direction to psychology or a therapy model of research, both of which employ a 'cognitive meaning (which) corresponds to ordinary communicative understanding' (van Manen 1996, p.20) which is different from the 'noncognitive' and 'poetic' language of phenomenology. This, as van Manen (ibid) explains 'refers to the experience of meaning that is evoked by language but that also goes beyond language, transcends language'. Phenomenology, then, does not privilege psychology over and above any other interpretation that may eventually be applied to 55 themes that may emerge from the study. As a phenomenological mode of thought is philosophical it gets under so many layers that have blocked my searches in the past.
Phenomenological research is very demanding and is a very difficult way of thinking. Any research is difficult but phenomenology is especially so in the precision of thought it demands. I believe you have to train for it just the same as you have to train yourself to see differently to be an artist and train yourself to use your tools. My training for this study has first and foremost been my studies in philosophy and ethics, and, equally as importantly, my long - standing practice as a visual artist where one is constantly reflecting, pondering and making aesthetic decisions.
The surprising benefit of a phenomenological methodology is a relief from the burden of judgment - even though as an ethical endeavour it has profound moral implications. In the pre-categorical description there is not a compulsion to 'do' - just to apprehend 'is-ness'. It is akin to the time when, initially, I was shocked by Andrew Carter's 1saying of the AIDS virus that when one looks at it through a microscope one cannot help but think how beautiful it is. It is the 'leaving things as they are' of phenomenological wisdom.
Van Manen (1990; 1996) rightly identifies a wealth of personal experience as a pre- requisite for a phenomenological study, and, if the researcher does not possess that themselves, they have to 'borrow' it from various people who have - especially writers. As important as a wide variety of lived experiences from which to draw practical wisdom is the amount of time a researcher has had to reflect on those experiences - and to incorporate them into their way of being.
Design of the Research Project
The initial step in phenomenological research is to identify the 'perspective' - 'the interest' that will describe the stance that one takes to the program of study (van Manen 1990). Painting and writing, both elements of the same phenomenon 'creating' 56 are the two points that mark my orientation towards this research. However, a critical factor in the design of this program of study is the recognition that I cannot write and paint at the same time. The intensity of the reflection and concentration required for both art making and writing means, for me, that one mode has to come first and then the other. Even using the word 'first' here can be misleading because it would be wrong to say, for example, that my art works illustrate my writing. As Deborah Walker (in McCulloch 1997), photographer Diane Arbus (1972) and printmaker Barbara Hanrahan (Carroll 1986) have said the relationship between reading, writing and the creation of images is much more fluid, complex and difficult to pin point than illustration. It may be more accurate to say that art making and writing are both ways of researching a phenomenon - but they are also different.
The design of a phenomenological study is difficult to describe in a linear fashion because so much of phenomenology is built upon - and dependent upon - insights and triggers that can lead in directions impossible to foresee or to program. Loosely the design of the study could be described as first, 'following the threads'. An example of this was an unexpected experience that triggered a series of monoprints that I completed in mid 2002 (see Exhibition Works Chapter 8). The monoprints began with the blotched face of my supervisor that led to the memory of my first Ankali client which led to another memory of a wounded soldier in Ethiopia - and ended up some two books of prints later with Colin McCahon's 'by gate I mean a way through'. When I had followed the images to the 'contentment of understanding' I would stop. Frequently such a period of making would then direct the next stage of my reading - as the period described above sent me to the work of other artists who 'scratched into their canvases' amongst them Anselm Kiefer (Rosenthal 1987) and Brice Marden (Kertess 1992). A second design strategy was the 'paper bark strips begging to be burnt' - that is, a specific question would direct the research. Such a question 'Is it right to want to paint a sore on the leg of a dying friend?' and its journey through this study is detailed in Chapter 6, Review of Related Literature. The third design element was the conscious decision to record some of the processes of making and this decision led to the creation of The Books - twelve books of
1 Andrew Carter, co-founder with Richard Johnson of the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project. 57 drawings, paintings and writing on shellacked greaseproof paper which are contained in Chapter 7 - 7e, Conduct of the Study, the Themes and Appendix 1. The fourth design method was to follow certain images that I was consciously aware I did not understand. These images, notably the 'robed women' and the 'parallel trees' kept returning to my pen and brush no matter how many times I drew and painted them. They ended up coming together as a critical link between AIDS and my father as a POW - and illuminating some of the central themes of the phenomenon - 'helplessness' and 'enduring', for example.
How this study was implemented is more fully described in Chapter 7, Conduct of the Study. The sequence of the painting and writing stages of this study were, in large part, determined by the requirements of the university regulations - for Stage 2 and Confirmation - which demanded the written component be given precedence in the early stages of the Study. An earlier version of the Review of Related Literature was required for these two stages and has been added to throughout the Study. 58
6. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Introduction
This study is a phenomenological investigation of my lived experience as a visual artist and the Background to the Study of Chapter 2 has described some definitive and formative experiences. As outlined in the previous Chapter, the depth and complexities of a phenomenological study only emerge 'in the doing'. Thus, whilst this Review of Related Literature is based upon some specific questions that arose during my research, other references to related and relevant literature are threaded throughout the study. Some particular aspects related to the topics of AIDS, War and the choice of methodological framework are outlined here.
Literature related to phenomenological theory and practice is also located elsewhere in this document particularly in Chapter 5.
Artists and Lived Experience
As already stated, this study is concerned with an exploration of my own experiences of artistic practice. Do different criteria apply to research within one's own practice with respect to a review of related literature? This is not a study of phenomenology. It is a study using a phenomenological approach and that distinction does materially determine what literature is helpful and what might be less so. Phenomenology exists to help us to understand our lived experience of the world. War in the Blood. Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia by Chris Beyrer (1998) perfectly illustrates the type of writing that has been most useful in this study. Beyrer is an American epidemiologist who has worked extensively on the question of AIDS for a number of years, particularly in Southeast Asia. The science of epidemiology is concerned to track and understand the behaviour of an epidemic - in this case HIV/AIDS. However, as disease affects human beings, to understand how best to prevent its spread it is necessary to draw together, not only the available medical and scientific knowledge, but to site that knowledge against a background of history, sociology, psychology, politics and economics. Beyrer's work is an instance par excellence of 59 what I believe to be one of the primary responsibilities of an academic - to make the fruits of their research available to those most in need of it. That audience of need is both a general audience concerned to understand what Professor Malcolm Gillies, President of the National Academies Forum, has described as 'one of the greatest but slowest moving calamities in human history' (http://www.naf.org.au/gillies2.rtf as well as other health professionals, sociologists and economists. Yet, as Beyrer notes 'All the New York Times stories in the world are worth less to a practicing scientist than one lead paper in the New England Journal of Medicine' (1998,p.183). Beyrer's work has been very valuable to this study - not only because it shone light on the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Australia's near neighbours - but because it was like reading a phenomenological study where the questions and puzzles that emerged during his research were clearly stated as well as the thinking through of all the disparate elements needed to understand them, Epidemiology, it appears, shares many of the features of phenomenology in that it depends upon a tactful and nuanced appreciation of the intimate details of human experience and behaviour which explain, for example, why the cultural norms of some remote northern Thai farming communities meant that they had a much higher incidence of infection than similar communities in the southern part of the country. It was daughters, not sons, who were expected to financially support their families in need - which often meant their having to leave their communities to work in the sex trade - and returning HIV infected.
In phenomenology one is encouraged always to keep returning to the central question of the study - a deeper and deeper awareness and understanding of the phenomenon under examination. This, in my study, is the phenomenon of creating as a visual artist. In a conventional academic endeavour one would first go to others who have conducted similar explorations - except that few artists have written about their practice (at least in any sustained and systematic way) and fewer still have written from within an academic framework (Hunter 1999; Asker 2001). Apparent exceptions to these assertions - artists' diaries, interviews with artists and annotated catalogue essays, for example, will be dealt with more fully later in this Chapter. The point of the observation is to highlight how difficult it is to find artists critically reflecting on their practice when that reflection is not mediated through the work of 60 others - art critics, curators, journalists and so on. One question that immediately comes to mind is why does this situation exist? On a purely pragmatic level I can now understand why. Artists generally cannot write and paint at the same time which invariably means, for example, that an exhibiting schedule must largely be 'put on hold' for the duration of the study or, at the very least, take a different form. Second, it could be noted that research within creative practice is comparatively new within an academic milieu. A more pertinent reason, I believe, might lie in the personal nature of the study. There has been a perception in human science research that personal experience is just that - personal - and has no great wider relevance - as evidenced by a pejorative attitude toward 'the anecdotal' (Midgley 1989). This perception, however, contradicts the reality that any 'society' or 'community' is not an entity that exists - it is a convenient name by which to categorize a number of singular and unique individuals who may (or may not) share some common values but do share a common humanity. While each individual's experience is uniquely theirs (shaped as it is by a myriad of different factors) it must be said that to be human is to have the capacity to feel joy, to feel pain, to suffer and so on and, for that reason alone, we can derive benefit and can learn from the personal experiences of others (van Manen 1990). Where ever the reasons for the lack of artists researching their own experience may lie, the question remains 'Where does one look for assistance in understanding one's own creative practice?' Not from within the more traditional academic avenues because, generally, academic writers have felt obliged to 'hide' themselves in their work (Dudley-Marling 1996).
There have been a few pivotal works that have been of immense benefit to my study - Ruth Wajnryb's The Silence: how tragedy shapes talk (2001) Inga Clendinnen's reading the Holocaust (1998) and Gail Bell's Shot. A personal response to guns and trauma (2003). One common thread that unites these three works is the quality of their thinking - clear, rigorously analytical and wide- ranging - and they are instances of beautifully crafted writing. Second, their own personal experience was the impetus for their research and the authority of that personal experience is not only kept visible throughout their work but provides a benchmark against which to judge their findings.
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Given the paucity of published work by artists reflecting on their own experience, one of the most valuable resources for this study has been ABC Radio National. Radio National's various programs, notably Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM, have been invaluable in airing in depth interviews with a range of artists and thinkers whose voices would not normally be heard, or only discovered with the greatest difficulty - and the ABC Transcript Service also provides a hard copy of many of them. Radio has played a critical role in my life from when I was a child to the present day. As Margaret Throsby remarked recently one of the great values of radio is its intimacy - its 'one to one' - where not only does the guest feel they have the interviewer's undivided attention but we, as listeners, feel as though they are speaking to us alone.
One of the frustrations of research is that one's specific questions are frequently not the ones that are asked by an interviewer - or not thought relevant and pertinent by an author. Murray Griffin, an Australian war artist imprisoned in Changi during World War 11 was interviewed at great length by Barbara Blackman for the National Library of Australia Oral History Collection in 1986 (Griffin 1986). As explained in Chapter 7e, Contemplation and Solitude, I longed to know why Griffin, after his return from Changi in 1946, had painted his figures nude in one particular painting. When the Oral History tapes arrived from Canberra I was disappointed to find Griffin spoke very little about his return from captivity - but endlessly about his abiding interest in theosophy and a 'super sensitive world'.
Artists, Plagues, Wars and Epidemics
As my study concerns an exploration of my experiences of AIDS and the after effects of war the paucity in some areas of the literature is of more serious concern. As discussed earlier I was arrested by Larry Kramer's accusation (directed at his fellow writers) that they, as writers, had abrogated their responsibility to witness to their own times (in Bull Ed.2003, p.xv). I believe the same accusation could be leveled at other contemporary artists as well. Apart from 'genius.. exceptions' such as Francisco Goya y Lucientes with respect to the Inquisition and the Spanish Civil War (Hughes 2003,p.7) it is difficult to piece together how artists would have 62 responded (if they did) to catastrophic plagues and epidemics (such as the Black Plague of the seventeenth century and the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918-1919) at the time they were emerging. In 1918, during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, New Zealand sent a boat to Western Samoa with some of those on board 'having a few sniffles' - two weeks later some 20% of the Samoan population were dead. The speed with which the epidemic affected the local population meant that many of the dead were buried in communal graves in contravention of the Samoan custom to have graves situated at the front of their homes. When I asked a local Samoan how this event had influenced the later practice of Samoan artists, he replied 'It hasn't. There has not been time and awareness' (Percival pers.comm.2002). When I asked a tertiary educated New Zealander the same question he replied that he was not aware of the historical incident 'I've never heard about it' (Bell pers.comm.2002).
Hollis Clayson (2002) in Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege 1870 - 71 has identified some long lasting effects of the Prussian siege of Paris in the work of Modernist artists, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet. All three were forced by the circumstances of the war to leave their studios and be part of a society where 'the everyday life' (of women in food queues, going to war from home, displacement from their studios and so on) had broken down some of the barriers of class and ruptured the distinctions between the private and the political (ibid.p.24). While, for Manet for instance 'the exploration of plein-airism in the 1870's continued the inadvertent breakthrough of his work outdoors in the winter of 1870' (ibid.p.363) for others:
There is, in fact, a gulf between instances of wartime perspectives persisting in peacetime careers, and the countervailing and more numerous examples of artists who dropped new habits or simply allowed them to wither away once the circumstantial urgencies and frustrations receded (ibid.p.363).
From a review of the available literature, it would appear that Australian artists' experience of war would conform to this pattern of some being profoundly affected and the rest returning to normalcy.
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There is, however, a more profound question that remains to be addressed as Gillian Russell (quoted in the above work) explains. I shall include this lengthy quotation because a similar situation appears to pertain in Australian research:
The neglect of the subject of war by both literary studies and, to a lesser extent, social history can be partly explained by the view of military history as the (predominantly male) preserve of militarists - ex-brigadiers in tweed jackets or graduates of West Point and Vietnam. However misconceived and prejudicial, this identification represents an invisible barrier, ensuring that military history has remained unaffected by the interdisciplinary change sweeping the humanities as a whole in recent years. It has also allowed literary studies and social history to be incurious about the subject of war, as if by approaching it one was somehow politically compromised (in The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793 - 1815 [1995.pp.2- 3]). McCormack and Nelson (1993) have highlighted the fact that there has still not been any sustained academic study of the impact of the POW experience on the Australian identity. Research (and personal memoirs) has largely concentrated, as Russell (in Hollis 2002) has noted on the very 'masculine' areas of interest 'guns, tanks, aeroplanes and battles' - and in the case of POW's graphic and detailed accounts of their imprisonment. This is so even in very recent publications dealing with experience of the Vietnam War, and even with the Second World War. The primary focus has been concerned with reliving the experience of some 30 or 60 years ago with, perhaps, a few pages or paragraphs dealing with their present situation and how they lived after their return (Lomax 1995; Peek 2003). Such works speak volumes about the trauma of war in that the authors are able to recount their experiences in such faithful detail after so many years, but their truncated stories shed little light on how their traumatic experiences have altered the tapestry of our contemporary society.
The earlier section discussing Trauma suggests that 'hidden and silenced' suffering (arising from the after effects of war and AIDS amongst other causes) is widespread in Australian contemporary society - so much so that it has become 'normal' and un- 64 remarked. There is, however, a further issue that is rarely mentioned in the literature - an enjoyment of war as described by war correspondent John Hinde in an interview with Tim Bowden (1991):
And also people think - I don't know about Vietnam - but people think that war is very terrible and so on, but an awful lot of people enjoy it, and I think we need to remember that. An awful lot of people love it, and miss it when they don't have it. Think I missed it myself.
This truth might account for some of the hidden trauma of war's aftermath - in that 'loving war' is not an emotion most would find acceptable (unless it refers to the value of male mateship) and would thus not be spoken much less written. More tellingly as far as a caring Australian society is concerned is Hinde's later accusation:
(soldiers) may have been the most proficient killing machine that his country ever produced. He was probably going to be the worst bloody civilian because no one was going to do the training and that was one of the things that I always said - that I was never detrained.
Probably the civilians didn't appreciate that need perhaps - the ones that had been in Australia all the time didn't realize how different you'd become (Bowden)
That's right, that's right. Well we had to stop killing, you know. That took a hell of a lot - found it very difficult not to kill a man when he got angry with him….they had troubles hanging on and so much so that they began to think that they were cowards - just trying to be a decent man again.
In her exploration of the 'short and long-term effects of being shot' Gail Bell (2003,p.222) spoke about 'reaching a flailing hand towards the solid shores of High Art' for understanding and assistance. 'Where', she asks, 'was the literature, the paintings, the music?' but her 'grip never quite held' and she was obliged to return to 'the press of urban housing and the wide open spaces where silences seem to invite 65 the explosive force of gunpowder' - that is to her own experience of being shot in a suburban street and the 'ordinary' people from whence murderers and assailants also come. But the question still remains - if art is supposed to be a witness to our time, if it is supposed to be something that assists the members of a society to make sense of their experiences - why has it failed so badly to assist women like Gail Bell - and, in some respects, researchers and artists such as myself?
There is a paradox, a disjunction, and, perhaps, a refusal of Clendinnen's 'imaginative engagement' (1998) alluded to by Fr Frank Brennan in an interview with Margaret Throsby (ABC Radio National 31 October, 2003) when discussing some Australians' attitude towards those seeking asylum. 'We "know" about notions of "queues" and "queue jumpers" because "queues" come within our own immediate experience. We have less experience, however, (because of our relative isolation and history of security at home) of situations where one might need to seek asylum'. Yet, that observation does not make complete sense because Australia is built on migration and those migrants (especially the post Second World War generation) were largely made up of those fleeing devastation, persecution and war in Europe and more recently from South East Asia after the Vietnam War. Their stories, have perhaps, been 'silenced' in the same way as those of our POW's and ex-servicemen and women - and, perhaps, we do not ask for them.
Artists and War.
Artists dealing with the subject of war can be roughly categorized into three groups. First, participants whose main purpose of their art making could be described as 'telling it as it was'. The second, witnesses and survivors, who may share some of the above motivation but also the desire to tell 'so that it will not happen again' and the third category are 'indirectly affected'. Descendants (though somewhat different) and others for whom the impact of exposure to images and stories has been so strong that they feel a need to react to them in their art would form part of the third category (Amishai-Maisels in Bohm-Duchen 1995,p.4). Ziva Amishai-Maisels is the leading scholar in the field of art and the Holocaust. Her major work is Depiction and Interpretation. The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts 1993. Amishai- 66
Maisels is also a major contributor to After Auschwitz. Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art, edited by Monica Bohm-Duchen 1995.
There are a number of themes which emerge from Australian participation in World War I, II, Korea and Vietnam that resemble the experience of unrelenting death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. What has been of great interest is the number of works that have been published in the last five to ten years dealing with World War I, II and Vietnam. For example, Wajnryb (2001) Carthew (2002) McKernan (2001) Lebert (2002) Lomax (1995). However, save for Wajnryb's work (and to some extent Lomax), none deal extensively with the after effects of war - how people were able to live with and in spite of the memories that they carried. Jennifer McDuff, whose husband served in Vietnam, has a theory that it takes 50 years for a personal experience to enter normal contemporary life. Ten years for the individual to come to some sort of terms with their experience, another ten years when it is shared within the family circle, another ten years when it moves into a wider circle of friends and so on until it becomes readily available to the wider community in libraries and State galleries. (McDuff pers.comm. 2000) When McDuff was outlining her theory to me I can remember saying 'I cannot wait that long' (meaning 50 years). During the course of this study I have come to acknowledge that my own experience of going back to some traumatic and painful experiences fits almost exactly into McDuff's time frame.
When I visited the Australian War Museum in 1999 a curator of the Vietnam Collection, said that it was perhaps too early for some 'down the track' works to come into their public collection. They were still in 'private' hands. Perhaps the same situation exists with works that deal with the after effects of AIDS as Malcolm Gillies of the National Academies Forum reflects during Every Eight Seconds: AIDS Revisited (29-30 November 2000):
When human beings find themselves in troubled times, they often pretend they aren't there, and afterwards even write the events out of their histories. The influenza outbreak of 1890-91 appears to have killed more people than any other outbreak of disease in the nineteenth century, but you will find 67
scant mention of it in our history texts. The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 probably only gains mention in our histories because of the peculiar fact that it carried off more people than did the First World War (http://www.naf.org.au/gillies2.rtf 14 November, 2003)
It would probably be safe to suggest that it was only during the 40th Anniversary celebrations of Samoan Independence in 2002 that many New Zealanders learnt that one of their ships carried the Spanish Influenza virus to Western Samoa with the devastating effects already discussed earlier in this section. The situation with respect to both war and AIDS would appear to support McDuff’s theory of stages within a fifty year span. However while a significant number of works may not have reached permanent collections in the War Memorial they have been collected into a major traveling exhibition Viet Nam Voices. Australians & the Vietnam War curated by Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (2000). Joanna Mendelssohn (in Lucas and Gouriotis 2000,p.36) (whose father was a Rat of Tobruk) remarks in her catalogue essay:
one of the problems facing those who survived the war and its aftermath has been a collective loss of memory. In the early 1970's, after the end of conscription and the departure of our troops from an embarrassing failure, mainstream Australia could not face its own soldiers
That 'inability to face' the legacy of the Vietnam War might still be said to exist. Given the current position of Australia with regard to the war with Iraq (and its deployment of peacekeepers to several trouble spots throughout the world) it is worthy of comment and reflection that when Viet Nam Voices was exhibited at the Queensland Museum in 2002, there were no reviews or commentary of the exhibition in any of the newspapers. It could be further suggested that a 're-visioning of history' does not only apply to our relationship with our Aboriginal heritage. McKernan's (2001) work dealing with the pain of returning POW's from Changi and the Burma- Thailand Railway is permeated with a perceived or attributed theme of 'guilt and shame' said to be felt by those soldiers who had surrendered and had become prisoners of war. Whilst such emotions may well have been felt by some, 'guilt and 68 shame' are two things that I had never read or heard spoken of in relation to my father's experience of being a POW. Yet, at a Seminar hosted by the State Library of Queensland in 2002 on 'Writing War Memories', in response to a question concerning the paucity of research dealing with the after effects of war service, a historian from University of Queensland responded in exactly those terms.
There is a huge wealth of stories – and art works – by prisoners of war, by servicemen and women and by war artists. There is, however, as already discussed, a paucity of information about how those experiences have shaped their life and work in later years. What has emerged in my research as of equal significance to the content of those experiences (unrelenting death, fear, grief and suffering) is the lack of language and opportunity to speak of them 'down the track'. As already mentioned, McCormack and Nelson (1993, p.23) point out that there has been little academic research which might 'generalize about (the experience of POWs) and show how those individual experiences have influenced Australian’s images of themselves and the way they see others.' The significance of individual stories has not yet influenced analysis of Australian identity. One study specifically dealing with the pain of returning POWs stopped in the 1950’s (McKernan 2001). A number of reasons have been put forward for this. Dunlop (1995) avoided publishing his war diaries for some 40 years because he felt they 'may cause more pain for POWs and their families'. Concerning the Vietnam War, however, as Mendelssohn (ibid.p.32) has explained:
Some of the most moving art made in response to the war has not been seen until recently. These are works by maverick artists, those outside the formal and informal networks of art schools and commercial galleries. Of these, some of the most remarkable works are by men who found themselves to be in Vietnam, to kill or be killed….George Bostock …and Ray Beattie's art is an attempt to grapple with the difference between experienced reality and manipulated image.
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Art and Descendants
When there has been so little research concerning POW experience and how that has influenced notions of Australian identity it is perhaps not surprising that there has been equally little research into how descendants of those POW's have been affected by their parent's experience. Eric Lomax, an exPOW of the Burma Railway reflects with some poignancy in his memoir published in 1995:
I began to worry, a little later, that the sins my captors had sown in me were being harvested in my family in more ways than one. Among Far Eastern ex- prisoners-of-war there is a rumbling of belief that our children are damaged, in some way genetically harmed. It seems to us, when we get together now as older men, that we have bequeathed some strange problems to our children. It is interesting that some American scientists suggest that the notorious 'middle passage' of the slave trade may have caused intolerable genetic stresses which damaged the immediate descendants of slaves. I don't know whether it is good science, but we murmur these things among ourselves, caught between rumour and doubt. Who knows, too, what effects our suppressed feelings may have had on the psychic development of our children? (ibid. pp.222-223)
Much of the traumatic consequences of war service can be found 'hidden' in the medical literature. As already mentioned, this study seeks to avoid viewing lived experience through the lens of medicalization and therapy for several reasons. The first, and main reason is philosophical in that I believe the prevalence of trauma is as much a question for the culture of a society (and its artists) as it is for the health professions. If, as I believe, much of the trauma is a natural and normal response to horrific experiences, it essentially adds little to have those responses categorized as 'Personality disorders' 'Manic Depression' and so on. As one ex-Vietnam veteran friend said to me during one of his periods of hospitalization and of his fellow patients:
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Listen, mate, one A4 page would do the lot of us. All infantry, all the same age, all with the same history of marriage break-ups, the same history of family troubles. Yeah, mate, one A4 page is all it needs (Schmidt pers.comm. c.1994) For these reasons I made the decision not to do extensive research in the medical literature but to glean its presence in the literature reviewed in this section and elsewhere in the study.
Reviewing related literature in a phenomenological research project also constitutes part of 'the doing' of the research. This is more obviously apparent with some works than with others. One of the unresolved questions with which I came to this study was whether it was right to paint a hideous sore on the leg of a dying friend that, for a fleeting moment, I had seen as beautiful and had wanted to paint it. Most artists are aware, consciously or subconsciously, of the dangers in making art out of human suffering - as Sartre has it 'betray [ing] the anger or grief of man for Beauty' (in Bohm-Duchen 1995, p.49) However, in spite of this, as Amishai-Maisels (1995, p.49) has pointed out, artists persist in reacting to catastrophic events in their art making.
Phenomenological research seeks to uncover the essential elements of lived experience - of which the creation of 'response works' would count as one such example of a lived experience. In the same way that a portrait is sometimes said to be a self-portrait, inevitably such works might also reveal the full range of human strengths and frailties - disciplined compassion to banal kitsch - however well intentioned. (Bohm-Duchen 1995) The task, as with phenomenological research, is to strike a fine line between the 'blunt instrument' the subject matter might deserve and creating a work that, while it might shock, does not definitively repel viewers. Lawrence Langer introducing the translation of Charlotte Delbo's trilogy Auschwitz and After (1995) speaks of her work as 'a literature of conscience' but to 'bring the world (of the concentration camps) back requires a great deal of restraint'. Delbo 'in order to bear and bare the unbearable..struggled to render her style unobtrusive, almost transparent' (ibid. p.vii) and it is this acute 'bare boned' observation that has provided some of the most heart wrenching descriptions of the realities of the camps 71 that I have read. In None of Us Will Return (ibid.p.6) Delbo writes of the miscellaneous composition of those arriving at the railway station of Auschwitz:
there are married couples who stepped out of the synagogue the bride all in white wrapped in her veil wrinkled from having slept on the floor of the cattle car The bridegroom in black wearing a top hat his gloves soiled parents and guests, women holding pearl-embroidered handbags all of them regretting they could not have stopped home to change into something less dainty
War Artists
Australia has a long tradition of artists covering most conflicts from before World War 1 although the first official war artist was not appointed until after Gallipoli (Churcher 2004,p.4) and there are some differing understandings of what ' War art' is. Laura Brandon, the curator of war art at the Canadian War Museum puts forward this view:
What war art does for people is that it makes them understand in a way that no other medium does. The words don't do it, the photographs don't do it, the artifacts don't do it. What the artist can do which nobody else can is find the essence of the experience, and in a universal way, translate that understanding into paint which can in turn be understood by the viewer. That’s what the best war art can do. It can make people understand what war is about and what people experience (in Ditessa n.d.p.8)
Elena Taylor, a curator at the Australian War Memorial sees war art as `synthesising experience and providing more than just a recording - a chance to talk about other things that only artists can talk about'. (ibid.p.15). Whilst I am in broad agreement with both curators concerning the potential of art to enable a different understanding of the meaning of experience, many of Brandon's assertions - about the place of photography, for instance, are contradicted by both my own experience and that of 72 other artists. It was a photograph by Henri Huet US Marine Corp chaplain John Monamara of Boston administers the last rites to war correspondent Dickey Chapelle (in Faas & Page 1997) that prompted a series of works that were exhibited as part of the exhibition Down The Track - The After Effects of AIDS and War in 1999. It was a photograph in a newspaper that was the catalyst for my traveling to Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2000, and Joy Hester's work was influenced by a newsreel of the concentration camps in Europe for a significant number of years (Burke Ed.2001). It could also be said that 'words' are some of the most effective and enduring modes of expression in conveying an experience of war - witnessed by the fact, amongst many examples, that the poetry of World War 1 has entered the classical canons of contemporary literature.
In public collections (and in published work) the work of the Australian war artists does not reveal the impact that their service has had on them (or how it might have influenced their subsequent art practice) after the conflict had finished. However, some material is contained in unpublished manuscripts and collection notes held by institutions such as Australian War Memorial in Canberra where unfortunately much is subject to a 30 year embargo under the Archives Act still current at the time when I was conducting my research (van Dyk pers.comm. 2003).
The collections of major public institutions like the Australian War Memorial do not just happen. They are the result of deliberate choices (or perhaps compromises) made by individuals or groups of individuals that reflect their view of art at the time of the commissioning of the war artist or the acquisition of their work. Mendelssohn's (ibid.p.34) critique of the work of the war artists appointed to cover the Vietnam War, Bruce Fletcher and Ken McFadyen, was that it was a 'banal reportage of a bloodless war….They both quote to excess the style and composition of the official artists from World War 1, but without the passion that drove Will Dyson as he recorded the first mass killing of Australian fighting men.'
Whether their work was 'banal' and 'bloodless' still does not answer the question of how they experienced their service. Fletcher, for example, when I spoke with him in 1999, was still extremely bitter about the costs of his service that had rendered him a 73
TPI. He felt he had been betrayed by both the Army and by his University colleagues who called him 'a murderer' on his return. 'Bugger the Army. Bugger the University. Bugger Australia' was his evaluation of his experience as a war artist and he now spends much of his time in Bali (Fletcher pers.comm.1999).
For the Gulf War in 1991, the Australian War Memorial decided not to appoint an official war artist but to invite selected artists (Andrew Sibley, Peter Booth, Jan Senbergs and Mandy Martin among them) to respond to the war. (Gray 1993, p.208) Kevin Connor was unusual in the selected artists in that he actually visited Iraq in 1991 and saw not only the results of the bombing but also the effects of the post-war rebellion. As Gray (ibid.p.215) remarks 'among the most moving of Connor's images are the ones of the war victims…. (his) drawings are intensely personal, and they suggest that he found the experience overwhelming at times'. Attempts to ascertain the continuing effect of that experience on Connor have met with little success.
Artists and the Holocaust
As the daughter of an ex POW of the Burma Railway and an ex service woman I fit the category of a 'descendant'. As does Ruth Wajnryb (the daughter of survivors of the Holocaust) whose study The Silence. How tragedy shapes talk (2001) has been very influential in my research because her experience growing up with 'the silences' surrounding the Holocaust were similar to mine concerning 'the Railway'.
The literature concerned with the Holocaust and art is some of the most accessible examining the links between trauma, war and the arts. While it cannot be said that the Holocaust is akin to AIDS, nor, in some respects to my parents experiences of their War, there are certain texts that throw valuable light on the ways in which visual artists grapple with the 'unimaginable'. Research into a Japanese response to their war heritage is much more problematic than that of the German one to their history (Cook et al.1992). With some exceptions, Katsushige Nakahashi, for example in The Third Asia Pacific Triennial (Osaka 1999)in general, it could be said that the Japanese response has concentrated on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its terrible aftermath rather than Japanese behaviour during World War 11 - and in 74 particular in the building of the Burma/Thailand Railway and the treatment of prisoners of war. Buruma (1995,p.295) has remarked:
There is something intensely irritating about the infantilism of post-war Japanese culture…. Japan seems at times not so much a nation of twelve year olds, to repeat General MacArthur's phrase, as a nation of people longing to be twelve year olds or even younger, to be at that golden age when everything was secure and responsibility and conformity were not yet required
Any artist, however, can only respond to those experiences and events of which they are aware. As with the case of the Spanish Influenza epidemic in the history of Samoa and New Zealand (it is missing from their history books) a further complicating factor facing Japanese artists is a lack of history teaching in their educational institutions - schools and Universities (McCormack and Nelson 1993). When asked if historians would be part of a Japanese Peace Shrine when it became a proper war museum, Buruma (ibid.p.224) was told:
The thing is…as soon as you bring historians in, you run into problems, you get distortions. As a shrine, we must think of the feelings of the spirits and their families. We must keep them happy. That is why historians would cause problems. Take the so-called war of invasion, which was actually a war of survival. We wouldn't want families to feel that we are worshipping the spirits of men who fought a war of invasion.
Whilst the 'regression' and 'denial' alluded to by Buruma (ibid p.295) could also be understood as a response to their own traumatization by war and its aftermath, it is pertinent to ask 'Is the response of a Japanese artist to their country's history different to that of a German one?' (Lee Ed. 1998; Aoki and Dardess 1981; Bohm-Duchen 1995; Buruma 1995; Fussell 1975; Geczy 1996; Grimes 1985; Sandler 1996). Alexandra Munroe, Scream against the Sky in Japanese Art after 1945 (1994, p.215) has said:
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In the shadow of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, belief in the individual’s power to affect the drastic shame of history was slight.
Amishai-Maisels (1993) comments that many contemporary German artists have enough trouble confronting the Third Reich let alone the Holocaust. Here it might be appropriate to refer to the work of German artist, Anselm Kiefer, whose belief is that 'by destroying its Jewish population, Germany destroyed a part of itself''; and in symbolically reuniting the two in his work, attempts to right a terrible wrong (Bohm- Duchen 1995,p.134) However, as Bohm-Duchen goes on to say:
Many view Kiefer's preoccupation, not to say his fascination with the Nazi past as deeply and necessarily suspect. It is certainly true that his paintings do not readily reveal their meanings, that ultimately they retain a disturbing ambiguity. It is precisely this underlying tension that makes his work so interesting - the glamour and allure of Nazism
Whatever Kiefer's motives might ultimately reveal themselves to be, one must feel grateful for his work:
I need to know where I came out of. There was a tension between the immense things that happened and the immense forgetfulness…..In '69, when I began, no one dared talk about these things….what the German people ought to remember..was a terrible part of themselves - but not as terrible as pretending the events of the war were just history, never to be spoken of, better to be ignored' (in Madoff 1987,pp.127 - 128)
Most pertinently for phenomenological research is his orientation towards his work. 'He calls himself a storyteller. 'My thinking is vertical, and one of those levels was fascism. But I see all these levels….I tell stories in my pictures to show what's behind the story. I use perspective to draw the viewer in like a bee to the flower. But then I want the viewer to get by that, to go down through the sediment, so to speak, and get to the essence' (ibid.p.128). Even more honestly, Kiefer says:
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Am I a fascist? That's very important. You cannot answer so quickly. Authority, competition, superiority…these are facets of me like everyone else. You have to choose the right way. To say I'm one thing or another is too simple. I wanted to paint the experience and then answer (ibid.p.129).
Amishai-Maisels’ formidable work Depiction and Interpretation. The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (1993) already discussed, has been immensely valuable because 'only rarely have attempts been made to see to what extent the Holocaust – as a major historical event – influenced Western Art, and these attempts have been made only in passing, in the context of studies on the development of individual artists, modern Jewish art or on 'artistic resistance' to Fascism' (ibid.p.xxxi). Understandably this massive work focuses extensively on Jewish art and Jewish artist’s response to the Holocaust. Where it has been of great benefit is in Amishai-Maisels’ reflections on which artists have responded to the Holocaust, when they have responded and how artists grapple with terrible events and horrible memories:
…many artists, Jewish and Christian, were driven by an inner need to express their reaction to the attempted destruction of the Jewish people and the horrors of Nazi oppression. These artists came from various countries and backgrounds; some had witnessed the events, some had fled them, some had had no personal contact with the Holocaust. A few artists reacted to events as early as 1933…many reacted during the 1940’s and early 1950’s, and young artists continue to react to the shock of the Holocaust to this very day. Some artists reacted immediately; others repressed their emotions for years before responding. (ibid.p.xxxi)
Even more pertinent is this observation:
Those who survived the camps were often haunted by their memories and produced works depicting the Holocaust in an attempt to free themselves from their past or memorialize it. This is also true to some extent of the 77
children of survivors, who form an independent category that is still in the process of development. (ibid.p.xxxii)
As already quoted, Lyas (1997,p. 109) has said we 'need artists to articulate (these inchoate burdens). When that happens the pain of these things will not be eased, but the burden of the inchoate will be lifted by that expression'.
Not all artists' responses to the Holocaust might answer Lylas' need. The work of Judy Chicago is referred to here for several reasons. First, following Sullivan's schemata in Studio Art As Research Practice (2003,p.6) the artist exploring their own practice must also, at times, don the cap of art critic and historian - about their own work and that of others. At the same time it is well to remember Kuspit's (1996) observation that any critique of an art work in a 'post-modern' world is now, in essence, an educated 'gut feeling'. On the face of it Chicago has answered many of the questions posed to contemporary writers by Larry Kramer (2003) (and I would also include visual artists) in that she had addressed some major issues of contemporary times, in particular the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Rare amongst visual artists, Chicago has also written two autobiographies (1975;1996) and produced a major work The Holocaust Project (with accompanying book of the same name in1993) 'which seeks to 'honour' the memory of the Holocaust victims while examining the event in a way which demonstrates how much the Jewish experience can teach us all ' (quoted in Bohm- Duchen, ibid.p.130). Given the nature of this study, and the breadth of Chicago's work, it is as important to identify the reasons I did not find her work useful as it is to describe work that I have found valuable. At numerous points in The Holocaust Project, Chicago describes herself as being 'shocked' and 'frightened' by what she had painted and written. That was not a response evoked in me by either her writing nor by her visual images. Bohm-Duchen's critique of Chicago's work might explain the disjunction I felt between the stated aim and effect:
Her intentions are undoubtedly honourable…but the result is both intellectually and aesthetically naïve, guilty of gross over-simplification in its 78
conflation of disparate global issues….her images remain crude and over- explicit. (ibid.p.130)
Bohm- Duchen's critique does not go far enough in trying to explain why some works appear to have a truth that 'calls to us' and others do not. It seems that works of 'truth' (like a phenomenological text) carry a weight and resonance that changes the way we now look and 'see'. Anselm Kiefer's work, for example, seems to evoke a feeling (in me) that he is determined to plough and mine the very soil of his German heritage for the understanding he seeks. His landscapes resonate with a weighty humanity - and every time I now see a bale of straw or a piece of lead sheeting his paintings will be before my eyes. In the same way it will be difficult to forget the commonplace pathos of Delbo's human beings arriving at Auschwitz 'expect[ing] the worst - not the unthinkable' (1995, p.4) and wishing they had changed into something 'less dainty' (ibid.p.6).
Artists and AIDS
With respect to AIDS I am more in the nature of a witness. Sometimes I felt like a combatant - and much war imagery was employed during the early part of the epidemic in Australia (Goddard 2002) and has entered my work as such (Down the Track. The After Effect of War and AIDS 1999). As Goddard wrote in 1991(p.5):
Some of the best poems on AIDS were written decades or centuries before the virus. As Michael Kirby has found and demonstrated, the love, fear, guilt and loss we experience now and associate only with AIDS, is not so far from more universal reactions in times of crisis and disaster. Shakespeare, who did not know it, was writing about AIDS. So were the soldier poets of the First World War, because the sharp emotions of AIDS are also felt in war. Robert Nichol's Casualty defines survivor guilt more accurately than a dozen learned surveys by academic sociologists
That piece could well be written today about AIDS in Ethiopia, South Africa, New Guinea, Korea, India and Russia - indeed, most countries of the world apart from 79
Australia and other Western countries with adequate access to drugs and education programs. Now, however, in Australia, Goddard (pers.comm 2002) comments:
that piece could not be written….the whole AIDS response is running on empty.
Further, it could be said, the desire for the new is not confined to the purchase of the latest material goods. One of the organizers for an International Conference on AIDS held in Melbourne in 2002 said they had 'done' African art and were looking for something 'more Asian'.
However, those, such as myself, who lived through that particular time of the early AIDS epidemic still seek to understand their experience but some different reasons for the silences apparent in the literature exist. First, many of the artists with whom I worked in Sydney in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s are now dead. Second, as already mentioned, McDuff’s '50 year theory' might apply as much to experiences of AIDS as it does to war. Goddard, again writing in 2002 (ibid.), remarks:
The meaning that AIDS art had ten years ago has now gone. It will at some time develop another meaning, as we look past on a time that has changed (like a lot of old diggers on Anzac Day?) but my feeling is that the time hasn't come yet.
My natural impatience would wish that were not true - but I think it is. Like art, and this study, the meaning will emerge in time.
A third concern, as Gott (1994, p.2) pointed out in Don’t Leave Me this Way. Art in the Age of AIDS 'the strongest response to the impact of HIV/AIDS in Australia has come from artists who identify as gay or lesbian' - and exhibitions that are so curated would exclude my work. (Don't Leave Me this Way was not such an example). A similar lack of heterosexual writers has also been identified by David Pear (2000). That the strongest response to AIDS has come from gay artists reflects the Australian experience of the epidemic where, certainly initially, the majority of people who 80 were infected and who died were gay men. That demographic did not reflect, however, those 'affected' nor the composition of the health care and community support workers - the nurses, the social workers, Ankali volunteers and so on. The carers (in whatever roles) and friends were almost evenly divided between gay men and heterosexual women - and the absence of heterosexual men and lesbians was so marked that, at one stage when I was giving a paper on 'the Catholic Church's response to AIDS' in the late 1980's, I said 'if the Church was making any response at all it was a Church that was almost exclusively comprised of gay men and straight women'. Yet, apart from parents of men who died (Courtenay 1998) there has been few works by heterosexual women - Maria Pallotta-Chirarolli (c.1991) wrote of the illness and death of a colleague and friend and Ainslie Yardley and Kim Langley published a moving series of interviews with people who had made panels for the Australian and New Zealand AIDS Memorial Quilt Projects (1994) many of whom were not gay. Why has a heterosexual response to the impact of AIDS been so slow to emerge in the literature - or to be recognized might be more to the point? That is a question that applies to me and my work as I am one of the women who could have written more widely but have not until now ( a selected list of publications and papers given at conferences is included in Appendix 6). My response to myself is both partial and unsatisfactory. At the time I was so overwhelmed by the unrelenting death and loss that I was afraid to 'take the lid off' lest I would never stop crying and would be destroyed by the grief (Brown Ed.1992, pp.66-67). Second, there was, sometimes, a strident militarism in some gay activists who held the view that, if one was not gay, was not HIV Positive and did not have AIDS, one had no right to complain about grief, loss or anger. Last, as with so many war veterans, I think it is another case of having to wait for a 'right time' - even if it is McDuff's 50 years - and in the interim I painted and 'published' in that mode.
One of the great advantages of phenomenological description of lived experiences lies in the fact that it can vividly highlight the interplay between the intensely personal and the objective and universal. In reading and viewing the 'visible' art of an experience, gender and sexuality, for example, are 'there' but are also 'not there'. Silence and Invisible, an exquisitely intricate and detailed Chinese wedding gown by Chinese Australian artist, Greg Leong (Umbrella Gallery, Townsville 2001) displays 81 such conjunction - and disjunction. Pure and achingly beautiful, the text stenciled into the fabric of the gown demands we listen to the soul of the artist (who is also us) not judge the geography of their situation:
When my partner died I became invisible to his family and so they could not see my grief. My veil became my shroud. The bridal white of his European tradition became my widow’s weeds for white is our colour of mourning.
In spite of the 'Ah, yes' of recognition, no one individual’s experience is identical with another. Grief and suffering are universal political concerns in that they go to the heart of the health and well being of the body politic. However, as discussed above, those elements are complicated in many artistic responses to AIDS by other political concerns dealing with sexuality and identity (Gott 1994,2002; Shernoff 1992; Duffin 2002; Goddard 1991; Chapman 1995).
Opening William Yang’s (1996) work Sadness during the course of my research I was confronted by photographs of my 'student artists' from the Day Centre in Sydney all of whom are now dead. It was akin to an unexpected reminder that Shernoff (2001) experienced in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre tragedy when, going about his everyday business, he was confronted by the gaps left by individuals who 'had gone missing' – just like with AIDS. Shernoff titled his piece 'Once Again, We All Have a Lot of Grieving to Do'. It is a situation that is played out in so many countries where colleagues are there one day and not the next. 'Gone home sick'. Then 'Gone home to their village', and then, 'a photograph and an obituary in the newspaper' is how one friend described their work place in Nairobi, Kenya (Toye pers.comm.2002)
Artists and the Experience of Art Making
Asker (1997, p.19) tells of doing a MA at University of Melbourne by dissertation but 'when it came to locating information about the practice of Australian contemporary dance artists it was 'the artist’s personal experience, insights and detail that somehow was often missing or hard to find'. So it has been with me and my 82 research. Practising artists frequently do not have the 'right' time to write consistently (or at all) for publication - because our visual works are our 'publications'. Fortunately, as discussed above, interviews are in a different category and Internet sources and the electronic library of ABC Radio National has been an enormously valuable resource for reflections on lived experience. One of the critical differences between being interviewed and conducting a phenomenological study of one's own practice is that, in an interview, we are responding to questions formulated by another whereas in a study such as this we have to identify exactly what are the questions - and then try and formulate a satisfactory response. This aspect is dealt with more fully in Chapter 5, Significance of the Study and Its Relationship to Published works in the Same Field.
Phenomenological Research
This study is a phenomenology, which, as has been discussed elsewhere, is a philosophy. The work of Midgley (2001,1989) eloquently describes the nature of a philosophical inquiry and what it demands of a researcher. Clear, precise thinking with its expression in everyday language and validated by reference to everyday experiences - 'the business of conceptual analysis and conceptual plumbing has to start from an understanding of the systems forged in everyday experience' (1989, p.59). In the field of phenomenological research Canadian Max van Manen (1984,1990,1999) is one of its most renown exponents and practitioners. It is not difficult to see why as his emphasis is on 'doing' research (with a clear appreciation of its complex philosophical foundations) for a 'moral purpose' - a deeper understanding and awareness of any practice enables us to act 'better' within our complex web of relationships. Much recent research in the human sciences owes a debt to his influence (Munhall 1994; Madjar et al. 1999; Cohen et al. 2000). This is partly because, as Crotty (1996), points out, phenomenology’s focus on lived experience is seen as a way of bringing 'the lived experience of a person' into human science research. Crotty critiques some phenomenological studies in their failure to comprehend the full dimensions of philosophical rigour demanded. Such research could be said to rest in a 'cognitive' and descriptive mode rather than fully mining the 'non-cognitive' meanings of any particular experience (van Manen 1996). 83
Artists, Aesthetics and Ethics
Van Manen’s approach to phenomenological research has been very useful for this program of study because his writings reflect an emphasis on practice as distinct from some writers whose work is more theoretical and formal. I came to this study with questions that had been perplexing me for years - one of which was 'Is it right to paint a hideous sore on the leg of a dying friend?' To a certain extent there was a need to address this question before others could be resolved. Furthermore, literature that proved unhelpful at the beginning of my research became more pertinent at a later stage – a fact that illustrates research as organic rather than linear and static (Barritt et al.1992). For example, I had thought that the field of philosophical aesthetics and ethics would prove most helpful. This has not proven to be so, for example, Aesthetics and ethics: essays at the intersection, edited by Jerrold Levinson (2001) have been 'too formal' and theoretical to be of assistance in dealing with the ramifications of lived experience. In a similar fashion many of the more theoretical philosophical approaches to methodology (Hammond et al.1991) were not useful in the initial stages of the research program. A theoretical investigation of the terms 'intentional object' or 'scientific realism' is not going to help determine if it ethical to paint a sore. My enduring dilemma about painting a sore sprang from a time some years ago when a great friend of mine was dying of AIDS in the Hospice in Sydney. He had a huge Karposi sore on his leg. Looking at it one day I realized I was thinking how beautiful it was - like ripples at the edge of the sea – and I would like to paint it. My desire to paint a hideous sore caused some consternation not the least with myself. I tried to paint it then. I tried to do some fabric collages. None seemed to work. Later in the study I realized that, perhaps my initial thought (that some things ought to only be painted through the lens of landscape) might still be the right one - for me.
However, that puzzling and worrying was the beginning of my search through the literature for some form of answer to that question. Some insight (and comfort) was derived from a story concerning the death of Claude Monet’s wife, Camille, found in several sources (Lallemand 1994; Heinrich 2000): 84
One day, Clemenceau recalled his friend Monet confiding, 'I found myself at daybreak at the bedside of a dead woman who had been and always will be dear to me. My gaze was fixed on her tragic temples, and I caught myself observing the shades and nuances of colour Death brought to her countenance. Blues, yellows, greys. I don’t know what. That is the state I was in. The wish came upon me, quite naturally, to record the image of her who was departing from us for ever. But before it occurred to me to draw those features I knew so well, I was first and foremost devastated, organically, automatically, by the colours. Against my will, my reflexes took possession of me in an unconscious process, as the everyday course of my life took over. Like a draught animal working at the millstone. Pity me, my friend'
When I first read that story I needed to understand what impact that experience had had on Monet in his subsequent work and I remembered Rilke’s wisdom concerning memories. 'It is not enough to have memories. They must turn to blood within us so that they cannot be distinguished from us' before they 'fertilize' our creations (in van Manen 1990.p.114; Beckmann in Buenger1997). Monet's story had provided some understanding but there was a further stage I had not yet reached although there was some comfort in the recognition that I was not the only artist asking such questions. It was only in reviewing the work of Max Beckmann (ibid.p.162) that an additional understanding came. At one stage in his Letters he wrote:
Since my fresco is also progressing….today I again have something of a feeling of satisfaction that the time is not totally wasted. Grit your teeth and carry on, through the war and through life. The two are not really so different. Today as I walked among the bare trees of springtime, the wind blew as it does near the ocean, and I even felt the way I did sometimes during the loneliest times, absolutely alone and close to nature
I came to a deeper insight into painting 'horrible things' in general (the wounds of war, sores or wards of men with AIDS). Even that, however, was not the whole of 85 what I gained from reading his wartime letters. In phenomenological description questions of judgment are suspended because they belong to a later stage of categorization. From reading Beckmann I came to the realization that there is no difference between war and other times of our lives - they are just different (perhaps, and obviously, more difficult) moments of one continuous being. Looking from that different perspective I could finally understand Andrew Carter's point that one should not hate the AIDS virus because it was merely doing what an AIDS virus had to do - trying to survive. It then follows that an artist cannot suspend being an artist simply because the circumstances might later be described as extreme or abnormal or horrible. The skin of an artist is always there - which is both a benediction and an affliction. Recently I was listening to an interview with the Laurie Anderson, artist in residence for NASA. She was asked 'How do you, how does an artist, cope with a tragedy like the Columbia disaster?' ' Just like anyone else', she replied 'You have to bring it into your world, yourself, your work or else you're always mourning the past' (ABC Radio National, The Music Show, 15 February, 2003)
In constructing this review I seek not only to identify the major relevant works but also to describe the experience of researching. In a very real sense the review cannot be cut out and placed in a separate section because it is part and parcel of the whole work of a phenomenological study.
Artists and Autobiography
My study is concerned with how artists 'make sense' of their lived experience. In this regard, as previously mentioned, a Conference held at Deakin University Double Dialogues: Conference with a Difference 1996 has been very helpful as it focused specifically on practising artists using phenomenology to research their lived experience (McCulloch 1997). Walker reflected on the interplay between research (reading) and the creation of images, Asker discussed 'the call to say something' and 'what answering that call might entail' and De Laruelle explored the different modes of thinking employed in art making and theorizing (all in McCulloch 1997).
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As a consequence of a widespread belief that 'any intrusion of everyday language is seen as a pollution and a danger' (Midgley 1989, p.50) and personal experience should be divorced from intellectual life, I was increasingly drawn into agreement with Ker Conway (1998) and Hawke (1996) when they assert that autobiography is one of the richest fields for the artist/researcher. At the beginning of this study I would have tended to agree more with Ker Conway (1998, p.17) when she asserted that:
the language of complex specialization has shut out the non-specialist, and makes it nearly impossible for such a person to draw on these modern disciplines (of history, psychology, literary criticism and philosophy) for the scrutiny of his or her own life'
That criticism might still hold true of much academic writing but it seems that a groundswell of change is starting to happen and academic writers are publishing in a language that is accessible to a general reader. In phenomenology this access to cross-disciplinary writing is critical because, as this study has demonstrated, to understand our own lived experience we also have to understand how it has been shaped by history, by our psychology, by economics, science and so on. I owe a great debt to a number of contemporary writers whose work has made a number of specialized areas accessible - as a representative sample, Clendinnen (1998) in history; Midgley (1989) in philosophy; Beyrer (1998) in epidemiology and some aspects of medical science; Pollan (2001) for an inspiringly new way of understanding botany, evolution and pleasure; Florman 1994 for again speaking about the notion of pleasure - and engineering; and Wajnryb (2001) for drawing together sociology, psychology, history and personal experience.
One of the joys of phenomenological research is the fact that there are no 'text books'. This same reason also accounts for the need for extensive and painstaking research where one work might yield a phrase, another a paragraph, another a 'world view' with which to read between the lines of text. It is for these 'snippets' and occasional gems that autobiographies - Judy Chicago (1975,1996) Paul Cox (1998), diaries - John Olsen (1997) Donald Friend (2002) Judy Cassab (1995), biographies - 87
Albert Tucker (Burke 2002) Stella Bowen (Lowe et al.1999) Frida Kahlo (Herrera 1992) Rainer Maria Rilke (Freedman 1996), and letters - Hester and Reed (Burke Ed.2001) can give a greater understanding of the complexities of artistic practice than many of the 'art books' which focus more on descriptions of finished work than the experiences of the artist in their construction. Two relevant examples, Ivor Hele (Wilkins n.d.) and George Gittoes (Fry 1998) are works where I could have expected to find the cost of an arts practice discussed and found very little. Elsewhere, in Chapter 5, I have addressed some of the similarities but essential differences between these forms of writing and phenomenological research.
Catalogue essays, when they move away from an exclusive focus on analyzing finished works, can be a rich source of understanding the motivations of an artistic practice. Those examining the works of Joseph Beuys (Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose 1993) Christian Boltanski (Tamar Garg in Semin et al.1997) and Mauricio Lasansky (Edwin Honig 1966) to take some examples, have been particularly useful for this study.
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7. CONDUCT OF THE STUDY
Zones of Desire - or Themes in Phenomenological Research
'Themes' and 'Essences'
A phenomenological study is conducted, in large part, by an identification or an apprehension of certain 'themes' by way of reflection and critical analysis. As already described in Chapter 6, phenomenology and art making have much in common and the task of phenomenology is, in many ways, similar to the analysis of what is involved in the creation of an art work as described by John Dewey in 1980 (p.45): Because perception of relationship between what is done and what is undone constitutes the work of intelligence and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd. A painter must consciously undergo the effect of his every brush stroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he is desiring to produce. To apprehend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes of thought.
What is not so apparent on the face of Dewey's analysis is the critical place of reflection and insight and how what one desires to paint emerges in the 'doing' of painting. All these elements are necessarily implicit in the construction of an artwork - unless one is painting by numbers or copying. The ability to see a relationship between ideas and fragments of thought and memory as they emerge in the conduct of a study is central to phenomenological research - as it is to the creation of an artwork. In phenomenology the 'seeing' of relationships that lead to an understanding of the webs of meaning is aided and enabled by 'themes'.
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The notion of a 'theme' in a phenomenological study is one fraught with complexities and ambiguities - difficulties that lie, in part, in an imprecision of language - in how we use words. In everyday parlance, a theme might be described as static or fixed, for example, the theme of Anzac Day is one of 'remembrance', or 'sadness' or 'celebration'. In a phenomenological study it is more useful to understand themes as being more active and organic - a tool that we have at our disposal. Understanding a theme, say 'remembrance', as a noun does not give the necessary working image that visualizing it as a tool does. It is like saying 'dog' and 'a sheep dog'. Implicit in the latter is an understanding that 'sheep dog' describes a function and identity that makes it different from a comforting and decorative pet. A working image of a theme is an additional sign that we have to do something - like ponder on the question 'What does it mean to 'remember?' - which obliges us to go back into our own experiences to work out a meaning for ourselves. Van Manen (1990,p.88) describes a theme as a 'desire' - our 'desire to make sense' - a desire to understand some phenomena more fully. So a theme is a tool that we ardently desire. During my theological studies I welcomed (with much relief) the image of a 'passionate God'. In the same way do I embrace van Manen's appreciation of a phenomenological study as 'passionate' and 'full' - full of thought, full of attention, full of desire. It suits and fits my approach to the making of art in all its dimensions. It then seems to follow that a phenomenological exploration is one characterized by passion, desire and a correspondingly passionate desire for a precision of language - a precision which, paradoxically, involves a correspondingly full discipline.
In the first instance, it is necessary to draw a distinction between 'theme' and 'essence'. Theme is active. It is our desire to understand and it is also the vehicle by which we come to understand. What we are seeking to understand is made up of big pictures and small ones that overlap and intersect. Agnes Martin (Von Dieter Schwartz Ed.1991) has a useful image of a triple layered artwork. The first is our life as a work of art. The second is our making of the artwork and the third what we produce. The big picture, then, is our life's work - how we live our lives answering the questions it throws up at us and is patently an ethical endeavour in that it goes to the heart of what it means to be human and what particular unique human being we are making of ourselves. 90
The big picture of our life's work is not predetermined. It is made up of (and to a certain extent driven by) smaller incidents to which we can respond in a variety of ways - some better than others. To respond well to life's challenges it is necessary to understand, not only the nature of the challenge, but the implications and ramifications of it - its meaning - and how the smaller pictures fit into the grander one. The pictures are made up of various phenomena, and, the focus of this particular study is the phenomenon of creating as a visual artist - for me.
A phenomenon, which is anything of which we can be aware (van Manen 1990) is made up of various essential elements or essences (in phenomenological language) that are necessary for it to be what it is. As previously discussed, one of the challenges of an exploration of a phenomenon is the realization that the subject of our search has not a fixed form. In each of our experiences of it, as it occurs in our daily lives, it shows different aspects of itself and we accordingly gain a deeper appreciation of the meaning of what we are seeking to understand.
The outcome of a phenomenological study is not a result as such but a deeper awareness and understanding. The deeper understanding, furthermore, is transformative in that it enables us to both reflect back and look forward with a sharper awareness of the ramifications of our actions. We act differently because of our different and deeper understanding - we see things differently (van Manen 1990; Sullivan 2003).
In a sense a study such as this can be understood as a type of storytelling. A story where we identify the experiences that have produced the puzzles; where and how and from whom we have sought guidance in trying to make sense of the puzzlements and then weaving them all together. The way these elements are woven together to enable a coherent telling of the story (with its resolution) is by way of 'insights' we have experienced along the way - with the added complexity of time. As we are always existing in time neither the big picture nor the small ones are static and the story might be different each time it is told.
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'Themes' and The Birthplace of A Work of Art.
Where, one might ask, do the puzzles, the lack of understanding arise - for this place is also the birthplace of art. Referring back to the previous discussion of theories of art and ethics, I believe art springs from conflict - from a conflict or a disjunction between what we do and do not understand. We are thrown 'out of kilter' by experiences we do not understand and the normal pace, progression and interpretation of our lives is disrupted. We can be surprised by joy and by suffering - and we can be surprised by the pleasure we can experience in witnessing sadness, suffering and death - as evidenced by Zoran Music (in Peppiatt 1988) being fascinated by the 'terrible beauty' of piles of corpses; Monet transfixed by the colours in the face of his dying wife (in Lallemand 1994); and myself wanting to paint a hideous sore on the leg of a dying friend. Martin (ibid.) on the other hand, would say that art springs from a desire to recapture moments of happiness (perfection) - those times when we, in our surroundings, felt no conflict or dislocation. Cyril Collard (in Vaucher 1993, p.119), a novelist and film maker poses a more demanding appreciation of the birthplace and function of art:
The other day I saw a slogan on a wall: "Art lives from freedom," which is totally false. It's exactly the contrary. Art lives from constraint and dies from freedom. Pure art, essential art, comes out of situations of extreme repression. And AIDS is a form of nonpolitical repression, it’s a psychic repression. The artist can experience this as an oppressive and repressive event that makes him want to create in order to prove to himself his freedom, his immortality.
An important thing for me in this idea of Les Nuits Fauves is the idea of liberty, of freedom. You enter a space and time that is no longer controlled by laws and power, by the hierarchy, but instead by pacts between individuals. Everyone is on equal footing. The only law is the law of desire.
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I cannot help but agree with Collard and I will further discuss my reasons for this in the later Chapters dealing in more detail with some of the themes which have emerged from this study.
'Themes'
In a sense, the use of the word 'theme' is unhelpful because it is so difficult to break free of a conception of it as fixed. However, as previously discussed, it is useful to visualize the notion of 'theme' as a 'desire', a 'tool', a vehicle of understanding - something to be put at the disposal of our searching. 'Essences' and 'elements' of a phenomenon I tend to use interchangeably.
In the same way that a phenomena does not have a fixed form neither does a theme. For me it is one of the attractions of a phenomenological study that so much is unknown, unpredictable, ambiguous and fluid. I find it exciting that themes are not pre-conceived and that they have to be 'dug out' through 'the doing' - the conduct of the study. It is possible to say that we can anticipate that some elements ought be essential to the notion of creating as a visual artist, 'patience' or 'perseverance' for example, but it is only by reflecting on how they emerge in a particular 'doing' that their full import emerges. Furthermore, the themes that emerge may surprise by showing sides of themselves that we had not encountered in the same way before. In a very real sense it is has not been possible to write this section until near the end of the study because the themes are continually emerging and my understanding of them is constantly changing and expanding.
How do the themes of a phenomenological study emerge? How do we recognize them when they appear? What meaning do themes have within a study? How do we understand them and their significance? These are all questions that go the 'how' of a research methodology. The conduct of the study.
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Conduct of the Study or the Interweaving of 'Texts'
I am predominantly a landscape painter. I view the world through the lens of landscape - even figurative work which, for portraits, for example, I call 'landscapes of a face'. I tend, then, to use 'text' and 'landscape' interchangeably at times, or to refer to the 'landscape of a text'. For me the notion of landscape is evocative of the textures, rocks and crevasses that are found in the experiences of a text as well as in an experience of the natural world.
This study, then, comprises an interweaving of three different languages of text. The first is the text - or landscape - of the art works (paintings, drawings, fabric collages and so on). The second text is the writing that has emerged during the making of the artworks. For the most part these writings have been interleaved with the paintings and drawings with which they came to birth and have been bound into books. The third text is the one I am now writing - the more formal reflection, analysis and interweaving of the first two. In my mind (and in this I agree with Martin's triple layered understanding of art referred to above) I draw no distinctions between one form and another and nor do I privilege one above another. I am a painter. Full stop. Sometimes I paint on canvas and paper with ink and pigments. Sometimes I paint with words on a page.
The definition of research that I have adopted for this study is one that sees research purely and simply (but with great difficulty) as a search for understanding. It is a search for meaning that will enable a transformative knowing or knowledge to emerge (Sullivan 2003). A transformative function of phenomenology is also implicit and explicit in the several writings on phenomenology by van Manen already referred to in all preceding sections. The logic of a phenomenological study precludes my experience of reading and reflection (even of the most formal academic works) being separated out from the other languages of the study1. In a very real sense this understanding of the equality of the languages cannot be any other way for, to privilege the more formal text over the production of the artworks (for
1 I am indebted to my friend Noel Rowe for assisting with this insight that was pivotal in my early struggles of this study. 94 example), would undermine the validity of the whole enterprise. Thus, for the most part, my experience of other writers/artists' work is spread throughout the study except when they are grouped together for greater ease of analysis and understanding.
The language of the Books
The transcription of an extract from Book 1 that follows below is unedited (the full text is contained in Appendix 1). Originally I had thought van Manen's writing and re-writing of a phenomenological study would demand that the Book be re-written and re-written. The aim, however, of writing and re-writing is to gain understanding - not merely to produce a more crafted work (van Manen 1990). The desire is to reach that point of completion, resolution, ' aesthetic delight'2, the saturation of 'That's it'. 'That's what I have been looking for'. (Caputo 2003,p.178) In this study where the writing and re-writing is spread across the several texts the insights which lead to an understanding can come from either or all directions. In the case of Book 1 they came from both writing and painting. A further consideration in deciding to leave the Book unedited is that, in a usual analysis of an art practice or a finished art work one rarely (if ever) gets to see or read the first tentative steps, the dead ends, the messiness of the original position from which (one hopes) clarity of understanding or completion comes. It is for these several reasons that I have decided to leave the Books unedited (save for a correction of 'wonky' spelling) - to show from whence I came. They are an answer (in part) to 'How did you do that?'
There is a further caveat that I enter concerning the language of the Books. When I paint I do not paint as a fully referencing academic. Some words and phrases, gleaned over the years of reading or listening, have become so much part of me that sourcing exact quotes (if they are exact) is sometimes impossible - and not important for the painting. I have, however, indicated when work is not my own and I believe I have used the words of others in their original spirit.
2 Jim Chapman, 2003, a fellow PhD student, who during the course of a seminar, responded to a question 'How do you know when a piece of music is finished?' with 'Aesthetic delight'. 95
The original book was written with a 'dip in' ink pen on shellacked paper. The task that I had set myself was to document the 'how' of my practice of art making - and to test more stringently and consciously whether van Manen's 'writing and re-writing' worked for painting as well as for words. I did not intentionally set out to make a series of books but found myself almost unconsciously folding the writings and the paintings into book form.3 Reflecting on this, I realized that forming and folding my experiences into books was significant and appropriate on a number of levels. First, books and reading have been an integral part of my lived experiences since I have been a small child, and, in fact, one of my earliest memories of my mother is of her sitting in front of a log fire reading once all children were asleep. Our home was crammed with books, and books were given as rewards and prizes for academic achievement as well as birthday and Christmas presents. Second, it seemed appropriate in a phenomenological study - where insights and deeper understandings unfold like a story - that the process was repeated in the ritual of turning pages. One layer reveals itself, and then another as one turns the pages of a book. Third, I liked the collaborative connotation of writing on my experiences - as though the words, drawings and experiences were a partnership in an exploration. I did not want the various layers and fragments separated out with some framed on a wall and some in a formal book. I wanted them to be together.
Book 1 is the first time I have consciously sat down to try and describe what happens when I make art. Some reflections on my practice I have incorporated into the various Letters to Keith that I have written over the space of the past fifteen years. Keith Robinson was a musician whom I first met at the Day Centre for people living with AIDS. He was a friend and, later, I was his executor. The day after his funeral (which he had organized from the music and readings down to the chocolate cake and oysters for the wake) I sat down to write and tell him how wonderfully it had gone. Ever since, and every now and again, I have written a series of Letters to Keith that are part travelogue; part whinge about how hard it is to get the right colour to render acres of Flinders grass; part prayer, I suppose, and how difficult it is to paint the dying babies and legless men of Ethiopia and Eritrea.
3 For a further reflection on why the work emerged as a series of books see Book 8. 96
When I came to reflect on what was written in this and the subsequent Books I became aware that it was bristling with so many of the 'themes' and 'essences' that have emerged as integral to the phenomenon of creating for a visual artist4 - the necessity of 'play'; the centrality of 'integrity and responsibility'; the discomfort of 'vulnerability', 'helplessness' and 'not knowing'; the 'fear' - and the ordinariness of that fear; and the joy, delight and pleasure of creating. The problem was how to 'unpack' some of these themes - or, more properly, to discern if they need to be unpacked at all. If the presentation of a study is akin to the telling of a story it is unnecessarily prescriptive (and perhaps rude to the author and to the audience/reader) to unpack in too much definitive detail. It might be the equivalent of pasting 'Post It' notes on the face of a painting - 'this bit means this…..' The decision I made is to further discuss only some of the themes or essences that are structurally essential to the storytelling framework.
Relationship to Works Produced
How are these writings and paintings to be viewed? What is the relationship between me, my pen and brush and what they produce? Commonly, when I have finished a work (written or painted) I have the feeling that they do not belong to me anymore. I have done my part and now it's up to them to do their work. This sounds like Zorba the Greek who, when asked what work he did, replied 'I have hands, feet, head. They do the work. Who the hell am I to choose?' On a more serious note (although I think Zorba's attitude is deeply and philosophically serious) I have become aware that I have two modes of art making and neither are mutually exclusive - an exterior impulse and an interior one. The exterior one is evidenced in work such as a large drawing I did of the Salvator Rosa ranges west of Injune in central Queensland. It was one of the most dramatic landscapes I have ever seen and I wanted to see if I could capture the grandeur of it - to 'get it all in'. I drew in situ
4 The following is a list of some of the 'themes' identified as emerging in Book 1- Enduring, playing, uncertainty, being led, not knowing, trusting, doubt/certainty, perseverance, corporeality, experimentation, burden of unknowing, limits of the medium, fear, sameness/difference, rightness, helplessness, stories, banal/inconsequential, remembering, seeing differently, vulnerability, 97 with a stick and ink - anchoring the succeeding sheets of paper with clumps of dirt and rocks - and over several meters of large paper I did succeed in 'getting it all in'.5 Later, in a similarly dramatic landscape near Moura (also in central Queensland) I repeated the exercise to see if I could 'do it again'.6
The 'interior' works tend to happen and I follow their appearance in order to make sense of something that has puzzled or troubled me. These works are characterized by images that appear of their own accord - and keep appearing until their meaning has dawned in me - and then I stop painting them. One of the first instances of this interior function of my practice came during a visit to Ormiston Gorge in the Northern Territory. Painting my way up the Gorge, I had come around a corner and saw a rock formation that resembled Quan Yin (the female embodiment of compassion in Buddhist spirituality) or the Madonna. At the time the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I remember thinking, not only was this a 'holy' place, but that somehow I was 'different'. I felt as though I was being asked to 'be' something different - but I had no idea what that difference in being might entail. I had no idea why, on returning from the Northern Territory, I compulsively drew, for months on end, not the rock formation in the Gorge but a saddle of hills and a path that led up into Ormiston Pound and down into the Gorge. The net result, however, of the compulsive drawing was an insight some months later (when I was despairingly and heartily sick of drawing the same saddle of hills) that the 'holy' experience did have a meaning and that meaning would emerge in time. That understanding was sufficient to still my brush.
It could be said, then, that my work is one of my 'teachers'. Frequently, I must also confess, patience is sometimes not one of my virtues and I am too harried, too rushed, and too burdened to listen to what my work is trying to teach me - and so the agony of incomprehension is prolonged. The relationship between me and my work
interrogation/witnessing, time/reflection, meaning emerging, authorizing/authority, colour/harmony, stability/instability 5 Mt Warrego West, exhibited in Landscapes of Desire, Brisbane 1998 and in The Earth Which Breathes the Sun, Townsville, 1999. 6 Twin Peaks exhibited in The Earth Which Breathes the Sun, Townsville, 1999.
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- teacher/pupil, mentor/guide and so on swaps and changes all the time - but always is my work (in the triple layered sense) part of me
In an interview with Margaret Throsby (FM Radio National 20 October 2003) war cinematographer David Brill said of his camera and its role in his work 'Every shot is a word and every series is like a paragraph…to tell a story'. More beautifully tellingly, however, was Brill's assessment of his camera 'The camera is just an extension of what is going through my eyes… my soul'. And the 'magnet' for his camera? 'Always the people…their dignity….what guns and bombs do to people'. In a similar vein, German cabaret performer Ute Lemper describes the use of her voice as 'more like a theatrical instrument' but her philosophy of acting is summed up by this:
I really think it has to come straight from the guts. I hate overacting and exterior acting. It has to all come from being. That's why I prefer movie acting because there you have to be instead of act; otherwise it looks pathetic…..Truly my approach has always been from the bottom. 24/09/03.p.2).
My pen and brush provide me with a means of 'making sense' of my experiences. My various works are to be read against The Background to the Study in Chapter 2 that sets out the basic framework - of geography and significant events - with which to frame the contents of the Books. Additional information relating to specific places or people mentioned are contained within the footnotes. The necessity for a background text (albeit necessary in an academic work such as this) highlights, yet again, the difference between a primitive notion of art (where the stories of the art are known by all within a group or a community) and the individualized Western one -where only some, if any, have access to the stories that are relevant to a certain understanding of the art work. To regain some of the primitive healing function of art is, in part, why this study is being conducted.
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Analysis of Themes
When I went to analyze some of the themes that had emerged during this study (especially as they emerged during the making of the Books) I realized that they fell into four basic categories. First, a desired state of understanding. Second, our comportment during the journey towards that understanding. Third, the guidelines provided by our body to assist in discerning the 'right' path in an exploration, and fourth, the qualities needed to embark upon the quest for understanding. The Desired State encompasses such notions as intimacy, being known, meaning, colour, harmony, stability, being ordinary, vulnerable and open, playful and healed. The second category deals with our state of being in the journey to what we desire - the capacities of enduring, perseverance, patience, not knowing, dull-eyed/ unseeing, wounded, traumatized, doubtful/uncertain, helpless/vulnerable and yet trusting. The third category explains how we can discern whether we are on the 'right track' to achieving a desired state - a sense of rightness, a sense of lightness and release of burdens that, for me at least, manifest themselves in my shoulders, 'tummy' and gut; the ability to see differently and a capacity to experience desire and pleasure. The last, fourth, category deals with the qualities we need to employ to reach the desired state - utilize our sense of integrity and responsibility, sharpen our appreciation of a 'personal sense', solitude, listening, telling stories, reflection, capturing insights, being puzzled, the subject of grace, playing, experimenting, open -ness, trust, hope and seeing differently.
Although I have grouped the themes into categories, the boundaries of the categories are porous and fluid and do not allow a rigid demarcation. The notion of 'helplessness', for example, can hold within itself the further notion of 'blackness', 'despair' - as well as 'yearning', 'hope' and 'trust'. For these reasons, and for those I have already discussed above in dealing with the language of the Books, I do not intend to exhaustively discuss every theme that has emerged in this study. 100
Book 1
I wish I could say I start out with a definite plan - an idea of what I want to do. Sometimes I do. Like the robed women. Ever since I came back from Ethiopia7 they have been a constant presence for my pen and brush. As the piles of corpses were for Zoran Music8. He painted them. Then returned to other things like landscapes and horses and cathedrals. Then they would return. Once again and once more he would paint them.
He dreamt once that they had disappeared and he was bereft. I think they go when they have taught us what we need to learn. So the robed women were not a conscious invitation. But somehow they prepared me yet again. I found myself buying a very pale umber muslin; then proper white muslin. It's hard to get but little country shops stock it for people to strain their jam. I have never had the patience to strain jam but others must. Then when I went into my studio I started rummaging through my precious hoards of fabric. Beautiful fabrics that have been given to me or I have collected just because I love beautiful fabric. Beautiful things full stop. And I find myself reaching for the plain strong honesty of calico. More human than dead white. More warmth and it can take so much knocking about without fraying all over the place. A good strong basis. Like some sort of faith I guess. And I start playing with the fabric. It somehow seems to be leading me until finally the penny drops and I can see what is emerging in some sort of fashion. But the robed women had their own language and I wrote it on the fabric with my machine. So still and silent. Enduring. My hand remembered the precious wonky box that Wardi9 had given me with its hank of woven silk and a little ball of glittery thread. White. I can't now remember where I was when I first saw some hanks of cotton (not silk) Addis I think and my stomach heaved in remembering Wardi and his dying.
7 I traveled to Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1999 to 'document' as a visual artist some of the effects of AIDS and the aftermath of war. 8 Zoran Music was an artist imprisoned in the concentration camp of Dachau during World War 11 (Peppiatt 1988). 9 Wardi Hazzaz, an art teacher, was my first Ankali client. Ankali was an emotional support program for people living with AIDS. 101
I couched the glittery thread around the women. Couched - as if sewing could embrace and keep safe those women in their silent enduring. 'Enduring'. I keep wondering why that word kept coming back to me. Enduring. To endure. It somehow reminded me of my father as a prisoner and the paintings and sketches done in Changi10. The same looking at the camera or brush with so little emotion. I suppose that would have been a waste of precious energy. To endure, though, is not the same as stoicism. It is, like calico, a strength to live, survive, get there - in spite of everything. That is 'to endure' I think.
10 Changi Prison in Singapore where my father was imprisoned for some time before being transferred to the Burma/Thailand Railway during World War 11. 102
7a. 'THEMES OF COMPASSION/EMPATHY, SAMENESS/DIFFERENCE AND WITNESSING
Introduction
The background against which these themes will be discussed has to do with notions of 'person' and 'identity'. Whilst I have rarely thought of myself in terms of having an identity it is a useful tool with which to describe the multiplicity of roles and characteristics that go to make a person what they are - and how they are liable to suffering. Mark C.Taylor's (1993) very simple example of 'Nots' sheds a new light on this complexity of relationships with the assertion that 'we can only define an identity in terms of what it is "not'''. The notion of 'mother', for instance, has no meaning unless it is understood in relation to that which it is 'not' -a child. My image of a person (with indebtedness to Isaacs 1996) as a complex of different roles, rights and responsibilities (and capacities for each to be wounded and thus cause suffering) is one of interdependence and inter-relatedness, but with a central core of 'aloneness' that will be discussed further below. Many years ago, I heard a phrase that has made an indelible impression - 'if one person dies so does a part of ourselves because we are all part of the human race'. It is a sentiment repeated by Lingis (1994) in his provocative work The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common. With respect to the after effects of AIDS and war it is easier to understand this interdependence of being human because those suffering - as I wrote on a drawing of the men in the AIDS ward in Addis Ababa '…were once husbands, lovers, friends and workers. Now they are just rows and rows of black skeletons'1. If I speak here mostly of men, it is not to exclude women (who also fight wars and die from AIDS and poverty) but to paint a picture of the interdependence and inter-relatedness of suffering where gender (in a sense) becomes less important. For the moment it is the whole notion of 'person' and 'suffering' that I am seeking to explicate not a hierarchy of gendered suffering. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, for example, if the husband/lover/friend becomes sick or dies, not only are their wives and family
1 A man with AIDS, part of a series of works which formed the exhibition 'suffering knows no geography' exhibited at Warwick Art Gallery and Perc Tucker Regional Gallery and Townsville Art Society Gallery in 2000. 103 deprived of the pleasure and support they gained from their relationship, but their community suffers in that the dead cannot tend stock, till the soil, plant crops, and so their family are likely to starve - and their country is likely to starve as well. As I wrote on another of the Ethiopian/Eritrean works:
The rains haven't come. Within three months the stock will die and the people will starve. The men are all at the front.2
In Australia we have not only lost friends, colleagues, sons and daughters and lovers but a generation of our best (and often youngest) artists to AIDS. With respect to the after effect of our several wars (as previously outlined in Background to the Study) it could be said that our society is literally crisscrossed with a silent web of suffering that affects all generations - my parents' generation, my own because of my experience of them (and my generation is that of Vietnam) and the next generation because they are the children of current veterans.
Compassion/Empathy Sameness/Difference
The notions (or theme) of 'empathy' and 'compassion' and 'sameness' and 'difference' have a great bearing on this study. If I say that I have been wounded or traumatized by witnessing what does that mean? It is a truism to say that our experiences are ours alone in that they have a particular colour and texture that we alone can fully understand (if we can fully understand them at all). 'I know how you feel' is a commonplace expression of sympathy that sometimes riles me as I am tempted to reply 'You don't understand how I am feeling until you ask me to tell you'. Having said that, it is also apparent from reflection on our own experience, of reading an account of another's trauma to take another example, we commonly feel they could be talking about ourselves. We identify ourselves in their experience, or, more properly, we identify ourselves in their account of their experience - in the safe space of reading and reflection - which is perhaps not the same thing as I will seek to explain below.
2 'The Rains Haven't Come' from the exhibition 'suffering knows no geography' whose exhibition details are as above. 104
It is again obvious, in speaking of 'suffering' for example, that which I experienced in 'looking at' or witnessing the suffering of my friends as they died, is not the same as theirs. I was not dying but I often suffered in being with them - as I have suffered since in remembering those times. It could be suggested, then, that the 'suffering' is part of the 'sameness' not what they suffered from nor how they themselves experienced their suffering. Part of my suffering (as described in Book 6) is also the realization of my helplessness - there was nothing I could do that would relieve them of the impost of their dying. My presence with them may help alleviate some of their suffering - but I could not change the fact that they might continue to suffer and would die. That realization of the inevitability of helplessness is part of my suffering and, perhaps, one of the impetus for my creating as an artist.
The following extract from Book 6 describes how some of these tangled webs of themes - suffering, helplessness, compassion, empathy and so on - entered my work:
'Sometimes one sees or hears something and one's heart breaks and one doesn't know why'3
But what does it mean to say our heart has broken? Tenderness, helplessness, sorrow, heart achingly beautiful - it tears some fundamental fibre of our being
And one's heart breaks - and one doesn't know why. I was going to say I do know why. It's as though their suffering has become all suffering.
Our hearts break because the are too full of Love?
Chagall's4 Love that inspires paintings?
3 A phrase I read which prompted Book 6 but escaped the academic net of noting references. Suffice, in this context, to acknowledge that the phrase was not mine. 4 Marc Chagall (c.1991) Russian/French artist who, in a Letter to all those who would visit his museum in Nice, France, wrote ''The thing that inspires paintings, as well as colour, is Love'. 105
What is this Love? That a tiny dying baby is part of me?5
A part of us all?
But I don't know why this particular dying baby and not the next one. Perhaps my heart had already broken and hadn't healed enough to break again so soon.
It's as though their suffering has become all suffering.
Rent open - so we can see more clearly?
Waterfalls rent and fill at the same time
So that is why the waterfalls are appearing again?6
So is that it? We feel as if we are rent apart?
Rent open - so we can 'see' more clearly?
Waterfalls rent and fill at one and the same time. 'Rent and fill' - in some other time a prosaic and commonplace observation but then it was the vehicle of my understanding. I finally understood. The rightness of that insight stilled my brush - for also implicit in the 'rent and fill' is a 'cut and cauterization'. I did not need to paint the waterfall anymore - for that time. The organic nature of a rightness of understanding and hence, its meaning, demands a further interrogation. It must be
Chagall's letter made an indelible impression on me and his sentiments have entered my work on numerous occasions over the past thirteen years or more. 5 A dying baby in Mother Teresa's hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A painting of the baby 'The Blue Baby' formed part of the 'suffering knows no geography' series of works whose exhibition details I have previously set out. 6Some of the first instances of waterfalls entering my work form part of the series exhibited as 'Down the Track. The after effects of AIDS and War' first exhibited as part of a Department of Veterans' Affairs conference, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney in 1999, and then at Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery, Queensland in 2000. 106 checked gently but rigorously because, as already discussed, the notion of 'rightness' has a moral or ethical dimension - it determines whether an insight gleaned during the making of an art work is transformative in that it colours the way in which we act in the future and it throws new light on what we have done in the past (see Sullivan 2003). So I started reflecting back - tracking the development, the journey of this new understanding through paintings and writing I had done in the past. I realized that the 'rent and filling' not only applies to my paintings of waterfalls but is also implicit in my enduring fascination with rent cliffs that I consciously started painting some 20 years ago.
What does 'rent and fill' mean in the context of a phenomenological exploration of the notion of creating as a visual artist? It means, I think, that pre-conceived notions, the safety of the topographical, must be rent open so that a different way of 'seeing' is allowed to emerge. This different way of seeing describes an understanding of interconnectedness - the interconnectedness of all things. During those times of painting when my hand seems to take over (Lloyd Rees speaks of it as though 'the Spirit behind Nature' has taken hold of his brush7) are times of diffuse boundaries and a different experience of suspended time. On reflection it seems, for a time at least, that there is no separation between me and what I seek to paint. But what is it that I am seeking to paint? Precisely, I think, understanding. And compassion. And helplessness. And Love.
Is experiencing helplessness, though, the same as painting my experience of it? From a reflection on Book 6 it is obviously not the same thing. A dying baby may be many things but a waterfall it is not. The image of that tiny child has frozen itself in my mind - yet when I go to paint my memory of that experience (which came unbidden) my hand paints a waterfall. In reaching back into that very particular and heart-breaking memory and in the painting and writing of it, I have somehow gathered together fragments of other images, memories to 'teach' me - what? A deeper appreciation of what it is to be helpless? A different understanding of acceptance? A deeper understanding of why I paint - to help me make sense of some
7 In Hawley 1993. 107 of the obscenities of AIDS and war? Yet even all these thoughts are problematic because some like Holocaust scholar, Shoshana Felman titled his interview with the maker of Shoah, Claude Lauzman 'The Obscenity of Understanding' (in Caruth ed. 1995, p.203). The desire to understand the evil that was the Holocaust has been described as an evil in itself (Neiman 2002) because to understand is to bring it within the realm of human comprehension - and the absolute rupture in what was previously thought imaginable prevents that. Durcharbeitung (ibid.p.212) even goes so far as to say:
What mankind can do to mankind, on the other hand, is for me as irrelevant as, for instance the debate on the existence of God. I can do nothing with this.
Yet still we try to understand - or we try to understand our own response to the incomprehensible. Poet, Essex Hemphill (speaking of the effect of AIDS) says of his art:
It's the one thing that I have that can make a difference at least in how I'm personally approaching this. With my hand, maybe, I can remember a Donald or a Joe. I can't be sure that the state's going to remember, or their families are going to really care, or that anyone else will remember, but I remembered and it meant something to me (in Vaucher 1993,p.180-181)
Sameness and Difference
A Conversation with Gregg Borowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky in Trauma. Explorations in Memory (Caruth Ed.1995) entitled "The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over" also raises some of the themes I am now discussing.. At one point, when the conversation revolved around the notion of 'empathy' for people living with HIV/AIDS I was shocked into thought by this reflection of Douglas Crimp (an HIV Positive activist) referring to a young woman who had contracted the virus through inadequately sterilized medical instruments:
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The fact is that Kimberley Bergalis is a person with AIDS who has managed to achieve a kind of empathetic reaction in someone like Jesse Helms. It makes you wonder: if that's the way empathy is constructed, is empathy anything we would even want to strive for? Because it seems that empathy only gets constructed in relation to sameness, it can't get constructed in relation to difference.(ibid.p.263 )
'Sameness' and 'difference'. Again, commonly used words but what do they mean in the context of this study? It begs (and introduces) the question 'Whom am I writing/painting for?' In the first instance for myself and only for myself - so that I can make sense of those experiences which trouble and puzzle me. However, my writing and my paintings will also be exhibited to the general public. What happens when we read or view the work of another - for surely this appreciation will shape our perceptions of notions such as 'compassion' and 'empathy'? For my part, as the author of the works, are they a result of a compassion felt for those who (directly and indirectly) inspired my works - the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea, my parents, those who have been damaged by their experiences of war and trauma? During my theological studies I was much taken with the image of a 'compassionate God' - compassion translated as 'a turning in the gut, so that one felt the pain of another as if they were the other - and yet they were not'. Put simply, if I hurt, God hurts as though he/she were me. I prefer 'compassion' to the notion of 'empathy' which, for me is slightly more cerebral and distant than compassion, and, perhaps not as visceral. Does it mean, then, that I feel compassion for those who are the subject of my works? But the 'subject' of my work - and this study - is my experiences of those whom I encountered and who have evoked a compassionate response in me. While these two statements may resemble a 'chicken and egg' dilemma there is an important distinction to be drawn that I will discuss in greater detail below.
What does this have to do with the creation of a work of art and its reception? In the light of Crimp's remarks quoted above I again started to reflect on my experiences of exhibiting my work - both written and painted. The most heart-felt viewer responses could be described as 'an identification with' - identification with the emotion people themselves have identified in the work (which might be different from mine). For 109 example, one of the Eritrean series depicts women and children in a refugee camp8. When viewers have said 'It's just like East Timor' or 'Just like Rwanda' they are not so much identifying with my experiences in Ethiopia and Eritrea but more my work has triggered a memory that they classify as similar to their own. They 'know' the 'truth' of the work 'because they have been there'.
It is the same as the manner in which I knew the truth of an American army nurse trying to explain the import of being with the dying:
That act of helping someone die is more intimate than sex, it is more intimate than child-birth and once you have done that, you can never be ordinary again (in McHugh 1993,p.23).
I, too, have struggled to find words to explain the extraordinary intimacy of accompanying someone as they die. What I hadn't fully comprehended until I read the words of the American nurse was the radical result of such an intimacy - we are never the same again. It is as though our essential status as a person has changed in the same profound way that it changes when we move from 'friend' to 'wife' or 'father', where, in each case, it is from a state of 'not knowing' to 'knowing differently'. Thus, in the context of a phenomenological study, what happened in my reading and reflection on my own experience was a deeper, extended appreciation of the notion of intimacy - except, had I not been there myself, I could only imagine what it was like - not know.
Could it be said, then, that a response to a work is only possible when (in some form or another) we have 'been there' ourselves - which is 'sameness'? Yet at another literal level they are 'different' - firstly, because a viewer's experience is not mine and mine not theirs - and neither East Timor nor Rwanda are Eritrea. In a sense, then, 'sameness' and 'difference' are like the presence of the colours blue and yellow in that of green - there in each, but not completely the same.
8 'Women and Children. Refugee Camp' on of the works forming the exhibition 'suffering knows no geography' whose exhibition details I have previously set out. 110
Many times I have quoted and drawn a response to Levinas's (in Kaplan 1994) 'face of the other …a face which questions and begs' a response from those who look into it. Reflecting on the exchanges quoted above, it would seem that 'the face of the other' can only be recognized - and thus answered - by another who can read/recognize the plea. Those who have 'been there'? In the conversation quoted above, Greg Borowitz, an HIV Positive filmmaker and activist, further shocked me when he said he did not seek to establish a relationship with those who were not HIV Positive. By implication, it must be deduced, he only sought a relation with 'sameness' - people like himself- HIV Positive. Douglas Crimp (in the same group) asserts:
I don't think you could ever make a cultural work that functioned as a general address. But the problem, of course, is that we live in a culture in which it is assumed that you can, always. And in fact almost every cultural work is made with that fiction of a general audience in mind. (in Caruth Ed.1995, p.216) At first reading these assertions seem to go completely against the demands of a common humanity - and the principles of education and common social intercourse. However, it is true, I think, that stories, appeals to empathy or compassion and so on, will fail unless there are some hooks of sameness that hold them to the surface of another. The appeals will otherwise fall on deaf ears and blind eyes and, furthermore, that deafness and blindness may itself be the cause of more traumatic wounding.
In the context of this new appreciation of the nature of empathy and compassion it makes a reading of Merleau Ponty's essay on Cézanne more pertinent (in Johnson Ed.1993, pp.59-75). At one point Merleau Ponty quoted Cézanne as saying 'The landscape thinks itself in me…and I am its consciousness' (p.67) and Merleau Ponty goes on to ask 'What does it mean to say 'the landscape thinks itself in me'? I could not help but think to myself, if Merleau Ponty had himself been a painter he would not have had to ask that question. He could merely have nodded his head and said 'Yes, I know what you mean'. However, in the context of a study such as this it is not sufficient to say 'Yes, I know what you mean'. A language must be found to 111 describe, not only that knowing recognition so that others can know it as well, but how I, as a landscape artist, can say a landscape thinks itself, paints itself in me - because some of my landscapes are human beings who are suffering. What, for instance, is that tiny baby painting in me? Something as profoundly simple as the humanity of its existence? And part of my response to its plea - a painting of a waterfall? It seems, and is, so pathetically banal and inadequate. Yet perhaps my redemption may come with the telling of the story of how a dying baby became a waterfall.
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7b. 'THEMES' OF BLACKNESS, DESPAIR AND HELPLESSNESS'
How extraordinarily silly I felt as I gathered 'black' pieces together for an extended discussion on the themes of blackness, despair and helplessness as essential elements of the phenomenon of creating as a visual artist - for me. As I read each one through I thought to myself 'These belong in the trauma pile'. It was with some shock that I realized the 'terrors of creating' pile and the 'trauma' pile were/are one and the same. Not so long before I had written some notes to myself - 'To say many artists have experienced times of blackness and despair really means nothing except to say that it is common. Why is it so difficult sometimes to make art? To live? The subject matter does not really affect the dread'.
Have I led a traumatized life? I would not have thought or said so. I would have described my childhood and growing up as normal. For my father, his nightmares were 'normal' and, although I cannot remember ever being told so, I somehow sensed that others who had been POW's had nightmares as well so my father's were not unusual. During the time of my childhood it would have been unusual for any of my family, friends or neighbours not to have had some personal (usually distressing) experience of the Second World War - or even of the First Wold War. It was so ordinary that it has only been comparatively recently that I realized just how much of my identity is made up of memories of war in some form or another. I started reflecting back and remembering - not only the blank years following my suicide attempts (that I can only reconstruct not remember) - but the frenetic pace with which I seemed to have approached all aspects of my life including my art. I tried to remember if all my experiences of creating have been characterized by these black spells - and it suddenly dawned on me that it was the shock of AIDS that started my 'remembering'. Even more particularly, it was only in leaving Sydney after the 'too many deaths' that I started trying to put it together. Even then I resisted - like the medic who served in Vietnam who 'for years carried the war inside himself because he hadn't a way to face the memories he had been through'. Finally, he stopped (in Kornfield 1994, p28):
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I began to realize that my mind was gradually yielding up memories so terrifying, so life-defying, so spiritually eroding that I had ceased to be consciously aware that I was still carrying them around. I was, in short, beginning to undergo a profound catharsis by openly facing that which I had most feared and therefore most strongly suppressed.
As I outlined in the Background to this Study, my experiences of AIDS have been the best and some of the worst experiences of my life. Until now I had not realized that another double edged sword was also hidden within those experiences. My experience of AIDS has given me a lens with which to appreciate (and to partly understand) the experiences of my father - and my mother - which, until then, I had no way into understanding. The other edge of the sword has been myself being thwacked over the head by trauma - and history repeating itself in a double traumatizing. As already mentioned, it was one of my fellow students who pointed out that my parents' generation were doubly traumatized by their experiences of the First World War followed so closely by the Second (Bourke pers.comm.2002). My double (or triple) 'whammy' has been the aftermath of my parents' experience, the aftermath of Vietnam and then AIDS. It is probably not surprising, then, that I write of black patches:
I am so tired of being consumed by sadness. So many of the experiences of the trenches of World War 1 refer to the mud, oozing slimy mud that, at times, threatened (and did occasionally) drown them. It’s like that. All I can see ahead is oozing overwhelming sadness and I don’t know how I am going to survive. Although I recognize, at the same time, I will not survive unless I go back. I search the databases, books and articles with a growing sense of desperation. Where are some experiences that are like mine? I want the comfort of recognition. I find a sentence here. Sometimes a paragraph. But nothing that will relieve the impost from my shoulders.
Then, again, at some other time:
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God I hate this blackness. Glibly I have read that it is common – as I well know – to have this period of `massive discomfort’ before the new stage1. Before new growth emerges. I know it has been true in the past. This time it seems as though the bottom has gone lower still and I am struggling. Sandy2 had to shoot Jiff yesterday. I know it is the sensible thing to do. He fought with all the other dogs and killed Sandy’s favourite Charlie but my stomach still heaves at the thought of another death – even a dog. He used to sit across Sandy’s knees on the bike and he had this dreadful mange which made him look like a skeleton from hell – or like the skeleton man I saw in Mother Theresa’s in Addis. A preying mantis skeleton covered in sores being bathed by a nun in her blue and white habit and a volunteer in a white coat.
Is it true that the subject matter does not really affect the dread of creating? What, really, is so shocking about the realization that the 'trauma' pile is the same as the 'theme' pile? That I, like Zoran Music3 and Claude Monet4, wanted to paint the beauty of another's suffering? It is not their suffering, though, that I am painting, is it? Is it Brill's5 'dignity' that his camera searches for in another human being? Or just the 'there-ness' of extraordinary shapes, colours and textures that are arranged differently in the sick and dying to those in the healthy and living when we are distracted by their aura of liveliness? Is it the stillness of suffering that arrests our attention? Is that both the attraction and the repulsion we fear in silence? The silence that calls for a response from us and we do not know what to say? I remember Mark Taylor's6 story of the Indian sage 'You go out into the Desert to lose yourself not to find yourself….and in the Desert there is silence….and gradually I hear the silence speak'.
So, the silence of my parent's suffering - and all the suffering I have witnessed - calls for some response from me? The fact that all I have to respond with is my art - is
1 Crosby n.p. 2 Sandy is one of my brothers. Jiff and Charlie were two of his sheep dogs. 3 Peppiatt (1988) 4 Lallemand (1994) 5 Little (2003) 6 Taylor (1992,p.270) 115 that part of the blackness? It is certainly part of the helplessness I feel in the face of their silence.
Reading, I have realized, has many faces for me. It is a source of great pleasure and, sometimes, it is a desperate search for understanding - and an attempt to 'blank out' the terrors of solitude. In the times of blackness I seem to read compulsively. One story I read (and have previously quoted) referred to a Buddhist student who had been a medic in Vietnam, and did provide me with some comfort. As Jack Kornfield relates the story in A Path with Heart, A guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (1994,pp.28-29):
At the retreat I was also plagued by a more current fear, that having released the inner demons of war I would be unable to control them, that they would now rule my days as well as my nights, but what I experienced was just the opposite. The visions of slain friends and dismembered children gradually gave way to other half remembered scenes from that time and place: the entrancing, intense beauty of a jungle forest, a thousand shades of green, a fragrant breeze blowing over beaches so white and dazzling they seemed carpeted by diamonds.
What also arose at the retreat for the first time was a deep sense of compassion for my past and present self: compassion for the idealistic, young would-be physician forced to witness the unspeakable obscenities of which mankind is capable, and for the haunted veteran who could not let go of memories he could not acknowledge he carried
Those terrible times of blackness and despair patently affect how I am seen by others: … more frighteningly, I must appear to others like my mother’s `hunted Devils’ I can see it in the eyes of `the curators’. Safe in their jobs. Deciding what is `appropriate’ for their collections. Not knowing of the existence of 116
the AIDS Quilt7. The largest community arts project in the world. `I haven’t heard of the Quilt’. A thump in the tummy. How long ago was it that the Quilt was in the Art Gallery of Queensland? Probably less than 10 years. This fresh faced young woman is probably not aware of the impact of AIDS. I felt like an old soldier confronted by a youth saying 'Which war? Do you mean that one that was on television a few years ago?' Such a feeling of loneliness – or aloneness. How do I convey what I am trying to say without frightening people off? It will be better, I think, when I have painted and written. That gives a `safe distance’ wherein people can appropriate according to their own space and need. And I am less overburdened and desperate. Where did I read that modern people are not accustomed – not at home with suffering? Or was it only Australians? I’ve read so much that it is an impossible jumble and I can’t remember who said what and where. But does it matter?
Many times during this study I have welcomed and appropriated the words of others as they have struggled to comprehend their experiences of trauma:
Hugh Clarke8 was a prisoner of war in Changhi and on the Railway I think. On his return home he spoke of `an emptiness. A hopeless hope’. That is what this blackness feels like – emptiness and so devoid of desire and hope. Or like a blanket of sadness that lies over everything. I suppose there are many things I can justifiably be sad about. But it as though there is a veil of sadness and emptiness in front of my eyes and my heart.
I do paint - or more usually draw - in these black times. I do not usually reveal the details of the black patches - and never until I have 'safely' negotiated them. In a certain sense these times are like the first beginnings of an art work that require my total concentration and when I cannot risk being distracted by the opinion of others as to what the painting might be nor their advice on the best way of getting it there.
7 Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project was based on The Names Project Quilt begun in 1985 by Cleve Jones. Panels from the Australian Quilt formed part of the exhibition 'Don't Leave Me This Way' Art in the Age of AIDS, National Gallery Canberra,1994. 117
For a number of reasons I do not usually exhibit these works. First, because some of my demons are my private affair and are only to be shared with others if I feel it is appropriate and the story may be of some use. Lloyd Rees9, who suffered prolonged periods of depression throughout his life once remarked that he never exhibited his black pictures 'because there was enough unhappiness in the world already'. That might also be one of my reasons as well, but, more pragmatically, I normally have other work that is more saleable to exhibit and it makes little sense to add to the despair and desperation by showing work that is less likely to be bought.
The psychology of exhibiting one's work is endlessly fascinating. To enable any real dialogue - be it between people or between a viewer and an art work - the space of the dialogue must be hospitable - safe, warm and welcoming. My experiences of exhibiting have been, for the most part, times of pleasure and excitement - albeit fraught with some necessary tension and anticipation. There have been occasions though (immediately prior to 'the stopping') when my exhibitions have not gone well. When I puzzled over the reasons for these 'black' exhibitions I realized it was my 'state of being' that was as much responsible as any particular works I had on show. More so, perhaps. My 'blackness' was not conducive to an hospitable space because, rightly or wrongly, consciously or unconsciously, viewers may have felt manipulated - impelled to respond to the works (me) in some particular way. A further reason, as has already been discussed, might also lie in our inability to cope with suffering - and 'blackness' and 'despair' is that.
8 McKernan (2001,p.139) 9 Hawley (1993,p.16). 118
7c. 'THEME' OF CONTEMPLATION AND SOLITUDE
Introduction The notions of 'contemplation' and that of an 'insight' are intimately but, paradoxically, related. To contemplate is to 'survey steadily with eyes or mind' 'a meditative view'. To 'meditate' is to plan mentally or to ponder over, while 'ponder' is to think over or muse (Little Oxford Dictionary, Fourth Edition). In 'doing' phenomenology van Manen (1990) advocates applying the totality of ourselves in a 'fullness of thought' directed towards a particular 'theme' or 'essence' of the phenomenon under exploration. 'Contemplation' for Paul Smith (1974, p.118) creator of unique book covers, involves bringing 'an experience of the book to mind', holding it 'before ' his mind 'without thought or analysis' and 'bringing his mind back' if it wanders from the subject of his contemplation:
..it is the concentration of attention which steers the mind back to the relevant image, and in this way one keeps in the present moment, crucial to contact with the creative imagination, which is allied to the dreaming mind…this discipline is an alternating play between active and passive attention
These several examples all appear to have a common element - a central focus for the mind and the necessity of bringing our attention back to it should it wander off. I have always avoided meditation - or being taught meditation to be more precise - but I believe I excel at the practice of 'pondering' and 'musing'. Or, I do it so frequently that I cannot conceive of a life without it.
Contrary to what may be implied by a 'fixed' attention, I would suggest, rather, that insights tend to happen precisely when our minds do 'wander off ' and we are surprised to find ourselves on a different path and seeing the world differently. In meditation, contemplation and pondering there is a subtle distinction to be drawn between an undisciplined wandering off - as when our minds are fraught and scattered - and a disciplined roaming (which in this case might be a better description than 'wandering' which carries a certain aimlessness within itself). However described I believe the image of a fixed and immovable focus belies the function of 119 contemplation which is to assist us to understand a phenomenon more fully. In phenomenology, as van Manen (1990) stresses repeatedly, it is essential that we keep returning to the main purpose of the study (why we are doing it in the first place) which is to understand a phenomenon more deeply so that we can live more fully aware of the complex inter-relatedness of the 'life world'. There is a 'purposefulness to all that we do' (van Manen 1990). The same strictures, I believe, ought also be applied to art making - that is we should not be so focused on what we want to do that we are less attentive to the 'nudging' of insights.
Almost all artists would agree that insights cannot be programmed. They are gifts and frequently moments of grace. How we describe the benefactor of such gifts - God (me); the Spirit behind Nature (Lloyd Rees in Free 1990) the muse (John Olsen 1997) is not really of issue here except to highlight the fact that it is not for us to command or demand their presence. The element of mystery and grace receives little attention in much of the literature yet, as previously discussed, the language of artists is replete with such references - if not to its presence, at least to its absence. There is another fine line to be drawn between an image of an artist as somehow 'God's typewriter or paintbrush' - as a passive recipient of whatever is sent to them (which in a certain sense they are) and as actively preparing and 'tilling the soil' ready for the arrival of an insight (which they are as well). This image of a 'tilled soil' or a 'primed mind' (implicit in van Manen [1990] and explicit in Smith 1974, p.117) is an excellent one to aid a comprehension of what happens in contemplation, pondering, solitude and so on. With what do we prime our minds? Reading, bringing the totality of our Being to bear on the puzzle at hand - but most essentially it is our desire to understand that is the key to the 'priming' - the decision to do whatever is necessary to facilitate our desire. An integral part of the whole endeavour of understanding is the 'stopping' which allows it to happen1. It is the ceasing to fight with ourselves. Keith (of Letters to Keith previously mentioned) once reminded me that 'God wants us to be happy. He wants to give us what we need.' Non- theologically, human beings, I believe, crave harmony - with themselves, with others and their 'life world'. I prime my mind by voracious reading (akin to Le Corbusier's
1 William Robinson (Klepac 2000,p.33 ) was quoted as saying 'stopping [teaching] enabled a transformation to occur'. 120 throwing all the elements of a problem into a pot2) actively thinking and then letting it all 'cook' (or 'ferment' in the Le Corbusier's recipe). Then I try to clear my mind of it all and 'just' wait - which is the more passive form of pondering. It is then that images, thoughts start appearing in my mind - for instance in writing this section on contemplation I had got 'bogged down' in my thinking. So I stopped, walked outside and a thought came to me -'the Trinity' -which, as it transpires, was a key link between all the notions I am now discussing. Such an appearing is termed an 'insight' and it cannot be rationally deduced - that is to say there is no real logic between the meaning of 'to contemplate' and a notion of 'Trinity'. I could have sat and thought about contemplation until I was 'blue in the face' (as my mother would have said) and I would not probably have arrived at a link between the Trinity and phenomenology.
The Trinity
To background the continuing discussion, it may be as well to here detail some of the journey the Trinity insight has taken. My mind had been primed by puzzling over the fact that trios had kept appearing in my work over the past months. I kept noticing and looking for references to 'trio' and 'the Trinity'3. I had puzzled (and pondered) over a painting, The Portraiture of War, by one of the Australian war artists and ex POW, Murray Griffin which depicted a poignant trio of figures emerging from the River Kwai near the Burma/Thailand Railway - two supporting one in the middle4. After viewing this painting at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra my Ethiopian duo of robed women that I had painted for so long became
2 Le Corbusier (Petit 1997 n.p.). 3 Joan Pope (Woodhams & Bishop Eds.1995). 4 There are many aspects of this painting which still puzzle me. In the first instance Griffin was in Changi for the entire length of his imprisonment but his work changed significantly when the first prisoners started returning from their time working on the Railway (Griffin 1992,p.68) A second aspect of the painting continues to trouble me - 'Why did Griffin paint his figures naked?' This particular work was completed in 1946 after Griffin's return to Australia. The explanations proffered to me concerning this aspect were- 'It was so hot' or perhaps "with dysentery they would get so sick of taking their pants off all the time that they left them off''. Neither of these explanations fit with my reading of the literature - nor my appreciation of my father's generation concern for 'modesty'. None of Griffin's other work depicts the prisoners as naked - even in the cholera ward where he did paint the stained sheets. Other war literature describes the most intricate arrangements that soldiers devised to enable them to cope with continual attacks of dysentery few, if any, of which involved remaining without trousers. 121 three - and their stance (two supporting one) began to mirror that of Griffin's figures. This mirroring is one of the reasons that 'enduring' came to be an integral part of my understanding of all those experiences - mine of the people of Ethiopia, my father as a POW - and me as I witnessed those living and dying with AIDS. What, however, did the insight of 'the trinity' add to these understandings - and why did the trios keep appearing? First, I realized that, apart from a conventional Catholic 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit', I did not really understand the meaning of 'the Trinity.' I could think of it in terms of 'I, Thou, and Thine' - or in the language of some ethical discourse - ourSelf in relation to others and the Other (an unknowable Other). It was only in returning to the 12th century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, that I could appreciate a more grounded Trinity as 'spirit, water and blood'. "Clearly these are in one and one in three"' (Hildegard of Bingen 1985, p.63) - which could be another way of describing the enterprise of phenomenology as involving descriptions of our lived experiences (we as blood) in the 'lived world' (water) with the assistance of insights and inspirations (spirit). The significance of the Trinity in understanding this relationship is that it (a triangle) is a symbol of perfect symmetry, balance and harmony where two points continually pivot on the other - with all contained within. There is no 'outside'. Then, I understood that, not only do I have to care for and about the dying baby, I cannot leave the image (memory) of it outside me, my skin. It has to come within for it has become part of me - and I of it. This triune notion gave me another way of understanding the reality of how my memories are part of myself - my being.
Insights
Writer Gerald Murnane (Crawford 2002) has a delightful description of how some of his insights happen - they 'wink' at him from the corners of his vision - they appear to the side of what his eyes (mind) are focused upon. 'Winking' and 'contemplation' may appear to be strange bedfellows but if, as I have discussed above, we return to the central point of a study (to understand more fully and so on), I believe the surprise implicit in wandering and winking more accurately describes what happens when we contemplate and how we are when insights happen. Part of the endeavour of being 'full of thought', 'full of attentiveness' is also being 'full of preparedness' to 122 notice and catch an insight whenever and wherever they appear - even if they 'wink' at us. Between two people who wink at each other Murnane would say there is an implied 'secret shared knowledge' (ibid.p.9). If, however, the understanding of the interconnectedness and inter-relatedness of ourselves with our surrounds is taken seriously, it must be equally possible that we can be 'winked at' by a rock - or a waterfall - or a tiny patch of orange fungi as I once was. Painting a tiny orange patch in a landscape was part of my first experience of having my art teach me - particularly the sometime disjunction between my heart and my head.5
Solitude
It may be apparent from the amount of concentration, patience and rigorous work that is implicit in the themes of 'contemplation' and 'insight' as discussed above, that they are generally performed alone - in solitude. Solitude for me is an essential element of my life as an artist - as it is for many other artists (Wolseley in Grishin 2003; Martin in Von Dieter Schwarz 1991; Maddock 1992). Wolseley (ibid.p.2-3) identifies a critical difference between solitude and being with another:
(with another) …the outside reference is another human being, whereas in solitariness it is the external world of rocks, trees and birds that provide the texture of reference. It's probable that the mind needs some kind of dialogue with something external
Frequently, for me, solitude is enriching and enabling - although I can also identify with Wolseley's' 'five-day-blues'. This is five days out on a painting trip when he becomes 'very bored - just plain bored' - and it appears that the 'five-day-blues' immediately precede his 'consciousness' going 'out there' to the rhythms of the landscape (Grishin 2003, pp.2-3). Always are some periods of solitude necessary.
5 During a retreat I was asked by the spiritual director what I thought about when I painted. 'Nothing' I replied, 'I just paint'. I was sent out into the paddocks to paint with a verse from the Psalms to think about while I painted. I decided to paint a slope covered with dry dead leaves as I thought it accurately represented my future in the church - which I then considered bleak. It was only later when looking at my painting that I realized I had included a tiny orange fungi that was half hidden in the dry leaves. It was in that 'learning from my work' that I realized my future may not be as bleak as I had imagined - there was some colour in the blackness. 123
Sometimes, they are extraordinarily difficult - even in a landscape of stunning beauty, as was an experience of driving alone between Tibooburra and Noccundra:
It was…. the hardest driving I have ever done. The dirt road was gibbers that built up in the middle of the road. Their blackness did not reflect the light so that for my poor little vehicle to retain its undercarriage I had to try and drive at an angle – straddling the gibbers. My top speed was about 60km hour through the red sand of Bullo Plains. The remainder was completed between 10 and 20km hour. I can remember, at one point, sitting in the gutter of this incredible landscape – the gibbers stretching into infinity it seemed – and thinking I cannot go on. Perhaps it was a metaphor for many of my experiences of AIDS – an intense awareness of beauty but a corresponding awareness that our bodies – our Selves – cannot endure too much of this level of intensity without cracking and having to construct a new sense of Self. I cannot now remember how long I sat in the gutter of those gibbers – long enough to realize I had little choice but to go on or long enough for the landscape to give me a new strength.
The memory of that drive was rekindled when I read Agnes Martin's assessment of being an artist:
We do not ever stop because there is no way to stop. No matter what you do you will not escape. There is no way out. You may as well go ahead with as little resistance as possible - and eat everything on your plate…..Going on without resistance or notions is called discipline (Von Dieter Schwarz 1991, p.70)
For me, solitude is always associated with being in the physical landscape. The time of my husband's dying was a very intense - sometimes increadibly beautiful - frequently tiring and draining. After it was over I just needed to paint and I went out to the Walls of China north west of Balranald:
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One of my sisters had given me a set of acrylic inks and those were what I used on that trip. The colours were vibrant and translucent and they seemed to answer the need I had at that time. It seemed as though I was completely depleted and the landscape, with its magnificent sand dunes and surreal sand sculptures, was a mirror of my interior self. As though the landscape was painting me. I felt both too full of emotion and totally devoid of strength. Empty and full at one and the same time. As though there were no defenses between me and the landscape. No filters. No barriers. I have come to acknowledge that some of my best works emerge from that paradox of empty fullness. More importantly I realized that my better works emerge when I have been able to still my head sufficiently for my heart to pick up its brush as well.
The 'empty and full' preempts the 'rent and fill' that arose in connection with the waterfall series that was discussed in the previous analysis of the theme of 'blackness'.
Solitude can be more terrifying when one finds oneself in the middle of a 'dry patch' - as I did when I went on a painting trip to New Zealand after painting the portrait of the Vietnam Veteran. That painting had trigged a massive upheaval of memories and, at times, I felt as though I was on the edge of sanity. When I arrived in New Zealand I found I could not be bothered to paint or draw; I could not be bothered to find a park for my car and had nearly run out of roads by the time I had come to my senses and stopped. Where I had stopped was before a wonderful range of hills outside Nelson opposite the Studio/Gallery of one of New Zealand's most esteemed potters:
At one stage as we were chatting I must have asked him how he weathered 'dry patches'. 'They are awful' he said, whereupon I burst into tears. The end result was that he sent me out to paint the hills from his back yard…..and then (I stopped painting and) read the war literature that I had accumulated until I reached saturation point.
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That the paintings I produced in the backyard that day later formed a significant part of the series Down the Track. The After Effects of AIDS and War is not as relevant here as understanding the meaning of a 'dry patch'. I had thought a 'dry patch' was just another common experience of artists - of no particular significance except that they were extremely uncomfortable and brought one face to face with the reality that art making is not only concerned with 'what I want to do'. This was precisely the insight that I gleaned from reading Matthew Fox's interpretation of Hildegard of Bingen's 'dry patches' - an interpretation that was hers as well (1985). Hildegard viewed 'drying up' more seriously than a common 'discomfort' - it was a grave sin because it 'interferes with our exalted vocation to create' (ibid.p.33). What is even more pertinent to a phenomenological study (with its triune focus of living more aware in the 'life world'), is, however, the cause to which Hildegard attributed the 'drying up'. Her own 'dry patch' she directly attributed to her 'refusal to write and share her images' - later called her Illuminations (ibid.p.33). In effect, it could be said, Hildegard had said 'No' to the invitation her art had presented to her to move beyond herself into an intimate relationship with others - the community. Again, in effect, her refusal to share her work could be seen as a denial of the responsibilities we have, not only to know ourselves but to allow ourselves to be known within a community.
The terrors and discomfort of solitude have a darker aspect - at least so far as they apply to my work concerning AIDS and the after effects of war. It is true that experiences of solitude have often highlighted with a painful clarity the absolute difference/difficulty/impossibility of breaking into the silence of another's suffering. In speaking of my despair of sitting in a gutter in remote Australia, I am conscious that my despair is of quite a different hue to the despair of others that I am seeking to paint - the suffering of the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea - or that of my father during his imprisonment. The painful difference is the reality that I could get in my car and leave. 126
7d. 'THEME' OF A SENSE OF PLACE
Introduction
The constancy of death and funerals in that time of AIDS in Sydney would only find a parallel in war - or, currently, in Africa, India, Southeast Asia where AIDS is decimating local populations. For myself, it threw into a sharp (and premature) relief many of the issues that surround death and dying - the importance of ritual, the historical importance of cemeteries, and the importance of a 'sense of place' and 'naming' in mourning. During that time I scattered the ashes of friends, colleagues and clients in the Harbour, helped dig them into gardens and posted some back to New Zealand. A cremation rather than a burial marked nearly every death. It was not uncommon for young (and not so young) men to die in Sydney surrounded by their 'gay' and 'AIDS family', but not their biological one. It was us, the AIDS family, who were largely responsible for funerals and the marking of death and, over time, I worried about the missing gravestones - a place that marked their presence and their passing.
'Naming' in phenomenological research is a complex element in the exploration of a phenomenon. The 'pre' of phenomenological research - the pre-categorization, theorization and so on - at first thought would appear to preclude naming because to 'name' something is to understand both its form and its function - its meaning - within a web of lived experience. What seems to be demanded by a phenomenological study is a suspension - or a delay - in the naming of some aspect of the phenomenon. Furthermore, as with any other aspect of this study, it is first necessary to try and identify the puzzle I am trying to unravel. I need ('desire') to understand why 'a sense of place' for the dead has become so important to me.
Memorials and Art
Whilst I have been worried about a 'sense of place', or, more properly, a place of mourning, for some years, the worry became more urgent after I attended a seminar Memorial Art and Architecture at the College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane in 127
August, 2003. One session was devoted to the design for the new Australian War Memorial then being constructed in Hyde Park, London. The memorial is constructed of sloping slabs of Western Australian granite on which are carved the birthplaces of Australian servicemen and women. Carved over the place names - Wagga Wagga, Haasts Bluff and so on - are the names of the great battles of the World Wars - the Somme, Borneo, Milne Bay, Lone Pine and Gallipoli. The only names on the memorial, however, are those of the current British and Australian Prime Ministers. The names of the servicemen and women are not part of the Memorial. During the course of the seminar I found myself almost on the point of tears and when I got home I wrote this in Book 9 (again an extract, the full text is found in Appendix 1):
The dead have names.
That's the whole point.
I don't know the place of my father. How could I find him without a name or a place?
I have clothed the lilies of the field. How much more do I care about you whose name I know?
You have to go looking (so they say) before you realize what you have lost. How can you find what you have lost if you don't have a place or a name?
The plants and flowers (endangered) have names - many of them - etched in stone and glass. Their destruction is etched beautifully but the people have no names1.
In art, and phenomenological research, a presence is only missed when we are confronted by an absence. We then go looking for what it is we sense is missing. In
1 Artist Janet Laurence showed a selection of her work at the Seminar Memorial Art and Architecture including one commissioned piece registering the names of endangered plants. 128 a sermon from Timothy Lutheran Church in Michigan, USA, an un-named pastor recounted a question posed to Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Why had the monument so 'gripped the hearts of American people':
"It's the names…The names are the memorial. No edifice or structure can bring people to mind as powerfully as their names". The power of memorials, indeed the power of most cemeteries, is the names that represent real human beings who lived and died (http://www.timothylivonia.com/sermons/2001- 01-07.html).
Cleve Jones, (in Bull Ed.2003, p.325) the founder of the American Names Project AIDS Quilt, had a similar reaction to the Vietnam Memorial:
I did not expect to be so moved by it. I was influenced by the Quakers, who are suspicious of war memorials, which they believe tend to glorify war rather than speak to the horror of it. But I was overwhelmed by the simplicity of it, of that black mirrorlike wall and the power it had to draw people from all across America to find a beloved's name and touch it and see their face reflected in the polished marble and leave mementos
Janet Laurence, one of the designers of the Australian War Memorial, could not explain the absence of names, except to say 'They did not want any names on it" and 'They had not thought of having a map' to assist people to find 'their' name. Later, I read that all references to States and different countries of origin had been removed because '"Aberdeen" would evoke memories for those concerned whether 'their' Aberdeen was in South Australia or Scotland' http://www.dva.gov.au/commem/oawg/memorials/london. My distress at the Memorial can be traced to several factors. First, as already discussed, is the importance of names and naming in mourning and remembrance. Second, the Memorial gives a false picture of the demographics of Australian servicemen and women - many of whom (like my father) were not born in Australia but in countries like Scotland, Greece and Italy. Last, and perhaps most importantly, the designers of the Memorial appear not to have understood the importance of 'place' in the stories we tell of each other - stories 129 which give the particular tone and texture that is critical to our sense of identity and belonging. It matters to me whether Aberdeen is the Aberdeen of Scotland where many of my father's relatives live, or, the Aberdeen in New South Wales that was once the answer to a correspondence school examination question that had me stumped and my father would walk past dropping hints about how we used to drive past the place when we went to visit my aunt and uncle.
The Place of Cemeteries
In the past I have had an ambivalent attitude towards cemeteries and gravestones and it has only been in the last ten or fifteen years that I have consciously sought them out in my fascination with the language of mourning. Cemeteries, too, can lay bare the historical cost of a country's development. At Silverton, a small former mining town outside Broken Hill, the cemetery - rusty corrugated iron and long unkempt grass - speaks of the underbelly of Australian wealth creation symbolized by the great mulloch heaps of Broken Hill. 'Saved to the memory of….' And the dates of birth and death reveal the cost of that wealth - death at 28, 25, 32 - and the children - ten months, three years, two years and so on. In the same way the military gravestones of El Alemain… Ypres …Gallipoli… reveal the youth of those who died - 17,18,22,25,19….
Book 8 (the full text is found in Appendix 1).
Over and over and over again - out comes these shapes and forms. I had thought it was the waterfall again. The 'rent' and 'filling' at one and the same time. Then a horizon reappeared and it seemed as though the waterfall was growing into something else
What is this meaning that is struggling to emerge? The image isn't struggling - it is strong and consistent. It is I (who holds the pen and brush) who cannot yet understand what I am trying to say.
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The overburdened hill is now a tourist attraction. The cemetery is overgrown, choked by weeds and the corrugated iron gravestones are rusting into forgotten.
At El Alamein the graves are well tendered - as is the memory of that place. It seems strange that we remember the dead with much cost and appear to forget the living. And yet I want the cemeteries so I could go and 'loll' on Keith's grave as the Samoans tend to do. Talk to him instead of having to write. How ridiculous. Talking to the dead in a 'special place' is just as ridiculous as writing to them. Yet the need is there to do both.
Funerals
The funeral of my friend Keith Robinson has been the impetus for many of my art works over the years2. It was also the beginning of my Letters To Keith because, as he had so carefully planned both the funeral and the wake, I sat under a wisteria vine the next day to write and report on its success. It has only been now during the course of this study that I have realized that the music Keith chose for the Service led us through the stages that we, the living, had to go through in accepting his death. The service opened with the beautiful bravado of a Brahms concerto, the reception of his blessing (a Hindu ritual) was accompanied by Indian Sitar music which, like Gregorian chant, is said to mirror the 'right' rhythm of the body, and, the final celebration, release and blessing was mirrored by the sublime last trio of Mozart's Der Rosenkavaliers. Is it that this mourning ritual mirrors the process of creating - we can start off with great strength of purpose and vision only to realize half way through the work that we must stop our purposefulness and listen and receive what the work is trying to achieve in us? Receive its blessing? And in due course give thanks and celebrate its conclusion?
2 A Series of works Kimino's and White Gums were part of the exhibition Figures From the Landscape Of Memory, Michel Sourgnes Fine Arts, Brisbane 2000. A selection of the Letters to Keith are found in Appendix 3. 131
Is it then, an acknowledgement that we are no longer the 'we' that we were prior to our experience of another that we celebrate in the rituals of funerals - and art making. There is a continuity with our 'before' selves (and our previous work) but somehow - from within the discipline of the ritual itself - something new emerges. We are now encased with another layer of complex experiences - eyes - (and ears) with which to progress on our way. In a very real sense, as we give thanks for a birth, so we do with a death because they are merely stages. Now I can understand Keith's story of the wave and the sea told me so long ago - and which has 'winked' at me on several occasions since and I have not fully comprehended what it was trying to teach me until now.
Mourning and Art
In 1999 I completed a series of four black ink drawings You get a poppy, a cross and a grave – if you’re lucky which was acquired by the Australian War Memorial in 2002. The references within the drawings cross over between war and AIDS. Loosely it is based on the Wall of Honour at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra with its white granite walls, brass plaques of names and the scarlet of poppies that some have placed against some particular name. The cross and the grave refer both to my preoccupation with the `no graves’ of my friends who died from AIDS and to a short story written just recently by a friend, Bert Yardley, entitled The Burial Party (1999). The Burial Party, a story of great Australian pathos, recalled the need to bury a mate during a lull in the fighting in New Guinea during the Second World War. The burial occurred some 60 years ago but the story was only written in 1999. My author friend mentioned that the Army used to carry a stock of white crosses and when needed they were 'sent up the line'. 'If you’re lucky' is obviously ambiguous - lucky that there was someone to bury the dead, lucky there was a cross to mark the spot, and, lucky, sometimes, that they had died and had not had to endure a life devoid of meaning and pleasure.
As already mentioned, I have had a troubled relationship with cemeteries over the years. In 1982-83 my husband and I lived in France in a small village near the sites of some of the great battles of World War One. At one time we had some (male) 132 friends visiting from Australia and a tour of the cemeteries was embarked upon. Some of the anger that I felt during that tour was not directed so much at the incredible waste of human life but at the culture in Australia that had produced men like my husband and our friends. They were typical of their generation - men who revered their fathers who had fought in World War I and 11, but, they themselves were too young for the Korean War, too old for Vietnam and were, thus, (in their own eyes) not 'real men'.
During that tour of gravesites one that affected me most profoundly was an American cemetery with a chapel/monument built on the line of trenches that was designed to defend a ridiculously small hill. Inside the monument were the names of 1,400 men whose bodies had never been recovered from that pimple of a hill and so they had no graves. That their parents, wives and children would come to France to visit their grave to find none, just their names as 'still missing' or 'still un-recovered' seemed to me sadder than the acres of white gravestones. I was even more affected by a small semi circle of graves in a corner of a paddock not far from where we lived. A flowering peach tree sheltered the graves of bagpipers from the Gordon Highlander's Regiment who were playing their Regiment into battle when a shell killed them all. My father was a Scot and one of the tartans we are entitled to wear is that of the Gordon Highlanders. Somehow, because they were Scots, wore my father's tartan and were buried in a paddock, it made their loss more personal and acute. It was only a few years ago that I did a small painting of that peach tree and semi circle of graves.
Until the last couple of years I had rarely attended an Anzac Day Service. I do not know for what reason, but my father had little time for the RSL and rarely went to RSL Clubs. He went religiously, however, to the annual reunions of his 2/10th Regiment. The one time I can remember my parents attending an Anzac Day Service was when I was living in a small country town in western New South Wales and their visit coincided with Anzac Day. My mother was also an ex-servicewoman and this particular day both my mother and father marched. I remember watching them come down the street and bursting into tears. The tears were mixed. I felt as though I had broken into an intimacy of their youth - and recognized that they shared 133 something that could never really be shared with anyone else - even, or especially, with their children. My mother's brother was killed in New Guinea, another was a Rat of Tobruk and never quite the same after the War. One of my mother's sisters was married to a man who had served in the First World War and 'went funny' when it rained because he hated mud.
I cannot separate out my feeling about the various wars - World War 1, 11, and Vietnam - they are too intertwined. I am surprised, now, how very much part of my identity, my self, they are. I had not realized until so comparatively recently just how much of 'me' is made up of war memories.
Jennifer McDuff3, in her artists' statement accompanying a series of etchings in the Australian War Museum writes:
In order to fully comprehend the whole experience, that of trauma, the banal, the fear, the reality of war as an experience for one man, I have chosen to use images that related directly to this total experience, one that has spanned twenty two years (Launceston, 1992).
Her etchings were, as I remember, of her husband's dog tag.
Coming home from Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2000, I trudged down the back of the 'plane to the smoker's section, lifted my head and saw a sea of military uniforms. The blood drained from my face before I was able to register the pale blue scarves and berets of UN Peacekeepers. Then a dog tag flopped out of a uniform and my tummy lurched. Why had I never comprehended before that dog tags are only useful if one is injured or killed?
3 Artist's statement transcribed from title panel during my visit to Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2003. 134
7e. THE 'THEME' OF THE RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF INTIMACY/ART MAKING AND TRAUMA There are probably few times in one's life that have a genuinely definitive quality about them, as when one is being 'asked' to move into a different level of 'Being'. A level which, on later reflection, could be described as being in a different landscape with more freedom and a quiet excitement of anticipation. I can only recall one or two such instances when I felt as though I was stepping into completely unknown territory where I had no idea what was going to happen, nor how I would respond to whatever was ahead. One of those instances was the occasion of my first exhibition some twenty-five years ago. It was a group exhibition with my fellow students and our teacher Graham Thorley in the old Masonic Hall (converted to an art studio) in Balranald in southwestern New South Wales. So frozen and numb did I feel at the prospect of my first exhibition that not even the grandeur of the Hay Plains could penetrate the fear, terror and apprehension that I experienced. Even now I cannot correctly identify the emotions that I felt - I only knew that my soul would be up on the wall for all to see - and, perhaps, to walk past. It was, perhaps, my first experience of a real understanding of 'intimacy' - allowing oneself to be known by others. And, my first experience of the reciprocity of intimacy - others wanting to have part of my soul, me, in their buying my work - although I did not fully comprehend this dimension at that time. In a discussion of an art practice what place does 'intimacy' have? And what are the rights and responsibilities that might be inherent in such a notion?
A proper appreciation and understanding of intimacy (as already explored throughout this study) has direct implications for how both trauma and art making are conceptualized. As already discussed, one of the key elements of trauma is the silence that necessarily accompanies 'not being known', and, not 'being able to speak'. The inability to find the right words, the right audience to listen to our stories in the right manner means that we have no way - or no satisfactory way, of letting ourselves be known. The authority of our voice has been diminished - or lost. In effect, intimacy is denied or experienced in a diminished form.
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Trust, Surprise, Trauma and Betrayal
I was told a story (or not even a story, a couple of 'snippets' of one) concerning an adult man who had been abused by a priest in his late adolescence. 'He never talked to me. He never said he loved me', so the man said, 'he just used me'. A poignant story that is, perhaps, all too common for those who have suffered abuse. What struck me, however, was the thought (possibility) that the trauma of abuse might not always lie so much with the physical act but with the surprise (betrayal) of what one is entitled to expect from a sexual act (an intimacy of conversation commensurate with the act) - and the absence of that in what, in fact, happened. In Sydney, during that time of AIDS, many gay men experienced rejection by their families because of their sexual orientation, and, then, because they had AIDS. The pain of that rejection was magnified, I believe, because we, consciously or unconsciously, expect our family to be different - to be supportive and caring. We have a trust that families ought to behave in certain ways and our trust (expectation) is sometimes shattered by the reality we experience. It is, perhaps, that shock of disjunction between what we expect and what we receive that accounts for much of our pain - not necessarily the 'content' of the rejection.
'Trust' as a notion is of little use unless it is possible to peel back the layers of language to identify 'What do we mean by saying we have trust in something or someone?' Is it as simple (and as profoundly difficult) as knowing and allowing ourselves to be known? Is it possible to say that an abuse of trust (however horrific the particular circumstance) has the same roots as art in the disjunction between 'sameness' and 'difference' 'surprise' and 'unexpected'?
In a sense this difference between what we expect and what we experience is merely, I suspect, points along a continuum. Soldiers returning to Australia after the Vietnam War (and ex POWs from the Second Wold War) trusted that their country would behave in a certain way - with gratitude for their service, compassion for what they must have experienced and so on. What they experienced was, in many cases, the reverse, or, indifference and disdain. On one trip home from Sydney I mentioned to my family that I would be marching with Ankali, a support group for people living 136 with AIDS, in the coming Mardi Gras Parade. 'I wouldn't say that too loudly if I were you', responded one of my brothers. A flippant 'joke' but symptomatic of a general attitude towards my work with people with AIDS - or, gays more specifically. In that tiny remark I gained a small understanding of what the VietnamVeterans might have felt on their return. I later read of the Veterans marching after the unveiling of the Vietnam Memorial when one said, 'We were a raggle taggle mob but as I was on the outside, people reached over to shake my hand and say "Welcome Home" and I thought "Everyone needs a parade".' (Hynes 1997) On the night of the Mardi Gras Parade as we turned into Oxford Street, the crowd was three or four deep and cheering. Some recognized the Ankali symbol as we passed and called out 'Good on you' 'You're doing a good job' and I felt proud, and realized much later that I, too, had had my 'parade'. Later still, I painted that sentiment, Everyone Needs a Parade, and it now forms part of the 'war series' Down The Track. The After Effects of AIDS and War.
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8. EXHIBITION WORKS
Introduction
A constant refrain of phenomenological study is the 'form emerges in the doing.' This is as true of the form of presentation as it is of the content of the works. The visual works that comprise the exhibition are largely completed in five media (in order of 'doing') mono prints on paper, oil and acrylic on canvas, fabric works, shellacked books on paper and glazed ceramic bowls. It is very different from what I would consider my normal exhibition format where all works are framed and hung on walls. The dominant symbol of a desk/table came to me as an inspiration some months ago and it seemed to answer the needs of this study in a way that was as multi-layered as the works themselves. First, and most pragmatically, the desk with its multiple compartments held and contained the books, drawings and writing, not only physically, but as metaphorically as the conduct of this study has held and contained me so that I was able to explore my experiences in a supported and disciplined fashion. Second, as already mentioned on several occasions, thinking and painting are so intertwined for me that I am not able to classify the two modes as one being more important than the other. It was only when scanning images for this study that I realized just how frequently the image of a desk/table and chair has emerged in my work over so many years. Third, in the same way as the painting of a waterfall united my love of landscape and my experiences of AIDS (and gave me the title of this exhibition How a dying baby became a waterfall) so, too, has the image of a table united some disparate experiences. During my theological studies a table was both my symbol of 'family' and of 'Church' - with both pointing to the essential nature of both - the hospitality of sharing a meal (sustenance) and experiences in a domestic and ordinary way. The image of a table further recalls one of my most poignant experiences of AIDS - also the subject of a fabric piece Four places and only one chair - and it is included as a tribute to Tracy Lee, a drag queen, who did so much for the gay community and who died from AIDS some years ago1. Fourth, this
1 Tracy Lee was a drag queen in Sydney who, even when very ill, continued to work for various AIDS related charities. As sometimes happened, Tracy Lee's dying came at the same time as many others and his friends were 'deathed out' and he sometimes felt acutely alone. One day I drove him home to 138 exhibition is overloaded in that many more works are included than would normally be the case. I have chosen to include so much material because it is a visual illustration of the magnitude of the task of a phenomenological study - writing, re- writing, editing, refining, re-painting, uncovering and drawing together of so many elements and experiences. This exhibition is obviously a final work in that it is the culmination of this particular program of study. I judged that it was particularly important, because of the research methodology chosen, that the steps along the way are revealed as much as possible - so others might come to know 'how it was' and 'what was it like?'
It has already been stated that these works ought not be considered illustrations of any particular experience. As visual artist, Deborah Walker(1997,p.68) points out:
The foundation and influence for my image making has always arisen from my profound interest in and understanding of other, parallel worlds. Literature and poetry always had a powerful, unidentifiable effect on my feelings and understandings. Yet, my idiosyncratic web of sources cannot be very easily communicated in relationship to the source of my images
Art Works and Phenomenological Description
To illustrate the interplay between writing and painting, extracts from two phenomenological descriptions are here placed in dialogue with some of the paintings and monoprints completed during the course of this study (the full text of the writings are contained in Appendix 3). They, perhaps more than any other work in this exhibition, illustrate how the phenomenological endeavour can begin in the commonplace of every day life, which can in turn inspire a series of works. The first piece was triggered by the appearance of my principal supervisor after he had undergone some treatment for incipient skin cancers in mid 2002.
his sparsely furnished house where, in the dining room, was a table exquisitely laid for four with lace tablecloth, glasses and cutlery - and only one chair. 139
Dull, blue red blotches. Crimson nearly. At first I thought 'Kaposi'2 and I thought of Keith3 going to the Red Cross to learn how to apply stage make up to cover up the black splotches that spelled the end. But Dave’s4 red blotches brought to mind the fever spots of pneumonia – or pneumocystis5 (that was the type that people with AIDS got. Wardi6 and his dog, Zen. Zen didn’t have pneumocystis of course but one dreadful day/night Wardi did. I was supposed to be working. As a dishwasher. At the Media Club in North Sydney. It was just before Christmas and the restaurant was packed. The kitchen a chaos. Then you rang. You did not ring often so when you asked if I could come I could not refuse. You were frightened, you said. Twenty phone calls later I found a stand in dishwasher and went to you. All night we changed the sheets as they became sodden. Took temperatures. Bathed fevered brows as they did in Romantic films. There were no beds and the nurse said they could do no more had you been in hospital. I don’t think that was true. But at the time it provided some comfort I suppose.
As dawn came up we drove to the hospital and they put you on a trolley in the corridor. When I came back the red blotches were staining your face. Trying to push away the oxygen mask. And your sisters sat well back in the room. One, the nun, saying the Rosary over and over again. They were frightened too. For a different reason. `Homosexuality was not holy. It was a sin’. They could not reconcile their love and their Bible. So they sat well back. Not touching you. Until you died. A quick convulsion and that was it. I went to ring your lover who would not come before. He had joined a monastery and he had made his peace with God so he told me. And if he had come as you pleaded you would think he would come every time. I went back to the hospital room. One of the sisters (or cousins it could have been) had rushed back to your house to get your suit. More becoming I suppose than the
2 Karposi scarmona, a rare form of cancer but common in people suffering from AIDS. It is characterized by dark purple/black blotches which can be found on any part of the body and which can progress into swollen, crusted sores. 3 Keith Robinson, my friend, to whom the Letters to Keith are written. 4 My principal supervisor, Associate Professor David Hawke. 5 Pneumocystis a rare form of pneumonia common in people with AIDS. 140
hospital gown open down the back and above your knees. You were so tall. So they had you dressed in the suit. The rosary beads were twined decoratively through your hands with a red rose. And your sisters were patting you and laughing and talking. I left. Walked outside and cried.
Later I sat with the lover at the red brick church funeral. Released from the protection of God for the dead. Not for the living. And the chasuble prayed that in heaven my client, my friend would` regain “the full vigor of his manhood”'. Later still I was coming home late. People piling into church for Christmas Eve Mass. I should go in I thought. But I might punch the chasuble priest. So I drove on.
The short, jerky sentences are indicative of how difficult it was to drag these memories into pen, paper and paint. I decided against re-writing this piece because I need to remember, in the silences between the raw and the polished, how I, in my then ignorance of the implications of disease 'signs', did not always respond well. Perhaps my need for an understanding forgiveness is also etched into the prints.
The second example again crosses over time. Sitting beside the bed of the dying was an all too common experience during my time in Sydney. This piece was written some years after I 'left AIDS' and refers more directly to the death of the husband of a great friend. It, too, illustrates the manner in which even most recent events are seen through the eyes of memory. It was written very early in the study when I was trying to comprehend the nature of a phenomenological description and how one went about writing one. The full text of this piece of writing is contained in Appendix 3.
What was it like to sit beside the bed of a dying man?
6 My Ankali client who was directly responsible for my going to the Day Centre of people living with AIDS in Woollahra, Sydney to teach painting and drawing. 141
I sat beside Ian’s7 bed last week as he was dying. I was dreading going to the hospital. Dreading going back to the smell of death. I got such a shock when they said he was expected to die within 48 hours that I scraped my car in two separate car parks that day - something I have never done before. Sometimes, during those days and early evenings, I would lift off. No not lift off. Dissolve. Was it Ian who lay there? Or Arthur8? Or Keith? Or Brett? Or Adrian? It seems obscene to confuse one man with another. It is mesmerizing. I watch the drips of the saline drip. There is a machine with digital numbers that keep changing all the time and I don’t know what they mean. But it doesn’t really matter. Ian is dying and it won’t make any difference if the drips are out of sequence – or even if they stop. Later we learn the drip is to help alleviate the symptoms of renal failure. The spasms which twitch his fingers and his shoulders. Is he in pain? How long do I wait before I go to the nurses and ask for more drugs? Is it for us who are watching or for Ian who is twitching that we ask for relief? Does it matter? Kathy is concerned that we don’t `do it for us’. But now, I say, it can be for us as well as for Ian. It defies time sitting beside a dying man. The first evening Kathy was wearing a yellow shirt. A rusty yellow. I wrote a poem once of sitting beside Adrian. I was wearing a bright yellow jumper. I don’t know where it is now. Yellow is the colour I love most passionately and even when I don’t think I will use it I always put out a great blob of it on my palette. When Adrian finally died about 3 o’clock in the morning I wrote my fingers shook as I went to light a cigarette and my jumper reeked of the sweet sweet smell of death.
The following text is a reflection on the phenomenological processes that followed the initial writing above:
Is this a description of lived experience? I can see the painting of it in my head and I will have to paint it soon. I think I will ask Kathy to be my model
7 Ian was the husband of my friend Kathy Hunt. 142
– sitting with her head resting on the bed. Is she me or I her? How can I paint utter weariness – and timelessness – and endurance? And the other painting that is forming itself is the sweet sweet smell of death. I need to explore some glazing techniques. The pervasiveness of the smell. I am reminded of Lloyd Rees9 trying to paint his experience of a bushfire – all red and gold and black. And he thought it was too raw and covered it with a milky glaze – and somehow it worked.
Reflection on some particular works – The Drought Paintings
Some of the exhibition works are influenced by our current drought when every time I looked out the window of my cottage or studio I saw hungry sheep and ground bare of grass. These images, like all phenomenological descriptions, are multi -layered and do not fit into a neat linear timeframe. Most of the images were completed before Christmas 2002 – some during the mono print phase in the middle of that year. They recall, not only previous droughts that I have experienced all through my rural life, but, more particularly, an image that was burnt into my mind during a visit to Mother Teresa’s hospital in Addis Ababa some three years ago. Down the far end of one vast space I saw a nun in a blue and white sari habit bathing the sores on a skeletal man who was half crouching on the bed. I think I did do a small sketch of this image during my travelling but it has returned time and time again in my painting and in my writing. In some small way it is akin to the situation that existed for Zoran Music (in Bohm-Duchen 1995, p.52) a survivor of a concentration camp, in his fascination with the heaps of bodies stacked up in the camp:
(I was) fascinated by these heaps of bodies…because they had a kind of …tragic beauty. Some of them weren't quite dead, their limbs still moved and their eyes followed you round, begging for help.
8 Arthur was my husband, Keith Robinson I have already identified, Brett and Adrian were young men who I met at the Day Centre for people living with AIDS in Sydney. Brett also became my Ankali client and I was to become the executor for Adrian's Estate.. 9 Rees (with Free1987,p.129) 143
For me the boundaries between art, war, AIDS and drought are fluid and permeable and commonly the images from one trigger memories of the others. Music's piles of bodies merged with the skeletal man - and these images triggered a memory of piles of sheep I saw at a sale-yards years ago (because outside the room of the man were piles of sodden clothes). For the sheep, drought had been followed by cold, driving rain and they were not strong enough to be trucked. The dead and the nearly dead were thrown in piles from the semi-trailer. For the destitute and sick (picked up from the street) in Mother Teresa's in Addis Ababa perhaps they had new clothes. It is 'the piles' that unite all these images - and 'that shape' - that skeletal, naked shape that in its absolute vulnerability somehow pleads for a response from us - a response that links 'us' with 'them'. It was August one year when I was allocated my first Ankali client. August is an especially poignant time in our family calendar because my father (Church of Scotland and rarely a churchgoer) always went to our Catholic Church on the 15th August to say 'Thank you to Mary' 10for letting him out of Changi11. My client was the same age as my father would have been at that time - and the same weight - skin and bone. In a way that is still not fully comprehended all this is somehow connected with the dreaded plastic bags with which one brings home personal effects from hospitals after the death.
I went to see a play in Sydney many years ago. At NIDA12 I think it was. About a man who had died of AIDS. All I can remember is that there were two swings set up on the stage and, of course, after the death there was only one man, his lover, swinging on the swing. And a collection of plastic bags and my stomach heaved in recognition. Clearing out the hospital room meant plastic bags. Plastic bags full of dirty clothes. Drugs, precious things. But plastic bags nevertheless. Some hospitals now, I believe, have calico bags that they give to family and friends so they don’t have to use plastic ones. A considerate gesture. But it is the same thing. The emptiness of `things’ that now have no owner to give them shape and relevance.
10 The 15th August is the feast of the Assumption - one of the most important dates in the Marian calendar. 11 Changi Prison, Singapore from where my father was released on 15th August, 1945. 144
Ceramic Bowls
Over the past few years I have sometimes worked with a Brisbane potter, Trevor Torenbeck where he has thrown some pots that I have then glazed. Some small bowls formed part of the first showing of the Ethiopian works in the Warwick Art Gallery in 2000. A friend remarked at the time that they looked like 'alms bowls'. 'Alms' strictly translated is a 'charitable relief of the poor' (The Little Oxford Dictionary 4th Edition) or a 'donation'. Both could equally apply to the lived experience of artists, however, it is the paradoxically reciprocal nature of alms and donation that I would like to 'tease out' with respect to the presence of these ceramic bowls in this exhibition. As already discussed, art exists to serve a community - and the opportunity to conduct this type of research might also be considered in the same fashion - a privilege with a corresponding responsibility. With regard to this study I find it very difficult to write what 'I want' without also couching it in terms of 'service to others' - which as van Manen (1990), and Sullivan (2003) have also identified as one of the ultimate goals of research. John Brack (Hawley 1993,p.117) has it that 'a painting is not finished until it has been exhibited'. There is a caveat, though, to these sentiments. It would not be true to say I paint for others because I do not. Nor do I believe that an 'art of truth' can be made for anyone else except the artist in the first instance - which may explain why so many artists are reluctant to undertake commissions (Olsen 1997). When I am painting nothing counts except me, the canvas and the paint
When I have finished, however, I have to let it go for it to do its work. In this letting go it is akin to the making of a panel for the AIDS Quilt13. The sentiments that prompt its construction are mine alone, but then I have to present it to the Quilt where it is sewn into a larger whole and my voice becomes joined with thousands of others who have experienced the same grief as me. It is then equally important for me to understand the process and the nature of the total experience so that I can link
12 National Institute for Dramatic Art, Sydney. 13 Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project begun by Richard Johnson and Andrew Carter in 1988 after Andrew has seen an unfolding of the American Names Project Quilt in Adlanta in 1987. There were 44 panels when it was first unfolded in 1988. When I later succeeded Andrew Carter as National 145 mine into a universal context to see if it makes sense. The bowls, then, can be thought of as an offering of this study back to others.
The glazing of these pots was conducted in late 2003. To the horror of my potter friend, I glaze with the same speed and abandon as I often paint - sometimes to the benefit of the pots, sometimes not. One of the essential differences between glazing pots and painting on a canvas is that it is not so easy to wipe off mistakes in glazing. In this particular session I started out by painting horizontal bands of wax resist across all the bowls - consciously reminiscent of the 'horizontal' paintings that had so irked me during some earlier stages of this study. It was only as I was applying further layers of glaze that I realized I had resolved the puzzle of the horizontal paintings, I did not need to paint them any more, and I wished I had not been so impetuous with the wax. Before the pots have their final firing I have little idea how they will emerge from the kiln. In whatever pattern the lines of wax take as they emerge through the glazes they may serve the same function as the 'jerky sentences' of the phenomenological description with which I began this section - a salutary reminder that the stages one goes through during the course of a study are often negotiated by the heart long before the head catches up.
Convenor of the Australian AIDS Quilt Project there were 72 panels and some 500 when I left the Quilt Project in 1991. 146
9. CONCLUSION
How a Dying Baby Became a Waterfall.
How a Dying Baby Became a Waterfall is the title of my final exhibition, an inspiration which came to me one graced day when, in the space of but a few hours, my study (in its fuller implications) all fell into place - not only did I have the conclusion to my thesis and the title of my exhibition, but I finally understood some seemingly disparate experiences. I understood that the landscapes of our experience are made up of panoramas as well as of footprints; some additional dimensions of helplessness and hope; and that one of the functions of music is that it can carve out a space so appropriate to the mood of an experience that they are forever linked in memory. That moment of it all falling into place moved the study from a personal response to the voice of the world calling on us to say something into a response to the demand of our common humanity (van Manen 1990). 'Our common humanity' I remembered was the resolution Underwood (1990) came to in trying to understand the nature of the grief he felt on the death of some one else's child. We feel grief, and are entitled to feel grief, simply because we are part of the same human family in which it is the role of adults to protect and safeguard children. That it is not always possible to do so is part of our common grief and suffering.
How have I responded to the voice of the world (of which I am a part) for this speaking must surely be the conclusion to this study?
Australian identity, as is mine, is intimately described by experiences of war from the Boer War of the nineteenth century until the present day. So much of this study has been concerned with knowing and yet not knowing. From my earliest childhood I have been aware of the presence of war - and yet it was not until I was conducting this study that I fully understood how much memories of war and its aftermath have shaped me and the way in which I see the world. Then, until mid way through the study, I had not realized how damaged I had become by my experiences of AIDS being added to the memories of war - and that is not to say I do not recognize beauty and value in what has been damaged. After the fire that destroyed our old family 147 home one of the rare pieces found intact was a pottery face somewhat roughly sculptured at boarding school by my youngest sister. The joy that we all experienced in finding something whole in the midst of so much that was smashed and burnt was not lessened when we discovered that its nose had been chipped by the bulldozer piling up the debris. That the sculpture not only survived the fire but the bulldozer blade as well somehow added to its precious quality.
One of the directions for future research that follows from the above is the experience of descendants of veterans and ex POW's which is only just starting to emerge, for example, in literature and the visual arts (Wajnryb 2001; Amishai- Maisels 1993). I do not believe we have begun to comprehend the significance of Lomax's (1995) poignant worry concerning the effects their (ex POW's) 'suppressed feelings may have had on the psychic development of (their) children'. As Wajnryb (2001) has remarked it was only when she had children of her own that she became aware that some of her behaviour (not speaking about some things, for example) was mirroring that of her survivor parents.
Then, again during the course of this research, I came to a deeper appreciation of the fact that my after AIDS self (with all its attendant delight, freedom, suffering and grief) was a permanent and enduring one. In a very real sense there is no cure for trauma. It would make little difference how much I painted out images that have haunted my mind for so many years (like the frozen terrible beauty of Zoran Music's piles of corpses) they would ultimately return. That I have painted them and I have come to a much greater appreciation of their significance within the threads of my lived existence and practice is of some comfort - as is the felt comprehension of their inevitable and enduring presence.
This study has given me a different appreciation of the value and place of obsessions. Rather than chastizing myself for certain images that repeatedly return to my brush and pen as somehow indicating a deficit in my practice of being, I have come to honour and trust them as being 'the voice of the cracks' that are not silence - but I have to learn to listen to them because the healing, making sense, power of art will only come from reflection on my own experience. That, perhaps, is the greatest 148 lesson that I have learnt during the course of this study - the critical need to stop so that we can hear when the silence starts to speak and can become the vehicle for our transformation and healing.
A re-thinking of the notion of obsession as being a valuable vehicle for a return to flourishing rather than as always evidence of a pathology is, I believe, another direction for future research that has emerged from this study. As is the necessity to revisit 'counseling' in the light of a deeper appreciation of the notion of 'intimacy', 'sameness' and 'difference'. If I am distressed about any aspect of the conclusion to this study, it is the ramifications of what has emerged with respect to those notions of 'sameness' and 'difference' - and, it appears, our inability to feel a just compassion and empathy for those whom we do not identify as being the 'same' as ourselves. The recent Four Corners documentary on the Rwandan massacre Killers http://hnews.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/panorama/transcripts/killers.txt 19/04/04) emphasized a need for Clendinnen's (1998) 'imaginative engagement' as a way into understanding the experiences of another. The documentary featured a young woman, Flora Mukampore, who had survived the Rwandan massacre by feigning death - and hiding amongst the hundreds of bodies for nearly a month. At first, my mind glazed over and I could not imagine what it must have been like for that young woman. As I began to reflect on her story I started to see some tiny cracks where my imagination might enter - her dead, shell-shocked, remembering eyes I recognized and remembered seeing many times before. It was, however, when she started brushing her arms and her clothes - brushing off the memory of crawling maggots - that I experienced another shock of recognition. I've Always Hated Maggots (2002) is the title of one of the mono prints of this study and refers not only to my father's experience as a prisoner of war but to my rural background when, after tending flyblown sheep, one commonly finds maggots crawling over one's arms and clothes - a sensation I loathe. While I will never be able to fully understand the suffering of that young woman, it is possible to find ways into an 'imagining' that can lessen the perceived 'difference'.
I have been an exhibiting artist for just over twenty five years - and yet it was only in the 'doing' of this study that I became more fully aware that my artist skin and eyes 149 are not something I can even choose to take off and put on again. I vowed some years ago that whatever I did in life it had to involve my art - whatever the cost of that decision might be. I have also said repeatedly that since that time of AIDS in Sydney it is as though, physically, I have another layer of skin - a skin of memories that I cannot separate out from mySelf - and when I say it I even pat and stroke the skin of my arm to demonstrate the physicality of the memories. Yet, had I fully comprehended the significance of what I was saying, I would not have gone through the years of worrying whether it was right to paint the hideous sore on Keith's leg. Now I really know that the eye of an artist does not discriminate in what it finds beautiful and what it desires to paint. It then follows that experiences of AIDS and the aftermath of war are not parts of a separate life - they are just different (and often more difficult) aspects of my lived experience as a visual artist. That deeper, grounded understanding has again provided some comfort and peace - and yet raised the awareness of how onerous is the corresponding responsibility to treat of 'horrible beauty' with care, tenderness and respect. As artists - and researchers - we are trained to 'see' differently and, we trust, deeply. That ability to see the ordinary in a myriad of different lights, together with a honed set of technical skills, carries a certain and peculiar power which, like any other power, must be discharged with a proper awareness of its presence and with corresponding care.
During my theological studies I was continually chastized for trying to introduce particular examples of lived experience into theory: 'personal experience was properly the domain of Pastoral Theology'. Then, and now, I believe there must be a continual dialogue and cross-fertilization - and correction when necessary - between both theory and practice. I owe a great debt to phenomenology because it has given me the way of researching my own experience of practice for which I had long been looking and where I was not obliged to leave bits of myself out - a way that honoured my painting as much as my writing, that welcomed my voracious and eclectic reading and did not require me to sanitize (or edit out) memories, feelings and emotions. That is not to say I did not value and benefit greatly from my previous academic work which had used some different methodologies but that, for this time and this program of study, phenomenology was a perfect fit for me. I now can 150 appreciate more fully that all my previous work - in both academia and art making - has, in a sense, been preparing me for this current study.
It is difficult to underestimate the importance of a phenomenological approach for any area of study and research. This importance is, perhaps, more critical for practitioners who have achieved a certain level of expertise in their chosen field as one of the less admirable qualities implicit in that expertise is a corresponding awareness that the ability to hide behind it is easier as well. It is impossible to conduct a phenomenological study without stopping to reflect on how the tangled webs of meaning have influenced how we view ourselves, our work and our place in the world. At the same time, however, the inherent non-judgmental and lyrical quality of phenomenology has given me (at least) the courage to try and unravel some of the tangled memories - and/or to sing my way through the darkness.
I have always been very wary and reluctant to excessively analysize my work. This is due, in part, to the elements of mystery and grace that I have always recognized as an essential element of my art making (and all art making for that matter) and it seems to me somewhat pointless to try and manufacture reasons and explanations for what is, essentially, unknowable. Gao Xingjian (2002, pp.15-16) has cautioned that 'reason and reflection are traps for the artist. You know from your own experience that when images escape your grasp you fall back on language and your painting gets irretrievably lost.' On a first reading, a phenomenological study would appear to contradict all these wise strictures in that reason and reflection are such an essential part of the research methodology - but they are also a demand of a moral and aware life - and of the practice of art making. So it must be in the humility that one treats of insights and discoveries made during the course of a study that one is able to avoid the trap of arrogance and the beguilement of excessive theorizing. What I feared (fear) most was that, in researching the mysteries of my art making, I would kill the very thing I sought to understand. Whether this fear has been justified or not will only reveal itself in time. All I can say at this time is that I ache to draw.
As this program of study is entering its final stages my family and friends are beginning to ask 'Where is it leading?' meaning, I think, am I going to get a 'proper 151 job' that pays decent, regular money - and will I be more comfortable to be with - less burdened, harried and haunted. At this stage I dare not tell them that this time of research has been a necessary preparation for the next stage of more AIDS. I shall allow that knowledge to unfold for them like their own phenomenological study. Phenomenology seeks to lay bare the bones of our lived experience so that we may come to a deeper and deeper understanding of their meaning and significance - and so that we may be able to continue the work of our lives in a more aware and just fashion. We cannot live justly and more consciously when our eyes, ears and hearts are burdened and haunted by memories of experiences that we do not understand. Until I had made sense of the rabbit trap memories that I have carried for so long I could not, in all conscience, go out to people living with AIDS for the simple reason I would not have been able to see them nor hear the stories they needed to tell.
In a way, that readiness was the deeper meaning of the Ormiston Gorge experience (described earlier in the Study) and alluded to at the beginning of this conclusion. The part of that story that I had previously not understood was the significance of the path - as then I was literally on a path. What now winks at me from beside the path is that, during that walk, I declined an invitation to climb up a rock to see the panorama of Ormiston Pound with its surrounding ranges. 'The fascination for panoramas is a male power thing' I can remember saying (meaning, in truth, I was too hot and too tired to climb rocks). Now, I realize, it was me that was not ready to see the panorama. My later explorations into the panoramas of Salvator Rosa and Moura were leading me, I can now appreciate, into seeing a bigger picture.
My difference of opinion with van Manen (1990) and Smith (1974) with their apparent fixed focus is then both right and wrong. The straight focus may be the way we are led into an appreciation of the implications of an understanding- which is right, but if we remain looking at the ground - it is wrong. In reflecting back on that painting trip to the Northern Territory I now realize that I was invited to do both - look at the minute details of footprints in the sand, and later, the panorama. I accepted the former but not the latter. For me, it is sometimes necessary to appreciate the meaning of the minutiae before we can even start to comprehend the grandeur of the universal and global. One of the functions of art (as it has emerged 152 from this study) is that it helps us to confront the overwhelming - and the terrible - without becoming overwhelmed. It can help make the awful manageable. One of the functions of phenomenology, as it has emerged with greater clarity in this last Chapter, is that in seeing the interdependence of the footprints and the panoramas the light returns to what might have previously been perceived as only darkness - and that takes time even if it is McDuff's '50 years'.
When I returned from Ethiopia and Eritrea I wrote to Keith telling him that I had 'copped a bit of flack' about the images of legless men and dying babies that some felt were 'too horrible', 'too confronting' and 'there was nothing beautiful about them' (Letters to Keith Appendix 2). Then I said 'they had already been killed by AIDS and war. I can't kill them again by the silence of invisibility'. I, like Levinas (in Kaplan 1994) carry within mySelf the memory of faces to which I have to answer - the eyes of my father and my mother, the wounded soldiers and haunted veterans - and the tiny, cold, dying baby in Addis Ababa. In a sense that need to keep answering (the responsibilities of intimacy and the coming to know) is akin to the processes of phenomenology - which are never finished either. On the afternoon of the opening of my exhibition in Toulouse, one of my French hosts asked me how I felt about my 'vernissage'. 'Vernissage' was outside the realm of my vocabulary but I learnt it meant 'the last varnish'. It is a common assumption (by myself as well) that a painting can be finished - but they are never finished because what we are painting is our response to life. What happens is that we stop working on one particular area of our lived experience (a particular painting) and try again to do 'it' better (Gao Xingjian 2002). In writing this last chapter I have learnt the one critical and essential difference between art making and a phenomenological study - in painting you can have a 'vernissage' - in a phenomenological study you cannot. One of the great strengths of phenomenological research is the awareness that we, in living our lives in a phenomenological way, always come to a deeper and deeper awareness of the phenomena we are seeking to understand. The fact that the process is never finished is, in one sense, exciting, provocative and enticing. From another perspective, particularly relevant to a study such as this, that endless unfolding can also be frustrating and can beget a thesis that is difficult to keep internally consistent - but for which there is necessarily a final full stop. In this last writing I had a 'gut feeling' 153 something was missing. Then I realized it was the flip side to the underbelly of trauma and suffering - the light that only can be seen in relation to the darkness of shadows - and vice versa. That I can finally see some light is the full stop of this thesis - and I believe, its benediction.
The success of an exhibiting artist's life is usually measured in exhibitions, reviews and red stickers. It is a strange aspect of the phenomenon of creating itself that a phenomenological study can subvert all those criteria and, in their place, reveal some very different successful results - a deeper awareness, a wider understanding, a lightness of things making sense, a renewed clarity of purpose and a very grounded gentleness or tenderness. Yet, it is those very different results that are needed by artists to enable them to address the lack of care that Kramer (in Bull Ed.2003) has so rightly identified as abetting the tragedy of AIDS - and the deaf ears that cannot hear the voice of silence.
154
10. APPENDICES APPENDIX 1. Books 1 - 12
Book 1
Notes 25 July 2003 I wish I could say I start out with a definite plan - an idea of what I want to do. Sometimes I do. Like the robed women. Ever since I came back from Ethiopia1 they have been a constant presence for my pen and brush. As the piles of corpses were for Zoran Music2. He painted them. Then returned to other things like landscapes and horses and cathedrals. Then they would return. Once again and once more he would paint them.
He dreamt once that they had disappeared and he was bereft. I think they go when they have taught us what we need to learn. So the robed women were not a conscious invitation. But somehow they prepared me yet again. I found myself buying a very pale umber muslin; then proper white muslin. It's hard to get but little country shops stock it for people to strain their jam. I have never had the patience to strain jam but others must. Then when I went into my studio I started rummaging through my precious hoards of fabric. Beautiful fabrics that have been given to me or I have collected just because I love beautiful fabric. Beautiful things full stop. And I find myself reaching for the plain strong honesty of calico. More human than dead white. More warmth and it can take so much knocking about without fraying all over the place. A good strong basis. Like some sort of faith I guess. And I start playing with the fabric. It somehow seems to be leading me until finally the penny drops and I can see what is emerging in some sort of fashion. But the robed women had their own language and I wrote it on the fabric with my machine. So still and silent. Enduring. My hand remembered the precious wonky box that Wardi3 had given me with its hank of woven silk and a little ball of glittery thread. White. I can't
1 I traveled to Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1999 to 'document' as a visual artist some of the effects of AIDS and the aftermath of war. 2 Zoran Music was an artist imprisoned in the concentration camp of Dachau during World War 11 (Peppiatt 1988). 155 now remember where I was when I first saw some hanks of cotton (not silk) Addis I think and my stomach heaved in remembering Wardi and his dying.
I couched the glittery thread around the women. Couched - as if sewing could embrace and keep safe those women in their silent enduring. 'Enduring'. I keep wondering why that word kept coming back to me. Enduring. To endure. It somehow reminded me of my father as a prisoner and the paintings and sketches done in Changi4. The same looking at the camera or brush with so little emotion. I suppose that would have been a waste of precious energy. To endure, though, is not the same as stoicism. It is, like calico, a strength to live, survive, get there - in spite of everything. That is 'to endure' I think.
And then came the blind alleys or the path leading some other way. The captivating computer router cut the robed women and rummages produced blue, sienna, white and black tiles for a mosaic face. But it didn't work. It was somehow too forced, too predictable, too me telling it what to be. So the writing started. I seem to be incapable of not writing. The shapes did not beg for rounded robes. It is the layers again and that raw sienna of dry winter grass and the robes of the rural women. They soak them in butter so that they won't show the dirt. So they become part of the landscape. The transparency of the paper melted into the glue and the writing came and disappeared. So many layers and that is what it is - the layers and layers of memories and after a while all the memories become indeterminate as though they, too, have forgotten how and when they were written. Or written to form coherent sentences and proper paragraphs. All that order and sequence has gone like the writing and the words.
So now it is fragments that lead to the coherence. Sometimes it is the colour like the white and cream and sienna of Ethiopia, which are also the colours of the dead
3 Wardi Hazzaz, an art teacher, was my first Ankali client. Ankali was an emotional support program for people living with AIDS. 4 Changi Prison in Singapore where my father was imprisoned for some time before being transferred to the Burma/Thailand Railway during World War 11. 156 babies of Carnarvon Gorge5. And the orange/sienna is the orange of Ormiston Gorge6.
Have all these defining times been marked by these colours of the earth? They are just fragment moments when I say 'yes' even though I don't know what the question is nor what I am being asked to do. Or be - more to the point. Like leaping off the mountain that particular day - not knowing if I was up to the task but somehow trusting I would not be asked to do something beyond my capacity. Or that is what I believe. Trust. Trust your own integrity Noels7 tells me. Most of the time it is ok. Then as when the robed women take a different turn doubts set in. But somehow one has to persevere and see what happens. It's difficult, sometimes, to push ahead not knowing if it is a self-indulgent wank or doing what has to be done.
But I like the writing disappearing into …what. I wanted to write on the experience. It is part of my skin but I need to make sense of it all. And it is my mother as well. As the bleached spiky(haired) nurse lifted her from her wheelchair for the ordeal of her shower it was Alan Moore's8 drawings of the Nazi soldiers dancing with the corpses they were to bury. The sheared off no bottom of 'that shape'. She, too, endures the long years of being imprisoned in her own decision. She said she didn't want to walk. More, I think, she didn't want to live without Geordie9.
The irresistible desire to cut things up, rearrange, to see what would happen. Even this 'rubbish' book as Lyndall10 called her tapes brings to mind more images -
5 Carnarvon Gorge in central Queensland has several Aboriginal rock art sites. One panel of stencilled babies hands was translated to me as meaning 'many dead babies'. 6 Ormiston Gorge, Northern Territory, where, one day painting my way up the Gorge I came around a corner to see a rock formation that looked like Quan Yin (the female embodiment of compassion in Buddhist spirituality) or the Madonna. That experience prompted a drawing of the saddle of hills of Ormiston Pound which I drew compulsively for months afterwards. 7Noel Rowe, poet and friend. 8 Alan Moore, Australian War Artist who was present at the discovery and release of Belsen Concentration camp at the end of World War 11. 9 My father. 10 Lyndall Milani, during her PhD seminar in 2003 referred to tapes of her 'musings' as her 'rubbish tapes'. 157
Drysdale's 11figures from his Northern trip. Dark aboriginal figures - they, too, so still and silent.
But I love the abstraction of the layered images. Like driving in the fog they relieve the burden of having to see with clarity. A bit of peace. Driving home yesterday I was seeing the sparse hills as Music did. After Auschwitz, he said, he had an affinity for sparse rugged landscapes where everything is reduced to bare bone shapes. Is that why I love harsh landscapes where there is nowhere to hide? Just simple solid 'thereness'.
This is a long way from how the fabric pieces came into being. And that is how it is - and why those who have 'been there' are such a relief. There is no need for all the paragraphs.
Why is it so difficult to write how I make something? I'm tempted to say it just happens. But I get so cranky when others say 'Well, I just did this' or 'I just happened to see'. It is not sufficient. But it also true that the 'how' 'just' seems to follow a logic of its own and beyond a certain point - when it has started to emerge with its own form and voice - that there is little that I can do other than make sure it all hangs together and I don't become too afraid to let it go where it needs to go. So when the robed figure also began to resemble the wounded soldier I remembered the Judas one-eyed figure in the Ethiopian chapels and made only one eye. And I kept playing with some pieces of suede. Soft beautiful leather. Perhaps I cut out some shapes as I often do - but it didn't seem right to cut into it. So I was dropping and draping these pieces of leather and suddenly it dawned on me that they were the bundles of rags that were the tiny babies in the hospital in Addis. Which are also the piles of dead and dying sheep thrown off the truck in Balranald12. And Zoran Music's piles of corpses and the piles of clothes heaped on the verandah at Mother
11 Russel Drysdale whose first marriage was to a cousin of my father's. His paintings of The Albury Railway Station, The Mullangendra Pub, Joe formed an integral part of my childhood and were my first experiences of artworks 'transforming' how ones sees a landscape. 12 Balrandald, a small country town in south western New South Wales where I lived for some years. During a freezing spell following drought some semi-trailers arrived at the saleyards with many of the sheep dead or dying. 158
Teresa's13. And somehow it all made sense in the context of the painting but sense apart from that? I don't know. Does it mean anything apart from the helplessness I felt standing there holding the cold hand of that beautiful baby? It seems so inconsequential to refer to that moment -those moments - merely by sewing a crumpled piece of leather - however beautiful it might be.
And yet I am 'happy' (if I am ever happy with what I have made) with the piece. It seems the least I can do. And when I show it to others I retell the stories. And perhaps that is why we make anything at all. So that we can tell the stories.
Papering over the cracks. One single phrase. Is that what all these days and weeks of playing and experimenting with resin and greaseproof paper have led to? Papering over the cracks. I had layered some resined paper over a pastel drawing I had done down in the 'Manar'14 shearing shed when the new bricks of an old doorway started resembling a giant cross and merged behind the white gums. What was happening? Then I remembered Keith's kimono (the same shape as a cross) and driving Noel to Macksville after his funeral and wake. Driving through the forests of the North Coast I saw Keith dancing in his kimono. 'There is a spiritual quality to driving at night (or in the dark)' said Noel. The layering of paper didn't work. It was too much so I chiseled some of it off with a knife until the colour of the bricks and the cross started to emerge again. I started to weave the drawings of yesterday and they were too big to weave around the mess of the robed women standing there looking. So I tore up the emerging bricks - and ran out of paper. I wanted to paper over the cracks of the weave. Then it dawned on me that the cracks didn't need to be papered over. They were sufficient unto themselves and didn't need to be smoothed over.
The black and white drawings happened in a frenzy of remembering. All the bricks and towers and chapels I have seen over so many years jumble into each other and my pen can't go quick enough to write them all. Chartres, Ronchamp, Arles, Broken
13 Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity hospital, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 14 Manar Station, near Braidwood, New South Wales has a stand of white gum trees that have entered my paintings many times over the past ten years or so. 159
Hill, Milparinka - the burnt chimney of 'Allendale'15. And I wonder why we have a fascination with ruins and relics? The old brick tower near Broken Hill just stood there - not even defiantly. Christ, just like those robed women. Just there. Perhaps it questions me as I question it. So is it 'thereness' is an interrogation as well as a witness? Shit what does that mean? But the bricks and papering over the cracks lead to windows, looking out - witnessing yet again. Shit.
I had thought I would like to leave these drawings/ paper in a black drawing book like the mono prints. But black did nothing for the drawings. So I tried white and that didn't work either. So I went back to Keith's Chinese paper. I've nearly used up the whole roll that I've had since he died.
I didn't want the drawings to be 'framed'. They need to be `part of' the paper because they are part of my skin.
Tom16 calls them 'dancing trees' - when they seem to hover above the horizon. I just love the lure of these immense plains. That time and space are endless - and so, too, perhaps am I in some funny sort of way.
I am so tired of drawing those wailing trees so I painted over the top of them with ink and layered some more paper on top. Perhaps something else will emerge later.
It is quite confronting to have one's duds incorporated even in my 'rubbish book'. But if David Brill17 can lay himself open to a biography so can I.
I have often wondered why it was (is) that I keep drawing this saddle of hills rather than the rock formation that made my hair stand on end. Sometimes the meaning only fully emerges over time. For the moment I love the way this layered paper and
15 Chartres Cathedral, Ronchamp Chapel and Arles are all in France, Broken Hill and Milparinka in northwestern New South Wales, and 'Allendale' is my old family property west of Warwick in Queensland. The homestead burnt down in 1986. 16 Tom Spence, an artist living in Stanthorpe, Queensland. 17 Little (2003). 160 paint reminds me of that beautiful light in the Gorge. It seemed to glow with orange and pink light and it filled me with quiet joy.
A 'rubbish' book - but I don't agree with Lyndal that the beginnings and the musings are rubbish. So I wanted to make this attempt to map the exploration as much an 'art construction' as any 'finished' work that may eventuate. I am choosing to write with pen and ink because this way seems more personal than the computer. Even with my old typewriter one could see the different pressures on different keys (and where I had typed so hard the keys had perforated the paper).
The dawning realization of what is implicit - or what is derived from - the process of making. I was wondering how the different stories - my mother, the babies, the artists of the camps - how and why they are coming together. Is this how Van Manen's18 themes are born? Is helplessness an integral part of creating? As I was helpless before the piles of sheep, the piles of clothes so I am helpless before the image that is starting to emerge? And yet it is not a paralyzing helplessness. With the dying sheep - I flipped in my anger and drove to get a rifle to shoot them out of their misery. But one doesn't shoot dying babies nor even sick and starving ones. For those I painted and told stories.
The white gum forest of 'Manar'. Like now I had been forced to stop. And then I started 'seeing' again.
I love drawing and I dreamt last night of drawing on this paper with white ink. Many things 'come to me' in dreams - and driving. I'm remembering again a mixture of Lloyd Rees and Zoran Music - and cathedrals. Cathedrals because Rees said if Aboriginal people could have their Dreamtime, his (because of his European heritage) were the cathedrals of France19. And Music painted cathedrals when he wasn't painting the piles of corpses. What brings all these memories together? The ochre, sienna and white of this layered paper evokes the rock art of Carnarvon - and hence Aborigines and Rees' linking them both.
18 van Manen (1990) 19 Rees (in Free 1990,pp. 116 -117). 161
Even drawing on this paper is not straightforward. I turn it back to front and upside down seeking the 'rightness' like playing with the fabrics and paint. I'll be sorry when this time of making has finished. I missed the obsessiveness of the monoprints when they had run their course and the images became stale and I was bored with them. And I am nearly tired now of layering paper and text and wonder what will come next. Try to keep at bay the thought that there will be no more paintings. The fear that this is it. I am starting to dream of painting on canvas again so why is there this fear? Perhaps the fear of nothingness is part of this creating business as well20. Not the fear of the blank canvas as usually understood as the fear of 'getting it wrong'. The fear of having nothing to say is much, much worse that the thought of getting it wrong.
I can't get rid of the fear - but I can keep it at bay by tending to the easy pragmatic things like learning how to sew this book together; cleaning up my studio; packing the car (yet again) and pray that the next stage will emerge21.
Does the 'how' encompass these doubts? I feel it must because sometimes it is like a shameful secret that I have to keep hidden. As an 'artist' I have found it difficult to say I am bored with my paintings. At Barcaldine22 - and at Burra23 - all I wanted to do was rest, sleep and read and yet there was this felt compulsion to 'produce' 'art' works - and 'good' ones. What was I if I couldn't paint?
Bricks, building, papering over the cracks. Brill has papered over his cracks by working for Ausaid. I am papering by stopping. That sienna is the colour of home. Papering over the cracks only means the surface is easier to live with. Or does the papering lend solidity to the foundations - or become foundations themselves. Like Steve24 hinging the healing Buddha with silk threads mixed with paint. So the
20 See also Agnes Martin, Writings (Von Dieter Schwarz Ed. 1991.pp.67 -74) for a detailed exploration of the notion of fear. 21 See also Smith (1994.p.118). 22 Barcaldine, central western Queensland where I had gone to paint. 23 Burra, South Australia near 'Paratoo Station' where my father worked as a jackeroo when he first came from Scotland. 24 Stephen Fahey, an Australian Buddhist monk 162 threads not only enable the opening and the shutting but are part of the ground of the icon
163
BOOK 2
It's all quite ordinary really. Just keep doing what one needs to do - without compulsion, drama or angst. This sounds like Keith25.
It is such a relief. A brief period of rest and understanding. Such a blessed relief.
So stopping and not running away has enabled me to learn this all once more. Why do we forget sometimes?
Three bells. Corbusier26 tapped into the Trinity as well.
Three bells.
The chant ripples like the desert
Like quiet still full breathing. So alive
25 Keith Robinson already mentioned. 164
BOOK 3
The only thing to do is to keep making jackets27
I'm being too polite. I'm not happy with wordless abstraction and yet my landscapes have become woven pieces because that is what it feels like - fragments scattered that I am trying to weave into a piece of comprehension. It doesn't happen all at once. It is like a discovery. Love yet again. We all might say we know what it is like to Love but each time (or even each day) we have to learn again. So 'enduring' is not a monochromatic `theme' (although it might be that as well). It, too, is made up of fragments that have to be pieced together so we can understand the whole. Take 'helplessness'. I wouldn't have thought that 'helplessness' is an essential part of enduring - except one doesn't have the need to endure unless there are circumstances which are beyond our power to control or change. It is how we live in the presence of powerlessness and helplessness that perhaps gives 'endurance' the peculiar colours it has. Is that why I have been using these colours of the earth? They are the manifestation of the groundedness that we need to be able to endure - to live - or to survive. Yet there is a difference between all those as well. To endure, to live, to survive. Surely one couldn't call it happiness or flourishing? Surely not. I can't imagine my father calling his experience 'happiness'. Yet I suppose if you survive till the next day that might constitute happiness - sometimes. It might all come back to Noel's28 'acceptance' - acceptance, acceptance, impermanence. That's what the monk told him that time in Bangkok. Acceptance = change what can be changed and accept what cannot.
26 Le Corbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp, Notre Dame du Haut, has three giant bells at the front of the Chapel which ring automatically (from memory to coincide with the Angelus - morning, noon and night). Also automatic is the playing of Gregorian chant. 27 Kenny O'Brien, one of the artists interviewed for Andréa R.Vaucher's Muses from Chaos and Ash. AIDS, Artists and Art (1993). O'Brien, a designer of exotic leather jackets decided at one point after his diagnosis that 'the only thing to do was keep making jackets'. 28 Noel Rowe, poet, friend and mentor. 165
BOOK 4
Where do the stairs lead?
The edges are dark
I hadn't thought of the dark winking29 at me
Oh Death where is thy honour? Or should it be 'thine honour'? Why am I writing about Death again. 'So easy to die,' says Levinas and 'so difficult to live'30. Not difficult to survive, perhaps, but difficult to live fully and honourably.
A graced time in spite of the blackness. 'Winking' it is such a deliciously wickedly fun filled thing to do. Saucy and sensual.
My mother sometimes winks. I love it when my mother winks at the nurses31. It is a glimpse of the woman she once was - and still is in spite of the wheelchair and such frailty.
I hadn't thought of the dark edges winking at me. I've often thought God must kill himself laughing at my absurd tantrums of despair. But I hadn't thought he would wink at me. I like the idea of God winking.
A little gold window - that is what these connections, fragments, inspirations - changes are -
29 Gerald Murnane (in Crawford 2002) in his Introduction to the work of Philip Hunter speaks of being 'winked' at by things to the side of his vision. 30 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p.21. 31 My mother was a resident of a Nursing Home Hospital for the last 10 years of her life. 166
BOOK 5
Why is the smell of death not an earth colour?32
This paper is not nearly as good as my supermarket rolls33. It is more flimsy and gutless. Fine for wrapping rissoles but not good for drawing and writing and painting. But I love working on paper. I do not need to apologize for liking paper rather than canvas. Olsen 34did too, I suspect. So part of all this is to sort out the weight of expectations. And sort out why the work seems to be needing to emerge as books. Books and reading are not only some of the earliest memories - especially of my mother but an enduring need and passion. Like swimming in warm water - surrounded, absorbed, uplifted, engrossed. And sometimes a fragment of text sparks an explosion - and a reconciliation. 'I mourn the needless dead' inhabited my brush for months (it could almost be years)35. I had forgotten where the caress of the mind had originally come from until just recently. 'Caress' Levinas says speaks of absence?36
I haven't yet painted the smell of death. Levinas says art is a vocation37. What is the nature of a vocation? Certainly it is a question answered. A 'yes' not only to a specific job - but 'yes' to a life time job - whatever 'form' it takes. It involves obedience if one is going to do it at all. No picking and choosing which jobs you like to do along the way. And yet it is not so much the actual work but the orientation that is the special quality of a vocation. It is saying 'yes' to whatever is asked of me. The tricky part is working out which of the many jobs is the one that needs to be done. And trusting that the necessary help will come.
All this I know - and yet I forget and fall into a black hole. I know it will work out in the end. I know that - so why do the thoughts of death come so unbidden? As though
32 The smell of death has been a constant preoccupation since my time of AIDS in Sydney. Attempts to paint it have so far been unsuccessful. Some of the mono prints are attempts. 33 Greaseproof paper as opposed to tissue paper. 34 John Olsen 35 Johnston (1985). 36 Levinas (in Hand Ed.1992). 37 Levinas (in Hand 1992,p.151). 167
I have used up all my share of help and assistance. God's help is infinite and unending - if we ask for it. All through this study I have been confronted by learning again and again what I would have said I already know. And yet I have not learnt it through the making before - or not recognized it as such. The knowing has come from pondering, reflection, pondering long after I have finished the making. Now I am more aware of it during the making. It is as though I can see blood pumping in veins instead of blobs emerging when I cut myself.
Perhaps if I write the blackness it will lessen the burden. The cottonwoods of the Gulf38. I loved those trees - as I loved that immense space. And I felt held and supported in my work. The smell of death.
Wright39 says she says the same things but with a different articulation. Is that the same thing as 'being born with a set of symbols and we spend our whole life trying to make sense of them'? So this sense of blackness (albeit alleviated by periods of light and inspiration) is what I am trying to make sense of all the time. Lloyd Rees said he never painted his periods of depression - 'there was enough blackness in the world'40 so he said.
I don't have this nightmare anymore. Anyway it was more rolling layers of blackness with suckers underneath the rolls - not sharp41.
Now I draw it it looks like the desert - but it felt as though I was suffocating and I'd wake up terrified.
Colour is the barometer of my soul. My soul is out of kilter and so are my colours
38 Several paintings of Cottonwood trees in the Gulf of Carpentaria formed part of the exhibition The Colours of Light and Desire, Ecole superieur d'Agriculture du Purpan, Toulouse, France 1997. 39 Artist, Judith Wright, Silence echoes in the hollow of the hand.n.d.p.18. 40 Rees (in Hawley 1993). 41 A nightmare that I had from the time of my childhood until my late 30's. 168
The yellow butter paper is the wrong colour. For years I have not been able to use yellow without it slipping into orange. Burnt orange. Now my favourite burnt sienna is too dark and doesn't have the lightness of raw sienna. Or it needs more black
I/Thou - it sounds 'acceptable' `to death' when Levinas42 writes about it. It is more difficult to look into those staring eyes and be given charge of closing them on death43.
It has taken years to write of that as `I/Thou' - to achieve the distance (which I had then) to write of the intimacy of that request.
All this because I am going to see the staring eyes of the Requiem exhibition44. It is almost obscene in its intimacy - the medic and the dying man. I want to look away but I keep looking.
42 Levinas (1998). 43 My friend Keith asked me to make sure his eyes were closed after he died. He hated those 'staring eyes' he said. 44 Requiem (Faas & Page 2001). 169
BOOK 6
'Sometimes one sees or hears something and one's heart breaks and one doesn't know why'
But what does it mean to say our heart has broken? Tenderness, helplessness, sorrow, heart achingly beautiful - it tears some fundamental fibre of our being
And one's heart breaks - and one doesn't know why. I was going to say I do know why It's as though their suffering has become all suffering.
Our hearts break because the are too full of Love? Chagall's45 Love that inspires paintings?
What is this Love? That a tiny dying baby is part of me? A part of us all?
But I don't know why this particular dying baby and not the next one. Perhaps my heart had already broken and hadn't healed enough to break again so soon.
And our hearts break. And our hearts seem to break and we don't know why. It's like when a child looks at us with open, trusting delight - or safety and we recognize that there is so little we can do in the greater scheme of things to keep them so safe and trusting. But there is more, I think. For our hearts to break. Is it a breaking in of `something else' - a glimpse of what can be. No that is not right either. When have I felt that my heart might break? Looking at the tiny baby in Addis I felt as though my heart would break. It was seeing it so beautiful, so perfectly formed (as most babies are) yet it was blue and it would soon die. Is it the disjunction between beauty, pathos, sorrow and helplessness? Helplessness again.
45 Marc Chagall (c.1991) 170
A part of us all?
It's as though their suffering has become all suffering.
Rent open - so we can see more clearly?
Waterfalls rent and fill at the same time
So that is why the waterfalls are appearing again?
So is that it? We feel as if we are rent apart?
Rent open - so we can 'see' more clearly? 171
BOOK 7
I'm so tired of this constant shuffling from one place to the next. I yearn for a place of my own. It sounds like Virginia46 and still it is a relevant and consuming and aching need.
I'm out of my depth in this milieu. Discordant videos and naked fluorescent tubes47 - I have enough discordance in my memories without making a video of it all. But I want to have the raw sienna works sung. Clive48 and a gutsy mezzo-soprano - I can't even spell that word - yet I would love to hear someone sing my works. Singing with a merging series of the drawings in the background. The genesis of those works. With the table of compartments. How strange and yet inevitable that it is ending up like a Quilt49 unfolding. But my tummy still lurches in bewilderment at the last few months of the Quilt. I can understand why Dr Kelly50 killed himself. When the should be support is gone - what is left? The helplessness of trying to fix the unfixable because the rules are hidden. Hidden rules, hidden stories, hidden agendas - bumping around against all the hidden till one day it comes - enough is enough
46 Woolf (1977). 47 A Student exhibition I had visited in 2003. 48 Clive Birch, a tenor with The Song Company, Sydney. 49 Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project of which I was National Convenor in 1990-91. 50 British Scientist involved in the search for `weapons of mass destruction' before Second Iraq War in 2003. 172
BOOK 8 (in two volumes)
Over and over and over again - out comes these shapes and forms. I had thought it was the waterfall again. The 'rent' and 'filling' at one and the same time. Then a horizon reappeared and it seemed as though the waterfall was growing into something else. The shapes remind me of the walls of Ormiston Gorge51 - a sacred, holy place. Later we were told it is a special healing site for Aboriginal women. Grosse Bluff52 did not feel like that - welcoming and safe. It is interesting that Wolseley53 felt that too - in spite of the number of drawings he did there. But that does not solve the problem of the shapes that insist on appearing.
Cloisters - secluded, attached to monastery. Why secluded when it is attached outside? Aqueducts Mullock heaps Waterfalls What is this meaning that is struggling to emerge? The image isn't struggling - it is strong and consistent. It is I (who holds the pen and brush) who cannot yet understand what I am trying to say.
But for the shapes - they are not a 'problem'. Perhaps if I call them a 'phenomenological puzzle' they may not be so demanding. Or I might be more patient with the unfolding and emerging.
I keep making things into books. At first not consciously. They just started. Even now I keep folding drawings and texts into books. It suits this exploration - a gradual turning over of the pages. A gradual uncovering of the story - page after page. I 'know' that - yet I want, sometimes, to read the last page first. Even still the
51 Ormiston Gorge, Northern Territory. 52 Grosse Bluff, Northern Territory 53 Artist John Wolseley. 173 journey is exciting. As Keith said 'It's nice not knowing where life will lead me'. A mystery just like these drawings.
At last. Is Jim's54 'aesthetic delight' (meaning the piece is finished) the same as the 'ah ha' - the recognition that signals comprehension? So that this piece of the puzzle is finished? I think it must - just as that recognition (delight) does not mean that the 'journey' is at its end. It just means that one is free to continue instead of going around in circles in one spot.
I thought at first that it was the waterfall emerging again (even though the 'rent' and 'fill' had signaled 'rightness') but a horizon kept appearing over the waterfall and the waterfall merged into naves? Cloisters? Mullock heaps? I had written on a Broken Hill drawing that our wealth had come at great cost. Their names (or some of them) were written in the cemetery at Silverton. 'Saved to the memory' and the years of birth and death revealed the cost. Twenty-eight. Thirty-two. And children. One month. Three years. Ten years. They, too, breathed the dust and lacked enough to keep them alive. The hill had its top mined and the overburden is now the height of the original except it now contains the bones of the dead.55 Or their spirits.
The overburdened hill is now a tourist attraction. The cemetery is overgrown, choked by weeds and the corrugated iron gravestones are rusting into forgotten.
At El Alamein56 the graves are well tendered - as is the memory of that place. It seems strange that we remember the dead with much cost and appear to forget the living. And yet I want the cemeteries so I could go and 'loll' on Keith's grave as the Samoans tend to do57. Talk to him instead of having to write. How ridiculous. Talking to the dead in a 'special place' is just as ridiculous as writing to them. Yet the need is there to do both.
54 Jim Chapman, a fellow PhD student already mentioned. 55 I completed a series of drawings and paintings ( including the mullock heaps and cemetries) around Broken Hill in 1996. Some were exhibited Hot Rubber Red Dust, Gallery Agua, Noosaville in 1996. 56 El Alamein, Egypt which I visited in 2000 en route home from Ethiopia and Eritrea. 57 There is a Samoan tradition of burying their dead in graves at the front of their homes. 174
Is that the real value of Murnane's winking - the 'shared secret knowledge' that is recognized by a silent movement of the eye? 'Shared secret knowledge'. It is what our parents protect us from (and what I shield from my little nieces) and now I seem to need to know.
'Epiphanies of the ordinary' (quotes Don Asker58). 'Epiphany' such a beautiful word and yet it simply means a breaking in of grace. So many times I have experienced that. The wonderful sense of relief, peace and rightness that is extraordinarily 'ordinary'. I was startled by the claim that our goal should be 'invisibility'. It seemed the antithesis of what I was seeking to do. To make visible. To be heard. To be acknowledged. All those things that speak of 'belonging', of being 'ordinary'. And yet that sense of 'right belonging', of being at peace cannot be awarded by others. It simply needs to be accepted with grace. Perhaps it is the subterranean logic - Christ, can one speak of an archeological logic? Wolesley and Hunter59 would seem to say there is such a thing. Is that what those spirit figures I have been drawing for years have been trying to teach me? I had thought (if I had given myself time to think bravely) that they were the earth groaning - crying out from the salt encrusted dirt. 'No more water' as the irrigation pumps sprayed relentlessly60. Dear God, it's me and that is why the earth colours. Now, as Murnane had said, the edges winked at me - seeing the drawn waterfall upside down I realize it is also Keith's kimono and his mantra 'Don't try so hard to know'61. We used it as his final blessing.
58 Asker (2001) 59 Hunter (1999) 60 Irrigation pumps and sprays near Milduria, Victoria that I witnessed on a painting trip to South Australia in 2001. 61 Keith Robinson quoting a reading from Krishmurti which was later read at his funeral. 175
BOOK 9
The dead have names.
That's the whole point.
I don't know the place of my father. How could I find him without a name or a place?
I have clothed the lilies of the field. How much more do I care about you whose name I know?
You have to go looking (so they say) before you realize what you have lost. How can you find what you have lost if you don't have a place or a name?
The plants and flowers (endangered) have names - many of them - etched in stone and glass. Their destruction is etched beautifully but the people have no names62.
Close to tears and I don't know why. I have said it is important to name - and yet (as I have found with the relentless trees) it leads up the wrong path. Or not the 'right' path which is, perhaps, not the same thing. It is still important, critical even, to name properly - with 'rightness'. So why was I close to tears? The work was beautiful. That cannot be denied. But something was missing. Like the brilliant scarlet of the surprisingly passionless paintings. Can beautiful work still be beautiful without conviction and passion?
Some didn't die then - only later. After the nightmares.
Paratoo, Yunta, Glenmorgan, Mountain Creek63. Even that is wrong. It ought to be 'Paratoo', 'Strathbogie', 'Allendale'. Precision matters with a sense of place.
62 References to a presentation given by artist Janet Laurence at a Seminar on Memorial Art and Architecture, Queensland College of Art Griffith University, Brisbane, 16 August,2003. 176
The list of names (some I recognized - many I recognized because I'd been there) 'Been there'. That was the key for the French works. An idle remark about the mulga trees of Thargomindah64. A felt sense of belonging in a landscape not his own. Perhaps that's what was missing this afternoon - a recognition that our hearts have many homes - places where we do feel 'at home' - even if it is not here.
It is much more complex and layered than can be contained in a wall - however beautiful it might be. The plants and animals had more layers than the people.
I have carved your name on the palm of my hand. I have called you by name65.
I have called you by name. Your name is etched in my heart.
It is the sad aloneness of feeling I am speaking a different language. Perhaps I am just tired and too full of unknowing.
63 Paratoo, is a property near Yunta in South Australia where my father was a jackeroo after he arrived from Scotland. Mountain Creek near Holbrook, New South Wales where we had a property Strathbogie. Allendale is my former family property near Warwick, Queensland. It was an important convention for grazing properties to be written between quotation marks, thus 'Strathbogie' not Strathbogie. 64 A pastel drawing Mulga at Thargomindah that formed part of the exhibition Hot Rubber Red Dust (1996) that had been reproduced on a postcard. It was seen by a student from the Agricultural University, Toulouse, France. Students from that University had completed their International Placements with various members of my family for some years. 65 Isaiah 43:1 -7. 177
BOOK 10, 11, 12 Images but no text
178
APPENDIX 2. Letters to Keith
1. A Letter to Keith After His Funeral
My dearest Keith,
I have to write and tell you about yesterday. I wish you could have been there – but of course you were there so it’s my need that has to write. It is very difficult to separate, sometimes, my needs and your needs. Noel1 says that dying is for the living and I think that is right. I will have to think about that.
You had a full house. Christine sat with your mother and Jimmy2. The kids and I were strung across the side.
At one stage I thought you were going to be late and I remember your passion for punctuality and think you would not approve. Jimmy couldn’t find the church it seemed – and Trish3 hobbled in with her broken toe – a bit forgotten in the rush of friends. In the face of death there seems to be a need to assert oneself. But the kids were great. Ian and Adam handed out the daffodils from your white basket. It still had the Christmas tartan ribbon – a bit incongruous perhaps – but a quaint and pretty touch. Sarah, Trudi and Heidi dispensed the readings and the maps to Len’s place4. I underestimated the crowd – or perhaps I could not paint anymore so some did not get the hand coloured versions.
It was a bit confused at the beginning. People were in the church before you – or the other way about. Peg5, like my mother and me, busy meeting people and being social and hospitable – putting them at their ease. A happy coincidence – Brahams Requiem reached the chorus as you came in so that was nice. It is so beautiful that music. Les was late so Greg6 did the music.
1 Noel Rowe, my friend and celebrant for Keith's funeral. 2 Christine is Keith's sister. Jimmy his brother. 3 Trish, Jimmy's wife. 4 Christine's children and Len was one of Keith's friends who later hosted his wake. 5 Keith's mother. 6 Greg Smith, Metropolitian Community Church minister. 179
Noel’s introduction was beautiful. He spoke of community – how you had shown us a new way of being community. There we were Jewish, Buddhist, Christian and none of the above – in the MCC church with a Catholic priest – with a ceremony with Hindu symbol and rituals. You would have loved it – but then you arranged it. Andrew Carter and Perry7 came up and vested Noel with the Day Centre vestments – Perry smoothing Noel’s hair that had been ruffled in the process. It was a very moving gesture. I can remember you cutting out Eric8’s green praying hands – the pink ones I had made you said looked like dolphins. In the greater scheme of things, I suppose it is only temporarily important whether things are green or pink or whether they look like hands or fish. I can’t remember your symbol. Did you share my golden sun on the back? I can’t remember.
Then Les spoke his few words. He mentioned Christine, which was important for her – and how you had become so close in the last few years. And he spoke of Ankali – what it was – and me. I wish he hadn’t. I said to him last night I wanted to be in the background. I get embarrassed when I am singled out – especially as Christa9 as there and she wasn’t mentioned. But I guess if it helps others to make the decision to do Ankali or csn or whatever it is worth the discomfort. I admired Les saying that Ankali people fitted in because often the friends and family could not keep going – it was too much. Knowing how Les and you had had discussions about leaving you out of plans and parties – it was a generous and open thing to say.
Then we had Jessye Norman singing the Tomorrow song. When I was typing out the translation the beauty of the words hit me again, particularly the bit where it says something like
`and in the silence our eyes will meet and the cloud of happiness will fall over us’.
7 Andrew Carter, founder of Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project. Perry one of the Day Centre members. 8 A Day Centre member. 180
I remembered your saying to Sue10 and I on Thursday night what nice visitors we were because we didn’t have to talk. And I remembered your saying to Perry `No, we didn’t need to be alone. We had such a special bond between us that we didn’t need to be alone to communicate’. And that is what I think I will miss most of all – an artist mate who knew what I was thinking and feeling and we didn’t have to use words.
At one stage both Noel and I thought Greg had put on the wrong tape. It seemed such a long before the song started. It is a heavy responsibility, you know, making sure it was all done right – as you wanted.
Anyway, then it was time for the reverencing of the body. I forgot to say that Steve11 had made a special brew of incense – with lavender. It was gorgeous. He lit it before people came into the church so that they came into a space filled with Brahms and incense. Noel put some more on and there was this fabulous cloud of smoke – he got it full in the face, which stuffed the sinus, but still. The first part was sprinkling with petals. I forgot to say that Sue, Christa, Christine, Michael and I decorated the casket with the garlands of calendulas and gazanias. We could not get marigolds in the markets but Steve said it was OK as long as they were the right colours. So you had this gorgeous mass of golden yellow flowers – with blue iris, white hyacinths, cornflowers, white daisy and stocks in the middle – with a blue bow for your mother – because you were a boy! So we had gold, blue, white and then the sprinkling of mauve sweet pea petals. Some fell off the casket and that looked so pretty – purple and yellow petals on the floor. Then it was the flame and bells. Steve had taught Noel how to cross the lamp and ring the bell at the same time – so you had the wonderful colours of the vestments going around and round the casket with all the flowers – and two beautiful yellow orange candles at the foot of the casket. At one stage the vestments nearly dropped in the candle flame – but I prayed that, as they were silk, they wouldn’t catch too quickly. Then the sitar music came on as people filed up to warm their hands on your spirit, the camphor lamp, and then glide their
9 One of Keith's Ankali volunteers. 10 One of Keith's friends. 11 Stephen Fahey, an Australian Buddhist monk, a co-celebrant of the service. 181 hands back over their foreheads and heads. Some looked as though they were pressing you into their eyes and their hair – calming their minds and their eyes. It was very moving. At the same time we placed our daffodil at your feet – so you could dance off on a sea of flowers and petals – yellow, gold and purple. But the White Rabbit only placed his flower – he didn’t warm his hands – so he may need some help in the fullness of time.
But the most wonderful part was Der Rosenkavaliers. Thank goodness I had gone around to Les’s last night and checked the music because he hadn’t got quite the right part. As soon as the music started, I just started to grin – we had made it – it had gone according to how you wanted it. And it was beyond imagining – heart achingly beautiful, full, lush, sublime and so sensual. I can remember that night you played it for me. We had done a heavy night of being waiters and dishwashers. Cups of tea and our eyes met and could not take in the exquisiteness of those soaring pieces. I had never heard such piercing music before. I can remember we played the tapes over and over going to the mountains. `Orgasmic’ you said. `Beyond orgasmic’ I thought. This is what Heaven must be like. It was an unbelievable experience. As it finished Noel said the blessing so simply
`Let be his life, and may there be a blessing upon it’12.
You couldn’t do anything else but bow your head in thanks as Lloyd Rees13 would say.
I couldn’t go out with the crowd. I couldn’t take any more consolation when I didn’t need to be consoled. You must have dropped your mantle of calm over me. I was so relieved everything had gone well.
There was a lot of confusion. People seemed reluctant to leave you sitting there. It was only later that I realized we had created the colours of enlightenment in the flowers. At one stage I was worried we had made the big bunch of flowers too pink –
12 J.Krishnamurti, Indian Hindu mystic. 13 Lloyd Rees, Australian artist. 182 but you loved pink too. Then I remembered my asking you what colours Lent was for you. I had to do those banners for the Divine Word Missionaries. You said Lent seemed to be the same as the stages of enlightenment which went from blue and pink – which were the stages we had to do – and moved towards yellow and white which were not our effort – gift, I suppose you could call it. So I painted the Lenten silks from green to blue to pink to yellow. I don’t think they hung them in the correct sequence but still. So you had pink flowers, blue flowers, mauve petals and great sashes of yellow and gold. As it happened – designed? – Michael, Sue, Cate, Karen and I were in the church as you left – so it was a completion for us. Sue and I took the flowers up to the Hospice14. Sue’s group – the ones you had played the bassoon for – had her buy you some flowers that morning. A glorious bunch of spring flowers – my favourite. The White Rabbit bought golden yellow freesias like the bunch you gave me a few weeks ago. I always remember you as music, flowers and colour…
The wake was magnificent. Les and Geoff coped and took it all in their stride wonderfully. When I saw the quail eggs in the salad I just started grinning again. Then when I saw the cake Robyn15 had made – luscious chocolate swirls – I could finally relax. I had done my part to make sure it was as you wanted. It was just so aesthetically pleasing. The crudities were arranged so that the white cauliflower contrasted with the blanched green peas and orange carrots – just wonderful. And a mammoth platter of natural oysters – your favourite – on a bed of rich green spinach leaves. Nothing, my dear, was lacking sparkle and thought. I sorted out the drama of Trish and her scarf. One of the ironies was that someone there had the scarf she had returned for `fixing up’. I think she went off happy but who knows? We did the best we could.
So, little one, it was truly a beautiful experience. I think many people were touched beyond what they could comprehend and articulate. Me included With love, Libby.
14 Sacred Heart Hospice, Darlinghurst, Sydney where Keith died. 15 The caterer whom Keith had commissioned to do the wake some time before his death. 183
2. Letter from the Gulf.
My dearest Keith,
I don’t know why the Psalmists speak so much of shes as in `I have called her out into the Desert and there I will speak to her heart’ but again it is true. I know that is not from the Psalms, it is from Hosea or Ezekiel as I well should know. And strictly speaking you would not call the Gulf the Desert. However, I have just returned from the Gulf, the Tablelands, Boulia and Windorah16 and in those vast spaces that are so subtly shimmering with life, I have been caught ( yet again) surprised by colour, desire and the most peculiar feelings of gentleness and tenderness. Armraynald17 – a name that one would suspect is most evocative of meaning but in reality is three bloke’s names joined together – was the first stop past Mt Isa18. My friend the vet was to pregnancy test thousands of multi-hued, multi-humped Braham cows. While my formative years were spent with monochromatic Herefords, they did lack the undoubted drama of humps and exotic pizzles. ( The cows didn’t have pizzles, of course, but they did have wonderful swinging bits.) While Phil19 offended the dignity of these young females ( I never did discover how they ascertained the relative fertility of the bulls – kindly forebearance I suspect) I variously hung precariously over the roof of Land Cruisers or up safely high railings with paper, paints and pastels all liberally coated with dust. Phil would harangue me about `my productivity’ as we drove fifty kilometers home in the dark. But even, or in spite of, feeble assistance with drafting, branding or whatever, the paintings emerged. Sometimes slowly as the dawn unravelled over the Gulf and a young boy, stark naked, chased the chooks; sometimes explosively as I wrestled with the colour of the Flinders grass – a most frustrating mix of burnt sienna, orange and crimson. I worried that colour to death until, one day, I gave up. And then it came as it nearly always does. And one day, this time at Walhollow20 on the Barkley Tablelands, we were driving through a paddock ( Puzzle Paddock for your information) and there
16 Boulia and Windorah are small towns in far western Queensland , south of the Gulf of Carpentaria. 17 A large cattle property in the Gulf. 18 Mt Isa, far western Queensland and close to the Northern Territory border. 19 Philip Harpham, a vet and a friend of mine. 20 Wallhollow, a cattle property on the Barkley Tablelands, Northern Territory. 184 were the colours of Rome – raw sienna and yellow ochre ant hills – perpendicular not triangular like the red ones of Cloncurry and Thargomindah21 – and the most delicate pink grass and pale blue grey salt bushy bushes. Heaven only knows what their botanical names were but stunningly lovely. Back in the Gulf the dirt is black and doesn’t reflect the light well so I came a cropper a couple of times playing centre prop or ( occasionally) the winger bringing in a mob of cattle. But there are these spindly Cottonwood trees – all bent and leaning in like Drysdale22 figures towards survival – or their flourishing too, I guess. Days later in the Boulia pub every time I picked up my brush out would come these cottonwoods – almost homomorphic as Ainslie23 described them. Do you remember how the same thing happened with the saddle of hills at Ormiston Gorge? Nearly drove me crazy. I have to learn to be more patient and wait for the meaning to emerge instead of shaking them like a dog after a bone – I want it now. But somehow they (the cottonwoods) have come to symbolize the persistence, trust and faith that is needed in the face of chancy unpredictability. Like choosing to paint instead of having a `proper’ job. I reckon you would go down the gurgler quickly if you lost that sense of respect and awareness of how far you can go in that country.
While my mates sailed on to Brisbane ( on a sea of red wine if the truth be told) I soldered on to Boulia so weary and overloaded that the landscape was a blur of orange scarlet hills pierced with black green spinifex. And what, my dear, has emerged from all this travelling seeing and painting? A welcome sense of right peace, serenity and excitement that keeps at bay ( for a time) the void. And the worries of business that assail me as soon as I get home. But last night as I was playing around with frames and what not the cottonwoods sang and I was stunned with gratitude. And do you remember a painting I started about 6 years ago? Of Chartres Cathedral24 where I had gone to sit and rest not long after you had died? Drusilla Modjeska25 has the most wonderfully accurate description of how I felt at that time – as if all the surfaces of my self were raw and exposed like a skinned
21 Both towns in far western Queensland - Cloncurry in the north and Thargomindah in the south. 22 Russell Drysdale, Australian painter. 23 Ainslie Yardley, friend and fellow artist. 24 Chartres Cathedral, France. 25 Modjeska (1994). 185 rabbit hanging in a butcher shop. The beautiful blue light of the Cathedral was like a balm and I said to Noel it was like being in the womb of God. Well that painting which somehow I couldn’t finish then is, I think, nearing a healing completion and I’ll probably have to call it The Cathedral of the Gulf26. Somehow the humps of the Armraynald cattle have merged with the light of the nave – one of those gift inspirations. Are you responsible? If so my gratitude and love. It is nice to have a sense of completion so one can be ready for the next mystery and task.
I realize I haven’t told you about Boulia and Windorah – where I am to have an exhibition next year. I am too tired to do them justice at the moment but the drive from Boulia to Winton was one of the most surreal - a heavy fog all across the plains - like the snow haze as I left Paris for Bangkok and where later the spires of Paris merged with the temples of that lovely ratty city. I remember driving from Hay to Balranald early one winter morning – a similar fog across saltbush plains – and Motzart’s Cosi van Tuti came on the radio. A breaking in of Grace I think they call it. Boulia was a bit like that. Driving in the fog one is held gently and relieved, temporarily, of the burden of seeing vastness with clarity. So, my dear, keep looking after me. Noel has said he would like to come with me on the next trip. He will sit in the pub and write while I paint. Kerry nearly fainted at the prospect of a drive to Windorah but I think he should come and see the sandhills where I nearly used up all the orange ink he so thoughtfully sent me. I love the sensual simplicity of sandhills with a fearful passion and these were unbelievably beautiful.27
I think some of the paintings they begat were a bit unbelievable as well but not all responses can be ordered, polite and acceptable as we both well know.
Keep well. With all love and thanks Libby.
26 Cathedral of the Gulf, exhibited Art in the Woolshed, Pikedale,1996. 27 A series of sand dune paintings were exhibited Art in the Woolshed, Pikedale, 1996. 186
3. Letter After Ethiopia and Eritrea
My dearest Keith,
Well you may ask what is this black bit above? It is a photocopy of a torn up drawing but it is the seed for a series of prints and etchings that I want to do once this exhibition28 in January is over. If I can learn how to make sushi I’m sure I can learn how to do a solarplate etching. As you know the trip to Ethiopia and Eritrea went well. But it was tough and I have found painting out the images even tougher. The men dying of AIDS in Mother Teresa’s29 hospital have proven to be the hardest (if I thought breaking off to go shearing was some longed for light entertainment that is some indication). Rows and rows of black skeletons. How many years have I had these images in my head? Now what I am painting is so multilayered – not only Addis Ababa, but the hospice at St Vinnies, Ward 17 South, the Prince of Wales30 and I still can’t remember the name of the hospital at Camperdown where Andrew Carter used to go sometimes. More private for suffering I think. Isak Dinesen said ` all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them’. Most of the time I think that is true but I nearly spun out in those huge dark rooms in Addis. I had bought a bag of lollies for the kids. It was the feast of the Assumption and St Mary is very big deal in Ethiopia. So the most poor and destitute were singing and dancing on the verandahs and inside vast rooms (where, at night, they push the beds together and more sleep on the floor) rows and rows and rows of men dying of AIDS. For political purposes, I feel, they divide them into diarrhea, TB and AIDS – but they are all the same. I can’t remember many women. Perhaps they were in another hospital. They die younger I was told – weakened by childbirth. My bag of lollies was pathetically inadequate but for brief instants, faces lit up with pleasure and momentary relief from suffering. Then we went across the road to another compound. To the babies and children. This time rows and rows of cots with bundles – sometimes two and three in a cot but they were tiny so they had plenty
28 Suffering knows no geography, Warwick Regional Art Gallery, where most of the Ethiopian and Eritrean works were exhibited in 2001, and then at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery and Townsville Art Society Gallery later in 2001. 29 Mother Teresa's Hospital, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 30 All hospitals in Sydney that specialized in the care of people living with AIDS. 187 of room. These are babies that have been abandoned by their mothers ( too sick or too poor to care for them). The police pick them up in the streets and bring them to the sisters. At that time of the year it was raining and cold and for some their rescue came too late. They got too cold and chilled and will die. Some have `quick, quick AIDS’ and they, too, will die. Before their first birthday. One baby was translucent blue `something was not quite right’ with it and it, too, will die soon. It was another of those times when I felt if I started crying I would never stop so I could just hold its cold tiny hand. But still there was more. Children, grossly deformed, playing with a team of volunteers from all over the world it seemed. Some have said my paintings from that visit are `horrible’ `too confronting’ `too discomforting’ `there is no beauty to be found in them’. I’ll have to have another go. There is beauty – the beauty of the presence of a human being – even if their faces are ravaged landscapes of light and shadow cast so gauntly. They were once vigorous young men – father, lovers and workers – as you were once a beautiful young musician, artist and poet. It’s hard to remember sometimes and even harder to look into those faces and to know, for them at least, there is nothing I can do.
It wasn’t all AIDS, of course, although one of the sisters31 said she thought AIDS was a bigger problem than both war and poverty. War and poverty are not pretty but all the time I was shocked out of being overwhelmed by the beauty of the people – dark skinned, flashing smiles and a quality of dignity and resilience that, at times, put a stroppy, impatient, itinerant Australian artist to shame.
How can I tell even you all in a letter? Since I got back several people want `a paragraph’ – for a magazine, a journal, a press release and I can hardly write a coherent sentence much less a paragraph. So I’ll have to content myself with sketches – singularly appropriate as I can’t even properly describe the works that have emerged. Are they paintings, drawings, sketches? And why does it matter so much? Thank God for George Gittoes. Providentially he has two exhibitions on in Brisbane at the moment. Pages from his sketch book – images and text interwoven ( which handily answers the comment during my seminar about the written word being
31 Daughters of Charity, a Catholic order of nuns that ran hospitals, schools, and teacher education colleges amongst other things. 188 privileged in ethical discourses). Huge canvases and small ones. But I loved the drawings/sketches the best. Precious little room to hide in those and it is comforting to know that even an artist of his calibre is stumped on occasions to adequately convey suffering, anger and despair ( yet he does all that so well). I would love a drawing he did in Somalia – of a starving child. Is it awful to say that it is not for the image of the child that I would like the drawing but for a small part of the text `I’m afraid I have given up on it (the child) is beyond my art’.
So you can see it has not been easy. I didn’t expect it to be but I was surprised by how many times I felt as though I was struggling under a blanket of such blackness. But the paintings are not black – they are umber and raw sienna and white. Me, who preaches to my occasional students to leave white off their palettes, have used tubes and tubes and tubes of it since I got back. It’s the shawls of the women – wrapped figures that are irresistibly aesthetic and elegant. And how they and the sisters in the clinic keep their shawls and habits so white is evidence, I feel, of miracles not bleach. I wish you could see the exhibition. I’ve copped a bit of flack about the legless men and dying babies and of course these images are not the total reality of Ethiopia nor Eritrea. There are images of people going about their ordinary everyday business – ploughing fields, weaving shawls, spinning cotton, tending stock (including the fattest cow in Ethiopia). There are landscapes of incredible greens, monks in brilliant orange robes) and one in viridian with, over his shoulder, an iridescent green plastic bag and a bright blue umbrella), a series as a tribute to the Daughters of Charity (God must give them big hearts I think) and their provincial was pleased to see that they had prayed in her absence. I prayed too. Noel says that when all else has gone we turn back to prayer. Again he is right. But for those other `black’ images. They have already been killed by AIDS and war. I can’t kill them again by the silence of invisibility.
I hope it goes well as I hope you are Love Libby
Keith Robinson, to whom this letter is written, died of AIDS some 12 years ago. Every now and again I write him a letter. 189
APPENDIX 3. What was it like to sit beside a dying man?
What was it like to sit beside the bed of a dying man?
Are writing and painting the same? In trying to write this I am immediately reminded of a fragment of text that was part of the Auckland exhibition1 I saw `documenting’ New Zealand’s involvement in various wars. The text, black writing on clear vinyl stuck up on the wall, was a quotation from a now elderly man, a soldier in the 1914 – 1918 War. 'I came home to my mother and my father and two brothers and a sister. No one asked me what it was like. For seventy years no one asked me what it was like. Until now'.
I sat beside Ian’s2 bed last week as he was dying. I was dreading going to the hospital. Dreading going back to the smell of death. I got such a shock when they said he was expected to die within 48 hours that I scraped my car in two separate car parks that day - something I have never done before. Sometimes, during those days and early evenings, I would lift off. No not lift off. Dissolve. Was it Ian who lay there? Or Arthur3? Or Keith? Or Brett? Or Adrian? It seems obscene to confuse one man with another. It is mesmerizing. I watch the drips of the saline drip. There is a machine with digital numbers that keep changing all the time and I don’t know what they mean. But it doesn’t really matter. Ian is dying and it won’t make any difference if the drips are out of sequence – or even if they stop. Later we learn the drip is to help alleviate the symptoms of renal failure. The spasms which twitch his fingers and his shoulders. Is he in pain? How long do I wait before I go to the nurses and ask for more drugs? Is it for us who are watching or for Ian who is twitching that we ask for relief? Does it matter? Kathy is concerned that we don’t `do it for us’. But now, I say, it can be for us as well as for Ian. It defies time sitting beside a dying man. The first
1 NZ at War, Auckland Museum 1990. 2 Ian was the husband of my friend Kathy Hunt. 3 Arthur was my husband, Keith Robinson I have already identified, Brett and Adrian were young men who I met at the Day Centre for people living with AIDS in Sydney. Brett also became my Ankali client and I was to become the executor for Adrian's Estate.. 190
evening Kathy was wearing a yellow shirt. A rusty yellow. I wrote a poem once of sitting beside Adrian. I was wearing a bright yellow jumper. I don’t know where it is now. Yellow is the colour I love most passionately and even when I don’t think I will use it I always put out a great blob of it on my palette. When Adrian finally died about 3 o’clock in the morning I wrote my fingers shook as I went to light a cigarette and my jumper reeked of the sweet sweet smell of death.
Each breath is like a rasping snore - or groan. Kathy counts the time between the breaths. I don’t think he will die tonight. His breathing is too regular and strong. But Wardi died when his was too. The first time I had seen anyone die. The first time I had seen a 'dead body' and I understood what Debbie4 had tried to tell me when I was so worried about how I would cope. 'They are just not there. They are dead'. I couldn’t imagine at the time but then I understood. Noel5 says death is such an ultimate and final event. In my head I know that but sitting beside the bed it seems as though time will go on forever. It will always be like this. Of course it won’t but that is what it seems like. And hours stretch into nights and days and we wonder what is keeping him alive. Is there something we have to do? Or something Ian has to do? Or is it simply there is nothing we can do. Louise’s6 sister got married in a hall in the Dandenong Ranges7. To a born again bikie. Six months he had been `reborn’. There was a stage at the end of the Hall where a woman was playing the piano as we waited for the bride. Jannine was late and the woman kept playing the piano and looking over her shoulder. For a surreal moment it seemed Jannine would never appear and for all eternity the woman would be looking over her shoulder playing the piano.
It was like that. As though this time, in this room, would go on for all eternity. And the compulsion to keep watching. Not to go away. Even for a
4 One of my oldest friends, Debbie Newell, who was a physiotherapist and of whom I felt I could ask 'hospital' questions. 5 Noel Rowe I have already mentioned as long time friend and mentor. 6 Louise Cox another long time friend. Her sister is Jannine. 7 Dandenong Ranges, just outside Melbourne, Victoria. 191
snatched cigarette. Keep watching. Praying even. And realizing, eventually, that everything has its time. Even death. Or especially death. The utter finality of knowing that. As though we were both frozen in time. No power to change the course of events. I think about the meaning of `to endure’. When time is out of our hands. We can guess. Educatedly to be sure. But still guess. And wait and endure. Kathy is exhausted and I am buggered. A blank space behind my eyes. A tightness that sleep does not relax. Watchful I suppose you call it. I put a pillow under Kathy’s head as she rests on the bed holding his hand. I go home. Kathy goes back to the hospital flat and one of her son’s takes over the vigil. 'I have never thought of vigil like this' she says 'but I guess that is what we are doing. Keeping the vigil.' It seems such a sacred time. And so intense as though nothing else matters – except watching. And praying. And just being – somehow suspended. But I when I go home I am starving. A friend of Ian’s comes in. He says Ian would be horrified to know that he was holding his hand and calling him Darling. I say I think the end of life and the beginning – with tiny babies – are the times when we are given permission to do and say what we like. Show as much love and affection as we need to. And they accept it and don’t call us silly and stupid.
And tomorrow we do it again. And the next day. And the next day. And then he dies.
The following text is a reflection on the phenomenological process that followed the initial writing above:
Is this a description of lived experience? I can see the painting of it in my head and I will have to paint it soon. I think I will ask Kathy to be my model – sitting with her head resting on the bed. Is she me or I her? How can I paint utter weariness – and timelessness – and endurance? And the other painting that is forming itself is the sweet sweet smell of death. I need to explore some glazing techniques. The pervasiveness of the smell. I am 192
reminded of Lloyd Rees8 trying to paint his experience of a bushfire – all red and gold and black. And he thought it was too raw and covered it with a milky glaze – and somehow it worked. Kathy had never experienced death like this. The waiting beside the bed as someone dies. Inadequately I said it is like making something out of clay. When we first mould and sculpt the clay it has a wetness and life. As it dries out the clay changes colour – and texture. It is more fail and fragile. And then it is fired and glazed and it takes on a cold translucence. The process of dying, I said, is sometimes like that. The body shuts down. It loses its warmth and the angles and planes of the face become blue green. Icy. And I was thinking after that of a series of clay masks I want to make – to describe that process.9 I hate masks but the beginning and the end pieces will have to be masks. The middle piece will be my torso. I will have to work out a way to make some pieces still look wet. And the end piece will be glazed white. Don’t whitewash the dead.
Why do I want to paint this – these – experiences? Quite simply I need to. I walked into the kitchen of a friend yesterday. Then some others rang to say that they were `calling in’. They had been to a memorial service for a friend and neighbor. And my stomach heaved. Not more death. Not more grief. Not more stories. I am weighed down by death. And I want to live. Fully. Over the years I have told stories about the death and dying of my friends. I told some to Kathy and her sister. It seemed appropriate and it seemed to help them understand some of the mysteries of dying. Some I have perhaps written. I can’t remember. Now I have to paint them. To lessen the load so I can go on. So the stories can have their fullness. Perhaps completion. In some form because they will never be finished. They have become the `needless dead’. The series of drawing I did last year. Compulsively. Every time I picked up my brush out would come these figures. 'I mourn the needless dead'. I read it in a book. The Railway Station Man10.
8 Rees (1987,p.129). 9 In the end the need to make clay works was not there - so I didn't. 10 Johnston (1985). 193
'To be silenced by the stillness of reflection' (van Manen 1984,p.99). Is this what it means 'when the meaning of an experience has emerged'? The endless drawing of the saddle of hills at Ormiston Gorge. It went on for months and it nearly drove me crazy. Until, one day, the meaning of that particular experience in the Gorge emerged. And then I stopped drawing the saddle of hills. Silenced? Will the painting of Kathy silence the memories? Take out the gut wrenching immediacy of what happened in the past? Dear God, I hope so.
'Lived experience and the structures of meaning…. in terms of which these lived experiences can be described and interpreted constitute the immense complexity of the life world' (ibid,p.101) I have just realized one of the reasons I love the remote outback and deserts. I have always said I loved them because they are so timeless and ancient. I feel at peace and at one in those areas. There is no compulsion to do. I just have to be. And yet sitting beside the hospital bed is the same. The same sense of timelessness. I am not asked to do anything (or not much) just to be. Yet it drains me of energy. My being is full nothingness. Like a blank slate and I have no energy to write.
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APPENDIX 4. Selected Exhibitions
2003 Fourth Art in the Woolshed, Pikedale, Group 2002 Bush/Bay, Solo, Art Café Manly 2002 Glimpses of Samoa, Apia. Western Samoa 2001 QCL Art Awards, Group, Logan Art Gallery 2001 Our Past Our Future, Centenary of Federation Exhibition, Group, Outback Regional Gallery, Winton 2001 Portrait of A Cranky Sheep, Solo, Texas Regional Art Gallery 2001 Art in the Woolshed, Group, Pikedale 2001 suffering knows no geography, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville and Townsville Art Society Gallery 2001 suffering knows no geography, Solo, Warwick Art Gallery 2001 -2005 Viet Nam Voices, Group, National Travelling Exhibition curated by Casula Powerhouse, Sydney 2000 Figures From the Landscape of Memory, Solo, Michel Sourgnes Fine Art, Brisbane 2000 Down the Track – the After Effects of War, Solo, Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery 1999 The After Effects of War, Group, Dept. Veteran Affairs Conference, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 1999 The Earth Which Breathes the Sun, Solo, in conjunction with 1V International Rangelands Congress, Townsville 1999 Art in the Woolshed, Group, Pikedale 1999 Waltzing Matilda Art Show, Group, Winton 1999 Mixed Impressions, Solo, Christina Mitchell Gallery, Brisbane 1998 As a Lizard Drinks, Solo, Sydney 1998 Landscapes of Desire, Solo, Brisbane 1997 The Colours of Light and Desire, Solo, Toulouse, France 1996 Hot Rubber Red Dust, Gallery Agua, Noosaville 1995 Life Works, Group, Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery 1994 Corridor Exhibition, Toowoomba Base Hospital, Toowoomba, Group 1993 Madly Arty, Toowoomba, Group 195
1993 Hard Curves Soft Edges, Collaborative with David Blomfield, Warwick Art Gallery 1992 Three Artists, Kyneton Art Gallery, Victoria, Group 1978 - 1986 Balranald Community Arts and Craft Exhibitions, Balranald.
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APPENDIX 5. Details of Images Figure No. Facing Page No.
1. The Quilt, 2002 Mono Print on paper, 29 x 26 cm. 5 2. Ricko, Portrait of a Vietnam Veteran, 1999 Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 120 cm. 6 3. I didn't expect it to be like this, 1999 Ink and acrylic on paper, 50 x 60 cm. 7 4. A Man With AIDS 11, 2000 Ink on paper, 23 x 20 cm. 8 5. My Father's Dreams, 1999 Ink and acrylic on paper, 56 x 76 cm. 9 6. The Roots and Threads of Meaning, 2003 Silk, and cotton on cotton, 160 x 120 cm. 12 7. Rabbit Trap, 2002 Ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 20 8. Figures in Shellac, 2003 Acrylic, ink, shellac on greaseproof paper, 180 x 110 cm. 21 9. PTSD - So Bloody What?, 2002 Mixed media collage on paper, 130 x 95 cm. 23 10. Robed Women and Drought, 2002 Mono print on paper, 28 x 26 cm. 34 11. Red Blotches, 2002 Mono print on paper, 25 x 23 cm. 56
12. Blue Gate, 2002 Mono print on paper, 25 x 23 cm. 57 13. Cream Robed Woman, 2003 Acrylic on muslin and calico, 215 x 98 cm. 93
14. So Still, and Silent, and Enduring, 2003 Acrylic, glitter thread, organdie on cotton canvas, each panel 30 x 21 cm. 94 15. Sienna Hills of Home, 2002 Mono print on paper, 29 x 26 cm 95 197
16. Glued writing, 2003 Ink, shellac, wallpaper paste on MDF cut out figure, approx. 200 cm x 50cm 96 17. Ma and the Nurse, Book 1,2003 Ink, acrylic, shellac on greaseproof paper, each page 30 x 30 cm 98 18. Bundles of Rags, 2003 Suede, screen printed linen, cotton on calico 187 x 100 cm. 99 19. Woven Landscape, 2003 Acrylic, shellac, greaseproof paper and Japanese rice paper, 150 x 200 cm. 102 20. How a Dying Baby Became a Waterfall, Book 10, 2003 Ink on paper, 43 x 75 cm. 111 21. If I start Crying Now, 1999 Ink and acrylic on paper, 76 x 56 cm. 113
22. Skeletal Man, 2002 Mono print on paper, 25 x 20 cm. 114
23. Grief Viewing Grief, 2002 Mono print on paper, 28 x 28 cm. 117
24. Duo Becomes the Trinity, 2002 Ink, acrylic, shellac on greaseproof paper, each panel 120 x 30 cm. 120 25. No Grave/Crosses, 2002 Mono print on paper, 26 x 22 cm. 126 26. Beside the Bed, 2002 Mono print on paper, 29 x 26 cm. 141
27. Drought Sheep 4, 2002 Ink and acrylic on paper, 56 x 76 cm. 143 28. I've Always Hated Maggots, 2002 Mono print on paper, 33 x 25 cm. 148
29. Dad's Leg and Spoon, 2002 Mono print on paper, 33 x 25 cm. 150 30. Dad's Leg/ Keith's Sore 11, 2002 Mono print on paper, 33 x 25 cm. 152 198
APPENDIX 6. Selected papers, conferences and publications
Publications
Woodhams, Libby.(2003) 'Knitting Backwards' Textile Fibre Forum, 22 (Issue 4, No.72)26 - 27.
Woodhams, L and Bishop, M (Eds.) (1995) The Arts in Health – exploring the role of the Arts in Health, Conference papers. The Cunningham Centre, Darling Downs Regional Health Authority, Queensland Health.
Crafting Art in Health (1994) Craft Link, 8 (8 September), 3-4.
Andrew, in Brown, Joe (Ed.). (1992) A Promise to Remember – The Names Project Book of Letters, Avon Books, New York, 66-67.
The Textile of Tummies – or a Reflection on Don’t Leave Me This Way – Art in the Age of AIDS. (1995) Textile Fibre Forum, 14 (Issue 2 No. 43) 42.
The Art of Living, 1995 Network News, Queensland Community Arts Network, (Edition 2), 5-6.
The Arts in Health – implications for Artistic and Health Practice, Policy Development, Education and Training, (1995) Australian Journal of Primary Health Care – Interchange, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria,1 (No.1, October),66-7.
Papers and Workshops
2002 Art in AIDS and War.Guest Speaker, Samoa Luncheon Club, Western Samoa,
2001 AIDS and War in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Keynote Address, Zonta Rural Women’s Expo, Roma
2001 Guest Lecturer, Barrier Reef TAFE, Townsville.
2000 The Ethical Questions Arising from Travels to Ethiopia and Eritrea. Seminar. QUT Centre for the Study of Ethics
1998. -`The Ethical Issues that Arise with Artistic Practice within Health Care Settings’. Keynote Address, 2nd National Conference Arts in Health, Toowoomba
1995 1. The Role of the Arts in Health – implications for artistic and clinical practice. 2. The Use of Art to Teach Ethics, Workshops. Australian and New Zealand Association of Medical Education Conference, Queenstown, New Zealand.
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1995 Reflection on a series of paintings Ormiston Gorge, NT. Paper presented at 2nd International Australian Conference Religion Literature and the Arts.
1995 The Art of Space – Spaces reflect an Ethical Worldview,Colloquium, Religion Art and Architecture. Sydney. `
1995 Interaction between Community Health and the Arts Joint Plenary with Michael Bishop. Australian Community Health Association 5th National Conference, Brisbane
1995 Gap Insurance – The Role of the Arts in Health, Flourishing and Well Being. Workshop/Paper presented at Third National Women’s Health Conference, Canberra.
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1991 Healing Art. Workshop/ Paper presented at First International Conference on Biopsychosocial Aspects of HIV/AIDS Infection’ Amsterdam.
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