Listening & Drawing: Methodologies towards Emplacement
Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art, Design and Media
The University of New South Wales Art and Design
2020 Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Surname/Family Name :Chen
Given Name/s : Yuen Zhe
Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : PhD Art, Design and Media
Faculty : Art and Design
School : Art and Design
Thesis Title : Listening and Drawing: Methodologies Towards Emplacement
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)
This practice based PhD develops processes of embodied listening and experimental drawing as multi-sensory, emplaced methodologies to articulate new approaches to the contemporary practice of drawing. Through creative interactions with the historically significant and visually iconic sites of Golden Gully in Hill End, New South Wales, Australia; and the village of Langshi in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, this project examines how drawing and listening can generate an awareness of perceptual, cultural and social emplacement.
My practice initiates a dialogue with visual paradigms evident in painted and poetic responses to these places from the Australian 20th century landscape and Chinese 12th to 13th century shanshui traditions. From these departure points, the practice responds to the material reality of Golden Gully and Langshi in the present. My engagement with these places is inflected by my context as a migrant, female artist of Chinese heritage practicing between cultures in Australia and internationally. The contextual specificity of this position in the practical research reinforces an approach to these places as constituted of many possible relations.
Through experimental process-based interactions with these places, I develop four embodied listening methodologies of Touch, Space, Durations and Sounding. These methodologies address the specific perceptual conditions generated by my engagements with these places. They facilitate the analysis of drawing with sound feedback and malleable paper ‘mediators,’ which act as conduits shaping my perceptual and physical interactions with these places. The drawing properties of surface, gesture and line, are extended through the intersubjective experiences of listening, and innovated by the spatial and temporal fluidity of sound.
Sound feedback compositions, paper mediators and video works from creative interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, are used to mediate further experimental interactions with the exhibition space. Through drawing and listening as methods of exploring ongoing relationships with places, contemporary drawing is extended as an enactive process that can generate manifold senses of perceptual emplacement.
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Acknowledgements
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project was undertaken upon the land and waters of the Cammeraygal, Darramuragal, and Wiradyuri people. Works from this project hold the sounds, waters, soil and plant matter from their Countries. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging who have cared and continue to care for Country. I would especially like to acknowledge Uncle Brian, Aunty Leanna, Uncle Bill and Yanhadarrambal from Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises and Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal Community Elders, who generously gave me their time, energy and counsel.
I also gratefully acknowledge the people of $:E - Langshi village, in particular Su Haibo, Su Ayi, Xiao Mo, Mao Shifu, Yang Ayi, Su Shushu, who welcomed me into their home, introduced me to their goats, fed me copious amounts of fruit and vegetables from their farms, and allowed me to make strange sounds with the rocks, water and bamboo of their land.
I greatly appreciate the depth of thought and energy that was invested into this project by my research supervisors Bianca Hester and Uros Cvoro. Their guidance greatly aided the unfolding of this journey and it has been a privilege to receive their mentorship in these four years. I would also like to thank my Masters research supervisor Andrew Christofides for his guidance with my earlier research.
I am extremely fortunate to have the love and support of Taiyo Totsuka, not just in this project, but for all aspects of our lives together. Our parents Kim Yoon Tan, Kong Ming Chen, Mitsuko Totsuka and Tetsuya Totsuka, and our siblings Sean Chen, Holly Tan, Takeaki Totsuka, Yura Totsuka and Yuki Totsuka have all been invariably supportive and understanding. I especially thank Tsuneko Totsuka; her calligraphy brush started me on this journey in 2007. My friends have also been incredibly kind and patient in my times of self-enforced solitude, and I am deeply grateful to all of them. Lastly, I am greatly indebted to my ancestors, whose trajectories of travel opened a path for my own.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations & Recording Excerpts iii
List of Exhibitions, Conferences & Publications vi
Prelude 1
Introduction 5 Listening and Drawing 7 Enacting (Specific) Emplacements 13 Structure of the Written Component 18
PART ONE
Chapter One: Towards Emplacement 23
Disentangling Place and Landscape 26
Embodied and Emplaced Experiences 33
• Mediators and the In-Between 37
Situated Specificities 45
• Some Responsibilities of Listening 51
Chapter Two: Listening & Drawing 55
Departing from Vision 57
Sonic Fluidity and Shifting Surfaces 60
Embodied Listening 67
• Touch 72
• Sounding 75
• Space 78
• Durations 82
ivi of Table of Contents
PART TWO | INTERACTIONS GOLDEN GULLY 87
Introduction 91
Section 1: Golden Gully - Russell Drysdale
• Constructed Visions 99
• Defining Visions 104 Section 2: Dorothy Napangardi 113
Section 3: Sounding Golden Gully
• Introduction 119
• Sounding through Touch 122
• Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully 129
PART THREE | INTERACTIONS ၵᎪ LANGSHI 135
Introduction 139 Section 1: Eight Views of Xiaoxiang - Imagined Worlds
• Reading and Wandering 147
• Listening Quietly 155
Section 2: Bingyi 161
Section 3: Sounding through Mountains, River, Bamboo
• Introduction 167
• Converging 171
• Looping - Möbius Scrolls 179
• Connecting Inner and Outer Worlds 184
Conclusion: Onwards
Learning from Listening and Drawing 189
Learning about Partiality 194
Appendix Interactions: Fig Tree Cove | 2016 - 2018 199 List of Works in the Exhibitions 202 Visual Documentation of the Exhibitions 204
Bibliography 213 ii of vi List of Illustrations & Recording Excerpts
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS & RECORDING EXCERPTS
Illustrations
Part One
1 Golden Gully Map & Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully process 2
2 Langshi Map & ၵᎪ段:ઊ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain process 3
3 Mercier Zeng, Photography Workshop Guilin 2020 web image 31
4 Drawing sounds in Golden Gully 2016 33
5 - 6 Video experiments in Langshi 2017 36
7 Binaural Sound Study - Bamboo process, Langshi 2017 39
8 Experiment with paper arc structures in Golden Gully 2016 57
9 Surface of Golden Gully after rain 2016 59
10 - 11 Experimenting with surfaces in Golden Gully 2016 60
12 - 13 Experiments with Chinese paper and wind in Fig Tree Cove 2017 63
14 Conversation with the Wind 1, Fig Tree Cove 2017 64
15 - 16 Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully process 2018 69
17 Spatial Malleable - River process, Langshi 2017 72
18 Sounding through Touch process, Golden Gully 2018 75
19 Binaural Sound Study - Bamboo process, Langshi 2017 78
20 Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11 process, Langshi 2017 81
21 - 22 Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11 (video stills) 81
23 - 24 Walking Ochre and Quartz: Morning, Midday, Afternoon (details) 85
Part Two Interactions: Golden Gully
25 - 30 Golden Gully: ochre, quartz and water, 2016 and 2018 88-89
31 Russell Drysdale, Golden Gully, 1949 96
32 Russell Drysdale, The Councillor’s House, 1948 97
33 Dorothy Napangardi, Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa (Belonging to 110 women), 2000
34 Dorothy Napangardi, Sandhills of Mina Mina, 2000 111
iii of vi List of Illustrations & Recording Excerpts
Part Two Interactions: Golden Gully (cont.)
35 - 36 Sounding through Touch process, Golden Gully 2018 121
37 Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators, 2018 126
38 - 39 Sounding through Touch - First, Second, Third Movements 127 (video stills)
40 Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully process 2018 129
41 Finding red-tinged ochre in Golden Gully 2018 132
42 Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully process, 2018 132
Part Two Interactions: ၵᎪ Langshi
43 - 47 ၵᎪ - Langshi: stone, bamboo, water and mist, 2017 and 2018 136-137
48 Map of Xiaoxiang region 143
49 Muqi Fachang (attributed), Evening Bell from Mist Shrouded 144 Temple, 1210-1270
50 ‘Master Li’ of Shucheng, Dream Journey along the Xiao and 145 Xiang Rivers, 1170-1171
51 Ma Lin, Listening Quietly to Soughing Pines, 13th C. 155
52 - 53 Bingyi, Shape of the Wind, 2012 (video stills) 159
54 - 55 Bingyi, Shape of the Wind, 2012 (detail and installation views) 160
56 Bingyi, Emei Waterfall, 2018 (video stills) 165
57 - 59 Spatial Malleables: Mountain, River, Bamboo process, Langshi 169 2017
60 Spatial Malleables: River process, Langshi, 2017 170
61 Spatial Malleables: Mountain, River, Bamboo, 2017 170
62 Local woman washing laundry in the Li River 1, Langshi 2018 172
63 ၵᎪ段’ - Sounding Langshi: River process, Langshi 2018 173
64 Local woman washing laundry in the Li River 2, Langshi 2018 173
65 ၵᎪ段: ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi: Bamboo process, Langshi 177 2018
66 ၵᎪ段: ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi: Bamboo, 2018 177
67 - 68 ᩳ, 室, 向 - Walk, Listen, Draw process, Langshi 2018 178
69 ᩳ, 室, 向 - Walk, Listen, Draw process, Langshi 2018 179 iv of vi List of Illustrations & Recording Excerpts
Part Two Interactions: ၵᎪ Langshi (cont.)
70 ၵᎪ段: ઊ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain, 2018 182
71 - 72 ၵᎪ段: ઊ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain process, Langshi, 2018 183
Appendix
73 Video experiment, Fig Tree Cove 2017 199
74 Screenshot of online journal, Fig Tree Cove 2016 200
75 Sound Feedback Drawing experiment with wind and stone, Fig 201 Tree Cove 2018.
Links to Sound and Video Recording Excerpts
Binaural Sound Study - Bamboo | Langshi 2017 39 https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/binaural-sound-study-bamboo
Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully | 2018 69, 132 https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/binaural-sound-study-golden- gully
Sounding through Touch | Golden Gully | 2018 75, 121, 127 https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-through-touch
Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11 | Langshi | 2017 81 https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/dawn-durations
Walking Ochre and Quartz: Morning, Midday, Afternoon 85 Golden Gully | 2018 https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/walking-ochre-quartz
Spatial Malleables: Mountain, River, Bamboo | Langshi | 2017 169 https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/spatial-malleables
ၵᎪ段: ઊ, , ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain, River and 173, 177, 183 Bamboo | Langshi | 2018 https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-langshi
vvi of List of Exhibitions, Conferences & Publications
LIST OF EXHIBITIONS, CONFERENCES & PUBLICATIONS
Exhibitions
2020 Golden Gully - Some ways to listen and draw (solo exhibition) Black Box, Sydney
ၵᎪ Langshi - Some ways to listen and draw (solo exhibition) AD Space, Sydney
2019 Sounding through Touch (solo exhibition) Firstdraft, Sydney
Ecologies of Being, curated by Tanushri Saha and Naomi Segal for Peril Magazine Kudos Gallery, Sydney
2018 ઊԏ樌 - Between Mountain and Water (solo exhibition) Ningbo Museum of Art, Zhejiang, China
Vis a Vis, Curated by Charlotte Watson Five Walls, Melbourne
Conversations with the Wind (solo exhibition) Incinerator Art Space, Willoughby
2017 Art Nova 100 Today Art Museum, Beijing
Willoughby Visual Arts Biennale: Home Grown, curated by Cassandra Hard- Lawrie and Kathie Najar Art Space on the Concourse, Sydney
Claudia Chan Shaw and Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen Art Atrium, Jones Bay Wharf, Sydney
Conferences/Lectures
2019 Paper Presented at TRACEY Drawing Research Network: Embodied Drawing - Conference, Loughborough University, United Kingdom, 11-12 July 2019
2018 Guest Speaker - Ningbo University Pan Tianshou Arts and Design Academy, 12 December 2018
Publications
2020 ‘Sounding through Touch - Golden Gully,’ Translating Ambiance: Embodiment, Practice, Listening, Unlikely - Journal for Creative Arts, September 2020 (forthcoming).
vi of vi Prelude
PRELUDE
I had always found it hard to say with absolute certainty, that there was a place that had a hold on me. This could've been the effect of having moved from Malaysia to Australia when I was four. Perhaps that is why I turned towards visually iconic places in Australia and China; places made known to me through idyllic paintings. It constituted an attempt to find cultural emplacement through images. But I soon realised that the process of being emplaced in material reality was contingent upon my body’s capacities and the nature of my desires.
The romantic idyll I was searching for, picturesque places away from busy cities, didn’t correspond with what I actually encountered on my journeys. Not that the solitary desolation of mining tunnels, the quiet township and ochre tinged countryside of Hill End differed greatly from the pictorial interpretations I’d seen; or that the karst formations and misty riverbank of Guilin were less impressive than the old scroll paintings. But rather, a questioning of ways of being and doing had begun to stir, and this nascent stirring was struggling to find expression.
As an artist trained in traditional drawing, the urge to visually aestheticise the places I visited initially occluded the perception of gritty realities and thereby impeded a deeper connection to these places. Mud and faecal matter underfoot, caterpillars, wind tearing paper from my hands, crouching behind rocks to tend to the sudden onset of my period; these were some realities of working ‘en plein air’. Like in a committed relationship, I had to learn to negotiate with the material ‘imperfections’ of each place, my expectations and the needs of my body. Perhaps that is why most Chinese painters traditionally worked on tables indoors.
Opening myself to the surface textures, shifting air, chaotic sounds and impinging smells urged me to question conventional ways of seeing and doing that I had unconsciously adopted from paintings and images. As a visitor I could only find a sense of purpose in Hill End and Guilin through my drawing processes, but I had to constantly, consciously, search for why and how to be where I was. Allowing places to affect me and sensing places in their fullness, shifted my understanding. I began searching for ways to be emplaced as an artist through listening. 1 of 227 Prelude
GOLDEN GULLY
Drawing and Listening Interactions: 6 December 2016 - 9 January 2017 & 1-28 March 2018
Golden Gully The former gold mining site of Golden Gully is situated two Hill End kilometres north of Hill End, a historical town in Wiradyuri Country. Hill End is approximately five hours drive northwest from Sydney in New South Wales, Australia.
Bathurst
Lithgow
Richmond
Sydney
1. Golden Gully Map & Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully Process
2 of 227 Prelude
ၵᎪ LANGSHI
Drawing and Listening Interactions: 11 October - 15 November 2017 & 11-31 October 2018
໗૱ Guilin City
ၵ làng - wave | Ꭺ shí - rock. 偳 Li River Located in the southernmost corner of the historical Xiaoxiang region in southern China, ၵᎪ - Langshi Village encapsulates the essential elements of Chinese ઊ shanshui (mountain water) painting in its topography and name. Nestled in between the Li River and limestone karst mountains, the village is situated two hours southeast of Guilin.
ၵᎪ Langshi Village
2. Langshi Map & ၵᎪ段:ઊ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain Process
3 of 227
Introduction
INTRODUCTION
‘Listening is a sensory-motor action toward the world, which thus is the crossing not the crossed. Hearing is participle and generative, creating the world and the things continuously in all their vitality from my moving within and toward myself also.’ Salomé Voegelin, 2014.1
Listening and drawing became inextricably entwined as an awareness of my bodily agency in places grew. Drawing and listening enabled me to touch, rub, crunch, drip and reverberate the dynamic materiality of Golden Gully in Hill End, New South Wales, Australia; and the village of Langshi in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China. These places touched and affected me in turn, shaping the way I moved in response to their contingent vitality.
This practice-based PhD explores how interdependent drawing and listening methodologies enabled me to interact with these places and generate my own unique perceptual experiences. By developing drawing and listening as multi- sensory relations with places, I investigate new ways of practicing the drawing properties of surface, gesture, line and mark-making through the experience of listening. The following questions emerged from my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi and became the key motivators of this PhD:
• How can embodied listening and drawing methodologies extend drawing as a multi-sensory, emplaced and enactive practice?
• How does engaging historically inflected places through drawing and listening, generate a critical awareness of my perceptual, cultural and social emplacement?
1 Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 106. 5 of 227 Introduction
I chose Golden Gully and Langshi for their visually iconic topography which artists practicing within the Australian twentieth century landscape and Chinese twelfth and thirteenth century shanshui traditions respectively, have responded to. Australian artist Russell Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully (1948-49), and Chinese Song Dynasty (960-1279) literati gentlemen scholars' paintings and poetry on the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang (a region that encompasses Guilin) were two such practices. These practices presented historical, visual responses to these places and appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities. Initially influenced by this imagery, I focused upon visually interpreting the sonic dimensions of Golden Gully and Langshi through drawing. However, there existed a tension between my aestheticised expectations and my bodily experience of the material realities of these places.
Negotiating with this tension gave rise to two correlating departure points: moving away from my original research methodology of visually depicting sounds; and resisting and responding to the visual conventions and motifs evident in the Australian landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions. The external viewpoint and perspectival techniques used in Drysdale’s paintings are visual conventions that have their roots in the European landscape tradition. In the Chinese shanshui tradition, visual tropes of mountain, stone, water and bamboo were used to convey specific philosophical and spiritual beliefs. These conventions exerted a strong pull upon me, influencing choices and actions in my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi.
This PhD explores how resisting and responding to these visual conventions engendered embodied listening and drawing methodologies that are multi- sensory, interactive and emplaced processes. By foregrounding the contextual specificity of my embodied processes and the reciprocal effects of my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, I explore how these methodologies enacted new senses of being emplaced in historically significant and visually iconic places. By developing drawing and listening as interdependent methodologies, this PhD aims to contribute towards practices of expanded drawing that extend the notions of surface, line, gesture and mark-making, through performance, sound and video practices. 6 of 227 Introduction
Listening and Drawing
This PhD began in 2016 with a focus upon visually depicting sounds heard around me.2 However, as practical research developed during my first residency at Hill End in December 2016, I came to understand the importance of examining the reciprocal nature of my bodily interactions with Golden Gully and how I contributed to the sounds of this place. It became clear that my aural, visual and haptic experiences were inherently entangled with the material and atmospheric contingencies of Golden Gully.
These moments of realisation occurred by listening to my processes of drawing in places and being mindful of how the gestural act of moving my body produced a sounding through which I situated myself in relation to the surfaces, topographical elements, animals, insects and people of Golden Gully and Langshi. This significantly shifted my drawing methodology from adumbrating sound experience, towards drawing as a responsive act of agency and bodily interaction with these places. As an active, embodied process, listening disrupted the dominance of vision that training as a sighted artist had instilled in my drawing practice, and opened my awareness towards bodily involvement.
My research methodology evolved at the intersection of drawing and listening practices, when my gestures and actions were compelled by the dynamic sounds that enlivened Golden Gully and Langshi. The act of drawing became simultaneous with the act of listening, whereby interactions between the surfaces of my body, paper and places, produced visible and audible traces. Both drawing and listening enabled me to search, to sound out my emplacement by touching the material surfaces of these places. I explore how drawing and listening as interactive processes can enact unique perceptual experiences and in doing so, contribute towards dialogues on the expanded practice of drawing.
2 My early research had examined the writings of experimental psychologist Charles Spence and philosopher Ophelia Deroy. These researchers had developed theories on multi-sensory integration and crossmodal correspondences. These theories explore relationships between different sense modalities and were pertinent to my initial investigation into correlations between sounds and visual forms. However, the writing of these researchers became less relevant as I began to develop my own methodologies of embodied listening. 7 of 227 Introduction
In a survey of drawing practices in the twentieth century, curator and art historian M. Catherine de Zegher describes drawing as ‘born from an outward gesture linking inner impulses and thoughts to the other through the touching of a surface with repeated graphic marks and lines.’3 The significance of drawing as a relational act is continued in her observation that contemporary women’s drawing practices in particular, often correspond to ‘weaving or knitting together materials, ideas, conceptions, sensibilities…the role of women’s work in the transformation of drawing opens up to many forms of expression’ and ‘Many women work with line not as separation but as connection.’4
De Zegher develops the notion of the line in drawing beyond a visible delineation on a surface, towards a process of drawing together material, perceptual and mental experience. De Zegher’s notion of drawing as a ‘linking' action that connects dimensions of experience through lines, marks, and gesture has been extremely generative. I interpret listening and drawing as processes that can facilitate and mediate the unfolding of new senses of places through their interactive potential. Informed by the practice of listening, I develop the act of drawing as way of a drawing together my body and the surfaces, atmosphere and people of Golden Gully and Langshi.
De Zegher identified the specific drawing properties of surface, line, mark and gesture in her description of the ‘linking’ action of drawing. I developed four interdependent listening methodologies to extend these properties as essential constituents of my embodied interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi. Listening through the ideas of Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations guided the development of paper drawing structures such as the Binaural Sound Studies and Möbius Scrolls, which facilitated variations of whole body listening by affecting my movements while I was drawing. These structures reconfigured the drawing surface and altered the relationships between gesture, surface and mark-making. The methodologies also provided a framework through which I
3 M. Catherine de Zegher, ‘A Century under the Sign of Line: Drawing and Its Extension (1910 - 2010),’ in On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, ed. Cornelia H. Butler and M. Catherine de Zegher (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 23-24. 4 Ibid., 120. 8 of 227 Introduction
examine key innovations, such as Sound Feedback Drawing processes that employed drawing with lines of sound feedback bounced off mining tunnel walls and limestone karst formations.5 In this interaction with the material and acoustic qualities of Golden Gully and Langshi, listening to my own sounding gestures enabled me to measure my emplacement.
Listening through:
• Touch explores the mutual contact between my body, surfaces of paper and the material surfaces of places. This contact engendered both visible and audible marks and lines.
• Sounding examines the sounds created through movement and bodily contact with surfaces. This also enabled me to sound out my emplacement with gestures that intersected lines of sound feedback.
• Space explores my egocentric space of drawing. This was generated by the extent of my auditory, sounding and gestural reach in relation to the surfaces of places.
• Durations investigates the temporal dimension of drawn marks and gestured, sounded lines. These were determined by my body’s capacity and endurance.
These embodied listening methodologies articulate how proximity and contact with the surfaces and shapes of places, generated the temporal, spatial and perceptual conditions of my embodied listening experiences. The responsive, material nature of the four listening methodologies enlivened my approach to the drawing properties of surface, gesture, line and mark-making.
As these properties became active constitutes in my drawing and listening processes, my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi became more dynamic and receptive. I situated myself as an agent in the creation of my
5 Karst topography is characterised by limestone formations eroded by rain or underground water. Langshi Village is located in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region which is a part of the South China Karst. ‘Karst,’ National Geographic, accessed November 25, 2019, https:// www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/karst/ 9 of 227 Introduction
perceptual experiences and the unfolding of new senses of these places. In this regard, I draw upon artist and writer Salomé Voegelin’s emphasis on the immersive participation of listening. Voegelin extends listening as a continuous act of ‘creating the world’ which also generates an inward movement of awareness ‘toward myself also.’6 I reimagine and rework the notions of surface, gesture, line and mark-making, through the immersive conditions of listening so that drawing and listening became participatory and enactive perceptual processes.
The four listening methodologies articulate highly specific ways to listen that have evolved through interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi. They are embodied listening practices that are closely informed by ‘the enactive approach’ to embodied cognition first developed by Fransisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in 1991.7 In describing the generative nature of the enactive approach to perception, Varela borrowed from poet Antonio Machado: ‘wanderer the road is your footsteps, nothing else; you lay down a path in walking.’8 In the enactive approach, the individual creates their own perceptual experiences by engaging with the world through skilful actions based upon their sensorimotor ‘mode of coupling’ with the environment.9 Movement, from physical gestures to internal shifts in awareness and attention, was integral to the enactive nature of the drawing and listening methodologies developed in this project. Movements of gestures, crouching, standing and walking, mediated by my paper structures, microphones, speakers and phone camera, generated particular ways to listen that informed the act of drawing in turn.
6 Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds, 106. 7 The enactive approach to embodied cognition wove connections between phenomenology and Buddhist practices to propose a new methodologies for cognitive science. This approach has influenced philosophers and researchers such as Alva Noë.
Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991). 8 Fransisco Varela and Antonio Machado quoted in Evan Thompson, Mind in Life - Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 13. 9 Thompson, Mind in Life, 13. 10 of 227 Introduction
Although listening and sounding became pivotal to the evolution of my approach to drawing, my transfiguration of drawing properties firmly orientates this PhD within experimental drawing rather than sound practices.10 This echoes an expanded approach to drawing that contemporary artists in Australia have taken in manifold directions in recent years. I am particularly interested in artists who have explored embodied extensions of drawing, such as Gosia Wlodarczak. In works such as Window shopping, frost drawing for QAGOMA (2012), Wlodarczak draws in situated, social, performative contexts in which viewing her environment and interacting with people, will affect the course of her continuous line drawing. Wlodarczak’s work Shared Space Longin (2005) was exhibited as a part of Performing Drawing at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. This exhibition extended the notion of experimental drawing across disciplines such as performance, photography and video, focusing upon processes and actions that enact temporal, embodied experiences.
Tom Nicholson’s drawing practice also extends into performance and collaboration, engaging with histories, political events and possible future actions and monuments. A work that has made a strong impression upon me is Nardoo Flag Wave (2009-2010). The trajectory of a flag being waved by a person is captured in the layering of multiple photographs. This composite image imagines the potential proliferation of nardoo fern in Melbourne’s Royal Park upon flooding.
My drawing and listening methodologies share an expanded approach to notions of embodied gesture and mark-making with these Australian artists. When researching artists practicing at the intersection of listening and drawing practices, I extended my purview internationally. In the mid twentieth century, Italian Arte Povera artists Mario Merz and Alighiero Boetti listened while they drew and recorded sounds of their mark-making; Czechosovakian artist Milan
10 I chose not to address the notion of ‘soundscape’ made popular by R. Murray Schafer in 1977, nor the research of soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause and musician Pauline Oliveros. The notions of sound and listening developed by these writers and practitioners did not directly influence the development of my drawing and listening methodologies, nor my understanding of emplacement, and are therefore beyond the scope of this PhD. 11 of 227 Introduction
Grygar performed his acoustic drawings in the 1960’s; contemporary British artist Emma McNally listens closely to sound in her transcriptive drawing processes; and Australian artist Joyce Hinterding invites participants to touch her graphite antennae drawings and listen to their ambient frequencies. These artists’ practices present important precedents for drawing and listening. Gosia Wlodarczak and Milan Grygar in particular, have influenced my interest in generating embodied auditory and perceptual experiences through drawing.
My drawing and listening methodologies stand apart from these practices through their emergence from interactions with the contingent materiality of specific places. Furthermore, in vitalising the relationship between surfaces of paper and the material surfaces of Golden Gully and Langshi; altering my gestures with Binaural Sound Studies and Möbius Scrolls; and activating rock and mining tunnels with Sound Feedback Drawing, my paper structures and technological tools of drawing became mediators of embodied listening experiences that were unique to my interactions.
To examine this development, I drew from philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the ‘in-between.’ For Grosz, 'the space in between things is the space in which things are undone…the space of subversion and fraying…it is the space of the bounding and undoing of the identities which constitute it.’11 Grosz’s notion was pivotal in shaping how I understood my drawing and listening processes. My technological tools and paper structures facilitated specific forms of relations in between myself and Golden Gully and Langshi. Their mediating capabilities became significant in enacting a transformative space of encounter that affected changes upon these places and myself.
11 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture,’ in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001), 93, EBSCO.
Writer Homi K. Bhabha takes another approach to the notion of the ‘in-between’ within the discipline of postcolonial theory. While Bhabha’s theories may have been generative for examining my position as a migrant artist practicing in between cultures, it was not instrumental in the development of my drawing and listening methodologies and hence, not discussed within this PhD. 12 of 227 Introduction
The notion of the ‘in-between’ emphasises transformative ‘networks of movement and force’ as the locus from which to explore ever changing ‘identities.’12 By focusing on the transformative potential of my ‘Paper Mediators,’ they evolved away from being passive, finalised drawings or objects, to become dynamic facilitators of perceptual experience that were imbued with the potential for future movement and change. By emphasising my embodied drawing and listening methodologies as active processes of relation, I was able to enact places in their vitality. In this regard, the dynamic, mediating nature of my drawing and listening methodologies, sets them apart from other drawing and listening practices.
*****
Enacting (Specific) Emplacements
Coming to terms with the mediating capacities of my drawing and listening methodologies, Paper Mediators and technological tools was also a journey of understanding the nature of Golden Gully and Langshi as places in the process of change. To examine how my interactive drawing and listening processes contributed towards their unfolding, I approached these places through the idea of their being composed of dynamic relations. To explore the co-productive bond between places and relations, I drew upon social geographer Doreen Massey’s argument for the generative capacity of this relationship:
‘the identities of places are inevitably unfixed…because the social relations out of which they are constructed are themselves by their very nature dynamic and changing. They are also unfixed because of the continual
12 Gilles Deleuze referenced by Grosz. In regards to ‘identities,’ Grosz is speaking specifically to the notions of culture and architecture. Ibid., 95. 13 of 227 Introduction
production of further social effects through the very juxtaposition of those social relations.’13
Massey’s processual approach to places has been extremely productive for examining how my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, partook in a continual process of becoming. While Massey is speaking of social relations (and this was an important aspect of my interactions with these places, particularly in Langshi), my embodied drawing and listening methodologies also enacted new ways of feeling, hearing and sounding with the surfaces, waters and acoustics of these places. In these interactions, the specificity of my methodologies contributed towards the protean potential of these places to unfold in many possible ways. In this PhD, I take a processual approach to the notion of ‘place,’ emphasising my drawing and listening methodologies as enactive processes of emplacement, which offer a number of potential ways to relate to Golden Gully and Langshi in particular.14
The specificity of my drawing and listening methodologies, and my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi were also influenced by my context. The trajectory of my methodological developments and my choice to respond to the Australian landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions, have been guided by my Western educational pathway and partial understanding of the Chinese language. Growing up in Australia as a second generation Malaysian-born Chinese person who speaks English as my main language, granted me access to certain areas of knowledge and restricted others.
For example, in this PhD I have chosen to use the Chinese term ‘& shānshuǐ’ - ‘mountain water,’ when referring to the Chinese ‘landscape’ painting tradition in my writing. This reflected my conviction that the English term ‘landscape,’ with its etymological roots connected to shaping and vision, was an inaccurate
13 Doreen B. Massey, ‘A Place called Home?,’ in Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 498. iBooks. 14 Philosophers Edward Casey and Jeff Malpas have developed particular approaches to the notion of ‘place.’ Similarly, environmental behaviour researcher David Seamon developed the idea of ‘place-ballet,’ in which daily actions and routine engender connections to places. The ideas proposed by these writers were examined in my early stages of research, however, they did not directly inform my drawing and listening processes. 14 of 227 Introduction
translation for this Chinese painting tradition. I argue that shanshui developed as a distinct tradition with its own philosophical and spiritual beliefs, and contextual practices. However, my access to writings on this tradition occurred within English based, Western art theory discourse (sometimes translated from Chinese through French to English). My understanding of this tradition had, from the beginning, been mediated and filtered through Western theoretical practices. Therefore, my discussions on Song Dynasty (960 - 1279) Chinese shanshui tradition occurred within the parameters of art history focused upon ‘landscape.’15
Furthermore, my drawing and listening methodologies were contextualised through my Western centric readings in art history, drawing theory, enactive perception, contemporary philosophies of listening and sound, and feminist writing in the fields of social geography, science and philosophy. The tradition of drawing that my methodologies extended upon, which propagates the notions of surface, gesture, line and mark-making, is also inherently Western in its theoretical discourse and practice. While writers such as Philip Rawson have extended their propositions on drawing to include Australian First Nations people's and ‘Far Eastern’ methods,16 such comparisons are done so based upon Western conceptions of what it means to ‘draw.’ It was important for me to consider the cultural specificity of this tradition when examining my use of Chinese paper and ink,17 and when bringing these materials and methods to my interactions with the land, waters and people of Golden Gully and Langshi.
15 James Elkins argues a similar point on his approach to Chinese landscape painting, stating that ‘the comparison of historical perspectives would set up and support a kind of writing that would remain entirely Western in intent.’ James Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 5. 16 Rawson observes reductively, that ‘drawings are done with a point that moves…Australian aborigines use their fingers, Japanese artists have used a wad of cloth.’ Philip Rawson, Drawing (London; New York: Oxford U.P, 1969), 15. 17 I grind my own ink from traditional Chinese or Japanese ink sticks that are made from pine or camphor charcoal and earth pigments. I also use water soluble Western charcoal blocks. These non-synthetic materials were chosen specifically to minimise polluting these places when I began to interact with their surfaces and waters. 15 of 227 Introduction
This tension and oscillation between cultures reflected my outlook as a migrant, female artist who is practicing across places in Australia and China. Understanding the partiality of my position enabled me to engage in a dialogue with predominantly patriarchal historical traditions that were distinct from my own context. This dialogue became a highly generative platform from which I could examine the specificity of my drawing and listening methodologies and my position as an artist interacting with these places in the present time.
Acknowledging the partiality of my understanding and working from a specific position in my listening and drawing interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, is an approach that draws from Donna Haraway’s argument for ‘particular and specific embodiment.’ Haraway criticises the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’18 and mobilises the metaphor of situated, embodied vision as a way to practice feminist objectivity in science and technology. She urges for accountability in scientific knowledge, asserting that ‘the knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another.’19
I interpreted Haraway’s deeply multifaceted text as a call for accountability and engaged in self-reflective interrogation of how my methodologies had been ‘constructed and stitched’ from my experiences and knowledge. This was a current that propelled my written, critical reflections on the development of my Paper Meditators, Sound Feedback Drawing processes, and the ways I learnt to listen and draw in Golden Gully and Langshi. My approach of working bodily with and within these places, articulated an approach that was distinct from the distant external viewpoint. This elevated viewpoint is visible in Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully and Song Dynasty literati gentlemen scholars’ paintings of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang.
18 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,’ in Space, Gender, Knowledge - Feminist Readings, eds. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (London: Arnold, 1997), 57-59. 19 Ibid., 61. 16 of 227 Introduction
I came to actively resist the external viewpoint by working within the mining tunnel of Golden Gully, and extending the shanshui tropes of stone, water and bamboo by responding to their material realities in Langshi. In doing so, I situate my drawing and listening processes in a close dialogue with the visual conventions of these traditions. Salomé Voegelin’s asserts that a listener is involved in ’the production of an invisible [perceptual] world.’20 By drawing through the experience of listening, I emphasise my bodily involvement within these places as an enactive participant, rather than as a disembodied, impartial viewer.
Engaging in bodily interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi necessitated a consideration of how these interactions were shaped and affected by my body’s capacities. My drawing and listening methodologies developed according to these needs: in practical decisions about the weight of audiovisual recording equipment; and the portability, dimensions, and materials of drawing in their suitability for hiking and travel. Furthermore, it was also important to examine the social, cultural and physical contexts that influenced my sense of vulnerability and personal safety as a woman in these isolated environments. These experiences were integral to shaping the emotional and physical nature of my bodily interactions with these places, affecting the amount of time I could spend in each place and the ways I learnt to listen to my surroundings. My discussion of the gendered aspects of interacting with Golden Gully and Langshi centres upon these experiences.
In these respects, my drawing and listening interactions with these places in the present time, are far removed from the predominantly masculine and visual experiences practiced in Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully and Song Dynasty literati gentlemen scholar’s paintings and poetry of the Xiaoxiang region. These tensions and differences contribute towards the specificity of my drawing and listening processes and inform the developments examined in each part of this written component.
20 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), 12. 17 of 227 Introduction
Structure of the Written Component
The development of my interconnected drawing and listening methodologies occurred through interactions with the surfaces, people and atmospheric contingencies of Golden Gully and Langshi. My writing practice responded to this journey through progressive journal reflections, enabling me to critically evaluate my drawing and listening methodologies as they emerged. The evolution of my drawing and listening processes informed the trajectory of the theoretical research, which drew upon writing from the disciplines of art history and theory, social geography and contemporary philosophy in their theoretical contextualisation.
This written component gleans moments of insight from my research journals to evaluate my thinking processes, perceptual experiences and the unfolding of key discoveries. It also references images and hyperlinks to an online repository of audiovisual recordings from my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi. As an extended research practice, this material emphasises drawing and listening as durational, embodied, reflective and involving continuing and interconnected processes. The written component, audiovisual recordings and practical outcomes of this research project have developed as interdependent, mutually enriching platforms that enabled multiple pathways for the evaluation of my methodologies.
This written component supports the depth of my practice-based engagements with Golden Gully and Langshi by employing a tripartite structure. Part One contains two chapters: Towards Emplacement and Listening and Drawing. These chapters develop specific notions of emplacement, embodied perception, listening and drawing, through their emergence from my drawing and listening interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi.
Towards Emplacement disentangles the relationship between the notions of place and landscape, to articulate my relationship to the external viewpoint in European landscape and Chinese shanshui practices. This chapter foregrounds the specificity of my drawing and listening methodologies within Golden Gully 18 of 227 Introduction
and Langshi and explores the mediating nature of my Paper Mediators, microphones, speakers and camera. I also argue for the difference of my experiences as a woman in these places, which contrast with the predominantly masculine experiences that inform the visual imagery of Golden Gully and Langshi.
Listening and Drawing situates this project’s approach to listening within the field of expanded drawing practice. It explores how bodily interactions with the fluidity of sounds and surfaces in Golden Gully and Langshi led me to rework the fundamental drawing properties of surface, line and gesture. These insights enabled listening and drawing to develop as co-productive, interdependent practices, leading to the development of the four embodied listening methodologies Touch, Space, Durations and Sounding. The chapters in Part One establish the basis from which innovations in drawing and listening are discussed in the following Interactions.
Part Two and Three comprise Interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi that explore how my listening and drawing processes wove specific dialogues between my context and the social, cultural and historical contexts of each place. As they are interconnected journeys with shared listening and drawing methodologies that yielded distinct moments of discovery, these Interactions each contain three corresponding sections. In the first section of these Interactions, I argue for the contextual specificity of Australian artist Russell Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully (1948-49), and Chinese Song Dynasty (960-1279) literati (gentlemen scholar) paintings and poetry on the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang. I examine how these practices contributed to the Australian twentieth century landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions, and I observe that they have directly influenced historical and contemporary understandings of Golden Gully and Langshi, including my own.
The second part of the Interactions study the contemporary practices of Australian Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi and Chinese artist Bingyi, as culturally distinct ways of engaging places in Australia and China. Their
19 of 227 Introduction
practices demonstrate specifically womens’ embodied relationships with places that exist beyond, or subvert, predominantly patriarchal Australian twentieth century landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions respectively. These studies support my investigation into the ways in which places can be practiced through a diversity of bodily interactions.
Focusing on different aspects of reworking surface, gesture, line and mark- making in drawing, the third section of the Interactions examine my distinct ways of relating to Golden Gully and Langshi through my interconnected drawing and listening processes. By emphasising the embodied and situated nature of my interactions with Golden Gully, Part Two Interactions: Golden Gully aims to generate a dialogue about the multiple ways specific places can be enacted and experienced in Australia. Part Three Interactions: Langshi takes a different approach by focussing upon how my drawing and listening processes extend upon the Chinese tradition of shanshui. In doing so, these Interactions generate ways of listening to existing practices, by situating my drawing and listening methodologies as specific processes of emplacement amongst many possible relations.
20 of 227 PART ONE
CHAPTER 1: TOWARDS EMPLACEMENT 23
Disentangling Place and Landscape 26
Embodied and Emplaced Experiences 33
• Mediators and the In-Between 37
Situated Specificities 45
• Some Responsibilities of Listening 51
CHAPTER 2: LISTENING & DRAWING 55
Departing from Vision 57
Sonic Fluidity and Shifting Surfaces 60
Embodied Listening 67
• Touch 72
• Sounding 75
• Space 78
• Durations 82
Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
CHAPTER 1: TOWARDS EMPLACEMENT
‘The position of the in-between…is that which facilitates, allows into being, all identities, all matter, all substance. It is itself a strange becoming…’ Elizabeth Grosz, 2001.21
I embarked upon this PhD intending to examine the perceptual experience of sounds in visually iconic places that were culturally significant to the Australian 20th Century landscape and Chinese Song Dynasty (960-1279) shanshui traditions. I selected Golden Gully in Hill End and Langshi Village in Guilin, as two such places. In this chapter, I disentangle the terms ‘place’ and ‘landscape’ to examine how my practice is positioned in relation to the European landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions, which had informed my decisions to interact with Golden Gully and Langshi.
Australian artist Russell Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully (1948-49), and Chinese Song Dynasty (960-1279) paintings and poetry on the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang had a strong influence upon my initial understanding and approach to these places. I identify the externalised viewpoint as a shared feature in European landscape and Chinese shanshui painting conventions, and argue for the contextual specificity of this visual construct. My argument for the contextual specificity of the European landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions informs later Interactions case studies on Australian artist Russell Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully and Song Dynasty paintings and poetry on the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang.
Recognising the impact of these historical images and visual conventions upon my understanding of Golden Gully and Langshi, and the limitations of these in relation to my perceptual experience of sounds and surfaces, instigated a
21 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture,’ 91. 23 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
movement towards actively interacting with these places as they unfolded materially in the present moment. This approach centred upon the enactive role of my multi-sensory drawing and listening processes engaging with the topographical, social and atmospheric contingencies of Golden Gully and Langshi. In doing so, I developed my drawing and listening processes towards dynamic actions of emplacement.
Engaging the dynamic qualities of places draws upon Doreen Massey’s notion of places being constantly transformed through generative interactions. Massey argues for places as ‘spatio-temporal events,’22 asserting their fluidity even in the inexorable migration of bedrock: ‘what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and a geography of thens and theres); and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman.’23 Relationships between people (who are inflected by their social, cultural and political contexts) and the living and non-living dynamic materiality of places, constitutes the specificity of these places. This notion resonates with how my relationship to Golden Gully and Langshi was influenced by the European landscape and Chinese shanshui images I had seen, and how my practical methodologies responded to this influence by resisting it.
I also explore how interacting bodily with the surfaces and waters of Golden Gully and Langshi brought forth my own listening experiences and senses of these places. I examine how developing drawing structures generated particular experiences of these places through my bodily movements, and how I came to understand these paper structures as mediators that vitalised the spaces in between my body and these places. By exploring the reciprocal nature of these interactions and adapting Elizabeth Grosz’s approach to the notion of the ‘in- between,’ I came to understand the transformative potential these encounters held for myself and these places.
22 Massey’s emphasis. Doreen B. Massey, For Space (California; Thousand Oaks, London: SAGE, 2005), 130. 23 My emphasis. Ibid., 140-141. 24 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
The final part of this chapter foregrounds the partiality of my processes and the specificity of my context, to critically examine the ways that I have learnt to listen and draw as processes of emplacement. I explore how my aesthetic attachment to European landscape and Chinese shanshui imagery, and my context as a migrant Chinese artist who is informed by Western philosophy and art theory, affected my choices and methodologies in listening and drawing. I also acknowledge that my vulnerabilities as a woman working in isolated places shaped the nature of my experiences, and I argue for the significance of gendered experience in my social, cultural and bodily interactions in Golden Gully and Langshi.
25 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
Disentangling Place and Landscape
While on a walk with my housemate, we expressed our admiration of the mountain mists to a local aunty. She replied ‘It’s only because you are not here everyday that you can say it’s beautiful.’ Langshi, 21/10/2018
In speaking of the European landscape tradition, art theorist Rachael Ziady DeLue observed that difficulties with defining the term ‘landscape’ may stem from our unique position of viewing landscape as a subject while simultaneously occupying it.24 It is perhaps this understanding of landscape as something that we occupy, which has led to its close association with the concept of ‘place’. Place as an intrinsic conceptual aspect of landscape was axiomatic in a key problem identified by art historian James Elkins when writing on a Landscape Theory seminar chaired by DeLue and Elkins: ‘Is landscape a place, a view of place, or both?’25 Differentiating between the historical landscape paintings and each place as a lived, contemporary reality was surprisingly difficult when I first began engaging with Golden Gully and Langshi. Resonating from a distant past, the visual imagery I associated with each place exerted a subtle influence upon my perception of them in the present.
24 Rachael Ziady De Lue, ‘Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds,’ in Landscape Theory - The Art Seminar Series, ed. Rachael Ziady De Lue and James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 9-10.
The notion of landscape as a genre of painting in Europe is considered by some art historians to have originated in the Dutch and Flemish schools of the 17th Century, although some authors such as Ernst Gombrich argue it began as early as the sixteenth century. See Hanna Johansson, ‘Assessments - The Revival of Landscape Art,’ in Landscape Theory - The Art Seminar Series, 223. 25 James Elkins, Problems in the Representation of Landscape (A Report on the Book Landscape Theory), unpublished paper from Elkins’ website, accessed October 25, 2019, http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/essays/196-report-on-the-book-landscape-theory 26 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
I observe that underlying this conundrum are two distinct approaches to landscape. Landscape that is experienced and negotiated in its physical materiality, and landscape as a viewed image. Landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn argued that from the Danish, German and English etymological roots of the term, ‘Land means both the physical features of a place and its population. Skabe and schaffen mean “to shape”…[and] as in the English -ship, also mean association, partnership;’ this connotes a ‘mutual shaping of people and place.’26 Landscape architect David Hays acknowledged that within their discipline, landscape is not a static image but a material reality that has ‘the power to defy our expectations, our attempts to shape it in our own image.’27 In the discipline of landscape architecture, it appears that landscape and lived places are always already intrinsically entwined.
Drawing upon the meaning of landscape as an ‘association’ or ‘partnership,’ landscape geographer Kenneth Olwig argues that shaping also occurs in the relationship between artists and the landscape subject during the process of art making. ‘Landscape painters or poets…try to capture the more abstract state, quality or ‘shape’ of the place…practicing the art of place-making…[in an] attempt to represent the countryship or landship/-scape that exists between people living in a land, and that puts their material environment in a given shape…That abstract quality could be called its “culture”.’’28 The reciprocal relationships between landscape as an aestheticised view, as topography shaped by people and as a place imbued with culture, can be observed in Olwig’s argument.
For Olwig, the art of landscape derives its aesthetic form from the physical shape of the land and the practices of its inhabitants within it. The aestheticised
26 Anne Whiston Spirn ‘The Art Seminar,’ in Landscape Theory - The Art Seminar Series, 92.
See also historian Simon Schama’s discussion on the adaptation of the Dutch and German terms ‘landschap’ and ‘Landschaft’ into the English ‘landskip.’ Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995), 10. 27 David Hays, ‘The Art Seminar,’ in Landscape Theory - The Art Seminar Series, 91. 28 Olwig’s emphasis. Kenneth R. Olwig, ‘The “Actual Landscape,” or Actual Landscapes?,’ in Landscape Theory - The Art Seminar Series, 163-164. 27 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
visual imagery then perpetuates the historical narratives and culture of a place as a practice of ‘place-making.’ I observe that landscape practice as a painted, visual construct, also involves a process that is subject to the motivations of the artist, and the broader cultural, social and political systems of which they are a part. Art historian Wen C. Fong observes that in China ‘landscape painting first developed as illustrations for narrative and poetry.’ These would evolve to become ‘heroic, epic…timeless, archetypal’ landscapes of the early Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).29 During the T’ang Dynasty (618-906), wealthy scholars would transform their properties into ‘artfully landscaped environments,’ and compose poetry about their gardens which would then be illustrated. He argues that ‘as pictorial representations, the paintings illustrate poetic themes of the site rather than the actual landscapes.’30 In this instance, aesthetic shaping of the land progresses through a material, topographical practice into literary and visually expressive forms. We can observe that in the Chinese tradition, shanshui also has its beginnings in physical negotiations with the material landscape.31
By the late T’ang and early Northern Song period, Taoist and imported Buddhist thought had become integrated into Chinese Neo-Confucian beliefs. Painters and poets of shanshui observed nature to develop archetypes such as trees, rocks, mountains and rivers, which articulated this spiritual outlook.32 Relationships between humans and nature in the Northern and Southern Song Dynasties (960-1279) was conceived of in terms of qì - ‘breath-energy’ or ‘life- breath,’ and shanshui ‘“mountains-waters” - grounds something of the spiritual in its forms.’33
29 Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation - Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th - 14th Century (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1992), 72. 30 Ibid., 73. 31 In his study of the European and Northern American landscape traditions, Simon Schama also recognises the ‘irrigation-mad Chinese’ for their ‘brutal manipulation of nature.’ Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 6. 32 Fong, Beyond Representation, 75-76. 33 François Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 134-5. 28 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
Sinologist and philosopher François Jullien foregrounds the difference in European landscape and Chinese shanshui approaches: ‘…what is here translated as “landscape” (‘mountains-water(s)’, shan-shui), far from offering itself to the unitary perception of a subject, whose gaze carves up the horizon… condenses and concentrates in itself the inter-actions which continuously weave the world and inhabit it - which animate it.’34 Shanshui painting placed greater emphasis upon expressing the flow of qì in its subject matter and composition rather than on visual likeness. I argue that in Fong’s example of T’ang dynasty 'landscaped environments’ and Song dynasty spiritual expression, shanshui shares a similarity with European landscape as aesthetic conceptualisations of places. In its emphasis upon archetypal ideals however, shanshui departs from close resemblance to the places it draws inspiration from.35
If landscape were to be considered as a constructed view of a place, then it also imparts a perceptual and ideological distance from the place that it describes. In the shanshui tradition, the eleventh century Northern Song Dynasty artist Kuo Hsi (also spelt Guo Xi) identified three distinct ‘views’ that comprise the standard compositional formula of most paintings. Wen C. Fong states that ‘The “high-distance” (kao-yüan), “flat-distance” (p’ing-yüan) and “deep- distance” (sheng-yüan) views’ are each a ‘mode of representation [which] corresponds to a way of seeing…[and] reduced, transposed and re-created nature.’ These carefully constructed views had been devised to convey an illusion of receding space, and according to Fong, for the ‘philosopher- landscapists’ represented ‘images of the macrocosm.’36
In the European landscape context, social geographer Denis Cosgrove argues that pictorial space and stage sets in Renaissance early landscape paintings and theatre production, allowed artists to manipulate topography and manoeuvre
34 François Jullien, The Strange Idea of the Beautiful, trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (London; New York; Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2016), 122, iBooks. 35 In Part Three Interactions: Langshi, I discuss this in relation to adaptations of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang and examine how painterly and poetic interpretations have contributed to the aesthetic and historical impressions of this region. 36 Wen C. Fong, ‘Toward a structural analysis of Chinese Landscape Painting,’ Art Journal 28, no.4 (01 June 1969): 393-394, DOI:10.2307/775311. 29 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
people in an imaginary world. He interprets perspective as ‘a device for controlling the world of things…perspective, proportion and landscape are united within a single claim for the role of the individual artist.’ The viewer is situated outside of this constructed world, where the sight lines of linear perspective converge towards their singular position as voyeurs.37 This externalised, elevated vantage point is a carefully calculated positioning that shapes the viewer’s experience and response.38
For historian W.J.T Mitchell, the relationship between place and landscape in European landscape practices is fraught by its emphasis upon visual representation: ‘Landscape is something to be seen, not touched. It is an abstraction from place…a reduction of it to what can be seen from a distant point of view…A landscape then, turns site into sight, place and space into a visual image.’ Mitchell stresses the power of landscape as a cultural practice to encode meaning in places, and in its aesthetic distancing, develops its own ideological functions.39 I argue that we can observe this in both the European landscape and shanshui traditions where the artists and poets occupy positions outside of the place they depict.
Cosgrove argues that ‘the painter’s use of the landscape implies…observation by an individual, [who is] in critical respects removed from it.’ He distinguishes between the experiences of the painter and those who live in the land which is being depicted: ‘To apply the term landscape to their surroundings seems inappropriate to those who occupy and work in a place as insiders…The insider does not enjoy the privilege of being able to walk away from a framed picture or from a tourist viewpoint…the external world is unmediated by aesthetic conventions.’40
37 Cosgrove, Denis, ‘Introduction to Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape,’ in Landscape Theory - The Art Seminar Series, 24. 38 In Part Two Interactions: Golden Gully, I will discuss this stage-like positioning in relation to Russell Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully. 39 Mitchell, W. J. T, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 265. 40 Cosgrove, Denis, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Kent: Crook Helm Ltd., 1984), 18-19. 30 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
Image removed according to copyright guidelines
3. Mercier Zeng, ‘Photography Workshop Guilin 2020.’ Accessed January 6, 2020, https:// www.mercierzeng.com/photography-workshops/guilin.
Although he is speaking of the European landscape tradition, Cosgrove’s assertion is especially pertinent in relation to the conversation I had with my housemate and the local woman in Langshi. I would argue that my preconceptions of this place as an artist and visitor had been mediated by historical paintings and tourism promotion images (see above); furthermore, these ‘aesthetic conventions’ continued to exert their influence upon my encounters with the physical place. The proverb ‘Q8&H Guìlín shanshui jiǎ tiān xià - Guilin landscape ranks first under heaven,’ mentioned to me in 2017 by my local host Su Haibo, continues to draw domestic and international tourists to this region in platoons of ferries along the Li River.
The locals who ferry tourists, farm the land and rear livestock in the mountains are not insensible to the beauty of their homeland. Rather, their interactions with this place extend beyond images and distant glimpses from a ferry. Memories of carrying over 50 kilograms of wood while climbing mountains barefoot, and grandparents’ accounts of victims of political conflict being disposed of in the Li River, are histories that inflect Su Haibo’s present
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experience of his home.41 In contrast, my month-long interactions were shaped by my creative labour and memories of visual constructs that had aestheticised this place for me. In Langshi I moved with determination to places that were acoustically distinct: bamboo groves that groaned in the north easterly wind and clusters of rocks that bounced sound feedback in interesting tones. I didn’t have to break soil in the farms behind the groves or feed the goats, I just made art. Rather than washing clothes and bed linen in the river as the local people did, I rinsed paper and sat, leisurely drawing for hours until the paper dried. My desire for artistic pleasure shaped how I understood this place and I was intent upon finding ‘beauty’ in what was mundane for the local people.
Chinese shanshui and European landscape conventions are both visual systems that position the viewer at the threshold of an imagined world. This constructed world interprets the visible features of a material place according to values that may not be shared by those who occupy and work in these places. I argue that the Chinese shanshui and European landscape traditions reflect the experiences of people who were socially, economically and physically removed from the labour of the land. This distance from labour allows these visual conventions to embed philosophical constructs and ideological values within the aesthetic imagery. My initial approaches to Golden Gully and Langshi were strongly influenced by these constructs and I climbed mountains and hills to seek picturesque vantage points of these places.
A desire to engage only with what I considered aesthetically pleasing also influenced the sounds I chose to listen to. In the following section, I examine how physical negotiation with these places led me to question the limitations of the external view and its effect upon my research choices. This became a departure point for recognising the distinct conditions of my listening experiences. This led me to develop drawing and listening processes that enacted senses of emplacement through tools and methods that mediated my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi.
41 Su Haibo, in conversation with author, October 12, 2017. 32 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
4. Drawing sounds in Golden Gully, December 2016
Embodied and Emplaced Experiences
As an artist interested in drawing and sounds, the convention of an elevated viewpoint became problematic during my first residency in Hill End in December 2016. In Golden Gully, not only was it dangerous and difficult for me to scale the friable gully walls to reach higher ground (which potentially harboured brown snakes in the scrub); I realised that obtaining an elevated position was a contrivance that would remove me from the acoustic dynamics within the gully. Golden Gully is reached by a steep descent from the asphalt road and the unique shape of this heavily dug out place absorbed and held
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sounds inside it like a long bowl. It also kept sounds out, creating distinct layers of sound stratum within: rumbling cars and wind in the eucalypts on the higher ground passed overhead, while the chirping of rosellas punctuated the inner gully and my footsteps crushed quartz underfoot.
From early drawing experiments as in the one pictured, I realised I had to be situated within Golden Gully in order to experience its acoustic qualities. It can be observed however, that I was still primarily responding to the visible structure of the gully and layering visual interpretations of sounds onto the composition. This early approach of drawing onto a flat, stable surface is rooted within the tools and methodologies of traditional drawing and painting, which were optimised for visual perception and responding to visible objects and events. Furthermore, my visual interpretations of sounds resonating within the gully borrowed compositional devices from European landscape practice, although these were reconfigured to reflect my physical situation between the gully walls.
These early methods of visually depicting sound positioned me within Golden Gully, however, I was a passive observer who was not involved with the sounds that I was physically immersed in. Writer Lucy Lippard emphasises the removed, externalised experience of landscape, which is ‘place at a distance, visual rather than sensual, seen rather than felt in all its affective power.’ Places on the other hand, must be experienced from the inside and ‘a lived-in landscape becomes a place, which implies intimacy.’42 I believe that Lippard's notion of places is still dependent upon the conditions of landscape; places are nested within landscape’s encompassing gaze. However, the notion of a landscape being ‘lived-in,’ suggests the possibility for action to affect embodied, multi-sensory experiences of places, which extends the practice of places beyond the purview of landscape.
42 Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society (New York: The New Press,1997), 8. 34 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
As these early experiments were being undertaken, I began to realise that the simple acts of walking and shifting my crouch on broken quartz further vitalised the dynamic layers of sound. This led me to experiment with rubbing wet ochre on paper or dragging paper along the ground, whereby sounds became much more noticeable. An awareness unfolded about how I was generating new senses of Golden Gully and this awakened a desire to create my own listening experiences. This realisation of my agency opened new possibilities for my interactions with this place, enabling me to move beyond an understanding of Golden Gully as a landscape inflected by Australian mid-20th Century paintings, towards engaging Golden Gully as a place unfolding in relation to my actions in the present time.
These interactions with the surfaces of Golden Gully instigated a shift from depicting sound towards listening, leading to the development of the four listening methodologies Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations. The impact of these methodologies on my approach to the drawing properties of surface, line and gesture is discussed in detail in Chapter Two: Listening and Drawing. In the following, I examine how my understanding of Langshi in 2017 became more nuanced as I developed a deeper awareness of how my drawing processes mediated my embodied listening experiences in this place. This led me to approach Langshi and Golden Gully as contingent, material realities that affect and are affected by my dynamic processes of listening and drawing.
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There is a moment of deafness during drawing, ironically. You just start hearing the paper. 24/10/17
Sounds of mark - making are like drawings themselves…a ‘playing’ of paper and surfaces as instruments. 27/10/17
5 - 6. Video experiments in Langshi, October 2017
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Mediators and the In-Between
On my first visit to Langshi Village in October 2017, I intended to develop the four listening methodologies of Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations by interacting with rocks, water and bamboo. I had identified these topographical elements as recurring features in Song Dynasty shanshui paintings and sought to investigate how my listening methodologies could interact with their materiality. I used video, sound recordings and ink on my hands to record gestures and listening interactions with rocks in the mountains, Li River water and bamboo. Microphones were attached to my arms so I could listen closely to these interactions.
I considered the contrived performance in these videos to be ineffective as they emphasised a visual engagement with Langshi that was incongruent with my experiences of listening. However, the process of listening to the sounds of stone, water and bamboo as they were sounded by the surfaces of paper, deepened my awareness of how my listening was being textured, shaped and obscured by the paper as I moved. The moment of deafness that I experienced during drawing was a significant realisation of how my interactions with the paper intervened upon my perceptual experiences in Langshi. It recalls Jacques Derrida’s study on the conditions of drawing, in which he asserts that when ‘the point of the hand (of the body proper in general) moves forward upon making contact with the surface, the inscription of the inscribable is not seen.’43
Derrida is referring to his notion of ‘the aperspective of the graphic act’ in which the act of drawing disconnects the drawer from what is being seen. In the transitory moment between looking at a drawing unfolding before them, and looking at the object being drawn, the artist experiences a ‘powerlessness for the eye,’44 which is a moment of unseeing. In listening during the process of drawing, the sounds of abrading and moving paper obscured my perception of
43 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind : the Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 45. 44 Derrida’s emphasis. Ibid., 44-45. 37 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
sounds beyond those that occurred between my body, the paper and the surfaces of this place.
Derrida’s proposition captures the relationship between two modes of looking during the drawing process; my awareness of the momentary experience of deafness during drawing allowed me to analyse how my listening processes were entangled with the surfaces of Langshi. In traditional methods of drawing, the visible object is distanced and independent of the body. In my interconnected processes of drawing and listening however, sounds from my movement penetrated my ears and flesh so that new listening experiences emerged as the drawing unfolded. These experiences were dependent upon the qualities of the surfaces I came in contact with, as well as the events occurring around me, such as cow bells, boat motors and bird calls.
In considering the dynamic nature of these interactions, I draw upon Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the ‘in-between’ to initiate a way of thinking about the relationship between my body and these places. The position of the ‘in-between’ is ‘a space without boundaries of its own…whose form is the outside of the identity, not just of an other…but of others, whose relations of positivity define, by default, the space that is constituted as in-between.’ The transformative nature of these relations can be seen in Grosz’s assertion for the potential of the ‘in-between’ to ‘disrupt the operations of the identities that constitute it.’45
Grosz develops the notion of the ‘in-between’ as a space of potential and mobilises the concept specifically to examine architectural, political, social and cultural identities ‘in terms of the transformation and realignment of the relations between identities and elements.’46 Borrowing from Grosz’s method to examine the transformative potential of my engagements with Langshi and Golden Gully has been extremely generative for my drawing practice. In the following, I explain how this approach has informed two interrelated aspects of my drawing and listening methodologies: the mediating role of my drawing and
45 Grosz, ‘In Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture,’ 91-93. 46 Ibid., 92. 38 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
listening methods, materials and tools in these engagements, and the affective potential of these interactions for both myself and these places. I also engage with the unfixed nature of Langshi and Golden Gully, to explore and affect their potential for change through my methodologies.
7. Binaural Sound Study - Bamboo process, Langshi, October 2017
Link to video documentation and listening process excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/binaural-sound-study-bamboo
For my first residency in Golden Gully in December 2016, I had created structures such as the Binaural Sound Study to explore sounds heard in each ear. They were designed to fit into the space between my knees and chin to disrupt my line of sight and foreground listening through movement. At Langshi in October 2017, I drew with fallen bamboo leaves dipped in Chinese ink while listening to the scrapes and rustles through microphones placed on my wrists. I waited until the noisy motorised boats had passed in order to respond to the bamboo grove creaking and groaning around me.
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It wasn't until mid 2019, that I realised that the Binaural Sound Studies and Chinese paper scrolls were not simply remnants from my listening to the sounds of places, nor resolved sculptural objects. They shaped my gestures and extended my reach in almost all of my processes, to generate listening and drawing interactions that responded to the atmosphere and topography of Golden Gully and Langshi. I decided that these structures were actually mediators of my relations with these places. Just as the microphones placed on my wrists augmented and reconfigured my auditory perception, the Paper Mediators activated the relationship between my body and these places to enable ‘a “playing” of surfaces and paper,’ transforming my perceptual experiences.
Some pieces such as the Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully, or my Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators, generated specific encounters between my body, paper and the surfaces of ochre, rock, soil, water and vegetation. Other works such as the , , - - Walk, Listen, Draw Möbius Scroll from Langshi, affected the way I physically negotiated with the topography as I climbed mountain paths and walked on river pebbles. Learning to draw and listen with Paper Mediators while moving with these forms challenged my body’s capacities as I hiked, crouched and sat in Golden Gully and Langshi. These were important experimental innovations to the drawing support and listening processes that I will discuss in detail within Part Two Interactions: Golden Gully and Part Three Interactions: Langshi.
To put these developments into context, my research began in early 2016 with experiments in visually depicting the spatial distribution of sound. I built a ‘pod’ by modifying an Ikea children’s tent, intending to sit within this cosy enclosure to draw sounds that I heard onto paper attached to its walls. This device was not only rigid and inert, it physically separated me from the places I was in. The evolution of my processes towards dynamic interactions with places was intrinsically connected to the evolution of the active drawing structures that mediated these encounters.
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The Paper Mediators enabled me to depart from depicting the sounds of places as static, visual forms, towards actively unfolding the material and sonic potential of these places. My drawing and listening methodologies in Golden Gully and Langshi shifted significantly when I began to destabilise the boundaries and surfaces of the paper, which also dissolved the boundaries between these places and my body. The Paper Mediators materialised the ‘in- between,’ taking on their form and marks through the dynamic relations between my body and these places. Understanding them through the notion of the ‘in-between’ extends the Paper Mediators beyond a finalised means of visual expression, towards dynamic processes of relation.
Engaging Golden Gully and Langshi through my drawing and listening processes allowed me to bring forth their vitality. Enacting relations with these places by situating myself as an active agent from within, enabled multi-sensory experiences that extended beyond the European landscape and Chinese shanshui paradigms that have shaped the visual culture of these places. If we consider the impact of people or things on others, as being integral to their connection,47 the potential of relations to generate an in-between space for new developments and a constant unfolding, has rich implications for examining the process of creative practices within specific places.
It is interesting to note that Grosz likens the ‘in-between’ to Plato’s notion of ‘chora’, a substance-less receptacle ‘that brings matter into being…nurtures the idea into its material form.’48 Philosopher Jeff Malpas argues that ‘chora’ ‘is always understood in relation to the particulars that appear or are received within it’ and in Plato’s Timaeus, which examines how things change or come into being, is ‘the seat or place for such becoming.’49 Writers in the discipline of geography make a more direct correlation between the terms ‘place’ and ‘chora’.
47 ‘The way in which two or more people or things are connected; the effect on or relevance to another.’ Oxford University Press, ‘Meaning of relation in English’ (Lexico.com: 2019), accessed on January 4, 2019, https://www.lexico.com/definition/relation 48 Grosz, ‘In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture,’ 91. 49 Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24. 41 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
Tim Cresswell for instance has noted that ‘chora’ is often referred to as ‘place in the process of becoming.’50
Malpas and Grosz’s interpretations situate ‘chora’ as a locus for becoming, immaterial and relative to that which constitutes it; however, Cresswell’s interpretation conflates the notions of ‘chora’ and place, attributing to ‘chora’ the materiality of the ‘thing in that space that is in the process of “becoming”.’51 My intention is not to equate place with ‘chora’, or the ‘in-between’ with a notion of place, but to make a case for the co-productive bond between relations and specific places, which are dynamically composed of these very relations. I observe that each of these approaches mobilise the notion of ‘becoming’ to animate ‘chora’ and ‘place’ as processes that are unfolding.
Drawing on this approach to develop Golden Gully and Langshi as dynamic processes has helped me to comprehend the agentive potential of my drawing and listening interactions with these places. My Paper Mediators enabled me to temporarily shape Langshi and Golden Gully, even as these processes were open to the contingent effects of these places. This meant that the moment I affected the surfaces of these places was also the moment that I was affected in turn. This became even more apparent in the beginning of the third year of research, when I began to use speakers to draw with sound feedback, transfiguring the sounds of my body’s interactions with surfaces. By affecting Golden Gully and Langshi through dynamic listening, sounding and drawing processes, I enacted these places through actions that simultaneously shaped the works. Paper Mediators, sound feedback compilations and video hold the visible and audible marks of these processes unfolding. Understanding this reciprocal relationship allowed me to approach Langshi and Golden Gully as active, fluid and open to manifold interactions.
50 Tim Cresswell, ‘Place,’ in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. Nigel J. Thrift and Rob Kitchin (Amsterdam; London; Oxford: Elsevier. 2009), 169-177, https://doi.org/ 10.1016/B978-008044910-4.00310-2 51 Ibid. 42 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
Considering the ‘in-between’ as ‘the locus of futurity, movement, speed… thoroughly spatial and temporal,’52 allowed me to consider Golden Gully and Langshi in terms of the multiple entanglements and enacting practices that transform and produce them materially, while opening these places to a constant unfolding of meaning. My argument for a notion of places partaking in generative processes also draws upon Doreen Massey’s critical analysis of places, whereby multiple identities of places are born from networks of social relations and interactions. Massey asserts that ‘the specificity of place is continually reproduced’53 and ‘different social groups, and different individuals…are located in many different ways in the new organisation of relations over time-space.’54
Massey’s fluid, partial and interdependent notion of place has drawn criticisms from Jeff Malpas as being oversimplified.55 However, Massey’s approach emphasises multiple, specific understandings and practices of places; a multiplicity that is integral to the nature of places that are open to global mobility and change. This understanding of places resonates with my experiences in Golden Gully and Langshi, which bear the visible markers of change upon their topography; the sculpting of land from mining or for agriculture, and the small mountains of bricks from rapid urban development in Langshi. There were invisible, audible markers too, the persistent thrum of motorboats that have decimated the local fish population, and the quick turnover of local and international tourists who continue to bring their myriad of cultures, languages and stories to this once isolated village.
By interacting with the surfaces, sounds, atmospheric contingencies and people of Golden Gully and Langshi through drawing and listening processes, I brought my own methods of relation to find emplacement. This approach centred upon
52 Grosz, ‘In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture,’ 94. 53 Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’ in Space, Place and Gender, 458. 54 Massey, ‘A Place called Home?’ in Space, Place and Gender, 485. 55 Malpas criticises Massey’s undifferentiated use of the terms place and space. Massey’s approach to both terms centre upon the socio-political meanings rather than philosophical (which is Malpas’ field). See Malpas, Place and Experience, 21. 43 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
my ability to generate individual perceptual experiences and enact new senses of these places. This occurred through highly subjective, embodied listening and drawing methodologies that were specific to my body’s capacities. In this regard, my processes in Golden Gully and Langshi stand apart from the contexts and practices of artists who had worked within the European landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions.
In later chapters that focus upon interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, I discuss how the visual conventions that inform the historical paintings of each place, came from specific, visual practices that were particular to the artists’ historical contexts. Elizabeth Grosz observes that ‘to admit that knowledges are but perspectives - points of view on the world - is to acknowledge that other, quite different positions and perspectives are possible. This opens up a multiplicity of vantage points or positions.’56 Asserting the partiality of practices in the landscape paintings of these places creates room for exploring the difference of my approach. In the following, I examine the specificity of my processes in relation to my bodily experiences as a woman in Golden Gully and Langshi, and the context of my listening and drawing practice as an internationally mobile artist.
56 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason’ in Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (St Leonards, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 30. 44 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
Situated Specificities
It is much easier to concentrate on the sound when one does not have a feeling of urgency originating from isolation. Regardless of where I am, if a place is out of my comfort zone, my mind is never completely able to absorb and respond to creative stimulus…When I am in an unfamiliar environment, I find that sight dominates in order to help me ‘keep an eye out’ for danger and survive. Golden Gully, 19/12/16
An awareness of the particularity of my interactions with Golden Gully first emerged from literally feeling 'out of place’ in Hill End in 2016. I felt emotionally and culturally disconnected from this place, a feeling that was compounded by a sense of vulnerability when I was drawing and listening in isolation. I was mindful of how regularly spending long hours in Golden Gully and the mining tunnel, with its rarity of visitors and lack of mobile coverage, increased the possibility for misadventures caused by other people, soil erosion, brown snakes or my own clumsiness.
Doreen Massey has observed how the sense of place differs depending upon ‘“race” and gender’. In the context of women, ‘Survey after survey has shown how women’s mobility…is restricted…from physical violence to being ogled at or made to feel quite simply “out of place” - not by “capital”, but by men.’57 I was always keenly aware of the vulnerabilities of working alone as a woman in secluded places with no mobile coverage, as I was in Golden Gully. This vulnerability was also palpable in the mountains of Langshi, where I would often work alone for half the day at a grouping of rocks that were almost an hour’s hike from the village. In Part Three Interactions: Langshi, I examine how being observed by curious farmers with machetes affected my drawing and listening processes in the mountains. I argue that few male artists would have
57 Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place,’ 434-435. 45 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
the same apprehensions of assault as women do in similar situations, affording them greater levels of freedom and mobility when working in isolated places. In this section, I examine the importance of acknowledging my vulnerabilities and responsibilities as a female artist of migrant background, who is interacting bodily with places in Australia and China. These contextual specificities affected decisions and actions in the development of my drawing and listening processes in Golden Gully and Langshi.
In Langshi, I realised that my bodily interactions with this place in the present time had very little in common with the imaginary painterly and poetic processes used by the ‘literati’ gentlemen scholars, who emerged in the Chinese Northern Song Dynasty (960 -1127), to conjure the imaginary scenes of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang. The literati were an elite group of educated scholar- officials who painted for leisure rather than as artisans undertaking skilled labour. The execution and connoisseurship of paintings, poetry and calligraphy were considered necessities for entry into this elite society.58 As women were barred from the entrance government examinations for scholarly professions,59 shanshui in the rarefied literati society was practiced exclusively by educated men.
Historian Susan Bush notes that in Song Dynasty China, ‘the painting of literary men was often produced for intimates in social gatherings….the work of art was often created in the company of friends at a drinking party.’60 In Part Three Interactions: Langshi, I explore how the literati’s imaginary and social practice of shanshui generated specific philosophical and ideological perspectives of the Xiaoxiang region that were incongruent with the physical spaces of women’s labour that I experienced in Langshi. I examine how engaging bodily with these
58 The literati tradition continued to evolve into the Southern Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037-1101) to Tung Ch'i-Ch'ang (1555-1636) 2nd ed (Hong Kong; London: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 1-4. 59 Restricted access to education and public office for women continued until 1905 when the entrance exam system was terminated prior to the Republic Revolution of 1911. Dorothy Ko, Rebecca E. Karl and Lydia H. Liu, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism : Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 34. 60 Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 7. 46 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
spaces enabled me to discern my cultural biases as a migrant Chinese woman with a Western education, and reflect upon how this informed the subjectivity of my actions and choices in Langshi.
I argue that the predominantly masculine practice of shanshui in the literati circles of Song Dynasty China served to elide the stories of people in the Xiaoxiang region who did not share their sociopolitical, educational and gendered privileges. In the context of the European landscape tradition, Denis Cosgrove has acknowledged that the central figure in his study on the social and cultural ramifications of European landscape practice has been ‘the individual European male, conceived as a universal subject, exercising rational self- consciousness within a largely disembodied mind, and endowed with a will to power.’61 I observe that the impact of this singular perspective resonates with how places can be understood in the present.
My initial sense of disconnection in Golden Gully stemmed from a cultural and gendered misalignment with my early understanding of Hill End. This perspective had been shaped by a visual culture dominated by 20th century landscape paintings by Anglo-Australian male artists such as Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend and Brett Whitely. In Part Two Interactions: Golden Gully, I examine the prevalence of this particular cultural narrative, and argue for the specificity of Russell Drysdale’s painting practices of Golden Gully, which drew heavily upon European landscape visual conventions. Drysdale’s methods of constructing a stage-like vision of Golden Gully from within his studio differed greatly from my own embodied listening and drawing processes that engaged directly with the sounds and surfaces of this place.
In Golden Gully, it became imperative for me to consider the stories that continue to be repressed and elided by the gold mining history of Hill End, which writer Bronwyn Hanna argues ‘has long been understood and presented
61 Cosgrove, Social Formation, 25-26. 47 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
in an obviously masculine register.’62 It is known for instance, that Wiradyuri women ‘harvested a wide range of plant foods’ in the area around Hill End, and many women and their families were killed and dispossessed during the pastoral settlement period in the 1820’s.63 Wiradyuri people’s experiences and relationships with this place are likely to be shaped by their cultural knowledge and practices, and also ancestral memories of trauma embedded in the land.64
Understanding that my hands were part of a manifold continuum that would touch or encounter Golden Gully and Langshi in different ways, I sought to examine how my body and context influenced the ways I related to these places through drawing and listening. As my methodologies emerged through bodily interactions with these sites, it was important to address in Part Two Interactions: Golden Gully and Part Three Interactions: Langshi how my unfolding relations with these places contributed to a distinct narrative of my partial experiences.
In her argument for feminist objectivity in science and technology studies, Donna Haraway has critiqued the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ and sought to reclaim vision as a sensory system which, in the distant, disembodied gaze, had signified the ‘unmarked positions of Man and White.’ She argues for a feminist approach that ‘is about limited location and situated knowledge…[which] allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to
62 Bronwyn Hanna, Re-gendering the landscape in New South Wales - Report for the Department of Environment and Conservation (New South Wales Government Office of Environment and Heritage: 2011), 10, last modified February 26, 2011, http:// www.environment.nsw.gov.au/nswcultureheritage/RegenderingNswLandscape.htm 63 Historian Alan Mayne states that ‘between a quarter and one third of the Wiradjuri in the Bathurst region were killed during the first wave of pastoral settlement.’ Mayne quoted in Hanna. Ibid., 43-44. 64 I have chosen to use the name ‘Wiradyuri,’ as it is used by the Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal Community Elders. It can also be spelt as ‘Wiradjuri,’ which is the name used by Alan Mayne and the New South Wales Government Office of Environment and Heritage.
New South Wales Government Office of Environment and Heritage, ‘Hill End Historic Site,’ accessed January 5, 2019, https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5051460 48 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
see.’65 Haraway also emphasises the importance of understanding vision as a multidimensional, embodied sensory system that is inherently partial in its positioning. Haraway’s approach enables me to examine how my embodied listening methodologies helped me to develop expanded drawing practices, that draw strength from the partiality and specificity of their interactions with these places.
The ways that I have learnt to listen, draw and move while interacting with Golden Gully and Langshi, are important outcomes in this PhD that have made me aware of the reciprocal effects of these relations upon these places and myself. Critically reflecting upon the impact of my interactions is a valuable methodology that can be carried forward in future engagements with other places. My drawing and listening interactions were facilitated through my Paper Mediators, microphones, speakers and iPhone camera; choices of where and what to listen to; and the methodologies of listening through the ideas of Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations. Moreover, these methods and tools evolved in response to my discoveries in progressive interactions with these places over time, and also my body’s capacities.
The Paper Mediators were designed to suit my body’s dimensions and specific mobility and were also made to be compact for hiking and international travel. Similarly, the miniature omnidirectional microphones and portable recorder were specifically selected for their compact size and minimum weight. In a sound masterclass in early 2016, I learnt that the sound artist Philip Samartzis hiked with over twenty kilograms of audio equipment to record sounds in Antarctica.66 I quickly realised that I needed to use technology that I was physically able to carry for an hour up a mountain and attach to my body as I drew. Furthermore, I preferred to work crouched close to the ground, and possessed the capacity to do so for long periods due to years of emulating the women in my family as they worked at home. Rather than having microphones
65 My emphasis. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges,’ 57-58. 66 Personal communication in Masterclass - Sound Art and the Environment, Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, 2016. 49 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
on upright stands or attached to handles and mounts, they had to be integrated with my body to generate a listening experience that responded to my proximity to the ground.
My preference for crouching is an inherited cultural practice that I observed while visiting relatives in Malaysia. I also saw people in Langshi in southern China adopting this position as they washed clothes along the river or tended their farm plots. I encountered people frequently along the riverbank and felt more comfortable crouching in Langshi than in Golden Gully, because it was the cultural norm. Elizabeth Grosz speaks of bodies as ‘the unspecified raw material of social inscription that produces subjects as subjects of a particular kind.’ She positions embodied knowledge as a strategy for examining women’s roles in the production of knowledge, asserting that ‘If the notion of a radical and irreducible difference is to be understood with respect to subjectivity, the specific modes of corporeality of bodies in their variety must be acknowledged.’67
Although Grosz makes a case for the particularity of women’s experiences, I assert that bodily subjectivity can be true of any practice that produces knowledge. In my case, crouching allowed me to interact with the ground and water of Golden Gully and Langshi at an intimate, material level. This position affected the way I saw, listened and touched the place I was in. In contrast to Drysdale’s methods of painting Golden Gully, my bodily experience of these places were distinct from the European landscape practices of painting upright on an easel, which optimised looking at places rather than interacting with them. This position shaped the ways I listened and sounded in these places, allowing me to straddle rocks over water in Langshi, and create sound feedback by gesturing low within the trajectory of sound in the mining tunnel of Golden Gully. These interactions allowed me to develop highly specific forms of listening and I discuss in the following section how choosing to listen in particular ways affected my relationships with these places.
67 Grosz’s emphasis. Elizabeth Grosz, ’Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason,’ 32. 50 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
Some Responsibilities of Listening
Ran out of the house by 7:15am to make a BSS in a bamboo grove near Shuiyantou. Was hoping to get there before the boats began, but alas they were more busy than yesterday afternoon. Langshi, 30/10/17
One of the first sounds I noticed in Langshi was the din of blue plastic SI zhúchuán or ‘bamboo’ boats, powered by noisy motors. My aesthetic sensibilities were affronted. Influenced as I was by expectations of a peaceful, remote countryside, I consciously avoided responding to this noise during my first visit in 2017. The part of me that wanted the local people to slowly pole authentic bamboo boats was yearning for an idealistic past which was not part of the current reality of Langshi. Questioning my notions of ‘authenticity’ led me to acknowledge that my perception of this sound as noise, was influenced by my attraction to the imaginary 11th century sounds of ‘evening bells' and ‘night rain’ from the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang. Furthermore, the microphones that I used painfully amplified this sound and it impinged upon my enjoyment of drawing and listening along the river.
The discomfort and tension I felt regarding the motorised boats stemmed from my nostalgic expectations and technologically enhanced relationship with the river in Langshi. My auditory relationship to the boats differed greatly from the local people, who had become accustomed to hearing them each day. Unlike me, they valued the boats as an efficient form of transport to deliver children to school and as a vital source of tourism income. The exclusion of boat motors in my sound feedback compositions of Langshi exemplify my deliberately partial approach to my engagement with this place.
The methodologies of listening through Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations, which grew out of my negotiations and interactions with these places, articulate 51 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
the specificity of my listening and drawing processes. I examine the development of these methodologies in Chapter 2 Listening and Drawing, and discuss the influence of contemporary artists and philosophers such a Salomé Voegelin and Evan Thompson upon my practice of embodied listening. Voegelin approaches listening through Western phenomenological ways of knowing, and Thompson’s Enactive theories of perception interweave Buddhist and phenomenological philosophy with theories from findings in cognitive science. The influence of these writers point to my Western educational pathway which, combined with my technologically enhanced listening methods, made my relationships with Golden Gully and Langshi specific to me as an individual.
The position of being an artist and a tourist informed the choices I made in my interactions with Langshi. I was resolved to derive some form of aesthetic pleasure or ‘inspiration’ from my visits and therefore experienced Langshi quite differently from the locals who lived and worked there. Engaging with the sounds of Langshi and Golden Gully involved a desire for self determination in my auditory experience, but bringing my way of listening and drawing to each place required a constant negotiation between my desires and the realities of these places. It became important for me to acknowledge the culturally and socially diverse practices of listening that enable multiple ways to relate to places.
For example, in her study of listening as an inclusive cultural practice that connects individuals to places and communities, cultural geographer Michelle Duffy has discussed the ‘ethics implicit in the act of listening.’68 Detailing her experience of ‘Näthi’ a Yolgnu First Nations women’s mourning ceremony in Arnhem Land in the Australian Northern Territory, Duffy describes sitting closely in a shared ‘space of intersubjectivity…in which we could see, hear, smell, feel one another’s presence.’ Participants were encouraged to ask questions, then listen and observe in an inclusive ‘dialogical performance… [where] we were involved at a deep emotional level.’ Duffy studies the affective
68 Michelle Duffy, ‘The Possibilities of Music: “To Learn From and To Listen to One Another,”’ in Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time and Culture, eds. Michelle Duffy, Dolly MacKinnon and Ros Bandt (Newcastle, U.K: Cambridge Scholars Pub, 2007), 341. 52 of 227 Part One Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement
potential of listening to overcome cultural and language barriers for non- Indigenous listeners, but also acknowledges that ‘the depth of knowledge behind the Näthi as cultural practice was beyond us’69 as years of practice and connection to community and land, were needed to understand deeper levels of meaning embedded in the songs.
While my processes allowed me to develop new approaches, they also prevented me from connecting with Golden Gully and Langshi at a lived, interdependent level of intimacy. Recognising the specificity of my context, methodologies, Paper Mediators and tools, has led to a deeper understanding of my responsibility and agency in my interactions with these places. Learning to be accountable for the ways that I have learnt to listen and interact as ways of finding emplacement in Golden Gully and Langshi has been an important outcome of this research. In doing so, I was also able to identify and critique my adoption of European landscape and Chinese shanshui ways of seeing in my approach to Golden Gully and Langshi. Disentangling my understanding of these places from the paintings of Golden Gully and the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang through my bodily interactions, also revealed the aesthetic biases that I brought to the ways I listened and drew in these places. In the following chapter Listening and Drawing, I detail the evolution of these processes and their extension of my experimental drawing practice and the drawing properties of surface, gesture and line.
69 Michelle Duffy, ‘The Possibilities of Music,’ 344-346. 53 of 227
Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
CHAPTER 2: LISTENING AND DRAWING
This chapter details the evolution of my drawing and listening processes from trying to visually depict the sounds of specific places by drawing on flat surfaces of paper, to developing interconnected listening and drawing processes that facilitate bodily interactions with the materiality of Golden Gully and Langshi. In the previous chapter, I discussed how coming to terms with generating my own listening experiences allowed me to disentangle my understanding of Golden Gully and Langshi from the European landscape and Chinese shanshui histories that informed my initial understanding of these places. This enabled me to foreground a practice-based approach to the notion of emplacement.
In this chapter, I will discuss key moments in the material and conceptual evolution of my drawing and listening processes that contributed towards the development of two important outcomes of this PhD: the interconnected drawing and listening processes, and a deeper awareness of the social, cultural and perceptual complexities of my body's entanglement with specific places. By observing changes in the sounds and material surfaces of Golden Gully during my residency in December 2016, I became aware of how I was contributing to those changes, and therefore, how I was actively affecting this place with my body. This crucial insight elucidated my research trajectory from that point onwards.
I develop highly specific approaches to listening that also rework the notions of surface, line, gesture and mark-making in drawing. This interconnected development enabled me to extend beyond notions of drawing as mark-making on a stable, passive surface, and to enliven the drawing surface as an active constituent of my bodily interactions with specific places. By vitalising the surfaces of drawing, and by using microphones, speakers and video cameras, I was able to extend and transfigure my experiences of listening in Golden Gully
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and Langshi. In doing so, the practice of listening became distinctly partial and particular to how my body’s interactions with these places were mediated by the tools and processes of drawing.
Four methodologies of listening through the ideas of Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations, emerged through examining my drawing experiments and interactions with Golden Gully in 2016. I found that touching surfaces produced soundings, and I could generate the spatial and durational conditions of my own perceptual experience. Drawing and listening through paper, sounding and video, mediated distinct bodily interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, so that I became an active agent of my own emplaced listening. This chapter foregrounds the specificity of my listening and drawing methodologies to explore new possibilities for practicing these places. In doing so, I explore how they can be constituted by many possible relations.
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8. Early experiment with paper arc structures in Golden Gully, December 2016
Departing from Vision
As a sighted artist with years of drawing training that taught me how to translate three dimensional objects onto an illusory visual space using linear perspectival systems, vision was the dominant sense that furnished spatial information about the places I engaged with. In early experiments,70 I faced
70 Please see appendix for details on a third site investigation at Fig Tree Cove in Sydney’s Middle Harbour. This site was a place for initial experimentation and preparation before travelling to Hill End and Guilin. 57 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
challenges in the disparities between my bodily experience of auditory space and the constructed illusion of visual space on a stable surface.
Writers Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter developed an approach to auditory spatial awareness that considers an internalised, multi-sensory ‘cognitive map of space’ which ‘is subjective…an active and synthetic creation’ determined by an individual’s perceptual experience of an environment. They argue that ‘sighted listeners usually ignore auditory and tactile cues when navigating a space, but may use them when light is inadequate.’71 Blesser and Salter acknowledge the visual bias of the term ‘map’, however, their notion still centres upon an ‘internal representation’ of space with input from all senses to varying degrees.72
I argue that ‘mapping’ an ‘internal representation’ indicates a stable source of reference, whereas the ephemeral nature of sound precludes this possibility. Attempting to ‘map’ my 360º auditory experience of places as visual symbols on folded paper was a futile red herring in my first year of research. There was an essential difference between how I saw the topography around me and how I heard sonic events. Sound unfolded ephemerally through my body and through places; visible phenomena mostly persisted in space and time. The crinkle of a leaf or buzz of a fly existed momentarily and could only be accessed again through memory and imagination for mental evaluation, creative interpretation and translation through mark-making. I soon found that trying to depict the entirety of a sound on visual terms was incongruent to my actual experience of sounds.
Furthermore, this approach positioned me as a silent, static, impartial observer, even though I was physically moving within a place and contributing to the sounds. Having stable surfaces of paper laid flat around me also foregrounded sight, and the drawn forms of my early experiments reflect this perceptual bias.
71 Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), 46-47. 72 Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, 48. 58 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
I soon realised that the traditional tools of drawing I was using - paper, pens, pencils, methods of looking, were made to serve sight and I needed to challenge them in order to develop a way of drawing that was responsive to the dynamic nature of sound. In the following section, I will discuss how the contingencies of rain, soil and wind prompted me to challenge the stability of the drawing support to better respond and listen to sound through movement.
9. Surface of Golden Gully after rain, December 2016
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10 - 11. Experimenting with surfaces in Golden Gully, December 2016
Sonic Fluidity and Shifting Surfaces
I first discovered the possibilities of surface after it dissolved in the rain. The ground in Golden Gully shifted and squelched after an overnight downpour during my first residency in Hill End in December 2016. Each step splattered my legs and feet with ochre mud. The ground was unpredictable, but it now afforded possibilities for new methods of mark-making. I began exploring how feeling the ground through paper, could enable listening to my own movements in this place and mark the paper simultaneously.
The fluid transformation of surfaces after rain instigated an inquiry into the changeable nature of places and how sound provides clues to those changes. Contemporary philosopher Casey O’Callaghan asserts that philosophical theories on perception have focused primarily upon visual experience,73 and he develops an analysis of auditory perception by examining the temporal and
73 Casey O'Callaghan, ‘Auditory Perception,’in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, last modified December 2, 2016, https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/perception-auditory. 60 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
spatial qualities of sound. Of most interest to my research was his assertion of sound as an ‘event-like individual’ occurring in time:
‘Sounds audibly seem to persist through time and to survive change. A particular sound, such as that of an emergency siren, might begin high- pitched and loud and end low-pitched and soft…This event is part of a more encompassing event, such as a collision or the playing of a trumpet, that occurs in the environment and that includes the sound.’74
Sounds not only change over time, they also indicate change through kinetic activation and interactions with material objects or bodies. Auditory perception provides us with information about our surroundings and hearing ‘is made possible…by the auditory system’s ability to sort through the complex information available at the ears and to extract cues about significant items the environment contains.’75
Hearing is innately dependent upon events occurring in places to stimulate perception. The interaction between my feet and the sinking, squelching mud of Golden Gully created sounds that spoke not only of my physical entanglement in the materiality of this place, but also the power I had to affect changes by generating footsteps in the ground or the air. Each step created an event with sonic dimensions that deepened my awareness of being entangled with this place.
The sticky, shifting surface of the ochre creek bed in Golden Gully invited me to immerse paper in rain water and drag it along the ground. Bending over to walk and make marks, I realised that the loud sounds I was producing were simultaneously affecting my immediate bodily experiences of this place. O’Callaghan has spoken of hearing within the environment as an experience that ‘presents the sound as occurring at some distance and in a particular direction’ that is ‘relative to their sources.’76 This is perhaps true of most aspects
74 Ibid. 75 Casey O’Callaghan, Sounds - A Philosophical Theory (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11-17. 76 O’Callaghan, Sounds - A Philosophical Theory, 30-32. 61 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
of hearing in environments where sounds such as birds or wind in the trees, occur away from our bodies. However, my tiniest shift in weight affected the sonic environment I was immersed in, and added a dimension of aurally stimulated proprioception that urged a deeper consideration of what actually constituted actively hearing in places.
In an anthropological study of the Inuit people’s predominantly auditory experience of spaces in the Tundra, Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan wrote of ‘auditory space’ unfolding as ‘a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment.’77 My experience of sounds amplified between the walls of the sunken creek bed and enclosed tunnel in Golden Gully differs dramatically from the Inuit experience of the expansive Tundra. However, both these experiences of sound are shaped by our bodily interaction with the dimensions and materiality of these places.
In my interactions with Golden Gully, sounds occurred close to my body as I was also a source. The multiple, diffuse ‘spheres’ of distal sounds were entangled with my own spheres of proximate auditory space that were created by touching the surface material of places. My initial approach of visually transcribing distal sounds became insufficient once I understood my active role in Golden Gully. Understanding my contribution to the sonic events and the changeable surfaces of Golden Gully instigated a shift in awareness towards audition, and a fundamental change in my approach to drawing. I had to find ways to draw that were empathetic to the movement of sound and my movement in places. Auditory perception was about listening to the dynamism between air, soil, water, trees, rocks, animals and me; listening to the stirrings to move and responding to these urges with my body. By mid 2017, the act of listening became intimately entwined with the act of drawing, each catalysing the other.
77 Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan quoted in LaBelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2010), xxi - xxii. 62 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
12 - 13. Experiments with Chinese paper and wind in Fig Tree Cove, September 2017
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14. Conversation with the Wind 1, Fig Tree Cove, September 2017
In my first year of research in 2016, I doubted the strength of the Chinese paper I had worked with for over ten years, unsure that it would survive harsh treatment in the great outdoors. After folding, tearing and contorting heavy watercolour paper into forms more empathetic to my touch, I took my chances one spring day in 2017 and ventured outside to draw en plein air with my long scroll of Chinese paper. A dry wind blowing upwards from the cove below my rocky perch moulded the moistened Chinese paper around my crossed legs in twists and curves.78 The traditional homemade wheat starch paste glue that I had used to ‘wet-mount’ two layers of paper together,79 hardened quickly in the intense Australian sun. Opening the paper to the unpredictable fluctuations of air and atmospheric conditions allowed me to relinquish the certainty of a visually stable and enclosed drawing surface. Since that experience, I began to explore the possibilities of spatially malleable drawing surfaces that were empathetic to the act of listening.
I had struggled with the spatial and temporal fluidity of sound in Golden Gully, learning that sounds disappear in time and do not possess distinct parameters that can be visually transcribed. O’Callaghan asserts that ‘hearing does not
78 Please see appendix entry on Fig Tree Cove for further details. 79 Entirely self taught from glue packet instructions and YouTube videos, I have used a traditional method of wet-mounting Chinese paintings and calligraphy for over ten years. 64 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
resolve the edges, boundaries, and filled volumes in space that I see.’80 Furthermore, event-like ‘audible individuals require time to occur, unfold, or stream. In contrast, visible material objects strike one perceptually as being wholly present at a given time.’81
Trying to hear the edges of a sound is like trying to find the edge of a droplet of water in an ocean one is swimming in. While this new drawing surface still possessed edges and a finite surface, its protean malleability echoed the amorphous nature of listening through a material that was responsive to my movement and the atmospheric contingencies of places. By turning, scrunching and twisting the scrolls of Chinese paper, I was able to overcome the urge to visually compose on a flat, enclosed drawing surface. During this process, mark- making evolved towards a performative act of generating listening through sounds of friction between paper, leaves, rocks and pens.
To consider this development in relation to the field of drawing practice, I argue that the tradition of drawing is intimately connected with the act of looking and this relationship is facilitated by the stability of surfaces. Art historian David Rosand begins his phenomenological study of drawing by stating that ‘drawing is the fundamental pictorial act…the graphic imposition [of a mark or line] turns the actual flatness of the ground into virtual space.’82 For Rosand, the ground of drawing occurs as a passive, two dimensional surface upon which the visual illusion of space is composed.
Similarly, curator Bernice Rose defined drawing as ‘marking a surface with a tool to create an image.’83 Art works included in Rose’s 1976 exhibition Drawing
80 O'Callaghan, "Auditory Perception",The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 81 Casey O'Callaghan, ‘Lessons from Beyond Vision (Sounds and Audition),’ Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 153, no. 1 (2011): 11-12, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/41487621. 82 David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. 83 Rose quoted in Laurence Schmidlin, ‘Drawing Between Quotes,’ in Towards Visibility - Exhibiting Contemporary Drawing, ed. Julie Enckell Juliard (Paris, Vevey: Roven éditions and Musée Jenisch Vevey, 2015), 103. 65 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
Now such as Sol LeWitt’s Lines from the Centre of the Wall (1976) and Piero Manzoni’s Line 1000 Metres Long (1961) extended the surface through wall based site specificity and conceptual practice - Manzoni’s work consisted of an ink line drawn on a 1000 metre roll of paper held in a metal drum.84 Bodily engagement with the expansive surfaces of wall and paper occur in both these practices. However, the line still demarcates, measures and activates a passive surface; its stable uniformity invites and optimises the act of looking during the drawing process.
My interactions with the ochre mud of Golden Gully and wind in Fig Tree Cove, prompted me to use the drawing surface to generate listening experiences, and innovate the drawing support to destabilise my visual experience. These developments challenge the flat support and pictorial foundations of the drawing definitions proposed by Rosand and Rose. No longer concerned with adumbrating the fugitive forms of sounds, my relationship to the drawing surface and support shifted towards reciprocity. The drawing surface became an active facilitator of my listening experience as I negotiated with its malleable structure to interact with the surfaces of places. This relationship between my body, drawing surface and surface dynamics of places engendered the four listening methodologies that I will discuss in the following.
84 Schmidlin, ‘Drawing between Quotes,’ 103. 66 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
Embodied Listening
Listening through the ideas of Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations develop my approach to drawing through the fluidity of listening and sound. These methodologies articulate interconnected drawing and listening processes as ways of drawing together my body and the surfaces, atmosphere and people of Golden Gully and Langshi. They grew from recognising that my drawing and listening interactions with each place are intrinsically shaped by the topographical, atmospheric and social contingencies and my body’s capacities.
The methodologies of Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations, emphasise my situated body as the locus for enacting new senses of these places. They address notions of tactile exploration, sonic agency, bodily space and endurance within the extent of my body’s capacities. They inform how the fundamental drawing properties of surface, line and gesture are reconsidered and reworked; serving as the framework for examining the drawing and listening processes discussed in the following chapters focused upon Interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi. In this section, I will elucidate how the four listening methodologies interweave ideas of listening and enactive perception from contemporary philosophers and artists, with insights from my practical research, to engender experimental approaches to drawing as a practice of perceptual emplacement.
Contemporary artist and writer Salomé Voegelin proposes a philosophy of sound art based upon listening, which ‘is a philosophical project that necessitates an involved participation, rather than enables a detached viewing position.’85 Voegelin’s immersive approach to listening practice has been an important influence in understanding how I interpreted and reworked the surfaces of my drawings, to generate an active practice of listening through bodily movement and contact with the materiality of Golden Gully and Langshi.
85 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, xii. 67 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
Voegelin asserts that the co-productive process of listening holds the potential to change the way we understand our perceptual experiences:
‘Focused listening is radical as it makes us ‘see’ a different world. The aesthetic materiality of sound insists on complicity and intersubjectivity and challenges not only the reality of the material object itself, but also the position of the subject involved in its generative production. The subject in sound shares the fluidity of its object. Sound is the world as dynamic, as process, rather than as outline of existence. The sonic subject belongs in this temporal flow.’
In her account of listening to the radio, Voegelin speaks of her ‘listening body’ clinging blindly to the voice of the speaker in a bodily relation where ‘I can feel myself working my ears.’ In her experience of Gregory Whitehead’s radiophonic piece If a Voice Like Then What? (1984), Voegelin is not a passive listener, but actively participates in a dynamic, affective event where the voice is ‘rolled around on the listener’s tongue,’ to engender an awareness of her own bodily proprioception at the same time.86
Voegelin’s approach to the ‘materiality of sound’ and the agentive nature of listening with the body resonated with my experiences of generating my own listening experiences in Golden Gully and Langshi. Furthermore, in considering the sonic dimension within the notions of ‘landscape’ and ‘soundscapes,’ Voegelin argues for a reflexive ‘sonic sensibility’ that is alert to ‘the cultural ideologies that limit this sense [of listening] and favour[s] others.’ She asserts that ‘not all senses participate equally in the production of what the world is.’87 Understanding the generative nature of listening compelled me to augment and emphasise my listening experience, by developing Paper Mediators that challenged the primacy of vision in my approach to drawing.
86 Ibid., 36-37. 87 Voegelin’s emphasis. Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds, 11. 68 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
15 - 16. Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully process, March 2018
Link to video documentation and listening process excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/binaural-sound-study-golden-gully
I adapted the structure and surface of drawings to integrate them with the size and shape of my body; to enable them to move with me within the flow of sound. In interactions facilitated by the Binaural Sound Study, this Paper Mediator was designed specifically to occlude vision and fit within the space
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between my bent knees and head while seated. By obscuring my vision and affecting movement, the Binaural Sound Studies shifted my sensory relationship to the sounds and material of surfaces around me. In March 2018 after an autumn downpour, I also learnt to rub the structure against the wet ochre walls and floor of Golden Gully to explore how I could listen through movement. By extending my ‘listening body’ with the paper structure and developing an awareness of ‘working’ my ears and moving to generate my own listening experience, I realised that I was enacting my own multi-sensory experience of the materiality of Golden Gully and Langshi.
Contemporary philosopher Alva Noë asserts that ‘the perceptual world…is the world for us…different animals inhabit different perceptual worlds even though they inhabit the same physical world.’88 He extends upon the ‘Sensorimotor Contingency Theory’ that he developed with experimental psychologist J. Kevin O’Regan, which proposes that perceptual experiences are skilful acts of exploration dependent upon movement.89 From the tiniest shift of the eyeball to movements of our limbs, sensorimotor knowledge allows us to discover the perceptual world as it exists in relation to us.
Noë’s concept of a ‘perceptual world’ generated through sensorimotor action parallels the enactive approach to perception proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosch in 1991. Rather than the orthodox view of perception whereby the brain creates an internal representation of environmental information from sensory receptors,90 proponents of the enactive approach such as Thompson assert that:
‘cognition is the exercise of skilful know-how in situated and embodied action…a cognitive being’s world is not a prespecified, external realm,
88 Noë’s emphasis. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004),156. 89 J.Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë, ‘A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness,’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences 24, no.5 (October 2001): 939-73; discussion 973-1031, https://doi-org.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/10.1017/S0140525X01000115 90 Alva Noë and Evan Thompson, Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), 2-3. 70 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment.’91
The enactive approach considers the body’s relationship to the environment as a vital facilitator of perceptual experience. This approach was particularly influential in the development of Touch and Sounding methodologies which directly affect perception through surface and acoustic interactions. By reworking drawing structures and using recording technology, I altered my body’s sensory ‘modes of coupling’ to generate new ways of enacting my emplacement. My perceptual world was conjured with the aid of audition enhancing microphones, materially mediating paper and, from March 2018, motion amplifying speakers. These tools enhanced my senses of touch and hearing, altered spatial awareness and deepened my consciousness of endurance. My embodied relationships with Golden Gully and Langshi were complicated and reconfigured by these tools and mediums that also extended my gesture in drawing.
Curator and art historian M. Catherine de Zegher notes that 'the intimate gestural act of drawing is a process by which an artist situates him or herself in the world.’92 This motion of searching facilitates our relationship to others in a process of perceptual discovery. In the following, I will examine how listening through Touch and Sounding altered my interactions with the materiality of places to generate particular Spatial and Durational perceptual conditions. These methodologies articulate how I extended and altered my perceptual capacities, to enact distinct senses of emplacement through drawing and listening processes that responded to the contingencies of Golden Gully and Langshi.
91 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 13. 92 M. Catherine de Zegher, ‘The Stage of Drawing,’ in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, Avis Newman and M. Catherine de Zegher (London: New York: Tate Publishing; The Drawing Centre, 2003), 275. 71 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
17. Spatial Malleable - River process, Langshi, October 2017
Touch
In 2017 at Langshi, listening through Touch developed into an active method of exploring the mutual contact between my body and the bamboo, river water and porous limestone rocks present there. While every drawing and listening engagement involved tactile encounters with surfaces and liquids through my hands, boots or the seat of my pants, this discussion will focus upon how microphones extended my interactions and altered sensory response when I touched surfaces and liquids through paper.
During most drawing processes, I attached small omnidirectional microphones to my wrists with medical tape. This brought my ears closer to the site of exploratory touch and a sensory awareness loop was created: I would touch a surface of rock, leaves, or water through paper; the sounds of gritty scrapes,
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scrunches or drips drew my attention down to the site of contact; and my curiosity would urge a movement to touch, making more sounds. Listening with my hands, I found myself closing my eyes to focus on the intermingled haptic and auditory sensations. Sometimes these movements were compelled by listening to external sonic events such as bird calls or boats, and I would move my hand towards the direction of the sound. The pleasure of simultaneously feeling tactile and sonic textures drove my desire to continue listening and touching in an aestheticised sensory exploration of sensation itself.
Contemporary philosopher Evan Thompson's enactive approach to experience draws upon phenomenological theory to analyse the relationship between consciousness, bodily experience and the world in which the embodied mind is situated. Borrowing a term from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thompson discusses ‘pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness’ to explain how one becomes conscious of one’s body as actively perceiving. This form of self-consciousness is noticeable in touch:
‘we not only feel the things we touch, we feel ourselves touching them and touched by them…one’s body can also sense itself, as when one hand touches the other. In this case, the one touching is the thing touched, and the thing touched senses itself as the one being touched…There is a dynamic linkage of outward perception and inward feeling, so that one encounters one’s own bodily sentience directly.’
Merleau-Ponty specifies that these experiences alternate and are not concurrent. This form of self-consciousness allows us to distinguish our bodies from other things.93
In his enquiry into sensorimotor subjectivity, Evan Thompson poses the questions ‘how does one’s lived body relate to the world and how does it relate
93 Concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception 1962, explained and referenced by Thompson. Evan Thompson, ‘Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience,’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 4 (December 01 2005): 412-413, DOI: 10.1007/s11097-005-9003-x. 73 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
to itself?’94 Drawing through listening to the tactile encounters between myself and material surfaces augmented my external auditory and haptic relationship with places. However, in moments of touching surfaces through paper, the enhanced, proximate sounds also obscured sounds in the distance, drawing my attention to the internal processes of sensing. The microphones amplified the tiniest sounds so that touching the rocks, leaves and water created a rich entwining of being aurally touched at the same time.
Listening through Touch emphasises drawing as a perceptual process of relating between inner awareness and external stimuli. In speaking of perceiving drawing gestures in ‘the mind’s eye,’ contemporary artist Avis Newman notes how ‘perception becomes an act of reconstruction that moves unobtrusively between interior and exterior.’95 Newman refers to the thinking and seeing processes in her drawing practice. In the process of listening through Touch however, auditory sensations are ephemeral and immediate, precluding any kind of mental ‘reconstruction.’
Marks produced on paper through contact with ochre, moss, bamboo leaves, the river, rain water and ink, provided visual cues of the drawing’s unfolding. I drew with an understanding that the story of my body’s interactions with Langshi was held within the paper, in a process that was entirely distinct from my early methods of visually depicting sounds. Furthermore, microphone enhanced sounds of touching foregrounded a bodily immersion in the sonic world and listening began to take precedence. The aural unfolding of the drawing had no stable reference, enabling me to focus on listening to myself listening. In reworking paper surfaces in drawing to mediate my interactions with the surfaces of each place, listening through Touch obscured distal sounds and enhanced sounds of bodily contact to generate highly partial sensorial connections with Golden Gully and Langshi.
94 Evan Thompson, ‘Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience,’ 409. 95 Avis Newman, ‘Conversation: Avis Newman/Catherine de Zegher,’ in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, 82. 74 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
18. Sounding through Touch process, Golden Gully, March 2018
Link to sound and video documentation excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-through-touch
Sounding
In my processes of drawing and listening to interact with Golden Gully and Langshi, ‘sounding’ became both a form of measure and a production of sound: taking a measure of where and how I was situated in these places through listening to my own sounding. Even tiny instances of contact between myself and these places produced a sound to listen to. Initially this sounding was private and small, amplified by microphones on my wrists and lodged in my earbuds. When speakers were added to my equipment in March 2018, sounding extended beyond my body into the mining tunnel of Golden Gully, and gained complex layers of overlapping feedback and reciprocity. This discussion focusses on how the notion of gesture was reworked with sound feedback, to extend drawing as a method of enacting distinct senses of these places.
Sound generated as my hands felt paper, rock, leaves, soil, rain and water were recorded through microphones, then amplified and emitted through speakers into Golden Gully’s mining tunnel and Langshi’s karst rock formations. The
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initial sounds from my interactions with the surface materials and liquids of these place were returned to me as feedback by ochre walls and limestone rocks. I located these sound waves by gesturing with microphones taped to my wrists, and through this process, sounded out how I was positioned in relation to the walls and rocks of these places.
Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues that ‘to sound is to vibrate in itself or by itself: it is not only, for the sonorous body, to emit a sound, but it is also to stretch out, to carry itself and be resolved into vibrations that both return to itself and place it outside itself.’ He draws correlations with a notion of self awareness through sensing, which ‘is always a perception…a feeling-onself- feel…it is perhaps in the sonorous register that this reflected structure is most obviously manifest.96 Nancy approaches listening through the sounding body, arguing that self-awareness is engendered through inherent resonance. My actions of listening through sounding articulate a similar understanding through technologically amplified interactions with the materiality of places.
Through sounding with microphones and speakers, I created a sonorous, amorphous kind of instrument located between my body and the curves and gaps of the mining tunnel walls and karst rock formations. Sending sounds into the environment of Golden Gully and Langshi expanded the resonant space of my listening body so that I was touching surfaces with fingertips of sound that bounced back to me in diffused and fragmented hums, purrs and squeals. I responded to this reflected sonority of each place with dynamic and immediate gestures, and in doing so ‘felt-myself-feel’ through sounding.
Alva Noë has compared sensorimotor skills in perception to gesture: ‘gesture knowledge is body knowledge; it belongs to our pre-intellectual habits, skills, anticipations, forms of readiness….Sensorimotor knowledge is basic.’97 Such
96 Nancy asserts that ‘once it is agreed that touching gives the general structure or fundamental note of self-sensing [se-sentir]: in a way, every sense touches itself by sensing (and touches the other senses).’ Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 8, notes 71. 97 Noë, Action in Perception, 120. 76 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
knowledge is instinctive and ‘perceptual experience, in whatever modality, acquires spatial content thanks to the perceiver’s knowledge of the way sensory stimulation depends on movement.’98 Finding the sounds through gesture was an instinctive act of searching; straining to hear where I was placed in relation to the rocks, walls, and ground in an act of echolocation. The sounds emergent in this process also had their own trajectory of movement, and intersecting these with my gestures allowed me to sound out the arc of my arm’s movement to generate ‘lines’ of sound feedback.
Experimental composer Alvin Lucier is an important forerunner of sounding acoustic spaces with feedback. His piece Bird and Person Dyning (1975) uses binaural microphones worn in the ears of the performer, who responds to electronic bird calls with small head movements while walking slowly through the space. Played through speakers, the feedback from this interaction generates a shared space of the ‘composer listening.’99 This and Lucier’s earlier piece I am sitting in a room (1969) activated ‘the acoustic characteristics of the performance space.’100 These works planted the seeds for my idea of activating ochre surfaces and walls of the Golden Gully mining tunnel with sound feedback as a drawing tool. This experimentation allowed me to reconsider the line in drawing, and to use gesture and sound to draw out my location in relation to the surfaces of places.
I came to understand this process as Sound Feedback Drawing. Unlike the visible accretion of marks on solid, flat surfaces, the ephemeral Sound Feedback Drawing process had no persisting reference point. Instead, the proximity, direction and velocity of a gesture intersecting with the sounds bounced back by mining tunnel walls or rocks, created an unfolding ‘line' of sound, determining
98 Noë, Action in Perception, 117. 99 A performance by the artist can be viewed on the website Issue Project Room. Yiyang Cao, Wyatt Owens, and James Emrick, ’Alvin Lucier: Bird and Person Dyning,’ Issue Project Room, recorded on November 8, 2017, https://issueprojectroom.org/video/alvin-lucier- bird-and-person-dyning 100 Randal Davis, ‘…and what they do as they're going : sounding space in the work of Alvin Lucier,’ Organised Sound 8, no. 2 (2003): 206, accessed October 4, 2019, DOI:10.1017/ S1355771803000116. 77 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
its length, volume and timbre. Listening through Sounding constitutes an embodied search for my situated presence, where the gesture of drawing facilitates the resonant loop between my body and places. Sound Feedback Drawing is a significant development in this PhD that extends possibilities of line and gesture in an expanded drawing practice.101
19. Binaural Sound Study - Bamboo process, Langshi, October 2017
Space
Listening through Space is actively practiced through drawing, listening and sounding. It explores the protean, interpenetrating and multilayered spaces of sound that are generated by movement and determined by the reach of my gestures. This section develops a specific approach to the notion of egocentric bodily space, by examining how microphones transformed my auditory space, and how the surfaces of Paper Mediators extended the reach of my body to challenge notions of the support in drawing.
101 In Part Two - Interactions: Golden Gully, I examine in detail how Sound Feedback Drawing extends the notions of gesture, line and mark-making in drawing. 78 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
Alva Noë observes that the sensorimotor skills that allow us to experience sensory stimuli are egocentric, and ‘to experience the item as off to the left is to experience the object as occupying a certain position in one’s egocentric space… in relation to the perceiver’s body.’102 Embodied listening focusses upon an egocentric approach to the notion of space, placing my body at the centre of perceptual experience in relation to things in places within my auditory, sounding and physical reach. This developed in part from an understanding that the sounds of places are in a perpetual state of flux, shifting, uncertain and re- constituting in relation to that which sounds around, within and from me. There is no absolute reference point within this dynamism and the space of embodied listening contributes to this flux.
James J. Gibson, pioneer of the theory of environmental affordances, considers surroundings not as the container of a single observer, but exists ‘with reference to a moving point of observation along a path that any individual can travel,’ giving rise to many possible perspectives.103 I draw upon Gibson’s notions to examine the spatial consequences of placing microphones on my wrists, which essentially made my ears mobile. The listening space of moving my arms with microphones taped on my wrists extended the binaural space of hearing from the sides of my head to the extremities of my arms’ gestural arcs. This space was no longer bound to the central pivot point of my neck, and each arm created its own sphere that could overlap with the other. The trajectories of distal sounds, sounds I created, and feedback sounds collided and merged in the listening locus of my body, which constantly shifted its centre of gravity, moving around and leaning towards the directions of sounds. In the Sound Feedback Drawing experiments, I physically caught the sound with my wrists and comprehended its movement through my own.
102 Noë, Action in Perception, 87. 103 Gibson’s emphasis. Gibson’s theories of environmental affordances (what an environment offers an animal and how the animal perceives this) and the ambient optic array that furnishes information about the environment, is also a key influence upon Noë’s writings. James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 1984), 43. 79 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
My egocentric listening space was transformed by drawing tools and processes that included Paper Mediators such as Binaural Sound Studies and in mid 2018, my reworking of the Chinese paper Möbius Scroll. Embodied listening through space enlivened the surface of drawing, transforming it into a dynamic mediator of action. I first discovered the possibility of using the surface of drawing for action-based sound practices through the works of Czechosovakian artist Milan Grygar.
In his ‘acoustic drawings’ from 1965 onwards, Grygar used unconventional items such as clockwork children’s toys and wheels to create ink marks on paper and sounds that he recorded. In 1969, he moved away from objects to develop Hmatová Kresha (Tactile Drawing), a piece where he would pass his arms and legs through a white paper ‘drum skin stretched in space’ that obscured his vision. Drawing with inked hands on the paper ‘there was nothing but the body and the echo of the body, sound.’104 In this performative drawing, Grygar stretched, flattened and penetrated the surface of drawing into an extension of his sounding body. Of most interest to me however, is Grygar’s assertion that this was an ‘open, and endlessly reopened drawing,’105 its possibility for continuation and evolution indicated by his tearing and removal of the piece upon the end of his performance.
Grygar’s understanding of his drawing as fluid and open in its structure, marks and surface, is a precursor to my approach in developing the Paper Mediators. In listening through Space, the drawing surface was no longer a passive substrate, but became an active constituent of sounding through my interaction with the surface materiality of a specific place. By facilitating my connection with places, the surface of the Paper Mediators extended the listening space of my body, altering my gestures and movement to create new egocentric spaces that were specific to each interaction.
104 Milan Grygar, ‘Interview conducted by Alexandre Broniarski,’ in Sound and the Visual Arts - Intersections between music and the plastic arts today, eds. Jean Yves Bosseur and Alexandre Broniarski, trans. Brian Holmes and Peter Carrier (Paris: Dis Voir, 1993), 117. 105 Ibid. 80 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
20. Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11 process, Langshi, October 2017
21 - 22. Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11 (video stills showing the beginning and end of one listening duration), Langshi, October - November 2017
Link to video excerpt: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/dawn-durations
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Durations
Listening through Durations generated my auditory experience in bodily negotiations with the contingencies and topography of Golden Gully and Langshi. If duration is understood as ‘the length of time during which something continues,’106 then the duration of listening and drawing within these places was contingent upon my body’s endurance in particular positions such as sitting, crouching and walking on rocks and soil, and the ability to bear sun, wind and rain. In this regard, listening through Durations articulates the contextual specificity of my drawing and listening processes, and their emergence from the dynamics between my body and Golden Gully and Langshi.
The artist Salomé Voegelin asserts that in the process of listening 'we do not observe but generate,’ and she proposes a notion of ‘sonic timespace' that emerges whereby ‘time and space [is situated] as a verb.’ The agency of a listener ‘contributes to social and human geography,’ producing ‘sonic geography…[through] a practice of walking and listening, doing and redoing.’107 The idea of ‘doing’ ‘sonic timespace’ resonates with the ways I enacted particular senses of Golden Gully and Langshi through gestures, mark-making and sounding. These drawing and listening processes generated egocentric spaces that corresponded to my body’s reach and unfolded according to my body’s endurance.
In Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11 (2017), I listened to the village of Langshi rising at first light for thirty days, and responded to these sounds by brushing water onto stone in the courtyard of the house I was staying in. The process of listening continued as I observed traces of my marks disappear. This was recorded with my iPhone camera held at waist height; the shifting and shaking bodily gestures growing more pronounced as my hungry listening body became tired of holding on and holding still. The ground grew brighter and I continued listening until the water marks evaporated or my body gave way. My
106 Oxford University Press, ’Meaning of duration in English’ (Lexico.com: 2019), accessed on January 4, 2019, https://www.lexico.com/definition/duration 107 Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds, 24-25. 82 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
mental and physical capacities were brought into negotiation with temperature and humidity levels, people and the progressively paling dawn of a deepening autumn.
My performance of drawing and listening incited the curiosity of villagers who began peeking at my actions through the courtyard door. In a traditional Chinese village, physical and auditory spaces are mostly communal. My dawn actions intervened into their daily routine, just as their shuffling sandals, morning ablutions and reverberating calls to goats signalled the start of my listening process. Langshi’s dawn ‘sonic timespace’ was generated by the actions of people and their animals; my morning ritual of listening and drawing responded to this ‘sonic timespace’ and added another in the process.
My duration of listening depended upon the marks of water interacting with the atmosphere, and my ability to withstand waning concentration, slight embarrassment and physical discomfort. The camera did not document the process of mark-making, rather, it mediated another interaction, conveying moments of performing listening through shifting movements that speak of the embodied nature of looking, listening and drawing. Performing drawing and listening in social situations is a practice that is new to me and is one that I have been made aware of through the work of Polish Australian artist Gosia Wlodarczak.
Wlodarczak describes her drawing process as ‘energy and time which actually imprints itself on the object.’108 Wlodarczak draws with markers on walls and on objects covered with paper or fabric, while responding to her environment through the processes involved in looking. Often undertaking durational, performative drawing residencies in public spaces and galleries, Wlodarczak sets time parameters for her physically and mentally demanding drawing processes. In the case of A Room Without a View, she drew in isolation for 7
108 National Association for the Visual Arts, 'NAVA: in conversation, Episode 28 Gosia Wlodarczak in conversation with Esther Anatolitis,’ accessed October 1, 2019, https:// visualarts.net.au/media/uploads/files/Episode_28_e2gxStD.pdf 83 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
hours a day, for 17 days.109 Through constant and intense reflection upon what, and how, she sees, Wlodarczak explores drawing as a temporal unfolding of perceptual engagements with the people, objects and space around her.
Wlodarczak’s enquiry into how drawing can facilitate the process of looking and provide insights into her perceptual states, has influenced my interest in listening and drawing as acts of perceptual endurance. In drawing-based situations where she interacts with people, such as during an interview with NAVA director Esther Anatolitis, Wlodarczak’s ‘fragmented' marks reflect the interruption of her visual attention during the conversation.110 In my experience of listening and drawing, the marks I produced with pens were always fragmented, as the sounds I responded to did not persist in time and space. However, fragmentation also revealed my fatigue in listening and diminishing attention, such as in the progressive shakiness and thinning of marks in Walking Ochre and Quartz: Morning, Midday, Afternoon (2018) from Golden Gully. As the day progressed, my footsteps faltered on the rocky terrain and my focus waned. Only the most distinct sounds drew my attention and the marks became increasingly rough and homogenous towards the end of the process.
In the case of my Sound Feedback Drawing processes, my endurance was measured by the line of sound that unfolded temporally, as it was drawn out by the gesture of my arm. The length of time I kept my microphone enhanced wrists within the trajectory of sounds determined the duration of sound feedback. Deciding when to move my wrist behind my body to occlude this line was determined by my desire to continue listening, and by my ability to withstand high frequencies and volumes. Listening through Durations emphasised drawing and listening as temporal processes that depended upon my body's relationship with diurnal and seasonal changes, and the material, atmospheric and social contingencies of Golden Gully and Langshi.
109 Jane Somerville, ‘Gosia Wlodarczak,’ Artist Profile, no. 29 (2014): 80. 110 National Association for the Visual Arts, 'NAVA: in conversation, Episode 28 Gosia Wlodarczak.’ 84 of 227 Part One Chapter 2: Listening and Drawing
Listening through Touch and Sounding articulate an awareness of my body’s ability to affect the materiality and acoustic dimensions of Golden Gully and Langshi through drawing. These interconnected drawing and listening methodologies also emphasise the Spatial and Durational dimensions of my interactions with these places. While these methodologies extended my reach and enhanced my auditory capacities or ability to sound in places, they also tested my endurance and sometimes obscured my listening. The distinctiveness of my drawing and listening methodologies generated highly specific experiences of Golden Gully and Langshi, that reinforce an understanding of these places as constituted by manifold, diverse relations. In the following chapters that explore interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, I critically examine the partiality of my methods of relating to these places, in order to explore the tensions in my relationships with historical European landscape and Chinese shanshui precedents.
23 - 24. Walking Ochre and Quartz: Morning, Midday, Afternoon (details from Morning and Afternoon), Golden Gully, March 2018
Link to sound recording excerpt: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/walking-ochre-quartz
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PART TWO
INTERACTIONS: GOLDEN GULLY
Introduction 91
Section 1: Golden Gully - Russell Drysdale
• Constructed Visions 99
• Defining Visions 104
Section 2: Dorothy Napangardi 113
Section3: Sounding Golden Gully
• Introduction 119
• Sounding through Touch 122
• Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully 129
25 - 30. Golden Gully: ochre, quartz and water, photos taken in December 2016 and March 2018.
Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
INTRODUCTION
The channelled pathway of Golden Gully in Hill End is quiet until the broken quartz and gravel underfoot is sounded by footsteps. The flies drone unceasingly in the heat of December and occasionally punctuate the cooler air of March. Walking between the walls of the gully situates you below the road to Mudgee; the occasional sound of cars and the rustle of gum trees growing on the higher ground is audible. I found that the contact between my body and the surfaces of soft ochre, hard quartz and crushed gravel alerted me to my own emplacement.
The area of Hill End is home to the First Nations people of the Wiradyuri nation. It was drastically altered by European and Chinese miners during the nineteenth century and made iconic in Australian visual culture by painters such as Russell Drsydale in the twentieth century. In this section, I approach Golden Gully as a place which occurs through complex ongoing relations and examine how my drawing and listening interactions generated particular ways of relating to this place in the twenty-first century.
Interactions: Golden Gully details key developments in my drawing and listening processes within Golden Gully, a historical alluvial mining site to the north of Hill End. During artist residencies in December 2016 and March 2018, I explored ways of interacting with Golden Gully that considered my multimodal perceptual experiences arising within this place. I examine how critically reflecting upon my context as an artist of migrant Chinese heritage, affected my understanding of my processes within a post-industrial site that is significant to the people of the Wiradyuri nation, and is iconic within the history of Australian landscape painting. This section aims to demonstrate how integrated drawing and listening methodologies can extend beyond existing ways of understanding this place. In doing so, I address experiences shaped by cultural and gendered influences that lie outside of the masculine, Anglo-Australian context which I
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argue, has formed the dominant cultural narrative on Australian landscapes in recent history.
Hill End was listed as a Historic Site of National Significance on the New South Wales State Heritage Register in 1967. Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend are credited by curator Gavin Wilson as having ‘famously rediscovered' this town in 1947,111 which had seemingly lain dormant in physical isolation since the decline of the gold mining rush from 1874. Writers such as Wilson have asserted that Drysdale’s paintings of the area established a ‘modern view of Australia’ and his scenes of a harsh and alienating Australian landscape were ‘a critical step in expressing our national difference.’112 Wilson’s statement exemplifies how particular practices of imaging places can shape the way these places are understood.113
The practices and artworks of Russell Drysdale, Dorothy Napangardi and myself will be discussed in this chapter as three culturally specific and contextually dependent ways of engaging with places in Australia. Taking an approach that acknowledges the differences in these practices and their contributions to historical and contemporary artistic contexts, creates room for a generative dialogue around the way we understand and connect to places in Australia. Recognising diverse methods of engaging with places enables a questioning of the predominant views of places that I argue, have largely been shaped by European landscape painting practices. As multiple practices exist and are continuing to develop, it is important to destabilise prevailing perceptions of the Australian land in order to enable unfolding pluralities of experience. I do so in order to locate how my drawing and listening interactions with Golden Gully are positioned in relation to the significant visual history of this place, and explore
111 Gavin Wilson, The Artists of Hill End: Art, Life and Landscape - Hill End Visitor Information Centre Brochure, (Bathurst: NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service), collected December 2016. 112 Gavin Wilson, The Artists of Hill End: Art, Life and Landscape (Sydney: The Art Gallery of New South Wales and The Beagle Press, 1995), 23-24. 113 See Chapter 1 Towards Emplacement, for my discussion on how particular ways of imaging places can extend into broader cultural and political narratives. 92 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
how these processes can contribute towards culturally diverse and critically reflexive practices of this place in the present.
Interactions: Golden Gully is comprised of three sections. In the first section of this chapter, I examine how Drysdale’s use of linear perspective and an elevated view in his paintings Golden Gully (1949) and The Councillor’s House (1948-49), bear the influences and cultural values of European landscape painting. I take the approach that the idea of ‘landscape’ is a culturally specific and distinctly European notion that has been adapted to imaging the Australian land. I argue that these paintings present a particular approach to Golden Gully that is informed by Drysdale’s studio-based working methods, European landscape painting conventions, and his context as a male artist of Anglo- Australian heritage in mid-twentieth century Australia. Drysdale’s methods foregrounded visual experiences of Golden Gully, and I emphasise the contextual specificity of his practice to generate a dialogue between his practice and my own embodied listening and drawing processes.
Although European landscape conventions were relevant to Drysdale’s context, I assert that working within them as an artist precludes access to other sensory modalities that enriched my own experiences of Golden Gully. In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate that the elevated, distant view is inadequate for expressing a multidimensional sensory experience from within this place, which is of primary interest to my drawing and listening processes. Furthermore, as the European landscape conventions are not relevant to my cultural context and are in fact, foreign to the country they have been used to image, I seek to develop new ways of engaging with Golden Gully that are conducive to my concerns.
By exploring the body of literature that championed Drysdale’s work, I examine how these particular paintings have come to be the predominant image of Golden Gully within recent Australian art history. The writings that advocated for Drysdale’s stylised imagery also had a broader impact upon foregrounding masculine experiences of places in Australia. In outlining the contextual influences upon Drysdale’s practice, I assert that it is one example of engaging
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with the Australian land, and his paintings of Golden Gully are a way of looking at the place which in turns shapes how this place becomes perceived. In doing this, I create a productive space for exploring ways of engaging with Golden Gully that are inflected by other contexts and perceptual modalities, hopefully reshaping perceptions of this place.
In the second part of this chapter, I discuss the painting practice of artist Dorothy Napangardi of the Warlpiri nation from Central Australia, in order to gain an understanding of the First Nations people's experience of places and Country within a broader Australian context. Although Napangardi was from a nation that is distant and culturally distinct from the people of the Wiradyuri nation who lived in the Hill End area, her painting practice is significant to this study because it exemplifies a personal and cultural approach to experiencing her Country, which exists and operates beyond the European landscape paradigm. It also presents a unique and recent example of how a female First Nations artist drew upon traditional practices of dance ceremonies, walking through Country and women’s ancestral stories to enact and sustain connections to her homeland of the Mina Mina region through contemporary painting. Napangardi’s practice encompassed dynamic vocal and embodied exchanges between women as they enacted and enlivened Country through song, dance and ceremony. Napangardi’s practice provides a valuable referential framework for place relations which offer possibilities beyond European compositional tropes of fixed, overarching and singular visual perspectives.
The final part of this chapter focuses upon two significant drawing and listening interactions with the ochre surfaces and sounds of Golden Gully. Sounding through Touch and Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully were processes undertaken March 2018 that extended my embodied listening through contact with the surfaces and waters of this place. Sounding through Touch included Sound Feedback Drawing processes and videos of gestural responses to sounds heard within the largest mining tunnel of Golden Gully. Sounding through Touch involved learning to draw with sound feedback, which constitutes a significant contribution of this PhD. Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully was
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a pivotal development that deconstructed the relationships between surfaces, gesture and mark-making, in bodily interactions with ochre and rain water that were mediated through paper. Rubbing the rain dampened Binaural Sound Study against ochre was distinct from the process of drawing and listening with inked bamboo leaves that I had undertaken in Langshi in 2017. In my interactions with Golden Gully, the Binaural Sound Study became an extension of my body which directly transfigured my sensory perception and expanded my spatial relationship with the walls of Golden Gully. I explore how enacting my own emplacement by generating multi-sensory experiences within this place, created an understanding of Golden Gully that was partial and specific to these embodied interactions.
I also examine how critically reflecting upon the partiality of my approach and my position as a visitor who was affecting temporary changes to the land and water of this place, led me to contact the Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal Community Elders and Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises - ‘Plains people of the Wiradyuri Enterprises,’ for cultural advice and permission to use ochre from their Country.114 This deepening of my social and cultural responsibility constituted a significant learning curve in my interactions with Golden Gully.
The distinct practices of Napangardi, Drysdale and myself reinforce the notion of places as emerging through fluid and layered processes that are inflected by specific contexts. This chapter aims to show that there are manifold ways of engaging with places and that these relations are deeply informed by bodily and cultural differences. These differences are indicative of experiences that existed and are unfolding, but have been less spoken of in the extant literary canon of Australian art.
114 Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal Community Elders and Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises - ‘Plains people of the Wiradyuri Enterprises,’ are closely affiliated collectives of Traditional Owners, Elders and Cultural Practitioners in the Bathurst and O’Connell Plains area of the Wiradyuri Nation. 95 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
Image removed according to copyright guidelines
31. Russell Drysdale, Golden Gully, 1949. Oil, pen and ink on canvas, on hardboard, h66 x w101.4cm. National Gallery of Australia, accessed April 2, 2018, https://nga.gov.au/exhibition/ oceantooutback/detail.cfm?IRN=29014&ViewID=2
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Image removed according to copyright guidelines
32. Russell Drysdale, The Councillor’s House, 1948. Oil, ink and pencil on board, h79 x w100cm. Private collection, accessed December 13, 2019, https:// www.bonhams.com/auctions/21362/lot/68/
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SECTION 1: Golden Gully - Russell Drysdale
Constructed Visions
Drysdale’s depictions of Golden Gully in his paintings Golden Gully (1949) and The Councillor’s House (1948-49) are characteristic of his dry, harsh and stylised depictions of the Australian rural countryside. Golden Gully is shown as treeless, straddling a rocky valley between vaulted walls devoid of life. In a 1978 interview with James Gleeson, Drysdale described western New South Wales as where ‘you can travel across vast areas of this country and you won’t see a thing moving,’ however at night time amongst the grass ‘there’s a tremendous life going on’ with the movement of insects, reptiles and marsupials reacting to his hurricane lamp.115
The contrast between viewing the ‘strange emptiness’116 of the rural countryside as a passer by, and being an active participant within the place forms a valuable starting point for a discussion on Drysdale’s practice. Drysdale chose to draw upon his experiences as an external viewer in both his paintings of Golden Gully and made conscious decisions to remove any signs of life beyond those of human occupation. However, his photograph of Councillor’s Whittaker’s house which is depicted in one of the paintings, clearly shows trees and vegetation amongst the carved mining pits that would have harboured insects and animal life.117 This is significant, as it shows that Drysdale’s primary concern was in painting an imaginary construct of his vision, one which was not necessarily reflective of his physical experiences of the dynamic qualities of the site. The aim in this section of the chapter is to differentiate between Golden Gully as a
115 National Gallery of Australia, ‘James Gleeson interviews: Sir Russell Drysdale - 19 October 1978,’ The James Gleeson oral history collection, 20, accessed January 4, 2019, https:// nga.gov.au/Research/Gleeson/pdf/Drysdale.pdf. 116 National Gallery of Australia, ‘James Gleeson interviews: Sir Russell Drysdale,’ 21. 117 Lou Klepac, Russell Drysdale (Millers Point: Murdoch Books, 2009), 168. 99 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
historical painted landscape construct by Drysdale, and Golden Gully as a place, rich in sensory complexities and unfolding in the present. In doing so, I begin to locate how my embodied drawing and listening interactions with Golden Gully are positioned in relation to the visual history of this place.
In Drysale’s painting Golden Gully, the land and sky is painted in similar shades of ochre and rust, imparting a heavy, weighted atmosphere. The gully has been deliberately widened to force a view through to the village of Hill End in the distance. While the sides of the gully rise to bind the horizon and enclose the composition, giving us a similar sense of enclosure experienced physically from within the gully, the horizon line extends our gaze and allows for the juxtaposition of an elevated perspective on Hill End. Prominent in the middle ground are the entrances of two mine shafts which draw us further into the painting.
The Councillor’s House employs a more compacted spatial composition with dual mine shafts occupying the foreground and middle ground. A third plane containing the nineteenth century cottage belonging to Councillor Whittaker118 dominates the centre of the upper third of the painting, and presents a perspective that is level with the horizon. Several authors have noted the theatrical qualities of Drysdale’s compositions. Art critic Robert Hughes compared “the successive planes” in his paintings to “the wings of a stage”119 with rocks, earth and trees as players in the scene. Similarly, writer Christopher Heathcote likened Drysdale’s rural scenes from the early 1940s to sets on a stage.120 Although employing a greater depth of field than these earlier pieces, Golden Gully and The Councillor’s House are stage-like in their positioning of the viewer as an impartial beholder at the threshold of a scene. Furthermore, the weighted atmosphere, strong lines and stark austerity convey what art
118 Alan Mayne, Hill End: an historic Australian goldfields landscape (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press. 2003), 46. 119 Robert Hughes, quoted in Geoffrey Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912-81 (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1997), 13. 120 Christopher Heathcote, Defining the Modern Australian Landscape (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2013), 11. 100 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
historian Lou Klepac asserts as a ‘sense of Greek drama’ to create ‘a particular action or scene which is now unmistakably his own.’121
It is known that Drysdale was a studio painter who preferred to paint from memory, sketches and photographs. He spent limited time working within the landscape of Hill End and consciously rearranged, altered or purposely erased elements of the landscape for his compositions.122 The conscious rearrangement and elision of topographical elements in the two paintings of Golden Gully is typical of methods employed in European landscape practices.123 The paintings of Golden Gully clearly departed from what Drysdale photographed and saw; they present a specific interpretation of his visual experience that has been consciously reconfigured for dramatic effect.
Drysdale’s use of elevated linear perspective in the layout of the town and buildings in Golden Gully (1949) situates the audience outside of the landscape. This affords a constructed view of Golden Gully’s entirety in one encompassing glance. In this instance, the viewer adopts a disembodied position similar to one critiqued by Donna Haraway as the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’124 From their external, distant position, the artist and viewer become seemingly impartial and exempt from partaking in the imaginary narrative unfolding before them. However, I argue that by visually transfiguring what he saw, Drysdale actively contributed towards a conceptualised vision of Golden Gully that resonated with European ways of comprehending the Australian land, thereby affecting how this place was understood by those who viewed his paintings.
121 Klepac, Russell Drysdale, 145. 122 Drysdale stayed with Donald Friend on his occasional visits to Hill End, collecting initial material that he would rework in the studio. Wilson notes that ‘What Drysdale created in his studio was not the historic landscape of Hill End; it was his own highly charged version of the place.’ WIlson, The Artists of Hill End, 56-57. 123 Cosgrove, Social Formation, 20. 124 Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges,’ 57-59. 101 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
Drysdale’s manipulation of the picture plane and method of working from imagination and memory reflects his early training in England with tutor George Bell,125 and his interest in the practices of European painters such as Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), both of whom were of significant influence upon Drysdale’s fascination with the affective potential of constructed imagery.126 Although writers such as Klepac, Wilson and Heathcote have praised Drysdale’s stylistic innovations and departure from the nineteenth century Australian Landscape School,127 European landscape conventions still clearly exerted an influence upon Drysdale’s way of seeing Golden Gully.
Linear perspective and the elevated vantage point are visual compositional devices from the tradition of European landscape,128 that Drysdale’s audience in mid-twentieth century Australia and England would have been familiar with. Geoffrey Smith observed that in adapting these techniques ‘Drysdale introduced new and often enigmatic subject matter, but in a format that was immediately accessible.’129 This approach could be said to have filtered places in Australia through a European lens in order to construct ‘landscapes’ that were more palatable for his audience.130 Drysdale’s approach resonated with English luminaries such as Sir Kenneth Clark, the former Director of London’s National Gallery, who purchased The Councillor’s House in 1949 before it was finished.131
Drysdale’s highly individual vision of the Australian landscape in the post World War II period, is regarded by Heathcote as evidencing a personal struggle to
125 Klepac, Russell Drysdale, 52. 126 Ibid., 187-194. 127 Wilson contrasts Drysdale’s depictions of rural hardships with the idyllic pastoral scenes of his predecessors Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. Wilson, The Artists of Hill End, 21-22. 128 Please see my discussion in Chapter 1 Towards Emplacement. 129 Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912-81, 13. 130 Heathcote observes that ‘Outwardly they depict Australian landscapes, although in compositional terms they are structured like Arcadian view paintings by the 17th century neoclassicist Nicholas Poussin.’ Heathcote, Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, 23. 131 Klepac, Russell Drysdale, 171. 102 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
reconcile a landscape subject matter that had been idealised by painters of the previous century, with his modern twentieth century context. This struggle correlates with his desire to ‘express his Australianness.’132 I argue that Drysdale’s search for a modern, nationalistic vision of the Australian landscape is as much a cultural construct as those of his predecessors. In heightening the sense of tension and lifelessness in his arid landscapes, Drysdale actively shaped a new perception of the Australian environment that was more aligned to the sentiments and aesthetic tastes of his time.133
I argue that Drysdale’s stage-like compositions and deliberate alteration of topographical elements reflects a vision that was shaped by his personal and cultural connections to his European heritage and artistic contemporaries in England and Scotland.134 This demonstrated one way of connecting to the Australian landscape. Drysdale’s approach spoke of his specificities as an artist of Anglo-Australian heritage who was attempting to ‘hone a national style,’135 thereby creating an enduring image of Golden Gully that has since been perpetuated by various authors in the body of Australian art literature.
Drysdale’s transfigured and carefully arranged vision of Golden Gully speaks of a still and barren place that is distinct from the dynamic realities of Golden Gully that he photographed and experienced. By examining the contextual specificity of the European landscape conventions that Drysdale employed in his paintings, and arguing for the partiality of his studio based working methods, I am able to distinguish between Drysdale’s vision of Golden Gully as a historical landscape construct, and Golden Gully as a place that is currently unfolding.
132 Heathcote, Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, 10-13. 133 Gavin Wilson argues that Drydale’s development of an Australian modernist style ‘seemed to satisfy the popular need for a modern view of Australia.’ WIlson, The Artists of Hill End, 23. 134 Terry Smith observes that in mid-twentieth century Australia, ‘English and Scottish tastes, styles, techniques, aesthetic ideologies and institutional forms dominated Australian artistic life.’ Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century - Modernism and Aboriginality Volume 2, (St Leonards: Craftsman House, Fine Art Publishing Pty Ltd., 2002), 30. 135 Heathcote, Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, 24. 103 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
My own approach to Golden Gully was initially influenced by the tradition of European landscape. However, they evolved towards drawing and listening interactions with the material and atmospheric contingencies of this place that resisted the elevated, external viewpoint. By deliberately shaping how I saw, touched and listened to this place, my embodied interactions with Golden Gully partook in methods of relation that are also constructed and partial. In the following, I critique the literature that foregrounded Drysdale's singular vision, in order to generate a dialogue around diverse interactions that include experiences which lie outside of the Anglo-Australian, masculine experience.
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Defining Visions
‘It is now difficult to view Australian landscape without an echo of Drysdale’s images. His vision has become an integral part of the world in which we live.’136 This statement by art historian Lou Klepac demonstrates firstly, how landscape is generally regarded as something to be looked at from an external vantage point, and to be experienced primarily through a visual modality. Secondly, it demonstrates how the power of an image or vision can influence the experience and identity of specific places, especially when perpetuated by systems of cultural dissemination. This section of the chapter examines how the cultural system that was comprised of curators, art historians and writers who supported Drysdale, facilitated the impact of his vision upon our understanding of Golden Gully and the broader Australian landscape. It also explores gendered experiences of Hill End and the Australian landscape as one example of contextually inflected experiences that were less often talked about by writers and curators.
136 Klepac, Russell Drysdale, 190. 104 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
Statements such as Klepac’s about Drysdale’s vision becoming an integral part of our world makes assumptions about his reader’s cultural background and their exposure to the work of Australian painters from the mid-twentieth century. It also makes assumptions about the ways his readers experience places within Australia, firmly situating them within a Western perspective that has been shaped by landscape’s visual systems originating in Europe centuries before. I assert that as there are many audiences and experiences which operate beyond this context, the notion of a ‘defining vision’ of a place is highly contestable.
Klepac’s statement affirms the cultural impact of Drysdale’s vision beyond the gallery walls, a notion which is corroborated by Christopher Heathcote. Heathcote speaks of Drysdale’s ‘defining vision’ shaping the ‘public imagination’137 of the Australian landscape and that Drysdale aspired to create images of the land which were ‘symbols for the distress of the modern world.’138 While it is difficult to confirm whether it was Drysdale’s intention to express modern nationalistic sentiments about the landscape through his art practice, we can see how the authors focused upon him have perpetuated this notion, thereby creating particular notions of what constitutes places in the Australian national imaginary. Art historian Terry Smith has examined the power of landscape images to affect a nation’s understanding and sentiments towards places. He asserts that in Australian history, landscape painting ‘could picture known places, and evoke the nation itself…[they] recorded unique and typical sites…[and] worked as a palliative, building a consensual myth of belonging.’139
It is clear from writings by these authors that Drysdale’s paintings are firmly established as a formative element within the narrative of Australian art history and national culture. More importantly, many of these authors were foregrounding one artist’s vision as a definitive way of understanding the Australian land. In doing this, the perspectives of those who experienced it
137 Heathcote, Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, 9. 138 Heathcote, Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, 20. 139 Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century, 34. 105 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
through culturally distinct practices, as well as bodily experiences that differed from Drysdale’s vision-centric approach, were effectively sidelined or disregarded. It is important to address this elision in order to develop a deeper and more multifaceted understanding of places, which is representative of the actual diversity underpinning the nation that is both historic and contemporary, but which has largely been repressed in the cultural imaginary.
For example, the experiences of female painters working in the land has been sidelined by the corpus of literature focussing on Australian landscape. Landscape painting in Australia has been historically dominated by male artists such as Tom Roberts, Sydney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Olsen and Russell Drysdale. While the contribution of female artists from Australia’s colonial to modernist periods have been acknowledged,140 artists such as Jean Bellette and Margaret Olley were primarily known for figurative or interior domestic subject matter, even though it is known that they created landscape paintings during their careers.
In the context of Hill End, Margaret Olley, like Drysdale, stayed in Hill End at Murray’s Cottage with Donald Friend during the late 1940's. She is recorded in Friend’s diaries as having ‘painted until the light failed’ outdoors and ‘often lugs huge canvases for miles through the bush.’141 Olley however, is very rarely known for her landscapes. Instead, she was most recognised for her interiors and still-life paintings.142 Terry Smith observed that the Australian landscape is a ‘subject which Streeton, Nolan, Drysdale, Olsen and other [male painters] had seemingly made their own.’143
140 Caroline Jordan for instance, has published a survey of female Australian colonial artists who were usually regarded as amateur practitioners. Caroline Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005). 141 Donald Friend, The Diaries of Donald Friend - Volume 2, ed. Paul Hetherington (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2003), 593. 142 Olley’s biography on the website of The Art Gallery of New South Wales recognises her as ‘one of Australia’s most significant still-life and interior painters.’ Art Gallery of New South Wales, ‘Artist Profile - Margaret Olley,’ accessed December 15, 2019, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/olley-margaret/ 143 Terry Smith, ‘Postmodern Plurality: 1980-90,’ in Australian Painting: 1788-2000, Bernard Smith, Terry Smith and C. R. Heathcote, (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001). 546 106 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
The close association between Australian national identity and the practices of Anglo-Australian, male landscape painters has been examined by Smith, who notes that ‘masculine sexuality was thematised in different ways, both within and between bush genre and symbolic landscape painting.’144 This foregrounding of a masculine experience of rural life on the land could be attributed to the visible history of male labour in agriculture and construction industries, which had been made iconic in the painting tradition during the nineteenth century.145 Australian cultural historian Juliette Peers notes how ‘the nationalistic imagery of masculine labour…was customarily read as the default art code in Australian settler culture throughout much of the twentieth century.’146
In Hill End, innumerable men left their mark upon Golden Gully, as evidenced by the partially collapsed mine shafts left by 7000-8000 Chinese and European miners, sharp cross-cuts into rock and a ground strewn with broken quartz fragments. The land of Golden Gully still bears the effects of erosion from alluvial mining and fossicking since 1851. The mining sites of Hill End have long been perceived within the context of male labour, although in an effort to redress this, the contributions of women have since been examined by the writer Bronwyn Hanna, in a study commissioned by the NSW Office of Environment
144 Smith is speaking of Drysdale’s predecessors in the Landscape School, noting that masculine sexuality was ‘so overtly present it was scarcely worthy of comment.’ Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century, 15 - 35. 145 See for example Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1890) and Arthur Streeton’s painting Fire’s on (1891).
Leigh Astbury, ‘Tom Roberts’s Shearing the Rams: The Hidden Tradition,’ Art Bulletin of Victoria 19, 1978, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/tom-robertss-shearing-the-rams-the-hidden-tradition/
Deborah Hart, ‘Arthur Streeton’ in Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape, education resource, accessed May 31, 2018, https://nga.gov.au/exhibition/turnertomonet/Detail.cfm? IRN=165173&BioArtistIRN=12361&MnuID=1. 146 Juliette Peers, ‘Women Artists as Drivers of Early Art Historical Activities and Alternative Art Historical Narratives in Australia,’ Journal of Art Historiography U6, no. 4 (June 2011): 5, https://search-proquest-com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/docview/902572909? accountid=12763 107 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
and Heritage.147 I argue that the history of masculine labour in this site coupled with the significant legacy of Drysdale’s painted visions as a male Australian painter, contributes to a distinctly masculine understanding of Golden Gully as a place. Implicit within the context though not overtly visible in the subject matter of Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully, are the ‘tough heroes which Drysdale, Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Tucker have made so well known.’148
Masculine experiences and depictions of the Australian landscape have been perpetuated by a system that historically privileged a masculine perspective. Juliette Peers criticises the elision of women artists in the post WWII period by an art curatorial system that ‘centred upon towering masculine figures such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale.’149 The effects of privileging particular interpretations and practices are still evident in the way we understand places such as Golden Gully today.
The purpose of analysing the context around Drysdale’s painting of Golden Gully is to open up discourse that allows for differences of gendered, cultural and embodied experience to be acknowledged. As we have observed in the example of Margaret Olley, these differences have contributed to the exclusion of womens’ experiences of places in the past. By asserting the specificity of Drysdale’s context, examining the cultural influences upon his visual interpretation of this place, and analysing the writings that perpetuated his vision, I create a space for other, more diverse and expansive interactions to occur.
I locate my drawing and listening processes not in opposition to Drysdale’s legacy in Golden Gully; I recognise the actuality of distinct experiences in the hopes of diversifying the cultural narratives of this place. In this regard, I
147 Hanna selected Hill End for her study on women’s roles and contributions to the Australian landscape specifically because of its masculine legacy and the variety of visual representations from the 1870s to the present. Bronwyn Hanna, Re-gendering the landscape in New South Wales, 10. 148 Bernard Smith, ‘Figurative and Non-Figurative’ in Australian Painting: 1788-2000, 322. 149 Peers, Juliette. ‘Women Artists as Drivers of Early Art Historical Activities and Alternative Art Historical Narratives in Australia,’ 16. 108 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
acknowledge the tensions that exist between my embodied processes and Drysdale’s historical vision. I do so with an understanding that by bringing multi-sensory drawing and listening methodologies, recording devices and Chinese paper to interact bodily with the materiality of this place, I bring an equally partial outlook that inflects my own understanding of Golden Gully. In the following, I study Dorothy Napangardi’s painting practice which was extended through intergenerational women’s practices of song, dance and ceremony, to gain insight into how an Australian First Nations artist’s embodied connection to her Country can enrich our understanding of how places can be enacted.
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Image removed according to copyright guidelines
33. Dorothy Napangardi, Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa (Belonging to women), 2000. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, h239 x w130 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, accessed December 18, 2019, https:// www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/ 67887/
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Image removed according to copyright guidelines
34. Dorothy Napangardi, Sandhills of Mina Mina, 2000. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, h198 x w122.7 x d3.5cm. National Gallery of Australia, accessed December 18, 2019, https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/ detail.cfm?irn=134381
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SECTION 2: Dorothy Napangardi
‘When I am doing my paintings I always have my family in mind, I have my Country in mind.’
‘We’re going back again soon, for more singing, dancing, painting up, making our Jukurrpa. Mina Mina my Country.’ - Dorothy Napangardi, 2002.150
‘Making’ is the operative word in Warlpiri First Nations artist Dorothy Napangardi’s statement about her practice. Her Jukurrpa is not a dream in any Western sense. It is a collective, lived present that constitutes her Country, and encompasses a place which is enacted and continued through Warlpiri women’s cultural practices in their actions and embodied reality. Napangardi’s Jukurrpa, the Karnta-kurlangu Jukurrpa (Digging Stick Dreaming)151 is shared in some of her most well-known works through the affective power of her painting. I use the word ‘share’ because as anthropologist Jennifer Biddle proposes, ‘it could be said that these works do not “depict” at all, but instead ‘engender response’152 in viewers. In this study, I consider Napangardi’s paintings within a broader practice that encompasses ceremony, dance, story-telling and body painting. I
150 Dorothy Napangardi, ‘Statement by Dorothy Napangardi,’ in Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), 10. Napangardi sadly passed away in 2013 in a car accident. This study respectfully acknowledges the artist’s family and community in the use of her statements. My capitalisation of the word ‘Country.’ 151 Napangardi’s Jukurrpa was passed to her through the paternal side of her family through her grandfather Jina-Jarlu. For a detailed explanation of this ancestral story, please see Christine Nicholl’s essay in the catalogue for Napangardi’s 2002 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Christine Nicholls, ‘Grounded abstraction: the work of Dorothy Napangardi’ in Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, 60. 152 Biddle is speaking of First Nations people’s paintings from the Australian Central Desert, of which the Warlpiri nation is a part. Jennifer L. Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), 5. 113 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
study Napangardi’s practice in order to gain an understanding of what is possible when an artist draws upon their cultural heritage and a profound relationship to their Country, to develop an entirely individual form of expression. Her practice must be considered in relation to the cultural practices that form the context in which they were made.
Napangardi’s practice is considered as an example of an art practice that was deeply connected to a place, and that cannot be discussed within the terminology or imaging conventions of the tradition of European landscape. It was a practice that also requires the reconsideration of the notions of place and landscape. In Chapter One Towards Emplacement I established the notion of landscape firmly within the European tradition, and as one which was predominantly concerned with and constructed upon a primarily visual modality. I continue to take this position in my discussion of Napangardi’s practice, in order to emphasise the fact that it had developed from an entirely distinct cultural context which is not bound by European conventions. Furthermore, Napangardi’s paintings are informed by cultural practices that occur through bodily expression in song, ceremony and living in Country. These are practices which engage the full gamut of senses in relationships with places.
The understanding of places in Australian First Nations people’s culture is deeply shaped by ancestral stories, often referred to as ‘Dreamings.’ Curator and writer Stephen Gilchrist prefers the idea of ‘the Everywhen,’153 a notion that encompasses layered and multiple perceptions of time, as well as a multifaceted and integrated understanding of places in their spiritual and sensual forms. Gilchrist explains that ‘The Everywhen is everywhere. It is found in the dynamic of transformation, and it is quickened through the mindfulness of ritual. It surges through the seasonal growth of tubers and is sensed in the poetry and
153 ‘“Everywhen” is a term first used in the 1960’s by Australian anthropologist William Stanner to describe his understanding of Aboriginal people’s perspective of time.’ Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, ‘Everywhen there is time for Aboriginal art in America - An interview with Stephen Gilchrist’ in Art Monthly Australia no. 292, (09, 2016), 48, https://search- proquest-com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/docview/1814159389?accountid=12763. 114 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
pain of memory.’154 The Everywhen appears to be place unfolding in a continuous present through action, enactment and collective knowledge. Learning about Australian First Nations people's understanding of place and Country opens us to their ways of doing, and destabilises Western centric notions of a national ‘Australian Landscape’ which is evident in the writing on artists such as Russell Drysdale. This study also helps me to gain an understanding of how my practice is situated in relation to the First Nations people's experience of places in this land.
Napangardi made numerous paintings based upon Karnta-kurlangu Jukurrpa, as well as paintings which referenced the visible land, such as Sandhills of Mina Mina (2000). They share her signature interwoven dotted lines that developed from 1997 onwards and are likened by some members of her community to ‘Yapa (Warlpiri people) running through and across their Country, moving across their pathways, when they go travelling.’155 The Karnta-kurlangu Jukurrpa tells of the Ancestral Women dancing across Country with their digging sticks, travelling east, north and south in groups or long lines, creating significant sites along the way. Curator Djon Mundine describes the elements of her earlier work Women’s Dreaming (1998) as expressing each dancer’s ‘kinesphere…the movement space surrounding the body.’156
The movement and dance of womens’ ceremonies began appearing in Napangardi’s paintings in 1997157 . In 1999 her female relatives instructed her in ceremony and body painting, and Napangardi danced ceremonially as an adult for the first time.158 This experience marked a significant transition in her relationship to her Country and Jukurrpa, one which is manifested in the marks
154 Stephen Gilchrist, Everywhen: The eternal present in Indigenous Art from Australia (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Art Museums, 2016), 30. 155 Valerie Martin Napaljarri, ‘Indigenous responses to Salt on Mina Mina (2001),’ in Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, 22. 156 Djon Mundine, ‘A dance through the desert,’ in Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, 69. 157 Christine Nicholls, ‘Grounded abstraction: the work of Dorothy Napangardi,’ in Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, 62. 158 Mundine, ‘A dance through the desert,’ 68. 115 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
and painted pathways evoking the Ancestral Women’s travel across Country. Whilst previously she painted recognisable bush plants and food, her knowledge now extended into an invisible, felt experience of her homeland. The memory of her bodily experience of dancing across land can be sensed in the expansive, rhythmic undulations of line which carry us across the space. Mundine observes how ‘The process in Napangardi’s compositions mimics the repetition in singing and dancing…a danced landscape of song lines and dance lines - layering the land with meaning through choreography.’159
Although Napangardi lived for the majority of her adult life in Alice Springs, around four hundred kilometres southeast of Mina Mina, she made occasional visits to her homeland. Her statement reveals how her practice was deeply informed by her connection to family, Mina Mina and experiences of ceremony held in memory. Gilchrist observes that for many First Nations artists, painting and art making becomes an extended form of ceremony. He states that ‘For the artists themselves these are multi-modal works. When the artists are working, sometimes they might sing the songs associated with the narrative, perhaps they might gesture the movements of the ceremony…’160 While it cannot be confirmed that Napangardi made her paintings in the same way, the resonance of ceremonial dance and the trajectory of movement is palpable in her works. In expressing and reliving ceremonial memory, Napangardi’s practice collapsed physical distance to nurture a relationship with her Country of Mina Mina.
The First Nations people's understanding of places is shaped by the lores of Jukurrpa and occurs through multiple layers of temporal and sensory experience, belief systems and is integrated into ways of being in the world.161
159 Mundine, ‘A dance through the desert,’ 69. 160 Stephen Gilchrist in Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, ‘Everywhen there is time for Aboriginal art in America - An interview with Stephen Gilchrist’ in Art Monthly Australia no. 292, (09, 2016), 46. 161 The Jukurrpa as Punayi (Jeannie) Herbert Nungarrayi from the Diwurruwurru-jaru Aboriginal Languages Centre in the Northern Territory explains ‘is an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment…it is a lived daily reality.’ Punayi (Jeannie) Herbert Nungarrayi, ‘Introduction,’ in Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, 6. 116 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
This lived, moral code which is embedded in the land and which enlivens it in turn, guides the principles within Napangardi’s paintings. ‘Making her Jukurrpa’ in ceremony and extending this knowledge into her paintings, could be understood as a way of continuing and reaffirming her connection to places.
The uniquely personal nature of Napangardi’s process of mark-making, which was distinct from the traditional Warlpiri iconography, allows her work to be interpreted in multiple ways across First Nations people’s paintings and contemporary painting contexts. However, informing any conceptualisation of her works must be an acknowledgement of the significant cultural knowledge that underlies the visual forms. Curator Christine Nicholls argues that ‘Focusing exclusively on the abstract, formal qualities of such art works is ultimately Eurocentric, because such interpretations are premised on the suppression or even erasure of this considerable substratum of cultural meaning.’162 This is true of conceptualisations of First Nations people’s artworks which may attempt to align or compare them to notions of landscape painting.
Terry Smith asserts that ‘both [Australian landscape and modernism] were haunted, challenged and eventually overcome by the visual culture of Australia’s first peoples.’163 I would argue that the lived culture of Australia’s First Nations people, one that encompasses all aspects of living in reciprocal relationships with the land, has not only overcome, but dramatically shifted the grounds upon which Western visual culture is understood. First Nations people's paintings such as Napangardi’s cannot be regarded in the same terms as Western landscape art, they do not depict Country or Jukurrpa in order to represent ideas.164 Instead they indicate a relationship with Country that transcends and adds layers of complexity to our understanding of places within Australia.
162 Christine Nicholls, ‘Grounded abstraction: the work of Dorothy Napangardi,’ 65-66. 163 Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century, 9. 164 ‘The Dreaming is “not our idea”.’ Quoted from a Pintupi colleague of anthropologist Fred Myers. Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, 4. 117 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
Biddle argues for the power of affect in the experience of Central Desert First Nations people's paintings, to ‘literally bring life to Country, Ancestors, people… by literally enlivening us, the spectator.’165 The power of Napangardi’s paintings come not from their representation of Country or ceremonial practices, but from their ability to move us in a way that shares her lived experience of places and the Karnta-kurlangu Jukurrpa. They recall experiences of moving over the land in a trajectory of gestures and steps, to convey the ‘intimacy of the Dreaming as a profoundly embodied and lived experience.’166 In this way, Napangardi’s painting practice can be seen to enact her homeland, by bringing it to life through movement in each mark, and as a way for her to extend, reiterate and reconnect to her home through personal expression.
Napangardi’s works evidence a cultural practice that is continually being innovated by contemporary First Nations artists. Her practice is significant to my study not only because of its expression of embodied knowledges on painted canvas, but that this adaptation of an introduced medium of Western art creates a dialogue between cultures past and present. I argue that Napangardi’s practice asserts the contemporaneity of First Nations people’s culture to engender a reconsideration of how we perceive and creatively engage with places in Australia. This notion has been extremely generative for examining my own processes of interacting with Golden Gully. Understanding how Napangardi’s expanded practices of song, dance and ceremony, enabled her to enact her homeland of Mina Mina through bodily expressions in painting, has produced a deeper awareness of how my actions and movements engendered continued connections with Golden Gully. In the final part of this chapter, I discuss how interacting with this place through Sound Feedback Drawing processes and Binaural Sound Study Paper Mediators, deepened my understanding of the cultural significances of interacting with Wiradyuri Country.
165 Ibid., 2. 166 Ibid., 29. 118 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
SECTION 3: Sounding Golden Gully
Introduction
The first section of this chapter examined how Russell Drysdale constructed images of Golden Gully in his studio. I argued that Drysdale’s methods of painting Golden Gully constituted one way of relating to this place, that was influenced by the elevated, external viewpoint which is a visual convention from the tradition of European landscape. This section of the chapter will examine how my drawing and listening interactions with Golden Gully contributes to a drawing practice that departs from the overarching, external viewpoint that is a visible influence upon Drysdale’s paintings.
My drawing and listening processes are distinct from the practices of seeing that have dominated the European landscape tradition, and that have in turn shaped how Golden Gully has come to be perceived by the literature that affirmed Drysdale’s vision in the Australian national imaginary. My integrated drawing and listening methodologies facilitated multi-sensory interactions with the material and the acoustic qualities of Golden Gully and proliferated multiple modes of interacting with the ochre surfaces, water and mining tunnel walls, rather than presenting a single perspective as a visual depiction. This is a significant departure from the vision-centric practices that are foregrounded in European landscape and traditional approaches to drawing, which had strongly influenced early methodologies in my research.167 I assert that the interactive nature of my drawing and listening processes operates beyond any notion of landscape as defined by the European tradition, to instead enact manifold senses of Golden Gully.
167 Please refer to the early developments detailed in Chapter One Towards Emplacement. 119 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
This understanding of my processes was also influenced by Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi’s ways of enlivening and reconnecting to her homeland through her expanded painting practice. In the preceding section of this chapter I had discussed how Napangardi brought ‘life to Country’ through the affective power of her paintings.168 This potential to enact her Country was extremely generative for understanding the capacity of my drawing and listening processes to enact specific senses of Golden Gully. This opened my understanding towards the significance of interacting with the Country of the Wiradyuri people, which led to my engagement with the Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal Community Elders and Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises.
This part of the chapter focusses upon Sounding through Touch and Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully which extend and transfigure the notions of gesture, line and surface through integrated actions of drawing and listening. By engaging with the surfaces of ochre, acoustics of the mining tunnel walls, rain water and the contingent sounds of wind, birds and cars passing by, these interactions focused upon listening through the ideas of Touch and Sounding to enact unique senses of my bodily emplacement. My methodologies occur at the intersection of drawing and listening, where the material surfaces and specific sounds that constitute the audible dimensions of a place are the forces compelling my gestural responses. Through the use of video, Sound Feedback Drawing processes and Paper Mediators, my body's perception and capacities were altered, extended and transfigured, to generate distinctly partial experiences of Golden Gully that were responsive to the dynamic contingencies of this place.
168 Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, 2. 120 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
35 - 36. Sounding through Touch process, Golden Gully, March 2018
Midday sounding at the spot where the tunnel bends and there is a distinct edge in the jutting overhang of the ceiling…All the sounds are contained in the paper except the overtones. 07/03/18
Link to sound and video documentation excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-through-touch
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Sounding through Touch
Sounding through Touch (2018) constitutes a collection of sound, video and Paper Mediators that explore phases of an interaction with the surfaces and acoustic structure of a mining tunnel in Golden Gully. Through drawing with sound feedback, I sounded my bodily presence and extended the notions of gesture, line and mark-making in drawing. Working from within the tunnel rather than from an external vantage point, I was able to approach Golden Gully as a living place that unfolded around me rather than as a scene that I beheld. This interaction focused upon listening through the ideas of Touch and Sounding to actively scrutinise the effects of my body’s engagement with surfaces from within the tunnel.
Listening to sounds produced through movement became the primary directive in each iteration of this engagement. My Sound Feedback Drawing experiments began with a desire to listen to my body moving within Golden Gully, to explore what its surface textures and shapes could afford me as an artist working within a sonic dimension. The intimate, enclosed space of the mining tunnel was both inviting and oppressive, presenting possibilities for me to play with sonic reflections and refractions against the walls and low ceiling. This process involved finding ‘sweet spots’, sonic focal points in three sections of the tunnel where the sound waves from both speakers converged at locations where I could ‘catch’ them with the microphones attached to my wrists.
Finding these convergence points and playing with the feedback, required me to constantly shift positions and to move my entire body with sweeps and twists of my arms. These movements produced microtonal shifts, shaping the sounds through gesture. Coupled with this were scrapes, scrunches and squelching of damp Chinese paper against the gravel and ochre surfaces, which produced the initial sounds that were returned to me by the walls and rocks. The resulting recording is a superposition of two sonic iterations of the gestural act occurring several seconds apart.
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Although I was the primary instigator of the interactions in Sounding through Touch, the dynamics of Golden Gully shaped the sounds of my gestures in ways beyond my understanding or control. Wind blowing through the tunnel and dripping pools of rainwater comprised the gully’s contributions to the sonic mix. Intersections in these trajectories of sound and movement were mediated by speakers and microphones, giving rise to new relations and activating the sounding potential of Golden Gully’s surfaces that were previously dormant. These interactions were particular to the material and acoustic contingencies of this place, the timing of these interactions on days after rain, and my adaptation of recording technologies.
Listening through the ideas of Touch and Sounding enabled me to approach Golden Gully as a place that is open to the affective potential of bodily presence. Sounding through Touch is a study of the way listening situates me as a perceiver within this place by revealing my involvement in the generative process. Using an example of the footsteps of a walking person, Salomé Voegelin describes how ‘the listener is entwined with the heard. His sense of the world and of himself is constituted in this bond.’169 This notion unites the listener with the sound in a relationship that is deepened by the listener’s role as the sounding agent. In Sounding through Touch, the process of understanding my emplacement was twofold, occurring firstly through an exploration of surfaces using my fingers or boot encased feet, which created a sounding that enabled me to reaffirm the touch through listening.
Bouncing sound waves off the tunnel walls and catching the returning sounds with gestures, revealed the auditory texture of rock and gravel surfaces in an exploratory act that shares similarities with Alva Noë’s ideas of sensorimotor perception as a dynamic process. Citing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Noë describes visual perception as a tactile act, a ‘“palpation with the eyes”…[where] You enact your perceptual content, through the activity of skilful looking.’170 While the visual quality of surfaces are revealed by light, the sonic potential of surfaces
169 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, 5. 170 Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 73. 123 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
must be activated through movement and contact. Playing the sounds of my hands rubbing paper against tunnel surfaces was a way of simultaneously activating this potential and augmenting my reach, amplifying the contact to effectively touch the walls with my sonic fingers. By catching the echoes of this sonic touch, I located my position in relation to the walls of the tunnel, gaining an understanding of my emplacement through movement.
The lengths of Chinese paper used in this process were initially regarded as remnants, or potentially surfaces to be drawn on with ink. However, they contain within them the scars, tears and folds from their life as the sounding medium between my hands and the surfaces of the mining tunnel. This history of gestures is inherent to their form, implicit though not delineated. These temporary inscriptions have been recorded in sound and video, though not visibly on the paper surface. M. Catherine de Zegher deconstructs the fundamental notion of drawing as a tracing of line on a surface and ‘the inscription of this gestural act, a drawing.’171 Sounding through Touch is concerned with the process of the gestural act and posits the questions: What if the medium of air and surface of paper do not retain a mark? What if the tracing tool of my arms and fingers produce a line of sound that cannot be seen?
Unlike a visible drawing, the line of sound does not accrete over time, but fades away to be replaced by other lines. Therefore, a record of the momentary gesture acquired more significance than the material remnant of a mark. Sounding through Touch reconsiders the fundamental properties of drawing. It extends gesture and line into the time-based realm of sound and video to activate surfaces through touch and sound waves. I argue that this gestural line of sound finds expression through an echo of materiality which describes the surfaces of rock and paper, to deconstruct the relationship between the drawn line and the support. In this work, the audible line becomes an echo of the drawn surface.
171 de Zegher, ‘A Century Under the Sign of Line,’ 23. 124 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
The relationship of the expanding sonic line to surface in the sound recordings of Sounding through Touch is characterised by transformation through contact. The first line of my hands interacting with gravel, rock and paper surface is thrown out by the speakers through a line of wires and electrical signals. It is bounced off soft and hard ochre rock surfaces to be diffused and transformed as it returns. My hands then catch this line by intersecting it with another arc of bodily movement. These lines have breadth, depth and dilate to fill the tunnel with echoes of its own texture.
De Zegher argues that:
‘If line can articulate and alter the background - which is to say, the order of our social reality, potentially - then drawing allows a rare open space for the conscious formation and critical development of subjectivity and for social change…It is an essential feature of contemporary drawing to make this open space visible as a possibility.’172
The process of making Sounding through Touch opened an audible space through gesture as a way of locating my position in relation to the trees, rocks, birds, water and gravel of Golden Gully. These gestures facilitated the perceptual exploration of this place and generated new methods of relating to Golden Gully through sounding and touch.173 This intuitive response of reaching outwards was similar to groping my way through the dark. Listening to the sonic lines of interacting with surfaces and finding my position in relation to those lines through movement, was a way of listening to my relationship with this place.
I came to regard the remnants of paper used in the Sound Feedback Drawing processes as Paper Mediators, and they became the membrane on which a visual record of gestural responses to sound was created in video. The First, Second and Third Movement videos of Sounding through Touch form the third iteration of my investigation into sounding and touch within the mining tunnel
172 de Zegher, ‘A Century Under the Sign of Line,’ 113-116. 173 See my discussion Chapter Two Listening and Drawing, on Alva Noë’s comparison between sensorimotor perception and gesture. 125 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
of Golden Gully. These videos document the paper in successive states from hard and dry to pliable and damp and convey my experiences of listening to these transitions of texture. Sounds of my fingers which were compelled by bird calls, wind in eucalyptus trees and cars on the road nearby, change in quality from raspy and coarse to mellow and velvety, in accordance with changes in the paper as it was slowly dampened by my wet fingers.
In the video works First, Second and Third Movement, the sonic line often occurs outside of the visual frame, implying occurrences happening beyond. The framing in these videos is deliberately enclosed and limited, situating the viewer within a membrane of paper that has been coloured and marked by interactions with the ochre surfaces of Golden Gully. Filming the gestural event from under my legs while sitting on the gravel floor of Golden Gully, foregrounds my agency and involvement in the process of making. Ironically, by tightening the visual boundaries of the gestural act, I resist the visual conventions that bound Golden Gully to Drysdale’s singular view.
37. Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators, 2018
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38 - 39. Sounding through Touch - First, Second, Third Movements (video stills), Golden Gully, March 2018
State of paper and quality of its surface as shaped by temperature/humidity, wind, grit, water, is the sounding board. 10/03/18
Link to video excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-through-touch
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My Sound Feedback Drawing processes and videos in Sounding through Touch adopted an extremely partial approach to the ways I experienced the mining tunnel of Golden Gully. By deliberately obscuring and transfiguring my listening experiences with microphones and speakers, and constraining my vision through tightly framed videos, I actively constructed my own ways of listening, seeing, touching and moving. In critiquing the mediating nature of scientific technologies of visualisation, Donna Haraway argues that:
‘The “eyes” made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.’
Although Haraway speaks specifically of visual technologies such as microscopes, cameras and satellite surveillance systems,174 her argument resonates with the ways that I used omnidirectional microphones, speakers and an iPhone camera to extend and enhance my arms, legs, ears and eyes. Just as Drysdale rearranged the topography of Golden Gully through perspectival systems, so too did I reconfigure how I saw and listened by placing microphones and a camera under and between my legs in these videos. Both our artworks present equally partial and constructed understandings of Golden Gully. By acknowledging the specificity of my drawing and listening interactions, Sounding through Touch reinforces the possibility of multiple ways of relating to this place by contributing a specific bodily approach.
In Sounding through Touch the invisible line of listening was more powerful when documented through sound recordings and video, emphasising the process of enacting Golden Gully rather than its depiction through visual imagery. By focusing on the momentary unfolding of relations between my body, the audible line and the ochre surfaces of Golden Gully, I initiate ways of interacting with this place that are open to the contingencies of working from within.
174 Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges,’ 58-59. 128 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
40. Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully process, March 2018
Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully
It became apparent towards the conclusion of my first residency at Hill End in December 2016, that the quartz and ochre surfaces of Golden Gully held enormous potential as inscriptive surfaces in both their rough texture and pigmentation. Furthermore, the hard, sharp edges of broken quartz produced contrasting sounds to the soft, friable ochre walls of Golden Gully, when activated by hands, feet and paper. This appeal to the auditory, haptic and visual senses led me to investigate the effects of mutual contact between the surfaces of this place and paper. Reflecting upon this contact with the ochre surfaces of Golden Gully also led me to consider the importance of working with material from the Country of the Wiradyuri people.
The surface or support of a drawing is often regarded as one of the fundamental conditions necessary for a line or mark to materialise.175 Although art historian David Rosand asserts that in drawing ‘a line releases the allusive or generative
175 ‘Draw…to trace by drawing a pencil or pen or the like across a surface - is the first and simplest definition of the word.’ Tania Kovats, ‘Traces of thought and intimacy,’ in The Drawing Book, ed. Tania Kovats (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 9. 129 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
charge of the surface,’ the surface is still considered as a passive support ‘on which [a line or mark] operates.’176 Recent writers such as de Zegher however, have critically examined contemporary approaches to the relationship between the line, mark, surface support and visual ground, ‘acknowledging that a single line can challenge and change the understanding of the ground itself.’ In the subtle difference of this approach, the line not only transforms a surface, but empowers its evolution in order to shift the relationship between these fundamental properties.177 It is clear within the diversity of practices de Zegher discusses, that the line needs to occur in relation to a substrate or medium which enables it to find expression, even if that medium is air.
While Sounding through Touch explored the ephemeral sonic line as an echo of surfaces, Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully conflated the surface of paper and surfaces of this place as inscriptive tools within the gestural act. Inscription and tracing of lines occurred through the mutual contact between paper and ochre surfaces, revealing the process of listening through gestures, in visible traces on the paper and in audible recordings. In both works, paper became the mediating skin in-between myself and Golden Gully, shaping how my perceptual engagement with this place unfolded.178
One way of drawing and listening in Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully involved holding a Paper Mediator arc in each hand with microphones attached to my wrists. While awkward and physically straining to hold, I learnt to use the heavy watercolour paper to listen closely to sounds of contact between the paper, ochre walls and the quartz floor of Golden Gully. It also taught me to listen binaurally, with sounds from each arm moving independently in each ear. Wielding the paper as an extension of my hands, I explored the surfaces of Golden Gully through sounding and touch, occasionally struggling with the wind in order to do so. Both the paper and ochre surfaces became inscriptive
176 Rosand, Drawing Acts, 1-2. 177 de Zegher, ‘A Century Under the Sign of Line,’ 108-119. 178 Please refer to Chapter One Towards Emplacement for a discussion on Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the ‘in-between.’ 130 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
tools, leaving their traces in a reciprocal process of marking. By changing the dynamics between the inscriptive tool and drawing surface, both ochre and paper surfaces became active constituents in the sounding process. This method enabled listening and drawing to become co-productive in the gestural act.
Fundamental to Sounding through Touch and Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully, is the way that they enabled the discovery of new relations within Golden Gully by extending the notion of the drawing surface. Unlike traditional drawing structures where the visual ground is a circumscribing force in the composition, the paper surfaces of these works were malleable and defied the restrictions imposed by rectangular borders. Artist Avis Newman describes drawing as ‘a relational organisation of individual inscriptive acts, which is not an inscription of a unitary world…the boundaries of forms are open.’179 By approaching Golden Gully with experimental drawing processes that deconstructed visual boundaries in listening with spatially malleable drawing surfaces, I eliminated the physical distance between my body and the material surfaces of this place.
These processes initiated a co-productive entanglement between my body and the dynamic sounds, atmospheric contingencies and material surfaces of Golden Gully. In her phenomenological comparison of vision and audition, Salomé Voegelin observes that listening ‘shares nothing of the totalising ability of the visual’ and ‘visual autonomy does not exist. Listening produces a sonic life- world that we inhabit…generating its complex unity.’180 The methods of listening through touch and sounding facilitated by my Paper Mediators involved me as an active agent generating unique spatial and temporal embodied listening experiences. These processes of enacting new senses of Golden Gully depart significantly from the vision-centric conventions of both drawing and European landscape practices. In doing so, my drawing and listening processes and Paper Mediators were able to respond to the fluid materiality of this place.
179 Avis Newman and M. Catherine de Zegher, ‘The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act,’ The Drawing Centre’s Drawing Paper 36, no.1 (2003):10-11, https://issuu.com/drawingcenter/docs/ drawingpapers36_stageofdrawing 180 Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, 10-11. 131 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
41. Finding red-tinged ochre in Golden Gully, March 2018
42. Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully process, March 2018
Link to video documentation and listening process excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/binaural-sound-study-golden-gully
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In reflecting upon my interactions with Golden Gully, I came to realise that by engaging with ochre and sounding the mining tunnel walls, I was enacting a cultural dialogue with this place. In his discussion of Dorothy Napangardi’s painting practice, curator Djon Mundine describes her practice as 'layering the land with meaning through choreography.’181 Studying how Napangardi’s actions of painting expressed the rhythms and trajectories of women’s ceremonial song and dance, to connect her to her ancestral homeland of Mina Mina, led me to consider how the traditional owners of Golden Gully would understand this place and how my actions could potentially affect meanings of Golden Gully.
Furthermore, I came to realise that in using ochre to mark paper, I was appropriating an important cultural resource of the people of the Wiradyuri nation. This led me to contact the Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal Community Elders and Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises,182 for cultural guidance and permission to use the ochre. In providing me with permission to use cultural resources from their Country, the Elders requested that I present their letter of support alongside public displays of my work as a practice of ‘cultural manners.’183 Learning to consider the deep connection that First Nations people continue to practice with the living materiality of their Country, and acting upon this knowledge to engage in a dialogue with the Wiradyuri community, deepened my understanding of how listening and drawing to enact senses of my emplacement, necessitated a respectful dialogue with the existing significant cultural practices in this place. I regard deepening the ethical dimension of my drawing and listening methodologies as one of the most important learning outcomes of this PhD.
181 Mundine, ‘A dance through the desert,’ 69. 182 I initially contacted the Elders via email. Uncle Brian, Aunty Leanna, Uncle Bill and Yanhadarrambal generously gave their time and energy for a telephone conference with me on January 21, 2019. 183 Email exchange with Yanhadarrambal (Jade Flynn). This letter of support can be viewed at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 54ca0a4ae4b0a3c0e5979345/t/5e252497c1003e671f186450/1579492504757/ LOS+CINDY+CHEN.pdf 133 of 227 Part Two Interactions : Golden Gully
Actively engaging with the traditional owners of Golden Gully enabled me to understand the differences that I brought to this place in using my drawing and listening methodologies, traditional Chinese paper and European watercolour paper. As a migrant Chinese artist who was born outside of Australia, I encountered this place in Wiradyuri Country as a visitor who was inflected by my own cultural and bodily specificities, and conceptual constructs. Elizabeth Grosz asserts that ‘knowledge is an activity; it is a practice and not a contemplative reflection,’184 whereby bodily specificities contribute to the ‘possibility of other ways of knowing and proceeding.’185 Acting upon the deepened awareness I had gained through interacting with Golden Gully, and through my study of Dorothy Napangardi’s practice, allowed me to extend the ethical, social and cultural dimensions of my drawing and listening methodologies. Putting this knowledge into practice generated new ways of relating to Golden Gully that are alert to the partiality of my methodologies and their potential to affect changes in this place.
Sounding through Touch and Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully contributed to expanded notions of surface, line and mark-making in drawing; these interactions also departed from visual conventions of the European landscape tradition, that informed Russell Drysdale’s practice. However, the most important development from my interactions with Golden Gully are the critically reflexive relations that enabled me to distinguish the partiality of my approach, thereby reinforcing an understanding of Golden Gully as a material place that is constituted through diverse practices. In Part Three Interactions: $: - Langshi, I explore how developments in drawing and listening enabled me to interact with the village of Langshi in southern China.
184 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason,’ 37. 185 Ibid., 38. 134 of 227 PART THREE
INTERACTIONS: ၵᎪ - LANGSHI
Introduction 139
Section 1: Eight Views of Xiaoxiang - Imagined Worlds
• Reading and Wandering 147
• Listening Quietly 155
Section 2: Bingyi 161
Section 3: Sounding through Mountains, River, Bamboo
• Introduction 167
• Converging 171
• Looping - Möbius Scrolls 179
• Connecting Inner and Outer Worlds 184 43 - 47. ၵᎪ - Langshi: stone, bamboo, water and mist, photos taken in October - November 2017 and October 2018.
Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
INTRODUCTION
In 2008 I came across the image of a painting titled @W/ Yān sì wǎn zhōng - Evening Bell from Mist Shrouded Temple attributed to the thirteenth century Southern Song Dynasty Buddhist monk Mu-Ch’i. It was the first time during an art education almost entirely focused upon Western art history, that I discovered the complex interplay between poetry and painting in the Chinese shanshui tradition. The notion that almost a thousand years earlier, artists outside of the Western tradition had developed a way of evoking auditory experience through painting, instigated a fascination with the poetic and painterly theme of the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279) UY13 XiāoXiāng bājǐng - Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, of which Evening Bell is the seventh scene.
This part of the thesis takes a different approach to the preceding chapter focused upon interactions with Golden Gully in Hill End, New South Wales. The previous section aimed to create room for a generative dialogue about the multiplicity of experiencing places in Australia by examining the approaches of an Australian twentieth century artist and a contemporary Warlpiri artist, alongside processes developed through this research project. This section examines my interactions with $:E - the village of Langshi, in Guilin, China, located at the southern-most extremity of the historical Xiaoxiang region. Song Dynasty paintings of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang strongly influenced my initial expectations of Langshi. However, actively listening and sounding in situ with the traditional shanshui tropes of stone, water and bamboo, enabled me to create new ways of interacting with this place that questioned and extended upon the historical practices of my cultural heritage. I explore how drawing and listening processes informed by my Western-centric education and my position as a contemporary female artist who is socially and geographically mobile, enabled me to interpret the practice of shanshui by taking the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang as an initial departure point.
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I argue that the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang embody a poetic idyll of semantically open scenes and archetypal visual tropes. These scenes provided the setting for imaginary engagements with the region of Xiaoxiang that was particular to the Song Dynasty gentlemen scholars who possessed specific aesthetic and philosophical perspectives. The interconnected practices of poetry and painting of the literati constituted a cultural practice of this region that was particular to a group of people defined by their gender, social ranking and education.
Asserting the contextual specificity of Song Dynasty literati shanshui practices and acknowledging their influence upon my understanding of the land and waters of Langshi, I locate a departure point for my drawing and listening processes that rework the traditional Chinese scroll and respond to archetypal tropes of shanshui. Engaging with the shanshui tropes of rock, water and bamboo in their material reality within Langshi, enabled me to recognise and examine my gendered and social experiences that lie outside of the patriarchal literati tradition. In doing so, I critically reflect upon how I was situated in relation to the people and topography of Langshi in the present, and to develop alternative ways of interacting with this place through methods specific to my body's capacities augmented by twenty-first century recording technologies.
This chapter is comprised of three sections. The first section explores how Northern Song Dynasty scholar Su Shi’s poetic account of painter Song Di’s creation of the original Eight Views of Xiaoxiang reveal Di’s imaginative painting processes in his creation of the original Eight Views. This example demonstrate how the co-productive nature of poetic and painterly interactions in the literati social circles, evoked the multi-sensory power of the Eight Views in a cultural and aesthetic practice that was specific to the Song Dynasty literati. I also examine how the broader shanshui tradition employed common tropes developed from observations of nature, to express philosophical ideas of the literati that were rooted in Taoist, Neo-confucian and Buddhist belief systems.
Shanshui is a tradition that still exerts a strong influence upon Chinese culture today. The second part will discuss Bingyi as one example of a Chinese female
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artist extending the shanshui tradition through an ink painting practice that encompasses installation, site-specific environmental art, performance and film-making. I examine how Bingyi’s visual documentation of her performative ink painting process and its digital dissemination, could be seen as subverting the absence of women in the male dominated literati tradition.
In the final part of this chapter, I examine my interactions with Langshi undertaken in October to November 2017 and October 2018. By activating the resonant potential of the shanshui tropes of water, stone and bamboo with Sound Feedback Drawing processes, I engaged with the material and atmospheric contingencies of Langshi. I critically examine how I extended my embodied space of listening towards the local people through the gestured line of sound and in doing so, intervened upon their listening experience of this place. I also examine my development of the Möbius Scroll which reworks the traditional scroll used in Chinese painting. By exploring how my interpretation of shanshui tropes and scrolls have been shaped by Western notions of drawing, I examine the specificity of my interactions with Langshi and the distinct senses of this place that my drawing and listening processes evoked.
I argue that my drawing and listening processes in Langshi were deeply informed by Western frames of thinking. The scholars of philosophy, social geography and art theory that I reference in this chapter write mainly from North America or Western Europe, almost a thousand years after the original Song Dynasty cultures. In this regard, I draw from art historian James Elkins’ argument that art history is ‘identifiably Western,’ and is practiced globally according to ‘Western European and North American standards.’186 Finding correlations and locating Chinese shanshui painting in relation to European landscape and my contemporary art practice, sets up a critical framework that has its roots in the methodologies of Western art theory. I am also conscious of the fact that my access to the writings of historical Chinese poets and artists, even the titles of paintings, have been subject to the interpretation of
186 James Elkins questions whether ‘the historical interpretive practice of one area of the world can be read, and interpreted, by scholars in some other part of the world.’ Elkins, James, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, 6-7. 141 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
translators, with the original meanings slightly altered through their adaptation into English syntax. Similarly, by positioning my drawing and listening processes within the expanded practice of drawing, and extending upon the notions of surface, gesture, line and mark-making, I bring a distinctly Western approach to my interactions with Langshi. My interpretation of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang and the processes employed within this research project are structured by my education and the language within which I think.
Furthermore, conditions such as access had directed the trajectory of my travel and subsequently, the place this research became focused on. Not being able to find a suitable artist residency within Hunan, the province most closely associated with the historical Xiaoxiang region, I turned to AirBnB. After an exhaustive search, AirBnB’s scarily predictive algorithm presented a restored Qing Dynasty home in the neighbouring province of Guangxi. The village of Langshi, nestled between the Li River and the mountains of Guilin allowed me direct daily access to both mountains and water. Guided by digital serendipity, Langshi became the locus for my situated drawing and listening processes.
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48. Map of Xiaoxiang, created using Google Maps. With reference to Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2000), xxii.
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49. Muqi Fachang (attributed), Evening Bell from Mist Shrouded Temple, 1210-1270. Ink on silk. Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art, Wikimedia Commons, accessed December 31, 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Evening_bell_from_mist-shrouded_temple.jpg
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50. ‘Master Li’ of Shucheng, Dream Journey along the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (section of handscroll), 1170-1171. Ink on paper, h30.3 x w400.4 cm. Tokyo National Museum, e-Kokuho, accessed January 8, 2020, http:// www.emuseum.jp/detail/100220/000/000? mode=simple&d_lang=en&s_lang=en&word=Xiao+Xiang& class=&title=&c_e=®ion=&era=¢ury=&cptype=&o wner=&pos=1&num=1
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Eight Views of Xiaoxiang
=[. - píng shā yàn luò Geese Descending to Level Sand !VRC - yuǎn pǔ fān guī Sail Returning from Distant Shore &#K\ - shān shì qíng lán Mountain Market, Clearing Mist 4X; - jiāng tiān mù xuě River and Sky, Evening Snow OG' - Dòngtíng qiū yuè Autumn Moon over Dongting UY%( - Xiāoxiāng yè yǔ Night Rain on Xiaoxiang @W/ - yān sì wǎn zhōng Evening Bell from Mist Shrouded Temple TE." - yú cūn luò zhào Fishing Village in Evening Glow
Titles of scenes painted by Song Di, c. 1074, Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).187
187 Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2000), 71. 146 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
SECTION 1: Eight Views of Xiaoxiang - Imagined Worlds
Reading and Wandering
First painted by the exiled court official Song Di around 1074188 during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang comprise a set of scenes in which the titles reflect the structure of an eight-line verse. It is based upon the expansive Xiaoxiang region which corresponds roughly to modern day Hunan Province in China. The Xiang River, which lends the region part of its name, is fed by headwaters from the mountains of neighbouring Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, extending the historical Xiaoxiang region into the karst mountain areas southeast of current day Guilin city where Langshi Village is situated.189 Although the original painting by Song Di did not survive, various adaptations of this theme exist in China, Japan and Korea.
In this section, the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang form the focus for my investigation into how the interconnected practices of painting and poetry amongst the Song Dynasty literati, contributed to specific cultural constructs of an imagined place. I argue that shanshui tropes such as mountains, rivers and bamboo, and the ephemeral scenes conveyed by the Eight Views engendered associations with the Xiaoxiang region that were particular to the male scholars
188 While scholars such as Valérie Malenfer Ortiz date the origin of this theme to 1060 based upon Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) sources, art historian Alfreda Murck states that Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) sources do not support this claim. Instead Murck argues that the paintings were completed after Song Di’s dismissal from government office in 1074, the titles of the Eight Views theme reflecting his melancholy.
Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, ‘The Poetic Structure of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Pictorial Dream Journey,’ The Art Bulletin 76, no. 2 (1994), 259.
Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 69.
189 Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 6-7. 147 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
who differentiated themselves through their education and accomplishment in the ‘polite arts’ of calligraphy, poetry and painting.190
These practices evoked multi-sensory experiences of the Xiaoxiang region, and meanings connected to this region shifted over centuries according to contemporaneous values. By examining two distinct historical responses to the Eight Views, I explore the potential for this theme and the shanshui tropes to be adapted and interpreted. This study connects to my discussion in the third part of this chapter, which examines how my processes of drawing, listening and sounding extend upon Chinese shanshui visual tropes of water, stone and bamboo, as a way of initiating a dialogue between literati cultural practices and my interactions with Langshi as a female artist in the present.
In her extensive study on the political context of Song Di’s original Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, Alfreda Murck argues that extant paintings on this theme reveal the influence of poetry upon the historical development of subject matter and visual composition, and one painting ‘organised the scenes in ways that mimic the structure of an eight-line verse.’191 Shanshui painting and poetry not only shared the mediums of ink and brush, the revelatory process of unrolling a long scroll to view sequential scenes imbued paintings with a narrative capacity, whereby the visual experience was temporal and accumulative.
Curator Chang Tsong-zung observes that ‘In Chinese there are two poignant words that describe the appreciation of a landscape painting: “reading” and “wandering” (5 dú and yóu)…Literati training of “reading” is for sensing the cultivation and “spiritual realm” (6 yī jìng) conveyed by “brushwork/ink- play”… a building of sensibilities, hoping to arrive at understanding/ appreciation outside verbal language.’ A connoisseur wanders visually by following the rhythm of a painting’s brushwork. ‘He is also invited to physically
190 ‘Polite arts’ were considered necessary accomplishments for the gentleman scholar. Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 7. 191 Murck notes that paintings ‘illustrated the main motifs’ or ‘offered a lyrical summation’ of a poem’s central theme. Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 4. 148 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
turn the album leaf and shift the long hand scroll.’192 It is notable that Song Dynasty literati required ‘training’ in this form of aesthetic appreciation in order to ‘read’ shanshui. I argue that the shared understanding on how to ‘read’ a painting, served to reinforce the social and educational status of literati gentlemen scholars,193 to generate a particular aesthetic practice of places. This was achieved through painting’s close association with poetry.
Northern Song scholar official and renowned poet Su Shi, believed that painting and poetry constituted one single discipline (B-F - shī huà běn yī lü).194 Historian Susan Bush observes that in the centuries preceding the Northern Song, painting was ranked lower than poetry and calligraphy in the ‘polite arts.’195 However, Su Shi and his cohort of gentlemen scholars elevated painting as a medium of personal expression and its connection to poetry established ‘the status of painting as a liberal art’ reflective of a scholar’s education and character.196 Amongst the literati, painting and the shanshui genre became carefully constructed aesthetic systems embedded in social, educational and therefore gendered hierarchy.197
Painter Guo Xi (ca.1020 - c.1090), a contemporary of Song Di and Su Shi, stated that a landscape “suitable for travelling in or gazing upon is not as successful as one in which one may dwell or ramble”.198 Guo Xi’s statement suggests that a
192 Chang Tsong-zung, ‘Reflections of “The Yellow Box in Qingpu,”’ Chinese Cross Currents 5, no.4 (October 2008): 70-72. 193 Literati painters differentiated themselves from commissioned artisans through their emphasis on painting as a leisurely, intellectual pursuit. Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 1-4. 194 Su Shi (ca.1037 - ca.1101) was a scholar official, poet and aesthetic critic who ‘remains one of the most important theorists of “picture idea” (huayi) or poetic painting.’ Also known as Su Dongpo. Ortiz, ‘The Poetic Structure of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Pictorial Dream Journey’, 260. 195 Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 12-13. 196 Ibid., 22-23. 197 Please see my discussion on the exclusively male context of literati gatherings and the imperial examination system in Chapter 1: Towards Emplacement. 198 Guo Xi (also Kuo Hsi) quoted in Richard Edwards, ‘Painting and Poetry in the Late Sung,' in Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting, ed. Alfreda Murck and Wen C. Fong (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 405-406. 149 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
painting’s capacity to evoke contemplative reflection was held in higher regard than its visible likeness. These paintings employed distinct visual tropes that reflected the literati’s relationship with the natural world, which was inflected by philosophical and spiritual beliefs grounded in a fusion of Neo Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist teachings.199 Su Shi observed that ‘mountains, rocks, bamboo trees, shadows, waves or mists’ have no constant form, and in their eternal variance are ideal subjects for conveying the qì - breath energy that animates nature.200
Furthermore, painterly motifs such as bamboo had been associated with ‘gentlemen’ since the fourth century, becoming synonymous with gentlemen scholars in the eleventh century due to its ‘upright and enduring’ character.201 I observe that by imbuing painted subjects in nature with particular philosophical, spiritual and gendered values, the literati practice of shanshui and its imagery, was inherently partial towards masculine experiences within an elite social context. This is important to consider when examining Song Di’s creation of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, and the particular approach that I take in responding to mountains, rocks, bamboo and water present within Langshi.
Philosopher François Jullien asserts that the Chinese painter of traditional shanshui ‘does not paint the thing as it appears in its singular form before his eyes… Rather, he explores it in depth and experiences it, in order to extract from it…the con-tenance (both “capacity” and “countenance”) that makes for its vitality.’202 For the literati to express and appreciate the ‘vitality’ in subjects observed from nature, they required a specific aesthetic and philosophical
199 Sherman E. Lee, Chinese Landscape Painting (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art,1962), 4. 200 Su Shi/Su Dongpo referenced in François Jullien, The Strange Idea of the Beautiful, 281-282. 201 Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 102-103. 202 Bracketed section indicates translator’s note. François Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, 146-147.
See also Wen C. Fong’s discussion in Fong, Beyond Representation, 77. 150 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
outlook. In my own approach to the mountains, rocks, river and bamboo present in Langshi, I engaged with their materiality to bring forth their potential for sounding and listening. In doing so, I generated an understanding of Langshi and a connection to the literati tradition, that emerged from my body’s interactions with these motifs in the present. I took a highly individual approach to interpreting the practice of shanshui, by adapting it to my specific circumstances in Langshi.
In the eleventh century, Song Di’s approach to painting mountains demonstrates his focus upon creating archetypal motifs rather than the visible likeness of specific topographies. The scholar official Shen Gua noted in 1090 that ‘real mountains were not the sole inspiration for Song Di’s art.’203 Song Di would drape a piece of silk on a run-down wall and carefully observe variations in light and shape on the obscured, uneven surface. These observations provided inspiration for irregular peaks and undulations in his paintings of mountains and valleys.204 By employing a process of visual extraction from the material world around him, Song Di was able to construct an idealised view of the Xiaoxiang region that conveyed his own particular ideas and experiences.
Song Di drew upon literati shanshui painting’s synonymous relationship with poetry to position the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang as a subject for the scholarly contemplation of specific ideas. Deliberately ephemeral scenes of misty mountains and meandering waters, allowed Song Di to create an emotional realm of semantically open poetic views, that conveyed his experiences of political exile in the Xiaoxiang region, through visual archetypes that were familiar to his colleagues.
Three poems by Su Shi describe witnessing Song Di’s painting process and illustrate the creative dialogical exchange that occurred between the poet and
203 Shen Gua quoted in Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 66. 204 Kuo Jo-Hsu, 1951 quoted in Nancy Wey, ‘Mu Ch’i and Zen Painting’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1974), 147-148. 151 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
painter, both of whom had experienced political exile. In the first poem Evening in Xiaoxiang, Su Shi writes:
N7) - xī zhēng yì Nánguó
A-UY - táng shàng huà Xiāoxiāng
"0& - zhào yǎn yún shān chū
J D - fú kōng yě shuǐ cháng
? > - jiù yóu xīn zì xǐng
<* - xìn shǒu bǐ dōu wàng
P,+ - huì yǒu Héngyáng kè
ZL - lái kàn yì miǎo máng
During a western journey, recalling the Southern Kingdom, In a hall, you painted Xiaoxiang; Before one’s eyes, cloudy mountains emerged, In emptiness floated long wilderness waters; On former journeys the mind reflects, Trusting your hand the brush is utterly forgotten; Perhaps the Hengyang traveller, Will come to see your misty conception.
Su Shi’s poetry gives us insights into Song Di’s process of painting a remembered world.205 Song Di’s ‘misty conception’ of a Xiaoxiang previously travelled through on horseback, was reconstructed from former experiences to convey his personal sentiments about the political climate.206 Directly addressed to Song Di, these poems convey the artist’s motivations and internal contemplative processes that would have otherwise not been visible in the original paintings, even if they had survived. Song Di responded to Su Shi’s poems with a letter stating ‘You sir, are also a fine painter,’ demonstrating the
205 Translation of poem from Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 67-69. 206 See Alfreda Murck’s Poetry and Painting in Song China for a detailed investigation into Di’s political motivations. 152 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
dialogical capacity of the two arts as well the artists' shared understanding of Song Di’s sentiments.
The intimate and exclusive nature of viewing shanshui paintings in literati practices, generated understandings of the Xiaoxiang region that were particular to those who partook in the exchange of painting and poetry. Although poetry on the Xiaoxiang had been associated with the melancholy of political exile since the third century B.C.,207 interpretations of this region varied amongst the groups of scholars. This difference be seen in a later painting of the Eight Views. Painted by an obscure ‘Master Li of Shucheng’ during the Southern Song Dynasty, the four metre long scroll painting Dream Journey along the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (1170-1171) was commissioned by the Chan Buddhist monk Yungu Yuanzhao, who had not visited the Xiaoxiang region and in his twilight years, wished to ‘travel mentally through it.’208 In her analysis of the painting’s original context, Valérie Malenfer Ortiz asserts that ‘Dream journey is essentially a literati painting, made for a Chan master and a group of Confucian scholars, by an artist who was…a painter by profession.’209
Commentary written on the scroll of Dream Journey demonstrates that this group of literati viewers were predominantly interested in the painting’s parallels with Buddhist thought. In the sixth inscription, scholar Zhang Quan writes ‘Gautama Buddha has taken the mountains and rivers as illusions, now in flux, now taking shape…one should not be obsessed with the distinction between the real and the illusory.’210 In this instance, The Eight Views of Xiaoxiang and shanshui tropes of mountains and rivers in transformative variations, were conceptually reworked to foreground Buddhist notions of ephemeral sensory phenomena. In a shift from the preceding century, the
207 Murck, Alfreda, "The "Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang" and the Northern Song Culture of Exile.”Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, no. 26 (1996): 115-116, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 23496050 208 Ortiz, ‘The Poetic Structure of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Pictorial Dream Journey,’ 261. 209 Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape : The Power of Illusion in Chinese Painting (Boston: Brill, 1999), 4-5. 210 Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape, 15. 153 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
Xiaoxiang region was no longer primarily understood by the literati as a place of exile, but became an imagined place of spiritual contemplation. This group of gentlemen scholars who unrolled the scroll to ‘travel mentally’ through the scenes, generated a particular notion of the Xiaoxiang region that was specific to their interests. In the twenty-first century, The Eight Views of Xiaoxiang continues to be adapted as a subject that is open to various interpretations.
Contemporary artist Hao Liang engages with this tradition of adaptation by appropriating stylistic components from various historical paintings in his own Eight Views of Xiaoxiang.211 Hao Liang’s Eight Views is far removed from physical correlations with the Xiaoxiang region, instead becoming a site for cultural parody and critique. Manipulating formal elements of line, colour and compositional space, Hao Liang reworks classical shanshui tropes such as bamboo, mists, water and rock formations to create highly detailed, idiosyncratic interpretations of the Eight Views, that contribute his own approach to the historical shanshui tradition.
By engaging with The Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, I partake in a practice of interpreting an iconic subject from the tradition of shanshui. In doing so, I am aware that the shanshui tradition, and the visual tropes inherent within it, such as the motif of bamboo, was predominantly practiced by and associated with men. Through my drawing and listening processes, I bring particular conceptual and methodological approaches to the Eight Views and the tropes of shanshui, that take into account my social and bodily experiences as a woman during interactions with the materiality of Langshi. In the part to follow, I examine how the literati employed poetry to evoke multi-sensory experiences in their paintings, which generated a highly specific social and aesthetic practice.
211 Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art Beijing, ‘Hao Liang: Eight Views of XiaoXiang,’ accessed February 3, 2019. http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/eight-views-of-xiaoxiang-1-2/ 154 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
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51. Ma Lin, Listening Quietly to Soughing Pines (detail), 13th c. Song Dynasty. Ink and colours on silk, L226.6 x W110.3cm. Taipei National Palace Museum, accessed January 8, 2020,http://www.npm.gov.tw/exh92/treasure/english/ selection-main9.htm
Listening Quietly
Alfreda Murck observed that the titles of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang echo ‘the formal structure of regulated verse, the pairs of titles juxtapose sound and silence.’212 Viewers familiar with the titles, and who occupied a similar position, would have been able to conjure from their imagination the sounds of honking geese, the lively din of a market, and the thrum of rain at night. The most direct reference to sound is in the penultimate scene of a bell tolling in the evening. As a sonic event that appears in Chinese literature to signify a moment of insight or
212 Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 72. 155 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
reflection upon the illusory nature of existence,213 its meaning would have been apparent to the literati scholar, alerting him to the end of his journey through the Xiaoxiang. I argue that the sensorially evocative power of the poetic titles of the Eight Views and their philosophical and spiritual meanings, were essential for imparting a multi-sensory dimension to the literati’s visual and imaginary journey through this region. This experience was particular to the literati and those who shared their aesthetic and literary expertise.
Historically, Chinese painters have long been fascinated with the challenge of conveying the invisible sensations of sound and smell through imagery. However, these sensations always occurred as part of a narrative event; imagery was never invented to represent the imagined shape of a sound for instance. Unlike in Europe,214 the interest in multi-sensory perception did not lead to pure abstraction in the Chinese pictorial tradition. François Jullien notes that ‘even while advocating a transcendence of resemblance in favour of resonance, it never envisions that this transcendence can lead to dissemblance.’215 It was painting’s evolution through its association with the written word that ultimately bridged the gap between visual suggestion and sensory imagination.
A well known example is the Southern Song Emperor Hui-Tsung’s ‘poetry- painting puzzle’ issued to court painters: “The scent of trampled flowers follows the hooves of the returning horse.” The most highly received response was a precisely painted image of butterflies fluttering around the horse’s hoof, whereby according to Edwards, ‘the exactness of the image…created
213 Murck states that for ‘Buddhists who created poems or paintings of the Eight Views of XiaoXiang, Evening Bell from a Mist-Shrouded Temple became a link to the religious life and a metaphor for Chan enlightenment.’ Chan Buddhism is more well known as Zen Buddhism in Western contexts. Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 111-113. 214 I am making a broad comparison to a movement which occurred almost 800 years later. Karin von Maur asserts that ‘Music stood behind the birth of pictorial abstraction and the revolutionary unrest in the arts that, in the years before World War I, pervaded the great art centres from Paris to Moscow and Prague, from London to Rome and, finally, New York.’ Karin von Maur, The Sound of Painting - Music in Modern Art, trans. John W Gabriel (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999), 8.
215 The term ‘resonance’ refers to 䶷殱 - qìyùn (literally ‘breath’ and ‘musical or pleasing sound’), which Jullien translates as ‘breath resonance’. Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, 115. 156 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
reverberations that lead the viewer beyond seeing and feed (sic) the other senses.’216 Similarly, Southern Song court painter Ma Lin’s Listening Quietly to Soughing Pines217 (c.13th C) portrays a finely dressed gentleman leaning towards a tree, listening intently to the wave-like sounds of innumerable pine needles in the wind. Notably, the individual who has the privilege of leisurely, cultivated listening is male, and in contrast to his servant, is depicted on a larger scale to foreground his prominent role in the scene.
Unlike the precise imagery of artisanal court painters, the bond between poetry and painting allowed the literati to create paintings that ‘evoke but do not define imagery.’218 In the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang and in painted versions such as Dream Journey, there is no male figure ‘listening’ or ‘smelling’ for us. Tiny, undifferentiated figures, mere specks in boats, are not a part of this educated community of gentlemen savouring sounds, sights and smells. Viewers such as Northern Song painter Guo Xi, who were able to ‘enjoy the sounds and glowing lights of nature “without leaving one’s room”,’219 were assumed to share the painter’s cultivated practice of ‘wandering' through and ‘reading’ poetic paintings. Through the evocative power of poetic titles and ambiguous imagery, literati painters and their cohort conjured multi-sensory, imaginary worlds of the Xiaoxiang that were ‘read' according to their spiritual, philosophical or political concerns. This constituted a highly specific, collective literati practice of a place.
My own access to imaginary sounds in the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang were facilitated through scholarly interpretations, the Chinese/English translation application on my phone, and by scrolling digitally through Dream Journey online. In Langshi, my context in the twenty-first century precluded any possibilities of hearing a temple bell. Audible events such as the tolling of temple bells had disappeared due to cultural upheaval and infrastructure
216 Edwards, "Painting and Poetry in the Late Sung,” 422. 217 Painting can be viewed on the Taipei National Palace Museum website. http://www.npm.gov.tw/exh92/treasure/english/selection-main9.htm 218 Edwards, ‘Painting and Poetry in the Late Sung,’ 405. 219 Northern Song Painter Guo Xi quoted in Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape, 7. 157 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
development.220 The sounds of boat motors, television sets through open doorways, chainsaws demolishing old wooden homes and concrete houses being rapidly constructed, constituted my listening experience of Langshi in the present. I realised that a contemporary, multi-sensory experience of the Xiaoxiang region would differ greatly from those of almost a thousand years ago.
These sounds were constant signifiers that the global developments that made it possible for me to travel here, were rapidly lifting this once quiet and impoverished fishing village out of the misty evening glow and into the glare of modern tourism. Bringing my drawing and listening methodologies to interact with the mountains and waters of Langshi, made me an artist tourist who was contributing towards these changes. These circumstances shaped my drawing and listening interactions, through which I enacted multi-sensory experiences of the Xiaoxiang and shanshui tropes, that were entirely distinct from the poetic and painterly methods used by the Song Dynasty literati.
This section explored how The Eight Views of Xiaoxiang formed the locus for aesthetically determined interactions that were only available to those initiated into collectives of educated, male individuals of a particular social status. I argue that these aesthetic and cultural practices also contributed to the elision of women’s presence in the shanshui tradition, and therefore, from a significant portion of Chinese cultural history. In the following section, I explore how this absence bears an influence upon the practice of contemporary artist Bingyi. In the final part of this chapter, I examine how my drawing and listening research in Langshi extended upon shanshui tropes of rock, water and bamboo to address experiences that are overlooked in this tradition.
220 The temple to Guānyīn Púsà (also known as the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara - Bodhisattva of Compassion - The one who perceives all sounds of the world) in Langshi was demolished during the cultural revolution of 1966-76. Su Haibo and Su Ayi, in conversation with author, 2017. 158 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
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52 - 53. Bingyi, Shape of the Wind, 2012. Ink on paper, L16000 x W300cm. Still images from documentation video. Richard Widmer, ‘Bingyi: Shape of the Wind, 2012.04,’ accessed January 5, 2019, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5ZXRfioUzc.
159 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
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54 - 55. Bingyi, Shape of the Wind, 2012. Ink on paper, L16000 x W300cm. Detail and Installation view at St Johannes Evangelist Church in Berlin. Bingyi, accessed January 5, 2019, http://www.bingyi.info/2012-2/shape-of-the-wind/
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SECTION 2: Bingyi
Contemporary Chinese artist Bingyi engages with the literati shanshui tradition through an ink practice encompassing site-specific land art, installation, music, poetry, calligraphy, film making and performance. In this section, I examine how her embodied engagement with places in China and Germany can be seen in the visual documentation of her performative processes and works on paper. I argue that Bingyi’s performative practice which employs ink in her work The Shape of Wind: in Fuchun Mountains, redresses feminine absence in the shanshui tradition and contemporary Chinese cultural landscape, through material traces and the digital documentation of her bodily presence and actions.
My approach to Bingyi’s practice takes into consideration the evolution of women’s art practices within China, in relation to the traditionally male- orientated practices of shanshui, and the continued marginalisation of female artists in Chinese contemporary art. This reading is influenced by writings on Chinese feminism by writers such as Britta Erickson, Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko, and the writing of art researcher Luise Guest. Curator Britta Erickson argues that as gender equality was a state endorsed institution during the cultural revolution of 1966-76, ‘there has been no feminist movement in China comparable to that in the West.’221 However, research conducted by Liu, Karl and Ko on early twentieth century writings by both female and male Chinese feminist theorists, demonstrates that Chinese feminism cannot be ‘neatly mapped…in opposition to the fiction of a totalised Western feminism.’222 In considering the different ways in which feminism may be practiced culturally,
221 Britta Erickson, ‘The Rise of a Feminist Spirit in Contemporary Chinese Art,’ Art AsiaPacific, Issue 31 (2001): 70. 222 For example, social theorist He-Yin Zhen published her Feminist Manifesto in 1907. Dorothy Ko, Rebecca E. Karl, and Lydia H. Liu, The Birth of Chinese Feminism , 8. 161 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
I acknowledge that my reading of Bingyi’s work, which is informed by writers working primarily from a Western viewpoint, may not be shared by Bingyi in her understanding of her practice.
In the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2013-14 survey of Chinese artists working with ink, female artists were remarkably underrepresented. Of the participating thirty five artists, only two were women.223 Although not exhibited, Beijing based artist Bingyi (b.1975) received a brief mention by writer Wu Hung in the accompanying catalogue as a ‘relative late comer to the field’ of 2 M shíyàn shuǐmò - experimental ink art.224 I argue that the contemporary cultural climate in which she is practicing, bears similarities in its marginalisation of women as the literati tradition that she engages with.
Navigating the dichotomy of - guóhuà (traditional Chinese painting) and
- xīhuà (Western painting) was an early point of departure for experimental ink practices after the end of the Cultural Revolution the late 1970’s.225 However, in the re-invention of traditional ink practices that draw upon patriarchal literati culture, writer Luise Guest argues that ‘the development of Chinese avant-garde practices in the years of Reform and Opening reveals a degree of nostalgia for a past culture in which hegemonic masculinity is unexamined.’226
As a part of the recent generation of experimental ink artists, I observe that Bingyi is similarly circumspect about the inherently masculine practices of the
223 Erickson notes that ‘marginalisation of women is…supported by cold statistics,’ with women grossly underrepresented in the fine arts departments of art academies. This trend continues in professional exhibition contexts. Britta Erickson, ‘The Rise of a Feminist Spirit,’ 66. 224 Wu Hung, ‘Transcending the East/West Dichotomy: A Short History of Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting’ in Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, Maxwell K. Hearn and Wu Hung (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 29-30. 225 Maxwell K. Hearn, ‘Ink Art: An Introduction,’ in Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, 13. 226 Luise Guest, Secrets, Sorrow and the Feminine Subjective: Nüshu references in the work of contemporary Chinese artist Ma Yanling, 3-4, accessed April 24, 2019, https://unsw.academia.edu/LuiseGuest 162 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
literati tradition. She continues the literati tradition of poetry and painting through a writing practice in the form of epic Han Dynasty style poetry and publications such as her theoretical treatise on landscape Shanshuilun. When queried by writer Luise Guest about her continuation of the male dominated intellectual tradition, Bingyi affirms her role as the ‘ultimate literati’ of the postmodern digital age, whereby poetic and painterly dialogues with her friends and viewers are facilitated through images and messages on Facebook.227
Guest observes that ‘there is something subversive in [Bingyi] assuming the mantle of a scholarly shanshui painter,’ and the artist is ‘entirely aware’ of her ingression into a ‘male domain.’228 However, Bingyi does not explicitly address the patriarchal nature of literati shanshui and the contemporary experimental ink practices she engages with. I argue that in circumventing the Great Firewall of Chinese government censorship to share paintings and calligraphy on Facebook, and appearing in video documentation of her performative ink practice on Youtube, Bingyi initiates a subversive, feminine presence through a contemporary digital continuation of literati tradition.
The Shape of Wind: in Fuchun Mountains (2012) is a work that uses the energy and memory of fire to connect the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) scroll painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains with the site of St Johannes-Evangelist Church in Berlin, and a mountain at Fuchun River in China. Made onsite in Fuchun, Zhejiang province where Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains was painted, the 160 metre long painting on paper transformed the Fuchun mountain road for several months and harnessed the effects of wind, humidity, sunlight and terrain texture, to create intricate flows of ink that speak of encounters between the land and the artist’s body.
Referencing the original Ming Dynasty scroll’s partial incineration, Bingyi used ashes from burnt paper, distributed by the wind, to affect the flow of ink that
227 Luise Guest, ‘The Postmodern Literati: The Performative Practice of Bingyi,’ in Bingyi: Impossible Landscapes 10.13 - 11.25, 2018 Exhibition Catalogue (Beijing: Ink Studio, 2018), 55. 228 Ibid. 163 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
she poured onto the paper with watering cans as she ran down the slope. Exhibited in St-Johannes-Evangelist Church which was burnt in World War Two, blossoming swirls of ink speak of the speed and trajectory of Bingyi’s gestures, her actions creating a conduit between places at several points in distant and recent history.
Her dynamic painting process can be viewed online in a documentary by Richard Widmer.229 In directly referencing a famous work from literati tradition, and visually documenting her physical intervention at a vast scale upon the original location, Bingyi makes it clear to her audience that she is the creative subject generating her own aesthetic and sensory experience within this historically significant site. Unlike the literati shanshui paintings in which the imagined body wandering along the depicted scenes was unequivocally presumed to be male and possessing the same aesthetic and spiritual outlook, Bingyi’s performative documentary process unsettles the distancing gaze in its evidence of her engagement with Fuchun that was entirely subjective and personal.
As a Chinese artist educated in America,230 Bingyi draws upon both Chinese and Western art practices, histories and theories. She identifies closely with practices of land and performance art that interact with natural forces, regarding her site-specific land art ink performance pieces as ‘Walter de Maria inverted.’231 She also subverts the European Romantic Sublime tradition in her own ‘search for the sublime,’ which is informed by Buddhist and Han Dynasty Daoist beliefs. For Bingyi, conceptual, land and performance art making is ‘a ritual I perform between Heaven and Earth…this ritual is relational between the universe and the individual, it’s a kind of sublime. It’s intensely primal.’232
229 Richard Widmer, ‘Bingyi: Shape of the Wind, 2012.04,’ WiE Kultur [Berlin], accessed April 24, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5ZXRfioUzc 230 Ink Studio Beijing, ’Bingyi Biography,’ accessed February 3, 2019, https://www.inkstudio.com.cn/artists/75-bingyi/overview/ 231 Luise Guest, ‘Between Heaven and Earth: Bingyi’s Meditative Ink Paintings,’ The Culture Trip, May 4, 2017, accessed February 3, 2017, https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/ between-heaven-and-earth-bingyi-s-meditative-ink-paintings/ 232 Ibid. 164 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
Bingyi's appropriation of the notion of the sublime and its origins in a European landscape tradition that is rooted in ways of seeing, such as the elevated view which feminist writer Donna Haraway describes as signifying the ‘unmarked positions of Man and White,’233 poses questions about how an artist’s interaction with the land is reflective of specific ideologies. In her cross cultural references, as in her unapologetic appropriation of literati traditions, Bingyi demonstrates an awareness of her significance as a female figure imaged within the landscape.
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56. Bingyi, Emei Waterfall, 2018. Still image from documentation video. Ink Studio Beijing, accessed January 5, 2019, https://www.inkstudio.com.cn/ video/36/
In the video documentation of The Shape of Wind, Bingyi is costumed in all white which makes her a prominent figure in the scene. In the video of her 2018 work Emei Waterfall which is more deliberately staged, a camera pans up the
233 Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges,’ 57. 165 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
waterfall to reveal Bingyi clad in white fur,234 in an image that recalls the jarring juxtaposition of human culture and nature in German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c.1818), or the gentleman in Ma Lin’s Listening Quietly to Soughing Pines (c 13th C). Just as Ma Lin’s gentleman with his servant speak of the cultivated elite, Bingyi’s choice of attire in the documentation of Emei Waterfall can be understood to resonate with the values of China’s contemporary affluent middle classes.
Bingyi’s selection of white cotton dresses or luxury fur vests were not practical choices for the task of pouring buckets of black ink. Splashes of ink on white evidence her participation in the making process, extending the painting onto her body and garments. The resulting scrolls convey a palpable sense of how her body had intervened upon a place, however, it is through the documentation of her dynamic, bodily painting process that we can see her physical emplacement in an engagement that transcends the painterly conventions of literati shanshui tradition.
Bingyi’s performative video documentations are a deliberate extension of her ink practice, whereby she also emphasises her cross-cultural, subjective perspective, informed by her globally mobile position. Shared online, they present an example of an embodied, emplaced practice and demonstrate how the digital era (and a good virtual private network connection) can perpetuate an artist’s presence, reaching across physical and political boundaries. In this analysis of Bingyi’s work, her multi-faceted practice generates a space for dialogue on how the mediums and conventions of shanshui and the practices of the literati, can be extended upon or subverted, through embodied practices and contemporary technology. In the following, I will explore how my drawing and listening interactions with Langshi, addressed the experiences that were overlooked in literati shanshui practices.
234 At 00:50 and 01:48. Ink Studio Beijing, ‘Bingyi: Emei Waterfall,’ accessed April 25, 2019, https:// www.inkstudio.com.cn/video/36/ 166 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
SECTION 3: Sounding through Mountains, River and Bamboo
Introduction
The first section of this chapter examined how the co-productive disciplines of poetry and painting amongst the literati in Song Dynasty China, created multi- sensory, imagined practices of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang that were particular to specific groups of educated, male elite. This theoretical enquiry established my understanding of how this particular practice of the Xiaoxiang region contributed to the elision of gendered and social experiences that existed outside of male dominated literati practices. This in turn shaped how the tradition of shanshui has come to be practiced in the present, with contemporary female artists such as Bingyi, visibly contributing a female presence towards a male domain.
This section elucidates firstly, how my interactions with the village of Langshi led me to address a space of women’s labour on the Li River that is overlooked in the shanshui tradition, and which I initially disregarded myself. Following these lines of enquiry initiated a deeper questioning of the aestheticised nature of my interactions with the material surfaces, waters and people of Langshi. From these interactions emerged an awareness of how my position as an internationally mobile female artist, inflected my social and cultural experiences of Langshi. I also examine how my Sound Feedback Drawing processes on the river impacted upon the daily routines and listening experiences of the local people.
Secondly, my transformation of the traditional paper scroll into a Möbius loop was a significant development from early 2018 that allowed me to draw on a single continuous surface while walking, sitting and sounding. Learning new ways to move and draw within Langshi enabled me to extend upon shanshui
167 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
tropes of rock, water and bamboo, and to subvert the rarified literati practice of cultivated indoor scroll viewings by taking the Möbius Scrolls outside to mediate interactions between my body and the surfaces of Langshi. In these discussions, I focus upon a pivotal body of work made in October 2018, $:9: &, 4, S - Sounding Langshi: Mountain, River and Bamboo, in which I employed the Möbius Scroll and Sound Feedback Drawing processes to interact with rocks, water and bamboo present in Langshi. I also discuss how the work , , - - Walk, Listen, Draw embodies the trajectory of my movement, as I learnt to listen and draw while walking along the river and climbing mountains. These developments enabled me to enact distinct perceptual experiences of Langshi, that were specific to my interpretation of the shanshui tradition, through my drawing and listening processes.
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Spatial Malleable standing at Wave Rocks. Simultaneously recorded sound and drew as an attempt at co-developing sound and ‘notation.’ Decided my session was over when two guys with small machetes came. Harmless I think, but they sat and stared at me. Made me uncomfortable and vulnerable. Still, I think the drawing worked well. 28/10/17
Link to video documentation and listening process excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/ listeningdrawing/spatial- malleables
57 - 59. Spatial Malleables: Mountain, River, Bamboo process, Langshi, October 2017
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60. Spatial Malleables: River process, Langshi, October 2017
61. Spatial Malleables: Mountain, River, Bamboo, 2017
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Converging
In October 2017 Langshi was dry and hot. I sat on the river bank, stood amidst rocks forty-five minutes up the mountains and crouched in bamboo groves, to respond to sounds I heard through the microphones attached to my wrists. An early group of works titled Spatial Malleables: Mountain, River, Bamboo produced in this time employed two-dimensional scrolls as the support for drawing, and the mark-making of ink and pen reflects the left and right progression of sound as I heard it in each ear, through each hand. The space of my auditory perception that was drawn on the paper, was still enclosed by four edges.
These drawings embody egocentric spaces of listening from different points within the topography of Langshi. Although the sound recordings from these sessions are not included in the exhibition of these works, they reveal how the amplification of the sounds of contact between my hands, paper, rock, water and bamboo, altered my natural listening space by temporarily obscuring distal sounds. I became acutely aware that this compression of auditory space made me vulnerable to events beyond my peripheral vision.
This vulnerability was most palpable when I was working alone in the mountains. My experience of being observed by two local farmers confirmed that the social spaces we partake in are inherently gendered, and each individual’s sense of place is affected by how we are perceived by others. My decision to vacate the grove of rocks was informed by a fear of assault, something which few male artists in a similar situation would worry about. After this experience, I worked for far shorter durations, and visually monitored my surroundings even as I drew and listened.
Perhaps however, as a foreign Chinese woman making art, my unexplained interactions with this place which was their home, made these men as wary of me as I of them. Doreen Massey asserts that ‘spaces and places, and our senses of them (and such related things as our degree of mobility) are gendered through and through. Moreover, they are gendered in a myriad of different 171 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
ways, which vary between cultures and over time.’235 This experience deepened my understanding of how the places that I had access to both physically and emotionally in Langshi, were inflected by my gender as a woman and determined by the conditions of my international mobility. These influences shaped my sense of emplacement in Langshi, to substantially shift my understanding away from Song Dynasty literati paintings of the Xiaoxiang.
62. Local woman washing laundry in the Li River 1, Langshi, October 2018
Dipped paper in river water. There was a young woman scrubbing clothes on the rocks. I’m not sure if they were cleaner before or after considering the rocks are covered in mud and the river is laced with effluent. But I am fascinated by the difference in our contexts, how she understands the river and I can only encounter it briefly. 16/10/18
235 Massey, ‘Space, Place and Gender’ in Space, Place and Gender, 540. 172 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
63. ၵᎪ段: - Sounding Langshi: River process, Langshi, October 2018
Inspired by the sounds of women scrubbing, I am testing scrubbing with ink. 18/10/18
Link to sound and video documentation excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/ listeningdrawing/ sounding-langshi 64. Local woman washing laundry in the Li River 2, Langshi, October 2018 173 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
In speaking of the ‘time-space compression’ brought about by global movements and instant communication, Doreen Massey observes how the interdependent paths of dynamic social relations can shift our understanding of places. She states: ‘what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalised history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus… each “place” can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection.’236 While I agree that places occur through the convergence of different relationships, I found that history, through cultural and material memory embedded in the land, shaped how I chose to interact with Langshi both artistically and socially.
The persistent rain in October 2018 compelled me towards the river. I had planned to make art in solitude in the mountains, but the loosely piled stone path, worn smooth by the soles of villager’s feet over hundreds of years, were too slippery for a novice like me. I reluctantly admitted that to draw with the river, I needed to be at the river. Actually listening to the woman scrubbing on the burnished rocks at the river’s edge helped me realise that this littoral space held age old sounds that had largely been ignored by the educated, elite, male dominated shanshui tradition. It was an attitude that I had subconsciously held when I saw, but disregarded, this domestic activity during my previous stay. Even when I borrowed an old plastic brush and responded to the scrubbing sounds of another woman a few days later, I still occupied a similar position as the Song Dynasty scholars in my aestheticised relationship with Langshi.
The process of making $:9: 4 - Sounding Langshi: River, involved me in a reciprocal exchange that temporarily bridged the social gap between my context as an artist tourist and the woman’s as a local immersed in the tasks of daily life. The percussive rhythms of her brush, fabric wringing and thwacks of her split bamboo cane on bedsheets and underwear, activated my microphones and speakers, which initiated a feedback sequence that melded her sounds with the sounds of my inky brush on paper. Listening to and manipulating the tones of
236 Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place,’ 455. 174 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
feedback with arm gestures harnessing the sound waves, I involved both of us in the production of a Sound Feedback Drawing.
Salomé Voegelin states that ‘Listening to the landscape’s pluralities and possibilities, hearing the dense multiplicity of its mobile production, allows us to challenge the singularity of actuality and articulate a different sense of place and a different sense of self…and shows us how else things could be.’237 I was fluent enough in Mandarin to ask for permission to include her laundry percussion in my sound feedback drawing. However, there was still a distance between our individual relationships to Langshi as a place. For her, the mountains and rivers were a pragmatic source of daily sustenance, and unwittingly participating in a process of drawing was a small blip in her morning routine.238 For me, listening to her interactions with the river and responding with my own, wove a new way of responding to the shanshui tradition into the existing fabric of Langshi by engaging with a predominantly female space of activity.
Our encounter exemplifies some problems of ‘time-space compression’ raised by Massey. She asks ‘to what extent does the currently popular characterisation of time-space compression represent very much a western, coloniser’s view?’239 It is easy and dangerous to assume that I was in a position of privilege; a position determined by international mobility and by choice. My mobility was enabled by generations of intercontinental migration to Malaysia and Australia. Being raised and educated in a Western context had distanced me from what I perceive as inculcated familial obligations which continue to bind Chinese women to traditional roles of wife, daughter-in-law and mother. However, in bringing my Western perspectives, disparaging views of Chinese patriarchy, and
237 Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds, 22.
.An oft-quoted Chinese proverb ᶌઊݰઊ, ᶌݰ - kào shān chī shān, kào shuǐ chī shuǐ 238 Translated literally as ‘Near mountain eat mountain, near water eat water.’ Su Haibo, in conversation with author, 2017.
This proverb articulates a pragmatic approach to ઊ shān - mountain and shuǐ - water that differs completely from the philosophical and spiritual literati approach to ઊ shānshuǐ. 239 Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place,’ 433. 175 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
appropriating the riverbank to impose my art-making upon the daily routines of the local people, my subjectivity inflected my actions in Langshi.
The situation around making $:9: S - Sounding Langshi: Bamboo at the riverbank was similar. A local man washing his shirt and shoes listened quietly without comment, as I drew with fallen bamboo branches dipped in ink, and manoeuvred a Möbius Scroll to generate hums, purrs and squeals of sound feedback. I realised that by affecting another person’s listening experience of this place, whether un/pleasant or neutral, I sonically drew them into an involuntary interaction. Artist and writer Brandon LaBelle observes that
‘in listening one is situated within an extremely relational instant…sound and sounding practices may therefore function as the basis for creating and occupying a highly malleable and charged relational area, modulating the social coordinates and territorial boundaries by which contact and conversation may unfold.’240
LaBelle’s notion of sounding and listening generating a ‘charged relational area,’ resonates with my understanding of the social dimension of my Sound Feedback Drawing processes by the Li River. By extending my egocentric space of listening and sounding to envelop others, I involved them in the production of an intersubjective sense of this place that resonated with my values which the locals did not necessarily share.
Although visibly curious, the women and man washing laundry on the riverbank did not choose to enquire about my activities. On my part, my limited Mandarin skills prevented detailed explanations about my Sound Feedback Drawing processes. While these social interactions between myself and the local people in these situations did not develop further, these interactions made me aware of the affective capacity of my drawing and listening processes, and their potential to create tensions through sounding. Developing a critical awareness of the social and cultural dimension of these processes of relating to Langshi, constituted an important learning curve of this PhD.
240 Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018), 8. 176 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
65. ၵᎪ段: ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi: Bamboo process, Langshi, October 2018
66. ၵᎪ段: ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi: Bamboo, 2018
Link to sound and video documentation excerpts: https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-langshi 177 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
Although I dislike the boats, the sounds of motors have a rhythmic, repeated regularity which makes it much easier to respond to. But my marks are tight. Whereas with frogs, birds, insects, my gestures cover surface area more quickly in large flowing strokes. 23/10/18 67 - 68. ᩳ, 室, 向 - Walk, Listen, Draw process, Langshi, October 2018 178 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
69. ᩳ, 室, 向 - Walk, Listen, Draw process, Langshi, October 2018
Looping - Möbius Scrolls
The rolls of Chinese calligraphy and ink painting paper I used in Langshi came in widths of 45 centimetres, which were close to the width of my shoulders and easy for me to handle. After experimenting with flat scrolls on my first visit to Langshi, I became frustrated with having to turn the paper over to draw evenly on both sides. Moreover, the singular surface of a sheet of paper, however malleable, was still enclosed by its four edges and presented a proposition for the drawn mark to initiate an illusory visual space.
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In May 2018, I transformed the traditional Chinese scroll by adding a twist and adhering the two ends, thereby shaping it into a Möbius strip. The half-twist of a Möbius strip produced a structure with only one side, enabling me to draw continuously without having to flip the paper. In philosopher Alain Badiou’s understanding of drawing, the two dimensional paper surface exists ‘as a closed totality’ where lines and marks ‘compose something inside the paper.’241 Reworking the finite space of the traditional Chinese scroll allowed me to disrupt the notions of definite ‘rear,’ ’front,’ ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ orientations, or a beginning and end.
Traditional Chinese scrolls enabled the viewer to ‘wander’ through imaginary scenes of places, as they slowly unrolled the paper. The three distinct ‘views’ of ‘“high-distance” (kao-yüan), “flat-distance” (p’ing-yüan) and “deep- distance” (sheng-yüan)’ were used by literati shanshui painters to create the illusion of receding spaces within these scenes.242 I take a different approach to the idea of manoeuvring paper, by reworking the traditional scroll into a protean structure, that I could use to facilitate multi-sensory embodied experiences in Langshi. The Möbius Scroll allowed me to transcend visual composition in Western notions of drawing, and the illusory visual spaces of Chinese shanshui painting, by responding to the paper surface as a malleable, three dimensional body.
Using the Möbius Scroll required me to learn how to draw with a scroll that looped down to my knees. Making , , - - Walk, Listen, Draw in October 2018 along the riverbank and climbing the mountain, involved tying an umbrella to my backpack chest strap and juggling ink pens as I walked, climbed, listened and drew. Dismayed at first by the autumnal mists and rain, I soon realised that the ink could bloom with the droplets of water. Varied tones of ink infused with the moisture of mist and rain, reflect variations in these atmospheric contingencies across two weeks.
241 Alain Badiou quoted in Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon,Drawing Difference : Connections between Gender and Drawing (London; New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2016), 82. 242 Please see my discussion in Chapter 1 Towards Emplacement and Fong, ‘Toward a structural analysis of Chinese Landscape Painting.’ 180 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
Learning to listen while drawing on the Möbius Scroll as I navigated slippery rocks and footpaths, was a process that is evident in the haphazard marks on paper. My hand was like the needle on a seismograph responding to my footsteps on varying surfaces, and fluctuations in my physical, emotional and mental endurance. Marks made by listening to boat motors, wildlife and farmer’s electric carts were shaped by the rhythm of my walk. My looped trajectory of walking along the riverbank, through bamboo groves and farms, up the mountain and back again, enabled me to traverse and interact bodily with the shanshui tropes, enacting their materiality. In doing so, I emphasised my embodied, sensory approach to these motifs from the shanshui tradition, through my listening and drawing processes.
Listening and drawing processes that employed the Möbius Scroll integrated the surface and support in drawing, to produce a Paper Mediator243 that transfigured my body’s relationship to Langshi. Deanna Petherbridge argues that the ‘irrefutable’ correlation ‘between the act of drawing and training the eye,’ developed ‘an affirmation of the importance of outer as well as inner vision: the perceptual and the conceptual.’244 The Möbius Scroll expanded beyond the exclusively visual dimensions foregrounded by Petherbridge’s concept of drawing, in a support that was responsive to the auditory, tactile and spatial aspects of bodily perception. The Möbius Scroll not only enabled me to draw on one continuous surface, it allowed me to listen within Langshi through a structure that shared the three dimensional space that my body moved in.
The softness and absorbency of the Möbius Scroll, the convergence of inner and outer sides, and protean mobility, were qualities that integrated well with the fluidity of my body as I interacted with rocks, water and bamboo. To borrow an analogy from Elizabeth Grosz, we can understand our body’s interactions with exterior elements such as ‘sand, with rocks, with grass’ as ‘linkages’ generative of ‘a psychical interior, an underlying depth, individuality or consciousness,
243 Please see my discussion on Paper Mediators in Chapter One Towards Emplacement. 244 Deanna Petherbridge, ‘Nailing the Liminal: The Difficulties of Defining Drawing,’ in Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, ed. Steven W. Garner (Chicago; Bristol: Intellect, 2008), 31-32. 181 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
much as the Möbius strip creates both an inside and an outside. Tracing the outside of the strip leads one directly to the inside without at any point leaving its surface.’’245 The malleable loop of the paper Möbius scrolls reflected my body’s sensory relationship with the materiality of Langshi, while also facilitating those interactions. The support’s ability to engender new perceptual experiences by mediating interactions between my body and Langshi, embodies the connective capacity of drawing and listening with Möbius Scrolls. This is another significant contribution to expanded drawing practice that I will discuss in the following.
70. ၵᎪ段: ઊ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain, 2018
245 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, (St Leonards, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 116-117. 182 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
First foray into the mountain. Thought the paper would stay
white. Little did I know how full of strong but gentle colour stone is. 17/10/18
Link to sound and video documentation excerpts: https:// cyzchen.com/ listeningdrawing/ sounding-langshi 71 - 72. ၵᎪ段: ઊ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain process, Langshi, October 2018 183 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
Connecting Inner and Outer Worlds
While making $:9: & - Sounding Langshi: Mountain, I was surprised by the depth of colour held in stone. I was initially concerned about how visible the action of mark-making would be in this context. Rain soaked moss that proliferated on the surface of the rocks assuaged my worries. The Möbius Scroll quickly transformed with holes from my fingers and greyish green stains that faded as they dried. These remnants of ‘dematiaceous hyphomycetes,’ of undetermined lichens and soil particles that became embedded into the surface of the paper which I brought back home with me, were of concern to Australian Biosecurity, who gamma irradiated the work upon my return to Sydney.
I bent and crouched between limestone rock karst formations, touching surfaces of rock and moss through the Möbius Scroll to create marks on paper. This process enabled me to generate sound feedback with the spaces between the tight clusters of rock. Holding a bent or crouched position while wedged between the rocks was challenging; the sounds produced in these positions were only possible with a body small enough to manoeuvre between the karst formations. In his discussion of the sensorimotor experience of sound, philosopher Alva Noë observes that auditory experiences ‘represent how things sound in relation to oneself…The patterns of change as one moves make the world available to perception.’246 My body’s relationship with these rocks evolved as I moved closer or further away, searching for ‘sweet spots’ where the sound feedback intersected with the microphones placed on my wrists.
My actions of generating this fluid relationship between my body and the clusters of rock were made manifest on paper and through sound. These actions also scraped moss and moved soil on the surfaces of rocks, materially affecting the mountain of Langshi that I was situated in. The Möbius Scroll facilitated this relationship while becoming imbued with its effects. In her examination of mid- twentieth century drawing processes that reworked relationships between the notions of the support and line in drawings, M. Catherine de Zegher observes
246 My emphasis. Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 160-161. 184 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
that ’the ability to respond to the other, a sense of responsibility and reciprocity, became paramount in the use of line to trace connective links within a space imagined as interstitial.’ De Zegher’s emphasis upon the connective capacity of line to engender ‘relational space[s] of experience’247 between materials, people and objects, resonates with my understanding of the mediating capacity of the Möbius Scroll.
While rubbing moss and stone to create marks on paper and generate sound feedback, I was responding to the material and acoustic qualities of the surfaces and interstitial spaces between the rocks. In doing so, I generated perceptual experiences that unfolded in relation to the contingencies of this place. Manoeuvring the Möbius Scroll as an extension of my body to interact with rock, water and bamboo, I enacted a ‘relational domain,’248 on and through paper, upon which my inner responses to external sounds and surfaces could be drawn.
In Chapter 2 Listening, I examined listening through touch as a perceptual process of connecting my inner awareness with external stimuli. This notion bears similarities with art historian Wen C. Fong's assertion that ‘the philosophical approach of the Chinese landscape painter’ entails reciprocal inward and outward observation:
‘Looking to nature he carefully studied the world around him, and looking to himself he sought his own response to nature. The interactive relationship between the two, as expressed by the term wai-chung, ‘outer/ inner’ or ‘exterior/interior,’ is circular and dynamic; as the artist sought to describe the external truth of the universe, he discovered at the same time an internal psychological truth.’249
Reworking the traditional scroll into a Möbius loop enabled a similar observation of my emplacement, however, it takes a different approach from
247 M. Catherine de Zegher, ‘Space/Line/Plane: In Relation (1960 - 2010)’ in On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, 78. 248 Thompson, Mind in Life, 13. 249 Fong, Beyond Representation, 76. 185 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
this concept positioned by the philosophy of the literati. Unlike the literati shanshui painters, I did not ‘look’ to visually ‘describe’ an ‘external truth.’ The integration of support and surface embodied by the Möbius Scroll extended it beyond a passive substrate for visual imagery, into a facilitator of sensory agency. Using the Möbius Scroll to listen through touch and sounding, enabled me to enact the reciprocal connections between my interior perceptual world and the shanshui tropes of rocks, water and bamboo. In doing so, I emphasised the capacity of my drawing and listening processes to draw together my body and the materiality of Langshi.
The Möbius Scroll facilitated distinct perceptual connections with this mountain in Langshi, that articulate my embodied approach by using the reworked Chinese painting scroll to interact with the tropes of shanshui in their materiality. These drawing and listening processes were informed by notions of enactive perception and listening in contemporary philosophy, and Western notions of surface, line and mark-making in drawing. My approach to the shanshui tradition reveals how my processes were strongly inflected by my Western educational pathway, which originates from my upbringing in Australia. Acknowledging this allowed me to come to terms with the fact that my access to the Chinese tradition of shanshui must be negotiated through Western concepts and practices.
It was important for me to examine how I actively fabricated my own ways of interacting with Langshi by weaving Western-centric drawing practices through my particular understanding of the shanshui tradition. By bringing motifs and practices of shanshui into a dialogue with Western drawing practices, I generated a specific approach to shanshui that was entirely distinct from the original practices of the literati. For example, the conception of bamboo as it was practiced by the literati, bore little in common with the bamboo ‘thwacking’ sticks and laundry poles that I saw in Langshi. I subverted this traditional symbol of the ‘upright and enduring’ character of the scholarly gentleman250 through a Western framework of expanded drawing. The symbolic association
250 Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 102-103. 186 of 227 Part Three Interactions: ၵᎪ - Langshi
of bamboo with the scholarly elite meant that the many pragmatic uses of this material were overlooked by the shanshui tradition. By engaging with sounds of women using bamboo to ‘thwack’ laundry in my Sound Feedback Drawing processes, and dipping bamboo leaves in ink, I deliberately addressed this elision through drawing and listening methodologies that were developed in a predominantly Western context. In this regard, the processes that I used to interact with Langshi embody a highly partial approach to this place, that reflects the culturally fragmented and integrated nature of my drawing and listening methodologies.
The Möbius Scroll facilitated perceptual segues between my inner perceptual and outer material worlds. It reworked the traditional shanshui scroll to significantly shift the Western notions of support and surface in drawing. Sounding with the Möbius Scroll through interconnected drawing and listening interactions with the shanshui tropes of stone, water and bamboo that were materially present in Langshi, compelled me to critically reflect upon the social and cultural impact of my actions. Engaging bodily with Langshi enabled me to recognise and address the gendered aspects of my experience, that my fascination with the literati shanshui tradition and the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang had initially led me to overlook. This deepened sense of awareness of the partiality of my interactions with Langshi constituted a significant development in my drawing and listening methodologies, that contributes towards drawing as an embodied and reflexive process of enacting senses of emplacement.
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Conclusion: Onwards
CONCLUSION: ONWARDS
This living, breathing, rapidly changing place has created a far more complex site investigation than I imagined. Langshi, 28/10/2018
This conclusion connects key moments of evolution and insight developed during this PhD. My interconnected drawing and listening methodologies enabled me to interact with the dynamic materiality of Golden Gully and Langshi, leading me to develop more nuanced understandings of the interrelated practices of listening, drawing and enacting emplacement. I found that by integrating actions of listening and drawing, not only was I extending drawing as a multi-sensory and embodied practice, I was consciously mediating and transfiguring my modes of listening, thereby enacting particular experiences of these places. In doing so, I developed a critical awareness of the specificity of my bodily interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, and a deeper understanding of how I was positioned socially and culturally as a visitor and creative practitioner in these places that were unfolding with each moment.
*****
Learning from Listening and Drawing
I had begun my research by visually interpreting sound through drawing in 2016. However, learning to listen by moving my body instigated a significant change in my methodology towards the end of this year. Sinking my feet into the shifting, rain soaked ochre of Golden Gully deepened my awareness of the reciprocal nature of my bodily relationship with this place. My movements were 189 of 227 Conclusion: Onwards
guided by the textures and shapes of surfaces, creating sounds that propagated the air which affected my auditory experiences in turn. My situated interactions within Golden Gully enabled me to recognise the significant influence of Russell Drysdale’s paintings of Golden Gully upon my initial, visual-centric approach. Understanding and resisting this led me to develop four listening methodologies to extend drawing as a way to interact bodily with the sounds and surfaces of Golden Gully and Langshi.
Methodologies of listening through the ideas of Touch, Sounding, Space and Durations emerged from examining my experiences of listening in Golden Gully and Langshi. I found that touching ochre surfaces and rocks determined the quality and duration of the sounds I produced. Therefore, the temporal and spatial conditions of my listening experiences were entangled with the extent of my bodily reach and were produced anew with each interaction. Reflecting upon my agency within these places and recognising the potential of creating audible and visual marks simultaneously by rubbing paper against surfaces, instigated my development of drawing and listening as ways of enacting new senses of bodily emplacement in Golden Gully and Langshi.
These methodologies guided my experiments with paper structures, video and sound recording technologies. These experiments led to the development of important innovations in this PhD: the Binaural Sound Study and Möbius Scroll Paper Mediators, and to adapting omnidirectional microphones, speakers and a portable recorder to create Sound Feedback Drawings. Using the four methodologies, I examined how these developments allowed me to transfigure my sense of touch and sound out my presence, and to extend or measure my body's reach and endurance.
I found that these Paper Mediators and Sound Feedback Drawing processes significantly affected the ways that I moved in Golden Gully and Langshi: they extended the whole of my body’s gestures with paper and sound; altered my posture in between karst rock formations and within low mining tunnels; and deepened my ability to co-ordinate walking, listening and mark-making.
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However, the Paper Mediators and Sound Feedback Drawing tools were not perfectly integrated with my body. Using the Paper Mediators and recording devices necessitated learning new ways to move, listen and draw with my body in relation to the material and atmospheric contingencies of Golden Gully and Langshi.
For instance, the Binaural Sound Study Paper Mediators extended the reach of my arms, but their rigid structure precluded gestural movements within smaller spaces between rocks. The watercolour paper from which they were constructed was also heavy and unwieldy, often resisting fluid changes in my arm movements or flapping uncontrollably in the wind. Their incongruity with my body produced occasionally clumsy and awkward interactions. Adapting the articulation of my wrists and hands and anticipating the wind conditions were important skills that I developed as a part of the drawing and listening process.
The watercolour paper of the Binaural Sound Studies interacted with ochre, leaves and water to produce particularly harsh sounds that spoke of the dense and resistant characteristics of the paper. These sounds were distinct from the soft, damp abrasions produced by the wet Möbius Scrolls, which became louder and harsher in tone as the Chinese paper dried. Furthermore, the softness of the Möbius Scrolls were far more empathetic to the articulation of my fingers and more responsive to the expansion and contraction of spaces between my body and rocks, water or bamboo branches as I moved. Using the soft Möbius Scrolls to interact with these elements in Langshi in 2018 produced completely different embodied listening experiences to the Binaural Sound Studies.
The distinctiveness of my embodied listening experiences was most clearly apparent in my Sound Feedback Drawing processes. In these processes, the sounds of my hands grasping quartz rubble and ochre, scrubbing paper or rubbing rocks were amplified by microphones taped onto my wrists and speakers placed on the ground or rocks. Gesturing to find returning sound waves transfigured by tunnel walls and karst stone formations, enabled me to physically sound out my emplacement in relation to the shapes of Golden Gully
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and Langshi. The textures, duration and pitch of the sounds I was listening to were shaped by these dynamic relations, that required me to hold particular positions while waiting for the walls and stones to respond.
I became aware that the many potential variations and nuances within listening were not only affected by the type of paper I used, but were also dependent upon unpredictable contingencies such as humidity, wind conditions and the shapes of places I encountered. The subtle differences between listening and drawing with the Paper Mediators and Sound Feedback Drawing processes speak of the specificity of each interaction with Golden Gully and Langshi. This was a significant insight that I did not anticipate while initially developing my four listening methodologies.
Learning to move, draw and listen in different ways that responded to the dynamic contingencies of Golden Gully and Langshi, are important skills acquired in this research that enabled conscious reflections upon how my body was situated as an active agent within these places. This was a significant development that differentiated my drawing and listening processes from the expanded drawing practices of artists who integrate interests in perception, drawing, listening and sound, such as Gosia Wlodarczak and Milan Grygar. My drawing and listening processes emphasise the interactive, connective capacity of my Paper Mediators and Sound Feedback Drawing processes; these tools of drawing and listening were vitalised as facilitators of transformative encounters between my body and Golden Gully and Langshi.
Furthermore, the Binaural Sound Studies, Möbius Scrolls and Sound Feedback Drawing processes extended the drawing properties of surface, gesture, line and mark-making. I enlivened the drawing surface and support in the Binaural Sound Studies and Möbius Scrolls by folding, twisting and looping the structures to disrupt the uniformity of their surfaces. This enabled me to intervene upon notions of the passive drawing surface by imbuing it with the ability to disrupt and occlude my visual experience, and to extend and alter the spaces of my body. Creating an active drawing surface led to new ways of mark-
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making, in which scrunching, rubbing and dripping the surfaces and waters of Golden Gully and Langshi enabled me to create visible marks on paper and sounds simultaneously.
This method of mark making generated sounds that speak to the acoustic potential of Golden Gully’s mining tunnel and Langshi’s karst stone formations. In the Sound Feedback Drawing processes, I was able to transfigure the notion of the line into the amorphous expanse of sound feedback. Intersecting returning sound waves with wide arm gestures enabled me to draw with lines of sound feedback that unfolded in the air, morphing and modulating in tone and pitch as my arms moved. Learning to draw with sound feedback is an important contribution of this research where the properties of drawing have become active constituents of an ephemeral, unfolding event.
Vitalising my Binaural Sound Studies, Möbius Scrolls and Sound Feedback Drawing tools to transfigure surface, gesture, line and mark-making, enabled me to extend and alter my embodied, perceptual experiences. Recognising the mediating capacity of my drawing and listening tools, was an important step in understanding that interacting with Golden Gully and Langshi enabled me to generate new forms of relation. In the following, I evaluate how critically reflecting upon the partiality of my approaches and the specificity of my drawing and listening processes, engendered a more nuanced understanding of the social and cultural dimension of my interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi as places that were unfolding in the present moment.
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Learning about Partiality
The drawing and listening methodologies that I developed to interact with Golden Gully and Langshi, contributed towards expanded drawing practices in their capacity to mediate distinct bodily encounters with the material and atmospheric contingencies of these places. Developing and using these methodologies within Golden Gully and Langshi opened new dimensions of social and cultural awareness in my interactions that I did not anticipate. This PhD has been a journey of recognising how my partial position as a creative practitioner has been shaped by my bodily capacities, and social and cultural biases as a migrant Chinese woman with a Western-centric education. This partiality was also influenced by my aesthetic interests in the historical imagery and poetry of these places. Learning to acknowledge and critically reflect upon these inflections was one of the most challenging aspects of this PhD, which significantly shifted my understanding of how my drawing and listening processes impacted upon Golden Gully, Langshi and myself.
My interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi drew upon, and departed from, my aesthetic interests in the European landscape and Chinese shanshui traditions. By resisting and responding to the visual conventions in these traditions, my drawing and listening processes engaged in dialogue with the historical imagery that inflected my understanding of these places. Critically analysing tensions in this relationship allowed me to deepen my awareness of how I listened to these traditions and attend closely to the ways they influenced my choices and actions. This dialogue became extremely generative for recognising the limitations of my initial approaches and adapting my methodologies in response to this.
Awareness of these influences upon my drawing and listening processes unfolded throughout the first three years of research. I became aware of my preference for specific surfaces and sounds. I had chosen specific locations within Golden Gully and Langshi so that contact with moss, stone, ochre, ink, leaves, water, my hands and body, would directly affect the quality of my paper mediators and sound feedback drawings. Most revealing however, was my 194 of 227 Conclusion: Onwards
decision to ignore certain sounds and spaces that I did not find pleasant to listen to. In Langshi, my decision to avoid ‘noisy’ motorised boats on the Li River reflected the ingrained biases that were influenced by my expectations of an idyllic, mist shrouded village resounding with temple bells (this stemmed from my fascination with the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang). This aversion compelled me to focus upon working deep in the mountains in 2017 and continued to influence my decisions to avoid recording these sounds in 2018. My aesthetic bias and dislike of motorised boats had also caused me to initially overlook the predominantly womens’ spaces of laundry washing on the river bank.
On the banks of the Li River, generations of people, mostly women, had scrubbed surfaces of rocks into a burnished sheen with their family’s clothes and bed linen. Listening to the women work and acknowledging their contributions to the sounds of Langshi, led me to consider how forms of women’s labour in the land had been elided from patriarchal painterly and poetic shanshui traditions for centuries. In an attempt to avoid questions and curiosity, I had not intended to interact with the local people through drawing and listening when I first arrived in Langshi. My initial reluctance to engage with the bustling riverbank also reflected my aesthetic preference for imaginary 12th century settings.
By interacting with the water, rocks, women’s activities and voices through drawing, listening and sounding, I extended beyond my initial methodological approach and stepped out of my comfort zone. This opened my drawing and listening processes towards social interactions and in doing so, allowed me to recognise that I enacted a sense of this place that was specific to my interests as a creative practitioner. Furthermore, I realised that intruding and impacting upon the listening experiences of people in Langshi imposed my values upon these places that the local people did not necessarily share.
Engaging with this space of domestic activity, enabled me to understand that shanshui - mountains and waters, held different meanings and purposes for the local people and myself as an artist tourist. The embodied, individual nature of
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my drawing and listening methodologies, which articulate the specificity of my perceptual experiences, had not evolved to invite or reciprocate verbal and creative dialogues with the local people, thereby precluding a deeper exchange of mutual understanding. With cultural and language barriers persisting, the local people and I remained mysteries to each other even as we scrubbed fabric and paper side by side. While I am currently uncertain of the ethical dimensions of actively inviting and integrating the participation of communities in future drawing and listening processes, this baby-step towards methodologies that are alert to their social and cultural impact is a promising direction for the evolution of these methodologies.
Similarly, I found that sounding with the materiality of Golden Gully constituted particular ways of listening that were specific to my interests in situated, embodied drawing and listening methodologies. These processes of listening and drawing were distinct from the ways that the Wiradyuri people, 19th century miners, visitors and other artists related to this place historically and in the present. Identifying and acknowledging this difference was a crucial step for critically reflecting upon the values and expectations that I brought to my interactions with the history, land and waters of Golden Gully.
In doing so, I deepened my sense of accountability in how I was affecting this place through rubbing and scrunching soil or sounding with the walls and rocks. Although people were not often physically present while I was interacting with Golden Gully through my drawing and listening processes, the visible traces of the previous acts of violence inflicted upon this place became more apparent as my awareness grew. I became conscious that the ochre and water that imbued my paper held memories of previous interactions which had to be acknowledged. In the later half of 2018, this awareness guided me towards seeking permission and cultural advice from the Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal Community Elders in regards to working with and sounding in their Country.
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By engaging in a dialogue with the Community Elders, I learnt to consider the significance of working upon land that had been forcibly taken from their traditional owners, and to acknowledge the stories and practices of this place which continue to be repressed by dominant cultural narratives. I came to understand that my actions contributed towards a manifold continuum of cultural practices, and that to do so necessitated reflecting upon the ethical dimensions of my interactions. Learning to engage places with respect for their current, traditional and emerging communities has been one of the most significant outcomes of this PhD. My deepened awareness of the social and cultural ramifications of my interactions with places is a methodology that I intend to carry forward into future projects.
The journey undertaken in this research project has provided me with valuable practical, theoretical and ethical skills and methodologies that I will continue to develop. By vitalising the drawing properties of surface, gesture, line and mark making and by deepening my critical awareness of the social and cultural dimensions of interactions with places, I have generated new possibilities in expanded drawing practices that are receptive to the dynamic contingencies and complexities of places. These methods can be extended upon by myself and by other artists working in the field of expanded drawing. In the near future, I intend to challenge the listening and drawing methodologies developed in this project, through interactions with rapidly developing urban environments. In this regard, I have come to consider this PhD as one initiatory moment in a continuum of drawing based research.
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Appendix
APPENDIX
Interactions: Fig Tree Cove | 2016 - 2018
‘Fig Tree Cove,’ in Sugarloaf Bay in Middle Harbour, Sydney, constituted a third Interaction with a place that was near to my home. Drawing and listening in this place enabled me to develop ideas and practical methodologies, before and after visiting Golden Gully and Langshi. As Fig Tree Cove was primarily a place for experimentation, it was not included within the main body of this paper. An online journal was used to record daily developments, however, this format was not suitable in Golden Gully and Langshi due to poor internet connection. Portable notebook journals replaced the digital format in these places.
73. Still image from video experiment, Fig Tree Cove, September, 2017
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74. Screenshot of online journal, Fig Tree Cove, August 2016 200 of 227 Appendix
75. Sound Feedback Drawing experiment with wind and stone, Fig Tree Cove, May 2018.
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List of Works in the Exhibitions
Images, video and sound excerpts of these pieces can be accessed via links to the online research repository.
Golden Gully - Some ways to listen and draw Black Box | UNSW Art and Design | 11 - 15 February 2020
Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators 2018 Ochre gravel and ink on Chinese paper Dimensions Variable (approx. H50 x W90 x D50cm) https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-through-touch
Sounding through Touch - First, Second, Third Movements 2018 Three channel video Duration 8mins 05secs https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-through-touch
Sounding through Touch - After Rain 2018 Sound Feedback Composition Duration 9mins 47secs https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-through-touch
Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully 2018 Ochre and soil on watercolour paper H92 x W101cm https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/binaural-sound-study-golden-gully
Walking Ochre and Quartz - Morning, Midday, Afternoon 2018 Ochre, soil and pen on Chinese paper H178 x W43.5cm each https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/walking-ochre-quartz
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ၵᎪ Langshi - Some ways to listen and draw AD Space | UNSW Art and Design | 4 - 15 February 2020
ၵᎪ段: ઊ, , ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain, River, Bamboo - Paper Mediators 2018 Chinese paper, Li River water, rain, undetermined dematiaceous hyphomycetes, undetermined lichens, soil particles. Dimensions Variable (approx. H40 x W53 x D35cm each). https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-langshi
ၵᎪ段: ઊ, , ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi: Mountain, River, Bamboo - Sound Feedback Drawing 2018 Sound Feedback Composition Duration 21mins 54secs https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/sounding-langshi
ᩳ, 室, 向 - Walk, Listen, Draw 2018 Ink, rain and Li River water on Chinese paper. Dimensions Variable (approx. H63 x W35 x D20cm). https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/walklistendraw
Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11 2017 Video and sound Duration 7hrs 33mins https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/dawn-durations
Binaural Sound Study - Bamboo 2017 Ink on watercolour paper. Dimensions Variable (approx. H75 x W98 x D10cm). https://cyzchen.com/listeningdrawing/binaural-sound-study-bamboo
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Visual Documentation of the Exhibitions
Golden Gully - Some ways to listen and draw Black Box | UNSW Art and Design | 11 - 15 February 2020
Exhibition Install View
Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators and First, Second, Third Movements 2018 204 of 227 Appendix
Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators and First, Second, Third Movements 2018
Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators, 2018
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Binaural Sound Study - Golden Gully, 2018
Walking Ochre and Quartz - Morning, Midday, Afternoon, 2018
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ၵᎪ Langshi - Some ways to listen and draw AD Space | UNSW Art and Design | 4 - 15 February 2020
ၵᎪ段: ઊ, , ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi - Mountain, River Bamboo, 2018 Exhibition Install View
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ၵᎪ段: ઊ, , ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi - Mountain, River Bamboo - Paper Mediators 2018
ၵᎪ段: ઊ, , ᒓৼ - Sounding Langshi - Mountain, River Bamboo - Paper Mediators 2018
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ᩳ, 室, 向 - Walk, Listen, Draw, 2018
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Dawn Durations Langshi: 13.10 - 11.11, 2017
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Binaural Sound Study - Bamboo, 2017
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