Blue and yellow

I grew these, from bulbs my sisters gave me -- the daffs from C this year as an Easter present instead of chocolate when the family came down here for a hot cross bun arvo tea, the hyacinths from W for my birthday in May. The vase is green alabaster from San Gimignano in Tuscany, a town made famous by E.M. Forster, bought there and brought home in a little backpack, heavily wrapped in soft clothes.

Given that I had a black thumb till I was 45, I think our mother would be proud. Not that I did anything but bung them in pots and forget about them.




For me this picture is both nothing but itself -- flowers, perfect and powerful, with intense and brief and burning lives -- and also immediately about an accreted mass of memory from a life spent mostly reading. Wordsworth. Ovid. Forster. A.S. Byatt. My mother chanting 'daffy-down-dilly'. The perfume I wore circa 1981, whose name I now can't remember, but which smelt of hyacinths, dense and ever so slightly bruised, not exactly sweet.

There were two lemons amongst the plums, to intensify the colour. How would one find the exact word for the colour of the plum-skins? (There was a further question of why one might want to do so ... It was a fact that the lemons and the plums, together, made a pattern that he recognised with pleasure, and the pleasure was so fundamentally human it asked to be noted and understood.)

... Language might relate the plum to the night sky, or to certain ways of seeing a burning coal, or to a soft case enwrapping a hard nugget of treasure. Or it might introduce an abstraction, a reflection, of mind, not mirror. 'Ripeness is all,' language might say, after observing 'We must endure Our going hence even as our coming hither.' Paint too could do these things. ... Van Gogh's painting of the Reaper in his furnace of white light and billowing corn said also 'Ripeness is all.' But the difference, the distance, fascinated Alexander. Paint itself declares itself as a force of analogy and connection, a kind of metaphor-making between the flat surface of purple pigment and yellow pigment and the statement 'This is a plum.' 'This is a lemon.'

... Alexander ... became obsessed with a small painting of a breakfast table, on which Van Gogh painted the household things he had bought for his artist's house ... held together by the contrast and coherence of blue and yellow. Vncent described it to Theo:

A coffee pot in blue enamel, a cup (on the left) royal blue and gold, a milk jug checkered light blue and white, a cup (on the right) white with blue and orange patterns on a plate of earthenware yellow-grey, a pot of barbotine or majolica blue ... finally two oranges and three lemons: the table is covered with a blue cloth, the background yellow-green, thus six different blues and four or five yellows and oranges.

-- A.S. Byatt, Still Life

Any sighted combination of blue and yellow has immediately evoked these pages from Still Life ever since I first read it, and the date I've written on the flyleaf is 1985.

But he knows what he likes

The Northern Territory News begins its article on the current Art Monthly cover with the screaming headline NUDE GIRL ART OUTRAGE and concludes with an implied whine about arts funding, of the kind you get on the blogs of adolescent male libertarians. In the middle they brag that the Arts Monthly editor Maurice O'Riordan is a Territorian and former art critic for the paper. Confused much?

Not that I think putting the offending (!) photo of the then six-year-old Olympia Nelson on the cover was any kind of a good idea. It may have been meant to be a daring and defiant gesture and I am in sympathy with the various principles behind it, but in terms of smart arts politics it was a really, really stupid thing to do.

Among other things it has the Prime Minister, who during the Bill Henson furore revealed through his attitude and choice of language to discuss it that he understands nothing about the arts and presumably cares less, now harrumphing about requiring the Australia Council to direct its funding in accordance with his personal quirks. Remind you of any other Prime Minister we know?

When I first read this report of Rudd's plans for the Australia Council I was reminded of two things. One was his announcement that he personally will have the final word on the lucrative new Prime Minister's Literary Award, something the judges weren't apprised of until after they'd been offered, and accepted, their positions as judges; presumably he means to continue as he began, making arts policy on the run by fiat when he clearly doesn't know his chiaroscuro from his elbow.

And the other was an image of the entire Australian arts community represented by the outraged figure of Daffy Duck in one of many classic Loony Tunes cartoons: 'Of courthe you know thith meanth war!' [UPDATE: Bugs said it too.]

In the wake of the Henson debate there was urgent need for the arts community and the PM to mend their fences but this is just going to make it worse. You'd think, wouldn't you, that an Arts Minister worthy of the name might step in at this point and do something intelligent.

Oh well.

Life imitates art: notes on the week's reading

One of this week's four novels is Jincy Willett's The Writing Class, a book about a middle-aged woman who's written a few books and is making a precarious living doing various things including teaching Creative Writing. She has a blog*, and a malicious anonymous troll/stalker to go with it.

At this point I found myself peering out through the bathroom curtains, fearfully looking out for lurkers in the back yard. God knows I've had one or two of those before today, too, not to mention Creative Writing students who were (a) monumentally pissed off with me for not admiring them enough, and/or (b) clearly mad.

However, the heroine is afraid of the dark, which means she can't possibly be me. (Never underestimate the power of the general reader's desire to map real people, places and events neatly onto those in fiction, thereby demonstrating that they regard a novel as a kind of Rubik's Cube.) She has one dog that doesn't like her much, not two smoochy cats. She's American, which I am not, and her name, unlike mine, is Amy.

And it's just as well she is not me, because she has a much nastier psycho in her life even than her troll: one member of her (otherwise variously interesting, nice and/or talented) fiction-writing class is leaving horrid, ugly anonymous letters, notes, calls, drawings and other psychologically damaging calling-cards with all of his/her classmates, and with Amy, and two members of the group end up dead before their stalker and murderer is finally caught.

Like all those driven by malice, the murderer turns out to have a grudge that she/he is projecting onto individual members of the group: she/he can't get his/her own fiction published. This, she/he decides, is the fault of rivals and of the people who teach and encourage them. The final showdown contains a conversation that I will, if I ever teach a fiction-writing class again, make copies of and hand around in the introductory class:

'I've read your story,' said Amy, trying to remember its particulars. "The Good Woman".'
'You said it didn't work.'
'I said it needed revision. It was about an old woman obsessed by the immoral conduct of her neighbour.'
'And from that you surmise what? ...'
'That you're observant,' said Amy. 'That you've always been a watcher, which is a great asset for a writer. That at some point you started keeping score, which is not. ... You took your eye off the page, where it belonged, and trained it on all those s.o.b.s who didn't love what you'd written.' ...

'Why don't they publish me?' [Murderer's] voice cracked, [his/her] face was drained of colour, and for the first time Amy saw that [she/he] was unwell. ... 'They give two-book contracts to MFA whores** with their MFA sentences and their MFA networking and they give me sorry, thanks, try again. I'm better than them. You know it. I've got something to say. I have a mind.'
'Yes, but you don't know how to tell a story.'
[Murderer] looked at her with loathing.
'You can do scenes, and character, and you write a mean sentence ... and you've got good ideas, but you don't know what a story is. "The Good Woman" started out great and then just ended because it had to. It wasn't a story at all -- it was a polemic.'

* I have now in the course of my novel-reading job read at least four or five novels in which blogs feature prominently, usually as part of the plot. They may yet become as central and as useful a narrative device as letters were to fiction in the 18th and 19th centuries.*** The possibilities are endless.

** The US Master of Fine Arts in writing now seems to be the gold standard for formal qualifications in writing.

*** More free Creative Writing advice: The Writing Class is a bloody good novel, in its genre, and part of the reason for that is that Willett has made excellent use of the 'house-party' sub-genre of crime fiction (of which she has clearly read at least 20 or 30 examples), and of the newly emergent 'reading group' sub-genre ditto. I would also be willing to bet a great deal of money that she had read and learned from Dorothy L. Sayers' best Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night, which this book recalls without ever actually imitating.

The point: writing will always be enriched if it demonstrates some sense of where it fits overall in the history of literature. There are no decent writers who don't read. There's an utterly bizarre notion held by some writing students that they don't want to be 'influenced', as though their writing were some sort of virgin entity that must not be defiled. The truth is that if you don't read, then your writing will be, of necessity and even at its very best, a thin and intellectually impoverished re-invention of the wheel.

Blowing the budget on books again: painting the lives of animals

Any Adelaidean will tell you that the Art Gallery Cafe is a pleasant place to meet your mates. It's convenient, and for out-of-towners it's easy to find. Unfortunately is has one massive disadvantage, which is that as you're leaving you have to walk past the bookshop, which also has high-end gifts and cards: silk wraps, Persian-rug mouse mats and drink coasters, wrapping paper in William Morris wallpaper designs and so and and so forth. It's a hard place to walk past.

And thus it was that I came home yesterday with this book.



This extravangantly gorgeous and interesting book covers only a century of British art, 1750-1850, but obviously there were massive changes in philosophical and religious thought about the nature of humanity and its separateness (or otherwise) from the animal world during that time and they were reflected in the work of visual artists. The title of Part 2 (of four) is '"The psychology of beasthood": from anthropocentrism to anthropomorphism'. Chapter 5 is titled '"Captive from mountain and forest": zoos and the imperial project'. That's the kind of book it is.

Here's a glimpse of Donald's style and approach:

Gainsborough's tender portrayal of his own two dogs, Tristram and Fox, brings them close to the eye, and the paw of one dog hangs over a stone ledge into 'our' space, in the manner of a Rembrandt portrait. In this intimate encounter, the sensory delights of soft ears, bright eyes and plumes of fur remind us of the dogs' purely physical nature and appeal. Yet the artist responds equally to the differing moods of the two animals: the sense of inner life and thought, and, with it, of transience and pathos. Installed over the mantelpiece of his London house, the painting was the memorial of an inevitably transient relationship, at the same time as it signalled Gainsborough's own sensibility and absence of pretension.

Absolutely revolting!

In an article in last Saturday's Australian, Beth Driscoll reminds us that the Prime Minister will be the final arbiter of his new and lucrative prizes for literature. The man who thinks Bill Henson's beautiful, powerful, emotive photographs 'absolutely revolting' will be having the last word on which books represent the country's best literature.

The judging panels -- Peter Pierce, John Marsden and Margaret Throsby for fiction, Sally Morgan, John Doyle and Hilary Charlesworth for non-fiction -- were, if their response to this news was anything to go by, invited to be judges without being told that their decisions would be subject to Prime Ministerial approval and/or veto, and were apparently not told until after they had already accepted and could not get out of it without looking bad from a number of angles.

That was a piece of appallingly bad management on the part of the administrators. And while one understands why the PM might want to have a say about the winner of a prize with his name on it, the inclusion of this very unusual and highly contentious condition suggests to me that whoever was developing this project behind the scenes knew less about literary prizes and the administration thereof than was required not to stuff it up before it had even got off the ground.

Pierce and Marsden voiced their disquiet at the time. Think how much worse they must be feeling about it now that we have so much more precise an indication of the Prime Minister's taste and discernment when it comes to judging the arts. What a good thing Vladimir Nabokov doesn't qualify for this prize, what with being Russian, not to mention dead. Clearly he wouldn't stand a chance.

This is not an argument: thinking about the Bill Henson debacle

As the farce continues to unravel around the work of photographer Bill Henson, here are a few pertinent scraps. This is not an argument, just some pictures, a couple of quotations, and a few tenuously connected points.

1) You can't 'sexualise' something that is already self-sexualised. Obviously I can't speak for blokes but any woman who tells you she was not sexually aware (not necessarily 'experienced', just aware) and curious by the time her breasts had begun to grow is either lying, repressed or very very unusual.

2) Adolescents are not children.

3) People who persist in framing the debate as one of two clear-cut binaries -- the 'anti-censorship v. wowsers' brigade, or the '"OMG they're enabling paedophiles, arrest them" v. "It's Art, you oiks"' brigade -- are never going to listen to each other. These four groups all appear to have plasticine their ears.

4) Kevin Rudd is a bureaucrat and a Christian. We all already knew that. Also, if your mantra is 'working families', it's dangerously off-message not to Loudly Denounce anything that appears to threaten 'family values'. Anyone who was surprised by Rudd's reaction hasn't been paying attention. Which is not to say that if he finds the Henson photographs 'absolutely revolting' then his knowledge of the history and theory of art must pretty much nonexistent. Which is depressing, but not surprising.

5) Trying to sort these issues into 'left and right', and to attach one's views to one side or the other, is the single least intelligent and most common thing I have seen commentators doing, on and off line, since this business first hit the fan, and has produced some of the most nonsensical commentary.

6) The populist scorn heaped upon the 'arty-farty', the 'luvvies' and so on and so drearily forth is to do with hysterical rejection of anything that is not understood, coupled with eleven years of thought-training in scorning the "cultural elites".

7) Freud abandoned the seduction theory -- that many of his patients' psychological problems had their origin in childhood sexual abuse -- under heavy peer pressure that mostly took the form of ridiculing the notion that childhood sexual abuse could possibly be so widespread, much less involve actual *gasp* fathers. This was in Austria. I mean, I ask you.

8) I've been looking at Bill Henson's work since Peter Craven and Michael Heyward used to publish it regularly in Scripsi, (and do read that, it's terrific, and very informative, and there are some wonderful images) of which Henson was graphics editor, in the 1980s and early 1990s, and it has always weirded me out. But the point is that that is the point. Like the painting of Goya, Heironymous Bosch or Francis Bacon, or Nabokov's Lolita, it is supposed to weird you out.

9) Here's a question: would those who scorn the claims that art is qualitatively different from p*rn in its intents and effects claim that this Greek vase is not art?




10) This is from Margaret Drabble's novel A Natural Curiosity. The character Liz is a psychotherapist; she is on a TV panel, arguing, on the basis of a recent Romeo-and-Juliet type tragedy, that the 'age of consent' law should be abolished.

'But you can't deny,' said the politician, 'that the removal of legal constraint would open the floodgates?'

Liz appeared amused, quizzical, interested.

'You mean you think that everyone is longing to have sex with the underaged, and that only the law prevents it? ... Do you really think,' she inquired, innocently, this time of the unfortunate headmaster, 'that the desire of adults for sexual contact with children is so widespread and so strong that only the most severe social and legal sanctions can control it?' While he hesitated, she pursued: 'And if this is so, does it ever occur to you that this desire itself could be less abnormal than you believe it to be? And less harmful?'

Now, Clive could tell, she really had gone too far, she had broken a taboo, she had said the unspeakable.

... When asked if her views represented those of her profession as a whole, Liz, for the first time, hesitated and then continued: 'No, I wouldn't say so, these views are my own ... But may I say that I haven't really been expressing views. The rest of you have been doing that. I have been asking questions and making suggestions.'

11) Here's another picture; this is a photograph of Alice Liddell, popularly supposed to have been the 'original' of Alice in Wonderland, taken by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll. He has dressed her up as a 'beggar-maid'; the reference appears to be to the story of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid, popular and well-known at the time, and in essence a love story about adults. Here is Alice. It's 1858, a date most will recognise as mid-Victorian. Alice comes from a secure, loving, educated and enlightened family, her father a classical scholar. This photograph was taken in the earliest days of photography, an art of which Dodgson was a pioneer.



Alice was six.

I find this photograph far more disturbing than any of the Henson ones, and would not like to try to say exactly where that disturbance lies.

To repeat: this post is not an argument. These jostling fragments and images are what occurred to me first in the wake of the Henson implosion, as signposts to different ways of thinking about it.

Every victim of childhood sexual abuse that I've ever seen or heard speak was in some way perceptibly damaged by the experience, and sometimes all but destroyed. But the question of the Henson photographs is entirely separate from that. The photographs are art, and art is an exploration of the human condition and the world beyond it. No subject matter should be disallowed, if we are to know ourselves.