Tuturamuri - Wairarapa dry lands
A young boy learns how to draw. The nearest
still things at hand – a Chinese ornament, his own hands, his parents as they
watch television, sleep in front of television.
Why does he do it? He knows people will
give him praise, he has a quest for this praise and he has a quest, is
motivated to see through the eyes of a painter, an artist. But what do these
words mean?
The core facts of drawing – from nature –
are... a species called Homo Sapiens (wise man) has the will and capacity to translate and
transfer what arrives through sensory devices to another medium. This is done
to help the species along, to communicate. It started with a bare hand being
silhouetted with basic pigment in a cave some 30 to 50,000 years ago. That
momentous instant when a shadow from the most likely recently invented portable
lights flickering in those caves cast shadows on the mainly limestone, creamy
walls. Black on white. Either through a straw or with a mouthful of chewed or
ground up carbon/charcoal and maybe some fat from the recently roasted animals
this concoction was sprayed over an outstretched hand . When the hand was
removed the negative imprint of the hand was left silhouetted on the wall – hey
presto an image of mankind. A self portrait. And can you imagine the “power”
this would have had among the artist's peers.
The artist could have then played all sorts
of games with that image – imagine him (one does presume a male!) then holding
out his hand in front of the lamp (yes lamp) to then cast another shadow of his
hand inside the image on the wall – effectively we have a white and and a
moving black hand. A smaller projected hand inside the large hand – the movies
were born.
Inevitably this set of projections would
have become the cinema of the times – and would have created both mirth, myth
and legend, and would have created a very specialised person in the camp – the
artist. No doubt the species already had manifold specialists at the time –
great warriors, great hunters, awesome gatherers, hut makers, clothes makers,
chefs let alone tattooists, weavers, rope makers, tool makers, fire makers,
vessel makers, morticians and yes lamp makers.
I am speaking here of my knowledge of
European cave art – which is most likely far younger – for some reason than
certainly Australian early art. In Lascaux we see the lamps that made all of
this possible and I think we are talking around 27,000 years ago. Lamps made
from animal fat and a wick. Controlled light – in itself a work of art. Imagine
the power the controller of light would have wealded when he or she first
managed to understand and then create wicks. Sure any old animal roasting on a
fire is going to create fat and oils which are then going to burn brighter than
any other part of the fire – will then be able to be taken from the bottom of a
fire once it is cold in the form of sand/ dirt and fat. It would not have taken
long to learn that this fat when a stork of grass, cotton fibre is best – is
dangled from the liquid fat allows the oil to be drawn up the fibres and burned
at the tip. The wick was the pre-eminent piece of technology of the age. Alone
in a fire the cotton or straw fibre wick would be burned in a second but when
the oil is drawn up into the flame through the fibres there is very little of
the wick that burns – why? I don't know. Perhaps the oil burns at a lower
temperature? Or higher temperature somehow allowing the wick to be mainly
preserved. Wicks do burn down of course and I do know that the diameter and
thereby drawing power of a wick and the amount of wax around it have been
carefully measured over - no doubt
– millennia so that the burning of the wax and the wick maintain an equilibrium
and burn down together – another great unsung pas de deux of human ingenuity.
So back to the boy – drawn by the same
propulsive mechanisms of race and culture, genes, hormones and whatever else –
he sits by a fire and draws his own hand. The world has a copying machine. The
boy shows his picture to his family. They praise him, he continues, get better
at it – he studies other painters and drawers, learns techniques like cross
hatching, methods of rendering shade, tone, light.
He learns that people like it, hold him in
regard because he can render something onto paper. He has learned a valuable
skill. He can translate nature into culture. He can take the wild world onto a
piece of canvas or paper and go elsewhere with it. This stuff is portable – he
can heap more praise on himself by taking it to his peers, to school. This is a
lot to do with power. He becomes known as “a good drawer and painter” “an
artist”.
So why is there this glow around the word
artist – other than the glimmer surrounding other skills – like gardening,
parenting, even mathematics. The artist takes the raw image of the world and
translates it into language, portable language, shares this in depth and
searching analysis of the object of his gaze through his depictions. Second
hand ideograms, pictographs, symbols.
Back in tha cave I am sure it would not
have been that long that images of the hunter, the hunted started to appear
following the hand – who knows maybe the quarry was first? It doesn't really
matter. Art and visual language had begun. And the animals from out there and
the great battles won etc were all now able to be recalled, passed on, we had memory
banks. Hard drives of hard walled limestone caves.
I recall the stunning image of a chimpanzee
filmed in the 60's or 70's – that famous woman who lived with and studied them.
The camp had a number of oil drums – tins left empty and this male chimp – for
some reason chose to use this tin as a – well a kind of weapon – he bashed and
smashed and rolled the drum to create a cacophony scaring all the other chimps
in earshot... was this art?
Then in 1901 I think it was the Lumiere
Brothers … for the first time played to a packed cinema in Paris the scene of a
steam train coming straight for the audience... they ducked, screamed, ran out.
We honour, scare, enthrall and enchant.
Challenge the status quo. But more than anything we collect the audience. - they
make the work into the collective memory – they pass it on with word of mouth.
In this way art is pure democracy – especially when it is possible for anyone
to see the work, access is an
issue but so is newness and new technology – The chimp had some new technology
– as did the Lumiere brothers.
If it's worth remembering... then don't forget it. Or – if
you can't remember it – forget it. And it's worth remembering for many reasons
– sometimes it really is just the new tricks of the techno trade – like
Speilberg with the dinosaurs, the chimps and some of Jackson's tricks like
Stephen Regelous' use of AI in Lord of the Rings crowd scene software “Massive”
but often these are forgotten with the money that made them – mainly the
lasting art that gets real memories going is driven by conscience – (the
science of the con? – na just kidding). Conscience is the driver for much of my
later work – after many of these drawings were done. The Cabbage Patch, much of
the artist's co-op stuff – where one's thoughts move through – concern, to
contradiction to a synthesis of new direction – a truly cathartic process as
TARKOVSKY says – art is essentially “a purging trauma”. The artist, in the
first instance, followed by the audience. This catharsis – endured, enthralled
provides a learning and it thereby coheses the audience into a shared belief, a culture – with the work
as the talisman.
Conscience drives comedy and most drama. As
Duchamp said (mainly of esthetics) “I wanted to throw (the urinal) in their
(the art judges) faces”. He wanted revenge of sorts, was motivated by pure need
for the written words that “all works will be displayed” to be tested. The
egalitarian driver of the show was not able to live up to it's aspirations when
confronted with the comic yet vicious Duchampian response. His conscience said
– let's see what happens if I take this to an extreme. In doing so he changed
art forever. He challenged authority pure and simple. The artist out on the
electron field of culture – orbiting the hub – fires a random yet targeted
arrow back into the status quo and changed the nature of that atom. In this
instant, unlike most of his other work, he was purely political. I have found a
rare small Da Vinci drawing that I have no-where seen commentary on which shows
Leonardo's only similar political anger. Drawn around the time of his deluges
Da Vinci shows an hypothetical situation of a flood of cultural flotsam and
jetsam – pots and pans, brooms, junk commodities all sailing down to earth
(from nature) – man's or Da Vinci's revenge on commodification in Renaissance
Italy! Brilliant. His conscience
said to him... we have too much junk in our lives mate. By the way – while we
are on Da Vinci – I learned ages ago that Leonardo Da Vinci means – Leonardo of Vinci (the town) so I thought I could call myself Barry da Upper Hutt... it has such a ring
nay?
Why draw? Why copy nature? It shows and
displays a discipline – a devotion a respect for the world as it appears. It
creates a memoir to the time and place of the thing drawn. It displays the fact
that we humans can and do hold the language of surrogate, sign and symbol,
metaphor dearly. Like money being a surrogate for energy/ power, resources art
and language stand in place of something, stand for something – a value at the
heart of the matter at hand. Values drive culture, what we believe holds us
together and propels culture forward... these are our myths and until they are
bettered they stand firm, sentinels in the sands, markers for the directions we
all need to live by. In the absence of the church and with an ever growing gap
between haves and have nots – an increasing homelessness in western cities – a
virtual plague of “nots” and a media increasingly at the mercy of those who pay
their bills, banks that care less, politicians playing all of the above for
their short term re-electability and corporate feeders - we need something like art to hold
our values up. Get moral, make art.
Like Da Vinci – after one has done one's
study, can draw well then – as with his “commodity deluge” it is then necessary
to imagine, consider and reflect on what is wrong with the world and use art to
re-design the future. I think this would be a pre-requisit of any art school I
ran – learn to look, draw and then reflect.
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