The Real Thing


Wherein our narrator remembers what he nearly forgot.

I nearly forgot to recount an actual full-on religious experience I had in Melbourne. ACMI, where SPAA was held, is part of a large complex of public buildings known as Federation Square. It's all very new, broken fractal beams and glass stretching in a thousand different directions. It houses ACMI, the BMW Theatre, and the Potter museum. The Potter museum has a continuous exhibition of Australian art, including some recent award winners on the 4th floor. Stelarc - perhaps Australia's most famous electronic artist - has an installation piece on the 4th floor, an "ear" he grew from his own tissues, on a surgical polycarbonate backing. The ear is "dead" now, but remains a white-gray wisp of its former self, lying in a case in the museum. We went up to snatch a peek of it on Friday afternoon, but, as we were exiting, Stelarc said, "Just a moment," and took us into the galleries on the 1st floor. This floor is dedicated to aboriginal art. We were only there a few moments, with Stelarc commenting, "This is the best collection of Australian aboriginal art in the world." Which I believed, because I was awestruck, just in those few seconds viewing. But we were busy people with things to do, so I just made a mental note that I'd have to return to gallery before I left Melbourne.

So, in my first truly free minutes on Sunday afternoon, after I'd checked out of the hotel, and before I was picked up for my tour of Brunswick Street (the rough equivalent of SOMA or Melrose Avenue, the funky neighborhood) I went back to that gallery.

Oh my goodness.

I can remember the works clearly, but they're difficult to describe. They are "modern" works, in the sense that they have been created within the last century, but they are prehistoric works in their design and use of materials. Without question the most stunning pieces (for me) were a series of bark paintings lining one wall of the gallery, all done by a single artist, born around 1911. These were truly primal scenes, featuring men with engorged penises in a few Kama Sutra-like positions with women. But one of them - perhaps the most signficant - featured a triple image: a full grown man, with erect penis, facing the back of woman, who, inverted in the image, gave her breast to feed a child. In other words, woman simultaneously as lover and mother.

This is an image that hasn't been found in any way in the-art-of-the-common-world for at least 5000 years. This is truly ancient art, prehistoric, because it represents the original triad of beloved-lover-mother-child, with lover-mother together in the same body. This was the subject of an entire chapter of The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, by William Irwin Thompson, perhaps the most influential book to my own thought that I've ever read (and reread, and reread). Here it was, not in some paleolithic rock-carving, but presented simply and powerfully on a bark drawing.

I imagine that most people would wonder what kind of bizarre sexual practice is being represented in the painting, and would mutter something about primitive brutes, without understanding that this image contains the essence of human thought and understanding. For me, though, it was like striking the mother load (quite literally), and I stared at it, transfixed, for a long moment.

Further along, on the next wall, were two drawings of the form of the spirit of the ancestor gods. These figures pop up in one of my favorite movies, The Last Wave, a film all about the aboriginal dreamtime and the end of the world. The figures themselves - well, they look like space aliens, or Christian saints, with halos around their heads, and simplified facial features containing eyes and a mouth, but no nose. They could be Greys, or Pleiadians, or what have you, like something out of a X-Files episode where the clues lead to an inescapable truth about the reality of alien visitations. But Jung noted that angels are aliens (or thereabouts, to the modern mind) so I just imagine this is what aborigines see (or saw) when they communed with the spirits of their ancestors.

And, in the next room - I was moving quickly, too quickly, because I had only about 20 minutes - another bark drawing, completely abstract (to my own eyes) but this one spoke to me, said "Stop," in a quiet but firm voice, as I fixed my eyes on it. And a voice began singing in the back of my head, a lovely middle-high tone that began and hasn't really stopped. "This is the song of the Earth," it said. "It will be with you always."

Woah. OK, so maybe that was just one of those occasional hallucinations that intrude upon my mostly rational thought processes, but who can really say. I can still recall the tone, clear and alone.

I only had a few minutes left, and my eyes were drawn to a piece at the back end of the gallery, undeniably modern, and "outsider art" from the almost comic way it was painted and the huge amount of text on the 10' wide panel. There were two of them, actually, side by side, both showing a flesh-fattened human in an Uncle Sam cowboy outfit, pointing dual six-shooters at the viewer and being the very essence of American imperialism in an icon. Political art, ok, sure. But on the far side of the second painting, an image I simply can not forget - a crowd of people, each of which looked like Ronald McDonald, each face bearing a different smile or smirk or frown, and each raising a bottle of Coca-Cola in their clown hands.

And that was it; that's the final image of globalism: we've all been turned into clowns, eating bad food, drinking bad water, and wearing the corporate colors, both on our body and on our skin.

Posted: Tue - November 25, 2003 at 08:50 AM        

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