( THIS IS A WAY OF SEEING )
INTERCOURSE WITH THE LANDSCAPE.
R.G.SHAW.
2011.
Abstract: This paper will investigate notions of identity and place in landscape
painting. Positing the landscape as a dialectical construct I will apply
interpretative strategies to question the idea that a Nationalist identity and singular
inherent truth lays in-wait to be discovered within the land. Investigating
landscape representation in painting and genre conventions I seek to expose and
challenge an hierarchy of such convention. Is there a core truth of identity
inherent in the land or is identity fragmented and layered upon an inert
geography? The paper explores capitalism as a framing device for landscape as a
coercive presence on the framing of land, place and identity. Using Jacques
Derrida's concept of erasure (sous rature), the presence of the absent is allowed
access to the 'text', questioning the univocity of meaning. This questioning
exemplifying the multi-coded discourse of a dialectically constructed landscape
and identity. The final section adventures into personal inscription and graffiti as a
way of being-in-place. An action of negating sociogeographical exclusion whilst
inscribing our own emotions and identity in place? Through intertextual theory
and multi-authoring the frameworks of singular perception are challenged and
propose a symbiotic participatory nomadic hybrid identity of people and place.
Key words: Landscape. Painting. Genre. Graffiti. Collage. New Zealand. Identity.
Capitalism. Myriorama. Erasure. Emotion. Affect. Uncanny. Haunting.
Is there an identity and truth of inherent meaning amongst the bushy valleys and
mountain peaks, awaiting to be roused and woken, discovered?
Is the land anything more than shaped geology of ascent and descent of rock and
stone, river and tree, in arbitrary compositions and placement? If there is anything
to found us amongst the land, it would be a place for our own imaginings, a
location to invent, not discover, the self in its imagined location. “To invent is to
create a new thing, and, contradictorily, to discover is to find-or uncover-
something that is already there.” (Pound.2009.p.xix). I would like to draw a
distinction here also between the terms 'land' and 'landscape'. Tim Ingold in his
essay on 'Temporality and the Landscape' describes,
It [landscape] is not 'land', it is not 'nature', and it is not
'space'......You can ask of land, as of weight, how much
there is, but not of what it is like. But where land is thus
quantitative and homogeneous the landscape is qualitative
and heterogeneous. (Ingold. 09. p60).
This distinction will inform my argument that landscape painting ( any painting
for that matter) will invite the viewer into a dialectical terrain. A dialectical
dependency between the image and its articulation. William Burroughs elaborates,
“What is word?-Maya-Maya-Illusion-Rub out the word and the image track goes
with it-[...] Image is trapped in word.” Burroughs cited in (Sobieszek. 1996.p34)
This codependency of image and script quoted by Burroughs informs not only
how we look, but what we see. How we locate and identify. Being concious of
language and the role it plays in place, sails us over the sea-bed and fore-shore to
a dialectical land. This quote from Francis Pound elaborates on the use of
language to inform our sense of place, in this place, nature.
And if that eighteenth-and nineteenth-century language
has been lost or debased, as landscape has largely been
lost to serious art in our time, the concepts that language
embodies still shape – if in an attenuated form – our own
looking at nature today. (Pound 83. p 28).
This quote by Pound points to the influence that language has upon what we view.
A view de-scribed and in-scribed with language. A language land, a textual
geography. That language is learnt signifies it's plurality. A language-land posits a
geography not singular or mono-linguistic, but intertextual. Julie Kristeva first
coined the term intertextuality. Intertextuallity is how the meaning of a text does
not reside in the text but in the interaction of the reader with the text and the
action of interpretative opportunities invoked in the reading of the text.
“...intertextuality must not be seen as an accumulation of influences and textual
sources, but is concerned with the complex transformation and assimilation of
various texts.” (Simmons. 2002. p52). This 'transformation and assimilation of
various texts', offers us an ever-shifting, restless landscape upon which to gaze,
interact and re-voice. An hybrid place continually written and spoken into view,
nourishing our ideas of identity and place with its fecund promiscuity of
signification.
But I am getting ahead of myself here, or should I say jumping the fence.
A FRAME OF MIND. The arena in which I work, which I will write these words
from and simultaneously to, is the descriptive, expressive ( and potentially
oppressive) device of 'land-scape' painting. A technique of seeing and telling
ourselves and the other of where we are, where 'they' are, and where you, me and
they could be.
In Western painting the landscape up until the 15th century acted as a locating
device for the depicted subjects. The painted landscape never appeared with out
the presence/colonisation of human, mythological or historical interaction. Over
time the protagonists left the frame. The landscape developed an autonomy,
opening with fertile potential for the insertion/colonisation of the spectator. A
portrayed silent and uncontested landscape as 'place' for the spectator to locate
themselves. A representation upon which is acted out the narrative of their
idea(ology)s. A land within a frame, an optical grid of imported references thrown
over the New (Zea)Land. A land framed, claimed and colonised in the same
instant and process.
The landscape in painting and visual representation has always 'acted' as what I
term a locational resonator, 'sounding' an identifiable present or absent location of
self. Francis Pound quotes about the act of claiming and locating in Sir William
Fox's landscape imagery, “ Fox's 'capturing' of landscape in sketches, and
triumphal return with it to the city, is but the beginning of that act of possession,
and shaping the land to European convenience, which he later continued as farmer
and commissioner.” (Pound.83.p44) This resonates an idea of location and
identity for Fox, in this case also an act of possession, of locating, claiming and
capitalising.
Cheryll Sotheran quoted in Pound, exposes a colonising capitalist interpretation of
the land in Fox's early paintings, “ ...landscapes of Fox emphasise not so much
unspoilt primeval nature, but potential productivity.” (Pound.1983.p44). Pound
elaborates on the capturing, gridding/subdividing and possession of the land
through interpretive image-frames in Fox's work/attitude,
[the] places they depict (the paintings) were first
subdivided and ordered, and their pre-civilised
nature first civilised with European art history. Fox's
'capturing' of the landscape in sketches, and
triumphal return with it to the city , is but the
beginning of the act of possession and shaping of the
land to European convenience, which he later
continued as farmer and commissioner.
(Pound.1983.p44).
This gridded net(work) that captures the landscape with perception illuminates as
well as obscures other ways of seeing. Such gridding, framing, perceiving allows
an hierarchy of perception to assert itself. Assertion of 'truth' that represses and
excludes any alternatives by non-inclusion through its interpretative frame. A
dominating system that over-throws familiar and distant lands as well as cultures
as it attempts to capture assimilate, demystify, familiarise and colonise. Here is
Marianne from Jane Austins 'Sense and Sensibility' expressing the confinement of
her feelings when measured against a dominating discourse (which she terms
jargon) that is held to express a 'true' way of seeing and interpreting.
"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of
landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Every body
pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and
elegance of him1 who first defined what picturesque
beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I
have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no
language to describe them in but what was worn and
hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."
(Austen.1994.p94).
The 'keeping of ones feelings to ones self ' has a repressive, passifying and de-
activating effect on the spectator, which presents them with a dualistic ultimatum;
accept the dominating 'truth' or remain in silence in fear of risking judgement,
alienation and potential persecution. This proclamation of 'truth' orders and
quantifies, measures (time and space), labels, promotes and denies. Using Jacques
Derrida's concept of differance, where meaning is established through reference to
what it is not, where a sign refers to what is absent, hierarchical titling and
framing presents a paradox. Rosiland Krauss quotes from Jane Austin's
'Northanger Abbey',
What begins to dawn on Catherine is that her countrified
notions of the natural- “that a clear blue sky” is for
instance “proof of a fine day” - are entirely false and that
the natural, which is to say, the landscape, is about to be
constructed for her by her more highly educated
companions.
( Krauss. 86. p162).
The context and genre that the image is presented within also is a framing device.
A window onto the world, is a classic metaphor for representational painting.2
This would suggest that the painting surface is the glass pane and the painted
image is the view through that glass, a styles 'true' representation. As Francis
pound reveals. “...a style-less way of painting is impossible, that metaphorical
glass is always full of paint, and any attempt to make it transparent quickly
becomes a style itself”.(Pound. 1983.p12).
1 'Him' refers to William Gilpin, a reverend who defined the picturesque in his, Three Essays: On Picturesque
Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting
was published in London, 1792.
2 Windows never-the-less are barriers between spaces. Under this metaphor the images upon the back wall of Plato's
cave could be mistaken for windows onto the world.
What painting represents is not the
whole of the world. It is a stylised image on top, over and between the spectator
and the world. A similacra of what the world could present. One of many
similacra. A glimpse if nothing else of part of the possible terrains of the world
we can imagine. A painted potential, a painted promotion. Pound elaborates
further on the imposition of style,
All the styles of landscape, in New Zealand and
elsewhere-the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Ideal, the
Topographical, or more lately, the Impressionist, the
Cubist, the Expressionist, the Hard edge realist, the New
image- they all stain the window, they all impose their
shapes and colours on what little (if anything) can be seen
of the world through that glass. (Pound. 83. p12).
The style or genre of the painting has certain parameters for the painting to be
presented and received. We look at the painting and its surface system of signs,
not through it. No painting can exist outside of a genre or style, which provide the
spectator with a context of possible meaning, as Pound states here. “The genre's
frames are the boundaries of the 'possibilities of meaning' of the pictures painted
within them. Their frames are the presuppositions, held as much by the spectator
as by the painter of painting.” (Pound. 1983. p14). Pound goes on to elaborate on
the metaphor of genre functioning as a key to deciphering meaning within the
work and offering up a code of expectations to guide us through the work. “...for
every landscape painting is a coded system of signs, and every genre is a key to
help us decode it”. (Pound.1983.p14). Recognising the genre will allow for the
appropriate consumption of the work and of the landscape. A way of
reconstructing the landscape in the coded genre. Nature, Pound thinks, could have
no visual experience outside these codes of seeing. The image and its framework
locating the landscape and the spectator. The image as a locational resonator.
Pound elaborates on how the importation of genre frameworks influenced the
attitudes that the colonisers developed to these islands of New Zealand. How
these frames visualised, transformed and obscured the environment and other
cultures through 'legitimised' ways or seeing. Today such framing conventions are
still prevalent as the tourist travels to sight scenes that gratify a sense of the
picturesque. Pound again, “ ...picturesque taste accounts for all the tourists in new
Zealand today. They are looking to see nature as pictures”. (Pound.1983.p26)
The locational properties of the image are always in operation. An image may or
may not present a desired terrain for the spectator to project themselves upon.
Though the viewer may resist entering the frame, the image has already entered
the viewer and willingly or not, located them in relationship to it. Locating the
spectator in a subjective terrain of satisfaction, dis satisfaction, indifference or
denial. The promised land or the denied land? Both, as Jacques Derrida would
postulate about the promise, “ whose concept is linked to the to-come...to the
experience of a promise engaged, that is already an endless promise”. Derrida (as
cited in Pound, 2009. p24.). This endless deferral of the promises' signified,
challenges any notion of a stable inherent promised 'truth', imagined or searched
for. In this context the promise simultaneously questions what it proposes to
promise. To use Derrida's term, the promise places itself under erasure, both
present and absent in the instance. Such temporal and spacial plurality is central to
place and identity within this project and argument. This plurality denies an
inherent dominating 'truth' and articulates the spectator to their own liberation of
expression.
Charles Harrision on interpretation of painting that doesn't pursue 'true' meaning,
or essential being, independent of language, thought or history. Harrision is
sighting in this example Kazimir Maliviche's painting 'Black Square'. An 80cm x
80cm black canvas square painted in 1929. Harrison postulates on how we
represent such a painting to ourselves as meaningful.
In fact, there is no one authentic face of the Black
Square...There is only another interpretation in the endless
competition of interpretations. The Black square the
spectator is interested in is one that serves his or her own
imaginative or other ends. To interpret the painting is not
to fathom its 'true' meaning and effects, nor to explain its
production. It is to set beside it another artefact, another
'text'. ( Harrison.1993.p218.)
This setting beside of another text, an interpretive parallel, that stems from and
co-joins the painting and its spectator amidst their location, time and place
transports the painting to the present, animating and invigorating the 'text', and
informing the spectator about their experience amidst present time. Interpretive
approaches to painting free the spectator from being subjected to a pre-ordained
truth or orthodoxy, allowing them with the aid of the painting, to interact freely
with their own position in time, space and discourse. Harrison continues, “ [the]
test of critical interpretation is not whether it truthfully recounts the effects of art,
but whether it is itself productive of effects and ideas which serve to destabilise an
existing critical decorum or orthodoxy.” ( Harrison.1993.p.218)
Such a destabilising interpretation, is required to allow inclusion into a
preordained text. Deconstructive reading of a text elaborates on any monological
reductive interpretation. A deconstructive reading...
[is] an attempt to show how conspicuously foregrounded
statements in a text are systematically related to discordant
signifying elements that a text has thrown into its shadows
or margins: it is an attempt to recover what is lost and to
analyse what happens when a text is read solely in
function of intentionality, meaningfulness and
representativity. (Simmons.2002.p.54)
If deconstruction is always already at work in a text, and we take a painting to be
a text then any monological 'truthful' reading of a painting is denied. The painting
becomes an allegory of its own reading. Any promoted singular 'truth' in the
landscape image is questioned with endless alternatives, singularity becoming
fragmented interpretive parts, jostling juxtapositions, dialogues and re-
compositions. The search for a Nationalist singularity of identity inherent in the
land and the image representation of land, is but a contributing fragment to debate
identity.
The landscape's singularity is thus not something which a
bit of topography does or does not possess; it is rather a
function of the images it figures forth at any moment in
time and the way these pictures register in the imagination.
That the landscape is not static but constantly recomposing
itself into different, separate, or singular pictures.
( Krauss.1986. p.164).
Rosalind Krauss elaborating on singularity and the spectator with regards to the
1801 Supplement to Johnsons Dictionary definition of the picturesque,
(remarkable for singularity). This statement posits that singularity is a “function
of the beholder.” ( Krauss. 86.p164) and that the array of singular moments
(are) of his perception. This is the process of acknowledging an active viewer
happily amidst a plurality of meaning.
To imagine the self requires a location, a location that is synonymous with
identification. A place to identify with, presenting us with an idea of where we are
and where we are not, of our presence and absence. A reference point of and for
self in time and place. The active identifier, and the act of identifying. Such
looking, (re)searching for identity and place is illustrated in McCahon's painting
'The Listener' of 1947. The image is of the rear and slightly side view of a male
head which gazes (we presume) at an abstracted minimal landscape. Looking, we
presume, but also as the title posits, listening.
THE LISTENER (HEAD) 1947.
C. McCAHON.
Looking and listening for what in this silent3 and remote land? Looking for place
to identify self with, and to 'carry' us, the audience, vicariously via his absent yet
presumed gaze to this new land. The Listener,
asks us, as viewers, perpetually to repeat the experience of
the originating 'Head' as we conjoin our gaze with its. For
two gazes-his and ours unite in the landscapes depths...and
share with it the very act of inventing/discovering the New
Zealand to come. (Pound.2009.p.8)
3 Silence being an 19th century attribute to the NZ landscape. A sublime rhetoric.
The search for a Nationalist identity in NZ in the early 20th century required a re-
interpretation of location. The 'old' attitudes, genres and frameworks needed to be
revised and 'painted over'. Broken, stripped and reduced like the land. Being had
to start becoming again. A new identity had to be grown out of a re-contextualised
location. The search for this new location became the focus for the poets and
painters over these decades. Searching for inherent Nationalist meaning and
identity within the land. Learning to voice in the silence. Land and its depiction
was chosen as the bearer for the re-contextualisation of place and identity, it
located a positioning of difference and otherness for the avant-garde/diasporic
offspring to 'ground' their concious differing from previous generations upon.
Such a redefinition of location needed to transcend the defines of city and
represent the larger and inclusive place of dwelling. The land. The landscape
being the most obvious visual means of depicting these attempts. Within a few
years the landscape (primarily through Colin McCahon) would be reduced to an
abstraction, a groundless confrontational unspecific modernist space challenging
the viewer to rethink their position and location. “To interpret the painting is not
to fathom its 'true' meaning and effects, nor to explain its production. It is to set
beside it another artefact, another 'text'.” ( Harrison.1993.p218.) This challenge,
questions any assumption of identity and place or destination of arrival. The
stripping back doesn't reveal an inherent 'truth', it defers such promise and remains
an enigmatic motivation. A Lacanian lack propositioning active desire. A
becoming to, not a being there. “ It is a flight, it seems, that must be perpetually
renewed; a flight after an elusive goal...” (Pound. 2009. p.22)
CONTESTABLE AND DEFERED LOCATIONS.....DO YOU SEE WHAT I
SEE....?
Darwin chased god and the grandeur of his presence away from 19th century
nature and landscape. The economy and capitalism took his place.
The sublime rugged grandeur and expanse of mystical nature that inspired and
dwarft the 19th century spectator appears now as a de-mystified fragment of an
ubiquitous capitalised and consumable perception. A new landscape to fulfil the
grounding and locating of the new spectator, promoting the protagonist beyond
self realisation and acceptance of their time and place. Beyond the subjects' social
and economic space. A new landscape of diversity and possibility. A landscape to
rival the production of space that myth, and legend granted. An ancestral location
for the dis-located. A culture for the culture robbed. A similacra of ourselves ,
hope and dreams. Territory for those without a territory. A terrain of motion. A
free land beyond the claimed present that no longer fulfils. A self promotional
location promising all of the above.
A 'new' Sublime; 'Democratic Capitalism', mapped and presented as the New
Land. Delivered to your mail box and T.V. set day and night. The land of
empowerment and plenty, of self realisation. A place where you will be realised.
A place to rest and to stand. A place where you can save. A land where all have
enough to be generous. Is this the promised land that McCahons' The Listener,
looked for?
R.G.SHAW. 2011.
Capitalism, promises all this and more, a land where the imagination
can flourish and run wild. Run free. “Imagine what we could do.” Capitalism, the
enslaving carrot of the promised land. A promise to transcend the present
promoting a new identity which it inherently holds for us all. A new Nationalist
genre of identity?
The Sublime, described here, “Terror, obscurity, pain, superior power, privation,
vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence, vastness, magnificence, infinity, suddenness,
terrifying, loudness-”. (Pound.1983.p19), 'speaks' such pervasive language and
emotions of horror inspiring awe, amplifying 19th century man's insignificance in
the vast face of nature. Today these adjectives are heard listed nightly on current
affair programmes and television news broadcasts. Sublime capitalism locates the
spectator. It be-littles as well as inspires awe. Petrus an der Velden quoted by
Pound describes this feeling of insignificance as he steamed from New Zealand to
Australia, “..he wrote, 'All the time I was wondering at the grandeur and power of
nature, and how small the steamer and the people comparatively are-' perfect
expressions of the sublime emotion” (Pound.1983.p21). How small and
insignificant the news and economy make people feel these days. The promised
freedom/salvation that the capitalised land represents is the only land for many to
work toward. For millions it is now the only option. This ubiquitous new land that
heavyly self promotes, colonises the imagination of the viewer, and therefore, as I
have been arguing above, colonises, claims and reforms the locating landscape.
The multi-coded effect of this colonising process simultaneously advertises the
purchasable 'freedom' of the new and better, whilst promoting a sense of lack,
confinement and inadequacy of the place of the present. This simulacrum of effect
seducing with an imagined location of freedom. (Capitalism, the Saviour?
McCahon's 'Promised Land'?)
In my studio practice I have been using the context of landscape painting as an
ambient bearer of meaning. Not a core of inherent meaning within the land or
image, but a terrain of layers and fragments of multi-authored meaning. This
posits that land is founded for meaning and identity to move across, lay upon,
contest, expose and conceal in their hybrid positionings. Land as ambient space,
an abstraction for meaning to be ascribed and inscribed. Substituting the word
'page' in the following quote for 'landscape', illustrates the active participation in
the production of meaning through re-scripting the triggering text.
The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows
the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal
spaces(both between and betwixt, in which the rules of
page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned)
are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank,
surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages
coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak
haphazardly and consciously, with and against the
triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a
crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the
ambient territory. (Ensminger. 2010.p2).
If we substitute landscape for page in the previous quote we have an inscribed and
interactive landscape. A merging of texts and a resistance to previous power
discourse. This interactive merging of texts, theoretically and visually has been a
motivator of my visual research into place and identity. The visualisation of this
merging, hybridising of texts, eg collage, montage, graffiti, signify in their
occurrence a liminality, a place where social boundaries and discourses of
meaning are blurred. A challenge to the power discourse by the active spectator as
participant. Has any power discourse ever been immune from a transgressive
impulse? Katherine Wright quoting M.Taussig on domination and
manageableness. “Taussig asks, “has the sacred ever been free of a transgressive
impulse?” For Taussig, desecration is an act that is immanent in the object itself,
“defacement...lies within the phenomenon to be defaced” (Wright.2010)
Another way of reading 'defacement' is the act of asserting the right to be in-place.
An act of active participation in the dominant discourse. Wilson and David
describe, “ Inscriptions are not simply writings in place, but the actions of people
who write themselves into the landscape” and thus are “ an assertion of a right to
be in-place....a resistance to sociogeographical exclusion.” (Wilson & David.
2002. p42). As well as resisting, such an act merges these texts/horizons. Each
statement puts itself and the other 'under erasure', presenting and eradicating in the
one moment. If the image of the landscape posits a locational resonator as I have
previously argued, then the inscription of text over this image elaborates on the
potential reading(s) of the 'silent' image. The font, the media, the vernacular, the
cultural tongue all dialogue with the image and audience.
(Speculative European Painter.)
R.G.Shaw. 2011.
In my works these
actions of inscription, become a metaphor for the ability to partake in the
production of meaning not only in the presented works, but in the dialogue of
place and identity that we are always already with in.
The text of the author can conflate with the text of the
reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes
an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols
with multiple intelligences-one manufactured and
condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed
end or beginning between the two no longer exists.
(Ensminger. 2010.p2).
Such a negation of a fixed end or beginning inseminates a liberating interpretation
into any prejudicing device that an inherent truth or orthodox system may assert.
The 'Interactive landscape' that I produced early in 2011 was the epitome of this
active interaction and articulation of self. A white panel with “You are
(W)Here(?)” and an arrow to the centre of the surface where a vivid marker was
attached via a cord. At the bottom of the work was writ, “ Notes on the New
Zealand Landscape.” The work was installed in the painting dept at Wintec.
It lay as insignificant as a vacant lot, or the roadside verge, but stating its context
all the same. This work/landscape slowly amassed a palimpsest strata of text. A
terrain began to assert, state and contest, for, over and through this 'landscape'.
The hierarchy of 'fine-art' was slowly superseded by a twilight liminality, the
audience began to activate their voice, claim their 'land' and express their identity.
(Interactive Landscape Painting 2011)
An experiment in research producing a theoretically successful work, and the
only consciously produced interactive landscape painting I know of. Each
authored statement signifying a differently stated 'I AM' in the 'white noise' (as
opposed to the dark silence) of the New New Zealand Landscape.
Here is Pound surmising on McCahon wanting to fill the silent blank rootless land
of New Zealand with Christianity, “ He wanted to fill that New Zealand blankness
with Christianity, to inscribe Christianity all over the empty land.”
(Pound.2006.p.146). On analysis McCahon's scripts appear to be more than
Christian dogma. They are foreign to the image, overlaid not in-bedded. Graffiti?
Graffiti makes the action of otherness explicit, especially scrawled across a public
or National space that is produced for us, rather than by us. The insertion of text,
fragment, collage, allows for the exposure of an image referent that refers to a
plurality. If identity was searched for in the depiction of place then the fractured
and fragmented image presented as locator of identity potentially allows via its
'confusion' an arena of multiplicity and inclusion.
Thunderbolt's Rock, NSW. (Wright.2010)
A 'silent' and isolated land on which the colonist searched for identity and place in
geographical isolation at the 'bottom' of the world, is now downloaded upon at
high-speed. The economy has now framed and colonised the land whilst
marketing identity. Land is as pretty as a picture, someone else's picture that you
do your best to comfortably locate yourself within, (or without), with job, or
without. Though, momentarily bored like us all, you can't help but write
something into the view.
PERSONAL INSCRIPTION. The love letter. The articulation of emotion and
soul, presence and absence, dedication, history and future. Writing emotive
knowledge and identity into being a place of being. Re-scribing and wrestling the land/place away from the grips of sublime capitalism. I posit such action as acceptance of otherness with the merging of horizons and texts, untouchable by social, economic and Nationalist dictations. Public personal inscription offers up revolutionary texts that defy and reunite people and place giving context to the bombardment of societies pressures. “people are not seperate from their worlds; rather, they are immersed through an invisible net of bodily, emotional,and environmental ties.” Seamon.D. (as cited in Wright.2010). I see this as the strength of the personal text. The indexical scribing of the personal, the lovers name carved in stone or tree, such self inscriptions like “_____ as here, (date)”, reserve a space for the individual in the land, time and history. The memorial seat or cemetery, function in a similar way. A dedication to a named life haunting the place with otherness, with the previous. Encountering such inscriptions offer a refreshing moment of the personal in the promotion dominated scriptorial landscape of the sign-age. Scriptorial landscape, “refers to all lexemic constructions that are meant for public eyes (though not necessarily on public property) and that are visible to more than one person at the same time.” (Gade.2003.p.447). Could these personalised affective scratchings of name and feeling upon rock and tree be the uncanny traces and essence of a Nationalist identity laying quietly and inherently in the land? Identity reflected in the fragmented emotive utterances of the other, persisting quietly outside the control of existing social forces? A deep strata of identity common to us all, quietly communing and commenting amidst the dominant discourse of the time?
PERSONAL TEXT IN THE LAND. (Wright.2010)
The texts layered upon my projects paintings co-mingle capitalistic coercive
language with auto-ethnographic personal inscription in an attempt to make
explicit a landscape/identity of dialectical intertextuality.
“WHAKARONGO KI TE AWA - LISTEN TO THE RIVER”. R.G.Shaw. 2011.
These encountered personal inscriptions haunt the location with traces of
otherness that affect our sense of self and place. Individuals just as us inventing
their time and place between the earth, the landscape of the past, and the
tightening framework of economic access to the future. The vast, silent potential
filled endless terrain that we gazed at previously with McCahons The Listener, is
now littered with commercial logos, blaring advertisements deferring the present
and offering brands of identity. A land framed in credit and debt.
R.G.Shaw. 2011.CONCLUSION:
In this essay, the idea of an inherent National identity has ungrounded itself and
fragmented, revealing its exclusive ideas of an inherent identity as its own myth.
Place and identity have been revealed as dialectictal interpretation layered over an
inert geography. The 'clean and green' land to play out our liberations upon
reveals itself as another billboard mistaken for the real thing. Untouchable and
quiet in its promise as the white noise of promotion and commotion solicit for our
attentions and time.
A privatised paradise.
The promised land privatised.
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