Hi Doug and list,

First, some extra background. Based on 18th Century Sovereign Law under
which Australia was claimed by the English there is a case to be made in
legal terms that Australian is an illegal colonial settler state. This
is not news to me. In 1978, after myself and many others were arrested
in gay and lesbian rights protests (the first Mard Gras and after) we
considered refusing to accept the legal status of these arrests and
threatened to fight the charges all the way to the World Court and bring
down the entire Australian legal system, including the Constitution,
unless our demand that all the charges resulting from these arrests and
any further arrests were dropped. It didn't come to this, since the
Police Commissioner who was the arresting officer perjured himself in
court and all cases were eventually thrown out of court.

I remember being in custody and the women were separate from us boys on
the other side of the building. But we could hear them singing; if there
were ten little piggies sitting on the wall and one little piggy were to
accidentally fall there'd be nine little piggies sitting on the wall,
and so on down to zero, then they would let out a loud cheer. A month or
so later, before going into court I had a cigarette with a drag queen
(she like my brand of ciggies) and when I left her to go into court
there was a police line preventing the protesters outside the court from
entering and only those who were charged were allowed in. Anyway, she
picked up her bag of tomatoes and started accurately lobbing them at the
police, always missing those charged who were going into court. That
night I got busted illegally putting up posters for yet another
demonstration, but wasn't charged with the offence and I just stared at
dry dribbles of tomatoes on the plain clothes cops who had caught us
while they made their empty loud mouthed threats. All these street
demonstrations were illegal, I should add. Also, prior to these events
it was almost impossible to walk down the street without getting pulled
up by the cops,  especially younger gays such as myself who worked the
Wall for extra pocket money, drag queens out in public, loud and obvious
and this did not exclude lesbians who also faced sexual assauts and rape
quite often.

Kant describes the sublime as a sort of unhinging or disconnection of
the faculties including reason. Reason flies out the window, I guess you
could say. The Kantian forces involved are repulsive forces which blow
things apart, a fluid dymanics rather then Kantian attractive forces
which make connections by being attracted together and hence working as
a mechanism. The sublime is a sort of repulsive-explosive situation
where things blow apart. The problem for Kant is how to get this sublime
back to a-priori Law and also judgment. The above stories are what I
would call sublime. That is, a materialist sublime where the rule of Law
is threatened and Law in-iself is made to be seen as problematic and
unable to function. That is, Law as an idealist illusion. Criticism,
both Romantic and Postmodernist as folded reversal onto Romanticism,
such as the Hegelian like criticism I described in that article on
Whiteley functions to overcode the sublime in art and take the sublime
to judgment and Law and to maintain the illusion of rule, even if this
is a reversal of Platonic rule as Hegel managed to pull off. (The way
this Postmodernist criticism hurls culture back onto a sort of Platonic
system of measure and moral judgement is interesting, too, but that is
another discussion in terms of societies of control which William
Burroughs writes of.)

I am a fan of Whiteley and do not consider him to be the last Australian
Romantic but perhaps a first in the sense of Nietzsche's eternal return
which is the return of difference. That is, I take a more Neitzschean
angle and as such would have to consider Whiteley not as a Romantic but
as a Modernist. This suggests the critics, such as this Postmodern
criticism by Jon Stratton,  needs itself to be critiqued and not just by
nonfiction critical writing but by artists in whatever media.

Whiteley was most certainly an artist of his time, a time unhinged and
he painted the sublime of his time; the unhinging or disconnection of
generation or the filial link that is said to connect generations
together. This is the period of the 60s and 70s, the youth rebellion and
anti-war years if you like. He painted a materialist sublime and kept on
painting it into the 80s and the time of reaction when the sublime of
his time was folded inward towards the psyche. He never let go of it. He
was not a Romantic but a critic and a critical artist even in the later
years. He even kept large canvases when he painted the interior folding
of the sublime into the psyche.

Perhaps if I have differences with Whiteley I would locate these with
heroin and illegal drugs. To admire Whiteley and followed his critique
implies that he is not immune from critique and sections of his art and
life still neeed critique to invoke the eternal return of difference.
Whiteley considered heroin as his personal demon and slipped into an
ideal ontological conception of drugs which says that to experience the
sublime of drugs you have to actually use drugs in person and if you
don't then you do not experience the sublime of illicit drugs. I don't
agree here and instead say that it doesn't matter if you use drugs or
not, at a personal level. Drugs still affect all of us and change the
co-ordinates of perception or put another way we are all high on illegal
drugs, users and non-users alike. There is no such thing as a drug free
body, in other words. David Herkt gave me a few clues in this direction
but I was struck dumb the last time I spent some time with David, some
five or so years ago, as he kept showing poem after amazing poem in a
series he was writing and I simply couldn't talk, even to ask more about
his thinking on Whiteley. Precisely how to carry through with this
critique I am still working on.

Anyway, I need to cook some food to eat and turn my computer off for the
day. Will reply to David tomorrow, BTW.

Best wishes

Chris Jones.







Douglas Barbour wrote:

 >That's a fascinating post, Chris, about bushfires as the sublime of the
 >Australian landscape. A terror
 >that 'we' face.
 >
 >But I don't know how to respond beyond saying that canada is, in this
 >dealing with landscape, very much like Australia, although here we did not
 >quite go the terra nullis route. But certainly a Romanticising of the
 >landscape, & a tendency to see it as empty.
 >
 >As to Whiteley, well, he always seemed very modern to me (so
post-Romantic,
 >& maybe a highly erotic romanticising of his own generation in many of the
 >portraist etc. It's interesting to me that he was such a close friend of
 >Robert Adamson, who has also both romaticised & then undermined that very
 >romanticising of land & people). So that what you pass on of this
 >critiquing of his work seems to me to leave out the most important
aspects:
 >what it looks like how it works, often the immense size of his canvases
 >(the ones I've seen in the galleries there), but also the way he would
take
 >on the sketch, as in that wonderful little book of his year in Paris. I
 >tend to respond in terms of what I see, not what the art is supposed to
 >'say'.
 >
 >And thanks for that mention in the other post.
 >
 >And, given those photos, admittedly near Sydney, I still hope you're
 >breathing easy where you are. The way journalism romanticises not just the
 >fires, but politics, & much else, is just another of the banes we must
live
 >with...
 >
 >Doug
 >
 >Douglas Barbour
 >Department of English
 >University of Alberta
 >Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
 >(h) [780] 436 3320      (b) [780] 492 0521
 >http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
 >
 >        and as you read
 >        the sea is turning its dark pages
 >        turning
 >        its dark pages.
 >
 >                        Denise Levertov
 >
 >
 >
 >