Alison Croggon wrote:"One thing I realised: you simply can't represent that landscape.
Maybe Fred Williams got close. Or Albert Namitjara. I see why the
indigenous paintings are like they are. The light is so clear
everything seems hyperreal, but the hyperreal paintings or the
photographs don't catch it, how dynamic that landscape is, what it's
like to walk by some of those rocks and mountains, or to be in those
edgeless horizons. If you represent it through some kind of realism,
it turns into instant cliche. Still mulling over that one."
Well, and perhaps even if it's not represented through "some kind of realism."
I am thinking here of the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe which for many
are synonymous with the landscapes of New Mexico, and how that blue
and endless sky which she called, aptly I think, "the great faraway"
was both framed and overrode the antelope or cow skull she placed
within it. In a sense, her work cannot be replicated to become a kind
of cliche, for cliche depends upon repetition to the point of emptiness,
for anyone who placed a skull in the sky would be considered to
be imitating O'Keefe. But, on the other hand, culturally, it has become
a cliche, being connected to the great number of trading posts
and Santa Fe shops that sell bleached cattle and horse skulls to
hang upon every real or ersatz adobe house. There are equivalent
cliches in writing, the poem with a coyote in it somewhere, just
as in other places there is the cliched animal totem, for instance
I've been told that the blue heron is such in much Pacific
Northwest writing. But it is an issue that one continually struggles
with in such an environment. Perhaps, inevitably, for in facing
an environment so hyperreal and both beautifully and threateningly
present, the mind could not help but sometimes resort to
worn-out containers.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
|