Body of Work (an excerpt from Wall) — Jen Craig

And so, what an astonishing reprieve, as it seemed, at the time, that I’d said what I said to Nathaniel Lord about the Chatswood Song Dong project. This idea that had “made it all possible”, as I’d said to you afterwards. This idea that, instead of being overwhelmed by what was here in this house – instead of being crushed – so completely overcome – there could now be a way for me to do something to it that would transform what I couldn’t even bear to think about – yes, all of this stuff – into something different – something that I could live with. Something in fact that was art. This belief that art could have its own solutions to things – its own processes – its very own results, which could not be understood by any other means. Yes, even how, as I remember saying to you on the way to Heathrow in the Tube, that you can be exposed to a piece of artwork at only one time in your life and not give that piece of artwork any other attention than this single exposure – nothing more than the fleeting attention of a moment in a gallery – and yet, this artwork will, all the same, be starting to squirm its way inside you without your knowing it and, in this way and in this way only, soon make it possible for you to solve, at last, the one huge problem in your life that it has always been impossible to solve. The serendipity of seeing that Song Dong installation at the Barbican when I did. And then the double serendipity of experiencing how I must have learned something from it – indeed, taken in something from it – because, as you see (I said), it had led to that sudden and extraordinary idea emerging from me in the midst of talking to Nathaniel Lord at the gallery in Hackney. Because it was not just a sort-of idea – a very vague idea – but an idea that had emerged from me fully formed. Telling you all this in the Tube as we were heading out to Heathrow the day that followed the meeting with Lord at the Tate Modern – so excited to be reliving what it had been like for me, for “such an inspired idea” to spring from me alive in this way. And yet, in the very same moment that I was telling you about “the perfect timing of it all’ – and this aliveness – I had actually been remembering, too, how it was, in the gallery in Hackney, that Nathaniel Lord – who I hadn’t seen for decades – decades and decades – had first shown what had looked to be a very strange fixation on my pieces and on me. This way that Nathaniel Lord, which is to say this fearful figure from decades ago in my past, had been so intent on trying to get to the bottom, as it seemed, of what I was doing with my “Still Lives” series – the premise of my approach, as it related, both, to my previous exhibits and my projected showings – in other words, everything I had been doing and was planning to do with this “Still Lives” series, and of course the Wall. So intent he was that he was practically bending himself over double with the effort of it. You need to be picturing the situation, Teun: Nathaniel Lord, as you might have seen him on that night in Hackney, stooped right over his clear plastic cup of blackish wine, with his over-sized jacket creeping up the back of his wispy white head as I said what I could in response to his peculiarly soft and yet urgent observations and questions about what I’d been doing with my art. Yes, this way I’d found myself pressed to say something about how I “continued to be interested in the intrusion of idealised imagery” – this seemingly necessary recourse to the idea of “continuing to be interested” – continuing to be “fascinated” (I even said) with how it is to be “an embodied being in the valencies of the abstractions and substances of the commercialised world”. And so instead of avoiding saying any of this in any detail to anyone in person, as I have been managing to do until this moment – only ever writing the correct sort of artspeak in necessary documents, but never saying it face-to-face to a human being. Instead of doing what I usually do – what I necessarily do – since art needs to have its own way of being, its own way of working, as I’ve always said – no point in talking about it “if the artwork doesn’t speak for itself”, as I’ve often said (to you at least) – instead of this avoidance, I’d been seized, it seemed, by an odd and inexplicable drive to push to the surface every bit of these artspeak notions – these trendy words – that are normally irrelevant and, because irrelevant, so often concocted. To lay before this man, Nathaniel Lord, everything that it might ever be possible to say about what I’d been doing with my “Still Lives” series and my projected work on the Wall. And so even the anorexia: this word that I have been writing everywhere in my applications and artist statements – in everything I have been writing in journal pieces these past ten years or more – even pressing to say this word “anorexia” to Nathaniel Lord. This word that I had particularly avoided all those years ago in that last-minute project at the end of art school, the last time he might have seen me in the flesh, unless it was at one of Sonya’s showings – those early showings that I occasionally went to whenever I was back in Australia if it happened to coincide. The awkwardness of being at the very same time compelled to confess, as it were, to the importance, to my “body of work”, of my anorexia as well as that student “happening” that he “might remember”, and then also, in the short moments afterwards, to attempt to neutralise its relevance to everything since. At the same time overplaying my indebtedness to that “happening” with Eileen and Sonya and – of course – to him (naturally), and conversely, insisting on how it had only been since arriving in Britain that I’d been able to turn my work in a “completely different direction”, which is to say towards this anorexia slash post-anorexia project. And hence towards a much more “subtle exploration” of “these sorts of themes”. And so – worst of all – towards the “major expression” I was planning with that ten metre Wall. This capitulation to Nathaniel Lord yet again, as it suddenly seemed to me, then, in that instant. This way yet again I had let myself tell Nathaniel Lord what I shouldn’t have told him – the whole of what was nothing but artspeak. Concocted artspeak. Which is to say how, in the flooding of my panic I had said far too much and in such a quantity that it was impossible to retract, impossible to unsay – the unsaying of it being, precisely, too, the problem. Since the harder I attempted to retract what I’d just said to him about the Wall, and thus its relationship to my “Still Lives” series, the more submerged I was becoming in the mounting incoherence of what I was saying – my attempt to unsay being far far worse than the worst of what I had just said to him in the first place. And so how everything I had said and was continuing to say was the very problem I might have avoided if only I could stop – this saying that I might never have started to say if Nathaniel Lord hadn’t been the one who was trying to get me to say it, as it seemed to me then, at the time – the one who’d kept proffering his brand new gallery space in Eveleigh in what might only have been a joking invitation, if I were to believe his soft little laughs, his so familiar wit and repartee. All of which soon gave rise to those panicky thoughts that kept going around and around in my head as I wondered how it was that, of all the people I should have chosen to reveal such spurious, nonsense thoughts to, it was Nathaniel Lord. Since the more he had got me to say about this “Still Lives” Wall – after pressing me to reveal so much, as it seemed – so much about the project – the worse it became. Since even telling Nathaniel Lord anything at all in the first place – as Sonya has so frequently noticed – is “the kiss of death” for any spark of an idea that a person might have, any idea that this person might want to give form to – and so for anything that he, Lord, as curator and facilitator – writer, academic and critic – might be tempted to get involved with. Anything at all. Hence it was that every crazy accusation that Sonya has ever posted on Facebook about this one-time mentor of ours from art school had now, somehow, found its noxious way into me as well. Poisoning my thoughts. Every entirely paranoid accusation about what he had done to her career – every idea about how, having once been her “champion”, as she’d put it – a very brief champion, supposedly, since he had only ever picked up her work just to “fling it away” – that is, having once done the apparently generous and chivalrous thing on her behalf, he had then “set” so many of the galleries in the country “against” her (as she’d written). Every idea that, if you “cross” Nathaniel Lord once, you will never recover from it – that if Nathaniel Lord takes a sudden, unaccountable dislike to you or your work, this dislike will ossify into a permanent condition. A permanent judgement. A personal judgement now become a supposedly impersonal judgement. Every idea that even the apparent approbation and support – the enthusiastic support – of Nathaniel Lord and his now very considerable facilities and nous with sourcing the fascinated attention of an extraordinary variety of private investors was – all of it – only likely to “doom” you the quicker. The quicker his approbation, the quicker the doom. And so, once a piece or a project had been approved by him, it would never get to thrive since it was only ever half your own work – half of yours and half of his. The spark all yours. The dominance and “absolute falsification” of it (Sonya) his. The way that Nathaniel Lord was only ever interested in directing the “eviscerated puppets” of his own vision. “His Nathaniel Lord vision”. And the minute that you dared to think for yourself, you were certain to be tossed and then trodden underfoot. And so it seemed, in that instant, that his persistent interest – his persistent questions, repartee and jokes – had only been designed to catch me out. That he’d only been trying to get me to admit that what I’d been doing in Britain was nothing but an attenuated and even brainless repetition of a project which he liked to believe that he’d had a hand in developing in the first place – and so, trying to get me to admit to the paucity of my work. The essential paucity. Getting me to see, too, that even the anorexia angle was but a trivial sort of nothing. An extra nothing. Since the very opacity of the ridiculous expressions I was using – such as this word “valencies” – these expressions that his still highly potent attention had managed to conjure spontaneously, as it were, out of my mouth – “his god-awful presence”, as Son would have put it – the very obscure vacancy of all I was saying was simply a sign, as I realised immediately afterwards, that my mind was just as empty as he might have suspected it to be. And so, now, desperate to avert the imminent implosion of decades of work, because still the food, as I was imagining him thinking. Still the bodies. Still the obsession with living in a female body among the ongoing onslaught of images of how we were supposed to be. Desperate to avert all this, I felt myself pulling into the centre of my being as I attempted to retreat from what I’d just said to him about my “Still Lives” series and the Wall. All of it. The necessity to deny it, suddenly. This Wall about which, until this moment in Hackney with my old art school mentor, I had naturally been cautious about discussing with anyone. Only ever writing about it on my own terms. Only ever in the abstract, and for clear and practical purposes. Never discussing it with anyone in person – or at least nobody in the artworld. Never allowing it, at least, to be discussed by anybody else. This project of the Wall that he was persisting, if only jokingly, in getting me to commit to, there, in London – this Wall that was “perfect” for his new “chic-industrial” space in Eveleigh, as he kept on calling it – alongside the ghosts of the workers, as he said: the ghosts of so many working class males who would never have seen an anorectic, ever, in their lives. Imagine it, he was saying. Tea, bacon, stewed Tasmanian apples. Most of it stodge. Imagine the smokos, he was saying. The slabs of butter evaporating in the clouds of nicotine. The waxy cheese. Their “oblivious conversations”. And so: The Song Dong approach to dad’s house. That was how it had arrived in my head. The whole of it there – clear, filled out – in an instant. A desperate plan. And also: the notion of there being no risk at all in such a project, as it even seemed to me then. Absolutely none. Since Song Dong, of course, had already taken on the risk himself. He had already triumphed – this Song Dong approach to the “problematic material accumulations of twentieth century masculinity” (as I found myself saying eventually, so very easily and naturally) – this same sort of approach and yet with the “masculine and feminine slantings” of his project reversed of course, as I said. Yes, you need to imagine how it happened – this way that I was soon telling Nathaniel Lord that, “prior” to the construction of the Wall, I was intending to make “a very different sort of artwork”. How I was even then in the midst of early preparations for “taking a Song Dong approach” to the leavings of my “recently deceased father in Sydney” whose peculiar obsessions “had always been expressed in a minutely purposeful drive for perfection and detail” – in the labelling, for instance, of all of his books and magazines with the Dewey decimal system (as it came to me then). A mania for labelling. The labelling of every disposable pen he had ever refilled with ink, every electric light bulb he had replaced, with the date and brand name of the item he had used. The progressive accumulation, I had said – and over many many decades – of an “extraordinary and complex system” that was only in fact dwarfed by a system – similarly immense – of “complete disorder”. The one and the other – the one pitted against the other, as I said. An incredible tension between them. The one trying to overtake the other, to swallow the other with its “disturbingly encyclopaedic dimensions”, its complete and utter filth and chaos. The extreme proliferation of objects, I said – this word “objects” being one of Nathaniel Lord’s favourite words, as I’d even remembered from the art history tutorials I had taken with him at art school. Yes, you should have seen the way that the eyes of my one time teacher had narrowed and grown moist as he took in what I was offering him over and above my descriptions of the Wall: this image of a vast accumulation of objects and filth, and in such an array – the very scale of the profusion and disorder and also, perhaps, unlikely treasures, in the house and life and being of my father. All of it striking Nathaniel Lord in a positive way as it seemed at the time – the very same monumentally terrifying image of the house and its contents which, until the moment when I began to describe it to him, which is to say only a matter of days before I was to fly back to Sydney, was something I hadn’t been able to bear thinking about in any way at all.

And so, the relief. Such an immense relief, I remember telling you over and over again on the Tube to Heathrow. Such an extraordinary relief that I had come up with this “incredible solution” – where I seemed to be speaking of it to you – of this supposed solution – as if I had already finished the project and so already dealt with the problem of the house. As if I had already made that “massive and interesting artwork” at Thinkspate Galleries that was going to be “on the scale of Song Dong’s most famous piece that had travelled the world” – this artwork which, as Nathaniel Lord had said in the meeting that followed it in the Tate Modern café, he would be “so proud” to be in a position to host “on an appropriate scale”. How he was almost chuckling with the audacity of what I was doing. My “unfilial audacity”, as he’d put it with his cheeks crinkling up and back into his crumpled, skin-flecked corduroy collar. And yet the scale of my blindness then, Teun. My conscious blindness. Since, in this short time before I left for Australia, I was no longer thinking of dad as I had known him – no longer trying to remember what I could of how he had always been for me – the complexity of everything I could recall about him, which was now becoming less and less complex the more I tried to haul it up. No longer even trying to have a view – any view at all – of the sum of these worn out thoughts about him, because I was now taken up with the prospect of “soon knowing my father better than I had ever known him”. As if, with this project, there were going to be no barriers or problems – only benefits – only the salutary benefits – of “taking full stock of my father’s mind”. Yes, I remember that I even wondered out loud to you in the Tube why it was that I had not understood any earlier how such an ethical and orderly approach would be so necessary to “this sort of difficulty”, as I was calling it. And my wondering, too, how it had taken me this long to develop some “appropriate” way of approaching it all – this problem of my parents and their “stuff” that has dogged me the whole of my life. In fact, why was it, I remember asking you, that my father had to die just as my mother had to die before I could begin to make any sense of what I’d seen in The Curve at the Barbican – in other words, before I could see there was meaning and value “in every bit of the stuff” that they’d left behind them? Every bit of that shit, I think I even said by way of explanation, that our parents inevitably leave, but which, of course, they would have preferred to be able to see – and to be alive in order to see – that we, their children, could finally understand. And this way that I’d used the word shit to mean so much more than rubbish, as I could only see over here while I was working in the hall of the family home in Chatswood – this distance I had, now, on the wheeling of my thoughts as they’d been turning and turning as we sat in the Tube, heading out to Heathrow. Not the word “rubbish” that you had used, Teun, of course. Our parents go through their lives building a nest of shit around them, I remember saying as we were travelling on the Tube out to Heathrow together (through a tunnel that was lined with the grey and crusted arteries of all sorts of piping) – something about growing up in that shit. Being made of shit. Okay, I probably didn’t say shit then. I think I wanted to, but I couldn’t, probably. I might have said crap or just stuff. All these Aussie-style words that I would have been hesitant to use at all if Nathaniel Lord hadn’t made it so easy for me to think again in this way, when he had approved of what I was planning to do – through my “very Australian suburban perspective” – this seemingly random and irrelevant idea about “applying a Song Dong solution” to the house. Telling you about how, in such a view – in such a Song Dong-inspired view – everything had value. Even the worst of the crap in a place like this had value. Just as, “for the whole of my life” (as I said to you), I had known that it did. How I “longed” to get here, to Sydney, to begin on this project. Even the most abject of this stuff can be beautiful or at least presented as beautiful, I remember telling you when we’d got to Heathrow and were standing at one of those raised little table-and-stool sets near an advertisement for luggage after I’d checked in my bags – one of those crazy advertisements, as I’d said, since obviously it was far too late to do anything about buying new luggage just then. Song Dong’s mother, I was reminding you – since you hadn’t seen the exhibition at the Barbican but had only heard about it through me and Arijit – mostly through Arijit, I’m fairly sure – this mother of Song Dong’s had collected so many crappy plastic bottles and so many crappy plastic lids, so many empty tubes. Practically empty. Nothing but crap, the lot of it, but clearly nothing that couldn’t also become entirely beautiful when it had been arranged in such a way that the whole collection could be viewed as a massive work of art, in both its detail and design – “a sensitive reworking of her life and experience”, as I or probably Arijit, earlier, had described it to you, you’d said. And of course, nothing in this exhibition was disgusting to me. It was surprising, I said, because not a single bit of the exhibition had been disgusting in any way at all. Even the most abject and useless and worn of the objects was beautiful, I remember saying – each of those worn and probably still smelly pairs of shoes, those balls of wool, those flattened out tubes. The soap with the long, deep cracks that were filled to the surface with grime – one after the other. One alongside the other. And so it was that this beauty of the whole thing, the entire installation, had made me revise (I’d said) what I had been tending to say to everyone – our friends – about the stuff in my parents’ house – which had made me think about my parents’ house and its contents “in an entirely other way”. How excited I had been that Nathaniel Lord was so keen to “facilitate this project”, which was going to be important in developing understanding, in Australia, of these sorts of ordinary suburban leavings. Yes, everything seemed to have lined up for me with this project. It was going to bring everything in my life together.

I had a sense then, as I was about to walk onto the plane at Heathrow, that soon “so much” would be revealed and I would come to know what it all meant – this sense that the burden of the house, which was filled with “rubbish”, as you called it, was about to be transformed through a sensitive and orderly artistic practice – a culturally attuned artistic practice – into a “collection” that would simply be made up of a variety of ordinary objects which, in fact, had “always been brilliant”. Always been diverse and interesting. All of it soused and heavy and shiny with the kind of meaning that was about to reveal itself for what, essentially, it was. That – basically – this Song Dong-inspired approach was little more than a “practice” that would enable me to see how the ordinary filth of life – that is, the stuff in the family home, with its layers of bodied and disembodied human existence – all of it in the filth, or rather in the objects – a part of the objects – how this deceptively simple approach could become a methodical means of  “celebrating this brilliance” (I said). And so everything I’d feared earlier – everything I had avoided – could be included as well. That is, all of my guilt and difficulty could be flipped inside out and made to do its thing. Because it was not at all that I was “in denial” about what I would soon be discovering to be the essential ordinariness of the objects I was about to be finding and sorting, I said, when we’d moved to that sort-of-café in Heathrow – when you were looking at your phone and getting anxious that I should already be moving towards the gates – getting anxious but not saying anything just yet, as you never like to do. Not at all that I was “in denial”. I was sitting there, still, with my coffee not yet finished – and with my toast not yet finished (as surely you will remember) – and I was saying how I was already beginning to imagine how easy it might be to arrange all of the newspapers somehow – and to lay out, over the floor, all of the stained and unwanted clothing. All of dad’s notes. His piles of magazines and books. All of those volumes that had been labelled so beautifully on the spines with his meticulous rendering of letters and numbers. His shaky hand. All of his socks. To arrange every last bit of the contents of the house so that it would be “beautiful, brilliant and moving”. And that the very act of its all being appreciated and acknowledged in this way, or in fact even before it was arranged – the intention to arrange it and so to acknowledge it, would already be “half the work”, since this was what I had realised “only recently” when I’d brought, to my interest in Song Dong’s “emotional achievement”, as it related to his mother and his family story, something of the “object-oriented sympathies” of the tidiness guru Marie Kondo (do you remember how I’d been reading her book that time, when I was “trying to make an effort” with the studio?). Yes, bringing in something of that: her tenderness with the objects, each of the objects, no matter that, surely, when all of them had been massed together, they would threaten to block out the sky. And so, drawing on the two of them, then, for my suburban Chatswood project – the tender-hearted discarder as well as the collector. And I had a sense, now, of how it would be possible to arrange the contents of the house in small aesthetic collections, which would then guarantee the success – the perfect success – of the project – the act of approaching it all in this multi-pronged sensitive way being essential to the success of the whole (do you remember how I had gone on and on about how each bit of the various leavings – even the worst of the leavings, the ugliest of the leavings – needed to be “acknowledged”?). And how I’d also realised that there was “so much in the house” that was already beautiful and interesting – so many of the books that were bona fide interesting in the most ordinary and obvious sense. So many of the plates and ornaments and wooden chairs with the dust growing black and thick in the creased inlets of their carvings – all of these bits and pieces beautiful and interesting “in themselves”. I was so fired up then – I know – as I sat with you in that café-sort-of-place at Heathrow that it was hard to talk about anything else. Too hard to contain how excited I was feeling. And even though I could tell that you were already growing sick of responding to what I was saying but were loath to tell me – don’t make me say it, I imagined you saying, if you’d had to – if, in fact, I’d pressed you. And yet I’d kept on talking about it all nonetheless. I had kept on talking about this Song Dong idea. This Song Dong Chatswood project. Yes, I remember saying that I was still trying to understand how it was that it had taken me this long to even begin to see how such an approach as Song Dong brings to “these kinds of problems” might be important – even relevant to me. How this sudden realisation about the house and the Song Dong approach had given me a “means” of making sense of everything about my life that I had found, thus far, so very difficult to face. And yet, I could also see that it was a simple concept – a perfectly clear and flexible but nonetheless “straightforward” concept that I might even have come up with myself if I’d put my mind to it (this I had said). And it was then that I started to say how odd it was that I hadn’t understood, when I had first seen Song Dong’s work, how very relevant to me his aesthetic approach would be – his practical face-to-face way of working with a whole manner of ugly and broken objects. Because, as you knew, I had long been worried about what I was going to do with the house and its contents when my parents died. In fact (I said), I remember telling you how I had not looked too closely at the exhibition when it had come to the Barbican all those years ago. Our friend Arijit had asked me to go with him to see it, so I did as he said, do you remember? Going principally to accompany Arijit, our old friend, who always hates going to shows on his own – going, too, as a useful way of socialising with him because he is so busy these days and keeps putting us off. All of us busy. Our sense of never being able to do all the things we want to do. All the months and years passing. So many shows that we miss. And I remember how he, Arijit, had spent so much longer in The Curve, looking at all of the objects and patterns, than I did – Arijit lingering for a very long time by certain of the pieces that Song Dong and his family had assembled for us there in the Barbican – Arijit spending so much longer and looking in far more detail than I had been able to bother with doing myself. In fact I remember only being sort-of-interested when I was looking at it all – how I had even feigned my interest in the show on the day that Arijit and I met up at the Barbican before going on to lunch to gossip about friends before he went back to his work. Yes, at the airport, I was remembering how I’d told you, not long after this visit to the gallery, that Arijit had always been so much more interested in the sorts of things that I should have been interested in myself – Arijit, not being an artist, of course, which made it all the worse. I knew you really didn’t have much time for Arijit when he talked about artworks and films in the way that he did. Arijit was my old friend, not yours, and so it made sense that I was the one who went along with him to shows. Okay (I’d said), Arijit really didn’t know what he was talking about when he said the kinds of things that were calculated to show you and me up as a pair of stuck-in-the-mud thinkers – the kinds of thinkers who only thought we were creative – always saying we were creative, but were never actually interested in what was “really” happening in the creative world. Arijit, since he is a dermatologist and not an artist, as you have always pointed out, didn’t have to think about risking himself and his innermost obsessions and interests – never having to put out into the world a single twisted image of the workings of his mind – never having to offer a single original thought. So it made sense that he had loads of time to be looking around him in this judgemental way. He could take his pick. He didn’t have to think about his next assignment, his latest creative commitment, as you did in your job. No designs for engineering companies, for instance, that could only be finished by suppressing every single creative thought that had just been stirred – by stamping on, suffocating every wavering thought, as you did every day of your life. The everyday compromise, you have often said, of the working, jobbing artist (I reminded you). Arijit had so much more freedom to do what he wanted to do and to think how he wanted to think, you had said as we sat there with our coffees at the airport (yours finished long ago). The whole world was spread out for his delectation and he could look at or think about it all as a connoisseur does – yes, a connoisseur who can close his eyes and take his time. So, it was no wonder, as you said to me then, that my reactions to artworks were not going to be the same as Arijit’s – saying all this as if the irritation you were clearly feeling about Arijit and his pretentions to know what-was-what in the world of art was really just the irritation you were reluctant to admit to about me and the ideas I’d been battering you with the whole way into Heathrow, as I was preparing to leave for Australia and the house. 

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Jen Craig is the author of the novels Since the Accident and Panthers and the Museum of Fire which, prior to its publication in the United States by Zerogram Press (2020), was longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize in Australia. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, and her libretto for Michael Schneider’s chamber opera A Dictionary of Maladies was performed in Lenzburg, Switzerland. Jen holds a doctorate on transgenerational trauma, anorexia and the gothic from Western Sydney University and, alongside her writing, she is a Gestalt therapist and teaches English to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Sydney, Australia.