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Meeting Nature And Art
“…Nature is okay in it’s place, but who wants to get wet?…”
Alice Springs sees them all, the weird and wonderful, the eccentrics, the arty-farties, the misfits and charlatans.
“Artists,” they call themselves: all dreamy-eyed, schizophrenic visionaries, heads in the clouds, brains floating away up there in the distant realms of Fairy Land.
They come to the Alice in droves, as though drawn by a magnet, like bull-ants to a dead bullock in the bush.
Some even stay, which is worse, because then these unwanted imports have to be suffered interminably as they promote their dubious talents (?) ad nauseum.
Our latest imports are two Israeli characters: the girl is Daphna Yalon, and her partner-publicist is known as Elad Rabinovich.
Their project, which they call “Shifting Ground,” consists of sticking a square white box, like an over-sized dog kennel, in the middle of the beautiful Ilparpa Valley, south-west of the township.
One of our local journalists from a mostly ignored publication described the setting as “a minimalist representation of shelter and of settlement … the foundation form of the colonisation of Australia …”
Most of us were profoundly grateful to her for this explanation of the unsightly dog box corrupting our ancient Centralian landscape.
The arty scribbler went on to say that the Israeli’s programme was “a vision of linking people to nature, art and ideas …”
To our shame, we desperately struggled with this concept, trying to envisage the overall scenario as she saw it, before succumbing to defeat, then muttering impotently to ourselves: “Oh, bullshit! Pull the other one!”
With the sun dying over the western ranges, local poets started spouting their respective verses of praise for the earth and nature.
Then the dark, growling clouds rumbled, lightning spat, and rain started to fall.
Almost at once there was a grand exodus of people who came to appreciate nature. They did not want to get soaked or have their cars bogged in gluey clay. Nature is okay in it’s place, but who wants to get wet?
En masse they sought the safety of the bitumen road, leaving behind Yalon in the mud warbling “Rivers Of Babylon” in English and Hebrew before presenting bottles of sand from Israel to what she hoped were the “traditional owners” of the country now being inundated with nature’s stormy rains.
Inside the big white dog kennel Daphna Yalon got down and started to clean the floor. Rather strange behaviour, we thought, as no dogs had so far befouled it. Maybe it was symbolic of something too deeply mystical to elucidate to dumb buggers like us. Then the lady took up a crowbar and started to dig a hole in the centre of the kennel.
It seemed a strange place to sink a fence post.
A silly kid standing nearby asked her: “Why are you digging a hole?”
The crowbar lady replied: “I want to meet the earth, to feel it, to see what it tells me.”
The people outside in the rain who were slow to depart were meeting the earth, too, and they were feeling it as they dug out bogged wheels and were listening intently to its messages …
‘Harken, earthy spirits. Those who venture out into the rain get wet. Some get bogged. Unheeding these spiritual truths prepares the entity for a nice warm bath in the sanctuary of suburbia. May these wisdoms ever suffice in thy consciousness, ye unmitigated dick-heads.’
Daphna then dug another little hole in the earth and placed in it a lighted candle. This was again symbolic of something too profound for revealing. It was all beginning to feel like a pseudo corroboree (?) performed by town-bred part-Aboriginals for gullible tourists. Anything will suffice as long as it appears to be sincere.
And so everyone but Daphna and Elad wandered away into the damp, dripping night, trying to find their vehicles among the buffel grass and spinifex, some undoubtedly wondering why certain types of people travel so far to do so little, and what the hell it is they gain from the journey.
-I. B.
The debilization of human efforts is the art of some over mentally retarded “critics”. Excuse my language, but nothing is more senseless than undermining the efforts made to communicate between nature, art and community.
Y.Y.
— Yehuda Yalon · 11 May 2008 · #