Heide Museum of Modern Art

Rubbish has two bees

Yesterday I got invited for lunch at the house of Australian Archaeologist Peter Matthews whose research and life long quest has been the Mayan writing, he has worked extensively in Southern Mexico. His friendship has been especially welcome as it has given me the opportunity to talk with many more scholars also immersed in the thinking of the Mayan Culture. People deeply involved in Mythology, Numerology, and the Semantics of a lost civilization. The brief chats that we had, have an empathy that is very hard to come by for lost and present Indigenous cultures of Mexico. "If the Maya were the ruling culture today", I was told, "Art simply would not exist" (as we understand it) one of his colleagues told me while commenting on the appreciation of “art” objects of the Maya, how refreshing is that? This was of course said almost casually if it was not for the fact that it is a conviction borne out of the understanding that the Mayan left a legacy that needs to be interpreted from many perspectives, or perhaps more to the point, that was borne of many “disciplines” at once, as a whole. The Mayan did not make the distinction and specialization of knowledge as we do today.

The Mayan built a civilization that both still amazes and puzzles us today, and the city temples, monuments and stele they left behind we most of the time admire for the formalist approach we take on them, but to the studios of this culture, such temples and stones have much more to say, astrological charters immersed and invested with religion and cyclical recurrences of governors and dates, all intertwined so as to be studied from disparate perspectives that only an archaeologist is capable of. Disciplines as different as astrology, geography, calendrics, math, etc

I agree, art today aspires to be borne also of an imagination cultivated, informed by a comprehensive understanding of the world, an imagination that may be similarly the product of mythology, math, physics, biology, astrology, medicine, altogether. The list is long. Is that kind of knowledge possible? Who is capable of that? Yet I believe it makes sense in the face of the pending environmental dilemmas of our age.

Insideout
Rubber glove near ABC Radio, Southbank

Landscape

When admiring a view and referring to it as a “landscape,” we most of the time do it in a loose way, we do it not taking into account the aged aspect of such concept. The idea of landscape was borne of a different set of attitudes to the land. The word does not bear the intimacy that we are looking, searching for in the appreciation of the land as we perceive it today. We lack the word or words for such a relation that may bear such an intimacy that may at long last allow us to see the chemicals, the toxins, the pollutants, the wondrous sprouting and digestion of a seed, the recurrent birth and death of physics and mathematical laws. We are still searching for a set of concepts that may encapsulate all of this. It is important also to realize that we may be doing the same when we talk of beauty, nature, wilderness, etc ideas that were borne in a completely different climate, a time that followed different sets of aspirations. Our understanding and intimacy with land is simply different to pre industrial days. Technological means have changed our perception and relation to life so rapidly and so conclusively we can not provide ourselves with the tool, the word that may bring a more intimate, closer relation with it. This I feel is one of the main challenges in our perception of land and the world within the arts.

You do get over it........eventually
Clifton Hill station

Landscape and matter

I still think lost or nearly lost languages have a lot to teach and we most preserve them as a matter of survival. Last year while attending a conference of indigenous peoples in Mexico City, and after delivering a view of Calpulli Tecalco NGO’s work in relation to environmental issues in the Nahuatl Language of San Pedro Atocpan, my home town, a Mixteca man approached me and told me, "In Mixteca language there is no concept for rubbish, the word does not exist." I went home and after a while realized that the word "Tlazolle" is currently translated into Spanish to mean: "full of rubbish: sinner, stain, dust," (Angel Maria Garibay K., Llave del Nahuatl, Mexico: Editorial Porrua 1989.) But the word "tlazolle" is root to such expressions like: "Tlazotla" (Love), "Nimitztlazotla" (I love you), the expression "Tlazocamachilliztli" (Thank you as in thanking life), "Tlazocamate" (Thank you as in thanking a person), words that confer intimacy and identification with the recipient of these gestures. Quite in a different vein, in the Spanish Language there must be an intrinsic categorization of what is no longer "good" as to be “finished”, “of no use”. Things or deeds that we call “basura” (rubbish), an attitude to matter that the Nahuatl language does not have. If this did not make any sense then is perhaps useful here to think of what the Goddess "Tlazolteotl" might have represented for the old Nahua world. Tlazolteotl is translated as the goddess of filth, the eater of placenta and at the same time the goddess of love. How such conviction may have existed, being possible? The answer may be found in the understanding that Tlazolle for a Nahua speaking person does not mean “rubbish”, Tlazolle is what is to be found on a continues process of regeneration.

Dropped flowers by train platform, Flinders St station

Huehuecoyotl-Fer
(Fernando Palma)

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