NOISES, SOUNDS AND SWEET AIRS

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Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

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—Shakespeare, The Tempest Act 3, Scene 2

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“Mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.”

—Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” The Location of Culture

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The immediate focus of Caliban’s speech is the music of “a thousand twangling instruments,” generating everything from noises to sweet, sleep-inducing airs (and sometimes voices) throughout The Tempest’s appropriated- yet unnamed- isle. It is disparate music, full of the substance and texture of sounds: sweetness and roughness, vibration, resonance, twangling and other bodily effect. It fills out a soundscape which Caliban—a colonised and traumatised man whose genealogical claim to the island is strongly redolent of take tūpuna—hears its humming everywhere, and accepts and honours it with tenderness. It’s familiar, not fearful, in its variety and noisiness.

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Complexly, the music is the work of another island being: Ariel. Politically and personally, both Caliban and Ariel are differently dependent on the coloniser, Prospero, through his promise of freedom to Ariel, and his threat of eternal colonial status to Caliban. Ariel’s music is a sound-world that precedes the coloniser Prospero, but Ariel’s  musicality is now conscripted into his regime. Prospero’s power works through Ariel’s sweet, polyphonic (indigenous? hybrid?) airs, which delight, but also drug. Their subtle regulation changes what people hear, where they go, what they think is happening and what their emotional condition is. Thus Ariel’s musical powers have been translated into ‘instruments’ of Prospero’s theatrical government. They render colonial realities a dreamland. Caliban urges acceptance of this, and welcomes both the lull of sleep and its dream of restored sovereign wealth and wellbeing.

Musicality in landscape painting has, in my humble experience, scarcely been mapped to colonial politics. The colonial politics of landscape painting has been well examined, as has the relationship between music and visual form. Yet the musicality attributed to painted landscape—its rhythm, cadence, harmony, dissonance, timbre—has scarcely been clarified as a mode of colonial ordering or decolonial listening.

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Landscape painting, when it consciously or otherwise approaches musicality, can proceed in multiple, sometimes obviously geo-political ways. Turner, for example, works through plural tropes of topographic survey or picturesque political- historical drama, or through the overwhelming affects—and sometimes radical, sometimes reverential, conservative fears—of Romantic sublimation. Across the bodies of this work, landscape has been assumed to be available for multiple perspective, mapping and rendering: macro-rhythmic or tempest-vortical brush notations and compositions; pencilled melodic lines beneath harmonising watercolour washes; wild or delicate inscriptions of movement and sensibility, dramatic and serene, sometimes both.

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In her Turner essay in ‘Landscape and Power-, Elisabeth Helsinger notes that ‘the extended meaning of property offered by landscape views was not stable in a time [the early-mid c19] in a time of increasing pressure for more radical reforms’, and that ‘by altering the conventions of picturesque views’, Turner’s drawings ‘unsettle an idea of landscape which had implied an answer to the question’ of national representation[i]. Closer to home, Buck Nin, Shane Cotton, Marilyn Webb, Ralph Hotere, Ayesha Green’s Landscape Painting (especially) have all taken that unsettling further.

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But in many ways, much landscape painting in its more musical notations seems more like a Sunday afternoon drive or a walk in the park. Musical landscape painting, even when it is closely referenced to place, seems to require no referential permission, allowing apparently limitless tonalities and highly personalised yet imperious notations of line and gesture. It doesn’t seem to need to second-guess whose rhythm they establish, what territories they make audible and sensible, and what kinds of historical or environmental resistance remain within contour, grid, gesture and timbre.

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And yet, these same places are often elements in a different view of landscape, expressed in pepeha, tūrangawaewae, manawhenua. As Tainui Stephens notes, the landscape elements of pepeha have multiple dimensions. “A mountain represents the timeless foundation of a people, and its peak something to aspire to. Tribal waters, whether a river, lake or ocean, evoke the ebb and flow of our humanity. When a marae, or canoe, or ancestor, is a part of the pepeha, it shapes your family connections to everyone in the tribe – and further back to those ancient ancestors of land, sea and sky”[ii]. Rangihiroa Panoho elaborates this lived, travelling landscape across urban and degraded topography, and into everyday, contested environmental politics[iii].

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This is my first gallery show, mainly earlier works, and I’d like to mark it by the intent to try to do more, and (literally) ask how painting’s visual-musical languages—their symbols, contours, grids and timbres work in such wider and closer cultural and political contexts, co-existing as they do with ‘noises, Sounds and sweet airs’ that are part of other kinds of landscape meanings  altogether. I don’t think there’s any way of painting landscape that’s innocent. To render place as immediate rhythm, sensation or expressive movement may temporarily suspend questions of prior naming, habitation and authority, much as the island’s sweet airs delight Caliban while returning him to a dream from which he wakes again into dispossession. Musicality can reconcile the landscape too hastily, converting historical dissonance into aesthetic coherence and allowing the painter to assume an unacknowledged right to orchestrate place.

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A painter might make a landscape rich in the music of “noises, Sounds and sweet airs,” clinging, as Caliban does, to the hypnotic or narcotic musicality of the moment: its rhythms, resonant compositions and varied notations, which may disclaim any deep symbolism or culturally meaningful colouration. You can hold any number of small pieces of coloured glass over your eyes, and look, and paint, I suppose.

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On the other hand, musicality might become a practice of situated, relational listening rather than grand orchestration. Rough timbres, interrupted rhythms, conflicting contours and unresolved dissonances might allow the painted place to resist absorption into a single, hegemonic harmonic order. No doubt neither roughness nor dissonance is intrinsically decolonial: they too can become the painter’s signature imposed upon the land. The more exacting question is whether the painter’s notation remains answerable—and corrigible—to the place, its prior relations and its continuing histories. And what each element and instrument and the ways they are applied contributes to an overall politics of representation, connections, honour, acknowledgement, aspirations, obligations, here.

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That said, for now, and in this show, these are less-than-critical paintings. They follow public roads, take liberties and dumbly trespass, not knowing enough about how or when to brush by, honour or acknowledge the lowland hills, distant mountains, harbours, lakes and rivers. “Noisy and sweet”, perhaps they are. Dirty pinks, vermilions and emerald greens; purple Prussian blues and tulip yellow ochres; gestural notations and bold but indeterminate contours; open compositions leaving negative spaces which, we know, were never simply empty.

The marks themselves resemble, but it’s unclear how aware the paintings are—or need to be—of what Homi Bhabha might call their menace. For now, they propose neither their own authoritative grammar nor anyone else’s. To some extent they mimic and caricature other depictions of place: from Peter McIntyre Rangitīkei papa cliffs and Toss Woollaston Māpua, McCahon contours, found landscape graffiti under a road bridge; from John Olsen aerial squiggles of rivers and their beds across the endorheic Kati Thanda basin, to Joe Furlonger-esque flooding Queensland snake-rivers.

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They name ambivalently, not very specifically. They borrow visual languages, symbols, contours, grids and timbres, but cant just repeat or appropriate them. In Bhabha’s terms: such hybrid mimicry cant make landscape and representation identical, and certainly, nor can they return either painter or place to some recovered ‘sameness’. Meantime, when we wake, we may cry to dream again.

 

[i] Helsinger, E. (2002) Turner and the Representation of England, in W.J.T Mitchell, Landscape and Power. Chicago. Pp 103-125; p103 and 106.

[ii] Tainui Stephens (2022), My Pepeha is my World’, in Tapu Misa and Gary Wilson, eds The Best of E-Tangata Volume Two, p145

[iii] Rangihiroa Panaho (2015) Māori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory. Bateman.