On Obsession

“Don’t waste any time trying to be like anybody but yourself, because the things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful.” – Ben Platt, in his Tony acceptance speech.


On this year’s trip, I’ve clambered – as well as my creaky bones would let me—over rocks formed by volcanic eruptions and others squeezed up from where the earth’s plates are grinding together. I’ve walked along beaches on four islands, dreaming on each of them what it would be like to work in a studio with a view of these far oceans. But mostly I’ve become obsessed with other people’s strange obsessions, specifically those who make art and those who collect it. 

Greg Duncan, woodcarver

In Derwent Bridge, Tasmania, Greg Duncan is chipping away at a wall, planned to be 100 meters long upon completion, that tells the history of the central highlands area, one 3-meter-tall Huon pine panel at a time. It is a master craftsman’s powerful personal view (one populated almost exclusively by white men) and his personal obsession. I’d post photos of the panels he’s completed, but the web site (http://thewalltasmania.com.au/) will have to do, since Mr. Duncan is controlling not only the making of the wall and the building of the gallery that houses the wall, but the photographing of it as well. Because, really, if you’re going to be obsessive about being the sole designer and carver of a massive narrative, you might as well be obsessive about controlling that narrative by being the only person allowed to take photographs of it.

MONA

In David Walsh, Tasmania has a collector as obsessive as Greg Duncan is a maker. Walsh, who amassed his fortune by monetizing the laws of probability (i.e. gambling), scraped the underground Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) out of a riparian hillside near Hobart. A chunk of MONA’s collection indulges Walsh’s twin obsessions of sex and death, but he also seems to delight in his one man “crusade to piss off art academics.” On my visit this January I lucked into seeing an extensive exhibit funded by Walsh, “On the Origins of Art,” which started with the premise that humans need art. To figure out why, he didn’t turn to art historians or curators but to three scientists and an English professor. Mr. Walsh’s bet that they would produce a quartet of challenging exhibits paid off. Perhaps having answered the question (or at least having pissed off those pesky art academics), Walsh has found a new obsession: collecting the work of one of my favorite artists, James Turrell. Work is underway to install a number of new works by this master of how we perceive light and color. It’s a sure bet that I’m planning on returning to see them.

James Turrell, Amarna

Backup music to Black Snake by Sidney Nolan

Installation by Yayoi Kusami

Richard Serra, Te Tuhirangi Contour

An hour north of Auckland a wealthy Kiwi (who made his money buying and selling utilities when New Zealand went on a de-nationalization spree a few decades ago -- a more institutionalized form of gambling than that which made Walsh wealthy) enjoys his various obsessions, which include dabbling with the manufacture of amphibious vehicles, playing paintball with his wealthy septuagenarian pals, and commissioning oversized artwork.  There on the Kaipara Harbor, Alan Gibbs has a farm. And on his farm he has some sculptures. With a Kapoor here and a Serra there, here a Lin, there a Wang  (everywhere a Sol de Witt, ee i ee i o), Gibbs Farm is a sprawling haven for free-range sculptures which have outgrown the confines of a brick and mortar museum. Rumor has it that when Gibbs approaches an artist to commission a work for his farm, he asks them to make the largest pieces they have yet attempted. As you hike up and down the hills on his farm you come face to face with one man’s obsession to fill his land with sculptures large enough to fit his expansive landscape (and ego). The collecting obsession extends beyond static sculptures. Visitors lucky enough to snag a pricey ticket for an open day (with proceeds going to New Zealand charities) will encounter giraffe, zebra and bison near the towering artwork. Perhaps the idea for importing large foreign animals occurred to him while he was enjoying one of his other obsessions, touring the world by helicopter. Yes, the rich are different. And so are their obsessions.

People added for scale

Anish Kapoor, Dismemberment Site 1

Lots of people added for scale

Andy Goldsworthy, Arches

 
And so are the obsessions of each artist I’ve ever met. If Greg Duncan’s obsession is carving the hard-scrabble story of his heroic loggers and miners out of huge slabs of wood, Josie Martin’s is arranging millions of pieces of chipped china, broken bottles, and mirror shards into a fantasyland of color. This blue-haired painter, sculptor and mosaic artist has transformed the multi-tiered garden encircling The Giant’s House in the seaside town of Akaroa into a fairy tale populated with angels, cats, dogs, birds, Egyptian goddesses and French flaneurs. They live amicably together, dancing across the lawns and up the stairs, cobbled together, figures and stairs alike, out of a rainbow of china and glass. Seen Parc Güell in Barcelona? Well, imagine it more playful and with a view of a shining blue harbor. No matter how bad your week has been, I dare you to be able to walk through this garden and not feel wings sprouting on your shoulders. You certainly can’t walk past the blue grand piano

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

planted with a forest of succulents without smiling or clapping your hands in delight.
These artists and collectors have filled my down under days with delight and curiosity and wonder. Imagine, deciding that your next big gamble is convincing artists to tuck the largest artworks they could make into the folds of your rural New Zealand farm  -- or constructing a world class museum on a lightly-trafficked Pacific Island and filling it with art that feeds your obsession, not an art consultant’s brief. Imagine, carving the history of an area out of the remnants of the very forests cut down in the making of that history -- or building a world out of broken things that can make you feel whole again. What wonderful and strange obsessions to have. And what power they possess.

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

Saying Yes To What Matters

Dove Lake, Cradle Mtn. National Park, Tasmania

just another crowded beach

This is the first day of serious rain we’ve had since leaving Portland, and it has given me the excuse to slow down and think after a month of readying the house for our leaving, celebrating the holidays with people we love and are missing now, and arriving in our new home in New Zealand where we had friends to catch up with and old haunts to revisit before packing again to leave to teach in Australia. We have another few days in Tasmania to say goodbye to new friends, both human and marsupial, to walk on yet another beach (we’ve lost count of the waterside walks we’ve taken on our travels), and to get ready for the next six months living in Auckland and traveling around New Zealand.

I am sitting in a stranger’s house in a country town I hadn’t heard of five days ago, in a part of Australia many Australians mean to get to but often don’t.  I am here because four years ago a class organizer read an article about me in an Australian magazine and decided to ask me to teach a workshop for her group. And we had such a great time, I came back this year and did it again.

But of course that’s the linear (so inevitably partial) reason I’m sitting at this hand-hewn table listening to the honking conversation of the resident geese in Deloraine, Tasmania. It’s because long ago I learned to say yes, please, when interesting opportunities came knocking, because even longer ago I learned that we only get this one fragile, precious life which I could either fill with fear and regret or love and new experiences.

Now, I’m not talking about bungee jumping off of skyscrapers or jumping out of airplanes. I was lucky enough to have had a near-death experience when I was a teenager, so I don’t need to pay someone else to understand that fine line between existing and not. I’m talking about chances to see a vista filled with trees that grow nowhere else and enlivened by animals who haven’t spread themselves very far from where they started (marsupials and monotremes, anyone?). I’m talking about having conversations with people who’ve made their way in places and cultures different from mine, and coming to understand them a little more through the art they make, the cities they build, and the way they construct their societies. The longer and more numerous these conversations, the more obvious it becomes that our differences are thin edifices teetering on the shared and deep history of our common humanity. Yes, they glimpse wallabies rather than squirrels scurrying around their landscape and bask in the southern sun while we freeze under a blanket of unexpected snow, but we all have similar hopes and dreams for ourselves and our families.

Do the buildings reflect this town's values about the relative importance of communication and incarceration?

Which makes it hard to write the date, the day before our disciplined, intelligent, moral president and his scandal-free administration leaves office.  Here in a small corner of an island floating noticeably near the Antarctic, I’m not able to attend the march in Washington to add my feet to others walking to remind everyone that our democracy, like our lives, is fragile and precious and will survive only if we learn what is worth saying yes to. I will think about my friends and family who are marching, but I will spend the day in an art museum, reminding myself that when we say yes to our biggest best selves we are capable of great beauty and understanding. Because I believe that we are capable of that, my vote, which I am willing to work to make count, will continue to be yes. Yes to taking care of each other, yes to widening the circle, yes to taking care of our corner of the world, yes to understanding that the decisions we make in this corner of the world affect people most of us will never meet, no matter how widely we travel.  I vote no to fear, because I know history and where that leads; because I know history and do not want to live with regret.