In October last year I saw four drawings by William Barak in the store-room of the Pacific collection at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. I later understood that one of those Barak drawings takes as its subject a march by Kulin men and women to the Acheron, from late 1862 to March 1863, a march which is also the subject of a re-enactment photographed by Carl Walter at Coranderrk in 1865 (a photograph now held in the State Library of Victoria). The work 5pm Friday 13 March 1862 has evolved in response to the encounter in that Berlin store-room. It has evolved in relation both to the different visual systems of the Barak drawing and the Walter photograph, and to their shared mnemonic impulse. The work is an attempt to grapple with the persistence of those two images. It is also an attempt to grapple with the significance of that march, and a specific history of dispossession and invasion which occupies the space in which we live.
Of the four words in the exhibition title Regarding Fear and Hope, the first strikes me as the most critical. ‘Regarding’ conveys both the sense of ‘about’ – the way one thing becomes the subject of another – and also ‘looking at’ – but with a different fastening between the gaze and its object suggested by the transitive form of the verb. In a related way, the relationship of an art work to its subject, and the kind of looking an art work generates or demands, are intimately connected. This connection is perhaps most acute in relation to the image and war, and specifically in relation to fear and hope. The exhibition title brings to my mind Goya’s Disasters of War, and the contradiction contained within the experience of those etchings. Their bleak horror is acutely experienced precisely through the exhilaration about the act of looking generated by their visual complexity. A love of sensing the world – a pacific but also hopeful emotion – is part of how those images stand against the acts of war which they describe.
TN May 2007
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