tom nicholson`s comparative monument

tom nicholson’s
comparative monument
Helen Hughes
Tom Nicholson’s work frequently employs
correspondence as a structuring device.
In visual terms, correspondence describes
a perceived similarity between two things,
whereas in terms of communication,
correspondence (the exchange of letters)
joins together two perspectives—including
wholly oppositional ones. That is to say that
correspondence can, contradictorily, at once
describe an equivalence and bring into contact
radical difference. Where works by Nicholson,
such as Cartoons for Joseph Selleny (2014)
have foregrounded written correspondence
(hypothetical letters from the artist to friends,
academics, and historical personages compiled
into a book1), his most recent work, Comparative
Monument (Ma’man Allah), also 2014, pivots
around iconographic forms of correspondence
—perceived similarities between sets of images,
politics, and histories. That this most recent
work conjoins a pair of profoundly different
politics and histories through the examination
of a perceived equivalence or similarity, that it
engages the contradiction of correspondence,
is the focus of this text.
Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah)
takes as its subject the history of the oldest
Islamic cemetery located in Jerusalem, called
Ma’man Allah or Mamilla. When Nicholson
visited Jerusalem in 2012 for the inaugural
Qalandiya International biennial exhibition, he
noticed a number of large river red gum trees
(Eucalyptus camaldulensis) in the Ma’man Allah
cemetery that reminded him of those populating
the Barmah National Forest in northern Victoria,
the State in which he lives.
This visual correspondence prompted a
major, two-year research project into the
history and present state of the cemetery, and
the subsequent artwork. The corresponding
presence of river red gums in two settlercolonial States, Israel and Australia, presented
a way for Nicholson to produce a “comparative
monument” that would speculatively conjoin
the two countries, while destablising the
sense of an ‘official history’ that a traditional
monument typically seeks to commemorate.
Through this artwork, Nicholson shows what
appears to be the same (the river red gums
in both countries) to in fact be symbolically,
diametrically opposed.
Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah) is
the sister work to Nicholson’s well known
and much exhibited Comparative Monument
(Palestine), a series of nine posters, fifty
centimetres square, double-sided, stacked in
nine piles on the floor, and free for visitors to
take away. Commissioned for and first shown
in the 2012 Qalandiya International as part of
The Jerusalem Show, the posters of Comparative
Monument (Palestine) document nine public
monuments in and around Melbourne that
bear the word ‘Palestine’. The accompanying
text (in both English and Arabic) describes
the Israeli annexation of the Palestinian city
Bir Sab’a (known in Israel as Be’er Sheva,
and in Australia as Beersheba) and the ethnic
cleansing of the native population during
the Nakba (“catastrophe”, the Arabic term
Palestinians use to describe the events of
1948), which brought the State of Israel into
being, resulting in the depopulation of about
63
five hundred Palestinian villages and towns,
and the dispossession of about seven hundred
and fifty thousand Palestinians. The posters’
text proposes a hypothetical monument to
be made by transplanting the nine existing
Palestine monuments from Melbourne onto the
present-day city of Be’er Sheva to form a sixtymetre long line pointing back to the historical
cemetery that is wedged between the historical
Ottoman city and the new Israeli city.
Comparative Monument (Ma’man
Allah), by contrast, assumed a slightly more
complicated form, it had what Peter Osborne
would call a “distributive unity”2, dispersed
across multiple physical and temporal
instantiations. Materially, Comparative Monument
(Ma’man Allah) is dispersed across photographs,
texts, a walk, a prospective plantation, and a
book (A Guide Book to a Collection of 69
Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Seeds in the Khalidi
Library, Jerusalem, published by Surpllus3).
In its short history, it has already manifested in
two very different places and guises: an initial
installation at Milani Gallery, Brisbane, and
the second installation as part of The Jerusalem
Show VII for the 2014 Qalandiya International.4
For the Milani Gallery iteration, Comparative
Monument (Ma’man Allah) comprised a threetiered frieze that snaked around the walls of
the two-storey gallery. The middle-tiered frieze
(located at eye-height) was the most consistent;
it ran in an unbroken line, whereas the upper
and lower friezes were punctuated with gaps.
The middle tier comprised sixty-nine framed,
fifty centimetre square prints numbered one to
sixty-nine, running right to left, and which bore
text written in both English and Arabic (the
exact dimensions and layout of the Comparative
Monument (Palestine) posters). The text described
Nicholson’s walk from eucalypt to eucalypt,
sixty-nine altogether, at the Ma’man Allah
cemetery, and provided additional information
on the site: the history of the trees, the cemetery,
and its contested future. The upper frieze
consisted of various different archival images,
which loosely correlated to or illustrated the
text on the prints below. Nicholson had sourced
these images from libraries and archives in
Munich, London, Boston, Jerusalem, Beirut,
New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia,
Newcastle and from the internet. The lower
frieze comprised photographs of river red
gums in the Barmah National Forest in Victoria,
taken with Melbourne artist Christian Capurro.
These photographs were captured using a
flash in daylight, thus transforming the tree
trunks into white, featureless absences, and
their branches into spectral veils. The resultant
images resonated with Capurro’s own oeuvre,
which often seeks to visualise erasure, and
pointed to the long history of the two artists
working together.5 Lastly, a single eucalyptus
seed sourced from each of the sixty-nine trees
at Ma’man Allah had been placed in a small
zip-lock bag (then quarantined for a period by
Australian Customs) and taped to the exterior
side of the glass of the middle-tiered frieze.
The seed taped to the Seed No. 1 station came
from the first tree on Nicholson’s walking
itinerary, the seed taped to the Seed No. 2
station from the second, and so on.
The installation at Milani Gallery
solicited a very specific choreography from
its viewers, who advanced slowly through its
sixty-nine stations in a linear procession.6 While
the frieze propelled viewers around the gallery
in a counter-clockwise direction (“in deference
to the Arabic”, explained Nicholson in an artist
talk7), the final station, Seed No. 69, encouraged
viewers to retrace their steps. At this threshold,
the work arrived at its central proposition,
that these seeds be planted in exactly the same
configuration (in, one presumes, an Australian
context), and thus in due course form a
secondary, austral plantation that would mirror
or echo the existing configuration of river reds
at Ma’man Allah on the other side of the world.
This secondary plantation would be “a replica
of the configuration of eucalypts at the Ma’man
Allah cemetery”, Nicholson writes, “an exact
double of their placement, inserted back into
an Australian landscape, part exile, part homecoming, a map of the cemetery grown into or
amidst a forest of eucalypts in their own place,
one forest cleaving another”.8 The gesture of
planting eucalypts may well reference Joseph
Beuys (on whose actions and traces Nicholson
wrote his doctoral thesis9) and his 7000 Eichen
for documenta 7 of 1982, a land artwork
concerned with social and ecological
regeneration. Equally, the gesture cites the
more nationalistic Lone Pine monument
phenomenon, which remembers Australian
soldiers who fought in the Battle of Lone Pine
at Gallipoli during the First World War. (In brief,
a soldier brought a pinecone from the battlefield
back to Australia from which many Lone Pine
monuments have subsequently been spawned.)
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The implication of eucalypts in Israel and
Palestine begins earlier, in the late nineteenth
century. As the Seed No. 23 station explains,
eucalyptus trees were introduced to Israel
en masse by the French Zionist Baron Edmond
Rothschild as an anti-malarial, swampdraining measure in 1900, and their use was
popularised by the Jewish National Fund (JNF)
after first being sent as seeds from Australia
in the 1880s.10 Seed No. 24 advances that trees
do the colonial work of holding contested
land cheaply, “as British law protects trees”.11
Seed No. 15 exhorts, colloquially: “Crikey!
Eucalyptus elected most ‘Israeli’ tree.”12 Later,
pines became the JNF’s ‘greenwashing’ tree of
choice, and pine and eucalypt forests quickly
become ‘symbols of claiming territory’—though
not without some resistance.13 Seed No. 62, for
instance, recounts a ‘botanical ghost’ story that
Nicholson discovered while walking in Canada
Park, formerly the Palestinian village Imwas:
At this place in 1967 Israeli soldiers expel
an entire village, Imwas, and bulldoze every
home in the village… Canada Park—the
pine trees I walk amidst—covers the traces
of the village. But after the bulldozers the
cactii [which Palestinian villagers use to
create fences between houses] grow back,
becoming the matrix of the missing village,
a botanical ghost of the destroyed homes.14
Further topographical layerings occur at the
site of Ma’man Allah cemetery. In 1959, graves
were cleared to make way for Independence
Park, built on the western part of the cemetery
by the Israeli Jerusalem Municipality. More
recently, a further four hundred graves were
cleared to make way for the controversial (and
some would say ironically named) Center for
Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance, which
now occupies a large remainder of Ma’man
Allah cemetery.15 The project is backed by the
Los Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Center, in
alliance with the Israeli government.16
Just as written correspondence is
the product of two vantages, and iconographic
correspondence requires two forms by which
to create the comparison, there is a dualism
governing the logic of Nicholson’s work. Hence,
while the subject of Comparative Monument
(Ma’man Allah) is unquestionably the fate of
Opposite
Tom Nicholson artist talk Khalidi Library
opening night, The Jerusalem Show VII
for the 2014 Qalandiya International
TOM NICHOLSON’S COMPARATIVE MONUMENT
occupied Palestine, it is framed (and haunted)
by the spectre of colonial Australia—by the
ghostly river red gums photographed in their
native landscape in the lower frieze. Comparative
Monument (Ma’man Allah), like its sister work
Comparative Monument (Palestine), connects
these two settler-colonies. The correspondence
between Palestine and Australia, channelled
through the image of the river red gum,
produces a mirror-like structuring device that
inverts as it seemingly doubles. The eucalypt
as a symbol of Israeli settler-colonialism in
Palestine is reversed as a symbol of Aboriginal
resistance in Australia. Nicholson’s pensive
prose explains at the station of Seed No. 17:
I am at the Pool’s edge… I recall looking
across another body of water amidst these
same trees, amidst monumental river
reds growing at the river’s edge. I recall
looking across the Murray River, that great
volume of water, from Barmah towards
Commerangunja—a landscape inscribed
with Yorta Yorta history, Yorta Yorta
resistance to the controlling and effacing
our colonising would effect—standing at the
water’s edge, looking out for pools of water
around where I step.17
The artist’s focus on occupied Palestine is twoway: Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah) is
also a reflection upon the settlement of Australia
by Great Britain and the subsequent affect this
has had on the indigenous inhabitants.
The lower frieze of photographs of the
Barmah Forest, what Nicholson refers to
using the filmic term “memory flashes”,18
also remembers the 1939 Cummeragunja
Walk-Off by the Yorta Yorta, traditional owners
of the Murray-Goulburn area. After decades
of exploitation and oppression, and, since
1937, mistreatment under a notoriously cruel
Protection Board manager, one hundred and
fifty Yorta Yorta went on strike and walked
off the reserve in protest, crossed the Murray
River, and then camped on the Victorian side
in Barmah. The Cummeragunja or ‘Cummera’
Walk-Off has, explains Yorta Yorta and
Dja Dja Wurrung elder Wayne Atkinson,
become a symbol of both “Aboriginal survival
in the face of dispossession” and “resistance to
government control over Aboriginal affairs”,
as well as attesting to “the continuity of culture
and identity”.19 In addition to the photographs
of river reds in Barmah, the Cummera Walk-Off
is also remembered in the choreography
of Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah),
whose final station concludes with the words:
“This walking is a monument, a line to follow
these words.”20 The complexity of the work’s
inverted historical and political correspondence
bears out not only in the yoking of occupied
Palestine to colonial Australia, but also in the
figure of Nicholson himself, who travels freely
between the two places: as a white man of
European heritage in Australia, and a friend
and colleague of Palestinians in Jerusalem (a fact
that foregrounds the tension or contradiction
that is inherent to the work).21 Indeed when one
looks for it in Comparative Monument (Ma’man
Allah), this dualistic, inverted, mirroring
structure is present in many of the work’s
formal and conceptual strategies. Nicholson’s
art is almost Manichean in this respect, and
it is not insignificant that many of his works
are produced in black and white.22 Within this
dualistic order, black is gravid with white, and
vice versa. In Comparative Monument (Ma’man
Allah), consider the bi-directionality of the
English and Arabic texts at each station, then
echoed by the gesture of traversing the series
of sixty-nine stations first counter-clockwise,
and then clockwise, or reading the Guide Book
left to right in English, then flipping it to read
it right to left in Arabic, meeting at the central
pages: Seed No. 69. The mirrored reflection pool
at the centre of the Ma’man Allah Cemetery,
Birkat Mamilla, which Nicholson refers to as
a “mirror to the sky”, is another key, mirrorinverting trope in the work.23 This reflection
pool (now empty) corresponds vividly with
another void, the nearby open excavations for
the foundations of the Museum of Tolerance.
This trope is emphasised by the phrase, “I visit
everyday. I descend into the pool, ten metres
below”, which is incanted no less than six
times throughout the sixty-nine stations.24
The three-tiered structure of the frieze also
creates a type of mirroring. It produces a vertical
correspondence between the upper and lower,
southern and northern hemispheres, which
couples the archival documents pertaining
to Ma’man Allah in the upper frieze with the
photographs of the Barmah National Forest
in the lower frieze.25 In the Milani Gallery
installation, the single seeds taped to the posters
in zip-lock bags form a perforated, equatorial
line demarcating this bi-hemispherical schema.
A related, bi-hemispherical mirroring
or correspondence is produced in another of
Nicholson’s works, Radio Exarcheia (2012), a
collaboration with Italian composer Riccardo
Vaglini. Radio Exarcheia comprised thirty-five
stacks of A4 paper positioned throughout
Melbourne’s Margaret Lawrence Gallery
creating a type of miniature townscape.
One side of the pages was printed with English
translations of contemporary political graffiti
found on the streets of Exarcheia, Athens
following the Greek economic crisis of
65
2008-09, and on the other side, the negation
of that slogan in “political, syntactical, and/
or formal terms”.26 Viewers were invited to
assemble their own scores of slogans/counterslogans, and then read these scripts into a
microphone, while listening to a composition
made up of field recordings from the suburb of
Exarcheia through a set of headphones, thereby
creating a spectral, antipodean community in
an inverted parallelism to its Greek, northern
hemispherical counterpart.
As with both Radio Exarcheia and
Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah), the
figuring of Australia as the mirror-inverse of its
north-hemispherical counterpart in some way
attends to early European conceptions of the
as yet ‘undiscovered’ austral land as antipodal
(diametrically opposed to) rather than southern.
Ian McLean maps the classical literature on
this belief in his book White Aborigines: Identity
Politics in Australian Art (1998), noting that
the classical concept of antipodality was first
glimpsed in Pythagorean cosmography, in
which “another body named antichthon is
the opposite or counterpoise of the world”.27
In Homeric Greek mythology, he writes
referring to James Romm that antipodality
was conceived as “ethnocentric inversion”.28
For the geographer Eratosthenes (b. 276 BCE),
antipodality was the rational product of
geometry. He wrote that “five encircling zones
were girt around” the earth, and “in them
dwelt men antipodal to each other”.29 For the
later Roman theologian Isidore, Antipodeans
were believed to be “opposite to our feet, so
that, being as it were placed beneath earth,
they tread in footsteps that are opposite to our
feet”.30 McLean explains that the neo-classical
conception of the Antipodes as an inversion of
the north was subsequently embraced during
the epoch of European colonialism.31 In this
respect, the Antipodean construct is emblematic
of the colonial projection of fantasies onto
distant lands, like the Zionist projection of
an unpopulated land onto Palestine pre-1948.
As the popular phrase goes, it was imagined
as “a land without people for a people without
land”.
Correspondence, mirroring, and
inversion each have specific but related
meanings. Correspondence joins, mirroring
doubles, and inversion reverses. The effect of
thinking of through mirrors, correspondences,
and inversions is such that a monument, history,
or memory is automatically rendered pregnant
with its other. It rejects a monolithic conception
of history by attending at every moment to its
countermemory, and creates a way of imagining
two histories together.32 But Nicholson’s use
of each of these strategies is always partial and
incomplete, riddled with gaps and structured
by the logic of the fragment—most evident in
Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah) in the
seven physical absences in the upper frieze, and
the corresponding seven ‘memory flashes’ of
the lower frieze. Anthony Gardner has observed
of Nicholson’s broader methodology that his
“meetings of history are fragile and inconclusive
so that the surety of any one perspective or
historical frame is perpetually suspended in
doubt”.33 In Comparative Monument (Ma’man
Allah), the use of mirroring, inverting, and
doubling is, importantly, coupled with the
strategy of fragmenting. This fragmenting
functions to dispel reductive comparisons
between—and to resist effacing the specificities
of—Israel and Australia, even as those two
States are brought into direct comparison.
That is, by conjoining these two profoundly
different politics and histories through the
trope of the eucalyptus, the point of comparison
and the kernel of the paradox, Comparative
Monument (Ma’man Allah) simultaneously
points to a correspondence between these
two States while sustaining contradiction.
Notes
1
Tom Nicholson, Cartoons for Joseph Selleny, 2014,
12 cartoons, charcoal drawings perforated and pounced
with cheesecloth bags full of ground charcoal; wall drawing
created through pouncing with cheesecloth full of ground
charcoal, 1200 x 500cm, off-set printed artist’s book to take
away
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11
ibid. (Seed No. 24)
12
ibid. (Seed No. 15)
13
Tom Nicholson, artist talk op cit.
14
A Guide Book, op cit. (Seed No. 62)
15
ibid. (Seed No. 58)
16
ibid. (Seed No. 60)
17
ibid. (Seed No. 17)
18
Nicholson, artist talk op cit.
19
Wayne Atkinson, ‘The Cummeragunja Walk-Off and the
return to Base Camp Politics’, History Journal, Vol. 1., No. 1,
2005: 35
20
Nicholson, A Guide Book, op cit. (Seed No. 69). A related
walking monument of Nicholson’s is Proposition for a Banner
March and a Black Cube Hot Air Balloon, a collaborative work
with Raafat Ishak from 2012, which would stage a banner
march through the streets of Shepparton following a black
cube hot air balloon, which, in turn, attempts to follow the
march. See Raafat Ishak and Tom Nicholson, Proposition
for a Banner March and a Black Cube Hot Air Balloon,
Ryan Johnston (ed.), Shepparton, 2012
21
Observation made by Johan Lund, co-director, Institute of
Modern Art, at Nicholson’s artist talk at Milani Gallery
22
For instance, Cartoons for Joseph Selleny, 2014, a black
and white charcoal rendition of Manet’s The Execution of
Maximilian (1867-69); the black and white wall panels, texts,
and photographs (some inverted) of Towards a Monument to
Batman’s Treaty, 2013; and the photographs for Proposition
for a Banner March and a Black Cube Hot Air Balloon, with
Raafat Ishak, 2012, to name a few recent examples
23
A Guide Book, op cit. (Seed No. 27)
24
ibid. (Seed Nos 6, 19, 42, 54, 62, 67)
25
There are seven gaps in the upper frieze, and seven
corresponding photographs in the lower frieze
2
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or not at all: Philosophy of
Contemporary Art, London and New York: Verso, 2013, see
Chapter 5: ‘Photographic ontology, infinite exchange’: 117-132
26
Tom Nicholson with Riccardo Vaglini, Radio Exarcheia,
2012, 35 stacks of 60 different two-sided A4 sheets, to be
read aloud into a microphone connected to the gallery public
address system; stereo sound component comprising two
sets of recordings from in and around Exarcheia Athens,
playing through one set of headphones; chair; vinyl text on
wall; silent HD video work, still images of political inscriptions
from the streets of Exarcheia, Athens, 6 minutes
3
Tom Nicholson, Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah):
A Guide Book to a Collection of 69 Eucalyptus Camaldulensis
Seeds in the Khalidi Library, Jerusalem (2012-14), Brad
Haylock (ed.), Melbourne: Surpllus, 2014
27
Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in
Australian Art, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press,
1998: 11, citing E.H. Bunbury, A History of Ancient Geography,
vol. 1, London: John Murray, 1879: 123-4
4
Tom Nicholson, Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah),
Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2014; Fractures, The Jerusalem
Show VII, Qalandiya International, 2014
28
McLean, ibid., citing James S. Romm, The Edges of the
Earth in Ancient Thought, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992: 45-81
5
Capurro is renowned for his painstaking method of rubbing
out images from the pages of magazines, such as with the
series Compress (doublivores) (2006-07)
29
McLean, ibid., citing Ruth Cowhig, ‘Blacks in English
Renaissance Drama and the Role of Shakespeare’s Othello’,
in David Dabydeen (ed.), The Black Presence in English
Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985:12
6
As Blair French has noted of Nicholson’s work
previously, emphasising the artist’s background in the
drawing department of the Victorian College of the Arts
under Bernard Sachs and John Cattapan, this linear
procession may be understood as an expanded form of
drawing. See Blair French, ‘Tom Nicholson: Following the
event’, Art & Australia, Vol. 47, No. 1 2009: 142-5
7
Tom Nicholson, artist talk at Milani Gallery, Brisbane,
5 September 2014
8
Nicholson, A Guide Book, n.p. (Seed No. 69)
9
Tom Nicholson, ‘Actions towards the Image: Traces, Images
and Memory in the work of Joseph Beuys’, PhD diss., April
2007, School of Culture and Communication, University of
Melbourne
10
A Guide Book, op cit (Seed No. 23)
30
McLean, op cit: 12
31
McLean, op cit: 11
32
The hypothetical walk between the sixty-nine red river
gums to be configured in an Australian landscape is intended
to by undertaken whilst simultaneously holding memory of the
Ma’man Allah cemetery in one’s head
33
Anthony Garnder, ‘Which histories matter?’, Third Text,
Vol. 23, Issue 5, 2009: 611
Opposite
Installation view Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah),
Milani Gallery, September, 2014
Photo courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane