Beauty Everywhere: A new kind of Living the Questions post
Intermittent sources of awe and inspiration.
There is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
When I started this Substack, I began by including a weekly joy or source of inspiration at the end of each post. However, I wanted to keep from expanding the posts beyond what is easy to consume of a Saturday morning. I missed sharing these little extras, because I think as much as I turn over the questions around practice, so much of what interests me is quite simple: it is about beauty, in whatever form. As a result, I want to try something new: I want to collect the things that are feeding the practice and share this inspiration with you. This is the first in this series.
I would love to hear whether any of these resonate with you or draw links to other things you’ve engaged with (books, films, art, etc). Drawing links between seemingly disparate concepts and resources always aids me in my work and helps bring about new ideas to explore. I would love for you to participate in this process.
Portraits of Helmut Newton and June Newton (of each other)
Artistic couples fascinate me, especially when they work in the same medium. Helmut Newton is perhaps one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, a Berlin-born Jew whose family escaped during the war. He made his way, via Singapore, to Australia, where he enlisted in the Australian army and later began in fashion photography while living in Melbourne.
Of his time in Australia, Helmut supposedly said he learned ‘Absolutely nothing! They were formative years but they didn’t form me.’ Who am I to argue with the man himself? What did come of those years, however, was the definitive working relationship of his life: the one he shared with his wife June, an Australian actress and later photographer and collaborator. She worked under the pseudonym ‘Alice Springs’. They left Australia in 1961 and never returned.
There’s something uniquely intimate about their photos of each other, a duo who would not only be married for almost 50 years but for whom the medium was always a work in progress - they were partners in all things, it seems, always searching for new subjects and new ideas and travelling widely together while establishing themselves in new ways. I often think about the prospect of sharing an artistic life with another person, and how difficult and fraught this might be - but would this be better than one person who is inside the art world and one who isn’t? Helmut apparently made it quite clear that his first love would always be photography. June seemed to be on board, insisting her home was 'always where Helmut was.’ Are two practitioners better than one?
The other example I always think of in this vein is Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, and the incredible book she wrote about his death, The Year of Magical Thinking. That book is so heartbreaking and yet what I came away with was the sense that this kind of relationship - the marriage she and John had - was an example of a uniquely successful connection between two people (of any kind). They were together all the time, but that wasn’t it. They understood each other’s work and somehow that meant understanding each other best. It makes me wonder about my own relationships; whether understanding my work is essential to becoming intimate with me. All this tracks back to the fact that an artist’s work often permeates every sphere of their life, through to their very identity as a person. And so what if someone doesn’t really understand it? Are they merely a facilitator for it, this great love that is abstract? As Jenny Offill wrote (in the Dept. of Speculation):
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.
I am not sure how I’d feel having a Vera in my own life. But every relationship finds its own balance and the beauty of Helmut and June Newton’s depictions of each other - of turning each other into the facilitators, the subject and the inspiration - for their life and work remains aspirational somehow. Whatever the cost of that may have been.
Anatomie d'une chute (Anatomy of a Fall), directed by Justine Triet, 2023
It’s rare these days for me to watch new films and come away thinking about the actual words expressed in the film for weeks after. I’m not really sure why this is, except that Anatomy of a Fall has done this for me. The performances are excellent and the film has a particular visual beauty, all of which I know many have already said. But what really struck me was just how double-edged almost everything said in the film is. While the film has been broadly critically praised, whatever audience frustration I’ve seen expressed about this film comes, I think, from its refusal to imply set meaning or a set interpretation that leans clearly one way or another in either what is expressed verbally or shown visually. This leaves so much space for interpretation that, while there is of course an ending and a verdict, it doesn’t quite feel tangible. We will always be left with questions.
A lot of this is to do with the way language itself operates in the film; we move from English to French and back again, as novelist Sandra Voyter (played by Sandra Hüller) struggles to defend herself outside her native language of German. There is one kind of language that served her marriage, another she must employ with her child, another to help reply to investigators and yet another within the courtroom. Written by Justine Triet (alongside her husband, Arthur Harari - here we go with another romantic/artist duo), the speech is itself always two- or three-fold. You must constantly ask yourself whether what you understand is at all what was intended, as the gap between you and everyone else is highlighted throughout. As Sandra herself points out, reality is an abstract concept. And what are we to do about that when what we want is a right or wrong judgment?
Ben Quilty’s Self-portrait Smashed Rorschach, 2009 and Fairy Bower Rorshcach, 2012
I was reminded of Ben Quilty’s work on a recent trip to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Two works that I particularly like:
Something I think we struggle with in Australia is finding ways to come to terms with the pain in our history while still engaging the present audience in a way that is sensible to them - so many Australians don’t have a connection to this land in any ancestral sense. As a nation of predominantly first or second-generation people, myself included, I have found it hard to articulate what it is about my own nation that includes or contains me, especially as important discussions around the impact of colonisation are occurring more openly and more regularly, and are centred around very particular experiences and dynamics that don’t have much to do with my contemporary life (because they are particular to First Nations people - and rightly so).
Indeed, I wasn’t sure how to articulate my ‘Australianness’ when I left for the UK; all I knew is that I felt more Australian than ever, and that I missed the landscape itself intensely. The landscape inspires awe in the proper sense of the term. For this reason, I find Quilty’s Fairy Bower Rorschach particularly impactful - it is an enormous painting, and the gallery describes the technique Quilty employs as purposefully ‘damaging’ a painting by pressing one canvas to another while the paint is still wet; this creates the mirror image and forever impacts the original while duplicating it. In this case, the site depicted is significant:
Fairy Bower Falls is an idyllic and spectacular destination for tourists and locals. Photographs from the mid 19th century depict the full colonial splendour of women with parasols and men in top hats at the foot of the falls.
Fairy Bower Falls is also reputedly the site of a massacre of scores of Aboriginal people in the early 19th century. Although there are no written records there has been a strong oral history of such an event handed down amongst locals.
By ‘damaging’ the original painting in this manner, and alluding to the therapeutic connotations of the ink-blot form itself, Quilty asks us to reconsider the awe we might feel at this site - what it may come from, how else it might effect us, and what else we might understand by it. Regarding his self-portrait, this is thought to be of Quilty in a state of drunkenness as a means of commentary on the different rituals of masculinity (in coming of age) across his own culture, which he often contrasts with those of the Australian Aboriginal people. It is then a reflection on his experiences as a young man, and coming to understand oneself through one’s own history.
For me, trying to engage both with the land that I always think back on as my own, alongside the way I reflect on my own rites of passage, do something intensely important for my own narrative. I find Quilty’s work to be liberating in laying this bare as a process that both aids self-awareness but which also remains slippery - in some ways, the ‘damage’ to the painting speaks to the act of remembering, in which we are always ‘re-writing’ (or perhaps ‘damaging’) the original memory. There is a therapeutic benefit perhaps, but not without cost. This tension is interesting, and adds appropriate nuance to reconceptualising individual and collective memory.
I hope you enjoyed this new kind of post. I hope to deliver these to you from time to time, simply sharing beautiful and interesting things I’ve come across. Separately, I am also considering writing up about my ‘artist dates’ - a part of my process inspired by Julia Cameron’s seminal The Artist’s Way, where she advises artists to go out and get inspired. I’ll be making notes and sharing what I can in due course.
For now, I would love to hear any feedback you have about this post and whether any of these items spoke to you or inspired any thoughts. Please leave me a comment!
I wanted also to let you know that there will not be a Living the Questions post for a couple of weeks while I work towards a writing deadline. The next normal edition will be with you for May 2024 and continue weekly as normal from there. Thank you for reading along with me so far and I hope you will stick around to read on upon my return from this short break!
Until next time,
Be well.
CCx