Girl, Moving.
'She thinks she is unseen; she begins to run with her fists clenched in front of her. Her nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the beech woods out of the light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to the shade like a swimmer.' 1 1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Grafton Books, 1977, p. 10
*
Makayla runs. She runs ahead of me, stopping, sometimes, only for a second. When she stops, she gawks, wide-eyed, or reaches her hand out, a gesture that makes me even more nervous than the running. In this space. I call out: Don’t touch! Don’t run! As loud as I dare, in a place where no-one calls out, and no-one runs. We’ve been here for five minutes and already we’re breaching all the rules.
If she hears me, she takes no notice. She runs ahead, into other spaces. Disappears from view.
*
There’s a film, by Eva Rothschild, titled Boys and Sculpture. A group of boys, ages six to twelve, are left in a gallery space with Rothschild’s sculptures. They are given minimal instructions: they can look at the work, they can touch the work, and they will not get into trouble. What they do, at first, is circle the work. At first. Then: BOYS DESTROY SCULPTURE! They ‘totally dismantled it’, says Rothschild.2 2. Eva Rothschild: In conversation, ACCA 2018 link With the parts, they build other things, or use them as props in imaginative games.
Boys and Sculpture is interested in how constructions of gender prescribe and restrict, for example, determining that boys will be destructive and ‘naughty.’ As the artist describes her work being joyfully dismantled, I’m reminded of the ‘parts’ that little boys are made of: slugs, snails and puppy dog tails. Masculinity, the rhyme tells us, almost giving a tolerant shrug, is messy, naughty and a little bit out of control.
I think of an eleven-year-old girl I know, and wonder what she would make of Rothschild’s work.
*
When I was a child, time was expanded, stretched out. Hot stuffy afternoons in the classroom seemed to go on forever. Now, time seems to be contracting and accelerating. Take October, 2018. ‘I recall the afternoon of the 2nd, your Honour.’ Next thing I knew, it was November.
Fact: The more I write, the faster time goes. I must be aging exponentially, then, since I’m writing more and more. I no longer have time for anything. Scratch that. That’s just an excuse. Sometimes I just don’t want to make time for things. Go out and take part in life? I’d prefer to stay in and write about it, if that’s ok.
To support this hypothesis, I undertake experimentation: some days I don’t write a thing. Not a word, other than ‘peanut butter,’ on a shopping list. Results are consistent: days without writing feel longer. ‘Look at that,’ I’ll say, to no-one in particular, around mid-afternoon, ‘it’s only 2pm! It felt like 6pm at the very least!’ On those long, heady afternoons, I don’t know how to spend all the extra time I seem to have.
*
At first, Kosmos offers me nothing. Straight away, I realise my usual approaches to writing about art won’t do; I need to try something new. The exhibition throws me a challenge: to write about the work without reference to the past, the artist’s process, the artist’s intentions, or what materials or methods she used. Don’t trace her ideas to the work of other artists, don’t draw a historical trajectory leading from the past to this work. For a moment, I falter. What is left to write about?
*
Let’s go, says Makayla when we park the car. What’s first? I say. The library? Ok! Let’s go. We sit in beanbags and read some books. I let her decide when we are done. Let’s go. We walk to the playground. She runs and climbs until she’s had enough. Next, over to the café, drink a hot chocolate, rate it out of 10. Wait a sec, I say, as she makes a beeline for the door. I need to pay. She stops and waits patiently until I’m done. Ok, what’s next? Let’s go.
*
After a short time wandering around the sculptures at Kosmos, and observing others do the same, suddenly it’s clear. The singularity, the point from which my writing will begin its expansion, will be distilled down to this moment in time and space. This moment in time and space will be the catalyst for potentially infinite expansion, incorporating any or all of the spatial, physical, temporal and psychological relationships forming, or becoming apparent, as that human movement occurs around, in, past and through some sculptural works in a gallery.
*
Time moves on, is moving on, even as you read these words. Try to be in the moment, try to be in each of the moments that are passing by with each word you read. (As I write this, I am always imagining you reading it. That’s the only way this can work.)
When I am absorbed in the present moment, time slows down. But time disappears rapidly into a vortex while I work at how to reshape bits and pieces of life into words, and words into sentences that convey some kind of meaning, with rhythm and syntax.
In this essay, for example, I’m continually rethinking what to keep, change, add, or discard. All this thinking takes up time. All this writing takes up time. All this thinking and writing makes life feel very full.
*
With Kosmos in mind, I begin writing, and wonder - is it possible to take the temporal context out of a text and still tell a story? To formulate and communicate thoughts without mentioning pre-existing ideas that ground and situate mine?
I can limit those techniques within my writing, I can even avoid the traditional forward motion of putting one word after the other. I could present my thoughts in a poem or a collage. But the linear progression I can’t avoid is the bridging of past, present and future that is inherent in the writing process: me, writing this here now, and, after some time passes, you, reading it. Unless I determine from the outset that I am writing only for myself, never for publication. And by doing so, allowing the work to remain unfinished and incomplete…….and thus, infinitely expandable?
*
Some reasons I write: to make sense of what happened. To make what happened into sense. To make what happened into something. To make something into something. To make something. Of the something. Or something.3 3. A favourite line from ROPE by Alfred Hitchcock: What (film) did you see her in? - I don't quite recall. ‘The Something Something.’ Or was it just plain ‘Something’?
For each minute of life that I live, it sometimes feels as if I could easily spend 100 minutes working on how to write about it. I deduce that the amount of time I could spend on shaping life into writing might be infinitely expandable, as I live life, then write about life, and then write about writing about life. I decline invitations to barbecues, dinners and film nights, propelled by the desire to keep writing, to keep on chiselling away at - something.
*
Makayla comes to a surprised halt. She’s rushed into a new room, and is confronted by long strips of shiny coloured tape; red, green, black and purple, forming curtains that divide the space into four small chambers. Cool, she whispers, as if to herself, although I’m standing next to her. The word drawn out, travelling on her breath. Cooooool. Takes out her phone again. Snaps the curtains from various angles. Stops. For the briefest moment, all is still, and we both stand there, looking, together.
*
When we talk about expanding the field the logical first question is, where to? It’s a worthwhile investigation, but so is the question, who to? Who will be able to enter the field, now that it has been expanded?
*
Rothschild made Boys and Sculpture to explore the way boys - her own sons for example - engage with the physical world, displaying ‘a sense of entitlement in creating their own world.’4 4. Eva Rothschild: In conversation, ACCA 2018 op.cit Her sculptural practice investigates the way that human movement can be regulated - or facilitated, or accommodated - by objects placed in an environment. Watching people sit, stand, and walk around and through the works in Kosmos, it occurs to me that our movement through public space reflects our ease with the world, our ability to ‘create [our] own world.’
Who creates a world where a child aged 6 – 12 is familiar and at ease in art galleries? Not the child.
*
Wow, breathes Makayla softly. She is almost vibrating with the desire to touch the work. A gallery attendant glides swiftly over. Some works can be touched, he tells us, but not this one. Makayla is unfazed. So she must restrain her instinct to touch this huge, hanging, punching-bag-like object. Ok. She pulls out her phone instead. Takes a barrage of photos. Then, she’s off again. Rushing past the works in the middle of the space with barely a glance, making her way towards Cosmos.
*
How do we imagine a little girl, sugar spice and all things nice, will move through a gallery full of formalist sculpture on a Saturday morning in Melbourne at 11am?
Prettily? Gracefully? Quietly? Obediently? In a dress that is crisp and white and ironed?
*
I can tell you what one little girl does in a gallery full of formalist sculpture in Melbourne on a Saturday morning: run.
*
I wonder if Rothschild ever imagined this particular small female viewer, who stands momentarily in front of a sculpture, contemplates it, reaches out tentatively, obeying an instinct to touch it, then stops herself and takes off again, passing some works without pausing, rushing straight to the next piece that captures her attention. Through the gallery space she courses, never displaying a moment of hesitation about which way to go next, following a trajectory of her own instinctual devising - past, through, inside, outside and around variously sized and shaped sculptural objects. Stops momentarily. Then again, runs. On to the next thing.
*
It’s a constant activity, navigating, often done without thinking. With varying degrees of eagerness or reluctance, confidence or nervousness, hope or resignation, grace or clumsiness, curiosity or cynicism.
Some things I’ve navigated through: city streets, freeway routes, unfamiliar subway systems, airports, websites, Netflix menus, new relationships, difficult relationships, instruction manuals, induction manuals, tax returns, hospitals, birth, death, academic texts, auto-corrected texts, job interviews, gallery spaces, Eva Rothschild’s exhibition, this essay.
I’m navigating now, through this essay, winding my way through and around each paragraph. The essay is constantly changing shape as I cut and replace words, and move whole sections around. I’m navigating through it with a high degree of uncertainty and clumsiness, without knowing where I’m going or how I’ll get there, but fuelled by curiosity and eagerness. And hope. I’m hopeful of achieving some kind of grace, in the making, if not in the final iteration. If you’ve reached this point, then you are also navigating through it, in a different now. Back here, in your past, I fortify myself by imagining that you are navigating with eagerness. Or curiosity. Or at least, with hope.
*
Makayla eyes a row of three small stools, dubiously. I’ve called to her, saying the artist made them especially for viewers to sit on. I’m being a bit sneaky – I’m trying to buy time to catch up to her. I’m way behind - she’s already moved ‘within and without’5 5. Eva Rothschild: In conversation, ACCA 2018 op.cit the hollow structure of Cosmos. She is about to rush to the next room. But she’s generous about tolerating my adult whims. To humour me, she sits on one of the stools. She sits for about 20 seconds. Then leaps up. She’s off.
*
Like the boys do, and as Rothschild does with her own work, I’m dismantling this essay even as I construct it. I’m pulling parts out, discarding some and rearranging others. I’m experimenting to see what alternative shapes I can form the parts into. After so much expansion, it’s hard to imagine a final, definitive shape, no longer open to transformation.
*
Stop. Exhale. Take the time to look around you, wherever you are. Recall that scientists tell us time is not linear, it’s not a conveyor belt, that you are not actually an x-coordinate on a graph, moving inexorably towards an inevitable end that lies somewhere along a plottable line.
*
On Saturday morning, I collect Makayla. I tell her what I’ve planned for that day. Today, we’re going to an exhibition and then a playground, I tell her. I’m going to write about the exhibition. Maybe I’ll write about what it looks like, or what it makes me think of. She nods. Maybe you can help me with some ideas, I say. She nods again. Or maybe she shrugs.
*
What I can recall is that I couldn’t read what she thought of this suggestion. But I do remember this. Right before we enter, outside the doors of ACCA, I stop, and ask what she thinks the exhibition will be like. I think it’s gonna be fun! she says. Let’s go.
*
The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature. 6. David Shields, Reality Hunger, Hamish Hamilton: the Penguin Group, New York, 2010, p. 101
A child’s movement through a gallery space might illustrate something about her life experience and ability to create her own world. It might - but I knew from the outset that I would not articulate any conclusions about this. After all, I can only speculate on what this small human thinks or feels; I can only ever interpret her thoughts and actions through the lens of my own. The scenes of Makayla included here all occurred in some place or time, but only some occurred at ACCA, and only some on the day we visited Kosmos.