The river’s revenge: an artistic perspective of the Darling

Gabriella Hirst gives us a timely reminder of environmental decay.

Still from Darling Darling by Gabriella Hirst — 2020 IPMIC Commission — Lake Menindee, Barkandji country.

This is the third Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, the first having been Angelica Mesiti’s The Calling (2013) and the second Daniel Crooks’s Phantom Ride (2016). And as in Crooks’s work, Gabriella Hirst’s Darling Darling consists of two projections shown simultaneously on opposite sides of a single screen suspended in the viewing space.

Each of these two short films lasts for just over 25 minutes, so one needs at least 50 minutes to watch both through from beginning to end, and longer if one wants to appreciate properly the structure of a film that one has of necessity started to watch at some arbitrary point in the middle; once again, however, I am struck by how little time audiences give to time-based work; most stay for a few moments, the more serious for 10 or 15 minutes, but hardly anyone long enough to get more than an approximate sense of what the work is about.

The repeated title has a meaning: one side is devoted to recording the meticulous restoration of W.C. Piguenit’s The Flood on the Darling 1890, while the other made up of a number of shots of the same river today, with its stark banks and flow reduced in places to a series of ponds, in other areas seemingly entirely desiccated.

The Darling River was an important and navigable waterway a century ago. The town of Wilcannia, in the far west of NSW, today almost forgotten, was once a river-port from which wool was shipped downstream to its junction with the Murray at Wentworth and beyond. But like all rivers in Australia, it was also prone to devastating floods, and in 1890 Piguenit saw the upstream city of Bourke submerged with considerable damage to buildings, railway lines and other infrastructure.

In the picture he painted five years later, however, he emphasised the grandeur and paradoxical tranquillity of the scene rather than the destructive nature of the event. As all commentators have observed, he is evoking the romantic quality of the sublime, an indirect and poetic way of dealing with the catastrophe, since the sublime is the experience of those aspects of nature that are exhilarating but dangerous and inimical to all sense of inhabitation.

The film records the restoration of the painting in the conservation laboratory of the Art Gallery of NSW, where everything takes place in an atmosphere of serene concentration and care. First the picture is brought in from the galleries and carefully removed from its frame.

Then precise quantities of chemicals are weighed out to mix a cleaning solvent, designed to take off the old varnish without disturbing the paint layer. Cotton buds are made up especially and used for this purpose, and slowly the restorer works over the surface of the picture, inch by inch. After cleaning, the canvas is varnished with a protective layer, and then damaged areas are repainted over this surface so that the repairs can be removed later if necessary without harming the autograph surface below. All of these processes are shown in short takes that alternate from one to another, giving us an impression of a complex series of stages, rather than documenting them in a literal fashion.

The frame too is restored; first cleaned, then regilded with gold leaf, gold beaten to within a few microns of thickness and so light that it can be blown away by the slightest breath of wind. We see the sheets lifted with a brush charged with static electricity merely by being rubbed over the back of the hand. Finally the film ends up with close-up shots of the inundation, plants, wading birds and other fine details.

On this side then, all is water, the land covered like a vast lake. On the other side we encounter the opposite extreme: the Darling River today, or more precisely a year or so ago, before the recent rains brought by the switch from an El Nino to a La Nina pattern. What we discover is a river in crisis, nearly moribund after years of drought and drained of its natural flow by excessive irrigation and the stubborn insistence on growing crops that are manifestly unsuitable to a land with the water economy of this region of Australia.

It is of course impossible not to be struck almost at once by the contrast between the exquisite care with which we handle and conserve a work of art and our brutal and irresponsible exploitation of the environment that is essential for our own survival; even if our priority is only the sustainability of our own farming practices, and thus our ability to continue to grow the crops and raise the livestock we need to feed ourselves, it is clear that neglect and abuse of our river systems is self-defeating.

As becomes apparent if we watch the sequence all the way through, this film starts with dawn; the light comes up and birds start to sing. We see a flat plain, with framing trees on the right; after a couple of minutes this view gives way to another, and now we are looking at the river, or rather the river bed, with a large framing tree in the left foreground, its branches reaching over the top of the composition. There is some water in the middle of the river, but nothing like a proper flow.

This view is in turn succeeded by another with water in the foreground, river banks on either side but this time with no framing trees. Subsequent views fill in our picture of the environment, one case hinting at irrigation canals, while in the ninth view, which presents us at first with the happier sight of a considerable amount of water, we are shocked by the sudden eruption of a pump, presumably drawing off the water that we found momentarily more comforting.

As this effect of surprise reminds us, the camera remains motionless so that each shot is like an animated still — a fixed view, but one that is taken over a certain duration of time, during which we hear birdsong, see leaves moving in the breeze, and other minor forms of movement that, like the sounds of a forest, contribute to the general sense of quietness.

The stillness of the camera in each view draws our attention to the composition of the frame, which would clearly be less obvious if the camera were moving through the landscape. And what we discover is that each of the views — 11 if I counted correctly — is composed like a painted landscape. The horizon is set at something like a third of the height of the frame, or perhaps in many cases close to the golden section, and the use of framing trees in the foreground and the middle distance helps to manage our sense of depth and space.

The effect of this quasi-painterly view of the landscape is complex; on the one hand it gives aesthetic shape to each shot, and like landscape painting allows us to see the countryside before us in a clearer manner and with a particular form and structure. But at the same time, these compositions make what is missing far more striking — the life-giving flow of the river that would have invited a painter to ponder the view in the first place.

It is always hard for art to make absence apparent, but one way is to invoke a tradition, a format or a language that brings with it certain expectations. And here the formats and conventions of landscape forcibly remind us of what is lacking in this view, the absence that prevents these images from being satisfactory and harmonious landscapes.

All of this works quite effectively at the poetic level that is proper to art, but the work is weighed down in the accompanying notes by rather heavy-handed suggestions of a connection between the western genre of landscape and the exploitation of the land that has led to the present condition of the river.

This line of reasoning is pursued in an even more tendentious and simplistic manner in some of the writing accompanying the NGV’s She-oaks and Sunlight, which will be reviewed here in a few weeks. There it is suggested that the very presence of a horizon in western landscape is inseparable from the exploitation and despoliation of the natural environment.

This argument sounds like the kind of tired ideology fed to hapless students in the first year of art school, mixed with the old chestnut from John Berger that landscape is about property. In reality, of course, all landscapes have horizons — Chinese landscape as much as western. The horizon is simply the end of the view of anyone who is standing up and looking out at the world; the fact that Aboriginal dot paintings do not have horizons is because they are more akin to maps than to landscapes.

It is true that the invention of rational perspective in the Renaissance is intimately connected to the rise of modern science, and science, as Merleau-Ponty wrote in L’Oeil et l’esprit (1960) ‘‘manipulates things and ceases to inhabit them’’ (manipule les choses et renonce à les habiter). But this does not mean that the modern landscape tradition can be reduced to a kind of advance guard of the scientific conquest of the world.

Modern landscape has one of its sources in Renaissance perspective, but many other elements were assimilated in the formation of the mature genre in the 17th century: the discovery of real natural locations in Florentine painting of the 15th century; the proto-romantic sense of the life of nature, stimulated by ancient bucolic poetry, in 16th century Venice; the fantasy and proto-sublime themes of the Flemish; the sense of historical gravitas found in Rome.

All of this reminds us of a deeper and fundamentally important principle: that although rationalism and the scientific view of the world may alienate us from an earlier and unreflecting sense of oneness with nature, there is a more sophisticated understanding of nature and our place in it to be found when, in turn, we transcend the limitations of rationalism and utilitarianism. In the same way, higher religions and spiritual traditions are not pre-rational like the tribal cultures we tend to romanticise today because they have become so remote, but post-rational, that is to say a new synthesis.

Thus it is legitimate to reflect critically on the Renaissance model of rational perspective and its effect on our thinking, but hopelessly simplistic to make the western landscape tradition responsible for the despoliation of the Darling River environment or anything else.

As this exhibition in fact makes clear, it is the very reference to this landscape tradition, reminding us of what has been lost and the damage that we have done, that makes the present state of the river so poignant.

Darling Darling. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, until May 30