Time as a site: Joel Spring

Special relativity proposes time as an illusion that moves relative to an observer. Because modern-day, Western society does not recognise itself as an ideological construction, it must be represented as one. I see this as one of the functions of work that seeks to involve itself with politics. But rendering something as legible is only the first step. What is at stake here is the definition between modes of inclusion and exclusion. 

The opportunity to engage with proposals for Issue 44 has been a privilege. The final selection offers compelling insight into some ideas that I’ve found hard to hold onto as purely text or language. I've never been interested in a single definition of time and this issue aims to hold as many different definitions as possible. Within the West, time has become the method by which we organise and discipline our coexistence.

Time slips, is slippery, and exists in many worlds at once. Each contributor's act of "holding time" in their own vision helps us find new meaning in its experience. This "holding" is literally a physical act, an act of labour and care, and a generous offering for Runway Journal readers. For all writers and artists it is a critical act, and for many, "holding" time in their own vision is also an act of decolonial imagination: it reclaims possibilities and acknowledges difference. How do we attempt to bridge these asymmetries of physical and spiritual experiences, to create tools as a community or many communities to build objects of shared value?

It’s not lost on me the relevance of writing about Issue 44 in the present, as a means to embed it historically into the existing canon moving towards the future. That is one of the roles of writing about Art and artists—a concern with futurity and imagining a better world, and the steps we might need to walk towards it. In seeking to inform a constructive reading of Issue 44—and the site it exists in, towards a political goal—I want to talk about a specific site, a painting of that site and its painter. 

In October 2017 the retrocession of Albert Namatjira’s copyright was awarded to his family and living descendants after 60 years. Albert Namatjira was one of the most celebrated and prolific Indigenous artists of the 20th century, yet born a ward of the state at Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission on Western Aranda / Arrernte Country.

A painter and one of the first ‘Aboriginal Australian citizens’, Namatjira is notable for many reasons. But it is his understanding of the relationship between the existing technologies of painting at the time, the emergent technology of the Australian art market and the representational form of the landscape which offers us an insight into the importance of his ways of producing and subverting usual ways of seeing Country through technology itself. 

This framing device places Namatjira literally at the point of partition between the state of subject and object as an ontological boundary, and it is at this boundary that Namatjira lived his life.

Another of Namatjira’s achievements is his recognition by the colonial state as the first Aboriginal citizen of Australia in the Northern Territory. In his lifetime and until 1967, Indigenous people were not recognised as people at all. In this sense Namatjira’s body of work attempts to reverse the colonial world’s order, the orders in which the associations between Aboriginal and object, settler and subject, appear to be fixed and natural.

One must recognise the boldness of the two thousand painted works that Albert Namatjira produced. Two thousand is a paltry number in comparison to our hyperproduction of images today, but it is an incredible statement, and example of the intentional manipulation of a technological and representational form within a political struggle—a struggle to inscribe one’s own self against a regime of inscription. Before image making practices such as photography, the colonial expansion of what is now called ‘Australia’ was depicted through images painted by settlers [1]. Namatjira’s work was attempting to dilute the increasing numbers of images depicting his Country by white artists, by painting it himself.

The political implications of Namatjira’s body of work as an attempt to protect his Country reverberate through time. In 2014, Kayte / ​Kaytetye man, film-maker and artist Warwick Thornton created an installation work for the Adelaide Biennale, titled Rebirth. The work is made up of moving image and charcoal drawings. It references an event in 2012 in which the two ghost gum trees depicted in Namatjira’s painting Twin Ghosts were intentionally set on fire and destroyed, after it was announced that they had been approved for heritage listing. Thornton used the literal burnt branches of the tree to create the charcoal drawings of the same scene, on Arrernte Country where the artist grew up. 

While unsurprising, the illicit action to destroy the trees and thus their heritage registration, demonstrates the political potential in Namatjira’s work. The very intentional documentation of his Country shows his paintings to be vital not only as a form of cultural production and imagery for Arrernte people, but also as evidence in the Western legal / heritage system. So much so that the only conceivable way of disputing and extinguishing the claims made with the paintings is to destroy the things depicted in them. 

How we understand the present moment as a shared site will be crucial in ensuring a future built in many images.

[1] see Lycett et al.