Beasts of the Southern Wild: Overwrought Ecological Hokum

This is not a bona-fide review, as it gives away a lot of the plot, but it does explain my feelings towards it. It soon became clear that this film was shot in queasy-cam and I was going to have to steel my nerves not to vomit.

The film is set in Louisiana, in a poor part of the bayou on the edge of an ugly city where everyone is poor. Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) is a little girl who lives in Bathtub with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in a shack built from reclaimed cardboard. Their yard is full of disused junk and pigs and ducks. Hushpuppy has a separate shack from her father and she eats with the animals.

The scene of poverty but community is set through a carnival with drinking, folk music, fireworks and a Rabelaisian atmosphere. Hushpuppy provides sonorous notation throughout the film, which gets annoying when it attempts to be profound – precocious children are my bête noire. She tells us the wider community ‘got fish in plastic wrappers, chicken on sticks, babies stuck in carriages – they only have holidays once a year.’ The inference is that people in Bathtub may be poor, but they can have a good time all the time. ‘They built the wall that cut us off. They think we’re going to drown down here, but we ain’t going nowhere.’

Hushpuppy not only eats with the animals; she communes with them. She listens to the hens to hear what they have to say. ‘Most of the time it’s I’m hungry or I need to poop, but sometimes they talk in code.’ She is taught in school that the icecaps will melt and everything south of the levee will flood, ‘so y’all better learn how to survive’. She believes everything is connected and that ‘the whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right’. Of course it doesn’t, and everything falls apart.

Her daddy is missing and her mother has swum away – she imagines talking to her mother and her mother singing back. Wink has been in a drunken incident and ended up in hospital, from which he discharges himself without his clothes and comes home ‘in a dress with a bracelet’.

Convinced of her own importance, Hushpuppy draws pictures of her life for future scientists to find, like cave paintings. ‘They will know that once there was a hushpuppy who lived with her daddy in a bathtub.’ While trying to cook, she sets fire to her shack, and then runs from her furious father. When he catches her he hits her and she thumps him in the heart. He falls down as though dead and she runs to find medicine for him in a sequence which demonstrates their fierce – often violent – co-dependency.

And then the storm comes, heralded by heavy symbolism of crumbling icebergs, insect larvae and aurochs – extinct beasts that look like giant cattle or buffalo. The sound of thunder is echoed in the collapsing ice shelves (some might call it magic realism; others might call it pretentious art school drivel) contrasting the hot and dirty land with the cold and clean – it’s all connected, in case we missed the point. Wink puts Hushpuppy in a suitcase with armbands on and tells her to go to sleep despite the wind and rain, ‘I’m your daddy and you have to do what I say because it’s my job to keep you from dying.’ He, meanwhile, picks up his gun and goes out to confront the storm, dealing with the physical the only way he knows how.

There’s very little of the storm itself before we cut to the aftermath. We see their pig in an altercation with an auroch. Aurochs died out in the seventeenth century; their extinction driven by hunting, a narrowing of habitat due to the development of farming, climactic changes, and diseases transmitted by domestic cattle. In other words, humans wiped them out, but as Hushpuppy intones, ‘every animal is made out of meat’ and, as animals, humans are just part of the food chain.

The quiet aftermath (a well-directed moment – actually, use of sound is good throughout the film) is disturbed by the boat containing Hushpuppy and Wink gliding through the water, with Hushpuppy’s voiceover, ‘For the animals that didn’t have a daddy to put them in a boat, the end of the world already happened. They’re all down below trying to breathe through water.’ They find some survivors and they band together, pooling their resources (pardon the pun) and feasting on crabs and prawns, ripping them apart with predatory fury. Hushpuppy needs comfort, but her father relies on strength and tells her ‘no crying allowed’. He reminisces about her mother, but his memories are sexual – ‘Mama was so pretty she didn’t even have to turn on the stove. She just walked into the room and all the water started to boil’ – when she needs maternal.

The survivors build a camp on top of the Bathtub, believing they have enough animals to last until the water goes down. The schoolteacher is among them and cautions, ‘Everything beautiful is gone. First the trees are gonna die, then the animals, then the fish – you better think about moving.’ She also tells Hushpuppy, ‘Most important thing I can teach you is to take care of people smaller and sweeter than you are.’

Two weeks later the salt water causes everything to die – dead trees and bloated cows float by, and when the water recedes the true devastation is apparent. ‘It didn’t matter that the water was gone. Sometimes you can break something so bad that it can’t be put back together. When you’re small you have to fix what you can.’ The aurochs rampage through and there is a mandatory evacuation: ‘strong animals got no mercy.’

Hushpuppy and Wink are taken and put in a shelter with bright lights that ‘looked like a fish tank with no water’, which they are told is for their own good. ‘When an animal gets sick here they plug it into the wall. Daddy said that if he ever got so sick that he couldn’t drink beer or catch catfish I had to put him in a boat and set fire to it so they couldn’t plug him into the wall.’ Wink is very ill and, though she is told everybody’s daddy dies, Hushpuppy denies it: ‘Not my daddy’. He explains to her, ‘I can’t take care of you no more. I didn’t want you to see that’, but she faces down the aurochs and counters, ‘The brave stay and watch it happen. They don’t run’.

Things go all hallucinogenic as she swims to a shack on a raft where kindly prostitutes (including one who may or may not be her mother) adore her as a plaything – ‘One day everything on your plate gonna fall on the floor and there ain’t gonna be nobody there to pick it up for you.’ Hushpuppy receives some of the physical affection she craves, but I must admit I had given up by now, partly because of the shaky focus issues, and partly due to the overwrought ecological hokum. ‘I’m a little piece of a big, big universe.’ So you said. We get it.

The film is adapted from a stage play, Juicy and Delicious, by Lucy Alibar. She worked on the film screenplay with director, Benh Zeitlin, and made a few changes. The character of Hushpuppy is originally male, but they made her a little girl to explore the father/daughter relationship of love/ responsibility/ protection. Also Alibar says they filled it up with music. Most of this is by Zeitlin and Dan Romer, with other tunes included from Lost Bayou Ramblers, Balfa Brothers and Harry Coates. The Cajun-influenced rock beats suffuse the film with depth and richness – it’s definitely a highlight.

Fiday Five: Biggest Weaknesses

I've applied for a lot of jobs since I've been in Australia. Ten, in fact. I've had a couple of interviews and a lot of rejection. As a writer living in Canberra, many of the positions I'm applying for involve working in government departments. To work for the government, it is preferred if you are an Australian citizen. I'm not.

There are interviews, and there are endurance tests. I quite like the interviews where you sit and chat and exchange views and you tell them what you want and they tell you what they want and it's soon pretty clear whether that's going to work. They're fine. And then there are the interviews with human resources. They are generally accompanied by a clipboard, a check-list and a load of clichéd questions to which you are expected to parrot text-book answers. I hate these.

This latter type encourages dishonesty from the start. The true reason you want to work for them is because you need the money. You know that; they know that, but are you going to admit it? Unlikely. Nor are you going to tell them you sulk when you don't get your own way or you handle conflict by pulling faces at your adversary behind their back. So why do they bother asking?

The question I dread most is the one about your biggest weakness. The usual answer is some guff about being a perfectionist, having high standards, putting pressure on self to complete task ahead of schedule, blah blah blah... All sorts of thoughts flash through my mind - none of which I would ever supply in a serious situation. But I am so tempted to offer one of the following:

5 Responses to the interview question 'What is your Biggest Weakness?'

1. Bad timekeeping - I hate getting up in the morning and I'm rarely punctual
2. I like to bitch and gossip about other staff, particularly if I can set people against each other and upset morale for my own amusement
3. I take credit for others' successes and am very quick to apportion blame to cover my arse
4. Insufficent standards of personal hygiene
5. Alcohol

Art Gallery of South Australia: Part Four

In this final post from the Art Gallery of South Australia, I thought I'd get a little more modern.

Flora (1970) by Barbara Hanrahan

Barbara Hanrahan was an artist, printmaker and writer whose work mostly revolved around the roles of and relationships between women. Between 1957 and 1960 she studied towards a diploma in art teaching from Adelaide Teachers' College, while also taking classes at the South Australian School of Arts. In 1961, she won the Cornell Prize for painting. From 1963 to the early 1980s she lived mainly in England, first studying at the Central School of Art, London and then lecturing at the Falmouth and Portsmouth Colleges of Art, before returning to Adelaide to live until her death in 1992.

I love this hypnotic print which looks like an illustration from an avant-garde children's tale. It seems to swirl and throb with vibrancy and colour.

Milngiyawuy/ Milky Way (2004) by Naminapu Maymuru-White

Detail from Milngiyawuy

Naminapu Maymuru-White is from North East Arnhem Land in the Northern territories. She began helping her fathers Narritjin and Nanyin paint their bark paintings and sculptures in their bark shelter on the beach at Yirrkala in about 1964 when she was twelve years old.

This work of natural pigments on bark is fairly self explanatory and incredibly relaxing to gaze upon. Just like the night sky it imbues the viewer with a curious sense of calm, connection and insignificance.


Milmilngkan (2008) by John Mawurndjul

John Mawurndjul was born and lives in the region close to the Mann River in central Arnhem Land, which is an important site for the Kuninjku people. Considered one of Australia’s leading bark painters, Mawurndjul began painting in the 1970s under instruction from his elder brother and renowned artist Jimmy Njiminjuma.

Milmilngkan relates to a major ancestral site for Kuninjku people. Mawurndjul has developed a sophisticated and very fine form of the traditional rarrk (cross-hatching) which has its origins in ceremonial body painting designs. The surface of this work has a shimmering intensity that evokes both the powers of the ancestor and the reflective moving surface water of the sacred billabong. This is an excellent example of an important development in Mawurndjul’s painting, showing an increasing move towards what may be read by Western audiences as abstraction.

In an interesting exercise to persuade patrons to engage with the gallery, an on-line competition was held in which viewers were asked to vote for their favourite art-works from the archives, which would then be displayed. Here are some of them.

Dry Grass Landscape (1986) by William Robinson

The perspective on this painting is intriguing. From some angles you appear to be looking down, like the birds flying above the river, whereas the next minute you find yourself at the bottom of the tall trees looking up into the clouds. It's disconcerting, but then so is extreme heat and drought.

Ngatijirri (Budgerigar) Dreaming (1987) by Billy Stockman Tjapltjarri

This acrylic painting represents the travels of the Budgerigar ancestors during the Dreaming. On their journey, the ancestors stop to camp in sandhill country around Ilpitirri, near Mount Denison. The camps are depicted as concentric circles superimposed on a background mosaic of sand dunes, broken by patches of desert plants.

Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri (c1927-), a founder of the Papunya painting movement, is from the Anmatyerr language group. He was born at Ilpitirri near Mount Denison, north-west of Yuendumu. The Papunya artists explain that their paintings come from the Dreaming. Like the natural features that mark out the journeys of ancestral beings and the ceremonies that re-enact these journeys, the paintings are both part of the Dreaming and part of the physical world.

By painting the designs and stories that represent their particular Dreaming places, the artists assert their rights and obligations as Central and Western Desert landowners, entrusted with the ritual re-enactment of the events that occurred at these sites. As part of these ceremonies, elaborate ground paintings are constructed using a symbolic language of U shapes, concentric circles, journey lines, and bird and animal tracks. This unique visual language is also used in designs painted on the skin, and is the same language made familiar by the Papunya painters.

Owl Vase (circa 1910) – Ernst Wahliss Porzellanhaus

I just love this fellow - he's so gloriously ugly. I also like his mischievous wink and reckon if he were in my house, I'd laugh every time I looked at him. He certainly looks as though he knows exactly what you've been up to, but he'll keep your secrets for you! 

My newest favourite thing: MaltEaster Bunnies

The MaltEaster Bunny looks pretty cute with his round paunch and big ears. Him Outdoors bought me one as a treat after a Sunday run. It's six weeks until Easter so I reckon it's just about okay to be purchasing festival goodies (hot cross buns, creme eggs and so forth).

This little chap is milk chocolate with a crunchy and creamy Maltesers centre. The middle has the malt honeycomb consistency of normal maltesers, but the texture around it is almost fudge-like. Apparently there are mini versions of the bunny, but this size (29g) seems just perfect to me, and you can devour him in three bites.

I don't know how long they've been available in Australia, but this is the first one I've seen. I'm sure they are likely to breed as all good rabbits do, and we shall soon be overrun. Perhaps I might be able to help solve that problem...?

Friday Five: Gonna Eat a Lot of Peaches

There is a peach tree in our back graden and we have a glut of peaches at present. They are only ripe for a very short space of time before they fall from the tree, become rotten or get scoffed by the rosellas. Now, I really like peaches, but there are only so many I can eat au naturel in one sitting (about three) or even for breakfast with a handful of blueberries and a dollop of natural yoghurt.

I looked into bottling them but, although all reports say it's easy, it's also pretty time-consuming and you need the correct equipment. Him Outdoors is going to brew a peach weissbier this weekend, which uses a considerable amount of fruit. In the meantime, we've been eating a lot of peaches, in various different ways.

5 Ways with Peaches:

1. Peach and prosciutto bruschetta with basil oil
2. Upside-down peach tart
3. Lamb cutlets with glazed peaches
4. Peach polenta cake
5. Peach and coconut crumble

Art Gallery of South Australia: Part Three

Moving perhaps to more familiar artistic territory for me, here are some more of the artworks I enjoyed.

The Letter (1889) by Emma Minnie Boyd

This is a fine example of the later nineteenth century Victorian narrative style of painting which told stories and pointed morals. It hints at the young woman's possible future as she looks away wistfully, the letter tucked behind her back and the opened envelope lying at her feet, pointing to a world beyond the threshold of the drawing room.

I also like the treatment of light in this painting as the interior is dark and precise highlighting the peacock floor feature and Persian style carpets indicative of the popular aesthetic movement, while the sunlight filtering through the curtains and the impressionist style brushwork of the outdoors world provide a pleasing contrast.
 

Peacock Panel (1899) by Albert Pedvin

And speaking of peacocks and aesthetics, this glorious beast shines brightly against the walls. It's watercolour, pencil and gold leaf on wood, and is quite a remarkable feature in the gallery.

The Four Seasons (1902) by Hugh Ramsay

Detail from The Four Seasons

This is Hugh Ramsay’s only known multiple panel work. It was originally placed in a Tasmanian hospital and later incorporated into a bookshelf in the billiard room in the house of John Ramsay, the artist’s brother. Illustrating women in harmony with their environment, the figures can be identified by their corresponding landscapes as spring, summer, autumn and winter. The lyrical treatment of the figures and drapery show the influence of French symbolist Puvis de Chavanne, while the Latin inscriptions reference the romantic Pre-Raphaelite tradition. Ramsay’s embrace of these influences reveals a more poetic side to his more typically masculine work.

Onions (1905) and Still life with celery and apples (1901) by Margaret Preston

The Tea Urn (1909) by Margaret Preston

Aboriginal landscape (1941) by Margaret Preston

Margaret Preston was one of Australia’s foremost modernists. Travelling widely both in Australia and overseas brought her into direct contact with modern European art and its assimilation of oriental and so called ‘primitive’ art influences. As early as the mid 1920s Preston began to reference Aboriginal art, in some instances borrowing directly from the designs made on rainforest shields.

In Aboriginal Landscape Preston modernises the then waning landscape tradition via the visual language of Aboriginal art. Furthermore, Preston believed that it was through the influence and agency of Aboriginal art that Australia could develop a truly national art form.


The Pink Scarf (1913) by Hilda Rix Nicholas

I know very little about this artist and less about this painting, but the soft gentle colours moved me, along with the young woman's slightly wounded expression. Apparently Nicholas has been accused of painting 'picturebox perfection' but I wonder if the fear of the young woman's propensity to blend into the wallpaper is what we see reflected in her features.

French Café (1936) by Peter Purves Smith

French Café was painted towards the end of Purves-Smith’s study at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Depicting three men and a woman seated at a table it pays homage to Cézanne’s famous series Cardplayers. The work shows, on one hand, compliance to artificial form with flattened planes, modelled figures and flat light while also representing a departure into an imaginary realm characterised by elongated arms and exaggerated facial features. A sense of alienation is evoked by the open doorway where a loan figure stands in the shadow of an isolated tree.

The Bridge (1030) by Dorrit Black

The Olive Plantation (1946) by Dorrit Black

Dorrit Black travelled overseas and studied in both London and Paris. It was her training in France in the Cubist manner in the late 1920s that led her to simplify her compositions and focus on the fundamental structures of her subjects. On her return to Australia, Black made a significant contribution to the Australian artistic community by teaching, promoting and practicing the philosophy of modernism – initially in Sydney in the early 1930s, and later in Adelaide during the 1940s.

The Olive Plantation is one of Australia’s most distinctive landscapes of the 1940s. It is a tonal depiction of the Adelaide foothills at Magill, now surrounded by suburban houses. The rounded solid forms are characteristic of Black’s modernist compositions of the 1940s.
 

Subway Escalator (1953) by Frank Hinder

Frank Hinder was an artist known for abstract and semi-abstract paintings and drawings, which expressed his belief that art is a means of revealing the fundamental laws of design that underlie the world of appearances. He not only painted and exhibited as a Modernist artist, but also worked on theatre and costume designs, commercial art for book publishers, magazines and advertising agencies, textile designs, and lithographic printmaking.

In this painting he uses tempera to produce dry, light colours and precise lines, rendering the city as a dynamic, living organism, where everything (particularly people and buildings) is in a state of endlessly altering relationships.

The Lift (1954) by John Brack

John Brack is regarded as one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century. His art is characterised by his carefully considered and controlled compositions, and by his choice of subject matter, often consisting of mundane images drawn from the world around him. Of course I had to take a picture of this one to show Him Outdoors (who didn't come to the gallery with me).

The Lift belongs to an important group of works from the 1950s which reflect the awful reality of the Holocaust. Rather than making an anguished or impassioned response to this subject, Brack imbues these paintings with their power by exercising constraint. The unnerving quality of this work comes from imagining that the steps leading up to this seemingly ordinary lift are analogous to the tragic fate suffered by the Jewish people led to their deaths in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Art Gallery of South Australia: Part Two

The Sisters (1954) by Arthur Boyd

I thought I'd mainly focus on the sculpture in this post, as there was a lot of it about, including this intriguin piece by a man better known for his landscapes and war art. It confronts the visitor to the gallery, being in the first room in front of a range of Sidney Nolan's portraits.

There were some very fine sculptures and pieces of metalwork in the gallery too. Many silversmiths arrived from Europe and adapted their skills to the Australian environment.

Perfume bottle holder (circa 1875) by Henry Steiner

Steiner was born in Rodenberg near Hanover in 1835. He arrived in Adelaide in 1858 and set up in business on his own account around 1860. Steiner was a very prolific silversmith who exhibited at many of the great 19th century exhibitions around the world.

This is an actual emu egg that encloses two perfume bottles. The egg has been cut in two and is hinged to allow access to the perfume bottles inside. The bottles are made of two very large beans from a Queensland tree, with silver necks and caps added to make them functional as perfume containers. It is an excellent example of the silversmith's ability to combine skills in engineering and design in the production of this visually striking, as well as mechanically clever, work of art - the emu finial activated the locking mechanism.

Detail from Julius Schomburgk's Presentation Cup (1861)

Schomburgk emigrated to South Australia from Prussia in 1850 and soon established a solid reputation for his silversmithing and design skills. A committed exponent of Victorian naturalism, he incorporated in his designs a vast range of sculptural motifs representing Australian flora and fauna in combination with figures of Aborigines.

Curator Robert Reason says, “For me, the work from 1850s and sixties is the most fascinating – you can really sense these European trained silversmiths grappling with their new environment and see them responding with different design solutions to Australia’s unique flora and fauna and Aboriginal people.”

Bishop Augustus Short Testimonial Candelabrum (1876) by Henry Steiner

Table (1878) by Henry Hugentobler and Conrad Sturm

This flamboyant table is an outstanding example of the technique known as marquetry, in which pieces of contrasting timbers are inlaid on a surface in decorative patterns. Reported to contain 30,000 pieces of timber (Australian red cedar; pine; stringy bark; red gum; black gun), it is the most elaborate example of nineteenth century South Australian furniture. It was made as a display piece and exhibited at the Sydney and Melbourne international exhibitions of 1879 and 1880 respectively.

Wreath of hair in a floral design (circa 1880) attributed to Zelma Sobels

I don't know why, but I've always found things made out of human hair a bit creepy. Actually, I suppose I do know why; it's the thought of people being forced to cut or shave their hair for money, or in concentration camps. Piles of hair on hairdressers' floors always makes me shudder as it was attached so recently and now it's lifeless. Hair in plugholes makes me feel ill and I always very carefully dispose of mine - nail clippings too: those things have power in the wrong hands.

Eros (1892-93) by Alfred Gilbert

I'm not really sure what this statue is doing in the Australian section, but I like it, so I've included the picture. And he looks pretty good there too.

Transitional shield (circa 1930) - artist unknown

This early South Australian shield has been carved from a dense hardwood and then burnt and scraped back to create a tortoise shell-like appearance before being incised with delicate decorations. The shield is described as a transitional shield because it combines the traditional form of a parrying shield, used as both a weapon and to parry the enemy away, with decorative elements from a non-Indigenous culture. The inclusion of introduced species such as camels, horses and cattle provide a fascinating and succinct synopsis of European contact. The focus on the kangaroo and emu can be read as both Aboriginal totem or game images and as a reference to the Australian coat of arms.

Caprice (1935) by Barbara Tribe

This glorious sculpture won Tribe a New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship when she was just 22. The scholarship provided £250 per annum for two years’ travel, plus the return fare to Southampton. Not since its inception in 1900 had this scholarship been awarded to a sculptor, or to a woman – an exceptional achievement.

I love the curvaceous warmth and exuberance of this sculpture. It did not surprise me to learn that Barbara Tribe, born in Sydney to recent immigrant parents, was a proficient swimmer and body surfer who represented her state. I can image that Caprice has just emerged from a swim in the ocean and is stretching her body on the rocks.

Transmutation (2010) by Caroline Rothwell

This is from Rothwell's website: "Transmutation, a pre-Darwinian word used to describe ideas of evolutionary change is also an alchemical term referring to the attempt to change a base metal into a precious metal. Both these terms are relevant to Caroline Rothwell’s practice where science, art and perception collide.

"Rothwell’s work revolves around our relationship with the natural world, particularly how the unintended consequences of our past crash into present and future technologies and environmental politics. Her work also explores very sculptural concerns where ideas of monumentality and process are challenged. Form gains a sense of liquidity, what appears light may be tremendously heavy or vice versa, industrial materials are hand-crafted. Things are never quite as they seem."

Indeed.