Dioramas and Shapes

I heard a story recently that sounded untrue but it got me thinking. Supposedly the Australian War Memorial had sought to commission a diorama of the Battle of Kapyong, and they had not been able to find any Australian diorama-makers, indeed the only diorama-maker to be found, allegedly, were Chinese. Womp womp! That's the punchline. Yeah, right; apart from anything else, I don't suppose there were squads of diorama-makers sitting around playing with each others' hair before the War Memorial ordered the ones they have.  Well, anyway, dioramas are wonderful and I wish they would make a comeback. I remember there being a whole series of them in what's now the Redmond Barry Room when it was McCoy Hall at the Museum, and they were fantastic. And oh my goodness, I have just remembered that I actually did my third year drawing work at VCA in that room, drawing those now vanished dimly lit cases full of rocks and minerals which were distributed around the upper gallery. God, how have I not thought about that in all this time? I don't even know what happened to all that work. It wasn't successful on any level and it wasn't good to look at, and no doubt it deserved the C, but it was trying to get at and convey an emotional response to collections of found objects which I have been feeling, and trying to articulate or even simply to understand, my entire life. MY WHOLE LIFE. Dear god, how did I forget about those drawings? And here I am, embedded in a place which is a monument to absence, soaring above a warm dark underground museum full of dimly lit glass boxes, themselves full of small, worn, dirty, mysterious talismans of moments of great power in other people's lives.  It is very hard to draw a glass case in a dark room full of Victorian iron lacework. Despite the fact that the teachers in that course required copious journalling of their students, I doubt I could have explained anything about how that room at the Museum affected and excited me. It just did. 

Oh dear, I'm going to have to think about that for a while. What i was going to say was the diorama story gave me a couple of ideas for projects which I think are really good but I won't be attempting to execute either one. There is a luxurious quality to having a great idea without feeling nebulously and irksomely obligated to realise it. Good conceptual art is luxurious in that way also. Well, my ideas.

First, a cultural history of the Australian War Memorial's dioramas. As that page on their site indicates they already regard and interpret the dioramas as significant artistic responses to the Great War, but with an interestingly persistent overlay of the educational, and now, the entertaining. And because they have always in fact been seen by visitors in these terms, and because they just are so very interesting and potent as objects for seeing, they have impacted Australians' thinking about that war in ways that would be incredibly fascinating to trace and explore. I've seen enough references in contemporary historians' works to a sort of primal scene moment of viewing them to know that it could be done. Somebody should.

Second, and the boat has been missed on this one, a counter-Centenary exhibition, full of dioramas of things that were happening in Australia during the time of the First World War but were not directly connected with it. A very sobering amount of public money has been spent on commemorating not even the war itself, but Australia's participation in it. It really is a fucking terrifying huge shitload of money and the biggest chunk of it has been spent despicably stupidly, but even so, I honestly can't bring myself to say it was wasted, because something it has certainly achieved, probably unintentionally, is to bring a lot of normal people to a really pretty impressive degree of fairly sophisticated general understanding of Australian life and society one hundred years ago. Through this one particular lens. And so if a correspondingly epic convoy of dump trucks full of cash was to be backed up and emptied over another theme in Australian history, oh, let's say, the labour movement? that would seem to me a very damn fine way to spend public money. We could save $741 million a year by ceasing to hold asylum seekers in offshore detention, and spend it instead on an interpretative centre full of gorgeous dioramas about the white Australia policy, Wobblies, eight-hour day etc. Or even a completely different topic: the idea did come to me while reflecting on this epic 101-year-old piece of hilariousness that I chanced upon and thought, this would make a great diorama. So yeah, if the Australia Council can administer a scheme of grants, of $741 million saved from closing the offshore torture camps, for Australian contemorary artists to design and construct dioramas of leftist counter-war perspectives on Australian history, that would be great thanks. Or if not just send the concept to Andrew Bolt and wait for the inevitable, hopefully fatal explosion to occur.

Vinnie's here. See how he is with the feet? Freak




I felt pretty over it for much of today and indeed a couple of times I wanted to scream but I'm proud of myself, or relieved with myself, for handling the rough patches without screaming, for having the strength today to take the necessary breath, to fake good humour and lightness until it begins to return for real. It doesn't take long. The obtuse and tactless part of me, the bit that insists on approaching every feeling I notice in myself as if it's an interesting question which some first-year philosophy students might enjoy debating, wonders about what is signified in the interplay of this small and intermittent proof of psychological resilience with the greater background fact of having a troublingly thin and brittle skin when it comes to being provoked in the first place by matters which should not in themselves be experienced as so provoking.

I took Len to a birthday party in the afternoon and Google Maps navigated me to the wrong side of Merri Creek for the reserve where it was held, and by the time I got over to where it actually was I felt very close to breaking point. It's hard to understand why, now, beyond the obvious fact that it was only the precipitating incident and what I'm actually stressed about is something that anyone would find stressful. Then after dinner Leonard asked if we could make some Shapes for his school lunches. (The teachers informed the whole class that Shapes are made with palm oil so he has been anxious all week not to have Shapes in his lunch. I would prefer that he didn't have Shapes in his lunch because it's a wasted opportunity to eat something useful to a growing body, but I don't make those decisions.) And so I had offered to do this with him earlier in the day but there hadn't actually been time. So we did make the Shapes, following a recipe that I'd found online and not read properly and which said things like 'add as much water as necessary'. It was not until I had to knead the dough that I really felt like I might lose it. The dough had the consistency of Blu-Tac and trying to knead it, surrounded by the nineteen cooking implements involved in the process (not even joking, nineteen) and I just thought, I hate baking and this is a complete disaster, and Lenny was beside me at the bench and I could tell he was looking anxiously at my face. He knows, you see, when I'm feeling the strain, and that is the worst of all, because when a child feels that he or she has to take care of a fragile adult, that's when the child becomes the sort of adult that spends seven years in therapy, and knowing this, I strive to do better at handling my own feelings. And I am working on rectifying the underlying problem. The doctor says to me that every child deserves to have a happy mother and I know this is not just what I selfishly want to hear, it is the truth.

The Shapes didn't turn too badly. Lenny actually really liked doing the cookie cutter and sprinkles parts. We won't be doing it again though.