Abstract

This time (1967–69), an artist’s book written, hand-printed and hand-bound by the artist Bea Maddock originated as a walk. Having relocated to Melbourne from Launceston in search of work and opportunities for her art in the mid-1960s, she later recalled that the book ‘had no real story, it’s just about me again wandering the streets …’ Yet, a young woman navigating a new city alone was not, and is still not, an act as benign as her evasive comment suggests.

This time belongs to an expanding lineage of work made by women artists and writers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries who moved through cities with agency and resolve. Building on the research of art historians including Daniel Thomas AM and Irena Zdanowicz, this short paper considers the declarative, performative and poetic aspects of Maddock’s work.

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This paper comprises some preliminary thoughts about This time, an artist’s book by Bea Maddock. The work was based on a poem she wrote in 1964, which she included, like so many of her other poems, in a letter to her friend, Beth Parsons. The initial poem, St Kilda Rain, was subsequently reworked in 1967 as This time, and forms the basis of her book of the same title. To begin, I’ll relay both the original and the final forms of the poem before going on to a broader discussion of the work.

St Kilda Rain, 1964

The fact that I am

Could mean that I was, or that I’m going to be.

The fact is,

The rain falls ahead

And beats behind,

The rain comforts the blind.

The rain, rain, rain,

And the dark trees,

I once saw and I spoke too long and too often.

And I was behind and blind.

I walked the whole length down.

Around, the rain fell

And beat from me and the trees,

The leaves.

THIS TIME, 1967

TO BEGIN

WITH NO

BEGINNING

IN THE END

THERE’S ONLY

THE CRY

THE FACT

THAT I AM

COULD MEAN

THAT I WAS

OR THAT

I AM

GOING TO BE

THE FACT IS

I WALKED

THE WHOLE

LENGTH

DOWN

AND THE RAIN

FELL

AND BEAT

FROM ME AND

THE TREES

THE LEAVES

BUT THERE

WAS TIME

TO RETURN

AND SO TO

REMAIN

TO CONTAIN

MY GRIEF

AND THERE

TO CRY

Written three years apart, these poems attest to the deep attention Bea Maddock paid to her movement through the world, and to the art practice borne from that movement; receiving, then grasping and refining, over a period of time, the central motifs of her earlier poem; its conversational, more lyrical style later whittled to the starker, more stridently modernist verse that is further fractured by its inclusion, at intervals, within the pages comprising the artist’s book, This time.

Artist biographies typically open by announcing the artist’s year of birth, as if it was time that was key to deciphering their work. But Bea Maddock, despite her birth in 1934, is hard to place. A solitary figure in both art and life, her work often bears little resemblance to that of her immediate contemporaries – least of all her Australian ones. Stylistically, her initial practice is more akin to that of the early twentieth-century German artists of Die Brücke, whereas her later work resonates with philosophical existentialism and European conceptualism, being text-driven, cerebral, albeit tempered and differentiated by its later engagement with, and reference to, the genocidal history of her home of Tasmania in works such as Terra spiritus… with a darker shade of pale (1993–98). Bea Maddock is an artist who traverses time through art, but whose work, in doing so, is often timeless.

For me, from both a personal and curatorial perspective, Bea Maddock is among the most compelling figures of recent Australian art. Her work is, subjectively speaking of course, beautiful and solemn and incredibly serious. Her approach to it has more than once been described as religious in conviction. Daniel Thomas, in his introduction to part one of Maddock’s catalogue raisonné, published in 2011, states his reluctance, reflecting the artist’s own, to describe her output as ‘art’. Rather she described it as ‘practice’ and ‘work’. The daughter of an Anglican clergyman, Maddock relinquished her faith while studying at the Slade School, London, between 1959 and 1961, and in its place she put philosophy, poetry and literature. Particular, but unprejudiced in her tastes, there were other influences, too; a secondary school mathematics textbook, for example, in which universal principles were relayed with what she felt to be a startling sense of clarity and poetry. ‘If you move in a circular direction you come back to the place where you started the long way round’, being one such statement she inscribed onto the walls of the houses in which she lived during her lifetime.

This time, made between 1967 and 1969 was Maddock’s first effort to bring her own poetry, of which little has to date been collated or studied, and her work, or art, into close relation. This time may seem simple and in a material sense it is, but it’s also a work in which she laid out in her mid-30s the future direction of her practice – one which became marked by a deep interest in time, the functions of language, in art as a vehicle for the pursuit of idea, and of craft as a counterbalancing or grounding action made with, and in relation, to the body. Given these things, This time is a work that deserves close attention.

The text is based on a poem written in Naarm/Melbourne in 1964 where Maddock had moved from Tasmania in search of work and opportunities for her art. It went through at least two revisions; a second, handwritten draft is held in the National Gallery collection while the final form was included in my earlier introduction. Maddock later recalled in a 1991 interview with curator Roger Butler, that This time ‘had no real story, it’s just about me again wandering the streets and looking in shop windows’. But a young woman navigating a new city alone is not an act as benign as her evasive comment suggests. Arguably, This time belongs to a lineage of work by women artists and writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who moved through the world with increasing agency and resolve. And yet, Maddock’s passage through a city as evidenced in This time, while originating at a time in which she had been relatively free to pursue her chosen career as an artist, is more sombre than exhilarating. Thomas has called it ‘rich in particularised ambiguities’. Certainly it’s a work that while deeply personal is unerringly recalcitrant, reluctant to give much up, even on repeated rereading. Inherent to it is a sense of bewilderment; the circular movement of its text begins and ends with a ‘cry’, and its sequence of what Maddock called ‘self images’ – metaphors for the self rather than portraits perse – pass backwards and forwards through the book, suggesting the disorientation caused by her move away from Tasmania, an island of which she remarked: ‘There’s something very special about [it]… you can identify where you are more than the mainland [because]… you can [always] see [or sense] its edge…’.

The book, as stated, is materially simple. Held between a dark paper cover, letterpress and linocut prints are made in black ink on white, slightly fibrous Japanese paper. The letterpress print is clear but the linocut words of the poem are slightly uneven, giving the effect of their trembling despite the stridency of their upper case forms. A title page announces the name of the work; an epigraph by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko follows. The first image portrays a young woman, contemplatively scratching her head. The subsequent page is printed with the first words of the poem – TO BEGIN.

The ensuing pages are split between the text of the poem and Maddock’s ‘self images’, many of which derive from, or were informed by prior works including Self portrait with Icarus (1964), that tragic figure who flew too close to the sun, a warning of the hubris of youth, and both an entity and idea which often appeared in Maddock’s work of this period. While in this sense, her imagery was somewhat rehearsed, it did not come easily. Remembering the making of the work years later, Maddock described warming the linoleum blocks by the fireplace of her Launceston studio, casting those into the fire with which she was unhappy, stating –‘It’s really hard to get it just as you want.’ There were other battles. While This time was initiated by Rolf Hennequel, a Vienna-born philologist and writer who had emigrated to Tasmania in 1952 and established the Wattle Grove Press, Maddock recorded in her 1967 workbook that after a time, he no longer wanted her work, and so she set out to produce and publish it herself, making 25 impressions in all.

Maddock had incorporated words into her work until this time and would continue to do so, but although she was a persistent writer of poetry, her influences in this sphere remain largely unexamined. This time, with its epigraph by the Russian modernist poet, Yevtushnko, reads as follows:

Everyone is alone,

Everyone is alone,

Twentieth Century.

. . this city is raddled

and it is alone.

Maddock may have come to know Yevtushenko’s work during his 1966 visit to Australia during which he gave recitals at the Adelaide Festival, and in Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal Nura/Sydney. Then writing for The Bulletin, the poet and publisher Geoffrey Dutton described Yevtushenko as having ‘electrified audiences of thousands in the [United States] USA and Europe’, and that his visit to Australia ‘could be the opening of a whole new era for [Australian] poetry...’ While this conjecture may have been an overstatement, Yevtushenko’s contemporaneous influence is evident; his poems were widely published and critiqued, and both the form and feeling of his work appear to have provided at least some of the impetus for Maddock to carve her earlier verse into a poem that was harder, sparser and better able to accord with her pared back imagery. The almost inevitable influence of T.S. Eliot may also be observed, in the borrowing of expressions including ‘the rain beat’ from his Burnt Norton in Four Quartets. But it is Yevtushenko’s resounding reference to the ‘twentieth century’, at which point, in 1967, Maddock finds herself somewhere in its middle, flanked by its past and future, which helps to establish the temporal uncertainty and complexity of her work, its aforesaid circularity destabilising any conventional or linear sense of time.

To return to Maddock’s claim that This time – ‘had no real story, it’s just about me again wandering the streets … looking in … shop windows’ – considered another way, perhaps the comment is not as evasive as it initially seems. Perhaps it is that the city’s architecture in and of itself provides, even forces, a space for self-reflection. Down and out, unemployed, walking the streets, Maddock’s passage through the city is not that of a young woman enjoying freedom, but suffering isolation, alienation, and encountering herself repeatedly in reflective shop windows that make up so much of the city’s fabric. In a later work, Passing the glass darkly (1976), Maddock degrades a portrait of herself taken by a street photographer, and in a sequence of just three images, quickens the passage of time, forcing her disappearance, alluding to her death. In This time, the paper on which the words and images are printed, are, like glass, translucent enough to entail that no part of the work can ever be seen in isolation. The experience of viewing it, then, is never linear; one can always see and sense the preceding and subsequent words and self images which fluctuate unpredictably between youth and old age, suggesting a split conception of self, evoking the precarity of time as it is most often understood, and alluding to time’s greater truth of relativity.

One begins to have an increasing sense, on re-reading and re-looking at this volume, start to finish, that its protagonist is not moving unthinkingly through a city, glancing vaguely in shop windows. Rather, she is at once recalling and anticipating her passage through a city. In its filmic kind of quality, cut and intercut between past, present and future, it comprises starkly outlined recollections and speculations precipitated by the words of a poem which, unembellished and sharply cut in relief, are much like the architectural features of the city itself, and which, in the absence of further visual description, often stand in for the city itself. This time does not portray one point in time but a collection of points and impressions which strike on its pages with varying degrees of force, and which are often caught, uncertainly, between humour, confusion, anxiety and dread.

Reflecting on This time in 1991, Bea Maddock remarked that ‘a lot of people don’t know how to handle books, they don’t know how to look at books’. Or perhaps it’s only that people didn’t know how to handle her books – a quality further complicated by their being in art collections which, for the most part, prohibit their handling. While entranced by this work, I too, am baffled by it and its illusory simplicity, its black and white images, its basic ribbon binding (now removed), its modest, even shabby paper cover. And yet it is also a work replete with philosophical and existential undertones, emotional incongruities that gradually, perhaps, reveal themselves as intentional plays of nuance.

It is unclear, for example, whether two figures earlier caught close in an alleyway are caressing or pitched against each other in hot aggression. It is also uncertain if gestures and sensations such as these were observed by Maddock in passing or were ones she herself experienced. After such incongruities, subsequent pairings of text and image sometimes seem too literal. The phrase, BUT THERE WAS TIME TO RETURN, for example, rests beside an image of a figure traversing a black road marked by a broken white line. And yet the image that follows, portrays this same figure resting in an undefined space. To where has she returned? Her left-facing profile suggests a doubling-back to the front of the book as opposed to progressing through it. This place is surely her studio, and yet in reality, it was a space that Maddock could not keep, owing to her inability to find work.

This time has been called a work of concrete poetry, which is perhaps not quite right, given that the visual arrangement of words and letters do not in themselves convey meaning. Yet the relationship between text to image is captivating. While Maddock’s poem is printed conventionally, in horizontal monostich, couplet and tercet, it is broken, episodic; words are pushed and pulled from each other unexpectedly, while the repeating, languid vowel sounds draw the words downwards, both on the page and in the mouth, for example: AND SO TO / REMAIN / TO CONTAIN / MY GRIEF / AND THERE / TO CRY. Maddock’s words may be few, but they are considered and purposeful, reverberating sonorously across the page, within the book, through the reader’s body, outwards from the lungs and lips.

Given that Maddock so often worked in print, the technical and material qualities of her work have often been considered above its bodily and performative implications. This time is a work that originated as a walk, or a series of walks. Many of Maddock’s subsequent works, would also use walking or travel, and other repeated actions including writing and transcription, not only as a way to measure time but to implicate or involve herself more closely with her subject. Macushla Robinson, for example, in her assessment of Maddock’s Being and nothingness by John-Paul Sartre, 1982, discusses Maddock’s transcription of Sartre’s text in the year following his death, as a way to counteract the sudden ‘nothingness’ occasioned by death, into a form of ‘being’ by incorporating his text into gestures made by her body. There is so often in Maddock’s work a great sensitivity and an even greater effort to marry the means of production to the impetus or ambition for the work, and this is evident, too in This time. Perhaps tellingly, Maddock’s first prints for the book were made as relief etchings, an arduous, difficult process surely borrowed with William Blake in mind, the latter who likened the action of acid etching the plate as a process which ‘opened the doors of perception’. While Maddock soon enough dispensed with this manner of making, she employed the similarly reductive process of linocut, whereby one excavates the image from the block, playing with positive and negative, to form work that strikes an often-mysterious balance between individual and universal experience. As Sasha Grishin has noted of Maddock’s work more broadly, she has in her deeply personal practice, also been able to remove herself from centre stage.

In a published transcription of the poem’s second draft, there appears to be a small error – an ‘a’ mistaken for an ‘o’ – which nonetheless alters a possible meaning of the work:

The phrase –

And so to remain

To contain myself

Within a small walled bottle

Should in fact read – a small walled battle.

If one understands Maddock’s self images as the subject, the fragility implied by their being a small walled bottle, is suddenly replaced by something less vulnerable, their various incarnations in fact, doing battle. With this in mind, one recalls those earlier figures: having previously been unsure if they were locked in embrace or violence, the idea of battle now suggests the latter. Along with the other manifold ideas and impressions one can take from This time, Maddock’s wrestle with the self, the battle to be an artist, the internal struggle to stay the course at all costs, also seems to be implicit in the work.

The only known public address in which Maddock spoke of This time was given in the year 2000 to the graduating students at the VCA, recorded in a transcript made by curator and author of the soon to be released second part of Maddock’s raisonne, Irena Zdanowicz. In this address, Maddock referred to the practice of art as always remaining as such, and she cited another Russian, this time, Tolstoy, as having said: ‘When artists hit on lucky thoughts, what then must we do?’ The circularity of time in the context of This time, implies the unending and Sisyphean nature of the artist’s task. The fallen leaves referred to in Maddock’s poem are both the fruit and detritus of so many endeavours, the rain that beat them from her, a necessary part of the process.

This time is a curious work but a telling one, too. Maddock is an artist who often in her life had the support and attention of various public gallery curators, among them Thomas, Zdanowicz, Butler, Anne Kirker and Alisa Bunbury. Despite this, the breadth and depth of Maddock’s work, and the infrequency with which she spoke of it, entails there is still much to do in terms of truly understanding her contributions. Her affinity for language and poetry, and her varying uses of them, is one such aspect of her practice requiring far deeper and sustained investigation.