Up the Garden Path
Alex Sutcliffe
A rail brings you into The Garden as a rib brought some into the world. There’s a rail for entering, a rail for the artist’s mother, and then there’s a rail for leaving. What do you do with a place you can only leave?
There’s one other rail. It’s fixed in the floor, off-centre. It stands vertically. Let’s stay in the shade of this rail.
*
I want gardens to be novels, and I act as though they are. When I visit a garden, I want to float away in contemplation while I sit in the shade, and there are photographs of shade here if the eye requires it. An apple tree dapples the sunlight. Applewood lies in the shade of a shed. A piece of paper on a flat, blank surface draws its own thin, dark outline. This is the foliage of the garden.
The photograph of the apple tree is called The Law. All the photographs here are printed in silver gelatine on matte paper and framed in white, but The Law’s frame is slightly larger than the others. Despite, or perhaps in accordance with, the story of the Fall, the subject is neither the tree nor the apples but our seeing them. The lustre of the apples is reduced to a pattern of light visible only in the lower reaches of the tree’s shadow. The fruit constitutes only a portion of the photograph and the photograph occupies only a portion of the frame, and yet we look for the fruit. It’s a funny work. It announces that this is what “thou shalt not eat of” (KJV Gen 2:17) at the same time as it announces it’s only an image, and the apples only images. The first law is arbitrary, goadingly so: Thou shalt not eat of what cannot be eaten.
The Law, however, not only satirises prohibitions; at the same time as it moves me to hunger, it also moves me to thirst. I know the crisp juice of these apples would satisfy my thirst because of their lustre and the tree’s shade. This thirst grows from the same root as the absurd prohibition against it, or maybe one grows from the other. The Law inspires this thirst because it cannot quench it.
Isn’t this how the first law works? To know what you want is to know want.
Though The Garden may not literally shade you, it does provide plenty to contemplate. And plenty to want.
*
Another question: Why would you want to go to a place you can only leave? To my mind this is bound up with the question of why we read literature—specifically, why we read novels. Part of what draws me to the novel is the way it makes readers engage with place as memory, absence. Want. It builds images of worlds, societies and characters, but it knows you will probably forget all but a few details. The novel anticipates its own vanishing, and so it requires your active participation to retain maybe this image, maybe that, for the moment when the image is made significant and thus changed beyond recognition.
This analogy to literature does not answer why you would want to go to a place you can only leave; it merely offers another such place. Aren’t all gardens such places? Isn’t the beauty of a deciduous tree in autumn its green? A garden is not a place of stasis but of growth and decay. To see a garden don’t you want to know its other phases, the gardens you’re not in as you sit in it?
The Garden, conversely, presents all its phases at once in a prelapsarian, impossible plenitude. Its flora’s life and death appear concurrently. The tree represented in The Law flourishes and fruits at the same time as its fallen wood lies unturned and rough (in the Fall photographs) at the same time as it has been torn from a novel (in the Passport photographs). But this simultaneous display only represents an atemporal world. Only the rails that bring us into the garden are present; the tree, the unturned wood and the paper are only presented. The rails lead us to the evidence of the gardens they’ve made absent. The closest we can come to Eden is a garden that contains all the gardens we can’t go back to or never went to at all.
You might not want to go to a place you can only leave, but you must leave all places. The Garden is a space to live with the gardens we’ve left.
*
We stand or sit and form a circle, listeners and readers. Each reader is framed by a handrail and a blank, white wall. These are the last days of the exhibition, and McInerney is leading us on a walk. She has asked us to assemble at ACE, in The Garden, to hear readings from works that nourished it. One of these pieces is A Stick of Green Candy. The story, by Jane Bowles, concerns a girl who, despite her father’s order that she play in the municipal park with other children, prefers to play alone in a clay pit. Within these blank, clay walls she is the leader of a unit of men whom she drills for hours each day. In the pit she has complete control, but it depends on her solitude. She fears she will lose her men’s respect if they see her father scolding her.
As we listen, the narrator's men practice mountain goat fighting beneath the handrails. It's easy to imagine the men training around us—easy because Bowles presents them as imaginary. When we imagine them we are doing the same work as girl in the story.
The style of the story, however, is not the only reason we can here superimpose fiction and reality on each other. Though I’ve read the story before, I’ve never pictured it so clearly taking place around me, and it’s not only the soldiers I picture now but the girl and the clay walls and the house looming above. Like the girl who leads the unit, we require enough space to let the fictional appear.
How does The Garden provide that space? I want gardens to be like novels, but they are not. One apparent difference is that everyone who sees a garden (at least at the same time) sees the same garden; unlike a garden described in a novel or a sentence, actual gardens do not require each visitor to interpret what they see. An actual garden is there; you do not need to conjure it from a set of arbitrary and in themselves meaningless signs. The Garden, however, shows you the material signs that make up actual gardens: wood, rails, walls, the sight of leaves. The Garden makes these materials as discreet as possible. It gives us the alphabet of gardens. And it asks us to read and write gardens into and onto it. The rails (which are made unusable in this gallery setting) ask us to picture how they might be used, when they might be needed; The Law, in itself a picture of an apple tree, asks us about the Garden of Eden, about desire and the Fall; and the readings on the artist walk ask us about how the clay pit full of soldiers looks to a small child. The Garden is pruned back so that other gardens flourish here. A gardener prunes to make space for new growth, and, if potential for growth were proportional to the amount pruned, The Garden would be the site of almost all absent gardens.
I’m walking between the soldiers towards the ledge of the clay pit when something shifts beneath my feet. A tile. A large, concrete tile. Unsealed. It is one of 400 that McInerney cast by hand, that form the floor of the installation, and that, in my reverie, I had floated over. I’m standing where I stood before. I’ve fallen to the ground.
Any place in which we entertain the absent, the fictional, must comprise peculiarities of its own that remind us we remain here, not elsewhere. Indeed, we cannot uproot our fictions from the peculiarities that ground us. The Garden, pruned of all extraneous foliage, must leave roots in the ground, something to grow. Even leaves floating in the thin air of speculation are of the ground.
(*
I admit I’ve found this difficult to write. I am trained to write about, to misrepresent, the dead. Writing about the living is a different matter entirely. I believed I had finished what I thought this would be when I visited Julia in Melbourne. We ate dinner in her garden and spoke about the work she’d made and the thing I had promised I would write. “There are very few of my works I wouldn’t have destroyed. I think conversations with friends come so much closer to it.” These were not Julia’s exact words, but the thought that there was, is, some “it” for which The Garden stood in made me ashamed of the various gardens, fictional and personal, I’d let stand in for it. I concentrated on how Julia’s back garden looked at that moment. I promised I would write my way to it by writing my way back to this garden. A couple of weeks later Julia moved house.
*)
McInerney puts a reminder of the world under the heel of your shoe. To experience this work, you must walk on it. Our ability to experience art, to think at all, requires a world beneath our feet, but, finding ourselves returned from our thoughts to this ground, we find ourselves wanting. Should we then stop thinking? In our fallen world, perhaps our task is rather to know precisely what the ground beneath our feet wants.
GH cannot leave the spot where she killed the cockroach. Theodora sits in the arid jardin exotique of the Hôtel du Midi for most of her novel. The girl in A Stick of Green Candy only leaves her clay pit when a boy from outside invades it. The figures from fiction whom McInerney references in the catalogue essay and the artist’s walk are mostly stationary, solitary. They confine themselves or are confined to one patch of ground.
Short, perhaps, of GH, the most stationary and solitary character McInerney references is the narrator of Marjorie Barnard’s The Persimmon Tree. Convalescing from an unnamed illness, her world is confined to her room. She can see, and describes, the trees outside her window and the shadow patterns they cast on her wall in the morning light. She can see the window across the street and the woman who lives in the room behind it, but she never describes the street. This accounts for the vertiginous sense of depth separating the two women. Barnard never puts it in so many words, but if her narrator attempted to cross, she could only fall.
How does Barnard’s narrator survive this isolation, this inability to pass from one room to another? I think her survival depends, partly, on the implicit doubling of the two women and the two rooms. This room opposite gives her, and us, the sense that, though she is alone in her room, she is not alone in the world. We know they share some sociological similarities; they are both single women living on the same street in the same city. We can be certain, however, that it is the afternoon, and not the morning, sun that casts shadow patterns on the opposite room’s walls (Barnard 22). It is the painterly detail in which the narrator describes her own room that allows us to see that the opposite room, whatever similarities it may share with hers, is different. This prevents the narrator from falling into that other solitude, solipsism. Though she is alone, there is an other person in the world. If the narrator crossed the street, would she understand her neighbour any better? Probably. Understand herself any better? Possibly, but sometimes you can’t cross the street. Sometimes you can only move through the world by reading where you are.
*
The Passports are works that don’t take you anywhere. They are about opaque. They announce that you cannot see behind their surfaces and cannot move beyond them. Each photograph shows a blank page. If there is anything marked on these leaves, it could only be on their other sides, but you cannot turn them over. Like Barnard’s narrator, we cannot cross from this side to the other. Because we cannot read any writing that may be overleaf and cannot ascertain whether there is any, we want to.
The exhibition catalogue claims that the leaves pictured in the Passports are taken from Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., but even if this were so, we could not know what words of this text were invisible to us. G.H. claims, “If I have the courage, I’ll let myself stay lost” (Lispector 4). It seems appropriate that we cannot know whether these words, or any of her words, or any words at all, are overleaf. We are totally without bearings: Not only do we not know where we want to go (what’s on the next, or is it the previous, page); we do not know where we are (what page are we on). I imagine the page we can’t see as the recto, but there are no marks on the visible page that distinguish it as the verso. The more we scrutinise the particularities of where we are, the more lost we become. The Garden is a map for when you can’t find your way there, can’t find your way back, for when you’re so lost you don’t know whether it’s the way there or the way back you’re trying to find—but not a map to help you locate yourself.
Perhaps for us, as for Barnard’s narrator, the details compel to float over borders we cannot cross, even if here the details also create those borders. There may be an irony in naming a work about going nowhere Passports, but passports were invented to prohibit movement. (If the aim were to allow people to move, passports, and borders, would be abolished altogether.) Both McInerney’s Passports and a nation’s official passports work as obstacles. They keep you in one place and proclaim they are keeping you there. The irony of the work is that, whereas official passports produce a sense that political borders are solid and stable (it is certain you are in Australia), these passports erase the sense that we know where we are at all. Of course, we usually want to know where we are, and official passports do this; they produce a sense of place you can obey. McInerney’s Passports, conversely, can demand no obedience. They have effaced any information that could tell you what to do. If they insist we do anything, it is to find our own ways to understand, and to act within, whatever borders enclose us.
Each Passport does provide one leaf of paper you can physically turn over: the leaves of matte paper on which the photographs are printed. Would removing the frame and turning the photograph paper around to see its hidden side tell you anything about the pages hidden from the camera? Would it tell you any more about what you want to know?
*
The moments of reading I try to hold onto are those when you, the reader, realise a character cannot return to some scene, cannot see some image again. You have retained an image only to find its significance was that it is somehow changed and somehow lost. At the end of A Stick of Green Candy, the child narrator returns to her pit, but she can no longer summon her imaginary world. But you, the reader, were never there, never saw it. You sat with a book in your hands. You saw text on a page. You will never see it again as clearly as you never saw it, and yet you feel like you’ve lost something.
When you leave The Garden, you leave an actual place. A place you have been. But because it makes you leave as soon as you’ve entered, and because it makes you lost and makes you want it while you’re there, you also leave a place you have not—which is what the place you have becomes.
*
When we leave The Garden for the last part of the artist’s walk, McInerney leads us to a community garden a few blocks from ACE. Here lavender perfumes the air, fig trees extend soft-furred leaves to grip your hand in greeting, and a single cherry tree, just off-centre, begins to blossom. McInerney opens her bag and offers us apples. They glow in the afternoon sun, but when you pick one up you feel the cool of the shade of the market at morning. We form a circle, readers and listeners. McInerney reads last, reads from The Persimmon Tree: “I saw the spring come once and I won’t forget it” (Barnard 21).
If you have come on the walk, you could believe that we remain in The Garden—only it’s in bloom. It seems less that we have walked from one garden to another and more that we have cultivated this one in the other’s place. This is, partially, an effect of visual similarity, which is itself an effect of The Garden’s minimalism; because the exhibition is pared back to its trellises (ground, rails, a single piece of wood standing for a tree trunk) it is possible to imagine any garden growing from it. I feel here something like the want I felt in The Garden, but in reverse. In this actual garden of lavender, fig and cherry-blossom, I want the concrete, wood and images of The Garden. In the community garden, I feel that unsealed tile tilting just beneath my feet.
Resemblance creates a sense that The Garden could be the origin, the root, of any garden, but at this origin we found ourselves wanting and lost. Absence at the root. Can’t it be good to see that we were lost at our origins? Isn’t this part of the courage of remaining lost—that it is difficult to not find your bearings and easy to turn a place or time, as it becomes the past, into a story and a story into co-ordinates to find your way. But if that place was loss you’ll never find it that way.
*
Then that root of absence was gone. It was only after the artist’s walk that I began to articulate the question I think The Garden was asking, “What do you do with a place you can only leave?” but the walk was on the second last day of the exhibition and I never saw it again.
As time goes on, I want the applewood rails the way I want the apple tree, applewood and paper in the photographs. As time goes on, the applewood rails offer me what the apple tree, applewood and paper in the photographs offer me.
*
Every line
of some poems
is a rail.
Now can you walk?