history
Greg Dening
Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche (eds)
Double Vision: Art Histories and
Colonial Histories in the Pacific
CUP $34.95pb, 320pp
0 521 643141
A FRIEND OF MINE once told me of his terror at experiencing
double vision. It was the first symptom of the multiple
scelerosis that would leach away his life. Double vision does not
have to be a symptom of a disease to be disorienting, though.
'Disorienting' -- I realise as I write it how pertinent the word
is. 'To turn from the east', 'to lose one's bearings', is what
the dictionaries tell us is its meaning. I presume, but cannot
really say, that believers look east, waiting for the Second
Coming. The dead lie east, waiting for the last day. To turn from
the east is the greatest disorientation of all.
Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the
Pacific is disorienting in another way. It is
'dis-Orientalism-ing'. Vision scholarship -- analysing critically
all the representations around us -- has been dominated by two
liberating books: Bernard Smith's European Vision in the Pacific and Edward Said's Orientalism. Smith alerted us to the
double vision that was in any colonial enterprise --the world out
there and the frames in the mind of its representations. Said
stirred a huge emotional swell by describing the double vision of
esoteric scholars. It was a double vision that empowered empires
and disempowered whole civilisations.
I remember a Muslim student weeping in my office as she told me
of reading Said and being culturally and spiritually revitalised
by his book. Put aside the political outrage that a Palestinian
scholar like Said could write an 'up your face' book on western
powers. Orientalism created a flood of 'normal science' as young
scholars the world over worked out the consequences of his thesis
for their region of the world. But there was an uneasy feeling
among many that Orientalism had created a dead end. Unless one had the double vision to see what was happening on both sides
of the encounter and the in-between, there was nowhere to go in
postcolonial studies.
Double Vision is a collection of essays by cross-cultural
scholars struggling to move out of the negativities left by
Said's Orientalism. They are art historians (Leonard Bell, Peter
Brunt, Joan Kerr, Harry Liebesohn, Ian MacLean, Michael
Rosenthal), literary critics (Jonathan Lamb), cross-cultural
historians (Bronwen Douglas), curators (Diane Losche), a
painter (Gordon Bennett). They are led by their editor, Nicholas
Thomas, who writes a seminal introduction on the state of play of
cross-cultural visual studies.
The double visions are many in this collection. There's the double vision of those who represent a Hawaiian king for the sake
of reforming a distant Russian aristocracy. There's the double
vision of those who see the penitentiary colonies in New South
Wales and Van Diemen's Land both as paradise and as hell.
There's the double vision of those who can see the
'counter-signs' of native insurgency in even the most demeaning
of representations. There is the double vision of those can see
the spaces negotiated by Maori artists in a colonial domain.
There are islanders transforming a native ornithology into a
native art and architecture. There is the double vision of the
picturesque and the grotesque in an artist like John Glover.
Then there is the double vision of a living painter, Gordon Bennett, who makes an aboriginal landscape out of Captain Cook's
face and makes a ritual space in Cook's mind from which a
landscaped aboriginal head forever peers.
There is a painting that intrigued me most of all. It was by
Charles Goldie, a New Zealand artist in 1905. All 'e Same T'e
Pakeha, Goldie called it. The double vision begins in the title.
Does it mean 'just like a pakeha'? Or does it mean 'all pakeha
are the same'? The portrait is of an old Maori man, tattooed on
his face, wearing a bowler hat, and a jacket and vest. He has an
intriguing smile on his face. Leonardo da Vinci would have been
proud to have painted it. There is a hint of the grotesque in the painting. In the grotesque the joke is on the native. Natives are civilised, but not quite. Nearly human, but laughably missing
out, like chimpanzees. But hold it. Who is the joke really on? Is
the old man laughable or is he laughing at those looking at him?