SOCCER BALL WITH EARS
The wood for the bonfire came from a woolshed fallen into disuse. Great multitudes of passing sheep had rubbed the beams smooth and oiled them with lanolin. I think it was the lanolin that gave off a rich and nutty aroma when burned. Earlier that day my partner and I had wrenched out the bolts joining the beams with crowbars and angle grinders. Bolts don’t burn.
While sitting around the fire we played a game with the other workers, a story-building game: one person speaks a sentence, and the person beside them follows with a sentence of their own, and so each participant carries along the story in any direction they may choose. I mention this only to note that at least some of those sitting beside the bonfire were already in a fanciful frame of mind when Bobcat and Robbo rumbled up in Bobcat’s ute. A spotlight struck our backs and then our faces. A dozen sides of donkey meat, mounted on hooks in the back of the vehicle, swayed to a stop. The men who emerged from the cab wore tank tops smeared with blood.
The smell of donkey meat is estherous, cheesy, and rough; it stays in your nostrils like smoke. Tough meat yields only to very sharp knives. I spent several days in a shipping container refrigerated by generator in the Western Australian desert cutting donkey meat with Bobcat and Robbo. The meat needed to be cut into two inch cubes. It was destined for a zoo in Perth where it would be eaten by tigers. Bobcat and Robbo kept the meat in the shipping container not only to prevent spoilage but to keep it hidden away from dingoes and other unwanted meat eaters on the many millions of acres the station controlled.
The station employed Bobcat and Robbo for the purpose of shooting feral donkeys, boars, kangaroos, and dingoes. The pair helped out with other station work as well; both were experienced motorbike riders, which made them essential for cattle mustering. They could fix engines. They made their own bullets and tracked the shells down to reuse them. They told me they never took a shot that wouldn’t kill; by this they meant to assure me they were not cruel. It wasn’t always easy to tell.
I liked them improbably: their trade in the culling of animals carries some presumptions about the value of certain animals’ lives I find hard to accept; their trade also requires the use of guns, and guns make me uneasy. But Bobcat and Robbo were also generous. They ranged widely in their shooting trips, which meant they could get beer and tobacco before the weekly supply truck could; this meant they were always handing out cans and smokes to those on the station running low, and there was always someone running low, for the place we worked was four hours from a paved road, eight from a gas station. I once saw Bobcat and Robbo spend a full summer day babysitting a pot of kangaroo tail stew for the birthday party of an Aboriginal child, visiting for school holidays. The kid ate three bowls.
Bobcat and Robbo wore their hair in skullets, but from the way their haircuts had grown in I got the sense that Robbo had followed Bobcat in committing to the style. I also noticed that Robbo deferred to Bobcat as boss. Their dynamic became clearer during a poker game. We used pistachio shells and beer tabs for chips, and Robbo brought out for his bigger bets some sparkly rocks he intended to give to his daughter. Bobcat was too drunk to play strategically; instead he left things to chance and told stories. Robbo backed up Bobcat’s stories. These were stories of killing animals and of horrific accidents that befell humans working in rough country. Many of these stories would sound untrue and demented if I retold them; they would have sounded untrue to me too, had Robbo not been there to back them up.
As Robbo quietly and without celebration won the poker game, he tempered Bobcat’s stories with the perspective of a witness, a quiet observer who holds back from inserting himself until ripened moments. His own stories were just as good as Bobcat’s — a biker gang, led by the father of his girlfriend, bullying him into marriage — but rarely did he volunteer tales where he played the protagonist. He seemed content to play the sidekick. And his commentary and codas to Bobcat’s stories performed a valuable service to Bobcat. It went something like this: Bobcat would tell the story of a night when a pack of dingoes surrounded them and they clutched rifles to their chest in the darkness; Robbo would then add in the smell of meat they’d just dressed, the twitchy pain of ant bites on their hands, and how Bobcat called his mother the next morning. If Bobcat’s language grew too local, or the point of a given story got lost, Robbo interpreted. And when a story became too brutal, Robbo could usually find a touch of humanity in it.
I had seen this role inhabited before. There was no copy of Don Quixote in the station’s library, but I remembered the singular impression the novel made on me at the time I read it. I saw Sancho as a great interpreter. The Don’s delusions give rise to grandiose aesthetic acts — performances, art — but without a witness and interpreter, these acts remain in the realm of madness: a lance swinging in darkness. Don Quixote’s art requires Sancho’s eyes. Wisdom teems behind their surface. It takes a wise person, or someone with a particular kind of understanding in their heart, to see madness as art. And just as I appreciate Sancho more than I do the Don, I hold a special affection for Robbo — humble, wise, endowed with a paunch.
I put some of these ideas to L. The discussion that followed took place in a sector of rocky scrubland where we’d traveled to see some Aboriginal rock carvings. The carvings showed orbs and lines, some of which represented plants and people; animals were more precisely rendered. We were in the traditional lands of the Tharrgari; beyond the likelihood that the artist came from this tribe, we can claim little definite knowledge about the artist and the circumstances of their art.
My claim was this: art requires a viewer. Let’s suppose the stone carver worked alone, in the absence of all viewers, scraping stone on stone for reasons known only to them. In this situation, the carving was not art — not yet. It existed in a liminal state, neither art nor not-art, unseen, waiting. Then, maybe months later, maybe years, another human soul, probably Tharrgari, came along and saw the carving. At that moment it became not just self-expression, but self-expression in a shared state, a bridge between two minds, the artist’s and the viewer’s. At that moment it crossed a threshold. It became art. So I argued.
I’m aware that the gatekeepers of museums are maligned. Justly. I’m aware that ‘Westerners’ have declared ‘Primitive’ forms of expression to be ‘Art’ with motivations as malicious as they are varied: racism, self-aggrandizement, and venality to name a few. The business of calling some things art and others not-art has a long and troubled history. Maybe it’s a reaction to this history that attracts me to such a simple binary definition (self-expression unseen is not art; self-expression seen is art). It feels inclusive.
I believe in art’s primary function as a social bridge: one person gives form to something in their mind or soul; another person views it, puzzles over it, gets it, doesn’t get it, gets elated or despairs over it, or has any other reaction to it. The only gatekeeper is a second set of eyes beyond the artist. It need not be a professional. Any second set of eyes will do.
Has it ever rubbed you the wrong way to hear someone declare their self-expression to be art? This kind of declaration has caused me some distress. The hubris of it. The declaration implies, first, the notion that certain acts have inherent aesthetic value, and second, the notion that the artist themself is an adequate judge of that value. Both implications ring false to me. Changing context — the translocation of urinal to museum wall — is one of many ways to debunk the idea of inherent aesthetic value. And even if inherent aesthetic value existed, I have trouble seeing artists as fitting judges of this value, mainly for reasons of objectivity. This is not to say that artists are untrustworthy. It is to say that, in making art, artists call on a part of their brain (or soul) that prevents them from fully inhabiting the role of viewer.
So my partner and I discussed in the desert. I felt thankful for her challenging company. While walking together (she’d wrapped her face in a black veil for flies, like a character from a Jodorowsky film) we became less fuzzy about our notions of art. I came away from the conversation with a personal stance that feels more connective. The act of viewing art involves human understanding, which may cross bridges of time and culture (in Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote of a time-corridor between the moment when a painting was painted and the moment you viewed it). But it is the catch of emotion in the throat upon encountering a piece of art that convinces me of art’s connective quality, more than any intellectual consideration. Slivers of another human soul seem rare and worth cherishing. They cry out to be perceived.
To see the work of the unknown stone carver, we had driven miles on dirt tracks in an unreliable vehicle, rambled on foot over hot sharp rocks, and warded flies away from our eyes. In a sense we had trespassed on the lands of the Tharrgari; though the station “owned” the lands on paper, one cannot set foot on the continent of Australia without trespassing on Aboriginal lands. I point this out to express my unease and wonder at the lengths one can go to connect with art, and also to recognize that trespassing is morally fraught, even if one’s goal is to connect with an artist. At the moment I encountered the carvings, however, these concerns weren’t foremost in my thoughts. Emotion has a way of pushing thoughts away. Here on stone was a story of a village and survival in a language I could understand just enough of to feel transported, grateful, and moved. I allowed the flies to land in my eyes without much interference.
Bobcat once sewed the ears of a donkey on a soccer ball. If he did this alone in the desert, and left the object where no one would ever see it, it would seem a demented act. It might speak of his loneliness. But the sewing of ears on a soccer ball was not an act performed in solitude. Robbo was there. The shooters had a full day to wait around their camp until a truck came to pick up their meat and drop off Bobcat’s daughters for a visit. They were low on beer and burnt out from the shooting trip: loopy moods, sundazed. The meat was already cut and the ears were lying on top of a pile of hides. Robbo woke up from a nap to find Bobcat with the sewing kit and the ball resting in his lap. Bobcat’s stitching was masterful; he used the same heavy, waxed twine they used to repair tarps. Bobcat concentrated on his sewing while the ball smudged his shorts red with dust and a cigarette burned down in his mouth.
There was something joyful in the upright perk of the ears, spaced on the ball in just the way they would be spaced on a head. Bobcat tossed the ball at Robbo and Robbo headed it back to him. They kicked the ball with ears around for a while. Then they began to feel a little bad about it. If it was art, it was a brutal kind of art. When Bobcat’s daughters arrived, Bobcat and Robbo tried to hide the ball with ears, but the daughters, four and six, found the thing eventually, and started kicking it around with their fathers. The ears prevented the ball from rolling the way a regular ball does; they added a wonky sense of chance to the game. But even the girls sensed that though the ball could be kicked, it might be damaged if kicked too many times, the ears might fall off, so it was probably better left in a place where it was not destined for use, where it could be viewed without tempting its viewers to kick it.
It remains now on top of a pole, where sometimes it serves as a perch for birds. The pole was Robbo’s idea, not Bobcat’s; ideally there exists a bond of trust between curator and artist.
