instant, adrenalous thrill of not knowing, the fear ofbeing different and seeing differently in alienated space. The history offirst encounters, for the most part, is a violent history, a spiralling implosion of this conflicted feeling into the more subtle and sinister forms of schizoid desire driving long-term objectives of controlling, possessing, assimilating, destroying-the appropriating of "cannibal" from its specific cultural framework by "civilized" as licence for "civilized" to run amok. The only thíngs that ínterest me are those that are not míne . .. By contrast, artists, recognizing the presence of the stranger within themselves as an immanent condition, create dynamic, performative, confrontational contexts through which to explore this sarne feeling, rather than attempting to define and fix it within the static and distended space ofhistory. And in proselytizing, rather than suppressing, its innate contradictions, they release it as an active and fertile discourse into the endlessly contested spaces ofland and body. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. ln the spirit of true modern cannibals, our curatorium bit the title of our enterprise from Oswald de Andrade's visionary manifesto for a modern, indigenous Brazilian culture, other snatches ofwhich appear throughout my text. 5 My instinctive response to the sprawling topography of our exploratory routes as situated within the comprehensive concept of antropofagía, was to treat Oceania as a project of spatial and corporeal history, an anthropomorphized entity that had become the anthropophagic subject itself, the thing being cannibalized. ln this thought resonates the idea that all of us have a consuming relationship with the land we come to inhabit by virtue of our desiring and acting upon it: ln other words, we are all "future-eaters."6 Only anthropophagy unítes uso .. Socíally. Economícally. PhílosophícaIly. One could even suggest that the land does not exíst until it is perceived and acted upon, until it enters language. Thus, the history ofthe land is an intersubjective history ofhow different people behave in and towards the phenomenon oflandscape, and ofthe conflict that arises from people ínhabítíng the sam e place ín düferent ways. GeoffLowe's pivotal work, Tower Hill (1984)-produced contemporaneouslywith the painting cycle Tenfamousfeelíngsfor men, ofwhich Impersonatíon is part-grew out ofhis fascination with Tower Hill, a primordial beauty spot in rural Victoria, denuded for arable cultivation by the late nineteenth century which, more than a century later, was reafforested using as a model the rendering of the originallandscape by the Austrian Romantic painter, Eugene von Guerard. ln response to this astonishing Chinese box of art and life-the reconstructing of a naturallandscape after a painting which so clearly sprang from the nineteenth century emigré painter's own interior model-his assimilating the foreign landscape before him into the formal terms that he knew-Lowe invited Greg Page, an artist who lived from selling his on-the-spot, slice-of-life, oil-on-canvas landscapes fresh offthe easel to weekend daytrippers-and an urbane postmodern counterpart, Tony Clark, who was engaged in a self-conscious investigation ofhistoricallandscape motifs-to collaborate with him on a major composite work, thus eliciting and enacting a complex discourse on the central and controversial role of painting in the perception and ordering of landscape. ln the resultant arrangement, insofar as von Guerard's original painting remained true to "the model within" himself, so did Lowe render the model as a discursive and unstable construct: Tower Hill consists of a large central paneI, a schematic afterimage brushed in acid yellow and green, around which are clustered small subjects ranging from more chromatically convincing, but equally impressionistic, renderings of the location to sketches from life and models. This idea ofthe power ofpainting over landscape reaches its apotheosis in Lowe's later, kookier formulation, Paíntíng devours everythíng (1995), where the topography ofTower Hill anthropormorphizes into a mythical dragon ofthe Italian Renaissance (though looking to me Geoft Lowe A constructed world Um mundo construído maquete 1997 ambiente técnica mista [mixed media environment] dimensões variáveis Artfan Magazine Revista Artfan
59 Oceania Louise Neri