Mun-dirra

 

At the cavernous entrance to the monolith is a one-finger salute. The hand atop its big bluestone plinth sends an unambiguous message to the gallery. On the one hand, it could be a jaunty thumbs-up of the sort emulated by groups of schoolboys in front of it, being photographed. On the other hand, the thumb is shaped like a tall finger, with phallic connotations that don’t take long for those with a mind for such suggestion. Walking with the schoolboys and their teachers through the cavern and its weeping wall, we have all day to test our powers of ambiguity on roomfuls of postmodernity. Or as one wag describes it, entering an AI area, The Try-any-old Thing. Two figures tall as David, though one reads her iphone, the other stares hands in pockets, stand in the atrium somehow aware of their Goliath. Women come and go, talking of not-Michelangelo. Ambiguities mount, or perhaps dismount, depending on how visitors see them. Robotic dogs draw with forepaws on walls mindless abstractions undeserving of reviews. Hieronymus Bosch goes mad again on hard-drives. Neck-bending screens depict unstoppable megacities of the world until the neck hurts. Materiality made over in every material, positioned to mock and mimic the old masters. A loose thread of try-anythings straggles through another portal and with nothing else to do either, I follow. We walk into a space where handiwork unfolds, curves, caresses, balances and bobs, reads tides and holds fast. Where ambiguity is put aside, if it ever had a place. Maningrida fish net fences wiggle into the distance, made of dried pandanus spiralis and “natural dyes”, anythings are told on tidy captions and through audible earplugs. The low-level frenzy of technological change is replaced by the original elements of grass, sunshine, flowing water, dextrous digitality where time is read by shadows on the sand. Fingers and thumbs interweave for hours, gestures practised year by year since youth, every inch and row pressed firmly into place, particularly. The appearance of perfect straight lines is corrected at close quarters, each rush and bind leaving its own variations on the retina. Blessedly free of tour guides and their high-level phraseology, we peer quietly through the nets into passageways of other nets, orange and yellow, black and brown, riding undulant the length and out of sight. We could be, for a brief moment, barramundi reading the signs, gliding towards a detour; giant groper dreaming where salt and fresh commingle, part company. Instead we take photographs, trace a weave with our eye to where all traces leave off. Someone jokes about this being a real immersion experience and, true, it is a moment the abstract by-product of sheer necessity catches our otherwise distracted attention in its charming coils and curves. Later there will be time to read about Mun-dirra, its unambiguous purpose, the ends for which the fences were woven, the contradictions their presence possess inside a monolith. But for now, the physical now, I bide my time thinking about Arnhem Land.