Dipping Mortal

Lachlan Taylor on Barbara Tuck’s painting Dipping Mortal (2014)—republished from an exquisite collection of essays in the new book Delirium Crossing, edited by Anna Miles and Christina Barton on the occasion of the touring exhibition: Barbara Tuck — Delirium Crossing (2022).

The book is a sublime companion to looking (and re-looking) at Tuck’s paintings, with 15 essay contributions from writers Hanahiva Rose, Susan Ballard, Rebecca Rice, Sarah Treadwell, Nathan Pohio, Simon Gennard, Christina Barton, Natasha Conland, Lachlan Taylor, Jan Bryant, Robyn Maree Pickens, Abby Cunnane, Richard Frater, and Emma Smith. Anna Miles also interviews Tuck; and there is a generous extended bibliography by Emma Fenton with fascinating annotations from various poems and books. As the accompanying note states, “Excerpts are added where they reveal something more of Tuck’s process and what fascinates her.”

The exhibition was first shown at Ramp Gallery at at WINTEC’s School of Media Arts, Hamilton; and runs at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery until 25 September 2022 before travelling to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

Copies for sale from the galleries. Contact am@annamilesgallery.com

Anna Miles and Christina Barton, eds.
Barbara Tuck: Delirium Crossing
ISBN 9781877309465
2022 Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington; Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland; and Ramp Gallery at WINTEC’s School of Media Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton

Barbara Tuck, Dipping Mortal, 2014, oil on board, 70 x 70 cm. Collection of Massey University College of Creative Arts Toi Rauwhārangi, Wellington. Courtesy of the artist

Thetis holds her infant son by the foot as she dips him in the dark waters—a baguette of a boy in Stygian fondue. Later, an arrow will strike the undipped heel. Later still, Alexander will throw his spear on the shores of Anatolia. Lastly, Brad Pitt will pick it up and find the experience wholly unfulfilling. When the actor took on the mantle of Achilles for Wolfgang Peterson’s big-budget film adaptation of the Iliad, he was so upset by the process that he swore off making that kind of blockbuster ever again. Years after Troy came out, Pitt would remember a deep frustration with the direction. Try as he might, under the glare of Peterson’s focus, he couldn’t get Achilles out of the middle of the camera’s frame.

There is no middle of the frame in Dipping Mortal, 2014, no focal centre. Perspectival havoc is something of a feature in the paintings of Barbara Tuck. It might be more accurate to say of Dipping Mortal that there are so many potential and fragmentary gazes adopted in the work that there is little point or interest in trying to identify any dominant or central perspective. Horizons grow on top of one other. Plains build into mountains which give way to skies cut short by new plains and more mountains. We’re in the presence of a sure hand that favours strong borders. Tuck’s real and imagined shards of landscape don’t appear to melt or flow into one another, they clash and contrast, marking their own territories across the map of the image. The course of a pale river is blocked by the jarring imposition of a mandarin mountain range. The tips of green rolling hills should be met by the sky, and for the briefest moment they are, until those glimpses fail beneath the plastered arrival of a burnt yellow plain cut with the smudges of black trees.

But Dipping Mortal isn’t entirely collage and juxtaposition. Tuck occasionally breaks from her pattern of hard boundaries and discrete environments in moments that are all the more arresting for their rarity. There’s an occasional softness of form, slips of ambiguity that introduce boundary zones of blurred doubling to the painting. This interplay between the dominance of firm edges and intermittent moments of gently abstracted brushwork is what lets her many horizons continue to fold in on themselves, further into the impossible depths of the image. It’s the tension that lets an oxbow strand of pale blue, marred by grey smudges, operate both as weightless sky and liquid river.

There are stranger impositions too. Sluggish black shapes, failing to appear as any conventional kind of landscape forms, emerge across the upper bands of the painting. Wreathed in clouds and marked with geometric dotted patterns, the shapes draw attention to themselves in their contrast with the fragments of legible landscape surrounding them. In other parts of the work, sweeping vertical rows of human faces—ranges really—rhyme in descent with their mountainous counterparts. Some have their eyes closed, others turn away from the foreground, none of them meet our gaze. And at the top, an infant, alone and semi-submerged in an impossible river, turns their back to us.

Where is Achilles? We’re trained not to fall for the tricks of a title, but Dipping Mortal is too seductive a lure. The Myrmidon must be hidden somewhere in the overlapping folds of Tuck’s jigsaw landscape. I’m guided by the reassurance that her painting has been a home for classical allusion before. She called one such work Lacrimae rerum. That phrase, one of the most contested in translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, is famous for presenting English speakers with a forking path. The translator must choose between subjective and objective interpretations of the Roman poet’s words. In the former, we are confronted with tears for things—our own sorrow for human suffering and the burdens of our lives. The latter, more poetically generative interpretation, is to witness the tears of things—a belief that the material world can bear witness to and receive our pains, that the universe might shed its tears for us.

And what about that most famous of classical landscapes? Virgil passed Arcadia on to the mythologisers of the European Renaissance, where it became a poetic byword for an idyll lost to time and civilisation, invariably told in elegy. Erwin Panofsky’s famed essay on Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego (1637–38) transformed understanding of that landscape from a simple memento mori into a more complex site of nostalgia and mourning. Tuck’s landscapes are, in some ways, more Arcadian than even Poussin’s because they are true imaginings. Instead of a fantasy forged from the mimetic representation of real place and real nature, her landscapes are often chaotic amalgams of real and fictitious space—smashed together into jarring, impossible, inaccessible but always alluring meshes of place and memory.

These are the windows I choose to watch Dipping Mortal through—heavy with emotional valence, with a sadness for things lost. The story of Achilles is, after all, a tragedy, full of the painful irony of Greek fable. I don’t think that the semi-submerged infant of Tuck’s painting, sat with their back to our gaze, can sit in for the son of Peleus, post-dip, Thetis out of sight. Achilles isn’t in the middle of the frame, as Pitt so unenthusiastically played him—I don’t think he’s in the frame at all. Like Arcadia, like Lacrimae rerum, Dipping Mortal is an elegiac landscape. Achilles has gone, died, succumbed to his only weakness. Absent his body, we’re left with memories, fragments that have lost the veracity of vision but gained something more interesting in the losing. They crowd and confuse, pitch in conflict against each other and the impossibility of inhabiting the same space together at once. And while it’s too much to call this collage a portrait, these pockets of place do coalesce into an image of something more than themselves, a someone, even. If not Tuck herself then, perhaps, her title’s subject? The river in the middle of Dipping Mortal might not be the Styx but, gently slipping back and forth between water and cloud, it strikes me as a fair substitute—stillness in a maelstrom of memory.

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