This is not a text I wish to write.  I write it against my will.  I write it therefore under a compulsion, not to write but to say something, not necessarily to speak out (I have no desire to speak out) but to move my consciousness forward, to allow myself a form of self-allowance.

It would be nice to write nicely, to write well.  That is not possible.  It is not a refusal of aesthetics that is at stake but a recognition that the ‘aesthetic move’ is an active, even a cowardly evasion.

Yesterday a friend said to me, “Ugly truths, it’s necessary to speak the ugly truths”.

I disagree with this to this degree: We cannot concern ourselves with whether the truth is ugly or beautiful, tawdry or sublime.  The truth is merely.

Life is not a river.  There is no constancy.  Our rivers are inconstant, erratic.  They stop and start, they wander, they deviate.  They flow backwards.  The end in nothing.  Here there is a stretch of glistening waters; here there is nothing, a bleak hole, a tangle of torn timbers.  Impedance, flow.

We have not learned to read our own maps.  We do not see what is before us.  We have not learned how to look.

The present work is a re-run, a re-presentation.  If it was Unfinished Business then^[1] it is something else now.  I cannot say what, I don’t know.  Even as I write I cannot be certain what elements it will contain, what elements will be deleted, ignored.  The test of psyche is to set up an interplay between intention and precisely those hidden motivations which are at—yes, precisely—to remain hidden but which, at the same time goad or provoke, if not an unveiling, then a sudden lifting of one’s guard.

We may in the process shock ourselves, even do ourselves an injury.  There is a sacrifice as there is with any act of self-revelation.  This is one of the many lessons I have learned from the Aboriginal life world.  All lessons can produce resentment.  At a simple level the work—this re-presentation—invites me to reflect on the act of re-enactment, and to pose myself the question whether the ‘art’ object is ever complete.  Completion implies completion, but if the object before us has precisely as its object ‘unfinished business’ then nothing is complete.  Each enactment is the enactment of a question: what is ‘incompletion’, what lies at the heart of the ‘unfinished’?  The artwork was constituted as a mise-en-scène, as a setting.  It was conceived as a site of insertion, of things inserted (the residues of history, relationships, encounters, gifts, ‘re-enactments’, re-renderings) and things to be inserted (bodies, ‘models’, presences, events expected and unexpected).  It is a side of recording, a site of quotation.

It has its own history.

In this respect the site constitutes a ceremonial space.  It is meant to invite participation.  It is a space in which to be to be seen and to see.  The continuity is constituted as a continuity of visuality; yet how much of that is real, how much imaginary?  We see the Mona Lisa—but what do we see, the painting of an unknown woman or ourselves, something that oddly, strangely, represents us?  And when we see ourselves, is that not somehow an object of horror, even dread?

Squeamishness is at the heart of the anthropological endeavour.  We are meant to suppress our ‘natural’ repugnance but in achieving that state, what are we withholding from ourselves, what violences and violations are we subjecting ourselves to, what are we forced to ‘forget about’?^[2] At what point does our relinquishing of repugnance (horror) require us to ‘forget’ our moral imperatives?  At the same time is it not the case that other repugnances, deeply hidden or overlaid, suddenly begin to make their appearance like unwanted spectres of our own past?

Acknowledgements: The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided by Dr J Deger in typing this text.

[This text was published in Interventions: experiments between art and ethnography, Macquarie University Art Gallery 9 December 2009 – 3 February 2010, North Ryde, pp40-41.]