Yhonnie Scarce, Burial Ground (left), and Kathy Temin, Memorial Gardens.
Memorial Gardens
Kathy Temin
Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane
Until August 25
Temoin Oculaire: Paris Gardens
Julie Davies
Place Gallery, 20 Tennyson Street, Richmond
Until July 28
Picture This
Counihan Gallery, 233 Sydney Road, Brunswick
Until August 15
GARDENS, like people, struggle with their personality. On the one hand, they’re soft and boofy, bringing the random growth of organic nature into the built environment. On the other hand, they mustn’t be too wayward and submit to control and design, sometimes becoming stiff and pompous. Like people, they always feel hemmed in and risk being shunted and demoted in favour of something new. They wilfully assert themselves but have to conform to their parent architecture.
With lots of fluffy synthetic fur, Kathy Temin creates a garden at Anna Schwartz Gallery that neurotically represents this split personality. A temple greets you when you enter, though not a garden folly but a kind of wall, with a bench on the other side. Answering this screen, a clump of topiary – also in furette – sits apart, keeping a respectful distance. The space between is tense and dead, without an intervening feeling of horticultural rhapsody.
In a fascinating essay, Luke Morgan explains how gardens frequently have a memorialising function. For years, Temin has tried to find a memorial garden in Budapest that her mother recalls recorded the names of family members who perished in the Holocaust. For Temin, no doubt, this recollection is fuzzy but nevertheless reflects a concrete truth that survives even if the garden is lost or since demolished.
Temin, whose name has connotations of darkness in some languages, is a witness to something that cannot be found; and it seems uncanny that her family name also looks a bit like witness in French (temoin), the word that Julie Davies uses for her Temoin oculaire: Paris Gardens at Place Gallery, which also explores the melancholy sacred quality of certain gardens with a memorial purpose.
The Parisian gardens are built in a more boastful and luxurious spirit, and often they’re maintained with a proud rigour that keeps the original authoritarian intentions in pristine condition. Paradoxically, for most visitors, the remaining statues and names are only prized for formalist purposes. Davies somehow acknowledges the redundancy of their memory: her photography juxtaposes the severe with the casual, indicating how bombast defaults to nature.
In the same gallery, Alex Rizkalla also finds death in the garden but for him it forms part of a beautifully logical cycle. His shrines with skulls inside look macabre but are an attempt to wrest ageing and death from the way that we imagine them, ”as pathologies, and not as natural processes”.
In essence, a memorial garden is a cemetery for an absent corpse. The garden acts as a haven for pious reflection.
In a thoughtful exhibition of urban indigenous artists at Counihan Gallery called Picture this, Yhonnie Scarce has created a graveyard in neat ranks, which she calls Burial site. Instead of tombstones to mark each person’s spot, there are native fruits made of black glass. Because of this lustrous material, the presence of the deceased is anonymous but imperishable.
Answering the installation on the floor is another on the wall. It’s a collection of old bottles for alcoholic spirits. Inside each bottle is a black stick-figure, presumed dead and mere tatters of a living soul. Called Family portrait, the work communicates the grief of generations of people in Scarce’s lineage who have succumbed to grog.
As with Temin’s family, we know where these unfortunate people ended up; but when we want to evoke their presence, the marker is inadequate and testifies to nothing.
So through these empty bottles, she erects another memorial, along the lines of Giorgio Agamben’s What remains of Auschwitz. The true witness who experiences the ultimate horror can never testify what it was like.
robert.nelson@monash.edu
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