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Notes to Third Annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address, given at the
Sydney Opera House as part of the Sydney Spring Festival,
September 2001
Peggy's Ghost:
Multi-cultural Identity and Creative Renewal
In 1995, I had the pleasure and privilege of staying in the
Peggy Glanville-Hicks House in Paddington (just off Oxford Street).
One of the things that people kept asking me was "have you bumped into
Peggy's ghost yet?" So many people asked me that I hoped and expected that
she would appear -- I imagined her with one of her celebrated brandy sodas
in hand, perhaps with Poo, her poodle that was buried in the backyard,
in tow. I didn't have any night-time visitations from Peggy sadly but,
I have bumped into other aspects of her legacy as an artist.
Peggy took part in one of the great cultural shifts of the twentieth
century in the West, namely that of looking to other cultures outside of the
Western canon as a source for creative renewal. In the 1940s and -50s she was
part of a group of composers in New York dubbed `Les Six d'Orient´,
comprising Colin McPhee, Paul Bowles, Halim El Dabh,
Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness and P.G-H, investigating
non-western musical materials. Her operatic works,
The Transposed Heads (1953), Nausicaa (1961) and
Sappho (1965) were the major manifestations of this exploration
and drew their vitality and inspiration from the modal melodic styles
and asymmetric rhythmic patterns of Indian and Greek music. Writing
for Vogue Magazine in 1966, she said, "it seems possible that
the third phase of musical modernism in the twentieth century will be
concerned with bringing together the assets of East and West". [1]
This attention to a `multi-culturalism´, in the form of a bringing
together of `east´ and `west´ was also critical to succeeding
generations of Australian composers. Peter Sculthorpe,
Barry Conyngham, Anne Boyd and Helen Gifford as well
as many others looked particularly to Asian models, as well as other
`ethnic´ and aboriginal musics, as an important step in
defining for themselves a notion of an Australian identity.
As an Australian composer with a South-east Asian Chinese background,
you could perhaps say that I straddle the East-West boundary of Australian
musical identity politics in quite a different way to the composers
I've mentioned. After all, I am from the `other´ culture though one
couldn't say that therefore I have a simple inverse relationship to European
cultures. But I am aware that the `hyphenated identity´, Asian-Australian,
positions me quite differently in relation to acts of cultural
borrowing. The relationships between notions of where I am and where I look
towards are I think, less stable, more contingent, more ambivalent.
And so I'd like to talk a bit about my own experience and artistic
practice before making some more general remarks about that word which is a
perennial lightning rod for controversy -- multi-culturalism. As a concept it
has been part of cultural policy-making in Australia for a little over
ten years and has now become that particularly Australian object of derision
-- the `politically correct idea´. How else can we think about this term
`multi-culturalism´? How can it be renewed? How can we go beyond simple
oppositions in defining its meaning -- `east/west´, `self/the other´,
`familiar/foreign´ etc -- and how can a broader understanding or
conceptualisation of what `multi-culturalism´ means, provide
insights towards a process of creative renewal?
First, some personal reflections:
Over the last five years I've sought to reconnect more fully with my
ancestral culture in works such as my Chinese ritual street opera
Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting), the video-installation work
Sonorous Bodies and a large ensemble piece, Machine for Contacting the Dead.
This exploration is something that I have had rather complex feelings about.
Feelings connected with both geographic and linguistic exile from the notional
`home country´ but also made more disorderly by my experiences in both
South-east Asia and Australia where Chinese communities have maintained and
elaborated traditions and festivals no longer celebrated in a post-cultural
revolution China.
Australia, the country, is known as `the antipodes´ -- a place diametrically
opposed to other regions on Earth (specifically Europe). It's a place where
one is often made conscious of one's relationship to `somewhere else´.
Ideas too, are often defined in terms of this kind of migrant relationship
as much as things in themselves. As I have continued to explore my idea of
`Chinese culture´ from a place like Australia, I've increasingly found
myself regarding `China´ as a symbol for parts of an interior landscape
within which I am negotiating a number of different journeys.
One important aspect of this interior landscape is the existence of numerous
`boundaries´ -- a very Chinese structure I've come to discover. These
`boundaries´ are not so much barriers which constrict action but rather, I
consider them permeable `threshold lines´ which admit movement into
ever-receding spaces. To develop the metaphor further, one way of defining
these Chinese structures observed from an Australian cultural space is that
these `boundaries´ are also `fault-lines´ around which things slip through,
collide and shear off into fragments that metamorphose beyond any simple
comparison with the original.
I deliberately set out to explore the fault-lines of cultural hybridity in
my opera Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting). Based on the story of the
moon goddess Chang-O and structured around the rituals of the Hungry
Ghost Festival as practised in Penang (Malaysia), I described the work as a
`Chinese ritual street opera´. As it went into production for the 2000
Adelaide Festival, I started to call it a `magic Chinese puzzle-box´.
Floating on a barge on the River Torrens, the stage-set was a box in
which Chinese dialect opera traditions met contemporary music. It contained
a vaudeville and puppet show with aspects of the shlocky Hong Kong movie
and seedy Bangkok show-girl culture, all of this colliding with trance and
ritual action. Adding to the cross-cultural mix of the opera
production were a number of `installations´. Along the river walkway leading
to the performance site were incense and food offerings to the ghosts.
Facing the barge was a shrine to Chang-O. Directly in front of this, a
table was set for the `eight immortals´, providing the best vantage point
for the spirits to view the opera and laid out with a banquet of noodles,
rice, pork, sticky buns, sweets and cans of Guinness.
One very special moment for everyone involved in the production, occurred
when the shrine was blessed by two Buddhist monks. They brought a level of
authenticity to the production that we hadn't quite expected. Suddenly, a
shrine that was part of the set design, became a functional and activated
spiritual space. In fact, we had only half set-up the shrine with a statue
of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, below which was placed a figure of
`the drunken monk´ with his proper offerings of beer and cigarettes when the
monks arrived. They were not at all perturbed by the juxtaposition of
figures and just got on with their blessing in which they asked for
protection and blessing for the company. Rather than being some strange
abstract, mystical event, it felt very `normal´, simple, direct and
grounded. It also felt extremely Australian. It seemed perfectly
reasonable to have monks chanting sutras outside a rowing club whilst burly
rowers (many of whom are Vietnam war veterans who row as therapy for
stress), went in and out of the club. Then there were school kids, joggers
and cyclists passing by adding to the chaotic inter-cultural mix. Yet
somehow, every element seemed to harmonise into a whole. Even though we
were not performing in the context of a traditional festival in a community
with a shared cultural heritage, I think we did create our own strange,
temporary community.
`Memory´ and the idea of ritually evoking or propitiating the spirit world
are themes that recur throughout all my compositions. Many of my projects
have been concerned with ways to somehow connect with a spirit realm or
access thoughts, emotions and desires of the past. And in recent years, the
theatre of Chinese ritual has been a strong inspiration. In the last few
years however, I feel that I've made a journey from an overt exploration of
this ritual culture as in the opera Yuè Lìng Jié towards much more abstract
distillations of the aesthetic systems underlying Chinese thought.
Since the opera I've made other works such as a video-installation called
Sonorous Bodies and a piece entitled Machine for Contacting the Dead which was commissioned by
the Ensemble InterContemporain. Sonorous Bodies and the middle section of
Machine (called Memory Body) explore in
quite different ways, aspects of the meditative stillness of qin
(Chinese zither) music. In qin music, silence and the the sound of the
musician's touch or caress on the instrument are central to
the performance practice. [The connoisseur of the qin listens to sound of
the plucked string but even more prized, is the sound of the subtlest
rubbing of the musician's finger on the string after the actual sound
has decayed into silence. This incredibly subtle noise is considered the
`breath´ of the instrument. It's an aesthetic of listening that
focuses on the spiritual dimension of music making.]
My music took its poetic inspiration from this tradition but I didn't
create an overtly Chinese sounding world at all.
So, rowdy street opera and rarefied meditative silence -- both of course come
under that umbrella called `Chinese culture´. As soon as one starts looking
closely at what that culture is and what it might comprise, one sees that it
not a unitary thing at all. The rough and ready contemporary opera
performances offered to the spirits in Penang are a world away from the
perfections of Beijing opera and their ritual context would certainly be
regarded as a relic of feudalistic superstition in modern China. From a
European point of view, this very hybridity would perhaps be regarded as an
impurity, less `authentic´ and less `Chinese´ than something coming from
mainland China. In reality, there are many `Chinas´ and Chinese cultures.
And this opens up, for me, ways in which the definition of multi-culturalism
can be quite fruitfully expanded.
Multi-culturalism
Multi-culturalism is one of the great myths in Australian society -- I mean
that in the sense that it is one of the stories that we like to tell about
ourselves -- that we're an open, tolerant society that embraces cultural
diversity. People always point to the diversity of cuisines as evidence of
this -- Australian cultural theorist Sneja Gunew calls food "the acceptable
face of multi-culturalism" [2]. Of course, with the light, come
darker impulses within our community -- under the civilised, happy surface of
restaurant-going one can smell the sizzle of cultural diversity as threat.
You can tell there's an election coming up when both sides of politics
engage in a cynical manipulation of public opinion and demonisation of
asylum seekers. Memories are short -- my Aboriginal neighbours love
winding up taxi drivers in conversations about `how boatloads of criminals
and political refugees are coming here, taking over our way of life´ and
the punchline of course is, `yeah the ones that came in 1788´.
Multi-culturalism as an ideal cannot take us very far I believe, unless we
also acknowledge the many territories that co-exist within a culture and by
extension, the self. More and more, I am also coming to see multi-culturalism
as a way of being in the world as an artist -- a way of working that not only
negotiates journeys between the boundaries of different cultures but also works
with differences within a culture. I would like to examine some of the
possible meanings and resonances of this understanding of `multi-culturalism´
and to tease out some of the wider implications and perhaps more abstract
gifts that it offers to artistic practice.
To embrace a `multi-cultural´ approach in one's artistic practice is to
encounter multiple perspectives. One is constantly confronted with the
questions, `what position or positions am I speaking from?´ and
`how is authority constituted?´ It provokes a structural change in one's
thinking.
One begins to dissect one's assumptions about the structures that underly
identity-formation and how these things inform the distribution of meaning
and power. The world is much less stable and the political dimension of
every action becomes more apparent. I have three favourite examples of how
`other worlds´ can offer quite radical strategies of understanding to the
popular subjects of language, numbers and money. What is common to each
story is that the symbolic or `art´ aspect and the `artifice´ of the
structures of language, numbers and money are fore-grounded. Each example
happens to be related to a Chinese perspective but I could also have included
some aboriginal stories, for instance in relation to the subjects of time
and education.
Language
When I was researching materials for my `ritual opera´ I became fascinated
with the subject of Chinese pronouns and how grammar or grammatical
structures manipulate one's understanding of identity. Chinese is a
grammatically uninflected language in relation to person, that is,
verbs are not conjugated as they are in Indo-European languages.
That is, verb forms don't change whether one is speaking from the viewpoint
of `I´, `you´, `he´, `she´, `it´, `we´ or `they´ and in Chinese poetry for
instance, these pronouns are usually completely omitted.
This grammatical fluidity strongly shaped Beth YAHP's libretto for the
opera. In Scene 6, Chang-O Flies to the Moon, the stories of
the moon goddess are passed through a series of grammatical translations
-- the singing subject `she´ transforms into `I´ through to `you´ until at
the end `you´ (her shadow presence) comes into an embrace and unity with `I´.
In spoken Chinese, the pronouns `he´, `she´, `it´ are represented by the
same syllable ta but are distinguished in their written form. I was
astonished to discover that these written forms and specifically the
written form of the 3rd person feminine, `she´, was only invented at the
beginning of the 20th century. Previously, the written form for ta
(meaning `he´, `she´, `it´) was written in an ungendered form denoting
`human´ with specific gender indicated by the context.
To create the written character `she´, one component of the old word was
lopped off and replaced with a feminine radical (sign). What this meant was
that in creating the new written form `she´, the old ungendered word (he,
she, it) was converted into a masculine pronoun whilst still maintaining its
meaning as a `universal´ form -- as is the case in a language like English.
This addition to the written language was made by Chinese writers wanting to
translate texts from European languages and the changes have become part of
the mainstream vocabulary of modern Chinese. In other words, the pronoun
ta cannot now be translated back into its previous state.
Lydia Liu, a theorist in linguistics and gender studies has made a
fascinating study of this. She talks about how the act of translation has
hypothesised or `made up´ an equivalence in meaning across languages and
how this is an interesting mirror of other kinds of exchanges that
"reproduce the colonial relations of power". Liu points out rather
provocatively, that "English and the metropolitan European languages have
not experienced a similar need in modern times to adapt to the formal
characteristics of the other languages by eliminating, for example, one
of its gender categories in a reverse mode of operation." [3]
French scholars don't alter the grammatical structure of the French
verbs to translate T'ang dynasty poetry.
Numbers
My second story is about numbers. It's a story that the Jungian
psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz tells about eleven Chinese generals in a
war who've reached a crisis point in battle. They have to decide whether to
attack or retreat and after a long discussion about strategy they take a
vote on the course of action. Three of the generals vote to attack whilst
eight are in favour of retreating and so they agree to attack because
`three´ is the number of unity (unanimity). [4] They won!
In Chinese culture, the employment of numbers to count or measure things is
really regarded as the least valuable or most banal of its uses. In this
culture, it is the qualitative approach to numbers that has been developed
over its quantitative functions.
The Chinese `art of numbers´ places value on their use as carriers of
symbolic information which is quite different to their statistical use as in
a western scientific sense. Rather than disregarding the extraordinary case
in a statistical survey, this approach focuses on the particular case
existing in a particular time.
[There are parallels between the Chinese approach and older western
traditions of numerology. Actually quantum physics has reached the point
where scientists are recognising the link between subjective consciousness
and so-called `reality´ so there seems to be some kind of full circle
between east and west.]
What I find interesting about the symbolic approach to numbers is that it
demonstrates a way of thinking that emphasises dynamic relationships between
events and the `quality´ or `spirit´ of the context. The I-Ching is another
example of this principle of synchronicity in action. One asks a question
and throws three coins three times to arrive at a symbolic number pattern.
The number pattern gives you information about the nature of your question
and suggests processes by which one can resolve certain issues. The device
of the so-called `chance´ element of throwing coins is actually a way of
opening up one's mind so that one can perceive links between apparently
unrelated things. For me, there are many analogies between this and the
processes of composition and creativity in general.
Money
My last story is about money. Money in its purest form could be
defined as a `tool of exchange´, a reciprocation that speaks of relationship.
One person whose art practice I greatly admire is the Taiwanese-American
artist Lee Mingwei. Whilst still studying at Yale University, he began
a series of works called Money for Art.
The first version of this, made in
1994, involved a series of interactions over a year with passersby that he
met whilst sitting at a café. He would invite people to sit down and ask if
they were interested in having a piece of original sculpture, the only
proviso being that they would give him their phone number and allow him to
remain in contact. The artwork was an origami sculpture made from a
ten-dollar bill. Typically, it would take him about forty minutes to make
the piece during which time they would chat and then exchange phone numbers.
When Mingwei talks about this work, he has a set of story-board slides to
illustrate each stage of the work which one will have to imagine.
The first board shows the ten-dollar bill sculpture. The following one is
divided into nine squares each showing someone´s hand holding the sculpture
and each labelled with a name and a profession, for instance, `Jennifer,
waitress´; `Kan, student´; `John, homeless´ etc. After six months, he rang
each person to find out what had happened to their sculpture and the
resulting storyboard showed again, hands holding the sculpture but also a
photo of a pair of moccasins (Kan) or ice-cream and bananas (Jennifer), where
these people had spent their sculpture to buy things. This led to
interesting discussions with these people on whether something could be
money and art at the same time and about the value of the artwork. Mingwei
himself felt pleased that some people had felt free to turn the sculpture
into something they needed rather than being precious about it.
Even later in the process, other transformations had taken place with more
people exchanging the art for goods or where the sculpture had been lost or
stolen. One of the interesting cases was of `John, homeless´ who still had
his sculpture and for whom it had become an incredibly prized possession.
It had become rather battered because he kept it in his wallet and often
brought it out to show people. His attitude was that he felt special and
proud to be able to be involved in an artwork and to own this aesthetic
object -- its importance far exceeded its literal monetary value. Therefore
he felt he would never spend it even though he was under considerable
pressure from those around him to use it. Mingwei still meets up with him
from time to time and makes a new one when the old one wears out.
Mingwei made another version of `Money for Art´ in 1997. This was for an
exhibition at the Lombard Freid Gallery in New York where rows of open
shelves displayed a hundred origami sculptures made from one-dollar bills.
[The materials budget obviously didn't extend to the $10 bills.]
Visitors were invited to take one of these so long as they left something in
exchange with, again, a card with the person's name, profession and phone
number. They were free to determine the value of the exchange. Mingwei says,
"some of the more unusual transactions involved a bra, an active bankcard and
a note from a self-proclaimed thief, who left nothing." [5]
When Mingwei rang the owner of the bankcard, she gave him her bank pin-number
saying that since she felt that the project was about trust, she would also
offer that trust back to him. He said that he did go to the bank and check
her account though he didn't take any money out.
Lee Mingwei's work is engaged with dissolving distances between
everyday life and art, between the spiritual and secular. In this art which
makes direct connections between artist and audience, he is opening up a
space for multiple encounters with the unpredictable nature of human life. I
admire the agility, the awareness, humanity and openness of his practice and
the unpretentious way in which it demonstrates the fundamental
interconnections rippling out between people and things.
This is art that explores the idea of `relationship´ on a person-to-person
basis and also invites an imaginative collaboration with inner experience.
It's informed by an energy of renewal which is able to embrace
unpredictability and complexity, yet it's also simple in its fundamental
premise of communication.
Art/music as way of thinking symbolically
Language, numbers, money -- these are powerful tools that shape our world,
shape how we see ourselves, and our relationships with one another. My
three stories try to illustrate that there are other ways, less straightforward and more ambiguous ways, of thinking about and deploying these tools.
The other aspect of these stories is that they highlight the strategic
function of these tools by uncovering something of their internal mechanics
or codes.
These tools can operate, can make their transactions, because we accept
certain things about how they function. In the process however, their
symbolic function (the fact that we construct their meaning-value), is
often rendered invisible, neutralised or taken for granted. As soon as one
steps outside the normalised perception of these things, one sees that there
might be other options, more fluid ways of constructing the world.
This is the arena where art comes into being. Art teaches us a way of
thinking that is fundamentally symbolic. It encourages us to delve
below surface appearances to a place where the ground is shifting and
meanings are transient and difficult to pin down in absolute terms.
In that place, one's identity becomes plural -- one can say `I´ in many
voices. Like `multi-culturalism´ in our wider society, this upsetting of
identity, this plurality of meaning, can also awaken anxieties and provoke
intolerance.
Vietnamese film-maker and composer Trinh T. Ming-ha says: "Literal and linear
readings are championed and validated as the only ones `accessible´ to the
wide number, in all media work, whether documentary or narrative." [6]
"Accessibility, which is a process is often taken for a `natural´,
self-evident state of language. What is perpetuated in its name is a given
form of tolerance and an unacknowledged practice of exclusion." [7]
Art and specifically music, can be a way of thinking in itself -- it does not
necessarily have to be `about´ something -- whether an emotion, a picture or
a story. It can inhabit a multi-place and does not necessarily have to rely
on strategies of opposition and confrontation, us and them, rejection versus
affirmation and so on, to establish its order. In its symbolic nature,
art can be a way of embracing life's paradoxes and complexities -- a portal
into experiencing life differently and with heightened attention.
Creative renewal -- why do we need to keep making art?
But why do we need to keep making art? Why isn't it enough to just
keep reflecting on the artistic achievements of the past? What keeps art
alive is its ungovernable dimensions and the ways in which it resists
systematic forms of closure. The essence of Art lies exactly where it cannot
be completely explicable or accounted for and in this way it points
towards the quality of the infinite.
One definition of art for me is that it demonstrates the limits of
centralised conscious knowledge. One cannot rationally know everything
about it nor can it be totally exhausted from the one position. I believe
that this is the area of Art's true freedom and it is a freedom that needs
to be continuously expressed. In this sense, the making of contemporary art
is a profoundly optimistic `evidence´ both of the ongoing necessity of art,
and of our presence in the world. We no longer live in the same village all
our lives with prescribed pathways for work, play and worship. We live in a
mobile and increasingly interdependent world (the hyper-, virtual-, global-,
rapidly changing post-modern world), where people have many choices in
constructing their identities, histories and traditions.
Our contemporary world challenges us to continually renegotiate questions of
identity and history. I think a more complex and open-ended definition of
multi-culturalism offers us new ways of making sense of the inter- and
intra-cultural territories that constitute our presence in the world.
In music, a non-binary approach to understanding the processes of cultural
exchange could release multi-culturalism's productive potential as a tool of
political intervention and could give fresh meaning to one's artistic
practice.
To engage with Art is also to engage with territories of exchange between
giver and receiver. At the heart of the exchange is an interdependency that
can simultaneously explore sameness and difference -- it is an active site
for wonder and for passion.
In Nadine Amadio's film about Peggy Glanville-Hicks made in 1990,
P.G-H: A Modern Odyssey [8], one gets a very strong
sense of a woman, a composer, who lived a life of passion and lived the
passionate life of the artist to the full. Despite her frail health during
the filming, Peggy was no ghostly presence. Peggy's legacy to us is as a
model of the artist as gift-giver. As a woman she breached multiple barriers
in order to practise her art. As an artist she journeyed over terrain that
we call `multi-cultural´. But perhaps most important of all, her example
helps to open a door to understanding that the spirit of our times is
inherently cross-cultural and that to be an artist is to not take anything
for granted in the interior realms of meaning-making. Working against
fixity and stagnation of identity in the in-between spaces of creative
action, one finds an infinite momentum for creative renewal.
--Liza LIM
Bibliography:
- Peggy Glanville-Hicks,
Music: how it's built,
Vogue, March 1 1966, p.210.
- Sneja Gunew,
Feminism and the politics of irreducible differences:
Multiculturalism/ethnicity/race
in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman eds.,
Feminism and the Politics of Difference,
Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993, p.13.
- Lydia Liu,
The Question of Meaning--Value in
the Political Economy of the Sign
in
Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation
in Global Circulations,
Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p.34.
- Marie-Louise von Franz,
n Divination and Synchronicity:
the Psychology of Meaningful Chance,
Inner City Books, Toronto, 1980, p.83.
- Lee Ming-wei,
Artist's talk,
Queensland Art Gallery, September 1999.
- Trinh T. Ming-ha,
When the Moon waxes Red,
Routledge, New York and London, 1991, p.86.
- ibid, p.228.
- P.G-H: A modern Odyssey,
Juniper Films, 1990.
Other Reading:
-
Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers,
Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas,
alter/asians:
Asian-Australian identities in art, media and popular culture,
Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Anna Cerneaz and Marshall McGuire from the
New Music Network and the Sydney Spring Festival for inviting me to speak
and a very special thanks to Judith Foster from the
Australian Music Centre who helped me with research materials about
Peggy Glanville-Hicks.
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