Jun 19, 2008 - hybrids galore, rainbow petals forever. Berg's allusions to the Linnean systems of. Enlightenment botany in the naming of her roses, is not an ...
This article was downloaded by: [175.196.233.50] On: 21 March 2014, At: 03:52 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Third Text Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20
A rose is not a rose, not a rose, Knot Ian McLean
a
a
Lectures in Art Theory , University of Tasmania , Published online: 19 Jun 2008.
To cite this article: Ian McLean (1997) A rose is not a rose, not a rose, Knot, Third Text, 11:39, 106-107, DOI: 10.1080/09528829708576678 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829708576678
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
106
A Rose is not a Rose, not a Rose, Knot
manifestly absent in its colonial history; incommensurable elements of a fragile and melancholy postcoloniality which now saturate Berg's essence like alcohol humid in the air.
Christl Berg's 'A Postcolonial Florilegium'
The flesh of rose petals — sensation of the mucous regenerated. Somewhere between blood, sap, and the not yet of efflorescence. Joyous mourning for the winter past. New baptism of springtime. Return to the possible intimacy, its fecundity and fecundation.1
Downloaded by [175.196.233.50] at 03:52 21 March 2014
Ian McLean
...like knots which slip apart on an endless string and again entangle only to once more fall like rose petals unravelling....a virtual florilegium in flux. Christl Berg might adore the countless rose gardens which dot the empire on which the sun never set, but in her computer imaged art the red blooms of Victorian and Edwardian hegemony evaporate, to condense into emblems of her own migrantology and repeated resurrections in colonial places — first India and now Tasmania. The European rose may have long faded, but for her the rose still blooms, for in its unending invaginations she sees a postcolonial formlessness. Roses lovingly planted and tended by colonials as signs of the paradise from which they have been expelled, still shine, but differently. The old signs have lost their lustre; now there are hybrids galore, rainbow petals forever. Berg's allusions to the Linnean systems of Enlightenment botany in the naming of her roses, is not an oath of allegiance to its values. Like Foucault, she mobilises the endless analogies, repetitions and meanings that emanate like invisible ripples from words, names and icons, in order to flush out the systems of power that contain life. Like Foucault, she returns to the mysteries of mediaeval scholarship which glimpse in each ripple or fragment the whole. In the unfolding and falling petal is the bloom. In the tale of the travelling English rose is a greater story, retold since time immemorial, of a migration from Paradise to India, to China and even to the happy isles of the Hyperboreans. The rose is the flux which has long flowed between Tao, Hindu, Islam and Christian, and now even to antipodean atheists. If this exhibition includes but fragments of an immeasurable series, they are enough to tell unceasing stories. Here the story is of a place called Tasmania, (Rosa antipodea), crossed with signs of love (Rosa cupida) so
While delirious on its perfume, Berg reads the rose as a text, as if it is a message or gift from God. From its brittle shape unfolds the future that Adam, in Eden, did not read but was irrevocably plunged into — a story that still slips towards the cataclysmic ends or perhaps just the small deaths of new millenniums. "O endless rose, intimate, without limit, which the Lord will finally show to my eyes" (Attar of Nishapur). This oldest of stories Berg re-stages in her mediaeval Foucauldian ways, so that when we read the rose, we can name our own characters and set our own plots in a game of interminable analogies: Rose gardens o( Englishmen round the globe; the steady tidal fullness of your fragrance rises up to the old declining faces of empires. You have followed them all, for your fragrance has wafted across the continents and millenniums — all the way from the ancient walled gardens of Persia where writing first spun its endless tales, and from where, it is written, civilisation, history and empire began. Time has etched the colours of empires upon your fragile globe, so that the whites of the sun and the moon's gold, and even the crimson stain on the hard swordedge of Satan's steel may now be yours. But now your endless varieties lovingly cloned by empire's hybrid children have passed their midnight. In the postcolonial hothouse your colours swirl and intermix, promiscuously entangled before suddenly bursting in radio-active glow. Like lovers swimming in blind ecstasy, the colours drown us in an unfathomable firmament. The rigours of Enlightenment which even bore you to the antipodes are barely remembered. Enlightenment's trim symmetrical botany, now lost in the lower layers of empire's soured dreams, explode into a postcolonial florilegium. We, blind in our delirium, know nothing; we see too many ways to go. Now everything is an infinity of things. Adam, so un-lifelike: erect, proud like Britannia, Emperor of India, a monument to God's greatness and oneness. From the singular hardness of Adam God made a sign of difference, a soft invaginated flowing which is not one. Unlike Adam, she multiplies, hybridises, ceaselessly becomes other. Perhaps the rose was given as a sign of his destiny,
Downloaded by [175.196.233.50] at 03:52 21 March 2014
107
I\ 0 $ 0
(I 0 I 0 Y 0 $ II Thorncd Variety • possum resistant - no scont
Rose Dolorosa, from 'A Postcolonial Florilegium', 1996, digital print, 16 x 25 cm
of his and his kin's brief rule and melancholy fate. Even her name, Eve, means destiny, the gate to night. Her watery being erodes and dissolves his. Her very letters rearrange themselves to taunt his Apollonian bearing: rose, eros, sore. Duchamp, who devoted his life to undo Adam's inheritance and celebrate the deathly erotic dance of Eve transforming the clock-work mechanical men into delirious fountains and of dreams, took on the garb of rose. Rose Selavy. Rose, such is life.
The rose, like us postcolonials, has travelled from paradise to Utopia. Expelled from the first home, that secure oasis on the Euphrates called Paradise or Eden, Adam and his rose were only left with dreams of paradise lost. Condemned to endlessly wander, their ever restless children fashioned empires from an oceanic desire to discover Utopias across the seas. Berg rediscovers a substitute paradise in the no place of virtuality, a perpetual threshold peeling and peeling away. Here the flickering light of its screen knows no end. In its nomadic freedom, home is only a page, a text that travels on and on, multiplying ad infinitum. Here the closed systems of Enlightenment drift into metaphors as its Linnean latinities deconstruct into absurd banalities with no end: Rosa antipodea, Rosa dolorosa, Rosa viminalis, Rosa insularis, Rosa bicapita, Rosa glacii, Rosa casanova, Rosa lunatica, Rosa fantasia, Rosa cupida, Rosa
erotica, Rosa affectionata...
The rose finds its destiny in the postcolonial florilegium, for here it is made second hand. This is the secret of its joy: now time no longer bends things. The postcolonial florilegium is a posthistory which hybridises endlessly rather than grows from its own seed. However, while both indigenous and empire days have long disappeared in this utopic florilegium of exponentially cloned joyfulness, the echo of paradise loudly proclaims that some things are never forgotten, no matter how many millenniums slip by. The rose is a rose, is a rose, is a rose, and always has been. (Apologies to Borges, The Unending Rose To Susana Bombal)
1
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C Gill, The Athlone Press, London, 1993, p 200.
Christl Berg's 'A Postcolonial Florilegium' was at the University Gallery, University of Tasmania, Launceston, Australia, April 1997.
