Dear friends and colleagues
I want to talk about trees.
I have been asked to write the catalogue for Geraldine Javier’s show that I talked about last week. Her work for it was very influenced, indeed was about, the house and garden she is building on an old fruit farm in the countryside two hours south of Manila. Next to it is an impenetrable ravine filled with bamboo, beyond that a mass of trees that climbs up a mountain. But do I call that mass of trees a jungle or a forest?
It matters. When I say “forest” you may think of Red Riding Hood, wolves, Hansel and Gretel. When I say “jungle” you have very different associations: Tarzan, impenetrability, tigers.
If you ask me the biggest difference between Northern Europe and the Tropics then I have to give the obvious answer: it is much hotter here and very humid too. This has an effect on people: they walk so much slower. Secondly, there are no seasons at all in Singapore, and in Indonesia or Philippines these are determined by monsoons: rainy season and dry season. The poetry of Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall is absent. (One could suggest, where the monsoon is more extreme there is a different poetry, one of dust and dessication, giving way to sodden ground and constantly dripping trees.) Thirdly, I would add, everything grows so quickly. When the soil is as good as it is in much of the Philippines or in Java – thanks to the volcanoes – things grow astonishingly quickly. They joke in Java that if you throw the stone of a mango you have eaten over your shoulder, you can come back a year later and pick another mango from the tree that has grown from it. Fourthly, nature looks different here, especially the trees.
Yes, the trees look different.
Bernard Smith in his 1960 book European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: a study in the history of art and ideas pointed out that for thirty or so years no artist visiting Australia could paint a gum tree as it was. Those trees just weren’t right. That is to say they didn’t look like the trees in Claude Lorraine and all the art he influenced. The trunks divide and branch so early and erratically.
And the trees here?
The tops of coconut trees look chaotic, like someone just woken with tousled long hair. They decay and grow at the same time: the top leaves are always growing, the bottom leaves always dying, and periodically fall to the ground. Elaine Scarry in her 1999 book On Beauty talks of finally recognising beauty in palm trees. She should have tried the coconut trees.
Can you remember your first shock at seeing an orange tree (bright orange balls against dark green leaves) or seeing a banana tree and realising that the fruit grows upwards?
Mango trees maybe don’t look so different, but when the fruits are wrapped in plastic bags to protect them from the bugs they look like something else. People put sacks round the large fruits of jackfruit and soursop trees too.
Mango tree
Jackfruit tree
One of my favourites is the Kalamias or cucumber tree. The fruits sprout from the trunk like a nasty disease. For reference, its normally dried before cooked with fish.
Kalamias tree Detail
Does this affect art and artists? I am sure this luxuriant growth does – however subliminally. I can point at the persistent horror vacui here, a tendency to think of form organically. Maybe this in part explains why minimalism has never happened here.
Maybe also there is, underlying this, an assumption that we live outside more here. Only rich people have dining rooms and kitchens. For most people a cover from the rain and some charcoal to cook with is sufficient. For them a house is not a necessary refuge from sleet, ice and the biting wind.
Have a good Tuesday, and hoping the weather is good enough to get outdoors.
Tony
PS. I am calling it a forest.