Clive Murray-White, Penates -
Portrait of an inconsistent
idealist, Chilago Marble, 2.4.m
high, 1993-6

Yet apart from the more obvious examples of new-age mysticism, there is much that remains magical in the everyday. If Big Science no longer inspires longing along with awe or fear, then information technology and virtual communications have the mass appeal of the evangelical: it is clean to the point of transparency, accessible and immediate. The advertisement is more complex, assuaging that often inexpressible sense of lack, need or even necessity through the seduction of the magical aura of the completed self, resolved in its wholeness and unity through the object of desire. Similarly, the mythology of global fiscal liquidity challenges even the toughest analysts to reason beyond a diffuse yet pervasive sense of grace; the market, in the final analysis, moves in mysterious ways.

Clive Murray White is a contemporary Australian artist whose work is concerned with questions of the viability of mysticism, myth and magic in the contemporary, everyday sense. His work for the 1993 Fifth Australian Sculpture Triennial was a site-specific case in point. Located in the smooth corporate semiotic of 101 Collins Street (an important high-rise business centre in Melbourne with a huge foyer designed by high-roller New York architect John Burgee) Murray-White’s installation Penates - Household Gods articulated what I described at that time as the conventions of temple architecture and visual representations of the sacred:

The massive, non-functional Doric columns at the entrance proclaim an invisible authority, yet they are also elegies to the eloquence of the noble ruin. The interior rivals the Vatican in the opulent use of marble, but it is in the interior pools in alcoves of 23-carat gold leaf where references to the tranquillity of the temple, or the lavishness of Byzantium are most concentrated.¹

This work included marble busts of what Murray-White calls his Penates, idols which in Roman times were the vernacular gods of domestic space and the guardians of the household. In Murray-White’s work they also carry associations of the important Roman tradition of sculptural portraiture.

More developed versions of the penates have appeared recently in the September 1997 installation at the RMIT gallery, Temple of the Southern Cross. Murray-White introduced this installation by hanging a flag called Night Sky over the entrance. As is clear from the flag, the constellation of the Southern Cross comprises five stars, these are identified cosmographically in the usual way, which designates Greek alphabetical order according to their intensity of brightness. Hence in this little constellation the official identification of the stars range from alpha to epsilon, but Murray-White has also given each one a sculptural characterisation as a contemporary Australian god representing a family of gods. These were found indoors on top of big, chunky and very 1970s looking wooden plinths. These plinths appeared to take themselves very seriously in the way that do-it-yourself groovy (and tongue-in-groove) "Organic" furniture used to do in the era of beads, beanbags, or more significantly, the age of Aquarius. Stranger still were the images of the gods themselves made of marble heads, each corresponding to a star of the Southern Cross. These heads were individual enough to suggest ancient portraiture - with its typically chipped or fragmented surfaces - but were clearly contemporary carved heads which had been mutilated deliberately as part of their formation. At a time when the critical edge in sculpture is often found in the grunge aesthetic, new- media installations and found objects, the use of marble and a conventional glyptic approach to the block seem anachronistic.

The solid, material core of conventional figurative sculpture was traditionally emblematic of an experience of the body which conveyed the idea of an inner presence; the body as a vehicle for the Christian soul, or in pre-Christian times, the body as the agent of a humanist ideal. Thus, for the Greeks of the high classical era, the subtle transitions from one plane of the body to the other in sculptures of the nude male body were components in an image of bodily unity, completion and wholeness which represented the humanist ideals of the polis and democratic speech to which a ruling male elite had exclusive access.²

In contemporary taste the sculpture of classical antiquity is still arguably experienced and valued as the fragmented signs of a great symbolic order which initiated the Western cultural tradition. Yet the fragmentary aspects of such sculptural relics now augments their aura of great age and preciousness to the point where the aesthetic of the fragmentary itself dominates even the value of that object as a semiotic conduit to the Greek world.

The Greeks would have regarded the chipped, fractured or broken relics of the 20th Century as ugly, just as the taste for pure white marble would have appeared incomplete since so many were originally brightly painted. And the Romans would have seen the fragmented portrait bust as unworthy of the verisimilitude they sought in the identification of patrilineal descent or in the icons of power in military portraiture.

So what is it which draws modern taste to the fragmented image? In the late 18th Century the discovery of the sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii gave archaeological substance (drawn from these ancient fragments) to the fashion for all things classical; from Napoleon’s haircut to the chaise-longue, yet in the canonical art of that time, in the sculpture of Houdon or Canova for example, there is a serious concern to achieve a satin-smooth ‘finish’, a resolved unity in composition and a sense of completion. In this phase of modernity, classicism could be hailed as a patrician alternative to the religious mysticism of the Baroque sculpture which preceded it, and the rational secularism of the Enlightenment project could claim a connection with a legacy of democratic thinking with its noble origins in Greek thought.

The aesthetic of sculptural unity and completion continued through the 19th Century along with the white plaster casts widely exhibited in the salons and grand expositions. Yet it may well be the case that the museum culture itself which rapidly gained momentum from the 1870s was a contributing factor in the cultural authentication of the sculptural fragment. The museum undoubtedly collaborated in the broad claims to abstract universalism of the Enlightenment legacy. It was (amongst other things) the space where the fragments of colonised cultures could be displayed as evidence of imperial power.

In the 1870s, when the first big ethnographic museums opened in Europe, Rodin first exhibited fragmented images of the human form as finished works, and by the early 1890s he completed a number of radically incomplete figures which seemed to challenge the stable core and mass of conventional sculpture. At the point then when Western culture could reflect on its claim to superiority in the museum, the fragmented body appears as a new formation in high-cultural sculpture, and the mythology of the modern nation state itself replaced the culture of nostalgia for classical antiquity which had verified its origins.

Since that time the image of the fragmented body has accrued considerable cultural status, and the classical sculptural fragment in particular is so saturated by the aura of cultural authenticity that it is close to occupying the sacred space of the priceless. This process is of course coeval with the breakdown of a dualist model of the mind and body on which the old order of the sacred depended. The body, on a number of fronts including its status in advertising, is now popularly synonymous with the soul rather than acting as its vehicle.

So, what is to be made of Clive Murray-White’s semi-precious, manufactured relics? They are the contemporary, local gods of our need to carve some kind of meaning from the world, especially the kind of meaning which satisfies the need for a magical sense of the sacred.

His gods represent an imaginary astrology of the Southern Cross, each god is also a representative of a constellation or family of characteristics which look over and protect Australia with attributes stolen from other religions or mythologies. Alpha the brightest star manifests in the figure of Aea whose family is usually male and concerned with our well-being, yet like most politicians is also capable of the rhetoric of benevolence without its substance. Aea are also the gods who govern sight, and are represented in grey or white marble. The Epsilon star in this constellation, Rashararek, is a god of the future, so Murray-White leaves this plinth empty since representations of the future are invariably wrong. Epsilon has neutral gender and is a portent of death and the after-life, and by implication (given the materialist model), the strange limbo of the general anaesthetic. The star at the top of the cross, known as the Grask star, manifests her presence in the black limestone head of Mycranthilos, from the family of strong and wise women capable of considerable influence in the world. The left hand star, Beta, is represented by The young woman of Hyrr, whose family is closely connected to the Latin penates or lares (the Roman domestic gods of the storeroom or larder) and her role is instinctual and governs intuition. Finally, Delta, on the left hand side of the cross, is a reference to the history of the site which like the future is hidden, despite the aggressive post-modern historicism of the recent architectural reconstruction of Storey Hall at RMIT by the architects Ashton, Raggatt and McDougall.

These then are Murray-White’s speculations on the protective gods of secular life. They have a quiet banality about them which reveals the levels of fantasy we have come to expect of local deities and star systems. They are of course absurd inventions in a way, yet they also have the realist edge of portraiture so that the artist’s own face or the faces of his family or friends are discernible in the broken facets of the stone heads. Murray-White’s portraits have changed over the years. Figures such as the God of Repeated Insistencies and Avoidable Reality or the Penates, Portrait of an Inconsistent Idealist, have given way to the more concentrated mythological types of the Temple of the Southern Cross, which is perhaps a more appropriate pantheon to guide us through the millennium when many events and portents in the skies and heavenly bodies are widely expected to occur.

Murray-White’s installation conveyed the sense of an abandoned temple, the sculptures appearing like fragments of a forgotten symbolic order. But in contrast to this the work is also replete with references to Australian national identity and locality, to the national symbol of the Southern Cross, the flag (with its associations of republicanism) or the use of coloured Gippsland marble. This contrast draws attention to the arbitrariness of cultural inscription, yet cultural inscription is so deeply marked in the damaged faces of his works that for all their irony (or perhaps because of it) they evoke an uncanny sense of presence, as if the block of stone, as the old art historians used to say, was brought to life.

Linda Williams
October 1997

Endnotes
1. Williams, L. "Little theatres of excess: spatial theory and site-specific sculpture", in Fifth Australian Sculpture Triennial, Vol.2, Melbourne, 1993, p.43.
2. For a notable account of the political significance of the nude male body in ancient Greece, see Sennett, R. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilisation, Norton, N.Y., 1994.

© The artist and
Courtesy of the artist

Clive Murray-White, The Temple
of the old Southern Cross,
Installation view, Old Morwell
Town Hall, 1995

Clive Murray-White, Fragment
from the temple of the Godess
of Quintessence waters,
Buchan Marble, 1993-6,

Clive Murray-White, Temple of
the Southern Cross,
installation view, RMIT
Gallery, 1997

Clive Murray-White, Temple of
the Southern Cross,
installation view, RMIT
Gallery, 1997