The Pull of the Volcano
Gretchen Miller
Volcano
Artspace, Sydney June 7- 30, 2001
A simply lit trunk sits in a corner. It’s reminiscent of something you might find washed up on a beach, or pushed aside by a lava flow. Faded, but still intact, it has a history. It may well have been the thing you grabbed, stuffing it full of clothes as you tore out the door, just before the volcano erupted. Maybe you dropped it, and by a twist of fate, as you were incinerated, it survived, the slow moving lava taking a different path from where it was hastily flung.
The shape of the island is strange, nearly circular—a mountain like a ring in the sea.
While the experience of Volcano has a similar, touching appeal to wandering the ruins of Pompeii in Italy, there’s also something gently humorous about Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark’s new installation piece, on the island of Stromboli, at Sydney’s Artspace.
The debris spilling from the trunk is not the legs of stockings and arms of sweaters, but the substance of the volcano itself, remembered by the trunk and now transformed as memories often are. Through technological aids we are given a trunk’s memory of the volcano…And because the trunk has seen many lives, so the memories are from many different times.
The
trunk is lit by a spot of yellow. From it spews a mass of tangled
cables, a lava flow of plastic and wiring, which lead to a collection
of lava rocks—in the form
of computer monitors, out of which spill and shake various images. ‘What!’
I shouted. ‘Are we being taken up in an eruption? Our fate has flung
us here among burning lavas, molten rocks, boiling waters, and all kinds
of volcanic matter; we are going to be pitched out…vomited, spit
out high into the air…in the midst of a towering rush of smoke
and flames; and it is the best thing that could happen to us. Shot out
of a volcano at last!
Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth Stones are falling around
your ears—they sound like rain on a tin roof, in Neumark’s
accompanying sound design. At strategic points around the monitors the
roar of the flow has come down through time, down through the wires, as
a static hiss, in and out of which fade voices—the gabble and chatter
of people and bodies before, during, after. They’re speaking in
the Stromboli dialect, something like a siren’s call, urging you
closer, drawing you through the rubble, to tease out the meanings. It’s
a trick—by now they have nothing particular to say, but to cry out
their grief and love, inarticulate but still genuine, over time. It seems
that Hephaestus, being displeased one day, had taken the island of Thira
in his hand and thrown it some distance, like a stone. Maria Miranda has
manipulated a series of static pictures, playing with the moment when
you’re really not sure whether or not the earth has moved, if the
trembling you’re feeling is lust or fear.
As
you move in closer to the volcano, the images shift, and texts circle
around, shifting between screens/stones. The radioactive heat has
rendered them distorted, but the message is clear. We’re discovering the seductions of the notion
of ‘volcano’, as did Krafft and Krafft, the vulcanologists
who were famously consumed by Unzen in Japan, erupting in June 1991 just
as they were taking photographs. The images could be, like the trunk,
what remains, the camera thrown clear…
Eugène Ionesco also felt the pull of the volcano, and wrote the
preface to Krafft and Krafft’s famous book of the same title as
this installation—he tells us the myth of Stromboli’s birth
in fits and grabs, while Jules Verne’s adventurers occasionally
emerge through its centre, relieved, after their travels underground.
And Stromboli’s also the island where Miranda’s grandfather
Giuseppe Russo was born. Russo left for Australia as a young man and never
returned, the tip of the volcano the last thing he saw. But in an ironic
twist, as his eyesight disintegrated, he was left with an impression of
the world somewhat in the shape of a volcano—a ring of clarity
around a blurred centre. It had fallen in the sea not far from Italy
giving birth to the volcanic island of Stromboli. But in uprooting the
center of the mountainous island, Hephaestus had left its edges, with
the volcano in the middle. They say that if one were to put Stromboli
back in its former place, it would take up precisely that part of the
island that was pulled up.
from Gretchen Miller "The Pull of the Volcano" RealTime 44 August 2001
