Print archive: Imperial Vegetables, Lachlan Taylor on Ayesha Green’s I thought I heard you crying in the forest

14 May

First published in The Art Paper Issue 00 — republished online on the occasion of the exhibition hurahia ana kā whetū/Unveiling the Stars at Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Ayesha Green (Ngāti Kahungunu, Kāi Tahu), *I thought I heard you crying in the Forest*, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 1730 x 2700 mm. Collection of Dunedin Public Art Gallery

I thought I heard you crying in the Forest is a painting of plants. Specifically, Ayesha Green’s mural-scale canvas depicts in her disarmingly simple style ninety-nine of the one hundred plants included in Eagle’s 100 Shrubs & Climbers of New Zealand. The 1978 illustrated taxonomy by botanist and artist Audrey Eagle is considered an exemplar of the form in Aotearoa, neatly describing and detailing a tidily centennial selection of local flora. Green’s work, however, isn’t quite so neat, nor quite so tidy.

It’s a painting about power, and the ways that power is gained, maintained, coveted, stolen, and mourned through systems of representation. Each of the ninety-nine plants are numbered and labelled by various combinations of their Latin, common English, and Te Reo designations—though not by any discernible set of rules or recognisable order. By artificially gathering a set of discrete objects that don't exist together in the real world, the work also functions as a kind of strained and uncomfortable collection. Like David Teniers the Younger’s (1610–1690) paintings of packed-in Habsburg artworks and artefacts, it shows us an imagined community of things that exist out there, somewhere, but never together like this.

Links between plants and power are not limited to illustrated guide books like Eagle’s. In a colonised landlike Aotearoa, our histories are punctuated with these moments where the natural world has been co-opted into stories of power and control. I thought I heard you crying in the Forest isn’t an end to such stories but rather a call to consider them closely and address the legacies they leave.

Taxonomies like Eagle’s Shrubs & Climbers are companies of signs that impose an order and arrangement on the world that doesn’t really exist. They identify, name, and isolate objects in the real world to be recontextualised in a family group—aligned along axes of similarity predetermined by cultural and personal preference. It’s no coincidence that taxonomy as a serious pursuit appeared during the height of European colonialism—a mission to claim authority over other worlds was given a language with which to do so. In particular, the bullish growth of Linnean taxonomy (the division of the natural world into ranked classifications which we still use today) in the eighteenth- and-nineteenth centuries represented a secular and distinctly imperial formation of a much, much older notion. Taxonomies systematise with brutal efficiency the ancient belief that to know something’s true name is to hold power over it.

But collections are slippery. While they are born as systems of control and order they can just as easily become sources of tension and anxiety. Rules bend and categories break, holes appear, dreams of completion turn to fantasy and order returns to disorder. Green’s painting already denies the colonising imperatives of a botanical taxonomy by disrupting its established systems of naming and description. But what cripples the list entirely is the exclusion of Eagle’s one hundredth plant. This gap hovers over the painting, there’s even space for it at the bottom edge. Its omission seems to assert a greater presence than the ninety-nine we can see. Its absence denies what a taxonomic collection desires most: completion. Without this totalising effect the list becomes unstable, unmoored from its tidy aspirations.

Green’s is a simple act of refusal that alters what we might see and feel in front of such a collection. Absent is the magic of total knowledge and control, the grasp of the taxonomy withers, the parts are no longer subservient to the whole. The structure is anxious and incomplete, using the language of a collection to challenge the exercise of power and authority at play in a certain type of collecting. What we can see are plants, endemic to Aotearoa, with lives and purposes that exist beyond the confines of Eagle’s collection or taxonomic impulse.

Below are three stories that individually take on the appearance of historical footnotes, cute marginalia providing colour commentary for more important tales. My hope, of course, is that together they form an incomplete collection, assuming in partial form the shadow that covers the way we see and interact with the natural world writ large in contemporary Aotearoa. It’s the same shadow that Green lets us see in I thought I heard you crying in the Forest, visible at the painting’s bottom edge. A shade cast by the trunks and stems of imperial vegetables.

Quercus robur
English Oak Oke

The first is a well-known story of Nazi botanical imperialism —fascist foliage if you will. Planted over eight decades ago on the grounds of Timaru Boys’ High is an English oak tree. As a year-old sapling, the oak had been gifted to Jack Lovelock by Adolf Hitler alongside the gold medal for winning the 1500m at the 1936 Olympics. It was one of the one hundred and thirty oak saplings awarded alongside gold medals at the Berlin games, tokens of Nazi propaganda dispersed throughout the globe by returning Olympians.

You’ve probably heard this story. Ann Shelton did a whole series on it. Perhaps because the story is so well known, and perhaps because the botanical metaphors it engenders are so on the nose, the Olympic oaks are treated as a kind of curiosity or cheeky historical oddity. But really, what’s the difference between the oak in Timaru and the fascistic statuary that still lines the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome? Or Stone Mountain? Or, you know, the Zealandia statue on Symonds Street (Tāmaki Makaurau) with its praise for the “imperial and colonial forces and the friendly maoris” who fought in the New Zealand Wars?

Monumental botany can be as powerful a signifier as its statuary counterpart. The Olympic oaks were an effective piece of propaganda (as were the games themselves) through which the imperial aspirations and global reach of National Socialism were demonstrated to the world. The seeds of fascism and anti-Semitism literally taking root across the globe.

Agathis australis
Kauri

The second is just a rumour, though a very good one. The reach and control of the British Empire through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied on the dominance of the British navy, which in turn relied on timber. Native oak had been the traditional source of timber for British ships for centuries—so much so that the material qualities of the tree were frequently anthropomorphised into a paragon of the English spirit. But by the mid-eighteenth century, the ever-increasing hunger of imperial expansion and its concomitant wars of control and oppression had ravaged local forests, creating a crisis in supply.

Britain looked to Empire. In the desperate years of the early nineteenth century the British Empire flexed the muscles of the first truly globalised economy and brought back to England mahogany from Central and South America, pitch pine and oak from North America, teak from India, and kauri from Aotearoa.

Kauri spars proved an ideal substitute for oak in the masts and booms of British warships. So indispensable was kauri to the British navy that a rumour persists (in the absence of any real evidence) that the masts of HMS Victory, Horatio Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, were crafted from kauri. The dates don’t align particularly well for this idea—use of kauri as a popular shipbuilding timber begins in earnest in the 1820s—but the story is perfect as a piece of imperial propaganda and source of colonial pride.

How many ships were constructed, how many Auckland houses built or Melbourne streets paved with kauri as a result of its international reputation as a timber to rival the English oak? The mass deforestation of kauri in the nineteenth century stems from this reputation, and the reputation grew from tales like that of the kauri masts at Trafalgar. Now pocketed, endangered, and threatened by dieback, the kauri of today exists as a result of the stories that built its colonial reputation.

Nicotiana tabacum
Tobacco Tupeka

The third and final is about how much this country loved the Confederacy. Through the years of the American Civil War (1861-65) the newspapers of colonial New Zealand reveal a consistent romance for the plight of the southern states and an active hostility towards their northern opponents. The forces behind Pākehā New Zealand’s love for the South are, of course, complex and multiple. But the regularly stated rationale was a shared belief in self-determination, sovereignty, and freedom from oppression—sentiments that rhyme historically with today’s toxic neoconfederates and ‘Lost Cause’ apologists.

So complete was this support for the South throughout the Empire that many believed open war with the Northern states was not merely likely, but inevitable. In fact, at the beginning of 1862 the colonial government in New Zealand believed for almost three months that it was more likely than not that the nation was actually at war with the United States—merely awaiting delayed confirmation from England. This pocket of colonial history is yet another reminder that the very worst of culture and politics is never as far from us as we might hope. But it is also the context in which the Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew sent a selection of tobacco seeds to New Zealand.

The prospect of war brought with it the threat of cutting the Empire off from a major supplier of tobacco, not to mention cotton which was already in short supply due to the conflict. The predicted shortage of these goods—both produced by slaves’ hands—created what must be one of the first major appearances of ‘economic anxiety’ as a dog whistle explain-away for crises that were really racial and imperial at root. Colonial authorities, here and in England, wanted New Zealand farmers working on their freshly seized, gridded, and transformed land to experiment with the viability of large-scale tobacco production in Aotearoa.

The ultimate aspiration for the project was to turn what looked like an increasingly inevitable catastrophe into an economic opportunity for the British Empire. The endeavour was ignorant to the fact that tangata whenua had been successfully cultivating tōrori (the name given to Aotearoa- grown tobacco as distinguished from the imported tupeka) since at least 1839. Regardless, New Zealand never became the Empire-sustaining tobacco power-house envisioned at Kew, but the once-profitable Tasman tobacco fields—immortalised in our painted Modernism—are the legacy of those seeds shipped halfway across the world.

This article appears in The Art Paper Issue 00. Purchase to read more.

The Art Paper 00, TĀMAKI MAKAURAU

(limited edition brochure)

Issue 00 celebrates artists who live or exhibit within Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa (New Zealand). Produced in conjunction with the Auckland Art Fair 2021, published by Index.

Featured artists: Conor Clarke, Owen Connors, Millie Dow, Ayesha Green, Priscilla Rose Howe, Robert Jahnke, Claudia Jowitt, Robyn Kahukiwa, Yona Lee, Zina Swanson, Kalisolaite ‘Uhila.

Contributors: Dan Arps, Julia Craig, Erin Griffey, Susan te Kahurangi King, Shamima Lone, Victoria McAdam, Robyn Maree Pickens, Meg Porteous, Lachlan Taylor, George Watson, Victoria Wynne-Jones.

Specs: 56 pages, 23 x 26 cm (folded vertically)