Returning soon

During the post–September 11 occupation of Afghanistan by a few Western forces, my thoughts crystallised around a certain body of images. All of them were residual impressions, evidence of spectacular violence either natural or man-made—piles, holes and ruins.

I began reading about occupation under the Taliban, a regime I frankly knew very little about. Its austere and backward form of oppression led me to think about that system of law applied to my own body. I imagined a post-sentencing self-portrait, my corpse rendered in fragments and strewn about a gallery floor, the result of punishment for a host of small crimes. It was in many ways a perverse guilty image, a desire to experience something else in extremis, like Salvador Dali repeatedly throwing himself down flights of stairs in order to experience equal measures of pleasure and pain, mingled with a bit of Western-style guilt at the luck that none of these calamitous misfortunes had yet crossed my path.

As the world has continued to eddy down this drain of annihilation, the train of thought has persisted. The dull script of the everyday has merged with the edited narrative of the cinematic, and some awful force (either natural or man-made) is building behind us and threatens to swallow the fragility of our comfortable little world. And the images from the beginning still remain—piles, holes and ruins— evidence of what has been suddenly stopped and destroyed. Initially I started to imagine making one of these piles with a room inside it that you could occupy. Certainly I could have chosen to fabricate any mound encountered on the side of the road or model one on an image sourced from the web or a newspaper. But what did these mounds have to do with me?

Then last year I drove up the inner-city street I lived in almost thirty years ago in the Australian city of Melbourne. I wanted to see the house that my architect father had designed for the family. I was a little shocked to discover that all that remained of the house was a vacant overgrown block—a hole, no less. While my family had known many homes, this was the one my parents had dreamed of. Every move had been a step closer to it—buying the land and visiting it as an overgrown plot for two years, before beginning to build in 1974 and moving in one year later. We lived there for five years before my parents had to sell.

It was the first building I watched grow from the ground up. And it was a good house, a distillation of all the things my father had absorbed while he was working overseas: a quasi-brutalist, ‘truth to materials’ modernity in the manner of one of his heroes, Louis Kahn—raw concrete-block walls, formed slabs and red cedar windows outside; inside pretty much everything was white. Thin concrete bridges on the upper level passed over the living and dining rooms below, opening up breezy holes between the floors. In fact, there were so many holes there was hardly a place to hide. On the street it resembled a fort, but inside it was a transparent maze.

The longer I thought about this house the more I realised how it still exercised a significant influence on what I do. Its image had haunted my dreams for years, as much a result of the trauma involved in its loss (particularly for my mother, who had planted and nurtured a thriving native garden and loved being there) as the actual house itself. My parents sold the house to a young property developer; he immediately rendered it apricot and parked his silver Porsche in the driveway. I remember driving by the house one day with my mother (we stalked it), and the two of us shaking our heads in aesthetic disbelief. Peering into the excavated site of the former family home recently, the image of erasure performed by warfare and disaster met the erasure of property development, and they didn’t look entirely dissimilar.

So I decided to remake this house as a fiction; not whole and complete, but as a stripped-out ruin, rising back up like the dead do, all rotting flesh and cracked limbs, torched, sutured together and shot through with holes, like a ghost-ride in the theme park of my life. It is an attempt to traverse the pitfalls of putting your own biography too much on the surface of things lest it undermine its connection to ideas outside yourself, coupled with the real pleasure in fumbling about with the materiality of your memory, block by block.

It’s a monument really to summers by a pool that was never finished and remained in its rough concrete form so that the water was always a deep lake green and ducks would land there by mistake every year on their way to (or from) the botanic gardens, and spend a couple of days swimming about before leaving; a monument to Neil Young’s Harvest and James Taylor’s Calling Out My Name and Carly Simon thinking I was so vain; a monument to watching from the bridges as my parents got drunk or stoned and falling in love with all my sisters’ friends only to be told to go back to my room. But more importantly it is a monument to all those skeletal forms left dangling after disaster strikes, when everything and everyone is lost and I only see it is an image I do nothing about.

Callum Morton