Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. Luke 1: 35 The chief defect of all previous materialism ... is that things... are conceived only in the form of objects of observation, but not as human sense activity. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845 B ^ / eith Looby's Incarnation 1965 I (Queensland Art Gallery) -J L . remains a mystery picture in both its structure and significance. To the viewer it is not obvious which limbs are whose, or which theological points — if any — are being advanced. Perplexity is compounded by the kabbalistic formula in the left centre penned by the boy wearing a Jewish skull cap. Further, the playing cards have hearts that are not only black and inverted to look like spades but carry such unlikely numbers as 531 of diamonds, 104 of hearts and 4g of hearts. Agravestone bearing the inscription 'FATHER /LORD /183' in the upper right is the ultimate oddity in a work entitled Incarnation, which is the moment of conception or birth. Looby's juxtaposition of birth and death, however, has precedents in western art where a skull would be included in a marriage or triumphal scene to remind donors that the concupiscence of the flesh must lead to its corruption in the tomb. Incarnation means to take bodily form, derived from caro, the Latin for flesh. In Christian theology, incarnation refers to God becoming human. To appreciate Looby's MYSTERY PAINTING Keith Looby Incarnation Humphrey McQueen Incarnation, religious and secular contexts require attention before analysing the contents of his canvas. Facing page Keith Looby Australia b.1940 Incarnation 1965 Oil on canvas 280x400.5cm Gift of Hugh Jamieson 1994 Queensland Art Gallery Incarnation as doctrine According to Christian theology the incarnation of Jesus Christ is a mystery in which God has become human. This doctrine can puzzle believers as much as it confounds outsiders. Howcould the creator of all things also be an ordinary mortal? The claim that God could become human and yet retain godliness provoked heresies, principally Arianism early in the fourth century. Some converts accepted that Christ might have been a special human being — or a kind of angel — but not God. Today, Christians can be shocked to discover that not only did Jesus cry out 'I thirst' but also needed to pass water; further, the doctrine of the incarnation requires that he knew sexual desire, though he was not capable of giving in to temptation. Renaissance artists showed the genitals of the infant Jesus as a sign that the divine had become human. The outcry over Martin Scorseses 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, based on a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, exposed how little many fundamentalists understood of Christology. Yet it is not only the subtleties of virgin birth or immaculate conception that are outside the ken of many Australians in the 1990s. Even stories central to the NewTestament and Christian tradition are becoming remote. Inheritances of religious imagery from Byzantine mozaics and Orthodox icons, frescos by Giotto and canvases of Murillo — which Looby had absorbed during his four years of travels before he returned to London — are not part of the repertoire of many younger Christians or artists. Such blindness makes it difficult for viewers to determine the ways in which Looby is being heterodox or secular. For example, none of the figures in Incarnation can be equated with the people associated with Christ's birth — no Joseph, no Magi, no shepherds. In the sense of 'incarnation' as 'the word made flesh', Looby painted a statement about his own desires and passions, ambitions and beliefs. The maternal protection crucial to incarnation was significant for him since his mother had died in 1953 when he was thirteen. The ten-to-twelve year gap between Looby and his older siblings meant that he had been brought up as if he were an only child. One of Looby's teachers at the National Art School, John Passmore, had inculcated T. S. Eliot's concept of the 'objective correlative': 'The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done'. For several years, religious imagery gave Looby a means to step back from the illustration of his life while retaining an autobiographical impulse. Solipsism was held at bay through attention to 'the totality of social relations' as Looby approached incarnation in the secular terms of human beings making their own history. Expatriates all Australians in the 1990s still study andwork overseas but any assumption that creativity can be fulfilled only outside this continent has all but disappeared. The burden of that 290 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965