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Naked in Alice: Rod Moss' paintings frame the life and death of a community.

Article Excerpt
No artist's work is reducible to the independent truth John Berger, Courbet and the Jura

As soon as you arrive in Alice Springs you are instantly aware of two things. There is the light that strips things naked. It's a light that both hurts and illuminates. There is a glare, and yet objects are luminous. Close up, things seem magnified. In the distance, they seem stage-lit. The first poems I wrote out of the place were an attempt to talk about the way the country pulsated. I have always felt the pulsation was absolutely deep and as timeless as granite and, out of that, strongly erotic, as fecund as Aboriginal song.

The second thing is nakedness of another kind. Inseparable from this pulsating landscape are the Aboriginal people. They make up a quarter of the population in the town of Alice Springs and they are, even though dressed in 'our' clothes, naked in a tragic way. There is no other word but tragic. Of course, not all Aboriginal people in Alice drift around the town bedraggled and drunk and begging and wounded. However, the dominant visual reality, on arrival, is one that confirms our sense that tragedy is the case. In Sydney or Melbourne we hear the statistics on health, poverty, mortality and substance abuse, so we think we might know something of the tragedy. But we don't really, until we walk along the Todd river, or sit outside the supermarkets, or stroll down the mall, or go near the casualty ward of the Alice Springs Hospital at night. Only then do you get your first sense of a pulsation inseparable from death and dying.

This is not an easy thing to say. The last time I was at an opening of Rod Moss' work was in Alice Springs four years ago, when the man doing the talking was Craig San Roque. The exhibition, larger and more representative than this, was called Where do you come from, Brother Boy? Craig is a Jungian therapist who had been working in town for several years. He'd been working out at Injatnana,...

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