Chatwin's Aesthetic

Now in the final stretch of Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Bruce Chatwin, symptoms of the latter's still-unidentified "virus" continue to mount. Accounts of food poisoning are consistent with the initial flu-like symptoms of HIV/AIDS infection, followed by fatigue, thrush, lumps and "chicken pox-like" blemishes (Kaposi's sarcoma), which Chatwin's estranged wife Elizabeth says were burned off with liquid nitrogen by Chatwin's unsuspecting doctor. Chatwin, nor the world, didn't know much about HIV/AIDS at the time, but Chatwin continued to travel, at this point in the company of the author Murray Bail. 

Shakespeare writes:

"Few understood Bruce's aesthetic better [than Murray Bail]. 'It was an aesthetic of removal.' It struck Bail from their discussion on art how many of the paintings and photographs Bruce admired had no people in them: Malevich's white canvases; the cloud scenes of Turner and Constable; the spotted bare landscapes of Fred Williams, whose work would appear on the paperback cover of The Songlines; the grey abstracts of the Australian Ian Fairweather (on whom Bail had written a monograph). 'They were emptied of character and references.' Bruce's admiration for austerity and plainness pervaded the arts. He urged Bail to visit the unfinished Cistercian Abbey at La Thornier in Var. 'Everything has been removed,' says Bail. "It was plain, immaterial and resonant because of the emptiness. It summed him up.'"

Just writing that first paragraph takes me back to those early years of the 1980s, when people were getting sick; and then nearer to the end of that decade, under the HIV/AIDS blanket, they began dying like crazy. For the first time in my life I did a count of those I knew who passed and they quickly numbered more than my fingers and toes. At some point I have to spend more time on this. From the shaking of my hands I have clearly not dealt with it.