The story of George
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Joanna Mendelssohn
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Joanna Mendelssohn's biography and other articles by this writer
This is the story of George, who thinks art can change the world. To do this, he tells a tale of conflict where different visions of life struggle to survive and fundamentalists of Islam show that they have more in common with the fundamentalists of the West than with their co-religionists.
I've known George Gittoes a long time. I think we were sixteen when we first met at Kingsgrove North High, an over-large school at the start of Sydney's south-west sprawl. I remember the newly arrived George telling the headmaster he was an atheist so he could get out of scripture classes.
‘That means you're Church of England,' was the growled reply. So George spent the next two years terrifying the local fundamentalist clergyman with some pretty basic questions on the resurrection of the body and the precise nature of life everlasting. George was serious about exploring spirituality, and could not be fobbed off with slogans from St Paul. Soon after we left school, the clergyman left the church and joined Foreign Affairs.
At school, we found greater sources of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment than scripture. Most importantly, there was the art class, which George dominated in the same way as he had taken over scripture. Here he used his not inconsiderable powers of persuasion to ensure that the entire class undertook a specialist study of Islamic visual traditions for the Higher School Certificate. The teacher had no special knowledge of Islamic art, but she was wise enough to let us find out for ourselves. Whipped along by George's passion, we delved into libraries to research the beauty and the meaning of formal Kufic script, the elaborate Persian Nasta'liq and the Spanish Andalusi. We hunted libraries for photographs of the Alhambra, Samarqund and the Taj Mahal. We found how poetry, music and dance were all a part of the visual and material culture of Islam. Our Islamic explorations did not go unnoticed by our English teacher, who gave his students parting presents of Fitzgerald's version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
George was entranced. Omar Khayyam became for him a springboard to discover Rumi, the great Sufi poet, who led him to a lifelong interest in the more mystic aspects of Islam. George was around university for just long enough to read Van Gogh's Letters to Theo. At a time when it was easy to admire Van Gogh for the way he liberated colour and form, George appreciated his spiritual use of colour, his tortured searching for transcendental meaning in art and life. He was most enthusiastic about Van Gogh's magical but doomed idea to create a Yellow House where artists could live and work together in harmony. A few years after he dropped out of university, George was at Sydney's Kings Cross with Martin Sharp, Albie Thoms, Bruce Goold, Peter Kingston and others where they created the Yellow House, a place that did indeed change Australian art. Here, in the midst of Martin Sharp's collage events, Peter Kingston's Stone Room and Brett Whiteley's bonsai, George turned towards a Sufi-inspired mysticism. In his Puppet Theatre, decorated with forms quoting Islamic calligraphy, he created his own versions of classic Sufi tales. The room is recorded in Greg Weight's photographs of that magical place; some of the exquisite drawings are in the collection of Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. George's devotion to an imagined Sufic tradition led to him dressing in skirts and performing mystical dances in the smoky performance nights that were a part of that strange time. Sydney's Yellow House was in the long term no more sustainable than Van Gogh's, as it ended in a heroin haze. Afterwards, even though George's mystic directions moved towards Aboriginal rainbow myths, he kept that passion for things Islamic. Maybe it was the impossibly beautiful calligraphy, the sounds of the voices singing, or even just that old-fashioned instinct for adventure, but from the 1980s onwards George started travelling to many different lands where Islam has touched the religious instinct of the people. He made informal links with the Australian Army's Peacekeeping Unit, which has led to the acquisition of many of his paintings and photographs by the Australian War Memorial.