Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

White, Pat

111Pat White – T Galatos – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
POEMPat WhitE
Galatos: those who came home
   For K F
Mac and you after haymaking, over a beer
talked of leaving Crete, smoking rollies – stukas
the bombs they dropped, other signs of war
it was to silence the other neighbour, a man
who’d had a lesser Pacific war, you told me later.
Your eyes only see inward now, change takes 
toll of certainties, and we are growing older. 
Back then I should have asked what makes 
for lesser wars or, what kind of war is worth it? 
Ah, Galatos. Maybe you were there, knew some 
of the men who never came home – which one
fell awkwardly, with a sigh, nothing more
than gossip on the breeze through an olive
grove, branches already bent to accommodate
the presence of your nightmares years later.
Penelope. She would have told you to go home.
These islands have been washing boys’ blood
off their hills to the cerulean waves below, for ever.
Pat White lives at Gladstone, Wairarapa, New Zealand. He has published several 
volumes of poetry, most recently Planting the Olives (Frontiers Press). His touring 
exhibition Gallipoli: In Search of a Family Story was shown most recently at the Waiouru 
Army Museum in New Zealand in 2008. 


English

"Galatos: those who came home"

Crowe, Deborah

77
Deborah Crowe
exercises in Control
Crowe – Exercises in Control – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008 
artist’s Pages
Deborah Crowe is an artist living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. She is also a 
Senior Lecturer at Manukau School of Visual Arts. Crowe’s repetitive process-orientated 
practice often refers to the grid, a sense of order and planning systems associated with 
woven construction. The drawings on the following pages were conducted in 2008.
78 Crowe – Exercises in Control – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008 
79Crowe – Exercises in Control – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008 
80 Crowe – Exercises in Control – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008 
81Crowe – Exercises in Control – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008 
82 Crowe – Exercises in Control – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008 


"Exercises in Control"

van den Berg, Dirk

7
Editorial
Van den Berg – Editorial – Junctures, 10, Jun 2008
dirK VaN dEN BErG
Editorial: Group and Grouping
Notions of ‘group’ and ‘grouping’ and their manifold cognates appear to be limitless in variety, 
application and relevance. To open this rich thematic field I propose an imaginative exploration 
of a number of metaphorical images as emblematic devices in order to attract, gather and 
articulate some group-related nuances of meaning.
Take as first instance a simple visual image from target shooting – the familiar disc with its 
spatial design of concentric circles and a bull’s-eye at the centre that is used to register random 
and inclusive ‘hits’. As soon as the distribution or positioning of hits begins to display an 
iterated regularity, symmetry, mechanical consistency or non-human accuracy – immediately 
suspect in target-shooting – one would tend to speak of a pattern and its components rather 
than a grouping of elements.  
Set theory has an operational concept of groups of elements (where elements may of course 
be anything – whether these be numbers, objects, processes, events, organisms, people, 
institutions …). It is in this sense that an exclusive and close grouping of hits on a target may 
count towards a high score in proximity of the bull’s-eye, alternatively as an index or measure 
with which to adjust the rifle’s sights. Instrumentality is the key feature here as picked up, for 
instance, in focus group methodologies.
The target image facilitates the conceptual formation of group categories by divulging a 
certain spatial play beyond the mere sequence of hits. This play includes such relations as 
being on and off target, inside and outside, proximity and distance and centre and periphery. 
Of cardinal importance, however, is the crucial distinction between the factual contingency 
of random numbers and clusters of elements or hits and the centre’s all-powerful pull or 
attraction. The power of the centre has diverse senses beyond the vital desire for grouping at 
or around a centre, including a normative sense of unity in group formation and the imperative 
of being centred or focused, of being aware, balanced and in control of oneself, of being 
self-possessed – particularly resonant senses of grouping current in psychology, sociology, 
political science and ethics.
8 Van den Berg – Editorial – Junctures, 10, Jun 2008
These examples of grouping also serve to recall an old archery image connected with the 
medieval and scholastic concept of intention. This is the image of an archer and his bodily 
effort of drawing and steadying the bow, with the eye aiming along the shaft of the arrow – the 
release of the arrow being directed by the desire to hit a bull’s eye or a lethal spot. Sporting 
and martial mastery of this exercise in bodily proficiency offered a striking metaphor of mental 
intentionality – a visual metaphor of the desire for knowledge, of the concentrated energy 
of a focused intelligence, of a perfect subject-object alignment driven by the mind’s spiritual 
directionality. It was notions like these that provided a historical basis for ideas concerning 
intentionality and intentional objects which saw a prominent resurgence in twentieth-century 
phenomenology and hermeneutics.
This remarkable historical dynamic of archaic images which recur again in the present, 
often with a new urgency and an enhanced content, epitomises another metaphor to be 
associated with ‘group’, namely ‘constellation’. In antiquity, mythical zodiac figures were 
familiar in many cultures as entirely imaginary configurations of fixed stars, thought to be 
permanently connected visual features of the eternal sidereal macro-cosmos – think of star 
maps and the lines connecting certain prominent dots. In astrological thought and practice, 
the shifting positions of planets, the so-called ‘moving stars’, against the imaginary figures 
of these fixed domains or ‘houses’ in the background were believed at micro-cosmic level to 
determine fateful events or influence individual human fortunes.
For critical theorists like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, however, the constellation 
notion signifies something apparently worlds apart from zodiac figures, namely such shifting, 
disparate, contingent and clashing forces as may be associated with notions like ‘dialectics at 
a standstill’. They emphasise the critically positioned points and difficult angles of view from 
which such revelatory constellations can be glimpsed, often with great difficulty. Historical 
phenomena apparently resist conceptual identification, categorical grouping and discursive 
ordering, their hidden ideological affinities only emerging like fleeting firework bouquets 
illuminating nocturnal darkness.
Despite the new horizons that opened due to the loss of representational bonding between 
figurative shapes and permanent ontic order, critical theorists’ discursive constellations still 
manifest themselves by means of imagery, now however in hauntingly apparitional formations. 
Moreover, they are also still imbued with a sense of human destiny, now weighed and censured 
in ideology-critical terms. Nonetheless, constellation has been established as a valid and 
productive procedure of heuristic and conceptual relating and correlating.
Clearly ‘group’ has acquired an emergent quality, ‘grouping’ in the sense of wholes rising from 
contiguous elements as described in Gestalt theory’s figure-ground relations. Such pregnant 
shapes or emergent wholes dominate their constituent components – the whole being more 
than a sum of its components – maintaining and asserting their sensory identities despite 
their fluctuating transformation or fluid ‘morphing’. Musical motifs which remain recognisable 
and persistent throughout diverse modulations, variations, orchestrations and performances 
would be a good example.
9Van den Berg – Editorial – Junctures, 10, Jun 2008
The prominence of emergent Gestalt identities clearly differ from the idea of a hidden identity 
becoming manifest or an occult portent being revealed, as exemplified by the icon of a 
particular species (the death’s head moth for instance) which only reveals itself in the final 
stage of the process of metamorphosis. Hence: the contested Gestalt-switch idea to account 
for emergent relations between separate wholes.
A further, projective and constructive, sense of grouping may be represented by the critical 
notion of ‘composition’. In the visual arts this term is primarily associated with formal 
design properties, in particular with Renaissance perspective, and in music with composing 
processes and complete musical works. Originally a grammatical term for syntactical ordering 
from language it was translated into the arts together with its prominent decorum values 
of Hellenismos and Latinitas. Like correct Greek or school Latin, classical composition was 
valued as unmistakable demonstration of civilization and achievement, of deliverance from 
or progress beyond the ‘other’ (whether identified as barbaric, pagan, primitive or Oriental).
It should be clear by now that the notional nuances of ‘group’ and ‘grouping’ drawn from the 
preceding examples all have particular social applications and consequences, some of which 
are investigated by authors whose texts are included in this volume. A critical and tolerant 
awareness of the power as well as the relativity of the historical bonds which bind us together 
into diverse groupings or spiritual neighbourhoods by far outweighs the identity of any of the 
social groups to which we may belong or which we may happen to be studying.
Professor van den Berg’s own work centres on art theory, art historical hermeneutics 
and typiconic research of the rhetoric of image power. Recent examples of his 
publications are “Painting History: ‘Terra Incognita’ as Anti-Leviathan Emblem”, Acta 
Academica, 2005, 37(1): 56-98 and “Not I: Troubled Self-Representations”, Acta 
Academica, 2007, 39(1): 47-78. He was awarded the Stals Award for Art History (2000) 
in South Africa.


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"Galatos: those who came home"

"Exercises in Control"

Group and Grouping

"Monument, 100th and Riverside"

Excerpt from A Memoir-in-Progress

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