AUKUS Chronicles/Studio Notes: William Blake’s violent 18th century messianic Soldier-God ‘Orc’ channels his violence into AUKUS
AUKUS Chronicles 2023 (Giclee Print of a Unique State print). The original is hand coloured in watercolour directly onto the drypoint print) by Carl Gopalkrishnan. The giclee is an edition of 50 scaled to A4 on a heavy cotton rag.
Conversations with Orc III, Drypoint, Unique State U/S, by Carl Gopalkrishnan. 2023. © Copyright Carl Gopalkrishnan 2023. This is the original drypoint print with a giclee edition of 50 planned for my new shop.
I’m posting two drypoint prints I printed as part of a print-mentoring session with WA fellow Artist Monika Lukowska last week. It’s titled Conversations with Orc III, but in my mind I’m already calling it The Spirit of AUKUS, which I will try to explain.
It’s a strange coincidence that tomorrow or sometime soon Australia, the US & the UK are jointly announcing to the world how their secretly negotiated AUKUS agreement will be enacted. For those unfamiliar, AUKUS is the name of a 2021 trilateral security agreement to share nuclear submarine and other secret defence technology (including AI) between the three countries.
I’ve said everything I want to say about this in an academic journal and an online talk, so I’ll just jump into these two prints. There are three different prints of Orc, and these prints are two versions of one of them. One bloodless, and the other bloodied from a fight. They reflect the different physical changes I saw in Orc during a year-long ‘imaginary conversation’ between myself and Orc, the lead character from William Blake’s 1793 epic poem America a Prophecy (listen to my 2023 Blake Society talk to know more).
Orc physically changed (in the Blakean sense) into several different emanations. Each change seemed to me to reflect different stages of his mental fight to go beyond his psychic need for violence to define his masculinity. It was exhausting to play out this thought experiment in my mind. As a nation, Australia has worn many emanations since Federation for its regional neighbours in the Asia-Pacific (which we now call the Indo-Pacific). Australia is also a former colony as is America. But in the ‘Family’ of nations of the Indo-Pacific, there seems to be - as Prince Harry notes in his 2022 memoir - heirs and spares to our shared colonial history.
The Spirit of AUKUS
So how do our regional neighbours see Australia? Perhaps we look like Orc as he retells the story of his supernatural acts of violence during the American wars of 1775 to 83 in Blake’s America a Prophecy (1793) and later in Europe a Prophecy (1794).
In this drypoint print, this particular ‘emanation’ of Orc was unable to hide his blind belief that violence was the only skill keeping him relevant to those he loved. His fear of losing respect, purpose and love from his tribe returned him time and again to the emotions, thought patterns and arguments justifying his violence. This is much like our military and political leaders today, and more so those who have never served but feed off the military experience of others.
As I described in my online talk, when I entered into this imaginary conversation about the AUKUS agreement and the Indo-Pacific, Orc started to ‘act-out’ the battles of his past. In front of me (creatively speaking of course) his body and face physically changed, smashed, tore, erupted, bruised, bled and stained the air around Orc until he was awash in the blood of past wars and completely deaf to my voice. Nobody may listen to these prints, but for me, they express The Spirit of AUKUS in these troubled times.
