The similarity and disparity between the ideas of Australia and America can be seen as informing Kinsella's reading of Warhol in terms of use-value and the aesthetics of different forms of consumption. In 'On Andy Warhol's Baseball and Gold Marilyn Monroe,' America is represented as "industrial might [...] pre-packed," with an "earthly" Joe DiMaggio leaping from a "black bunker" towards Marilyn's celestial lips like a germinating phallus. The heliotropic metaphor links together industry and fertility in an image of commodified desire ("a gold shrouded satellite / orbiting the American dream," "The President licks your golden feet"), while the rhetoric recalls a whole genealogy of creation (and nation) myths, and one could almost imagine DiMaggio hitting the home run for the species. But then, seasonal "[r]e-runs of greatness start to look the same," and the allegory itself seems banalised at the same time as its language becomes inflated and sloganised ("course // marked collision").32 America as utopia, as Warhol himself insisted, is a "dream America," "custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions."33
But as elsewhere, Kinsella, like Warhol, poses a challenge to the way in which the value-structures of myth or legend are often perceived. Much of Warhol's production, for instance, can be viewed as a critique of the way in which myth and cultural identity have become objects of the market place, comprising, in his own words, "a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us."34 The banality of such symbols, however, is always contextual, and this is something we need to keep in mind even while reading Homer's Iliad, for example, whose similarities to the inflated prime-time rhetoric of modern ball games are perhaps more significant than its differences. And it would be disingenuous to suggest that hexameters are somehow intrinsically more worthy as a medium than modern commercial silk-screens, or that intentionality intervenes on the part of Homer to elevate his subject, while on the part of Warhol it intervenes to debase it. If we consider the well-worn phrase of Cleanth Brookes that relates a work of high art to a well wrought urn, there may be more than sarcasm at play in Kinsella's formulation of "[a] perfect pose concealing / popular truths, the trashy / synthetic polymer makeup, canvas / skin and silkscreened hair" ('On Andy Warhol's Marilyn Six- Pack').
In 'Shot Marilyns & Gunbelt,' the theme of allegorical recycling is tied explicitly to landscape. As with 'Warhol at Wheatlands,' the landscape is viewed through the use of catachresis. The "sunset," contrasting with Marilyn's lips in 'On Andy Warhol's Baseball and Gold Marilyn Monroe,' is "tacky / & nothing special." The iconic value of the solar metaphor is replaced by the negative commercial value of an image which is apparently unaffected (and dysfunctional). However, Kinsella is quick to remind us that the "real" is not anchored in mere portrayals of landscape (or "crops [with] broken unglazed surfaces"). Significantly there are "[p]owerlines" that "hiss in the uneasy air– / like poems escaping from screen-prints," suggesting that the poem itself, like the industrial objects and "collectibles" that define the rural environment in terms of commodity pre-packaging, is already involved in a process of consumption.
To recast the signifying equation, we might say that every signifier markets a signified. Or, as Kinsella himself has said: "landscape has always been a political concept," or so much "rural propaganda."35 But beyond "landscape" there is also the ideology of "THE LAND," whose "reality" serves to mythologise the Australian dystopian experience in a way that the Statue of Liberty, for example, serves to mythologise America's utopian one.36 That is to say that the idea of "THE LAND" serves to dignify the antagonistic relationship between "man" and environment–a relationship which might otherwise be seen as merely one of cruelty, cynicism or futility.
In section 28 of Syzygy, entitled 'Reality,' Kinsella connects landscape with the female body, which is seen to function, counter to the ideal "feminine" object of desire ("capture[d] and isolate[d ...] like a flash billboard") in poems such as 'On Warhol's Marilyn Monroe's Lips And Red Disaster,' as a carnal object in a drama of sexual / textual aggression:
If it's real it's been photo-
graphed but not by lips
testing on recall cauterised
word(s)–slash & burn, scorched
earth releasing opacity
of skin and smooth cool sight
in our hands, wounds
washed & THE LAND
never sulking.
Elsewhere, in section 12, 'Entropy / Flesh,' a reference to Warhol's 'Tunafish Disaster' separates "tundra vista / the canvas captures and projects / the sky shocked" from "disaster spread / like emulsified stabilised sheen upon / Marilyn's tender lips c/- Big Sirs." Here the carnality of section 28 is prefigured in an image that at once commodifies and ironises a "rape" by conflating the language of pornography with that of speculation ("en-loading your own quizzing sense-around. Smell it!").
In much of Kinsella's writing, "landscape" functions not as a plane of representation, but as the place of a "missed encounter" between the "real" and those systems that seek to exploit it's concept in terms of what it can be made to stand for (as the value-guarantee of an experience or encounter that simultaneously masks its inaccessibility). Hence 'Entropy / Flesh' suggests a type of encounter whose limits define a "carnal knowledge" in opposition to the higher (socio-economic, cultural, political, aesthetic) values invoked in order to conceal its baser operations. Instead we are invited to witness the effectiveness of this encounter, its technology, which becomes anaesthetic in the form of (lyric) pastoral.
However, to supplant the pastoral with some other negative representation, such as "the rape of the land," does little to engage the complicity of representation itself (–it ultimately makes no difference if "THE LAND" is depicted according to one ideological system or another, as utopia or dystopia, since it is equally suborned in either case). Where we might begin to speak more decisively of traumatic realism, then, is at those points at which the subornation of the "real" is exposed in its own machinations, through a lapsus or series of lapsus.37