ART AND AUDIENCE

IN THE AGE OF ELECTRONIC EXCHANGE

The phone call from Everest

About twelve months ago, in April 1996, over one weekend eight or nine (I'm not quite sure of the exact number) mountaineers on the summit of Mt Everest were killed in a blizzard; they came from a number of different countries, in different climbing parties that were going up the mountain. One of those mountaineers - I think his name was Hall, but I'm not quite sure - had previously climbed the mountain five times. He was the joint record holder for ascents of Everest. He had gone into the business of taking paying clients to the top of the mountain: clients would spend a bit of time practising, getting fit, and then they would be taken to the top of Everest by this mountaineer.

On this particular weekend, his client - who had also become a friend - was dying in the blizzard. They were about 150 metres from the top of the summit. Hall stayed with him until his client died, but at that point had delayed too long and wasn't able to get himself down the mountain. Several attempts were made to rescue him from the support camp, which was a couple of hundred metres further down the mountain, but each of these failed. And while those attempts were being made, Hall used his radio telephone to ring his wife who was at home in suburban Auckland, a major city in New Zealand. She herself is an accomplished mountaineer but was, at that time, in the advanced stages of pregnancy.

After the last rescue attempt failed to get to him, Hall placed the third and final call to his wife. It was almost midnight in Auckland, late afternoon on the mountain. They spoke for a while, then they rang off and he died. She told the press the next day that she thought he would have suffered no pain at the end and would have slipped into a hypothermic euphoria, fallen unconscious and died. It was a major news event - I don't know if you had it in the news here - it was a significant media event in Australia.

I have thought a lot about that event since then and an increasingly strong conviction has emerged that, in doing so - in thinking about it - I'm actually inside a work of art, a work of art that was, at the time, playing itself out on quite a vast landscape, and also in time. And I've thought that there's an aesthetic dimension that distinguishes this man's death from the other seven deaths on the mountain that weekend. In thinking about it as art, I've tried to identify what are the elements that make, to my mind, this event into a work of art playing itself out across time and space.

Art and its elements

Introduction