Black Cockatoo

In September 1998, News From The Pews outlined how Ms Foley’s ‘black cockatoo’ wordplay works.  This wordplay takes the form of a pun.  A pun is ‘a play upon words’, the production of a humorous effect by the use of a word so as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or the use of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings.  A pun is really a joke arising from a witty association of ideas.  Ms Foley’s puns are jokes intended to provide titillation and amusement to the select group who can read her art.  So, how does the pun work?

Recapping briefly, Ms Foley’s first two panels refer to a well known Aboriginal creation story involving a male and female lover whose affair is discovered by a male elder who is betrothed to the female lover.  The aggrieved elder throws a boomerang at the male lover, the Rainbow Serpent, severing a part of his body and killing him.  In Aboriginal mythology, the black cockatoo, shrieking loudly, accompanies the spirit of the deceased male away from the burial ground, which is in panel 1.  Panel 2 depicts the black cockatoo as the symbolic genitalia of the lovers.  The pun works visually, by equating a black cockatoo with the panel’s genital symbols: a black cock or two.

NFTP also outlined the panel’s connections with Ms Foley’s Fraser Island and the many myths of Eliza Fraser, with Ms Foley’s ‘a black cock or two’ serving as an allusion to the rape of Eliza on Fraser Island.  NFTP further outlined how the artist and critic Olu Oguibe had described Ms Foley’s 1991 series Eliza Heads For Trouble as “Foley’s fist-in-the-face piece”.  Finally, NFTP noted that all this was corroborated by Foley’s catalogue Lick My Black Art, which contains a coarse black cockatoo pun and mocks the ‘gentlewoman’ Eliza Fraser.

White Cockatoo

The above is not the only rendition, however, of Foley’s ‘cockatoo’ puns in St Stephen’s Cathedral.  To appreciate the second joke, it is helpful to understand the fascination with geometry in the western occult tradition, the tradition shared by both Aleister Crowley and Ms Foley’s art.

In St Stephen’s, it is the floor geometry that points the way to the second cockatoo.  If, standing at the black cockatoo, panel no. 2, you look through the narrow opening of the shrine directly into the Cathedral and follow the direct line of sight you will see the light-marble statue of St Joseph with the Child Jesus.  If, standing at this statue at the other end of the Cathedral, you look down through the narrow opening of the shrine you will see the black cockatoo panel.  In terms of the Cathedral’s floor tiling, the panel and the statue are geometrically, perfectly aligned.

The black cockatoo panel is positioned at an oblique angle, aligned precisely with the inner half of the third row of the geometric Cathedral floor tiles.  At the St Joseph end of the Cathedral, the statue has been precisely placed side-on so that this very narrow half-tile ‘corridor’ also manages to encompass the genital areas of both St Joseph and the Child Jesus.  The pun here is that St Joseph and the Child Jesus are ’a white cockatoo’.  Things are contrived in such a way that at one end of the Cathedral we have a black cock or two and at the other, as a further joke for the amusement of those ‘in the know’, a white cock or two.

Ms Foley’s Art

Ms Foley’s facility with ‘black cockatoo’ jokes is a published fact, per her catalogue Lick My Black Art.  Earlier NFTPs have also detailed her use in the shrine of a coarse four-letter reference to female genitalia.  Others have noted Ms Foley’s work for its “biting wit”, for “highly sexualised imagery” and for “representations” which “are not innocent and unmediated, but contrived and complex”.  As Mr Oguibe has noted, Ms Foley is fully capable of “fist-in-your-face” artwork.  One can only wonder at how someone with Ms Foley’s interests came to be involved in church art.

Sacrilege

Ms Foley’s black cockatoo~white cockatoo routine constitutes a mockery of St Joseph and of the Person of Christ.  Real sacrilege, however, is the violation of a sacred thing: the actual sacrilege lying in the violation of the sacredness of the thing.  The formal sacrilege here lies in the use of the statue – an object set aside and reserved for devotion – in a system of mockery.

Mystery Solved

Cathedral-goers have often remarked at how the traditional statue of St Joseph and the Child Jesus somehow survived the controversial renovation process in St Stephen’s Cathedral in 1988-89.  We now know why: the statue was required to complete Ms Foley’s black cockatoo~white cockatoo joke.  The statue was kept for use in mockery and sacrilege.

Betrayal From Within

Another interesting dimension of the white cockatoo is the light that it sheds on the question of whether Ms Foley worked alone or in concert with others.  There has never been any suggestion that Ms Foley’s brief extended beyond the confines of her own shrine.  To the extent that the statue of St Joseph and the Child Jesus is part of a wider system of mockery in St Stephen’s, we can now say with a measure of confidence that Ms Foley did indeed have help from within St Stephen’s.  The white cockatoo powerfully corroborates the coded Crowleyan message previously identified in Ms Foley’s shrine concerning the betrayal from within of St Stephen’s Cathedral.

Archbishop’s Duty

Finally, now that it is becoming clear that Ms Foley did not work alone, it is Archbishop Bathersby’s solemn duty to bring those who worked with Ms Foley to account.  An enquiry is now urgently needed.