today

anyone

2012-02-14T15:31:00.002+11:00

Ethical i-phone protests hit apple stores

Protesters Deliver Petition for Ethical iPhone to NYC Apple Store

does anyone else wonder if such an action begs the question of why these people don't just buy a second-hand 'phone and reduce the demand that creates the awful working conditions that they are protesting against?

anyone?

fucking boomers

2012-02-11T08:54:00.001+11:00

why is it that our contemporary version of aetheism is so mean, so parsimonious, so righteous?

I remember, in Chile, talking to a man about what it was like to grow up in a country so dominated by religion. He said that being agnostic was considered a more radical position, because the negation of aetheism merely affirms organised religion through its binary sum. The agnostic admits to not-knowing or not-caring -- and, I would hope, allows other ways of being the world to flourish.

I should listen to this guy again ...
Terry Eagleton 'The God Debate' (you tube)
Download audio here (ABC Radio)

are there ordinary moments

2012-02-05T23:50:00.030+11:00

I have been troubled by this graffiti for some weeks. It irritates and saddens me in turn. Not only because the observation is somehow superfluous, and not only because there is a self satisfied quality to it. Perhaps because there is something deadeningly predictable in exactly this type of naive and idealistic comment being freshly sprayed on the walls of urban buildings each summertime. Do we need reminding that there are no ordinary moments? What have we done to deserve such ugly yellow lettering? If no moment is ordinary, and they are all extraordinary, where does that leave us? ... back in the repetitive, relentless parade of one moment after another, undifferentiated apart from the annoyingly bright observation that it is up to us to make them somehow 'special'.

this new yet unapproachable ...

2012-02-04T17:00:00.000+11:00

... America is understood as the place in which freedom is construed as a matter centrally, perhaps exclusively, of individual liberty (as opposed to the achievement of the power to do or be something in particular - for example, to be more fully human or more properly faithful). Most Americans exercise their liberty by pursuing happiness and satisfaction in the private spheres of family life, consumption, and enjoyment. Larger workplace and public identities are taken to be instrumental to satisfactions in these more private spheres, unless, of course, some people just happen to enjoy political work or quasi-familial workplace friendships or workplace activities. The business of politics in America is the fair reconciliation of competitive individual and factional interests. There are not enough goods to go around to enable everyone to satisfy every preference. Government hence properly sets up rules of fair competition, including centrally the laws of property and person and the laws of contract, fair trade, workplace safety, and nonexploitativeness.

Richard Eldridge
Cavell on American Philosophy and the Idea of America
in "Stanley Cavell" Cambridge University Press, 2003

O joy

2012-02-04T09:33:00.003+11:00

I hate to admit it, but sometimes this is the kind of affirmation that makes it all worthwhile. From The Age 4th Feb. 2012 Dan Rule is the reviewer.

Pics at dainesinger.com/a-partial-index

Bitter orange

2010-10-10T11:34:00.002+11:00

Our local grocer sometimes stocks fruit from their friends' or neighbors' trees. These looked like a cross between an orange and a lemon, the boys behind the counter said they were awful, I thought they might be Seville oranges.

I have only seen Seville oranges a few times in organic stores, and the fruit has been more regular in shape, the skin has seemed smoother, the colour deeper. I asked Janet, who always knows the back-story behind what's in stock, and she said that some middle eastern people make jam with them but her family use them for salad dressings - they call them 'naranje' [guessing at the spelling here]. They were selling them for a song, so a bought two kilos. I did some research and it turns out they are what I would call a Seville or bitter or marmalade orange, the flowers are used for making blossom water and the fruit for preserves.

I used the ever trustworthy St Benoît Three Day Marmalade recipe from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, but with a little less sugar and some orange blossom water — & I now have some beautiful marmalade. The consistency is not jelly-like, it's looser and more voluptuous than other marmalade. Have been distributing it with some glee to friends. I owe Janet a jar.

One fruit is set aside for the seeds, I'll see whether I can grow a new tree.

2010-08-20T09:03:00.000+10:00

a cold spring morning
porridge made with last night's brown rice
in the back yard, cats are stalking mynah birds

Possibly the best radio programs, ever

2010-08-14T12:33:00.000+10:00

Radiolab is produced by National Public Radio and a community radio station in New York. Podcasts are available through iTunes, too.

rhubarb pie

2010-08-14T10:31:00.003+10:00

this pie was made to follow an excellent beef bourguignon made by my friend Sandie last night.

The rhubarb was from the garden, cooked in a slow oven with orange juice, a scant two tablespoons of raw caster sugar, and a bay leaf. I made a creme patissiere flavoured with the zest of the orange and another bayleaf. The pastry included fine cornmeal, flour, sugar, eggs, butter and a drizzle of milk.

Once the rhubarb was out of the oven, I drained off the excess liquid, layered creme pat., rhubarb, creme pat. in the pie crust, covered it over with the remaining pastry, and baked at medium hot for about 25 mins. The magenta orangey cooking juices from the rhubarb were poured over each slice at serving.

It was a dessert of surprising gentleness. Best eaten at room temperature.

banners/drawings

2010-08-10T13:32:00.001+10:00

2010-05-05T14:33:00.001+10:00

work in progress

2010-04-29T08:52:00.001+10:00

pumpkin

2010-04-28T06:58:00.000+10:00

Literature gone wrong

2010-04-20T17:37:00.001+10:00

I been reading the most recent novel by Ian McEwan, Solar - and have spent all most the entire time I have been reading the book wondering why on earth I'm reading it. I wonder, is this post modernity, a species of irony, or nihilism? Pointlessness reified. I've hated every moment, and yet I find I have read it to it's coy/ daft/ bitter end.

in print

2010-04-02T10:56:00.001+11:00

I chanced on this at the site for re.press publishing, who asked me for an image for the cover of one of their books.

First Loves by Sigi Jöttkandt

It's an image from 2002 for a wall drawing I made in Sydney and Melbourne in 2001, and later in Canberra, most recently in as an updated version in Perth. I always thought that when my work appeared on the cover of a book, it meant that I would have achieved a degree of authenticity as an artist.

work in progress

2010-02-23T17:46:00.019+11:00

chard

2010-01-19T17:37:00.025+11:00

More from the garden. These are the ends of the stalks of the rainbow chard I have been using to make a pie —it seems a shame to throw them into the compost with out stopping to appreciate their wonder. I'm fascinated by these plants, they're like the silver-beet I used to know as 'spinach' but with red, magenta, yellow and orange stalks.

When I started cooking for myself, I learned to call this plant 'silver-beet', rather than 'spinach'. It went into a number of things [pies, stir-fries, soup] but I was always a bit puzzled by the flavour I thought of as soapy, which didn't seem to be mitigated by the addition of lemon juice — which I had read was an ideal partner to spinach. Now I think the perfect foil for the earthy, alkaline quality of chard is sweetness, rather than souring. Spinach is sometimes paired with currants and pine-nuts. Chard seems to benefit from the addition of the flavour of cinnamon or all-spice, the gentle sweetness of ricotta, onions cooked until they are well softened and golden brown, or fried or toasted nuts. Its coarser aspect is softened by fat or oil.

I grew rainbow chard by request (G had admired it at the Ceres community garden), sowing the seeds midwinter between rows of broad beans. I left it to disappear below the taller stalks of the beans, food for the earwigs. Since the broad-beans have taken their faintly eau de cologne scented crimson flowers back down into the compost, the chard has come into its own. My gardening books say that chard is a heavy feeder, so it probably appreciated the nitrogen that the broad beans gathered into the soil. I am amazed at its beauty and its tolerance of the recent heatwave. At first, I didn't know what to do with it. Since discovering English spinach 18 years ago, I've come to see chard as the poor cousin. However, I did remember that a marvelous chef called Rachel Titchener, who I worked for as a kitchen-hand, grew rainbow chard and made a beautiful pie. This is my memory of Rachel's recipe -

1 x onion
oil for frying
salt and pepper
about two handfuls shelled walnut pieces
ground dutch cinnamon or allspice
a large bunch of chard
ricotta cheese (about 250g)
feta cheese (about 100g)
thick filo pastry
olive oil and butter

Make the filling: Wash the chard, slice the stalks and leaves into thin strips. Chop the onion finely, fry gently in about 2 tablespoons of oil with a sprinkle of salt until soft. Add the walnut pieces and about three quarters of a teaspoon of cinnamon or allspice. When the nuts are slightly brown and the onion is coloured, season with salt and pepper, add the chopped chard stalks and cook, adding the chard leaves as they cook down, stirring to mix the leaves, onion and walnuts well. Cover the pan and allow the leaves to steam. When they are cooked down, remove the lid and increase the heat to evaporate excess moisture. Mash the ricotta and feta cheeses together in a bowl, add the cooked chard mixture and mix.

Lay out a sheets of filo pastry in an appropriate tray, brushing with a mixture of olive oil and melted butter between each sheet. Let the pastry hang way over the sides as you will be folding it over to cover the top. Place some of the filling on the pastry, distribute evenly, cover with more sheets of pastry, add another layer of filling, another of pastry, fold the bottom pastry over. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the pastry is well browned.

As they were also growing in the garden, I added a few leaves of cavollo nero to the filling, and stirred the finely chopped leaves from a few sprigs of mint through the cheese mixture.

rhubarb harvest

2010-01-02T13:45:00.002+11:00

how lucky are we?

2009-09-26T18:41:00.001+10:00

from the garden this evening—black kale and the first broccoli for the season

more procrastination

2009-08-31T11:58:00.004+10:00

Knitted mostly as a means of finding out how to make a non-pointy hat, after spotting someone wearing a similarly shaped item in the IGA supermarket one evening.

making the space

2009-07-26T09:10:00.019+10:00

a work made recently for a seminar at the VCA. Thank you to Geoff for such patient collaboration! The idea being to make something like one of those figure/ground illusions where you might see a vase [the positive space], or you might see two facing profiles [the negative space] — they're apparently used for psychological testing.

I wanted to make "the space between me and someone else". We used a coil pot technique, which I neglected to research before-hand. The results were cathartic.

We made a second attempt in order to achieve something that would be recognisable as a human profile. I'm not sure the product requires refining. But further attempts are in the pipe-line.

allocasuarina littoralis

2009-07-20T11:17:00.003+10:00

I found this black she-oak fruit a few weeks ago on a walk home form the studio and it has sat on our kitchen table since then. The other morning I noticed that the seed capsules have opened. Not hard to propagate from seed, apparently, so maybe, in a few years, we could have she-oaks singing in our back yard on windy days.

Christmas eve

2008-12-25T06:45:00.003+11:00

My Christmas eve activities included rolling dolmades and preparing the stuffing for a lamb roast for lunch with the Orphans on Christmas day. I listened to an audio book of Plato's Republic while I was rolling, folding and stuffing. At this season of enforced and often uncomfortable togetherness, it seemed a luxury to be indulging in such productive and fruitful aloneness -

The Republic is something that I have been thinking I want to read, it is a representation of conversation as method, conversation as a means of instruction or learning, after all. Somehow though, I just don't think that we are meant to learn by reading slabs of text.

Now I've heard Part One read aloud, I feel like I've got a handle on something, a way into the text

Glaucon and the rest of them begged me to proceed and not let the argument drop, but try to find out what justice and injustice are and what is their real usefulness. So I began by saying, quite frankly, 'This is a very obscure subject that we're enquiring into, and I think it needs very keen sight. We aren't very clever, and so I think we had better proceed as follows. Let us suppose we are rather short-sighted men and are set to read a distant notice written in small letters; we the discover that the same notice is up elsewhere on a larger scale and in larger lettering: won't it be a godsend to us to be able to read the larger notice first and then compare it with the smaller to see if they are the same?'

What I hear here, is like a pre-echo of Wittgenstein's use of examples to address the questions of an skeptical interlocutor, —it has the same patience-barely-hiding-frustration, simplifying air of a school teacher addressing an idiot pupil—; a searching for metaphors in order to approach what he is trying to see (or lead us to to see) from different angles, to sneak up on truth as it were. It is the same as Heidegger's poetic method, leading the reader in circles around the central thought in an essay, J.A. Austin's "stalking horses" used to approach the problems of modern philosphy though literary surrealism or humour.

field research (Joseph Henry Green drinking fountain)

2008-12-13T10:26:00.005+11:00

The inscription on the fountain reads:

ERECTED BY CITIZENS OF NORTHCOTE
IN MEMORY OF
CR. JOSEPH HENRY GREEN J.P.
ELECTED 23.6.1927 MAYOR YEAR 1930-31
DIED 22.9.1939.

decommissioned, sadly, and asphalted

night thoughts (field research)

2008-12-08T12:15:00.007+11:00

The conversation I had with my friend H. on Sunday night about how the new practice of paying a "carbon offset" for travel or another kind of [green house gas producing] activity, paying to pollute (in the case of the coal industry), is similar to purchasing, from the Catholic Church, "indulgences" for sins committed instead performing penances — how dissatisfaction with this practice and the corruption generated in the church by this practice was a contributing factor for the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century.

It is the sad hilarity of seeing one of those Greenfleet stickers on a car with the little tag of 'reducing my cars impact on the planet'. Is it possible to un-emit what you have emitted, in the same way that sin can be absolved through a little transaction, a little bit of penance?

I'm not the only one to think this, as a quick search on the World Wide Web will show. But I have been wondering, in the early mornings, how far this metaphor extends — how, in my mind, the line of thought extends to the problem of the economy, debit and credit, having replaced Christian morality, sin and repentance, as the dominant metaphor of our time. The economy has become the poetic structure of the world.

My saddest intuition is, I think, that this shift in our thinking is the result, directly or not, of the Protestant Reformation, and the subsequent secularization of our culture; and the most likely 'revolution' being a turning toward religiosity, and an emphasis on piety, rather than a process of bringing about a change, an alternative to the culture of credit and debit or heaven and hell.

Stanley Cavell—always in my thoughts at the moment, it seems

2008-12-02T10:31:00.015+11:00

I'm just posting this here, now, as a kind of place marker. It is one the most resonant and remarkable things that I have read, although I can never tell whether I am impressed by the quality of the thought, or simply by the dizzying series of qualifications within qualifications, or the startling length of this fine 'american' sentence.

...Ambitious or new art, that which recognizes a break with what seems a continuous, developing history of artistic traditions and practice, now exists in two states, one I called the modernist (in which the present wishes to maintain the artistic quality, say the greatness, of the past, despite the differences the look and sound of the art, as it were, must discover precisely to preserve its status), and the other [...] I called the modernizing (in which the present would forget the past by, so to speak, by embracing the fact of the present, in its transience, its fashionableness, its distrust of, even contempt for, greatness); apparently ungrounded, the modern in the arts, in both its states, courts the charge of fraudulence; both states cause what may be called philosophy, the modernist by embodying its theory of itself (an origin of romanticism) the modernizing by inviting as a response to it an outpouring of theory and manifesto; and since I spoke of modernist art as assuming the condition of philosophy, bearing absolute responsibility for itself ("seriousness"), I was bound to ask what effect this assumption had on what is called philosophy, whether philosophy contained a counter move toward assuming the condition of art, a wish to bear some responsibility for its own literary conditions, something encouraged by my own growing fascination with the writing of Wittgenstein and of Heidegger, and later with that of Emerson and of Thoreau, given their difference in sound and look from what most of my profession of philosophy acknowledged as philosophy; and it seemed to me that the power of the profession to discourage this move to the literary, let's call it, came not alone from its formidable institutional power (unlike the arts or the sciences, philosophy essentially now finds its sole support in the university), but equally from its quality as philosophy: academic music or painting need not be recognized as a competitor of advanced art, but modern philosophy, in its power genuinely, all but exclusively to represent the present of the history of philosophy, is the scourge of the non-academic, let us say, the literary, in philosophical ambition; a way of putting this asymmetry between art and philosophy is to say that philosophy's struggle against what it perceives as fraudulence or charlatanry(it knows it's debasement under the name of sophistry) is as ancient as the establishing of philosophy in Plato, whereas the the struggle of the arts against their debasement is definitively new, say modern - a further mark of the arts assuming the condition of philosophy; is is part of Wittgenstein's originality to have internalized the issue of philosophy's enmity toward a kind of charlatanry (a test of its seriousness) by including forced or fixated or otherwise inauthentic responses to philosophical perplexities (through the medium of what is called his "interlocutor", voicing his or her insistances or disappointments or cravings in the face of Wittgenstein's corrections), as if we are, in striving to become the philosopher it is in us to become, meant to overcome the sophist it is equally in us to remain.

field research (drinking fountain, Banksia Park)

2008-12-01T08:29:00.004+11:00

This drinking fountain is from Banksia Park, a little bit of neo-brutalist Japonoisserie from the Yarra Parks team.

field research (oh! oh! oh! oh!/Margaret Hodgson)

2008-11-30T10:11:00.008+11:00

Four illustrations by Margaret Hodgson from A Field Guide to Australian Wildflowers, published in 1971. I bought this book in a second-hand bookshop. When I saw the illustrations it seemed as if something in them was answering something in myself. One of those things that's hard to explain, I guess.

night thoughts

2008-11-25T07:00:00.002+11:00

Toward the end of Ursula le Guin's book, The Dispossesed, the scientist Shevek speaks with the ambassador from Earth (Terra), Keng. She tells him about 'her Earth' —

My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite or violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable — but it is not a world as this is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. [...] We survive there [...] People are tough! There are nearly half a billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do — they never adapt either. We failed as species, as a social species.

emperor dragonfly

2008-11-24T09:39:00.005+11:00

I found this creature sheltering from fierce south-westerly winds on the north-east side of our gate. What's amazing is that it matches so perfectly the rust and green paint on the gate, so much so that I almost walked straight past it. ... I imagine that it had been blown off-course from the Merri creek down the hill during the weekend storms. Though I have noted, with some pleasure, that despite our somewhat exposed position, damselflies and hover flies regularly visit our garden to feed on larvae of white-flies and aphids. (Perhaps, to encourage such friendly gardening assistance, it's time to incorporate somekind of water feature in the back yard?)

It is an emperor dragonfly, I'm guessing, & we were honored to have it visit.

excursion to Central Creek Grasslands

2008-11-17T17:09:00.003+11:00

One of the best birthday presents/occasions ever.

A bike trip to the central creek grasslands in Reservoir with my friend L. Starting in the Coburg mall with one of the best and cheapest cups of coffee around, we rode along the Merri bike trail to a protected remnant of western basalt plains grasslands. (remnant actually means part of the surviving 0.1% of native grassland habitat in Victoria, and it is literally in people's back yards...). A beautiful morning.

Highlights included:

spotting what I think was a beautiful firetail along the creek between Fawkner and Reservoir,

observing three gray kangaroos grazing on an oval in suburban Reservoir,

the Grasslands, which are small but very exciting, and finally

lunch back in Coburg, where you can find the best dish of ful medames anywhere.

Unfortunately my camera's battery was running low, but I did pick up this lovely rock on the grasslands. The new bike works beautifully.

field research (drinking fountain, University Square)

2008-11-16T22:12:00.003+11:00

field research (drinking fountain, Coburg Lakes)

2008-11-11T11:53:00.005+11:00

field research (the literature of loneliness)

2008-11-07T06:54:00.006+11:00

Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Tove Jansson's Moominvalley in November, both of which feature characters in search of a kind of imaginary, perfected state of being that exists somewhere between the society of like-minded friends and the exquisite loneliness of an Emersonian self-reliance.

field research (Time Management for Anarchists)

2008-11-02T14:34:00.005+11:00

...from a link on the Mammalian Diving Reflex website. Time Management for Anarchists comic by Jim Munroe

our vacuum cleaner made this

2008-10-27T11:36:00.002+11:00

field research (John Russell on "art and liberty")

2008-10-25T22:22:00.009+11:00

This is a transcript from one of the Tate podcasts, this time from a conference in October 2006 to celebrate the bicentenary of John Stuart Mill. The conference was titled On Art and Liberty and included the following from British artist John Russell.

You've just got to love a man that can rant like this, even if eventually the sense of what is said is elusory. ...or maybe not. There is something here that niggles at me, the problem of dialectic, the critique of institutions, a sense of the loss of the potential of art, melancholy and rage. John Russell is introduced by Malcolm Quinn—

Malcolm Quinn: I’d now like to introduce our first speaker.

Our first speaker is John Russell. John Russell was a founding member of the art group Bank, and was responsible for exhibitions such as Zombie Golf, Cocaine Orgasm, Bank TV, Life/Live, and Bank Tabloid. Recent projects include 20 women play the drums topless, a performance staged at the South London Gallery, London and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and shortly to be staged at The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto in Portugal in October 2007. He’s also produced the books Frozen Tears and Frozen Tears 2 which adopt the format of an 800 page Horror/Sci-Fi best-seller and include texts by Kathy Acker, Art & Language, Pierre Guyotat, Dennis Cooper, Jake Chapman, Michelle Foucault, Lucy McKenzie, Ulrike Mienhof and 40 other artists and writers. The Frozen Tears projects have included a series of related exhibitions, events in the UK and USA, including a solo show at the Cabinet Gallery in 2003, and in the US, launches at Starlight Books, Los Angeles, Maccarrone Incorporated in New York and the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, that’s all in 2004.

Forthcoming projects include Frozen Tears 3—no doubt eagerly awaited—and a solo exhibition at Matts Gallery and the Union Gallery in 2007, so we’re very lucky to have John here. Thank you John.

John Russell: I’m going to talk about this idea of liberty as tied to ideas of doing. The idea of liberty as doing as art. [ahem] The liberty to do as art. [ahem]. Obviously this would ideally require a theory of Doing, but I haven’t got time here to go into that, so I will...in its...I will...I’ll just conceptualise this talk by suggesting that what I’m going to talk about relates to the ongoing debates regarding the function of art, um [ahem]...The function of art...the political, aesthetic and social function of art, i.e. the sort of straight-forward question: what and how does art do stuff? It seems to me that doing is...I was trying to think of what liberty is and I...I suppose I’m translating the idea of liberty as the ability to be able to do things [ahem]...Anyway, I’ll continue, hopefully the idea of what I mean by doing will come out as I talk. In relation to these issues I’ll be roughly talking about the contemporary post-conceptual tradition or legacy of critical art - that might be a territory that you could locate this discussion in.

In a contemporary sense, critical art is most often [ahem]...critical art is most often talked about as something which has been lost or abandoned. Julian Stallabrass, in his book High Art Lite describes the YBA phenomenon in terms of its superficiality and conservatism whilst at the same time hinting at a golden age of criticality which supposedly occurred at some point—unspecified point, I might add—in the 1960s or 1970s [ahem]. In this context, rough context, the critical or political register is seen to have been deserted in favour of more commercially aligned activity. Similarly, in the introduction to the 800 page book which accompanied Documenta X, Catharine David, who is the chief curator, adopts a similar tone when she explains how she is intending to stage a Documenta which is not just another spectacular event but which is a moment of rearticulation for progressive thought.[ahem]. In extension from this, she explains how her understanding of progressive thought insists upon

a radical critique of mainstream ideologies, calling for an art which addresses the marginal and privileges complexity, a critical art which exists in direct opposition to both the spectacle and its adherence to the market, or capital.

J.J. Charlesworthy, the Art Monthly critic, comments on this: "typically this perceived decline in critical art activity is staged as a crisis, for instance, the supposed crisis in critical writing which is being written about in a wide range of contexts and locations at the moment..."

As an example of this, maybe a slightly old example, there was a round table discussion in October magazine in 2002, which included contributions from the likes of Krauss, Buchloch, Foster etcetera etcetera...In this discussion their favourite bad objects are YBA (Young British Art), and contemporary art writing supposedly uninterested in critical debate, most specifically, the writer David Hickey, who, according to Hal Foster, has become successful through his development of a ...pop libertarian aesthetic very attuned to the market. This mourning of a lost criticality in a sense misses the point, although these criticisms of banality and Thatcherite commercialism may or may not—(I would say I don’t agree with that, those comments)—be valid, it is also true that the whole idea of criticality or political-ness in, or as, art has become itself co-opted—as co-opted, as commodified and contained as any of Damien Hirst’s taxidermy spectaculars.

It could be argued that critical art and writing now exists only to signal its criticality as style marked out as cultural capital along the lines suggested by Pierre Bourdieu. John Miller in fact suggests something of this sort in that same October round table discussion, when he writes quite amusingly, I think—

...of course art writers don’t write for cash, for there is none, it’s more the position in academia that’s secured by publishing, so the payoff isn’t the writer’s fee, it’s the mostly the prestige that comes from first establishing an apparently negative relationship to the market per se...as it accumulates, that symbolic capital can always be converted to real capital.

Certainly the subject matter or content of critical art (as we all know) and writing seems to have been easily and un-problematically accommodated within the mainstream discourses of the art world itself— subsumed as part of art-world orthodoxy, commodified as key texts, used routinely as the preferred subject matter of art works, catalogue essays, press releases, themes of exhibitions and taught routinely on contemporary curating and arts administration courses. (I can’t give you a list of all the particular things I’m talking about, but I think you probably know what I’m talking about...I should stop going off subject here. [ahem]). It seems that saying something political in the art world is not saying something political. In the same way as saying something feminist in the art world is not saying something feminist; or saying something post-colonial in the art world is not saying something post-colonial—these meanings have been co-opted by the general discourses of the institution. In this context, art—going along with Barthes’ idea of a mythology—art means things, but only within the strictly demarcated conditions within which any meaning is allowable, but means the same thing as everything else.

It can obviously be argued that critical art is continually transforming its practices and strategies to resist these institutionalising effects. James Mayer, in a recent article, points to developments of this kind when he describes two historical waves of institutional critique: the first wave, which he identifies with the practices from the late 1960s and early 1970s, was involved in a critique of the art museum and the gallery (well known examples are Michael Asher); In the second wave, from the 1980s onwards, the institutional critique has expanded to include the artists role, the subject performing the critique as institutionalised.

More recently, 2005, the artist/theorist Andrea Fraser has suggested a further transformation, following on from Benjamin Buchloch’s description of the historical moment of conceptual art as a movement from institutional critique and the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions, as is the title of his famous essay; Andrea Fraser extends this trajectory in her recent essay From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique to claim that a movement between an inside and an outside of the institution is no longer possible, as she writes

with each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it, but we never escape it... and so the structures of the institution have become totally internalised

But it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a totally administered society, it is because the institution is inside of us and, as she writes, we can’t get outside of ourselves (...that sounds vaguely sinister to me). We are the institution, she concludes, and so it is not a question of critique-ing the institution but rather, a question of creating critical institutions. What type of institutions do we want? What she terms institutions of critique, established through self-questioning and self-reflection, the institutions of art should also not be seen as an autonomous field, separate from the rest of the world in the same way as we are not separate from the institution. This is an interesting schizophrenic analysis and proposes a complex and slightly disorientating relationship between the ‘we’ of the critical institution that internalises the institutionalisation, and the other extra-institutional and perhaps uncritical 'we's that are integrated within the wider context of the politico-economic world system.

In some senses, Fraser’s analysis is in line with the move away from previous versions of institutional critique as anti-institutional, towards contemporary models based on ideas of negotiation and transformation [or; translation?]. And so, for instance, one of the people that Simon Sheikh might be referring to there [?] is the well known curator Nicholas Bourriaud, [who wrote the] influential book Relational Aesthetics. Within this book he sees a potential in artistic practice to exist as a context or laboratory for social experiment. In this context, the gallery space exists like a space partly protected from the uniformity of behavioural patterns. This concept of the institution as oasis is pitched against the world where human relations are no longer directly experienced (...seems familiar...tone to this...) but have become blurred in their spectacular representation. Within this context, the purpose of Relational Aesthetics as Bourriaud terms it, is to explore art that concerns itself with creating encounters or moments of sociability for non-scripted social interaction. Within the context of the institution, Bouriaud claims, we can learn to inhabit the world in a better way. Instead of looking to future utopias this relational art sets up functioning microtopias in the present, and it is this D.I.Y microtopian ethos that Bourriaud perceives to be the core political significance of his ideas of relational aesthetics.

However, as I’m sure alot of you are aware, if you’ve been following this debate, the art historian Claire Bishop has some serious problems with Bourriaud’s ideas of politics and his conception of interaction in an essay she wrote in October magazine. She is unclear what the viewer is supposed to garner from such an experience of “creativity” which is essentially institutionalised studio activity to quote Clare Bishop. In extension, she suggests, that if Relational Art produces human relations, we should ask what types of relations are being produced, for whom and why. She claims that Bourriaud is suggesting that all relations that permit dialogue are automatically assumed to be democratic, and therefore good. As an alternative to Bourriaud’s diversion of democracy she proposes the concept of antagonism, a term drawn from the clapped out ideas of radical democracy (...sorry that was a subjective view in there [audience laughs]...) which suggests that democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased and therefore in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and bought into debate. This theory of democracy as antagonism, Clare Bishop suggests, is evident in the activities of the artists Thomas Hirschorn and Santiago Sierra...unfortunately, Bishop’s analysis seems to be even more tedious than Bourriaud’s original idea—(I haven’t got time to go into it, but that’s my basic, very précised reason why)—reinstating binaries, and replaying the old dialectics of art politics inside/outside politics etcetera, etcetera...Bishop takes us back to approximately 1970.

What is problematic here is, existing in this institutionalised sense that I have briefly described [ahem]... contained, managed and commodified, contemporary art seems to resemble an updated version of Christianity in line with Nietzsche’s account of the death of God in The Gay Science. Contemporary art presents itself as something like "The Good Conversation", by this I mean...[heckling from audience]...art as a forum, art as a debate, art as a space where ideas can be exchanged and discussed, art as a power for good—a talking shop for reasonable, well adjusted, civilised people. Obviously there are problems of class and race exclusion and so on, but these problems are solved by the inclusive critical theories in art.

This is an old story. It seems we continue to have faith in art, to believe in its redemptive power, or as Steve Rushton writes:

in the idea that it still provides us with moments of revelation about real life, a secularised form of transport or even that it could provide a critique of itself and by doing so, live on.

The promise of art’s redemptive possibilities continues to revisit us like a phantom pain, after the amputation, we still feel the limb in the space where it used to be. This kind of desperate optimism or hopeless hope seems to be the subject of an artwork by Martin Creed produced in 1999 which involved a neon sign fixed to the front of a half-derelict, neo-classical building in London which read EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. In fact Dave Beech, quite elegantly I think, in a piece in Art Monthly sums up...uh, describes the effect of that piece of work as [ahem]...a promise of happiness, contemporary art is not concerned with the summoning up of visions of alternative worlds to the ones we live in, but also...is not only concerned with that, but also...in performing a symbolic corrective moral function, as in the example of the holy lives of saints...

Suhil Malik discusses this issue in his essay Why Contemporary Art is so Disappointing. As he suggests, the conditions and ambitions of liberal democracy underlie what goes on in and as contemporary art, namely, the open diversity of art practices and their criticality, the way that they make a difference and/or show something besides the dominant and conventional way of doing things. Making reference to Richard Rorty’s book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Malik discusses how a liberal society is defined as one whose ideals can only be fulfilled "by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution", and he then goes on to suggest how even if these liberal societies cannot fulfil their liberal aspirations and ideals, in many ways contemporary art can do so. And so, contemporary art, in its politcality and it’s affirmation of something else than the dominant order—even if this is by dis-affirmation or critique— seems only to be concerned with showing the current social and cultural order that it does not match up to it’s own self image because of certain endemic inequalities and exploitations in, and as, capitalism. In return, art is affirmed by liberal society for providing this display of something that is closer to liberal society’s dream or ideal of liberal society than liberal society itself can achieve. Finally, Malik describes how this example cannot be accompanied by action, he suggests that, intrinsic to being liberal is the willingness to recognise that your beliefs are historically formed and held only on a personal basis, they are precisely not universal. This what Rorty calls liberal irony— it is to have a conviction about the individuality and non-universality of your personal beliefs, that is, you must have the very strong conviction that you can’t have a very strong conviction, and as such, presumably the conviction that your convictions can never be acted upon with any real conviction. [audience laugh] This is very funny, obviously. [John chuckles]...("This is obviously very funny",...I actually wrote that, it wasn’t an ad-lib)...and reminiscent of Habermas’ 40-year-old discussion of the legitimation crisis. As such, The Good Conversation, as I have characterised it, with all its disaffirmation and critical nuance, can never reach its conclusion, and in fact this is its purpose or its institutional remit. The Good Conversation must continue to allow for the continued existence of the space in which the conversation is staged. The Good Conversation flows seamlessly like the flow of capital and the continuation of The Good Conversation suits the administrators of it. It may make a few marginalised figures temporally visible on the platform, but to quote Peggy Phelan, if representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked white young women would be running western culture’. Again, a very funny quote, that.

And so, to conclude this in relation to my title of The Crisis of Limits— (or, perhaps a Trauma of Limits would be more accurate) the anxiety regarding boundaries and the dialectic between located and unlocated-ness that is what is contained and what is excluded by the institution, what is allowed and what is censored; for instance, if an artist maintains a critically located position the critical or political content or performance of the work is inevitably staged within the structures of that which it is critical of, but which it relies upon for its visibility. This is a kind of critical not-belonging-ness, or disaffirmation, or antagonism. The question here is, unfortunately, what or how these antagonistic or dis-affirmative stagings actually do except to signal their presence as antagonistic or dis-affirmative to a receptive, but fairly limited audience for this type of critical art product?

However, if this type of art is pitched at a wider, perhaps 'non-art' audience, then it risks losing its art-status and visibility as art and its differentiation from the chaos of other 'non-art' messages. In this context it risks losing itself within the infinity of extra-institutional social relations. In this respect, the move towards the possibility of an infinitely expanded institution leaves open problems of indeterminacy, both in relation to the status of art and to how this indeterminacy as ‘non-art’ might operate.

Take, for example, J.J. King’s criticism of Michael Landy’s installation Breakdown in his 2001 article Landy’s (Failed) Gesture and the General Intellect. Landy’s project involved the staging of he destruction of all his material possessions in a disused central London C&A department store. As J.J. King writes, the project had no political impact, except perhaps, to demonstrate how commodifiable political impact is. King points to the futility of staging resistance on the plains of the material and the symbolic, he claims Landy’s failure is roughly equivalent to the failure that many perceive in the anti-globalisation or anti-capitalist scene to constitute any real opposition to the processes of global capital. What is significant here is not so much the failure or otherwise Landy’s project, but the lack of any clear criteria by which King feels Landy has failed. What exactly does King want from art, or from anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protest? What does he believe constitutes failure or victory? Or is this just an instance of ‘bad faith’ criticism?...Yes.

Interestingly however, King’s account suggests that inadvertently the success of Landy’s failed project is the way in which it points towards a privileged freedom from materiality allowed for, perversely, by the structures of capital which constitute themselves around immaterial labour and the general intellect. And therefore can be considered, to use newer terminology, that’s King’s terminology, properly virtual. King concludes by asking

...could this putative, privileged detachment from property, possession and possessiveness be the potential predicate for a useful sort of nomadism, a levity and a freedom which might allow in the future, or even now, the general intellect to begin to act for itself, for the people rather than for capital?

Again, the argument folds back on itself. This is reminiscent of Fraser’s schizophrenic conception of the art institution/ non-art-institution split personality. The idea that as art—determinate, finite and institutionalised—Landy’s art is impotent and facile, but inadvertently, in its suggestion of an indeterminate, infinite and extra-institutional dimension it is potentially potent, but unknown. In a sense this presents an institutional version of the sublime, where the art world is presented in a variety of different ways with an experience of the terror of the infinity of the outside or unlocated. This is the same sublime that Robert Smithson humorously pointed to in his juxtaposition of the finitude of the art world with the infinity of other systems —eg: the juxtaposition of the time of the art world and geological time in various art works he did. In this sense, Buren’s 1960s discourse of limits is replayed as a trauma of limits. If you were able to escape or invalidate institutional boundaries, what would you do?, what would art do, and how would it do it?

What might be useful here is Derrida’s conception of the parergon, that is, his conception of the frame as that which is outside of the work, (ergon: external to it), yet undeniably and unalterably part of it. As he describes it, using the well known example that he used of a picture in a frame, draperies around a nude statue etcetera...or the columns that frame a Greek temple—within this context it is clear that the frame is not a boundary but rather that which opens the art work to the world outside. Indeed, the frame, however it is thought (or institutional limits, as suggested earlier) operates as much as a connector in this respect; the parergon therefore is the structure of the limit, or more exactly the structure of the double limit or double edge, both in internal and external. This proposes...I’m really précising here, this proposes a dynamic connectivity as an alternative to the repressive apparatus of representation which seeks to divide and categorise and ultimately to limit. This is, after all, the source of the institution. This idea proposes the interrelation of different categories of subject relations suggesting, relations between an art object, a ton of coal, a cd player, a scientific experiment, and/or perhaps that hand eye coordination diagram of a crab to quote somebody else’s idea, which I...[ahem].

Rather than re-performing the territorialised categories of resistance of critical art practices which imply or necessitate a kind of totalised, normative, repressive enemy, and an unhelpfully totalised notion of capitalism, and/or a kind of authenticity of subversive response—that is, a relatively stable signifying quality of authentic subjects of resistance. Deluze and Guattari point to this possibility when they suggest advanced capitalism is reaching a new global or trans-national level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and territories and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far more mobility and combinatory power than ever before. As always, this de-territorialisation is affected only in order to make possible a future re-territorialisation on an even grander and more glorious stage of world-wide capital reborn. In the mean time—as Brian Massumi proposes, in a now quite well known article he wrote about simulation—a breech has opened and the challenge is assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by marshalling all our powers of the false towards the shattering of the grid of representation once and for all.

So I would suggest that as [ahem] my final conclusion that what this requires that we start forgetting things in the same that that Deluze asks for a philosophy that has forgotten dialectics in his book on Nietzsche...a philosophy that has forgotten dialectics as a way of escaping dialectical thought without that escape being dialectically reincorporated as dialectics. In his case, he is concerned with this project because he’s trying to think of a way of thinking or doing that would allow difference and contradiction and various other Delusion themes. If, in the same way, art works are confined politically, theoretically and materially by their prefigured relationship to the structures of the institution—whether this is aesthetic, critical or conceptual, or whichever category you want to use—and if doing as art is also prefigured and contained in the same way, it is possible that we could start forgetting some things. We could start forgetting about critical art, forget about art and forget about politics, and that’s it. The end. Thanks very much. [ahem]

field research (the appearance of heidegger's philosophy in young adult literature, and other contexts)

2008-10-25T14:45:00.006+11:00

"I don't like that knife," Iorek said. [...] "...With it you can do strange things. What you don't know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions too."

"How can that be?" said Will.

"The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vice intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing. Can you see the sharpest edge of that knife?"

"No," said Will, for it was true: the edge diminished to a thinness so fine that the eye could not reach it.

"Then how can you know everything it does?"

from The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman

Scholastic Children's Books, 2000

I was thinking about this scene in 'The Amber Spyglass' this morning as I brushed my teeth, it seems to echo what I understand Heidegger is saying in The Origin of the Work of Art—(that bit about the 'intention' of a tool)—that objects in the world are in some sense hidden (or not entirely revealed) until we are able to allow them to reveal themselves to us, and they reveal themselves when we relinquish our common sense and allow ourselves to approach a thing unencumbered by habits of ideology and use.

I was thinking about this following breakfast, when I had been listening to a podcast of a talk at Tate Modern called "On art and liberty" wherein John Russell describes how the 'clapped out ideas of radical democracy' are put to use by Clare Bishop to critique Nicholas Bourriaud's writings on Relational Aesthetics, an exercise which is 'even more tedious than Bourriaud's original idea'...'rehashing art world dichotomies of inside and outside'.

So, I had been thinking about the abuse of philosophy - primarily in the way that it can often be put to the use of entrenching ideologically strong positions, fortifying ways of being that are already narrow and inflexible, common sense as opposed to critical or independent thinking.

field research (handbooks)

2008-10-05T17:13:00.003+11:00

Janet Frame's gorgeous, luminous, poetic guide to living in the 'bloody plain' of existence & a book of Australian wildflowers found recently in a second-hand book shop.

thesis

2008-10-04T08:53:00.001+10:00

I made this sign and took this photo whilst my love was overseas for an extended period of time; it was a way of trying to get at something, an idea. Or maybe it was an idea trying to get at me.

Over a year ago, I began a Masters degree. My research will be concerned with collaboration and ethics. Everyone was very pleased about this.

There's been some tussles over definition of terms, and the proper way to conduct collaboration within the university environment, which has lead to an extended period of nothing much. I've been on leave for the last year & I've started to feel that it is not so much a question of defining, researching and conducting collaboration and ethics in a universal 'everyone agrees' kind of a way as it is a question of something much more personal, local, egocentric. In the same way that my intent in writing a sentence like my research will be concerned with collaboration and ethics was kind of like putting up a sign-post collaboration indicating one direction, ethics indicating another, at a random point in uncharted land. My research will proceed in these two general directions, what we will find out there, nobody knows. Which no doubt contributed to the problem with definitions, leaving everyone involved a bit hemmed in too early in the piece and a bit too uncomfortable.

This sign points me somewhere a bit more definite. As it's not so much a question of who owns what, or who gives consent for one person to do something to another person or with another person and how informed that person is about what they are doing, it turns the idea around from collaboration and ethics to an ethic of collaboration.

Maybe this will point generally somewhere in the direction of 1) practice as learning (an improvement of the self); 2) in the mode of something like a conversation (with one's peers, history, the past of one's own practice, with specialists in other fields) as opposed to an isolated and singular pursuit; 3) the idea of art as something other than original, always indebted to the past, something that is the result of a conversation with one's context, a process of co-creation, or a continuum of creative activity; 4) how art makes a picture of itself, shows the trace of its own coming about: i.e. bears the marks of more than one's own hand or mind; the concept of the mise en abyme; 5) how an artist might promote the conversation as a method for making work, and by extension, how an artist in the academy pursues conversation as a research methodology as opposed to other methods promoted and made available through the academy; 6) how conversations are initiated, acknowledged and documented, & 7) the history of such practices in the field of the visual arts. (one might also consider how documentation has become incorporated into the economy of the arts as product and fetish); 8) the relation of the viewer to the work, the relation of the artist to the viewer through the work, generosity as a trope in the visual arts; 9) explicitly, the art work as a way of thinking about you, the viewer, collaborator in the making of meaning, audience.

field research (Hans Haacke)

2008-09-30T12:30:00.003+10:00

From one of the Tate podcasts, an interview with Hans Haacke.
Link to the whole interview here for webcast & here for the MP3.

Audience member: You were mentioning earlier that in the '60s artists were more political than now. Why do you think that is the case?

Hans Haacke: I can answer the question for the U.S. I cannot...well, maybe I can also answer it for Britain. In the '60s, in the U.S., and in Britain I believe, there was a draft; everybody had to be in the military.

Presenter: It ended in the late '50's, I think, in Britain; but yes, post-war we did have the draft.

Hans Haacke: In the U.S. the draft was discontinued, I don't remember when, but since then, what happens in Afghanistan, what happens in Iraq, or where-ever else it may be does not directly affect the population at large. There are very few families that are affected and the young people have absolutely nothing to do with it and therefore they don't fret about it, they go out and make money!

If there were a draft—and there are, in fact, some Congressmen that are proposing there be a draft; it has no chance to pass, of course—then it would look very different, there would not have been a war and all sorts of things would have been very different.

I remember teaching in the late '60s and some of my students at the time were studying art because there was a deferment to be drafted, they didn't want to go to Vietnam.

Woman in audience: Your work often challenges boundaries, whether they're formal, institutional or ideological; I was wondering whether you considered that to be an artist's responsibility and how you considered this had an influence or not on art on the wider context of art within society as you referred to it earlier?

Hans Haacke: Well I hate to be prescriptive, so I wouldn't like to say, 'yes, you have to have that responsibility'. What I would ... one way to go at it in a maybe softer manner is that whatever you do, will, if it is occurring in the public arena, can have a...an affect on the zeitgeist, on the social climate, what people are talking about, what they think, what is acceptable to talk about, or what is, for one reason or another, not acceptable. So it is not as if artists work in a vacuum and that they would have no repercussions. Now, not claiming that they have huge repercussions, but they, like every other profession whatever it may be, in their particular area do affect what people think and that's where it may matter.

[...]

Presenter: ....another question, anyone? The man with the white t-shirt...here?

Man in white t-shirt: Thanks. I have a question about the limits of institutional critique which you can either take personally or as a general question about the limits of institutional critique.

I was struck by the question that you were asked about how you supported your own practice through teaching. I'm particularly struck by what's changed in the education system since the 1960s and '70s. But particularly in the last ten years, and I would speak only with reference to the U.K. because I don't really know the American system.

Really, since the Clinton and early Blair administrations, education, universities have been regarded as the centres of the knowledge economy. There's been a movement within universities away from performing knowledge and circulating knowledge toward the production of knowledge, and then the transfer of that knowledge to industry. There's the notion now of the university as a 'hub' of knowledge. So for example, regional development agencies now support the formation of universities as they've done in Lincoln, for example, where there was no university but there was alot of economic depression so they say "what do we do? we found a university".

At the same time, in that period since the '70s there has been a growth from undergraduate degree course to M.A. courses in the 1980s to PhD courses in the late 90s for artists and increasingly now, fellowships for artists. So at the same time that this process of commodification of knowledge had occurred, the artist's actual means of making a living has become increasingly institutionalised within the university system.

So the question I have, really...I have to say, within that...as a teacher within a university system you are increasingly invited to provide a neo-liberalised version of knowledge for your students the student is...you're encouraged to think about the student as a customer and what you give them as a product.

What's the role of institutional critique within the university system for an artist like yourself or more generally? ...It just strikes me that institutional critique did very well to look at the art market, to look at the museological institutions, it's done very little to look at the actual educational institutions.

Hans Haacke: Well to begin with...what has been called 'institutional critique' since the late '70s, I believe, has become something that had been talked about only during the last fifteen years. Maybe before that this was an in-group term and nobody really worried about it ...And of course it has nothing to do per se with...if you take it at face value, ‘institutional critique’ is not, per se, related to the art world and art institutions. The university is also an institution, the government is an institution, the medical establishment is an institution and each of these institutions that we all need-, depend on using-, and are victims of in many ways- deserve an internal critique by their participants, and not as the latest thing on the art market or the in the medical establishment, but ongoing...And I would go so far as to say, and this now sounds very pompous and please forgive me for this, if you are interested in a democracy that deserves the name, that's what you need.

Woman in audience: What do you think art is for, do you think art has a function?

Presenter: We've saved the 60,000-dollar question for the last! [Presenter & audience giggle hysterically]

Hans Haacke: Does art have a function? Well, it depends on the circumstances. If you look at art history it usually performed the function, whether you agreed with the function, that's another story; but, in answer to an earlier question I said, well, no matter whether the artist believes that his or her work has a function, it does function and it has an effect, as marginal as the effect may be in the individual case, but it leaves something that—the other big word—you may be responsible for even though you didn't think of it!

Presenter: Ah, the "R" word, I'm glad you bought it up! "Responsibility". [Han Haacke & Presenter giggle] It's my responsibility now to draw things to a close ... is that...? ... You have time? OK. In that case, I shan't! Yes, Grace, you had, down here...? ...And somebody over there?

Woman 'over there': It'd be good to hear about your observations about the future. It seems we have some huge challenges in various pipelines coming toward us and to know whether you have a sense of...any optimism about our collective futures?

[all laugh]

Presenter: Two 60,000-dollar questions![cackles]

Hans Haacke: The future is a crapshoot!

[all laugh]

field research (grevillea)

2008-09-30T10:29:00.003+10:00

field research ('relational' figures)

2008-09-29T12:47:00.002+10:00

To pass the time as I am doing the-most-boring-job-I-have-ever-done-for-money-ever, I have been listening to pod-casts. It's hard to say exactly what I hear, and what I take in. I think about it as something like the type of attention that psychoanalysts pay you as you monologue your experience: what is of interest or use or relevance stands out from the static and drone.

This is from a documentary podcast by ABC Radio National on the life of Melbourne-born cosmopolitan painter Lina Bryans, The Pink House.

Art Historian 1: She's been described as a relational figure, relating to people and bringing people together, but not being a high profile person. She managed to...I would say, bring a sense of wholeness to the scene.

Narrator: Lina Bryans met the Czech architect Alex Jelinek in the mid-1950's and he was her companion until her death in the year 2000. Her portraits can be found in the collections of all the major Australian art galleries, confirmation of the importance of painting to the national archive, and, of course, the importance of painters to life.

Art Historian 2: The effort she put into living and into relating...you know, the way she conducted friendships and relationships in general—it doesn't fit within idea perhaps of male orientated or male created ideas of careerism or posterity; but that comes into her art—this same ability to put people together and to see what's important in the world is the thing that she brings to a subject that she's painting. It's a very rare achievement.

Art Historian 3: What I like about her is that she's an example of someone who didn't run with a certain way of doing things. She's a relatively minor figure in some ways. She's done some superb paintings. What more can you ask of an artist than to do that?

[archival recording]Lina Bryans: I mean you only go on doing it because you've made it your life and it gives you something.

Interviewer: Has it given you a good life?

Lina Bryans: Yes.

the enigma of gardeners past

2008-09-29T12:41:00.003+10:00

four objects (at bottom) uncovered whilst preparing the overgrown garden bed for spring (at top). In the background is the site of our epic struggle with the cooch grass, and, in the middle ground, the new lemon tree.

field research (vision statement)

2008-09-27T22:23:00.006+10:00

The text on the exterior of the Melbourne Campus Building of the Australian Catholic University:

"The University explicitly engages the social, ethical and religious dimensions of the questions it faces in teaching and research, and service."

the crackle of spring

2008-07-29T10:13:00.002+10:00

This morning, in the backyard. One of the cats rolling on the concrete, dust-bathing, enjoying the morning sun. When I reach out and stroke his fur, he crackles with a subtle static charge.

For some reason, I take this as a herald of the coming spring.

Iris Murdoch: so perfect for public transport

2008-06-17T12:53:00.004+10:00

'Dora stopped listening because a dreadful thought had struck her. She ought to give up her seat. She rejected the thought, but it came back. The old lady who was standing looked very frail indeed, and it was only proper that Dora, who was young and healthy should give her seat to the lady who could then sit next to her friend. Dora felt the blood rushing to her face. She sat still and considered the matter. There was no point in being hasty. It was possible of course that while clearly admitting that she ought to give up her seat she might nevertheless simply not do so out of pure selfishness. This would in some way be a better situation that what would have been the case had it simply not occurred to her at all that she ought to give up her seat. On the other side of the seated lady a man was sitting. He was reading his newspaper and did not seem to be thinking about his duty. Perhaps is Dora waited it would occur to the man to give up his seat to the other lady? Unlikely. Dora examined the other inhabitants of the carriage. None of the looked in the least uneasy. Their faces, if not already buried in their books, reflected the selfish glee which had probably been on her own a moment since as she watched the crowd in the corridor. There was another aspect to the mater. She had taken the trouble to arrive early, and surely ought to be rewarded for this. Though perhaps the two ladies had arrived as early as they could? There was no knowing. But in any case there was an elementary justice in the first comers having the seats. The old lady would be perfectly alright in the corridor. The corridor was full of old ladies anyway, and no one else seemed bothered by this, least of all the old ladies themselves! Dora hated pointless sacrifices. She was tired after her recent emotions and deserved a rest. Besides it would never do to arrive at her destination exhausted. She regarded her state of distress as completely neurotic. She decided not to give up her seat.'

Iris Murdoch The Bell Chatto & Windus, 1973

it was beautiful

2007-12-31T10:07:00.000+11:00

Christmas 2007.

this is the summer pudding that I made for Christmas lunch with the orphans this year. I'm sure that Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall would scold me for using frozen berries instead of spending weeks trying to track down perfect, locally grown red currants and raspberries, but needs must ...

I was so amazed that the fragile concoction of soft fruit, panettone and liquid maintained its architectural integrity that I had to take this photo to commemorate the occasion.

Here is the recipe: I purchased about 1kg of frozen berries, including raspberries, blueberries and red currants. I bought 150g of raw castor sugar and 50ml of water gently to the boil in a large saucepan and let it simmer until the colour darkened a little. Off the heat, I added a vanilla pod, and half a bottle of valpolichella. I bought it all back to a simmer, then added half of the fruit, and let it cook a little. Off the heat again, I added the juice of half a lemon, and the rest of the fruit.

At this point, I discovered that the white sourdough loaf that I had bought and sliced into 1cm slices was not going to cover the surface area of a 2 liter pudding basin. So, I decided that even though it was a risk, and I chanced the scorn of purists, I would have to find something else. Buying a 'good quality white sourdough loaf' anywhere in inner Melbourne on Christmas Eve was a fruitless search, so I biked over to the nearest Italian cake store and bought a panettone. I cut this into 1cm slices and lined the basin. I added half the fruit, then a slice of panettone for structural soundness, then the rest of the fruit and the juice. I finished off with more panettone on the base, weighted the top with a small plate, then placed it in the fridge.

About 2 hours before serving, I took it out of the fridge so it was cool, rather than chilled, when we ate it. I beat some pouring cream to a pleasing consistency and stirred in some creme fraiche.

Nigel Slater heaps scorn on those who toy with the simple elegance of this classic British pudding, questions the wisdom of using anything other than a white sandwich loaf, and despises the addition of foreign ingredients. Being something of a international cooking skeptic myself (the thought of a 'risotto with asian herbs' sends shivers up my spine), I never would have considered using an Italian Christmas bread in this recipe had I not been forced to do so - but I'm learning that sometimes it's OK to be flexible.

I'll try it with the sandwich loaf next time.

new studio premises

2007-01-13T21:06:00.000+11:00

I have rented a new work place. It's only been a few days, and it takes a while to settle and get used to working elsewhere. At least I won't be distracted by the garden.

Temperatures have been regularly over 30 degrees celsius during the last month, and my beginning attempt at a garden has suffered a great deal. Mostly sunburn. My thinking leads me to consider that the soil needs work so it can retain more moisture. That and trying to combat white fly and red spider mite through companion planting. Happily, I can report a large number of tomatoes ripening, and vigorous growth from the pumpkins, several healthy beetroot, and a single cucumber. That and about 2 and a half kilos of apricot jam, and some plum jam coming soon.

I have sighted some native bees pollinating my tomato plants, which is the cause of much excitement - they have been identified as blue-banded bees, with the help of a website called Aussie bee where I found information about trials currently being conducted into the use of Native bee species as pollinators for green-house grown tomatoes.

Apparently, green-house tomato growers want to import European bumble bees to Australia to do the job. According to Aussie Bee, the European bumblebee poses a significant threat to Australian ecosystems if it were ever to escape into the wild, and are suggesting the blue-banded Bee as an alternative . The greenhouse tomato growers believe that the bumblebee poses no threat at all. When you think about the damage done by apparently harmless creatures like the rabbit, the cat, the carp, myna birds and the cane toad you wonder whether introducing more 'beneficial' exotic organisms is a good idea. The green-house tomato growers need to be able to compete with cheap imported tomatoes, which begs the question as to whether flying tonnes of tomatoes around the world really is cheaper than growing them locally. Especially when you think about the greenhouse gases that are introduced into atmosphere just so we can enjoy a few flavourless tomatoes in the dead of winter.

summer lust

2006-11-16T18:27:00.000+11:00

[no title]

2006-08-02T16:16:00.000+10:00

This might be one of those 'o my god it's been ages since I've written anything on my blog' type of occasions, but, never mind. It was always (was it always?) imagined (not planned) that this writing would have periods of inactivity, periods in which I was actively thinking of nothing in particular.

I have been gardening. And I have been doing a little work between bouts of a fiercesome head-cold for an artist friend. And I have been kindly invited to resume facilitating some feedback sessions for ClubsProject. And I have been talking about ideas to people.

We moved into a house with a sizeable back-yard. The garden beds were pretty overgrown, but we thought that it would be nice to have some vegetables growing. So I have been clearing the weeds and digging some lucerne and some sheep poo and some compost into the soil. There are 6 fruit trees too, so I am gradually clearing the weeds away from around them and putting down lots of mulch around their roots. [Apart from the apple tree, which has wooly aphid, and I'm told that these pests can be encouraged by an excess of nitrogen - so, no mulch for the apple tree...]. It's a relaxing/ exhausting/ calming type of thing to do. Some plants had established themselves happily here, so I'm trying to work around them - there's some rocket, parsley and nettles growing here, loving the sun and not minding the clayey soil.

Today in the garden, as I was crouched under the plum tree digging out the grass, I noticed that my fingers had a distinctively different way of feeling about them. As the soil and the compost cakes around them and works its way under my nails and into my finger prints the way of feeling becomes - I don't know if I can describe it - less like me and more like an experience that someone is describing to me. What I love about it is that I feel that I am thinking of everything and nothing at the same time.

It feels like the right thing to do, a way of letting experience settle and become thought. My work as a studio assistant has been to paint in large flat areas around a detailed drawing. My friend H remarked that I must go into something like a 'beta-state' when I am doing this, as I must also do when I am working in the garden. This would explain the particularly vivid memories and imaginings that have been rising up in my mind over the last fortnight.

I will always find it hard to leave the thinking-time and move into the process of production. My practice might be described as trying to find a means of making this thought space accessible. It's been confirmed that I will be traveling to Santiago, Chile later this year to take part in an exhibition for the South Project - which you can find out about, if you like, here.

today (austraya)

2006-06-24T15:54:00.000+10:00

I have been back in Australia for at least four weeks, though it is difficult to tell. The days go by. Everything has changed, nothing has changed.

A friend in the Netherlands suggested that I write down all the Dutch words that I had learnt during the flight home. I am still completing the list, although the words I am most proud to have aquired are schragen (trestle) and gemeente(municipalty). Occasionally I feel that another language ghosts

People ask me whether it is good to be back, or whether I still wish I was away. I'm not sure, I can't tell.

in which I arrive late for almost everything

2006-05-05T03:14:00.000+10:00

I arrived in Glasgow a few days after the close of the Glasgow International. Which is a festival of contemporary art. There are still things to see, although everyone tells me that "I've come at a bit of a bad time".

What is on view is the Becks' Futures exhibition, and the Ross Sinclaire show at the Centre for Contemporary Art...

cherry tree in bloom

2006-05-05T02:54:00.000+10:00

Glasgow. I’m sitting in my hotel room, and there is a tree in bloom outside my window. I’m drinking organic cider and eating blue cheese on oatcakes. Two more things to like about the U.K. The wind blows the white petals from the cherry tree through the window & I’m listening to the not-quite-perfect compilation that I made in Rotterdam …

Tugboat Galaxie 500
Birds Electrelane
Loch Raven Animal Collective
One That Got Away Minimum Chips
Avenue Au OOIOO
Strange Fruit Robert Wyatt
She Is Not David Sylvian
Test Pattern Minimum Chips
Formant Pluramon
Weight of Water Low
Transit Fennesz/ David Sylvian
Visionary Road Maps Stereolab
Furniture Minimum Chips

… for some days I have been thinking how great it would be to have a travel guide for the single traveller. It would list the hotels and B&B’s that welcome single people, the restaurants that have delightful tables for one, and handy suggestions for people like me who enjoy being by themselves but who probably don’t talk to the requisite 3 or 5 people per day (I forget what the number is) that one must in order to fend off madness.

This travel guide would not emphasise danger, but adventure. My Lonely Planet guide has a sections on each city for the Gay or Lesbian traveller but never mentions the single traveller – unless it is by inference, that some places are not good to walk alone at night, and so on. Now that I’m in Glasgow, I’m thinking longingly of the three days that I spent walking in the hills near the town of Larach, County Wicklow, in Ireland. Which was a tame kind of adventure, but never-the-less it was exactly the type of thing that gives you a kind of confidence. Are there great cities to be alone in?

perhaps travelling alone is a skill that needs to be perfected, rather than one that needs to be written about.

Eavesdropping becomes an unavoidable pastime in restaurants. Seated at a table for one in a restaurant in Edinburgh, I listened to the conversation between four back-packers – an Australian, two South Africans, and a New Zealander - at the table next to mine. The conversation began with a comparison of the colonial history of each person’s respective country; [I wonder if it’s actually true that the Maori peoples ate the original inhabitants of New Zealand? I’ll have to check …] and progressed to comparisons of cities that all of them had travelled to – for safety, friendliness and fun; and then to countries that each one had visited. Comparisons of dangerous situations and observations about sensible travel followed.

I have said the same things to much the same people myself. So I learnt nothing new, but was reminded that most of the time conversation isn’t about learning or exchanging ideas so much as it is about securing oneself, re-enforcing a position, making sure that the ideas and assumptions that constitute our individual worlds are still in place. It’s a type of security.

Something else I thought about was whether one person’s plan to work in a foreign city or another’s plan to travel to a third world country in order to work as a volunteer in an orphanage would constitute an experience in its own right, or whether it would only take on a solidity and meaning once it was discussed in a café or a restaurant in such a place as Edinburgh with fellow travellers … like my fellow travellers, I’m hoping for something authentic, but I’m in a situation in which authenticity is impossible – what experience of authenticity do you have to compare your travel experience with?

When the conversation turned to “what should be done” about the large number of people begging on the streets in the UK, I tried to concentrate on my book …

I have just finished reading Colm Tobin’s fictional portrait of Henry James – which deals with the subject of solitude very often, particularly the solitude of the foreigner in Europe. On the back of this, I’ve started to read James’ Roderick Hudson, which is already yielding ideas around another favourite topic -

The book begins in America, -

Rowland invites Roderick for a walk and, affected by the beauty of the Connecticut Valley, reflects on ‘this virtual quarrel of ours with our own country’. Roderick is inspired to advocate the practice of ‘American art’. We should ‘fling Imitation overboard’ he says, and ‘fix our eyes upon our National Individuality.’ Although James is poking fun at an idea so gauchely presented, he is also broaching a subject that was to occupy him for much of his writing life: the International theme.

from: Geoffrey Moore’s introduction to Roderick Hudson, by Henry James, this version published by Penguin Classics, 1986.

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to Roderick when he visits Rome as the result of Rowland's philanthropic impulse.

everywhere and nowhere [time and time again]

2006-04-28T07:08:00.000+10:00

Last year I was asked to write a catalogue essay for an exhibition by Mira Gojak at CLUBSproject in Melbourne. The exhibition was the first of what CLUBS calls "peer productions" - it's a commission of sorts, but in the CLUBS spirit, the activity of commissioning a project by an admired artist and partly funding it is, in actual fact, the provision of a permission for the artist to realise a project in a space free of the usual constraints.

Mira's show featured a work from 1998 titled herd of unending blue and a work made for the exhibition titled ruin. The juxtaposition of these two works made something mysterious and beautiful, and pointed tantalisingly towards a meaning to be made out of it; and a meaning to be made from the artist’s decision to show works encompassing that period of time. But the thing that is really wonderful about Mira’s work is that eludes easy interpretation and definition.

Saying this now sounds as simplistic as when I tried to say it then - writing about an artist whose work and practice you admire deeply is difficult, so my essay became about that difficulty, amongst other things. I still don't know how to feel about the text, but it is published and it is available online, at the CLUBSproject website, which is here

uitnodiging kaart

2006-04-28T04:15:00.000+10:00

an invitation to the exhibition 3 large drawings at Hotel Mariakappel in Hoorn, N.L. in which my work is included.

I am showing alongside André Alves from Porto, and Andrés de Santiago from Barcelona. It's exciting and kind of nice to be involved. Best of luck to the other A's, and many thanks again to the HMK.

The show follows twee projecten [two projects] in Rotterdam, now there is three large drawings, the next show I am in will perhaps be called be called four enormous and wonderful new works. I can't wait.

more on the scale of things

2006-04-23T07:27:00.000+10:00

On my visit to the National Gallery of Ireland today I saw this painting, which is by Orazio Gentileschi, painted sometime around 1605 and is titled David and Goliath ... which somehow seemed to fit with my current interest in the scale of things.

more Spring, more sun

2006-04-22T07:46:00.000+10:00

The sun is out and the weather feels warm. Back in my hotel room, after a day of walking about in Dublin, I take off my shoes and pad about in bare feet, it's Spring.

In Dublin I have what is a familiar sensation for me in Europe - that of the loss of my sense of scale. I don't know what it is - it is just that, when I get to places they somehow seem to be bigger in certain directions than I expect them to be. From Australia, European cities look small. When you get there (here) they seem huge.

I visited the Irish Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition by Orla Barry called Portable Stones - which featured a film of the same name, and a selection of text based works.

There was also a retrospective of work by Howard Hodgkin - who interests me because his works are just so - err, wilfully wrong, and he uses colour in such exciting ways, reminding me of adventurous home decor in the late 1970's and early 1980's (without being retro, that is) & there was also a collection of photography from the school of "isn't it interesting how people who aren't part of the middle classes live" which makes me feel that I should be making comments like "I feel blessed to have a University education".

I'm still thinking about the Orla Barry film. It is unusual for me to sit through any video piece that is longer than a few minutes, but with this film I sat through the entire hour and five minutes. It is a story involving implausible situations, anachronisms; it has the quality of those old, old myths that survive only as fragments. I'm still not sure if I like it. There is one image that stands out in my memory; two men walking through sand dunes on a deserted island, a wild place, the track littered with discarded water bottles. Which sums up – something, - the impossibility of a wilderness existing in this modern age, without people to see it. This is perhaps the key to why I liked the film.

The film deals with aloneness, with being without speech, -a state that the artist suggests repeatedly as being different from being without means for communication,and a state that is different from being silent. It seems like a plea for something like poetry, ‘letting words speak their meaning’ rather than trying to force them to conform to our own intentions. But also, the film deals with the fascination that aloneness has for us, - like the wilderness, we cannot imagine someone (or something) existing without human witness. The acknowledgement that someone or, the world, might not exist for us, but despite us is terrifying and almost impossible to conceive of; … and the fear that if we abandon the state of being in society with others (other humans) we become something less-than-human.

London, England

2006-04-21T07:50:00.000+10:00

Toast. Wonderful toast. Some people miss television, I missed having a toaster, or a grill, anything to stick a slice of bread under or in and make it all golden and brown. I love my toast with jam, with peanut butter, with avocado. I love making tea in a pot and eating toast. I love drinking too much and coming home to toast. The presence of toast makes England a wonderful place. My visit to London this time differs from previous experiences - I spent my few days there before leaving for Ireland strolling in parks. It's spring, really Spring now and Brockley Park, Regents Park, and Greenwich park are glorious places. Very different to London during a heat wave (2003) or my quixotic search for a winter coat along Oxford Street during January this year. The parks are a different view on London. It's gorgeous, it has open space, there are happy people there. I'm looking forward to going back.

no title

2006-04-18T07:23:00.000+10:00

My last view of Het Wilde Weten.

I left the Netherlands today, discovering, to my great surprise, that I was almost ten kilos in excess of the baggage limit. I continue to be mystified by this as most things that I have bought (some novels, a very beautiful yellow 30cm ruler, and two small exhibition catalogues) have been posted back to Australia seperately. I did purchase some sensible underwear from HEMA, but when I weighed this at my friend's house in London later in the afternoon, it turned out to weigh as little as you would expect.

L.P., one of my English friends, puts it down to careless packing. I simply wonder if that 'baggage' is stuff that I took with me from Australia and haven't managed to 'work through' in my time away, or whether it is new 'baggage' that I'm taking away from the Netherlands. It is, always, a place that gives me allot to think about.

today

2006-04-13T18:46:00.000+10:00

some thoughtful words about my exhibition from the lovely and wonderful Annelys de Vet. Her blog is here http://www.xs4all.nl/~annevet/. Go to the "Reflecteren" menu and scroll down to "Weblog". The entry about me is Zondag, 09 April. If you want to translate, I use Alta Vista babel fish translation, ... here

Thoughtfulness is the reason that I make work, to be thoughtful, cause thoughtfulness ...

really something for you

2006-04-13T00:01:00.000+10:00

a brightness in my day, and genuine excitement after visiting the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven - One of the things that I enjoyed seeing there was an exhibition of drawings and maquettes by the guy who built this hot pink structure, which is a covered bridge and entrance to the cafe at the rear of the building. His name is John Kormeling. The text on the top of the shed reads echt iets voor u, which translates as "really something for you" and was commissioned by the museum to respond to community perception that the organization is elitist. (not for "them").

The covered bridge crosses the water that surrounds the museum on two sides, and the text is perhaps an invitation for the uninitiated to make the leap of faith over the water and find, on the other side, that there really is something for them ...

this makes me think about what is currently so problematic about our relation to one another - it is what always is problematic, knowing who is outside, who 'you' is (not I), know who "I" is (not you) and the more specific problems to do with (advanced) culture, it's audiences and its aspirations. Because it can never really be one thing for everyone. The more complex question, which makes this work seem, um ... cynical (?), is about how we enable people to feel that they have ownership of culture in the public domain, and are able to enter the critical discourse - rather than insisting that they like it necessarily.

So perhaps the reason that I liked this work is that it is forcing me (one of the "I") to think about what the problem is. I wonder if the people who "they" are trying to encourage to cross the bridge are thinking about it.

I liked the Van Abbe Museum, anyway.

and I liked Dan Perjovski.

and I'm glad that I liked Lily van der Stokker as much as I thought I would.

[rather a beastly way to treat an artist] ... [not a penny gets you ... a large solo exhibition in a large museum]

place

2006-04-11T04:41:00.001+10:00

a path through the trees in the Kralingse Bos.

install: day five

2006-04-09T00:31:00.000+10:00

The show opened yesterday. These are the things that I like:
firstly, the feeling of stillness that I had when the work was installed in the gallery. This accompanies doing what you set out to do.

secondly; the fact that all the work is documentation of some kind ... the government drawings are documents of a conversation or a process, the photographs are documentation of the conversation or the process in action; the wall drawings are installed elsewhere and represented by preparatory studies and photographs. So I guess you could call the show a kind of index.

third; the people who I like the most in the Netherlands were at the opening.

forth; we ate good chinese food after the opening.

I think what I miss most in Melbourne are Quan 88 - a Vietnamese resturant on Victoria Street; David and Camy's dumpling house in China Town; sitting outside the Builders Arms in in the early evening during summer and drinking beer (the Builder's Arms is now a completely different pub, since gentrification, however). It is difficult to disassociate the people who I do these things with from the quality of the food and the atmosphere that is particular to each place. How I miss them!

wall drawing install: day four

2006-04-07T02:20:00.000+10:00

wall drawing install:day three

2006-04-05T04:23:00.000+10:00

It's all about me. The show opens this Friday. Below is the press release for the exhibition.

Andrew McQualter
Two Projects
Het Wilde Weten
7th – 16th April, 2006

Open Wednesday to Saturday 13:00 – 18:00, or by appointment: telephone - 06 3848 3261

Andrew McQualter is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. His work is primarily concerned with the practice of drawing, a process through which he pursues an open, questioning and diverse investigation.

Following a three-month period as ‘guest artist’ with the artists’ organization Het Wilde Weten, he will present two projects in the project space.

Studies for the shape of government is a collaborative drawing project. Following an open call for participants, McQualter has produced a series of nine drawings that document the participants’ subjective knowledge of the system of government in the Netherlands. The process of making the works enabled the artist to explore recurrent themes in his practice, such as the visual representation of concepts and relationships, as well as conducting a kind of “consciousness raising” exercise with artists living and working in Rotterdam.

The presentation Two Projects at Het Wilde Weten, will also include documentation of two site specific wall drawings. These works have been executed in guest artist’s accommodation at Het Wilde Weten and at Hotel Mariakappel in Hoorn. Based on the artist’s observation of visitor behaviour in galleries and museums, both works depict an encounter between a museum visitor and an audio-visual display.

The wall paintings are intended as a gift to subsequent artists using the accommodation. Like many of McQualter’s site specific wall paintings, these works mix whimsy with seriousness – pointing out the absurd nature of everyday situations. However, beneath the humour, a moral seriousness is implied. These images create a feeling of antagonism between sites of production and sites of display - placing a situation that is public into artists’ intimate and private space. Like his collaborative project, these works reflect on the responsibility of artists as citizens, producers and participants in the dialogue around contemporary culture.

no title

2006-04-04T16:56:00.000+10:00

photos of the work I made last week arrived today. Many thanks to the wonderful artists who run the Hotel Mariakappel and to the photographer, Huig Bartels.

wall drawing install: day two

2006-04-04T05:51:00.000+10:00

wall drawing install: day one

2006-04-03T04:10:00.000+10:00

I have started installing in my bedroom at Het Wilde Weten. This work is a companion piece to the work that I completed in one of the "guest" bedrooms at Hotel Mariakappel in Hoorn last week. The installation process was also documented in Hoorn, but I managed to delete the photos entirely from both my camera and from my computer when I returned to Rotterdam on Friday night. Such events leave me with the feeling that the universe is trying to tell me something. I said as much to the artist who coordinates the program at Hotel Mariakappel in an email the following day - the reply was along the the lines of "What do you think that the universe is trying to tell you?" We'll see if the universe can be a little clearer over the next few days ...

Thinking about my work, (as one does, living in a different place for three months, with little else to think about apart from one's practise) I am always uncertain about why I do what I do - and this is one of the things that I have hoped to resolve here - arriving at some kind of clarity about the connection between the disparate elements of my practise, or an idea about how they interrelate.

Perhaps they don't.

I do have this, which is from an email I wrote to a curator in Australia, following a request for information on my work for an application ...

[...] I basically have two lines of investigation – one collaborative, which entails thinking of situations that enable me to investigate the dynamics of a relationship through a shared activity, and through that activity, looking at systems of knowledge and interaction, but in the end it is about the process by which we are all (ideally) co-creators of cultural forms (such as architecture or government); the other includes my figurative drawings, which are intended to manifest ideas about the practice of art and to create a kind of antagonism between sites of production and sites of display –

if the collaborative drawing project I am doing here does something like this: [from a friend in Melbourne]

it makes me think of lots of things, about how successful those welfare economies have been, but it also makes me think about the rise of global conservatism, how those economies are changing and becoming less inclusive. I think it will also remind people of the gap between the certainty we feel about our political assumptions and the lack of knowledge we have about how the political system actually operates and is structured.

then what do the wall drawings do?

work, part 7

2006-03-28T19:50:00.000+11:00

This was the last drawing in the series that I am making here in Rotterdam. I note that it is an advantage of the Netherlands education system that most people educated here have a fairly firm knowledge of the system of government here. Or perhaps the fact that I feel that I learnt nothing at school means that I simply wasn't paying attention ... my knowledge of the Australian system is by no means as comprehensive.

today

2006-03-27T21:58:00.000+11:00

Today is dedicated to the friendly and generous customer service staff at PRAXIS hardware store, and the timely and thoughtful writing of Sal Randolf. Her site is ... here

It's spring, the crocuses are out on the traffic islands and it is a balmy 11 degrees in Rotterdam.

(no title)

2006-03-23T02:17:00.000+11:00

I'm sure that it's common that you suddenly feel that a song or a piece of writing is addressed specifically to you. (You know this if you are or have ever been a fan of the Smiths.) I'm reading the first volume of the Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, and it's gradually dawning on me that it is a fairly black commentary on the Victorian middle classes, struggling their way into the 20th Century. What is happening in the quote below has happened to me. Different time, different place. Same bewildered middle class boy trying to be an artist. When the dominant discourse is the movement of capital (financial or intellectual) ... What do you make work about?, how do you find a value for your work outside of this discourse?, what's the point?

An Art critic who had recently been looking at his work had delivered himself as follows:

'In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some of them certainly quite a feeling for Nature. But, you see, they're so scattered; you'll never get the public to took at them, Now, if you'd taken a definite subject, such as “London by Night”, or “The Crystal Palace” in the Spring, and made a regular series, the public would have known at once what they were looking at. I can't lay too much stress on that. All the men who are making great names in Art, like Crum Stone or Bleeder, are making them by avoiding the unexpected; by specializing and putting all their work in the same pigeon-hole, so that the pubic know at once where to go. And this stands to reason; for if a man's a collector he doesn't want people to smell at the canvas to find out whom his pictures are by; he wants them to be able to say at once, “A capital Forsyte!” it is all the more important for you to be able to be choose a subject that they can lay hold of on the spot, since there's no very marked originality in your style.'

[…]

The words bore good fruit in young Jolyon; they were contrary to all he believed in, to all that he theoretically held good in his art, but some strange deep instinct moved him to turn them to profit.

He discovered therefore one morning that an idea had come to him of making a series of watercolour drawings of London. How the idea had arisen he could not tell; and it was not till the following year, when he had completed and sold them at a very fair price, that in one of his impersonal moods he found himself able to recollect the Art critic, and to discover in his own achievement another proof that he was a Forsyte.

from: John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga Volume One, Book One “The Man of Property” pp 250 – 1; first published in 1906 by William Heineman Ltd., the edition that I'm reading published by Penguin Classics, 2001.

What is a Forsyte? The central character of the first three books, young Jolyon Forsyte, defines what a Forsyte is in a conversation with an architect, Bosinney, at an earlier point in the first book …

‘[…] what I call a “Forsyte” is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property – it doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or reputation – is his hall-mark.’

‘Ah!’ murmured Bosinney, ‘you should patent the word.’

‘I should like,’ said young Jolyon, ‘to lecture on it: “Properties and quality of a Forsyte. This little animal, disturbed by the ridicule of his own sort, is unaffected in his motions by the laughter of strange creatures (you or I). Hereditarily disposed to myopia, he recognises only the persons and habitats of his own species, amongst which he passes an existence of comparative tranquillity.”’

‘You talk of them,’ said Bosinney, ‘as if they were half of England.’

‘They are,’ repeated young Jolyon, ‘half England, and the better half too, the safe half, the three percent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middle men, the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner-stones of convention; everything that is admirable!’

‘I don’t know whether I catch your drift,’ said Bosinney, ‘but I fancy there are plenty of Forsytes, as you call them, in my profession.’

‘Certainly,’ replied young Jolyon. ‘The great majority of architects, painters or writers have no principals, like any other Forsytes. Art, literature, religion, survive by virtue of a few cranks who really believe in such things, and the many Forsytes who make commercial use of them. At a low estimate, three-forths of our Royal Academicians are Forsytes, seven-eighths of our novelists, a large proportion of the Press. Of science I can’t speak; they are magnificently represented in religion, in the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I’m not laughing. It is dangerous to go against the majority – and what a majority!’

pp:202- 203

work, part six

2006-03-20T00:30:00.000+11:00

work, part five

2006-03-17T00:30:00.000+11:00

I look at these photographs and remember that this drawing was a really nice experience.

I worked with an artist who is currently staying at another guest studio in town - Stichting BAD, which is in the south of Rotterdam.

The drawing is quite comprehensive, and takes in the judicial system, as well as two houses of parliament, the provinces and Gemeente. What is also interesting is the appearance of the word "bevolking" on the edge of the drawing. Bevolking is Dutch for "the Population".

It looks back to the interview with Chantal Mouffe that I was reading at the beginning of this work, in 2004. Mouffe discusses a work by Hans Haake at the German Parliament building which brings the terms "the population" and "the people" into play - and from there, discusses the influence of the work of Carl Schmitt on the development of her political philosophy.

If Haacke’s piece is seen as a way of questioning the manner in which “the German people” is currently defined, then it is a very interesting intervention. In terms of political philosophy, it points to the need to redefine “the people,” to extend it by introducing people who have until now not been considered citizens. But that should not happen by abandoning the idea of “the people” because it’s necessarily related to either a Nazi past or to a certain type of exclusion. The existence of a certain type of exclusion is something that politics cannot do without. That is one of the questions I’ve been trying to address in my thinking about Schmitt and the idea of “the demos.” You cannot have a demos if it is not in some sense exclusive. The very idea of “the demos” simultaneously implies both a logic of inclusion within and exclusion without. It can never be the case that everyone who happens to be in a certain territory—be it France or Germany— should be entitled to vote. There needs to be a definition of who constitutes the body of citizens, who constitutes “the people.” This is something that needs to be discussed in Germany—less now, perhaps, with the broader immigration laws, although the conception of “the people” is still too restricted. However, it can never be a question of replacing the political conception of “the people” with the sociological concept of “the population.”

In this drawing, the population have limited influence on the workings of government - exercised through the vote. Outside of this influence are the military, the judiciary and the eerste kamer (Senate), bodies which act upon the population.

Does this emphasise one intention of the project? - the idea that, in a system over which we have, in theory, the controlling influence of the vote, but in practice are only secondary to the greater influence of state machinery, we have a kind of responsibility to understand how it works. Does knowledge such as this lead to greater involvement, or greater influence?

Throughout this project I have been thinking of a line from a book, I think that it is by either William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, that you should never trust anything if you can't see where it keeps its brain. The 'brain' of the system of democratic government is variously located by these drawings as being the media, the parliament ... but rarely 'the population'. It is something dispersed, ambient - mutable.

cooking

2006-03-10T09:34:00.000+11:00

I have added three new words to my Dutch vocabulary:
foelie (mace), kruidnagels (cloves) and laurier blaadjes (bay leaves)

Rotterdam lamb with prunes (lamen met gedroogde pruimen van Rotterdam)
Place about 200g (about 15 prunes) in a bowl and cover with beer (we used Leffer Blonde).
Fry one onion, chopped small, and three bay leaves in oil until the onion is soft and slightly browned.
Sprinkle with pepper as they are frying.
Add about 500g cubed lamb, cut from the leg. Brown the lamb.
Add 3 cloves of garlic (knoflook) chopped finely and fry until the aroma rises.
Add the prunes and the beer that they were soaking in, and top up with more beer ( you could also use stock).
Add about 3 blades of mace, 4 cloves, more pepper and salt to taste.
Stir in a teaspoon of appelstroop (apple concentrate).
Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for about 50 minutes. Check for seasoning. You may need to add more pepper to counteract the sweetness.

Serve with mashed potatoes, and lightly stewed apple.
For 3 to 4 people

work, part four

2006-03-09T03:09:00.000+11:00

What I know about the government of the Netherlands increases. For instance, I know that Parliament consists of two houses, the eerste kamer and the tweede kamer. The tweede kamer is a directly elected group of about 140 representatives, and the eerste kamer is like the Australian Senate, also representing the interests of the states - but in the Dutch case, the representatives aren't directly elected by the people, but proposed by the provincial organizations. Here, my knowledge gets foggy ... I'm trying to clear it through asking questions of each person that I draw with, but this is usually the occasion for some embarrassment, foot shuffling and bemusement. I guess this would be like me or one of my peers attempting to explain the finer points of the Australian electoral system to a visitor from another country. But I am not always sure whether it is my questions that cause the embarrassment, or whether it is a case of people feeling that they need to come up with the right answer.

The drawing in progress below was made with a graphic designer. The conversation was really great, and the drawing conveys some of the sense of the way that that the conversation progressed. It also shows, I think, the process of learning that the conversation and the drawing became. There was an interesting back and forward discussion about the media being the thing that you see - and how much political debate is represented graphically - but I wanted to push beyond this and find the mechanics of political process that underlie the representation in the media.

I have tried a tactic of pushing things along by asking more questions. This works, but I am not interested so much in the work being purely description.

I think about my friend Stephen's Doctoral research into the practice of sand drawing in Vanuatu. The drawings are symmetrical abstract designs, a kind of template that is both a representation of the particular story that is being told and a means by which to remember the story. The drawings that I'm making in this project are a trace of an interaction, always partial and subjective. What do I want from them? I return to the idea that the accurate representation of the subject of the conversation (how does government work?) isn't the aim of the project. It’s aims are aesthetic, it seems to me, or an investigation into aesthetics.

The drawing that is shown in progress below took up some of these questions. Why this topic for conversation?; why drawing?; why collaboration?; how does the process relate to the topic of conversation?

I am thinking about ways to push the project forward, to make both the process of interaction and the process of drawing more structured, and ways to carry the knowledge from the previous works into each new conversation and the drawing.

As it stands, the project is interesting to me. It could carry on this way for a long time with no or little change. To take the work into a more exhaustive examination of government would require a change of method, I think. Like making drawings with more political scientists or with politicians. I actually tried this in Melbourne and observed an agony of indecision from the person who I asked to make a drawing with me, firstly about drawing, then about being photographed. In the end I got the feeling that the problem may have been that they didn't want their opinions to be revealed in the drawing, and made public.

The work will be displayed as planned, a further development of the project will have to wait for another opportunity like the residency I am doing now.

link

2006-03-06T18:53:00.000+11:00

just in case you were burning to know more about the Australian Green's policies on constitutional reform, here is a link to their current policies. Do scroll down past the "Policy Snapshot Booklet" to the actual policies. The stuff on constitutional reform is under "Democracy and Constitutional Reform".

happy days

2006-03-05T06:53:00.000+11:00

work, part three

2006-03-05T06:52:00.000+11:00

The most recent drawing in progress (above), was made with a political scientist. So the knowledge I've gained through making this drawing is considerable. I now know more about what I don't know - which is the type of knowledge that I seem to be involved with in this project ... perhaps with everything that I do, workwise at least

(there are some things that I would love to be certain about in real life, but that is again the type of knowledge, or lack of knowledge, that keeps me making art. The question being "is it worth continuing to make work" both in a personal sense and a general sense ... the idea of a truthful, profound and honest work of art being another of those new yet unapproachable countries that I continue to chase)...

anyway, I learnt allot about the structure of parliament, the role of the Monarch, and the relationship between National, Provincial and "Gemeente" (municipal) government. Interestingly, the relationship between national and local government here in the Netherlands is more direct than in Australia. I'm still unsure about the role of the provincial governments ... it seems to be around coordinating larger scale public works and issues, but I am sure that it more than that.

It is (or was) an aim of the Australian Greens to work toward devolution of State Government in Australia and create stronger local government with a direct relationship with government at the national level. It's been a while since I read their policies, so they could have changed [and forgive me if I have misunderstood something] ... but it seemed like a sensible idea; and what a fabulous way to reduce government spending, rather than cutting spending on hospitals, education and the arts. It would also seem to be a strategy that would foster greater involvement at a grass roots level in the process of government. I don't know... a more direct relationship betwen national and Local government seems to work here - voter turnout has risen to about 70% in recent years in the Netherlands, which is pretty good going in a country that doesn't have compulsory voting.

I did all the drawing this time, which I didn't mind, but I wondered the whole time whether I should apply a little more pressure to the other person and get them to draw as well. Was this true to the project? I was more interested in finding out as much as I could. Every drawing is an experiment, I guess. The drawings that are made by non-artists are often my favourite drawings. … this goes back to the question about working with artists or non-artists. I can’t help feeling that if I were to work with non-artists it would be a different project – much more about what distinguishes art from ‘not-art’, expert from amateur. Which would be interesting, but maybe not what I’m interested in. It is a question to return to.

This is different from the drawing below, which was really a collaborative effort, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of making the drawing. I particularly enjoyed using Wikipedia to find out some details as we were making the work. The details in this drawing are really nice. It includes a portrait of the queen of the Netherlands in her purely symbolic role. Really nice.

I have started to think about ways to extend the project, and I am reminded that the work first grew out of an interest in the way that the Australian Parliament was designed, and how the formal qualities of the building expressed a vision of government. So the first idea I had was to make the drawings, and then collate them somehow to produce a new design for parliament house. It still sounds like a good idea. But I remember thinking that before I started to work with artists on the redesign of Parliament House, they would need to be informed about how parliament and government worked in Australia. This was followed by the realisation of how little I knew about how parliament and government actually functioned - so I thought I needed somekind of 'consciouness raising' exercise. What followed was this project, which is, as I said to start with, more about what I don't know than it is about the things that I do know.

The other way that I have thought of extending the work is to complete a series of para-drawings which show the cumulative effect of each conversation. Or perhaps, making a drawing at the end of the project that combines aspects of all of the drawings to date.

an aerial view of parliment house, Canberra, Australia. Below, a view of the approach to the entrance of Parliament House. Note the mosaic in the forecourt, Michael Nelson Jakamarra’s Possum and Wallaby Dreaming, commissioned by the Australian Government ... I remember thinking when I did the "field-trip" to visit Parliament how you actually had to walk over the top of this symbol of the First Peoples of Australia in order to enter the building. I'm not sure whether it is symbolic in a negative or a positive way. It depends how you think about a mosaic.

The urgency of my practice

2006-03-02T01:19:00.001+11:00

There has been allot of thinking and thinking and thinking over the last few days. To the point that I feel I have thought myself into a corner. The cause of this is trying to write a press release for my show here - which leads to contemplation of the difficulty of trying to explain my practise -

At an interview for a place at an internationally prestigious art program in Amsterdam a few years ago I was asked the question "what is the urgency of your practise?" My response then, as now, is that I find it hard to understand the question.

I feel like taking the person who asked the question to the window and showing them the world, if you could, showing the largeness of the world and the many great urgencies that occupy people's lives and asking if they feel art could answer that. “Do you mean that kind of urgency?” I want to ask.

The oddness of it was that I felt I was being asked how my work was going to change the world. But the question was in a different context.

I am interested in the fact that we do art because it is a cultural thing. Imagine asking someone “what is the urgency of using your knife and fork like that?” I guess the discussion would become interesting if the person who you asked happened to have done their PhD in table etiquette. They would be able to tell you why, and what it meant to do this, in certain contexts, and what it would mean to do it differently.

no title

2006-03-01T19:06:00.000+11:00

"I don't understand you. There is sometimes a vagueness about the Dutch that we English find hard to understand. Something like the reflection of your beautiful skies in your characters."
Louis Couperus Langs Lijnen van geleidelijkheid 1900
Translated as Inevitable Paul Vincent, Pushkin Press, London, 2005

the beach

2006-02-28T04:37:00.000+11:00

work (2)

2006-02-24T00:47:00.000+11:00

Drawing number two in progress.

I think what I liked about this drawing was the way that the blank paper became a space that enabled conversation —a kind of arena for thoughts. What is depicted in the drawing approaches Chantal Mouffe’s definition of the political, the friend/enemy distinction (see below, February 22nd) … So you might say that the drawing concerns the political, rather than politics. Even though the work itself doesn’t arrive at a final definition or concrete representation of the concept.

In this case, the conversation revolved around the concepts of ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘you’ … and the difficulty of defining these concepts in relation to politics in general, and to the current situation in the Netherlands in particular.

Each work seems to point me towards creating more and more elaborate guidelines for the participants, to start the process with i.e. an overview of what I see as the distinction between politics and the political, and the story of my thinking around the idea. But this assumes that this dynamic of friend/enemy, us/them, citizen/not-citizen is an aspect of everyone’s social and political awareness – and not something that needs to be further discussed, of discovered and further defined through each successive encounter.

If I begin with this definition I feel that I will be determining the outcome. But isn’t the way that I begin the drawing already creating this distinction? As I set the process up, seating someone opposite me across the table? And this unfamiliar situation of making a drawing with someone, me, more or less an unknown quality – is this situation of knowing/not knowing analogous to the friend/enemy relationship?

(no title)

2006-02-23T21:31:00.000+11:00

Work

2006-02-22T19:30:00.000+11:00

I began work on [one] of my projects here yesterday. Many thanks to Niels, the first volunteer.

Like allot of the things that I do, and, I guess, allot of the things that every artist does, it isn't always apparent to me why I am doing what I'm doing. The thing that I like about his project is that making the work is a process of finding out what the work is. It generates more questions every time.

The project has a fairly simple basis. I ask people to make a drawing with me of how they think government works. I provide the paper and the other materials. We sit on either of the long sides of the paper. We start with a conversation about how they think government works. The drawing is a representation of that conversation, with both of us making contributions to the drawing.

The result is a representation of subjective knowledge, but also a representation of the conversation, and representation of the communication that occurs between myself and the other artist. So in a sense it is "about" government, and in another sense it’s not about government at all.

To start with, I think that I am already creating a representation of an aspect of government by having the other artist sit across the table from me, and then creating something through what is [more or less, depending on the person] a process of consensus. This is an idealised and simplified representation of consensus decision-making and of the process of government.

this is a familiar image of debate between our Prime Minister (seated, on the left hand side) and our Opposition Leader (standing, on the right) in the Australian parliament

The first unanswered question is whether I want to challenge this idea, or entrench the idea further.

The second question comes from some of the people I have approached to be part of the project - am I a political artist? No, and um ... yes. In a sense (he says in an enthusiastic rush, wildly making connections between thoughts that no-one else can follow) every artist is political and every artwork is political. It's always been a feeling that I've had, that if we participate in something (like the art world, or capitalism, or the tax system) we implicitly give our consent to the way that something is organised, we agree with it in a sense. Chantal Mouffe puts it quite succinctly in an interview about the connections between art and politics ... she says

... One cannot make a distinction between political art and non-political art because every form of artistic practice either contributes to the reproduction of the given common sense —and in that sense is political— or contributes to the deconstruction or critique of it. Every form of art has a political dimension.

... but I guess that I'm getting ahead of myself here. Because the interview begins with Mouffe making a distinction between 'politics' and 'the political' —

What I call "the political" is the dimension of antagonism—the friend/enemy distinction. And [...] this can emerge out of any kind of relation. It's not something that can be localised precisely; it's an ever-present possibility. What I call "politics", on the other hand, is the ensemble of discourses and practices, institutional or even artistic practices, that contribute to and reproduce a certain order. These are always in conditions that are potentially conflictual because they are informed by, or traversed by, the dimension of "the political." [ ...]

I want to continue and say how I think that this relates to the drawing project, but I have also just realised that the "we" that I keep talking about and the audience that the interview assumes are people that have a choice whether to be part of a country, a system of government, or a way of life. Maybe I'll just leave that hanging there, as a problem that is internal to this project, and by implication the discourse that the project is part of.

I was going to say that the drawing project is an attempt to make material some of the ideas that jumped out at me when I read this interview the first few times, i.e.: the distinction between "politics" and "the political", the dimension of antagonism that is present in every relation, and that artistic practices contribute to and reproduce a certain order.

Anyway the Chantal Mouffe interview is available in a journal called "Grey Room", It's called Every form of Art has a Political Dimension and it is in Issue 02, Winter 2001 - it's available on-line, but you have to subscribe, which is why I haven't linked to it.

The third question that remains unanswered is -why am I only asking artists to participate? There are many long conversations to be had about this. (One involves the issue of involving (non-art) people in artistic practice, and a kind of discussion about something that I want to call ethics but probably has another name - and deserves to be pursued at length, perhaps as a topic for a MA research project, so if I ever do a Masters ...)

I know for sure that while I am continually drawn to work with other people, I also find it really difficult to get to know people - artists are the easiest people for me to work with because we at least have something to start the conversation. The other answer is that the project is in response to the current interest in the (one of many) art world(s) in political practice - I was interested in how much artists actually knew about the system that they were commenting on ... that, making a comment on "politics" or "the political" seemed to me to assume a position of being already outside the system, and, like many of contemporary art's excursions (into "the everyday" for example), the political was treated as someplace else. It assumes that artists or institutions have a position outside the political, when really our world, the art world, is a microcosm or intensification of the politics that exist out there. It is also inextricably linked to the world of politics through the provision of government funding, the stucture of institutions, and our education system - however, sometimes artists dealing with the political can be kind of like civilising missionaries or anthropologists.

So another signpost, here, from an interview with Lucy Suchman - an anthropologist who I first heard interviewed on the radio about her work studying the behaviour of people interacting with office machines (photocopiers, faxes, printers). Such a topic piqued my interest - and I looked her up. I have held onto this interview because it points to some of the ways that I feel about making work with other artists and about the art world. The full transcript I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions is at http://www.dialogonleadership.org/interviewSuchman.html

Lucy Suchman: (…) I was also very much interested in Native Americans, as many students of anthropology are. I was just overwhelmed by the sense of their wonderful ways of organizing and relating to the world. But it was a very terrible history, and I started to feel that the last thing that Native Americans needed was another anthropologist studying them. I thought instead I should study the institutions that were closer to my own position in life and that had tremendous consequences for Native Americans, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This was also at the time when the idea of studying up, as it was called in anthropology, was developing at Berkeley.

Interviewer: “Studying up” means?

Lucy Suchman: Anthropology had traditionally been concerned with non-industrial cultures, or those that major Western societies were interested in administering and dominating, and that’s carried over into the field. Even within American anthropology, the focus has always been on Native Americans, and then more recently on various minority groups within the United States, rather than on mainstream, middle-class Americans, on elite institutions, powerful organizations. In the 70s there was an initiative within anthropology that said: We have as much culture here as anywhere else. In fact, we have a responsibility to turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves, and really understand ourselves as participants and co-creators of the world, rather than just as observers.

2006-02-21T20:10:00.000+11:00

On looking at looking
Ann Stephen's biography of Ian Burn, launched in Melbourne recently. Ann also co-ordinated, along with Luke Parker, a series of page works for an online publication, Natural Selection Magazine, in response to the statement by Ian Burn -

“What is held up as originality is a myth, given the degree to
which art evolves as a collective enterprise, with artists always
building on other artists’ work... To talk to other artists’ work,
and simultaneously to talk about the other artists’ work...
Isn’t that what constitutes originality anyway?”
— Ian Burn in conversation with Imants Tillers 1993

The page works can be found in section 25/ page 84 of the magazine.

coat

2006-02-20T22:41:00.000+11:00

The blog has been slow work. To remedy this, I'm going to include a few things from emails, so there will be a bit of time travel over the next few days ...

from a mail to my father on Sunday -

I have finally bought a coat. I was lucky that I asked the sales woman whether the green coat I was trying on looked to big on me (for some reason all Dutch coats are too wide across the shoulders) and she said yes, and started to suggest different options. It is usually OK to ask a sales-person's advice in shops - because the response is almost always honest. In the end, I found a grey duffle coat, which is, by some strange co-incidence an Australian brand, and it fits well, and is very warm. So my walks in the morning are now especially nice.

I have noticed that it is a matter of etiquette here to eat toasted sandwiches with a knife and fork. It's something that I generally ignore, but when, the other day, I ordered a sandwich on 'stokbrood' (stick bread, a baguette) it turned out to be an open sandwich and I had to struggle through the experience with my knife and fork. It was worth it and I was hungry. I find this a small but somehow significant point of difference between Australian and Dutch culture - that it is generally 'not done' to eat with one's hands (especially when sitting at a table, but hot chips also come with a small plastic fork ...), whereas in Australian culture there is a whole array of things to eat with one's hands. Whether you follow this or not seems to be an indication of your class, or even your "Dutchness".

I have also learnt over the last few weeks not to take the Dutch manner of speaking always in the imperative to heart. My friend Annelys notes that the Dutch are known throughout Europe for giving unsolicited advice. So a conversation runs something like a series of statements and commands - which is different from the english mode of conversation which is has many more questions and is more open ended. I also have to take into account that the conversation is being conducted usually in someone's second, third or forth language. ...Something that I have been reflecting on is the world's increasing 'proficiency' with English. I find here that English is the language of commerce, business and trade - and this is reflected in the way that it is used. So I often feel I get the wrong impression of people's character and motives - that they are merely interested in the opportunity that I might offer.

I have started to read a novel by a Dutch author from den Haag, Louis Couperus. The novel is called called Inevitable, and it was published in 1900. It would probably compare well with Henry James - if I had got that far in my reading. Even though it is in translation, I can hear the difference in the way that it is written, again, a series of statements, confident and precise. Ewoud says that he is one of the 'greats' in Netherlands literature & admired for his use of language, style & wit.

There are now many responses to the email that we sent out asking people to participate in my collaborative drawing project. I have met two of them and will start making drawings this week. I spent a lovely few hours with an Israeli/Dutch woman in her studio discussing her work and also talking about living in the Netherlands. She spoke about being in Israel as a feeling of not belonging in a particular community (one parent was a Sephardic Jew, the other Ashkenazi). Afterward, I was thinking about the Netherlands being the place where it is possible to be in this in-between state ... it is indeed a place full of people who are either physically or spiritually or culturally stateless. Although the Netherlands, like so many other places in the world, is increasingly less welcoming to people who find themselves inclined or forced to leave their country of birth - more anxious about it's borders and 'national identity'.

Another point of reflection has been a statement by American philosopher Stanley Cavell concerning America - that it is a fiction, a home that everyone imagines, but which no-one ever really arrives at. It is always unapproachable. (Emerson's phrase from his essay "Experience" ... I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West...) I think that, during the 20th Century, many places were like America - places of new beginning for people who were dissatisfied or displaced - Australia, Canada, the Netherlands ... but this period of migration and optimism seems to be truly historical now. Countries are fortresses, not places of the imagination, not questions about what it means to belong to a place.

world esperanto association

2006-02-19T19:50:00.000+11:00

Universala Esperanto-Asocio

buy an art work and support a good aim

2006-02-17T22:09:00.000+11:00

The machine translation of the text in Dutch at the top of this sign is buy an art work and support a good aim ... It's from the Lucy & Jorge Orta show at Boijmans - here,

The show finished on the 5th of February, but I have been thinking about this show for a few weeks now and trying to figure out why it bugged me so much. My first thoughts were that the show is an expression of a kind of anxiety that art institutions have, and that artists have, about the relevance of their practise. In the face of problems like the lack of clean drinking water in the third world, contemporary art and it’s institutions can seem fairly irrelevant. But I ask myself all the time whether this feeling of … irrelevance, or helplessness, or impotence … can be addressed by taking ‘an issue’ as the subject of the work that you make.

My second thoughts were that the problems of the third world are pretty much related to the development of capitalism, so it seems a little short sighted to try and remedy these problems by selling something in a museum. The idea that you can alleviate the effects of capitalism by buying more things, instead of attempting to modify your own behaviour. The installation doesn’t address the distribution of funds raised by the sale of the bottles of water. For example, what are the museum’s administration costs, and how much does it cost to produce the bottles? What are the costs of sending the money out of the country?

Related to this was something I heard on the radio a few months ago about the environmental cost of building or renovating a home or a new building. The information I remember is that the environmental cost of carpeting a floor of a building was equivalent to filling the same space with water 10 times. That’s just the cost in water, you can add all the other raw materials, electricity etc on to that. So, what’s the environmental cost of producing a single bottle made from clear glass? Is this equivalent to filling the bottle ten times over and then emptying it down the drain? What is the environmental footprint of a contemporary art exhibition?

Making work ‘about something’ doesn’t really avoid the fact that art is always about aesthetics. And isn’t aesthetics a set of rules or conventions about how things are done in a certain situation or context? Not so much a language game as a highly specialised form of charades? So we have highly developed conventions for making a work that explodes the white cube, or making work that addresses the separation between art and life, or making work that questions the differentiation between high and low culture, and making work that addresses the issue of “x” … we have conventions for challenging conventions.

lost

2006-02-06T04:09:00.000+11:00

I am back just now from a long walk in the mist - following my street directory toward a bit of green on the map - a very civilised park and very beautiful on this damp and misty day. I walked further along the waterside, over the Erasmusbrug, which is my current marker for known territory in Rotterdam …

I’m thinking about a friend’s comment about travelling – that one of the things that they like is the absence of personal experience implicit to objects and sites … and that somehow with that absence comes a clarity of thought

When I walk about here I feel like a blind person - and it makes me realise - for good or not so good - that my sense of being at home (which is different from being in one's home) has allot to do with the familiar. So I am feeling or experiencing a sense of the uncanny. I’m not well versed in the debate around the term – but I do have a feeling that the word is usefully ambiguous, and is often used as a matter of convenience or politeness by critics or curators – as a means of abbreviating or avoiding complexity. Anyway, at the moment - It is a sense of being un-homed, which is not quite homesickness (yet) or loneliness, not quite. Part of this uncannyness is the awful suspicion that I have no centre or soul, no personality apart from that which is continually enforced through the feedback loop of the familiar.

Also on my mind is the rhetorical question put to me the other evening by my friend Annelys over a beer and a snack consisting of croquets on bread (a particularly unfamiliar form of Netherlands cuisine – these are basically a crumbed deep-fried bolus of ragout, served with buttered white bread; you squash the croquet onto the bread and then spread it with mustard and eat the result with a knife and fork) … the question, How can you be an artist if you don’t like change? ... I guess the extension of this is the question of how can you be an artist if you are not willing to unbecome yourself, to loose your bearings, get lost in the mist...

Part of me reacts against the idea that, as an artist, you are duty bound to actively seek out and experience disruption, the unfamiliar, or the unknown. It seems a little outmoded and romantic. But then, one of my favourite bits of writing at the moment is this, from Thoreau – in the chapter titled “The Village” in Walden

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighbouring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Which I think I should one day embroider in coloured silks and hang above my studio door.

2006-02-04T08:34:00.000+11:00

2006-02-02T06:20:00.000+11:00

back in the Netherlands after a 6 day absence in the UK. I visited Birmingham for a day to see a friend's exhibition at the international project space at the college for art and design. The image above is the only one I have of Birmingham, it's the view from the window of the bedroom where I stayed for one night. London was frustrating, hard, exhilarating and wonderful in equal measures. I spent so much time in trains, on train platforms and in train stations listening to a automated announcement personally apologising for the delay in one service or another ... and it seems that this is a point of genuine cultural difference between Australia and the UK ... How can a machine express regret? Perhaps it is an apology given in the same spirit as most other courtesies in England. Bland, automatic and meaningless. It has made me conscious of how painfully polite Australians are.

Despite my fixated and relentless interest in the quality and genuineness of customer service, I did manage to experience several good things -

One, an astoundingly good couple of beers and a meal in a 'gastro pub' somewhere near London Bridge Station - as part of the celebrations for my friend Kate's birthday;

Two, the pre-renaissance bits of the National Gallery's collection;

Three; tea in the Wallace Collection Cafe in Manchester Square with friends Nag and Sue;

Four, standing outside the Tate Modern in a freezing wind with an Australian friend who was wearing bright pink earmuffs as a few tiny, delicate snowflakes fell;

Five; seeing the Dan Flavin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery with my friend Lucy, who enabled me to appreciate work that I would have otherwise disregarded.

I guess what I found most interesting about the Dan Flavin's show was watching the people moving about in the space - and the way that the work activates the space as a kind of stage for human movement and interaction. It was also interesting to reflect on the idea that allot of artists only need one idea - for Dan Flavin, it was this thing with the fluorescent tubes, and how the tube is first used as a linear, two dimensional form, and then gradually becomes a barrier across a space. It made me think all kinds of things about light, and corners, and the relationship that these things have to the sacred or the sublime. And you can trace this back to the Constructivist trick of placing abstract works in the corner of the room, a place usually reserved for a religious icon, - or the constructivists generally replacing images or representations of the sacred with pure abstraction ... and the show makes this quite explicit, starting with some early 'icon' works and leading into the works dedicated to Tatlin.

the site for the show is ... here ... http://www.hayward.org.uk/flavin/retrospective.htm

Unfortunately, the strategy of having only one idea doesn't work to Rachel Whiteread's advantage ... the new work commissioned for the Turbine Hall, 'EMBANKMENT' is quite awfully hollow. And the pun is intended, awfully.

There is a link, or a lineage, between one thing and the other - between the works made by people like the Constuctivists who, I believe, or have been told, believed in something and the work made by Dan Flavin to "celebrate empty rooms" or by Rachel Whiteread to celebrate empty boxes. But that isn't really it, I don't have a problem with whatever it is that DF is celebrating - nothing, or something, or something that will remain wholly unkown to us - it is just that the idea of the work as a window to the sublime persists, and I (still) can't find anything in the work to replace it. And I'm afraid that, for me, the work is never just aout itself, it refers to something. So as much as I enjoy the work, its emptiness disturbs me.

What happens then, I feel, is that other agendas colonise the work. Famously, Abstract Expressionism became political during the Cold War as an expression of American "freedom". That's what I worried about as I watched people wandering about in RW's massive installation of (casts of the inside of) empty boxes. They were there for something (an experience of the sublime or the spectacular, perhaps) but after my days of wandering in amongst countless Londoners just struggling to survive, it really was a bread and circuses kind of affair ...

the first of the Netherlands

2006-01-22T19:25:00.000+11:00

the last of Australia

2006-01-22T08:30:00.000+11:00

not the last of Australia, really, but a detail of a photo I asked a friend to take at the airport on my departure for Rotterdam the 14th of January. The shoulders in the foreground are mine and my boyfriend's. I kept thinking of this painting, Ford Maddox Brown's 'the last of england'. It kind of sums up how glum I was feeling at the prospect of leaving my love behind.

I'm now a week into my residency with an artist run organisation in Rotterdam. Have spent the week denying that I have a cold, induced by the airconditioning on Austrian airlines - an airline that distinguishes itself by having the most lovely blankets I have ever seen on an airline. I still wish that I had taken mine with me.