the problems issue
Editorial
Natural Selection Magazine
Issue 6: Problems
Guest-editor: David Hatcher
[email protected] Co-editors: Dan Arps and Gwynneth Porter
[email protected] Contributing editors: James Lynch Proofreader: Totally Anal Ltd. Designer and Dungeon-master: Warren Olds
[email protected] Subscribe for free at www.naturalselection.org.nz
ISSN 1176-6808
www.naturalselection.org.nz
0.2
Issue 6: 2007
Editorial
Natural Selection Magazine
Issue 6: Problems
Guest-editor: David Hatcher
[email protected] Co-editors: Dan Arps and Gwynneth Porter
[email protected] Contributing editors: James Lynch Proofreader: Totally Anal Ltd. Designer and Dungeon-master: Warren Olds
[email protected] Subscribe for free at www.naturalselection.org.nz
ISSN 1176-6808
www.naturalselection.org.nz
0.2
Issue 6: 2007
Contents
........................................ 1
Tessa Laird, “But where is the white monkey?”
Tessa Laird found herself getting quite hot under the collar during a recent trip to Paris. Trauma! The incident involved some white monkeys, or possibly their absence. You decide. The setting was the Musée du Quai Branly. Trauma! As an institution, the MQB is clearly resting far too comfortably on its liberal European laurels. Intrepid as ever, Tessa took a squizz and came up with some simple advice for them which they and their ilk should follow, immediately. ........................................ 2
Dan Arps, “Outreach”
Suburbs are ridden with problems and so are those that seek refuge from their upbringing in them, but it’s not hopeless you know. Get i nvolved! Do something for others. Lift a nger!
Believe in something! Spread the word… Dan Arps, A uckland artist and Natsi co-editor, has been quite taken with these terrible internet documents of human travails and aspirations of the most poignant kind. The vulnerability risked by these souls, and the fan-boy costumes, the hopeful gatherings, the Juliet windows, the weird conjunction of futuristic and the historical (anywhere but here and now?)… Do try this at home. ........................................ 3
Mark von Schlegell, “Robert Smithson SF”
Mark von Schlegell sent us this shocking exposé. Reading between the lines, it appears that Robert Smithson was the secret founder of Scientology, or that the church emerged from an ideological battle between a handful of spaced-out artists, SF writers and camp evangelicals. Is there a difference? Not necessarily, see, and that’s something we don’t know enough about. Except for Dan Graham, he’s got the grass on everything. ........................................ 4
Dane Mitchell, “Sense And Sanitation” The home can be a lthy place, there’s danger lurking on every horizontal surface, your
only hope is eternal vigilance. Thanks to Dane Mitchell’s sensible advice, now you have something to study during those quiet moments you might otherwise spend worrying about whether you should wash your hands, again. We are very pleased to present Dane’s rst
issue of Sense And Sanitation, a cautionary tale. ........................................ 5
Jess Whyte, “This is not Australia”
Jess Whyte sent us a report on the role of the camp and its position as one of the cor nerstones of White Australia’s present operations as a nation-state. You already know it isn’t pretty, here are some of the details. Jess adds her thoughts on bare life and the gure of homo of homo sacer
to those of Agamben, looking at the vulnerable position of the immigrant in contemporary Australia and other societies that consider themselves too civilised to all ow such conditions to develop. ........................................ 6
Layla Rudneva-Mackay, “Education Stories” An audio le! Layla Rudneva-Mackay shares some Education Stories with us. Pay attention!
Especially if you’re a white male middle-class academic working in an art institution in Dunedin. Or a creepy ignorant high school teacher who nds teenage girls make you angry.
........................................ 7
Scott Redford, “PHOTO: Sculpture, Theatre etc…”
Lock up your fathers, Scott Redford is back! Herr Redford was in Melbourne recently for a show called PHOTO: Sculpture, Theatre etc… and like everyone else here, seems to have an axe to grind. Trauma! Finally some honesty about affect and the aesthetics of convenience in contemporary art. You heard it here rst from the Queen of the Gold Coast.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
0.3
Issue 6: 2007
Contents
........................................ 8
Matthew Shannon, “On the capacity for the Queen of Australia to be replaced by a CGI avatar”
Speaking of queens, Matthew Shannon’s been doing some good thinking on how to solve that monarchy problem Australia can’t seem to get past—without cutting of f anybody’s head. It’s really easy to replace her with a CGI avatar actually, as you’ll discover.
........................................ 9
Mercedes Vicente, “Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools (1976—1977)” Sleepwalking backwards into the Web 2.0 world, Natural Selection’s rst ever video-ondemand offerings are here! Mercedes Vicente selected some videos from Darcy Lange’s Work Studies in Schools project so now you can watch this great black and white grainy 70s
footage from the comfort of your own home. Mercedes also gives us some of her thoughts on Darcy Lange’s practice and as a special treat you can read those in Spanish too. And you thought you knew everything there is to know about the DL. .............. ................ ......... 10
Simon Denny & Tahi Moore, “I feel optimistic”
Simon Denny & Tahi Moore are feeling optimistic. There is a lot of optimism in denim these days, for those of you who didn’t know. There is a prize offered too, for the rst reader who
cracks the code. .............. ................ ......... 11
Katie Holten, “Solution”
Our favourite itinerant artist Katie Holten has been trying to solve the time/space/resources/ etc. problem, and here’s one very practical solution she sent in. It has the added bonus of being able to be used to keep little animals warm, or to reduce the harsh effects of frosts on young plants, if you put the off-cuts through a shredder or better still, slice those off-cuts into thin strips by hand. See if you can get all the strips to be exactly the same width with straight edges, without looking. .............. ................ ......... 12
et al., “Maintenance of Social Solidarity – Stage Three”
We asked et al. about it all, and this is what they were willing to reveal at this stage. We couldn’t agree more, and will be distributing the fruits of their research into the maintenance of social solidarity until further notice. If you are German, pay special attention. You may have in fact been studied at close range, without having noticed a thing. .............. ................ ......... 13
The School of Hard Knocks, “Free PhDs, only while stocks last” The School of Hard Knocks is nally here to solve your problems with educational institutions.
Just say no! Instead, have one of ou r free PhDs, available over the internet while stocks last. To enrol, submit your thesis by email (must be at least 25 words in length). We will certify you and send you your PhD when we are satised that you have completed the requirements
of the course. This usually takes about 48 hours. Don’t forget to tell us what you are a specialist in and no, we won’t send you a hard copy. That would be cheating. .............. ................ ......... 14
Joel Mesler, “A soldier’s etiquette”
Joel Mesler’s got an axe to grind too. Here’s his letter to the LA Times about ethnicity, partisan journalism, a soldier’s etiquette. .............. ................ ......... 15
Sean O’Reilly & Rachel Shearer, “Fakerie and other heavens...”
More SF (and lovely midget), this time from Sean O’Reilly and Rachel Shearer. Fakerie and other heavens... In admirably secretive fashion, this biting hoarded missive was published in a sound-ancillary publication that was hard to get and not announced. We felt that it was impossible to blow this work’s cover as it is certainly a veritable ill wind blowing tumble weeds down your post-acid corridors. In other words it is inter-dimensional and slippery enough to not need that much privacy.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
0.4
Issue 6: 2007
Contents
.............. ................ ......... 16
Damien Lawson & Kylie Wilkinson, “empty land”
More bare life – shock! The pretty Antipodes as a veritable nudist colony of postcolonial real (e)state apparatus suck. Damien Lawson & Kylie Wilkinson sent us a brief history of bare life in Australia, a chilling list of Australia’s legislation of bare life. There is a history to the recent political conditions for immigrants and other vulnerable persons in Australia today, and this is a good introduction to it. .............. ................ ......... 17
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Mr. Do Not Attempt To Analyse Your Inner Experiences”
Ludwig Wittgenstein!! Yes, Ludwig sent us a doodle of Mr. Do Not Attempt To Analyse Your Inner Experiences, a kind of colouring in template for under 5s. Give it to your kids, it’s the best advice they may ever get. If you’re over 30 you’re probably old enough to regret not being told this as a child yourself. It’s OK to colour it in yourself, just don’t steal any crayons from under 5s, it’s kind of against the spirit of the exercise. .............. ................ ......... 18
Rob Mckenzie, “In defense of experimentation”
Rob McKenzie’s been thinking about living dangerously and here are his thoughts on some writing that extols-slash-legitimises risk. Drug and consequence takers are posited as the advance scouts that effect societal transformations that chickenshits then sit nervously in, unaware, worrying about household security and premature aging and those freaking irritating luxury problems that keep most people working all the time in order to have money to throw at these “problems”. .............. ................ ......... 19
Spiros Panigirakis, “Baubles, blood and bushes”
And if you didn’t get it by now, here is more. Lots of bare life this issue, spotted here in an oblique weave through some of Spiros Panigirakis’ recent thinking on gay hate crime, art/agitprop, homophobic enculturation in the class-room, sex in bushes and well, see for yourself! .............. ................ ......... 20
Amelia Harris, “Amelia Harris – Fine Art 1998-2005”
Lady Amelia Harris, the patron saint of forgiveness, shows you how it’s done. It’s a true story and we thought you needed to see it all. So next time you’re wondering what to do about a problem large or small, start with forgiveness. She did, and Amelia Harris – Fine Arts 1998- 2005 records the ray of hope that she became for all those hopeless art students, academics and hapless bystanders that took their books back to the Fine Arts library after the due date. If you work in a library please accept a round of applause from the Natural Selection editors and we imagine, most of our readers. Without forgiveness we would all have been more heavily ned than was in fact the case. This is possibly the most important thing you
can learn in a Fine Art library, we’ll tell you that for nothing.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
0.5
Issue 6: 2007
Tessa Laird
But where is the white monkey?
O
Tessa Laird, But where is the white monkey? Detail of Another Museum
n the 20th June, 2006, Jacques Chirac, President
of the Republic of France, opened the Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) in Paris. Designed by architect Jean Nouvel, the museum was built to house the African, Oceanian, American and Asian collections of the Louvre and the Musee de l’Homme, as well as millions of euros worth of
of the Other presents: Te Tari Pekapeka /Department of Bats, Curat ed
newly purchased artefacts. Chirac, apparently a big fan of
African art, saw this as his opportunity to make his mark on Parisian cultural life, as his predecessor Francois Mitterand
museum pays homage to those who have suffered conquest, violence and humiliation.2 One can only ponder if Chirac extends this soothing cultural balm to the victims of French
had inaugurated many signicant cultural sites in the city.
nuclear testing in the Pacic, given that Chirac himself
Chirac’s deference to difference was undoubtedly also
reinstated these tests after their long hiatus on his 1995 election into power.
inspired by the racial riots that rocked Paris last year. One of the museum’s missions was “Dissipating the fogs of
*
ignorance” and promoting the “fragile owers of difference” 1 evoked by Claude Levi-Strauss, who, somewhat incredibly,
Seven days after Chirac’s inauguration of Paris’s newest
was present at the launch of the Theatre that bears his name, at 98 very ripe years of age.
museum, I’m standing in the very long queue in the still partially uncompleted courtyard, reeling from 24 hours of
by Rascar Capac, Principal Sponsor: The Zonge Tribe , Ceramics and
acrylic paintings, dimensions variable, 2006
ying, the Parisian summer heat, and the buzz of voices I Chirac declared, “There is no hierarchy among the arts, just
barely understand. The new museum seems to be the talk of
as there is no hierarchy among peoples.” Added to this, the
the town, eclipsed only by the World Cup. I saw banners for
www.naturalselection.org.nz
1.1
Issue 6: 2007
Musée du Quai Branly at the airport, with the subtitle “Where cultures are in dialogue”. Elsewhere, such as the cover of Télérama magazine, the subtitle is the almost unbelievably embarrassing “The Museum of the Other.”3 I can just catch a glimpse of the photographs by Michael Parekowhai and Fiona Pardington donated by the New Zealand government. They’re over by the restaurant, but much of that area is still under construction, and is cordoned off. It’s the only contemporary work I’ll be seeing today, except for that of Australian Aboriginal painters, and the Trin T. Minh Ha video work which does little more than slightly confuse visitors with a spray of barely visible (in the light) images and texts about self and other as they walk up the ramp on the way to the galleries.
Tessa Laird, The mythical master of all splitting Detail of Another Museum of t he Other presents: Te Tari Pekapeka /Department of Bats, Curated by Rascar Capac, Principal Sponsor: The Zonge Tribe , Ceramics and acrylic paintings, dimensions variable, 2006
Fred Wilson, the American artist who made his name from the astute rearranging of museum set pieces, kicked off his career with Colonial Collection in 1990, a selection of African masks which were blindfolded with either the Tricoleur or the Union Jack, depending on which colonial power (French Vanilla or Plain Vanilla) had asserted its dominance in the region. The wall tags next to these works, rather than tracing a lineage of white collectors, as most museums do, said very simply “Stolen from the Zonge Tribe”4 if that was the tribe in The galleries themselves are beautifully constructed question. Yet the MQB remains quite silent on this issue. – promoting a seamless perambulation that’s supposed to echo the sinuous curves of the Seine. The long hall is * subdivided by a snaking partition which doubles as a place to sit, and there are countless little coves with information I was in Paris to participate in a conference called New kiosks embedded into the walls, featuring texts and videos Zealand, France and the Pacic . Organised by the UK-based in which numerous indigenous folk talk of their lifeways. New Zealand Studies Association, it seemed, like most Still, I couldn’t see any evidence of the conquest, violence conferences, an excuse to junket. Papers on just about any and humiliation that Chirac had mentioned. There was no aspect that connected the three designated topic zones were effort to contextualise these works in a history of colonial accepted, and, apart from the keynotes, they were each 20 plundering, no attempt to explain the trajectory of the minutes long, and ran in multiple streams. Many deliveries objects from their sources to their current resting places. were hurried and plagued with mispronunciations and possibly, misapprehensions. After three days of hearing
www.naturalselection.org.nz
1.2
Issue 6: 2007
Of course, Michael Parekowhai has explored similar territory with Poorman, Beggarman and Thief (1994), in which three dummies modelled on Parekowhai’s father stood sentinel in galleries, looking like the clean cut Maori “entertainers” of the 1950s; and Kapa Haka (2003), in which breglass models of Parekowhai’s security guard brother staunched out gallery visitors, underlining the ethnic divide operating in such low-paid, but dangerous work.5
Europeans ponticate about Katherine Manseld, Janet
Frame, Whale Rider , and the haka, I realised how it felt to be “the other”. I was frustrated by my marginal status – both grateful to be receiving attention from the global “centre”, and suspicious of that attention’s intentions. Not since Paul Gauguin left Paris for Tahiti has Oceania been so hip. Within the last couple of years, shows in London, Paris, New York and Cambridge have proled New Zealand Pasika artists, with attendant programmes,
I wonder about the morality of using the designs I’ve sketched in my notebook for future artworks. I’ve just been reading Anne D’Alleva’s Art of the Pacic where she says that in Papua New Guinea, many of these kinds of ritualistic objects would only be visible to the male initiates of the tribe. And here they are for all the world, or at least the Parisian bourgeoisie, to see.
seminars, and performances. And while it’s exciting that our artists are gaining an international audience, I wonder if it’s not still a case of exoticisation of “the other”. A friend told me a story of how a Maori man with moko was recently using the Paris metro. A local was heard to exclaim, “Oh la la, le nouveau sauvage!” More evidence of such novelty from the periphery was to be found in the location of our conference dinner, at a
It becomes increasingly difcult to look at the funerary
reliquaries. There are human skulls on show from PNG, hard to regard as “art objects” when even reproductions of moko mokai are now jealously guarded in Aotearoa. There’s a section where Papuan fetishes, made with human hair and other highly charged ritual ingredients, look too dangerous to even approach. I don’t believe these objects have l ost their power. power. They were built to terrify, and they still terrify. I hurry on. There’s a giant globe with an interactive map showing the origins of the collections. New Zealand emerges from a soupy water of pixels. I want to lay my hand on it and say “home.” But I don’t want these Europeans to “other” me, either. For as long as I can, I’ll blend in.
restaurant in a chi-chi quarter of Paris, called Kiwi Corner.
Run by enterprising young antipodeans, the menu is a mash-up of New Zealand, Australian, and Pacic avours.
The décor, however, is pure Kiwiana: Maori carvings mingle with scenic photographs. Listening to Fat Freddy’s Drop, and sipping 42 Below vodka, I felt simultaneously soothed and irked by the all-too-neat packaging of my homeland. But my main course was anything but soothing – the vegetarian option was a pastry package lled with kiwifruit and cheese,
which looked, and tasted, like a stomach stuffed with waring savours. It was a reminder that métissage , or cultural fusion, can be a fraught and difcult process.
There’s not much Maori work here, and what there is has no In the Musée du Quai Branly, I walk up the long hall of tribal afliation indicated by the signage. But I do enjoy the Oceanian art. There are amazing pieces from Papua New juxtaposition of a Maori canoe prow with a Moluccan prow Guinea. There’s a Sepik beam oating from the ceiling, known as kora ulu . Somehow, this simple visual comparison covered in heads with round ears and sharp teeth. Having helps to bridge the yawning gaps of Oceania, and categories spent the last few years engaged in studying pan-cultural of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Asian seem arbitrary and imagery of bats, I’m pretty positive that these are bat permeable. spirits, though the signage doesn’t identify them as such. Photography is forbidden – I’ve just asked one of the guards There are a couple of other moments like this – the Siberian in my halting French, so I make a hasty sketch of the bat Shaman costume looks so much like North American Indian beam in my notebook instead. Shaman costumes, that it’s almost as though the Bering Land Bridge happened only yesterday, while California
Almost all the guards are African, and almost all the visitors are white. I keep wondering what the guards really think of this situation, and about the designation of the art of their homelands as “the other”. Do they see themselves as “the other” or are they French or both? Do they feel connected to this art, or is it just a job? Are they bemused by the fascination these artefacts have for those who have little time or respect for real live Africans? The skin colour of the guards puts me in mind of another Fred Wilson work, Guarded View (1991), in which the artist displayed dark-skinned shop dummies in museum guard uniforms. When giving an artist’s talk about the work, Wilson, who is African-American, played a trick on his public. Excusing himself for a minute, he put on a guard’s uniform and came back into the room. No one noticed him, and several complaints were made about his disappearance.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
1.3
Indians wore grass skirts that looked not unlike piupiu. I salivated over a 19th century padded green jacket from the Shan of Myanmar. So very Princess Leia! I saw the white monkey mask of the eminently cool Dogon.6 And I thought I smelt a faint whiff of incense, as if these objects had had some kind of sacred inauguration. I experienced moments of elation and moments of a kind of dread and even nausea (perhaps it was the jetlag). I felt giddy at the enormity and weirdness of it all. Because, no matter the architecture, the multimedia, the MONEY, it was still white people looking at the sacred artefacts of non-white people for a frisson, a tingling of the nerves, a form of entertainment like any other. And while it’s an enormous privilege to be able to view such works, it’s one I’d gladly relinquish for the far greater privilege of witnessing the return of these objects, masterpieces, taonga, to their original people and contexts.
Issue 6: 2007
In the end, I think that the only truly “modern” museum is one that repatriates its collections. Just imagine all the “going home” stories! If each one could be as detailed and
and exhibition fees. ( … )
magnicent as the one elucidated by Paul Tapsell in Pukaki: A Comet Returns , we would be culturally richer, not poorer,
Already it had become more than difcult to procure old
for the process. These are the stories I want to hear.
masks, for Shrobenius and the missionaries had had the good fortune to snap them all up. And so Saif – and the practice is still current – had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight, or sunk into ponds, lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumed later on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These three-yearold masks were said to be charged with the weight of four centuries of civilization . To the credulous customer, the seller pointed out the ravages of time, the malignant worms that had gnawed at these masterpieces imperilled since time immemorial, witness to their prefabricated poor condition.”9
* I once heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a Mexican man who repatriated an ancient codex from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.7 And a story about Native American elders, who, as they were performing a ritualistic dance to entertain the whitefolk at a museum, were secretly squirreling their sacred artefacts into a truck out the back. Then there’s Barry Barclay’s ctional feature Te Rua , about the repatriation of Maori carvings from a German museum.
After watching Artist Unknown , I wrote a letter to the British Museum, enquiring as to the current status of the Benin bronzes, and if there were any plans to repatriate them. It took me over a year to get a reply. Eventually, they posted me a photocopied article from the journal Public Archaeology , Volume 4, Number 1, 2005.
Watching the lm today, there are some cringey moments of
big shoulder pads and earrings, white women lusting after warriors and German curators professing themselves to be experts on things they can’t even pronounce. Well, perhaps very little but the shoulder pads have changed, for certainly, Te Rua is worth watching today. There are some magical moments – the gypsy who cleans the museum’s cabinets hears our Maori hero greeting his ancestors – she is moved to sing a traditional song of her people, for perhaps the rst time in years. I love Te Rua for opening up this crosscultural korero, for recognising that longing and loss is not the prerogative of one people. I got particularly hot under the collar about the issue of repatriation of the Benin bronzes after watching Artist Unknown , an Omnibus documentary from 1995, made for British TV.8 In it, a Londoner of Trinidadian extraction falls in love with a bronze African mask in an antique shop, and tries to trace its lineage by interviewing a series of experts, and visiting the British Museum, before travelling to Benin City, Nigeria. The inside politics of tribal art collection that
this documentary only hints at, are wickedly critiqued in Yambo Ouloguem’s 1968 novel Bound to Violence , where the real German anthropologist and collector Leo Frobenius is thinly disguised as the ultimate exploiter, Shrobenius: “Thus drooling, Shrobenius derived a twofold benet on his return home: on the one hand, he mystied the people of his
own country who in their enthusiasm raised him to a lofty Sorbonnical chair, while on the other hand he exploited the sentimentality of the coons, only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white man that Africa was ‘the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization.’ ( … ) And, shrewd anthropologist that he was, he sold more than thirteen hundred pieces, deriving from the collection he had purchased from Saif and the carloads his disciples had obtained in Nakem free of charge, to the following purveyors of funds: the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, the museums of London, Basel, Munich, Hamburg, and New York. And on hundreds of other pieces he collected rental, reproduction,
www.naturalselection.org.nz
The article in question was called “The encyclopaedic museum: Enlightenment ideals, contemporary realities, A reply from Neil MacGregor and Jonathan Williams”, but I didn’t know what exactly it was a reply to. All I know is that McGregor is the Director of the British Museum while Williams works on that institution’s “international relations”. There’s something simultaneously self-congratulatory and scared about the tone of this “reply”. Try this: “the British Museum is a resounding assertion that truth is a civic virtue that the state should foster”.(57) Orwellian? Moi? “The Museum was conceived for David Hume’s citizen of the world – a member of that international republic of letters which prized the shared pursuit of truth above national particularism. In Hume’s day, the Republic was limited to the educated of Europe and America. It is now worldwide”. (57-58) Don’t they mean it is now open to the educated and wealthy the world over? I don’t see the British Museum as performing a function for the rice-farmers of Laos and the miners of Mali. There is still an elitist assumption at play here, masquerading as equity. But the authors of the article assure their readers that the museum is attending to this issue, not by returning artworks to their rightful owners, but by curating travelling shows! Since the 1970s “we have witnessed the unparalleled sharing of cultural patrimony, as museums in the developed world collaborated to bring great civilizations and great artists to new publics. Two recent examples: the British Museum’s exhibition on memory in world cultures was seen last year by over 1.3 million Japanese, while a selection from its Egyptian collection has now been seen by over 1.5 million North Americans”. How fantastic that the otherwise culturally starved Japanese and North Americans were able to dine out on the collections of the British Museum. What a
1.4
Issue 6: 2007
reversal of expectations and dominant trends! Bravo British Museum for thinking so far out of the box!
combine African ritual gures with educational and political
to Chua, Stan Brakhage had called the 1958 scratch
use this kind of obfuscation, or rather, a clarication of
animati animation on “an “an almost almost almost unbelievably unbeli unbelieva evably bly immense immens immensee masterpiece”. master masterpie piece” ce”..
the complexity of the relationships between the indigenous objects it “owns” and the contemporary Paris it “ serves”.
poster painting, along with the detritus of all world cultures in the form of books, records, t-shirts, and tracts of writing. Perhaps I am being too cruel – the essay then goes on to Every Adéagbo installation requires a long period of research sketch out contacts with Mexico, India, China and various and collection on site, a return to Africa where this material African countries. And then there’s a line, touching at is digested and often re-made, and then a return to the site where more information and material is collected. Finally, rst, which bears closer reading. “When peace returns, the British Museum will resume its longstanding collaborations the combined words and images are assembled into a whole with colleagues in Baghdad and Mosul”. “When peace that is part research library, and part schematic voudoun returns” implies that what’s happening in Iraq is out of mandala of geopolitical structure. Britain’s hands, and doesn’t acknowledge that the British military continue to play an aggressive role in the misery of Sabine Vogel describes rather beautifully Adéagbo’s “archival that country. The British Museum waxes lyrical about the cosmos” in an essay entitled “Creativity”. She says, “At night, global citizens it hopes to create and inspire, but can take no when the exhibition is closed and the lights have gone off, responsibility for carnage, past or present, can only whisper the prepared primate controls the system. The index cards euphemistically about war, and can provide no vehicle for of the ethnological institute y about, the computers go reparations. haywire. Things take on a new order. Somewhere there is the sound of music but there is none. The scales of humanity In this sense I think the museums to be found in the colonial tip. And Georges Adéagbo proceeds to clean up”. 11 outposts, the Museum of Sydney and yes, even Te Papa, offer a far more intelligent and nuanced relationship with I love the image of the museum that plays when the lights the people they service and the stories they tell. The British are out, which reminds me of Michael Taussig quoting Museum and others of its ilk have a reputation based solely Antonin Artaud, that we must “awaken the gods that sleep in on their collections. No wonder they are so loathe to give museums”.12 The image of Adéagbo, however, as some kind them up. of cosmic cleaner, is a culturally loaded one I’d like to avoid. What’s fantastic about Adéagbo is that he is an African who is not a cleaner-away of western trash, but an artist who * makes us reappraise our cultural detritus by looking at it At the conference, the paper I enjoyed the most was by Eu Jin through an African lens. Chua, entitled “Modern Movement, Free Radicals : Len Lye’s Animated Primitivism”. Chua began by screening the lm, Adeagbo’s métissage is as dense and complex as that found one of the liveliest moments of the conference. According in the Paris Metro or in last year’s riots. The MQB could
But as Chua notes, it is the drumming of the Sudanese
Bagirmi tribe that the animations are cut to which “plays no small part in the electrifying liveliness of the lm”. And
he asks, “whether whether Free Radicals is Radicals is a kind of lmic variant of that tendency of the European primitivist to fetishise the authenticity of the state of nature that the uncivilised savage
Notes
supposedly enjoys, and if so, should we denounce this lm,
or can we recuperate it?”
1
Quotes from Chirac’s speech as posted posted by the MQB website,
http://www.quaibranly.fr/index.php?id=933, http://www.quaibranly.fr/inde x.php?id=933, then fed through
Yes, Len Lye’s works and words were “primitivist”, and yes, this is problematic in terms of a contemporary, post-colonial reappraisal (to a certain extent, the animations of Lisa Reihana and Veronica Vaevae have relocated the boundaries of this argument). Personally, I could never denounce Lye or Free Radicals , and watching the jagged, jumpy white lines on an inky ground for the millionth time, I wished for a way to integrate this powerful work into the MQB, instead of the overcooked, insipid Trinh T. Minh Ha video, or even the cool, cerebral photography of Michael Parekowhai. But how to integrate work by a white Westerner into this gallery of tribal artefacts without falling into the trap of MoMA’s much-reviled 1984 Primitivism show, or the similarly suspect, though for different reasons, Parisian Magiciens de La Terre (1989)?10
the (wonderfully questionable) Babelsh translator.
2 3
4
5
My best advice to the MQB would be to hire as their head curator Benin artist Georges Adéagbo. Adéagbo’s installations
www.naturalselection.org.nz
1.5
Riding, Alan, “Imperialist? Moi? Not the Musée du Quai Branly”, New York Times , June 22, 2006, The magazine’s editor, Michel Daubert, opines that all other terms are simply embarrassing: primitive, primordial, savage, Negro, tribal, outsider, opting instead for the weirdly loaded “Other”. Everything I’ve ever read about Colonial Collection cites “Stolen from the Zonge Tribe” as its example. No other tribes are mentioned, and upon attempting to research the Zonge Tribe, no references can be found, except in relation to Wilson’s work. Who are this mysterious tribe? Are they Wilson’s symbol for every plundered indigenous group? The invisibility of those who serve us is thrown into high high relief relief for the traveller. I was appalled that all the maids in my hotel were black, that all the trash collectors were black (whereas, somehow, I am inured to the Maori roadworkers and P.I. cleaners cleaners
Issue 6: 2007
6
back home). I remember asking my maid what the French word for rubbish was, holding up my wastebasket. “La poubelle” she said, with what I took to be weary resignation. Later, I found an image image on the Branly Branly website website which showed showed Jacques Chirac and Ko Anan inspecting the room of masques of masques dogons . I made it into an artwork, adding the question, “But where is the white monkey?” hoping that visitors will nd the simian in Chirac’s pendulous features before they see it pinned
to the wall. It’s a reference to one of my favourite books from childhood, “But where is the green parrot?” 7
I get get so angry when I think about the Spanish Spanish Catholic Catholic zealot-
bigots who burned the Mayan codices. And then one day I had a good look at some images of pre-conquest codices. All the pictures were of burning libraries. 8 I wrote about this in in “pink eye: is this whitefella whitefella dreaming?” A review of Albino , Francis Upritchard and Rohan Wealleans, Wealleans, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, April 2004, published in the South African literary journal Sweet , on-line at: http:// www.substancebooks.co.za/content/view/67/62/ 9 Ouologuem, Yambo, Bound to Violence , London: Heinemann Educational, 1971, pp 95-96 10 The most rollicking debate on the Primitivism show took place in Artforum between a gloriously bitchy Thomas McEvilley and the waspish curator Kirk Varnedoe, and the whole text is reproduced in Beckly, Bill, (ed.), Uncontrollable beauty: toward a new aesthetics , New York: Allworth Press: School of Visual Arts, 1998. McEvilley was subsequently asked to provide a catalogue essay for Magiciens de la Terre , which desperately wanted to differentiate itself from Primitivism . McEvilley then reected on the two shows and their differences in his essay “The global issue,” McEvilley, Thomas, Art & otherness: crisis in cultural identity. Kingston, NY, Documentext/McPherson, 1992 11
Vogel, Vogel, Sabine, “Creativity”, “Creativity”, Eiblymayr, Eiblymayr, Silvia, (Ed.), Georges Adéagbo, Archaeology of Motivations – Re-writing History , Galerie
12
im Taxispalais, Austria, 2001, p. 55. But where is the prepared primate? Artaud, Antonin, from Le Theatre et son double , Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 52, quoted in Taussig, Michael, My Cocaine Museum , University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004, p. xvi.
Even Ben Stiller appears to have read this.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
1.6
Issue 6: 2007
2.1
2.2
Measuring Success 2.3
2.4
2.5
Mark von Schlegell
Robert Smithson SF
T
The best strategy with Graham is to begin, so as soon as he answered I asked:
he dialog of conceptualism and science ction has
been recognized, but is not frequently spoken about, perhaps because of the very healthy “ghettoization”
“What kind of SF did Smithson like?”
with which science ction has defended its libertarian ideals for so long. Science ction remains an explicit theme in today’s art scene, but if today’s artists bring science ction
There was no pause. “Science ction to him was second
ideas into the gallery, museum or art fair, or today’s critics refer cannily to important SF texts, the following is usually
only to gay camp culture, which of all cultures he loved the
the case: science ction is presented on its own terms but
paperback novels. He probably came to them through his hero worship of William S. Burroughs. He loved Burroughs’ SF. He was an incredible reader, devoured everything. SF in those days supplied a lot of titles to addicts. Smithson loved trash culture and cheap paperback covers. He didn’t have favorite SF writers. He loved them all in general and stacked them around his bed.
most. But Smithson liked the trashiest SF novels. Cheap
always only within the larger terms of the art world. The art itself remains, therefore, usually irrelevant to science ction
itself. I assumed this was a natural fact of the cultural landscape. But when Robert Smithson Retrospective, organized by Eugenie Tsai with Connie Butler, opened in Los Angeles in
2004, I began to think differently. It was impossible to miss
His favorite mainstream writer was Borges. But he realized that if you looked at it the right way, Borges wrote science
the SF avor of some of Smithson’s best work – the peculiar
time-traveling of the Hotel Palenque lecture, the avid pursuit of the esthetics of the laws of thermodynamics, the
ction. Jack Smith, Burroughs, Andy Warhol all had a SF interest in the avant-garde. Andy’s favorite movie: Creation of the Humanoids, of 1962, was incredibly important to
“rock sample” oor sculptures and the abiding interest in
importing geological science into the art gallery. Smithson’s most important work, the lm Spiral Jetty (1970) reads like an homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Smithson himself wrote of the lm in terms that recall new wave author Brian Aldiss’ art & time travel classic, Crytopozoic! (1967):
Smithson too. It was actually written by the famous SF writer Jack Williamson and based on his hilarious novel The Humanoids . In the movie the 3rd World War has wiped out most of the Earth. Humanity survives with the help of androids, who are gentle and green and very sensitive. The humans turn against them and try to wipe them out. The
Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. One is transported by this Archeozoic medium into the earliest known geological eras. The movieola becomes a “time machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs.
lm is told from the point of view of the Humanoids. It’s
incredibly campy but dark and biologically profound.
science ction fantasy come to life. As if the work of art itself
He also loved Roger Corman, a big favorite. The shoe-string budgets, the way Corman helped other lm-makers; his Poe movies. Corman was an Aries. Smithson took me to a Corman festival at Kip’s Bay. He loved Vincent Price. Did
were being judged not by what it said about SF but by how it functioned as SF.
you know Vincent Price was a great collector? The best Hollywood collector.”
Furthermore, like newly self-conscious writers of political pop Ursula LeGuin, Philip Dick and Samuel Delaney, Smithson’s work also came with a smooth, hipster sense of hot-shot speculation into real hardcore science.
“Were any other artists into SF at that time? Was it part of the scenes that Smithson hung out in?”
Smithson was everywhere presenting his work as a sort of
“Joan Jonas liked science ction and you can see it in her work. She was married to a science ction writer, in fact. The
I phoned Dan Graham. (I had met Graham long ago when I worked on a construction team overhauling his New York studio. I was in the midst of reading the complete available works of Philip K. Dick at the time, and when Graham walked by, he reminded me of Phil. I asked him if he’d ever read any of the books. Without missing a beat, he stopped and answered,
only other ones I remember being into SF were Smithson, Weiner and me. Weiner loved Michael Moorcock – had copies all over the place. The comical, new-Edwardian thing, the time-travel and humor of Moorcock appealed to him. I loved Dick. You must understand, in those days, the minimalists were the center of things. The minimalists weren’t into SF at all. For them it was theory and the French New Novel. They loved Robbe-Grillet. They liked Alphaville , not loved. They
“I have everything. Even the complete philosophical works.”)
loved Godard – he was a big inuence – but just not that
picture. But some of them liked crime. Actually, Sol LeWitt
www.naturalselection.org.nz
3.1
Issue 6: 2007
loved the crime writer Chester Himes, books like Pinktoes and The Heat’s On.” “Was SF as important an inuence on conceptualism as
French theory?” “It was more inuential. I don’t know Kosuth, but Smithson
wasn’t interested in the French thing. He was interested in Pop culture and Borges and camp. Look at his mirror works – they refer to all these things at once. He always used trashy, mannerist colors. He was always very interested in cheap special effects. In terms of art, Smithson’s hero was Paul Thek. He loved everything Thek came up with. Thek did step mirror pyramids and dinosaurs, lots of speculative productions. And Thek loved science ction, all of it, though
I’m not sure he read L. Ron Hubbard.” “Did Smithson ever try to write science ction?”
“No. He wasn’t a frustrated Faulknerian like you.” “Do you think Spiral Jetty is a work of science ction?”
“Yes. It’s unearthly . A message to alien gods.” Then he hung up. It struck me that that’s exactly what science ction is not. It is often a message from alien gods, but not to them – it is
always directed towards a huma n common reader. In what may have been the high point in the sporadic hyperhistory of western enlightenment, the 1970s, Smithson himself seems to have withdrawn from the need for genre labels. As movements began more and more to label themselves, land artists pursued a romantic environmentalism that Michael Stevenson has shown to be a Tolkienian reaction to modernity. As camp moved to activism, glam to punk, and conceptual art turned increasingly serious and academic, Smithson’s sculpture moved outside of contemporary classication. Insisting on an ever larger popular mechanics
esthetic, it inscribed itself onto the planet’s skin by rented bulldozer in actual local non-art-world environments. Science ction, conceptualism, gay culture, and Borges
and Paul Thek seemed to have joined together at this brief moment on a single shoe-string, to fall away – leaving, for the future, as a last and quiet memorial to all that humanity ever really achieved, a science ction story turning real . Unless….
www.naturalselection.org.nz
3.2
Issue 6: 2007
4.1
Jess Whyte
This is not Australia
This is not Australia. You are not permitted to be here. You cannot leave. The law allows us to detain you until your boat leaves Australia. You cannot enter our country. We have burnt your boat. You cannot leave. Welcome to the camp…
I
n 1992, the Australian Government was forced into the Federal Court to justify its three year internment of a group of Cambodian asylum-seekers. In justication,
Camps, like those in which the Cambodians were held after
their boats were burnt, camps that are still occupied today, are where the life that threatens to undermine the nationstate is captured. Excluded from the nation, yet interned within its territory absolutely exposed to state violence, the life in the camp is bare life. The camp is not a recent phenomenon in Australia’s history: from its origins as a penal colony to the reserves and indenture of the Aborigines Protection Act (1909); from
the Government relied on Section 88 of the Migration Act “Custody of Prohibited Entrant During Stay of Vessel in
Port”; a section, which provided for the temporary detention of stowaways— who were considered to have “not entered Australia” — until such time as the boat on which they had arrived in Australia left the country. Under s88, people who were physically within Australia’s national territory could be detained then disappeared, all without ever being legally considered to have entered the country. Section 88 was
the capture and forced deportation of Pacic Islanders in
the wake of White Australia to the war time detentions of ‘enemy aliens’, the unity of the Australian nation-state has always presupposed the camp. Australia—a nation founded on genocide of an indigenous population—has never been a state where birth and nation coincided precisely, or where citizenship was automatic by virtue of birth. Without easy recourse to the myth of the unity of birth and nation in an eternal national belonging, the Australian nation-state has been in crisis since its inception. The survival of the state has always been premised on the biopolitical capture of bare life. The camp constitutes the nation.
always a law based on a ction, but the work the Government tried to make it do in justifying the indenite detention of the Cambodians went beyond this original ction of ‘not-
Australia.’ In order to justify the detentions, the government argued that the vessels on which the Cambodians arrived
had still not left Australia, and would not be leaving any time soon: the government, after all, had arranged to have them burnt. The boats had not yet left Australia. The detentions would continue until they did. * * In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben suggests that the ferocity with which the nationstate has responded to the claims of refugees is connected to a crisis in the very form of the nation-state. This nation-state, Agamben argues, is founded on the unity of birth-nationterritory. Central to this unity is the immediate passage
* * “Delegates from the various social groups incarcerated at the Woomera Detention Centre met last night (Saturday) to plan a hunger strike in support of the 85 Afghanians (sic) there, many of whom are Hazaras, who are being threatened with forced deportation in the next few weeks, by the Australian Government. It is expected that over 100 detainees will participa te in the hunger strike, which was scheduled to begin today (Sunday). Iranians are taking a stand in solidarity with their brothers from Afghanistan, because they fear that they will be the next to go.” 2
from birth to nation, or the myth that birth in a determined territory is automatically nation. The formula “blood and soil”, which cannot but make us shudder in the wake of National Socialism, has been, since Roman times, a juridical formula by which a citizen is dened—a citizen was one who
was born in a particular territory to citizen parents. If the state responds as it does when faced with asylum seekers, this is because “by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality , they put the originary ction of modern sovereignty into crisis” 1. In the person who has no recourse to citizenship in the nation-state they have ed, and has not yet been granted it in the state they have ed to, we see, for a moment, the pure fact of a birth that
resists subsumption into nation. This is the life that the nation-state cannot tolerate. And so, a fourth element has added itself to the birth-nation-territory nexus: today, the unity of the nation-state is secured only through the camp.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
5.1
In June 2002, as hunger-striking Woomera detainees lay in graves they themselves had dug, life and death entered a zone of indistinction utterly suggestive of Agamben’s bare life. “When some people moved from their graves, another one stayed instead in hole in ground and waiting for their death”3, a detainee described the event. No gure can better evoke the liminal zone of bare life than that of the refugee, “very thin and feeling dizzy”4, who lies day and night in a makeshift grave, demonstrating, and courting, death while struggling for a life which is more than mere life. Yet it is precisely this struggle that punctuates the zone of bare life. In this moment of resistance, detainees refuse their subjection to sovereign power and challenge this power on the very terrain on which it operates: the terrain of death. What does it mean for the one who is already sacer to threaten his own life? For one man, interned in Woomera, the hunger strike
Issue 6: 2007
is a means to “feel human”—“Something controls you all the time”, he said. “With the hunger strike I control myself”5. Paradoxically, by threatening their own lives, detainees regain the control that is lost the moment they are captured in a sovereign ban. No longer simply abandoned to the wishes of the state, they re-grasp their own lives from the ban, retaining the capacity to determine their own fates. “It is a very serious hunger strike,” a detainee said, “f or some it will be to the death.”6
nation state imbues every crevice. The task we are faced with then is one that is modelled on the escape from Woomera and yet recognizes that there is no outside to escape to, no space outside the camp. Such a politics must recognize the futility of appealing to that nation-state which, in a state of perpetual crisis, is evermore reliant on the camp. The struggle against the camp, against the reduction of us all to bare life, can only be a struggle against the state.
If this struggle then occurs on the terrain of death, on the terrain of thanatopolitics , is there a form of struggle that — while still operating on a plane determined by
—— Jess Whyte is a writer and PhD candidate in Monash University’s Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Melbourne Australia.
the biopolitical control that nds its expression in the camp—supersedes this plane, or refuses to be dened solely
by it? For while the terrain of death presents itself as a space where the sacer can remove themselves from the ban and the consecration of their lives to the power of the sovereign, there is only one place to go. “Death”, said Aristotle, “is most frightening because it is a boundary”7. For some in the camps this boundary appears as the only one available, hence the “pervasive belief”, described by a former Woomera psychiatric nurse “that suicide was the only way out.” 8 If bare life is a threshold however, it is not one that is determined entirely by sovereign power. Rather, the threshold is unstable not simply because “politics must again and again enact its internal distinction from bare lif e”,9 but because this movement is confronted again and again by the resistance of those who refuse this distinction, and struggle against the power of the camp, and their subjection to sovereign power within it. Over Easter 2002, this struggle revealed the possibility of another boundary, another way to release oneself from the relation of the sovereign ban. This time the boundary that was crossed was not the blurred boundary separating life in the camps from death, but the razor wire boundary of the camp itself. With the aid of tools and towels, and with the combined strength of those on either side of the fence, the razor wire was cut, and one bar, then another, was levered off, providing just enough space for detainees inside to climb through the hole, hurling themselves through the air into the arms of the protesters below.10 “…on Good Friday people came there and we broke the fence and we came out ,” one of the escapees wrote. “At rst night we was very scared and it was very cold night and we was waiting until 2 o’clock morning and we was happy that we came out. But at last after too much struggle we came out. We nished to listening the abusing and beatings of ACM and their guard with their black stick and we came to city. 11
Notes
1 2
Giorgio Agamben, 1995, p. 131. Dave McKay: “Woomera Hunger Strike: Update from the Refugee Embassy”, Nettime, June 2002, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/ Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0206/msg00156.html (accessed May 28th 2007) 3 Ashraf Shad, “15 Iraqi Refugees Bury Themselves”, Dawn: Internet Edition, 9 March, 2002, http://www.dawn. com/2002/03/09/int4.htm (accessed May 28th 2007) 4 Sadiq Ali, Woomera 2001-2002, Desert Storm , Lowenthal, Whyte et al [Eds], http://www.antimedia.net/desertstorm/contact. shtml (accessed May 28th 2007) 5 In Schwartz, Larry: “A Scar is Born”, The Sunday Age, Melbourne, June 15, 2003, p. 13. 6 Woomera delegate, quoted in, “Woomera Hunger Strike: Update from the Refugee Embassy”, Nettime, June 2002, http:// amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0206/ msg00156.html 7 Aristotle, quoted in Andrew Norris, 2000, p. 38. 8 Glenda Koutroulis, quoted in Penelope Debelle, “Blowing the Whistle on Hidden Suffering in Woomera”, The Age, April 24 2002, http://theage.com.au/articles/2002/04/23/1019441244295. html (accessed May 28th 2007) 9 Andrew Norris, 2000, p. 41. 10 This account is based on my own observations, as a participant, of the Woomera protest, which are recounted at greater length in: “Finding Humanity in Woomera”, ZNet, April 16, 2002, http://www.zmag.org/content/Activism/whyte_woomera.cfm (accessed May 28th 2007) 11 Sadiq Ali, Woomera 2001-2002, Desert Storm, Lowenthal, Whyte et al [Eds], http://www.antimedia.net/desertstorm/contact. shtml (accessed May 28th 2007) 12 Giorgio Agamben, 1995, p. 170.
The city they came to however is no longer the city of classical times. As Agamben says, “there is no return from the camp to classical politics.”12 When the camp is opened, it cannot help but overow its own boundaries, permeating
the outside and blurring the distinction between camp and the city. The overowing of the camp imbues every aspect of
the lives of those who escape—and, living il legally, must live in constant fear of a return to the camp—and of those who are in contact with them. In ‘the city’ the exceptional regime instituted to reinforce the sovereignty of the Australian
www.naturalselection.org.nz
5.2
Issue 6: 2007
Layla Rudneva-Mackay
Education Stories
Click to listen to MP3 audio
www.naturalselection.org.nz
6.1
Issue 6: 2007
Scott Redford
Photo: Sculpture, Theatre etc…
A
s philosophers have told us our making good art out
Scott Redford, Photo: Sculpture, Theatre etc… (2007) Installation
of bad, even horric events comes at a price (let’s call it the Goya: Third of May effect, the Guernica effect). By linking visual fullment to such ‘ne spectacles’ we long
views, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.
ago entered a Faustian pact, and this pact forms the basis of separate from the ‘real’ world. Here perhaps is evidence of much of our (over) lauded western humanity. western art’s ancient links to the concept of the two worlds found in the bible. The scriptures describe two worlds: the The texts I quote in PHOTO: Sculpture, Theatre etc… are present ‘evil’ world we are living in and the world to come. examples of journalism. In each case the writers used poetic Indeed the bible is often absolute and extreme: “Whoever is metaphor to heighten our empathy for the events described. a friend of the world is an enemy of God” (John 2:15). Again In two cases (Hardcore But Beautiful and Vaporize ) the quotes philosophers stress art’s own terrible origins, proposing end the original text with a highly dramatic (manipulative?) that western art ‘began’ with the invention of ancient Greek ourish. We become ‘concerned’ but we also relish our theatre and that all western art may have its genesis in the concern: “We are reminded of the story that Socrates tells beholding of tragedy. in the Republic of the man who, unable to resist the desire to look upon a ghastly scene of mutilated bodies, nally gives in and cries out to his eyes, “There, ye wretches [his own eyes], take your ll of the ne spectacle!” .1
Much art that wants to help the world is based upon an impossible binary, it conceives of itself as belonging to a world
www.naturalselection.org.nz
In much ‘concerned’ contemporary art there is a real inability to bridge a kind of conceptual ‘gap’, and to be honest this work is not so different. Indeed I suspect that within us is a subconscious reluctance to even acknowledge that a gap may exist, because we cannot bridge it. Art cannot do
7.1
anything except perhaps despair, or as Chris McAuliffe put
Issue 6: 2007
it recently: “I think you see a lot of artists who say: I feel
Scott Redford, Photo: Sculpture, Theatre etc… (2007) Installation
despair, I feel a sense of helplessness about what I see going on in the world” .2 Perhaps the urge to infuse art with ‘the
views, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.
political’ is a tactic to overcome this sense of helplessness. Notes
However too much thinking about art today uncritically presents the political as an already known category; a genre like landscape or abstraction, with certain artists consistently deemed ‘always political’. The world of art is too often cast as a kind of separate ‘good’ place where hope, fears and despair are presented in quaint, aesthetically ambient terms. This thinking is academic, normal even. Despair is undeniably useful but only as a beginning point, there is always possibility within any situation: “Aesthetics
1
Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying University of Chicago Press, Chicago &
London 2003 p. 286 2
Corrie Perkin, ‘Age of Aquarius has dawned’ The Australian, 19
3
April 2007 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory Routledge & Kegan, London 1984 pp. 464–470.
can no longer rely on art as a fact. If art is to remain faithful to its concept… it must develop a sense of self-doubt which is born of the moral gap between its continued existence and mankind’s catastrophes, past and future” .3
—— Melbourne, May 2007, with editing and advice from Emily Cormack, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne
www.naturalselection.org.nz
7.2
Issue 6: 2007
Matthew Shannon
On the capacity for the Queen of Australia to be replaced by a CGI avatar
A
s some may know, and some not but that’s ok this isn’t a witch hunt, Queen Elizabeth II is not only the Queen of Great Britain she is also ofcially to be
considered Queen of Australia, she just doesn’t live here or come here very often. She remains the head of the state and is a non-political gure above the parliamentary system. She
has a series of governors, one for each state, and a GovernorGeneral to do the big stuff in Canberra like carrying out her
symbolic duties such as; appointing ministers and judges, dissolving Parliament and giving Royal Assent to legislation. The Governor-General however will only act on his powers under the advice of the Prime Minister of Australia and not who he is supposed to represent, the Queen of Australia, so as far as holding the balance of power, in the event of a rising dictator say, the Queen of Australia is null and void. So can we become a republic? Yes but it often seems too difcult to rewrite Australian law from the top down. I
suggest instead of going through the legal nightmare of trying to restructure the whole state/federal system to become a republic we continue as a constitutional Monarchy. But how I hear you cry will we appoint our own Royal Family? How do we choose? If it was up to the government I’m sure we’d end up with someone like His Excellency Major Philip Michael Jeffery as King, which I for one object to on primarily aesthetic grounds. This is why I propose we design our own Feudal head of state using state of the art CGI and rendering software, just like France’s very own fully
computer generated talk show host ‘Eve’. All the ceremonial, symbolic functions of the head of state could be acted out for television using actors and community volunteers with the Royalty added in Post Production. The Christmas speech could still be written by a team of
speechwriters with a synthesised voice delivering it during lunch on the 25th December. Of course during foreign visits international heads of state would have to agree to be actors in the production of the reception, and if they didn’t we could expel their respective diplomats. For all the controversy this plan may bring there’s one thing to keep in mind, if we do want our own head of state and we can’t bear the complexities of designing a republic, CGI Royalty would
be far cheaper than the real thing.
Image credit: Hao Guo
www.naturalselection.org.nz
8.1
Issue 6: 2007
Mercedes Vicente
Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools (1976—1977)
I
n 1972 Darcy Lange (New Zealand, 1946–2005) started videotaping labour practices in English factories, mines and schools. During the 1970s he extended his documentation of ‘people at work’ to farmers and factory workers in Taranaki, the rural region of New Zealand where he was born. He later aligned himself with Máori activists’ struggles to establish land rights in New Zealand with his ambitious M áo ri Land Project (1977–1981). Lange’s video practice continued a tradition of socially engaged
Ms. Astani’s Upper 5th class viewing tapes, St. Mary’s School, Oxfordshire. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
for social change: …making videos and photography in other people’s areas, as I have done with my art—whether it be walking in their area, entering their houses, absorbing their ideas or recording them on their burial grounds or their places of work—was due to many motives, not all good, I must say—at times it was for my career, at other times in search of a new image for art. But these motives were balanced by the reciprocal respect that caught me as I entered other people’s territories, as I explored those people so they explored me, and we changed together.1
documentary lm and photography, sharing the ideological
objectives of 1930s American FSA photographers Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine, and lmmakers such as Frederick Wiseman. Lange made parallel use of photography, lm and
video, and his restless experimentation with the structural possibilities of both moving and still images aligned him with conceptual and structuralist artists such as Dan Graham. The absence of electronic editing equipment in the early days of video prevented Lange from post-producing tapes into a nished ‘product’ and contributed to his engagement with
the ‘process’ aesthetic that was ascendant in the 1970s. For Lange the capacity for early portable video to provide live and taped feedback—unlike lm or photography—made the
medium a viable tool for criticism and analysis, a catalyst
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Without montage or the use of dramatic sequencing, multiple takes or camera angles, Lange’s videos rely exclusively on a process of slow observation facilitated by long takes recording the actions of their subjects in real time as they perform daily work. The duration of time in which these activities are performed is generally equivalent to that in which they were captured, and to the time required to view them on screen.
9.1
Issue 6: 2007
Focusing on pedagogical practices in the classroom, Lange’s Work Studies in Schools (1976–1977) explored the implications of video for teaching and learning environments. The rst of these studies took place in three Birmingham
schools in 1976. This was followed by further studies in four Oxfordshire schools in 1977. In his Birmingham studies, Lange carefully chose institutions representing different social classes, recording in both public and private schools. He also videotaped a range of school subjects in his examination of teaching methodologies, developing a system to survey the teaching of art, history and science and observing at the time that: …creativity in schools is not necessarily conned just to the art
class… art is important because of its observation of material life. Creativity when applied through music, poetry, art, to life
and work could become a protection against object worship, beyond functionalism. It might help to recreate involvement and creativity within manual work or build non-object recreational expression.2
In his Oxfordshire studies Lange was able to play his recordings back to their subjects for the rst time, recording
teachers in their classrooms and then both teachers’ and students’ reactions as they viewed tapes. The subjects’ reactions became incorporated into the work and guided its development, while the self-reexive process added another
dimension to the studies—Lange’s videotaping was also being declared as work. Lange saw these tapes as ‘ researches’ and ‘an educational process’ rather than nished artworks 3. However, rather than create a structuralist exercise for its own sake, Lange sought to effect change for his subjects. By inviting his subjects to become critical viewers as well, the artist introduced a radical potential for social transformation into his work. This also diminished the extent to which his tapes might be considered an exclusively formal exercise for the benet of art audiences.
In devising this feedback structure, Lange acknowledged the work of Dan Graham and Guy Brett, two gures with
whom he maintained a critical dialogue. Lange formulated the guidelines to his school studies thus: 1. to investigate teaching as work 2. to illustrate the skills of the teacher through vocal and gestural communication with the class and also the class’s response to this. 3. to illustrate the process of teaching and learning in the classroom 4. to illustrate the social breakdown within each class 5. I am particularly concerned to prevent what I make, whether it be photograph or video from becoming an end in itself—not dissimilar to the loved art object 4
Lange countered the techniques used by mass media to Top to Bottom: Ladywood Comprehensive School, Birmingham
inuence and manipulate viewers, instead inviting them
1976; Mr. Hughs, Leabank Junior School, Birmingham; Chris Wright
to freely select, compare and interpret his material at will. Intended as a survey of a range of teachers, schools and subjects, Lange’s tapes cast teaching as a socially constructed and constructive process without overtly assigning a value to
viewing tapes, Cheney Upper School, Oxfordshire 1977; Mr. Brenton’s mathematics class, Ladywood Comprehensive School, Birmingham.
All images courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
9.2
Issue 6: 2007
these practices. Lange considered the process of education to be “subtly but totally political”, and “concerned with the establishment of values and parameters of behaviour; its criteria of success are mostly orientated towards middle class academic aspirations”.5 He later recalled the work of Roger Perks in Birmingham during the taping of Work Studies in Schools :
Eric Spencer with his art class viewing tapes, Cheney Upper School,
Oxfordshire 1977. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
Notes
A selection of material from Darcy Lange’s Work Studies in Schools tapes can be viewed at: www.naturalselection.org.nz/darcylange/
Roger was head of Ladywood Comprehensive and along with
a good social and political understanding was enormously successful in dealing with the possibly dangerous potential of various racial groups in the school. In fact he turned this completely around the other way into a positive force. His lesson on George Orwell was followed by a discussion with the class which introduced me to the kind of work he was doing with the students. Taking the senior students around old people’s homes and to hospitals integrated the philosophy of Orwell with the problems faced by young people in British cities at the time. Had there been more people like Roger Perks, fewer racial confrontations would have occurred in the area later.6
1 2
3 4 5 6
Darcy Lange, cited in: Land, Work, People , Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 1985 Darcy Lange, “To Effect a Truthful Study of Work in Schools”, in: Work Studies in Schools—Darcy Lange (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1977) p. 18. Guy Brett, “Introduction” in: Work Studies in Schools—Darcy Lange ” (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1977) p. 3. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 18. Darcy Lange, in: Video Art (Auckland: The Department of Film, Television & Media Studies, University of Auckland, 2001), pp. 72–75.
Exhibited for the rst time at the Museum of Modern Art
Oxford in 1977, Lange’s studies were set up in separate viewing rooms to challenge the viewer’s perceptions and expectations of them as works of art.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
9.3
Issue 6: 2007
Mercedes Vicente
Darcy Lange: Estudios del trabajo en los colegios (1976-1977)
E
n 1972 Darcy Lange (Nueva Zelanda, 19462005) comenzó a grabar en video el trabajo en fábricas, minas y colegios de Inglaterra y continuó en la década de los setenta documentando “gente en el trabajo” centrándose en granjeros y empleados de fábrica en Taranaki, la región rural de Nueva Zelanda en la que nació el artista. Luego se unió a las causas de los activistas Maoríes en sus esfuerzos por establecer los derechos sobre
Mr. Trott’s literature class, King Edward’s School, Birmingham. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
la tierra, realizando el ambicioso proyecto videográco Maori Land Project (Proyecto de Tierra Maorí) (1977-1981). La obra
crítica y análisis y, en denitiva, un catalizador potencial
en los setenta. Para Lange el que el video portátil ofreciese la oportunidad única de visualizar la imagen en vivo e inmediatamente, no factible en el cine o la fotografía, convertía a este medio en una importante herramienta de
de Lange se inscribe en la tradición del documental social del cine y la fotografía, compartiendo la visión ideológica de los fotógrafos americanos de la FSA de los años treinta tales como Dorothea Lange y Lewis Hine, y de cineastas como Frederick Wiseman. De forma semejante, su ejercicio de la fotografía, cine y el video paralelos y su constante experimentación con las posibilidades estructurales de la imagen en movimiento e inmóvil, le asociaron con artistas conceptuales y estructurales tales como Dan Graham.
para el cambio social: hacer videos y fotografías en territorios de otra gente, como he hecho en mi arte – fuese paseando en su zona, entrando en sus casas, absorbiendo sus ideas o grabándoles en sus lugares de sepultura o de trabajo – fue debido a varios motivos, no todos loables, todo hay que decir – en ocasiones fue para mi carrera artística, en otras buscando una imagen nueva en el arte. Pero estos motivos se equilibraban por un respeto mutuo, que me cautivó al entrar en los territorios de esas gentes, y así como yo les examiné también ellos me examinaron a mí, y en denitiva
La inexistencia de equipo electrónico de edición en la etapa inicial del video previno que Lange editase sus cintas convirtiéndolas en trabajos “acabados”, desarrollando y contribuyendo así a una estética procesual que despuntaba
www.naturalselection.org.nz
cambiamos juntos.
En ausencia del montaje o del uso de secuencias dramáticas, toma múltiple o ángulos de cámara, los videos de Lange se
9.4
Issue 6: 2007
relegan exclusivamente en un proceso de observación lenta facilitado por la toma larga, grabando la acción de sus protagonistas en tiempo real mientras éstos realizaban sus tareas de trabajo diarias, siendo equivalente la duración de estas tareas al tiempo que tomaba el capturarlas en video y el verlas en la pantalla.
Peter Garwood with his 5th year O level history class, Banbury School, Oxfordshire. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
práctica más de trabajo. Lange concibió estos videos como ‘investigaciones’ y como ‘un proceso educativo’ en lugar de trabajos acabados, sin entenderlos por otro lado como meros ejercicios estructuralistas sino siempre con una clara intención de efectuar un cambio para sus sujetos. Al incentivar a sus sujetos a ser críticos, el artista introducía un elemento potencial radical de transformación social en su trabajo, e impedía el caer en puro formalismo y que
Centrándose en la labor pedagógica que tiene lugar en la
sala escolar, los Estudios de trabajo en los colegios (197677) de Lange examina las implicaciones del video en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje. El primero de estos estudios fue realizado en tres colegios de la ciudad de Birmingham en 1976 y fue seguido en 1977 por estudios similares llevados a cabo en cuatro colegios de Oxfordshire. En los trabajos de Birmingham, Lange escogió cuidadosamente las instituciones
éstos fuesen disfrutados para el benecio exclusivo de la
audiencia del arte. Lange reconoció el papel que jugaron en la concepción de la estructura de estos trabajos Dan Graham y Guy Brett,
a n de representar las diferentes clases sociales, grabando
tanto en escuelas públicas como privadas. También grabó diferentes materias escolares haciendo un examen de las metodologías didácticas mediante un sistema que desarrolló centrado en la enseñanza del arte, la historia y las ciencias. Éste le llevó a concluir que:
dos guras con quien el artista mantuvo un diálogo crítico.
Lange formuló las directrices de los estudios en colegios como sigue: 1. investigar la enseñanza como un trabajo 2. ilustrar las habilidades del/la profesor/a mediante su comunicación verbal y corporal con la clase y la respuesta de la cla se a sus dotes como profesor. 3. ilustrar el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje en la clase 4. ilustrar la estructura social implícita en cada clase 5. en particular, estoy interesado en prevenir que lo que hago, sea en fotograa o en video, se convierta en el único objetivo, no de forma diferente al objeto de arte.
…la creatividad en los colegios no se limita necesariamente a la enseñanza del arte… el arte es importante por ser una observación de la vida material. La creatividad, cuando es empleada a través de la música, la poesía, el arte, en la vida y el trabajo, puede resultar una prevención contra la adoración al objeto de arte, más allá del funcionalismo. Puede ayudar a potenciar la participación y la creatividad en el trabajo manual o crear una expresión recreacional no vinculada al objeto.
En los estudios de Oxfordshire, Lange tuvo por vez primera la ocasión de mostrar sus cintas a los sujetos de estos estudios, grabando primero a los profesores mientras daban sus clases, seguido de las reacciones de éstos y de sus estudiantes tras verse en las grabaciones. Estas reacciones no sólo se incorporaron a la obra sino que también
Lange contrarrestó las técnicas usadas por los medios de comunicación masivos que buscaban inuir y manipular
a la audiencia, invitando en cambio a que su público seleccionase, comparase e interpretase el material a su gusto. Contemplado como un estudio comparativo de profesores,
colegios y materias escolares, las cintas de video de Lange presentan la enseñanza como una actividad socialmente construida y como un proceso constructivo sin asignarle abiertamente un valor a estas prácticas. Lange consideraba
guiaron su desarrollo, conriéndole con este proceso de autorreexión una dimensión adicional a estos estudios:
la propuesta de la actividad del video de Lange como una
www.naturalselection.org.nz
9.5
Issue 6: 2007
la educación como un proceso “sutil y totalmente político” y “preocupado por establecer valores y parámetros de conducta; su criterio de éxito principalmente orientado hacia las aspiraciones académicas de la clase media”. Más adelante recuerda a Roger Perks durante la grabación de los estudios en Birmingham:
Ms. Astani’s chemistry class, St. Mary’s School, Oxfordshire. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
Roger era el director de la Ladywood Comprehensive y aparte de
su buen juicio social y político, manejó con gran éxito el peligro implícito que conllevaba la relación entre los diferentes grupos raciales de este colegio. De hecho consiguió todo lo contrario, hacer de esto una fuerza positiva. Sus lecciones sobre George Orwell eran seguidas de una discusión con la clase, la cual me introdujo al trabajo que realizaba Roger con sus estudiantes. El llevar a sus estudiantes superiores a asilos y hospitales integraba la losofía de Orwell con los problemas con que se enfrentaban
los jóvenes en las ciudades británicas de entonces. Si hubiese existido más gente como Roger Perks, menos enfrentamientos raciales habrían acontecido en esa zona más tarde.
Estos estudios fueron mostrados por primera vez en el Museum of Modern Art Oxford en 1977 en salas separadas para cuestionar la percepción y expectativas del espectador y prevenir que fuesen consideradas como obras de arte.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
9.6
Issue 6: 2007
10.1
10.2
10.3
10.4
11.1
12.1
12.2
12.3
12.4
12.5
12.6
Natural Selection Founded Two Thousand and Four
On the nomination of the Faculty of the School of Hard Knocks the powers that be confer the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy upon
Firstname Lastname for satisfactory completion of the prescribed curriculum and examinations as set forth in
Insert Faculty/Specialty With all the rights, honours, and privileges pertaining thereto, granted at Howe Street, Freeman’s Bay, in the city of Auckland on this [insert da ] da of [insert month], two thousand and seven.
GERONIMO BOOTS
NOBEL DYNAMITE
D. NOMINATOR
IZZY BENT
14.1
Sean O’Reilly & Rachel Shearer
Fakeries…and other heavens.
1. Northern Soul 2. On the pattern1 of the innitesimal
seemed as if she were etching each word into the windscreen with a compass, a mouth so painedly angular.
We were led into the basement of the power station’s central
‘Do you know, what is the planetesimal?’ ‘Is it a measure of scale?’ 2
tower. A brutalist décor, the kind you do not nd in magazines, dissolving everything in a deep faded blue. Suspended oors,
glassed in, concentrically arranged around a deep central space. A oor like still water reected the commanding glow of what appeared at rst to be a control room, in fact a
scale model of the entire plant. Its dimensions suggestive of important men, their faces in darkness above the diorama’s edges, men now gone, their distance echoing in the bleached sunless photos hanging, barely, in the visitor’s centre. Our guide explained in front of a console of buttons, lighting up each sector, with barely any effort giving an outline of purpose and history. She described large distances and walked us through lethal rooms indifferent to human frail ty. A secondary stage initiated, lights in systematic unison. Among the small group a momentary excitement fades as the possibility of glimpsing the actual power is overshadowed by the diagrammatic. Later Theia recalls having bouts of vague na usea prior to the visit, the attack itself she describes as a pause in her vision, She said the guide’s voice grew somniferous repeating the brochure in Italian, she stared harder at the sequenced congurations of lights and locations. As her mind expertly
worked through the intricate circuit plans the sequence froze
Though we both wished for silence the present became laden with projection. Theia seemed to be stuck at a point between cold logic and a displaced personality, in this state she shone electrically. ‘No, it is what a planet is before it becomes a planet…’ She struggled to nd words I could understand. 3 I tried to imagine a proto planet, Theia balled her sts and gestured
as if they were in orbit around each other. ‘These two objects exist in relation. At some point, a catastrophic collision’, her hands sprung open, how delicate they were. In the wake of this catastrophe you have dust and bigger particles which are possibly planetesimal, it is the rst grain
of planet data in an accretion of disclike and planar data, the rst stone of a lapidary 4 whose multi valent components each with umbra.’ 5
She had lost us both Silence,
in a pattern oating off in retinal burn. While a stout woman in green waved the paraphernalia of inappropriate rst aid
Self-misting, the glass and plastic of the interior became less
over her very still, sack-like body, Theia was experiencing a continuance beyond the onset of unconsciousness.
reective. The language of breath installed itself securely. Using her smallest ngertip, seven points appeared in
Noticing that something was dreadfully amiss was the last thing she remembered before waking on the oor. Having never lost her exile instincts, ailing at the would-be medic,
we had beaten a swift retreat to the car park. In our dust, a room of shaking heads, ‘such a rude girl, and we were only trying to help.’ Moving slightly too fast down back roads, She refused to use a seat belt. The run of her heel across the dash, a direct
the passenger window. Her voice had returned with the warmth ‘even these theoretical points are communicating to each other their separateness. The traces of connection to their shared existence disappear like wiring steeped in acids. Denite signals but travelling on the ghost of circuits,
‘it sounds like you are still in that room’. ‘That room was terrible wasn’t it…why do they let people in there?’
challenge to velocity. Conversation minimal, though I was
glad of it, her voice made a frightening appearance, and it
2
1
3 4
Propose a system that exploits a fundamental aspect of the material (silence as material), its inertia and stableness in order to illuminate the unexpected spaces that the object itself creates and by divergent technological means a production of other objects, a ghost image.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
5
15.1
A graduated line on a map/chart, plan, photograph, or mosaic, by means of which actual ground distances may be determined. Having initiated a program of self analysis in early February. The beyond godlike task of lithic assemblage, it is no wonder all kinds of gods appeared, themselves in stone. Or possible difference between silence and an absence of sound
Issue 6: 2007
‘Yes, maybe we overstepped the mark on thi s one’.6
the calming inuence.8
The Seiko set into the dash r ead ve minutes faster than the upside down wristwatch. Theia had the ngers of her right
hand pressed to her forehead, obscuring her face from my view. I could not pinpoint the reection of her gaze, open and
undefended as if I were sleeping. I remember reaching the motor lodge as western ranges blocked out the sun. We drew up to cinder block and modular accommodation, the duty manager had left keys under a sign that read ‘Game room, Spa-Pool, T.V.’ and no one was around. The rooms were dustless, with the presence of refrigerated long life milk. Out through oxidising sliders to an unbroken view of the pacic. High cloud registered green
from the watery, sunset horizon. Night stepped out of the ocean with a dry southerly and the breakers were lighting their own way into the sand dunes, white without a trace of effervescence. Theia’s room was the exact mirror of mine, true seventies Serialism. On the second oor, the ceiling caught a blueness
emitted by the Plant’s main generator, over a hundred miles away and lling everything with a distant heat.
While the sectioned spaces drove me from room to room as if seeking an escape, Theia was being shaken back from the lulling embrace of the seaborne night by an abundance of light pollution. She had lost her sunglasses.7 Silence would be broken. Though before the next word arrived, as I reached for a grey, slightly shabby, suit hanging
‘The voices are trying to tell you of their bodiless state, nobody is listening though they are a wake everywhere’ ‘What medicines?’ ‘sleepless’ We sat in two unravelling plastic chairs and watched the sea, or at least the blackness from where the sound of surf came, reassuring us that it had not stood up with the night and walked off over the ranges. Still, there was an oil y blackness, of possibility, or presence of a body strong enough to haul on the golden chain and drag up a monster with an appetite for sinister power plants, with a girth wider than night, capable of devouring what the night could not. It became so dark and still, Theia disappeared from me in a way less like mergence with shadows than an overlaying of many shadows. Somewhere out in the darkness a surface had shifted and begun reecting light into the room. Slowly this light etched out her stillness. In the ash of illumination
as I turned on a desk lamp, she appeared to be wearing a veil of spider silk, as if she had walked through an attic space taken over with orb webs. This illusion was momentary as her gravity re-entered along with the threat of her voice. * The planetesimal…Place d’italie-les gobelins-9
intersections-optical cluster-binary cluster, or the dialogue between stars.
inexplicably on the shower rail. It disappeared in my ngertips
and I let out an alarmed squeal. Well-planned rum solved the problems of moments. Theia turned on the radiogram
The projection of lines from point to point incidentally strands together a theoretic nest of intersections, eclipses
bed head, it warmed and something like peri Como emerged.
and inuences, while at a structural level, the processes of
This did nothing for the atmosphere. Our thoughts were drawn back to dark currents, the temperature of sharks.
accretion, coagulation and accumulation work to produce something like a roomful of orb webs. The spiders rapidly spinning around a central axis, this action is elemental,
Theia nally broke, her voice made of sand. ‘This music is
almost electrical. Spider in science ction and space, arcade
so old’. Me, tripping over the shoe holder, ‘we might have to
games rock musicals.
nd another channel’. ‘No, It is the only channel and besides
it is there whether this machine is off or on’. I am worried by her excitement, me ‘I’ll turn it off at the wall’. It was her turn to practice calm. ‘There are so many voices, how many times they have sung this song. The perfect tune for vapours.’ Why was it that I could not bear to hear her speak? Attempting to derail her train of thought I asked, ‘You do not have cigarettes by any chance?’ Russian, the kind you have to snap the lter before you
smoke, she passes one over with concentration unbroken. ‘This is no longer a song. It is a space inhabited by the
The spider’s10 work produces architecture beyond the human. The web’s lightness belies its ability to command a space. It represents an understanding of space. Are there layers of work that we cannot see? Looking into a funnel web could be like staring through the eye of a miniature tor nado. We leave the scientic 11 to include sensation… * Does intuitive composition locate truer emotional responses than a precise mapping 12 of sounds?
bodiless. It scares me’. Clearly we were taking turns at being
6
Later, Theia’s report to the committee did nothing to quell
8 9 10
Spider in science ction and space, arcade games, rock
11 12
musicals. If only to escape the imaginary. Sound as map—a) overmapping B) inter mapping.
the crisis of a scientic project crumbling under the weight of conicting data.
7
Fragment (consider revising)
www.naturalselection.org.nz
15.2
‘I am remembering summer Past marker
Issue 6: 2007
Or an overlaying of maps, the replicate star cluster resembles a navigational device, universal in its applicability as a key. There are two actions, one of specic non-specicity 13, the other of disintegration. The mapping of pieces and the re- piecing of projects, resulting in a mass of webs, a complex of complexes.
* LM:‘The material is fragmented and (re) organized, permitting a non-linear mind-set.’ SF: ‘Or is it that a linear mindset is disturbed through fragmentation and reorganization of sound. LM:‘Melodic gestures are to be reduced to a minimum so that they are more a trace of melody.’ SF: ‘Instead of the word ghost could we say ‘distant signal of unknown origin LM: ‘…or that the sounds are clustered like stars in the sky, like crystalline structures, crystal systems, patterns of cells, white light’ SF: ‘… the trace of a navigational key and marker of sidereal time.’ LM: ‘Sounds are decomposed into many smaller components or grains, for the purpose of processing by reordering. SF: ‘By reducing the traditional notions to grains of data they become a Sand-like after image of the original, now sectioned, melody. In drift.’ LM: ‘Exactly, electronic thinking, and a slight shift of my wrist and ngers.
13
Guides, keys, directions. The precisian utility of a point of light xed and moving in relation to other points of light, superimposed on a ‘ground’. Non specic in the sense of this
preciseness.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
15.3
Issue 6: 2007
Damien Lawson & Kylie Wilkinson
empty land
1914 Internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in camps around
1788 Convict transportation to Australia begins
Australia begins. Initially only those born in countries at 1833 Port Arthur convict prison opened in Tasmania, one of war with Australia are classed as enemy aliens, but later this the rst sensory deprivation prisons in the world. is expanded to include people of enemy nations who were naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants 1861 Law passed banning the ‘naturalisation’ of Chinese of migrants born in enemy nations and others who are people who wish to become citizens of NSW. thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security. 1917 Referendum to introduce military conscription fails.
1868 Convict transportation to Australia ends. 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of
Opium Act allows the controlled use of Aboriginal people for pastoral labor.
1918 Palm Island Aboriginal settlement established on the advice of Chief Protector J.W. Bleakley as a reserve that would be ideal for the connement of ‘the individuals we
want to punish’. 1901 Immigration Restriction Act and the Pacic Islander Labourers Act are some of the rst laws to pass the new
Australian Parliament implementing the White Australia Policy.
1929 A number of Commonwealth Ministers publicly propose
their departments should construct a complex formal caste system based on categories: ‘full blood’, ‘mulatto’, quadroon’, and ‘half caste’.
1911 A Commonwealth act places Aborigines and ‘half
castes’ 18 years and under automatically under the protection of the Aboriginal Protector. They are forbidden to marry non-aborigines.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
1933 A proposal for Aborigines to be represented in the Commonwealth parliament is tabled in the form of a petition
from South Australian churches and public organizations. A
16.1
Issue 6: 2007
1938 Cabinet submission from the Minister for the Interior,
J. McEwan, recommends that no action be taken.
Between 1995 and 2000, women prisoners provide $5
million in labour for various projects in western Queensland communities.
1936 NSW Aborigines Protection Act amended to give the Aboriginal Protection Board the power for the rst time to conne people against their will. After previously dening
only those who are of ‘predominantly Aboriginal blood’ as Aboriginal, the board now states that anyone who was deemed to have ‘any Aboriginal blood’ could be placed under its control. 1937 A.O. Neville, Western Australian Protector of Aborigines,
1996 High Court nds the preventive detention of Greg Kable under the Community Protection Act 1994 (NSW) to
be unconstitutional. 1997 The Bringing them Home report nds that a ‘stolen
generation’ exists amongst Australian indigenous people who were subject to forced removal from their families by authorities.
declares: ‘Are we to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our
1999 Woomera Immigration Detention Centre in the South
white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?’
Australia desert opens. By the time of its closure in 2003 over 3000 people are imprisoned; the size of each room 8 ft by 10 ft.
1939 National security internment begins again. Most
of those interned are of German, Italian and Japanese origin including many born in Australia. Others classed as enemy aliens include people from Palestine, Iran, the Straits Settlements, the Netherlands East Indies and New
2001 Military Special Forces board and detain refugees on
Norwegian vessel Tampa rescued at sea from their sinking vessel. The refugees are subsequently taken to Nauru and Manus Island, PNG and detained.
Caledonia. 1951 The United Nations Convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees is approved at a special United Nations conference on July 28 1951. 1969 Court rules that abortion is considered legal if
necessary to preserve the woman from a serious danger to her life or health – beyond the normal dangers of pregnancy and childbirth – that would result if the pregnancy continued, and is not disproportionate to the danger being averted.
2002 Protesters and detainees break down fences at Woomera Immigration Detention Centre and 11 detainees
escape. 2002 Australia votes against the strengthening of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. 2002 Anti-Terror laws inscribe terrorism into law and allow
the banning of terrorist organizations 2003 Intelligence agencies given powers to detain people for
1980 The world’s third IVF baby, Candice Reed born on
7 days for the purposes of collecting information.
June 23 in Melbourne. 2003 Number of un-sentenced female prisoners in Australia 1987 Jika Jika, a climate control pre-formed concrete high
increases from 15% (1993) to 25%.
security unit in Pentridge Prison, is closed after the prisoners 2005 Preventive detention powers given to police to detain
set it on re, four of whom died.
people for up to two weeks to prevent a terrorist threat. 1990 Gary David indenitely detained under the preventive detention provisions of the Community Protection Act 1990
Control orders allow indenite house arrest.
(Vic).
2005 public debate on torture takes place with academics, military spokespeople and police ofcials discussing the
1992 The Migration Act requires that all unlawful non-
merit of torture.
citizens should be detained and should be held in detention until granted a visa or removed from the country.
2006 Local shires are encouraged to submit expressions
1993 Gary David dies of peritonitis caused by self-inicted
of interest in establishing a female prison work camp for northern Queensland.
wounds after 33 years of internment. 2006 Bill to remove the power of the health minister to veto 1994 David Kang res a starter pistol at Prince Charles protesting the indenite detention of Cambodian boat people.
the use of abortion drugs passes Parliament.
Kang described immigration detention as ‘concentration camps’.
2006 Parliament debates embryonic stem cell research.
1995 Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 legalises
Euthanasia in the Northern Territory, subsequently vetoed by the Federal Government.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
16.2
Issue 6: 2007
Mr. Do Not Attempt To Analyse Your Inner Experiences
17.1
Rob Mckenzie
In defense of experimentation
I
’ve been working on a project about artext , a magazine founded in Melbourne in 1981. Although I’ve read a lot of the magazine, it is amazing how much I missed. As I sat and catalogued the contents I came across two articles
The discourse around drug abuse seems to engender hysteria not dissimilar to that of AIDS, and where the drug is
in particular that attracted my attention. The rst of the
assumed. This can in part be blamed on a lack of research into the creation that drug abuse has engineered. Over the last two or three months I’ve had a number of conversations about drug use, and what it is. Outside the narrow parameters of ‘fucked up’ or ‘high’, there seems
articles, “Body Fluids” by Didier Gille and Isabelle Stengers, was published in issue 26 in 1987 and translated by Paul Foss. The second article was written by Foss and printed in issue 71 in 2001, a gap of sixteen years. Foss took over as editor of artext from Paul Taylor in 1984 and worked as the editor and publisher until 2002 (he now runs artUS ). Titled “Phantasm: No Punding Zone”, his essay is almost invisible. It is not entered on the contents and it occupies only a double page spread. These essays seemed to be about something similar, companions. Gille and Stengers wrote “Body Fluids” in the beginning years of the AIDS crisis. The uncertainty surrounding the disease caused hysteria and fear. As they note, people infected with the virus instantly became “a member of the menacing hoards”. Infection swiftly and automatically transformed an individual from comrade to enemy. So-called risk groups such as homosexuals and intravenous drug users were vilied. Their supposed transgressions which had ‘allowed’
the disease to come into being, and then to spread, came under scrutiny. Rebuking this prejudice, Gille and Stengers argued that disease is a by-product of experimentation and change, and, perhaps, an unfortunate but necessary accompaniment to social and political transformation. They write that “explorations, conquests, commercial ventures and changes in lifestyle punctuating the history of mankind were accompanied, like some clandestine understudy, by the history of epidemics”. Gille and Stengers highlight a grave misunderstanding. They make the case that rather than being the cause, the person with the disease is the discoverer. “[The] so-called risk groups are in a sense the ‘advance scouts’, the rst to
be stricken by a danger threatening everyone, but also who can report it and alert others to it”. In this role, like the explorer reporting back the menace of wild animals, those who take the risk of dangerous experimentation do so for a reason. They are looking for fertile ground, new ways of living, ways that might or might not be more productive. In this regard we should applaud those living dangerously. This ideation of risk makes possible a far more productive, and I believe optimistic, relationship to the experience of danger and death. As Gille and Stengers proclaim – “we can recognise, down through the ages, the subversive insistence of this question of those who agree to expose their body to danger, not in the name of a country, religion or conviction, but for an abstract, faceless idea”.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
administered intravenously, these realms meet. The ndings of a cost-benet analysis of drug abuse are all too readily
to be difculty in theorising the experience. No one seems
to address what is produced through this activity, what it is that makes it such a foundational or instrumental experience. Amongst friends, acquaintances and colleagues it has been discussed as many things; an alternative to the banality of suburbia, another option to all those ‘options’, a different way to inhabit time, a pain killer. And I imagine it is all these things and probably more. In “Phantasm: No Punding Zone”, Foss argues that drug abuse is a “totally aphasic, anoetic production”. This might explain why it is so difcult to describe what is produced
through amateur pharmacological experimentation. At the edge of consciousness, this almost unthinkable production lies outside a classical understanding of what we aim to ‘achieve’. Foss points to “the advantages (and possible abuses) of the determination of ‘speed freaks’ to derange their senses as far from higher cognitive functioning as inhumanly possible”. What is it that might be gained through this irtation with mental dysfunction? To use the
example of methamphetamine, where long term abuse leads to a vegetable mental state, what might be learnt from an insight into this degradation or rearrangement of the human cognitive function? Foss suggests a methodology for the analysis of the productivity of drug abuse. He argues that “[only] through the speculative reconstruction of narcotic rapture can its monumental successes and failures be read”. Rather than the sober recollection of narcotic experience, perhaps we can try and imagine the experience as it is, not as it was. The ‘hallucinatory body’ of drug abuse is not a fantasy but a reality, and perhaps we need the possibilities of this body. What these articles by Gille, Stengers and Foss offer is legitimacy for risk. We can eschew hysteria and fear. We can avoid the useless dualisms of healthy vs. unhealthy or good vs. bad, and the untenable proposal of cost-benet analysis.
We can then address without constraint the pressing and unavoidable concern – what has been made, what can we make and what will we make through dangerous living?
18.1
Issue 6: 2007
19.1
20.1
20.2
20.3
20.4
20.5
20.6
20.7
20.8
20.9
20.10
20.11
20.12
20.13
20.14
20.15
20.16
20.17
20.18
20.19
20.20
20.21
20.22
20.23
20.24
20.25
20.26
20.27
