Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Mounted Branch



This poor plinth, one pillar of the art world, was found hiding in the bin behind the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Maybe this itself was an artist's installation, which the saving of the poor plinth ruined (one need only place the dumpster and it's contents inside the gallery, and of course be an artist, for such to become art). Be that as it may, this plinth and its surrounds bewitched us with the presence of Robert Morris, and soon we could not fathom where the art began and the body ended. (The Mounted Branch is, of course, the Mounted Police Barracks across the road from ACCA and the Victorian College of the Arts... necessary to keep in check the revolutionary nature of contemporary art)



In this photo you can see how the act of being luggage at a tramstop has been transformed into a mysterious art object.



Here a waiting commuter has sacrificed their inviolable corporeality to becoming art.



Art today is very transportable. One even finds it in the very air that inhabits cultural Melbourne's famous trams.


Yet art, especially if performative, is serious business and therefore hard work. This living sculpture is taking a nap... or is he/she?

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Fuck Capitalism!

The cult of the new is, despite certain claims to the contrary, as intrinsic to the contemporary art market as it is to capitalism. Maybe this is because the former is dictated to, albeit with a large degree of mystification and reified self-denial, by the latter. In each case, which is the same case, we may feel left behind by the succession of the new. Despite the seeming futility of rebelling against all this, we must, as they say, 'keep the flame alive'... especially after finding an old fold-up battering ram and some Dionysian spirit... or rather spirits.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Thursday, January 15, 2009

no use crying over spilt milk


Paul Celan's Death Fugue is, of course, one of the greatest poems of the greatest of all Post-War poets. This milk may not be black milk, but nonetheless it was found to be cracked and left lying on a street corner by a stranger who obviously abhorred cracked containers of milk.


After some photos, we took this milk home and we did drink it, but not before it managed to leave a trail, not unlike a trail of candy, that the cats of the culture industry could track us down with.


Thankfully gravity is on our side, and the cracks between the pavement provide an ample maze for any liquid Ariadne's thread to lose itself within, and to lose those cultured cats who hope to follow it to 'The Next Big Thing'.


Dreams of success can provide no reliable Ariadne's thread in our present world, unless ones enjoys following the threads of steel wool used to clean soiled coins. Maybe a love of mutability, affirming the mutability of love, and an expenditure without hope of earning interest in this life nor 'interest in eternity', however, carries a gravity all its own, and 'It is enough, the freight should be/ Proportioned to the groove.' (Emily Dickinson)

entertain me


Telstra - Ostraya's formerly publicly owned telecommunication's giant- has opened a premium Melbourne retail outlet: T [Life]. Communists, as the colloquial wisdom runs, prefer to drink herbal T- lets shorten Tea, for marketing purposes, to T- because they don't like proper T. Telstra prefer to place life in brackets behind the T their company logo drinks, and me, naturally for any advertising expert, follows in brackets after any mention of entertain. I'm not sure whether life and me are thus quietly subordinated, within the Symbolic, to a Name of the Father adhering in T and entertain, although a good cup of T can be entertaining, but is less so if one drinks merely out of fear. But what becomes forgotten in all this is the anthropocentrism of telecommunicative technologies, ergonomically speaking. For horses, although insultingly measured in hands, have no hands, and hooves are certainly something no mobile telephone manufacturer considers when designing telephone ergonomics.


Hence a quiet protest appeared amongst the entrance to T [life], which we were fortunate enough to capture the results of. The communicative technology here utilised against anthropocentric telecommunicative devices is, like the body, much more ancient and reliable than the all-too contemporary technologies it critiques. And there is no contract involved, which means no credit check! But horses, like all who have a cultured stomach, are also very sensitive to art and art history. But we shall allow the audience to decide on whether or not the critique is naively avant-garde or ironically sentimental, or just plain horsing around.