A Confrontation With Falling

1. being in a taxi on the raised highways of a great city, in a country other than your own, especially at night. preferably the window is open and, god willing, there is rain.

2. or when you catch sight of the sea, unexpectedly.

3. to arrive, in the warm, morning light at a train station, in a large city, on the other side of the world-

4. snow.

5. someone you love very much comes back from overseas. and you come towards each other, or stand looking at each other, touching or about to touch like ghosts who are filled with blood.

6. when the last lines of a poem choke you a little bit, so to speak.

We go in there to dream together, to sleep from the rain. Stray shots of light.

We can feel the trains passing beneath the ground. The rattle of ice in a glass, like cow bells someone said. The sound of many people suddenly smiling.

We walk around stoned on exhaustion, passing each other, hidden. Sleepwalkers watching sleepwalkers.

We stand in lines in the electric light. We trudge carpeted stairs. We breathe next to strangers. It's spring. It snows everywhere.

Crowds emerge blinkingly from unheard of doorways into back alleys, into parts of the city they don’t know how to get out of. They are still there now, starting fires, holding their own elections, eating one another.


And the darkness is in everything, a vague, tertiary sadness.



We sit in cars for hours, unable to move at 3am, out the front of houses, in the middle of the road, with the lights off. Waiting for a truck to clean us up. Or a boat that might row quietly past, at head height. We put each other to our ear, to hear the lapping sounds.

There is no death, we simply slip into other lives.


Our homes are beached ships.



We are insomniacs by necessity and the darkness is in everything.


We wake up, we try to wake up. And love is a flimsy nocturama.

All That Light Inventing Itself (oil on canvas) 2008





Red Boat (oil on canvas) 2005







Untitled (oil on canvas) 2001)

Having woken
to someone else's life
that's what this is,
or from someone else's
dream.
This kind of horrible, unreal
slow-motion,
trespassing in the hung-over air,
in the radiant, uselessness of beauty.
I don't want to go and see
the murderous things
or the new shops.
My father is dead.
I don't want to watch him
die again.






***




poised here

waiting

for the right angle

no, angel

angel.

ARE MULTI-NATIONAL COMPANIES EXTENDING THEIR UNWARENTED MARKETING CAMPAIGNS INTO YOUR DAILY LIFE? DID YOU ASK THEM TO SEND YOU JUNK MAIL? WOULD YOU LIKE TO BRING THE WHOLE THING CRASHING DOWN AROUND THEM?

IF THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE, YES, AND THEN NO, AND THEN YES AGAIN, THEN WRITE, SEEKING JUSTICE, TO THE ENTERPRISE OF DESTRUCTION!
447 CHURCH ST RICHMOND 3121, INLCUDING A COPY OF THE OFFENDING MATERIAL.


THE ENTERPRISE OF DESTRUCTION!
MORAL DEBT COLLECTER, EXECUTOR OF RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION.

It's some years since I first watched Chris Marker's extraordinary and unsettling meditation San Soleil. Among many other things, including African and Japanese street festivals and the killing of a giraffe, the film features the work of a Japanese video Artist called Hayao Yamaneko:


He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.







Uncannily, they were the same images, more or less, that I had been making by painting over the photographs in newspapers; the same reduction of detail, the same ambiguity of gesture, the same field of contextless action and suffering.

That night I decided that I wanted to live in a house (perhaps near some live volcano), where this film was always playing somewhere in the background, where ordinary conversations might be constantly interrupted by such dream-like sentences.

The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick




At the heart of this film is the recognition that the given world is forever being broken into by the ungiven. That is the world we see and accept is like a skin over the numinous, the world of dreams and memory and death.




The existence of underground train systems beneath the surface of cities has long fascinated me in this regard, embodying as they do, the idea of a hidden, mirror city beneath the surface, an underworld, where the laws are different and which we can step into as Orpheus steps through the mirror in Cocteau's film.




This is also one of the reasons why I loved Heather B. Swann's Gates of Hell, which stood for a while near the entrance to the Flinders St. Station underpass in Melbourne.

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does.

Its not hard to draw comparisons between San Soleil and and the work of W.G Sebald, who charts in his similarly ambiguous documentary style a kind of mournful, psychological journey across time and space. Both Marker and Sebald employ the tangent as a fundamental tool, and both use a series of voices which entwine with one another in such a way that it often becomes difficult to tell who is speaking.

And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

These stray sentences half heard even, unlock something. Like snatches of conversation heard in a crowd, like a telephone ringing in the night, like unsent letters, like images returning from a dream or half glimpsed scenes from a late night film: it's as if the otherword is always speaking to us.


Don Delillo recognised this in White Noise and made the television itself a character who was always interjecting into the layered conversations of the family, constantly making some surreal point.

And of course the Internet works in a similar way, running off on tangents and forever comforting itself with the compilation of lists. Perhaps that is the real function of the Internet: the business of ordering somehow, according to whatever particular obsessiveness, the endless stuff of memory. I'm sure there's a Kafka story somewhere that might describe this task: the ordering of files which in itself produces more files, burying itself by digging to get out.

Somehow, there is a belief that all these moments might fit together, that nothing need be lost, that the half remembered thing might return, renewed by its association to another. We believe that such moments might mean something at last and find a kind of repose amongst the restlessness of images. This (probably futile) hope, is signalled, in the opening scene of San Soleil:





The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked.


somewhere in the heaven
of lost futures

the lives we might have lead
have found their own fulfillment


wrote Eavan Boland.

I had believed until this moment that the name of the author of these words (words which I cut from a newspaper review in London three years ago) was no doubt lost forever. But of course here is the exact review, unlost forever.



Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.'


Not a bad criterion, I realize, when making a blog.

Dear Foxtel,




“See something. Feel something”. Such touching advice coming from an entourage of coma patients.

Who do you run for? Who’s the old man who changes your drip at night?

My advice, since you asked, Br’er Fox, Executive Director – T.V and Marketing: draw a big circle called despair and go stand in it.

Look in the mirror of every morning and repeat: I am defeated. See it. Feel it. In high definition!



Yours fearlessly,


x


The Enterprise of Destruction!

Spring rain
where this lonliness clarifies you sometimes

not the blurred-colour-whirl in a city at night

but the single, definite sadness of form-
this inescapable thing
and not any other.

Clearness

the real grey of the sky

is there a holiness to see


unreconciled
not so alone


***



I'll leave the window open
so that the snow will cover us
while we sleep, if it snows.

Cover the sound of breathing
and your white, dreaming, unsually serious face
with the conditions of another world - snow in the hems of your eyes.

Cover me with this unreckoned for happiness
in the half-waking aftermath of a storm
in spring.







for k

Photo: Francis Alys


In his Nobel prize lecture, Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian novelist and survivor of two quite distinct 20th century dictatorships, poses, rhetorically, the question, "for whom do we write?"


"It is an interesting question," he says, "but it can also be dangerous and I thank my lucky stars that I never had to deal with it. If a writer were to pick a social class or group that he would like, not only to delight, but also to influence, he would first have to examine his style to see whether it is a suitable means by which to exert influence. He will soon be assailed by doubts, and spend his time watching himself. How can he know for sure what his readers want, what they really like? He cannot very well ask each and every one. And even if he did, it wouldn’t do any good. He would have to rely on his image of his would-be-readers, the expectations he ascribed to them. For whom does a writer write, then? The answer is obvious: he writes for himself."

This doubt which Kertesz speaks of, this watcher, is no stranger to the realm of art in public space. I for one, have spent a good part of the last few years, variously assailed by his gaze. And I think the answer that Kertesz supplies, (and which is, I believe, as self evident as he reveals it to be) is nevertheless too easily missed amid the liability clauses and stake holder outcomes which surround the ‘implementation’ of much public art like an invisible tide of mud.
This tension between the personal and the public, is, if not unique to public art, then certainly more fundamental to the nature of our ‘business’, than it is for those artists whose work is made for the gallery. And I think the attempt to address this tension, is, certainly for myself, an ethical question, at least as much as it is an aesthetic one.
If it is, self evidently, the self, for whom we make art primarily, what is it in fact, that we are doing when we are making public art? What is art’s relationship to the social, to this so called "public" and how do we reconcile what, for most artists, is a private undertaking with the demands called forth by our position as people in the world? To what or to whom, as artists, do we have responsibility other than to ourselves?
For Kertesz, the question of arts responsibility retains a pertinence that it has for few others. As a Jewish child he survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. What, one wonders, is the responsibility felt by such an artist, toward those who did not survive? In Hungary after the war, Kertesz then spent the best part of the rest of his life under the communist dictatorship which replaced the Nazis, in a society that, officially as least, considered art as a weapon, where literature was state controlled and ideas of ‘social engagement’ ordained the obligations of the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp, a very private artist, and not one you would immediately associate with an ethic, seemed to be interested less in what an artist produced, than in how he lived. I am often heartened by Duchamp’s lack of productivity, the curious patience with which he produced a few elaborately titled paintings or drawings here and there, and a string of experiments that barely qualified as art, even within his own expanded notion of the term. The works he did make can be seen to exist not as ends in themselves so much, but as exercises in freedom.


"I didn’t even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not...one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn’t mean anything fundamentally. One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn’t want to go to the office every morning." " I did as few things as possible, which isn’t like the current attitude of making as many as you can, in order to make as much money as possible."

Similarly, Robert Rauschenberg, rest his soul, was quoted once as saying:

"It doesn’t bother me if people call what I’m doing art or not. All I know is that painting is the best way I’ve found of getting along with myself."

Fortunately or not, however, art requires an audience.


* * *
A number of years ago I found myself making art for the street: stencils, tampered billboards and eventually installations of varying legality in lanes and carparks.

Torture for freedom: billboard with Dom Allen

The Space Instead Of A Car

I was dissatisfied with the idea of galleries, vaguely sickened by dealers and their openings, and horrified by the contempt for art, which is disguised in such circles as connoisseurship. I imagined a world out there, beyond the gallery walls, unencumbered by capital and free of hierarchy, where ordinary people might be deeply affected by an art they deeply craved. I was reminded of this fabulous place the other day, when a friend of mine, a poet, was recounting the ordeal of his obligatory Centre-Link job training session, in which he was forced to watch a video entitled: interviews in the real world.

The real world is a little more fraught that I imagined. In the real world, the public quite often prefer military parades to art, as was demonstrated enthusiastically earlier this year when the Russian government marched an assortment of nuclear weapons through the streets of Moscow. And in the real world, a good portion of the public art which has not been granted credibility by its status as illegal, has been commissioned by developers with two ends in mind: to conceal bad architecture and urban planning, and to create the illusion of community, where the desired community doesn’t actually exists.

(Two inspirational examples of public art in Melbourne- you can't blame people for preferring military parades.)

Even accepting that this will sometimes be the case, it is easy to feel paralyzed I think, by the seeming futility of art, the best art even, to stack up against the various brutalities that we know, vicariously for the most part, to be taking place at every moment, all over the world and down the street.

In Latin America, where I traveled a couple of years ago, the sort of public art which springs to mind when one thinks of a city such as Melbourne would be nearly impossible without being deeply offensive. The magnitude of the inequality there and the recent history of tyranny demands a more drastic appraisal of the artists privileged, if necessary position. What semi-figurative abstract steel sculpture would not be eclipsed, indeed shamed, by the sheer extremity of daily life in a city like La Paz for example? What art at all for that matter? And in an increasingly globalized world, how long can the art of privileged societies such as ours continue to plead ignorance to the less than blissful realities elsewhere?

The Belgian born artist Francis Alys treats these questions head on. Having emigrated to Mexico City, Alys’ work deals openly with the seeming futility of action, demonstrating however, the reverberations which are disseminated in a society through the creation of urban myths. "After all", Jean Fisher writes of Alys’ work, "what is the purpose of the city if not to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech, by allowing a space of social demonstration."




One such work involved Alys pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melted to nothing (Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997) while in 2002 he staged a work entitled When faith moves mountains" an event which required hundreds of participants to displace slightly, a mountain of sand with simple shovels, as they moved in a sweeping, picturesque and ultimately futile line across a large dune in Peru. "Art, like play, garbage and wastelands in general", writes Fisher of this work, "is an excess or unproductive expenditure, a continuous production of "otherness" neither reducible to commoditization nor wholly subject to the disciplinary mechanisms of the system that engenders it. And as such it always presents a latent form of resistance to prevailing structures of power". Clearly it would be naive to suggest that this is the case for all ‘art’, but in Alys’s case the description rings true, I think.


Like Duchamp’s ready-mades, which are not dependent upon their actuality in space, and which function instead like theorems, or propositions which emigrate and affect us just as well through description, Alys deliberately creates fables through his actions; stories of events which work in the collective imagination and are passed on by word of mouth, as equally as by documentation.
In this manner, the art work as possible happening, takes on the quality of a story, or a poem, which alludes by its nature, the forces of capitalism which unavoidably reduce paintings and sculptures to their essential forms as property. "It is around property", John Berger wrote, "that we piece together our last tattered religion, and our visual works of art are its ritual objects."

Myth served an equally important function in the work of Joseph Beuys, who mythologized his own near death and subsequent rebirth in order for it to serve as a metaphor for the resuscitation of mankind and nature, after the holocaust and in opposition to modernity’s attendant environmental disregard."Tenderness, indirectness, inconspicuousness, along with ‘anti-techniques’ are my possibilities", Beuys, responded.Within Beuys’s notion of social sculpture it became possible to consider society at large as an enormous art work in itself, to which everyone was capable of contributing.

Joseph Beuys: Explaining pictures to a dead hare

"Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST."

* * *


In his autobiographical mediation, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung recounts one of his own dreams:

"It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. But at the same moment, I was conscious in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through the night and wind regardless of all dangers. When I woke I realized at once that the figure was my own shadow on the swirling mist, brought into being by the little light I was carrying."

According to Jung’s definition, there is one part of us, which must go forward into the world, which must act and work and suffer and hope amongst other people. This first self must bear the brunt of things in order to create and protect the shadow, which is the unconscious, the deeper self, and that well from where art is drawn, in order to lead it into the world.

At the very heart of our nature, we are confronted by the self’s struggle in the world of other people, with the disparity between what I mean to myself, and what I say to the world. While societies function because they have systematized approximations of shared meaning, there will always remain a gap between the personal and the public, between my own being and the meaning I am led to confer upon it by the society in which I exist. Sometimes this gap is small, sometimes monstrous.

Art, public art in particular, is capable of recognising the conditions under which we meet; the social, and of making apparent that gap between the self and meaning, the space "where I end and you begin".

This gap seems to be the very place where art belongs, because art is the best means we have of productively occupying uncertainty, the means given to us, by which we become capable of volatizing that meeting point, from within, with the force of that shadow which Jung encountered in his dream.

Irish.

Grant me right of way
over the cornstair to your sleep,
right of way
Over the path of sleep,
the right to cut turf
on the shelf of the heart,
come morning.

paul celan

(translated by C.Murray)

A balloon is a flexible bag filled with a type of gas, such as helium, hydrogen, nitrous oxide or air. Modern balloons can be made from materials such as rubber, latex, polychlorprene or a nylon fabric, while some early balloons were sometimes made of dried animal bladders. Some balloons are purely decorative, while others are used for specific purposes such as meteorology, medical treatment, military defense or transportation. A balloon's properties, including its low density and relatively low cost, have led to a wide range of applications.

A story
We hailed a taxi and I showed the driver the map. "Somewhere, near that curling highway is this", I said, pointing to the dubious little drawing of a cooling tower I had made. "That’s where we want to go". We drove for a long time as the driver became increasingly frustrated, increasingly confused. The sky was too thick with mist and smog to see anything much beyond the edge of the highway. The power station, which we had seen producing its quota of sky a few days earlier, had vanished. At the toll-booth, the driver stopped and got out to speak to a little group of soldiers sitting at a desk to the side of the road. We went over to them and we all waved our hands at each other, muttering certain sounds. I pointed to the map, I mimed the actions of a photographer. The soldiers shook their heads and handed me a telephone. The voice and I didn’t understand each other. We got back in the taxi and drove home, passing a hospital on the way. The billboards advertised it as a "painful treatment centre".


* * *

A question of loss

The highway slogans between Xian Yang and Xi’an imagine a wonderful, collective adventure, a utopian vision perhaps magnified by the English translation. These two cities in China’s Shaanxi province, an hour’s drive apart, are moving inexorably towards each other. A metro system is being built as we speak, and towering new apartment blocks, doubtfully endorsed by Olympic athletes, are rising up the full length of the highway. But what is being lost as China "strides along the avenue" towards its "harmonious future"?, And what is able now, to be created in the lost zones, in the places of contested memory? What sudden paroxysms of meaning appear in this new translation: 21st century China?


Arriving there for the first time, late last year, I was struck by the outpourings of smoke from the power-stations, by the burning rubbish dumps and factory chimneys and by the similar sight of steam rising from the cooking pots in the street. Added to this were the perpetually white skies, skies so low that they inhabited the earth too, with a pollution and fog which made it seem as if we were passing through some netherworld, as if we had died and were crossing over toward the unknown other shore.


There is no doubt a certain pleasure taken by outside commentators when mentioning environmental problems in China. Beautiful photos recently of Olympic rowers forcing their boats through a bloom of luminous green algae in the coastal waters of Qingdao ride a wave of sentiment that is quietly triumphant when it comes to China’s ecological failings, whilst being careful to ignore the First World’s complicit involvement, or our own somehow acceptable failings of proportional significance.


For me, this stuff pouring into the sky, this rising residue of energy, continues to speak more eloquently than anything, of the question of loss which is the underside of such rapid progress. These are the ghosts we produce in order to live, the disappearances which our transformation in time necessarily produces.

I think of the photographer Sze Tsung Leong and his History Images, those sublime landscapes where brand-new high-rise towers thrust out of the ruins of traditional low lying neighborhoods into blank skies. They capture a kind of frozen tumult, the debris of history upon history.


I think also of the artist Ai Weiwei, the Han Dynasty and Neolithic vases which he painted crudely or beautifully with poster paint or smashed completely.




And I recall sitting on the window sill in a hotel room in Xian Yang, tuning a radio, trying the catch word of the uprisings in Burma, which the Chinese English television news channel neglected to mention.






The work of these two artists, and the illicit and almost archaic crackle of that cheap transistor, all speak of a particular tension to do with an historical moment of globalization, which, while not limited to China, is perhaps best represented there. The particular tension I am referring to is both an inter-personal and a political one and it resides, I believe, at the point of acknowledgement, in the contested space between what is said and what is left unsaid, between that which is held high and that which is left to remain invisible.

In a way this point of acknowledgement is a description in itself of the process of translation, that impossible balancing act of sense and spirit; caught between the obligation to convey information and the duty to capture the subtleties of style, inference and particularity. But it also applies more broadly to the creation of narratives, to the familiar art of story telling which is what we are doing all the time, travelers and nation states alike.

Crucial to this tension is the way absence and disappearance are regarded during moments of profound change. How do we choose to recognise these moments, the losses of history, and how do we remember them once they are gone.

For us, the question remained as to how we might interpret these tensions as artists, from the perspective of outsiders in a small (by Chinese standards), though rapidly expanding city, far removed, culturally from the internationalism of Beijing or Shanghai in particular. It was a situation complicated by diplomacy, bureaucracy, a specific and warm formality, and political necessity.

* * *

A story and a poem


We were eating dinner in a small and tidy house which had been built like a cave in the hollow of a rock wall, in a rural area outside of Xian Yang. The district had recently become part of a government initiative that allowed rural workers to open their homes to tourists interested in sampling traditional home cooked food. Towards the end of the meal, a bald farmer with an open, mischievous face wondered in, attracted by the commotion which a troupe of foreign tourists creates in a region where few have reason to venture. He seemed like a mad old uncle, the sort you’re obliged to put up with, but enjoy having around because he’s good to laugh at. A great fuss was made around him, as if people were worried he might do something embarrassing. Eventually it was declared that the farmer wished to write a poem in our honour. He had never seen foreigners before in his life.

He sat on a couch for some time, scrawling on a bit of paper and then he stood and read the poem to us surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. The translation we were given, suspiciously brief, was spoken aloud for us. It went something like this:

Foreigners came to our village
I wanted to write a poem
But I was too excited


* * *


An art of the found

How to make art on the run in such a politically charged environment? How to bridge the gap posed by language and dubious translation? How to respect cultural differences and not ignore invisible, political realities we know to exist? How to interrogate and avoid the clichés of our own assumptions and remain aware of our own ignorance? How to be less ignorant? How to translate our own artistic models in a traditional and artistically conservative environment without becoming patronizing? How to accept our role as a traveling delegation, as guests, in a culture where conflict and debate are carefully eschewed, (and at times silenced) in favour of so called "harmony", and yet continue to respond honestly as artists?


What were we to make of the farmers poem? If there was indeed an element of censorship to the translation , it was no doubt polite, rather than political. More than likely the brevity of the English version was a matter of expedience. But does this doubt somehow diminish the gentle elegance and the irony of its apparent composition? What is lost, in short, by the act of translation, and what is found transformed on the other side? What new creature?


At one end of a long corridor Rowena Martinich’s mural was a maze of dazzling fluorescent paint. A teeming, restlessly beautiful action painting, a shock of colour that provoked some consternation among visitors, one of whom was drawn to comment, "We don’t paint like that in China".

This a a view of Rowena's Recent Mural Project in Melbourne, which is similar though much larger than the painting I'm refering to.

Far from the cosmopolitanism of the centres, in a place like Xian Yang, such art can be a provocation. There was an energy to this work, a spirit of audacity which remained undiminished, I think, by the official explanations that at times tried to veil it behind the clichés of cultural relativism. "In China we have our painting, in Australia you have yours", was a phrase I heard a number of times from officials, which attempted, congenially, to preserve a kind of dignity in the face of incomprehension, but which served also to preclude a further engagement.

But who, in Xian Yang, asks for this dare which is so much a part of recent art, and who does it serve? In Shanghai you can find any number of giant naked Mao images, sculptured pink Mao babies, Mao with many breasts.


The Luo Brothers

Even the tourist shops sell whipped–up versions of these paintings now or t-shirts of the same thing. The capitalism of the big cities has thoroughly subsumed such provocations, incorporating both the modernist shocks of the new and the post modern shock of sensationalism into itself. The story that development tells in these mega cities perhaps disguises the fact that the vast majority of people in China are still farmers.



The Gao Brothers - Miss Mao

The Chinese contemporary art market with its international auction records and its brash theatricality seems pretty far away from the reality of life as experienced by the inhabitants of a city such as Xian Yang. Throughout, we faced the difficulty of making work, public work at that, which continued to have a cultural resonance beyond such art worlds as exist in Shanghai or Melbourne for example.


Eddy Carrol and Antonella Ripani, with the assistance of a group of textile students, created a series of garments which were able to exist in the narrow space between conflicting demands. In one such work, a western suit jacket and a traditional Chinese version hung opposite each other in the entrance hall of the Xian Yang Costume and Art University, the arms of each out-stretched to the point where they met and joined, forming a single sculptural entity. It was a work which satisfied the unspoken but iridescent condition that art in the context of such a traveling delegation promote and celebrate that ‘harmonious’ meeting of cultures. The garments seemed to be holding hands. At the same time though it became a useless, restrictive and unwearable garment that critiqued the sometimes paralyzing effects of the conditions under which it was made.





Geoff Hogg worked with the assistance of Wen Jun, a Chinese artist with whom he has a long history of collaboration. Neither speaks the others language, and yet they have maintained a friendship and a working relationship for nearly twenty five years, through an interpreter. This, their latest mural together, plays off the iconography of the mechanical and architectural diagram, the exclamations of science, against the idea of the traditional Chinese motif, in this instance, the peony flower. In each case, it’s a matter of compressing significance within culturally refined symbolic systems. But the mural’s real topic seems to be the tension and balance between opposing, at times incompatible languages; industry and nature, china and the west, and the struggle to exist and to create amid contradictions.



For my own part, I was enthralled by the improvised kitchens which poured steam into the air in a way that resembled the magnificent drift of smoke from the power stations. This image of rising gas or smoke had been playing at the back of my mind for a number of years, having seen it in a number of guises in South America and Eastern Europe. I had no idea what it meant there, but seeing it represented again, in China, I felt compelled to examine it at last.






I was able to compile a small collection of cooking implements; coal burners, woks, electric fry-pans, which I used to boil Coca-Cola until the little room I had installed them in was filled with a noxious combination of steam and burning chemical-sugar. I wanted, subconsciously for the most part, to produce a violent disappearance, a kind of ghost song, matter, translated by heat. But I also wanted to pay my own small tribute to the ingenuity of the street vendors and to the Chinese streets in general, which remain uncensored and which refuse to be managed, indeed sanitized, as they are in Australia. I hoped to make a work capable of walking that line between contradictory expectations. On film, the sound from the nearby building-work echoes and intermingles eerily with the hiss of the steam.




* * *
It’s possible, I think, to view the endeavor of creation as an act of translation. We are strangers in the world, abandoned on a train station somewhere. We turn around and begin to decipher the signs of this new place. The formation of birds, the angle of light, the way people hurry off into the distance or linger over their drinks, saying something to each other. The strange indications on the front page of newspapers. We begin to tell a story, to ourselves and to each other. We begin, slowly and with a desperate, laborious exhilaration, to translate the foreign language of the world by means of this curious, universal and individual process, which in one particularly concentrated form is called art, but which, in a more general sense might merely be referred to as examined living. And what matters, via this behaviour, is not whether the world makes sense, but whether it is able to bear meaning. Whether we can render the world capable of carrying enough meaning for us to survive, that is.



A third story.


On the banks of the Huangu River, beneath Shanghai’s elegant colonial boulevard referred to as The Bund, there’s a pedestrian underpass, which is usually lined with beggars and musicians and men selling cheap plastic toys that whiz. During a holiday it smells uniquely of sugar and piss, while teenagers walk around beating each other with giant, inflatable hammers. Did we ever doubt the Underworld was a circus? Along the walls of this passage were a series of light-boxes, advertising, in some oblique though no-doubt effective way, a bank or an insurance company. Each box seemed to burn with light (a luminosity which was somehow spiritual down there amid the cacophony), because each image was an enlarged reproduction of a Van Gough painting.
"Why does the art world leave me so cold?" I wondered as I walked from gallery to gallery to gallery in Shanghai’s groovy art districts. Yet those Van Gough’s beneath the highway! By some quirk of fortune, by some circumstantial alignment of forces, a 19th century French cornfield had collided underground, via art and neon, with a healthy dose of 21st century state capitalism and its attendant dashes of desperation and frivolity. The portal yawned. Translation at work.

'Notes and drawings from the first year of (The Vorticist's) encounters are now on display at the Abbotsford Convent's C3 gallery. The "subjects" remain anonymous and the notes provide intriguing reading, like excerpts from a surrealist novel. Sometimes the concerns of the subjects are interrelated, which interests and pleases The Vorticist:

"As a certified dream technologist, he was responsible for delivering people their dreams. The subject would phone his clients late at night and through the use of suggestive words and sounds he would attempt to induce a requested dream."' *
* Katherine Kizilos. The Age, October 14, 2008

Dear Citibank,



How did you get our address and how does one go about acquiring such a grand and ominous title as “Director of Cards”? Do you play shop with The Puppet Master?

We are very wealthy but prefer to give our money to more worthy causes, such as stem cell research and militant terror campaigns waged jungle to jungle etc. We are not threatening you, but we cannot speak for anyone else, certain associates we may have for example. Your dungeons are not worth our time breaking into.

If you would like your dreams analyzed however, we offer competitive rates.


Yours fearlessly,


x


The Enterprise of Destruction

What will happen now ?

Everyone's gone to the moon.

There's nobody left


Everyone's gone to the moon




( Lyrics: Nina Simone)
(Images: Bolivia, Chile 2005)