Quote of the day, yay!

'There is something paradoxical and beautiful in the sense of security that man needs to live and in the sense of insecurity that man needs to feel alive.'

-- Alessandro De Santis, architect, quoted in the OMA/Progress exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery (curated by Rotor).

Nuno da Luz at Vera Cortês

For those in Lisboa this Saturday (21 January 2012), head to the opening of artist Nuno da Luz's first solo show at Vera Cortês Art Agency, which runs through 3 March 2012.

The show is titled O nosso silêncio é um aviso / O nosso silêncio é sólido after the group of works included, and comprises aural/spatial propositions that explore ideas around experience and its recording (remembering) via technological means. The artist endeavours to highlight the potential contained in the deterioration of records, as opposed to aspiring to the perfect rendering of experience lived, which ever-newer technologies ceaselessly claim to offer us.

As Sílvia Prudêncio writes in the press release, Nuno's aim is 'to allow us to embrace imponderability, to make use of improvisation as strategy. To suspend control, to reconcile uncertainties is to know the nature of things... [The work] is based on a eulogy to the poetic dimension of all disrupting factors, be they catastrophes or everyday coincidences.'

The opening will also include a concert from Manuel Mota and Margarida Garcia from 23h00.


Check it out!

I Hurt I Am In Fashion

Check this genius fashion blog called I Hurt I Am In Fashion:

http://www.ihurtiaminfashion.com


Some of the most astute fashion commentary I've read in a long time. So glad someone has decided to put in writing what has been going on unvoiced in many of our heads for a long time!

IHIIF has been going strong for about 18 months now and has recently taken up residency in Jalouse magazine with a monthly contribution. It will be interesting to see how such a critical stance goes in the context of a fashion magazine. Could Jalouse's own pages potentially be victim to the IHIIF treatment? Or will IHIIF tone it down for the pristine gloss of printed fash?


About a year ago, IHIIF's anonymous author contacted me, when I responded positively and curiously, asking why it was started, etc., s/he provided a kind of manifesto in email-form. Here it is, from 15 January 2011:

i started IHIIF because i felt enough is enough
i use stereotypes to fight stereotypes
i fashionleak what everyone knows but no one talks about
i rub shoulders with the industry through mutual acquaintances
but instead of patting it on the back like everyone else i prefer to slap it
i'm a 5-month-old baby and growing quickly
and i will keep posting. indefinitely.
because i hurt, and i hurt because i am in fashion


Keep hurting!

(Maybe the next one will be called I Hurt I Am In The Art World? Starring HUO?)

Quote of the day, yay!

"Whatever the future of alienated creativity and the city may be ... art and artists symbolically and structurally register the tensions between economic realities and corporate-governmental fictions of the post-Fordist city everywhere.

The artist has become both aider and objector to regeneration, but also the ultimate capitalist subject, what Agamben calls the 'whatever being'. Good for everything and nothing, s/he is without authentic identity - the figure of human 'species-being' freed from specialisation, social obligation and physical work, but in distorted form under alienated labour's continuation along flexibilised lines.

It is perhaps for this reason too that artists have become such paradigmatic figures within late capitalism, attracting fictitious fantasies of production whilst also finding it hard to know how to act within such a treacherous climate of cooptation.

Neither able to successfully collude due to art's lingering requirement for autonomy, nor to effectively opt out (street art becomes gallery art becomes street art etc.), the artist working in the maelstrom of regeneration registers, either critically or not, the social war it entails."

-- Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles, No Room To Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City, Mute Books 2010 (p.52)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's last interview

Check out the last ever interview conducted with the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, on 1 November 1975:

http://www.leftcurve.org/LC30WebPages/Pasolini%27s%20Last%20Interview.html


The director of the infamous Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) was interviewed by Furio Colombo only a few hours before the former's murder, which we could say imbues this conversation with more gravitas than is due. However, there is something presciently astute about some of Pasolini's comments here, no matter whether we choose to read them as fortuitous, coincidental or irrelevant.

Certainly, in any case, this last interview sheds some beautiful light on the man while leaving a lot of elusive statements to be interpreted - now, as then - as one sees fit. This seems like an apt textual conclusion to Pasolini's life, considering his reluctance in general to absolutes.


Some nice excerpts:

'We are particularly pleased with conspiracies because they relieve us of the weight of having to deal with the truth head on. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, while we are here talking, someone in the basement were making plans to kill us? It's easy, it's simple, and it's the resistance. [...] Let's not joke about the blood, the pain, the work that people then too paid with so as to "have a choice". When one keeps one's face flat against that hour, that minute in history, choice is always a tragedy. But let's admit it, it was easier then. With courage and conscience, a normal man can always reject a Fascist of Salò or a Nazi of the SS, even from his interior life (where the revolution always begins). But today it's different. Someone might come walking toward you dressed like a friend, very friendly and polite, but he is a "collaborator" (let's say for a TV station). The reasoning goes that first of all he needs to make a living somehow, and then because its not like he's hurting anyone.'

'Power is an educational system that divides us into subjects and subjected. Nevertheless, it is an educational system that forms us all, from the so-called ruling class all the way down to the poorest of us. That's why everyone wants the same things and everyone acts in the same way. If I have access to an administrative council or a Stock Market maneuver, that's what I use. Otherwise I use a crowbar. And when I use a crowbar, I'll use whatever means to get what I want. Why do I want it? Because I've been told that it is a virtue to have it. I am merely exercising my virtue-rights. I am a murderer but I am a good person.'

'It's like it rains in the city and the gutters are backed up. The water rises, but the water is innocent, it's rainwater. It has neither the fury of sea, nor the rage of river current. But, for some reason, it rises instead of falling. It's the same water of so many adolescent poems and of the cutesy songs like "singing in the rain". But it rises and it drowns you. If that's where we are, I say let's not waste time placing nametags here and there. Let's see then how we can unplug this tub before we all drown.'


[Thanks to Roi Cydulkin for sending me this interview!]

INTO 2012 WITH LOVE

2011 requiem

for one who started with such uncertainty, 2011, such hesitation, and confusion, oh year of ones and firsts,
you have been a year of surprises, twists and turns, of joy and love and revelation – of shock tactics!
and – in the end – of something going towards a certainty

you have given me something more than any year – arbitrarily demarcated as they are – before
but it is hard to say what something is when it's framed so heavy-handedly by silly numbers

2011, you have shown me different cities, different languages, many different homes
you have shown me old and new, old in new, and new in old, and all the connections for self and other in between
geographically, emotionally
you have introduced wonderful people, reconnected me to long lost ones in ways I could have never imagined
you have shown me what love can be about in oh so many forms, friends, family, lovers, partners, romances, colleagues – I want all these words to mix into something far less narrow and insufficient
what word would we use to describe the love that is everywhere around us?
the love that appears in various forms but is largely the same love manifest through different beings and circumstances?
I guess this is why there is no word

2011, you have shown me that this love-thing can transform, and that transformation is beautiful somehow, always, both in self and other
you have shown that honesty and frankness are undoubtedly the way forward in all respects
that people deserve to know the world and that we all must endeavour to discover it, together

you have revealed to me, in quick succession and with necessary brutality, the forces behind our little society – the fragile façades that maintain our precarious existence – the quivering barrier between what-we-think-is-happening, what-They-tell-us-is-happening and The Real

the challenge is to get as many people as possible aware of these barriers, their careful construction -
and knock them down!!

2011, you have taught me that the answer is almost always 'yes' and that you really never know who or when someone will ask you a question

you have reinforced a hundred times that it's better to leave the house than stay inside alone (even when They make outside increasingly difficult to exist in, render the public obsolete)
outside is where the possible and potential collide with the self and all those other selfs who have bounced themselves outside their homes and into the realm of potential encounters
you never know when your random route is going to collide with the random route of a precious other, a fortuitous situation
so bounce around!

you have shown me that competition and individualism are poison to the soul and are to be avoided if we want to foster relations not based on conquering, profiting or capitalising upon the other (and selling the self)
you have proved the opposite is in fact true – that by sharing, giving, inviting, asking, linking, forwarding, introducing, opening relations, by really relating,
competition becomes something absurd – for why would you want to beat those who are yours and who you belong to and with?

2011, you have surprised me more than once, you have thrown curve balls and knocked me down, you have given me opportunities and changed my fate – many times – you have provided much music, dancing and so many laughs, you have given tears and made my decisions hard,
you have made my work confused and destabilised what I thought was direction
but you have also given me something in return, something that must needs only exist already-destabilised

you have presented people and events which, both 'bad' and 'good', I was not (of course) wholly prepared for,
the former I hope to have dealt with in a manner true to my progress and the latter I thank you deeply for sending
(and vice versa?)

for everyone there and here and around and with whom eyes and smiles have been shared, thank you
and go well

for 2011, you have shown me something the way

Prisoners

Prisoners is a video made by Terry Flaxton in 1983-84 using footage from the making of Apple's famous advertisement launching the first Macintosh. This is the ad:



In Prisoners Flaxton juxtaposes images of the making of the ad with texts from George Orwell's famous Nineteen Eighty-Four and excerpts from conversations with extras on the set. It is a brilliant approach to investigating the curious correspondence between Apple's ideology (seen even more clearly with hindsight) and Orwell's 1984 dystopian prediction. This is nowhere more clearly highlighted than in the very fact that Apple are so at pains (presciently, over 25 years ago) to affirm that, because of them, 1984 "won't be like" 1984. But what about 2012?

Flaxton's last text-frame reads:

"It seems as though the sheer weight of the image has overcome my intention – strangely this has also happened in the ad – one simple voiceover cannot regain the ground lost. '1984' as an idea will always mean what Orwell intended. Oblivious to our fears, that year has passed and we have yet to deal with those ideas that hold us prisoner."


For more info on Terry Flaxton, see his page on LUX's website: http://www.lux.org.uk/collection/artists/terry-flaxton

All I Can See is the Management at Gasworks review

Review written for BREESE LITTLE Prize for Art Criticism Volume IV (which I didn't win). Voilà, some (very) hurriedly thrown together words about this great Gasworks exhibition, which ran 7 October through 11 December 2011.


Immediately upon entering the Gasworks building one is confronted with the exhibition All I Can See is the Management, or at least some of the art works that have been curated into and thus contained by that exhibition title and the building that houses Gasworks contemporary art organisation. On first glance, it looks like a pretty exemplary example of a Contemporary Art exhibition in the early twenty-first century – a variety of media (moving image, still image, text work, silkscreen prints), no labels, works spanning the last thirty years or so, artists of various origins and ages, etc. – but as one delves further into the works presented it becomes apparent that this co-curated show is not your run-of-the-mill contemporary art exhibition. It seems to function in at least two at once complimentary and contradictory directions: All I Can See is the Management comprises a very clear critique of the hyper-managerialism that has been progressively integrated into our lives on all levels, whilst maintaining a certain consciousness (one senses) of the role that contemporary art itself plays in such managerial and neoliberal ideals.

Thus, perhaps it should come as no surprise that all we can see is the management when we enter Gasworks. That is the management of art works; more precisely the management of art works which themselves deal with ideas of managerialism and its effects on the human psyche, neoliberal indoctrination, so-called creative labour, the role of gender stereotypes and the family under capitalism, and the role of institutions and increasing institutionalisation of life. Hence the paradox: how to treat works who are consciously critiquing managerial principles from within a framework that is inherently so?

It seems that curators Antonia Blocker, Robert Leckie and Helena Vilalta are aware of this paradox without letting it detract from the individual works and their arrangement in the space as an exhibition. Instead, the exhibition allows the art works to serve as a powerful tools for examining – even interrogating – the constraints contemporary society (or post-Fordist society) puts on people in regard to work, bureaucracy and the legitimisation of practice (artistic or otherwise).

For example, in Filipa César's video Rapport (2007), the artist documents a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) session. César employs primarily close-up shots of participants' faces and body gestures during group psychotherapy tasks aimed at improving management skills and training workers for 'excellence' in the office by aligning their needs with that of the business. The result is quite a strange experience (particularly if you haven't read the room-sheet explication) of wondering why these people are performing such odd movements, saying such bizarre things and interacting in a very rigid, contrived manner. One realises that this sort of behaviour, where humans are trained to behave primarily as business-minded individuals, when taken out of context, is entirely abstract and almost pointless. Through this abstraction one becomes subtly aware of the way human interaction has been instrumentalised for entrepreneurial motives, and the way personal interrelations based on the business model have been made to seem commonplace, even desirable.


In a similar vein, Amy Feneck's film [image above] Government Workers (2010) reveals, through the seemingly mundane aspects of a Hackney secondary school, a certain bureaucracy and administrative pressure that pushes subtly on all existing within that institution. She does this via long observational shots of the classes, offices, playgrounds and communal areas of the school, showing how those inhabiting these spaces are effected and controlled by such educational models – both physically and mentally. This prosaic account differs from Allan Sekula's School is a Factory (1978-80) series, for which the artist takes a somewhat more humorous track in his critique of educational institutions as spaces of continuous production. Sekula utilises documentary and staged black and white photography as well as diagrams to illustrate the socio-economic make-up of various South Californian community colleges in the late 1970s. His approach seems to flag many of the issues around, race, class and gender which continue to haunt (and produce) education systems today.

Whether we choose to see All I Can See is the Management as an overt attempt to expose the oppressive nature of managerial tendencies in neoliberal society, and as a successful exploration of how late capitalist society has so successfully blurred life and work (in that even the exhibition itself must be considered to function within this double-bind), or as a self-contradicting enterprise, we really can see the management here, which is fine by me.


[Please excuse the cheese!]

Quote of the day, yay!

"Art is an occupation in that it keeps people busy—spectators and many others. In many rich countries art denotes a quite popular occupational scheme. The idea that it contains its own gratification and needs no remuneration is quite accepted in the cultural workplace. The paradigm of the culture industry provided an example of an economy that functioned by producing an increasing number of occupations (and distractions) for people who were in many cases working for free. Additionally, there are now occupational schemes in the guise of art education. More and more post- and post-post-graduate programs shield prospective artists from the pressure of (public or private) art markets. Art education now takes longer—it creates zones of occupation, which yield fewer “works” but more processes, forms of knowledge, fields of engagement, and planes of relationality. It also produces ever-more educators, mediators, guides, and even guards—all of whose conditions of occupation are again processual (and ill- or unpaid).

[...]

Another prime example in the complicated topology of occupation is the figure of the intern (in a museum, a gallery, or most likely an isolated project). The term intern is linked to internment, confinement, and detention, whether involuntary or voluntary. She is supposed to be on the inside of the system, yet is excluded from payment. She is inside labor but outside remuneration: stuck in a space that includes the outside and excludes the inside simultaneously. As a result, she works to sustain her own occupation.

[...]

In poorer parts of the world, the immediate grip of art might seem to lessen. But art-as-occupation in these places can more powerfully serve the larger ideological deflections within capitalism and even profit concretely from labor stripped of rights. Here migrant, liberal, and urban squalor can again be exploited by artists who use misery as raw material. Art “upgrades” poorer neighborhoods by aestheticizing their status as urban ruins and drives out long-term inhabitants after the area becomes fashionable. Thus art assists in the structuring, hierarchizing, seizing, up- or downgrading of space; in organizing, wasting, or simply consuming time through vague distraction or committed pursuit of largely unpaid para-productive activity; and it divvies up roles in the figures of artist, audience, freelance curator, or uploader of cell phone videos to a museum website.

[...]

The incorporation of art within life was once a political project (both for the left and right), but the incorporation of life within art is now an aesthetic project, and it coincides with an overall aestheticization of politics.

[...]

The artist-as-dilettante and biopolitical designer was overtaken by the clerk-as-innovator, the technician-as-entrepreneur, the laborer-as-engineer, the manager-as-genius, and (worst of all) the administrator-as-revolutionary. As a template for many forms of contemporary occupation, multitasking marks the reversal of the division of labor: the fusion of professions, or rather their confusion. The example of the artist as creative polymath now serves as a role model (or excuse) to legitimate the universalization of professional dilettantism and overexertion in order to save money on specialized labor.

[...]

Desire for self-determination was rearticulated as a self-entrepreneurial business model, the hope to overcome alienation was transformed into serial narcissism and overidentification with one’s occupation.

[...]

To paraphrase Allan Kaprow: life in a gallery is like fucking in a cemetery. We could add that things become even worse as the gallery spills back into life: as the gallery/cemetery invades life, one begins to feel unable to fuck anywhere else.

[...]

Your phone is driving you through this journey, driving you mad, extracting value, whining like a baby, purring like a lover, bombarding you with deadening, maddening, embarrassing, outrageous claims for time, space, attention, credit card numbers. It copy-pastes your life to countless unintelligible pictures that have no meaning, no audience, no purpose, but do have impact, punch, and speed. It accumulates love letters, insults, invoices, drafts, endless communication. It is being tracked and scanned, turning you into transparent digits, into motion as a blur. A digital eye as your heart in hand. It is witness and informer. If it gives away your position, it means you’ll retroactively have had one. If you film the sniper that shoots at you, the phone will have faced his aim. He will have been framed and fixed, a faceless pixel composition. Your phone is your brain in corporate design, your heart as a product, the Apple of your eye."

-- Hito Steyerl, 'Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life', e-flux Journal #30, 12/2011

Weekend listening

For a nice listen this weekend, check out the new mix called 'Patterned Ground' from New York-based group, Beige (see website for more infos and to hear some of their own tracks).



You can stream the track via SoundCloud above or download it to your computer via the following link: http://www.mediafire.com/?z9w8g2tf37scxyq

I'm with you at Occupy London/Bank of Ideas

This Thursday 8 December 2011 for 20:00 head down to the occupied ex-UBS building at 17-29 Sun Street EC2 for I'm with you's latest event, I'm with Occupy!

I'm with you is an ongoing collective performance project conceived and produced by Johanna Linsley, R Justin Hunt and Christa Holka, which has so far popped up in gardens, houses, clubs, books and clifftops around London and England.

I'm with Occupy will be the eighth incarnation of the I'm with you performance event project which, according to their website, "has something to do with weirdness, if weird could mean collapsing contingency, necessity, function and awareness. Not quite, but not unrelated to, ‘queer’ ..."

In the context of Occupy London and the Bank of Ideas, I'm with you comes to show the power of communal organisation and energy as a driving force for finding new ways to invest time and spend it (largely without spending £)!


As such, the event will be a "coordinated set of un-harmonious performance outbursts, as friends of I'm with you contribute song-length flash performances to the growing alternative investment structure." It will be a "collaborative, simply produced presentation of complicated (or not so complicated) ideas, emotions and experiences related to occupation, solidarity, righteous anger and desire (with a healthy dose of ridiculosity, glamour and hysteria)."

Come down!

For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

The Great Klepto Debate

For those in Sydney this Saturday 3 December 2011, go and check out the sixth incarnation of Serial Space's 'Great Debate' series: That Property Is Theft.

The evening starts at 19:00 and speakers include:

AFFIRMATIVE
Catriona Menzies Pike
Bec Conroy
Mark Gawne

NEGATIVE
Ann Deslandes
Adam Jasper
Pip Smith

"Real Estate agents in Sydney are like celebrities, driving in fancy cars and driving up the cost of living. Increasingly the artistic community is feeling priced-out of the city. But, on the flip side, we work hard for a living, we need to be able to manage and organise our society and the concept of property is one way to do that. ..." For more info click here.

Quote of the day, yay!

"Events like biennials, art festivals and buildings like a theatre, a Kunsthalle or a museum are ideal semi-public venues for the art scene around which creative ideas can circulate. You could say they form the concrete infrastructure. Or rather, they make the scene more visible - the non-seen scene becomes a seen scene. That primarily applies to artists whose work is displayed by the organizations in question or is on display in the buildings. The concrete infrastructure literally scenarizes the art scene thus making of it a more or less lasting artistic scene. And, incidentally, the displaying of the scene takes place in complete accordance with the rules of post-Fordist art.

The consequence is that someone works with a temporary contract or, in the art world itself, often without a contract - in what is always a vitalistic, project-based setting and of course with flexible, invariably night work, and irrepressible creative enthusiasm. In short, it involves a work ethic in which work is always enjoyable - or should be; in which dynamism is boosted unconditionally by young talent; and in which commitment outstrips money. That is what determines the spirit of the artistic scene. If you try to rationalize this great, spontaneous desire and freedom to work (for instance, by means of rigid contracts or labour agreements), bureaucratize or reutilize it, you are in danger of letting the metaphorical creative genie out of the bottle, or rather suffocate it.

However, we should not forget that creative work like this is always a form of cheap instable [sic] work - something that makes the art scene of great interest to outsiders like company managers and politicians. Not only does it boost the local economy and introduce the city into the world market. It also, and especially, reveals a biopolitical ethic that nowadays benefits the economy. The protagonists of the creative scene and economy appear not to believe 'Arbeit macht frei', as in the Nazi concentration camp, but 'Freiheit macht Arbeit' (freedom makes work).

The willing acceptance of flexible work in an artistic operation would make gratifying advertising for a temp agency. It is better to offer no opinion as to whether, with that rhetorical reversal, the concentration camp has become the central social matrix of all society as Giorgio Agamben claims. If the crossover between professional, public and domestic activities - but especially, on the one hand, the interplay between formality and informality, and, on the other, seeing and being seen - is exploited on the basis of economic rationalism, the cultivated freedom of the art scene gets uncomfortably close to the inhuman confinement of the camp. To make this link between scene and camp is no doubt carrying things too far. However, the point is that the freedom of the art scene within the capitalist mis-en-scène can merely provide a false autonomy, because it always stems from a well-defined (un-free) finality, primarily the pursuit of profit."

-- Pascal Gielen, 'Art Scene - Control Machine', Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization, NAi Publishers 2011

Message from the Vice-Chancellor: 2012 budget and staffing

An email to all University of Sydney students from Vice-Chancellor, Michael Spence:

Dear student,

As you may have heard, the University of Sydney is planning some major changes in the coming year.

Many of you will be aware that some of our facilities are run down and in need of repair, and our IT systems are overdue for upgrading.
Repairs, maintenance and upgrades of this scale do not come cheaply – in 2012 alone we need to spend $53 million on repairs and maintenance and replacement of basic IT infrastructure, some of which is 20 years old.

This work can’t be postponed any longer.

To meet these costs and to begin saving for further improvements, we will have to take some prudent measures in 2012. Every area of the University is being asked to make savings, and we will have to accelerate some of the organisational changes we have been planning. We need to reduce the cost of our administration and staffing, and a small number of academic staff who are no longer contributing significantly to our research or teaching will be offered redundancies or early retirement. [My emphasis.]

In taking these steps, we aim to provide you with a reinvigorated, more innovative learning environment, and to give you buildings and facilities of which we can all be proud. You deserve the best.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Spence
Vice-Chancellor and Principal

Translated, this basically means USyd want to build some pretty facilities (like a cafe in Fisher Library - the Southern Hemisphere's largest bibliothèque - for which 500,000 books must be removed), upgrade on technology (which will always need to be upgraded anyway!), and get rid of any staff whose student evaluation responses and research 'contributions' are not up to the university's standards (i.e. are not making monetary profits for them or whose classes are not functioning in a suitably 'outcome'-based manner - God forbid a challenging lecture, God forbid a specialised subject that necessarily has small enrollment numbers!).

Furthermore, Spence uses the lame excuse of old infrastructure to justify the trimming off of any staff (and departments if he had his way, read: the near-dissolution of Sydney's brilliant Political Economy department) who do not fulfill his (and the University's funders') ideas of what research and teaching are about. (For more information on USyd's 'Investment and Capital Management', click here.)

I would vehemently argue that research and teaching have nothing to do with profit-margins, evaluation forms and bureaucratic examination processes (and also not much to do with IT systems, if I'm honest), but I guess I am naive to think that a university might be a place where one learns how to think not how to tick pre-determined boxes.

It is actually embarassing that Spence would make the assumption that I would be 'proud' of these changes and the so-called 'reinvigorated, more innovative learning environment' that he will be providing me with. Somehow, I highly doubt it. These catchy words actually say nothing to me except 'neoliberal dogma'.

Outrageously, we now clearly see from Spence's friendly little email that The University of Sydney is well and truly - as if we didn't already know, thanks ANZ bank for sponsoring our student cards - going down the dark and pathetic path of putting profit over education, infrastructure over experience, pre-determined outcomes over the possibility of challenging knowledge structures and learning from teachers who themselves love learning without knowing where it might lead.

We need education that acknowledges the unknown and allows for students and teachers to approach new ideas together and without the pressures of profit-margins, endless funding applications and bursary justifications, the need to publish-for-the-sake-of-publishing, ubiquitous evaluation questionnaires that assess the performance of teachers in terms of 'learning outcomes', and the idea of students as full fee-paying 'customers' who cannot be criticised or failed because we need their money.

Well done, Michael Spence, bravo to you for this stroke of economic genius! Thank you for confirming my suspicions that The University of Sydney is no longer an institution that promotes learning in an unfettered manner but rather the contrary - fettering in an unlearned manner. The fetters are in the finance.

That said, Spence is right about one thing: students really do 'deserve the best'. But unfortunately for all of us, including Spence, this is not it! Universities are not meant to be businesses! Financial viability is not a relevant factor in evaluating their success or the success of their staff.


EDIT: Matthew Thompson, an editor at The Conversation, has posted an interesting article in response to these measures and the email that was sent to all staff (slightly more detailed than the student one). Read it here: http://theconversation.edu.au/sydney-uni-to-cut-academic-and-general-staff-but-boost-it-4404

Interestingly, Thompson reveals: "The announcement comes less than a fortnight after the University of Sydney recorded 2010’s third highest operating surplus of any university in the country. Third only to the University of NSW and the Australian National University, the University of Sydney last year notched up an operating surplus of $113.7 million, with over half a billion dollars in revenue coming from student fees and charges, student contributions, and Commonwealth contributions in lieu of students paying upfront fees."

Well, well, well, "difficult times", eh, Mike?

EDIT 2: I received this response from David Pacey - Executive Director and Portfolio Manager, Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Education and Registrar - after sending the Vice Chancellor a link to this blog post:

Dear Eleanor

Thank you for your email and detailed BLOG expressing concern in relation to the necessary adjustments to the University’s 2012 Budget.

The University takes your concerns and feedback seriously and your views will inform ongoing budget discussions.

Really? It's like they've never seen the word 'BLOG' before ... !

EDIT 3: A group of University of Sydney staff have co-authored an article titled 'Sydney University Academics Speak Out' for the independent news website NewMatilda.com (published 5 December 2011). A very good explanation of what's really going on here.

The Haircut Before THE PARTY !

Come join to celebrate the end of THCBTP's time on Toynbee Street this Saturday 19 November from 18:00 !



More info here.

parataxis iii

parataxis iii is happening Wednesday 16 November at The Hair Cut Before The Party at 26-28 Toynbee Street, London E1 7NE.

This will be the third edition of an ongoing project I have been organising that has so far taken place at Serial Space, Sydney (2009) and MKII, London (2010). parataxis tries to explore the possibilities of an event where the need to pre-claim thematics and connections between works is suspended in favour of acknowledging the connections that may emerge through the common 'dis-measure' of creation.

This time we are being hosted by The Hair Cut Before The Party, whose project I have been interested in since receiving a free haircut from them back in March and subsequently becoming more involved. Considering THCBTP's aims, parataxis iii will be functioning in a more discursive/conversive mode, with a series of presentations, spoken interventions, soundscapes, images and printed texts from trance-national thinkers/artists/writers/performers, etc.

These include:

Alex Gawronski
Anastasia Freygang
Ashley Wong
Doublethink Project
Eleanor Weaver
Marian Tubbs
Noah Brehmer
Owen Parry
Richard Houguez
Wrong Solo & Lucas Liccini

We hope you also will have something to say/read.

Come!

[P.S. For info on past versions, click: parataxis i & parataxis ii.]

FIVE YEARS

TODAY RADDEST RIGHT NOW IS FIVE YEARS OLD !!!!!

HOW DID THAT HAPPEN !??!?!?

HOW MANY HOURS, DAYS, MONTHS, HAVE I 'WASTED'/'SPENT' WRITING, EDITING, READING THIS BLOG ?!?!?

PERHAPS TOO MANY.

MAYBE YEAR SIX WILL ALLOW FOR NEW DIRECTIONS.

AS ALWAYS, ANYONE WHO IS READING THIS, THANK YOU FOR CLICKING TO HERE PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE !!!!!

WEIRD.

X


(pic by Manon Marguerite)

Interview for SuperKaleidoscope

I recently interviewed artist Marian Tubbs for SuperKaleidoscope's Featured Artist programme.

I asked Marian about Heidegger, Damien Hirst, photography, Pagan urges and what she's 'looking for', all in relation to a recent exhibition, Pagan Pop, curated by Yolande Norris at Canberra Contemporary Art Space.

You can read the short interview here:

http://www.superkaleidoscope.com/featured-artist.php

Thanks to Sarah Mosca and Kim Fasher of SuperKaleidoscope.

Ex-Trendy at PACT for Sydney Fringe

About a month ago (25 September 2011, to be exact), I was lucky enough to attend one of Ex-Trendy's performances at PACT centre for emerging artists as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival.

I have been an Ex-Trendy fan since hearing them play at Stucco in Newtown, Sydney back in early 2009. Earlier this year I wrote about Ex-Trendy's debut EP, Losing Business, on this blog. Since then, bassist Michaela Davies and drummer Reuben James Alexander have joined the original members, guitarist/vocalist Robbie Ho and lead vocalist/keys-synth player Matte Rochford, to create a sound which is enhanced in its depth and has a slightly more bluesy rock/psychedelic feel to it than the more acoustic tones of the Losing Business EP.

For Sydney Fringe Ex-Trendy did more than play a gig. Their performance entailed a 'participatory and sensory journey' of thirty minutes non-stop musical and vocal splendour. We heard not only the Losing Business tracks but also some new tunes and superb improvised poetry from Matte as well as awesome solos from Robbie, Michaela and Reuben.

One particularly great moment was the song 'No Connection', for which Ex-Trendy had a mobile number (Robbie's, I later learned) blown up large on a TV screen behind the band for all the audience to see. The idea, as Matte explained to us during the introductory bars, was that the audience text him anything they have lost and he will alter the lyrics to the song (which lists many things that have been lost by Matte) to include the audience's lost items. This was a great moment of texting frenzy as members of the audience informed Ex-Trendy via SMS of their lost stuff only to hear it relayed back to them moments later in song as Matte frenetically read texts, made rhyme and held tune. My lost Le Coq Sportif sneakers even made an appearance, which I was very happy about!

This and other hyper-live elements (like the unintended failure of one of the mics and the band's smooth integration of this hiccup into the show) really showed the attempt to get the audience involved in the performance more than simply as spectators, as well as the band's awareness of the utter indeterminacy of the live and the possibilities this fact enables for performance. The jaunty beats, slightly glamour-rock vibe of Robbie and Matte's performances, and the critical-comical lyrics that really made you want to laugh/dance/cry all combined to prove Ex-Trendy as a really exciting prospect for critical and entertaining music/performance/art.

Matte's lyrics/poetics range from seemingly banal discussions of beer labels to implicit political critiques, and the music moves similarly: from the cheekily romantic metaphor of 'Battery Low', to the deceptively simple message of 'Textbook Store' (which I see as quite a convincing critique of our bureaucratic/technologic/schizophrenic world), to the intimate ambiguity of 'Losing Things'. As PACT themselves describe it: 'Flight of the Conchords meets Syd Barrett, PJ Harvey, Laurie Anderson and Suede in an inter-stellar spaceship turbolift.' There may seem to be a lot going on here, but it also feels like Ex-Trendy embrace the chaos in a really concise way: reception comes through the Ex-Trendy television very clear.

Technology is a recurring theme for Ex-Trendy, but the somewhat distanced, even impersonal lyrics, which embody that technological aspect in content and form, are rendered the opposite by an extremely passionate delivery from all involved. And by the very fact that we were all there, hearing the music, feeling the beat, clapping along; by the fact that, at the end, we all wanted more live.

Check out part of one of Ex-Trendy's performances at PACT:



And the official video of 'Textbook Store', by Maia Sinclair-Ferguson:



For more information you can find Ex-Trendy on Facebook and on MySpace.

Gombrich comes to me via Jura!

By chance I came across Ernst Gombrich's The Story of Art 12th edition (1972) for $2 at Jura Books, a great bookstore and social space with anarchist tendencies in Petersham, Sydney. [Pic below is part of the 'Gnome Rebellion', inspired by Noam Chomsky! See the Facebook page for more.]


Gombrich was included in an Art History course I did recently, and we discussed his methodology from an art historiographical perspective in our seminars, though to be honest I didn't actually get around to reading any of his writing!

It's funny how the world works. I'm of the persuasion that letting books, ideas, people and theories come into your life somewhat au hasard, by these chance encounters, is much more conducive to an 'academia' than being forced to read or pursue or consult Theory by external imperatives (such as the aforementioned course, for example, though I admit the book wouldn't have meant much to me were it not for this very same course making it significant!). Not only does the latter mode imbue all findings with a kind of obligation, it inhibits the kind of personal investment or story that can produce and encourage intellectual stimulation and exchange.

In any case, upon reading the first few pages of Gombrich's most famous book, I realise it is indeed a very useful reference and his approach is really interesting in terms of thinking art history as it was posited in the mid-twentieth century (the book was first published in 1950). I can't say for sure, but I'd suggest his work has relevance for thinking contemporary art as well.

A particularly charming paragraph that grabbed my attention follows:

'We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colours in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colours.'


Quite surprisingly appropriate to find this phrase in an old art history book in a counter-cultural space, just down the road from The University of Sydney - who demanded I read it in the first place!

Freud for females ... ?

This quote from Freud reveals all! Read the following to be enlightened:

"...When a male child first turns his curiosity to the riddles of sexual life, he is dominated by his interest in his own genital. He finds that part of his body too valuable and too important for him to be able to believe that it could be missing in other people whom he feels he resembles so much [my emphasis]. As he cannot guess that there exists another type of genital structure of equal worth [my emphasis], he is forced to make the assumption that all human beings, women as well men, possess a penis like his own.

This preconception is so firmly planted in the youthful investigator that it is not destroyed even when he first observes the genitals of little girls. His perception tells him, it is true, that there is something different from what there is in him, but he is incapable of admitting to himself that the content of this perception is that he cannot find a penis in girls. That the penis could be missing strikes him as an uncanny and intolerable idea, and so in an attempt at a compromise he comes to the conclusion that little girls have a penis as well, only it is still very small; it will grow later.

If it seems from later observations that this expectation is not realized, he has another remedy at his disposal: little girls too had a penis, but it was cut off and in its place was left a wound. This theoretical advance already makes use of personal experiences of a distressing kind: the boy in the meantime has heard the threat that the organ which is so dear to him will be taken away from him if he shows his interest in it too plainly.

Under the influence of this threat of castration he now sees the notion he has gained of the female genitals in a new light; henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same time he will despise the unhappy creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen."

-- Sigmund Freud, 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood', Philosophers on Art: from Kant to the Postmodernists, Columbia University Press 2010 (ed. Christopher Kul-Want); originally published as 'Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci', 1910.


Now, my big question is: Does this psychoanalytic explanation of phallocentricity explain patriarchy? Or rather, is Freud's analysis merely a product of patriarchy?

Is the idea that women are 'missing' something, that they possess 'wounds', that they are 'unhappy creatures' a psychoanalytic discovery - i.e. in relation to the non-lack of having a penis - or a product of a patriarchal, phallocentric psychoanalysis? Are these assertions even possible without the assumption that a penis is the 'ground zero' of sexual being (and thus human being)? Is it not absurd to speak in such terms, as if the female's perspective on the male genitals (as foreign, as 'different', as lacking, even - to use the loaded term in reverse) is somehow inferior or secondary to the male's impressions of hers?

Perhaps, Freud is aware of this - I've not read widely enough to say - but certainly upon reading the above text, one has not only the impression that Freud is staking out something crucial to his general theory, but also that the quote itself explicitly delineates these obvious short-comings, this obvious oblivion (for which he cannot totally be blamed, given his epoch) to the inherent phallocentricity of his claims.

Moreover, this can be seen further in the fact that - here, at least - we have no 'female child' perspective to parallel the 'male child' one. Perhaps it's because Freud is male, I don't know. But my first reaction to this text was: Okay, but what do the female children think !?! Surely they, too, must be 'dominated by [their] interest in [their] own genital'? Surely they, too, must find it 'uncanny and intolerable' that others who they see as resembling themselves so closely have this odd protrusion where there shouldn't be one? Surely, if Freud's argument has any traction, the female child, too, is 'incapable of admitting to [her]self' that such a perception (i.e. the male child's odd protrusion) of difference can be correct? Does she, too, imagine that the boy's strange 'growth' will alter itself eventually to look like hers?

Maybe she does. But Freud doesn't seem to give her (and hence us) the chance to see her genitals as in fact not less-than a penis, but rather at least 'equal to' a penis (as he himself intones in relation to children's physical resemblance in all other respects).

For it seems that Freud assumes that there is a lack inherent in the simple biological fact that a female doesn't have something ostentatiously sticking out, like a penis or testicles, for example. But could this simple - banal - biological reality possibly equal 'lack'? I guess we are trapped by language, I am realising; I can't even speak about female genitals without there being a certain presupposition (in my own words and thoughts) that obviously females are lacking, because the penis protrudes. Lack is something 'missing'. The penis is missing from the female because, apparently, there is nothing to see. But, what if our idea of missing, of lack, was totally fucked up? And in fact constructed on this very idea of male supremacy?

I guess that's what many women have been saying for a while now. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is case in point. More recently, Luce Irigaray's Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, speaks about the female sex as being not one but 'already two' (though not divisible into ones); which fundamentally alters the dominant conception of sexuality. (I quoted Irigaray on this blog a couple of months ago: http://raddestrightnow.blogspot.com/2011/08/quote-of-day-yay-citation-du-jour.html.)

Maybe all this is bleedingly obvious and redundant, and maybe I've completely misinterpreted Freud. In any case, these are some questions that came to mind. Any thoughts very much appreciated.

WORDS ON OCCUPY WALL STREET

Check out this new work from brilliant New York-based photographer, Ruvan Wijesooriya:

wordsonoccupywallstreet.tumblr.com

Ruvan has spoken to various individuals present at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York City. These short clips offer a really interesting insight - from very varied perspectives - on what this occupation means for people there at Liberty Square, and indeed for the United States and the world at large. (Click pics for links.)


If you're curious to read something more theoretical about what's going on with OCCUPY, two very good online journals, transversal and e-flux, have come out with issues dedicated to OCCUPY. transversal's '#occupy and assemble∞' issue can be found here, and e-flux Journal #28 is here.

Plus, it is also worth checking up on blogs like Jodi Dean's I cite, Laurie Penny's Penny Red, Brian Holmes' Continental Drift, or Richard Seymour's Lenin's Tomb, for various musings on this and related struggles.

There is a great opinion piece on Al Jazeera English called 'The class warfare the rich don't understand' by Heather Digby Parton. And you can read/hear Slavoj Žižek's take on OCCUPY by clicking this link. There are many, many insightful YouTube clips documenting this occupation circulating about the interwebs. For example, via Democracy Now!:



Lastly, for those in Sydney and environs, there is a solidarity demonstration starting tomorrow, 15 October 2011, at Martin Place in the CBD from 14:30. For more information, visit the Occupy Sydney website or the Facebook event.


The OccupySydney.org.au 'Unifying Statement' follows thus:

*We act in solidarity with protests and occupations that have occurred and are occurring in New York and other US cities, Spain, Greece, Egypt and other cities around the world.
*We are the 99%.
*The system is broken.
*A better world is possible.
*Human need, not corporate greed!

They stress that this will be a 'peaceful' and 'mass democratic' occupation, which 'will be a place for discussion about what is wrong with this system, how we can change it, and the organisation of the occupation itself.'

Let's see where this thing can go, let's see if the 99% have still got it in them after all these years of being told they should desire to be the 1.

In solidarity,

Quote of the day, yay! (Note to self ...)

"Freud makes clear that those who ask for analysis do so because they want a witness to share their feelings with. At the same time, to surrender those feelings is the last thing they are prepared to do. This is because they find comfort in the pattern of repetition they have established for themselves. As long as they repeat it, they recognize themselves in the repetition. So the cycles of reenactment are mistaken for the core of one's personality. To give them up, it seems, would mean to surrender oneself entirely (to the witness).

This is why, in the moment of transference, the witness is simultaneously drawn into the close cycle of repetition, and warded off as a threat to the comfort of a familiar pain which shall not be surrendered. In Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) Freud in fact describes the force of repetition/transference as a 'demonic' principle of 'conservative resistance' against the pleasure principle itself: Under the spell of repetition people protect a world they (believe to) know and control against new experiences of pleasure that would disrupt the immutable laws of their cyclical universe.

Provocatively then, Freud portrays the surrender of the comfort found in the repetition of safe patterns as a leap forward towards an avowal of memory that implies an openness to yet unknown pleasures."

-- Jan Verwoert, 'You Make Me Feel Mighty Real: On the Risk of Bearing Witness and the Art of Affective Labour', Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, Piet Zwart Institute & Sternberg Press 2010 (pp. 290-1)

STREETERS has a new website!

Check out the great new website for Creative Management & Representation agency, Streeters:

www.streeters.com


Streeters is based in London and New York and represents some of fashion's most important artists, including Alastair McKimm, Andrew Richardson, Cathy Edwards, Eugene Souleiman, Jacob K, Jane How, Karl Templer, Kate Phelan, Luigi Murenu, Mario Godlewski, Mark Segal, Pat McGrath, Raphael Salley, Richard Nicoll, Russell Marsh, Tabitha Simmons, Tom Allen, Val Garland, Vanessa Reid, and many more.


Streeters was established in 1988 by Beverley Streeter and Liz McKiver, who today direct the London and New York offices respectively. The agency's ethos has always been about discovering and developing new creative talent who push fashion imagery in new directions and blur the categories of confinement, whilst simultaneously maintaining a stable and reliable work-ethic, which has enabled - and continues to enable - the cultivation of a strong and loyal client base.


The new website has been conceived and produced by Streeters' Art Department manager, Siobhan Cait Farrar, in consultation with the whole Streeters team as well as Streeters artists. The result is a concise, regularly updated and easily navigated portal into what each artist is up to.


The new site is easy and efficient, with drop-down menus that actually work, allowing paths to be (re)traced simply and logically (e.g. London>Hair Stylists>Eugene Souleiman>Editorial>Full Screen), with simple 'Back' buttons, various portfolio-viewing options and PDF download feature.


In addition, Streeters now has a blog, which has regular posts about new editorials, advertising campaigns and related news. Everything is tagged and linked, so it's really easy to connect artists who work together or stories which contain multiple Streeters artists.


The site has been in development for an extended period and has been worked and reworked to get it to the current point of efficiency, ease and visual pleasure. The amount of work at the back-end of a site like this is expansive and never-ending. There is an immense history of work by many of the artists (particularly established ones), which has needed to be digitally archived and sorted from the existing physical magazine archives - Streeters has a wonderful magazine collection.


This sort of work is that from times before fashion's digitisation at every level; when images existed primarily as hard copies - literally, 'tear-sheets' or 'tears' - and magazines were the only way of seeing the work of fashion artists. Indeed, there was a time, really not so long ago, when physical portfolios were laid out and re-laid out almost every day as new editorials came. This was done for every working artist by the art department and the agent, and the portfolios were sent out to prospective clients by couriers - real people, not 0s and 1s - every day. Now this process tends more and more to occur via PDFs, links, downloads, etc.


This development is by no means a bad one, it's just worth remembering that a lot of the fashion we see on the screen - which, I would say, is where most of us access it, most of the time - has a very physical, tangible and human backstory.


So this new site - despite its apparent simplicity - has required much research and planning, myriad conversations, a lot of schlepping magazines and scanning tears, and hours of tagging; combined with the fact that artists are continually producing new work which requires archiving, editing and arrangement. This is an ongoing task that is often unnoticed when we see such a comprehensive catalogue or archive of production laid out so neatly, and at the click of a finger.


So congratulations to Siobhan and everyone at Streeters for this great effort and thanks for the amazing resource! I encourage everyone to check out the site and provide any feedback you may have by contacting art[AT]streeterslondon.com.

[Tweeters, you can follow Streeters at: @StreetersLDN and @StreetersUSA.]

Quote of the day, yay!

'... I come from the generation for whom, in the early nineteen-seventies, shoplifting became a positive virtue within the disaffected counterculture. Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" contained handy shoplifting hints and was chained down in bookstores. Jerry Rubin, channelling Proudhon's dictum "Property is theft," declared in his book "Do It", "All money represents theft.... Shoplifting gets you high. Don't buy. Steal. If you act like it's yours no one will ask you to pay for it." I found this to be true. Running an alternative school with almost no money in the early seventies, I made trips to a large bookstore in London and piled up reference books and textbooks until the tower nestled under my raised chin. Then I confidently walked out of the shop. No one ever stopped me. I had no qualms. It was a corporate-owned shop, and the books I stole were for the educationally and socially deprived kids I was working with. Even better than acting like it's yours is righteously believing that it's yours ...'

-- Jenny Diski, 'The Secret Shopper: The history of shoplifting', The New Yorker, September 26, 2011

[To hear Diski speaking about shoplifting with Blake Eskin for The New Yorker's audio series, click here.]

"Press" archives: Rise Art & Z!NK

I hesitated from posting the links to a couple of 'press' interviews I've done in the last year or so. It seems a bit funny to blog about yourself talking about yourself and your blog; it feels funny to talk about this blog, in general. It becomes, like, triply self-referential, which I guess is fine, but I haven't quite yet worked out exactly what I think of it all.

That said, despite slight reservations, after all, I did agree to answer questions about this blog, and myself, so I guess that means I must be okay with it.

So, in the spirit of being 'okay' with talking about oneself talking about oneself:

Early this year I answered some questions for London-based writer and curator, Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, who is editorial associate at Rise Art and writer of the art blog, SelfSelector.

You can read that here: http://www.riseart.com/article/detail/id/1438

In 2010, similarly, I answered questions for Ashley Caputo, a writer at New York/Montreal's Z!NK magazine.

That one can be read here: http://www.zinkmagazine.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=376:what-is-rad-right-now-ask-eleanor-weber&catid=40&Itemid=88

[Just for the record, some of the words used for my responses in the Rise Art interview are not mine, maybe that is clear. And, yes, my naïve enthusiasm and excessive exclamation mark use in the Z!NK one is slightly painful to witness for me, too.]

Er, haha. This is awkward! Let's look at a picture!

Quote of the day, yay!

"I’m a cheap intellectual whore"

-- Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, The New School, New York. (Excerpt from 'The Infinite Demand of Art', Art & Research, Volume 3 No. 2, Summer 2010)

Alicia Frankovich interview for KALEIDOSCOPE blog!

Back in June I interviewed artist Alicia Frankovich in Berlin for KALEIDOSCOPE blog!

Finally the results of that conversation and the ensuing correspondences are online, so please click the link below to read it.

http://kaleidoscopeoffice.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/alicia-frankovich-in-conversation-with-eleanor-weber/

Many thanks to Alicia Frankovich, Chris Sharp and Margarida Mendes.

Cannibal delicacy

Some coincidences on cannibalism.

First, I read Georges Bataille's text Eye (tr. Allan Stoekl), written 1929, where he says:

"Cannibal delicacy. It is known that civilized man is characterized by an often inexplicable acuity for horror. The fear of insects is no doubt one of the most singular and most developed of these horrors as is, one is surprised to note, the fear of the eye. It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably the boundary of horror.

In this respect, the eye could be related to the cutting edge, whose appearance provokes both bitter and contradictory reactions; this is what the makers of the Andalusian Dog must have hideously and obscurely experienced when, among the first images of the film, they determined the bloody loves of these two beings. That a razor would cut open the dazzling eye of a young and charming woman - this is precisely what a young man would have admired to the point of madness, a young man watched by a small cat, a young man who by chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon, suddenly wanted to take an eye in that spoon.

Obviously a singular desire on the part of a white, from whom the eyes of the cows, sheep, and pigs that he eats have always been hidden. For the eye - as Stevenson exquisitely puts it, a cannibal delicacy - is, on our part, the object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it. The eye is even ranked high in horror, since it is, among other things, the eye of conscience. [...]"


Second, I stumble across Planningtorock's I Wanna Bite Ya (released 2006) on YouTube. Horribly à propos ...



Third, I wonder: If extreme seduction exists at the boundary of horror, and if cannibalism is understood as extreme horror, are the cannibal and the seductive analogous?

If then the eye is the most attractive part of the body, does it ('the window to the soul') point to a certain cannibalistic drive through its inherent seduction? Is it horror or beauty that we see when we look into someone's eyes?

We obsess about, protect, and revere the eye - that most elusive of organs - while simultaneously we fear and feel disgust for its invisible roundness, its sliminess, its revelation ('scary eyes'); it is uncomfortable to think of dead eyes, and we eat animals most easily without having to see or think that they once saw (and thought). Does the eye (the delicacy at which we retch) thus exemplify the seductive horror that is humanity in all its glorification and abjection?

Finally, does this cannibal instinct reveal itself equally in our desire for the seductive (to consume/be consumed, to penetrate/be penetrated - vitality) and in our dread of the horrific (to destruct/be destructed - mortality)? To the point where both that desire and that dread become part of exactly the same movement?

I think you know the answer to this. And in the words of Planningtorock: "What happens if we get close to each other?"

"I want to bite you."

My Soul At Work for New Planes

Please excuse self-promotion (though this is a blog, after all) but below is an article I wrote for New Planes Public Press Issue #2, The Page as a Performance Site. You may remember I wrote about the New Planes 2 launch here earlier, which consisted of performative interventions and installations inspired by the issue.


It was a really great night, with good people, good work and good whisky. Plus everyone got a copy of the broadsheet, which includes contributions in text/photo/graphic/(etc.)-form from a whole heap of good souls and costs only $3. You yourself can procure a copy via the stockists listed here.


To read my article (and contributions from Hellen Rose and Eleanor Bennett), click the images below.


P.S. This article has also been published (in slightly revised format) for THCBTP's chapbook series, but more on that later.