technorati tags:art, aesthetics, cartoons
Monday, 30 April 2007
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
Monday, 23 April 2007
Apathy and AUstralians
On Australians and political and moral apathy:
A couple of Sunday afternoons ago I was laying on my sofa watching Sunday Arts on the ABC.
My somnambulant ease was momentarily disrupted. A young theatre/film director was pointing out how so many Australians lie back on their sofas all weekend, reaching out for another stubbie, flicking between sports and arts programs. His thrust was that this is no way to make things happen. It is a squandering of our positive freedom. We ought not be like that. Get up off
your sofa you slob and go out there and conquer the world. Make a difference, to
your own life if not to that of others.
Was this worth thinking about? Sure, I had a knee jerk prick of guilt; and I'd guess that everyone else who saw the segment did too. A natural reaction to being accused: "Who? Me?"
So in between being too bored with Gaydar to bother, and actually getting up long enough to grab some fresh porn, I did think about it. Is Australia a nation of pathetic, apathetic slobs who don't deserve the freedoms and standards of living that they enjoy (as this young man seemed to be suggesting)? Even if so, what is the reason? Are Australians naturally formed to be apathetic slobs? Are most people in the world actually so disposed, so that given half the chance they'd be slobbish and apathetic? Is it a natural fault that we have to fight against? Is it social conditioning: get it easy and you get lazy?
I think there's a degree of truth there; but I think there is a lot more to it than that. On reflection, I thought this young director exhibited unconsidered views: rash, self-sure, vivacious youth led him to error, but he definitely deserves a good spanking.
For various reasons, it has only been during rare moments of great social crisis that the bulk of people in any population have been energetically, positively active in society, outside their ordinary, weekly routines.
One reason is that no socio-economic system could sustain ongoing effervescent agitation by all its members. The result (at an extreme) would have to be something like an inharmonious anarchy, a lurching social animal ever in danger of reverting to an unpleasant "state of nature." Can you imagine what Australia would be like if every Sunday afternoon the Domain and the foyer of the Young Liberals were over-run by enthusiastic, well meaning intendant caesars? What if every second gay boy in your building decided he was going to emulate the disclosing, chasing victories of Chas and the Lads?
In fact, during the early days of democracy, back in Athens, citizens were expected to actively participate, though not in a Chad-ish way. Were you a landholder, you'd be expected to spend a lot of time in the agora (market and meeting place). You'd be expected to judge too: when the Chad-ish Socrates was brought before the court on charges of infecting the youth with impious thoughts, he was judged by 500 of his peers. Socrates, by the way, claimed that he was guilty of no more than asking people to think clearly. Death by hemlock.
Of course, this Athenian democracy didn't include all the sweating, naked bodies you'd see labouring in the fields: slaves didn't count. To be worthy of being called a citizen you'd have to be born to the aristocracy or at least be in the free upper classes, and definitely not be female. The politically empowered actually ruled courtesy of the surplus created by the working poor. A good labourer was a productive, quiet labourer.
European fiefdoms worked much the same way, right up till such events as the abolition of the "rotten boroughs" in England, mid-19th century, and women actually started to get a political say, a century ago. Marx may have had dreams of a peaceful post-industrial utopia, but that final revolution never happened and we are still living under what it was supposed to replace: capitalism.
Can capitalism work if everyone hops up off their Sunday sofas and starts getting politically active? Hell no! What if everyone refuses to buy over-priced iPods (over 100 000 000 sold during the last 6 years: I've owned three) or Nokias, let alone refuses to work for the companies that produce the iPods and Nokias that they buy? Gawd!!!
True, there are certainly times and places when individual mass civil disobedience are comely things: times when the platitudinal untruths the system feeds the people just cannot be swallowed anymore. Roll in the suffragettes and Lech Walesa.
True, even the well oiled machine needs occasional maintenance, and our particular society is hardly a well oiled machine, despite its manifest virtues. We do need people to jump up and down, paint pictures for galleries, direct economically unsuccessful theatre, bring down the house with a too-soon ruined tenor voice, paint slogans on the side of the Opera House, write to their M.P's about immigration laws, stand up and heckle during Condelisa's guest lectures at the Con., and so on.
But through training and necessity, we cannot all so act.
Nor, I think, through nature. Most people are born to watch Mardi Gras and strip shows in the Manacle, not to participate in them. Nature has endowed the many with the blissful propensity to be followers, not agitators or leaders.
Apathy may not be a virtue, but it isn't about to vanish.
A couple of Sunday afternoons ago I was laying on my sofa watching Sunday Arts on the ABC.
My somnambulant ease was momentarily disrupted. A young theatre/film director was pointing out how so many Australians lie back on their sofas all weekend, reaching out for another stubbie, flicking between sports and arts programs. His thrust was that this is no way to make things happen. It is a squandering of our positive freedom. We ought not be like that. Get up off
your sofa you slob and go out there and conquer the world. Make a difference, to
your own life if not to that of others.
Was this worth thinking about? Sure, I had a knee jerk prick of guilt; and I'd guess that everyone else who saw the segment did too. A natural reaction to being accused: "Who? Me?"
So in between being too bored with Gaydar to bother, and actually getting up long enough to grab some fresh porn, I did think about it. Is Australia a nation of pathetic, apathetic slobs who don't deserve the freedoms and standards of living that they enjoy (as this young man seemed to be suggesting)? Even if so, what is the reason? Are Australians naturally formed to be apathetic slobs? Are most people in the world actually so disposed, so that given half the chance they'd be slobbish and apathetic? Is it a natural fault that we have to fight against? Is it social conditioning: get it easy and you get lazy?
I think there's a degree of truth there; but I think there is a lot more to it than that. On reflection, I thought this young director exhibited unconsidered views: rash, self-sure, vivacious youth led him to error, but he definitely deserves a good spanking.
For various reasons, it has only been during rare moments of great social crisis that the bulk of people in any population have been energetically, positively active in society, outside their ordinary, weekly routines.
One reason is that no socio-economic system could sustain ongoing effervescent agitation by all its members. The result (at an extreme) would have to be something like an inharmonious anarchy, a lurching social animal ever in danger of reverting to an unpleasant "state of nature." Can you imagine what Australia would be like if every Sunday afternoon the Domain and the foyer of the Young Liberals were over-run by enthusiastic, well meaning intendant caesars? What if every second gay boy in your building decided he was going to emulate the disclosing, chasing victories of Chas and the Lads?
In fact, during the early days of democracy, back in Athens, citizens were expected to actively participate, though not in a Chad-ish way. Were you a landholder, you'd be expected to spend a lot of time in the agora (market and meeting place). You'd be expected to judge too: when the Chad-ish Socrates was brought before the court on charges of infecting the youth with impious thoughts, he was judged by 500 of his peers. Socrates, by the way, claimed that he was guilty of no more than asking people to think clearly. Death by hemlock.
Of course, this Athenian democracy didn't include all the sweating, naked bodies you'd see labouring in the fields: slaves didn't count. To be worthy of being called a citizen you'd have to be born to the aristocracy or at least be in the free upper classes, and definitely not be female. The politically empowered actually ruled courtesy of the surplus created by the working poor. A good labourer was a productive, quiet labourer.
European fiefdoms worked much the same way, right up till such events as the abolition of the "rotten boroughs" in England, mid-19th century, and women actually started to get a political say, a century ago. Marx may have had dreams of a peaceful post-industrial utopia, but that final revolution never happened and we are still living under what it was supposed to replace: capitalism.
Can capitalism work if everyone hops up off their Sunday sofas and starts getting politically active? Hell no! What if everyone refuses to buy over-priced iPods (over 100 000 000 sold during the last 6 years: I've owned three) or Nokias, let alone refuses to work for the companies that produce the iPods and Nokias that they buy? Gawd!!!
True, there are certainly times and places when individual mass civil disobedience are comely things: times when the platitudinal untruths the system feeds the people just cannot be swallowed anymore. Roll in the suffragettes and Lech Walesa.
True, even the well oiled machine needs occasional maintenance, and our particular society is hardly a well oiled machine, despite its manifest virtues. We do need people to jump up and down, paint pictures for galleries, direct economically unsuccessful theatre, bring down the house with a too-soon ruined tenor voice, paint slogans on the side of the Opera House, write to their M.P's about immigration laws, stand up and heckle during Condelisa's guest lectures at the Con., and so on.
But through training and necessity, we cannot all so act.
Nor, I think, through nature. Most people are born to watch Mardi Gras and strip shows in the Manacle, not to participate in them. Nature has endowed the many with the blissful propensity to be followers, not agitators or leaders.
Apathy may not be a virtue, but it isn't about to vanish.
technorati tags:Philosophy, Morality, ethics, apathy
Friday, 20 April 2007
The hidden city
So often it's in cities, where the most people are, that you get a great sense of isolation. Lilfe seems to be full of oxymorons. Empty side streets and litter covered footpaths lit by neon signs: but no one around....
technorati tags:photography, aesthetics, art, sydney
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
My locale
People say the camera cannot lie. I say it cannot speak truth. All is filtered under the necessary conditions of what we want to see. This is the job of a photographer: to interpret and proclaim, performatively.
I see it as this and then so it is this...
technorati tags:Art, Aesthetics, photography, philosophy, sydney
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Saturday, 14 April 2007
Sex and Art
I'd lilke to do a Lacanian analysis of this. But not today. I have to clean my mirrors...
technorati tags:sex, art, lacan, psychoanalysis, aesthetics
Thursday, 12 April 2007
And another...
Not that I'm interested in psychonalytic interpretations of art or anything....
technorati tags:art, aesthetics, cartoons, angst
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
A Howler
You get the picture (well, an electronic facsimile)...
technorati tags:Art, Cartoon, Anxiety, Aesthetics
Tuesday, 10 April 2007
Some Paintings
Monday, 9 April 2007
A Maverick
Just did one of those personalilty tests and got back the following:
Do I agree? I 'll march to my own drum, thanks!
Sunday, 8 April 2007
Three Heroic Acts
Some more drawings of mine. These were all dont in Photoshop, incidentally.
technorati tags:Art, Aesthetics, Morality
Saturday, 7 April 2007
Derrida's Invaginations
I was looking at Jacques Derrida's deconstructed idea he calls "invagination" and wondering how to react to that in an abstract image.
Think of invagination as the folding space between two complimentary systems: the interaction is not simple but keeps folding back on itself in a way that is and isn't. A bit like the crack in the centre of a book which is there by virtue only of the pages around it, but which also inflects on those pages.
I decied to use Photoshop. I used only two colours in each image, and just a large brush. But I set the brush to "difference" mode; which means that where you paint over a colour, you don't get the colour of the brush you are using, instead you get the difference between it and the colour that happens to be already on that part of the image.
Repeating this many times meant that the "seam" in these images became more and more complex.
Invaginations I, II, III
Past and Becoming
These "virtual" sculptures were made by looking at different states of an object as it changed through time. A cloth fell and I took "snapshots" of it at different times. Converted them into chrome, because after I combined them, they'd refelct each other in unpredicably complex ways.
The 19-20th century philsopher Henri Bergson highlighted the fact that out present state and the future states that we will become inflected by "memories" of our past states. We are constantly becoming the past: the past is more real than the present.
technorati tags:Art, Sculpture, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Bergson, 3DS Max
Thursday, 5 April 2007
More Black Stuff
I submetted these to the editors of the indie art mag Neomu.
They said they loved them, but din't publish them.
One thing: the fashion of what was published was definitely "softer".
Is all this trendy, sad, cartoony art that you see around tinged a bit with sentimentality?
Portrait of My Mum
What Me and K Used to Do
Which reminds me...
Emotion in art? of course! But why and how? I mean, how can humour in art lead to somethign deeper? Think about Kant: he says, sagely, that art has to include a "purposiveness without a purpose". It has to have a purpose, yet not have one at the same time.
Crazy huh? But many people since have agreed, and a whole swathe of Continental thinkin gsince has relied heavily on "antinomies" or oxymorons.
There's a "gap" between purposfulness and purpose, and art fits uncannily within. Lacan couldn never have discovered his formulation of the Gaze without this kind of thinking.
Humour in art amplifies the gap, catches us unawares, makes us suddenly this uncanny gaze. Slips us up.
Yet too often artists dicount humour.
Here are a couple of drawings I did a while back. One ended up on the front cover of Australia's oldest literary journal. Hey, I think I managed to get the first ever erect penis there!
technorati tags:humour, black-humour, graphics, art, penis
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