Australia, Everyone is Scared Here.
Forum > Rants
by Flake 26 Jun 2007 7:26 am
61 Comments
Article of the Month June 2007
I feel that I’m living in an extremely comfortable cartoon, pretty and clean and ripped off. Where everyone has the same dream, replicas of me are already here, being here makes them have to move over, but they just wait patiently for me to leave, see they don’t need me. Australians – and this is the most frightening thought, are completely self sustaining. They don’t need anything or anyone. They have built a snug cocoon and their moral crack in their fiber is their fiber. Like NZ’s Treaty we whistle through the hole in our teeth bared.
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I wanted to think about this before I said something, to late. 3 in the morn is all right. I’m not a student or a scholar so I’ll write this just as I see fit. Australia the Land of the scared, I have been supported by an idealistic welfare system in NZ and therefore I lay some of my beliefs on and to the people of NZ, but a people living on a land that has serious and catastrophic history needs to be taught, learnt about and made one with so that the ghosts of seriously fucked can be lived along side with. But you'd have to be a well balanced individual to want to learn about that, and as a country of children of convicts, famous for not getting enough love themselves where is this role model suppose to spring from. It is like watching an abused chimp trying to nurse an infant with a lump of concrete. So it is instead paved over, since the local indigenous numbers are more like 1 or 2% it is spookily and easily done. And what I am saying is simply respect. Aboriginal people are not given respect.
It is my opinion that any opinion is some indication of what a person is willing to say about what they really don't know much about but are willing to hear and learn more about it from the rest of you. So with that in mind I will continue to recall my impressions of Australia as experienced here in the bubble of Melbourne, with a few impressions gained from earlier forays on the Gold Coast. Plus a lot of tele watching. Is NZ aware that quality NZ programs like "Neighbors at War" and I think "Police 10-7' or something, you know 11.30pm late night tv nz style showing people being idiots is Australian Major network Prime time TV. Tuesday nights at 8pm. That’s all you will see of NZ and I think betrays teeth to what is usually portrayed as friendly rivalry.
My first psychic research trips into the landscape of Aussie right now was done reservedly. I couldn’t name an Australian artist (Bands excluded) that I was interested in, generally there is a glut of painting all trying to paint out wall paper over the glaringly obvious, the spiritual rot of humans in this picture perfect landscape. I wrote earlier an idea that I’ve floated before, that those living in major cities suffer from a lack of perspective that has them all crawling and itching to get up each others arses to see the view. You see it in NZ too where one little aesthetic innovation will sporn a wave of activity but with the low population numbers NZ gets away with the gaps in between aesthetic movements, meaning you can see them for what they are. Here and in other major cities I have visited the alternative is “alternative’ the gap is smeared over and criticality is a department in a corporation. The only reason NZ is ‘better’ is our low numbers, village life is re-created here, everywhere there are cells of cultural behavior, I have met myself at least twice running into the back of one of these clicks, we’re all making the same work, only I think mine is TRULY better, wow with out italics it would be hard to tell. But I digress, here is a page unedited (sorry academic wankers) from my notes.
“Sunday 17 June,
I’m a tourist and like all tourists I didn’t come here to see your particular rendition of what was fashionable in the west through the ages, though pleasant enough. I want to see what is here originally and
Beaut to have your comments, Flake. And tasty looking paintings too.
What's with the holes? Are you saying rude things about John Nixon or something? Or is it Mystical Abstraction you are punching your fist through?
Speaking of 'mysticism' but ignoring 'abstraction' the Conland show that opens this Friday in Auckland looks very exciting:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0706/S00187.htm
You sound deeply alienated Flake. How about getting out of the city and the 'art world' and going to the outback where you will find a very different Australia. Better than beating up Malevichian motifs. Though take care, there are plenty of pubs out there where you could get beaten up. On The Road....
Incidentally, may I suggest you go to the NGV and take a good look at the paintings of John Brack, a Melburnian. Particularly the pre 1980s works. You might have an affinity with his view of Australian values. This work was painted in 1955.
I did see his GCAS show and was really impressed, though feel a bit sad that his impressions of this town are so simplistic.
Everyone here knows that the current government emulates the USA and that Australia's excessive reliance on uranium and other mineral mining is something to despair, not to mention the catastrophe that is white australia's relationship to its indigenous people, however there is a great deal of literature, film, theatre and art that has been written and exhibitions curated, and government policy written and rewritten - that address these things. People are more than aware of it. It gets in everything. Just read leunig!
And that Melbourne bubble Tao refers to. The quick whir and click of a well oiled machine, everyone in their groove moving through the network seamlessly - yes it is a bit Courbieuseresque - a little frightening in its seamlessness, and can make one a little prone to contentedness, lose the hunger a bit. Infrastructure can be the enemy of anarchy - NZ's chaotic lack of any infrastructural order is perhaps what keeps it on its toes culturally? Keeps it angry and questioning?.
And besides a simple psychogeographic reading of the city will come up with the same lack of perpspective and desire for height (physical and metaphoric) that tao identifies in his travelogue. That too is a pretty well trodden path. But then - what is new. I guess.
The mirror is an old one, the face a bit tired. Blow it up and start over - remove some teeth , make a gap. perhaps? The irony is that you can here, there are funding bodies to assist in such mattters!
an old debate about too much comfort leading to complacency and inertia.
lose some teeth indeed.
Art is what can make life worth living for if you are destitute, it's the expression of an alternative, a compensation for misfortune, a priestly stoicism. The same with the obscenely wealthy, art is the connection to the thing they lost along the way, or have always longed to experience, the one thing that wealth can never aquire in truth.
I live in a city, but my interest is in nature, the almost maschocistic detachment from the subject gives it intensity, a rose is best viewed against a concrete wall in my opinion.
Oh really? Last time I looked, NZ was a nation of bureaucrats and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the arts. There are myriad funding schemes for this and that; the special dole if you are an artist; every tinpot town has an art gallery and museum & community arts facilities; the opera, ballet, symphony etc are all funded by government. Arguably it's all about infrastructure and not enough about good work...
Even if what you were saying was true, the argument would still be specious. It's ridiculous to propose that lack of infrastructure is a condition of good artmaking & a causal factor for a healthy culture that is 'on its toes'. On these terms, all the best artists would come out of the Congo.
It seems obvious on the face of it that art would be the least important thing to think about when starving or under constant threat of violence...but the reality is sometimes different. I have raved before in this forum about artists in Sarajevo and their extraodinary comittment to continuing to practice while being shot at for three years... not possible to generalise about such things perhaps. slightly off the topic of infrastructure...more about will, passion and commitment
I have heard Melbourne artists speak about Sydney as seamless and self-sufficient...(sydney artists speak that way about New York and London)...South island artists speak that way about Auckland...fact of life fatter cities ARE relatively self sufficient...they ask with some justification why the hell should they look further when everything they need is directly at hand. for example Natasha Conland is attributed with saying that there are no decent artists in the south Island (hearsay, but related to the notable demographic gap in Scape 06). is she right? is it true that if it happens in the South Island it never happened? obviously i dont think so...but why should australia care about NZ? why should auckland care about the south?
how the hell would we know how good the artist in the congo actually are?
I met a woman from Russia once who's friends all said, why would you move to a place where you cant wear high heel shoes? when she told them she was moving to NZ. Ignorance is bliss I guess, we all think were so clever, when in reality we just don't know what people outside of our own particular little cocoons are doing, much like any form of discrimination really, including that which Flake talks about in Australian society.
Your work looks really awesome though, congratulations.
Simon Laurence
Rob Hood
a comment about the pervasiveness of smug regionalism...as opposed to a defensive stand about artistic pedigree measured by geographical means...
you dont sound very happy about australia though, meybe you should do something about that.
