As the severity of Covid-19 restrictions have been dialled up and down over the past two years, one rule with a significant impact on my work as an independent writer remained a constant: university libraries largely barred physical access to non-students. This has been the case for most Sydney campuses at least and it’s only […]
Burn, Ian. ‘Is Art History Any Use to Artists?’ In Dialogue: Writings in Art History, 1–14. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991. This essay has entered my life on several occasions, and every time I read it I interpret it slightly differently. Burn’s essay hypothesises that, fundamentally, there’s a disconnect between art making and the making […]
TITLE [untitled] ceramic cup ARTIST/MAKER Pauline Hoerboer DATE OF MANUFACTURE c. 2017 DATE OF REPORT February 2022 DIMENSIONS H 90 W 100 D 86 mm CURRENT LOCATION Kitchen cupboard above the microwave, second shelf from the bottom, to the left. KNOWN PROVENANCE Purchased at Kali Tengah, The Hague, 2017. Description A small ceramic vessel designed […]
Uncle Charles Moran, Uncle Greg Harrington, and Norm Sheehan. ‘On Country Learning.’ Design and Culture 10, no. 1, (2018): 71–9. Graham, Mary. ‘Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place.’ PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 3 (2009): 71–7. These two seminal writings step out the importance of Place (Country) and its reconfiguration into and around the […]
The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine (1984) by Roszika Parker is a seminal text in contemporary textile and fibre art discourse. Centring on the history of embroidery and the role it played in the construction of the ‘feminine,’ the work has weathered much criticism since its original publication in 1984. While […]
Précis – In December 2021 ad agency Clemenger BBDO announced a collaboration with art collective Glue Society and the University of Tasmania for Earth’s Black Box, a large steel vault recording ongoing climate data much like a plane’s flight recorder. Drawing on this project, I reconceptualise the ‘black box’ – as container of knowledge but […]
I am a descendant of south-eastern Europe, a prisoner of war refugee and a post-war migrant: a second-generation Australian. I am conscious that while I am Australian, I live on the landsof Aboriginal Australians. Over two decades, I have sustaineda curatorial practice that honours this awareness. Travelling Australia from the lands of the Gimuy-walubarra yidi […]
THE ARGUMENT The One Eyed Man has cultivated an obsessional quality in us.It has become the keystone for paradigms of creative practice that are otherwise outside the normalised strictures of two allegedly art-historically trained artists. Through its polyphony of rhythms and basslines and harmonies and dissonances and instruments and players it ruptures and intervenes and […]
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York:Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. I’m late to the work of Octavia Butler, having put the other Butler (Judith) ahead on my reading list. While I haven’t made it much beyond introductions and crib notes with Judith (whose teachings on gender have anyway passed into a realm […]
The-one-who-loves-knowledge, he says: ‘What is writing? What are its places of storage? Compare it to its like, O overflowing one!— Book of Thoth From my window, between this building and the next, I’m counting ibis. In the morning over coffee … 1, 2 … at lunch … 4, 5, 6 … at dusk …7, 8, […]
sanitation was a response to the putridness of British life classed, crammed, sickthe toilet is where youshitthere are chickpeas simmering gentlyon the stoveidentical almost to mybody simmering in the hot baththoughts slowing downor in the shower, speeding upSpecial Agent Dale Cooperperceived the demonic presenceof Bob by smashinghis head through the bathroom mirrorI was in the […]
Aesthetic perception is necessarily historical. — Leela GandhiWe’ve got to play ordinary venues at the moment but I dream of playing the rubble of London’s palaces.— Anwen Crawford We met as workers in a Middle Eastern restaurant. We worked less for them and more with them. You on dishes after the day’s art and me […]
AREF SEA 793 ‘The principle reason for the three-way handshake is to prevent old duplicate connection initiations from causing confusion’ This poem is concerned by a means to address you.It is only about connecting. It is trying not to be Defensive. It’s no longer 1981 and we are not on Wilson Boulevardand we no longer […]
San Francisco’s Burning is not only a ballad opera for the stage, it is also a piece of historical fiction. Set in San Francisco in the days prior to the earthquake of 1906, it chronicles the interactions of a cast of characters whose lives intersect through murder, sex and urban planning reform. The musical, written […]
Footsteps on the dance floor remind me baby of you … To all of my on-the-floor partners, friends and colleagues. Every floor is a dance floor — Harrison I moved to Sydney in 2015. I was constantly hungry because I was nervous and unhappy. There is some food you can buy and eat for under […]
Fixations I might be addicted to problem solving. At least, it often preoccupies me. For example: if I take food that’s gone off and put it in the freezer, will that preserve more available nutrients for decomposition in the council’s green waste facility? Will the energy cost render this a futile gesture? And: how true […]
Rationalisation Writing in 1983, George Ritzer argues that McDonald’s exemplified the accelerated rationalisation of the broader society. As constantly reiterated in The Founder,[^1] a biopic focused on Ray Krok’s franchised expansion of the fast-food restaurant, McDonald’s became a ‘symphony of efficiency’. Over the years, Ritzer’s definition of ‘McDonaldization’ as a process that emphasises efficiency, predictability, […]
Elena Gomez is a poet, editor and researcher living in Melbourne. She is the author of Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (2020), Body of Work (2018) and several chapbooks and pamphlets. [^1]: Indrajit Ray, ‘Indigo in Bengal’ in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. H Selin (Dordrecht: […]
Mutual debt, debt unpayable, debt unbounded, debt unconsolidated, debt to each other in a study group, to others in a nurses’ room, to others in a barber shop, to others in a squat, a dump, a woods, a bed, an embrace.— Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Today, a brief lull between lockdowns, is for writing. […]
It feels too easy to write the abject — I puke all over myself and my organs fall out and I shit my pants and everything that was inside is out now. That’s writing the abject though, not writing about it. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the above example, it simply operates and exists. […]
on venus, the winds blow harderthey strip every surface, the air hostile // on venuswe are neighbours in nerves/ with chemical / with acid.[^1] In a moment defined by climate crisis and worsening inequalities under capitalism, the fantasy of utopia resembles nothing more than a nostalgic vision of the past. In this context, P. Staff’s exhibition On Venus (2019)presents […]
Teik-Kim Pok: I saw this one-liner on the internet — ‘My friend told me she wouldn’t eat beef tongue because it came from a cow’s mouth. So I gave her an egg.’ As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded it was hard to keep up with all the stories of food, both good and bad, that shaped […]
Atlantis Marine Park is an abandoned theme park and the centrepiece of the Yanchep Sun City development. It was built by notorious criminal entrepreneur Alan Bond in the small fishing community of Two Rocks in 1981, sixty-something kilometres north of Boorloo/Perth. Atlantis seems a curious name for a theme park in settler-colonial Australia — for […]
The Socialist Scholars Conference was a gathering of intellectuals, academics, community organisers, religious leaders and a who’s-who of grassroots and celebrity progressives. It happened to be taking place in New York and I was visiting nearby, so I was able to duck in to listen to a long weekend of speakers and panels. I made […]