The World We Found

Michael Waite



Master of Fine Arts

University of New South Wales
College of Fine Arts

March 2010
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Surname or Family name: Waite
First name: Michael Other name/s:
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School: School of Media Art Faculty: College of Fine Arts
Title: "The World We Found"
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)
This paper documents three visual art projects that explore the area of everyday life. One concern was to find ways of
attending to the everyday that were appropriate to express its elusive and ambiguous nature. The two main
approaches determined were, firstly, a direct engagement with the world rather than a detached way of operating, and
secondly, working within the framework of the project, a method that is more concerned with the process of
engagement rather than producing a polished artwork as the final result.
The basic concepts of phenomenology are also considered in regard to their relevance to the everyday.
Phenomenology is a philosophy that stresses the importance of studying our subjective experience of the world as
embodied beings. Important thinkers in this area such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of both
the relevance of everyday life to this philosophy and also of the potential for artists to play a role.
Consideration is also given to the sorts of organising structures used in traditional museum displays where things
are brought together in ways that seem to produce meaning. This is an area of interest to some contemporary artists
who question the principles of these systems, which are often collectively referred to as the archive. Two of my
projects are presented in the form of an ordered system of visual records, while the third is documentation of an
official ordering system found in a Mexico City park.
Essentially, I was exploring the potential for visual art projects to present aspects of everyday life in ways that draw
attention to the subjectivity inherent in the encounter between self and the world.
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Contents


Introduction 1

Chapter One: The Man Who Collected 4

Chapter Two: The World 7

Chapter Three: Landmarks from Home 19

Chapter Four: The Collection of a Gentleman 29

Chapter Five: D.F. Nature Walk 39

Summary 43

Appendix A: Stills from Landmarks from Home

Appendix B: Index of VHS titles onto which
Landmarks from Home footage was inserted

Appendix C: Catalogue of street portraits

Bibliography

DVD Insert Landmarks from Home (inside back cover)
1
Introduction

... the way we relate to the things of the world is no longer as a pure intellect trying
to master an object or space that stands before it. Rather, this relationship is an
ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an
enigmatic world of which we catch a glimpse (indeed which we haunt incessantly)
but only ever from points of view that hide as much as they reveal, a world in
which every object displays the human face it acquires in a human gaze.
1


In this paper I explore ideas around three projects completed as part of my MFA
research from 2007 to 2010. The MFA research paper and exhibition are both titled
The World We Found, which points to the key concepts being explored. In broad
terms, the three projects use ordering structures to examine aspects of everyday life as a
way of exploring the subjectivity inherent in our quest for knowledge. As expressed by
one of the fundamental philosophical questions Is the world knowable?
2

In my research the area of the world that is under consideration is everyday life
our immediate surroundings and mundane activities that are often taken for granted,
might be a source of philosophical insight when presented in different ways. The
question as to whether it is possible to have objective knowledge of the external world
was considered by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and is still a question of interest
to contemporary philosophers and scientists. We would like to have objective, unbiased
knowledge of the world around us, however our approach always proceeds from our
own subjectivity. Across my MFA projects the main knowledge structures being
explored are the kinds of gathering and sorting practices found in traditional archive and
museum displays that bring together disparate items in ways which seem to produce

1
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (69-70).
2
Throughout the paper the term the world is used in its philosophical context, not to describe
planet Earth but rather to represent the ultimate setting for our existence and all the things we
experience.
2
meaning. However it is possible that there is no inherent meaning in the world and it is
we who create these narratives out of our desire for meaning. This view ties in with one
of the basic tenets of phenomenology, which states that because our experience of the
world is always filtered through our senses and consciousness we cannot have objective
knowledge and that all we can really study is ourselves studying the world.
3
We never
see the world clearly because we are always in the way.
I begin the paper with a general discussion of everyday life, ordering systems,
and phenomenology, outlining the key concepts of relevance to my research, and also
mentioning various writers and artists who have explored these areas. I then describe
the three projects, which were all undertaken as part of the MFA research. The first
project discussed is Landmarks from Home which comprises a video archive of
mundane buildings and locations around Sydney that hold some personal resonance for
me. In relation to this I also discuss sense of place with particular reference to the
Situationist International concept of psychogeography. The second project covered is
The Collection of A Gentleman which consists of 44 portrait drawings of myself that
were made by street portrait artists around the world. In this work I was interested in
creating an archive of a particular form of popular art as a way to point to the
subjectivity of perception, as well as a presentation of the ubiquity of a certain style of
mimetic representation. The final project discussed is D.F. Nature Walk a selection of
photographs I took in a Mexico City park where more than 1,000 trees had large
identifying numbers painted on them. This project documents an institutional ordering

3
Edmund Husserl outlined the basic approach of phenomenology early in the twentieth century
as an alternative to the detached objectivity that had come to dominate the sciences post-
Enlightenment. Husserl proposed that as our fundamental experience of the world is via our
embodied interaction with it, this should be the starting point of science and philosophy. The
world is a world of phenomena and the things in it are studied as they appear to a conscious
being.
3
system, which I saw as a vivid example of our attempts to understand the world by
applying our own meanings to it.

4
Chapter One:
The Man Who Collected

In a short story titled The Man Who Collected the First of September, 1973, Tor ge
Bringsvrd
4
writes about a Norwegian man named Ptk who had begun to feel
increasingly disconnected from everyday reality. Unsettled by this he devises a plan that
he hopes will lead him back to his previous state of being at ease in the world. He will
accomplish this by an intensive study of the complete contents of his local daily
newspapers, believing that if he can grasp the totality of the concrete events happening
in his part of the world it will help to ground him. He soon finds this approach to be
impractical as it takes several days to read the contents of one days newspapers, Ptk
realised that the sum of information was too weighty for any single man to balance on
his head. News fell in heaps around his feet, clung like ivy to his legs and tightened like
a belt round his stomach.
5

After rethinking his methodology he decides to select one particular day and
study it in-depth. He chooses the 1
st
of September 1973 and begins by purchasing all of
the Norwegian newspapers published on that date. He clips items from the papers and
sorts them into various categories such as the weather, business and sport. Once he has
worked through the local publications he buys newspapers that were published on
September 1
st
from neighbouring countries and then from around the world. He studies
foreign languages and twice moves to larger apartments in order to be able to
accommodate his growing archive:

4
Bringsvrd, Tor ge. The Man Who Collected the First of September, 1973, (1973) in
Borges, Jorge Luis, Silvina Ocampo, and A. Bioy Casares (eds.), The Book of Fantasy, Viking
Penguin, New York, 1988 (77-80).
5
Ibid. (78).
5
But all the time there were more things to learn. The subject turned out to be
just about inexhaustible. Who would have guessed that so much had happened
on exactly the 1
st
of September 1973?
6

He becomes progressively more hermit-like, avoiding contact with friends and anything
that distracts him from his project. His apartment is essentially a research library
dedicated to the worldly events of one day. The more material he gathers, the more
connections and patterns he finds that seem to hint at some grand unified understanding
that might be attainable. One day there is a fire in his building and Ptk is severely
burned while trying to save his archive. He dies in hospital, oblivious to his immediate
surroundings as his mind is still assembling the final pieces of the giant puzzle.
This story touches on some key concepts in regard to everyday life and the
archive that are present in my research as well as the work of some contemporary artists
and writers to whom I refer. First is the notion of a person as a lone researcher, who
while working on a project uses a methodology that is structurally rational, (gathering,
ordering and classifying in the case of Ptk). However, unlike a conventional academic
research project which would require some initial peer assessment of its rationale and
likelihood of success, the individual can devise his or her own rules by taking a leap of
faith based on intuition. In the case of Ptk, he never rationalises the way in which he
expects his project to make sense; his is an act of magical thought that is given the
appearance of rationality by his use of archival methodology. Another element of
interest in the story is that Ptk does not discriminate between the various pieces of
information that he collects. For example, he doesnt give particular importance to
global politics over local sports results; there is a levelling where all categories of
information are capable of providing value. He gathers and sorts everything - classified

6
Ibid. (79).
6
ads, the stock market and business news, the TV guide, sporting results, cinema listings,
crime, politics and war. In The Delirious Museum, Calum Storrie writes how this
profusion of data overwhelms Ptks project ... but the enterprise can never be
completed because even when time and space have been contained there is an infinite
number of narratives.
7

7
Storrie, Calum. The Delirious Museum: A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, I. B. Tauris,
London, 2006 (152).
7
Chapter Two:
The World

I shall suggest ... that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy
... has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are
always prone to forget.
8


THE EVERYDAY
Ptk felt this news article gathering was a project that could be carried out by himself, in
his own apartment, using material that was readily available to any person, implying
that philosophical understanding is attainable within the realm of everyday life. Tor ge
Bringsvrds story was first published in 1973 at a time when interest grew in everyday
life as a field of study. In the same year Georges Perec published an article titled
Approaches to What in the journal Cause Commune in which he coined the term
infra-ordinary" to describe that which exists below the extraordinary
9
. He argued that
while much attention is paid to the big events of life, the ordinary and common
elements are overlooked as being unimportant, when close study of them with a fresh
approach might lead to valuable insights about human existence. He wrote:
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our
utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that
which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.
10

Something that several writers have noted is the ambiguous and elusive quality of the
everyday. Helena Tatay writes:

8
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (39).
9
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, London, 1999 (209-11).
10
Ibid. (210).
8
The everyday is associated with the small side of life, with the grey, humble and
imprecise element. It is the other side of the coin of the capitalist social scene,
whose image, constructed by the media, is colourful, optimistic and logical.
11

In a 1969 article titled Everyday Speech, Maurice Blanchot notes the importance of
this elusive quality:
Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold.
It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth,
without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible
signification.
12

In his essay Recent Art and the Everyday, Stephen Johnstone identifies two common
elements in the approaches of contemporary artists to this area. Firstly, in line with
Perecs notion of the infra-ordinary, the everyday ... exists below the threshold of the
noticed and is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
13
In the second place, artists
whose work explores the everyday, generally do so by some direct engagement with the
world rather than operating as detached observers. The everyday is seen as ... both
authentic and democratic; it is the place where ordinary people creatively use and
transform the world they encounter from one day to another.
14
This leads to a
consideration of how such an elusive concept can be dealt with artistically in regard to
approach, materials and presentation. In Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, Ben
Highmore asks, What then would constitute a suitable aesthetic form for registering

11
Tatay, Helena. Hans-Peter Feldmann, 272 Pages, Centre national de la photographie, Paris &
Fundacio Antoni Tpies, Barcelona & Fotomuseum, Winterthur, 2002 (35).
12
Blanchot, Maurice. Everyday Speech (1969), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The Everyday,
Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008 (36).
13
Johnstone, Stephen. Recent Art and the Everyday (2008), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The
Everyday, Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2008 (13).
14
Ibid. (13)
9
daily life in all its newness, uncertainty and lack of tradition?
15
Georges Perec also
asked:
How are we to speak of these common things, how to track them down rather,
flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to
give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we
are.
16

Michael Sheringham writes of the risk of the everyday dissolving into statistics and data
if the approach is too didactic or rational.
17
He proposes the framework of the project
as a suitable approach, defining a project as an endeavour, that, although it points
toward some end, is more concerned with the steps that are taken along the way,
shifting attention from outcomes (for instance, a finished artwork) to processes,
practices, constraints, and durations
18
. Writing that the project:
allows for everydayness by suspending abstract definition and creating a
breathing space, a gap or hiatus that enables the quotidien to be apprehended as a
medium in which we are immersed rather than as a category to be analysed.
19

As an example he refers to the 1981 work by Sophie Calle La Filature (The Shadow) in
which she had her mother hire a private detective to follow her.
20
She knew that she was
being followed and therefore, to an extent performed for the watcher, without being sure
who he was; meanwhile the detective was unaware that she knew of his surveillance.
The results of this project have been presented in both gallery and book form as a
combination of texts (his report and her writings) and photographs (those taken by the

15
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, London: Routledge,
2002 (23).
16
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin Books, 1999 (210).
17
Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006 (360).
18
Ibid. (388).
19
Ibid. (390).
20
Ibid. (342).
10
detective and others by a friend who Sophie Calle involved in the project). The work is
presented as documentation of a process rather than as a polished work that had been
created later.

THE ARCHIVE
In a 2002 interview with Helena Tatay, the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann said, I
am not interested in the high points of life. Only five minutes of every day are
interesting. I want to show the rest, normal life.
21
His 1977 project All the Clothes of
a Woman is an example of how in his work he considers both the everyday and the
archive. Most of his titles are plain descriptions of what is in the work and in this case
he simply photographed all the clothes of an unidentified woman. It was first presented
as a book of 71 photos, simple black and white shots with the clothing on a clothes
hanger on a wall and the shoes on the floor. It is reminiscent of a museum display and if
it was photographs of all the clothes of a seventeenth-century woman we might easily
apprehend it as such. However there is a sense of displacement caused by the
contemporary look of the garments how do we read our own era and culture as a
museum display? Further, a museum would have explanatory texts but Feldmanns
works never do, as if they are meant to be self-explanatory. This absence draws
attention to the underlying ambiguity of museum collections and the texts that
contextualise them. They often present one narrative in favour of other possible ones.
As Helena Tatay writes:
Rather than search for a coherent discourse, Feldmann seems to explore the
meaninglessness of existence. Another aspect he finds interesting is leaving the

21
Tatay, Helena. Hans-Peter Feldmann, 272 Pages, Centre national de la photographie, Paris
& Fundacio Antoni Tpies, Barcelona & Fotomuseum, Winterthur, 2002 (35).
11
work open, so that it not only allows but demands that the spectator recreate the
works, projecting his or her own experience.
22

In January 2008 the International Center of Photography in New York staged an
exhibition titled Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art that
included artists such as Christian Boltanski, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Tacita Dean. In
his catalogue essay the curator, Okwui Enwezor, discussed the ways in which
contemporary artists have explored the idea of the archive. First he clarifies what is
meant by the use of the word archive in contemporary art, not, a dim, musty place
full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert
repository of historical artefacts
23
but rather as, an active, regulatory discursive
system.
24
And further, that the archive is, a representation of the taxonomy,
classification, and annotation of knowledge and information
25
and thus also refers to
the kinds of ordering systems traditionally used in libraries and museums. One key
aspect explored by contemporary artists is the air of authority attached to these systems:
Artists interrogate the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against
the grain. This interrogation may take aim at the structural and functional
principles underlying the use of the archival document, or it may result in the
creation of another archival structure as a means of establishing an archaeological
relationship to history, evidence, information, and data that will give rise to its
own interpretive categories.
26




22
Ibid (35)
23
Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, New York,
N.Y.: International Center of Photography, Steidl, Gttingen, 2008 (11).
24
Ibid (11).
25
Ibid (16).
26
Ibid (18).
12
PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE EVERYDAY
In her book The Ecstatic Quotidian
27
, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei analyses examples of
modern literature that explore the everyday in ways that relate to phenomenology, the
philosophy primarily developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
28
One
central idea proposed by Husserl is that we can never have objective knowledge of the
physical world as our experience of it is internally produced in ways that are so
automatic we are rarely aware of them. As Husserl wrote:
Daily practical living is naive. It is immersion in the already given world, whether
it be experiencing, or thinking, or valuing, or acting. Meanwhile all those
productive intentional functions of experiencing, because of which physical things
are simply there, go on anonymously. The experiencer knows nothing about them,
and likewise nothing about his creative thinking.
29

Phenomenologists use the term natural attitude to refer to this unquestioning common
sense acceptance of our experience of the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty said that we
have to consciously find alternative ways of looking at the world to break out of the
natural attitude and become aware of the processes of perception. He wrote that this
type of philosophical reflection, ... slackens the intentional threads which attach us to
the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world
because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.
30

This position makes everyday life ideal material for phenomenological study,
once we realise that the mundane world of things that we use and take for granted (e.g.

27
Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in
Modern Art and Literature Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2007
28
The primary text on phenomenology was Edmund Husserls Logical Investigations (1901).
His student, Martin Heidegger developed the ideas in Being and Time (1927). Maurice Merleau-
Ponty studied the processes of perception in Phenomenolgy of Perception (1945). Although
having different approaches, all three stressed the primacy of the embodied individuals
encounter with the world.
29
Ibid. (14).
30
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (13).
13
bricks, utensils and table manners as listed by Perec)
31
can also be a source of insight
into the condition of being and our experience of it. However, if these objects are
potentially so interesting, why do we tend not to notice this most of the time? One
possibility given by Georges Perec is that we are creatures of habit, performing the
same routine day after day, and as long as things go as we expect them to there is no
need for deeper reflection on those activities or the objects involved in them. He wrote,
we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if
it werent the bearer of any information.
32
In an essay from 1931 Samuel Beckett wrote
that, Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, and
as a result of this, the creation of the world ... takes place every day".
33
That is, we are
creating the world as we understand it based on all of our experiences, even those on
which we place little importance.
This leads to a consideration of what might be required to prompt us to move
from this habitual not noticing to a more aware and insightful approach to considering
the world and our perception of it. Husserl suggested that due to the centrality of
subjective apprehension of the world, the ideas being considered by phenomenology
could just as well be explored by art and literature.
34
Victor Shklovsky, a Russian
Formalist
35
wrote that one purpose of art was to defamiliarise the world by making
strange. He wrote in 1925, The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to
make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the

31
Op. cit. (210).
32
Ibid. (210).
33
Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in
Modern Art and Literature Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2007 (16).
34
Ibid. (87-88). Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei writes that Husserl grants fiction ... a special
relevance for the philosopher. And further that Husserl was aware that the poetic-literary
writer not only competes with but may exceed the phenomenologist in regard to facilities of
description and imaginative variation, and so provides a resource for phenomenology.
35
Russian Formalism refers to a loose grouping of literary theorists active from around 1910 to
1930. Their writings were influential in the areas of semiotics and structuralism.
14
process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
36
So artists
and writers, as well as philosophers, can play an important role by presenting the world
in such a way that the viewer or reader has their perception altered and moves to more
awareness.
One element that is of interest to me in this field of study is the perception of
ordinary objects such as buildings and trees. Martin Heidegger referred to objects as
being either obtrusive or unobtrusive and used the term average everydayness
37
to
describe how we experience the world in the state of unquestioning acceptance. Most of
the time we might sit at a table or write with a pen and consider them as no more than
an object with some use value, in that sense unobtrusive. However in the state of
obtrusiveness, the naked presence of the object as being, separate from its use value,
stimulates our awareness. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei gives an example from the novel
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, (1910) by Rainer Maria Rilke. The character
Malte is both fascinated and disturbed by some partly demolished houses that he
encounters in Paris. He is particularly drawn to explore the interiors by the way they
evoke the past lives of the people who once lived there. As Gosetti-Ferencei writes,
The houses in ruins, naturally, have lost their equipmental signification; their
existence, torn out of average everydayness, protrudes.
38


36
Childs, Peter and Roger Fowler The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms Routledge,
Oxon, 2006 (93).
37
Heidegger, Martin Being And Time, Harper Perennial, New York, 2008 (69).
38
Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in
Modern Art and Literature Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2007 (30).
15


DRIVE & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

All cities are geological: you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts
bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose
landmarks constantly draw us toward the past.
39


In mid 1950s Paris the members of the Situationist International group began using two
words, psychogeography and drive, in relation to their practice of creative exploration
of the city. The leader and main theorist, Guy Debord, described psychogeography as,
the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,
whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.
40

Drive (French for drift) was the name given to their technique for exploring certain
parts of the city on foot, either alone or in groups. Writing in 1958, Debord explained:
In a drive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations,
their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement
and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity
than one might think: from a drive point of view cities have
psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes
that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
41


39
Chtcheglov, Ivan. Formulary for a New Urbanism, (1953) in Ken Knabb (ed & trans),
Situationist International Anthology, Rev. and expanded edn., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public
Secrets, 2006 (1).
40
Debord, Guy. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, (1955) in Ken Knabb (ed &
trans), Situationist International Anthology, Rev. and expanded edn., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of
Public Secrets, 2006 (8).
41
Debord, Guy, Theory of the Drive, (1958) in Ken Knabb (ed & trans), Situationist
International Anthology Rev. and expanded edn., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006
(62).
16
Its worth noting that at this time Paris was undergoing urban modernisation that saw
some old districts being demolished and replaced by metro stations, freeways
constructed alongside the Seine, and public housing blocks that were often built in the
hard edged International Style
42
favoured by the government of the day. The
Situationists disliked this architectural look, regarding it as the house style of modern
capitalism and state control; their preference was for the more chaotic and unplanned
older areas of the city that had evolved over centuries and that is where most drives
were undertaken. As Vincent Kaufmann writes, one reason for this practice was, the
desire to introduce poetry into a lived experience of the street, of the city.
43

There are apparent similarities between a drive and how someone might
wander through a museum or gallery, leading to the notion that during a drive the
participants explore an area of the city as if it were a museum. Architect and exhibition
designer Calum Storrie considers this idea in his book The Delirious Museum
44
, his
argument being that when approached in this manner cities have the potential to be
more interesting than museums. He writes, Most cities have evolved over a long period
of time and they have often done so with very little control. The museum, however, is
traditionally associated with order and classification.
45
His view is that the logical
structure of most museums limits the range of possible interpretations of the contents,
whereas the city has a greater richness of possible meanings. For example, in a city such
as Sydney it is possible to view in close proximity to each other, elements of the urban
landscape that range from the 21
st
century back to the 18
th
, rather like walking into an
art gallery and finding an abstract expressionist painting next to a Vermeer with no

42
The International Style was a modernist architectural style practiced by architects such as Le
Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with slogans such as form follows function.
43
Kaufmann, Vincent. The Poetics of the Drive, (2001) in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The
Everyday, Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008 (95).
44
Storrie, Calum. The Delirious Museum : A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, I. B.
Tauris, London, 2006.
45
Ibid. (2).
17
explanation. As Storrie writes, In some ways any city is a Delirious Museum: a place
overlaid with levels of history, a multiplicity of situations, events and objects open to
countless interpretations.
46

Although the drive was described as a transitory experience, some of the
Situationists did produce visual art works as a result of their walks. Naked City
(1957), a collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, was produced by cutting
up a map of central Paris, eliminating certain areas, moving others about, and adding
arrows that represented subjective connections between these zones. Psychogeographic
Map of Venice (1957) by English artist and sole member of the Psychogeographic
Committee of London, Ralph Rumney, was a two page document of black and white
photographs and captions documenting a drive in Venice. As Calum Storrie describes
it, he treated it as a found place, a museum of spaces and accidental encounters. By
selecting sites and routes with particular resonances, Rumney became a nomadic curator
of the city.
47

In his writings Debord stressed that the drive was a new technique, distinct
from earlier artistic walking practices such as the chance-determined walks of the
Surrealists or Baudelaires concept of the flneur. However in his book
Psychogeography, Mervin Coverley
48
takes issue with this stance, writing that although
the drive has its distinctive elements it should be considered as part of a loose tradition
of creative urban exploration that both precedes and follows it:
But psychogeography has resisted its containment within a particular time and
place. In escaping the stifling orthodoxy of Debords situationist dogma, it has

46
Ibid. (2).
47
Storrie, Calum. The Delirious Museum : A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, I. B.
Tauris, London, 2006 (40).
48
Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography Pocket Essentials, Harpenden, Herts, 2006
18
found both a revival of interest today and retrospective validation in traditions that
predate Debords official conception by several centuries.
49

He gives as examples the eighteenth century London novel Journal of the Plague Year
(1722) by Daniel Defoe; the urban wanderings documented in Thomas De Quinceys
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) and in the contemporary era, books and
films by Iain Sinclair such as London Orbital
50
(2002). The latter is about a year spent
walking the edge of the M25 motorway that encircles London. Taking this broader view
of psychogeography, Coverley lists two key characteristics; first, the importance of the
act of walking, in which we move at human pace and have direct engagement with the
street, as opposed to the view through the window of a moving car; and second, in the
search for new ways of apprehending our urban environment.
51
In a statement that ties
in with ideas about everyday life, phenomenology, and their potential for revealing
meaning, he writes, Psychogeography seeks to overcome the processes of
banalisation by which the everyday experience of our surroundings becomes one of
drab monotony,
52
and further, that the various artists and writers involved in this
practice, all share a perception of the city as a site of mystery and seek to reveal the
true nature that lies beneath the flux of the everyday.
53


49
Ibid. (10).
50
London Orbital was released in hardcover in 2002. Iain Sinclair also collaborated with
filmmaker Chris Petit to rework the material as a poetic essay style video work, also titled
London Orbital and released in 2002.
51
Ibid. (13).
52
Ibid. (13).
53
Ibid. (13).
19
Chapter Three:
Landmarks from Home

... no other medium of expression has cinemas original and innate capacity for
showing things that we believe worth showing, as they happen day by day in
what we might call their dailiness, their longest and truest duration.
54


In late 2007 I began work on a project titled Landmarks from Home as part of my
MFA research. In this project I use Super 8 and Single 8 motion picture film to
document particular buildings and structures around Sydney that have a particular
resonance for me. Various clips from this documentation are linked together and then
inserted onto the blank section at the end of VHS tapes that I rent from video libraries.
The tapes are returned to the library to be available for future rental. This work is best
discussed in two parts; firstly, the rationale behind the selection of the sites and how I
document them, and secondly the manner in which Ive chosen to disseminate the work.
Ive lived in Sydney since the mid 1960s and have always felt a strong sense of
place. By this I mean that quite often I will encounter a building that has an unexpected
impact on me in terms of making me think about how the city works and how people
live. Sometimes these buildings will be in a district that also holds interest for me and I
will spend time exploring the area on foot, returning over the years. Occasionally when
I revisit an area I will find that one of the buildings has been demolished or altered and
no longer has the same resonance. In thinking about ways to preserve an image of these
buildings and also try and make sense of my response to them, I had the idea to make a

54
Zavattini, Cesare. Some Ideas on the Cinema quoted in Ivone Marguiles, Nothing
Happens: Chantal Akermans Hyperrealist Everyday Duke University Press, Durham and
London, 1996 (37).

20
motion picture archive of them. An early working title for the project was Places I
would miss if they were to disappear.
Im not sure if I can define one specific quality that draws my attention to these
buildings, however there seem to be some common factors shared by the majority.
There is a sense of transience due to many of them no longer serving their original
purpose and not yet having been adapted for a new function. Others stand out due to
being rather ugly, strange looking, or somehow not in harmony with their surroundings.
I think most of them are obtrusive as described by Heidegger; there is something
about their appearance that makes them distinctive. In part, I see my video
documentation and re-presentation of these places as an alternative to the type of coffee
table books (on Sydney architecture, for example) that present spectacular images of
impressive buildings; these publications are designed to show Sydney at its best, as a
wealthy, cultured city where the citizens care about good design.
55
Realistically, these
publications only represent the lives of a small proportion of people, while the plain,
utilitarian and even shabby structures are more representative of the lives of most of us.
Jeremy Millar wrote, ... architecture is societys values made concrete.
56
I believe that
the city reveals much of itself in the places that were designed with no priority given to
their appearance but rather were constrained by tight budgets and construction
timetables.
I will attempt to describe one of the key buildings out of the more than twenty
places I have documented thus far in order to give some understanding of my selection
process.
57
One of the first places I documented, in late 2007, was the wall of an old

55
For examples, see Robert Irving; John Kinstler; Max Dupain Fine Houses of Sydney Methuen,
Sydney, 1982 and Paul McGillick & Patrick Bingham-Hall, Sydney Architecture Pesaro
Publishing, Sydney, 2005
56
Millar, Jeremy and Dean, Tacita Place Thames & Hudson, London, 2005 (120).
57
Appendix A has still images of all the clips along with brief text descriptions. The DVD
included with this thesis plays all of the clips as they will be shown during the MFA exhibition.
21
brewery building on Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, which had marked on it, the
shape of a two-storey terrace house that must have been attached to it at some time in
the past. I saw it as an accidental piece of public art, like an enormous photograph, a
physical impression that had lasted long after the event of its making, providing
evidence of what had been. I realised that what fascinated me about this shape was its
phenomenological obtrusiveness, representing the structure that had since lost its use
value. When looking at it, this inspired my reflective state, with thoughts of the
transience of things and human projects. I would think about the amount of human
energy that must have gone into that structure - initially someone had designed it,
council approval must have been sought and achieved, others built it and people bought
furniture and lived there. I made my recording of the site in late 2007 when the brewery
had ceased operation and the site was marked for high-density housing construction. By
mid 2008 the building had been demolished and all trace of the house was gone.
Although I generally work with still photography I decided to use motion picture
film clips for this project because the clips have a duration, giving a sense of witnessing
time passing that seems particularly relevant for recording the city. Paul Virilio wrote
that, the city is a film, one in a state of continuous metamorphosis, one in which not
only is everything animated but everything is also incessantly accelerated. Everything
passes by, everything is always in the process of unreeling.
58
I frame and shoot
somewhat akin to a still photo by having the camera fixed on a tripod and letting it run
for 60 seconds. My hope is that the viewers experience of watching the clip will be
similar to when I stand on the street and contemplate these buildings. The fixed-frame
moving image is a concept that has been explored by contemporary artists such as
Chantal Akerman and Tacita Dean. In her study of the films of Chantal Akerman, Ivone

58
Virilio, Paul. On Georges Perec (2001), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The Everyday,
Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008 (110).
22
Margulies writes that such extended takes of everyday subject matter, prioritise what is
often regarded as minor and banal, which in turn leads to a hyperreal vision of the
everyday.
59
Similarly, the short films of Tacita Dean have been described as forming an
archive of an extended meditation
60
on places that are stranded, outmoded, or
otherwise sidelined.
61


VHS
VHS video interests me as a technology that I have seen rise and fall during my adult
lifetime. I remember when the first video library opened in my suburb in the early
1980s and the effect this had on our viewing habits. VHS was the start of the general
population programming their own entertainment, a trend that continues today with
DVD rentals and Internet footage. The VHS industry must have turned over billions of
dollars in its era. As of 2009 however it is a niche technology seemingly on its way to
extinction. Most rental libraries have gotten rid of the last of their tapes and as of mid
2009 I only know of three businesses that still rent VHS tapes in Sydney, although they
do seem to be committed to keeping them for as long as possible.
62

The act of placing my footage where it is essentially hidden is an attempt to
explore suitable ways of presenting ideas related to the everyday, as suggested by Ben
Highmore:
But if what is deemed to be the appropriate form for attending to the everyday
(mainstream sociology, say, or novelistic description) has resulted in a lack of

59
Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday Duke
University Press, Durham and London, 1996 (p. 4)
60
Foster, Hal. An Archival Impulse OCTOBER, 110, Fall 2004, (12)
61
Ibid. (14)
62
One of them, Videos Galore on George Street, next to Wynyard railway station went out of
business late in 2009.
23
attention to certain aspects of the everyday, then the everyday might benefit from
the attention of purposefully inappropriate forms of representation.
63

I have also thought that to insert the material into such an obscure place might be
representative of my anonymity - as just one person in the city of four million. These
are records of my private interests that might not be of any interest to others who have
their own memories and interests, just as our diaries and photo albums are possibly only
of interest to ourselves. This idea was explored by Tactita Dean in her photo book
Floh
64
, (floh being the German for flea, in reference to the flea market) in which she
presented her collection of anonymous snapshots bought at German flea markets, which
she described as being a selection from an ocean of private memories
65
It could also
be argued that my method is pointless because given its VHS form, it is unlikely to
ever be seen by anyone. However for myself, part of the interest is in not knowing what
has become of the material. I also relate to the thoughts expressed by John Baldessari
after his cremation of most of his early work in 1971. He said that he was asking the
question, where does art reside?
66
and his conclusion was that the memory trace being
the key thing, art could exist perfectly well in a residual form in his mind, or as
photographic documentation.
Occasionally I will see an article in the media about a 19
th
or early 20
th
century
shop that has been discovered, abandoned for decades and preserved as it had been left.
These discoveries are always of interest because they provide us with an image of how
people used to live. I think that in 2010 it would already be fascinating if we were to
discover a late 1980s video rental library frozen in time. It would function as an archive

63
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory : An Introduction, Routledge, London,
2002 (21).
64
Dean, Tacita. Floh Steidl, Gottingen, 2001.
65
Royoux, Jean-Christophe. Cosmograms of the Present Tense in Jean-Christophe Royoux et
al., Tacita Dean, Phaidon, London; New York, 2006 (95).
66
Kirby, Peter .John Baldessari: Some Stories, (video recording) Media Art Services, 1990.
24
of popular culture as well as evidence of how quickly things can change in capitalist and
industrialised societies. In some of Walter Benjamins writing, he considered this area,
in particular his notion of the role of a cultural researcher as being akin to a ragpicker.
67

Ragpickers are those who scrape a living by searching through the discarded production
of society, looking for items of value. As Ben Highmore writes, Benjamin, will look to
the meagre materials of everyday life in his attempt to apprehend actuality
68
The
concept is that there is hidden value in the discarded or overlooked, whether it be
merchandise or ideas, and that we can learn much about a society through examining
what it has discarded. The throw outs of the immediate past are predictions of the
future, soon DVDs and CDs will join VHS on the scrap heap, and in a few years it will
be iPhones or some other desired consumer product of today.
One structural element that fascinates me about VHS technology (and which in
fact makes this part of the project possible) is that the tapes are quite easy to copy onto.
This seems strange and almost naively old-fashioned in the digital era of passwords and
copy protection. The tape shells have a plastic tab that allows the video recorder to write
information onto them. On all commercial tapes this tab is broken off to prevent
accidental erasure, however it is easy to put a piece of masking tape where the tab was
and the tape can then be recorded onto again. Another factor that engages me about
these tapes is their containment of internal space that represents time. The blank VHS
tapes that were used for movie rentals came in lengths of 15-minute increments, for
example, 90 minutes, 105 minutes, 120 minutes. This meant that when movies were
dubbed there was invariably some unused tape at the end. It also interests me that this
space is essentially private property, part of the asset, but of no particular worth and not

67
Highmore, Ben Everyday Life and Cultural Theory : An Introduction, Routledge, London,
2002 (21).
68
Ibid. (63).
25
something with which the owners would ever intend to do anything, it simply sits there
unused. Furthermore, when I add my material to it, it doesnt damage it in any way or
have any effect on the original footage, and if some owner did find my material and
object to it, it would be quite easy to tape over and return that part of the tape to its
prior state.
69


DTOURNEMENT
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Situationists devised a practice called
dtournement, a word that does not translate directly into English but has several
meanings along the lines of hijack and detour. Guy Debord described it as a sort of
cross media collage, The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing
together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces
a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.
70
The principle was
to combine separate works to make a new work with new meanings. This was not as a
direct, rational response to the original as this would just continue the dialogue, but in a
way that transformed the original. The best known examples are works by the Dutch
Situationist member Asger Jorn that he called modifications. Between 1959 and 1962
he would purchase paintings from flea markets - mostly kitsch works by anonymous
artists. He would then paint on top of them, leaving some of the original still showing
and exhibit the work under his own name.


69
Appendix B is an index of the titles of all the VHS rental tapes onto which footage was
inserted. I would generally rent a couple of tapes per week, watch them and then add my
footage. There was usually room for around five minutes of film to be appended.
70
Debord, Guy. A Users Guide to Dtournement, (1956) in Ken Knabb (ed), Situationist
International Anthology Rev. and expanded edn., Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, CA, 2006
(15).
26
In a work titled T3-AEON (2000), Israeli born USA based artist Omer Fast rented
VHS tapes of The Terminator (1984) from New York video libraries. He then over-
dubbed his own audio onto four sections of the soundtrack. The sections onto which he
added his material were the most violent scenes, replacing the original dialogue, music
and sound effects with his own recordings of people describing childhood exposure to
violence. In one instance, when Arnold Schwarzenneger as the Terminator was shooting
someone, a mans voice recounts being hit by his father, He slapped me. And then he
slapped me again and again. As Jennifer Allen writes he was ...transforming the
blockbuster film into a public archive for private memories...
71
The viewers enjoyment
of manufactured Hollywood violence would be disrupted by an intrusive reminder of
the reality of everyday violence.
Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell met in 1951 when they were students at the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and became lovers then collaborators on
theatre writing projects. In the mid 1960s Orton was a successful playwright with works
such as Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot that were savage attacks on what he saw as the
priggishness and hypocrisy of English authority and genteel middle class morality.
Before this success, between 1959 and 1961 they were living in the London suburb of
Islington and were disgusted by what they saw as the poor choice of books at the local
library. In 1967 Orton wrote Libraries might as well not exist; theyve got endless
shelves for rubbish and hardly any space for good books.
72
They expressed their
disgust by altering book covers with the addition of offensive collages. They would
smuggle the books out of the library, alter them at home with images removed from
library art books and then covertly return the books to the shelf to be discovered by
unsuspecting readers. Eventually they were arrested and both sentenced to six months

71
Allen, Jennifer. Openings : Omer Fast Artforum 42.1, 2003, (216-217).
72
Lahr, John. Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton Allen Lane, London 1979 (97).
27
prison in 1962 for theft and malicious damage to more than 70 books. Ironically, as a
result of Ortons later fame, the altered books are now valuable and kept in a special
archive by the Islington Local History Centre where they are viewable by appointment.
There are similarities and differences between these projects and mine. All entail
some element of adding new material to work produced by others. However the works
by Jorn, Fast, and Halliwell and Orton are destructive to some extent, where the
additional material functions as an attack on the ideas represented by the original works.
I dont regard my insertion of VHS footage as destructive and it is not motivated by
anger. I see it partly as a neutral act that attempts to explore a form of presentation in
regard to particular media characteristics. There is also a message in a bottle aspect to
this; I dont know if anyone will ever see my added material and it would have to be
somewhat unlikely when the low amount of VHS rentals is considered as well as the
position of the material on each tape. However if someone did rent one of the tapes and
watched it past the end credits (perhaps dozing off in their armchair) it would be a
strange experience when footage of buildings around Sydney appeared with no
explanation.
Dubbing my footage onto VHS tapes is one of the ways Ive explored in order to
disperse the images, outside the context of a gallery. The original footage exists as a
distinct work and for the MFA exhibition will be shown in the gallery as a DVD loop
playing on a TV screen. It will be displayed on an older style analogue television to suit
the personal and domestic nature of my project. Large scale video projection did not
seem appropriate. By the selection of particular building structures and the creation of a
moving-image archive of them, I have made a record of my psychogeographic response
to Sydney. When I watch it I see a city of obscure buildings and structures that have a
feeling of transience and lack of care. I felt that my intentions were summed up in a
28
quote by the artist Allan McCollum referring to the text Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art
of the Everyday by Allen Ruppersberg, ... a love letter to the ephemeral and to
memory, a valourisation of the things that are destined to disappear.
73

73
Johnstone, Stephen. Recent Art and the Everyday (2008), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The
Everyday, Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2008 (18).
29
Chapter Four:
The Collection Of A Gentleman

The Collection of a Gentleman is comprised of 44 drawn portraits of myself that I paid
to have done by street portrait artists across six countries. I started work on this project
in July 2007 as part of my MFA research and the drawings had all been made by August
2008. My primary intention was to explore the process of perception whereby our
senses continuously and seamlessly present the world as image. I didnt expect to learn
about perception in a scientific sense, rather I wanted to place myself in the state that
Maurice Merleau-Ponty called philosophical reflection that, ... slackens the intentional
threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice.
74
During the
course of a sitting the artist would closely observe me for around 40 minutes. They
would perceive me as a mental image which they would depict on a sheet of paper. By
gathering dozens of examples and presenting them together I hope to draw the attention
of others to this generally overlooked but quite extraordinary process whereby our
senses continuously present the world to us. As a secondary element I was also
interested to discover how the generic style of realistic portraiture is globally dispersed.
Perhaps a key reason for our fascination with realistic portraiture is the way in
which such a portrait can be seen as both a work of art and as a stand-in for the person
depicted. Unlike other genres of art such as landscape or still life, when we look at a
portrait our mind readily flips between the apprehension of it as art and our emotional
response as if we were facing a living person. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote:
I say: This is a portrait of Peter, or more briefly: This is Peter. There the
picture is no longer an object but operates as material for an image ... Everything I

74
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (13).
30
perceive enters into a projective synthesis which aims at the true Peter, a living
being who is not present.
75

Richard Brilliant suggests that there is something in the mimetic quality of a portrait
that stimulates our perceptual cognition in the same way as does a living face.
76
Also,
although we might tend to think of the living face as being real and the drawing as a
clever illusion, it is worth considering just how contingent is our direct apprehension of
a living face when on a phenomenological level we are already experiencing each other
as internally produced images. In 3
rd
century Greece, Porphry related the refusal of the
philosopher Plotinus to have his portrait made:
He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit to a painter or sculptor, and
when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked
him, Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us?
Do you really think I must also consent to leave, as a desirable spectacle to
posterity, an image of an image?
77

In 1990 Jacques Derrida curated an exhibition at the Louvre titled Memoirs of the
Blind in which he explored his theory of the blindness of the artist. The opening
image in the show was a painting by Joseph-Benoit Suve titled Butades, or the Origin
of Drawing (1791). It depicted Pliny the Elders classical Roman tale which told of the
birth of drawing. A young woman, the daughter of the potter Butades, when faced with
separation from her lover who was going abroad, drew his outline on the wall by tracing
his shadow cast by an oil lamp. As Derrida explains, In this tradition, the origin of
drawing and the origin of painting give rise to multiple representations that substitute

75
Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture, Reaktion Books, London, 2008 (24).
76
Ibid. (24).
77
Ibid. (16).
31
memory for perception.
78
Butades cannot draw her lovers outline and see him at the
same time. The same applies to all life drawing, the artist looks at the model but must
then move their eye to the paper to draw; due to this even slight delay the mark depends
on memory, From the outset, perception belongs to recollection.
79
John Baldessaris
1971 work Police Drawing explored this role of memory in drawing. At the beginning
of a community college art class taught by a friend, when only the students were
present, Baldessari entered the room and stood for a while so the students had a good
look at him, then left. The teacher then came to the room with a police identity sketch
artist who made a drawing of Baldessari based on the descriptions of the students.
Baldessari described this work as being about the gap between seeing and making the
mark, in this case due to the translation of verbal information into visual information.
80

My intention when I gathered the multiple portraits of the same subject was (as I
hoped) to prompt viewers to think in broad terms about portraiture as representative of
perception, rather than to just see it as a portrait exhibition. Richard Brilliant wrote of
the potential for multiple portraits to be about more than just appearance:
...an experience comparable, in its way, to reading several biographies of a
famous person. However, such an abundant repertoire of images may also present
the viewer with a confusing range of options, destabilising the characterisation of
the person portrayed and obscuring the mental image of the subject ...
81

Contemporary artist Francis Als has explored the potential of multiple images in his
project Fabiola. Since 1995 he has been collecting paintings of the Catholic saint
Fabiola (currently he owns more than 270). They are mostly sourced from flea markets

78
Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: the Self-Portrait and other Ruins University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993 (49).
79
Ibid. (51).
80
Bashkoff, Tracey. Not Just People Falling Off Horses in Baldessari, John, et al. John
Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange) Guggenheim
Museum Publications, New York, 2004 (22).
81
Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, Reaktion Books, London, 2008 (132).
32
around the world and are generally not expensive as they are not of great artistic merit.
The interesting thing about them is that they all appear to be copies of each other, in fact
derivations from one source image by the French artist Jean-Jacques Henner that was
originally exhibited in 1885; although it is doubtful that many of the artists know that,
as they work from the copy most available to them. As David Morgan writes, Yet one
senses that there is a referent, albeit elusive, never fully present in any single image, but
there nonetheless.
82
That is, the multiplicity of variations draws our attention to the
image of the absent original. We see the same face through the veil of each images
peculiarities. What we see is a juxtaposition of a consistently observed pictorial
formula, virtually an eidetic schema, a mnemonic device branded on the surface of the
neocortex.
83

At one stage while working on this research and thinking about everyday life
and archives, I wondered what a Museum of the Everyday might look like, and in
particular the section devoted to art. I could envisage there being examples of black
velvet paintings, some big-eyed Keane kids from the 1970s, amateur paintings gathered
from thrift stores, and works by street portraitists. All of which have in common the
element of being somewhat informed by fine art, both traditional and contemporary,
although rarely receiving any critical attention, being produced for immediate
appreciation by the everyday person and/or consumption away from fine art galleries. It
is a genre of creative output that is widespread and globally popular. However, it exists
below the level of regular critical attention. Of course the fact that this type of
production is ubiquitous and popular does not necessarily make it good, but I think it
can make it interesting.

82
Morgan, David. Finding Fabiola in Francis Als, Fabiola: An Investigation Dia Art
Foundation, New York, 2008 (19).
83
Ibid. (19).
33

Occasionally popular art does cross over into the fine art world, exhibitions of outsider
art and graffiti art being perhaps the most common. One example is the exhibition
Thrift Store Paintings first exhibited at Metro Pictures gallery, New York in 1991. The
paintings, hundreds of amateur works by anonymous, untrained artists, belong to
contemporary artist Jim Shaw who has, for more than a decade bought them cheaply
from USA thrift stores. When seen in a junk store most people would probably consider
them to be worthless rubbish, however gathering them together in the context of a
contemporary art gallery caused them to be seen differently. When the collection was
presented at the ICA in London in late 2000, reviewers did note the lack of skill and
talent evident in most works, but also saw significance in the evidence of the dispersal
of high culture into the everyday. Julian Stallabrass noted attempts to emulate
expressionist, abstract and surrealist works
84
, while Neal Brown referred to the
particular energy of amateur practice
85
and Ralph Rugoff wrote that the mind-
boggling range of formal solutions and unusual content in the work provoked many
visitors to drastically reassess their evaluation of fine art, much of which by comparison
seemed constrained and dull.
86

Part of my interest in street portraiture is due to its stylistic origin in traditional
fine art portraiture, which Shearer West has identified as being initially a genre specific
to Western Europe.
87
Defining portraiture as a recognisable depiction of an individual,
she locates its origins in Renaissance Italy in the form of large-scale, full-length
portraits of prominent persons such as aristocrats and religious leaders.
88
Through the

84
Stallabrass, Julian. Collector's Pieces [Jim Shaw's Thrift Store Paintings, ICA], New
Statesman, 16 October 2000, (42-3).
85
Brown, Neal. 'A Noble Art / Jim Shaw', Frieze 57 March, 2001, (104-05).
86
Rugoff, Ralph. 'Rules of the Game', Frieze, 44, Jan-Feb 1999, (46-9).
87
West, Shearer. Portraiture, Oxford History of Art; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004
88
Ibid. (39).
34
17
th
and 18
th
centuries portraiture continued to develop in countries such as England,
France and the Netherlands while being influenced by social changes such as the rise of
the middle class, and the spread of printed books. The popularity of biographies and
memoirs helped to develop more complex notions of personal identity. The growing
middle class provided a market for portrait artists, although their budgets and sense of
social place required a more modest depiction than the portraits of rulers. The portraits
were smaller and the pose was typically head and shoulders rather than full length - very
much the look that is still popular today.
One element that interests me is how this originally Western style has attained
worldwide popularity and acceptance as evidenced in the availability of street portraits.
During my project I have had portraits drawn in Sydney, Los Angeles, Mexico City,
Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. As part of my research I also have
specific information as to where I could find similar portrait artists in Manila, Jakarta,
Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Bogota, not to
mention the well-known sites in London, Paris and other major cities of Western
Europe. Although Im content that my 44 portraits are enough to represent this
phenomenon, if I had the budget and the time I would like to continue this pursuit in as
many parts of the world as possible. I would present the collected results in a book that
would act as an archive that presented the global dispersal of this style. Because they
would all be representations of the one person, they would also act as a means of
comparison between stylistic similarities and differences.
The drawings I have collected range in size from A4 (210x297 mm) to A2
(420x600 mm) with about sixty percent in black and white and the rest in colour, with
the media varying between pencil, charcoal and crayon. The lowest price paid was two
dollars in Hanoi and the highest was one hundred dollars in Mexico City, the average
35
being around fifteen dollars. The time taken to draw a portrait is pretty standard,
varying between 30 to 40 minutes. Based on conversation, I would estimate that half the
artists had received formal art school training while the rest were self-taught. In Sydney
most of the artists work in Paddys Markets on weekends. There are generally two or
three artists in different parts of the building at any time. The ones I spoke to were from
mainland China and all of them said they were graduates of the Chinese art school
system. One man told me that for every 400 applicants only one is accepted to art
school where the students attend class six days a week for four years, mostly being
tutored in a style of straight realism. On graduation they can expect to take a job as an
artist in some semi-official capacity, making portraits of local dignitaries to be
displayed in town halls and the like, for which they would earn about one hundred
dollars Australian per month. I found other graduates of Chinese art schools drawing
portraits in Kuala Lumpur and have also been told they are present in New York City.
Out of all the artists I observed, I found their work to be the most technically competent.
In Los Angeles my portrait was drawn by a man who had trained as an illustrator
and had worked for Warner Brothers before being laid off. In Mexico City about half of
the artists were art school graduates. The rest were either self-taught, or I wasnt able to
talk to them due to language difficulties. I would estimate that about one third of the
portraits were made with the artist and myself communicating with basic sign language
and perhaps writing a number for the price. In Kuala Lumpur, at a busy night street
market called Bintang Walk, there were a couple of tables set up with three Chinese
portrait artists working each night. Two of them only did black and white and the other
specialised in colour. They spoke no English and were being managed by a Malay
woman. When I asked her how she communicated with them, she laughed and said that
36
she couldnt speak Mandarin and they spoke no Malay, but somehow they got things
done. Its the duck talking to the chicken she told me.
Wherever I went the portrait artists were typically to be found in parks, markets
and other locations where tourists and families congregate, mostly on weekends and
evenings. Generally it is not only artists who are found there but also a range of vendors
of food, drinks and novelties. In Los Angeles, around Santa Monica and Venice Beach
there are buskers and Chinese artists carving portraits in grains of rice. In Kuala Lumpur
at Bintang Walk there are vendors displaying battery-operated toys on the footpath,
while in Hanoi the street artists were in the night market area among stalls displaying
clothes, food and mobile phone covers. Most of these places are family friendly and a
way for parents and kids to have a day or evening out with free entertainment in the
theatre of the street. The portrait artists and their subjects play a role in this, as generally
any instance of a portrait being drawn will attract a crowd of spectators. The audience
are fascinated to observe the skill of the artist as they build up the image of the person
in front of them. Its quite common for people to stand and watch for most of the
process, their eyes constantly moving between the sheet of paper and the subject. The
one person who cant see the image forming is the person who is being drawn. I also
found it quite common for members of the audience to give me approving nods and
smiles to confirm that it was going well. I recall in Paddys Markets in late 2007 a
woman met my eye, smiled while giving the thumbs up and said Its you.
In her work Layers Korean artist Nikki S. Lee used drawings made by street
portrait artists to explore ideas of identity. Beginning in 2007 she had her portrait drawn
in Bangkok, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Prague and Istanbul. In each location she had three
artists draw her portrait on the translucent paper she provided. Back in her New York
studio she layered the three portraits from each city on a light box and took a
37
photograph of them with elements of each either showing through or being obscured by
the others. The work was first exhibited in 2008 as a series of large photographic prints
of each of these layerings. She said that the work was concerned with notions of identity
and how she found herself behaving differently depending on what country she was in
or with whom she was mixing:
I am interested in identity as it is affected or changed through social contexts,
cultural categories or personal relationships. This interest began through personal
experience. I realized that I changed between my surroundings in New York and
Seoul, depending on whether I was with my family or friends. So before I was
thinking about 'who I am' I first started thinking about 'where I am'.
89

When I look at my collection of portraits I can see there is potential to interpret it as
being about identity, and I think that is an interesting interpretation, although it was
never my main interest. I never even thought it was essential that the portraits be of me.
I would see it as being the same if, for example, I was able to collaborate with a person
who travelled a lot and was prepared to sit for portraits wherever they went. In terms of
identity I could see the collection as referring to a diffused and anonymous identity: the
difference between the idea of a concrete, clearly defined and separate identity versus a
more fluid and diffuse notion of being - hard to grasp or categorise.
Although my project has obvious similarities with Nikki S. Lees Layers, I
believe there is an important difference. She controlled how the drawings were made
and then significantly transformed them into a finished work. My method is what
Michael Sheringham referred to as a project
90
more concerned with the ideas being
explored rather than a polished outcome. The artists drew me just as they depict every

89
Jenkins ,Sikkema, & Co., Nikki S. Lee Press Release, retrieved 3 June 2009,
<http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/nikkislee_pressrelease.html>
90
As discussed in The Everyday section of Chapter Two in this thesis.
38
other sitter and the drawings will be presented unaltered, together on the gallery wall. I
would expect many viewers to be confused by this and to wonder just what my artistic
contribution was. Displaying them in a collective order just as a museum display might
be presented is intended to suggest that there is a narrative to be discovered, although
unexplained.
In May 2009 I showed the collection of portraits in a gallery space inside the
Sydney Antique Centre, which is a large two level building shared by dozens of antique
dealers. Walking through the centre a visitor sees multiple collections of furniture, art,
jewellery, sports memorabilia; a grouping of diverse objects brought together because
they are all for sale. I chose to exhibit the work here because I wanted to emphasise the
collective nature of the portraits and thought this might come though in an environment
that had something of the ambience of a museum. The gallery space consisted of two
long rooms and I arranged the 44 drawings in one row along four of the walls, in the
order in which they were made. For the MFA exhibition I will show the drawings
grouped together on one wall with dimensions 4 by 3 meters. My intention is that it be
seen as one work, comprised of multiple elements.
39
Chapter Five:
D.F. Nature Walk

When I stayed in Mexico City
91
for five weeks in early 2008 working on the street
portrait project, I spent most of my spare time in the Hipodromo Condesa area. This
district was first developed for housing in the 1930s. Previously it had been vacant land,
part was the estate of a Countess, (Condesa) and part was a defunct horseracing track,
(Hipodromo). The developers incorporated the shape of the racetrack into the street plan
by turning it into a main loop road named Avenida Amsterdam. The architectural style
is predominantly art deco and it was once a popular area in which wealthy families lived
until the earthquake of 1985 when they started to move to the newer suburbs outside the
city. A lack of demand lead to cheaper housing and artists and other creative types
started to move in; today its a quiet district comprising parks, cafes and bookshops.
Running along the centre of Avenida Amsterdam is a tree-lined pedestrian
pathway. The first time I walked along this path I noticed that each tree had a prominent
identifying number painted on it. The numbers were mostly executed in white, some in
red. They were approximately eight inches in height and generally quite sloppily
applied, as if with a house painting brush. The only reason I could think of for
numbering each tree in this way was some official attempt to catalogue and keep track
of them. Although this might be understandable from a bureaucratic point of view the
visual impact of the numbers was enough to spoil the illusion of a walk in nature that
was presumably the original intention. In fact, it was more like walking through a giant
inventory and this interested me as an example of an institutional ordering system that
was on public display. It made me aware that the trees belonged to the city and were

91
The citys official name is Distrito Federal, commonly shortened to D.F.
40
regarded as accountable assets. No doubt this is the same in most parts of the world but
I had never really thought about it. By putting the numbers on the trees it was as if the
city was, in terms of this area, making strange and jolting me from my natural
attitude.
I was also struck by the fact that trees that were being ordered, seeing a
connection to Eugenio Donatos claim that modern institutional ordering systems
originally developed from the structures of eighteenth-century botanical taxonomy:
the Enlightenment could then originate the idea of giving an ordered
representation of Nature in various botanical gardens. It is in this idea of an
ordered spectacle of Nature, supplemented by an ordered language that would
describe the spectacle, that the idea of the Museum was born.
92

It could also be seen as an example of what has been called the mathematisation of
nature, a way of thinking about the natural world that originated with Enlightenment
thinkers such as Ren Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton. Nature was divided into primary
and secondary characteristics, with the primary being anything that could be objectively
measured and the secondary being those qualities such as colour and texture that could
not be easily quantified. In terms of modern science the secondary qualities were
ignored or overlooked in favour of the primary, giving the sense that nature was
something that could be measured and understood.
The next day I walked the length of the avenue, which being an oval has its start
and finish at the same place. I discovered that the main numbering system in white paint
started at 1 and ended at 1,058; however there was also a different numbering order in
red paint that was sometimes applied to trees that were also numbered white, with no

92
Donato, Eugenio. The Museums Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard
and Pcuchet in Josu V. Harai (ed.) Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
Criticism Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1979 (227).
41
obvious relation between them. My assumption was that the red numbers were part of
an older system that had been superseded by the white, although I had no way of
confirming this and was content for it to remain a mystery. (In fact I never attempted to
find out who was responsible for the numbers, believing it safe to assume it was the
work of the local parks department.) Rather than photographing the trees and using the
photograph as a document, someone had merged the original object with its
documentation. This struck me as an extreme example of the structures we use to
organise our knowledge of the world - it was an attempt to impose order on chaos, with
the logic of numbers being applied directly onto unruly nature. It is common in museum
collecting practices to remove the object from its original location, however in this case
it was as if the ordering system had been brought to the site of the objects and made part
of them. I felt that it represented what Matthias Winzen calls, the paradox of protective
destruction inherent in collecting, the damaging or diminishing of the object intended to
be collected comes from its being torn out of its previous context, its everyday use.
93
I
decided to photographically document each of the numbered trees, thinking that perhaps
they could be presented in some way to illustrate the detached, objective approach to
understanding the world. Most urban display trees are unobtrusive in Heideggers
terminology; in this case the addition of numbers made them obtrusive.
I photographed all the trees over several weeks using a wide-angle lens to also
show the street context. I wasnt sure if it would be necessary to display all of them
together to convey the effect of the system. For the MFA exhibition Ive decided to
display half a dozen from the series with the intention that a selection of A3 (297 x 420
mm) prints will document the ordering system and be visually interesting. The examples

93
Winzen, Matthias. Collecting so normal, so paradoxical in Schaffner, Ingrid and Winzen,
Matthias (eds.) Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art Prestel-Verlag, Munich,
1998 (24).

42
chosen are representative of the whole - large trees, a stump, and the dual numbering
system. They will be presented as documents rather than as fine art photographs. To
convey this I had them printed on matte inkjet paper and used a thin wooden frame that
crops to the edge of the image. I am considering future possibilities to display all of the
tree images, possibly using a website or in the form of an artists book.
43
Summary

But how could we possibly explain anything? We operate only with things that do
not exist: lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces. How
should explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image,
our image!
94



I began this paper with a summary of Tor ge Bringsvrds story about Ptk as it
seems to encapsulate key aspects that are present in my practice as well as those of
some of the contemporary artists to whom I have referred. There are obvious
similarities between Ptks newspaper article gathering and Hans-Peter Feldmanns All
the Clothes of a Woman, or Francis Alss Fabiola. They all entail a direct
engagement with some aspect of everyday life, along with systematic gathering and
ordering structures. The key difference is that whereas Ptk had a desire for certainty and
the belief that his system could provide it, contemporary artists such as Als and
Feldmann are more open to exploring uncertainty.
The range of approaches and methods used by contemporary artists who work
with the everyday demonstrate the richness of possibilities in this area. Members of the
Situationist International developed a walking practice that had direct engagement with
the city streets. Sophie Calle had herself followed by an unwitting private detective.
Tacita Dean makes motion picture documents of outmoded structures. Francis Als and
Jim Shaw have operated as curators, gathering examples of marginalised art production
and re-presenting them in ways that caused them to be seen afresh.
Ptks process of collecting worldly data was a project as defined by Michael
Sheringham in that it didnt lead to some end result such as a book, but rather the
gathering and sorting was an end in itself. The vast amount of information collected

94
Nietzsche, Friedrich & Ansell-Pearson, Keith, Large, Duncan (eds) The Nietzsche Reader,
Volume 10 Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2006 (222).
44
could be seen to represent the unfathomable complexity of the world even when
narrowed down to the events of just one day. As such it points to the difficulties
inherent in any attempt to apprehend the world. This awareness in itself might be
regarded as a worthwhile outcome and can partly be ascribed to the open-ended aspect
of the endeavour, a factor that is also present in some of the work of contemporary
artists who deal with the everyday. They produce works that initially seem to present
facts in a logical manner but ultimately leave the viewer in a state of uncertainty.
Feldmann particularly tends to present his work in a direct manner, often rough and
unpolished as if he doesnt want the presentation to overwhelm the source material.
The everyday is a fascinating area to work with, as it is readily available to
everyone and the main site of our encounter with the world. Phenomenological
philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the
potential for the everyday to be a source of philosophical insight. The habitual nature of
daily life might instill in us an unquestioning acceptance of the world, the so-called
natural attitude. One of the first steps to awareness is to move from this unquestioning
state to one of reflection, that, as Merleau-Ponty wrote ... slackens the intentional
threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice.
95
Art is as
capable as philosophy of provoking this awareness by making strange as Victor
Shklovsky suggested, by presenting the familiar in new ways.
In my MFA research I was attempting to find approaches to the everyday that
were appropriate to its elusive and ambiguous nature. I utilised direct engagement; the
framework of the project; and open-ended structures, to present the world in a way that
makes it look strange with the intention that this might invoke in viewers a feeling of
uncertainty that could lead to philosophical reflection. In an essay on John Baldessari,

95
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (13).
45
Thomas McEvilley
96
wrote that we live in age of doubt and uncertainty that is reflected
in the philosophy of our time and also in the trend for contemporary artists to work with
philosophical ideas. Over the course of my research I sometimes thought of myself as
an amateur philosopher, which is a designation that might apply to many people in the
world who consider the fundamental concepts of existence in their own idiosyncratic
ways, rather than at the more defined level of an academic philosopher. In this regard I
am working with the everyday to try and present it in ways that draw attention to the
uncertainty inherent in the encounter between self and the world.




96
McEvilley, Thomas. John Baldessari: Tetrad Series, (exhibition catalogue), Marion
Goodman Gallery, New York, 1999 (23).

Appendix A

Stills from Landmarks from Home

Appendix B

Index of VHS titles
onto which Landmarks from Home
footage was inserted


Alisons Birthday
Alvin Rides Again
Assault on Precinct 13
The Best of Friends
The Big Boss
The Big Heat
Billy Liar
Bliss
The Boston Strangler
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Bullitt
Capricorn One
The Cars That Ate Paris
The Chain Reaction
Chungking Express
The Citys Edge
Coca Cola Kid
The Collector
Crime Of the Decade
Crosstalk
Dawn of the Dead
The Day of the Jackal
Deathcheaters
Death Race 2000
Death Wish
Dogs In Space
The Empty Beach
Escape From New York
Every Move She Makes
Fat City
For The Term of His Natural Life
The French Connection
Going Down
Hancock vol 4 (Hancocks Half Hour)
He Walked By Night
Heat
I Spit On Your Grave
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1950s)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1970s)
The Journalist
Joysticks
The Killers
The Killing of Angel Street
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Kindred Spirits
The Last Wave
M
Mull
The Mysterians
The Narcissus Factor
Newsfront
Palm Beach
Pitfall
The Plumber
Rear Window
Rollerball
Rolling Thunder
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
Rosemarys Baby
Run Chrissie Run
Saving Private Ryan
Scum
Shadow of a Doubt
Straight Time
Street Kids of America
The Street With No Name
The Taking of Pelham 123
10 Rillington Place
The Tenant
Theyre A Weird Mob
The 39 Steps
Tubular Swells
The Valley of Gwangi
Warriors
While The City Sleeps
Winter of Our Dreams
The Wrong Man
The Young Poisoners Handbook

Appendix C

The Collection of a Gentleman
Catalogue of street portrait locations and prices paid



# 1
Date: 17th June 2007
Place: Paddys Market, Sydney
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: Self-taught artist, China
# 2
Date: 5th August 2007
Place: Paddys Market, Sydney
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: Art school graduate, China
# 3
Date: 12th August 2007
Place: Paddys Market, Sydney
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: Art school graduate, China
# 4
Date: 21st September 2007
Place: The Rocks, Sydney
Size: 38 x 55 cm
Cost: $48
Info: Has been drawing there since the 1970s
# 5
Date: 22nd Sept. 2007
Place: Sydney, Paddys Market
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: Art school graduate, China
# 6
Date: 4th Nov. 2007
Place: Sydney, Paddys Market
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: Art school graduate, China
# 7
Date: 8th Dec. 2007
Place: Sydney, Market City
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: B&W detailed, upstairs from Paddys Market
# 8
Date: 9th Dec. 2007
Place: Sydney, Paddys Market
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $28
Info: B&W
# 9
Date: 9th Dec. 2007
Place: Sydney, Paddys Market
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: Art school graduate, China
# 10
Date: 16th Dec. 2007
Place: Los Angeles, Santa Monica
Size: 36 x 43 cm (14 x 17 in)
Cost: $10 USD
Info: 3rd St promenade, Sunday afternoon
# 11
Date: 16th Dec. 2007
Place: Los Angeles, Venice Beach
Size: 28 x 35 cm (11 x 14 in)
Cost: $15 USD
Info: self taught God given talent
# 12
Date: 16th Dec. 2007
Place: Los Angeles, Santa Monica pier
Size: 35 x 43 cm (14 x 17 in)
Cost: $20 USD
Info: Artist was originally from Malaysia
# 13
Date: 22nd Dec. 2007
Place: Mexico City, La Alameda
Size: 25 x 32 cm
Cost: $6.00 (60 pesos)
Info:
# 14
Date: 28th Dec. 2007
Place: Mexico City, Chapultepec
Size: 33 x 50 cm
Cost: $10.00 (100 pesos)
Info: Chapultepec is a large park
# 15
Date: 6th Jan. 2008
Place: Mexico City, Sullivan Park
Size: 25 x 35 cm
Cost: $55 (550 pesos)
Info: Sullivan Park has a weekend artists market
# 16
Date: 12th Jan. 2008
Place: Mexico City, Roma
Size: 20 x 30 cm
Cost: $12 (120 pesos)
Info: Alvaro Obregon street market
# 17
Date: 12th Jan. 2008
Place: Mexico City, Coyoacan
Size: 33 x 42 cm
Cost: $15 (150 pesos)
Info: The only artist who told me to smile
# 18
Date: 20th Jan. 2008
Place: Mexico City, Sullivan Park
Size: 31 x 44 cm
Cost: $100 (1,000 pesos)
Info: Enrique, the most expensive artist
# 19
Date: 26th Jan. 2008
Place: Los Angeles, Santa Monica
Size: 36 x 43 cm (14 x 17 in)
Cost: $20
Info: Once worked as an animator at Warner Bros.
# 20
Date: 26th Jan. 2008
Place: Los Angeles, Venice Beach
Size: 46 x 61 cm (18 x 24 in)
Cost: $10
Info:
# 21
Date: 26th Jan. 2008
Place: Los Angeles, Santa Monica pier
Size: 36 x 43 cm (14 x 17 in)
Cost: $45
Info: Studied at San Francisco art institute
# 22
Date: 3rd Feb. 2008
Place: Sydney, Paddys Market
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $38
Info: Art school graduate, China
# 23
Date: 9th July 2008
Place: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Size: 33 x 50 cm
Cost: $20 (60 MYR)
Info: Central Market annexe
# 24
Date: 10th July 2008
Place: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $17 (50 MYR)
Info: Bintang Walk, mainland China artist
# 25
Date: 10th July 2008
Place: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Size: 27 x 40 cm
Cost: $20 (60 MYR)
Info: Bintang Walk
# 26
Date: 11th July 2008
Place: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $27 (80 MYR)
Info: Art school graduate, China
# 27
Date: 13th July 2008
Place: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Size: 28 x 48 cm
Cost: $10 (30 MYR)
Info: Bintang Walk
# 28
Date: 13th July 2008
Place: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $10 (30 MYR)
Info: Bintang Walk
# 29
Date: 18th July 2008
Place: Hanoi, Vietnam
Size: 32 x 39 cm
Cost: $6 (100,000 VND)
Info: near Hoan Kiem lake
# 30
Date: 18th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: 28 x 40 cm
Cost: $2 (30,000 VND)
Info: Night market
# 31
Date: 18th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: 28 x 40 cm
Cost: $2 (30,000 VND)
Info: Night market
# 32
Date: 20th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: 28 x 40 cm
Cost: $2 (30,000 VND)
Info: Night market
# 33
Date: 20th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: 27 x 40 cm
Cost: $2 (30,000 VND)
Info: Night market
# 34
Date: 20th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: 28 x 40 cm
Cost: $3 (50,000 VND)
Info: Night market
# 35
Date: 25th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $3 (50,000 VND)
Info: Night market
# 36
Date: 25th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: 27 x 40 cm
Cost: $2.50 (40,000)
Info: Night market, young female artist
# 37
Date: 26th July 2008
Place: Hanoi
Size: 27 x 40 cm
Cost: $2 (30,000)
Info: Night market
# 38
Date: 3rd August 2008
Place: Chiang Mai, Thailand
Size: 40 x 55 cm
Cost: $5 (150 baht)
Info: Walking market
# 39
Date: 3rd August 2008
Place: Chiang Mai, Thailand
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $5 (150 baht)
Info: Walking market
# 40
Date: 3rd August 2008
Place: Chiang Mai
Size: 40 x 55 cm
Cost: $5 (150 baht)
Info: Walking market
# 41
Date: 7th August 2008
Place: Bangkok, Thailand
Size: A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)
Cost: $30 (900 baht)
Info: MBK shopping centre
# 42
Date: 7th August 2008
Place: Bangkok
Size: 39 x 53 cm
Cost: $13 (400 baht)
Info: Nana district
# 43
Date: 9th August 2008
Place: Bangkok
Size: 40 x 55 cm
Cost: $ 15 (450 baht)
Info: Chatuchak market
# 44
Date: 9th August 2008
Place: Bangkok
Size: 40 x 55 cm
Cost: $ 15 (450 baht)
Info: Chatuchak market

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