the problems issue

Editorial

Natural Selection Magazine Issue 6: Problems

Guest-editor:
David Hatcher
david@naturalselection.org.nz

Co-editors:
Dan Arps and Gwynneth Porter
editors@naturalselection.org.nz

Contributing editors:
James Lynch

Proofreader:
Totally Anal Ltd.

Designer and Dungeon-master:

Warren Olds
warren@naturalselection.org.nz

Subscribe for free at

www.naturalselection.org.nz

ISSN 1176-6808

www.naturalselection.org.nz 0.2 Issue 6: 2007

Contents

........................................ 1 Tessa Laird, “But where is the white monkey?”

Tessa Laird found herself getting quite hot under the collar during a recent trip to Paris.
Trauma! The incident involved some white monkeys, or possibly their absence. You decide.
The setting was the Musée du Quai Branly. Trauma! As an institution, the MQB is clearly
resting far too comfortably on its liberal European laurels. Intrepid as ever, Tessa took a
squizz and came up with some simple advice for them which they and their ilk should follow,
immediately.

........................................ 2 Dan Arps, “Outreach”

Suburbs are ridden with problems and so are those that seek refuge from their upbringing
in them, but it’s not hopeless you know. Get involved! Do something for others. Lift a finger!
Believe in something! Spread the word… Dan Arps, Auckland artist and Natsi co-editor, has
been quite taken with these terrible internet documents of human travails and aspirations of
the most poignant kind. The vulnerability risked by these souls, and the fan-boy costumes,
the hopeful gatherings, the Juliet windows, the weird conjunction of futuristic and the
historical (anywhere but here and now?)… Do try this at home.

........................................ 3 Mark von Schlegell, “Robert Smithson SF”

Mark von Schlegell sent us this shocking exposé. Reading between the lines, it appears that
Robert Smithson was the secret founder of Scientology, or that the church emerged from an
ideological battle between a handful of spaced-out artists, SF writers and camp evangelicals.
Is there a difference? Not necessarily, see, and that’s something we don’t know enough
about. Except for Dan Graham, he’s got the grass on everything.

........................................ 4 Dane Mitchell, “Sense And Sanitation”

The home can be a filthy place, there’s danger lurking on every horizontal surface, your
only hope is eternal vigilance. Thanks to Dane Mitchell’s sensible advice, now you have
something to study during those quiet moments you might otherwise spend worrying about
whether you should wash your hands, again. We are very pleased to present Dane’s first
issue of Sense And Sanitation, a cautionary tale.

........................................ 5 Jess Whyte, “This is not Australia”

Jess Whyte sent us a report on the role of the camp and its position as one of the cornerstones
of White Australia’s present operations as a nation-state. You already know it isn’t pretty,
here are some of the details. Jess adds her thoughts on bare life and the figure of homo sacer
to those of Agamben, looking at the vulnerable position of the immigrant in contemporary
Australia and other societies that consider themselves too civilised to allow such conditions
to develop.

........................................ 6 Layla Rudneva-Mackay, “Education Stories”

An audio file! Layla Rudneva-Mackay shares some Education Stories with us. Pay attention!
Especially if you’re a white male middle-class academic working in an art institution in
Dunedin. Or a creepy ignorant high school teacher who finds teenage girls make you angry.

........................................ 7 Scott Redford, “PHOTO: Sculpture, Theatre etc…”

Lock up your fathers, Scott Redford is back! Herr Redford was in Melbourne recently for a
show called PHOTO: Sculpture, Theatre etc… and like everyone else here, seems to have an
axe to grind. Trauma! Finally some honesty about affect and the aesthetics of convenience in
contemporary art. You heard it here first from the Queen of the Gold Coast.

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Matthew Shannon, “On the capacity for the Queen of Australia to be replaced by a CGI
avatar”
Speaking of queens, Matthew Shannon’s been doing some good thinking on how to solve that
monarchy problem Australia can’t seem to get past—without cutting off anybody’s head. It’s
really easy to replace her with a CGI avatar actually, as you’ll discover.
Mercedes Vicente, “Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools (1976—1977)”
Sleepwalking backwards into the Web 2.0 world, Natural Selection’s first ever video-on-
demand offerings are here! Mercedes Vicente selected some videos from Darcy Lange’s Work
Studies in Schools project so now you can watch this great black and white grainy 70s
footage from the comfort of your own home. Mercedes also gives us some of her thoughts on
Darcy Lange’s practice and as a special treat you can read those in Spanish too. And you
thought you knew everything there is to know about the DL.
Simon Denny & Tahi Moore, “I feel optimistic”
Simon Denny & Tahi Moore are feeling optimistic. There is a lot of optimism in denim these
days, for those of you who didn’t know. There is a prize offered too, for the first reader who
cracks the code.
Katie Holten, “Solution”
Our favourite itinerant artist Katie Holten has been trying to solve the time/space/resources/
etc. problem, and here’s one very practical solution she sent in. It has the added bonus of
being able to be used to keep little animals warm, or to reduce the harsh effects of frosts on
young plants, if you put the off-cuts through a shredder or better still, slice those off-cuts
into thin strips by hand. See if you can get all the strips to be exactly the same width with
straight edges, without looking.
et al., “Maintenance of Social Solidarity – Stage Three”
We asked et al. about it all, and this is what they were willing to reveal at this stage. We
couldn’t agree more, and will be distributing the fruits of their research into the maintenance
of social solidarity until further notice. If you are German, pay special attention. You may
have in fact been studied at close range, without having noticed a thing.
The School of Hard Knocks, “Free PhDs, only while stocks last”
The School of Hard Knocks is finally here to solve your problems with educational institutions.
Just say no! Instead, have one of our free PhDs, available over the internet while stocks last.
To enrol, submit your thesis by email (must be at least 25 words in length). We will certify
you and send you your PhD when we are satisfied that you have completed the requirements
of the course. This usually takes about 48 hours. Don’t forget to tell us what you are a
specialist in and no, we won’t send you a hard copy. That would be cheating.
Joel Mesler, “A soldier’s etiquette”
Joel Mesler’s got an axe to grind too. Here’s his letter to the LA Times about ethnicity,
partisan journalism, a soldier’s etiquette.
Sean O’Reilly & Rachel Shearer, “Fakerie and other heavens...”
More SF (and lovely midget), this time from Sean O’Reilly and Rachel Shearer. Fakerie and
other heavens... In admirably secretive fashion, this biting hoarded missive was published
in a sound-ancillary publication that was hard to get and not announced. We felt that it
was impossible to blow this work’s cover as it is certainly a veritable ill wind blowing tumble
weeds down your post-acid corridors. In other words it is inter-dimensional and slippery
enough to not need that much privacy.
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Damien Lawson & Kylie Wilkinson, “empty land”
More bare life – shock! The pretty Antipodes as a veritable nudist colony of postcolonial real
(e)state apparatus suck. Damien Lawson & Kylie Wilkinson sent us a brief history of bare
life in Australia, a chilling list of Australia’s legislation of bare life. There is a history to the
recent political conditions for immigrants and other vulnerable persons in Australia today,
and this is a good introduction to it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Mr. Do Not Attempt To Analyse Your Inner Experiences”
Ludwig Wittgenstein!! Yes, Ludwig sent us a doodle of Mr. Do Not Attempt To Analyse Your
Inner Experiences, a kind of colouring in template for under 5s. Give it to your kids, it’s the
best advice they may ever get. If you’re over 30 you’re probably old enough to regret not being
told this as a child yourself. It’s OK to colour it in yourself, just don’t steal any crayons from
under 5s, it’s kind of against the spirit of the exercise.
Rob Mckenzie, “In defense of experimentation”
Rob McKenzie’s been thinking about living dangerously and here are his thoughts on some
writing that extols-slash-legitimises risk. Drug and consequence takers are posited as the
advance scouts that effect societal transformations that chickenshits then sit nervously
in, unaware, worrying about household security and premature aging and those freaking
irritating luxury problems that keep most people working all the time in order to have money
to throw at these “problems”.
Spiros Panigirakis, “Baubles, blood and bushes”
And if you didn’t get it by now, here is more. Lots of bare life this issue, spotted here in
an oblique weave through some of Spiros Panigirakis’ recent thinking on gay hate crime,
art/agitprop, homophobic enculturation in the class-room, sex in bushes and well, see for
yourself!
Amelia Harris, “Amelia Harris – Fine Art 1998-2005”
Lady Amelia Harris, the patron saint of forgiveness, shows you how it’s done. It’s a true story
and we thought you needed to see it all. So next time you’re wondering what to do about a
problem large or small, start with forgiveness. She did, and Amelia Harris – Fine Arts 1998-
2005 records the ray of hope that she became for all those hopeless art students, academics
and hapless bystanders that took their books back to the Fine Arts library after the due
date. If you work in a library please accept a round of applause from the Natural Selection
editors and we imagine, most of our readers. Without forgiveness we would all have been
more heavily fined than was in fact the case. This is possibly the most important thing you
can learn in a Fine Art library, we’ll tell you that for nothing.
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Tessa Laird
But where is the white monkey?
O
n the 20th June, 2006, Jacques Chirac, President
of the Republic of France, opened the Musée du
Quai Branly (MQB) in Paris. Designed by architect
Jean Nouvel, the museum was built to house the African,
Oceanian, American and Asian collections of the Louvre and
the Musee de l’Homme, as well as millions of euros worth of
newly purchased artefacts. Chirac, apparently a big fan of
African art, saw this as his opportunity to make his mark on
Parisian cultural life, as his predecessor Francois Mitterand
had inaugurated many significant cultural sites in the city.
Chirac’s deference to difference was undoubtedly also
inspired by the racial riots that rocked Paris last year. One
of the museum’s missions was “Dissipating the fogs of
ignorance” and promoting the “fragile flowers of difference”1
evoked by Claude Levi-Strauss, who, somewhat incredibly,
was present at the launch of the Theatre that bears his
name, at 98 very ripe years of age.
Chirac declared, “There is no hierarchy among the arts, just
as there is no hierarchy among peoples.” Added to this, the
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Tessa Laird, But where is the white monkey? Detail of Another Museum
of the Other presents: Te Tari Pekapeka /Department of Bats, Curated
by Rascar Capac, Principal Sponsor: The Zonge Tribe, Ceramics and
acrylic paintings, dimensions variable, 2006
museum pays homage to those who have suffered conquest,
violence and humiliation.2 One can only ponder if Chirac
extends this soothing cultural balm to the victims of French
nuclear testing in the Pacific, given that Chirac himself
reinstated these tests after their long hiatus on his 1995
election into power.
*
Seven days after Chirac’s inauguration of Paris’s newest
museum, I’m standing in the very long queue in the still
partially uncompleted courtyard, reeling from 24 hours of
flying, the Parisian summer heat, and the buzz of voices I
barely understand. The new museum seems to be the talk of
the town, eclipsed only by the World Cup. I saw banners for
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Musée du Quai Branly at the airport, with the subtitle “Where
cultures are in dialogue”. Elsewhere, such as the cover of
Télérama magazine, the subtitle is the almost unbelievably
embarrassing “The Museum of the Other.”3 I can just catch
a glimpse of the photographs by Michael Parekowhai and
Fiona Pardington donated by the New Zealand government.
They’re over by the restaurant, but much of that area is
still under construction, and is cordoned off. It’s the only
contemporary work I’ll be seeing today, except for that of
Australian Aboriginal painters, and the Trin T. Minh Ha
video work which does little more than slightly confuse
visitors with a spray of barely visible (in the light) images
and texts about self and other as they walk up the ramp on
the way to the galleries.
The galleries themselves are beautifully constructed
– promoting a seamless perambulation that’s supposed
to echo the sinuous curves of the Seine. The long hall is
subdivided by a snaking partition which doubles as a place
to sit, and there are countless little coves with information
kiosks embedded into the walls, featuring texts and videos
in which numerous indigenous folk talk of their lifeways.
Still, I couldn’t see any evidence of the conquest, violence
and humiliation that Chirac had mentioned. There was no
effort to contextualise these works in a history of colonial
plundering, no attempt to explain the trajectory of the
objects from their sources to their current resting places.
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Tessa Laird, The mythical master of all splitting Detail of Another
Museum of the Other presents: Te Tari Pekapeka /Department of
Bats, Curated by Rascar Capac, Principal Sponsor: The Zonge Tribe,
Ceramics and acrylic paintings, dimensions variable, 2006
Fred Wilson, the American artist who made his name from
the astute rearranging of museum set pieces, kicked off his
career with Colonial Collection in 1990, a selection of African
masks which were blindfolded with either the Tricoleur or
the Union Jack, depending on which colonial power (French
Vanilla or Plain Vanilla) had asserted its dominance in the
region. The wall tags next to these works, rather than tracing
a lineage of white collectors, as most museums do, said very
simply “Stolen from the Zonge Tribe”4 if that was the tribe in
question. Yet the MQB remains quite silent on this issue.
*
I was in Paris to participate in a conference called New
Zealand, France and the Pacific. Organised by the UK-based
New Zealand Studies Association, it seemed, like most
conferences, an excuse to junket. Papers on just about any
aspect that connected the three designated topic zones were
accepted, and, apart from the keynotes, they were each 20
minutes long, and ran in multiple streams. Many deliveries
were hurried and plagued with mispronunciations and
possibly, misapprehensions. After three days of hearing
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Europeans pontificate about Katherine Mansfield, Janet
Frame, Whale Rider, and the haka, I realised how it felt to
be “the other”. I was frustrated by my marginal status – both
grateful to be receiving attention from the global “centre”,
and suspicious of that attention’s intentions.
Not since Paul Gauguin left Paris for Tahiti has Oceania
been so hip. Within the last couple of years, shows in
London, Paris, New York and Cambridge have profiled
New Zealand Pasifika artists, with attendant programmes,
seminars, and performances. And while it’s exciting that
our artists are gaining an international audience, I wonder
if it’s not still a case of exoticisation of “the other”. A friend
told me a story of how a Maori man with moko was recently
using the Paris metro. A local was heard to exclaim, “Oh la
la, le nouveau sauvage!”
More evidence of such novelty from the periphery was to
be found in the location of our conference dinner, at a
restaurant in a chi-chi quarter of Paris, called Kiwi Corner.
Run by enterprising young antipodeans, the menu is a
mash-up of New Zealand, Australian, and Pacific flavours.
The décor, however, is pure Kiwiana: Maori carvings mingle
with scenic photographs. Listening to Fat Freddy’s Drop,
and sipping 42 Below vodka, I felt simultaneously soothed
and irked by the all-too-neat packaging of my homeland. But
my main course was anything but soothing – the vegetarian
option was a pastry package filled with kiwifruit and cheese,
which looked, and tasted, like a stomach stuffed with waring
savours. It was a reminder that métissage, or cultural fusion,
can be a fraught and difficult process.
In the Musée du Quai Branly, I walk up the long hall of
Oceanian art. There are amazing pieces from Papua New
Guinea. There’s a Sepik beam floating from the ceiling,
covered in heads with round ears and sharp teeth. Having
spent the last few years engaged in studying pan-cultural
imagery of bats, I’m pretty positive that these are bat
spirits, though the signage doesn’t identify them as such.
Photography is forbidden – I’ve just asked one of the guards
in my halting French, so I make a hasty sketch of the bat
beam in my notebook instead.
Almost all the guards are African, and almost all the visitors
are white. I keep wondering what the guards really think of
this situation, and about the designation of the art of their
homelands as “the other”. Do they see themselves as “the
other” or are they French or both? Do they feel connected
to this art, or is it just a job? Are they bemused by the
fascination these artefacts have for those who have little
time or respect for real live Africans?
The skin colour of the guards puts me in mind of another
Fred Wilson work, Guarded View (1991), in which the artist
displayed dark-skinned shop dummies in museum guard
uniforms. When giving an artist’s talk about the work,
Wilson, who is African-American, played a trick on his
public. Excusing himself for a minute, he put on a guard’s
uniform and came back into the room. No one noticed him,
and several complaints were made about his disappearance.
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Of course, Michael Parekowhai has explored similar territory
with Poorman, Beggarman and Thief (1994), in which three
dummies modelled on Parekowhai’s father stood sentinel
in galleries, looking like the clean cut Maori “entertainers”
of the 1950s; and Kapa Haka (2003), in which fibreglass
models of Parekowhai’s security guard brother staunched
out gallery visitors, underlining the ethnic divide operating
in such low-paid, but dangerous work.5
I wonder about the morality of using the designs I’ve
sketched in my notebook for future artworks. I’ve just been
reading Anne D’Alleva’s Art of the Pacific where she says that
in Papua New Guinea, many of these kinds of ritualistic
objects would only be visible to the male initiates of the tribe.
And here they are for all the world, or at least the Parisian
bourgeoisie, to see.
It becomes increasingly difficult to look at the funerary
reliquaries. There are human skulls on show from PNG,
hard to regard as “art objects” when even reproductions of
moko mokai are now jealously guarded in Aotearoa. There’s
a section where Papuan fetishes, made with human hair and
other highly charged ritual ingredients, look too dangerous
to even approach. I don’t believe these objects have lost their
power. They were built to terrify, and they still terrify. I hurry
on. There’s a giant globe with an interactive map showing
the origins of the collections. New Zealand emerges from a
soupy water of pixels. I want to lay my hand on it and say
“home.” But I don’t want these Europeans to “other” me,
either. For as long as I can, I’ll blend in.
There’s not much Maori work here, and what there is has no
tribal affiliation indicated by the signage. But I do enjoy the
juxtaposition of a Maori canoe prow with a Moluccan prow
known as kora ulu. Somehow, this simple visual comparison
helps to bridge the yawning gaps of Oceania, and categories
of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Asian seem arbitrary and
permeable.
There are a couple of other moments like this – the Siberian
Shaman costume looks so much like North American Indian
Shaman costumes, that it’s almost as though the Bering
Land Bridge happened only yesterday, while California
Indians wore grass skirts that looked not unlike piupiu. I
salivated over a 19th century padded green jacket from the
Shan of Myanmar. So very Princess Leia! I saw the white
monkey mask of the eminently cool Dogon.6 And I thought
I smelt a faint whiff of incense, as if these objects had had
some kind of sacred inauguration.
I experienced moments of elation and moments of a kind of
dread and even nausea (perhaps it was the jetlag). I felt giddy
at the enormity and weirdness of it all. Because, no matter the
architecture, the multimedia, the MONEY, it was still white
people looking at the sacred artefacts of non-white people for
a frisson, a tingling of the nerves, a form of entertainment
like any other. And while it’s an enormous privilege to be
able to view such works, it’s one I’d gladly relinquish for the
far greater privilege of witnessing the return of these objects,
masterpieces, taonga, to their original people and contexts.
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In the end, I think that the only truly “modern” museum
is one that repatriates its collections. Just imagine all the
“going home” stories! If each one could be as detailed and
magnificent as the one elucidated by Paul Tapsell in Pukaki:
A Comet Returns, we would be culturally richer, not poorer,
for the process. These are the stories I want to hear.
* practice is still current – had slapdash copies buried by the
I once heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a Mexican
man who repatriated an ancient codex from the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris.7 And a story about Native American
elders, who, as they were performing a ritualistic dance
to entertain the whitefolk at a museum, were secretly
squirreling their sacred artefacts into a truck out the back.
Then there’s Barry Barclay’s fictional feature Te Rua, about
the repatriation of Maori carvings from a German museum.
Watching the film today, there are some cringey moments of
big shoulder pads and earrings, white women lusting after
warriors and German curators professing themselves to be
experts on things they can’t even pronounce. Well, perhaps
very little but the shoulder pads have changed, for certainly,
Te Rua is worth watching today. There are some magical
moments – the gypsy who cleans the museum’s cabinets
hears our Maori hero greeting his ancestors – she is moved
to sing a traditional song of her people, for perhaps the
first time in years. I love Te Rua for opening up this cross-
cultural korero, for recognising that longing and loss is not
the prerogative of one people.
I got particularly hot under the collar about the issue of
repatriation of the Benin bronzes after watching Artist
Unknown, an Omnibus documentary from 1995, made for
British TV.8 In it, a Londoner of Trinidadian extraction falls
in love with a bronze African mask in an antique shop, and
tries to trace its lineage by interviewing a series of experts,
and visiting the British Museum, before travelling to Benin
City, Nigeria. The inside politics of tribal art collection that
this documentary only hints at, are wickedly critiqued in
Yambo Ouloguem’s 1968 novel Bound to Violence, where the
real German anthropologist and collector Leo Frobenius is
thinly disguised as the ultimate exploiter, Shrobenius:
“Thus drooling, Shrobenius derived a twofold benefit on his
return home: on the one hand, he mystified the people of his
own country who in their enthusiasm raised him to a lofty
Sorbonnical chair, while on the other hand he exploited the
sentimentality of the coons, only too pleased to hear from
the mouth of a white man that Africa was ‘the womb of the
world and the cradle of civilization.’
( … )
And, shrewd anthropologist that he was, he sold more than
thirteen hundred pieces, deriving from the collection he
had purchased from Saif and the carloads his disciples had
obtained in Nakem free of charge, to the following purveyors
of funds: the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, the museums of
London, Basel, Munich, Hamburg, and New York. And on
hundreds of other pieces he collected rental, reproduction,
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and exhibition fees.
( … )
Already it had become more than difficult to procure old
masks, for Shrobenius and the missionaries had had the
good fortune to snap them all up. And so Saif – and the
hundredweight, or sunk into ponds, lakes, marshes, and
mud holes, to be exhumed later on and sold at exorbitant
prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These three-year-
old masks were said to be charged with the weight of four
centuries of civilization. To the credulous customer, the seller
pointed out the ravages of time, the malignant worms that
had gnawed at these masterpieces imperilled since time
immemorial, witness to their prefabricated poor condition.”9
After watching Artist Unknown, I wrote a letter to the British
Museum, enquiring as to the current status of the Benin
bronzes, and if there were any plans to repatriate them. It
took me over a year to get a reply. Eventually, they posted
me a photocopied article from the journal Public Archaeology,
Volume 4, Number 1, 2005.
The article in question was called “The encyclopaedic
museum: Enlightenment ideals, contemporary realities, A
reply from Neil MacGregor and Jonathan Williams”, but I
didn’t know what exactly it was a reply to. All I know is
that McGregor is the Director of the British Museum
while Williams works on that institution’s “international
relations”.
There’s something simultaneously self-congratulatory and
scared about the tone of this “reply”. Try this: “the British
Museum is a resounding assertion that truth is a civic
virtue that the state should foster”.(57) Orwellian? Moi?
“The Museum was conceived for David Hume’s citizen of the
world – a member of that international republic of letters
which prized the shared pursuit of truth above national
particularism. In Hume’s day, the Republic was limited to
the educated of Europe and America. It is now worldwide”.
(57-58) Don’t they mean it is now open to the educated and
wealthy the world over? I don’t see the British Museum as
performing a function for the rice-farmers of Laos and the
miners of Mali. There is still an elitist assumption at play
here, masquerading as equity.
But the authors of the article assure their readers that
the museum is attending to this issue, not by returning
artworks to their rightful owners, but by curating travelling
shows! Since the 1970s “we have witnessed the unparalleled
sharing of cultural patrimony, as museums in the developed
world collaborated to bring great civilizations and great
artists to new publics. Two recent examples: the British
Museum’s exhibition on memory in world cultures was seen
last year by over 1.3 million Japanese, while a selection
from its Egyptian collection has now been seen by over 1.5
million North Americans”. How fantastic that the otherwise
culturally starved Japanese and North Americans were able
to dine out on the collections of the British Museum. What a
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reversal of expectations and dominant trends! Bravo British
Museum for thinking so far out of the box!
Perhaps I am being too cruel – the essay then goes on to
sketch out contacts with Mexico, India, China and various
African countries. And then there’s a line, touching at
first, which bears closer reading. “When peace returns, the
British Museum will resume its longstanding collaborations
with colleagues in Baghdad and Mosul”. “When peace
returns” implies that what’s happening in Iraq is out of
Britain’s hands, and doesn’t acknowledge that the British
military continue to play an aggressive role in the misery of
that country. The British Museum waxes lyrical about the
global citizens it hopes to create and inspire, but can take no
responsibility for carnage, past or present, can only whisper
euphemistically about war, and can provide no vehicle for
reparations.
In this sense I think the museums to be found in the colonial
outposts, the Museum of Sydney and yes, even Te Papa,
offer a far more intelligent and nuanced relationship with
the people they service and the stories they tell. The British
Museum and others of its ilk have a reputation based solely
on their collections. No wonder they are so loathe to give
them up.
* is not a cleaner-away of western trash, but an artist who
At the conference, the paper I enjoyed the most was by Eu Jin
Chua, entitled “Modern Movement, Free Radicals: Len Lye’s
Animated Primitivism”. Chua began by screening the film,
one of the liveliest moments of the conference. According
to Chua, Stan Brakhage had called the 1958 scratch
animation “an
����������������������������������������������
almost unbelievably immense masterpiece”.
But as Chua notes, it is the drumming of the Sudanese
Bagirmi tribe that the animations are cut to which “plays
no small part in the electrifying liveliness of the film”. And
he asks, “��������
whether Free Radicals is a kind of filmic variant
of that tendency of the European primitivist to fetishise the
authenticity of the state of nature that the uncivilised savage
supposedly enjoys, and if so, should we denounce this film,
or can we recuperate it?”
Yes, Len Lye’s works and words were “primitivist”, and yes,
this is problematic in terms of a contemporary, post-colonial
reappraisal (to a certain extent, the animations of Lisa
Reihana and Veronica Vaevae have relocated the boundaries
of this argument). Personally, I could never denounce Lye or
Free Radicals, and watching the jagged, jumpy white lines
on an inky ground for the millionth time, I wished for a way
to integrate this powerful work into the MQB, instead of the
overcooked, insipid Trinh T. Minh Ha video, or even the cool,
cerebral photography of Michael Parekowhai. But how to
integrate work by a white Westerner into this gallery of tribal
artefacts without falling into the trap of MoMA’s much-reviled
1984 Primitivism show, or the similarly suspect, though for
different reasons, Parisian Magiciens de La Terre (1989)?10
My best advice to the MQB would be to hire as their head
curator Benin artist Georges Adéagbo. Adéagbo’s installations
www.naturalselection.org.nz
combine African ritual figures with educational and political
poster painting, along with the detritus of all world cultures
in the form of books, records, t-shirts, and tracts of writing.
Every Adéagbo installation requires a long period of research
and collection on site, a return to Africa where this material
is digested and often re-made, and then a return to the site
where more information and material is collected. Finally,
the combined words and images are assembled into a whole
that is part research library, and part schematic voudoun
mandala of geopolitical structure.
Sabine Vogel describes rather beautifully Adéagbo’s “archival
cosmos” in an essay entitled “Creativity”. She says, “At night,
when the exhibition is closed and the lights have gone off,
the prepared primate controls the system. The index cards
of the ethnological institute fly about, the computers go
haywire. Things take on a new order. Somewhere there is the
sound of music but there is none. The scales of humanity
tip. And Georges Adéagbo proceeds to clean up”.11
I love the image of the museum that plays when the lights
are out, which reminds me of Michael Taussig quoting
Antonin Artaud, that we must “awaken the gods that sleep in
museums”.12 The image of Adéagbo, however, as some kind
of cosmic cleaner, is a culturally loaded one I’d like to avoid.
What’s fantastic about Adéagbo is that he is an African who
makes us reappraise our cultural detritus by looking at it
through an African lens.
Adeagbo’s métissage is as dense and complex as that found
in the Paris Metro or in last year’s riots. The MQB could
use this kind of obfuscation, or rather, a clarification of
the complexity of the relationships between the indigenous
objects it “owns” and the contemporary Paris it “serves”.
Notes
1 Quotes from Chirac’s speech as posted by the MQB website,
http://www.quaibranly.fr/index.php?id=933, then fed through
the (wonderfully questionable) Babelfish translator.
2 Riding, Alan, “Imperialist? Moi? Not the Musée du Quai Branly”,
New York Times, June 22, 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com>
3 The magazine’s editor, Michel Daubert, opines that all other
terms are simply embarrassing: primitive, primordial, savage,
Negro, tribal, outsider, opting instead for the weirdly loaded
“Other”.
4 Everything I’ve ever read about Colonial Collection cites “Stolen
from the Zonge Tribe” as its example. No other tribes are
mentioned, and upon attempting to research the Zonge Tribe,
no references can be found, except in relation to Wilson’s work.
Who are this mysterious tribe? Are they Wilson’s symbol for
every plundered indigenous group?
5 The invisibility of those who serve us is thrown into high relief
for the traveller. I was appalled that all the maids in my hotel
were black, that all the trash collectors were black (whereas,
somehow, I am inured to the Maori roadworkers and P.I. cleaners
1.5 Issue 6: 2007
 back home). I remember asking my maid what the French word
for rubbish was, holding up my wastebasket. “La poubelle” she
said, with what I took to be weary resignation.
6 Later, I found an image on the Branly website which showed
Jacques Chirac and Kofi Anan inspecting the room of masques
dogons. I made it into an artwork, adding the question, “But
where is the white monkey?” hoping that visitors will find the
simian in Chirac’s pendulous features before they see it pinned
to the wall. It’s a reference to one of my favourite books from
childhood, “But where is the green parrot?”
7 I get so angry when I think about the Spanish Catholic zealot-
bigots who burned the Mayan codices. And then one day I had
a good look at some images of pre-conquest codices. All the
pictures were of burning libraries.
8 I wrote about this in “pink eye: is this whitefella dreaming?” A
review of Albino, Francis Upritchard and Rohan Wealleans, Ivan
Anthony Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, April 2004, published
in the South African literary journal Sweet, on-line at: http://
www.substancebooks.co.za/content/view/67/62/
9 Ouologuem, Yambo, Bound to Violence, London: Heinemann
Educational, 1971, pp 95-96
10 The most rollicking debate on the Primitivism show took place
in Artforum between a gloriously bitchy Thomas McEvilley
and the waspish curator Kirk Varnedoe, and the whole text is
reproduced in Beckly, Bill, (ed.), Uncontrollable beauty: toward a
new aesthetics, New York: Allworth Press: School of Visual Arts,
1998. McEvilley was subsequently asked to provide a catalogue
essay for Magiciens de la Terre, which desperately wanted to
differentiate itself from Primitivism. McEvilley then reflected on
the two shows and their differences in his essay “The global
issue,” McEvilley, Thomas, Art & otherness: crisis in cultural
identity. Kingston, NY, Documentext/McPherson, 1992
11 Vogel, Sabine, “Creativity”, Eiblymayr, Silvia, (Ed.), Georges
Adéagbo, Archaeology of Motivations – Re-writing History, Galerie
im Taxispalais, Austria, 2001, p. 55. But where is the prepared
primate?
12 Artaud, Antonin, from Le Theatre et son double, Paris, Gallimard,
1964, p. 52, quoted in Taussig, Michael, My Cocaine Museum,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004, p. xvi.
Even Ben Stiller appears to have read this.

www.naturalselection.org.nz 1.6 Issue 6: 2007

2.1
2.2
Measuring Success
2.3
2.4
2.5
Mark von Schlegell
Robert Smithson SF
T
he dialog of conceptualism and science fiction has
been recognized, but is not frequently spoken about,
perhaps because of the very healthy “ghettoization”
with which science fiction has defended its libertarian ideals
for so long. Science fiction remains an explicit theme in
today’s art scene, but if today’s artists bring science fiction
ideas into the gallery, museum or art fair, or today’s critics
refer cannily to important SF texts, the following is usually
the case: science fiction is presented on its own terms but
always only within the larger terms of the art world. The art
itself remains, therefore, usually irrelevant to science fiction
itself.
I assumed this was a natural fact of the cultural landscape.
But when Robert Smithson Retrospective, organized by
Eugenie Tsai with Connie Butler, opened in Los Angeles in
2004, I began to think differently. It was impossible to miss
the SF flavor of some of Smithson’s best work – the peculiar
time-traveling of the Hotel Palenque lecture, the avid
pursuit of the esthetics of the laws of thermodynamics, the
“rock sample” floor sculptures and the abiding interest in
importing geological science into the art gallery. Smithson’s
most important work, the film Spiral Jetty (1970) reads like
an homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Smithson himself
wrote of the film in terms that recall new wave author Brian
Aldiss’ art & time travel classic, Crytopozoic! (1967):
Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and
crude. One is transported by this Archeozoic medium into the
earliest known geological eras. The movieola becomes a “time
machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs.
Smithson was everywhere presenting his work as a sort of
science fiction fantasy come to life. As if the work of art itself
were being judged not by what it said about SF but by how
it functioned as SF.
Furthermore, like newly self-conscious writers of political
pop Ursula LeGuin, Philip Dick and Samuel Delaney,
Smithson’s work also came with a smooth, hipster sense of
hot-shot speculation into real hardcore science.
I phoned Dan Graham. (I had met Graham long ago when
I worked on a construction team overhauling his New York
studio. I was in the midst of reading the complete available
works of Philip K. Dick at the time, and when Graham
walked by, he reminded me of Phil. I asked him if he’d ever
read any of the books. Without missing a beat, he stopped
and answered,
“I have everything. Even the complete philosophical works.”)
www.naturalselection.org.nz
The best strategy with Graham is to begin, so as soon as he
answered I asked:
“What kind of SF did Smithson like?”
There was no pause. “Science fiction to him was second
only to gay camp culture, which of all cultures he loved the
most. But Smithson liked the trashiest SF novels. Cheap
paperback novels. He probably came to them through his
hero worship of William S. Burroughs. He loved Burroughs’
SF. He was an incredible reader, devoured everything. SF in
those days supplied a lot of titles to addicts. Smithson loved
trash culture and cheap paperback covers. He didn’t have
favorite SF writers. He loved them all in general and stacked
them around his bed.
His favorite mainstream writer was Borges. But he realized
that if you looked at it the right way, Borges wrote science
fiction. Jack Smith, Burroughs, Andy Warhol all had a SF
interest in the avant-garde. Andy’s favorite movie: Creation
of the Humanoids, of 1962, was incredibly important to
Smithson too. It was actually written by the famous SF
writer Jack Williamson and based on his hilarious novel
The Humanoids. In the movie the 3rd World War has wiped
out most of the Earth. Humanity survives with the help of
androids, who are gentle and green and very sensitive. The
humans turn against them and try to wipe them out. The
film is told from the point of view of the Humanoids. It’s
incredibly campy but dark and biologically profound.
He also loved Roger Corman, a big favorite. The shoe-string
budgets, the way Corman helped other film-makers; his
Poe movies. Corman was an Aries. Smithson took me to a
Corman festival at Kip’s Bay. He loved Vincent Price. Did
you know Vincent Price was a great collector? The best
Hollywood collector.”
“Were any other artists into SF at that time? Was it part of
the scenes that Smithson hung out in?”
“Joan Jonas liked science fiction and you can see it in her
work. She was married to a science fiction writer, in fact. The
only other ones I remember being into SF were Smithson,
Weiner and me. Weiner loved Michael Moorcock – had copies
all over the place. The comical, new-Edwardian thing, the
time-travel and humor of Moorcock appealed to him. I loved
Dick. You must understand, in those days, the minimalists
were the center of things. The minimalists weren’t into SF at
all. For them it was theory and the French New Novel. They
loved Robbe-Grillet. They liked Alphaville, not loved. They
loved Godard – he was a big influence – but just not that
picture. But some of them liked crime. Actually, Sol LeWitt
3.1 Issue 6: 2007
loved the crime writer Chester Himes, books like Pinktoes
and The Heat’s On.”

“Was SF as important an influence on conceptualism as

French theory?”

“It was more influential. I don’t know Kosuth, but Smithson

wasn’t interested in the French thing. He was interested
in Pop culture and Borges and camp. Look at his mirror
works – they refer to all these things at once. He always used
trashy, mannerist colors. He was always very interested in
cheap special effects. In terms of art, Smithson’s hero was
Paul Thek. He loved everything Thek came up with. Thek
did step mirror pyramids and dinosaurs, lots of speculative
productions. And Thek loved science fiction, all of it, though
I’m not sure he read L. Ron Hubbard.”

“Did Smithson ever try to write science fiction?”

“No. He wasn’t a frustrated Faulknerian like you.”

“Do you think Spiral Jetty is a work of science fiction?”

“Yes. It’s unearthly. A message to alien gods.”

Then he hung up.

It struck me that that’s exactly what science fiction is not.

It is often a message from alien gods, but not to them – it is
always directed towards a human common reader.

In what may have been the high point in the sporadic hyper-
history of western enlightenment, the 1970s, Smithson himself
seems to have withdrawn from the need for genre labels.
As movements began more and more to label themselves,
land artists pursued a romantic environmentalism that
Michael Stevenson has shown to be a Tolkienian reaction to
modernity. As camp moved to activism, glam to punk, and
conceptual art turned increasingly serious and academic,
Smithson’s sculpture moved outside of contemporary
classification. Insisting on an ever larger popular mechanics
esthetic, it inscribed itself onto the planet’s skin by rented
bulldozer in actual local non-art-world environments.

Science fiction, conceptualism, gay culture, and Borges

and Paul Thek seemed to have joined together at this brief
moment on a single shoe-string, to fall away – leaving, for
the future, as a last and quiet memorial to all that humanity
ever really achieved, a science fiction story turning real.

Unless….

www.naturalselection.org.nz 3.2 Issue 6: 2007

4.1
Jess Whyte
This is not Australia
This is not Australia. You are not permitted to be here. You
cannot leave. The law allows us to detain you until your boat
leaves Australia. You cannot enter our country. We have burnt
your boat. You cannot leave. Welcome to the camp…
I
n 1992, the Australian Government was forced into the
Federal Court to justify its three year internment of a
group of Cambodian asylum-seekers. In justification,
the Government relied on Section 88 of the Migration Act
“Custody of Prohibited Entrant During Stay of Vessel in
Port”; a section, which provided for the temporary detention
of stowaways — who were considered to have “not entered
Australia” — until such time as the boat on which they had
arrived in Australia left the country. Under s88, people who
were physically within Australia’s national territory could
be detained then disappeared, all without ever being legally
considered to have entered the country. Section 88 was
always a law based on a fiction, but the work the Government
tried to make it do in justifying the indefinite detention of
the Cambodians went beyond this original fiction of ‘not-
Australia.’ In order to justify the detentions, the government
argued that the vessels on which the Cambodians arrived
had still not left Australia, and would not be leaving any time
soon: the government, after all, had arranged to have them
burnt. The boats had not yet left Australia. The detentions
would continue until they did.
* *
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio
Agamben suggests that the ferocity with which the nation-
state has responded to the claims of refugees is connected to
a crisis in the very form of the nation-state. This nation-state,
Agamben argues, is founded on the unity of birth-nation-
territory. Central to this unity is the immediate passage
from birth to nation, or the myth that birth in a determined
territory is automatically nation. The formula “blood and
soil”, which cannot but make us shudder in the wake of
National Socialism, has been, since Roman times, a juridical
formula by which a citizen is defined—a citizen was one who
was born in a particular territory to citizen parents. If the
state responds as it does when faced with asylum seekers,
this is because “by breaking the continuity between man
and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary
fiction of modern sovereignty into crisis”1. In the person who
has no recourse to citizenship in the nation-state they have
fled, and has not yet been granted it in the state they have
fled to, we see, for a moment, the pure fact of a birth that
resists subsumption into nation. This is the life that the
nation-state cannot tolerate. And so, a fourth element has
added itself to the birth-nation-territory nexus: today, the
unity of the nation-state is secured only through the camp.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Camps, like those in which the Cambodians were held after
their boats were burnt, camps that are still occupied today,
are where the life that threatens to undermine the nation-
state is captured. Excluded from the nation, yet interned
within its territory absolutely exposed to state violence, the
life in the camp is bare life.
The camp is not a recent phenomenon in Australia’s
history: from its origins as a penal colony to the reserves
and indenture of the Aborigines Protection Act (1909); from
the capture and forced deportation of Pacific Islanders in
the wake of White Australia to the war time detentions of
‘enemy aliens’, the unity of the Australian nation-state has
always presupposed the camp. Australia—a nation founded
on genocide of an indigenous population—has never been a
state where birth and nation coincided precisely, or where
citizenship was automatic by virtue of birth. Without easy
recourse to the myth of the unity of birth and nation in an
eternal national belonging, the Australian nation-state has
been in crisis since its inception. The survival of the state
has always been premised on the biopolitical capture of bare
life. The camp constitutes the nation.
* *
“Delegates from the various social groups incarcerated at the
Woomera Detention Centre met last night (Saturday) to plan
a hunger strike in support of the 85 Afghanians (sic) there,
many of whom are Hazaras, who are being threatened with
forced deportation in the next few weeks, by the Australian
Government. It is expected that over 100 detainees will
participate in the hunger strike, which was scheduled to begin
today (Sunday). Iranians are taking a stand in solidarity with
their brothers from Afghanistan, because they fear that they
will be the next to go.”2
In June 2002, as hunger-striking Woomera detainees lay in
graves they themselves had dug, life and death entered a
zone of indistinction utterly suggestive of Agamben’s bare
life. “When some people moved from their graves, another
one stayed instead in hole in ground and waiting for their
death”3, a detainee described the event. No figure can better
evoke the liminal zone of bare life than that of the refugee,
“very thin and feeling dizzy”4, who lies day and night in a
makeshift grave, demonstrating, and courting, death while
struggling for a life which is more than mere life. Yet it is
precisely this struggle that punctuates the zone of bare life. In
this moment of resistance, detainees refuse their subjection
to sovereign power and challenge this power on the very
terrain on which it operates: the terrain of death. What does
it mean for the one who is already sacer to threaten his own
life? For one man, interned in Woomera, the hunger strike
5.1 Issue 6: 2007
is a means to “feel human”—“Something controls you all the
time”, he said. “With the hunger strike I control myself”5.
Paradoxically, by threatening their own lives, detainees
regain the control that is lost the moment they are captured
in a sovereign ban. No longer simply abandoned to the
wishes of the state, they re-grasp their own lives from the
ban, retaining the capacity to determine their own fates. “It
is a very serious hunger strike,” a detainee said, “for some it
will be to the death.”6
If this struggle then occurs on the terrain of death, on
the terrain of thanatopolitics, is there a form of struggle
that — while still operating on a plane determined by
the biopolitical control that finds its expression in the
camp — supersedes this plane, or refuses to be defined solely
by it? For while the terrain of death presents itself as a space
where the sacer can remove themselves from the ban and
the consecration of their lives to the power of the sovereign,
there is only one place to go. “Death”, said Aristotle, “is
most frightening because it is a boundary”7. For some in
the camps this boundary appears as the only one available,
hence the “pervasive belief”, described by a former Woomera
psychiatric nurse “that suicide was the only way out.”8
If bare life is a threshold however, it is not one that is
determined entirely by sovereign power. Rather, the
threshold is unstable not simply because “politics must
again and again enact its internal distinction from bare life”,9
but because this movement is confronted again and again
by the resistance of those who refuse this distinction, and
struggle against the power of the camp, and their subjection
to sovereign power within it. Over Easter 2002, this struggle
revealed the possibility of another boundary, another way to
release oneself from the relation of the sovereign ban. This
time the boundary that was crossed was not the blurred
boundary separating life in the camps from death, but
the razor wire boundary of the camp itself. With the aid of
tools and towels, and with the combined strength of those
on either side of the fence, the razor wire was cut, and one
bar, then another, was levered off, providing just enough
space for detainees inside to climb through the hole, hurling
themselves through the air into the arms of the protesters
below.10 “…on Good Friday people came there and we broke
the fence and we came out,” one of the escapees wrote. “At
first night we was very scared and it was very cold night and
we was waiting until 2 o’clock morning and we was happy
that we came out. But at last after too much struggle we came
out. We finished to listening the abusing and beatings of ACM
and their guard with their black stick and we came to city.11
The city they came to however is no longer the city of
classical times. As Agamben says, “there is no return from
the camp to classical politics.”12 When the camp is opened,
it cannot help but overflow its own boundaries, permeating
the outside and blurring the distinction between camp and
the city. The overflowing of the camp imbues every aspect of
the lives of those who escape—and, living illegally, must live
in constant fear of a return to the camp—and of those who
are in contact with them. In ‘the city’ the exceptional regime
instituted to reinforce the sovereignty of the Australian
www.naturalselection.org.nz
nation state imbues every crevice. The task we are faced with
then is one that is modelled on the escape from Woomera
and yet recognizes that there is no outside to escape to, no
space outside the camp. Such a politics must recognize the
futility of appealing to that nation-state which, in a state
of perpetual crisis, is evermore reliant on the camp. The
struggle against the camp, against the reduction of us all to
bare life, can only be a struggle against the state.
——
Jess Whyte is a writer and PhD candidate in Monash
University’s Centre for Comparative Literature and
Cultural Studies, Melbourne Australia.
Notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, 1995, p. 131.
2 Dave McKay: “Woomera Hunger Strike: Update from the Refugee
Embassy”, Nettime, June 2002, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/
Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0206/msg00156.html (accessed May
28th 2007)
3 Ashraf Shad, “15 Iraqi Refugees Bury Themselves”, Dawn:
Internet Edition, 9 March, 2002, http://www.dawn.
com/2002/03/09/int4.htm (accessed May 28th 2007)
4 Sadiq Ali, Woomera 2001-2002, Desert Storm, Lowenthal, Whyte
et al [Eds], http://www.antimedia.net/desertstorm/contact.
shtml (accessed May 28th 2007)
5 In Schwartz, Larry: “A Scar is Born”, The Sunday Age, Melbourne,
June 15, 2003, p. 13.
6 Woomera delegate, quoted in, “Woomera Hunger Strike: Update
from the Refugee Embassy”, Nettime, June 2002, http://
amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0206/
msg00156.html
7 Aristotle, quoted in Andrew Norris, 2000, p. 38.
8 Glenda Koutroulis, quoted in Penelope Debelle, “Blowing the
Whistle on Hidden Suffering in Woomera”, The Age, April 24 2002,
http://theage.com.au/articles/2002/04/23/1019441244295.
html (accessed May 28th 2007)
9 Andrew Norris, 2000, p. 41.
10 This account is based on my own observations, as a participant,
of the Woomera protest, which are recounted at greater length
in: “Finding Humanity in Woomera”, ZNet, April 16, 2002,
http://www.zmag.org/content/Activism/whyte_woomera.cfm
(accessed May 28th 2007)
11 Sadiq Ali, Woomera 2001-2002, Desert Storm, Lowenthal, Whyte
et al [Eds], http://www.antimedia.net/desertstorm/contact.
shtml (accessed May 28th 2007)
12 Giorgio Agamben, 1995, p. 170.
5.2 Issue 6: 2007
Layla Rudneva-Mackay

Education Stories

Click to listen to
MP3 audio

www.naturalselection.org.nz 6.1 Issue 6: 2007

Scott Redford
Photo: Sculpture, Theatre etc…
A
s philosophers have told us our making good art out
of bad, even horrific events comes at a price (let’s call
it the Goya: Third of May effect, the Guernica effect).
By linking visual fulfilment to such ‘fine spectacles’ we long
ago entered a Faustian pact, and this pact forms the basis of
much of our (over) lauded western humanity.
The texts I quote in PHOTO: Sculpture, Theatre etc… are
examples of journalism. In each case the writers used poetic
metaphor to heighten our empathy for the events described.
In two cases (Hardcore But Beautiful and Vaporize) the quotes
end the original text with a highly dramatic (manipulative?)
flourish. We become ‘concerned’ but we also relish our
concern: “We are reminded of the story that Socrates tells
in the Republic of the man who, unable to resist the desire to
look upon a ghastly scene of mutilated bodies, finally gives in
and cries out to his eyes, “There, ye wretches [his own eyes],
take your fill of the fine spectacle!”.1
Much art that wants to help the world is based upon an
impossible binary, it conceives of itself as belonging to a world
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Scott Redford, Photo: Sculpture, Theatre etc… (2007) Installation
views, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.
separate from the ‘real’ world. Here perhaps is evidence of
western art’s ancient links to the concept of the two worlds
found in the bible. The scriptures describe two worlds: the
present ‘evil’ world we are living in and the world to come.
Indeed the bible is often absolute and extreme: “Whoever is
a friend of the world is an enemy of God” (John 2:15). Again
philosophers stress art’s own terrible origins, proposing
that western art ‘began’ with the invention of ancient Greek
theatre and that all western art may have its genesis in the
beholding of tragedy.
In much ‘concerned’ contemporary art there is a real inability
to bridge a kind of conceptual ‘gap’, and to be honest this
work is not so different. Indeed I suspect that within us
is a subconscious reluctance to even acknowledge that a
gap may exist, because we cannot bridge it. Art cannot do
anything except perhaps despair, or as Chris McAuliffe put
7.1 Issue 6: 2007
it recently: “I think you see a lot of artists who say: I feel Scott Redford, Photo: Sculpture, Theatre etc… (2007) Installation
despair, I feel a sense of helplessness about what I see going views, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.
on in the world”.2 Perhaps the urge to infuse art with ‘the
political’ is a tactic to overcome this sense of helplessness.
Notes
However too much thinking about art today uncritically
presents the political as an already known category; a 1 Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche
genre like landscape or abstraction, with certain artists on Seeing and Saying University of Chicago Press, Chicago &
consistently deemed ‘always political’. The world of art is too London 2003 p. 286
often cast as a kind of separate ‘good’ place where hope, 2 Corrie Perkin, ‘Age of Aquarius has dawned’ The Australian, 19
fears and despair are presented in quaint, aesthetically April 2007
ambient terms. This thinking is academic, normal even. 3 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory Routledge & Kegan, London
Despair is undeniably useful but only as a beginning point, 1984 pp. 464–470.
there is always possibility within any situation: “Aesthetics
can no longer rely on art as a fact. If art is to remain faithful
to its concept… it must develop a sense of self-doubt which
is born of the moral gap between its continued existence and
mankind’s catastrophes, past and future”.3

——
Melbourne, May 2007, with editing and advice from
Emily Cormack, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces,
Melbourne

www.naturalselection.org.nz 7.2 Issue 6: 2007

Matthew Shannon

On the capacity for the Queen of Australia to be replaced by a CGI avatar

A
s some may know, and some not but that’s ok this
isn’t a witch hunt, Queen Elizabeth II is not only
the Queen of Great Britain she is also officially to be
considered Queen of Australia, she just doesn’t live here or
come here very often. She remains the head of the state and
is a non-political figure above the parliamentary system. She
has a series of governors, one for each state, and a Governor-
General to do the big stuff in Canberra like carrying out her
symbolic duties such as; appointing ministers and judges,
dissolving Parliament and giving Royal Assent to legislation.
The Governor-General however will only act on his powers
under the advice of the Prime Minister of Australia and not
who he is supposed to represent, the Queen of Australia,
so as far as holding the balance of power, in the event of a
rising dictator say, the Queen of Australia is null and void.

So can we become a republic? Yes but it often seems too

difficult to rewrite Australian law from the top down. I
suggest instead of going through the legal nightmare of trying
to restructure the whole state/federal system to become
a republic we continue as a constitutional Monarchy. But
how I hear you cry will we appoint our own Royal Family?
How do we choose? If it was up to the government I’m
sure we’d end up with someone like His Excellency Major
Philip Michael Jeffery as King, which I for one object to
on primarily aesthetic grounds. This is why I propose we
design our own Feudal head of state using state of the art
CGI and rendering software, just like France’s very own fully
computer generated talk show host ‘Eve’.

All the ceremonial, symbolic functions of the head of state

could be acted out for television using actors and community
volunteers with the Royalty added in Post Production.
The Christmas speech could still be written by a team of
speechwriters with a synthesised voice delivering it during
lunch on the 25th December. Of course during foreign
visits international heads of state would have to agree to
be actors in the production of the reception, and if they
didn’t we could expel their respective diplomats. For all the
controversy this plan may bring there’s one thing to keep in
mind, if we do want our own head of state and we can’t bear
the complexities of designing a republic, CGI Royalty would
be far cheaper than the real thing.

Image credit: Hao Guo

www.naturalselection.org.nz 8.1 Issue 6: 2007

Mercedes Vicente
Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools (1976—1977)
I
n 1972 Darcy Lange (New Zealand, 1946–2005) started
videotaping labour practices in English factories,
mines and schools. During the 1970s he extended his
documentation of ‘people at work’ to farmers and factory
workers in Taranaki, the rural region of New Zealand
where he was born. He later aligned himself with Máori
activists’ struggles to establish land rights in New Zealand
with his ambitious Máori Land Project (1977–1981). Lange’s
video practice continued a tradition of socially engaged
documentary film and photography, sharing the ideological
objectives of 1930s American FSA photographers Dorothea
Lange and Lewis Hine, and filmmakers such as Frederick
Wiseman. Lange made parallel use of photography, film and
video, and his restless experimentation with the structural
possibilities of both moving and still images aligned him with
conceptual and structuralist artists such as Dan Graham.
The absence of electronic editing equipment in the early days
of video prevented Lange from post-producing tapes into a
finished ‘product’ and contributed to his engagement with
the ‘process’ aesthetic that was ascendant in the 1970s. For
Lange the capacity for early portable video to provide live
and taped feedback—unlike film or photography—made the
medium a viable tool for criticism and analysis, a catalyst
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Ms. Astani’s Upper 5th class viewing tapes, St. Mary’s School,
Oxfordshire. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
for social change:
…making videos and photography in other people’s areas, as
I have done with my art—whether it be walking in their area,
entering their houses, absorbing their ideas or recording them
on their burial grounds or their places of work—was due to
many motives, not all good, I must say—at times it was for my
career, at other times in search of a new image for art. But these
motives were balanced by the reciprocal respect that caught me
as I entered other people’s territories, as I explored those people
so they explored me, and we changed together.1
Without montage or the use of dramatic sequencing, multiple
takes or camera angles, Lange’s videos rely exclusively
on a process of slow observation facilitated by long takes
recording the actions of their subjects in real time as they
perform daily work. The duration of time in which these
activities are performed is generally equivalent to that in
which they were captured, and to the time required to view
them on screen.
9.1 Issue 6: 2007

Top to Bottom: Ladywood Comprehensive School, Birmingham
1976; Mr. Hughs, Leabank Junior School, Birmingham; Chris Wright
viewing tapes, Cheney Upper School, Oxfordshire 1977; Mr. Brenton’s
mathematics class, Ladywood Comprehensive School, Birmingham.
All images courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Focusing on pedagogical practices in the classroom,
Lange’s Work Studies in Schools (1976–1977) explored the
implications of video for teaching and learning environments.
The first of these studies took place in three Birmingham
schools in 1976. This was followed by further studies
in four Oxfordshire schools in 1977. In his Birmingham
studies, Lange carefully chose institutions representing
different social classes, recording in both public and private
schools. He also videotaped a range of school subjects in
his examination of teaching methodologies, developing a
system to survey the teaching of art, history and science
and observing at the time that:
…creativity in schools is not necessarily confined just to the art
class… art is important because of its observation of material
life. Creativity when applied through music, poetry, art, to life
and work could become a protection against object worship,
beyond functionalism. It might help to recreate involvement and
creativity within manual work or build non-object recreational
expression.2
In his Oxfordshire studies Lange was able to play his
recordings back to their subjects for the first time, recording
teachers in their classrooms and then both teachers’ and
students’ reactions as they viewed tapes. The subjects’
reactions became incorporated into the work and guided its
development, while the self-reflexive process added another
dimension to the studies—Lange’s videotaping was also being
declared as work. Lange saw these tapes as ‘researches’ and
‘an educational process’ rather than finished artworks3.
However, rather than create a structuralist exercise for its
own sake, Lange sought to effect change for his subjects. By
inviting his subjects to become critical viewers as well, the
artist introduced a radical potential for social transformation
into his work. This also diminished the extent to which his
tapes might be considered an exclusively formal exercise for
the benefit of art audiences.
In devising this feedback structure, Lange acknowledged
the work of Dan Graham and Guy Brett, two figures with
whom he maintained a critical dialogue. Lange formulated
the guidelines to his school studies thus:
1. to investigate teaching as work
2. to illustrate the skills of the teacher through vocal and
gestural communication with the class and also the class’s
response to this.
3. to illustrate the process of teaching and learning in the
classroom
4. to illustrate the social breakdown within each class
5. I am particularly concerned to prevent what I make,
whether it be photograph or video from becoming an end in
itself—not dissimilar to the loved art object4
Lange countered the techniques used by mass media to
influence and manipulate viewers, instead inviting them
to freely select, compare and interpret his material at will.
Intended as a survey of a range of teachers, schools and
subjects, Lange’s tapes cast teaching as a socially constructed
and constructive process without overtly assigning a value to
9.2 Issue 6: 2007
these practices. Lange considered the process of education
to be “subtly but totally political”, and “concerned with the
establishment of values and parameters of behaviour; its
criteria of success are mostly orientated towards middle
class academic aspirations”.5 He later recalled the work
of Roger Perks in Birmingham during the taping of Work
Studies in Schools:
Roger was head of Ladywood Comprehensive and along with
a good social and political understanding was enormously
successful in dealing with the possibly dangerous potential
of various racial groups in the school. In fact he turned this
completely around the other way into a positive force. His lesson
on George Orwell was followed by a discussion with the class
which introduced me to the kind of work he was doing with
the students. Taking the senior students around old people’s
homes and to hospitals integrated the philosophy of Orwell
with the problems faced by young people in British cities at the
time. Had there been more people like Roger Perks, fewer racial
confrontations would have occurred in the area later.6
Exhibited for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art
Oxford in 1977, Lange’s studies were set up in separate
viewing rooms to challenge the viewer’s perceptions and
expectations of them as works of art.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Eric Spencer with his art class viewing tapes, Cheney Upper School,
Oxfordshire 1977. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
Notes
A selection of material from Darcy Lange’s Work Studies in Schools
tapes can be viewed at: www.naturalselection.org.nz/darcylange/
1 Darcy Lange, cited in: Land, Work, People, Govett-Brewster Art
Gallery, 1985
2 Darcy Lange, “To Effect a Truthful Study of Work in Schools”,
in: Work Studies in Schools—Darcy Lange (Oxford: Museum of
Modern Art Oxford, 1977) p. 18.
3 Guy Brett, “Introduction” in: Work Studies in Schools—Darcy
Lange” (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1977) p. 3.
4 Ibid., p. 18.
5 Ibid., p. 18.
6 Darcy Lange, in: Video Art (Auckland: The Department of Film,
Television & Media Studies, University of Auckland, 2001), pp.
72–75.
9.3 Issue 6: 2007
Mercedes Vicente
Darcy Lange: Estudios del trabajo en los colegios (1976-1977)
E
n 1972 Darcy Lange (Nueva Zelanda, 1946-
2005) comenzó a grabar en video el trabajo en
fábricas, minas y colegios de Inglaterra y continuó
en la década de los setenta documentando “gente en el
trabajo” centrándose en granjeros y empleados de fábrica
en Taranaki, la región rural de Nueva Zelanda en la que
nació el artista. Luego se unió a las causas de los activistas
Maoríes en sus esfuerzos por establecer los derechos sobre
la tierra, realizando el ambicioso proyecto videográfico Maori
Land Project (Proyecto de Tierra Maorí) (1977-1981). La obra
de Lange se inscribe en la tradición del documental social
del cine y la fotografía, compartiendo la visión ideológica
de los fotógrafos americanos de la FSA de los años treinta
tales como Dorothea Lange y Lewis Hine, y de cineastas
como Frederick Wiseman. De forma semejante, su ejercicio
de la fotografía, cine y el video paralelos y su constante
experimentación con las posibilidades estructurales de la
imagen en movimiento e inmóvil, le asociaron con artistas
conceptuales y estructurales tales como Dan Graham.
La inexistencia de equipo electrónico de edición en la
etapa inicial del video previno que Lange editase sus cintas
convirtiéndolas en trabajos “acabados”, desarrollando y
contribuyendo así a una estética procesual que despuntaba
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Mr. Trott’s literature class, King Edward’s School, Birmingham.
Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
en los setenta. Para Lange el que el video portátil ofreciese
la oportunidad única de visualizar la imagen en vivo e
inmediatamente, no factible en el cine o la fotografía,
convertía a este medio en una importante herramienta de
crítica y análisis y, en definitiva, un catalizador potencial
para el cambio social:
hacer videos y fotografías en territorios de otra gente, como he
hecho en mi arte – fuese paseando en su zona, entrando en sus
casas, absorbiendo sus ideas o grabándoles en sus lugares de
sepultura o de trabajo – fue debido a varios motivos, no todos
loables, todo hay que decir – en ocasiones fue para mi carrera
artística, en otras buscando una imagen nueva en el arte. Pero
estos motivos se equilibraban por un respeto mutuo, que me
cautivó al entrar en los territorios de esas gentes, y así como yo
les examiné también ellos me examinaron a mí, y en definitiva
cambiamos juntos.
En ausencia del montaje o del uso de secuencias dramáticas,
toma múltiple o ángulos de cámara, los videos de Lange se
9.4 Issue 6: 2007
relegan exclusivamente en un proceso de observación lenta
facilitado por la toma larga, grabando la acción de sus
protagonistas en tiempo real mientras éstos realizaban sus
tareas de trabajo diarias, siendo equivalente la duración de
estas tareas al tiempo que tomaba el capturarlas en video y
el verlas en la pantalla.
Centrándose en la labor pedagógica que tiene lugar en la
sala escolar, los Estudios de trabajo en los colegios (1976-
77) de Lange examina las implicaciones del video en la
enseñanza y el aprendizaje. El primero de estos estudios fue
realizado en tres colegios de la ciudad de Birmingham en
1976 y fue seguido en 1977 por estudios similares llevados
a cabo en cuatro colegios de Oxfordshire. En los trabajos de
Birmingham, Lange escogió cuidadosamente las instituciones
a fin de representar las diferentes clases sociales, grabando
tanto en escuelas públicas como privadas. También grabó
diferentes materias escolares haciendo un examen de las
metodologías didácticas mediante un sistema que desarrolló
centrado en la enseñanza del arte, la historia y las ciencias.
Éste le llevó a concluir que:
…la creatividad en los colegios no se limita necesariamente
a la enseñanza del arte… el arte es importante por ser una
observación de la vida material. La creatividad, cuando es
empleada a través de la música, la poesía, el arte, en la vida y
el trabajo, puede resultar una prevención contra la adoración
al objeto de arte, más allá del funcionalismo. Puede ayudar a
potenciar la participación y la creatividad en el trabajo manual
o crear una expresión recreacional no vinculada al objeto.
En los estudios de Oxfordshire, Lange tuvo por vez primera
la ocasión de mostrar sus cintas a los sujetos de estos
estudios, grabando primero a los profesores mientras daban
sus clases, seguido de las reacciones de éstos y de sus
estudiantes tras verse en las grabaciones. Estas reacciones
no sólo se incorporaron a la obra sino que también
guiaron su desarrollo, confiriéndole con este proceso de
autorreflexión una dimensión adicional a estos estudios:
la propuesta de la actividad del video de Lange como una
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Peter Garwood with his 5th year O level history class, Banbury
School, Oxfordshire. Image courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
práctica más de trabajo. Lange concibió estos videos como
‘investigaciones’ y como ‘un proceso educativo’ en lugar
de trabajos acabados, sin entenderlos por otro lado como
meros ejercicios estructuralistas sino siempre con una
clara intención de efectuar un cambio para sus sujetos. Al
incentivar a sus sujetos a ser críticos, el artista introducía
un elemento potencial radical de transformación social en
su trabajo, e impedía el caer en puro formalismo y que
éstos fuesen disfrutados para el beneficio exclusivo de la
audiencia del arte.
Lange reconoció el papel que jugaron en la concepción de
la estructura de estos trabajos Dan Graham y Guy Brett,
dos figuras con quien el artista mantuvo un diálogo crítico.
Lange formuló las directrices de los estudios en colegios
como sigue:
1. investigar la enseñanza como un trabajo
2. ilustrar las habilidades del/la profesor/a mediante
su comunicación verbal y corporal con la clase y la
respuesta de la clase a sus dotes como profesor.
3. ilustrar el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje en la clase
4. ilustrar la estructura social implícita en cada clase
5. en particular, estoy interesado en prevenir que lo que
hago, sea en fotografia o en video, se convierta en el
único objetivo, no de forma diferente al objeto de arte.
Lange contrarrestó las técnicas usadas por los medios de
comunicación masivos que buscaban influir y manipular
a la audiencia, invitando en cambio a que su público
seleccionase, comparase e interpretase el material a su gusto.
Contemplado como un estudio comparativo de profesores,
colegios y materias escolares, las cintas de video de Lange
presentan la enseñanza como una actividad socialmente
construida y como un proceso constructivo sin asignarle
abiertamente un valor a estas prácticas. Lange consideraba
9.5 Issue 6: 2007
la educación como un proceso “sutil y totalmente político” Ms. Astani’s chemistry class, St. Mary’s School, Oxfordshire. Image
y “preocupado por establecer valores y parámetros de courtesy of the Darcy Lange Estate.
conducta; su criterio de éxito principalmente orientado
hacia las aspiraciones académicas de la clase media”. Más
adelante recuerda a Roger Perks durante la grabación de los
estudios en Birmingham:

Roger era el director de la Ladywood Comprehensive y aparte de

su buen juicio social y político, manejó con gran éxito el peligro
implícito que conllevaba la relación entre los diferentes grupos
raciales de este colegio. De hecho consiguió todo lo contrario,
hacer de esto una fuerza positiva. Sus lecciones sobre George
Orwell eran seguidas de una discusión con la clase, la cual me
introdujo al trabajo que realizaba Roger con sus estudiantes. El
llevar a sus estudiantes superiores a asilos y hospitales integraba
la filosofía de Orwell con los problemas con que se enfrentaban
los jóvenes en las ciudades británicas de entonces. Si hubiese
existido más gente como Roger Perks, menos enfrentamientos
raciales habrían acontecido en esa zona más tarde.

Estos estudios fueron mostrados por primera vez en el

Museum of Modern Art Oxford en 1977 en salas separadas
para cuestionar la percepción y expectativas del espectador
y prevenir que fuesen consideradas como obras de arte.

www.naturalselection.org.nz 9.6 Issue 6: 2007

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Natural Selection Founded Two Thousand and Four

On the nomination of the Faculty of the

School of Hard Knocks
the powers that be confer the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
upon

Firstname Lastname
for satisfactory completion of the prescribed curriculum
and examinations as set forth in

Insert Faculty/Specialty
With all the rights, honours, and privileges pertaining thereto, granted at
Howe Street, Freeman’s Bay, in the city of Auckland
on this [insert day] day of [insert month], two thousand and seven.

GERONIMO BOOTS NOBEL DYNAMITE

D. NOMINATOR IZZY BENT

14.1
Sean O’Reilly & Rachel Shearer
Fakeries…and other heavens.
1. Northern Soul
2. On the pattern of the infinitesimal
We were led into the basement of the power station’s central
tower. A brutalist décor, the kind you do not find in magazines,
dissolving everything in a deep faded blue. Suspended floors,
glassed in, concentrically arranged around a deep central
space. A floor like still water reflected the commanding glow
of what appeared at first to be a control room, in fact a
scale model of the entire plant. Its dimensions suggestive of
important men, their faces in darkness above the diorama’s
edges, men now gone, their distance echoing in the bleached
sunless photos hanging, barely, in the visitor’s centre.
Our guide explained in front of a console of buttons, lighting
up each sector, with barely any effort giving an outline of
purpose and history. She described large distances and
walked us through lethal rooms indifferent to human frailty.
A secondary stage initiated, lights in systematic unison.
Among the small group a momentary excitement fades as the
possibility of glimpsing the actual power is overshadowed by
the diagrammatic.
Later Theia recalls having bouts of vague nausea prior to the
visit, the attack itself she describes as a pause in her vision,
She said the guide’s voice grew somniferous repeating the
brochure in Italian, she stared harder at the sequenced
configurations of lights and locations. As her mind expertly
worked through the intricate circuit plans the sequence froze
in a pattern floating off in retinal burn. While a stout woman
in green waved the paraphernalia of inappropriate first aid
over her very still, sack-like body, Theia was experiencing a
continuance beyond the onset of unconsciousness.
Noticing that something was dreadfully amiss was the last
thing she remembered before waking on the floor. Having
never lost her exile instincts, flailing at the would-be medic,
we had beaten a swift retreat to the car park. In our dust, a
room of shaking heads, ‘such a rude girl, and we were only
trying to help.’
Moving slightly too fast down back roads, She refused to
use a seat belt. The run of her heel across the dash, a direct
challenge to velocity. Conversation minimal, though I was
glad of it, her voice made a frightening appearance, and it
 Propose a system that exploits a fundamental aspect of the
material (silence as material), its inertia and stableness in order
to illuminate the unexpected spaces that the object itself creates
and by divergent technological means a production of other
objects, a ghost image.
www.naturalselection.org.nz 15.1
seemed as if she were etching each word into the windscreen
with a compass, a mouth so painedly angular.
‘Do you know, what is the planetesimal?’
‘Is it a measure of scale?’
Though we both wished for silence the present became
laden with projection. Theia seemed to be stuck at a point
between cold logic and a displaced personality, in this state
she shone electrically.
‘No, it is what a planet is before it becomes a planet…’
She struggled to find words I could understand. I tried to
imagine a proto planet, Theia balled her fists and gestured
as if they were in orbit around each other. ‘These two objects
exist in relation. At some point, a catastrophic collision’, her
hands sprung open, how delicate they were.
In the wake of this catastrophe you have dust and bigger
particles which are possibly planetesimal, it is the first grain
of planet data in an accretion of disclike and planar data,
the first stone of a lapidary whose multi valent components
each with umbra.’
She had lost us both
Silence,
Self-misting, the glass and plastic of the interior became less
reflective. The language of breath installed itself securely.
Using her smallest fingertip, seven points appeared in
the passenger window. Her voice had returned with the
warmth ‘even these theoretical points are communicating
to each other their separateness. The traces of connection
to their shared existence disappear like wiring steeped in
acids. Definite signals but travelling on the ghost of circuits,
‘it sounds like you are still in that room’.
‘That room was terrible wasn’t it…why do they let people in
there?’
 A graduated line on a map/chart, plan, photograph, or
mosaic, by means of which actual ground distances may be
determined.
 Having initiated a program of self analysis in early February.
 The beyond godlike task of lithic assemblage, it is no wonder all
kinds of gods appeared, themselves in stone.
 Or possible difference between silence and an absence of
sound
Issue 6: 2007
‘Yes, maybe we overstepped the mark on this one’.
The Seiko set into the dash read five minutes faster than the
upside down wristwatch. Theia had the fingers of her right
hand pressed to her forehead, obscuring her face from my
view. I could not pinpoint the reflection of her gaze, open and
undefended as if I were sleeping.
I remember reaching the motor lodge as western ranges
blocked out the sun. We drew up to cinder block and
modular accommodation, the duty manager had left keys
under a sign that read ‘Game room, Spa-Pool, T.V.’ and no
one was around. The rooms were dustless, with the presence
of refrigerated long life milk. Out through oxidising sliders to
an unbroken view of the pacific. High cloud registered green
from the watery, sunset horizon. Night stepped out of the
ocean with a dry southerly and the breakers were lighting
their own way into the sand dunes, white without a trace of
effervescence.
Theia’s room was the exact mirror of mine, true seventies
Serialism. On the second floor, the ceiling caught a blueness
emitted by the Plant’s main generator, over a hundred miles
away and filling everything with a distant heat.
While the sectioned spaces drove me from room to room as
if seeking an escape, Theia was being shaken back from the
lulling embrace of the seaborne night by an abundance of
light pollution. She had lost her sunglasses.
Silence would be broken. Though before the next word
arrived, as I reached for a grey, slightly shabby, suit hanging
inexplicably on the shower rail. It disappeared in my fingertips
and I let out an alarmed squeal. Well-planned rum solved
the problems of moments. Theia turned on the radiogram
bed head, it warmed and something like peri Como emerged.
This did nothing for the atmosphere. Our thoughts were
drawn back to dark currents, the temperature of sharks.
Theia finally broke, her voice made of sand. ‘This music is
so old’. Me, tripping over the shoe holder, ‘we might have to
find another channel’. ‘No, It is the only channel and besides
it is there whether this machine is off or on’. I am worried
by her excitement, me ‘I’ll turn it off at the wall’. It was her
turn to practice calm.
‘There are so many voices, how many times they have sung
this song. The perfect tune for vapours.’
Why was it that I could not bear to hear her speak?
Attempting to derail her train of thought I asked,
‘You do not have cigarettes by any chance?’
Russian, the kind you have to snap the filter before you
smoke, she passes one over with concentration unbroken.
‘This is no longer a song. It is a space inhabited by the
bodiless. It scares me’. Clearly we were taking turns at being
 Later, Theia’s report to the committee did nothing to quell
the crisis of a scientific project crumbling under the weight of
conflicting data.
 Fragment (consider revising)
www.naturalselection.org.nz
the calming influence.
‘The voices are trying to tell you of their bodiless state,
nobody is listening though they are awake everywhere’
‘What medicines?’
‘sleepless’
We sat in two unravelling plastic chairs and watched the sea,
or at least the blackness from where the sound of surf came,
reassuring us that it had not stood up with the night and
walked off over the ranges. Still, there was an oily blackness,
of possibility, or presence of a body strong enough to haul on
the golden chain and drag up a monster with an appetite for
sinister power plants, with a girth wider than night, capable
of devouring what the night could not.
It became so dark and still, Theia disappeared from me in a
way less like mergence with shadows than an overlaying of
many shadows. Somewhere out in the darkness a surface
had shifted and begun reflecting light into the room. Slowly
this light etched out her stillness. In the flash of illumination
as I turned on a desk lamp, she appeared to be wearing a veil
of spider silk, as if she had walked through an attic space
taken over with orb webs. This illusion was momentary as
her gravity re-entered along with the threat of her voice.
*
The planetesimal…Place d’italie-les gobelins-
intersections-optical cluster-binary cluster, or the dialogue
between stars.
The projection of lines from point to point incidentally
strands together a theoretic nest of intersections, eclipses
and influences, while at a structural level, the processes of
accretion, coagulation and accumulation work to produce
something like a roomful of orb webs. The spiders rapidly
spinning around a central axis, this action is elemental,
almost electrical. Spider in science fiction and space, arcade
games rock musicals.
The spider’s10 work produces architecture beyond the
human. The web’s lightness belies its ability to command
a space. It represents an understanding of space. Are there
layers of work that we cannot see? Looking into a funnel web
could be like staring through the eye of a miniature tornado.
We leave the scientific11 to include sensation…
*
Does intuitive composition locate truer emotional responses
than a precise mapping12 of sounds?
 ‘I am remembering summer
 Past marker
10 Spider in science fiction and space, arcade games, rock
musicals.
11 If only to escape the imaginary.
12 Sound as map—a) overmapping B) inter mapping.
15.2 Issue 6: 2007
Or an overlaying of maps, the replicate star cluster resembles
a navigational device, universal in its applicability as a key.
There are two actions, one of specific non-specificity13, the
other of disintegration. The mapping of pieces and the re-
piecing of projects, resulting in a mass of webs, a complex of
complexes.

LM:‘The material is fragmented and (re) organized, permitting

a non-linear mind-set.’

SF: ‘Or is it that a linear mindset is disturbed through

fragmentation and reorganization of sound.

LM:‘Melodic gestures are to be reduced to a minimum so

that they are more a trace of melody.’

SF: ‘Instead of the word ghost could we say ‘distant signal

of unknown origin

LM: ‘…or that the sounds are clustered like stars in the sky,
like crystalline structures, crystal systems, patterns of cells,
white light’

SF: ‘… the trace of a navigational key and marker of sidereal

time.’

LM: ‘Sounds are decomposed into many smaller components

or grains, for the purpose of processing by reordering.

SF: ‘By reducing the traditional notions to grains of data

they become a Sand-like after image of the original, now
sectioned, melody. In drift.’

LM: ‘Exactly, electronic thinking, and a slight shift of my

wrist and fingers.

13 Guides, keys, directions. The precisian utility of a point

of light fixed and moving in relation to other points of light,
superimposed on a ‘ground’. Non specific in the sense of this
preciseness.

www.naturalselection.org.nz 15.3 Issue 6: 2007

Damien Lawson & Kylie Wilkinson
empty land
1788 Convict transportation to Australia begins
1833 Port Arthur convict prison opened in Tasmania, one of
the first sensory deprivation prisons in the world.
1861 Law passed banning the ‘naturalisation’ of Chinese
people who wish to become citizens of NSW.
1868 Convict transportation to Australia ends.
1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of
Opium Act allows the controlled use of Aboriginal people for
pastoral labor.
1901 Immigration Restriction Act and the Pacific Islander
Labourers Act are some of the first laws to pass the new
Australian Parliament implementing the White Australia
Policy.
1911 A Commonwealth act places Aborigines and ‘half
castes’ 18 years and under automatically under the
protection of the Aboriginal Protector. They are forbidden to
marry non-aborigines.
www.naturalselection.org.nz 16.1
1914 Internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in camps around
Australia begins. Initially only those born in countries at
war with Australia are classed as enemy aliens, but later this
is expanded to include people of enemy nations who were
naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants
of migrants born in enemy nations and others who are
thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security.
1917 Referendum to introduce military conscription fails.
1918 Palm Island Aboriginal settlement established on the
advice of Chief Protector J.W. Bleakley as a reserve that
would be ideal for the confinement of ‘the individuals we
want to punish’.
1929 A number of Commonwealth Ministers publicly propose
their departments should construct a complex formal caste
system based on categories: ‘full blood’, ‘mulatto’, quadroon’,
and ‘half caste’.
1933 A proposal for Aborigines to be represented in the
Commonwealth parliament is tabled in the form of a petition
from South Australian churches and public organizations. A
Issue 6: 2007
1938 Cabinet submission from the Minister for the Interior,
J. McEwan, recommends that no action be taken.
1936 NSW Aborigines Protection Act amended to give the
Aboriginal Protection Board the power for the first time to
confine people against their will. After previously defining
only those who are of ‘predominantly Aboriginal blood’
as Aboriginal, the board now states that anyone who was
deemed to have ‘any Aboriginal blood’ could be placed under
its control.
1937 A.O. Neville, Western Australian Protector of Aborigines,
declares: ‘Are we to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in
the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our
white community and eventually forget that there were any
Aborigines in Australia?’
1939 National security internment begins again. Most
of those interned are of German, Italian and Japanese
origin including many born in Australia. Others classed
as enemy aliens include people from Palestine, Iran, the
Straits Settlements, the Netherlands East Indies and New
Caledonia.
1951 The United Nations Convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees is approved at a special United Nations
conference on July 28 1951.
1969 Court rules that abortion is considered legal if
necessary to preserve the woman from a serious danger to
her life or health – beyond the normal dangers of pregnancy
and childbirth – that would result if the pregnancy continued,
and is not disproportionate to the danger being averted.
1980 The world’s third IVF baby, Candice Reed born on
June 23 in Melbourne.
1987 Jika Jika, a climate control pre-formed concrete high
security unit in Pentridge Prison, is closed after the prisoners
set it on fire, four of whom died.
1990 Gary David indefinitely detained under the preventive
detention provisions of the Community Protection Act 1990
(Vic).
1992 The Migration Act requires that all unlawful non-
citizens should be detained and should be held in detention
until granted a visa or removed from the country.
1993 Gary David dies of peritonitis caused by self-inflicted
wounds after 33 years of internment.
1994 David Kang fires a starter pistol at Prince Charles
protesting the indefinite detention of Cambodian boat people.
Kang described immigration detention as ‘concentration
camps’.
1995 Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 legalises
Euthanasia in the Northern Territory, subsequently vetoed
by the Federal Government.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
Between 1995 and 2000, women prisoners provide $5
million in labour for various projects in western Queensland
communities.
1996 High Court finds the preventive detention of Greg
Kable under the Community Protection Act 1994 (NSW) to
be unconstitutional.
1997 The Bringing them Home report finds that a ‘stolen
generation’ exists amongst Australian indigenous people
who were subject to forced removal from their families by
authorities.
1999 Woomera Immigration Detention Centre in the South
Australia desert opens. By the time of its closure in 2003
over 3000 people are imprisoned; the size of each room 8 ft
by 10 ft.
2001 Military Special Forces board and detain refugees on
Norwegian vessel Tampa rescued at sea from their sinking
vessel. The refugees are subsequently taken to Nauru and
Manus Island, PNG and detained.
2002 Protesters and detainees break down fences at
Woomera Immigration Detention Centre and 11 detainees
escape.
2002 Australia votes against the strengthening of the United
Nations Convention Against Torture.
2002 Anti-Terror laws inscribe terrorism into law and allow
the banning of terrorist organizations
2003 Intelligence agencies given powers to detain people for
7 days for the purposes of collecting information.
2003 Number of un-sentenced female prisoners in Australia
increases from 15% (1993) to 25%.
2005 Preventive detention powers given to police to detain
people for up to two weeks to prevent a terrorist threat.
Control orders allow indefinite house arrest.
2005 public debate on torture takes place with academics,
military spokespeople and police officials discussing the
merit of torture.
2006 Local shires are encouraged to submit expressions
of interest in establishing a female prison work camp for
northern Queensland.
2006 Bill to remove the power of the health minister to veto
the use of abortion drugs passes Parliament.
2006 Parliament debates embryonic stem cell research.
16.2 Issue 6: 2007
Mr. Do Not Attempt To Analyse Your Inner Experiences

17.1
Rob Mckenzie
In defense of experimentation
I
’ve been working on a project about artext, a magazine
founded in Melbourne in 1981. Although I’ve read a lot
of the magazine, it is amazing how much I missed. As I
sat and catalogued the contents I came across two articles
in particular that attracted my attention. The first of the
articles, “Body Fluids” by Didier Gille and Isabelle Stengers,
was published in issue 26 in 1987 and translated by Paul
Foss. The second article was written by Foss and printed
in issue 71 in 2001, a gap of sixteen years. Foss took over
as editor of artext from Paul Taylor in 1984 and worked as
the editor and publisher until 2002 (he now runs artUS).
Titled “Phantasm: No Punding Zone”, his essay is almost
invisible. It is not entered on the contents and it occupies
only a double page spread. These essays seemed to be about
something similar, companions.
Gille and Stengers wrote “Body Fluids” in the beginning
years of the AIDS crisis. The uncertainty surrounding the
disease caused hysteria and fear. As they note, people infected
with the virus instantly became “a member of the menacing
hoards”. Infection swiftly and automatically transformed an
individual from comrade to enemy. So-called risk groups
such as homosexuals and intravenous drug users were
vilified. Their supposed transgressions which had ‘allowed’
the disease to come into being, and then to spread, came
under scrutiny.
Rebuking this prejudice, Gille and Stengers argued that
disease is a by-product of experimentation and change, and,
perhaps, an unfortunate but necessary accompaniment
to social and political transformation. They write that
“explorations, conquests, commercial ventures and changes
in lifestyle punctuating the history of mankind were
accompanied, like some clandestine understudy, by the
history of epidemics”.
Gille and Stengers highlight a grave misunderstanding.
They make the case that rather than being the cause, the
person with the disease is the discoverer. “[The] so-called
risk groups are in a sense the ‘advance scouts’, the first to
be stricken by a danger threatening everyone, but also who
can report it and alert others to it”. In this role, like the
explorer reporting back the menace of wild animals, those
who take the risk of dangerous experimentation do so for
a reason. They are looking for fertile ground, new ways of
living, ways that might or might not be more productive. In
this regard we should applaud those living dangerously.
This ideation of risk makes possible a far more productive,
and I believe optimistic, relationship to the experience of
danger and death. As Gille and Stengers proclaim – “we can
recognise, down through the ages, the subversive insistence
of this question of those who agree to expose their body to
danger, not in the name of a country, religion or conviction,
but for an abstract, faceless idea”.
www.naturalselection.org.nz
The discourse around drug abuse seems to engender
hysteria not dissimilar to that of AIDS, and where the drug is
administered intravenously, these realms meet. The findings
of a cost-benefit analysis of drug abuse are all too readily
assumed. This can in part be blamed on a lack of research
into the creation that drug abuse has engineered.
Over the last two or three months I’ve had a number
of conversations about drug use, and what it is. Outside
the narrow parameters of ‘fucked up’ or ‘high’, there seems
to be difficulty in theorising the experience. No one seems
to address what is produced through this activity, what
it is that makes it such a foundational or instrumental
experience. Amongst friends, acquaintances and colleagues
it has been discussed as many things; an alternative to the
banality of suburbia, another option to all those ‘options’, a
different way to inhabit time, a pain killer. And I imagine it
is all these things and probably more.
In “Phantasm: No Punding Zone”, Foss argues that drug
abuse is a “totally aphasic, anoetic production”. This might
explain why it is so difficult to describe what is produced
through amateur pharmacological experimentation. At the
edge of consciousness, this almost unthinkable production
lies outside a classical understanding of what we aim to
‘achieve’. Foss points to “the advantages (and possible
abuses) of the determination of ‘speed freaks’ to derange
their senses as far from higher cognitive functioning as
inhumanly possible”. What is it that might be gained
through this flirtation with mental dysfunction? To use the
example of methamphetamine, where long term abuse leads
to a vegetable mental state, what might be learnt from an
insight into this degradation or rearrangement of the human
cognitive function?
Foss suggests a methodology for the analysis of the
productivity of drug abuse. He argues that “[only] through
the speculative reconstruction of narcotic rapture can its
monumental successes and failures be read”. Rather than
the sober recollection of narcotic experience, perhaps we can
try and imagine the experience as it is, not as it was. The
‘hallucinatory body’ of drug abuse is not a fantasy but a
reality, and perhaps we need the possibilities of this body.
What these articles by Gille, Stengers and Foss offer is
legitimacy for risk. We can eschew hysteria and fear. We can
avoid the useless dualisms of healthy vs. unhealthy or good
vs. bad, and the untenable proposal of cost-benefit analysis.
We can then address without constraint the pressing and
unavoidable concern – what has been made, what can we
make and what will we make through dangerous living?
18.1 Issue 6: 2007
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Clouds publishing Clouds publishing
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