Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics

Contributors David Attwood, Diana Baker Smith, Andrew Brooks, Eva Bujalka, Rex Butler, Darren Jorgensen, Lisa Radford, Francis Russell, Mladen Stilinovic´, Masato Takasaka, Natalie Thomas, Tim Woodward

Edited by David Attwood, Francis Russell

Text Only Series The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics

Contributors: David Attwood, Diana Baker Smith Andrew Brooks, Eva Bujalka Rex Butler, Darren Jorgensen Lisa Radford, Francis Russell Mladen Stilinović, Masato Takasaka Natalie Thomas, Tim Woodward

Editors: David Attwood, Francis Russell

CENTRE of VISUAL ART Publisher _ A+A Publishing, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Distribution _ Peribo, and John Rule Art Book Distribution

© 2020 A+A Publishing ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

EDITORS David Attwood Francis Russell

SERIES EDITOR Edward Colless

AUTHORS David Attwood Diana Baker Smith Andrew Brooks Eva Bujalka Rex Butler Darren Jorgensen Lisa Radford Francis Russell Mladen Stilinović Masato Takasaka Natalie Thomas Tim Woodward

The views expressed in this publication are those of the contributing authors and editors, and not necessarily those of the publisher.

The publisher respectfully acknowledges the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation, on whose land Art + publications are produced. We acknowledge their ancestors and Elders, who are part of the longest continuing culture in the world.

A+A Publishing Text Only series The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics 2020 ISBN 978-0-9924589-0-4

Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne 234 St Kilda Road, Southbank, 3006, AUSTRALIA T: +61 3 9035 9463 E: [email protected] W: artandaustralia.com

CENTRE of VISUAL ART Contents

3 Foreword

5 Introduction David Attwood and Francis Russell

27 Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast, So Accelerated? Slow Art and Decelerationist Strategy Francis Russell

39 Myth-making in the Settler Colony: On Laziness, Representation and Refusal Andrew Brooks

63 Sculptures That Go Home at Night: On Labour, Performance and Re-enactment Diana Baker Smith

81 Natty Brings Her ‘A’ Game Natalie Thomas

99 Like a Rug on Valium: Homer Simpson, Georges Bataille and Excessive Laziness Eva Bujalka

129 Dole Bludgers, Junkies and Share Houses in Australia, 1972–96 Darren Jorgensen

139 Four Orders Tim Woodward

147 The Artist’s Practice as Always Already-made: Remaking and Repetition in the Work of Marcel Duchamp, Mutlu Çerkez and Masato Takasaka Masato Takasaka

167 John Nixon’s ‘Laziness’ Rex Butler

181 Not Making Public Lisa Radford

197 How to Work Better David Attwood

217 The Praise of Laziness Mladen Stilinović

222 Authors

224 Acknowledgements

ix Foreword

As one celebrated painter whose work was almost singularly dedicated to black once said, black is not as black as all that. In the broader palette of art, one might adapt this modernist maxim and say, with the authors of this book, that laziness is not anywhere near as lazy as it sounds. Two principles, despite their apparent paradox, quickly become agreeably clear in this anthology, expertly edited by Francis Russell and David Attwood: that laziness can be an artful pursuit; and that, because of that artfulness, this pursuit is a type of work. It can be the type of industrious self-attention that keeps Ivan Goncharov’s anti-hero Oblomov confined in an effort of dignified indolence, getting him only from his bed to a chair in the first 50 or so pages of that eponymous novel. Or it could be the industrial slog of Al Capp’s comic strip hillbilly, Li’l Abner, when he was employed by a bed manufacturer as a mattress tester—requiring him to sleep in the new models each day long.

What is also clear is that this book has little time for lazy art. Despite initial appearances as a ‘found object’, Duchamp’s famous urinal, Fountain, is, for instance, anything but slothful. True, Duchamp disowned making it, though indeed didn’t actually make it, and then even disowned that gesture of not making it. And of course it doesn’t work as a urinal. As its persistent aesthetic irritation proves, it is a work of art without the work that is expected to go into a work of art. Or perhaps it only has the work that has gone into making it, which by disowning that work unmakes it. Fountain may be a piss-take, but it takes hard work to appreciate just how artful its laziness it. We might say the same of Martin Creed’s wonderfully slacker neon motto: ‘the world plus the work equals the world’. The work is a drop in the ocean of the world’s already working worldliness; or it simply doesn’t matter. One plus infnity still equals infnity. But it is, of course, also infnity plus one.

It is precisely that effort of adding to the uncountable that makes this volume unique, and worth the effort. The Art of Laziness is the first in A+A Publishing’s venture Text Only. Commissioning a project in the visual arts that relies only on text without illustrations may sound perverse. But we want to place an emphasis on new writing, and writing on new topics, that is sustained by the writers’ own powers of invention, invocation, investigation and inspiration.

Edward Colless

1 Introduction

Why can art not exist anymore in the West? The answer is simple. Artists in the West are not lazy. Mladen Stilinović, ‘The Praise of Laziness’1

Over the course of your working life, you are likely to have several careers across a range of occupations. Employers have an increasing focus on transferable skills which enable workers to adapt to changing workforce demands. Job seekers who can show they have these skills, in addition to role-specifc expertise, will have an advantage in recruitment processes. These skills include digital literacy, critical thinking, creativity, problem solving and presentation skills. Aptitudes such as adaptability, resilience and entrepreneurial skills will also be important. Department of Jobs and Small Business, Australian Jobs 20182

While the global financial crisis promised the ruin of neoliberal ideology,3 the past decade or so has shown the durability and obstinacy of the cultural obsession with entrepreneurial self-development and work. Despite the fact that the aftermath of the financial collapses of 2008 required a broad systemic response, ever-more attention has been paid to how individuals—especially individual members of the millennial cohort—can adapt themselves to the demands of a world that seems increasingly ungovernable and crisis prone.4 As economic austerity has lowered living standards and increased precarity worldwide, the typical response seems to be one of producing more resilient and flexible individuals. Rather than simply being imposed from above, the drive to become better suited to the unforgiving and crisis-prone neoliberal society is evinced by the general tendency to work harder, longer and for less. The notion that our relationship to work can be resisted, if not transformed, strikes many as an anachronism—an inability to understand that, for good or for bad, the future is now fundamentally ‘disrupted’.

Indeed, while Australia still prides itself on being a country defned in part by its laid-back attitude towards life, the activity of workers and the statements of poli- ticians suggest otherwise. Whether in terms of the enormous number of workers putting in extra, unpaid hours, or the sheer volume of young workers engaging in free internships and unpaid work ‘experience’, or the constant haranguing

3 Introduction Introduction

of politicians that suggests Australians have developed a mentality of entitlement, Australia’s richest woman and the ninth richest woman in the world (at the it is difficult to view contemporary Australia as other than dogmatically committed time of writing)—could be so naked in her contempt for struggling Australians. to overvaluing work.5 Moreover, the vast majority of jobs being produced will do As quoted by Emily Bourke, Rinehart advises that: little to help ameliorate, if not prevent, future ecological and economic disaster. While job creation and longer hours are demanded at each election, the impact If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there of increased production and consumption on our ecology and culture is rarely and complain; do something to make more money yourself— taken seriously by policy makers and media pundits. Indeed, for a host of politi- spend less time drinking, or smoking and socialising, and more cians, journalists, academics and influencers, the future of work will be unavoid- time working.8 ably precarious, dynamic and all-consuming. An artifcial intelligence that is yet to manifest and a digital revolution that is poorly defned are often cited as the It is worthwhile considering the impact that such an emphasis on work ethic and causes of this fundamental shift towards unstable and increasingly demanding entrepreneurialism has had on our contemporary understanding of art. While work. Despite the rhetorical power of such explanations—tapping into, as they the popular figure of the 20th-century artist may have been a countercultural do, a cultural obsession with the semi-deistic status of technology, an obsession rebel or a work-shy dropout, the contemporary figure of the artist is arguably that is at least as old as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—they ultimately miss the both preemptive and exemplary of the contemporary ideology of work. The artist, political agency that underpins the transformation of wage labour since at least as Benjamin Noys has claimed, ‘is the fgure of contemporary labour—the most the 1970s. As Judith Bessant, Rys Farthing and Rob Watts argue in their text extreme instantiation of the present—and hence the one whose self-valorisation The Precarious Generation: A Political Economy of Young People, the last 50 years is most plugged into capitalism’s self-valorisation’.9 For Noys, the fact of the artist’s have seen a concerted shift away from state paternalism and towards a new coincidence with contemporary notions of labour is supported by the latter’s ‘active society’.6 From the perspective of the ‘active society’: ‘precarity, fexibility, mobility, and fluidity’.10 Despite being remunerated in the most paltry sums,11 artists engage in an extraordinary range of labour activities ‘Giving’ jobless people benefts and ‘receiving nothing back’ encouraged and processes of self-development: engaging in artist talks, developing their own passivity and laziness. It exacerbated the problem by ‘rewarding’ citizens online and social media brands, and applying for opportunities to help bridge for being ‘inactive’. If unemployed people wanted income support, divides between communities and between public and private ‘stakeholders’. then from now on they would have to demonstrate they were active, The artist has become the model for the precarious professional—a worker who which involved proving they were ‘genuinely’ looking for work and/or is expected to view their low-paid and unstable work as a calling that requires participating in an approved education or training that improved their rigorous training and personal investment. The status of contemporary work in ‘job readiness’.7 Australia, with its tendency towards a ‘gig economy’, unpaid work and precarious casual employment, has revealed a situation in which artists’ typical precarity Within the logic of the ‘active society’, the instability or precariousness of work has become massively expanded. Working for exposure, experience or token is not inevitability wrought by unforeseen technological advances but is, rather, remuneration—kinds of work that accord with our cultural perception of the a necessary condition for producing better citizen-consumers. According to the majority of labour performed by artists—has now become common place in all dictates of this mode of governance, without such instability individuals will manner of vocations and professions. Nevertheless, artists often seem the least become passive and lazy, and, accordingly, even the most draconian of tactics likely to resist such a state of affairs—anxiously performing how hard they work, can be embraced, as they will ultimately lead to the enrichment of the economy how deserving they are of the tiny remuneration they receive and how willing and the individual. Such a logic explains how a public fgure such as Gina Rinehart— they are to take on ever-more projects.

4 5 Introduction Introduction

Such a lack of resistance does not necessarily reflect a lack of criticality on the have attempted to respond to their immanence to neoliberal governance is still part of artists, however. Arguably, artists have assumed the role of the innovative of enormous value. In particular, this book hopes to make a small contribution new knowledge worker as a means to survive the onslaught of cuts to funding. towards what seems to be a renewed interest in anti-work politics and the possi- As George Yúdice has argued, the late-20th century saw a shift away from the bility of severing our attachment to wage labour as the primary vehicle for the notion of art as means of cultivating a certain kind of ethos—and in particular ‘good life’. The central provocation that all of the chapters in this collection helping to cement the notion that capitalist liberal democracies were inherently respond to is that of the conceptual and political possibilities offered by rethinking drivers of creative freedom—and towards the idea that art and other cultural notions of laziness. Laziness might seem like a markedly unambitious starting activity could help lower government expenditure.12 Indeed, Rina Kundu and point, a notion too lethargic to stimulate a radical anti-capitalist imagination. Nadine M. Kalin compellingly argue that the emergence of the entrepreneurial Nevertheless, the championing of laziness and leisure has a long history in the artist and arts organisation is inseparable from the steady destruction of socially anti-work and post-work imaginary. Indeed, the dominance of work in Western democratic notions of state responsibility. They state that through a neoliberal liberal societies has drawn criticism from fgures as disparate as the radical Paul lens: Lafargue and politically moderate Bertrand Russell. For Lafargue, writer of the infamous essay The Right to Be Lazy and the son-in-law of Karl Marx, the ‘furious Culture has value if it has been instrumentalized in terms of how it can be passion for work’ and the ‘love of work’ are harmful delusions foisted onto the entrepreneurial in fulflling social outcomes. Museums need to improve working classes, and maintained by priests, economists and moralists alike— people’s lives and meet their needs while less funding for social services each of whom, Lafargue argued, cast their own ‘sacred halo over work’.14 is forthcoming. Stated in another way, people and communities need to be empowered to get involved in meeting their needs on their own.13 For Bertrand Russell, the notion of work as a virtuous activity has greatly stymied our capacity to re-evaluate the roles and responsibilities of workers in economi- While this in no way invalidates the aesthetic appeal or conceptual interest facil- cally dynamic times.15 For Russell, our regard for work has conventionally viewed itated by socially engaged art, there is nevertheless something disquieting about it as a kind of duty that is tied to moral notions of decency and not to notions of the way in which the contemporary artist’s transformation into a super-flexible productivity, as is overtly espoused.16 One’s expectation to work, while seemingly freelancer runs parallel to cuts to other important social services and programs. caught up in a framework of mutual obligation and practical necessity, is, in fact, Often functioning as a casual or unpaid writer, publisher, web developer, curator, by Russell’s account, linked to deeply moralistic sentiments that begin from having social scientist, historian, activist, events organiser, environmentalist and/or posited the necessity of work rather than having discovered it as a conclusion— journalist, the contemporary artist is encouraged to prove their social wealth by as is so often portended.17 Nevertheless, while there is a rich history of demystifying functioning, albeit unconsciously, as a means of softening the blow of economic our attachments to work, the conceptualisation of work’s other—of laziness as austerity. Whereas once an artist might have been accused of laziness, today it has an antonym of the work ethic—has been left relatively underdeveloped. Indeed, become normal for artists to view themselves as the most flexible, yet precarious, isn’t there something naive about emphasising the value of not doing? Given that workers of late capitalism. under-employment has become as much of a problem as unemployment, is there really any value in championing leisure and time away from work? It is due to this transformation of the artist that this book seeks to investigate the contemporary ideology of work in relation to artistic practice. If the last 50 to 60 Italian cultural theorist Maurizio Lazzarato provides perhaps the most provocative years have seen a retreat of art as a privileged space for critiquing the dominance engagement with these questions in his discussion of Duchamp—a discussion of wage labour in the organisation of social life, then the ways in which artists that has only emerged in English in the last few years via the translation of his

6 7 Introduction Introduction

Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work and Experimental Politics: Work, order to beguile or amuse their audiences, as the use of delegated labourers, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age. For Lazzarato, Duchamp’s work in all manner of artistic work, has seen many contemporary artists assume the presents the opportunity for a radical reconceptualisation of laziness. ‘Duchamp- guise of the project manager. Accordingly, the Duchampian tactic of inserting ian laziness’ is, by Lazzarato’s account, both a critique of the socio-economic the incongruous non-aesthetic, or readymade, into an art context has potentially conditions underpinned by the logic of capital and a concept that ‘compel[s] us lost its power as a form of protest.21 Such failures are important to keep in mind, to rethink action, time, and subjectivity’.18 The first level of Lazzarato’s use of especially given the propensity for art world discourse to take an ebullient, if not Duchamp, that of the ‘socio-economic’ critique, is potentially more familiar to naive, stance on the capacity for artworks to resist hegemonic forms of power. the reader. It is now generally accepted that part of the readymade’s critique of However, it is only possible to make Duchampian laziness synonymous with conventional understandings of art can be located in, as Lazzarato puts it, ‘the a straightforward withdrawal from activity if we ignore the materiality of the refusal of “artistic” work’ by way of an unwillingness to ‘produce for the market and readymade. While Duchamp’s readymades are often reduced to the act of inter- collectors in order to meet the aesthetic demands of an ever-expanding public’.19 vention—that is, to the process of interjecting the non-art object into an art If one is trapped within an ever-widening culture industry—an industry so large context—his choice of objects has been somewhat overlooked. As curator Helen and powerful that it transforms all artistic endeavour into commodities—could Molesworth has indicated, Duchamp’s readymades are almost always objects of one fnd tactical moments of resistance by doing their job poorly? This frst sense maintenance.22 The curious question that the readymade poses is: Why do such of laziness, of laziness as a kind of protest against the demands of utility and humble objects of domestic life—and the labour of maintenance that goes along productivity, is potentially embodied in the readymade’s rejection of the culture with them—seem incongruous with the fgure of the artist? Is there something industry’s need for a continual flow of aesthetically pleasing objects and its inherently uncreative and unimpressive about such labour, something that challenge to the division of labour inherent in the relationship between artist and would intrinsically see the world of the domestic partitioned off from that of art? audience—the artist as a technical specialist who combines specialised knowledge Or could it be the case, instead, that the value of work is fundamentally open to and skill with a mysterious inspiration in order to produce artefacts that compen- political contestation, such that no activity can be seen as intrinsically valuable sate the general public for its inability to be creative. Against such a division of outside of some power relation. labour, the readymade challenges the notion that the artwork has to embody the specialised training of the artist, and that the role of exhibiting art is to provide It is this latter possibility that allows us to return to Lazzarato’s second notion of the viewer with something that they supposedly lack. As Lazzarato puts it, the ready- Duchampian laziness. Rather than reducing Duchampian critique to the simple made is confrontational in its laziness insofar as it ‘involves no virtuosity, no special act of refusing to work or work well, Lazzarato refers to Duchamp’s ‘lazy action’ know-how, no productive activity, and no manual labour’.20 as the capacity to question precisely what gets to be designated as proper or valuable, with respect to work. As Lazzarato states, ‘lazy action does not derive On such terrain in a battle against the division of labour required by capital and from aesthetics; it is part of an existentialist pragmatics’.23 In other words, he the demands for ever-increasing productivity, this first sense of laziness as the refers to ‘lazy action’ not simply as the refusal to meet the demands of an art simple refusal of activity has perhaps exhausted its radical potential. Yet this market but as a more general questioning of our inherited sense that some forms model for protest or resistance seems to have been well and truly recuperated by of activity are inherently more valuable than others. That the readymades ‘resist the culture industry and the institutions of the art world, insofar as certain kinds their intended, mandated, standardised use’24 does not simply challenge the of institutional critique have become a key part of the continued relevance of ontological status of art but it also challenges the way certain activities—often a great number of art galleries and museums. Moreover, it is arguably no longer unpaid—slip into the background. the case that artists are expected to produce technical or aesthetic wonders in

8 9 Introduction Introduction

The value of laziness, then, does not require the naive supposition that leisure or the exploitative relationship between art institutions and young arts workers, inactivity necessarily and immediately entail some kind of resistance to contem- and the strange relationship between the body and value in contemporary per- porary capital’s logic of utility, productivity and competition. Instead, to affirm formance. The desire for, and seeming impossibility of escape from the neoliberal laziness as a political category, by way of Lazzarato’s reading of Duchamp, is to art world is explored in Natalie Thomas’s chapter. Equally comedic and acerbic, reinvestigate those activities and agents deemed to naturally stand outside of Thomas corrodes contemporary art’s mirific sheen by exposing her ambivalent prevailing conceptions of the work ethic. Those actions that seem to resist best relationship to working in the creative industries. As she writes: ‘my artistic practice or efficiency, those people who seem unproductive or unwilling to help career is a vanity project. I still pay to play.’ Eva Bujalka’s chapter questions the themselves to get ahead, those forms of culture and shared experience that don’t ambivalent relationship between laziness and work by examining the paradoxical fit with dominant—that is to say, white, male and heteronormative—notions of labour of popular character Homer Simpson. Bujalka asks what it means that progress or productivity are the ones most commonly sneered at and denigrated Homer, one of the most internationally recognised symbols of laziness and animos- as ‘lazy’. Accordingly, to embrace laziness is not simply to assert the political ity to work, is a hyperactive—if not manic—figure, seemingly possessed by the value of doing very little or nothing, but is also an attempt to think through those dual desires of immobility and incessant action. Darren Jorgensen’s chapter sifts existential and conceptual possibilities that have been overlooked or suppressed. through the archive of the dole bludger and the share house to outline the apparent disappearance of Australian arts’ relationship to forms of negativity, such as lazi- This collection reconsiders laziness for the purposes of thinking through the ness and hedonism. Through a winding tour of 1990s bludger and slacker culture, relationship of art and visual culture to anti-work politics. The artists and writers Jorgensen helps to bring into focus the dominance of the entrepreneurial spirit involved have responded by either engaging specifically with the problems and of our own time. For Jorgensen, the negative representation of the share house, possibilities offered by the concept of laziness, or have directly addressed artistic the dole bludger and the junkie—that is, more generally speaking, the lazy—are practice to consider how anti-work politics challenges artists to live and create troubling today ‘because they offer other possibilities for living, for creating differently. With constant reference to art and visual culture, part one of this book relationships and for finding pleasure’. engages with laziness and a critique of our ideological relationship with work on a broad level. Francis Russell’s chapter begins the collection by posing the Tim Woodward’s fictional vignettes serve as a transition between parts one and question of whether laziness necessarily involves a commitment to deceleration two of the collection. These short-fiction pieces touch on a range of interrelated and slowness. Given the popularity of slowness and the emergence of ‘slow art’ themes, from the use of the café-as-office by the freelance worker in ‘Coffee discourse, this chapter attempts to clarify whether an investigation of laziness House’ to the supposed readiness and superior work ethic of the rich and famous can offer a different perspective on art and late capitalism from the more dominant in ‘Rolled Sleeves’, and other tales of exorbitant and absurdist consumption. Part discussion of slowness. Andrew Brooks’ chapter explores the limitations of two contains a range of critical and exegetical reflections on how laziness might laziness as an emancipatory concept by engaging with the term’s racist, colonial operate as process or technique within art practice. Masato Takasaka’s chapter logic. Brooks highlights important tensions that are unavoidable when attempting addresses notions of remaking and repetition, as these processes apply to his to think through an emancipatory conception of laziness and anti-work. His artistic practice. He traces the presence of these processes in the work of Duchamp, chapter concludes by exploring Indigenous sovereignty with regards to the urgent specifcally his Boîte-en-valise series, and in the work of the late Turkish-Australian demands for decolonisation. Diana Baker Smith’s chapter further questions the artist Mutlu Çerkez. Rex Butler’s chapter proactively poses the question of whether limitations of thinking through laziness and art by probing the ever-intensifying post-avant-garde art is fundamentally lazy, insofar as its main function often seems levels of commodification that occur in the art world. Baker Smith does this by to be to keep art alive as a cultural form. Butler suggests that abstractionist John investigating the politics of re-enacted performance art, raising questions about Nixon is exemplary of the difficult possibility that ‘we might call the contemporary

10 11 Introduction Introduction

art world “lazy” … not as any criticism but simply to acknowledge its new dispen- 1 Mladen Stilinović, ‘The Praise of Laziness’, Moscow Art Magazine, no. 22, 1998. sation as ultimately flat, featureless, contentless’. David Attwood’s chapter asks 2 Department of Jobs and Small Business, Australian Jobs 2018, 2018, p. 29, cica.org.au/ rhetorically whether being an artist is a ‘real’ job—a form of work or a reprieve from wp-content/uploads/Australian-Jobs-2018.pdf; accessed 24 October 2019. work. While acknowledging the impossibility of escaping the current temporal and 3 There is a vast body of literature dedicated to unpacking the term neoliberalism and its spatial boundlessness under which we must all work, the artist included, he puts historical emergence as a hegemonic form of governance. Accordingly, a list of such texts forward a number of interventionist, satirical and sarcastic methods that may pro- would be too long to cite here. Nevertheless, for texts on neoliberalism in the Australian vide means to work better. This collection concludes with ‘The Praise of Laziness’, context, see Elizabeth Humphrys, How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, a treatise by the late Croatian conceptualist Mladen Stilinović. First published in the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project, Brill, Leiden, 2019; Richard Denniss, 1998, the short but seminal piece asserts that ‘there is no art without laziness’, an ‘Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next’, Quarterly Essay no. 70, apt conclusion for the chapters collected here. Black Inc., Carlton, 2018; Dominic Kelly, Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The Hard Right in Australia, Press, Melbourne, 2019.

4 For a detailed analysis of the lack of systemic response to the global fnancial crisis of 2008, and to the continued dominance of neoliberalism as a mode of political and economic governance, see Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Verso, London, 2013.

5 There is obviously a long line of Australian politicians who have framed unemployment in moral terms, contrasting a deserving from an undeserving poor. Scott Morrison, the prime minister at the time of writing, provided yet another example of this rhetoric when he announced that he believed in a ‘fair go for those who have a go’, once again implying that a signifcant number of Australians seek to beneft from, without contributing to, the welfare system. See Katharine Murphy, ‘The Meaning of Morrison’s Mantra about Getting a Fair Go Is Clear. It’s Conditional’, , 17 April 2019, theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/ apr/17/the-meaning-of-morrisons-mantra-about-getting-a-fair-go-is-clear-its-conditional; accessed 24 October 2019.

6 Judith Bessant, Rys Farthing and Rob Watts, The Precarious Generation: A Political Economy of Young People, Routledge, London, 2017, p. 95.

7 Bessant, Farthing and Watts, p. 95.

8 Emily Bourke, ‘More Work, Less Play: Rinehart Sets Out Road to Riches’, ABC News, 30 August 2012, abc.net.au/news/2012-08-30/rinehart-sets-out-road-to-riches/4232326; accessed 25 October 2019.

9 Benjamin Noys, ‘The Art of Capital: Artistic Identity and the Paradox of Valorisation’, talk at the Centre for Drama and Art, Zagreb, 16 June 2011, academia.edu/689156/The_Art_ of_Capital_Artistic_Identity_and_the_Paradox_of_Valorisation, p. 1; accessed 25 October 2019.

12 13 Introduction Introduction

10 Noys, p. 1. Or, as Pamela M. Lee puts it: ‘when contemporary experience is ever rationalised 13 Rina Kundu and Nadine M. Kalin, ‘Participating in the Neoliberal Art Museum’, Studies in through the logic of design; when the word “creativity” is taken as a cognate to the “market”; Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, vol. 57, no. 1, 2015, p. 45. and when social relations are relentlessly mediated by a formidable visual culture—a culture 14 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy [1883], AK Press, Oakland, Ca., 2011, p. 23. of the image writ large through the peregrinations of global media—the art world as we once knew it begins to lose its singularity and focus, to say little of its exclusivity’. Pamela M. Lee, 15 Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 5–7. Forgetting the Artworld, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 2012, p. 2. 16 Russell, p. 6. 11 Research has shown that in Australia, ‘the median total of income for professional artists in 17 Russell, pp. 6–7. 2007/08 was $35,900 … Just over two-thirds of artists earned between $10,000 and $69,999 in total in 2007/08. However, most were towards the lower end of this range. Sixteen percent 18 Maurizio Lazzarato, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work, Joshua David Jordan (trans.), of artists earned less than $10,000, while fve percent earned more than $100,000’. The median Semiotext(e), , 2014, p. 9. income exclusively through creative activity in this same period was $10,300 for men and only 19 Lazzarato, p. 12. $5,000 for women. See David Throsby and Anita Zednik, ‘Artist Careers: Do you Really Expect to Get Paid? An Economic Study of Professional artists in Australia’, 2010, p. 10, 20 Lazzarato, p. 19. australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/fles/artist_career_research_summary- 21 Indeed, the critical project of Duchamp’s readymades has failed insofar as the readymades 591bc8ff7bbbc.pdf. have been recuperated within an institutional discourse of individual genius—and specifcal- A follow-up study conducted in 2017 did not show improving conditions: ‘in the case of ly white, male, heteronormative genius—that casts Duchamp in the role of innovative ‘ideas practising professional artists as a whole, there has been a substantial decline in real creative man’, akin to the fnancial investor or CEO, who seems to do very little but nevertheless has the incomes over the seven year [2007–08 to 2014–15] period, despite the fact that the proportion necessary capital (fnancial, intellectual, cultural) to ‘make things happen’. In this sense, of time artists devote to creative work has remained roughly the same’. See David Throsby and Duchamp’s work is a failure inasmuch as it now functions to reinforce the notion of the artist Katya Petetskaya, ‘Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia’, as a specialist who is fundamentally distinct from the ‘mass’ audience. Yet Duchamp’s critical 2017, p. 86, australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/fles/making-art-work-throsby- project has also failed in that the socio-economic conditions it aimed to critique have report-5a05106d0bb69.pdf; accessed 24 October 2019. drastically changed. In a certain sense, the Duchampian fgure sits comfortably with the contemporary knowledge-economy worker, as the readymade emphasises the existence of These reports provide little in the way of a breakdown of earnings across divisions, other than a ubiquitous creativity and privileges the opportunities afforded by disruption, deskilling those of gender. However, Mark Banks has argued that, in the British creative industries, and reskilling, and dematerialisation. ‘where they are employed, ethnic minorities tend to occupy lower-status or entry-level jobs and more often fnd it difficult to secure stable, consistent work or elevation into the most 22 As Molesworth puts it: ‘a hat rack and coatrack to hang things on, a comb to straighten one’s senior or secure positions’. Banks has argued further that the predominance of ethnic hair, a cover to protect a typewriter from dust, a urinal for peeing in, a rack to dry bottles, minorities in insecure creative work has also meant they are most likely to be excluded from a shovel to remove snow. Almost all of Duchamp’s readymades could have been found in an paid positions in times of economic downturn. Mark Banks, Creative Justice: Cultural average home or store; they are mundane objects of everyday life. Sharing the attribute Industries, Work and Inequality, Rowman & Littlefeld, London, 2017, p. 113. As the problem quotidian, the readymades are also bound together by the processes of maintenance.’ of insecure work intersects with sexual, gendered and racial discrimination, members of Helen Molesworth, ‘Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades’, marginalised groups are the most impacted by low remuneration and the insecurity of Art Journal, vol. 4, no. 57, 1998, p. 51. creative work. 23 Lazzarato, p. 41. 12 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Duke University 24 Molesworth, p. 58. Press, Durham, 2003, pp. 11–12.

14 15 Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast, So Accelerated? Slow Art and Decelerationist Strategy

Francis Russell Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast

At a cultural, technological and even political level, it seems that contemporary life is inseparable from the expectation that temporal intervals will be overcome. Whether in the form of delays, pauses or even the outright cessation of events, temporal limits to productivity and utility are taken as antithetical to the prog- ress of modernity. For journalist Carl Honoré, author of the popular In Praise of Slow, such expectations are manifest in our commitment to the ‘go-faster gospel’, according to which the solution to the demands of an accelerated culture is to accelerate further: ‘Falling behind at work? Get a quicker Internet connection. No time for that novel you got at Christmas? Learn to speed-read. Diet not work- ing? Try liposuction. Too busy to cook? Buy a microwave.’1 For Honoré, the most immediate symptom of this will-to-accelerate is the ever-increasing problem of overwork, stating that empirical evidence points to a trend of employees in America refusing to take time off work when sick or when they have amassed large amounts of paid leave due to their excessive workloads.2 Honoré points towards Japan as one of the most extreme illustrations of the problem of overwork, and where the term karoshi—literally meaning ‘death by overwork’—has emerged in response to the phenomenon of hundreds of Japanese citizens dying from work-related stress every year.3 Indeed, the ever-present demands for people to work longer hours and to increase their productivity appears to have emerged at the same time as a booming stimulant industry that promises to eradicate the limitations that sleep deprivation and general fatigue induce. The predominance of caffeinated products—manifested in an increasing consumer interest in specialty coffee, energy drinks and other forms of stimulant-laced consumables, such as caffeinated chocolate and soap—has become almost entirely normalised in contem- porary culture. So dominant is this that the trope of needing coffee or other forms of caffeine as a necessary part of one’s day has become almost unavoidable.

If, as the cultural critic and theorist Benjamin Noys states, ‘speed is the problem’— insofar as we are subjected to the ‘accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more’4—then for some, an interest in deceleration and slowness has become a radical point of departure for imagining new social relations resistant to late-capitalist logics of speed. While the critique of speed seems inextricably connected to the emergence and mutations of modernity, the popularity of ‘slowness’ as a critical category is a seemingly more recent phenomenon. As the theorist Nick Salvato comments,

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while artists and critics have been ‘quick in their uptake of speed’ as a focal point engage with this increasing affirmation of deceleration by way of an examination for thinking through the crises of modernity and capitalism, most have been ‘slow of slow art,11 a more recent form of ‘slow discourse’ that argues for a decelerated to take up slowness’.5 Nevertheless, the last few decades have seen a rapid uptake engagement with art in order to foster a more authentic life. Especially by looking of the discourse of deceleration. For many activists, writers and artists, slowness at the recent work of philosopher and art critic Arden Reed, we can question the now suggests something radical and potentially revolutionary. As the infuential extent to which slowness is useful for understanding art’s role in fostering an anti- contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou writes, ‘today revolt requires leisureli- work politics. Specifcally, this will be done by engaging with slow-art discourse’s ness and not speed’.6 The affirmation of slowness, or a slower future, has accord- nostalgic fxation on vision and broader conceptualisation of capitalism as univers- ingly become a common rhetorical feature of a range of discourses that seek to ally dynamic and accelerating. Such a critical examination of slow art will open offer an alternative to the social formations of capitalism. Honoré speaks of the up the possibility (towards the conclusion this chapter) of proposing Maurizio emergence of the Japanese ‘Sloth Club’, the American ‘Long Now Foundation’, Lazzarato’s notion of laziness as an alternative for thinking through art’s relation- the European ‘Society for the Deceleration of Time’, the ‘slow education’ move- ship to anti-work politics. ment and the ‘slow city’ movement that has spread internationally.7 To this list we can add the host of slow manifestoes that have emerged online, such as the slow Austere Looking science manifesto, the slow media manifesto, the slow design movement and Increasingly in the work of infuential art critics and historians we fnd the claim the slow fashion movement.8 Perhaps the most interesting expression of the rise that we are living through a crisis of vision and spectatorship. According to fgures in decelerationist culture is the production of ‘slow clocks’, clocks that ‘tick once such as Arden Reed, James Elkins and David Joselit—just to name a few—contem- a year and measure time over ten millennia’, the frst of which is on display at the porary life has rendered us unable to look at, unable to sit with, a work of art long Science Museum, London.9 enough to appreciate its depth and power. In the work of Elkins12 and Reed,13 and in a host of journalistic articles on slow art,14 we find the claim that gallery visitors The various forms of slow discourse that have emerged over the last few decades spend mere seconds looking at artworks—as little as fve seconds or as many as 20, perform the important task of helping to keep alive anti-work and anti-capitalist depending on the account. Such evidence is usually deployed to remind the reader desires. Indeed, it seems difficult to disagree with the sentiments that inspire of the accelerated pace of contemporary life, and of the continual destruction discussions of slowness, insofar as they show a sincere concern for the continued of our capacity to pay attention. In response to our purported fixation on quick alienation of life under late capitalism. Despite this, the common-sense appeal thrills and flippant purchasing and discarding of commodities, Reed is clear to of the injunction to ‘slow down’ and decelerate potentially obscures the perhaps make slow art distinct from a new or privileged set of aesthetic objects. Instead of unintended and unconscious attachments that slow discourse holds to conserva- slow art referring to a genre of artworks or a style of artistic production, slow art tism, homogeneity and nostalgia. While the rhetorical appeal of slowness clearly is to be understood in terms of the cultivation of an ethics of spectatorship, one resonates with large numbers of people, any articulation of what makes slowness in which the viewer is encouraged to become more adept at lingering on the art specifically ethical, desirable or politically strategic is, as Filip Vostal writes, object so as to let its meaning gradually emerge.15 Reed offers his own eight-year ‘largely avoided and/or vague in existing accounts’.10 Accordingly, the risk stretch of looking, writing, researching and speculating, with Édouard Manet’s presented by the popular embrace of ‘slowness’ is that the ‘self-evident’ desirability Young Lady in 1866 as inspiration for and an example of, the practices that would of an anti-capitalist strategy of deceleration both naively rehabilitates the past, be cultivated through slow art.16 It seems for Reed that spending such a sustained by way of conservative nostalgia, and misdiagnoses the current experience of period of time returning to the same work allowed him to not only appreciate late-capitalism by assuming its accelerated effects are evenly distributed— the art object better, but to also tap into modes of comportment that are largely geographically, culturally and economically. Accordingly, this chapter will critically antithetical to the injunctions of late capitalism. Looking slowly, and looking

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at less, seems to have provided Reed with more—not only a surplus of aesthetic Shari Tishman provides one such example in her description of fifth-grade pleasure, but also a spiritual and intellectual nourishment he was not easily able students encountering a by Henri Matisse, published in the introduction to find elsewhere. Indeed, the spread of the ‘Slow Art Day’ has shown that Reed’s to her Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation. ideas already have a potential audience. Starting with 16 museums in 2010 and Tishman reports her scepticism on hearing that the group of students were expect- with 700 venues having participated by 2019, Slow Art Day encourages individuals ed to look at a single Matisse painting for minutes: ‘tell a group of fifth-graders to to look at a handful of artworks for extended periods of time (at least 10 minutes sit still and look at a painting for 30 minutes, and you will very quickly have a class- each), before breaking with other art enthusiasts to discuss the works and their room of squirming, restless kids’.23 To Tishman’s surprise, however, the students experiences.17 As Creative Good CEO and founder of Slow Art Day Phil Terry in this case study took to the task eagerly, and in the process of engaging with the states, ‘people usually go to a museum, see as much as they can, get exhausted, painting were able to make a host of relatively complex observations about its and don’t return’.18 Against such burnout-inducing spectatorship, Terry believes composition.24 Interestingly, the students did not simply look at the painting in that ‘Slow Art Day energises people’.19 an uninterrupted manner, but were encouraged to look for a few minutes while making notes about what they saw. Once they had taken down some notes, they What is missing from slow art discourse is some argument for why an austere were encouraged to discuss in groups what they had seen, and then to look again relationship to looking—one in which we limit what we look at and how we look— so as to compile more notes before beginning another round of discussion. What will provide us with rejuvenation. Put differently, we can ask what gets left out seems to have provoked so much attention and dialogue between these young when we fixate on ‘looking’ as the primary or originary means of accessing art. students is not their ability to take an austere approach to their activities—that As the phenomenological critique of aesthetics provided by figures such as Martin is, limiting themselves to looking for sustained periods of time—but instead their Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer has shown, any encounter with art is irre- capacity to employ different modes of engagement with the painting in question. ducible to the experience of looking, insofar as our engagement with art always As Tishman states herself, of central importance seems to be the fact that the already involves historical and hermeneutic dimensions.20 Put differently, art teacher leading this activity did not ‘give them much textbook information about happens as much in the moments of looking at an artwork as it does in reading the painting’.25 However, rather than affirming the autonomy given to the students, about the work, dialoguing with others about the work, reflecting on one’s or the dialogical way in which the activity progressed, Tishman takes the success experience, and often as a consequence of not thinking about the work at all!21 of the activity as evidence of the power of looking slowly. What is important, Moreover, any experience with an artwork is already permeated through and on Tishman’s account, is that the students ‘were looking long and closely for mediated by our memories of past encounters with art. Despite this, slow art themselves’.26 discourse seems to uncritically fall back on the myth of the authentic spectator— the individual who truly accesses the artwork through the disciplined act of look- Arguably, the subsumption of such heterogenous and collective conditions for ing. So powerful is this myth that we find its reference even when the descriptions encountering art under the term ‘looking’, and the fixation on how long people in question blatantly exclude it. Indeed, while Reed writes enthusiastically of look, reveals a nostalgic attachment to an assumed past in which people were free the ‘shifts in perception that happen in the process of beholding’ slowly, and that to simply stand, stare and experience art. Supposedly, this past not only lacked our ‘slow art names the sacred gaze adapted to modernity’,22 his own account of engag- contemporary distractions, hyperactivity and anxiousness, but also provided a more ing with the works of painters such as Ad Reinhardt and Manet does little to argue homogenous set of aesthetic experiences. Unsurprisingly, European painting for the supposed primacy or primordiality of looking. Nevertheless, the assump- features heavily in the aforementioned illustrations of slow art experience. Indeed, tion that our and art’s authenticity can be restored through the act of looking ad for many, painting is a privileged site of slowness and deceleration. Writing for nauseam in slow art discourse. Art in America, Stephen Westfall states that ‘the slowness of painting—both in its

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creation and its apprehension by viewers—is routinely overlooked because it is a limited and homogenous encounter with art. As a discourse, slow art embraces so often taken for granted. Compared to digital media, painting is always slow.’27 the conservative canon of European male painting, seeks to restore the viewer to For David Joselit, ‘painting has been, and remains to be, the privileged format for their place as a disinterested observer—an observer who is up to the challenge of negotiating attention, for exploring the regulation and deregulation of affective disciplining themself in the ‘correct’ aesthetic and ascetic practices of looking— time in an era of massive image production and circulation’.28 Indeed, it is almost and consequently offers little in the way of a critical project that might help us impossible to imagine slow art discourse applying such ebullience to television to imagine new sites of contestation within late capitalist or alternative futures. or cinema. Champions of slow discourse often take television to be antithetical Indeed, slow art seems to be explicitly at odds with those 20th-century artistic to slowness, and as an utterly decadent symptom of capitalist culture.29 For Reed, movements that sought to subvert vision’s place as the supposedly authentic ‘the mechanical (and eventually electronic) proliferation of images prompted a origin of the artwork so as to foster just such critical projects. To take one need for uniqueness; and virtuality a need for embodied experience’, both of which example, art historian and Art & Language collaborator Charles Harrison can, or perhaps should, be found in painting.30 For, as Reed writes elsewhere, has written that the more ‘substantial project’ of 1960s and 70s conceptual art films cannot count as ‘slow’, no matter how much they captivate our was to: attention, since they aren’t ‘coded as culturally slow’.31 These arbitrary moral hierarchies of culture, and this affirmation of ‘traditional’ art and ‘traditional’ dislodge the empiricistic gentleman—the symbolic guardian of the spectatorship, makes slow art discourse appear disquietingly reactionary in its contemplative account of knowledge—from his position as primordial rejections of modernity. arbiter of value in culture as a whole. He and his supposedly disinterested vision had to be disqualified so that a critical and social activity could be While not referring to slow art discourse specifically, political theorist Davide installed in their place.33 Panagia provides a useful critique of this narrow fixation on such decelerated cultural practices. As he writes, slowness should not be embraced as part of a: According to Harrison’s account, the power of the various conceptual art move- ments was their capacity to question the supposed autonomy and meritocracy of luddite attack against speed and against the notion that an accelerated the dominant culture. Rather than viewing this dominant culture as democratic- tempo of life eliminates the pace appropriate to democratic deliberation. ally open and inherently valuable, Harrison argues that Art & Language attempted After all, there is much material pleasure in driving fast, or allowing oneself to reveal the philosophical and political contradictions that artists and art to be captured by the force of gravity when diving into crystal clear water.32 institutions had suppressed. Paramount to this project was the disruption of the authority of the ‘empiricistic gentleman’, the cool detached viewer who savoured Instead, for Panagia, slowness should be embraced strategically as a means of art as an autonomous sphere of gentle experience and contemplation. In particu- exposing the dominance of speed in contemporary life. Put differently, we could lar, the centrality of vision and the reduction of all non-visual aspects of art to the read Panagia as arguing that the ‘slowness’ of slow discourse is simply one form status of mere epiphenomena by the ‘empiricistic gentlemen’ was seized as a target of alterity, one kind of difference, which is under threat due to the homogenising for critique. As Harrison writes, ‘it was an aspiration of Art & Language—Sisyphean logics of late capitalism. Following this line of argument, slow discourse should —to destroy the edges of artworks, to undo the authority of and the be perfectly compatible with the affirmation of other forms of social practice— autonomy of vision’.34 It is this ‘authority and autonomy of vision’ that slow art whether they be creative, political or otherwise—regardless of whether these seeks to restore, perhaps unconsciously or unwittingly, through its appeal to a other forms can be understood as decelerationist. Nevertheless, slow art, with its subjectivity that can issue from specific ascetic and ethical acts of looking. fixation on the individualistic and austere act of looking, functions to promote

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Arguably, the assumption that such slow acts of looking are intrinsically beneficial misguided understanding of capitalism as fundamentally dynamic and acceler- speaks to an unconscious or ideological attachment to a purportedly stable and ating. Accordingly, in this next section we turn to the problems of boredom and solid past that perhaps never existed. Rather than a truly historical engagement stagnation as dominant modes of experiencing life under late capitalism. with the past, slow discourse seems to draw more directly on the aesthetics of chocolate-box pastoral gentleness and the various retro-revivals of Fordism, The Boring Dystopia of Slow with the latter’s purported economic and cultural stability. Such nostalgia is While it is conventional to depict life under late capitalism as being akin to a terri- always dangerous, insofar as it ignores the systemic racism, misogyny and wealth fying and exhilarating rollercoaster ride, for many, life in late-capitalist society is inequality of both the 19th and 20th centuries. This nostalgia for past stability utterly boring, repetitive and inert. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s Facebook page connects slow art to what Owen Hatherley has referred to as ‘austerity nostalgia’.35 ‘Boring Dystopia’ has provided a visual vocabulary for the sense of meaningless While proponents of the various slow movements tend to distance themselves and dull change that has come to characterise much of late-capitalist life. Images from conservatism and parochialism, the image of the ‘slow life’ that they depict of out-of-order ATMs, desolate apartment blocks adorned with ‘inspirational’ seems to suggest a ‘conservative longing for security and stability in the face of advertising messages from banks and fast-food companies, and billboards inviting hard times’ that Hatherley takes as indicative of so much late 2000s and 2010s millennials to sell their blood plasma to help finance their education speak to a culture—that is, the culture that followed the austerity responses of many stage of capitalism utterly devoid of meaningful change or development—a stage liberal-democratic states to the global financial crisis of 2007–08.36 Similar to the of capitalism in which the very means for social reproduction, such as education, pop-culture texts that Hatherley takes as examples of British austerity nostalgia— employment, ecology, health and housing, are liquidated for short-term profit.38 such as the ‘KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON’ branding phenomenon, the popularity As Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek state, ‘rather than a world of space travel, of television programs such as Call the Midwife and Downton Abbey, and Jamie future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time Oliver’s attempted reboot of the Ministry of Food—slow discourse more generally where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry’.39 seems to nostalgically fixate on the past in its attempt to develop critical resources Indeed, the restriction of innovation and change to the realms of consumer for the present. For Hatherley, while austerity nostalgia may seem like the return electronics speaks to the utterly boring prospects of living under contemporary of a repressed past, one in which community, authenticity and stoicism featured economic and political conditions. New media and consumer electronics exist at more prominently, it is perhaps better understood as ‘a nostalgia for the state the ‘bleeding edge of obsolescence’, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun puts it. New media of being repressed—solid, stoic, public-spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, technologies, she says: hysterical, and privatised reality of Britain over the last thirty years’.37 Rather than slowness featuring as a point of contrast, a means of provisionally and are exciting when they are demonstrated, boring by the time they arrive. rhetorically pointing to an alterity irreducible to capitalist speed in order to better Even if a product does what is promises, it disappoints. If an analysis is critique its logics, much of slow discourse, and slow art writing in particular, takes interesting and definitive, it is too late: by the time we understand some- slowness to be a virtue in and of itself. Interestingly, the embodied act of experi- thing, it has already disappeared or changed. We are forever trying to encing painting appealed to by both Reed and Joselit is not framed as offering catch up, updating to remain (close to) the same; bored, overwhelmed, anything like a critical project, but instead championed for its purported capacity and anxious all at once.40 to remove the individual, even if momentarily, from alienated existence under late capitalism. Here, slow art discourse provides what is perhaps a considerable Unlike so many theorists and commentators, Chun does not see the fast pace of misdiagnosis of late capitalism. By fetishising the specific act of deceleration change in the world of consumer electronics and digital media as indicating the and the asceticism of looking, slow art discourse contributes to the potentially existence of a dynamic and exciting capitalism. Instead, the constant movement

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of dull and often pointless change is characterised as boring and anxiety-inducing. Mona Lisa)’.47 The reality of visiting a major exhibition involves negotiating huge As anthropologists Marguerite van den Berg and Bruce O’Neill have argued, crowds, the tedium of standing in queues, the frustration of having to purchase boredom has for too long been associated with the aristocrat and dilettante, those exorbitantly overpriced food and drinks, and the difficulty of looking at artworks ‘fortunate enough to not have to work’.41 However, they argue that boredom over and around the cameras and iPhones that are thrust in every direction to should now be understood as a dominant affect for late capitalism, since ‘rather document the space. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how a deceleration of cul- than a plight of the privileged’, boredom has come to impact ‘the most economi- tural activity could function in such spaces without a radical de-democratisation cally vulnerable. Boredom and a sense of “doing nothing” emerged as a predom- of culture. Without cutting access to the majority of people, how could these spaces inant characteristic of the precariousness of everyday life for millions of people adequately slow down? Moreover, it is in the attempt to locate the problem across the world.’42 Rather than simply existing as an all-encompassing state of and solution to the commercialisation of culture in individual acts of restraint, experience by the well-to-do, boredom is equally felt by the precarious through that slow art unwittingly aligns with the broader politics of austerity. As Kirsten forced downtime between moments of activity. For increasingly large numbers Forkert contends, there is great public support for the right-wing promotion of workers on casual, precarious or ‘zero-hour’ contracts, there is no sense in of the: either planning for the future or acting spontaneously, as one doesn’t know how much work will be available, and once work appears one must be free to drop guilty sense that ‘we have lost our way’ and are living less virtuous, everything in order to take it up. Rather than leading to a life characterised by healthy and authentic lives after the binge years of credit-fuelled overstimulation and hyperactivity, the lot of many under late capitalism is slow, consumerism and open borders, and so must now repent and return boring and depressing. Journalist Dawn Foster writes of workers in the south to a worthy, modest existence: we must become more like previous of Wales who had to sleep in bus shelters in order to secure single shifts at an generations, when people knew how to mend things and didn’t eat Amazon warehouse.43 Since public transport in the area is so sporadic, and given fast food or own flat-screen televisions.48 that Amazon only notifies staff on the day as to whether they will be needed, ‘several locals slept in a bus shelter the night before on the off-chance they would While it is almost certainly unintentional, slow art discourse oddly mirrors be needed’.44 Like Tehching Hsieh’s famous One Year Performance 1980–1981 the conservative distinction between ‘hard work’ and ‘bludging’, insofar as it (Time Clock Piece), the precarious worker must be ready for short stints of work at reinforces the trope of the modern individual as unwilling or unable to discipline any time; unable to properly rest or to properly work, the precarious are constantly themselves by way of the honest ‘hard work’ of slow looking and paying attention. active, albeit in a dull and repetitive way. Just as political supporters of cuts to public spending argue that a contraction of the government’s support of social welfare will force the unemployed to look Despite evidence that the accelerations of capital are not evenly distributed, the harder for work, so too do we find in slow art discourse the notion that an austere cliché that we are suffering due to universal extravagances and luxuries seems to relationship to how we look and what we look at—getting away from YouTube and proliferate endlessly in the media. For instance, writing for The New York Times, smartphones, and back to —will promote a more authentic relationship Stephanie Rosenbloom has discussed the increased , wellbeing and to art and ourselves. When Rosenbloom makes vague references to research flourishing that can be precipitated by spending slow time in an art museum.45 on ‘meditation and its beneficial biological effects’ in order to gesture towards As she rightly observes, the experience of visiting a major gallery or museum can an explanation for why ‘viewing art in this deliberately contemplative manner be overwhelming and alienating.46 As she writes, the typical visit to such tourist can increase well-being’,49 there is an eerie similarity to the politics of austerity, magnets involves ‘darting from one masterpiece to the next, battling crowds, in which individual solutions centred on a kind of asceticism are to be found for exhaustion and hunger (yet never failing to take selfies with boldface names like systemic problems.

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Without question, it takes time and hard work to engage with art meaningfully. and nor should a ruthless critical investigation of systemic violence or suffering However, once that hard work becomes fetishised as an end in and of itself, we necessitate affects of paranoia or anxiety. As Sedgwick writes, ‘just because you begin to obscure the systemic problems that truly inhibit our capacities to engage have enemies doesn’t mean you have to be paranoid’.51 In this context, the capacity critically and creativity with art, and with culture more broadly. Suggesting that to slow down or decelerate should not be understood as necessarily anti-capitalist, people take more time, that they slow down and decelerate their lives—and use and nor should critique be understood as necessarily agitating or provocative. art as a catalyst for doing so—presumes that time is available in the first place, Likewise, while we should be cautious of any attempt to ‘return’ to vision—as if and that boredom and a sense of stagnation aren’t the ubiquitous and painful it went somewhere—through slow art’s appeals to sustained acts of looking, this experiences to be escaped. Furthermore, slow art discourse inhibits art’s capacity does not mean that art should be viewed as fundamentally dialogical or cerebral. to serve as a critical tool for thinking through the very structural and systemic Vision specifically, and sensuousness more generally, is intrinsic to the encounter forces that contribute to the immense suffering experienced under late capitalism. with art, and, for this reason we should be careful to avoid subscribing to an anti- This does not mean that slow art discourse is entirely apolitical or even anti- aesthetic ‘orthodoxy’ that has been questioned by critics such as Claire Bishop.52 political, simply because it is not particularly useful for critique. Instead, slow It is true that a great deal of contemporary art is made and exhibited without art’s politics shares an affinity with what Srnicek and Williams have referred to much attention to its status as art, that it takes place in art institutions and is as ‘prefigurative politics’—that is, a form of politics that attempts to embody the made in relation to a tradition that is in a specific sense irreducibly aesthetic. practices it wishes to see in the world.50 While some form of prefiguration is Nevertheless, and as Bishop herself notes, we should not forget that the critique of perhaps always necessary to produce change, the danger of prefigurative politics, aesthetic appreciation and cultivated spectatorship ‘were necessary to dismantle as Srnicek and Williams see it, is the way it can fixate on authenticity and short- the deeply entrenched authority of the white male elites in the 1970s’.53 Rather term successes at the expense of more significant change. Rather than attempting than a critique of slow art discourse enjoining us to limit our horizons when to tackle conflict at a systemic level, prefigurative politics involves an attempt to countering art—or forcing us to make the false choice between individual vision simply embody that change on an individual level. Similarly, slow art discourse versus collective dialogue, tranquil contemplation versus the intensity of critique, seems to discourage approaching art as a way of thinking about the racial, sexual, slowness versus speed—we should oppose to slow art an affirmation of plural and ecological and class conflicts that cause untold misery and suffering, but instead heterogenous anti-work social practices. It is possible to maintain a critique of attempts to cultivate a practice of temporarily embodying the kind of slowness late capitalism that takes into account the variety of alienating experiences it or tranquility that is desired in a future world. While it can acknowledge various produces. Rather than diagnosing capitalism as producing a kind of motion sickness, forms of late-capitalist crisis, the solutions it offers are individualistic and we should look towards a mode of critique that challenges the dominance of logics ultimately disempowering. of utility and productivity without ascribing to either deceleration or acceleration as universal strategies. Accordingly, in the final section of this chapter, we turn to This does not mean that all our engagement with art is somehow naive or uncriti- Maurizio Lazzarato’s discussion of laziness in order to pursue such a possibility. cal if it offers us momentary respite. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about the notion that art can offer us a means of a temporary aesthetic transcendence Lazy Technique from capitalism by way of its supposed powers of deceleration. Furthermore, Against slow art’s affirmation of cultural homogeneity and deceleration, laziness art’s capacity to negatively interrupt common-sense understandings of practices, can be embraced as critical concept that helps to bring to attention those modes objects and images should not be seen antithetical to the nurturing affects so of comportment that sit outside of governing norms of propriety and productivity. valued by slow art discourse. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us, the production Laziness should not be confused with the simple cessation of activity, nor with of negative affect does not necessarily enjoin political action or critical thought, the dominant image of leisure and relaxation offered to contemporary citizen-

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consumers. Instead, we can look to the work of cultural theorist Maurizio the ‘mindlessness’ of television entertainment, we can begin the more difficult Lazzarato to gain an understanding of laziness as affirming the plurality of task of critiquing the various levels of ideological work that are demanded of us as ways of living and acting that are discouraged, demonised or left dormant in subjects of culture. In other words, the injunction to speed up can be as prohibitive our contemporary situation. By way of recourse to Lazzarato’s work, we can as the injunction to slow down—especially when one’s life is already character- articulate a discourse not around slow art but around the various arts of laziness ised by boredom and stagnation. Furthermore, laziness’s anti-normativity should that could and perhaps do exist. be taken as an excuse to avoid the ideological imperative to seek out some new ‘disruptive’ or ‘radical’ solution as the all-encompassing answer to society’s ills. Lazzarato defines laziness as ‘political action that at once refuses and eludes roles, Rather than looking to ‘slowness’ as some definitive answer, as a totalised anti- functions, and significations of the social division of labour and, in so doing, capitalist lifestyle, we can acknowledge, as Lazzarato has done, that there are as creates new possibilities’.54 He notes that the choice of the word ‘laziness’ to refer many ‘counterconducts’ as there are apparatuses of control—that is, that there are to these political acts of refusal is made with a certain sense of irony.55 While he as many forms of struggle and resistance against late capitalism as there are forms does not elaborate on this point, we can perhaps interpret this ironic use of the of late-capitalist coercion and oppression.56 To paraphrase Lazzarato, against term ‘laziness’ as allowing us to better see the political value in the embracing the slow movement’s desire to save the work of disciplined looking and aesthetic those activities that conventionally sit outside of governing moral norms. For appreciation, we can look to laziness as the desire to save ourselves from work. example, modes of cultural production that sit outside of dominant notions of skill or technique, especially those skills and techniques associated with the image of the white, male, bourgeois artist, are often disregarded as being lazy—as if the dominant modes of creative production are natural and universal, and that any deviation from these must be due to a lazy unwillingness to gain self-discipline. Accordingly, the embrace of the term laziness allows Lazzarato to simultaneously invoke a struggle against wage labour and the dominance it has over what is deemed dignified or respectable, while also avoiding any notion of morally sanctioned rest or relaxation. Laziness does not conjure images of professional ‘downtime’, corporate ‘mindfulness’, or the ‘wholesomeness’ of slow discourse. To embrace laziness is not to embrace the absence of activity but is to commit ourselves to the validity of activities that sit outside of the wage relation.

This is not to argue ultimately that laziness could or will become a central word of political coalescence around which groups might organise various refusals of work. Such a suggestion would require the affirmation of laziness to become a kind of work, one that political actors would be required to employ themselves in for fear of being seen as politically indolent. Instead, laziness and lazy-action become ways of thinking through social practice in non-moral and non-hierarchi- cal ways. Rather than replacing the ‘bad’ accelerated practices of late capitalism with a ‘good’ slowness, and rather than returning to painting as a means of escaping

32 33 Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast

1 Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed, 15 Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, University Orion, London, 2004, p. 4. of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pp. 10–11.

2 Honoré, p. 5. 16 Reed, Slow Art, pp. 1–2.

3 Honoré, pp. 5–6. 17 slowartday.com/about; accessed 27 September 2019.

4 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism, Zero Books, Washington, 18 Trent Morse, ‘Slow Down, You Look Too Fast’, ArtNews, 1 April 2011, artnews.com/2011/04/01/ 2014, p. x. slow-down-you-look-too-fast; accessed 27 September 2019.

5 Nick Salvato, Obstruction, Duke University Press, Durham, 2016, p. 100. 19 Morse, n.p.

6 Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, Oliver Feltham and 20 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics’, Nietzsche Justin Clemens (trans.), London, Continuum, 2006, p. 38. Volumes One and Two, David Farrell Krell (trans.), New York, Harper One, 1991; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Transcending the Aesthetic Dimension’, Truth and Method, Joel 7 Honoré, pp. 15–16. Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (trans.), Continuum, London, 2003. As Gadamer writes 8 See, for example, ‘The Slow Science Manifesto’, slow-science.org, and Benedikt Köhler, on aesthetic experience: ‘By disregarding everything in which a work is rooted (its original Sabria David and Jörg Blumtritt, ‘The Slow Media Manifesto’, en.slow-media.net/manifesto; context of life, and the religious or secular function that gave it signifcance), it becomes visible both accessed 27 September 2019. as the “pure work of art”. In performing this abstraction, aesthetic consciousness performs a task that is positive in itself. It shows what a pure work of art is, and allows it to exist in its own 9 Honoré, p. 37. right.’ As Gadamer writes later on the same page, what the aesthetic experience ignores are 10 Filip Vostal, ‘Slowing Down Modernity: A Critique’, Time & Society, April 2017, p. 6. ‘the extra-aesthetic elements that cling to it [the work], such as purpose, function, the signifi- cance of its content’, p. 74. 11 Slow art refers here to a discourse, a way of thinking about and engaging with art, as opposed to label of self-description. Some of the writers mentioned in this chapter do not use the term. 21 Think of the Aha-Erlebnisse or eureka moments that follow on from having actively given up Despite this, they all share a commitment to deceleration as a means of curtailing the excesses on thinking about something or working out a problem. of late capitalism. 22 Reed, ‘Ad Reinhardt’s “Black” Paintings’, p. 219 (Reed’s emphasis). 12 James Elkins, ‘How Long Does It Take to Look at a Painting?’, Huffington Post, 6 December 23 Shari Tishman, Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation, 2017, huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/how-long-does-it-take-to-_b_779946.html; Routledge, London, 2017, p. 3. accessed 27 September 2019. 24 Tishman, p. 3. 13 Arden Reed, ‘New Sites for Slowness: Speed and Nineteenth-Century Stereoscopy’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 22, no. 2, 2014, p. 69; Arden Reed, ‘Ad Reinhardt’s 25 Tishman, p. 3. “Black” Paintings’, Religion and the Arts, no. 19, 2015, p. 216. 26 Tishman, p. 3. Tishman states early on in this book that ‘slow looking’ should not be reduced 14 Stephanie Rosenbloom, ‘The Art of Slowing Down in a Museum’, The New York Times, to the strict act of gazing, but can incorporate a variety of sensorial responses. Such an 9 October 2014, nytimes.com/2014/10/12/travel/the-art-of-slowing-down-in-a-museum.html; admission begs the question of why looking was singled out at all, both in terms of the book’s and Arthur P. Shimamura, 22 November 2014, ‘The Slow Art Movement: It’s More Than Meets title and principal concept, and in the illustrations of slow looking provided. the Eye’, Psychology Today, psychologytoday.com/au/blog/in-the-brain-the-beholder/201411/ the-slow-art-movement-its-more-meets-the-eye; both accessed 27 September 2019 27 Stephen Westfall, ‘Slow Painting’, Art in America, 1 February 2018, artinamericamagazine.com/ news-features/magazines/slow-painting/#fn1; accessed 27 September 2019.

34 35 Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast

28 David Joselit, ‘Marking, Scoring, Storing, and Speculating (On Time)’, in Isabelle Graw and 41 Marguerite van den Berg and Bruce O’Neill, ‘Introduction: Rethinking the Class Politics Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (eds), Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition, of Boredom’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 78, 2017, p. 1. Sternberg Press, , 2016, p. 14. 42 Van den Berg and O’Neill, p. 2. 29 For example, Peter Lunenfeld comments that the conviviality of the ‘slow food movement’ 43 Dawn Foster, ‘Where Are We Now? Responses to the Referendum’, London Review of Books, can ‘serve as a model of resistance to television’s junk culture’. The Secret War Between 14 July 2016, lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now#foster; accessed Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, The MIT Press, 27 September 2019. Cambridge, Ma., 2011, p. 6. 44 Foster, n.p. 30 Reed, ‘Ad Reinhardt’s “Black” Paintings’, p. 219. 45 Rosenbloom. 31 Reed, Slow Art, p. 19. 46 Rosenbloom. 32 Davide Pangaia, ‘“You’re Eating too Fast!” On Disequality and an Ethos of Convivium’, Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 11, no. 3, 2007, p. 193. 47 Rosenbloom, n.p.

33 Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language, 48 Kirsten Forkert, ‘The New Moralism: Austerity, Silencing and Debt Morality’, Soundings: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 2001, p. 97. A Journal of Politics and Culture, no. 56, 2014, p. 42.

34 Harrison, p. 98. 49 Rosenbloom, n.p.

35 Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia, Verso Books, London, 2016, p. 18 (Hatherley’s 50 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World emphasis). Hatherley is almost exclusively writing about the British relationship to austerity Without Work, Verso Books, London, 2015, p. 28. in this text. Nevertheless, his work serves as a useful tool for thinking through cultural 51 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University responses to the GFC and austerity governance more generally. Press, Durham, 2003, p. 127. 36 Hatherley, p. 18. 52 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, 37 Hatherley, p. 21; emphasis in the original. London, 2012, p. 18.

38 Such a process of privatising and individualising the means of social reproduction are typically 53 Bishop, p. 18. associated with ‘neoliberalism’—a term used to refer to a period of intensifed class warfare, 54 Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, Joshua David Jordan (trans.), Semiotext(e), a form of economic theory, and a mode of governance dependent on the analytical tradition South Pasadena, 2015, p. 246. being referred to. The works of Wendy Brown, David Harvey, William Davies, and Peirre Dardot and Christian Laval are indispensable on this point. 55 Lazzarato, p. 246.

39 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’, 56 Maurizio Lazzarato, Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate: The Acceleratonist Reader, Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey, et al. (trans.), The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., Urbanomic, Falmouth, 2014, p. 355. 2017, p. 81.

40 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 2016, p. 1.

36 37 Myth-making in the Settler Colony: On Laziness, Representation and Refusal

Andrew Brooks Myth-making in the Settler Colony

On 4 August 2016, The Australian newspaper published a cartoon by Bill Leak. The cartoon is set in remote Australia, as indexed by the ochre landscape, blue skies and bush shrubbery that comprise the backdrop. In the foreground, a police- man grips a baton with one hand and holds an Indigenous child by the scruff of his shirt with the other. The cop is handing the child back to his father, who, drunk and indifferent, is holding a can of VB in one hand. The speech bubble emanating from the cop reads, ‘you’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility’, to which the father replies, ‘yeah righto, what’s his name then?’. While the overt racism of the cartoon was condemned by many, Leak’s reproduction of the well-worn colonial trope of the lazy and neglectful native found a mainstream audience that nodded along in easy agreement. The Australian’s response to the backlash against the cartoon was a mash-up of offensive and defensive positions. In editorials that emerged in the following days, the paper argued that Leak was a courageous teller of uncomfortable truths whose ‘confronting and insightful cartoons force people to examine the core issues in a way that sometimes reporting and analysis can fail to do’, while doubling down on the claim that ‘broken families’ are ‘the self-perpetuating cause of so much indigenous misery’.1 The paper also claimed that Leak was the victim of angry horde of politically correct leftists who were trying to censor free speech.2 The controversy around the cartoon was quickly subsumed into the ongoing culture wars, which obscured analysis of how and why the racist colonial stereotypes found in Leak’s cartoon continue to be perpetuated by emphasising a generalised discussion of free speech and censorship that appealed to class distinctions between so called ‘ordinary’ and ‘educated’ Australians.3 This reorientation of the public debate worked to obfuscate the centrality of myth-making in maintain- ing the settler colony, disguising the limitations of liberal forms of recognition and obligation.

Leak’s cartoon was a response to an exposé by the Australian national broadcaster’s (ABC) Four Corners program on the treatment of minors at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the , which aired on national television on 25 July 2016.4 The program opens with a now infamous image of Indigenous teenager Dylan Voller strapped to a mechanical restraint chair, his head covered by a spit hood. The image—captured by an on-duty guard—bears a striking resem- blance to the image of the hooded man in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who was

41 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

tortured by US military personnel in the early days of the most recent war in Iraq.5 indolent, neglectful and irresponsible pervades non-Indigenous narratives of We then see footage—a mixture of CCTV and images recorded by prison officers— Indigeneity, from political policy to mainstream journalism to talkback radio of the Behavioural Management Unit cells at the facility from 2014, when another to internet commentary and more. But what exactly is implied in this depiction? Indigenous teenager, Jake Roper, got out of his unlocked cell before trying to break How does the rhetoric of responsibility work to uphold the legitimacy of the out of the locked doors of the building, using broken light fttings. The footage cuts settler state? This chapter aims to excavate the settler-colonial ‘myth of the lazy between grainy CCTV footage of this distressed child and shaky handheld footage native’, tracking its historical and philosophical implications and the ways that it of the guards talking and laughing on the other side of the door, while a voiceover continues to circumscribe non-Indigenous representations of Indigeneity.8 I am tells us that Roper had been kept in solitary confinement for 23.5 hours a day arguing that the epistemological violence that Leak’s cartoon rehearses is directly for the past 15 days. Captured on the closed-circuit footage is an utterance from linked to the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism and its contemporary mani- Roper that sounds somewhere between a question and an exclamation: ‘I’ve been festations, including the abuses at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.9 The in the back cells for how long bruz?!’.6 Roper’s utterance seems to simultaneously myth of the lazy native works both to justify the ongoing operations and violence signal a state of temporal confusion, frustration, anger and distress. More than of settler colonialism and obfuscate the uneasy foundations upon which the this, it exposes the tactics of racial, spatial and temporal management at play in settler state rests. The chapter concludes by looking to the work of Quandamooka the detention centre. Shortly after this, we see footage of prison officers spraying artist and Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal artist Dale Harding, tear gas into the small room that holds Roper, and the adjacent cells of fve other whose recent installation works forge a counter-archive that intervenes, albeit boys. We hear one of the boys yell: ‘I can’t fuckin’ breathe!’. Outside the room, in different ways, in the dominant narratives of settler modernity. we hear one guard chuckle while another says: ‘that’ll learn you’.7 The footage ends with the prison officers clad in gasmasks entering the room and dragging Origin Myths the boys outside, where they are sprayed with a fre hose at close range. The myth of lazy native feeds into a racial discourse of colonialism that is couched in paternalistic and familial metaphors. Indeed, the endurance of such metaphors I include this account of the brutal violence of the penal system not to reproduce is an expression of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson refers to as the ‘possessive the spectacle of Blak violence, but rather to provide context for the production of logics of patriarchal white sovereignty’.10 The emphasis on possessiveness in Leak’s cartoon. Responding directly to the Four Corners program, Leak’s cartoon Moreton-Robinson’s phrase goes to the heart of the settler colonial project, which shifts the focus away from the structural and direct violence of the state and is ultimately concerned with the ownership and occupation of land. Yet, as historian reframes the crisis as the failure of individual will and a breakdown of traditional Patrick Wolfe tell us, ‘invasion is a structure, not an event’.11 What Wolfe means . The not-so-subtle implication of the cartoon is that Indigenous is that the process of claiming possession is never as straightforward as simply people are lazy and neglectful, lacking the qualities of will and moral responsibility declaring sovereignty. Rather, settler sovereignty is a claim that must be contin- that defne the liberal subject. This emphasis on the responsibility of the liberal uously made and remade. This ongoing process of settlement is what Moreton- individual works to displace the state’s obligations to its subjects, shifting the Robinson’s phrase refers to: burden of duty wholly onto individuals. This burden, as I will elaborate, is further amplifed in relation to Indigenous people, who are called on by the settler state I use the concept of ‘possessive logics’ to denote a mode of rationalization, to demonstrate both the continuation of pre-settlement social and spiritual rather than a set of positions that produce a more or less inevitable answer, customs and the assimilation of settler values and ways of living. Leak’s cartoon that is underpinned by an excessive desire to invest in reproducing and exemplifies the endurance of a settler-colonial mentality in contemporary reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership, control, and domination. As such, Australian politics and media. The invocation of Indigenous people as idle, white possessive logics are operationalized within discourses to circulate

42 43 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

sets of meanings about ownership of the nation, as part of commonsense Locke’s notion of ownership via improvement is not limited to land but also, knowledge, decision making, and socially produced conventions.12 and crucially, concerns possession of the self. The ability to self-possess was considered by liberal thinkers—such as Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel This possessive logic is enacted in the foundational mythologies of the colony, Kant—to be the necessary precondition for claiming possession of land. The which seek to naturalise and legitimise settler sovereignty via appeals to a split criteria for determining which subjects were capable of a possessive individualism between nature and culture. This occurs in two distinct yet related ways: on one was predicated on dominant ideas of race and racial classification that emerged hand, the extraction of value from the natural world is fgured as a necessary and from Western Enlightenment thinking in which whiteness was constructed as a inevitable step in the process of modernisation; on the other, the reproduction of universal norm. Deviation from this norm resulted in exclusion from the category the nature/culture split as the native/settler binary forms the moral justifcation of Human, and in Australia this was formalised by classifying Aboriginal people as for the invasion and appropriation of Indigenous land and the violent processes of wards of the state and refusing to include them in the official census. This was the racialisation that follow. The native/settler binary posits that Indigenous people situation until the 1967 referendum, when Aboriginal people (but not Aboriginal belong to the fundamentally lawless state of pure nature, while settlers, who are sovereignty) were fnally legally recognised. The spatial and racial logics of coloni- marked by European agricultural practices, social formations, technologies and sation require regulatory and representational orders that establish and uphold a forms of economic and political organisation, are taken to have transcended this conception of the universal that can be deployed as law, and a teleological concep- uncivilised realm. The depiction of Indigenous people as indolent, negligent and tion of history that can be utilised to impose a moral order. As Denise Ferreira da disorganised is presented as evidence of their primitivism, which in turn works to Silva explains: justify and naturalise the imposition of settler forms of governance and control. Because European juridical and economic appropriation of other lands In the case of Australia, the myth of the lazy native plays a crucial role in the and resources has from the outset required the symbolic appropriation deployment of the doctrine of terra nullius. As Astrid Lorange has written, of natives, of indigenous peoples, one cannot ignore that this beginning the doctrine of terra nullius is a phrase that was retrospectively used describe is always already mediated by a rearrangement of the modern grammar ‘the various legal fabrications that were deployed to justify occupation both at and the deployment of projects of knowledge that address man as an the time of settlement and subsequently in the establishment of colonial law and object.16 the assertion of sovereignty.’13 Developed from the Roman concept of res nullius, the doctrine draws heavily from John Locke’s theorisation of possession, which The production of a universal fgure of Man in the post-Enlightenment period posits that property arises from the mixing of one’s labour with the earth. Locke’s relies on a logic of possession, in which ownership of oneself is taken as conception of labour, of course, is defned by distinctly European understandings evidence of a sovereign subject governed by reason. Race is deployed in this of agriculture, irrigation, enclosure, centralised governance and so on.14 The onto-epistemological project as a symbolic tool, a negative ground that the doctrine of terra nullius is deployed to make the distinction between land that universal (white) Man is defined against. The self-possessed individual, and was inhabited but not possessed and land that was possessed by a sovereign therefore the individual that can also accumulate possession of the property, subject or power. As Henry Reynolds puts it, ‘Locke’s ideas were used to justify is defned by those groups who lack the capacity to possess (either self or property). the dispossession of the Aborigines because they had apparently not mixed their The self-owning, self-accumulating individual is based on an a priori formulation labour with the soil. The argument was simple. If there was no sign of agriculture of a series of ideals that assume European existence to be intrinsically superior to the natives must still be in a state of nature.’15 all other forms of human life.

44 45 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

The appeal to possession as a determinant of sovereignty enshrines whiteness determined the initial invasion and establishment of the Australian settler state as a form of property. A necessary precondition for rights in property, possession but continue to guide its governance in the present. Here we might think of the (of both self and land) comes to be defned by exclusively white cultural and agri- way native title legislation has paradoxically worked to protect white property cultural practices. Only those forms of possession inherent to white settlement and whiteness as property rather than facilitate the widespread reparation of are recognised as legitimate and lawful. As Cheryl Harris elucidates, ‘this defi- Indigenous land. The Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth) places the onus on Indigenous nition laid the foundation for the idea that whiteness—that which whites alone people to demonstrate the existence of ‘traditional laws and customs that give rise possess—is valuable and is property’.17 The assertion of whiteness as property is to the claimed native title’ and the continuous connection to that land ‘in accor- upheld by the rule of (settler) law, which ‘provided not only a defense of conquest dance with those traditional laws and customs.’23 As Moreton-Robinson writes: and colonization, but also a naturalized regime of rights and disabilities, power and disadvantage that fowed from it, so that no further justifcations or rational- The law places the burden of proof for native title on the Indigenous izations were required’.18 This juridical justifcation instils whiteness with value people to demonstrate to the courts of law controlled by predominantly and legislates the right to exclude, which Harris notes is a premise common white men. Since courts regard the written word as more reliable than to both whiteness and property.19 The rule of possession in the settler colony oral testimonies, all claimants must be able to substantiate their oral is bound by race, whereby those who do not possess whiteness are deemed histories with documents written by white people, such as explorers, incapable of possessing property. Here, property is transformed from a thing public servants, historians, lawyers, anthropologists, pastoralists, and to a right, characterised, as Harris notes, ‘as metaphysical, not physical’.20 Put police … Thus, patriarchal whiteness sets the criteria for proof and the another way, whiteness is a type of status property, a non-physical entity that standards for credibility. Confrmation of the Indigenous presence in is nonetheless afforded signifcance and value in ways akin to physical property. the landscape is dependent on the written words and oral testimonies The complexity of whiteness is that it functions both internally as a marker of white people, which is a direct manifestation of the law’s legitimation of self-identity and externally as a legally recognised property interest. Harris of whiteness as a form of property.24 explains the multiple valency of whiteness and the slippages in its various signifcations: Patriarchal white sovereignty is unable to deal with its own externality; that is, it is unable to deal with Indigenous claims to sovereignty, as to recognise such According whiteness actual legal status converted an aspect of identity claims would invalidate the authority of the settler state and undermine the into an external object of property, moving whiteness from privileged value of whiteness. This gives rise to the type of political rhetoric that frames identity to a vested interest. The law’s construction of whiteness defned the question of land rights as being about fnding a balance between Indigenous and affirmed critical aspects of identity (who is white); of privilege (what and settler property rights. Such possessive logic can be found in the justifcation benefts accrue to that status); and, of property (what legal entitlements given by John Howard—the prime minister of Australia at the time—for amending arise from that status). Whiteness at various times signifes and is deployed the Act to protect pastoral leases from native title claims in response to the High as identity, status, and property, sometimes singularly, sometimes in Court decision on Wik Peoples v. State of Queensland & ors, which ruled that tandem.21 pastoral leases did not necessarily give pastoralists possession of the land and that the existence of pastoral leases did not necessarily (and automatically) The organisation and administration of the settler state in order to preserve the extinguish native title. ‘The fact is’, argued Howard, ‘that the Wik decision pushed condition of whiteness as property is what Aileen Moreton-Robinson refers to as the pendulum too far into the Aboriginal direction’.25 This line of argument ‘patriarchal whiteness’.22 Patriarchal whiteness and its possessive logic not only circumscribes Indigenous claims to ownership within a settler framework,

46 47 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

thus externalising the question of Indigenous sovereignty. Put more explicitly, work in central and northern Australia were labouring on cattle stations.29 Howard’s statement demonstrates the continuation of a foundational settler The underlying desire of settlers to replace the native workforce fuels the colonial logic, a ‘possessive investment in patriarchal whiteness’ that ‘endorses production of stereotypes of Indigenous people as lazy, neglectful and generally white accumulation of property by diminishing Indigenous property rights’.26 unsuitable for work. In turn, these representations are appealed to in order to justify the poor working and living conditions that Aboriginal labourers were The underlying logic of the settler state is, however, not simply the preservation subjected to. In a 1929 report to government, J.W. Bleakley, holding the paternal- of property and sovereignty but the replacement of the native population with istic post of Chief Protector of Aboriginals (Queensland), described the prevailing settlers. The legitimacy of settler sovereignty is predicated on a continual attitude of white pastoralists towards Indigenous workers: disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty, which gives rise to what Wolfe refers to as ‘the settler-colonial logic of elimination’.27 For Wolfe, settler colonialism is It seems to be the conveniently accepted notion that they are beyond fundamentally a project of replacement and, as such, ‘elimination should be seen redemption, that education spoils them, so there is no encouragement as an organising principle rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence’.28 for ambition and the blackfellow, naturally lacking initiative and given It is only by eliminating the Indigenous population—initially in explicitly no opportunity, has a hopeless outlook. Is it any wonder that he sometimes genocidal ways (such as frontier wars) and later via assimilationist policies has little heart in his work and is branded as lazy and unreliable?30 (such as state-sanctioned miscegenation, the forced removal of children from their families, re-socialisation programs, reconciliation initiatives and so on)— Settler archives from this period are full of similar descriptions. In 1845, the police that the settler state may resolve the problem of its own externality. The grammar magistrate at Port Macquarie, William Gray, wrote ‘they [Aboriginal people] are of race is crucial to the maintenance of this colonial ontology and its ongoing exceedingly idle in their habits, and have no inclination to work’.31 Henry Smythe, refusal to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty. The myth of the lazy native is Crown Lands Commissioner for the Murray District, relied on the assumption of a representational strategy that affirms the split between native and settler, nomadism in his dismissal, stating that Indigenous ways of living were defined inscribing Indigenous peoples into the state of nature (and therefore outside of by ‘indolence and a propensity to roam about from place to place’.32 In an 1853 the category of Human) and thus in need of discipline and control. The repre- report for Governor La Trobe, Murray squatter Hugh Jamieson wrote: ‘in these sentation of Indigenous people as lazy, childish, uncivilised and backward feeds districts, during the summer months, nearly all, from the oldest to the youngest into both the juridical (via the doctrine of terra nullius) and moral (via the settler in the various tribes, have the greatest desire to abandon every employment, and assertion that Indigenous people lack the ability to self-possess) justifcations for indulge in the roving life of naked savages’.33 The same stereotypes can be found the appropriation of Indigenous land and the establishment of settler rule. in Mary and Elizabeth Durack’s popular 1935 account of pastoral life, All-about: The Story of a Black Community on Argyle Station, Kimberley, which derides In addition, the underlying intention of settlers to replace the native population one particular Aboriginal worker for ‘his laziness, his shameless cunning and creates a situation whereby Indigenous labour cannot be relied upon in the long his untruthfulness’.34 term, as this runs counter to the dominant logic of elimination. The modus operandi of the settler colony is to import a workforce and replenish it, when While the myth of the lazy native becomes ubiquitous in settler records with the necessary, with more and more settlers. In practice, settlers are often initially burgeoning of the pastoral economy, the production of this representation has a dependent on indentured Indigenous labour, and this was certainly true in the much longer history. It can be traced all the way back to the first European account Australian settler colony. Aboriginal labour was central to the Australian pastoral of Aboriginal people by English colonial explorer William Dampier, in 1688. industries, and, by 1928, some 80 per cent of Indigenous people deemed fit for Dampier, who landed on the north-west coast of Australia, described the Indigenous

48 49 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

inhabitants he encountered as ‘the miserablest people in the world’.35 With a A gendered element was added to the racialised rhetoric of this time, in which sense of exceptionalism native to Europeans, Dampier immediately attempted Aboriginal women were depicted as living in a state of domestic slavery, forced to indenture the Indigenous people and extract service from them. He recalls to endlessly toil by native men who did little more than sleep away the day.39 fnding some wells of water and flling two or three barrels, which he imagined the Such representations are a common strategy of imperialist forces, who invoke Indigenous people would take aboard his ship, being ‘somewhat troublesome’ for the liberation of women as a moral justifcation for conquest.40 The subsequent the British to carry themselves. Dampier recounts: subjection of women by colonial forces is rationalised as a step up the ladder of civilisation, a movement towards modernity. [W]e gave them some old clothes; to one an old pair of breeches, to another a ragged shirt, to the third a jacket that was scarce worth owning … We put As we have established, the early colonists had decided a priori that Indigenous them on them, thinking that this fnery would have brought them to work people were lazy, uncivilised and trapped in a state of nature. In turn, these heartily for us … we brought these our new servants to the wells, and put a assumptions were supported by key Enlightenment thinkers, whose writings were barrel on each of their shoulders for them to carry to the canoe. But all the shaping conceptions of subjectivity and the production of the law. But in a circular signs we could make were to no purpose for they stood like statues without logic, the racial hierarchies that we can fnd in the philosophical, geographical and motion but grinned like so many monkeys staring one upon another: for anthropological writings of thinkers such as Immanuel Kant—writings that rein- these poor creatures seem not accustomed to carry burdens …36 forced and legitimated the notion of a split between nature and culture—were, in part, derived from Kant’s readings of travel novels, such as the journals of Captain The refusal to be become peons was interpreted by Dampier as a sign of Indig- James Cook. The basis of his racial taxonomies come from travel books which he enous people’s indolence and incapacity for work. This rhetoric of laziness was argued were a legitimate substitute—regardless of their role as propagandistic reproduced in accounts of officers of the First Fleet. Shino Konishi’s history formalisations of imperial expansionist narratives—for actual feldwork.41 In the of Aboriginal representation in Enlightenment thought offers a compilation writings of Kant, we see the observations of early colonists transformed into the of accounts of the lazy native by officers of the First Fleet. He writes: quasi-scientifc production of a system of nature. Kant fnds anthropological and geographical ‘evidence’ in these writings to support his idea that the human sub- Judge-Advocate David Collins never saw them to ‘make provisions for the ject—defned as a rational creature who has transcended the state of pure nature morrow’, and thought that they ‘always eat as long as they have anything via a willingness to make himself through self-regulation and self-possession— left to eat, and when satisfed stretch themselves out in the sun to sleep’. is an exclusively white (European) subject. Equating geographic location and He ‘observed a great degree of indolence in their dispositions’ and climate with temperament, Kant writes: suggested that they would continue to slumber ‘until hunger or some other cause call[ed] them again into action’.37 All inhabitants of the hottest zones are, without exceptions, idle. With some, this laziness is offset by government and force … The aroused power And: of imagination has the effect that he [the inhabitant] often attempts to do something; but the heat soon passes and reluctance soon assumes its Marine Lieutenant Captain Watkin Tench had the same opinion, believing old position.42 that it was only ‘the calls of hunger and the returning light’ which roused the Aboriginal man ‘from his beloved indolence’.38 Taking this line of thinking even further, Kant extrapolates it into an explicit racial hierarchy: ‘In the hot countries the human being matures earlier in all ways

50 51 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

but does not reach the perfection of the temperate zones. Humanity exists in its by a Weberian conception of the ‘Protestant Ethic’ and it became the role of the greatest perfection in the white race.’43 Here, non-Europeans are placed (spa- adult (and by extension, the state) to ‘save’ the child from a life of sin and idolatry tially, temporally and morally) outside the arc of universal reason and further by instilling in them the value of productivity and self-sacrifce.46 inscribed into the state of nature. The equation of racialised other and children, of native ‘savage’ and infantility, However, when we look closely at the accounts of early explorers we fnd that they establishes a linear conception of progress that legitimates colonisation as are littered with descriptions of Indigenous labour and ingenuity alongside the a necessary step towards a mature and productive (adult) society. The analogy a priori dismissals chronicled above. As Bruce Pascoe’s recent counter-archival of childhood is used to rationalise colonisation as the inevitable transition from work has shown, the records of early colonists—such as Charles Sturt, Major primitivism to modernity. The European settler casts themself in the role of Thomas Mitchell, John McDouall Stuart and others—document sophisticated the civilised adult and takes on the task of domesticating the native population Indigenous agricultural and land-management practices that included evidence through a range of imperialist policies and disciplinary measures. In Australia of cropping; the harvesting and storing of grains; organised fire-management that has included such things as the classifcation of Aboriginal people as wards practices; complex aquaculture practices, such as the fsh traps at Brewarrina; of the state; native citizenship; the forced abduction of children (such as, but not and much more.44 And yet, despite the existence of such archival evidence, the limited to, the Stolen Generations); forced resettlement to missions and reserves; myth of the lazy native remains a dominant narrative of settlement, a spectre religious conversion; and re-socialisation programs in missions, boarding schools that will not be vanquished. and prisons.

Contemporary Paternalism Conservative politicians and commentators continue to appeal to a representa- The yoking of laziness, immaturity and primitivism provides a rationale for the tion of Indigenous people as lazy, irresponsible, primitive and childlike to justify patriarchal and paternalistic forms of governance that defne the treatment of the ongoing deployment of repressive forms of biopolitical governance. This is Indigenous subjects by settler states. One of the hallmarks of modern colonial the image put forward to justify the continuing Northern Territory intervention, regimes is the way colonised subjects are fgured as akin to children, a homology which explicitly invoked the protection of a Symbolic Indigenous Child from a that provides yet another moral justifcation for paternalistic settler policies neglectful Indigenous adult (who is presented here as developmentally stunted, of discipline and custodial control. This parallel between primitivism and child- trapped in a perpetual state of childhood) by the civilised and mature adult that hood relied on a transformation of the conception of the child in 17th-century represents the settler state. This is the representation that was tacitly invoked European thought, a transformation that mirrored the doctrine of progress, when then prime minister Tony Abbott supported the defunding of 150 remote with the child being considered an inferior version of the adult (rather than Indigenous communities in Western Australia, stating: ‘what we can’t do is simply a smaller version of the adult) who would only develop into a productive endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive adult through education and discipline in the newly expanded period of childhood. to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have’.47 This reconfiguration of the child was linked to the emergence of a capitalist This is the depiction that textures the indifference to the extraordinarily high economy that placed utmost value on progress and productivity. As Ashis Nandy numbers of Indigenous incarcerations and deaths in custody.48 In each instance, explains, ‘it [childhood] increasingly looked like a blank slate on which adults and it should be noted that this is by no means an exhaustive list, we can see that must write their moral codes—an inferior version of maturity, less productive the representations that turn on the dismissal of Indigenous people as indolent, and ethical, and badly contaminated by the playful, irresponsible, and sponta- primitive, irresponsible and childlike work to continually externalise Aboriginal neous aspects of human nature’.45 These ‘moral codes’ were largely informed people for a conception of the universal, which in turn reinscribes them in the

52 53 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

state of nature. The ongoing nature of this process is what Wolfe means when he Cope’s installation, RE FORMATION part 3 (Dubbagullee) (2017), can be read writes that ‘invasion is a structure not an event’.49 as a challenge to the doctrine of terra nullius and a refutation of the notion that Indigenous people were not engaged in organised forms of agriculture, aqua- The Leak cartoon rehearses the possessive logic of white sovereignty that I have culture and sociality. RE FORMATION part 3 was the third work in an ongoing been unpacking in this chapter. The cartoon casts Aboriginal people as wilfully series of installations in which Cope produces large shell monuments commonly remaining in the state of nature, despite the best efforts of the state to lift them referred to as middens. Cope produces the structures by hand-casting hundreds into civilisation. It simultaneously draws a parallel between Indigenous people of Sydney rock oyster shells that are then layered into an undulating structure and children in need of disciplining (both the father and the son are in the process with black sand and copper slag (a by-product of copper extraction that indexes of being disciplined by the policeman); writes off Aboriginal adults as unable to the destruction of sacred Indigenous sites by mining and commercial activities). be disciplined (evidenced by the father’s drunkenness and inability to remember Cope’s work is an invocation of the man-made structures that were found—and his son’s name); and justifes the presence of the state via an appeal to protect the subsequently destroyed in order to extract lime to create mortar for use in child. The father is depicted here as a lazy and neglectful bludger who refuses to building the early colony—on Dubbagullee, the peninsula that is now known adhere to ‘the Australian way of life’, that ambiguous invocation of values and as Bennelong Point. These structures are compacted mounds of discarded beliefs, often invoked by politicians such as Howard, Abbott and Pauline Hanson organic matter and the remains of cooking fires, stone, bone and so on.51 For as a stand in for European mono-culturalism. The myth of the lazy native is not Cope, the midden is a form of Aboriginal architecture, an infrastructure that simply an enduring racist stereotype but, rather, is a symbolic order central to the evidences the labour of pre-invasion Indigenous life, contesting the European legitimation of settler colonialism. This origin myth works to provide a moral and metrics of possession that were imposed on Indigenous cultures. In The National, juridical justifcation for invasion and the subsequent dispossession of Indigenous the architecture Cope produced rose imposingly from the floor of the gallery, people via the doctrine of terra nullius; to affirm the replacement of Indigenous the bright lights that lit the work would catch on the copper slag in ways made labour with settlers, which is a manifestation of the settler-colonial logic of the entire structure shimmer. The glistening monument stood as an affirmation elimination; to establish and protect a racial hierarchy in which whiteness is of Indigenous forms knowledge, infrastructure and labour, resisting the very akin to property; to equate Indigeneity with childhood; and to justify the ongoing premise of a split between nature and culture, and rejecting the settler-colonial subjugation of Indigenous people by settlers. narratives and stereotypes that emerge from this Cartesian dualism. In doing so, the work can be understood as a forceful assertion of continuing Indigenous Resistance and Refusal sovereignty, which constitutes a direct challenge to the possessive nature of I want to conclude by looking briefy at two different strategies, found in the work settler sovereignty. of Megan Cope and Dale Harding, that resist and refuse the dominant and en- during narratives of settler society. Both installations—shown at the Art Gallery Harding took a different approach to that of Cope in his installation,Know Them of as part of the 2017 iteration of the exhibition The National: in Correct Judgement (2017). Where Cope directly challenged the mythologies New Australian Art—challenged the erasure of Indigenous culture by settlers and that legitimate settler sovereignty, Harding’s work preserved the incommensu- asserted a claim to sovereignty that undermines the self-proclaimed legitimacy rability of difference by refusing to make the violence inflicted upon his family of settlement. Yet, Harding and Cope approached this task in strikingly different transparent and legible. In other words, he refuses to engage with the depiction ways; Cope’s work confronted the mythologies of patriarchal white sovereignty of Indigenous people as indolent and uncivilised, instead presenting a work that head on, while Harding’s work refused to engage with these modalities of rep- documents the continuation of Indigenous culture and history in daily life, and resentation, asserting instead what the anti-colonial theorist Édouard Glissant as resistance and survival. Harding’s installation responded to the biopolitical would call ‘the right to opacity’.50

54 55 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

violence Indigenous people are subjected to by the settler state, specifically the us to a conception of knowledge that does not require appropriation, a conception relocation of his family to the Woorabinda Mission on Ghungalu Land, in central of knowledge that can only be discerned in the movement of relations of differ- Queensland. Made with the assistance of his Uncle Milton and his cousin Will, ence. Put another way, opacity is a relation of movement that foregrounds the the installation comprised a series of mouth-blown wall paintings that wrapped unknown and the unknowable. As Glissant writes, ‘opacities can coexist and around three walls of a long, open-ended room, a long glass cabinet holding two converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the small and one large fghting stick, and a handmade A4 book titled The Oral History texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.’54 In political terms, of Mr Tim Kemp. All of the artefacts belong to Harding’s relatives who lived on the the right to opacity might constitute the assertion of Indigenous ways of living mission estate: the large fighting stick was his great-grandmother’s and used in that do not seek the legitimation of settler sovereignty. Refusing to make his social rites; the smaller ones were his grandfather’s; and the oral history records family’s experience immediately legible, Harding actively refuses to adhere to another of Harding’s relative’s experiences of mission life. The glass cabinet was the assimilatory logic of the settler state, a gesture that makes it impossible for locked, foreclosing any possibility of the audience accessing the details contained Harding and his family to be interpellated into any settler stereotype. In addition, in Kemp’s oral history. As I have previously written of this work: Harding’s work offers us a blueprint for approaching meaningful political solidarity, one that takes opacity as its necessary precondition. As Glissant tells us, ‘to feel The paintings are relief forms of the objects in the cabinet and use a trad- in solidarity with him [sic] or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not itional mouth-blowing technique, as well as ochre sourced from Ghungalu necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to become the other (to become country. The largest of the paintings wraps around the join of two walls and other) nor to “make” him in my image.’55 shows the outlines of the fghting sticks; a smaller painting traces the shape of the book; and a fnal painting, positioned up high in an awkward corner I want to conclude by suggesting that despite the endurance of the myth of the of the space, is a redaction of the names of fve missionaries who worked lazy native, work such as Cope’s and Harding’s shows us that the colonial archive on the Woorabinda Mission. The work is minimal and yet it fully inhabits is an unstable and piecemeal affair that is open to critique and reformulation. the space of the gallery in which it is installed. Spread across three walls These works both challenge the dominant modes of representation that we can of a long, open-ended room, the work punctuates the white space of the trace from post-Enlightenment European thought through the foundations of the gallery with a combination of porous pigment and definite edges. The settler colony and into the present. They also assert the continuity of Indigenous painted shapes are both definite and blurred, inviting us to reconsider sovereignty in ways that destabilise the self-proclaimed legitimacy of settler the notion of history as defnitive or the status of the archive as stable.52 sovereignty. Challenging the foundational myths of settlement is not simply a project concerned with producing counter-histories, but rather, and crucially, The mission, an extension of the state, garners legitimacy by reproducing the it is a necessary step towards a decolonial future. equation that Indigenous people are akin to children in need of tutelage and disciplining by the state and its affiliated institutions. Harding’s work, then, can be understood as a response to the endurance of the symbolic order. The power of Harding’s work, as I have argued elsewhere, lies in its refusal to produce a counter- narrative that makes sense of the senseless violence endemic to settler colonial- ism.53 In other words, Harding refuses to make Indigenous experience legible and instead enacts what Glissant refers to as ‘the right to opacity’. For Glissant, opacity is central to any meaningful conception of knowledge and politics. It leads

56 57 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

1 Paul Whittaker, ‘The Australian Defends Bill Leak Indigenous Cartoon’, The Australian, 9 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of August 2016, theaustralian.com.au/business/media/the-australian-defends-bill-leak- Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006. indigenous-cartoon/news-story/ac8807a5040be29d3d890d3646cc9ef2, and ‘Family 10 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Failure Is the Root Cause’, The Australian, 5 August 2016, theaustralian.com.au/opinion/ Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015, p. xi. editorials/family-failure-is-the-root-cause/news-story/ea2eab6431dcac731f8d3dec2adbe0cf; both accessed 5 December 2018. 11 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Verso Books, London, 2016, p. 33. 2 Sharri Markson, ‘Censorship: Editor, Cartoonists Attack Bill Leak Investigation’, The Australian, 19 October 2016, theaustralian.com.au/business/media/print/ 12 Moreton-Robinson, p. xii. censorship-editor-cartoonists-attack-bill-leak-investigation/news-story/ 13 Astrid Lorange, ‘Forging the Declaration’, Sydney Review of Books, 6 July 2018, n.p., f6d1252b0791523406b0b0b0e984d765; accessed 5 December 2018. sydneyreviewofbooks.com/forging-the-declaration-vincent-namatjira; accessed 7 December 2018. 3 See, for example, the rehearsal of this line of argument by Paul Kelly, editor-at-large for The Australian, who writes: ‘What happened to Bill is simple in essence. He came into 14 It has been proven that Indigenous people pre-invasion did in fact employ a variety confict with the self-righteous bigotry of the educated class—the belief that across of agricultural, aquacultural and land management practices. See Bruce Pascoe, the spectrum of expression from artistic work to cartoons that progressive ideology Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, Magabala Books, Broome, WA, 2014; (often called political correctness) must be affirmed, not challenged.’ Paul Kelly, and Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, ‘Bill Leak: Funny Once a Day, Courageous for a Lifetime’, The Australian, 15 March 12017, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2012. theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/paul-kelly/bill-leak-funny-once-a-day- 15 Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, pp. 26–27. courageous-for-a-lifetime/news-story/239dd660d39785e8c9231ef540524b0d; accessed 5 December 2018. 16 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007, p. 2. 4 ‘Australia’s Shame’, Four Corners, ABC TV, 25 July 2016, abc.net.au/4corners/ 17 Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 106, no. 8, 1993, p. 1721. -shame-promo/7649462; accessed 6 December 2018. 18 Harris, p. 1723. 5 Images and descriptions of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison were brought to the 19 Harris, p. 1714. public’s attention in 2004. See, for example, Seymour M. Hersch, ‘Torture at Abu Ghraib’, The New Yorker, 10 May 2004, newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/ 20 Harris, p. 1725. torture-at-abu-ghraib; accessed 12 September 2019. 21 Harris, p. 1725.

6 ‘Australia’s Shame’. 22 Moreton-Robinson, p. 71.

23 Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth), s190B. 7 ‘Australia’s Shame’. 24 Moreton-Robinson, p. 69. 8 Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of Malays, 25 John Howard quoted in Moreton-Robinson, p. 71. Filipinos, and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism [1977], Frank Cass, London, 1997. 26 Moreton-Robinson, p. 71.

58 59 Myth-making in the Settler Colony Myth-making in the Settler Colony

27 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, p. 387. 42 Immanuel Kant quoted in Eze, p. 116.

28 Wolfe, Traces of History, p. 33. 43 Eze, p. 118.

29 J.W. Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes of Central Australia and North Australia 1928, 44 Pascoe. Commonwealth of Australia, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1929, p. 6. For a history of 45 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Aboriginal labour in Australia, see Ann Curthoys and Clive Moore, ‘Working for the White Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983, p. 15. People: An Historiographic Essay on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Labour’, Labour History, no. 69, November 1995. 46 Nandy, p. 15.

30 Bleakley, p. 7. 47 Shalailah Medhora, ‘Remote Communities Are “Lifestyle Choices”, Says Tony Abbott’, The Guardian, 10 March 2015, theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/10/ 31 Quoted in Richard Broome, ‘Aboriginal Workers on South-Eastern Frontiers’, remote-communities-are-lifestyle-choices-says-tony-abbott; accessed 28 December 2018. Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 103, 1994, p. 216. 48 For information on Indigenous deaths in custody, see ‘Deaths Inside: Australian 32 Broome, p. 216. Indigenous Deaths in Custody’, August 2019, The Guardian, theguardian.com/ 33 Broome, p. 216. australia-news/ng-interactive/2018/aug/28/deaths-inside-indigenous-australian- deaths-in-custody; accessed 12 September 2019. 34 Mary and Elizabeth Durack, All-about: The Story of a Black Community on Argyle Station, Kimberley, Sampson Printing Company, , 1935, p. 26. 49 Wolfe, Traces of History, p. 33.

35 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, A. and C. Black Ltd, London, 1937, 50 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing (trans.), The University of Michigan gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500461h.html#ch16; accessed 20 December 2018. Press, Ann Arbor, 1997, p. 189.

36 Dampier, chapter 16, n.p. 51 Paul Irish and Tamika Goward, ‘Darling Walk Midden’, Barani: Sydney’s Aboriginal History, sydneybarani.com.au/sites/darling-walk-midden; accessed 3 January 2019. 37 Shino Konishi, ‘Idle Men: The Eighteenth-Century Roots of the Indigenous Indolence Myth’, in Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys, and John Docker (eds), Passionate Histories: 52 Andrew Brooks, ‘Cracks in the Archive’, Runway, no. 35, 2018. Myth, Memory & Indigenous Australia, ANU E Press & Aboriginal History Inc., Canberra, 53 Brooks. 2010, p. 104. 54 Glissant, p. 190. 38 Konishi, p. 104. 55 Glissant, p. 193. 39 Konishi, p. 106.

40 For an excellent contemporary analysis of how gender and sexuality is mobilised alongside race in the production of Western exceptionalism, see Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Time, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007.

41 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ‘The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,’ in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, Ma., 1997, pp. 127–28.

60 61 Sculptures That Go Home at Night: On Labour, Performance and Re-enactment

Diana Baker Smith Sculptures That Go Home at Night

On the opening weekend of the exhibition 13 Rooms (2013), curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist performed what they referred to as a ‘ping- pong’ dialogue to a crowded room overlooking Sydney Harbour. The two celebrity curators had been brought to Australia by Kaldor Public Art Projects to speak alongside the exhibition, presented in Pier 2/3, a former warehouse converted into a publicly funded arts precinct. In an upstairs room, previously used for the storage of wool, Biesenbach ‘pinged’ and Obrist ‘ponged’ their way through an improvisational dialogue on their curatorial projects and methods.

Over the course of an hour, they applied this approach to dissecting their inspira- tion for 13 Rooms, discussing their desire to transform live art into sculpture, or, as the tagline for the show proclaimed, ‘sculptures that go home at night’.1 Notably, the sculptures themselves were a group of young Australian artists, performers and dancers. Their task was to re-enact iconic works by artists such as Marina Abramović and Joan Jonas, as well as more contemporary works by artists including Tino Sehgal and Xu Zhen throughout the opening hours of the 11-day exhibition.2 In contrast to the ping-pong dialogue of the two curators, the re-enactments were decidedly more regimented, operating as a series of shifts undertaken in the exhibition’s 13 titular rooms.

13 Rooms is indicative of a wider interest in re-performance and re-enactment in contemporary art.3 Social, performative and choreographic turns since the beginning of the 21st century have prompted a rethinking of how to bring live art into institutional contexts and how to reanimate historical performances. As early as 2001, RoseLee Goldberg was pointing towards an ‘exponential increase in the number of performance artists in every continent … and the many contemporary art museums opening their doors to live media’.4 A decade later, Amelia Jones noted a ‘wholesale resurgence’ in performance, ‘particularly in relation to their histories and limits’.5 With increased frequency, museums have taken to re-staging historical performances, especially those from the 1960s and 70s.6

The most well-known project of this type is Marina Abramović’s retrospective titled Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2010), at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. This project was also curated by Biesenbach, in close consultation with Abramović, and included a series of re-enactments of the

65 Sculptures That Go Home at Night Sculptures That Go Home at Night

artist’s work, dating back to the 1970s. In the lead up to the exhibition, Biesenbach, previously marginalised practices into view, the institutionalisation of perfor- the then director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator at large at MoMA, ran a series mance raises a range of questions about the politics of embodiment long associated of workshops across two years that focused on the exhibition, collection and with the live act. preservation of performance in the context of the museum. Through this process, Biesenbach and Abramović developed an approach to re-enactment involving out- For many artists who were drawn to performance in the 1960s, live actions sourcing the labour of her historical works to artists and dancers for the opening facilitated a form of active resistance to the logic of late capitalism. The use of the hours of the museum, much like the model developed for 13 Rooms. In this way, body became a way to assert agency and subjectivity in a system of commodity the presentation of performance no longer relied on the physical presence of the exchange that turns subjects into objects. Unlike other mediums, such as painting artist, allowing its duration to be adapted and extended to make full use of its or sculpture, performance is ‘live’ and therefore cannot be bought or sold, nor institutional setting. collected by the major institutions. As Phelan suggests, ‘performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation Depending on which history one reads, performance art emerged at the start of of capital’.13 This explains the difficulty traditionally experienced by museums the 20th century, yet discussions about how to incorporate such practices into the seeking to incorporate performance into an institutional setting. It also casts a museum are relatively recent, with serious institutional interest emerging only in different light on the re-enactment methodology developed by Biesenbach and the last two decades.7 On a purely pragmatic level, performance poses a number of Abramović, raising the question of how we might understand the desire to turn problems for museums and collecting institutions, in that it is difficult to display, performance into sculptures that go home at night. collect and preserve. This has contributed to the limited representation of per- formance in museum collections, and the marginalisation of performance in art Mirror Check historical contexts. In the early 1990s, Peggy Phelan famously proclaimed that I walk into one of the 13 custom-built ‘rooms’ to see Joan Jonas’s 1970 perfor- performance was ‘the runt of the litter of contemporary art’.8 More recently, in mance Mirror Check. When it was first performed, Jonas stood alone in front 2010, Goldberg noted, ‘The history of performance art has been entirely missing of the audience, slowly examining her own naked body with a hand-held mirror. from the history of art so far’.9 The currency of performance in contemporary art Today Jonas is not present, and the work is being re-performed by a much younger has forced institutions to reconsider how such practices can be incorporated into woman I do not recognise. The didactic label on the wall does not name her, listing collections and art historical discourses more broadly. only Jonas’s name and a description of the original work.

In many ways, re-enactment has become the most viable answer for institutions It is the end of the frst shift, which is inevitably the beginning of the second shift. to exhibit performance. Rather than an image or an object that stands in for the In between the two is a changeover period, an awkward moment where schedules live event, re-performance recalls the ‘liveness’ of the original work. As Jessica intersect and workers overlap. This begins with the young woman bending over Santone notes, re-enactment provides ‘a dynamic, living document as a solution beneath a spotlight. She holds a small mirror in the palm of her hand. She is look- to the past’s disappearance’.10 Biesenbach and Abramović were among the frst to ing at herself, studying the image of her left thigh. As she stands up, she moves the develop this approach. In 2008, the latter commented, ‘reperformance is the new mirror along her naked body, closely observing the surface of her stomach, across concept, the new idea! Otherwise it will be dead as an art form.’11 Abramović has her left breast and down her right arm, in much the same motion she has been long campaigned for performance to enter into the institution, so that it can be undertaking for the previous 20 minutes. My attention moves between the woman taken seriously as a medium. As she claims, performance ‘has to be honored, as and the audience members, who stand, lean and crouch against the four walls has any history, in a museum’.12 While re-performance has the potential to bring of the room. We collectively observe each other as the action unfolds in silence. And then something shifts.

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The woman stops what she is doing and walks to the corner of the room. She is in the global art market requires the institution to re-evaluate the way in which it handed a dressing gown, which she wraps around her body. The audience mem- displays, collects and preserves artworks. It also provokes a productive encounter bers shuffle, glancing between the empty spotlight and the corner of the room. with the archive, producing new art historical narratives that incorporate live For a brief moment, I think I am seeing double. Two women in identical dressing and participatory practices. In other words, performance forces the institution gowns exchange glances, the mirror is passed between them and one of the dress- to question the way it does the things it does. However, in the case of 13 Rooms, ing gowns is removed. Most of the audience members leave the room, but I am the aim is not to reconsider historical works in a contemporary context, but captivated by this choreographed change of shift. After a few minutes, the second instead to freeze the initial performative moment to allow for its reproduction. shift begins, and the new performer takes her position under the spotlight. She takes a moment to settle herself, while the other performer slips out of the room To change the duration of a performance like Mirror Check in accordance with the in her dressing gown. Then she begins to perform the same movement score. opening hours of the exhibition synchronises the performance with the time of the institution. By delegating the labour to hired workers, Mirror Check is trans- While the score might be the same, this is a very different work to the one that formed into an object that will inevitably be turned into an image and recuperated Jonas performed in 1970. It is different because, frst and foremost, this is a dele- into the structures of capital. The concept can be collected by the institution, gated performance. By delegating the labour to other ‘re-enactors’, the conditions something that Tino Sehgal has pioneered since the mid-2000s, and the work of the performance are radically altered. For example, the duration has shifted can be repeated whenever necessary. from a one-off event to an itinerant, global endurance performance—performed in a range of cities across fve years. The work no longer relies on the labour of the In the case of Mirror Check, this shift to the duration is applied retroactively, but individual artist; instead, it is dependent on shift work, in which performers come in the work of many contemporary artists this becomes the way in which the work in and out of the space, clocking on and off in front of the audience. The mechanics is conceived. In other words, the pressures of the contemporary art market have of this factory line become part of the performance in a way that was not present reshaped performance into a form that fts neatly into the institution—a sculpture in the original work. that goes home at night. Certainly, the ability to repeat and therefore commodify the live act aligns with an understanding of art history that revolves around the The labour and temporalities of performance have radically shifted in the last collection, display and preservation of objects. However, the leap here is that now decade. The capacity to make performance something that can be performed all these are objects that can go home at night. the time, and by anyone, has been a key mechanism through which to incorporate performance into the institution. Rather than being an ephemeral event, with Luminosity a duration dependent on the live act, the work can be on display for the duration After leaving the young woman with the mirror, I walk into the next room to of the exhibition. As the curators of 13 Rooms explain, ‘a key inspiration for the see Abramović’s performance Luminosity, which she first presented in 1997. project is the idea that live art can also be sculpture and have a duration similar According to Abramović this is a work ‘about the transcendental quality of the to a physical object, that is from morning to night, throughout the opening hours human being’.15 In essence, the original work involved Abramović sitting on a of a gallery’.14 This approach is evident in most institutional contexts in which bicycle seat attached high up on a gallery wall, completely naked and with her historical performances are re-staged in the gallery. limbs outstretched. At 13 Rooms, the body of the artist has once again been replaced by a much younger woman who I do not recognise, and who is not The presence of performance (or re-performance) in the museum forces a mentioned on the didactic label. When Abramović frst performed this work rethinking of institutional processes and practices. The currency of performance at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, she sat on the bicycle seat for two hours.

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For 13 Rooms, the work is only performed for 30 minutes at a time. While the real she re-performed iconic performances from the 1960s and 70s by artists such artist can will herself to achieve the superhuman task, the paid labourer only has as Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys and Gina Pane.19 The documentation of these two the strength to briefy imitate this act of transcendence. projects has been reproduced across every imaginable platform. In the case of Seven Easy Pieces, Abramović worked with flmmaker Babette Mangolte to create As the door shuts behind me, I look up to see the young woman suspended against a feature-length flm and full-colour images documenting the re-enactments from the wall. For a moment she appears to be floating. She is naked under the hot every angle. As Robert Blackson notes, ‘Abramović has taken steps to potentially lights, sitting on the bicycle seat. Her hands rise slowly as her gaze fxes on a point eclipse the works she re-enacted in Seven Easy Pieces by meticulously documenting in the distance. I can see her body trembling and the sweat forming on her fore- each of her performances’.20 Jones takes this point one step further, suggesting head. This is hard work. While I am moved by the extraordinary physical strength ‘Abramović has become the new author-name through which all the performances of the performer, rather than having an experience of transcendence, I fnd myself she claims to be authentically returning to their artistic origins are coming to wondering how much she is being paid to complete this gruelling task. mean and be valued’.21 This is made particularly clear, as Jones notes, by a quick online search for Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare or There has been much discussion around re-enactment, delegated labour and rates Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, which produces more images of Abramović’s of pay in regard to a number of Abramović’s projects, the most controversial being re-enactments than the original incarnations. the 2011 fundraising gala directed by Abramović at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA). This annual high-profle event is typically conceived For her directorial debut at the MOCA gala, Abramović once again turned to her as a dinner for museum benefactors, who pay US$25,000–100,000 per table, back catalogue, hiring people to re-perform a number of her works as part of which is effectively a donation to the museum. The event is always directed by an the event. On this occasion, Abramović conceived of the re-performances as artist or celebrity (Lady Gaga and Angelina Jolie have been previous directors). ‘live centrepieces’ that adorned the dining tables for the patrons. This included a naked performer lying underneath a skeleton in the centre of a table, an adap- While performance artists do not typically reach celebrity status, Abramović has. tation of Abramović’s Nude with Skeleton (2002), while on another table, a man’s Apart from major solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA and the head could be seen rotating through the dinner plates. This event sparked much Serpentine Gallery in the last decade, there has been a documentary about The criticism, including a widely circulated open letter to the MOCA director, Jeffrey Artist Is Present, a stage show directed by Robert Wilson and numerous collabora- Deitch, from a range of senior art world fgures, including artist Yvonne Rainer tions with a cast of popular musicians and actors, such as Jay-Z and James Franco. and historian Douglas Crimp. The letter denounced the ‘exploitative’ and Abramović also started her own performance art academy—The Marina Abramović ‘grotesque spectacle’ as reminiscent of Pier Paulo Pasolini’s flm Salo (1975).22 Institute—and has recently published her autobiography, Walk Through Walls: Several days later, Sara Wookey, one of the performers, circulated another letter, A Memoir.16 You can even go online and wait in a virtual queue for several hours discussing her involvement, and the reasons that led to her decision to ultimately to then sit in front of a virtual image of her in a reconstruction of her 2010 withdraw from the event: performance, The Artist Is Present.17 I refused to participate as a performer because what I anticipated would As a range of scholars and artists have suggested, Abramović’s celebrity status has be a few hours of creative labour, a meal, and the chance to network with been facilitated through the meticulously documented re-performances staged like-minded colleagues turned out to be an unfairly remunerated job. as part of The Artist Is Present and her earlier project Seven Easy Pieces (2005), I was expected to lie naked and speechless on a slowly rotating table, presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.18 In the latter project, starting from before the guests arrived and lasting until after they left

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(a total of nearly four hours). I was expected to ignore (by staying in capital through their physical presence, with the authenticity of their bodies what Abramović refers to as ‘performance mode’) any potential physical standing in for the spectacle of the original artist’s subjectivity. Performing their or verbal harassment while performing. I was expected to commit shift for the agreed time, until their replacement arrives, they allow the spectacle to ffteen hours of rehearsal time … I was to be paid $150.23 of that authenticity to produce a value in surplus to that of the original work. In effect, they allow the artist to be present, even when the artist is not actually Similarly, in the case of Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, the re-enactors were there. initially paid US$50 for their two-and-a-half-hour shift, which did not include paid rehearsal time, breaks or workers’ compensation. According to three of the Living Sculptures participants involved in the exhibition, their contract was negotiated following Let us return to the ping-pong dialogue between Biesenbach and Obrist that took two reported cases of re-performers fainting. This resulted in a slight pay increase place on the opening weekend of 13 Rooms. As the two curators continued to and the granting of a ‘temporary employee’ status, which provided workers’ perform their improvised conversation, one that they had clearly rehearsed in compensation.24 As the performers note, this was still below the living wage, a range of similar contexts, they turned their attention to the work of artistic duo meaning that they needed to fnd additional employment. Gilbert & George, a key point of reference for the exhibition.

Precarious employment contracts are not uncommon in the context of contem- Like many artists drawn to performance in the late 1960s and early 70s, Gilbert porary capitalism. However, these labour conditions add another element to & George turned themselves into the artwork. Through their live performances, the way we access an endurance performance like Luminosity. If the aim of the they pushed the boundaries of the art object, approaching sculpture as a practice performance is to reach a state of transcendence through pushing the physical or activity rather than the production of an art object. Dressed in their signature limits of the body, what does it mean if the person performing the work has been matching suits, the artists performed routines and gestures that deliberately hired to complete the task? merged art and everyday life. As Obrist notes, ‘whenever they enter a room, they’re living sculpture’.25 This idea of ‘living sculpture’ that Gilbert & George Abramović has built a career on her physical presence. The body has been both pioneered was key to the way the curators conceived of the exhibition, informing the subject and medium since her early experiments with Ulay in the late 1960s. the idea of turning performance into ‘sculptures that go home at night’. She has withstood extreme pain and undertaken acts of physical violence in an attempt to reach an artistic transcendence. Luminosity is no exception. While the As they ping-ponged back and forth, Biesenbach and Obrist acknowledged physical feat of being suspended against the gallery wall may enable the artist the connection between John Kaldor and Gilbert & George. In 1973, Kaldor (and audience) to reach a state of transcendence, when the performer is paid an brought the artists out to Australia to perform their legendary work, The Singing hourly rate the work takes on new meaning. Abramović demonstrates her enlight- Sculpture, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney, and the National ened physical and mental state as she foats above the gallery foor, yet the hired Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne. In this work, they merged performance and labourer is focused on completing their job and, presumably, paying their rent. sculpture even more explicitly than the work in question, painting their faces and hands with a mix of bronze metallic paint and singing Flanagan and Allen’s Of course, Abramović is also being paid, but she has access to the means of ‘Underneath the Arches’, while they rotated on top of a plinth as if inside a music box. production—in this case her own body and the intellectual capital that goes into conceptualising the work. The value of the work is generated through the knowl- The performance of Gilbert & George was the third iteration of the Kaldor Public edge that she once performed it. The re-enactors produce a certain cultural Art Projects, and as John Kaldor notes:

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Hans Ulrich Obrist’s description of an exhibition in which the ‘sculptures as the work is no longer ‘doing’ anything; it has instead become a representation, go home at night’ resonated with me immediately. It reawakened memories a copy or an imprint of the original. This process is most evident in the changeover of 40 years ago—Gilbert & George’s The Singing Sculpture, our third project period between shifts. In the case of Mirror Check, there is a break or puncture back in 1973 … Gilbert & George indeed went home at night, after keeping in the smooth fow of the machine. In this instance, the subjectivity that is being the gallery audiences in Sydney and Melbourne spellbound for a non-stop represented by the performer is revealed to be a choreographed gesture rather fve hours.26 than evidence of their subjectivity. The presence and power of the performer is undermined. It becomes evident that the performer’s body has become a cipher, The key difference between the work of Gilbert & George and the performances and that we are watching the spectre of an authentic subjectivity from which the in 13 Rooms is that the sculptures that went home at night were the artists, rather person we have been watching is largely excluded. than a team of hired performers (other than in the work of the Australian artist duo Clark Beaumont). Given the work of Gilbert & George was a key inspiration, It is interesting to think about how this alters the value, or the accumulation it is notable that their work was not chosen for the exhibition. I would speculate of value, produced by the work of the artist. The ostensible value—albeit rarely that this is because, for Gilbert & George, it was key that they performed the work economic—of an ‘original’ performance lay in, and was returned to, the artist themselves. Like many other artists who began working with performance in the performing it, embedded in the ‘authenticity’ afforded by their presence. Devoid late 1960s, the decision to position their bodies at the centre of the work was a way of that authentic presence, the performance offers the physical presence of an to assert the self within the value of the art object, removing the degree to which artist, but one detached from the product being produced. In effect, the artist’s that value could be detached and sold without material beneft to its creator. subjectivity, and the value of its display, now falls to the institution presenting the work. In much the same way as we might go to a gallery to see an authentic The value at the heart of much early performance art was the sense that one painting by Vincent van Gogh or Claude Monet as a product with a saleable value witnessed the artist, and the art object, as an authentic subject. This is why most long detached from the artist’s labour, we can now do the same with an art form artists did not delegate their work to other performers. Instead, the use of the previously bound inextricably to the artist performing it. body as an artistic medium became a way to claim agency and subjectivity. This is certainly evident in the work of Joan Jonas. The act of viewing her body in Mirror To see an ‘original’ performance is to see something with the potential for the un- Check was a way to claim the self. Refecting on this work four decades on, Jonas expected to occur, in which the performer may exercise their agency and disrupt explains that the work was centred on ‘reversing the gaze and claiming her own or alter the nature of the product we are witnessing. In the re-enactment, this is body as her own’.27 Like many other women artists who were drawn to perfor- no longer the case, the value is principally historical, a glimpse of an ‘authentic’ mance at the time, she was ‘directly inspired by the women’s movement in the moment of performance art history and the performers who produced it. Standing late 1960s and early 70s’.28 The use of the body was a way to embody the feminist in one of the 13 rooms, watching the unnamed worker perform the spectre of Jonas’s proclamation that the personal is political. Rather than being an object to be viewed work, I too felt something like a spectre, knowing that with or without my presence or consumed, she denied the viewer the voyeuristic pleasure and took control of the spectacle would continue. Rather than witnessing a performative gesture, I was her own image. watching an image, or what was soon to become an image, that would be repro- duced on the pages of catalogues, magazines and books much like this one. When such an act is delegated, the subjectivity of the artist is decoupled from the work, allowing for the commodifcation of the performance as an art object. In contrast to the regimented shifts of re-performance, the ping-pong conversa- The re-performance is not a performative act, in the linguistic sense of the term, tion between the curators was highly performative. Performing their own kind

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of ‘living sculpture’ as a dynamic curatorial duo, the two curators were no doubt 1 Evident in the marketing material online and in print, as well as in the exhibition the stars of the show. Unlike the re-performers, who were denied their own catalogue. See 13 Rooms, exhibition catalogue, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, 2013. subjectivity, the curators had the capacity to act, to assert their own agency 2 13 Rooms was originally commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, and subjectivity. By extracting the labour value from the re-performers, they no the International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale and the Manchester Art Gallery. longer need the ‘original’ artists to be present, as performance art once demanded. The project was frst shown as 11 Rooms at Manchester International Festival, Instead, they were able to generate new value from old performances, largely in 2011, and as 12 Rooms at the International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale, in 2012. bypassing the original artists to extract additional cultural capital from the labour The exhibition was subsequently presented as 14 Rooms at Art Basel in Switzerland, of the re-performers. in 2014, and as 15 Rooms at Long Museum, Shanghai, in 2015, with the collaboration of director Wang Wei. For each edition, the list of artists was slightly altered. 13 Rooms included works by Marina Abramović (Luminosity, 1997), Allora & Calzadilla (Revolving Door, 2011), John Baldessari (Thirteen Colourful Inside Jobs, 2013), Simon Fujiwara (Future/Perfect, 2012), Damien Hirst (Hans, Georg, 1992), Joan Jonas (Mirror Check, 1970), Xavier Le Roy (Untitled, 2012), Laura Lima (Man=Flesh/Woman=Flesh—Flat, 1997), Roman Ondák (Swap, 2011), Tino Sehgal (This Is New, 2003), Santiago Sierra (Veterans of the Wars of Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Iraq and Vietnam Facing the Corner, 2013) and Xu Zhen (In Just a Blink of an Eye, 2005), which were re-enacted by the team of Australian artists. The exhibition also included a newly commissioned performance (Coexisiting, 2013) by Australian artist duo Clark Beaumont (Sarah Clark and Nicole Beaumont). They were the only artists to perform in their own work.

3 ‘Re-performance’ has become the common term for re-enactments of historical performances, particularly in museum settings. Throughout this chapter I use ‘re-performance’ and ‘re-enactment’ interchangeably to refer to various re-stagings of performance works.

4 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, Thames & Hudson, London, 2011, p. 225.

5 Amelia Jones, ‘The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History’, in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfeld (eds), Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, Intellect, Bristol, 2012, p. 12.

6 For instance, as part of A Little Bit of History Repeated at Kunst-Werke in Berlin (2001), younger artists were invited to re-enact performance classics by artists such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman. In the two-part program A Short History of Performance at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (2002/2003), pioneering performance artists,

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7 For instance, the appointed a performance curator in 2002, while MoMA created 20 Robert Blackson, ‘Once More ... with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art Department of Media in 2006, which changed its name to of Media and Culture’, Art Journal, vol. 66, no. 1, Spring 2007, p. 39. and Performance Art in 2009. 21 Jones, ‘The Artist Is Present’, p. 34. 8 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, London and New York, 22 Yvonne Rainer, ‘Yvonne Rainer Blasts Marina Abramović and MOCA LA’, 1993, p. 148. The Performance Club, 11 November 2011, theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/ 9 RoseLee Goldberg, ‘100 Years: A History of Performance Art’, Inside Out MoMA PS1 Blog, yvonne-rainer-douglas-crimp-and-taisha-paggett-blast-marina-abramovic- 5 April 2010, moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/04/05/100-years-a-history-of- and-moca-la; accessed 21 November 2018. performance-art; accessed 21 November 2018. 23 Sara Wookey, ‘Open Letter to Artists’, The Performance Club, 23 November 2011, 10 Jessica Santone, ‘Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/open-letter-to-artists; accessed 21 November 2018. Strategies for Preserving Art’s History’, Leonardo, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, p. 151. 24 Abigail Levine, Gary Lai and Rebecca Brooks, ‘Three Reperformers from 11 Marina Abramović, in Carol Kino, ‘A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue’, “Marina Abramović The Artist Is Present” Respond to the MOCA Gala Performances’, The New York Times, 10 March 2010, nytimes.com/2010/03/14/arts/design/ The Performance Club, 28 November 2011, theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/three- 14performance.html, p. 2; accessed 21 November 2018. reperformers-from-marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present-respond-to-the-moca- gala-performances; accessed 20 November 2018. 12 Abramović quoted in Amelia Jones, ‘The Live Artist as Archaeologist’, in Jones and Heathfeld (eds), p. 554. 25 13 Rooms, exhibition catalogue, p. 12.

13 Phelan, p. 148. 26 13 Rooms, exhibition catalogue, p. 8.

14 13 Rooms, exhibition catalogue, p. 12. 27 Joan Jonas, ‘Interview with Joan Jonas at 14 Rooms’, Daily Motion, 16 June 2014, dailymotion.com/video/x20nmo1; accessed 20 November 2018. 15 13 Rooms, exhibition catalogue, p. 23. 28 Jonas. 16 Abramović, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, Penguin Books, London, 2016.

17 This virtual game was created by Pippin Barr in collaboration with Marina Abramović. See pippinbarr.com/games/theartistispresent/TheArtistIsPresent.html; accessed 21 November 2018.

18 In particular, see Jones, ‘The Artist Is Present: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’, TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 2011, pp. 16–45.

19 The re-performances took place over seven consecutive nights and included (in order) Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), EXPORT’s Genital Panic (1969), Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (1973), Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) and Abramović’s own work Lips of Thomas (1973/74). On the seventh night, Abramović presented a new performance, Entering the Other Side (2005).

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Natalie Thomas Natty Brings Her ‘A’ Game

Guy Rundle and I were drinking. Social interactions are my studio. About three drinks in, conversation strayed into the pseudo-philosophical terrain so beloved of the half-cut. Guy wanted to know if I was a pessimist or an optimist. I said it depended on how I’d woken up, how my body and brain felt that day. My answer wasn’t cutting it with Guy. He wanted it one way or the other, so to speak. He pressed on: capital ‘P’ pessimism or capital ‘O’ optimism, he coaxed, like an upper- case letter changed everything. I couldn’t answer then, but, like with all the best questions, a kernel of it remained, haunting the frontal lobe like an insolent teen refusing to locate the stench within the hidden recesses of their room.

Optimism is stereotyped as the foundation on which life’s winners build their wins; pessimism is the countenance of losers. But I’m not sure that’s right. There’s a nagging suspicion that, in today’s mess of a world, optimism isn’t even a sane response to life’s unfolding horrors. Optimism is part of the essential arsenal leveraged by the snake-oil salesmen, grifters and con artists who utilise the full power of the ‘hope’ narrative to sell us stuff.

Mostly I’m optimistic about my pessimism, but it can slide into pessimism about my optimism, depending on the variables, of which there are many. I’m a moody bitch, a resistant stance one works hard to maintain. Argumentative, wilfully disobedient women play so counter-intuitively within patriarchy. So that’s good. Society prefers everyone to be bright and cheerful. But why bother faking it? Ambition and drive are boring if everyone is doing it.

I’d be a better person except I can’t be fucked. Self-help and I don’t see eye to eye. I’m too lazy to invest what I could (what I should) in my personal develop- ment. The self-help industry creates a problem (that being you) then sells you the solution (that being them). In this it shares many of the characteristics of religion/spiritual guidance from the unqualified, sold with a moral authority that saves customers the burden of thinking for themselves.

The basic idea, the main premise on which the behemoth personal-improvement scam of an industry is based, is that you are deeply fawed and underperforming, and if you do what they say and buy what they’re selling you can put yourself on the road to living your best life. So, the appeal is obvious: Who doesn’t love a make-over?

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The self-improvement industry sets us up to fail, so why not beat them to it. Have you ever wondered if never trying is better than trying and failing? Sure, Will reading ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Actualization’ or ‘Personal you won’t find schools admitting they teach students the principles of never try- Growth for Dummies’ really help? If you’re super busy playing on one of your ing, but rest assured, it goes on. With a stifingly disproportionate focus on exams many electronic devices, super-condensed listicles provide rapid-response and league tables, assessment results and comparisons, students are shit-scared solutions to life’s obstacles: ‘Three ways to improve your mental wellbeing in of what they haven’t yet learned. Teachers are shit-scared, too. Teachers get under fve minutes’, ‘Powerful mind hacks that really work’, ‘10 research-backed assessed by their students, even the ones they failed. Now that education has ways to beat procrastination for good’! mutated into a big, expensive user-pays industry, there’s no room for failure. People don’t buy failure. They buy success. The simple answers to life’s problems take many forms. There are brand-new magical pills, herbs and potions to detoxify our bodies, doing the work tradition- Failing is a key to learning. Traditional educational models, with their bells ally left to the liver and kidneys. There are motivational speakers, courses, master and assemblies and announcements and supervised revisions, prepare students classes, seminars and stress-management techniques; books, podcasts and for the rigours of a nine-to-fve working life that doesn’t really exist anymore. therapies to lift our spirits; life coaches, mindfulness training, mystics, personal And when the computers take over for real, many more of us will be freed from trainers and boot camps. If you’re feeling inadequate there’s good reason: you’re the strictures of full-time gainful employment. Then, many more of us will be supposed to be feeling inadequate. Our weaknesses and our desires to succeed free to explore what boredom and laziness can contribute to a day. Most people are carefully manipulated and then we’re sold false hope. can’t handle unrestricted time and nobody telling them what to do. That’s why retirement is the beginning of the end for so many. For Australian artists it’s easy to be lazy. There’s not enough work to go around. The energy that laziness saves us can be redirected towards competing for the In our house we like to say: why do today what you can put off till tomorrow. scarce resources on offer. Laziness is also an effective counter to false hope. It’s a strategy that really takes the pressure off. Procrastination is now an invalu- Inertia and a natural disinclination towards unnecessary exertion conserves able part of my creative process. It’s my subconscious saving me time and effort. energy. Laziness is in fact the smarter option. Neoliberalism, the mutant spawn Laziness, rather than manifesting as a negative coping mechanism, creates dreamt up by patriarchy, is the penultimate organised-crime racket. It benefits the space needed to imagine change. members at the expense of non-members. The arts industry is a near perfect neoliberal model, efficiently channelling vast resources and opportunity into Laziness gets a really bad rap. Laziness has been stereotyped, and we’re too lazy the hands of the mighty few. It is a system of exclusion whereby spurious claims to challenge the misconceptions that have it wrongly misconstrued. Why focus on of artistic excellence are used to justify totally weird decision-making. your productivity, when being unfocused is the more creative choice? Most people bounce from one novel distraction to the next, performing jobs that don’t really Laziness is intrinsically associated with poverty and failure. There is a presump- need to be performed. Doing nothing is just for holidays. tion that poor people are lazy, no matter how hard they actually work. Instead of talking about casualised workforces, the ‘precariate’ (the precarious proletariat), Many jobs serve no real purpose. In his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David under-employment, wage stagnation and wage theft, mainstream conversation Graeber, anthropologist and professor at the London School of Economics, is dominated by talk of dole bludgers. It’s textbook victim blaming: non-achievers develops his idea that there are fve basic types of bullshit jobs.1 These are most fail because they haven’t tried hard enough. It’s lazy not to consider how the prevalent in sectors that include public relations, human resources, academic corrupted systems we attempt to exist within leave most people failing. and health administration, telemarketing, corporate law, fnancial services and the arts industry.

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You can tell who the flunkies are because they excitedly follow the boss around, Be inert and indifferent, study idleness, save yourself the bother and outsource making them feel as important as they are. Rich, powerful men and women have your work to some other poor sucker. Swap independence for dysfunctional always surrounded themselves with entourages of underlings, paid to enable the co-dependence, and then there’s someone else to blame. Fall guys are invaluable, boss to be the very best boss they can be. Flunkies are often younger members and they’re why artistic collaboration is so popular. of the ruling class, learning the ropes on their ascent to, one day, being the boss themselves. Flunkies are privy to many of the dubious decisions being made in One of the many appeals of being an artist is that it doesn’t necessarily get better the name of progress, so a key characteristic of an efficient funky is knowing when the harder you work. Sometimes it gets decidedly worse: over-laboured, over- to keep their trap shut. Which is always. conceptualised—the spontaneity and life literally laboured out of it. Sometimes, even as you’re doing something, creating something, you’re not sure what you’re Duct tapers work to make two systems that don’t work together, work together. doing. This manner of making is in direct opposition to those artists who design Duct tapers fx problems that shouldn’t exist but have most probably been created a successful rarefed commodity and continue to churn it out until it is no longer by senior employees. Duct tapers clean up others’ messes. Within heteronormative in fashion. nuclear families, the mother often orders the chaos, soothes the egos, calms the nerves and fnds solutions to the problems created by the father. I choose to work as an artist. If I wanted to be a professional I would have gotten a real job. Being an artist isn’t a real job; it’s more like a real joke. I can’t be Box tickers create work to prove to everyone that something is happening—even more professional until someone pays me properly. There’s a problem to this if not much is happening. For instance, large organisations produce in-house logic, but I’m too lazy to challenge my own brain and change my mind. magazines and online video content supposedly to keep audiences informed. This shiny, glossy content more often serves to provide senior executives with the I do take my art career seriously. I work diligently between 10am and 2pm three warm cosy feelings of workplace pride they so crave. days a week before downing tools from the sheer strain of it all. The physical and psychological exhaustion involved in pretending to nourish a burgeoning art Taskmasters create work for other people to do, and then they oversee the work. career can get the better of you. Each afternoon I take a well-earned nap. Sleep Often the work would get done regardless of the boss overseeing it, but don’t tell is the simplest, cheapest and most effective way to drastically improve your them that because they’ll get really pissed. quality of life. Most workers are too busy, too professional, too ambitious to factor into their days the type of sleep durations I take for granted. Twelve hours Goons are confdent extroverts born with the gift of the gab. Goons work to grow each night and a two-hour power nap most afternoons: that’s the secret to my the business that employs them, through sheer force. If the goons didn’t exist we’d stalled art career. Sleep results in razor-sharp receptiveness to facial cues. This be better for it but their numbers keep multiplying regardless. Soldiers, telemar- comes in handy when I’m meeting with a curator who doesn’t like me or my work, keters, lobbyists, think-tank employees, public relations departments, corporate but doesn’t mind wasting my time. Then I can wrap up the whole meeting super- lawyers, private-sponsor-relationship advisors are all goons. fast by pretending I’ve another, super-important, super-exciting commitment to attend. Hard work (even when it serves no real purpose) is romanticised. Hard work is intrinsically linked to virtue and the Church, and we don’t believe in all that Devoted sleep regimes come in handy in other ways too. The well-rested have make-believe God crap. Why not investigate pessimism, vice, apathy and despon- an increased ability to handle problems—like the big problem of calling yourself dency instead? Resist making plans, because chances are they won’t work out. an artist when you can’t get an art exhibition. That problem takes some very

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creative thinking to work through. Artists do have the capacity to create their My personal motto is: work less and sleep more. Listen to your body’s natural own platforms through which to present their creative impulses, but most don’t. rhythms and go to bed and stay there. The overall cognitive performance of people Most artists are too busy becoming institutionalised to think outside institution- who indulge all their sleep impulses is enhanced. alised boxes. Sleep, Sleep Deprivation and the Rise and Rise of Endurance Performance I used to spend a disproportionate amount of my time trying to maintain the Sleep deprivation is a torture technique everywhere except in the art scene. illusion of being a ‘professional artist’. I was always busy applying for art prizes, In the arts, sleep deprivation is lauded. Hans Ulrich Obrist doesn’t sleep: too exciting exhibition opportunities and government funding only for it to end badly, professional, too committed, too ambitious, he is, to program sufficient shut-eye with heart-wrenching, soul-destroying rejections. I was trapped in an endless into his daily schedule. In H.U.O.’s hands, sleep becomes a signifer of the weak- cycle pregnant with possibilities but without fxed realities. I was always thinking willed, the half-hearted and the lazy, rather than a daily necessity. If everyone into the future, explaining now what I wanted to do next year, if my application worked as long and hard as H.O.U. and Marina Abramović we could all be that was successful. It was doing my head in. The system puts the cart before the horse successful. and it was stymieing my creativity. Now I know my best work is more impulsive, more spontaneous, just like me. Justifying to boards and panels of ‘leading Obrist’s favourite word is ‘urgent’. The basis of his brand as an uber-curator of industry professionals’ why my project might be a better bet than my peers’, repute is that he doesn’t sleep—too busy travelling across international time that’s emotional work. I got sick of explaining to everyone how good I was only zones collecting the unfinished or unrealised dream projects of artists and to be assured that, no, you’re not that good after all: ‘We received record number cultural fgures, and then sharing them with followers on his Instagram feed. of applicants of a very high calibre this funding round. Unfortunately, on this H.U.O.’s job is in deciding who is hot and who is not. As he travels, meeting and occasion your project has been unsuccessful in attracting funding. We wish you interviewing artists, he records these interviews so nothing is lost, later becoming every success with future projects.’ books. There are 45 volumes of interviews, 200 published catalogues accompany- ing exhibitions, and Obrist’s compendium, aptly titled dontstopdontstopdontstop.2 I no longer submit. I don’t care for begging. Now, I use all the energy I’d wasted In 2006, H.U.O. founded the Brutally Early Club, a meeting of other possessed in applying to be an artist on being an artist. I’ve created the space I need to leading industry professionals who conduct meetings at 6.30am. He has organised build a healthier relationship with the process of making art. Without all the a program of 24-hour seminars in London’s Hyde Park, discussing all manner submitting I used to do, I’ve time to burn. It took me ages to work it out, to jump of art-related thinking. Not all of the sessions were well attended. Following the off the treadmill of my own ambition and reframe what success might look like for 2006 marathon seminar, Obrist had to check himself in to the hospital to recover. me—what it might feel like. I had to undo a good deal of what I’d been taught about That’s how competitive it is being a world-famous curator today. being a professional artist. Making art is enough of a job. Now, I’m a better artist. Poorer, sure, more unprofessional, yes, but I’ve bought back my time and my If we don’t sleep we can’t dream. Endurance performance is so hot right now. It’s independence and I’m free now to follow my instincts and impulses. I concentrate a trend through which artists and arts professionals can differentiate themselves on saying and doing whatever I like. There’s nothing like the threat of looking from their peers/competitors, with well-publicised, lengthy public demonstra- stupid to challenge one’s inherent knack for laziness. That’s the best thing about tions of enhanced dedication to their ‘craft’. Endurance performance aligns with work deadlines. The worst thing about deadlines is how they change art from neoliberalism in that suffering is elevated into an art form. The media loves it being something you want and choose to do for yourself into something you’re and so do the other bosses. Artists stay up all night and all day, performing their not getting paid enough to do for other people. performance to illustrate their resolve to succeed against all odds, no matter the personal cost. Yawn.

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Marina Abramović loves endurance performance, and everyone loves Marina. In my work Man Cleaning Up (2017–18), I appropriated the iconic series We love her success. We hang on her every word, even when they’re not that good. Maintenance Art Works (1969–80) by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, especially her ‘Artists should suffer for their art’, proclaims Marina from the tranquility of washing of the staircase at Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Connecticut her New York loft apartment, high above reality. She inficts pain on herself, her in 1973. My work is an act of homage, but updated to deal with women’s frustration performers and her audiences, but there are so many flashbulbs going off every at working harder for less money than everyone else. Whereas Ukeles performed where that Marina goes that nobody notices that a rich famous woman performing menial tasks such as cleaning the stairs outside a museum, I thought, well, I’m too pain might be a bit weird. Getting famous performing pain is even weirder. lazy for that; I’ll suggest to men that if they want to be feminists they perform my Celebrity is funny in that it trumps logic. Celebrity is emotive and emotions are performance for me. My work took the form of a ‘Help Wanted’ advert: not always rational. – Are you a white man born to a privilege you didn’t ask for? Marina Abramović has commodifed contemplation. In Marina’s hands contem- – Have you assumed power because you never questioned you’d have it? plation becomes a spectator sport. Five-hundred-thousand people stood in line – Are you a boss who earns an embarrassing amount more than your for Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective, The Artist Is Present. The audience dedicated female-dominated workforce? [Women continue to be paid waited for the chance to sit across from the artist (who was present) and commu- a signifcant amount less than men but the pay gap is narrowing.] nicate with her non-verbally. Everyone was very excited. People are the ultimate – Are you a man feminist wanting to work towards gender equality but spectacle. A type of media-led hysteria surrounded The Artist Is Present, fed by don’t know where to start? the public’s appetite for what Andy Warhol long ago identified as everyone’s – Are you tired of being emotionally complicit in maintaining a status quo 15 minutes of fame. that works for the few but not the many? – Are you a beneficiary of the unpaid and underpaid labour of women? Once the rent is covered, people don’t spend money when they’re sleeping. [Women are still disadvantaged by the amount of unpaid housework The push towards 24-hour cities—cities that never sleep, cosmopolitan cities, they do.] the sophistication of accessing anything you want at all hours of the day or night— – Do you want to confront cultural norms and help clean up the mess is peak neoliberalism. Sleep should not disrupt the economy. that is gender discrimination? THEN I’VE GOT A JOB FOR YOU! Appropriation is the basis of much culture. At its core, appropriation wilfully complicates the complexities in and around intellectual property and ‘fair use’ Man Cleaning Up is a durational performance work. The real work of this laws. The reason I like appropriation is because it’s easier to build on existing work is about who can be convinced to address their privilege by dressing excellence than to start from scratch. And art historical precedence tells us it’s in a hi-vis vest (so we won’t miss this small public gesture), getting down OK, which is considerate. Why think up your own original idea when you can on your hands and knees and scrubbing the foor clean. just riff off someone else’s? Are there original ideas even left anymore? Or is that a flawed premise on which to begin? Does a belief in originality merely Each shift will be 30 minutes, unless you really were born to rule, at which reveal that the maker hasn’t yet become acquainted with the relevant art- point you might like to commit to a longer stretch of grunt work, but I’ll historical thread? leave that up to you. You will not be required to speak, but to reflect on gender politics within society today and how we can work together for more equitable life outcomes. Like many gender role expectations, sexism

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is a problem left to women to solve. Dissolving sexism in turn becomes to the complexities of a Westfield Shopping Complex. Improvisational, collabo- more unpaid labour for women. We’re sick of solving problems men rational, durational, relational, locational, the ‘shopping-for-art-at-the-art-fair- beneft from. artwork’ is the dominant performance work of our times. And critically important WHO’S IN? AND THANKS IN ADVANCE. work it is, too: the performance of culture as it is hollowed out, commodified and rendered meaningless plays out before our very eyes. You buy a ticket to watch. My artistic career is a vanity project. I still pay to play. When I was a disillusioned woman in my 40s, I liked to kid myself that value in art is assigned as arbitrarily Art fairs sell the idea that you can buy class, and let’s face it, art provides a quieter as purchasing the winning ticket in a chook raffle down the local RSL club. Now I sense of luxury than a Ferrari. You can buy class now. It’ll cost you a motsa but it’s know that is a lie that artists rely on to justify not selling shit. tax deductible.

The Idle Rich Are Lazy but You Can’t Tell Them That Because You’re too Busy As an idea for sustaining an artistic career, selling art to eager investors is a real Trying to Sell Them Your Art goer. The chances of success might even be better than entering government Art fairs are speed-dating-style retail-shopping events for time-poor art lovers. funding lotteries. At art fairs, gallerists are the store managers, gallerinas are the For those at the top of the wealth spectrum, for whom time is scarcer than money, shop assistants, attractive and well-coiffed to a fault; on entering their shops, art fairs provide excellent bang for buck; you can see an awful lot of merchandise I mean booths, you are surreptitiously sized up for your potential spending power. quickly before hitting the check-out. Art fairs are spreading fast. We didn’t even Just like at Gucci. The business of art fairs is in how they elevate art to an alterna- know there were enough punters buying art to justify the spread of art fairs, but tive asset for wealthy individuals looking for asset protection and diversifcation, art fairs reckon there is. Art fairs collect rich art collectors. as well as for emotional and social returns on investment. Bless.

I love art and I love shopping, so you’d think I’d love art fairs. Back in the days There’s no better place to see the creative industries’ numerous stakeholders when I was still trying to grow up, Mum, Gran and I would hit a shopping centre working out their private–public partnerships than at an art fair. These exciting every Thursday night for a dose of quality family time in a retail setting. Even relationships play like a scene from District 12 in The Hunger Games. All our key when we didn’t have two bob between us, we’d still get all dolled up and religiously industry professionals from cash-strapped arts organisations around the nation stride round Toombul or Chermside, occasionally even venturing over to fly into the art fair host city to go shopping: the major institutions; the minor Indooroopilly to lust after all the things we couldn’t afford to buy. Then we’d institutions; the award-winning architects, who think they are artists or have round out our cultural evening with dinner at the food court, piling mountains been commissioned to design the next exciting new museum extension or of all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet onto plastic plates, a careful balancing act ‘house museum’; the commercial galleries; the collectors; the Eftpos machines; back to the table without a spill, then returning home sated like the committed the university thinkers, educators and stalwarts; the publishers and printers; consumers we aspired to be. the developers; the art-transport providers; the wine sponsors and other benefac- tors. Artists, conveniently cast by this behemoth industry as charity cases (rather At art fairs it’s hard to look through the performance of people shopping for than as the primary producers on which the whole industry/circus is based), art to see the actual art. But then maybe that’s ok. Most art at art fairs isn’t any we’re there too, dressed in our Sunday fnest, eyes expectantly scanning for those good anyway. And maybe shopping for art is art, a performance artwork of the who might fall for us and what we do. highest order. This work paints (in broad, expressive brushstrokes) a self- portrait of a cultural sector that’s feigning confdence, as it edges ever closer

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Risk plays centre stage. Commercial galleries double down on the rent they (and very lucky) then we want to get to know the ‘real person’ behind the already pay to sustain their galleries, investing in exorbitant art-booth real estate. character. Off-screen actors perform versions of ‘themselves’, or perform the role It’s a pay-to-play scheme where even the shoppers, I mean art collectors, pay to of how others see them, because how other people see them will affect their future shop. What a circus. career of pretending to be other people. Actors are at the forefront of creating and maintaining illusion, an act that can so easily slip into delusion. This is what Sure, there’s an art in backing a winning horse (I mean artist), when so many retire I learned from Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher, along with how much lame each season. You can tell how well dealers are selling by the extent to which I revere bravery in artists. their usual demeanour of carefully controlled boredom morphs into chirpiness. If a dealer starts ruminating on ‘covering costs’ you know they haven’t sold shit. Naomi Klein said that in the future we will all be brands.3 And we are. We’re all now very busy creating, maintaining and developing our own brands. Through The commercial imperative has morphed arts journalism into advertorial. Not a social media we construct, represent and manage our self-image, performing our critical word is afforded. Arts writing works so effusively, hard selling us the idea self for our followers. We share ‘our self’ with our friends, colleagues, acquain- that everything is very exciting now, that you’re left wondering where’s the knob tances and strangers, even when they don’t ask us to. We feed the ever-hungry to turn the bullshit down? Arts journalism has absorbed the ‘don’t judge me’ vibe image machine, even when it’s not hungry for us. Maybe now, like actors such as so beloved of teenagers. Criticism is cast as an unnecessary downer: ‘them haters Carrie Fisher, we act out versions of our self in public for ‘our public’. On a good always be hating’. Criticism, though, is the basis of a healthy culture. day this is fne, but on a bad day it can feel like you’re dangling from the edge— attempting to manage the pressures of typecasting, pigeonholing, stereotyping Postcards from the Edge and misreading of our private/public selves. Potential has a shelf life. There’s something terribly romantic about thwarted possibility and budding promise amounting to nothing and turning to ruin. Through writing, Carrie Fisher graduated from the psychological prison of being Audiences have always been hungry to watch the demise of talent. Many a cultural typecast by the preconceptions of others. There are few artists brave enough to icon’s appeal is based on what could have been but never was (because of the fast give audiences access to the ‘backstage’ of their human frailties, failures and fears. car/cocktail of drugs/vomit). Creative genius struck down in its prime; that’s But this is the fodder of so much of celebrity culture, gossip columns and women’s a whole art movement and a couple of subcultural genres. magazines. The public has an insatiable desire to know about famous people’s struggles, and perhaps through their stories we contextualise and act out our own. Don’t worry if you’ve become self-absorbed. So has everyone else. We live now in the Great Age of the Individual, each of us isolated within our own screens. It’s a I’m Looking Around for Women Writing Their Own Parts dog-eat-dog world, and competition is reframed as a motivational tool bringing Art is a funny game. Often, it’s not in the least bit funny and there is reluctance in out the best in us all, one ‘like’ at a time. even calling it a game. Now it’s called a creative industry. But art is a game, not so much in its making (that’s work) but in the opaque process of who gets a gig and ‘It’s a disease of critics that once they’ve labelled someone, it’s very hard to change who doesn’t. You can call that either a game or a circus. their perspective. It’s laziness’, says Michael Haneke. Laziness is linked to ideas about failed potential, but how can you ever know what I like to think about the art of acting because I think most of us are acting. An you’re ever really capable of? Think more about what you could do, but do less. actor’s work is to pretend to be other people. If an actor is any good at acting Make kicking back and editing out the superfluous noise a big part of each day. That’s your ‘A’ game.

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1 David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs; A Theory, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2018.

2 Hans Ulrich Obrist, dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop, Sternberg, Berlin, 2006.

3 Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies, Knopf, Toronto, 2000.

96 Like a Rug on Valium: Homer Simpson, Georges Bataille, and Excessive Laziness

Eva Bujalka Like a Rug on Valium

In season seven, episode two of The Simpsons, titled ‘Radioactive Man’, a Hollywood production company comes to the town of Springfield to film the long-awaited Radioactive Man movie. Bart and his schoolfriends eagerly audition for the coveted role of Fallout Boy, horses are painted as dairy cows because, apparently, cows don’t look like cows on flm, and -parody-character Rainier Wolfcastle fails to learn how to articulate Radioactive Man’s catchphrase, ‘up and atom!’. Amid this, Homer Simpson meets his match in laziness. Just off set, Homer comes across a troupe of flm teamsters leaning against the side of the truck, smok- ing and drinking coffee. With child-like glee, Homer tells the teamsters: ‘I always wanted to be a teamster. So lazy and surly.’ The teamsters and Homer then take turns at out-lazing each other, stretching, yawning and reclining to such an ex- treme that, collectively, they eventually slide to the ground in a writhing mess of satisfied groans and flexing limbs. Though this is a scene that contributes little to the plot of the episode, it nevertheless says something significant about the specific nature of Homer Simpson’s laziness and, I argue, the laziness of a text like The Simpsons. What is funny about this scene is not merely the show’s cynical wink at the flm industry, nor Homer’s or the teamsters’ attempts at ‘outdoing’ each other in their displays of laziness. Rather, what is curious about this scene is the paradoxical excess of energy that seems to underpin the laziness—across a lengthy 23 seconds we see the characters’ increasingly active efforts to yawn louder, stretch deeper and recline more fully. For Homer and the teamsters, it is, paradoxically, a very ‘active’ thing to be lazy. It is this paradox of laziness—what I refer to as both The Simpsons’ and Homer Simpson’s ‘manic laziness’—that is the central problematic of this chapter. While we might typically assume that laziness and an excess of energy are utterly incompatible, incommensurable, and entirely separate phenomena, I propose that both The Simpsons as text and Homer Simpson as a character undermine this typical division of laziness and excess energy.

In making this case, I approach the work of psychoanalyst Josh Cohen. In his 2019 book, Not Working: Why We Have to Stop, Cohen proposes that Homer Simpson is the ‘slobbish’ response to overworked exhaustion in our times.1 Over the course of his book, Cohen examines numerous pop-culture texts and icons (among them, Homer Simpson, Garfeld, Snoopy and the ‘Dude’ Lebowski) that actively eschew work in the pursuit of slobbishness, slackerdom and daydreaming. In his chapter titled ‘The Slob’, Cohen makes the observation that Homer Simpson’s charact- eristic laziness can be understood through the thought of 20th-century French

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philosopher Georges Bataille. Specifcally, Cohen proposes that Homer’s compul- Even today, as the it moves through its 30th season—15 or even 20 seasons too sive overindulgence in Duff Beer and Lard Lad Donuts, and his revelling in what many for a certain Simpsons fan demographic—the show persist as an undeniably Dr Nick might refer to as couch-bound ‘assal horizontology’, variously make an lazy text. Of course, calling the show ‘lazy’ today might seem an oxymoron, espe- example of Bataille’s theories of expenditure, sovereignty and formlessness. In cially given the series, since season 20, has been produced in HD, its illustrations what follows, I will take my point of departure from Cohen, who has set up a novel are crisper than ever before, its celebrity and guest appearances are more prolifc, and productive way of reading Homer’s slobbishness through Bataille’s thought. and even the show’s depictions of violence have been curtailed—Homer is no While Cohen explains the paradox of Homer’s manic laziness as characteristic of longer allowed to be depicted strangling his son. My calling the show a ‘lazy’ text, the cartoon medium (for instance, Homer’s ability to have had almost every job as Josh Cohen has likewise referred to the show (and cartoons generally) as ‘slob- imaginable despite his slobbishness and disinclination to work), I want to suggest bish’, is not a judgement of the very real time, energy and efforts that are put in by instead that Homer’s manic laziness is congruent with Bataille’s theory of ‘general the show’s scriptwriters, voice actors, illustrators and production team. If anything, economy’—a theory that provides a crucial revision of the ways we typically think across its 30 seasons, The Simpsons has been visually ‘cleaned up’ and ‘tightened’, about energy. Further, where Cohen focuses predominantly on Homer Simpson as and moral panic about the series has all but died. Indeed, The Simpsons might a pop-culture icon that offers a slobbish response to contemporary work politics, broadly be regarded as wholly innocuous today; if Bart is still disobedient, if Homer I contend that it is also the very series The Simpsons that offers a signifcant is still lazy then their disobedience or laziness are somehow ineffectual or have response to our everyday assumptions about laziness and work. become absurd rather than dangerous to viewers.

The Simpsons is an undeniably lazy text. Indeed, the moral panic that surrounded It is curious, for this reason, that among the series’ fanbase there persists a the show in its early years was very much bound up with anxieties about the sort reverence for roughly only one-third of the series. Episodes beyond season eight of laziness and slackerdom that the series appeared to celebrate. For many of us, are broadly regarded as being somehow intrinsically different to, and somehow The Simpsons was a show that filled our parents and our teachers with dread, diluted and less ‘funny’ than, the stories, styles and conventions that made up or it was a series for which they harboured a certain kind of suspicion or disdain, the ‘golden era’ of The Simpsons—broadly understood as seasons three to eight, and to which they may have attempted to limit our access because of its focus on though this ranges depending on fan site, with seasons two to 15 occasionally still the exploits of a disobedient, smart-mouth boy, Bart, and his lazy and abusive acceptable. Online, you will find all sorts of fan theories that explain when and father, Homer. As children, we might have been told that The Simpsons was why The Simpsons ‘died’ or ‘lost its way’—for instance, Charlie Sweatpants from crude or a bad infuence, that it was poorly illustrated (as Cohen says, the show the fan site Dead Homer Society proposes that today the series is something of a is steeped in what Lisa Simpson might call a ‘dumbening’ yellow, urinal glow),2 lazier text than it was before, insofar as it is ‘a hollow shell, over animated, under or that it was flled with too much bad language and violence. It was a series that thought’.5 In a book-length Dead Homer Society series of posts, collectively titled our parents, like Marge Simpson, may have felt created ‘a dangerous amount of ‘Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead’, laughter’ and that prompted a frightening re-examination of the imperative of Sweatpants proposes that since the year 2000, new episodes of The Simpsons have academic success. After all, what responsible parent of the early 1990s would effectively come to make up a series that can no longer be calledThe Simpsons but want their child to wear an ‘Underachiever and proud of it’ Bart Simpson T-shirt should instead be understood as ‘Zombie Simpsons’. to school?3 And then who can forget the now-famous denunciations that both the 41st president of the United States, the late George H.W. Bush, and his wife, That is, while the series still superfcially looks and sounds the same as the pre- the late Barbara Bush, levelled against the show—such a threat, as they saw it, to 2000 episodes, these ‘zombie’ episodes are, by contrast, ‘blandly forgettable’.6 the foundations of the wholesome, proactive and productive modern American Indeed, while there is nothing intrinsically wrong with bland or forgettable family?4

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television, for Sweatpants there is something disheartening about the new of the hundreds of variations of ‘Steamed Hams’), Simpsons memes (‘So you’ve episodes’ relationship to what the series once was: ‘The only thing that makes ruined your life’, ‘Owning your Okayness’ and ‘Everything’s coming up Zombie Simpsons exceptional’, Sweatpants says, ‘is its illustrious predecessor, Milhouse!’), unofficial and often short-lived onlineSimpsons apparel stores The Simpsons’.7 Among Sweatpants’ speculations about the problems with current (think, Best Damn Pet Shop or The 33 Cent Store),10 to the huge numbers of episodes are inversions in the comedic stylings of the show, the emergence of a Simpsons podcasts (among the best include Talking Simpsons and Everything’s cruel-and-stupid rather than redeemable-and-stupid Homer Simpson (ironically, Coming Up Simpsons). the inception of a non-Bart-strangling Homer has given way to a crueller father and character in Homer), and the show’s focus on producing cheap gags even There is something of a mystery, then, about why The Simpsons, which has, for at the risk of overlooking episode plot holes. Still others have proposed that the so many fans, clearly sucked for quite a while is nevertheless still so culturally series died when it became ‘patronising’ to its audience. Consider, for example, signifcant today. Is it that we are merely nostalgic for the good old—‘don’t have Entertain the Elk’s video ‘The Day The Simpsons Died’, which proposes that a cow, man!’—days of The Simpsons, or is it instead that the very laziness and The Simpsons undermined its audience in an inexcusable way in its season nine slackerdom that these earlier episodes celebrated continues to be meaningful episode ‘The Principal and the Pauper’, in which Seymour Skinner is revealed to for us today? While it may seem paradoxical, I argue that it is nevertheless ftting be an imposter, or was unnecessarily cruel to its characters. Or consider Mike that the very fan hatred of the later seasons has afforded the golden era seasons Zanna’s Dead Homer Society post ‘The Day the Laughter Died’, which documents something of a legendary status. Like Bart capturing the exact moment that Ralph the ways that Homer has become ‘more of a jerk’ as the series has continued.8 Wiggum’s heart broke on national television, Simpsons fans have tried to capture Zanna contends that in later seasons Homer’s character has developed into some- exactly what it is that makes the newer episodes quite as bad as they are in light thing particularly puerile and downright mean—this is an incarnation of Homer of the earlier seasons. Today, Simpsons merchandise continues to take up the that Zanna proposes is most clearly identifable in the season 11 episode ‘Alone lazy and slacker sentiments that made Bart and Homer such ‘bad’ role models Again, Natura-Diddily’, when Homer inadvertently (though also callously) brings in the early seasons, and Simpsons shitposting and memes, which draw almost about Maude Flanders’ death. Across the Dead Homer Society site and No Homers exclusively from these early episodes, are, I would hazard, more entertaining Club message boards this transformation in Homer, from a character who was than new episodes of The Simpsons. For many of us who were children in the once stupid but well-meaning, lousy but endearing, to now culpable but uncaring, 1990s and early 2000s, The Simpsons likely gave us a way of thinking about the nasty and zany, ridiculous and idiotic, has come to be popularly known as ‘Jerk- critical potential of laziness and slackerdom as a response to authority and Ass Homer’.9 obligation (say, to our teachers, to our homework), and it continues to function as an important way of responding, as Cohen has suggested in his reading of Homer Despite a huge proportion of the fanbase broadly recognising only the frst eight Simpson, to overwork and precarious employment today. Rather than our current or so seasons as ‘true’ Simpsons, and despite claims that the series, in its later re-engagement with The Simpsons golden era being only bound up with a kind of seasons, has ‘died’ or become ‘undead’, the series has maintained ongoing lazy nostalgia, perhaps there continues to be something signifcant in the show’s popularity. Clearly, Simpsons nostalgia, specifically for the early seasons, ability to bring into relief, to satirise and to problematise enduring power relations is booming, and we are saturated by reproductions and re-engagements with that we were very much beholden to as children and that we remain beholden to the show across various online platforms. One of the central points of this as adults. Think of our subordination to either teachers/school or bosses/work, re-engagement is, undoubtedly, our enjoyment of The Simpsons as a lazy text, and our perhaps begrudging commitment to our responsibilities, and our being urged to this end we reproduce and revel in The Simpsons as lazy through our own lazy to be productive, active, health-conscious members of society. As a lazy response to means. Consider the proliferation of Simpsons shitposting (we need only think our various obligations, we may want nothing more than, like Homer Simpson,

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to fatten ourselves on the couch with a bag of chips at one side, a six-pack of beers Charles Montgomery Burns’ illegitimate heir. Larry, a lazy-oaf failson (voiced by at the other, watching reruns of our favourite show onscreen. the inimitable Rodney Dangerfeld) who enjoys nothing more than sleeping and drinking, regales Homer with the extent of his laziness: ‘Lazy? You’re not kidding. Whatever our engagement with the series as a lazy text—as one that we can enjoy I’m like a rug on Valium. I’m talking lazy’. When he realises that his father does nostalgically or through something of a critical and repetitive re-engagement— not respect his laziness, Larry confdes in Homer, who tells him that the only way it necessarily prompts a reconsideration of one of the central contradictions that to get his father to love him is to stage a phony kidnapping. Larry, who initially underpins the series’ depiction of laziness in both its earlier and later seasons. rebuffs Homer’s idea, tells him that he needs to clean up his act, and that he I refer specifcally, to what may be called the manic laziness of Homer Simpson. intends to begin working harder, slacking-off less and that he will quit booze. It may seem an unnecessary, even a self-evident question, but: Is Homer Simpson The next scene, however, Mr Burns receives a letter: ‘your son has been kidnapped’. lazy? If we may say without doubt that he is, how, then, as Cohen has also asked, Similarly, it makes far greater sense to Homer to lazily engage with problem- might we account for the seeming disparity between Homer’s characteristic solving. Who of us, in school, were told not to rock on our chairs? Why? we might laziness and the fact that he has had nearly every job imaginable? Is it, as Cohen have asked. Our teachers may have given us any number of reasons: because it is proposes, that Homer, like characters in other cartoons, is, within the realm of dangerous, because it could damage the chair, and, inexplicably, because it is lazy. fction, able to shed the mantle of physical reality? Where the Road Runner can Who then but Homer Simpson might fnd a solution that allows us to maintain escape into a painted backdrop which solidifes back into a painting when Wile this very laziness? Homer Simpson, the laziest inventor of all time, who invents E. Coyote tries to catch him, Homer Simpson, by the very nature of the cartoon items that nobody asked for and that nobody would even accept as a gift, so Marge world, is able to do nothing more than sleep, watch TV and overindulge in beer tells him in season 10, episode two, ‘The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace’. Homer, and donuts, and yet also tour with the Smashing Pumpkins, be shot into space as who invents a make-up gun that takes the form of a two-barrel shotgun that an astronaut, work as a marriage celebrant, win a Grammy with his barbershop is designed, for application purposes, to shoot a woman in the face. This same quartet, own and operate a hair salon, become a distinguished conceptual artist, Homer invents his most ingenious device as a response to his having lazily rocked run as powerplant union leader, secretly operate as a prohibition-era beer baron, and fallen out of his chair too many times—a second pair of chair legs that are apparently (according to Marge) start a detective agency, captain a monorail, work attached by hinges to the back of the chair. as a food reviewer, become an attendant at the Kwik-E-Mart, invent the ugliest and most expensive car imaginable, coach the kids’ local football team, invent Homer’s characteristic laziness is, evidently, more than just indolence or sloth. a variety of offensive and useable Edisonian devices and be elected Springfield’s While he clearly enjoys being immobile, asleep, inert, his laziness is also, paradox- sanitation commissioner, all while somehow maintaining his ongoing position as ically, very much underpinned by an excess of energy. Indeed, it might be possible a nuclear safety inspector. For Cohen, ‘Homer embodies the fundamental affinity to read Homer’s laziness, his active rejection of all forms of work, as incredibly between the slob and the cartoon—the fantasy that you can do anything without active, where such a rejection of work ironically often culminates in Homer’s having to do anything’.11 Yet, I believe that Homer’s laziness is not quite, as Cohen completion of work—but just not the right kind of work, and through his having has suggested, not doing anything. done things the ‘wrong’ way. Consider Homer’s complaining to Moe, when he is urged to compose a catchy motto to underscore his position as candidate for Homer’s laziness, I propose, is curiously active—curious in that it makes far greater sanitation commissioner in season nine, episode 22, ‘Trash of the Titans’: ‘Can’t sense to Homer to go to the effort of staging a phony kidnapping than to commit someone else do it?’—a phrase that, again ironically, becomes his catchphrase more time, attention and energy to work. In season eight, episode four, ‘Burns, as sanitation commissioner and underpins the very waste-collection services he Baby Burns’, Homer befriends Larry Burns, Springfeld nuclear powerplant owner boasts (which, invariably fall apart when he blows his yearly budget in a month

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and trashes Springfield). Or, we might think of Homer’s remarkable ability to constitute Homer Simpson’s manic laziness—are not mutually exclusive but procure a bowl of dip from the far end of a table without his having to get up to rather have more in common than we may initially think. collect it—this specifc scene, in season eight, episode 12, ‘Mountain of Madness’, depicts Homer and Mr Burns reclined at one end of a long table, exhausted after a The general economy is, among other things, Bataille’s study of the fow of energy day of hiking, hungry but too lazy to get up to eat. ‘Why get up to get food?’ Homer (it is also, to this end, a study of political economy and wealth, as its very name asks. Homer then demonstrates to Mr Burns a little move he has been ‘tinkering suggests). What is perhaps most immediately arresting and seemingly counter- with’, where he hammers his foot against the table with such force that the bowl intuitive about Bataille’s theory of general economy is the reversal that underpins of dip bounces into his reach. What makes this scene funny is not simply that his very understanding of energy. Through his theory of general economy, Bataille Homer, despite his ability to maintain a near full-body recline, is able to get the rejects the standards by which both thermodynamic laws of entropy and economic bowl of dip without getting up, but that the order of things—the ‘proper’ way of principles of scarcity have come to designate the problem of limits (in economics, doing things—is momentarily undercut and repositioned. Far from his laziness for instance, this might be the limitation of resources in contrast to the seeming being mere slothful indolence, Homer expends a far greater amount of energy in limitless desires of consumers). For Bataille, the general economy overturns the maintaining his recline than if he had got up to get his food, or done things the conventions of conservative economic theory or the ‘restricted economy’ because, ‘right’ way. unlike a restricted/conservative economy that is run on production, accumulat- ion and gain, his general economy is based on his Blakean conception of a non- The paradox that emerges from Homer’s and The Simpsons’ ‘manic laziness’ is returnable expenditure of excess energy—what he refers to as the ‘accursed share’.15 articulable through the life and work of philosopher Georges Bataille. Indeed, in his ‘Method of Meditation’ Bataille is bemused at what might be called his Bataille believed that the laws of the general economy extend from the natural own ‘manic laziness’. He says: ‘I see hardly anything in idleness (rather, I imagine world to human society. In the natural world there is an enormous amount I have an excess of vitality)’.12 Yet, as he continues, drawing on a memory of his of energy available to both individual organisms and to whole communities; school years: ‘I asked a fellow student who was the laziest in their studies? It specifcally, there is a superabundance of biochemical energy that is available to was me. But out of the whole school? Me again.’13 Bataille, who doodled in his the earth in the form of solar energy. ‘The origin and essence of our wealth’, he notebook, who could not complete his homework because he had not listened to says, ‘are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth— his teacher or written down their instructions, was, according to his biographer, without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving.’16 Living beings on Michel Surya, ‘a poor pupil, a fact he actually emphasises: he was lazy, and seemed earth receive this energy and make use of it for growth (both plants and animals almost proud of it’.14 Bataille was an underachiever, it seems, and, like Bart Simpson, alike). However, Bataille says that if an organism has reached maximum growth proud of it. But what can be said of the paradoxical way in which Bataille describes or is somehow limited in its growth then it must squander any excess energy.17 himself at school—as both lazy and yet ceaselessly active? While we may typically Thus, even solar energy cannot be used for entirely productive ends. When limits imagine a clear distinction between these two ways of being, and assume that it is of accumulation are met, any remaining energy must be spent, ‘willingly or not, impossible that the two are in any way related (that it is impossible that we can be gloriously or [else] catastrophically’.18 Indeed, Bataille argues that if a part of at once lazy and ‘have an excess of vitality’), such divisions, binaries and valuations energy (or wealth) could not be productively used up, it was far better to squander (where laziness is socially and morally repugnant and activity is a necessary good) or consume this ‘commodity’ without expecting any form of return, gain or profit. are thoroughly revised and revaluated in Bataille’s thought. It is for this reason This is why, for him, eroticism and laughter are understood as modes of unpro- that I propose it is through Bataille’s concept of general economy that we can ductive expenditure—they do not purposefully result in any return, insofar as begin to recognise the ways in which laziness and an excess of energy—which eroticism is concerned with pleasure rather than procreation, and laughter is

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an immediate body-jostling response to the absurd, the transgressive or the [T]he man of leisure destroys the products necessary for his subsistence impossible. In contrast, a restricted economy would not allow anything to ‘go no less fully than does fre ... We obtain the same result if we ingest a to waste’ or escape production and productivity, or, presumably, efficiency. substance, such as alcohol, whose consumption does not enable us to As he says, ‘the notion of a “general economy”’ has as its primary object, work more—or even deprives us, for a time, of our strength to produce. ‘the “expenditure” (the “consumption”) of wealth, rather than the production [Alcohol has] the advantage of consuming without return—without proft— [of wealth]’.19 To this end, Bataille proposes that ‘it is not necessity but its contrary, the resources that they use: they simply satisfy us; they correspond to the “luxury,” that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.’20 unnecessary choice that we make of them.22 This fundamental problem is an excess of energy rather than a scarcity of energy, and it is this excess of energy that is left over once a society (or even an individ- One may think here, of course, of Homer Simpson’s well-known frequenting Moe’s ual organism) has reached its maximum growth. This excess, volatile and wholly Tavern at the end of a lousy (though typically sleep-flled) work day, before he is unusable energy is what Bataille refers to as the ‘accursed share’. He proposes ready to face the responsibilities of family life at home. For Bataille, it is in the that in the past civilisations expended this ‘cursed’ excess of energy in often moments that we surrender to our desires, where we are briefy removed from our glorious, goalless, unproductive, wasteful pursuits that by necessity only resulted everyday state as workers, say, as nuclear safety inspectors, and where we become in loss. These forms of expenditure, he says, may have taken the frightful form worse workers through our consumption of alcohol, that we experience what he of, for instance, among the ancient Aztecs, ritual human sacrifce, or, among the calls a ‘sovereign moment’. In a footnote to his ‘Method of Meditation’, Bataille Tlingit or other Pacifc north-west groups, the ritualistic and ruinous gift-giving offers a clarifcation of his notion of sovereignty as it relates to the accursed share: ceremony of potlatch. While human sacrifice and even potlatch might seem, if ‘Sovereignty’, he tells us, ‘is this useless, senseless loss’ of excess energy, a loss not barbaric, at the very least absurd to us today—not least because we might see that is not bound up with ‘the slightest goal’, and this energy is lost ‘consequently these acts of violence as repugnant, but also because they seem so contrary to the without any meaning’.23 It is in the immediacy of these moments of intoxication apparent imperative to accumulate at all costs rather than squander any excess (and again, Bataille sees this same immediacy in eroticism and laughter) and our wealth21—Bataille argues that it is necessary to expend surplus (or excess) energy luxuriating in being unproductive that we momentarily glance an ‘outside’ to our luxuriously, and through eroticism, drunkenness, laughter and art, otherwise it lives as workers. Thus, for Bataille, ‘what is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present risks erupting into war and disorder. time without having anything else in view but the present time’.24 Bataille’s urging us to revel in the satisfaction of immediate material needs and desires outside Bataille’s concern with how we ought to expend this cursed energy is also bound of the sphere of commodity is a compelling attempt to challenge the very social up with his concern for how and why we spend so much of our time in waged system of work, which, day-in day-out, would have us believe we have committed labour, working. For Bataille, the expenditure of excess energy in these luxurious some moral or social error for, say, slacking off at work, or otherwise demand an formations—eroticism, laughter, drunkenness—cannot contribute to the necess- explanation for our wanting nothing more than to laze about. arily productive output of work because the squandering of energy through plea- sure and revelry can only ever lead to loss and not to accumulation. It is this The question of how Homer Simpson, despite his lassitude, his inertia, his sloth, ‘principle of loss’ that allows people to momentarily experience what Bataille his absolute laziness, has been able to have nearly every job imaginable—including, calls a ‘sovereign moment’. Bataille offers an example of this principle of loss— as well as those already listed, local vigilante, snow-plow driver, voice actor for or consumption without return—through an examination of a worker drinking Itchy & Scratchy character Poochie, and celebrated child carer—is, I argue, made a glass of wine or beer after a day at work: sensible through Bataille’s theory of general economy. Indeed, it is this super- abundance of energy that must be squandered ‘lazily’ or risk exploding into chaos,

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this ‘cursed energy’ or ‘accursed share’ that underpins Homer’s very manic constructs a phony religious holiday that he uses to get out of work. At Moe’s laziness. While often Homer’s overly energetic laziness results in some sort of Tavern he calls work and says: ‘I won’t be coming in tomorrow. Religious holiday’, absurd or impressive comic feat (for example, his stomping the bowl of dip from at which point he looks about the tavern for a name for his religious holiday. Too one end of the table to the other), it can, and has, in so many episodes nearly seen lazy to muster the effort to come up with a plausible name, even despite the energy Homer bringing about total nuclear destruction. Indeed, it is through Bataille’s he has mustered to develop a religion—a religion that nevertheless celebrates the theory of general economy that it is possible to glimpse Homer’s manic laziness unproductive squandering of energy—Homer, the man of leisure, drinking a beer, as a kind of paradoxical and volatile excess of energy that cannot be folded back goes for the slacker option and blithely takes up the name of an occupational health into a productive framework and that must be expended gloriously, goallessly and safety sign behind the bar: ‘Feast of … Maximum Occupancy’. and lazily. For instance, Homer may revel in the violent and absurd joy of having a bowling ball shot at his stomach, or relish in writhing on the ground with a In Not Working: Why We Have to Stop, Josh Cohen makes a curious note about troupe of burly film teamsters, trying to out-lazy each other. Yet, this same the ambivalent position of the ‘slob’ in our work-obsessed culture. As otherwise volatile excess of energy can very easily put Homer, his loved ones and the town harmless as the slob may seem, Cohen proposes that the slob possesses a remark- of Springfeld at risk of nuclear apocalypse. In fact, Homer’s manic laziness is, able ability to fill us with both resentment and disgust.26 It is fascinating that, while underpinned by an excess of energy, rarely destructive when it serves despite seemingly slack passivity, the slob is able to disrupt even our vainest further goalless, unproductive, luxuriating forms of laziness—again, when he is attempts at reassuring ourselves of the importance of an active, productive life— able to procure the bowl of dip at the far end of the table without having to get up. we need only think of Frank Grimes’s bewilderment, boiling over into rage, at Yet, when he deploys this same manic laziness at work—be it in his work as a beer Homer’s ‘good life’ despite his ‘lifetime of sloth and ignorance’.27 Tellingly, we may baron, as an astronaut, in inventing (unwittingly) the ugliest car imaginable, typically reject laziness or slobbishness as either childish or as some sort of a as sanitation commissioner or as nuclear safety inspector—his attempts at failure, even as we may nevertheless desire, in the way the slob embodies, a lack of returning this bubbling, unstable and unusable excess of energy to productive responsibility and a hostility for those who tell them to stop being lazy. As I have ends almost always nearly brings about utter chaotic destruction. argued, it is possible to rethink and revaluate the seeming disparity between lazi- ness and activity, not least as they paradoxically underpin a character like Homer In what may be the clearest example of Bataille’s theories of general economy Simpson, but also as we may typically assume the social value of one way of being and sovereignty, and indeed, what I would call the most Bataillean episode of over the other. To this end, I have argued that such a revaluation is articulable The Simpsons, season four, episode three, ‘Homer the Heretic’, Homer’s single act through Bataille’s theory of general economy, which offers a re-examination of the of skipping church one Sunday to sleep-in leads to his construction of a sui generis ways through which we might typically think of energy as scarce and limited, and religion that celebrates slacking off, lazing about and sumptuous meal-preparation ponders at the dangers of an energy that is superabundant and exceeds productive (that is, of Homer’s ‘patented space-age out-of-this-world moon waffles’).25 In the use. Indeed, Bataille’s concern with such divisions and valuations in the ways time that he could be dedicating himself to saving his soul, Homer instead channels we typically think about work and energy even inform his early essays such as his manic laziness into celebrating his own ‘religion’, by either dancing around the ‘The Big Toe’ and ‘The Language of Flowers’. In these essays, Bataille rethinks house in his underwear and sunglasses singing along to The Royal Teens’ ‘Short the seemingly obvious distinction between high and low, specifically between Shorts’, or kicking back on the sofa with cigar and a nudie magazine. In his most the human head and the big toe, and the head of the fower and its roots. In these committed to his religion, and in an instance that is not only deeply lazy but also essays Bataille proposes that, for the human, our uprightness, our ability to think employs this laziness as a means of momentarily escaping the world of work— and reason, is upheld by that which is rejected—the ugly big toe—while for the what might be called Homer’s momentary glimpse of ‘sovereignty’— Homer flower, for all the beauty of its bloom, this beauty is underpinned by its ugly,

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hairy roots.28 Rather than propose that we need merely to invert our disdain for 1 Josh Cohen, Not Working: Why We Have to Stop, Granta, London, 2019. the big toe or the roots of flowers, Bataille is fascinated by the fragility of such a 2 Cohen, p. 75. system of inclusion and exclusion. For Cohen, Bataille’s fascination of this fragile hierarchy and his revision of the ordered, uprightness of nature and of the human, 3 There are, in fact, a number of news articles from early 1990 that document the banning of Bart Simpson T-shirts at schools across the United States. See Randy Lewis, allows us to rethink our cultural exclusion of the downward-tending ‘slob’ who has ‘Let’s Give the Kids a Break on the Bart Simpson T-Shirts, OK?’, LA Times, 13 May 1990, surrendered to the couch. Homer’s laziness—and, indeed, our own ‘laziness’ in latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-13-ca-521-story.html; and Brian P. McEntee, slouching on the sofa, watching reruns of the golden era episodes of The Simpsons, ‘Controversy Over Bart Simpson: ‘Underachiever and Proud of it’, LA Times, while celebrated within the show itself (as, say, Homer stares blankly into the 24 May 1990, latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-24-f-534-story.html; reruns he watches on TV)—is largely excluded in our work-focused culture. This may both accessed 28 November 2019. be why, as Cohen says, the cartoon heroes of our childhoods, among them Homer 4 In January 1992, George H.W. Bush proposed, ‘We are going to keep on trying to Simpson, are ‘dissidents from the imperatives of productivity and purpose’.29 strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the We celebrated them as children, and may well continue to celebrate them as Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons’. James L. Brooks, ‘Bush vs Simpsons’, adults, for their lazy, slacker resistance to authority and the resounding demand in The Simpsons: The Complete Fourth Season [DVD]., 20th century Fox, 2004. that we work better, harder, smarter. See also, Yohana Desta, ‘Barbara Bush and Marge Simpson were Pen Pals in the 90s’, Vanity Fair, 19 April 2018, vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/barbara-bush-marge- simpson-letter; accessed 28 November 2019.

5 Charlie Sweatpants, ‘Dead Homer Society Manifesto’, Dead Homer Society, n.d., para. 2, deadhomersociety.com/manifesto; accessed 28 November 2019.

6 Charlie Sweatpants, ‘What Is Zombie Simpsons?’, Dead Homer Society, n.d., para. 1, deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs1; accessed 28 November 2019.

7 Sweatpants, ‘What Is Zombie Simpsons?’, para. 2.

8 Mike Zanna, ‘The Day the Laughter Died’, Dead Homer Society, 21 July 2014, deadhomersociety.com/2014/07/21/the-day-the-laughter-died; accessed 28 November 2019.

9 The Wiggs, ‘The Birth of Jerk-Ass Homer’, No Homers Club, 14 May 2010, nohomers.net/showthread.php?87145-The-Birth-of-Jerk-Ass-Homer; Charlie Sweatpants, ‘Season 10: Jerkass Homer Gets a Job’, Dead Homer Society, n.d., deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs10; both accessed 6 December 2019.

10 Indeed, new Simpsons merchandise that has become popular in recent years almost exclusively gives a tip of the hat to episodes from the golden era—consider recent apparel brand 33 Cent Store’s ‘Dear Rat Boy’ T-shirt (an homage to Homer’s hallucination of Bart as ‘Rat Boy’ in season six, episode 17, ‘Homer vs. Patty and Selma’) or its Hullabalooza 1996 festival memorabilia-style T-shirt (a nod to the fctional Hullabalooza festival from season seven, episode 24, ‘Homerpalooza’).

114 115 Like a Rug on Valium Like a Rug on Valium

11 Cohen, p. 75 27 While I have focused almost exclusively on the exploits of Homer Simpson, I realise that it would be remiss to overlook another signifcant outcome of Homer’s volatile 12 Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Stuart Kendall (ed.), and manic laziness. Specifcally, it is important to look to the way that Homer’s very Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, ability to be lazy, to be disinclined to work, even as he seems to take up a new job every Minneapolis, 2001, p. 89. episode, can only be supplemented by the extra work that this wife, Marge Simpson, 13 Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, p. 89. necessarily takes up and completes in his stead. Indeed, The Simpsons, for the most part, knowingly examines Marge’s work within the home and the work that she does out of the 14 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, Krysztof Fijalkowski home, as well as the fact that Marge keeps everything together, where Homer doesn’t and Michael Richardson (trans.), Verso, London, 2002, p. 15. ‘have to’. It is more than evident that both Homer’s laziness and his schemes often lead 15 Bataille’s philosophy of the accursed share is based on a Blakean concept of energy. to Marge having to pick up after him—consider, her cleaning up after he shoves a fourth Bataille opens the frst volume of his work (The Accursed Share, vol. 1, p. 7) quoting of July explosive into the dishwasher at the Flanders’ holiday home in ‘The Summer of 4’2”’; a passage from William Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’: ‘Exuberance is Beauty’, her ceaseless and overlooked domestic labour, before a nervous breakdown, in ‘Homer Alone’; in A. Kazin (ed.), The Portable Blake, Penguin, New York, p. 255. or her vacuuming around a booze-comatosed, foor-sleeping Homer after a party gone wrong in ‘The War of the Simpsons’. Hearteningly, Marge’s commitment to her family, where Homer 16 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy: Vol. I: Consumption, can slack off, has been recognised even among theSimpsons fanbase and, in 2016, BoJack Robert Hurley (trans.), Zone Books, New York, 1988, p. 28. Horseman creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg posted a series of tweets that collectively made 17 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, pp. 32–33. up an ode to Marge Simpson—a piece fttingly and heartbreakingly entitled ‘Does Marge have Friends?’. Caroline Siede, AV Club, 16 August 2016, news.avclub.com/bojack-horseman- 18 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, p. 21. creator-tweets-heartbreaking-ode-to-mar-1798251323; accessed 28 November 2019. 19 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, p. 9. 28 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, Allan Stoekl (ed.), 20 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, p. 12, emphasis in the original. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985, pp. 13 and 20. 21 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, p. 55. 29 Cohen, p. xi. 22 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, p. 119.

23 Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, p. 284, n. 5.

24 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy: Vol. II: The History of Eroticism, & Vol. III: Sovereignty, R. Hurley (trans.), Zone Books, New York, 1993, p. 199.

25 I call this episode the most Bataillean because it curiously mirrors Bataille’s own development of a secret sui generis religious order, Acéphale, or ‘Headless’, that, among other things, undermined the Catholic mass and privileged the non-productive expenditure of energy (this privileging of the non-productive expenditure of energy was nearly taken to the extreme when, so the legend goes, the group planned a ritual human beheading, which, so far as has been documented, did not eventuate).

26 Cohen, pp. 54–55.

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Darren Jorgensen Dole Bludgers, Junkies and Share Houses in Australia, 1972–96

In 1992, the landlords finally declared their intent to inspect the house on Grosvenor Road, in Indooroopilly, . The declaration came by mail, but the leaseholder wasn’t there, having gone interstate to do a pick up. Grosvenor Road was packed with students and the unemployed—its already-cheap rent made even more affordable because of the number of people living there. This was not untypical for the time. Property had not yet trebled in value, and it was easy to live on student and unemployment benefts. Renting was easier too, with landlords inspecting only once a year for the most part. It so happened that a baby pig had moved into the house before the landlord came knocking at the door. It fossicked among the leftovers from the ongoing parties, midnight meals, acid trips and couch surfers that were typically strewn about the house. In the lounge room, band posters gazed down upon ashtrays, books and dirty dishes, while in the bed- rooms it was often difficult to see the foor for clothes and mattresses. The baby pig was a mascot for SWINE (Socialist Women’s International something ...), which was running in the University of Queensland student election. It was thought to be the end of an era for those who lived or sometimes lived at Grosvenor, but the leaseholder was not deterred. He moved across the road and waited for the place to be painted inside and out before moving in under someone else’s name— so the parties continued.

The comedy of this era of share housing is memorialised in John Birmingham’s He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (1994), a book released soon after the Grosvenor Road pig incident. Birmingham paints a thick veil of comedy over the tragedy of his title, the story of a housemate who died from an overdose while watching Rage on the television in the lounge room.1 The legacies of Grosvenor Road are no less tragic, with a Facebook site now dedicated both to its memories and to those who died too early. There is also the website junkie.com.au, used by a handful of people from Brisbane to track their usage, adding up their expenditure on drugs and their reasons for injecting them.2 While He Died inscribes heroin use into a temporary phase of share house life in one’s 20s, junkie.com.au testifies to the surreal medi- ocrity of living with its legacy. This era in which networks of share houses fostered a hedonistic lifestyle has now largely passed. Unemployment and heroin use were at their height in the early 1990s in Australia, marking the culmination of decades of dole bludging, drugs and casual sex. It is possible to track the ways in which this era came into being and disappeared through films, novels and artworks.

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In Brisbane, the art of this era has an illustrious history, as Club 76 was the rented In a way, it is misleading to talk about job growth in Australia since the share house where The Saints frst played their 1976 single ‘(I’m) Stranded’, one of 1980s. It is more accurate to talk about job replacement: full-time by the first punk records in the world. After having a brick hurled through the front part-time, secure by insecure, long-term by short-term and casual, window by an annoyed neighbour, the residents boarded it up and spray painted manual by non-manual, producing by selling, unqualified by over- Club 76 on top, before the place was closed down by fire and health inspectors.3 qualified, public by private.5 The lyrics of ‘(I’m) Stranded’ refect the way share housing produced conundrums of freedom: It is against this background that the history of Australian art has unfolded since the 1970s, as well as amid a boom in the property market dating from the late Babe I think I’ll lose my mind 1990s, which has transformed houses from homes into investment properties.6 ’cause I’m stranded on my own stranded far from home Contrast the Melbourne share house narrative of Please Like Me with earlier ones from the same city, such as Bert Deling’s flm Pure Shit (1975) and Richard Club 76 was not the only suburban home The Saints deconstructed. The flm clip Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space (1986), or Helen Garner’s novel Monkey Grip (1977), and cover were shot in the rooms of an abandoned house in Paddington, or Lyndal Walker’s 1990s Share House Living Room (1996) installation and House framing the players before curtains and freplaces. This is only the most famous Style series (1997–98). Walker’s work memorialises the Melbourne share house of the share houses of Australian rock history. In Sydney, Deniz Tek met Ron just before the inner city was gentrifed. 1990s Share House Living Room simulated Keeley after Deniz responded to a housemate ad on the University of New South the couches and posters of a lounge room of the time and was installed behind Wales noticeboard, asking for ‘Dangerous Deviant Derelicts’.4 And so began Radio museum-style rope barriers, at once inviting and excluding the visitor. Exclusion Birdman. So it was that the Australian family home turned into an experiment in is here generational rather than fnancial, the mock-up of laziness and leisure art and life. recognisable to a grunge generation but perhaps not to those who would follow. In House Style, Walker documented interiors from different share houses in There could be no greater contrast to such heady artefacts from the past than Melbourne, again producing a voyeuristic paradox of being both invited into these the most recent television series set in an Australian share house, Please Like Me spaces while also being excluded from them. The photographs are of communal (2013–16). Housemates Josh (Josh Thomas) and Tom (Thomas Ward) play out spaces such as kitchens, corridors and living rooms, spaces that are quasi-public, a comedy amid love affairs and friends, while Josh’s mother struggles with mental but not for the public itself. They are spaces of leisure, featuring an accretion illness. Critics have praised this serious side of the show, but it also serves to of stuff leftover from ex-residents and visitors. As Walker explains, ‘things get enable a narrative in which Josh is upwardly mobile. When his mother commits left behind that don’t belong to anybody anymore’.7 Walker’s share house is a suicide, Josh is able to leave his share house to buy a million-dollar inner-city heterotopia, a place that intensifies informal relationships, a place where life apartment with his inheritance. The scenario is symptomatic of the times, as pur- might take a different turn. These houses are now a part of Melbourne’s cultural chasing a property in Melbourne where Please Like Me is set depends on having history, renovated or destroyed for new inner-city developments. more money than one could possibly earn or repay with an average or even above average wage. Josh is able to move into a life of leisure, free even of the need to In a later series, Stay Young (2004–10), Walker abandons the quasi-public side of pay off a mortgage, while Australian workers struggle with diminished labour the share house and instead takes intimate portraits of young men in their under- conditions. As historian Mark Peel argues: wear, often in their bedrooms. While these shots are largely taken in share houses, the bedrooms and partial nudity turns the share house into a private rather than

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a public space. There are no collective couches or accreted mess. There is also a lives of the leading characters, who are used instead to paint a portrait of the sense of melancholy about these young men, as they look awkwardly at the camera houses they live in. As Peter Galvin writes, ‘One of the original and best things or away from it, their trackless skin fated for age. By the time these photographs about Dogs is that until its last half hour it bears no relation at all to conventional were shot, increasing living costs and relative reductions in student and unem- drama—there’s no “plot”, no signifcant “character arc”’.11 Yet, there is also an ployment benefits had made it more fnancially difficult for young people to move expressiveness at work in Dogs; although not a lot happens overall, a lot happens out of home, and share houses more difficult to live in. Turning a share house into all the time as its characters play loud music, yell at the police, drink, smoke and a venue, as The Saints did, would be near impossible today, heavily policed as they inject drugs. The thinness of the plot is ultimately anchored by the overdose of are by real-estate agents. the young Anna (Saskia Post) at the end of the flm, turning the hilarity that made much of the flm a success into tragedy. Lowenstein uses the same strategy in He Juxtaposing share house fctions from different eras between the 1970s and 90s Died, tying three comic storylines together with the funeral of the titular junkie. captures something of the changes that have taken place in Australian society. Released in 2001, He Died is nostalgic for share housing, as it turns the comedy Fredric Jameson’s essay ‘Periodizing the 60s’ has long been a model for such of the junkie’s death into a tragedy. While Birmingham’s novel breezes over the arguments.8 Writing in 1984, Jameson looked back on the ideals of the 1960s as death, Lowenstein concludes his film with a memorial to him. Danny (Noah an effect of much larger historical phenomena, as much a historical experience Taylor) tells his ashes, ‘I love you Pip’, as if this might compensate for the family for those who were there as an effect of capitalism’s expansion into a newly that is not there, his share house buddies a substitute for family. The suburban decolonised third world. As the infuence of revolutions in Africa were felt both Australian home is, after all, designed to accommodate a nuclear family, its room consciously and unconsciously in North America and Europe, so too in Australia sizes and shared spaces remaining tied to the hierarchy of parents and children. the liberalisation of art took place in the wake of an anti-Vietnam War movement. Throughout the flm, people tell Danny to ring his mother, that his mother is wor- As the then prime minister, Gough Whitlam, took the country out of the war and ried about him as he drifts from one share house to another. By the third and fnal made a raft of reforms that shifted Australia’s arts, education and welfare policies, storyline, the clutter of share house interiors has given way to the clean surfaces new types of art, flm and fction were possible. In Melbourne, Pure Shit was funded of a Sydney apartment. Nina (Sophie Lee) is an aspiring actor who administers a by a liberalised Australia Council, while Monkey Grip was written on the newly schedule of housework to her housemates, as if to mirror the conditions of a new minted Supporting Mother’s Beneft.9 The Little Bands scene that inspired Dogs neoliberal century. in Space was funded by dole payments.10 If the election of Whitlam in 1972 marks the beginning of a long cultural and social renaissance in Australia, its end began The quality of Lowenstein’s flms lies in this interest in historical fdelity. His frst in 1996, with the election of a federal government hostile to the unemployed and feature, Strikebound (1984), was an understated flm about the 1937 Korumburra underemployed, and to much of the arts. coalminer stay-in, a little-remembered strike that that kicked off a period of union militancy in Australia. Stylistically, it has a lot in common with Lowenstein’s later Just as Walker’s shift from lounge room to bedroom is symptomatic of a shift in films, as scenes of the strikers occupying a claustrophobic, dirty and crowded Australian life, so it is possible to consider the flms of Richard Lowenstein as cap- coalmine are not so far from the cluttered share house of Dogs. This later flm can turing an earlier shift. His films Dogs in Space (1986) and He Died with a Felafel also be read as a kind of historical drama, one that was based on actual parties and in His Hand (2001) are historical fctions that mock up share house interiors of an actual overdose that took place at the very house in Richmond, Melbourne, different generations. WhileDogs in Space is about the Little Bands scene of the in which it was set. Sam (Michael Hutchence) was based on a real Little Bands late 1970s and early 1980s, He Died is based on stories from John Birmingham’s member called Sam Sejavka and on Lowenstein’s own time living with Sejavka 1994 book of the same name. In both movies, very little happens to change the at this same house (which is now a million-dollar heritage-listed property).

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Anna was also a real person and Sejavka’s , who tragically overdosed organisation that would contain the good things about family and minimise during this heady period in Melbourne’s history. So it is that the film’s ultimate the bad things, the awful neurotic thing that happens in families.15 tension lies in a contradiction between its true overdose narrative and the debauchery of its content, the pleasures of an ongoing bohemian party moralised Monkey Grip was written after Garner had shifted away from her family in , by a tragic conclusion. away from parents that thought reading and writing were forms of bludging.16 Even in her 30s, Garner reports that her parents still thought she was a ‘bludger Although Dogs was a critical failure, it influenced a generation of adolescents because I don’t have a job and a wage’.17 It was also written after Garner had been looking for a way out of their country towns and Australian suburbia.12 Walker married and had a child, failing at creating another nuclear family in her life. was one of those youths, reporting that Dogs opened her to the idea that there was ‘Collective households’, as Garner calls them, represent a feminist and utopian more to life than her childhood bedroom: ‘The chaos and eclectic characters flled ideal away from the model of the nuclear family. Kerryn Goldsworthy argues that me with the hope that I might one day escape incarceration by my parents and such utopianism was only possible in the 1970s, ‘the post-Pill, pre-AIDS-awareness watch Countdown with other misfits’.13 This hope was both realised in Walker’s era during which the sex-and-drugs practices represented in Monkey Grip were share house youth and frustrated by being out of the time in which Dogs was set— something more than just a rumour from the jungle and something less than in the late 1970s and early 1980s when The Boys Next Door, whose music features lethally unsafe’.18 While feminism might appear to have freed women in the 1970s, in the flm, was playing live around Melbourne. As she writes: this freedom was also shipwrecked on bad relationships and heroin addiction. Walker recalls that she ‘threw down Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip in disgust. I yearned for time travel. The tyranny of distance became a tyranny Communes were weird, murderous sex cults, and 1970s share households were of time. I was soaked in melancholy, obsessing about a past that was characterised by naive women who fell in love with junkies and never seemed geographically close but entirely lost to me. Although I was on the to go to work.’19 The share houses of the novel are enabled by feminism but not edge of adulthood and a hopeful future, I was absolutely preoccupied equipped to realise feminist ideals. They are spaces in which gender is constantly by a past I had missed. It felt like a great injustice that I never saw negotiated, while these negotiations are not necessarily empowering for women. The Birthday Party play live.14 Each house in the novel represents a different kind of gendered politics. Nora lives with her daughter in Falconer Street, Fitzroy North, where children and visitors So it is that Lowenstein’s flms are immersed in nostalgia for a recent past, whether come and go. Easey Street, Collingwood, is the dope house, while The Tower is it be the height of Melbourne’s punk and post-punk scene, or the early 1990s when populated by Marxist artists. In each place, freedom is hampered by dependence, Australian unemployment and share house culture were at their height. whether on men or heroin. Nora struggles with loving the junkie Javo, and with the fact that their intimacy only happens when he is stoned. She sometimes con- The emphasis on outdated or abandoned nuclear families recurs throughout share fesses that she might be just as dependent on Javo’s heroin habit as he is himself house fictions. Its beginnings can be dated to Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip, on heroin, creating a metonymy of dependence between houses, heroin and a novel that became a touchstone for Australian feminism because it represented people that crowds out the idealism of their lazy lifestyles and obscures the women struggling to achieve the freedom that feminism promised. As Garner feminist revolution that enabled it in the frst place. says, Monkey Grip was controversial because it represented: Monkey Grip describes something of the double bind at work within this era, those open households where people actually cared about each other of the way share housing was normalised amid a circuit of casual sex, heroin use and tried to create some kind of alternative to a family, some social and art practice. The ‘monkey grip’ of Garner’s title describes her impossible

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infatuation with Javo, how ‘the harder one tries to pull away, the more frmly one they cannot be employed, and yet they cannot be employed because they are is held’.20 It is also possible to glimpse the monkey grip, too, in the desperate, Aboriginal. Delores also puts the viewer in a double bind, in that by judging her shifting and single-minded plot of Pure Shit, a flm made in Garner’s milieu and unemployment we are judging her Aboriginality. Marcia Langton calls the kind starring Garner herself. This film is also driven by the death of a junkie, whose of paradoxes that Deacon establishes ‘black humour’, a series of double negatives body is left in a shared house while the residents drive away in an attempt to score from which the viewer cannot escape.22 These doublings are most easily visual- heroin, a carload of junkies hopping from one house to another. One suburban ised in work about Aboriginality because it is the Aboriginal person that has been home has been converted into a cocaine freak’s chaotic playground, while another most negatively constructed in Australia. Deacon’s work often turns this around, is in the process of being cleaned, over and over again, by speed freak Jo, played by so that Aboriginal people have what in the title of one of her works is the Last Garner. Cleaning her kitchen incessantly, Jo is completely paranoid, believing an Laughs (1995/2004). This is a photograph of three Aboriginal women dressed intruder has broken into her house. The monkey grip here is speed, and the moral up to go out in front of a tin wall, suggesting they are living in humpies. They are for the junkies is how speed but not heroin can destroy your mind. The catch-22 laughing at a joke that the viewer cannot share, not only because we cannot hear between speed and heroin is but one of the double binds in which the un- and it but because, for the most part, we are not Aboriginal. Langton explains that underemployed were caught during these decades. As heroin, welfare and share ‘To really understand Destiny and her work, it is almost essential to have been in a housing shaped people’s lives, they also shaped the choices people made, as freedom share household, probably a squat, with a group of Aboriginal single mothers and/ confronted the politics of using and sharing. These politics do not curtail freedom or black separatists ...’23 There is an inside audience for Deacon’s work as much as but defne its experience. Throwing themselves into impossible love affairs and an outside one, making it impossible for those on the outside to judge her work. heroin addiction, the characters of these times wanted to push freedom into shape. As Goldsworthy argues of Monkey Grip, Nora was not trapped by Javo but Such insider worlds have been something of a staple not only for artists such as used him as a way of deferring the possibility of creating another nuclear family. Deacon and Walker, whose share houses also construct this view from the outside, Her impossible love affair, as much as the shared households in the novel, ‘keep[s] but for the Australian media too. Ray Martin’s infamous television interviews the struggle going’.21 This is the feminist struggle, but one mired in impossible with the Paxton family on A Current Affair in 1996 vilifed the Paxtons not only for choices between romantic love, marriage and a solidarity between women that is being unemployed but for being unemployable, as the two brothers were unwilling persistently undermined. to cut their hair to get jobs labouring and washing dishes.24 Martin’s scenes inside the Paxton house are voyeuristic, as family members play up the hopelessness of The contradictions through which these double binds take shape become clearer their situation by refusing to get out of bed or offering the audience hope that they at the end of the 1990s, as the unemployed were being forced to attend courses at could ever get a job. The flm The Wog Boy (2000) parodies these interviews, using privatised job-search agencies and to turn up at work-for-the-dole schemes, while then Channel 7 television host Derryn Hinch. While the parody is in good humour, their incomes were also being outstripped by rising living costs. Serious interviews The Wog Boy also attempts to resolve the impossible contradiction between the with dole officers mark the end of the Australian dole bludger. In the Destiny unemployable and the employed by giving its hero, Steve (Nick Giannopoulos), Deacon and Michael Riley video I Don’t Wanna Be a Bludger (1999), Deacon plays a job. The difference here, however, is that Steve is handsome, has many friends and Delores, who plays out her own helplessness in a series of interviews with dole a nice car, and plays a role in the lively Greek community around him. His charm officers and art teachers. She proclaims: ‘I can’t be unemployed anymore because extends to the dole office, as an opening scene shows him representing a man who of the government!’ She abuses everyone who tries to help her, calling them has been cut off: ‘If there’s one thing I know how to handle its the government’, ‘coconuts’ because they are Aboriginal people who work in white people’s jobs. he says. But by the time this film was made, the dole office is not what is was. Delores puts them in an impossible position, for in identifying as Aboriginal Steve is confronted by a frighteningly committed public servant (Kym Gyngell),

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before becoming a media star on Hinch’s show and subsequently employed gaze that the dole officer brings into being the dole bludger as the positive image in politics. Steve is successful as the Paxton family never could be, playing out of unemployment. The unemployed have turned into the unemployable. a fantasy in which the unemployable dole bludger could also be a part of the mainstream community. Sartre may not be the best French philosopher to describe this state of the unem- ployable. Unemployment for its own sake is something of a state that Sartre called It was once possible for the unemployable to have a positive identity in Australian ‘bad faith’, he instead being interested in an art of commitment. His existentialist film, in a way not thinkable today. In Going Down (1983), Greg (David Argue) is a philosophy of ‘the look’ was written after having been conscripted into the French hopeless rollerskating dole-office worker. Irresistibly cute, Greg falls over himself military and having the gazes of other conscripts upon him while writing his more and more as the film goes on, ingesting more drugs than he can handle, diary.26 It is, in other words, a working consciousness, one that he confrmed later mumbling away the evening with the besotted Ellen (Moira MacLaine-Cross), in Critique of Dialectical Reason, which would describe the way the mutual gaze who falls in love with and takes care of him. The man from the dole office is produces conformity or ‘seriality’.27 It may be that Sartre’s rival, Albert Camus, someone just like her, and an equity is established between office worker and dole better represents a philosophy of unemployment, his early life of underemploy- bludger in a romance between employed and unemployed. The 1996 movie Idiot ment vexed by his love of a drug addict and his casual affairs, and his frst novel, Box captures a tense interview between Kev (Ben Mendelsohn) and his dole The Outsider (1942), celebrating days baking in the sun in Algeria.28 But I want to officer, played by Darren Gilshenan: turn to another of Sartre’s contemporaries, Maurice Blanchot, as through him it is possible to fnd a philosophy of unemployment, if not unemployability. Sartre C.E.S. man: How many interviews you had? accused Blanchot of writing, and said nothing of falling short of the commit- Kev: None. ment required of the artist to change the world.29 In this writing about nothing, C.E.S. man: But you put in an application. however, lies the very problem of making works of art about not working, of the Kev: Yea. impossibility of working to capture the subject of not working. Kev’s poetry lies C.E.S. man: But you didn’t get any interviews? embedded within the work of a flm to construct a character and narrative around Kev: Nah. Can I go now? that character, but it also alludes to an art that exists spontaneously, without C.E.S. man: Yea, all right. work. It is, however, impossible to conceive of what Blanchot called ‘worklessness’ without a work of art to frame it, to capture this non-identity of art with the work As the C.E.S. man, Kev and the audience know, he does not want a job and nobody of art.30 For Blanchot, art lies in the shadow of its appearance, assuming a negative would want to employ him. The C.E.S. man is complicit in Kev’s inability to be identity. So it is that in the Australian works detailed here, characters and narra- employed, implicating the government in the identity that Kev has constructed tives are carefully constructed in double binds. In the dole office scenes in Idiot for himself. The same scene is repeated with Kev’s mate Mick (Jeremy Sims), Box, Kev goes to put his feet on the dole officer’s table but pulls them away as he who gives the same answers to the same interview. It is precisely from such serial does so. He is both rebelling against the authority of the dole office but cannot, as negativity that cultural identity takes shape. As Jean-Paul Sartre famously argues, the dole pays him to perform this very resistance. This kind of defeatism is coded identity is not extrinsic or intrinsic, tied to either the look of others upon us or in the overarching plot of the flm, too, as Kev and Mick rob a bank on the day their ourselves on others, but comes from the implication of these looks at each other, own dole payments are delivered to it. the self-consciousness of being looked at as one is looking at others.25 It is not the dole officer looking at us that produces the identity of the dole bludger, but the The problem of describing the positive value of art is one that will be familiar to dole bludger looking back at the dole officer looking at them. So, it is in this mutual many Anglophone readers, who are exposed to the rationalisation of art’s value by

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popular philosophers from Bertrand Russell to Alain de Botton. This is why it is Mick: Yea, you just say this is a poem and it is. necessary to turn to Continental philosophers and to an older generation whose Lani: What if it’s bad? experience of the war made them more critical of the systematisation of labour Mick: Then it’s a bad poem. (Sartre) and of instrumentalisation (Blanchot). Debates over the place of art as Lani: Well, I think if you say something’s a poem and you didn’t mean labour recurred in the controversy over Monkey Grip. Belatedly defending herself it to be then you’re a wanker. against critics who said she had published her diary rather than a work of litera- ture, Garner argued: ‘As if there is no work in keeping a diary in the frst place ...’ Earlier in the film Kev’s girlfriend, Betty (Susie Porter), has also cast doubt upon (and Garner did go on to publish her diaries later in her career, throwing off the Mick’s defnition of poetry. Kev recites a poem about her: pretence of the novel entirely).31 This defence of diary writing as art, however, is duplicitous, as it takes work as the reason through which a piece of writing You are an idiot qualifies as a work of art. It is a moral argument that discriminates against You are a bitch unemployment and the unemployed, and against art produced through not work- You shit me to tears ing. It is, of course, an impossibility to have a work of art that is also not a work of I’m goin’ down the pub. art, and yet it is also possible to push at the defnitions of art in order to consider what Blanchot calls art’s outside as, paradoxically, also art’s inside. Betty then quips: ‘Is the pub bit part of the poem?’ In each scene, the boundaries of art are in question because Mick’s poems do not assume the form of work. This philosophy of art that is without work is also represented in Idiot Box, in This is precisely Blanchot’s point, that the work of art is always on the outside of Mick’s character. He is a poet who does not produce poetry, an artist whose art art’s form, that it can only be art by negating its status as work. It cannot rhyme, is composed spontaneously and without work. When he orders a beer and a packet be about fowers, or have a defnite beginning or end. It must, in Blanchot’s terms, of chips, the barmaid (Celia Ireland) asks Mick for a poem. He replies, ‘It’s called be open to formlessness, to the outside of its own work, here represented by the Hope’: doubts of the woman he composes for. It may be that, with the difficulty of defn- ing art through artwork, Mick’s poetry is the best representation of Blanchot’s Every second Thursday they pay the dole into my bank account philosophy of art that we have. It is, after all, a kind of negative poetry, defined So I go down the teller machine and hope I can remember my pin number. not only by its refusal to work but by the way in which it is an artwork within an artwork, poems within a film, in an art that is at once itself and not itself— The barmaid says: ‘Is that it? Poems are about flowers and sunsets and shit like identical with poetry while not being identical with it. that. You can’t have a poem about being on the dole.’ This leads Mick to wonder what a poem is, and he asks Lani (Robyn Loau), who is working in the bottle shop: There is a tension here between the negative identities of dole bludgers and junkies, and their periodisation in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The negativity of Kev, Mick and Mick: What do you reckon a poem is? Delores, the passive aggression of their double binds, troubles the notion that Lani: A poem? Australian art of these decades could be defned by a neat analogy with the history Mick: Yea, how would you explain what one was? of the economy or welfare policy. Griselda Pollock has argued against such period- Lani: I dunno, when something rhymes? ising arguments because they presume to master their subjects.32 To blame the Mick: I reckon if you say something’s a poem then it is. government is to do just as these characters themselves do, rather than to see Lani: Anything? their negative choices as having their own volition, whether this be robbing

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a bank (Idiot Box), becoming a bad Aboriginal artist (I Don’t Wanna Be a Bludger) 1 John Birmingham, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, or falling in love with a junkie (Monkey Grip). As Lou (Gary Waddell) says in Pure 1994, p. 5. Shit: ‘All I want to do is get high, is that so bad? It should be easy but people make 2 See, in particular, the page junkie.com.au/old_site/Connections/usage_all.php; it so fuckin’ hard.’ Lou poses the most crucial of questions, one that should make accessed 13 October 2018. us pause. Why do people make it so difficult for each other to have a good time? 3 Clinton Walker, Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music, 1977–1991, In Australia, the question is more pertinent than ever, as working and getting Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1996, p. 18. housing are more difficult than ever before, as students and the unemployed receive incomes far below living costs, if they receive an income at all. The negative 4 Vivien Johnson, Radio Birdman, Sheldon Booth, Melbourne, 1990, p. 15. identities of these past fctions remain troubling today because they offer other 5 Mark Peel, The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty, Cambridge University Press, possibilities for living, for creating relationships and for fnding pleasure. Cambridge, UK, 2003, pp. 116–17.

6 On this, see Ian Buchanan, ‘Renovating Reality TV’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 31–32, April 2004, australianhumanitiesreview.org/2004/04/01/ Thanks to Lyndal Walker, Richard Forster and David Lennon. No thanks to the LNP and all of you negative-gearing, property-investing arseholes who ruined Australia for the rest of us. renovating-reality-tv; accessed 11 October, 2018. 7 Lyndal Walker, personal communication, 28 September 2018.

8 Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Volume 2: Syntax of History, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, pp. 178–208.

9 Kerryn Goldsworthy, Helen Garner, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 12, citing Helen Garner, True Stories, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 2–4.

10 Anonymous, ‘The Little Bands’, The History of the Melbourne Punk Scene, punkjourney.com/little-bands.php; accessed 13 October 2018.

11 Peter Galvin, ‘We’re Living on Dog Food. So What?’, SBS Movies, 7 September 2009, updated 26 February 2014, sbs.com.au/movies/article/2009/09/07/ were-living-dog-food-so-what; accessed 3 October 2018.

12 David Nichols and Sophie Perillo, ‘Friday Essay: Dogs in Space, 30 Years On— A Once Maligned Film Comes of Age’, The Conversation, 15 April 2016, theconversation.com/friday-essay-dogs-in-space-30-years-on-a-once-maligned- flm-comes-of-age-56288; accessed 19 September 2018.

13 Lyndal Walker, ‘Share Houses’, Meanjin, vol. 71, no. 4, 2013, p. 60.

14 Lyndal Walker, ‘The Birthday Party’, Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2018, cordite.org.au/poetry/suburbia/the-birthday-party; accessed 11 October 2019.

134 135 Dole Bludgers, Junkies and Share Houses in Australia, 1972–96 Dole Bludgers, Junkies and Share Houses in Australia, 1972–96

15 Goldsworthy, p. 29, citing Jennifer Ellison, ‘Helen Garner’, Rooms of Their Own, 30 See for example Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Absence of the Book’, The Infinite Conversation, Penguin, Ringwood, 1986, pp. 140–41. Susan Hanson (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, pp. 422–34.

16 Bernadette Brennan, A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, Text Publishing, 31 Helen Garner, ‘I’, Meanjin, vol. 61, no. 1, 2002, p. 60; Helen Garner, Yellow Notebook: Melbourne, 2017, p. 13. Dairies Volume 1, 1978-1987, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2019.

17 Brennan, p. 47, citing Jan McGuinness, ‘Helen the Stirrer’, Melbourne Herald, 32 Griselda Pollock, ‘Whither Art History?’, Art History, vol. 96, no. 1, 2014, pp. 9–23. 27 December 1977, p. 32.

18 Goldsworthy, p. 10.

19 Walker, ‘Share Houses’, p. 67.

20 Brennan, p. 38.

21 Goldsworthy, p. 40.

22 Marcia Langton, ‘The Valley of the Dolls: Black Humour in the Art of Destiny Deacon’, Destiny Deacon: Walk and Don’t Look Blak, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2004, pp. 70–74.

23 Langton, p. 70.

24 Ray Martin and the Paxton family, A Current Affair, television broadcast, Channel 9 Australia, 19 February 1996. Coverage of the Paxton story is best summarised by Media Watch, television broadcast, ABC, youtube.com/ watch?v=deNlBLAXsxU; accessed 11 October, 2018.

25 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), Washington Square Press, New York, 1956, pp. 340–400.

26 Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, November 1939–March 1940, Quentin Hoare (trans.), Verso, London, 1984.

27 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Alan Sheridan-Smith (trans.), New Left Books, London, 1976, pp. 262–64.

28 See Oliver Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, Benjamin Ivry (trans.), Chatto & Windus, London, 1996, pp. 13–127; Albert Camus, The Outsider [1942], Sandra Smith (trans.), Penguin, London, 2013.

29 See Hannes Opelz, ‘Between Writing and World’, in Adrian Mirvish and Adrian van den Hoven (eds), New Perspectives on Sartre, Cambridge Scholars, Cambridge, 2010, p. 335.

136 137 Four Orders

Tim Woodward Four Orders

1. Rolled Sleeves

Young Michelle Pfeiffer is ready Ryan Gosling is ready Patti Smith is somewhat ready Retired General of the Army is ready Cowboy is ready Vermeer’s Milkmaid is ready David Beckham is ready Bernstein’s Untitled Men are both ready Springsteen is always ready Thelma and Louise ready Barack Obama at his desk ready Plant Welders are ready Darry and Sodapop Curtis are ready Casual bar staff are ready Visiting politicians are ready Gordon Gekko is ready Newspaper moguls are ready Tracey Emin is ready All TV chefs are ready Zac Efron also ready

141 Four Orders Four Orders

2. Clint Eastwood Sunbakes

Clint Eastwood sunbakes under a motorcycle. This is the part. A Clint Eastwood production schedule. For Clint Eastwood Sunbakes we shoot nine hours a day, six soaking up rays at the Oakland Marinas, his sparkling motorcycle a feeble source days a week. This, from my not entirely limited experience, is a very steady gig for of shade across one leg. He wears a brown woollen suit jacket with a colour- a semi-professional actor. My agent tells me it’s unheard of. A Hollywood pope job. matched pair of cotton trousers. He has an off-white dress shirt and boots, and Clint Eastwood sunbakes under a motorcycle. This is my part. I should add, fnally, has a sticky bandage across one eyebrow. His helmet must have slipped off and that despite the description I am not always under the motorcycle. I mostly lie scooted into the drink. Sun hits his face and his hands. For this scene, it’s always under the vehicle in the same way someone might lie under a tree. I am within a midsummer Californian day. The director calls action from under an umbrella. the motorbike’s expanse, taking a space between the wheels, but only with a leg or an arm, and on the rare occasion I stick my neck out. When we wrap for the day Once in position Clint’s horizontal motorcycle conks out fast. There’s a kill switch around six I’m allowed to take the bike out as though my own. It takes two hours’ function that takes over when a bike is pulled up like bed sheets. This is primarily servicing with the oiler and jerry, but after that I use the bike to deliver dinners for the safety of the rider, or in our case the cast and crew too. In stasis the motor around the Marinas. La Pisa Pizzerie, La Casita and The Temple Club on Mondays, oozes, and to keep the wheels moving would be inflammable madness. There’s Wednesdays and Thursdays. Adalé, Two Mammas’ Vegan and Lake Chalet on brown oil dripping into the ocean and petrol evaporates as it drains from the gills. Tuesdays and Fridays. MoJoe’s on Saturdays. This is no dry bike, thinks Clint, This is no prop bike oh no. There is no dialogue scripted for this scene.

As the Clint bakes he seeks motivation from the foating unconscious. He dreams of a truly convincing death. First up is brake failure off a skyscraper. No-one could survive such a fall. Then next on ground level there’s some additional deadly contact with a truck at full speed, a mattress delivery vehicle hit head on. It’s hardly necessary but there’s also the recurring roadside ditch detail with angry rattlesnakes that haven’t seen a mouse in weeks. Finding a motivated dream-state, Eastwood is directed to squint across the sun-drenched pier as though reading a tiny book. They say, in post, some fuffy clouds will part, revealing a witch doctor’s SFX scrawl, an augury of Clint’s tragically spectacular downfall revealed once and for all. In the meanwhile it might read: complete dehydration coupled with extreme heat exhaustion along with 10th degree sunburn to face and hands.

I am the sunbaking Clint Eastwood. I have been contractually him for almost nine months. I am not the famed movie star Clint Eastwood (if that needs qualifying) but only because I never got an audition. This is all fine. As the sunbaking Clint Eastwood I am afforded certain benefits denied my celebrity double. Take this

142 143 Four Orders Four Orders

3. Coffee House

Before bad habits. Before new routine. Before splitting the plastic flm on a weekly Another of my famous orders is a double espresso (two sugars) stirred with the planner pad. The late summer mornings were finally cooling but not yet cold. wicker cane replica of a 1970 Husky 400 Cross motorcycle foot peg. I had this It’s hard to get out of bed on account of bad weather. Weather makes the news. Steve McQueen Special woven up three years ago by Angelo, a Croatian chaise and Weather makes history. It knocks down buildings and blocks the view. But today basket guru I met at a Blackburn bakery. You can imagine weaving didn’t take long it wasn’t that bad. Laws of the earth weren’t my excuse. on such a small item, although for weeks we couldn’t agree on a price. For another memorable cuppa last summer, I called an RACV technician out for an early stir. As I arrive each morning the white-enamelled chairs are wiped down, cleaned of This was an expensive but not altogether unsatisfactory use of my frst and only concrete dust from the construction of 142 apartments across the street. Despite alfresco assist. ‘An Ultra Tune for the teaspoon’, I joked alone. the wipe these chairs don’t get used much. This isn’t the Paris End after all. Oh the Paris End. But I use them. I’m the only one I know using them. **

*

They say the best way to approach a barista is from behind. This ensures a little atmospheric magic when the steaming wand gets a clean. Hallowed café vapours rise, cutting a heavy elbowed and tightly aproned fgure. Some hunchy Bs do this clean per cuppa, some after two or three froths. So watch for the moment and time your move. Besides this yen for food theatre, every coffee-hand will tell you steam assists the sciomancy, a dark and necessary art of the café biz. The dead line up at the door. If you come from behind you’re considered alive. This is the best approach.

*

My usual coffee order is a double espresso with two sugars stirred with the hair of a Chinese shadow puppet. My second is a double espresso with two sugars stirred with the username and password of a barista’s Ancestry.com account. You’ll notice I like to get the Bs involved as much as possible. I appeal to them as the complex people they are, real fleshy professionals with family genetics and heirloom Bialetti jugs.

*

144 145 Four Orders

4. Absolute Zero

It took so many years but we made a Helium Dilution Refrigerator. The coldest fridge there is. And we made it big. The size of a cookie-cutter studio apartment. The size of an Olympic Village bedroom. Working non-stop for 13 years, summer, autumn, winter, spring. One-hundred-and-ffty-six months and then we moved in.

Our earliest cryophilic ambitions were roused in the warmth of pre-anthropocentric summers. Those days were equal parts hustle and speculation, and to stay compet- itive only the sparest energy was given to our more pessimistic instincts. We swore by movement, even as the heat grew and grew and grew unbearable. At this time, thermal still ran KIA Sportage, our Bluetooth bedroom, our sweaty desire for upward mobility. We had no clue just how much cooling would be needed so soon. Or that we’d even WANT such a chill. As well, we sort of liked to move. We moved to stay visible or we moved to catch the breeze from rented windows.

As our sexual organs greyed, the motile years took numbers. Naturally at first, we daydreamed of a different repose (and certainly our aspirations were petty leisure class) but we soon stopped looking forward to a comfortable slowing w/ charcuterie sides. We squinted for a wind down more warranted. More meagre. We then drew blueprints for a cold lake to row, or a cool pool to sit, or an icebox worth building. Nothing ft.

Without heat of any kind the atoms in matter grind to a near halt. Fact. Then cell activity automates towards stasis, the molecular holding pattern of frostbitten molasses. We still agitated thankless contracts and paced hospitality dungeons, but our future fridge offered a best chance at sleep. Real sleep. A minimum vibra- tional lifestyle our grandparents never asked for. Everything we always knew we needed we now worked towards.

Now in absolute subzero the heart is as good as dead, a mannered line on a cardio- pulmonary monitor, the rhythm strip that has no style. One start, gratefully stuck between A and B. Not ever reaching B. Forgetting B is even there or ever was. Should we call this mannered? At the lowest thermodynamic limit we all find a recursive scribble of our very own. I bought two new scarves and a Patagonia Gore-Tex vest for this rest. In the HDR we are 3He/4He. We not quite RIP.

146 The Artist’s Practice as Always Already-made: Remaking and Repetition in the Work of Marcel Duchamp, Mutlu Çerkez and Masato Takasaka

Masato Takasaka The Artist’s Practice as Always Already-made

How can you fnd what you have already made? Wherein lies the creative act, and at what point and why do the objects become compelling? What are the implications of self-appropriation? Christopher Miles, ‘Mark Grotjahn’1

In posing these questions, artist, writer and curator Christopher Miles highlights the slippage between the found object and the already made that frames this chapter. He asks these questions in reference to the use of found objects and the processes that result from an artist selecting from what they have already made for use in subsequent works. The focus of this chapter is not the legacy of the Duchampian readymade. Rather, it investigates modes of appropriation in relation to my studio practice, particularly how the processes of remaking and repetition generate new work.

Appropriation is ubiquitous and all pervasive. Berlin-based writer and critic Jan Verwoert notes:

Appropriation, frst of all, is a common technique. People appropriate when they make things their own and integrate them into their way of life, by buying or stealing commodities, acquiring knowledge, claiming places as theirs and so on.2

Likewise, visual artists use appropriation in a variety of ways, by repurposing images, objects and materials, and in adopting the visual language of other artists. According to Verwoert, artists seek to ‘adapt these artistic means to their own interests’, including through the appropriation of ‘objects, images or practices from popular (or foreign) cultures’, restaging them to expand or break with the conventions of what an artwork can be.3

This chapter argues for an expanded understanding of appropriation in visual art.4 It opens with a discussion of Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41) to investigate the processes of reproduction and repetition employed in the making of this artwork. These processes highlight how differences are produced through the specific techniques of hand-coloured stencilling and procedures of casting miniature replicas of his readymades used to reproduce the two-dimensional and

151 The Artist’s Practice as Always Already-made The Artist’s Practice as Always Already-made

three-dimensional works. Secondly, this chapter uses this approach to remaking of his readymades.7 David Joselit emphasises how Duchamp reproduced the two- as a mechanism to discuss how a reproduction reinterprets what is being remade. dimensional artworks by choosing outdated, labour-intensive methods, such as collotype printing with pochoir, a process of hand-colouring using stencils instead Thirdly, it investigates the presentation of the replicas in the Boîte-en-valise in of newly available technologies of colour printing.8 Duchamp also produced terms of the differences achieved between Duchamp’s various remaking strategies. hand-coloured proofs, known as couleur originaux, as unique artworks mounted I draw on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of difference, specifcally in the deluxe versions of Boîte-en-valise. Joselit argues that Duchamp’s use of his analysis of the relationship between the model, copy and simulacra, to further hand-coloured stencils and proofs ‘established an infnite regress between original understand how difference is produced by way of processes of remaking, as is and reproduction’.9 These proofs in particular oscillate between being original evident in Boîte-en-valise. The use of repetition to affirm difference in Duchamp’s works in their own right and copies, as 300 were produced.10 Joselit maintains Boîte-en-valise is also evident in the work of London-born, Turkish-Australian that Duchamp’s motivation for employing the technique of pochoir demonstrates artist Mutlu Çerkez (1964–2005). Çerkez’s artworks demonstrate appropriation the way that ‘each successive copy’ shares with the original a ‘process of applying as remaking through the effects of slight variation generated by his method of pigment by hand onto a surface.’11 Joselit notes that the combination of labour- forecasting the remaking of his artworks. These procedures set in place a process intensive production returns the artist’s hand to the production of the work while whereby difference is produced through the works’ repetition. leveraging the mechanisms of mechanical reproduction.12 He remarks on this process: ‘if copying is transformed into the production of successive “originals,” The writings of Deleuze provide the basis for arguing how difference inhabits it is not thereby redeemed. Rather the converse is equally true: the artist is repetition. Deleuze develops his argument by drawing on Nietzsche’s concept of restricted to performing a compulsive series of repetitions.’13 Joselit sees an the ‘eternal return’, which Deleuze understands to be not an eternal recurrence inherent contradiction in Duchamp’s method of reproduction. Having previously of the same but of difference.5 I explore these philosophical concepts through the stated that the idea of copying what he’d already done repulsed him.14 Subsequently, writings of Elizabeth Grosz to help elucidate the way in which Çerkez’s practice Duchamp spent a great deal of time elaborately replicating his work.15 However, of remaking produces differences through repetition. through the use of the pochoir technique, for example, he distinguishes between imitating himself in the making of new work and reproducing his work.16 As Finally, this chapter explores the processes of producing variation in my studio Joselit argues, repetition was a ‘false innovation that Duchamp paradoxically practice. Through processes of appropriation in remaking the series Post- wished to avoid through his own perfectly tautological acts of reproduction’.17 structural Jam (2009–10) and more recently Garage Days Revisited (2016), variation comes about through handmade processes and mechanical reproduction, Joselit argues that Boîte-en-valise is not to be interpreted as a ‘simple retrospective- along with shifts in scale, context and production. I relate the differences produced in-a-box’. Rather, it should be understood as ‘an allegory of the self, caught in the in the various artworks to the analysis of Duchamp and Çerkez in the context of compulsive repetition of reproduction’.18 Joselit goes on to remark that ‘Super- Deleuze’s discussion of the variance that resides in repetition. fcially it may seem that the purpose of Boîte-en-valise is to shore up Duchamp’s artistic identity through a coherent summary of his oeuvre’;19 however, he claims Remaking as Repetition in Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise that the work more importantly demonstrates ‘an elaborate form of compulsive Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise was a travelling retrospective in a suitcase, operating repetition’.20 as a playlist containing miniature reproductions of his artworks.6 To make the various items in Boîte-en-valise, Duchamp employed labour-intensive methods, In addition to the two-dimensional works, Duchamp incorporated three- creating reproductions of his paintings as prints, and miniature handmade models dimensional miniature replicas of his readymades and other artworks into Boîte-

152 153 The Artist’s Practice as Always Already-made The Artist’s Practice as Always Already-made

en-valise. This mobilised the inventory of three-dimensional forms using processes Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’ differentiates between copies of remaking to repeat his artworks, with the effect they were reinterpreted. Dawn and simulacra in relation to his critique of Platonic idealism.28 According to Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins note the importance of Duchamp’s choice Australian philosopher Paul Patton, Deleuze aims to ‘overturn’ the hierarchy of technique, commenting, ‘The miniature replicas of the readymades in the Plato establishes between the model, copy and simulacrum.29 Plato’s hierarchy Boîte produced the ironic situation that the mould of an already mass-produced values copies over simulacra, considering simulacra of lesser value because, object had to be handcrafted in order to mass produce it again’.21 This relationship as much as ‘Copies are secondary possessors, they are well-founded pretenders, between the original object, the mould and the cast is apparent in the miniature guaranteed by resemblance’, whereas ‘simulacra are like false pretenders, built recreations of Fountain (1917) made in 1938. Duchamp made the tiny papier- upon dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion or deviation’.30 Deleuze discusses mâché miniatures primarily from memory, and with reference to a 1917 photo- how the absolute difference of the simulacrum has no relation to the model and graph by Alfred Stieglitz and other photographs taken that year of the urinal the copy. Beyond doubt, the simulacrum ‘still produces an effect of resemblance: suspended from the ceiling of his New York studio.22 From this papier-mâché but this is an effect of the whole, the completely external and produced by totally model, a miniature ceramic pattern was commissioned. A mould was then taken different means than those at work in the model. The simulacrum is built upon from this pattern to produce multiple cast copies.23 To cast the multiple copies, a disparity or upon a difference. It internalizes dissimilarity.’31 For Deleuze, the adjustments were made to the papier-mâché model; slight variations commensu- power of the simulacrum relies on the way that difference is concealed internally. rate with lost wax casting process are evident in the miniature copies of Fountain.24 In applying this concept to art, he distinguishes between imitation and simulation to argue that ‘an imitation is a copy, but art is simulation, it reverses copies into The method Duchamp used to remake his readymades compares with the pochoir simulacra’.32 This process of reversal demonstrates that ‘Art does not imitate, technique.25 In both, Duchamp employed craftsmen to make copies based on a above all because it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power’.33 hand-coloured proof or a handcrafted model he provided.26 Oscillating between Deleuze argues that in visual art the paradigmatic example of remaking that an original and a copy, the works in Boîte-en-valise have a strange indeterminate results in simulacra is found in the work of Andy Warhol. In Patton’s discussion status, Martha Buskirk remarking they are both reproductions and works in their of Deleuze’s example of Warhol, he adds Duchamp as another exemplary artist, own right.27 What results is not a repetition of the same, but a form of repetition suggesting both offer visual realisations of simulacra.34 The production of differ- that generates difference through the slight variations produced by the techniques ence evident in the artists’ work is, according to Patton, a ‘manifestation or illus- employed. Although both examples maintain a likeness to the original works, tration of difference, by means of perceptual similarity’.35 Through replicating his the process of remaking leads to slight variations. The two-dimensional and works in the Boîte-en-valise, Duchamp enacts a process of remaking as a repetition three-dimensional reproductions combine a hand-crafted element with processes that is at the same time a refexive reinterpretation of his work. of industrial reproduction, and also time-consuming techniques to faithfully reproduce the works. What differentiates the two- and three-dimensional works This approach to remaking is also found in the work of Mutlu Çerkez, his remade is the technique of their reproduction. The processes of hand-coloured stencilling bootleg album covers functioning as reinterpretations of original album covers. and casting miniature replicas—in addition to the artist’s signature—elevated This effect of repetition is explored in the next section. Duchamp’s works, made through act of copying, to the status of an original work of art. Duchamp’s musings on the minute variations that exist through repetition Remaking as Repetition in Mutlu Çerkez’s Work can be related to Deleuze’s concept of differentiation between the model, the copy The relevance of Çerkez’s art practice to a discussion of the simulacrum is and the simulacrum. exemplified in the artist’s fascination with bootleg recordings of Led Zeppelin. In New Album Cover Designs for Bootleg Recordings of Led Zeppelin (1996), Çerkez

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created a series of new designs for bootleg versions of Led Zeppelin’s live recordings his artworks, without simply reproducing them, bears useful comparison to and studio out-takes. For example, in Untitled: 10 June 2018 (1999), Çerkez Deleuze’s discussion of difference produced through repetition. Deleuze draws remade the album cover art for Tangible Vandalism, a 1986 bootleg of studio on Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘eternal return’, holding that each recurrence is out-takes and live studio jams recorded by the band between November 1973 quantitatively the same. However, the quality of that recurrence seems to remain and May 1974, which in turn referenced the cover art of Led Zeppelin’s Physical an open question. For Deleuze, the eternal return can be understood ‘as the Graffiti (1975), depicting an apartment block in New York City. Çerkez’s remake expression of a principle which serves as an explanation of diversity and its pays tribute to both the bootleg and original ’ cover art, capturing the reproduction, of difference and its repetition’.43 What returns for Deleuze is same imagery through deadpan black-and-white photography, taken by the artist not the same as that which occurred in the past; rather, it has the power to affirm himself almost 30 years later.36 In doing so, Çerkez reveals the difference between difference through producing a variation that inevitably arises in the process of the original album cover, the bootlegged version and his remake. Commenting returning. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s concept is intrinsically bound to his on this series of artworks, Rex Butler suggests Çerkez may be ‘trying to fnd some understanding of the ‘will to power’; that is, willing something to its highest power equivalent here to the minor variations a rock band introduces into its songs enables its return in a form of difference. Broadly speaking, according to Deleuze, when playing them live’.37 Accordingly, Çerkez has valued the bootleg versions Nietzsche sees no possibility of escaping the present, demanding that one affirm as reinterpretations that privilege the variations and differences from the original everything that has ever occurred or could take place through its perpetual recur- studio recordings.38 rence. What returns through repetition is cast in difference; it is changed through its repetition rather than being identical.44 In an interview with Robyn McKenzie, Çerkez explains his fascination with Led Zeppelin’s bootleg recordings. Yet he comments that ‘I went through about 10 The variations produced in Çerkez’s work demonstrate how difference is created years not listening to any of their music. I knew all their albums all too well.’39 through appropriation of the cover version. Stephen O’Connell, writing on the When Çerkez discovered the bootleg recordings, he was able to re-engage with relationship between the bootleg recordings and Çerkez’s artworks, observes the band’s music: that ‘In the refrain of the familiar there is often something singular and startling, which sends things off on a new tangent’.45 He maintains that each of Çerkez’s It was like being able to listen to them infnitely … I could listen to artworks are ‘singular events which could themselves spawn divergent series, them again because it was all different again. It was the same group, running toward other horizons’.46 For O’Connell, Çerkez revisiting his favourite the same songs, but they played them so differently in concert that songs through discovering bootleg recordings is analogous to the way he set up I could start again.40 a system to revisit his artworks to remake them in the future. In effect, Çerkez produces bootleg versions of his own artworks. Just as Çerkez’s discovery of the McKenzie notes that Çerkez’s work based on the bootleg recordings ‘ponders the bootleg Led Zeppelin recordings identified, for him, a new and different way to nature of the relationship between creativity and repetition (every time the same listen to the music, the remakes of his own artworks allowed him to reinterpret song is played differently)’.41 She points out the quality of the unique that inhabits his back catalogue in new and inventive ways. repetition, and Çerkez’s ‘return to an earlier obsession’ reflects a ‘self [that is] distanced in time from the present self, fractured. It can be just like doing some- Çerkez devised a system based on an obscure personal logic that forward-dated thing new.’42 his artworks to a time when he intended to remake them. Butler describes this process as making the artworks ‘over before they begin’.47 He equates this with Çerkez’s reinterpretation of the bootleg albums’ covers and his remaking through Duchamp’s reference to his readymades as incorporating a ‘rendezvous with

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the future’, Duchamp recognising that the time in which his works might be figure this back catalogue in a manner akin to the ‘shuffle’ setting on an iPod. understood had not yet arrived.48 Similar to Duchamp’s readymades, Çerkez’s Just as an iPod facilitates the random shuffling of the music it stores, I randomly procedure contains a delay between when the artwork is frst exhibited and when select and reactivate elements from past artworks. Improvisation informs this it is remade for a future time in which it might be fully understood. Duchamp shuffling—chance being used to select and order elements in the construction and Çerkez revisit past subject matter and reinterpret their own back catalogues, of my installations to allow for unexpected outcomes and processes. This way of although in different ways: Duchamp worked from photographic reproductions working predetermines what I work with; I am limited to drawing from my back to remake his artworks in miniature, creating his own portable museum; Çerkez catalogue of works. Through this set of limitations, I attempt to exhaust the idea forward-dated his work to be remade in the future, although not necessarily in of repeating myself while making something new from what I have already made. its original form.49 There is an affinity between Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and This limitation has increasingly given way to incorporating new elements that Çerkez’s motivation. As musician and writer Francis Plagne notes, Çerkez ‘struc- I accumulate as I remake work. ture[s] a body of work in advance in such a way that the only guarantee is its own repeated self-reference’. The effect of this structure is a gesture, in the manner of The constant return to the same materials and objects through the process of Duchamp, of generating what Plagne comments is ‘a labyrinthine self-referential revisiting and rearranging becomes an intensification of the presence of these ‘oeuvre’.50 materials and objects in my work. For Deleuze, affirmation and intensification through the return underscore the power of beginning and beginning again.52 The affinities between Duchamp and Çerkez are also evident in terms of the This act of appropriation is a remaking that returns and intensifes as an affirmation processes they employ, with remaking generating differences as a result of of appropriation—appropriation as remaking extending the life of the artwork. repetition. For the works in Boîte-en-valise, Duchamp employed labour-intensive methods of reproduction to create miniature facsimiles of his works, resulting in In my practice, I combine the process of remaking as repetition with my deep, differences created by reinterpreting and recontextualising his oeuvre. Çerkez’s abiding interest in the rock-guitar solo. This interest in lead guitar and in pro- discovery of and responses to the bootleg recordings of Led Zeppelin underscores gressive rock music has led to aligning my art practice with the idea of the ‘session the difference that inhabits repetition. The practices of both artists map out a muso’, or ‘session musician’. There is a parallel between this practice and that of process of repetition that generates variance and change that relates to Deleuze’s the visual artist. A session muso’s professional role is to play the songs of others, interpretation of the eternal return, creating what Elizabeth Grosz describes this concept of creative performance rather than authorship reflecting my ex- as a ‘future that is always carrying and transforming the past’.51 The concept of panded idea of the practice of the visual artist. The practice of session guitarists the eternal return produces difference through repetition. Duchamp’s remade primarily involves replicating the signature sound of others. A driving force of prints and readymades in the Boîte-en-valise produce something different, as does my series Post-structural Jam (2009) is the differences within the variations pro- Çerkez’s return to his past artworks and his remakes of Led Zeppelin bootleg duced through repetition. The series revisits a time when I was in high school. cover designs. My own artworks equally explore the difference generated by It explores interests similar to those that motivated Çerkez to revisit his earlier repetition in the context of different processes of production. preoccupation with Led Zeppelin through the bootleg recordings. In both cases, the artworks document signifcant adolescent years, in my case through the guitar- Appropriation as Remaking in My Work magazine pages I scoured as an aspiring rock musician and bedroom guitarist. The specifc use of materials in my practice is connected to how it affects judge- ment. For example, by referring to my back catalogue of works, I defer the The adolescent self-imposed ritual of daily practice became a form of escapism, as judgements necessary in making new artworks. Instead, I reactivate and recon- I would spend countless hours in my bedroom, with the aim of attaining technical

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perfection to sound like my favourite guitarists.53 The idea of the session musician produced through the production of variation by employing processes of repet- who plays the songs of others with ‘signature inserted’54 is a metaphor for the ition. The differences produced through the processes of remaking inGarage Days artist at art school, who is yet to fnd their own ‘signature style’.55 I revisit the Revisited and the Post-structural Jam series can be understood using Deleuze’s signature style of my previous artworks, which are remade as simulacra. In my discussion of how difference is produced as variation through repetition. In my work, what is produced is not a copy, but one in which altering the scale of the artworks, the processes of remaking as repetition affirm the power of the simu- magazine pages to AO poster format, combined with the effects of serial repro- lacrum as a product of change through reiteration. This process of remaking relies duction, produce difference and variation. on revisiting and reconfguring past material. The activation of past artworks and materials through rearrangement results in creating something new. In my work, appropriation as remaking as a repetition, which reinterprets what is being remade, is produced using two different processes: hand-painting in the Garage Days Revisited series and mechanical reproduction for the poster works in Post-structural Jam. The Garage Days Revisited series appropriates, and then repeats, a painting 15 times. Returning to painting after a 20-year hiatus, I revisit the seminal works completed during my last year of high school, created in my parents’ suburban garage. The title of the series is a reference to an album of the same name by American heavy-metal quartet Metallica. Although similar in composition, each version reveals subtle differences, due to the process of manual rendering and random application of colour. The handmade variations reflect Duchamp’s use of labour-intensive techniques to replicate his paintings as prints in Boîte-en-valise. Duchamp remade his works through a combination of manual labour and mechanical reproduction; I choose between manual and technological reproduction in the replication of any one work. The posters in Post-structural Jam are produced solely through mechanical reproduction, which also saw them blown up considerably in scale, the mark of the hand reduced to the act of ripping out the pages from the guitar magazines. In the third iteration of Post-structural Jam, AO-size works derived from the images from my high-school guitar magazine collection were displayed en masse, as a continuous frieze high up on the gallery wall. The AO-size works were not mere copies of the original source material; altering the scale to the AO poster format and the effects of serial reproduction produced difference and variation.

In The Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz asserts that production of copies is ‘essentially transformative’, whether reiteration occurs through the process of hand-written or mechanical reproduction.56 As discussed in my analysis of Deleuze’s concept, the simulacrum is a way of understanding how the new is

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1 Christopher Miles, ‘Mark Grotjahn’, Artext 2002, p. 48. Boîte-en-valise: Between Institutional Acculturation and Geopolitical Displacement’, Grey Room, no. 8, 2002); and de Duve argues that the work ‘is a monograph on Duchamp’s 2 Jan Verwoert, ‘Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels Different’, oeuvre in its totality, presented as if it were a museum object or a collector’s item’ Art & Research, vol. 1, no. 2, Summer 2007, artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/verwoert.html; (‘After and Before’, in his Kant after Duchamp, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1996, p. 417). accessed 15 November 2019. 9 Joselit, p. 192. 3 Verwoert. 10 Joselit, p. 192. 4 Although the phrase ‘always already’ is referred to by a number of philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) and 11 Joselit, p. 192. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Derrida’s seminal text, Of Grammatology, discusses 12 Joselit, p. 192. the question of origins, arguing that writing is always inhabited by a trace of another sign. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.), 13 Joselit, p. 192. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976, p. 4. However, my interest in 14 Joselit, pp. 187–88. discussing appropriation in relation to my own practice does not lie in an examination of origins, but in the relationship between the copy and the simulacrum, as discussed 15 Joselit, pp. 187–88. Joselit notes that ‘Despite this disdain for copying oneself Duchamp in this chapter. spent great portions of his life doing exactly that’, and refers to Boite-en valise as being ‘entirely composed of elaborate reproductions of the artist’s textual and visual work’. 5 For the primary texts on Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘eternal return’, see Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Walter 16 Joselit, pp. 187-88. Joselit here refers to the distinction between the double meaning Kaufmann (trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1954; and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche of the word ‘copy’, which is to reproduce or imitate. He writes: ‘This contradiction & R.J. Hollingdale, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, between Duchamp’s explicit revulsion to “copying himself” and the irrefutable evidence Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, and Ringwood, Vic., 1969. that “copying” was one of his preferred aesthetic strategies seems irreconcilable unless we recall the double meaning of the word copy’. 6 The various strategies identifed by French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud in relation to post-production lead him to suggest that some artists operate in 17 Joselit, pp. 187–88. Joselit’s claim of ‘compulsive repetition’ is from Freudian psychological a manner similar to a contemporary deejay. See Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Deejaying and analysis. For other explanations cited for Duchamp’s abandonment of painting to avoid Contemporary Art: Similar Confgurations’, in his Postproduction. Culture as repeating himself see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Lucas & Sternberg, New York, 2002, Passage from Painting to the Readymade, Dana Polan (trans.), University of Minnesota p. 38. Duchamp’s remaking through the replication of his artworks in miniature Press, Minneapolis, 1991. uses a process of appropriation that incorporates repetition and reproduction 18 Joselit, p. 192. as a method of production. This can be reconsidered as utilising a combination of the techniques, including ‘toasting’, which can be seen in the sampling of his 19 Joselit, p. 192. own artworks, and ‘cutting’, in which his own images are replicated and recontextualised. 20 Joselit, p. 192. In sampling his artwork, he effectively selects from his existing artwork or ‘playlist’. 21 Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins, ‘Replicas, Casts and the Infra-Thin’, in their 7 David Joselit, ‘The Self Readymade’, in his Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941, Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999, p. 180. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1998, p. 189–91. 22 Ades et al. 8 In addition to Joselit’s writing, other art historians and theorists such as T.J. Demos and Thierry de Duve have also written on Boîte-en-valise. For example, Demos writes 23 Ades et al. about the geopolitical displacement of Duchamp’s artworks in miniature (‘Duchamp’s

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24 Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum, Thames & Hudson, London, 39 Mutlu Çerkez interviewed by Robyn McKenzie, recorded on 21 January 1999, 1989, p. 203. see Robyn McKenzie, ‘Mutlu Çerkez: Life and Times’, Like Art Magazine, Autumn 1999, p. 39.

25 The term pochior is used here to describe a decorative stencil-based printing technique. 40 McKenzie, p. 39.

26 Bonk, p. 203. 41 McKenzie, p. 39.

27 Martha Buskirk, ‘Thoroughly Modern Marcel’, in The Duchamp Effect, Martha Buskirk 42 McKenzie, p. 39. and Mignon Nixon (eds), The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1996, p. 197. 43 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Hugh Tomlinson (trans.), Columbia University 28 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, in October, vol. 27, 1983. Press, New York, 1983, p. 49.

29 Paul Patton, ‘Anti-Platonism and Art’, in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea 44 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Eternal Return and the Overman’, in The Nick of Time: Politics, Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, Routledge, Abingdon, Evolution, and the Untimely, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2004, pp. 140–41. UK, 1994, pp. 141–56. Grosz refers to Deleuze’s reading of the dice throw as ‘one of Nietzsche’s favorite images of the eternal return’. The dice throw for Deleuze represents ‘pure chance’ and is an 30 Deleuze, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, p. 52. affirmation of chance—the willing of chance, which brings the repetition of change and 31 Deleuze, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, p. 52. difference into existence.

32 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton (trans.), Athlone Press, London, 45 Stephen O’Connell, ‘Mutlu Çerkez, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, August 1997’, 1994, p. 293. Like Art Magazine, Spring 1997, p. 45.

33 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 293. 46 O’Connell, p. 45.

34 Patton observes that Duchamp and Warhol both offer ‘visual realisations of a similar 47 Butler, p. 61. strategy, the former by employing ready-made objects as sculptural artworks, 48 Butler, p. 61. thereby transforming the nature of the appearance represented, the latter by recreating a series of banal objects, Brillo boxes made from plywood and hand 49 Francis Plagne, ‘Mutlu Çerkez: “Got a Date, I can’t Be Late”’, Un Magazine, vol. 3, no. 2, painted to reproduce the mass-produced commercial item’, p. 143. 2009, p. 11.

35 Patton, p. 142. 50 Plagne, p. 11.

36 For further reading, see Helen Hughes, ‘Catalogue raisonné’, Mutlu Çerkez 1988–2065, 51 Grosz, p. 146. exhibition catalogue, Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2018, p. 257. 52 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136. 37 Rex Butler, ‘Mutlu Çerkez, The Year 2025 Will Not Take Place’, Art/Text, no. 64, 53 In a previous review of the exhibition, Australian artist and writer Kate Woodcroft 1999, p. 63. describes my work in relation to the guitar poster works: ‘the work is a self-portrait, 38 Through brief artist statements, Çerkez explains in a matter-of-fact way the specifc a nostalgic, performative memento to failed teenage ambitions. His ambition isn’t details of the relationships between the found bootleg recordings and his remade very unique though, rock stardom is a pretty run-of-the-mill vocational desire … variations. Mutlu Çerkez, ‘A design for the overture curtain of an unwritten opera, so it is also a refexive remark on popular notions of the artist.’ Kate Woodcroft, and, stage furniture / props for an unwritten opera, and, make-up design studies ‘Masato Takasaka: Post-structural Jam (Shut Up! We Know You Can Play!)’, Eyeline, for an unwritten opera, and, variations on album covers for bootleg recordings of no. 72, March 2010, p. 85. Led Zeppelin’, exhibition catalogue, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 1999.

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54 Damiano Bertoli, ‘Post-structural Jam (Shut Up! We Know You Can Play!)’, Y3K Gallery, Melbourne, 2009.

55 Hillel Schwartz examines the idea of ‘the authority of the signature’, in which the notion of authenticity is questioned. Schwartz writes that ‘no two signatures by the same person are exactly the same’, and forged signatures are discerned by the absence of sprezzatura, which signifes the ‘offhandedness by which we sign a bit differently every time.’ Hillel Schwartz, ‘Ditto’, in his The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses and Unreasonable Similarities, Zone Books, New York, 1996, p. 219.

56 Schwartz, p. 215.

166 John Nixon’s ‘Laziness’

Rex Butler John Nixon’s ‘Laziness’

While visiting The Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2017, I had a strange and slightly unexpected insight. The show, continuing a line of two earlier Heide exhibitions—Cubism and Australian Art (2009) and Less Is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia (2012)—sought to trace the infuence of constructivism on Australian art. Of course, 2017 was the centenary of the Russian Revolution, so this ambition seemed entirely appropriate. But perhaps the exhibition—and this had been a feature also of the two earlier exhibitions—did not so much seek to trace the influence of constructivism, as though the passage were only one way in that classic provincialist model, as record the ongoing presence of constructivism in Australia. Indeed, although the title of the show opened up the possibility of Australian constructivists out in the world—it did include, for example, Dahl Collings, who worked with László Moholy-Nagy in London in 1936–37—it must be said that it largely wanted to follow the ongoing practice of constructivism in Australia. And this is not even to be understood as the ‘Australianising’ of constructivism, in that subsequent (after modernism) way of writing Australian art history, because there is no distinctly national character to the work to be discovered and that would justify the work.1 Ultimately, we might say the show began with a model of the slow spread of constructivism from its original sources, but, at some point halfway through, constructivism had already arrived in Australia and it was merely a matter of recording its presence here.

It is for this reason that The Call of the Avant-Garde was split into two parts, manifested not so much in the installation of the show, which mixed up the works throughout Heide’s two exhibition spaces, as in the division of the catalogue into two halves: the frst dealing with the period 1920 to 1970, written by curator Lesley Harding; the second, dealing with the period 1970 to the present, written by curator Sue Cramer. Overall, the show was an exemplary instance—as were the other two—of thinking through the presence of international art movements in Australia in terms neither of the provincialist model of their infuence nor the reciprocal postcolonial model of how Australian artists sought to make them their own. However, at least for gallery-goers used to encountering one of these two approaches, the works, especially towards the end of the show, were strangely rhetorically undercharged, unmotivated as they were by either of these two ways in which Australian art has invariably been discussed. Pitched neither against an

171 John Nixon’s ‘Laziness’ John Nixon’s ‘Laziness’

international constructivism nor for an Australian constructivism, they operated a Tatlin-like ensemble incorporating a hammer and rope; Dick Watkins’ Moscow simply as evidence that there was constructivism in Australia, which is a fact with (1963), a painting of a black cross above a red square; and Robert Rooney’s The no wider meaning. Put like this, there was no polemical aspect to these works or Death of 2 (1983), an El Lissitsky-style typographical cut-up. In the even an argumentative or propositional aspect to their exhibition. In fact, I am slightly shorter adjoining room of the main exhibition space was Nixon’s Untitled tempted to say that it was driven neither by modernist provincialism nor by post- (Eleven Heads) (1978), small sculptural objects made out of the packaging for modernist anti-provincialism, but rather was an example of our contemporary commercial products, based on marionettes made in the 1920s by theatre director globalism.2 Alexandra Exter, and Black and White Guitar (2015), a painted guitar from the experimental music ensemble The Donkey’s Tail, founded by Nixon in 2007; However, let me try to put this more acutely, and to get closer to what occurred Gabriella and Silvana Mangano’s Study for Form series (2011), based on designs for to me while walking through The Call of the Avant-Garde. The particular thought the theatre by Lyubov Popova; and Justene Williams’ Victory Over the Sun series I was struck by—and this is not meant to be critical of the show, which was indeed (2016), based on costumes for an opera of that name staged in St Petersburg in something of a test case for its time—is that, with the withdrawal of the rhetorics 1913. Along with these various Nixon objects were works by artists from the 1980s of both provincialism and anti-provincialism presenting it in either a negative and 90s Melbourne art scene, either associated with or inspired by Nixon. There or positive light, the works served simply as evidence of a fact: that there was were works by the artists of Store 5 gallery, such as Gary Wilson’s Untitled (1992), constructivism in Australia. And, reciprocally, being in a show like The Call of the a red monochrome band painted across a yellow garbage bag; Kerrie Poliness’s KS Avant-Garde seemed to be the entire point of much of the work in it, particularly series (1989), spray-painted stencils using plastic offcuts; and Melinda Harper’s that made after 1970. This would be its apotheosis, its raison d’être: to be in an Untitled (Scarf ) series (1999), screenprinted silk scarves employing geometric exhibition in which its mere presence was enough. That is to say, given that the designs. There were also works by the artists of First Floor gallery, such as David show did not put forward any strong hypothesis, arguing neither that Australian Noonan’s Untitled (Components) (1993), a series of small nondescript objects cast art imitated that made overseas nor that it reacted against this model of depen- in white plaster. Finally, there were works by artists who, although not directly dence, being exhibited in the show appeared to be the entire point of its works. connected with Nixon, worked in a style or manner that broadly follows him. Their presence functioned as evidence of the show’s minimal claim: that works These included Mark Galea’s Adapted to Local Conditions (2005), a series of like these existed. There was, therefore, something like a tautology driving re-arrangeable monochromes; Alex Gawronski’s Limit (2013), a photographically The Call of the Avant-Garde: the fact that there was constructivism in Australia inverted version of Malevich’s Black Square (1915); and David Thomas’s Locating is demonstrated by the works exhibited, and these works’ entire meaning is to end the Monochrome (Tokyo White) (2008), photographs of major metropolises with up being exhibited in a show like it. Indeed, paring this back to its simplest form, a stroke of paint covering them. I would even say that the very mounting of the show was the proof of its argument, just as the exhibition of the works served as their entire justification. This was Nevertheless, where did my refection that these works were in effect made to be the strange insight I had as I wandered through The Call of the Avant-Garde. in a show like The Call of the Avant-Garde come from? What in the works allowed this conclusion to be drawn? Another consequence of the post-provincialism of But whose work in particular—if we can ask this question—best evidenced this? a show like this is that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, actually to say what The crucial artist of the second half, whose practice in effect brings about the makes up constructivism. It is not something that can be imitated, either slavishly division between its two sections, is John Nixon. In the long central room of the or ironically, but in fact devolves into a mere historical fact or practice, so that main exhibition space was Nixon’s Red and Black Cross (1988), a small Malevich- there is literally a continuum between what happens in Russia in 1917 and what style red cross on a black background, and The Lives of the Engineers (1980), happens in Australia a century later.3 In other words, without the relationship of

172 173 John Nixon’s ‘Laziness’ John Nixon’s ‘Laziness’

provincialism, the argument of the show becomes simply something like: there it has gradually ‘softened’, passed from the harsh look of the earlier reds, blacks was constructivism in Australia, which paradoxically is now indissociable from and whites to painterly, almost lyrical, pinks, oranges and yellows, along with the thought that there is no such thing as constructivism as such. Constructivism a slight rise in formal complexity. However, I would contend that this is not any becomes—and self-contradictorily I would say that the actual movement of kind of a meaningful formal development but merely a sign that there is nothing constructivism is well suited to this—a mere activity or practice. Perhaps it might at stake in the actual look of the work. In fact, all of this represents a retreat, or even be said, in acknowledgement of this at once tautological and permanently moving away altogether, from any association not only with one particular historical incomplete status, it is the practice of itself. This is, indeed, the argument Cramer avant-garde but with avant-gardism in general. makes in her catalogue essay, where beyond a general emphasis on the theatrical and art-into-life aspects of the ‘original’ movement, she emphasises the ‘perfor- In other words, if it can be put this way, Nixon’s recent work tells us that there is mative’ element of its reception in Australia. She will quote, for example, George nothing at stake in it, at least not in any sense of formal development or continu- Johnson saying that the ‘relationships in my paintings are similar to those of life’; ation or extension of the original principles of constructivism. (Of course, in this will speak with Lesley Harding of Store 5 coming out of the ‘desire to practice the he is offering something of an interpretation of constructivism.8) The move from art of exhibition’; and will quote the gallery website, saying, of Meredith Turnbull’s red to pink (and orange and yellow) makes it seem as though the original impetus textiles, that they ‘function as both singular entities and as collectives’.4 is running out in the work or that the work is not to be understood in terms of any formal advancement or progression. It would be tempting to say that it thereby It is at this point, in order to ‘evidence’ this, that we might want to step back a becomes decorative or ornamental, but more properly—and this is the difficult little and look in more detail at the work of Nixon, the decisive artist for the show— thing to capture about it—it is less outwardly directed than this, less about the not only marking the chronological turning point between its two halves but more response of its audience. I mean this not in any autonomous modernist way, or generally providing the show with its logic and methodology. He has very explicitly even as some performative self-refexivity (as in, say, Robert Morris’s Box with the claimed to be making work in the line of constructivism (particularly if we can Sound of Its Own Making), but more to think of the work as a kind of tautology, count Malevich as constructivist), stating this in any number of his writings and the real subject of which is simply that it exists. There is undoubtedly a kind of public statements. Constructivism is listed as one of Nixon’s artistic sources heroism about Nixon’s practice, the fact that it has persisted for so long and had in manifestoes covering the years 1968–92 and 1984–89.5 In an interview with such an extensive exhibition history. But the practice exists entirely to make this Ben Curnow, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Australian Centre for point—although more than being about it, it merely evidences it.9 It is therefore Contemporary Art in 1994, he said: ‘Malevich’s Black Square was the key work, not narcissistic or self-conscious, but immanent and self-refexive. It is not about because it is the work which forwards nomination as the “idea” of painting’.6 anything, not even itself. Rather, it just is itself. Each new exhibition or body of However, although at least his paintings and graphic works repeat the recognised work is a continuation of what has come before, not because it is a development iconography of constructivism—squares, crosses, monochromes—it is in effect the of or reflection upon it but simply because it is more of it. So, each new show or practice of constructivism that he is speaking of here. But it is practice in a very body of work is also entirely new and unprecedented, insofar as it has nothing to particular sense, for if we look at the span of Nixon’s career over some 50 years, do with (as it is neither justifed by nor commenting upon) what has come before. there has been little if any iconographical development. Or if we trace the actual It is merely another in a seemingly endless progression, and for this reason is both movement of his work, it can be seen to be telling us that its iconography is not its self-contained and self-explanatory. real subject; that the work, despite Nixon’s own earlier claims, is not to be under- stood in any modernist avant-garde sense as a progression towards some goal.7 Hence the prevalence of Nixon’s work in art exhibitions of all kinds. For, insofar On the contrary, if we actually follow the trajectory of the work, we would say that as it is authorless, motiveless and contentless, it allows others to make work

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just like it. It is effectively able to be seen as evidence not just of itself but of a inconsistency or self-contradiction, I would want to suggest that Nixon himself whole field of similar practice. It is just this that is to be found in The Call of the realises this. In a recent show at Anna Schwartz Gallery, EPW: Selected Paintings Avant-Garde, with the works of Wilson, Poliness, Harper, Noonan and others. (2018), which in Nixon’s words was about his ‘continuous artistic activity in In a sense, these artists can be understood to be part of a scene gathered around several mediums’,11 there was the notable presence of both old and new wooden Nixon—and Cramer is good at locating and historically placing such contexts: frames used to make the work. These did not frame the work but were actually Store 5 in Prahran in the late 1980s, First Floor in Fitzroy in the mid-1990s. But included in it, as though they were its subject. Indeed, the real point is that the I would also say that it is not a matter of Nixon infuencing, in any traditional way, frame or the act of framing is ultimately the privileged subject of Nixon’s work. these artists. There is nothing in his work that can be followed: no style, method Its fundamental ambition is to frame itself, again not in any modernist way as or technique—only the fact of its making. Nixon simply authorises, by his example, a meditation upon its formal and material qualities, but as a certain holding others to make work like his, the only real subject of which is the fact that it is together of the time and location of its making, its literal presentation of itself made and shown. And thus, we have a ‘scene’, which is always the true outcome of via exhibition. Nixon’s work: a marker of a particular time and place. The work serves as evidence of a group of artists working together to make work about a group of artists work- Perhaps if I was going to make some sort of an art-historical comparison to Nixon— ing together.10 And it is just this that the curators of this show are able to point although this would have no real bearing—it would be not to constructivism but, to: a shared moment that is not in any sense about constructivism (with respect with a certain allowance given for its strikingness and unexpectedness, to the to its style, motivations or history) but has meaning only as a record of a moment Japanese artist On Kawara. For, in the same way as Kawara’s work does, Nixon’s in art here that has passed, whose only meaning is that it has recorded itself. functions like a diary, a marker of daily existence, of ongoing activity, but asserting But, of course, it is just this that constructivism is said to be: an art of ‘production’, nothing but its own possibility. It testifies to nothing but itself—but ‘testify’ is and frst of all the production of itself. too strong, too triumphant, too manifesto-like (and certainly, if we read Nixon’s various manifestoes, very little is argued except for the sheer fact that the work It is an ethos that has entirely entered the artist-run galleries and smaller insti- is made). In fact, even against some of the other diary-like projects in the history tutional spaces in Melbourne today. In a perhaps too critical but also a too grand of art—for example, German artist Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Pictures, made in Berlin way, we might say that their fundamental justifcation is that they continue to car- immediately after World War I, collaging together food stamps, bus tickets and ry on, despite all of the factors militating against them. This is in effect their single assorted debris of everyday life—it is not fnally a matter of the difficulty, persist- reason for existing in a post-avant-garde world. They do not—and they admit that ence, arduousness and unlikeliness of the making of the work, or any material they do not—show new art, art that in any way extends or builds upon what has sense of the place out of which it comes. It is merely that it has been made, which come before. Rather what they attest to—and I would suggest Nixon’s art pioneers is the same as it having been curated. This, again, is the structuring tautology of this logic—is simply that there is a practice that exists in a certain time and space Nixon’s work: it is justifed entirely by being made and seen, just as any exhibition in Australian art history. In this sense, there is a documentary quality to the art, showing it is justifed by its inclusion. (Indeed, the truth of this equation is indi- a certain holding of time and location together, making it identifiable later on. cated by how many of Nixon’s exhibitions, even those in commercial galleries, It is not a moment characterised by any coherent artistic style or wider social are presented as though a curated selection of works, either on the basis of some project, and so, in the absence of this, it is re-classifiable or re-narratable in any supposed thematic, the ‘experimental painting workshops’, or time and place, number of different ways. (Hence the absolute ubiquity of Nixon in all sorts of ‘recent’ or ‘selected’ works.12) histories and retrospectives. He appeared in Heide’s Less Is More and we can just as easily imagine him appearing in their cubism show.) And again, in a kind of

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There is perhaps another art-historical comparison that we might make to Nixon’s not only that Nixon’s work, and that of the artists of Store 5, was justifcation for a work, which although strictly speaking beside the point is also tempting. Hal Foster show on constructivism, but that a show on constructivism was justifcation for it. speaks of ‘an archival impulse’ in contemporary art in his well-known article of What the work ultimately testifed to was not anything the curator might put to it, the same name.13 By this he means to refer to such works as Thomas Hirschhorn’s but only itself. It was precisely—and perhaps in the end we might need a religious Monument series, which gathers together diverse materials around certain major vocabulary for this—self-evident. philosophers, and Sam Durant’s putting together of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed with civil rights placards of the time. Following Foster’s sugges- tion, we might speak of Nixon’s work as fundamentally ‘archival’ in impulse, but archival only of itself. That is to say—and this, as we have seen, is the use curators principally make of it—it operates as a record or reclamation not of some other time but of its own time. Its fundamental value is effectively sociological, as a marker of the scene or moment of its making. But it is not in any sense reflective or historicising of it. It is not in any way about the scene in which it was made and exhibited but just is its making and exhibition. So that, for all of the gesturing towards some deeper social context in The Call of the Avant-Garde, it was literally no deeper than the surfaces of the work it exhibited. The ‘scenes’ of Store 5 and First Floor were nothing but the works they exhibited, and the works indicated nothing but the fact that they were exhibited in the ‘scene’.

To come fnally to the theme of this collection—art and laziness—is any of this to call Nixon or his work ‘lazy’? Not at all. In fact, almost the opposite. What Nixon’s work aims at is a kind of total visibility, a total legibility, a total equivalence be- tween the work and its exhibition. Nixon holds many solo shows and appears in many group exhibitions each year, but in principle he could hold a continuous solo show and appear in every group exhibition on the simple justifcation that the work has been made and that looking at it we evidence this. And every art exhibition today, since the end of modernist style and postmodernist revision, is like this. Its only necessary justifcation is that it is exhibiting work to be seen. It is in this sense fnally that we might call the contemporary art world ‘lazy’, which must be understood not as any criticism but is simply to acknowledge its new dispensation as ultimately fat, featureless, contentless. Looking at the long sequence of Nixon’s work, there is ultimately nothing there but it. It is missing nothing, needs nothing to be said about it, needs not to be explained or understood, but only to be shown and witnessed. It speaks only of the fact that it exists and it is there. This is the strange sensation that I had walking through The Call of the Avant-Garde—

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1 The classic statement of this postmodern sending back of infuence the other way is 7 See Francis Plagne, ‘John Nixon, The Lives of the Engineers, 1980’, in Cramer and Ian Burn’s reading of ’s Railway Guard, Dimboola (1943) with regard to Harding, p. 117. cubism: ‘The historical resistance, in Australia and elsewhere, to the picture-making 8 But it is important to note that this does not thereby constitute any kind of a ‘revision’ of techniques of Analytic Cubism is as important a factor of the history of Cubism as it constructivism because there is no assumed distance from it on the part of Nixon himself. is a (positive) feature of a history of Australian art’. Ian Burns, ‘The Re-Appropriation of Infuence’, in Dialogue: Writings in Art History, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 9 Nixon writes, ‘The documentation and dissemination of the work is a necessary part of the 1991, p. 202. total work’, ‘In Situ’, in John Nixon, EPW: 2004, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2004, p. 13; and ‘Meaning should not be a function of illusion—works do not 2 Just to be clear and to avoid any misunderstanding, what I am saying here is not to affect meaning but instead generate it. The works are fabricated and built in a straight be seen as any simple criticism of Nixon or Call of the Avant-Garde. Obviously, any forward and workmanlike manner and the gestalt of the individual painting can be characterisation of Nixon as ‘lazy’ can be meant only ironically, and the devolution experienced immediately. “What you see is what you see”’, ‘Minimal Art’, in John Nixon, of contemporary art history into the form of the self-confrming list is, as much as EPW: 2004, p. 13. anything, something I have observed in my own work on ‘UnAustralian’ art with A.D.S. Donaldson, where, in the absence of the structuring logics of modernism and 10 See Lane Relyea on this in terms of First Floor: ‘We’d like to imagine our practices nationalism, art history becomes effectivelyquantitative , the simple accumulation as unifed by social rather than institutional or discursive forces. We don’t read of necessarily non-selective data. This is, of course, part of a much wider conversation postmodern theory any more, and we don’t critique institutions. What we do is hang about the future of art history in the era of the internet, the artistic ‘multitude’ and out.’ Cited in Lucinda Strahan, ‘First Floor: Swansong for a Scene Maker’, Realtime, 52, world art. December 2001–January 2002, p. 30.

3 Indeed, the difference between the two halves of the show might be summarised 11 Cited in John Nixon, EPW: Selected Paintings, Anna Schwartz Gallery, 5 July–18 August 2018, by the following two statements. In their jointly written ‘Introduction’ to the annaschwartzgallery.com/exhibitions/epw-selected-paintings; accessed 12 September 2019. exhibition, Cramer and Harding (but I suggest it is Harding) write, ‘Our present 12 This is undoubtedly why in Nixon’s exhibition catalogues the work is so often seen in his understanding of Russian Constructivism is necessarily shaped by our distance various studios, garages and storage spaces. It is not only because part of the meaning of from it’ (p. 1), while, in her essay introducing the second half of the exhibition, his work is its exhibition, but more than this that as soon as his work is made it is exhibited. Cramer proposes, ‘Constructivism can be loosed from its fxed position as a As I have been arguing, there is an absolute equivalent between the making and the defnite stage in history’ (p. 83). The frst is a modern or postmodern conception exhibition of the work in Nixon. allowing a certain relationship to constructivism; the second is a contemporary construction meaning that we have no relationship to constructivism. 13 Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, no. 110, Fall 2004. See Sue Cramer and Lesley Harding, Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Vic., 2017.

4 See Cramer and Harding, pp. 85, 13 and 105.

5 See ‘1968–1992’ and ‘Worldview 1984–89’, in John Nixon, Thesis: Selected Works from 1968–1993, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1994, n.p., content.acca.melbourne/uploads/2016/11/John-Nixon-Thesis-screen.pdf; accessed 5 November 2019.

6 ‘Interview: John Nixon with Ben Curnow’, in Nixon, n.p.

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Lisa Radford Not Making Public

This chapter makes public that which an artist attempts not to. ‘Not Making Public’ is the result of a desire to examine the parameters of how a public is formed in relation to artworks conceptualised and presented in a context beyond view, with- drawn from traditional contemporary art-viewing platforms. ‘Not Making Public’ considers frst how a public exists in relation to the creative act, and then what is disseminated and distributed in the context of this withdrawal. In an interview with James Lingwood, Francis Alÿs made the provocation, ‘… maybe you don’t need to see the work, you just need to hear about it’, a statement that gestures not only to the discursive and dialogical nature of art, but also to an action of withdraw- al and how an action is represented.1 An inherent contradiction sits between the competing actions of withdrawal and the desire to present that which has been withdrawn from circulation. In this case, I am interested in the conditions or contexts that contribute to this contradiction in the work of Kati Rule, an artist who has decided to not make public that which she has and continues to produce. Embedded in the phrase ‘not making public’ is both a question of what is ‘public’ and the act of ‘not making’. The phrase reveals a counterintuitive of labour, one of making and then withdrawing, highlighting the relationship between the with- drawal of the art object as an extension of the readymade and the ready-to-hand.

Since 2011, Kati Rule has been making work that is housed in the North Ringwood home of her parents. This project exists under the title Site: Unseen, with work made in conversation with her family and in response to the site where the work is eventually housed. Those outside the immediate family who encounter the work are mostly an audience of friends and extended family. Rule is interested in what is considered art, how it is produced, what is made visible, who engages with it and the context that emerges from these encounters and considerations. In her approach, Rule engages in a discursive and dialogical relationship with the site and a very specific select audience. This approach enacts a withdrawal from the usual means of presentation, and in doing so reveals a series of political relations between the intersections of family, the labour in which they participate and the changing demographic of the suburb in which the family home is located. As the work is produced over years, Rule captures these variables as they change over time, and their impact on her intimate engagement with what constitutes the art object. Rejecting traditional representations of what might constitute or repre- sent labour in contemporary art, Rule’s intervention forces a visible withdrawal

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from the more familiar sites of contemporary art, those being the museum, gallery In the preface to the book drawn from his doctoral thesis, Proletarian Nights: and formal exhibition. The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, Rancière states ‘that present forms of capitalism, the collapse of the labour market, the destruction of systems As friends, colleagues and past collaborators, Rule and I have discussed the visi- of social solidarity and the precarious nature of employment are creating experi- bility of this work, the act of not making public and the relevance of making work ences of work and forms of life that may well be closer to those of the artisans that is hidden or difficult to encounter. We have discussed audience, materiality of the past than the world of non-material work and frenetic consumption’.3 and the politics of family. What of the potential generosity in the act of making art Rancière’s research fndings into the archives of the proletariat take the form of for an unknown audience? Is there a responsibility to distribute one’s work in a selected texts, diary entries and letters interspersed with commentary and reflec- more democratic manner? Does this apparent responsibility conflict with the tion. The texts are by the workers, and as a collection they present the desires and intimacy and intended rigour with which she approaches making the work? thoughts of workers in their own time, and they self-present as creative agents. The withdrawal is made visible when representations such as this—writing with Rather than embedding his fndings in the presentation of a strictly academic and or on the work—are made public, or when the artist is asked to contribute to an historical text, Rancière leaves the workers to speak for themselves. By drawing exhibition. For Rule, the site of production and reception are collapsed into on the family as an archive, Rule similarly activates her family through the objects the family home, necessarily limiting a public. If art can be returned to a site she collects, arranges and makes, depicting her own engagement with a shared of conjecture, myth, rumour or oral history, as Alÿs’s earlier conjecture implies, contemporary situation, questioning how labour and art relate to our own time Rule radically redistributes the act of making art with her family and within the and a future. family home. By removing the work from the gallery circuit or usual formats of exhibition, Rule quite literally relocates the redistribution of art by placing it In his introduction to Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno within the architecture of her previous and present family homes (the two located Latour suggests that it is things which bring people together because they divide on adjacent blocks of land)—a literal shift between one home and the other, and us.4 Here, Latour is making visible a world where ideas and things cohabit space the social and familial dynamics these sites house. and are in dialogue. This dialogue, as he refers to it, creates publics, where ‘matters of concern’ tie worlds together, raising the question of whether this performance This chapter attempts to unpack some of these questions. It considers the act of of things that we call democracy is always determined by that which we can see.5 withdrawal in relation to that explored by Bruno Latour, and in relation to the Latour addresses the visibility of a public in an interesting way—placing us in the concept of a melancholic retreat discussed by Joost de Bloois concerning contem- context of the origins of object-orientated ontology (being that in technology porary political theory and the politics of withdrawal. By removing the evidence and software programming), absence (or ‘object-avoidance’) and the public affair of one’s artistic labour from the usual circuits of visibility, Rule is making a call (res publica). In refence to political philosophy, he says: for both the right to make art and the right to privacy—a shared intimacy, a private conversation. Contextualised and presented in the family home, these acts are In a strange way, political science is mute just at the moment when embedded in an inherent relationship with domesticity and the readymade. In a objects of concern should be brought in and made to speak up loudly. sense, the act is a double withdrawal: frst, as Paul Lafargue and Jacques Rancière Contrary to what the powerful etymology of their most cherished word might agree, a withdrawal from the usual means of production and the labour should imply, their res publica does not seem to be loaded with too many market; second, a withdrawal from visibility and in relation to a public usually things. Procedures to authorize and legitimize are important, but it’s associated with the art world.2 only half of what is needed to assemble. The other half lies in the issues themselves, in the matters that matter, in the res that creates a public

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around it. They need to be represented, authorized, legitimated and When we eventually pull up outside the house, I am met by X. He hands brought to bear inside the relevant assembly.6 me a key and tells me he will wait outside. Take as long as you like, he urges me. Here’s a map. It’s all quite straightforward and simple. You do need Rule’s engagement with what might be produced from and for the archive in a to look at all of the work. If you have any problems, come and find me home suggests a failure in the spectacle of the public museum and archive. Rule’s and I can help you. objects of concern and their assembly manifest in and around her, her family, her partner, the home, its history and through discourse and conversation with family Just as he walks away, a small car pulls out of the driveway. A woman, and friends, before they permeate academic circles and incidental conversations. with two large dogs in the back seat, waves cheerfully and also disappears, Rule represents, authorises and legitimises objects and experiences that might down the long driveway winding through to the main road.8 otherwise be hidden or unspoken in the family. Their emergence and arrangement within the specifcs of the site are actions of assembly, and it is here that a delinea- The importance of the ‘private act’ is heightened by Daw’s use of the referent X, tion between making visible and making public emerges. indicating a guide of some sort and his proximity to a woman, with two dogs, who waves cheerfully. The viewing experience for Daw is mediated by a list and a map. Rule defnes Site: Unseen by what it is not—in the title’s wordplay and also, in an There is an offer of help by X. The task is to negotiate a stranger’s home via a list expanded manner, where she has noted that the project: of untitled but coded works. In printed form, nothing much is given away. The description of the materials that support the titles is both minimal and literal, … is not a house museum lacking any detail or conceptual clues and content. This minimising act, perhaps … is not a museum that is a house also a kind of withdrawal from the excesses of information, means the emphasis … is not a temporary show—it has a duration that will not be known is placed on the experience of seeing the works and being with them in the context until the moment it ceases to exist of the home. The code printed with the titles, not unlike monogrammed initials on … is not a historical site that will become a museum a bathroom towel, consists of acronyms that Rule uses to make private, but still … is an open exhibition that is in fux, depending on the inhabitants reference the names of friends and family members who have contributed some- and their needs.7 how to the works—be it the photographer who was employed by the artist, or the subject in conversation with the artist, or the owner of the readymade materials Rule’s project is affirmed and described almost entirely in negation that responds the artist has used. to the conditions and concerns of the stakeholders—in this case the family. Rule acknowledges that there may come a time when the collection she has made will Untitled (with LCR) (2013) exists as two orange kitchen-cabinet doors removed be dissolved, if the occupants of the residence move or the use of the house changes. from the original home and, from memory, hung above the servery of the open- In the meantime, on permanent display in her family home are approximately plan living area. Operating within the language of modernist monochrome, the nine autonomous works made for the tenants of the house and their extended doors are specific to a previous home (next door to the current house) and also family. These works are essentially by her family and about her family. An exercise contain a language of 1970s domestic interiors, with their painted gloss-enamel in co-authoring, they are listed on a room sheet made for assessors’ and friends’ surface. As Rule recounts: discreet viewing of the works in February 2015. An accompanying map was provided on the day of viewing. Kate Daw recalls: … through hard work and mishap my parents acquired a damaged bright orange laminate kitchen bench top. They decided to put this in their ‘new’

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home, and my paternal grandfather then painted all the cupboards The theme of technics reasserts itself—the very experience of perceiving a matching orange. There are various marks and blemishes on these the same temporal object twice is possible only by virtue of the prosthetic cupboard doors but considering they were exposed to [a] large west- memory support of digital or analogue recording. It is only with the advent facing window they are still vibrant and unfaded. They were always of such technologies that the verbatim repeatability of the temporal object remarkable and striking as bold colour trends are when they are becomes possible. Stiegler calls this technical memory support ‘tertiary translated into domestic interiors. There was something seamless memory’ and argues that it is the phonogram qua tertiary memory that in the way they were painted, a heavy object that had a high-gloss originally highlights the fact of the selection of primary retentions by fnish making it almost impossible to fnd a brushstroke.9 consciousness, and thus the intervention of imagination at the very center of perception.10 For Rule, these doors recall John Nixon’s EPW: Orange works, produced since 1994 and exhibited from 1999. At this time Rule was a student, and Nixon’s work As I write this, a headline on Twitter reads ‘Memories of Music Cannot Be Lost spoke to an art language she was learning, one that would evolve and unravel as to Alzheimer’s and dementia’.11 Can an image of the album that held a recording she ventured through her art education. The language of Rule’s doors mirrors also be a trigger for lost memories? Rule’s rendering of the Elvis cover hangs in a Nixon’s—that of the domestic, the readymade; that of construction and utilitarian hallway, not far from an entrance, above a plant that rests on the cast-iron Singer histories and futures. Handles were never attached to the doors that make treadle sewing machine that is now a side table. This hallway is a threshold for Untitled (with LCR), which renders their original function somewhat obscure, a public, the work an introduction to about potential shared relegating it to a semi-private narrative, a shared oral history, myth, with the experiences, history, taste and their evolution over time. potential for misinformation—is it an early John Nixon, a precursor, a homage or bootleg? While these discreet works are autonomous in some sense, it is impossible to isolate them from the greater project, an ecosystem that deliberately traverses There are eight other works to date that form the material manifestation of Site: the limits of art and its discursive possibilities. Upon visiting the home, I am Unseen. Many of these are intended to operate as discreet objects. Ranging in particularly taken by Untitled (with TRR) (2014), a collection of Rule’s father’s their approach and mediums, some, such as Untitled (with ZA) (2012) and pay slips. These weekly slips were ritually kept for the 34 years that he was a Untitled (with ZA) (2014), take the form of what we may consider more traditional truck driver for Safeway (now Woolworths). The collection has an unintended two-dimensional art-making. Sharing the same title, one of these two works is resonance. An unconscious and accidental archive, the rolled black, white and photographs of the lounge and living rooms of the old house (bookends to the green carbon slips are held in bundles by rubber bands; as Rule acknowledges, past, as Rule calls them), while the other is a framed pencil drawing. The latter, her father kept every pay slip without ever really knowing why. Housed en masse from memory, is a coloured-pencil drawing, faithfully rendering an Elvis record in a museum-style Perspex box, the pay slips speak to the quantification of labour from the collection of Rule’s mother. With its tattered corners, tape and ageing and its remuneration. The dissonance between the scale of the presentation and stains, the Australian pressing of this Elvis record, I am sure, was in my own the knowledge that 34 years x eight hours a day x five days a week can be contained family collection. Rule’s remaking holds the history of the music played and the in a 34-centimetre-square container is unsettling. A memorial to labour, this materiality of the technology, a recording that can be held in our hands. work, in its failure at representation—paper documenting time by omitting the body—poignantly addresses the spaces between documents: that which the body As Ben Roberts reminds us, Bernard Stiegler speaks of the change that recording does and that which paper accounts for. had on us, and the possibility of it altering memory and our very relation to it:

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This work in particular speaks to a larger project: the relationship between the ‘melancholia’, in this way laying out an analysis and arguing for an understanding body and the technology, the labour and the home. Here, the details of the back- of the politics of withdrawal as a relation between a subject and the lost object story are inaccessible—who issued the pay slips, gathered the details they contain, (in this case, ‘the left’).15 Recalling that not long ago the art world and critical the sick days, overtime, holiday pay, superannuation and the other time fractions theory heralded a return to the political, de Bloois suggests such a return might that define paid employment. On top of this memorial to work we find Untitled indeed be symptomatic of a dramatic turning away from or closure of the political, (with LCC) (2014), the contents of a drawer emptied into a container. Rule’s father as signified by the election of Trump, or, as he refers to it as in a tongue-in-cheek describes the collection as ‘the total of his father’s [her grandfather’s] worldly manner, the ‘Trumposcene’. goods’ when he died.12 An exaggeration we are all familiar with through narratives of family history, this one exists as a symptom of class history and a The ‘Trumposcene’ reveals a split in the human species between those ‘designated relationship to objects and ownership that could be considered simultaneously as survivors’ of climate disaster (those able to buy their survival by means of romanticised and emblematic. The two cases—one containing the quantified ‘New Zealand helipads’ or even space colonisation) and everyone else (those labour of a son and father, and the other the possessions of a father and grand- of us who are forced to continue to inhabit the dying planet). The culture wars father—sit on the very cabinet in which the contents were originally found. It is of the Trumposcene—easily mistaken as ‘the return of the political’—act as a a tower to paternal history, the remnants of working lives contextualised as art, smokescreen for what is really happening. While the rest of us are struggling with archived in the home and not a museum or library. the conjured ghosts of fascism, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, elites are literally plotting their escape through ‘techno-eugenist transformations’.16 Stiegler might Rule’s withdrawal, not only from the networks of art but also the performance call this the ‘Entroposcene’, an epoch of perpetual disruption preventing new of its presentation, circumnavigates the institution while actively engaging in a thought and short-circuiting new forms of sociality, as well as the appearance or dialogue with it. The images she supplies for inclusion in essays or book chapters formation of subjectivities in relation to collective ones. This occurs through an provide no detail of the actual work; they are vector drawings of things in-situ, ongoing process of abstraction and excessive representation in which the polis absent of detail. They were frst produced in responding to my request to ‘present becomes a gated community for the 0.00001 per cent, democracy and an excuse the work to a public’ for the exhibition Support Material, Soft Furnishings.13 for the forceful removal of any obstacle to a planetary free market. Language If my role as curator is considered one of power, this power was subsequently itself becomes meaningless (as the old idiom of autonomy, creativity and excellence reclaimed and reframed by Rule as a further act of withdrawal. becomes instrumentalised) and even the subject, as Stiegler explains, is expropri- ated, robbed through its narcissism by profiling and subsequent data-mining.17 In an unpublished conference paper titled ‘Melancholic Retreat: Narratives of Withdrawal in Contemporary Political Theory’, Joost de Bloois examines The contemporary art circuits in which we participate are characterised by press contemporary philosophical inquiries in which withdrawal emerges as central releases, Instagram posts, interviews, gallery magazine articles and book chapters to the significance of the political today.14 In this paper, which was previously (commercial or independent), museums, festivals and biennales—networks of titled ‘Taking Oneself Off the Market’, de Bloois uses Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe excessive representation and instrumentalised creativity, and their subsequent Lacoue-Labarthe’s Retreating the Political as means to discuss other thinkers and circulation. In Rule’s project, withdrawal from these circuits provides an avenue activists, such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler and the Invisible Committee, who for thinking about an exit strategy from this organised perpetual disruption, provide a conceptual nebula that includes notions such as withdrawal, retreat, narcissism and data-mining. It is also a withdrawal from the need (not desire) to disconnection, desertion and exodus. De Bloois believes that withdrawal needs have everything represented. Rule’s vector drawings reiterate this—simply the to be understood in relation to Sigmund Freud’s understanding of ‘mourning’ and outlines of objects and borders of forms, emptied of detail and specific function,

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and, as a result, form. Rule’s project literally frames loss: of the family, the family ‘the capitalist workshops [that] had conquered the country’ with pre-capitalist home, craftsmanship, representation and perhaps also that to which Rancière communities, particularly classical antiquity, where Greek philosophers saw refers, social solidarity and reliable forms of employment. De Bloois traces Judith work as an activity for slaves. He writes: Butler’s outline for a ‘politics of mourning’; that is, a politics of retreat, of loss, where the politics of mourning is an affirmation of the subject’s/our continued The philanthropists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having presence.18 If Rule’s project is an act of mourning, it is in this mourning that the done nothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better were it re-articulation of the social bond and an escape from contemporary melancholic to scatter pestilence and to poison the springs than to erect a capitalist narcissism occurs. In Rule’s politics of mourning, withdrawal doesn’t result in one factory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work, and taking revenge on the world. On the contrary, Rule re-affirms our attachment to farewell joy, health and liberty; farewell to all that makes life beautiful the world in order to reorient both herself and us in it differently.19 and worth living.23

Rule acknowledges that there is a form of critique embedded in the work, her aim It is no coincidence that I have chosen this quote where the term philanthropist being to ‘integrate art more directly into the realm of the social’.20 Her act is one has a very particular inference in relation to art and its production and even of redistribution, and in this case contemporary art and its experience is navi- circulation. While we are perhaps all too aware of how capitalism continues to gated through the family home, beyond the public eye. Jan Verwoert might refer reshape the relation between work and life, Lafargue’s call is not only a for the to such an act as ‘unwillingness to submit to industry standards’—to the high-res right to refuse work and the right to withdraw, but also for rights alone. Site: images, catalogue essays, email announcements and formal invitations.21 If we Unseen is, at the time of writing, a nine-year project, unfinished and mostly consider Rule’s project alongside the documented withdrawals of Lee Lozano unvisited. Site: Unseen exists outside of and beyond the parameters and demands (Dropout Piece, begun c. 1970) and Cady Noland, we can perhaps recognise, as to exhibit and (self-)promote. Site: Unseen resists the norms of what is considered Alexander Koch (organiser of the 2002 exhibition Kunst Verlassen 1: Gestures a demonstrative work ethic. Site: Unseen is Kati Rule’s call for the right to engage of Disappearance) and Chris Sharp do, a criticality in Rule’s work that addresses in a different conversation, one independent of the customary circuits and capital the mechanisms and nature of the art world.22 To consider the circuit of art in of contemporary art. this context is to do so in the language of the art world—to side step it and mirror it. Rule acknowledges her own role in the art world (she works in a commercial gallery and has done so for many years) and so is acutely aware of the mechanisms— commercial or otherwise—that might contribute to an exit. It seems, though, and this is demonstrated through her project, that she is more interested in how the audience for art can be expanded and mobilised, with the possibility for a private and cultural dialogue about art and its intersection with life by those who might otherwise feel excluded from contemporary art discourse, due either to proximity or to education.

It was Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, who in 1883 published the pamphlet The Right to Be Lazy, a political treatise responding to the increasing number of factories and the declining number of people working the land. Lafargue compares

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1 Alan Quireyns, Direlia Lazo, Emily Highfeld, Jan Verwoert, Nikita Yingqian Cai and 12 Kati Rule, conversation with the author, February 2019. Yael Messer, I’m Not Here: An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs, De Appel Arts Centre, 13 Liang Luscombe and Lisa Radford, Support Material, Soft Furnishings, with Elizabeth Amsterdam, 2010, p. 5. Newman, Angela Brennan, Alek O., Koji Ryui, Katherine Hattam, Natasha Madden, 2 Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy, published in 1883 by Charles Kerr & Co. in Chicago, Howard Arkley, Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Spiros Panigirakis, Tony Schwensen, is a treatise that examines labour in relation to productivity. But it is also a polemic about Kati Rule, Sanja Pahoki and Kate Daw, RMIT Project Space / Spare Room, Melbourne, rights, and how and what type of political change we can affect. Available online at: 12 February–24 March 2016. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-lafargue-the-right-to-be-lazy. 14 Joost de Bloois, ‘Melancholic Retreat: Narratives of Retreat in Contemporary Political 3 Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, Theory’, conference paper, Towards a Politics of Withdrawal?, Leiden University, Verso Books, London, 2012, p. xxix. Netherlands, 26 May 2018.

4 In ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things Public’, Latour addresses 15 Citing Wendy Brown, de Bloois writes: ‘left melancholy represents not only a refusal Martin Heidegger’s distinction between objects and things, and the background to to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to under- Dingpolitik by saying: ‘Thus, long before designating an object thrown out of the political stand history in terms other than “empty time” or “progress”. It signifes, as well, a certain sphere and standing there objectively and independently, the Ding or Thing has for many narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them’. any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation.’ Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3, Fall 1999. ZKM and Karlsruhe, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 2005, p. 23. 16 De Bloois. 5 Latour and Weibel, in Kevin S. Fox, Elizabeth Hennessy, Scott Kirsch, Lisa Marshall, 17 De Bloois. Sara Safransky, Autumn Thoyre and Jenna Tiitsman, ‘Book Review Essay: A Catalog of Things’, Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 11, no. 2, 2010. 18 De Bloois.

6 Latour and Weibel, p. 6. 19 De Bloois.

7 Kati Rule, email correspondence with the author, October 2014. 20 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 2002, p. 24. 8 Kate Daw, ‘Site Unseen; The Enigmatic Work of Kati Rule’, catalogue essay for Support Material, Soft Furnishings, curated by Liang Luscombe and Lisa Radford, 21 Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’, in his Tell Me What You Want, RMIT Project Space / Spare Room, Melbourne, 12 February–24 March 2016. What You Really, Really Want, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, 2010, p. 21.

9 Rule, email correspondence, October 2014. 22 Chris Sharp, ‘The Concert Was Not a Success: On the Withdrawal of the Withdrawal’, Fillip, no. 18, Spring 2013, p. 96. 10 Ben Roberts, ‘Cinema as Mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the Industrialisation of Memory’, Angelaki, vol. 11, no. 1, 2006, p. 60. 23 Lafargue, p. 9, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-lafargue-the-right-to-be-lazy; accessed 29 April 2019. 11 Ned Dymoke, ‘Memories of Music Cannot Be Lost to Alzheimer’s and Dementia’, Big Think, 29 April 2018, bigthink.com/news/ever-get-the-tingles-from-listening-to- good-music-that-part-of-your-brain-will-never-get-lost-to-alzheimers?utm_medium= Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3g7f7T3jXvK0GIZEmzJbI_5-u-v T13EEcYYpYUxIoioDD-rP4EO9EKdl4#; accessed 26 November 2019.

196 197 How to Work Better

David Attwood How to Work Better

Over the last two years I have produced a series of artworks that attempts to critique ‘work’ and its relationship to art practice. By work I mean mainly the white-collar variety: the administrative, managerial, clerical and so on. This direction began with a realisation that much of my practice is clerical, in the sense that artworks come into being through activities such as online purchasing, taking screen-shots, emailing, liaising and ordering, more than crafting, capturing, rendering or ‘making’. In response to this, I have tried to more deliberately explore processes of administration, repetition, tedium, automation and management as ways of producing work about work. In this chapter I trace the impulses that have informed three recent artworks, and contextualise them in relation to writings on work by Jonathan Crary, David Frayne and Liam Gillick, as well as other art- works about work by Richard Prince, Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Underlying my tracing of the artworks that I have produced over this period is an attempt to negotiate how I might introspectively understand my contemporary art practice as work, and how to work better.

An exhibition titled Work Ethic, held at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2004, examined developments in the nature of artistic labour during the 1960s, and its effects on the production of art both then and now. Curator Helen Molesworth explains that when the United States shifted from a manufacturing to a service- based economy following World War II, this had a dramatic and widespread effect on the conditions of labour. As the nature of work changed for the vast majority of Americans, ‘so too did it change for artists’.1 Molesworth explains that this saw artists openly explore ways of making that were more aligned with other forms of labour; liberated from the need to evidence technical, manual skills in the produc- tion of visually aesthetic objects, ‘art could thus be made with unskilled manual labour, with highly regimented managerial labor, or with labor that resonated with ideas borrowed from the service economy’.2 For Molesworth, the results of these new approaches manifested in the deskilled, dematerialised, performative, instructional, experiential and process-based works of conceptual art, performance art and Fluxus. Moreover, she argues that through this period artists ‘came to see themselves not as artists producing (in) a dreamworld but as workers in capitalist America’.3 Molesworth draws on seminal conceptual artist Sol Lewitt to further emphasise this point, who at the time equated the work of the artist to that of the clerk: ‘The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious

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object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise’.4 engage further with the conceptual concerns of Officeworks, I’ll firstly detour In contextualising the artwork of this period in relation to larger socio-political through some recent texts that speak to the dominance of work in contemporary developments in the conditions of labour, and in turn evidencing that these Western culture. developments continue to infuence the production of art today, Molesworth’s exhibition ultimately asks: if artistic labour has become so closely aligned with In the lead up to the conception of Officeworks I had been reading The Refusal of other forms of labour—the clerical, the managerial and the provision of service— Work: The Theory & Practice of Resistance to Work (2015), by David Frayne, who then what exactly constitutes the work of the artist, and what is the role of talks through the work-centric nature of contemporary life and what he sees as an this work? increasing hostility towards the human need for autonomy, leisure and community under capitalism.6 The concluding chapter includes a series of interviews with The artworks that I’ve made and that I discuss in the following sections owe much people living in the who are actively resisting work by choosing to the period that Molesworth describes, frstly in regard to approaches to making to work less, or not at all, in favour of pursuing other activities or forms of leisure, art that foregrounds mental over manual labour, and secondly to the questions such as gardening or train modelling. Frayne uses the familiar social ‘pleasantry’ such approaches raise regarding the nature, role and value of work within con- ‘So what do you do?’ shortly after being introduced to a stranger at a party, as a temporary art practice. I attempt to address these questions through a number means to illustrate the way that societal pressures work to align one’s identity of juxtapositions of the contemporary artist and the clerk. with one’s occupation. For those resisting work, prioritising their preferred leisure activity acts like a proud reprieve from this social trap.7 Negotiating the Officeworks ‘So what do you do?’ question at a social gathering is often a humorous talking Officeworks (2017) was a group exhibition that I curated inside of an Officeworks point among my peer group of fellow artists. A friend recently shared a meme of store. I invited artists Daniel Eatock, Sean Peoples, Shannon Lyons, Gavin Bell, a blurry Principal Skinner from The Simpsons hastily escaping through an open Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn to each contribute a work for the exhibition window with the caption, ‘When you get introduced as an artist at Christmas’. that I would install or perform on their behalf. The exhibition was not approved Typically, it is agreed, explaining to a stranger that you are an artist inevitably by the office supplies store, and it took place without its knowledge. Initially, the leads to further questions regarding the type of artwork you make, which can be project was hinged on a proposition: that the staging of an exhibition inside an tricky and tedious terrain, and so best to avoid altogether. But perhaps a genuine office supplies store might in some way speak to the similarities between the work reason for not plainly answering this question with ‘I’m an artist’ is because there of the contemporary artist and that of the clerk, and that this might, by extension, is a scepticism as to whether this is real work, both in the imagined opinion of say something about the nature of contemporary work in general. The artworks the stranger that I assume will be sceptical, but maybe also in the honest opinion presented in Officeworks included plaster-cast replicas of kneaded Blu Tack blobs of myself, the artist. Is making art work, or is it a reprieve from work—like train (Lyons), a smuggled-in watermelon left unexplained on the foor of an aisle (me), modelling? a performance involving presidential merchandised slippers (Bell, de Kuijer, McGlinn), vinyl cut extracts from a Ginsberg poem (Peoples) and a drawing made This dichotomy of art and work is explored by artist Max Grau in a piece produced by testing every pen in the store (Eatock). While each was discrete in its own right, for the podcast Status Effect, titled ‘Reclaim Your Fucked-up-ness ... Maybe’ (2016). these artworks collectively composed an overarching artistic project of sorts, Speaking in the frst person (through the guise of a voice actor), Grau talks about one that would precede the details therein, as an unsanctioned exhibition inside spending the whole day in bed and the associated guilt that this can often conjure. of an Officeworks store. It is this project—more than the individual artworks it Grau asks: encompasses—that is the focus of this section of my discussion.5 In order to

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As an artist why do I feel like a failure when I spend the day in bed, instead recognised and socially accepted forms. From this position, being introduced to of like an avant-gardist? … Why do I tell my friends that I was doing office a stranger as an artist would be just as pleasantly banal as being introduced as stuff all day instead of proudly admitting that I watched half a season of an accountant. Despite appearances, I now consider the attitudinal differences ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’? Why do I worry about being considered lazy? between the work of the artist and that of the clerk as providing value for the role When did I become so professional, and if that’s the case why do I earn so of work in contemporary art practice. This has been largely informed by Liam little money?8 Gillick’s essay ‘The Good of Work’ (2010), which begins with an ‘accusation’ that under the current neoliberal conditions of Western culture, or what Gillick Grau goes on to relay a friend-of-a-friend’s story about a ‘quite well-known’ artist describes as the neoliberal ‘regime’, artists have become the ultimate freelance complaining about being stuck in traffic on the way to their studio. One day the new knowledge workers: ‘Artists are people who behave, communicate, and inno- successful artist realises that they are just one more person commuting to work vate in the same manner as those who spend their days trying to capitalize every and that their practice had become a regular job. ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be’, moment and exchange of daily life. They offer no alternative to this.’10 Gillick Grau states, with poise. ‘Reclaim Your Fucked-up-ness ... Maybe’ ends with a later provides a series of musings on ways for the artist to combat this accusation manifesto-like affirmation to dismiss the guilt of laziness and instead approach in tangentially addressing the ‘good of work’, which he locates in the production work with an artistic proclivity: of art—as separate from its reception, or, rather, consumption. Among Gillick’s suggestions is a strategic withdrawal from production itself: ‘working less can re- If you’re fucked up, use the means of artistic production to address exhaus- sult in producing more’, and more deliberately controlling the moment of work’s tion on a level that is more complex than doing a spa day once in a while. completion; ‘As there are no limits to work there are also no limits to not work- Invent ways to talk to your friends. Fucking start considering your ing’.11 A point that seems particularly poignant to my thoughts on the impetus for colleagues as friends. Blame capitalism not yourself. Instead of worrying Officeworks and its supposed artist–clerk dualism reads: ‘The reason it is hard to if you might be working too little, start asking if they might be working determine observable differences between the daily routines and operations of too much. Have a sip of champagne in bed even when you’re alone.9 a new knowledge-worker and those of an artist is precisely because art functions in close parallel to the structures that it critiques’.12 In this light, I see Officeworks I interpreted Grau’s sentiments as encouraging the use of artistic practice as a as a Trojan horse of sorts, an undetected intervention in an office supplies store vantage point from which to critically address work. Art cannot escape work, camoufaged by its resemblance to that which it seeks to critique. Engaging with so put it to use. Rather than seeing artistic practice as something separate from Gillick’s text in the wake of Officeworks not only provided me with a way to retro- work, or merely another form of work, art practice might be used to critique work spectively understand the implications and potentialities of the project, it was also through work. instrumental in informing the production of a number of artworks that followed.

In accordance with my original proposition, I initially thought that staging an How to Work Better exhibition inside an Officeworks store might, in a humorous, self-deprecatory way, In response to inviting Los Angeles–based artist Daniel Eatock to participate in invite an equivalence of sorts between the contemporary artist and the clerk; Officeworks, I received a one-line instructional statement via email: ‘Try every pen both spend their time in a small room at a computer, typing, editing, ordering, in the store with a scribble on one piece of paper’. The resulting artwork, titled purchasing, accounting and promoting, in between scrolling Facebook and Pen Tests, became a catalyst for work of my own post-Officeworks. Standing at refreshing Gmail. Perhaps subconsciously, this was a strange attempt to legitimise the immense display case, picking up a pen, removing the lid and inscribing a the work I perform as an artist, aligning this mode of work with more familiar, small scribble before moving on to the next pen was a tedious task, and one that

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I thought could speak to the monotonous, repetitive and tedious nature of clerical 4 LEARN TO ASK QUESTIONS work in an abstract way. Channelling this process, I produced a series of four 5 DISTINGUISH SENSE FROM NONSENSE drawings titled How to Work Better (2018), each made by using a BIC 4 Colour 6 ACCEPT CHANGE AS INEVITABLE Retractable Ballpoint Pen on two-millimetre graph paper, familiar stationery 7 ADMIT MISTAKES cupboard staples (coincidentally, purchased from Officeworks). Using the black, 8 SAY IT SIMPLE green, blue and red ink conveniently provided by the BIC pen, I laboriously coloured 9 BE CALM in single squares of the graph paper to make up letters that spell out words. 10 SMILE The drawing reveals a list of 10 ‘rules’: I understand my version of How to Work Better as a critique of work, reflected HOW TO WORK BETTER firstly in the content of its textual communication (what is says), and secondly through its facture as a tediously made, time-consuming drawing (what it is). 1 DON’T MAKE ANYTHING OR DO ANYTHING I’ll elaborate further on these aspects of the work in relation to Fischli and 2 DON’T BE SKILLFULL Weiss’s work. 3 DON’T TRY HARD 4 TAKE BREAKS In the catalogue for the artists’ retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2016, 5 START LATE AND FINISH EARLY also titled How to Work Better, curator Nancy Spector describes the artists’ list 6 DON’T POST, TWEET, LIKE OR SHARE of rules as ‘an exercise in platitudes or, perhaps a list of banal truths that inform 7 AVOID EFFICIENCY the daily ritual of organized labor’.13 Elaborating on the tone of the rules, Spector 8 AVOID VIRTUOSITY continues, ‘It is not without irony that the artists portray labor as something 9 BE IDLE enjoyable, even manageable, as if the average worker could have agency within 10 LAZE his or her occupation if he/she mastered the correct attitude or set of manners’.14 While Spector muses on the rules as they exist as a Fischli and Weiss artwork, My rules for How to Work Better were written in direct response to Swiss artists writer John Kelsey in his contribution to the catalogue speaks to the imagined Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s well-known artwork of the same name. How to motives of the text before its appropriation, in its life before art, explaining that Work Better (1991) is a large wall mural painted on one side of an office block in its ‘infantilizing, big brotherly tone [is] clearly meant to motivate good behaviour the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland. The story goes that while travelling through in the workplace (or world)’.15 While I have always interpreted them ironically, Thailand the artists encountered the list inside a ceramics factory. Opportunis- Fischli and Weiss’s rules could be taken in earnest as a guide for improving one’s tically re-presenting the list some time later, as a readymade of sorts, Fischli and productivity and commitment to work, either as an artist or other type of worker Weiss’s rules read: (as its original ‘non-art’ context of a ceramics factory would suggest). In fact, Kelsey cites a number of artists who have claimed to have A4 copies of the list HOW TO WORK BETTER pinned ‘to their studio walls and over their desks’.16 In this context, I wonder about the level of irony at play for these artists: Do they sincerely subscribe to 1 DO ONE THING AT A TIME these rules for improving their work? (If so, this would certainly provide more fuel 2 KNOW THE PROBLEM to Gillick’s ‘accusation’.) In contrast to Fischli and Weiss’s list, my rules are more 3 LEARN TO LISTEN overtly negative, or cynical, and contrary to the more motivational, affirmative

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adages that might be presumed to follow the Pinterest-style heading ‘How to The supposed self-referentiality of How to Work Better was important to the con- Work Better’ (in fact, a more apt title might be ‘How to Survive Work’). Where ception of my work of the same name and its materialisation. In a different way to Fischli and Weiss’s rules closely resemble the motivational mottos that commonly Fischli and Weiss’s artwork, my How to Work Better pen drawings also refect on adorn the office fridge or staffroom noticeboard, my rules are explicitly sceptical the rules they inscribe. The colouring in of many tiny squares requires no skill, of such mechanisms and their promotion of productivity. no virtuosity; I took many breaks, and production was terribly inefficient. Different from Fischli and Weiss’s almost formless version (I say formless in the sense that Speaking further to the artwork’s relationship to work, labour and the employee, work has so many forms), my work’s facture, that is the visible traces of the way it Kelsey suggests that How to Work Better ‘touches us deeply in the place where was made, records the labour of its production, the scratchy pen marks revealing all work now touches us and takes hold of us: on the level of shared language and a mind-numbing process of senseless repetition. The grid paper, intended for communication’.17 Seen by more people through the windows of commuter trains plotting graphs, recording data and identifying trends, is instead subjected to passing to and from the nearby station than from the street below—or within the a childish colouring in. It is of course the predecessor to the Excel spreadsheet, office block itself—the experience of the artwork is inherently transient: on the its long ubiquitous, virtual supplanter, which, in a matter of clicks, could have been go. ‘Transmitting this idea of better, smoother communication as a moving image used to execute the artwork in far less time. Instead, the analogue and obsolete in a train window, How to Work Better is a work we’re already carrying within us, form of How to Work Better—a series of pen drawings on grid paper—furthers its in our jet-lagged bodies and heads.’18 For Kelsey, the artwork ‘inhabits the space sarcastic message to resist productivity. of communication of post-Fordist labor in general, offering almost nothingbut communication’.19 Lastly, the time-consuming process of making How to Work Better can also be seen as akin to doodling, a habit of sorts that sees the doodler scribble absent-mindedly A testament to Kelsey’s reduction of the work to a piece of communication, How in the margin of their ledger, induced by the boredom of a staff meeting, conference to Work Better has, since its Zurich office-block manifestation, been realised in call or the like. In this moment, the doodler is at work but not working, and while numerous other public locations around the world, as well as in a multitude of it is an unproductive time-wasting habit for the clerk, it is not necessarily so for other forms, including a silkscreened poster in unlimited edition and as the cover the artist. Gillick again explains: for the aforementioned retrospective catalogue. How to Work Better is, of course, now widely available online as an image for easy retrieval, printing and Blu-Tack- Not thinking about art while making art is different to not thinking while ing. Indeed, the artwork’s content (communication) well and truly precedes its preparing a PowerPoint presentation on the plane. Of course I am working form (mural, poster, book cover, image, print-out etcetera). For me, the easily even when it looks as if I am not working. And even if I am not working and transmutable, mobilised nature of How to Work Better as a piece of appropriated it looks as if I am not working I still might claim to be working and wait communication, and its subsequent realisation in a multitude of forms, both for you to work out what objective signifiers actually point towards any public and ‘private’, suggests that the artwork is as much about the work involved moment of value or work. This is the game of current art. Art production in artistic production as it is about work more generally. That is to say, the artwork and work methods are not temporally linked or balanced because the idea is self-refective, an in-joke about the work (or lack thereof) involved in making art. of managing time is not a key component of making art, nor is it a personal Speaking to the artwork’s original Zurich office-block version, Kelsey suggests that or objective proft motive for artists. Unless they decide that such behavior How to Work Better may finally be ‘a joke about Fischli and Weiss’s performance is actually part of the work itself.21 of the public commission itself: by simply repeating and displacing a message about work, the artists make the message itself work overtime’.20

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Here Gillick endorses a very deliberate ownership, control and instrumentalisa- interrelationship between the work’s content and materialisation), I thought tion of the constituents of work to be stipulated by artists themselves. For Gillick, that using Larson’s cartoon as is, and co-opting the work in some way as my own, time management and, further to this, efficiency, is not a factor for the artist: would be a way to save time—a way to wryly actualise the cartoon’s prophetic productivity and work needn’t break even. The relationship between time and message. work became a more explicit focus of the artwork that followed the How to Work Better drawings, and so I turn to a durational artwork made in response to ideas Coincidentally, in 2008 Larson wrote an open letter to the internet, pleading with around time and its commercialisation. fans of The Far Side to refrain, or in his words ‘cease and desist’, from sharing his cartoons online.23 While Larson cites the deeply personal nature of his work as Time = Money the reason for his opposition to its online circulation, it is the issue of authorship In his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2014) Jonathan Crary that surely underlines the cartoonist’s contestation. Authorship has long been discusses the devastating effects of Western modernisation and neoliberal global- fundamental to conventional understandings of artistic work, and the perception isation on time and its commodifcation. For him, the 24/7 operations of the global of its value, validity and role in the marketplace. Like other conventions of marketplace have seen many of our basic human faculties (sleeping, eating, working, artistic work, authorship became but another area for artists to contest, provoke leisure) remodelled and realigned to better suit what he describes as the ‘non-time’ and agitate during the 1960s, and it has had lasting effects on the production of our contemporaneous 24/7 world: of art. As Molesworth explains: ‘when artists challenged the role of the author, they also, wittingly or not, questioned the status and even value of their labor’.24 A temporal alignment of the individual with the functioning of markets, An artist for whom this anti-authorial period has been influential is Richard two centuries in developing, has made irrelevant distinctions between Prince, who, since the 1970s, has infamously incorporated the work of others as work and non-work time, between public and private, between everyday part of his own, agitating the parameters and conditions of artistic authorship. life and organised institutional milieus. Under these conditions, the Prince draws on a diverse range of media, from print advertisements that he relentless fnancialization of previously autonomous spheres of social re-photographs to cartoons from newspapers that are collaged into paintings, activity continues unchecked.22 to reproductions of others’ paintings that become the base for his painting, and, most recently, images sourced from Instagram that become large inkjet prints. Reading Crary’s account of capitalism’s commodifcation of time sparked a foggy More ‘hands on’ than a Duchampian designation of existing objects as artworks, memory of a Gary Larson The Far Side cartoon. The cartoon features Einstein Prince typically takes the work of others and, in his words, ‘continues’ them in standing hands on hips at a chalk board covered in a complex formula that mathe- some manner, generally through some level of material transformation. matically concludes that ‘time is actually money’. The cartoon is a joke that hinges on a colloquialism being mathematically proven to be a fundamental truth of the Begun in 2003, Prince’s Nurses is a series of paintings made by scanning the universe. The absurdity of this is, of course, not as far from the truth as the joke covers of found paperback novels that feature images of nurses, which are then might have originally suggested; first published in 1985, the cartoon precedes printed large on canvases before being further worked in acrylic paint. During technologies such as the now ubiquitous smartphone that make it easy for the an interview with Vice Media, Prince stands in his studio and, pointing to one of user to work around the clock, a practice exemplary of Crary’s view on today’s these books, explains: ‘this is the original cover for that paperback. I sort of mess work-centric culture. Struck by the poignancy of the retrieved Larson cartoon, with it, intervene with it, contribute to it, continue it and make it my own work’.25 I began to think about how I might recontextualise it as an artwork. In a similar Prince later elaborates on this notion of ‘continuation’ as not only a method for way to Fischli and Weiss’s use of a found list of rules (and the aforementioned making, but a subject fundamental to his work:

210 211 How to Work Better How to Work Better

For me, a lot of what I think about … you could talk about in terms of this This gesture is presented using Tumblr in a strikingly matter-of-fact fashion. idea of continuation. That’s all it is really—a continuation. It’s something A modestly sized image of Coulier is repeated, one after another in a vertical that’s added onto what has been done before me. And you know the idea of column, each neatly captioned with the date—and yet this impersonality is buying a book and calling it yours is something that you have to give your- tempered with the knowledge that, as Littleton attests, ‘there’s not just a script self permission to do. Obviously, someone else can’t do it for you. A lot of somewhere posting this picture; there’s a human being behind it’.29 It is the utter people would probably say, ‘well wait a minute you really can’t do this, you pointless unproductiveness of this daily labour that for me makes the page so can’t go out and buy a book and sign it, call it yours and sell it.’ But for me compelling. The repeated daily action that Littleton’s project hinges on conjures that’s very easy to do. It’s not really about being new, it’s more about this a host of seminal contemporary artworks that similarly employ durational repeti- idea of something continued.26 tion, by the likes of On Kawara, Roman Opalka and Tehching Hsieh, for example. Perhaps Littleton’s project could be thought of as a kind of ‘post-internet Kawara’, I identify with Prince’s attitude of ‘continuation’, and enjoy the idea that the his daily posting of an image of David Coulier constituting evidence of his existence, history of art might be imagined as a production line of sorts, with artists passing a record of a life being lived, a signal that he is ‘still alive’, as Kawara would say, works along the conveyor belt for others to pick up, re-release, rebrand, renew. still working. It was with this in mind that I approached the application, or rather This sentiment surely provides a role for work for the artist, even if it is just to continuation, of Larson’s cartoon to this end, starting my own Littleton spin-off. make sure that there’s stock on the shelf. Returning to Larson’s poignantly topical Having decided this format was the best application for Larson’s cartoon, I was cartoon, and taking on the method of continuation, I devised a durational art- soon confronted with the reality of how much work making the daily post would work that would involve disseminating the cartoon repeatedly and routinely via actually entail. Did I really want to give myself a job without end? Couldn’t I just Instagram. Begun in August 2018, the Instagram account @same_larson_cartoon_ automate the posting instead?30 Could I outsource the posting to someone else? every_day features an image of Larson’s cartoon posted to the social-media platform When can I retire? every day—in perpetuity. The account mimics a mass of similar groups operating through Tumblr and Facebook that have, over the last half decade, formed a global Interpreting the Instagram account @same_larson_cartoon_every_day as an art- online trend. Usually featuring peripheral celebrities or cult figures, such as work, which I have titled Time = Money (2018–), a series of frictions arise through actor Jeff Goldblum or comedian Jim Carrey, Tumblr pages and Facebook groups the relationship of its form (the daily management of an Instagram account) to its dedicated to this cause will feature the same image of these fgures, posted once content (a co-opted cartoon that addresses the commercialisation of time). At the a day, every day. time of writing, the account has no followers (so no audience), and it is undisclosed as to whether the posts are made manually or are automated. Does the artwork in The inaugurator of this online movement is an American man named Aaron this way resist the bleak ‘time equals money’ aphorism or affirm it? I return to Littleton, a local government IT worker who, in 2011, created a Tumblr page Gillick, here, to tease out some possible interpretations of Time = Money and its dedicated to posting the same picture of Full House actor Dave Coulier every day.27 relationship to work. Gillick suggests that one way the activities of the artist can Littleton explains that he chose the image of Coulier because of its innocuousness— resist mirroring those of the new knowledge worker is by artists setting their own an image of someone known but not known, someone familiar but for whom we deadlines, thus exercising control over or even denial of the moment of work’s have no particularly strong associations.28 Indeed, key to the poetics of ‘The Same completion. Deadlines are critical to the capitalisation of time, and ‘an awareness Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day’ is its innocuousness, its sheer dumbness, not of the constructed nature of deadlines allows one to electively engage and disengage only the picture itself but also the gesture of its daily posting. and thus to create a zone of semi-autonomy’.31 The open-ended, potentially infnite duration of Time = Money means that the artwork is never fully complete, its scale

212 213 How to Work Better How to Work Better

determined internally by me as the artist, rather than by an exterior, imposed 1 Helen Molesworth, ‘Introduction’, in Helen Molesworth (ed.), Work Ethic, Penn State authorial deadline. While the work’s logic requires daily administration, and at University Press, University Park, Pa, 2003, p. 18. least in part could be seen to mirror the way that Instagram and the like promote 2 Molesworth, p. 18. endless streams of content production and consumption, its denial of completion 3 Helen Molesworth, ‘Work Ethic’, in Molesworth (ed.), p. 27. (an indefnite deadline) is aligned with the position that artistic production needn’t be on time. 4 Molesworth, ‘Work Ethic’, p. 31.

5 An online catalogue for the exhibition Officeworks can be accessed at davidattwood.net/fles/ This series of artworks that I’ve produced over the last two years, and have attempted Officeworks%20Catalogue_Draft%203_NOMUSIC.pdf. to contextualise here as a critique of work, have provided a way for me to better understand the relationship of work to artistic practice. Gillick’s assertion that art 6 David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory & Practice of Resistance to Work, Zed Books, London, 2015. often resembles and functions in close parallel to the structures that it critiques has provided a reassuring criticality for the role of clerical processes within my 7 See chapter 8, ‘From Escapism to Autonomy’. approach to producing artwork. By situating the work of the artist in close proximity 8 Max Grau, ‘Reclaim Your Fucked-up-ness ... Maybe’, Status Effect, 2016, listennotes.com/da/ to that of the clerk in Officeworks, to denying the productivity and efficiency of podcasts/status-effect/episode-03-TfRyi3D0SMz; accessed 14 November 2019. work in How to Work Better and fnally managing and continuing the work of some- one else in Time = Money I have explored the use of artistic production to negotiate 9 Grau. the demands of work. While it is surely not possible to escape the temporal and 10 Liam Gillick, ‘The Good of Work’, eflux journal, no. 16, May 2010, e-fux.com/journal/16/61277/ spatial boundlessness of contemporary work, mimicry, inefficiency, doodling, the-good-of-work, n.p.; accessed 7 November 2019. continuing and prolonging deadlines indefinitely may provide means for 11 Gillick, n.p. working better. 12 Gillick, n.p.

13 Nancy Spector, ‘What Shall I Waste My Time On?’, in Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman (eds), Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Delmonico Books, Munich, 2016, p. 328.

14 Spector, p. 328.

15 John Kelsey, ‘Public Relations’, in Spector and Trotman (eds), p. 345.

16 Kelsey, p. 346.

17 Kelsey, p. 346.

18 Kelsey, p. 346

19 Kelsey, p. 346.

20 Kelsey, p. 346.

214 215 How to Work Better

21 Gillick, n.p.

22 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, London, 2014, p. 74.

23 Rick Marshall, ‘Gary Larson and Our “Far Side” Cease & Desist’, ComicMix, 7 March 2008, comicmix.com/2008/03/07/gary-larson-and-our-far-side-cease-and-desist; accessed 7 November 2019.

24 Molesworth, ‘Work Ethic’, p. 30.

25 Richard Prince, ‘Continuation Painting with Richard Prince’, Vice Media, YouTube, 2008, youtube.com/watch?v=R0X4-2g1zPI; accessed 7 November 2019.

26 Prince.

27 samepicofdavecoulier.tumblr.com; accessed 7 November 2019.

28 Kelsey Lawrence, ‘The Mad Genius Behind Tumblr’s “The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day”’, 27 May 2015, The Daily Dot, dailydot.com/unclick/man-behind-same-photo- dave-coulier; accessed 7 November 2019.

29 Lawrence.

30 A quick Google search reveals that there are many social-media automated post apps available.

216 The Praise of Laziness

Mladen Stilinović The Praise of Laziness

As an artist, I learned from both the East (socialism) and the West (capitalism). Of course, now when the borders and political systems have changed, such an experience will be no longer possible. But what I have learned from that dialogue, stays with me. My observation and knowledge of Western art has lately led me to a conclusion that art cannot exist anymore in the West. This is not to say that there isn’t any. Why cannot art exist anymore in the West? The answer is simple. Artists in the West are not lazy. Artists from the East are lazy; whether they will stay lazy now when they are no longer Eastern artists remains to be seen.

Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, just dumb time—total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are import- ant factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practised and perfected.

Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore are not artists but rather producers of something … Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as produc- tion, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is frst), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art. Just as money is paper, so is [the] gallery a room.

Artists from the East were lazy and poor because the entire system of insignificant factors did not exist. Therefore they had enough time to concentrate on art and laziness. Even when they did produce art, they knew it was in vain, it was nothing. Artists from the West could learn about laziness, but they didn’t. Two major 20th- century artists treated the question of laziness in both practical and theoretical terms: Duchamp and Malevich.

Duchamp never really discussed laziness, but rather indifference and non-work. When asked by Pierre Cabanne what had brought him most pleasure in life, Duchamp said: ‘First, having been lucky. Because basically I’ve never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope that some day we’ll be able to live without being obliged to work. Thanks to my luck, I was able to manage without getting wet.’

221 The Praise of Laziness

Malevich wrote a text entitled ‘Laziness—the real truth of mankind’ (1921). In it he criticised capitalism because it enabled only a small number of capitalists to be lazy, but also socialism because the entire movement was based on work instead of laziness. To quote: ‘People are scared of laziness and persecute those who accept it, and it always happens because no one realizes laziness is the truth; it has been branded as the mother of all vices, but it is in fact the mother of life. Socialism brings liberation in the unconscious, it scorns laziness without realizing it was laziness that gave birth to it; in his folly, the son scorns his mother as the mother of all vices and would not remove the brand; in this brief note I want to remove the brand of shame from laziness and to pronounce it not the mother of all vices, but the mother of perfection.’

Finally, to be lazy and conclude: there is no art without laziness. WORK IS A DISEASE – KARL MARX (Mladen Stilinović) WORK IS A SHAME (Vlado Martek)

Written by Stilinović in 1993 and translated by Marija Marušić, ‘The Praise of Laziness’ has been reproduced with the kind permission of the estate of the author.

222 Authors

David Attwood is an artist based in Melbourne. In 2016, he completed a PhD in art at Curtin University, Masato Takasaka is a visual artist based in Melbourne. He holds a practice-based PhD in visual arts and in 2019 completed the SOMA Summer program, SOMA, Mexico City. He has exhibited his work from Monash University and currently teaches in the graduate program at the Victorian College of widely, both locally and abroad in artist-run, commercial and independent galleries, as well as in off-site the Arts, University of Melbourne. and online projects. Natalie Thomas is a Melbourne-based artist and writer. She maintains an independent practice that Diana Baker Smith is an artist and academic at UNSW Art & Design. Through her solo practice and considers storytelling as the basis of culture. Her work engages with the mass media and its role in how as a member of the art collective Barbara Cleveland, her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of we see each other and the world. Her natty solo.com (one woman, one camera, no film) is an ongoing New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery endurance performance project with an online outcome. The widely read blog uses the forms of the of , Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, National Museum of Modern and social page and social archives, and fuses gossip and innuendo with scathing cultural criticism. Contemporary Art, in Seoul, and Hayward Gallery, in London. Diana’s essays and performance texts have been published in Performance Paradigm, Live Art Almanac, Artlink and un Magazine. Tim Woodward is a Melbourne-based artist working across video, writing and assemblage sculpture, and whose creative gestures extend from the lineages of conceptual art to the unrestrained potential Andrew Brooks is an artist, writer, editor and teacher. He is interested in the regulation and mediation of imagination. Tim has presented his work in numerous solo and group shows, with recent exhibitions of bodies, systems of power and discipline, infrastructure and labour, and histories of resistance and including ExVivo(–), Institute For Provocation, Beijing (2019); ARTJOG MMXIX Arts in Common| survival. His work takes the form of installations, videos, texts and sound recordings. He is one half common space, Jogja National Museum, Indonesia (2019); Check Website For Details, Kuiper, of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate and co-curates the occasional reading series Morsel. Brisbane (2019); TV Insides, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne (2018); and Plus Solids, Bus Projects, Melbourne (2017). Eva Bujalka completed her creative writing PhD at Curtin University in 2015, where she currently teaches. She has published fction in Voiceworks, Meanjin, Southerly and Black Sun Lit, and has essays, chapters and reviews in Westerly; (Re)Possessing Beauty: Politics, Poetics, Change; Seductive Concepts: Perspectives on Sins, Vices and Virtues; Desire, Performance and Classification: Critical Perspectives on the Erotic; The Rites of Spring; and Critical Animalia. She has an essay on black metal politics forthcoming in Cambridge Core’s Popular Music.

Rex Butler teaches art history in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University. He writes frequently on Australian art, and is one of the editors of Memo Review. His most recent book is Double Displacement: Queensland Art 1992–2016 (2018). He has recently completed a book on Stanley Cavell and the arts, and another on UnAustralian art, with A.D.S. Donaldson.

Darren Jorgensen lectures in art history at the University of Western Australia. His books include Wanarn Painters of Place and Time (2016), co-authored with David Brooks, and the edited volumes Bush Women (2018) and Indigenous Archives (2017), the latter co-edited with Ian McLean.

Lisa Radford uses conversation and correspondence as a way of exploring the shared space between images, place and people through writing, editing and exhibition-making. More often than not she works with others, most recently with Sam George and Yhonnie Scarce. She currently works in the Painting Department at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and intermittently she shares thoughts publicly in The Saturday Paper.

Francis Russell is the course coordinator of the humanities honours program at Curtin University. He has a PhD in literary and cultural studies from Curtin University, and researches the political and philosophical implications of mental illness, alongside conducting broader research into neoliberal culture. He has published in Cultural Studies Review, Deleuze Studies, Space and Culture and Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, and his criticism has appeared in numerous contemporary art publications.

Mladen Stilinovic´ (1947–2016) lived in Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia, where his conceptual art practice ranged over performance, flm, photography, drawing, collage and artist books. A leading fgure of ‘new art practice’, he had an abiding interest in language and the politics of signification. He used this linguistic focus to critique prevailing social and political structures and preoccupations.

224 225 Acknowledgements

As the editors of this collection, we wish to acknowledge that this book has been conceived, written and printed across various sites. These are united by belonging to the Indigenous peoples of the forcibly settled nation referred to as Australia. Much of this book was written on the lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people of the place we now call Perth, the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the place we now call Melbourne, and the Gadigal people of the place we now call Sydney.

We wish to acknowledge that the traditional owners of this land never ceded their sovereignty. We wish to pay respects to the Elders of this land, past, present and emerging.

We wish to acknowledge the centrality of Indigenous peoples and their struggles against white supremacy and colonialism to the struggle against capitalism.

The editors would like to thank their family and friends, especially Amy and Shannon. We would also like to thank the editors and publishing team at A+A Publishing.

226

While the global fnancial crisis promised the ruin of neoliberal ideology, the past decade or so has shown the durability and obstinacy of the cultural obsession with entrepreneurial self-development and work.

This collection of essays reconsiders labour and laziness in order to think through the relationship of art and visual culture to post-work politics. Edited by David Attwood and Francis Russell, The Art of Laziness asserts that laziness can be an artful pursuit and that—because of its artfulness—this pursuit is a type of work.

ISBN 978-0-9924589-0-4

ISBN 978-0-9924589-0-4

9 780992 458904 >

9 780992 458904 >