A good friend

Every morning at about nine and again at about eleven I call on my friend here. While tea is all the rage I celebrate my old-schoolness, black no sugar.

When I mentioned to a friend a while ago that we will quickly need to cease our reliance on the transportation of goods and resources he agreed, however added that there should be a few exceptions like spices and other things only grown in the tropics. We white people can be so flexible with our ethics. My preferred bean comes from Goroka in Papua New Guinea, owned and operated by locals and is certified organic by NASSA.

Of course the exceptions will soon be determined for us by energy descent and climate change. These luxurious days are numbered.

Roaming Graffiti Wall

It has taken a number of years but I finally edited Ivor's great footage of our temporary autonomous zone. Thanks again to all the supporters* of this project. At the time The Age ran this article.

Background
It's March 2006 and it's the height of two disparate cultures in Australia – Howardism and stencilism. The City of Melbourne is hosting the Commonwealth Games and the authorities of the city have taken it upon themselves to enforce a zero-tolerance policy towards graffiti. This was our response.


Roaming Graffiti Wall from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

A WorkmanJones action, 2006. Film and music by Patrick Jones (Peej), 2009. Roaming camera by Ivor Bowen. Wall roamers and supporters*: Jeff Stewart, Cath Davies, Pete O'Mara, Tim O'Sullivan, Jasmine Salomon, Patrick Jones, Laura (the RMIT student we roped in off the street), Tara Gilbee, Jason Workman, Cath Ryan, Ruark Lewis, Petra Beuskans, Peter Tyndall, Adrian Kosky and Nikki Blanch.

April sketch (with Zeph)

Jason Workman is returing to Melbourne next month, so I'm looking forward to more WorkmanJones collaborations in the not-too-distant. In the meantime I have spent a few days trying out some things in the forest, a short walk from home. I'm currently developing a practice of biophysical poetry, while at the same time thinking about the physical comedy of Jaques Tati and Buster Keaton. Zephyr came with me one afternoon after school and I started to see the potential for more advanced father and son play too. 

April sketch from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

Free-dragging, slow text and permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry (an excerpt)

The following is the final paragraph of a paper I finished today for UK journal Angelaki, which I am presenting at Two Fires festival this weekend on a panel called Social Warming. The festival's theme is "Coming Together".

Little by little the things that were once free and uncapitalised are increasingly legislated against, privatised or both – seed, birth, milk, school, water, art, death, etc. While free-dragging on road signs in country Victoria a few years ago Jason Workman and I were booked for “abstracting traffic”, and after challenging the police officer as to why we were being booked he told us “people have concerns when they see people doing things”. The fine was manageable at $120, however it was 100% of the budget for our day of practice. I managed to record the whole conversation I had with him, and have played it back many times to hear those words: “abstracting traffic”. But we were neither abstracting nor obstructing, which is no doubt what the country cop meant to say. Free-dragging developed for both Workman and I out of our own imprisonments. Free-dragging is thus a response to feeling enslaved. Free-dragging is a biophysics for self-liberty, a poetry form synonymous with composting where abstractions do not dominate but rather play their part in a material world. In coming out of these self-imposed sentences we began to understand that to hope was to project something abstract and unreachable upon the future and this caused considerable anxiety. We quickly came to reacquaint ourselves with joy and post-utopian play – non-deluded – our blood oxygenated with the liberty of hopelessness; endorphins as air in an aerobic compost. By becoming unstuck and uprooted we took greater refuge in ourselves as contiguous beings with everything else. Therefore our poetry/graffiti had to become public and participate in social space. We pulled down our garrets and with the materials reclaimed from an age of isolation and anxiety built raised beds for vegetables, chook houses, compost bays and are planning future alehouses based on steady state economics. Food sovereignty has become central to our work, which has developed as part of a broader permaculture community, a community of intensifying "poeverty" (post H D Thoreau and D T Suzuki), and through the development of a personal permapoesis. Thanks to Ian, Meg, Kate F, Jeff, Hamish, Jason and Pete O for your help with this work.

The title of the panel came from this drawing I did a few years ago and was first published in Going Down Swinging No.26 last year.


Click for bigger.

Stateless Gestures

And from public fruit (yesterday's post) to another form of self-pollination – Jason Workman and Ian Gamble in North Carolina.

That which is possible

Several years ago Jason Workman and Esther Buder carried out a small food project in the Castlemaine district that filled their larder with bottled preserves and generated relations of sharing that continue today. The project was called That which is possible, and one of the gifts to come from it (that wasn't food-based) was a hand-made postcard series which contained pictures of claimed roadside food, recipes for preserving and a map of where the various plums, pears, apples, blackberries, and quince are and when, approximately, they bare fruit. The postcards were sent to friends but also to random strangers, not necessarily in the area, to promote a poetic of resourcefulness.

Today I had to go to Castlemaine to choose some stone for a small wall I'm building. I asked PO if he wanted to test Jason and Esther's 2005 map. Bingo! Early season cherry plums. We picked together a bag full for Meg's pancake breakfast on Sunday.

Tag

Jason and I had a day making new work in Melbourne last Friday. On Saturday we put together this collage.

More body tagging (WorkmanJones)

WorkmanJones tag Brunswick

The printing of the poem appears as a tag on the retina of the passer-by – a poetry of memory, of a pure consumption of time and of a pure materialism – generated by chance, spitting everything back onto the street as a compost activator for culture.

Best Sellers

The Centre for Collective Wealth is a project-based initiative founded by Jason Workman and Larisa Marossine in Brooklyn, NY. The centre facilitates online projects, discussions, events, public works and shows.

For its inaugural project, the Center for Collective Wealth presents Best Sellers, a new video work by Patrick Jones. 

Nipple (for Peter O'Mara)

Photography is the art of certainty that accepts as its limits the impartial something that can be captured of the everything that precedes the lens. 

Then there is photoshopping. A digital technique that confiscates the already memorialised before pushing it into the abject world of hyper-mediation. Not to be confused with collage or sampling.

Of course, the tiresome lineal premises of art's capitalisation (as discussed via skype with J this morning) is central to any critique of representation or object fetishised by the bourgeoisie, photographic or otherwise.

And, on another topic, it feels satisfyingly indulgent to be reading Spoerri's 'Mythological Travels..., given to me by my graphic friend Ian, and taken this afternoon by bike to the lake with Meg and her book of essays on plastics and ducks. But not indulgent in the same sense as the bourgeoisie's addiction to impure (non-compostable) consumption, because dipping into Spoerri's peculiar fetishised but unsentimental obsessions with macabre and other objects, crudely printed on the page like roneo copied black and white photos, (Something Else Press, Inc.) – the topographer of chance, the eternal infantile Spoerri – is go!

Jason Workman

Jason Workman practising in the space of the everyday.