Too Much of Me (reviewed today)

Reviewed in The Age by Robert Nelson.

The rage against permanency

The system of economics that both defines and bullies modern Australian society is rarely questioned or comprehensively critiqued. That is until there is collapse. But even then, and despite all the evidence against aggregate-growth economics, the system largely remains intact and it’s business as usual. Why is this? Why is it that profit-growth capitalism is resistant to being more economically efficient, more ecologically embedded and less destructive?



Arm people with organic methods of self-sufficiency and see the rapid decline of factory farms, obesity, self-harm, ADHD, tooth decay, factory slaves, dioxins, wage-slaves, drug addiction, non-compostable waste, poisoned soil, carbon pollution, and on and on and on it goes.

Too Much of Me

Click for bigger. Image from Art Monthly, May issue 2009

Lucky dip and scratch (or, carbon fixed/carbon smoked)

I've been up a ladder, building walls to pay bills, and I've spent much of the past month finishing essays, films and funding for WorkmanJones' 2010 US tour. We've been invited and funded to make new work and show it at a non-profit gallery in Richmond, Virginia so we'll be looking to do a number of things while we are there.



In the meantime the garden has been neglected and the frost season has begun, which makes looking at the garden a tad depressing. Every day I have been scheming and planning new raised beds, future composts, fruit and nut tree plantings, canopies over raised bed structures in order to mitigate birds and frost damage, mulch and humus for further water and carbon conservation and more indigenous plantings to encourage greater biodiversity.



Surprisingly we've found that these heirloom toms (Riesentraube) are extremely frost hardy, for tomatoes at least. Because we live in a cold climate (though increasingly less so) toms generally come into abundance just as the first frosts start rolling in. Therefore these hardy toms are ideal in this climate. We've had 2 frosts already and the plants keep producing and ripening fruit.



In my absence the chooks have been guarding the compost. Over the Summer and until the first frost the European wasps had colonised the heap, now the chooks have reclaimed it as their very own lucky dip and scratch zone.



Working to pay bills and planning to fly to the US are obvious hypocrisies in light of what we're aiming to achieve in the garden over the next five years: 90% water self-sufficiency, 70% energy self-sufficiency, 70% food self-sufficiency. I suppose by agreeing to go to the US I participate in what I represent: a privileged late-capitalist citizen who still partakes in the short-term fantasy world of oil-based technologies.

As WorkmanJones' practice involves both disembodiment and re-embodiment, displacement and re-placement these ethical dilemmas are just part and parcel of a cold and rainy 2009 Sunday afternoon milieu.

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.

Melbourne cultural carbon factories (Art Precincts)

After walking out of ACCA once again befuddled by the director's taste in all things emissions and waste, Meg and I walked back into the city past the "Arts Precinct".

When will the art world pull its weight when it comes to carbon emissions and toxic waste?

Does this picture need any more explanation?

STUFF! We're overcrowded with TOO MUCH stuff, and apparently we need more. And, that's my segue in to an exhibition that opens tomorrow at MUMA called Too Much of Me: 7 Paths Through the Absurd (with Detour). Jason and I have two of our films in it as WorkmanJones. The "detour" is a collaborative film by Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. Working with another certainly begins a de-centering process. The self has to consider the other and become something else, something less controlling.

The self, as artist, as consumer, or as religious identity is disembodied in modern capitalist culture. The other (nature) is veiled and abstracted as if the material parameters that govern the universe will immaterialise via technological rationalism or religious fervor. Both manifest as monological illogic. There is too much of everything because the self is all consuming. Art is implicit in this picture, a bourgeois obsession. I'm not sure if WorkmanJones is an anti-art anymore. I often call our practice transitional in the way we attempt to ground our carbon in a practice that is of the body, but perhaps it's more aptly post-art.

Regardless, farming food bio-dynamically and living by permacultural methods is the priority now. Art has to re-embed itself in nature, it has to work on its own humus composition.

Incidentally the below pic is from the patron's honour board at ACCA. A cry out to all the Anonymous dudes online. You're legends!

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.

Apple workshop

Today I gave a workshop to design students at RMIT. Before heading to Melbourne Meg, Z and I picked apples at the local library, where nearly ten years ago I planted 18 Fujis as part of a public work (which included public food and poetry). I introduced the students to the methods of WorkmanJones' practice and how we use chance and one prop, word or idea to propel our work on a given day. At the end of the workshop, after introducing the gleaned Fujis to corporatised public space – materially, architectually and as disruption – the students ceremoniously destroyed the remaining apples by throwing them at a wall. After a day in the city the destruction of such precious and nutritious life was somehow apt.

On-off

I haven't paid much attention to the Obama-land-of-hope-fest that's been playing out in the abstract world of global media, until this morning. I sat in my local drinking coffee, reading the papers and after only a short while I was taken by an overwhelming compulsion to cry. For the first time in innumerable years I was actually moved by two-party politics.

All the cynicism in me remained. Obama will either be shot or fully bought within 12-24 months. And most likely we'll be just as disappointed as we are with Kevin07. So I think the emotional dunking was more for the outgoing rather than the incoming. Reading and seeing the great relief of everyday Americans while at the same time flashing through the past eight years of my own life (under Bush) was extraordinary. Fuck! he's gone. The fucker's gone.

Later in the morning a guy called Neil came to inspect our solar panels and connect us up. We watched with immense joy our electricity meter stop, then go in reverse. After he left, and in celebration of the moment, we also turned off our mains water and turned on our previously stored tank supply. Bliss.

Then an hour later we had a blackout and our solar system, which is connected to the main grid supply, went out. Because we have a small electric pump to push our water supply, we were also without water.

This naturally returned me to my hopeless-homeostasis that I've come to function so well under before two lovely peeps, Geraldine and Kyla from Monash University came to talk to me about a WorkmanJones component for a group exhibition based on detours and the absurd for later in 09.

Mashed (elegy for the city)

Our elders are sick. Written on the wall of a child's tree-house by a Scottish poet.

Since Plato we have been conscious of the ill-logic of our cities but struggled to do away with them. Now for the first time in human history there are more people in cities than in rural areas. It is no wonder, therefore, that human existence is at its most abstract, most violent, most 'civil', most veiled, most mediated, most toxic, most insane.

Jason Workman gave me permission to do a mashup of WorkmanJones city interventions between 2006 and 2008, which I've just finished. The main track is by Esmerine, who I think are a Canadian band that don members of godspeed you! black emperor.

Cities

After I posted the most recent WorkmanJones film, Tag, a friend of mine, Hamish Morgan, challenged me on why we chose to use the city as a site for our work. There are so many ways to think about and address this question. I initially gave some reasons in response, but having thought more about it lately, about impermanent culture (impermaculture), I thought I'd share some of this thinking.

Firstly, cities exist. Modern cities are toxicities, they rely on resources from elsewhere, they waste waste, they can (probably) never be sustainable, more people live in them than in rural areas (a recent global phenomenon), and cities are places of social invention and mutation. For all these reasons, critiquing, participating in and understanding the city is to understand the dominant psyche of modern humans and why centralised capitalism is killing us, and many other species, very rapidly and very cruelly.

Hamish has spent a few years living with an aboriginal community in remote WA, and I have spent the majority of my life living in occupied regional areas of Australia, namely the Wingecarribee district, Wagga Wagga and Djadjawurrung country for the past 13 years. Both Hamish and I have been educated in urban universities, where few questions are ever asked concerning urban impermaculture.

Recently, I voluntarily endured a paper given by a PhD candidate that cross-pollinated Situationist thought with her own desire to continue shopping. It was a seemingly clever paper using fashionable dérive poetics with individualist urbane desire. Michael Farrell brilliantly called it 'romantic shopping'. It simply repulsed me. She was a post-graduate student in sustainability and architecture. 

Her intellectual abstractions represented her mediated blindness. She told us that she drove her car into the city to carry out her shopping 'experiments', and that she had to consume things in order for her experiment to work. When I challenged her, pretty clumsily regrettably, on her work as capitalist embellishing, she exclaimed, "But what other system have we got?"

What was so offensive about this paper was that an architect working in the area of sustainability was not looking at urban permaculture in Havana as a model or focus point for her research, or any other transitional city. Havana is a living example that excitingly challenges my Jensenian belief that cities can never be sustainable (based on a reliance upon the importation of resources). Instead it was her own desire and its place in the world that was being indulgently understood. The other area this paper failed to investigate, regarding the question of future sustainability and urban psychogeography, was indigenous intelligence.

Our urban film, Tag, was never meant as a critique of the city, rather an example of using an impermacultural domain as a site for post-consumer play. A critique of the city occurs in other parts of my practice, as it does here. It was also made to demonstrate the body as common substance, devoid of shame and embarrassment, and directly influenced by the abstract and toxic environment in which we were courting chance behaviours. 

Photo: Kathryn McCool

Property relations

Photo: Kathryn McCool

If property is so closely related to avoidance, and if these two principals of identification and exclusion really are so consistently at play (and I think they are), then is it really so daring to suggest that the person, in the domain of avoidance, is constructed out of property? David Graeber, Possibilities, p22.

Tagged Post (a response to Hamish Morgan)

The following writing is in response to Hamish Morgan's comment on Tag yesterday.

I don’t think Tag is ‘against the city’; at least it is not a negation in total. It is difficult for play to be against something when it is caught up in the surprise and the joy of the new.

We have made similar work in the country, and of course the environment alters the work we make wherever it is. A rule of our practice, set out by John Cage, is ‘a work of art should include its environment’.

So, I see this new work not so much a critique, nor a logical attack, rather states of permanent play (permaplay) in everyday space and poesis (meaning-making) through activity before langauge. Making art without producing anything consumable is an obvious eco-politic that is 'against' the city (civis, civilisation, centre, transportation of resources, capitalisation, etc), but the work overall, I think, is more than this.

We specifically chose non-heroic, non-spectacular outer parts of Melbourne for no other reason than CBDs (toxicities) are so last century.

In relation to tagging itself I have a developing interest in the urban phenomenon of self-determining font making, graffitists who through the act of generating their own personalised fonts decentralise and demiltarise the alphabet in public space. This is important and exciting territory, and the body as tag is an extension of this line of graffic thought.

To make Tag we caught a train down to Melbourne, thus burning carbon, so this is a negation of our own making. A zero carbon footprint comes in small gradual steps over the next 6-7 years. Just in terms of carbon, we have a very small distance to go compared with, say, Fox Studios.

Additionally this film is part of a gift-ecology, a concept I'm developing so as my overall practice continues to contribute to the global movement of decapitalised art. I use gift-ecology instead of 'gift-economy' (a term developed by capitalists), because art should produce no waste – hence permanent culture (permaculture) as antidote to toxiculture.

Again, all this is transitional thought, on the way to a post-industrial, post-consumerist modality.

Thanks to all the commenteers – such generosity!

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.

Jason Workman

Jason Workman practising in the space of the everyday.

Ian Robertson

Designer of all things and How to Do Words With Things. 

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