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!

Hamish's gift

Response to my Tagged post by Hamish Morgan. 

You talk about in your 'How to do Words with Things' about city based artists feeding off their own disconnection/abstraction in order to do their art (I would have to check up on that); their angst becomes generative of the work itself, and because everyone in the city has this disconnection there is a good market for this kind of work. Consumers buy the art in order to express their solidarity with disconnection and consumption. Your play in the city (along with an interest in graffiti, tagging, fonting!), to me, expresses a critique of those kind of artistic practices. That is, an art practice not built around consumption, one that is decapitalised. You propose an exchange, or gift-ecology. (The idea of a gift-economy began with Marcel Mauss, an anthropologist writing in the late 1920s after the destruction of Europe – through war and the industrial revolution – and wanting to rediscover a point of human connection without economic and industrial subterfuge. His book, 'The Gift', is a rather interesting critique of capitalism). I digress, back to my long-winded point. So you are interested in an art practice that generates responsibilities, obligations, debts, counter-gifts that keep a cycle of exchange going, that connects and keeps us in play with each other. (Another side point, the word for gift in German 'Gib' is the same word as poison - i.e. the gift is not 'free' but indebts us to give back, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The gift; antidote and poison! Also the English derivative of gift comes from the same word as 'take': the gift economy is one where we give and take; by giving we take something from the other - we take their sense of debt so that they give back!).

Perhaps all I want to say is that a truly decapitalised practice would have nothing to do with the city; would have no play with its structures, because this is what gives and takes our (creative) energy. I love a good ideas stoush; this shows my terrible reliance on critique (this is what the university teaches). I retreat from creativity through the self-defense of critique - now there is another provocation... PJ, I might add, I find your work terribly hopeful and evocative of a post-industrial future. Please keep sharing and indebting us all in a gift-ecology.