Radical Slacker Beach Threat

The group ‘I am Kloot’ have a song called ‘Proof’ (look, it up)’ it begins with the lyrics

Hey, could you stand another drink
I'm better when I don't think
It seems to get me through
Say, d'you wanna spin another line
Like we had a good time
Not that I need proof

It seems to me to say everything about the world I live in now, it’s a world that is getting more abstract, more inept and visually dysfunctional each month. With now no need to think or question anything spun my way.

A form of devious electronic zealotry has invaded everything, competing for all our cultural future, it’s nowhere close to how I imagined it as a child, or even as a young adult. Granted, mine is a 1970s British childhood of slightly creepy malevolence, with a certain menace lurking behind the neighbours curtains. But it’s was also dreamy world of haunted rainy days spent indoors with a glorious technical future of strange science, linked with a hangover of a post hippy, slightly folky can do attitude, beamed by the TV into my subconscious.

But the blokes that run everything (and let’s be honest its mainly blokes) now, seem to have taken an authority position to new levels of ineptitude. Its key is to frown on any kind of knees up, promoting a puritanical patriotic spirit, it’s in their interest to tell us that our way of life is under threat, while keeping us all spending sometimes on the internet while using inflammatory language and visuals, to keep us compliant.

It’s a present my Australian self can’t fathom. A electronic proletariat is adding to the static while looking for a bigger and bigger outrage, calling for the banning of this and promoting the hating of that, all hidden behind an avatar revealing the unpleasant individual behind an amiable exterior.

I usually spend hours composing something witty to say about my paintings. But nobody is listening and why should they, we all have shit to buy on eBay, and the blokes in blazer are promoting Australian values behind flags.

I spend most of my time in complete bemusement. I am on a different hemisphere of the globe from where I started, I am a long way from a child of the 70s watching TV, I am bombarded by ineptitude and patriotism. Why not paint people upside down on the beach. Buggered if I know what it’s all about.

Gas Works Art Park August 10th  15

Concrete Atlantis Terminal 1

“For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.“ W.G Seabold

Throughout time, societies have recounted spells and incantations to assist travelers from this world and into the next.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a collection of 200 magic spells and incantations that were believed to protect the dead from evil and to guide them on their travels through a kingdom of the dead to their final destination. In Greek mythology, spells were recorded to assist travelers get to Elysium (paradise).  Each spell was intended for use in a specific situation that the traveler might encounter on the tortuous transit to eternal bliss. Before reaching Elysium the guardian gods would interrogate them in the hall of judgement. The travelers would protest their innocence by reciting spell 125: “I have done no falsehood, I have not robbed, I have not stolen, I have not killed men, and I have not told lies”. The modern traveller also encounters similar interrogation in the departures hall: “Have you packed your bags yourself?”, “Are you carrying anything sharp?”, “Are you a dickhead who is likely to get drunk and try to take over the plane?”

As an eight year old I was a bit of Egyptologist. I was an expert bedroom traveler, thanks to my Red View Master.  These toys were released in 1939, presented a stereoscopic image to the viewer of places and things of interest.  In 1976, mine took me to the Pyramids, the Olympics and the Acropolis in Athens .

Thanks to my parents, by 1976 my travels expanded beyond my bedroom and gave me a taste of mainstream modern day travel abroad. We turned up at the new local space port with our suitcases that were carried. My Dad would smoke his way through a packet of cigarettes, while my Mum knitted, before we strolled casually on to the tarmac where the aircraft waited. Once on board the Captain would talk over the tannoy to explain what was going on.  Belts fastened, drinks in hand the plane would then  rocket off down the runway and into the sky at usually an unfeasibly acute angle, before arriving at our sunny destination where everybody smiled. Holiday paradise.

Thirty four years later, on the morning of a flight I will wake to the sound of my own despairing screams.  My childhood enthusiasm for air travel has been destroyed as I now have to enter a faceless living organism, Transfixed.  I will be funnelled down tunnels that drain and feed me into a monsters throat with my fellow travelers. We will all pass unnoticed and un-mourned through a system of cubes, to tube, and back to a cube.
My vortex of boredom starts with the anxiety of getting to the airport in the first place. I usually travel cattle and get the experience the whole gambit of life. While I wait under a florescence lights, in climate controlled, two storey building with multiple bathrooms.
The experience is enhanced by dystopian security, dysfunctional furniture and dreary cups of coffee in this weird airline sanctioned bazaar. I can move from queue; to seat; seat to security; security to seat and seat to queue with no place of sanctuary, amidst the ordered chaos of my transit .I usually have the half on, half off look. Eyes dead, ears plugged in. my humanity seeping away as a darkness descends.
All airports now contains this fabulous dullness reducing people to primitive simpletons. Like the dead Egyptians, my heart is weighed on the scales of judgment, balancing  the good against the bad I have done. This act is the penultimate in The Book of the Dead, the ultimate travel guide.

Paralyse yourself with my new paintings about travel boredom.

The Toilets of South Australia

Dear Minister Hunt

Dear Minister Hunt

I am deeply upset about your recent decision to approve the Abbot Point dredging project.

Your decision suggests to me that you have complete disregard for the views of the wider population because you are the lapdog of a few (ie the mining magnates). The Great Barrier Reef is not just a national asset, it is a global asset that is already under threat. Your decision to allow dredging and to also allow the spoil to be dumped within the marine reserve is criminal. I'd imagine that you would not appreciate it if someone dumped a whole heap of spoil in your backyard and house? At least you would have the means of removing the inconvenience.

When the Great Barrier Reef is reduced to a fraction of its current size, do you really want to go down in history as the Minister who massively contributed to its demise? Your current portfolio is actually one that requires custodianship of the environment at a national level. You have a choice (the beauty of a democratic society) to reverse your decision and protect the reef, and the associated tourism industry, and thereby regain the trust of the Australian public.

Somethings are worth more than providing a handful of mega mining executives with their wishlist. I want my 6mth son (who interestingly was born on World Environment Day) to enjoy the wonder that is the Great Barrier Reef.

Please show courageous leadership and think as an Environmental Minister and not as an economist. If you can't look after the environment who will? It certainly won't be your colleagues who have ministerial positions relating to industry, business, primary industry and business.

Yours sincerely

Emma

Wednesday 11.15pm. 67 Tram

It was the way you dismissed it
What
When you were at the bar
Sorry
I got upset because you manipulated the situation
I didn’t
You did that’s your thing, you manipulate and then dismiss
Can we not have this conversation on the tram
Well it upset me
I can see that
Well you manipulate these situations and then dismiss them
I don’t
You do
What are you talking about
The way you dismiss things
But I don’t , I just didn’t want to talk about it, at the bar , like I don’t want to talk about it here
But admit you manipulate things
I don’t as I said I just…
Can I just say one thing without you interrupting?
Oh. Ok go on
Well three months ago you…
Hold on you been hanging onto something for three months
See there you go interrupting
I am not but you have been wound up over something I manipulated three months ago, which you now bring up on our holiday on this tram
OH Forget it
No tell me what’s bugging you about my manipulation
No this isn’t the place
I said that earlier
Oh hangon where are we
I think that’s Fritzroy Street
We had better get off as we are staying over there

1979

Until the advent of computers this was my Saturday Morning, starting in 1979 in a world of smoking men and naked women on calendars. I worked as 'The Beatles' said, for a man in the motor trade. Spending those mornings in an automotive parts shop. Dishing out shock absorbers, filters, spark plugs and clutches, to the trade for we were a trade warehouse and heaven forbid retail punters, for I was a car obsessed nipper.

To get the multi coloured boxes to the counter, Involved looking up various products by looking in various parts application catalogues. Followed by a swift trek out the back to fetch the item in question, The orange section was Fram Filters,or the yellow section of Girling brake parts.

These catalogues were multi coloured matching there component shelfed friends and came out every year promoting everything automotive.

15 Ways to a Better Body

“Images. Millions of images. That's what I eat

I got organisms, I got screams. I’ve got all the images any hick poet every should have

My power’s coming, my power’s coming, my power’s coming

I got millions. Millions, millions and millions of images of me, me, me.”

William Burroughs (he of the book, The Naked Lunch) and Gus Van Sant (he of the film, Good Will Hunting),

                                                                             The Elvis of Letters, EP released 1985.

I grew up in the UK near a small village called Lacock in Wiltshire. It’s famous for a few things. It is entirely owned by the National Trust; it’s got a good pub (The Red Lion); the BBC’s mini-series Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth version) was filmed there; but most important of all, the photograph was invented there in 1835 at Lacock Abbey, by William Henry Fox Talbot. This remarkable invention made painting at a stroke obsolete and means all our futures are now one of image appropriation.

The world of marketing and advertising has since prostituted photography so that every day we now wake to a photographic image onslaught attempting to make you and me perfect consumers. There is no escape from magazines, TV, the internet, and those sales and marketing people who are trying to sell you some new experience that you hadn’t thought existed and now can’t do without. The title of this show comes from a woman’s magazine I randomly picked up in the doctor’s surgery on a normal mundane day. The tag line was beautifully rendered and its syntax drilled itself into my memory banks, making me long for something perfect I hadn’t got – and I am not a woman.

 Our feeble monkey brains already have too many images jammed into them. Attempting to find space for the new ones, might mean we all lose something important such as the power of speech or the memory of a late relative. Perhaps this is why today’s photograph is instant and available to all with the appropriate technology. Globally we are now experiencing a photographic vortex where anyone can capture an image and share it with the world. These then feedbacks into all the visual static we consume.

Everything visually assaults us with perfection disguised as marketing. Even painting, as a consequence we should all be giving up on perfection. I now no longer actively practice trying to get better at anything as I have been stunned into being a better consumer. You and I live in this manufactured world, high on quality aspiration, but in reality low on actuality.

Everything we see is demographied, appropriated, manipulated and used in conjunction with various fonts to get us to consume. Image marketing seeks to grab us with an expectation of animating our dull days, but reality sees us all experiencing repetitious days thanks to the power of consumption and we need more and more consumers just make the whole thing work.

My brain is full and I’m suggesting yours is too. Mine’s jammed with World War II, 1970 Horror Films, clowns, korabi and remembering how to walk plus all the other rubbish it’s taken me 45 years to accrue. Before your brain is conditioned solely into product recognition and reciting ads, I invite you to try backing your brain up and escape the sameness that permeates everything and work towards a personal memory dump to liberate yourself from just being a consumer. I tried during a moment when I wasn’t sleep-walking. I managed to create this image collision collage.

I was alarmed at what spews from my brain, so don’t buy or photograph anything here as it just adds to the problem.

 

"Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one woken suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.”  Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, (1908), Chapter 7