Enjoying the recombinant aesthetics of blood and piss - a personal, monthly observance - bends my mind to situations where this is ok(in private toilet cubicles; in the comfort of your woan home; bdsm play parties;) and where it is not (in public; as commercially compeditive art; enjoying). I hasten to add that I don’t mean this monthly bleeding is a divine right, a special woamnly thing. It might be a regular physical occurence for me, but lots of other people deal with this as work, in their social lives, daily bodily functioning, as queer desires, as consequences of violence, midwifery, various medical and or spiritual practices…the list could be as long as my arm (runs down my leg).

I’m not sure i’m a very good storyteller - each step of the way I like to shine a torch down other paths, wonder if they ever hook up again, imply whole other journeys with a syllable. Writing a report for uni yesterday reminded me of the shimmeringness of dreaming and how I like to think and dream while I’m reading. This is the quality that I want my writing to have, except I have a lot of psychological blocks to writing assessments these days and really struggle to complete simple assignments.

But…a recent art exhibition opening for “Avatar”, (at the Australian Centre for Photography) included an installation called “Havidol”, a spoof on lifestyle marketing of medication, featuring lots of images of conservative happy shiny white heteros with clean hair and teeth, and tennis. My younger sister made a surprise appearance as their interactive performative art - dressed as a Prozac nurse in trendy stilettos doling out mints from a large glass jar with a dental mirror. She works for ACP so her role may have more to do with the actual gallery’s value added production effort than part of the official artwork. I grimace when I think about this work, because it was boring and the kind of culture jamming that is no longer contentious, and there’s my sister having a ball dressing up and embodying a gentle critique of the feminised history of the nursing profession, and codes of feminine conduct in today’s late capitalist world.

Shortly after seeing her, I met a fine arts lecturer who made the unfortunate social gaffe of admitting her concerns that young artists today are discovering (20 year old) new media technique/ performance art as though they are the first to do so: “and you think, are they doing it for the right reasons?” An odd thing to say, but certainly related to what I was thinking. New media art history perhaps hasn’t been old enough to warrant codifying and retrieving “lost history”; indeed, perhaps they don’t want to be historicised or drawn into a grand narrative; the stuff and value of temporal artworks is often the inability to record them in halls of of the academe…maybe it’s even zooming ahead and can’t wait for academics to catch up?

Anyway, more platitudes later. For now, a provocative epithet: There is nothing so practical as a good theory, from a curiously named conference site: Balisage

A little walk I took a couple of years ago…

Night time

I went out walking and the cats watched me
All through the back of Newtown along the trainline
On top of terrace walls and under cars
Their heads turned silently or not at all
And I strolled, marvelling at the orange light
And purple dimples of the clouds.
(more…)

gee, sometimes i feel like i came down in the last shower… but look at this! it’s really exciting, or hopefully at least it will be endearing to people who saw it the first time it came out and did the rounds…

They Rule allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.
The data was collected from their websites and SEC filings in early 2004, so it may not be completely accurate - companies merge and disappear and directors shift boards.

from the friendly neighbourhood newmedia filter

“It refers to a practice in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when dissidents who wanted to bring banned Western music into Russia would go to hospital trash cans, secure already exposed X-ray film and then press a master disk onto the X-rays to make floppy records,” Cadava said. “They were called ‘music on bones’ because the grooves were on images of chest cavities and spinal columns.”

Music on bones, some audio to listen to, somehow related to Eduado Cadava’s “small book on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing.”

From Cabinet magazine, via 3 quarks daily:

In their external characteristics and mode of life, whales are basically fish (if by that you mean, as people did, “a creature living exclusively in the water”), but in their internal anatomy they are pretty much indistinguishable from a big carnivore. And it was in moving the cetaceans out of the category of fish and into the emergent category of “mammals” that comparative anatomy had its triumph in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Did whales and fish all have fins? Sure. But when you got out your scalpel, you discovered that the whale’s “fin” secreted the bones of a human hand!

(A comparative anatomy of the hand from The Natural History of the Ordinary Cetacea, or Whales (1837), by Robert Hamilton. Diagrams C and D show the bony structures in the flippers of a dugong and a bowhead whale, respectively. Diagram E shows a human arm for comparison.)

This wobbled the old certainties of natural order and implied new and troubling kinships. We don’t any longer hear the word “breast” (mamelle in French) in “mammal,” but people very much did hear that in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it raised eyebrows. Much resistance to the non-fish whale hailed from anxiety about this newfangled taxonomy: lots of folks agreed that there was something louche about organizing God’s creation according to these intimate, bedroom details. Sexual organs? What was wrong with nice, clean external characteristics?

ps: charles linneaus created the category of mammals specifically to draw attention to the fact that humans, like a number of animals - cows, pigs, dogs, goats, sheep, cats, bats, whales etc suckle their young. and he was concerned that not enough women were doing their own breastfeeding. i think he was alarmed at changes to the relationship between humans and technology with industrialisation. and relationships between humans.

THE HARD ONS are being joined by THE ASSASSINATION
COLLECTIVE from Melbourne, THE THAW and CALL THE
MEDIC, CALL THE NURSE in a benefit gig to raise money
for people arrested after the G20 protests.

G20 arrestee benefit gig with:

The Hard Ons
The Assassination Collective (melb)
The Thaw
Call the medic, call the nurse

Date: Thursday 7th February
Cost: $10
Venue: Annandale Hotel
Cnr. Parramatta Rd & Nelson St, Annandale

first band on by 8:30

All proceeds to the G20 arrestee fund.

In November 2006, people took to the streets of
Melbourne to confront the G20, a meeting of the
world’s most powerful finance ministers whose policies
perpetrate suffering and violence in countless
communities around the world every day. Since that
protest, Victorian and Federal police have carried out
a vast operation of surveillance and arrests, raiding
houses at dawn and slapping protestors with ludicrous
charges and repressive bail conditions. This is a
campaign of intimidation and part of an attempt to
criminalise protest; it is an attack on everyone’s
ability to resist war, poverty and oppression.

To defend political protest, people are organising in
solidarity with those arrested and supporting them by
raising money to help with legal costs and other
expenses. For more information see www.afterg20.org

The assassination collective is number one on my punk band list. They are really freakin excellent.

Time was the not-so-secret weapon of the medieval church; the tolling of the church bells every quarter hour was a ubiquitous reminder of Death-the-Universal-Leveler. In the early centuries of the first millenium, the Gnostics believed that the souls of dead people entered the earth’s atmosphere as pure information. It was like the first sci-fi technology of time-travel. The living can absorb the dead at any time. Therefore everyone knows everything and all time exists simultaneously. The species has an infinite capacity for memory. Time is mixed with blood. At the end of the French Revolution’s reign of terror in 1789, the Jacobins invented a new calendar. The revolution is a break with past recorded time, ushering in a new regime. The years had names: Humidor and Thermador. Pol Pot, who’d studied history at the Sorbonne, tried to do this too after murdering half the population of Cambodia. Time starts new. In the 1920s, the Dadaist Hugo Ball saw his nomadic movements around the backwater towns of Europe as a flight out of time. He wanted to arrive someplace where time stood still. Is it a coincidence that Ball, like [Paul] Thek and Simone Weil, was ambivalently Catholic?”

Aliens and Anorexia, Chris Kraus, Semiotext(e) Press

i haven’t read it all yet, but it looks interesting: the nature of online art

via my big backyard