The World's Shittest Psyop
“(Projection) On Reflection,” MMXXIII.
Oil on glass. Photograph: Jessica Maurer.
“I used to think being an artist would allow me to step beyond reason toward what ought to be, to disturb the seemingly natural order of things and unwind our counterfeit intuitions. But I’m fairly certain that the art world—caught as it is between the demands of yacht owners and delusional incompetents with advanced deskilling degrees—won’t let me do so. Instead, I’ll defect and let others get bullied into making evangelical pablum, financial instruments, interior decor, identity flags, conceptual contracts, tech demos, checked boxes, “research,” encrypted Marxism, postcolonial apologia, excuses, complaints . . .”[1]
-Andrew Norman Wilson, “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now”
Brian Fuata forwarded this article to a short-lived group chat after an oddly momentous night at “the studio” which culminated in the usual suspects standing last on the dancefloor and a drive to Potts Point via Croydon courtesy of a sober Mike Hewson, with whom I found myself discussing the outrageous expense of Sydney’s toll road system and how many people it must adversely affect, at 2am on the silent highway. Hewson built a public playground in St Peters out of buildings demolished to build the WesConnex toll road, a project which was paid for by WesConnex. Ella Sutherland was sitting quietly in the back seat beside her greyhound Hannah, both our faces unaccountably painted green; everything and nothing was changing. Odd moments of relation that are difficult to translate to anyone who doesn’t believe that an artist can constitute a “real” life. When I began writing my next blog months ago I had a lot of glib but I think potentially hilarious jokes to make about the Sydney Art scene basically conforming to the plotline of Bridgerton, in which Hewson has proven the “diamond of the season” via his allegedly serious alleged relationship with a Nielson daughter, the two of whom (alongside their mother) are responsible for a large amount of art philanthropy in the city via the billions of their sire Kerr, who emigrated here from South Africa in the early 1980s. Despite the strangeness of our friendship, Hewson has always proven constant, at times going out of his way to help me simply because he could, some strange combination of solidarity and naked ambition basically synonymous with the Late Capitalist artworld. He has messaged a couple of times to apologise over the last couple of months for missing my exhibitions, finally making the closing drinks for “Dark Ages and Ages” at Mais Wright Gallery[2] where an off-handed remark teasing him that he hadn’t yet walked up the stairs to look at my work was misconstrued as criticism of his earlier lack of attendance. I wasn’t having the best luck expressing myself at all that night, I had arrived at the gallery after working all day and my body and psyche was beginning to register the strain of my 6-day working week, between the low paid full-time job in customer service, and the one class of university teaching (which seems like all I will ever get now that I am disgraced), not to mention the three exhibitions in the space of a month. I had been quite disciplined in waking at 6am to continue writing, but I was really only managing to keep on top of the mountain of admin, unable to write my blog or my PhD. I have had to quit my job because I just couldn’t do it all, and now I am in a financially precarious position and don’t really have any prospects. I have never had a proper job in the field that I think it’s safe to say I have some expertise in, and I don’t quite know what to do. It was also strangely weighing on me that over the course of that exhibition that a few senior artists had walked into the space seemingly with the express intention of not greeting me and giving me withering stares to express their disapproval of me as a person. This kind of thing has been happening a lot. While I have generally found these interactions ridiculous enough to be funny, when you are that tired and frightened for the future, let alone devastated over world events, it can be quite depressing. More than anything they are depressing. I have mostly seen all of this as a process of self-selection, these people, after all, are quite often the same who will happily pose for photos with a known sexual predator. But I have to give myself credit sometime, like maybe one Instagram post almost a year ago should not condemn me to a life of exclusion, and maybe their attitude toward me also exposes their character as people so compromised that they would join an angry mob over something so spurious. I guess everyone is afraid of critique, it has been so long since it has been proffered. And yet, all the art movements looked to and repeated ad nauseum in today’s hackneyed exhibition circuit, the art movements of the mid to late 20th century, were accompanied by a strong print media that critically engaged with art. When Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” was debuted in the 1960s, it was widely derided in the press as misogynistic (the title reeks of it and one of the Acts is actually titled Walpurgisnacht or the Witches Sabbath)[3], and this was an era comparatively wildly backward regarding women’s rights. It was probably the many forums for debate and criticism that helped make things better, even, in some respects the work of CIA operative Gloria Steinem. Unfortunately, this is not the case of the media landscape today.
So, I was milling around awkwardly that night at Mais Wright, with Hewson standing about a metre away, as I was accosted by the admin of a meme account literally wearing a hammer and sickle on his sleeve and mansplaining Walter Benjamin, a scene that would be unbelievable in satire. Welcome to the artworld. The meme maker @timwintoncellectuals and henceforth timcel, was demanding answers from me, as I was barely standing, beer in hand, trying to enjoy the one night of the week before my one day off, when I would only have to do some class prep. He wanted information on a list of references in my work as well as my view on progress, straying as it does from a particular branch of Marxist orthodoxy, though I imagine that even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels may have agreed when confronted with the rise of fascism, that history does not inevitably trend toward a workers’ paradise so much that we must always remain vigilant. Throughout the diatribe I awaited the explanation of an alternative view because I was genuinely interested (I like learning) but perhaps timcel wanted to express that he had so little respect for my intelligence that it wasn’t worth his time, as he actually said to me in person something that he wrote subsequently about how “artists shouldn’t be allowed to read Benjamin”. He published a Substack entitled “Who’s Afraid of Zoë Marni Robertson”,[4] the choicest from which I have cut and paste below:
“A little scratching and I found that a lot of people had anecdotes, anecdotes and anecdotes about mad Zoe. Maybe she harangued you at a dance party, or made an offhand remark to your detriment at an opening. What was clear is that she works by insult, and not by objective appraisal (does she know that Julia spends sixty hours a week in her studio?)
I’m sick of the nepo baby discourse. I long for a bourgeoisie that would take leadership of the arts scene and decorate the emerald cities with galleries and live music spaces. Bring on the Neilsonecene. There are in fact many things I disagree with in Robertson’s vision of the world– not least her treatment of the concept of “progressivism” in a way that renewed my desire to forbid artists from reading Walter Benjamin.”
There is much to dislike in timcel’s bizarre and unaccountable “Marxist” tirade in support of a thriving art scene as delivered by the billionaire class, but I do, for one, support any serious attempt at criticism, to quote that famous line about defending his right to say it, overlooking Voltaire and his fortune and elevation into the aristocracy built on rigging the lottery (creepy).[5] Nevertheless, it seems important to address character-based libel, as I know that I am by no means the only person being suppressed, ostracised and/or outright bullied in this milieu. A friend of mine who is a very successful commercial artist and who also moonlights as the Sydney art world’s most prolific and reliable gossip told me that they had never heard anyone describe me the way that I was portrayed in that blog, though they run in varied social and economic circles between gallerists, collectors and general art bros. There is also a whole artworld outside the commercial, and I regularly interact with people more interested in making art for its own sake, and the many who I have spoken to over the last couple of weeks seemed quite as shocked by this characterisation. The company that timcel apparently keeps and quotes are expressly adjacent to Gutman, and though people that it would appear that I dislike may seem universally certain of my poor mental health (though none of them seem to offer any sympathy), that doesn’t necessarily mean anything other than that they believe that anyone taking issue with their attitude or behaviour must necessarily be mad, which may actually make them quite psychologically robust. A lot of people are feeling much less so right now. I really didn’t want to have to write this piece as I have a mountain of work to do, I am exhausted, and I am sad. But I had been writing something about ableism in the art and band scenes for months now, finally breaking through to a way to describe earlier trials and have realised that it will now be impossible to publish lest it appear as defensive in the face of being apparently widely thought of as “crazy”. Out of solidarity with the mentally ill and neurodiverse I will not deny that I am “crazy”. Antonin Artaud had more mental health, neurological and substance abuse issues than I feel like listing and yet wrote some of the most beautiful, sane poetry and theory of his time. So, I don’t think that it follows that someone who is mentally ill is necessarily wrong or incapable of contributing, simply that the veracity of what I have said is much more difficult to deny than I am. It also does not escape notice that the epithet “mad” applied to intelligent and outspoken women is a standard misogynist trope. And so, you will have to forgive me for not really caring about what these people think and feel, as I am sure that they will be quite fine, and I have much more pressing concerns, as well as people to tend to who are in much more vulnerable situations. To extend the Bridgerton metaphor, one might presume timcel to be something of an Eloise.
On the other hand, I initially took the critique towards my in-jokes in good faith and wondered if my painting of Coen Young was a little silly and overly specific. Though, I can hardly claim to spend 60 hours in the studio (and didn’t even when I still had the PhD stipend), as I can usually paint a good likeness in under an hour, the Young as Narcissus work “(Projection) On Reflection”, being no exception. Thus, it seems absolutely worth the laugh that all of Young’s friends have had from it. Young is among the least narcissistic artists I know (hence the title), someone who has rented many cars to install my work and nurtured me through some of the worst times of my life, and yet, monster that I am, I still attempted to immortalise a photo that he loathes. I must be “unhinged”. But not everything has to be world-ending high art, after all, and not all insult is ill-intentioned, some things are just fun, which judging from the humourlessness of timcel’s writing, he might have trouble understanding. Which is especially weird when one considers that he has made some genuinely funny memes, such as this one of this year’s terrible Archibald winner:
This is not to say that I don’t take exception to a varied and nuanced practice spanning fifteen years being reduced to being labelled “insult”, last year and the beginning of this, I painted some figureheads of art and the oligarchy in the Western tradition because I was thinking around them. I didn’t go easy on Simon Denny but there was a lot to write about because he is genuinely interesting and intelligent, so I would hardly say that the painting of him could be reduced to being called an insult.[6] It took me a few re-readings to finally realise that the “critique” of all my work, the “insult” and the “scene specificity” seems to be directly in relation to the Gutman work. And I don’t know how many times I have to say that she isn’t portrayed as decapitated, her shoulders are clearly visible, she is if anything portrayed as a bust. The continued misrepresentation feeds into the campaign against me, and so is hardly the action of anyone behaving earnestly and seriously as a critic. I have never used the term “nepo baby” or criticised nepotism in the arts, because that is an unsupportable position, the arts function almost entirely by nepotism, which doesn’t mean that decisions shouldn’t be challenged, or institutional curators pressured to go to even small exhibitions and extend their circle beyond the ultrawealthy. In the context, even the application of the term “Marxist” is completely irrelevant regarding my position, conjuring up some 20th century boogie man for the centre-ists and their friends the outright fascists to hang on to, in place of describing a critique devoid of politics, as an artist winning a prize of $100,000 the same year their family donates over $100,000 to the public gallery it is awarded by seems like a conflict of interest.[7] Maybe it is just because the money was given back in good faith because it wasn’t needed, but that is something that I feel deserved clarification. I always thought that the expected trajectory toward the awarding of major prizes and opportunities is an established exhibition track record, as opposed to what felt like someone being parachuted into the Prima Vera at the MCA, followed by an Archibald win, an ARTSPACE studio and weeks of having work projected onto the Opera House, which I didn’t even know was a possibility. None of this passes the pub test, at least at any of the pubs I frequent. When I have explained it all to extended family members, well outside the artworld, they have been genuinely shocked by the whole thing, and shocked that I have been hounded for daring to express an opinion. Because outside the limits of this vain and censorious context, the expectation, based on some 150 years of free market propaganda, is that artists are supposed to be opinionated rabble-rousers, and that some will hate each other, and that that really doesn’t reflect on them or their work.
One might ask who timcel’s blog is intended to appease…? This argument that my paintings are good but should somehow stick to universalising, was described by my friends who read it as simply weird (Beau Lai is happy to go on the record, as I do believe that one should be able to answer one’s critics). Not the less weird is the suggestion that I should consult someone with a much broader overview of culture, someone who could be relied upon to speak for the workers of the CFMEU about what they would like to see in art. To be fair, timcel’s breathless allusion to the CFMEU was in the context of my work “Paleo Monolith on Neolith”. But I imagine someone affected by the health crisis caused by engineered stone need not be privy to the Paul Thek reference to get the full impact of the work, which is kind of the point. Painting tends to be referential to a labyrinthine degree, where even a brushstroke can count as a means of communicating a history. Painters will routinely pack paintings with allusions to other artworks, events, atmospheric conditions or whatever, often simply to amuse themselves. A picture tells a thousand words, but that has never been enough for me, because I am not looking to reduce life to some rigid program to prove I am the smartest and most virtuous. I want my paintings to be generative in the way that everything I learn makes me excited about some new and beautiful idea. Every time I begin to “explain” my paintings I seem to come out with another explanation as to what it is “about”. This is particularly evident as regards the work produced over my PhD as the point of producing the paintings was to take the piss out of the notion that the written word can offer the ultimate explanation for all things, as Artaud memorably wrote “All Writing is Pigshit”.[8] I find that most people are quite happy to hear my varying stories, and also happy just to enjoy the work at face value, appreciating the formal characteristics, which is not actually a lesser way of appreciating the work. Human beings process shockingly little of all the sensory information available to us, who would claim a perfect understanding? And if, as charged, I was failing so badly in communication, how come that nice young businessman that follows me on Instagram (because he knows my mother) came up to me in the street to thank me for the education that I had given him? That being said, I am quite aware that I can always count on those men of superior intellect to be insulted upon being exposed to references they do not immediately understand, the person in the painting that timcel referred to that he had never heard of is Hito Steyerl, who one would have to have lived under a rock to not have heard of as an artist. Timcel asserts his ignorance of art of the last 20 years as a virtue, because art must be undemocratic or “petit bourgeois” if it doesn’t appeal to Scott Morrison’s mythical “quiet Australian”, or makes privileged inner city narcissists feel ignorant or out-of-the-loop because artists have communities and thus in-jokes. I suppose then, we should not be interested in other artist’s work or have fun among ourselves because every work should be propaganda that can be understood by all…? I was more than prepared to let timcel in on the jokes, as I have done with anyone I believed was acting in good faith over the past fifteen years of exhibiting and attending exhibitions in support of my community, but I don’t think I can be bothered now.
MYSTERIES OF MY “SEXUALISED WORKERS’ MURALS” REVEALED
Byron Bourke, Orson Heidrich and Jesse Hogan in one of their many promo images for “Reverse Archaeologies” at Tin Sheds. Kate Newby also has work in the show, but she is from Aotearoa and lives in Texas, and so is absent and I am not sure if she actually knows the other artists.
Meme by @artreviewpower100
A friend I hadn’t spoken to in months messaged me when I shared timcel’s blog to my stories, thinking it was going to be a positive review. When I told them it really wasn’t, they said that they were only just forgiving timcel for the positive review of the current Tin Sheds show (lol).[9] All these young strong men taking selfies like real workers, we can only hope they all find their billionaires someday. That show made me really appreciate the well-intentioned work of Joshua Citarella, as some kind of antidote to those being featured in the Murdoch-owned “newspaper” The Australian as artists to collect, with works that are art objet geographies of the internet like some himbo version of Simon Denny. I knew the name Orson Heidrich only because people are forever sending me artist selfies to irritate me and often ask me to paint the men in these photos.
Screenshot sent to a friend of mine who then forwarded it to me.
I am also just so tired of men championing men and telling women what to do and what to like in the arts. I am sure I have said it before but like 90% of people that go to art school are female, and men are still vastly overrepresented in museums and in university positions etc.[10] And yet despite being marginalised with prejudice, there’s always some new male authority trying to talk over me, attempting to outdo me in the edgelord stakes but without any of the substance. That is not to say I don’t get along with male artists (I get along with most people), and I don’t know what I would do without all the support my friends of all descriptions have given me over the years, no art is made in a vacuum. Young even calls me “queen of the art bros” as they always seem to be around me, laughing at my jokes or helping me with things, sometimes it even goes both ways. I used to think it was because of some creepy symbiotic relationship where I enjoy giving them a hard time and they enjoy being given a hard time, but it might even be more than that. It was, after all, only a couple of weeks ago at the opening of a Nielson art precinct that I announced loudly to Alistair Hill in front of a group of maybe eight people that “Coen wanted me to tell you that I didn’t notice your outfit”. Hill laughed louder than anyone and said that I can’t get him because he knows what I am about, much to the chagrin of myself and his brilliant and long-suffering partner Sophie Penkethman-Young, so I am still trying to puncture the man’s apparently impervious ego (though being referred to as an art bro might finally do it). (His outfit was great.) But since timcel’s blog was published quite a few men I would characterise as art bros have sent me random messages like they just wanted me to know they are there, and I realised that they were worried about me, and that maybe these slightly odd affinities run deeper. After the closing drinks at Mais Wright, I hung out with a few friends and told them that I was excited to make a smart and political new friend in timcel because I have enjoyed his memes, in hindsight, ignoring a lot of red flags. One of them asked to meet up at an exhibition and asked me about the blog… Looking into his eyes I could see he was really worried that I would be hurt, and it sort of gave me permission to feel devastated, that the character judgements of people that obviously don’t know me is supposed to pass for critique, that the legitimate hardship I am experiencing is because I am a “self-appointed Socrates”, where he is literally arguing that I have brought it all upon myself. I felt like I had been punched in the gut, but I guess I am supposed to believe I asked for it.
.
WALPURGISNACHT
The rave review of Tin Sheds was in pretty stark contrast to what timcel wrote about Emily Hunt’s “The Grotto” at The Art Gallery of New South Wales,[11] where according to timcel she mentions 19th century Spiritualist Salons and some people that participated in Spiritualist salons were reactionary capitalists, which is apparently proof of Hunt being “petit bourgeois”. The salons are apparently referenced within an exhibition drowning in text (I know, I hear it) as along with printmakers of the German Renaissance and their connection to the witch trials, Rosaleen Norton, ancient Rome, the Sirius Building, Centrelink, Callan Park etc, etc etc, …? Pretty damning stuff. I actually liked the nostalgic Dolewave of the Centrelink logo repeated throughout Hunt’s exhibition, but all the information printed everywhere felt a bit heavy-handed within the same slightly twee Greyson-Perry-esque work she has been making for the last couple of decades. I have never seen her work presented as “research” in that way, but then she has been in Germany a while. Hunt is smart and I think I would probably like what she’s saying, but that space is tiny, and the didactic panels clashing with neatly framed drawings and wall paintings and puppets and door handles was somewhere between too much and not enough. It lacked confidence, which seems fair enough in this age, but there was no reason for Hunt to lack confidence. Maybe it should have been a monograph? Maybe it should have been filled to the ceiling with incredible junk a la Nick Dorey? It’s not for me to say. I should admit that I wasn’t immediately moved to defend the work of Hunt when I first heard about it, it seemed like she didn’t want to acknowledge me at an opening when she was in town, though that could be down to my paranoia as the gaslighting does kind of mess with your head. Someone also told me that she had made a puppet to honour Mikala Dwyer, to which I immediately replied “appropriate”. I get pretty annoyed with vague “witchiness,” claimed by successful liberal artists that make it all seem silly, where a witch was really nothing if not a subversive autodidact piecing science and history together from the broken threads left over after violent imperialist oppression. I was really pleased to see that Hunt turned out to be communicating the political history of witchcraft pretty well. Whether or not widely acknowledged by brocialists, the witch trials are also an important area of Marxist discourse, as scholars like Barbara Ehrenreich[12] and Silvia Federici[13] argue that a flaw in Marx’s work was to fail to mention women’s labour being exploited as natural resource as a form of primitive accumulation (in which something that once belonged to everyone, like common lands, is privatised). It’s something that became pretty important to post-colonial theory also, that one’s labours could be treated as natural resource. One could argue that the tech barons have used the internet to this end regarding the techno-primitive (sorry) accumulation of media and culture. It is the situation in which “Social Media Manager” is a good job and “Investigative Journalist” is what one writes on one’s unemployment form. The tech monopolies have successfully stifled dissent by crippling independence in the art, music, film and mediascape and anyone looking to grow their platform or get a job seems willing to help them, even the ever-growing number of self-appointed-Platos nipping at my heels.
The art market is a bad joke that produces bad art. But some of the best times of my life have been hanging out at galleries drinking cheap free wine and talking and laughing with people who are there, like I am, because they just really love art. My PhD supervisor, Alex Gawronski, has run independent galleries continuously over 21 years. It became a running joke at one of them, Knulp, that I was the only person who would always show up, and they would all laugh when I arrived, to the extent that one of the other directors, Mitchel Cumming, threatened to make a fundraising t-shirt with my face on it and my then-famous catchphrase “bet you didn’t expect to see me here”. Before that there was 55 Sydenham Road, hanging out with Iakovos Amperidis and Eleanor Weber after openings, through the hilarious spontaneous parties and the times when it was just the three of us running through the events of the evening. Amperidis never showed anyone represented commercially and habitually rejected applications from people that were trying to climb the institutional ladder, that “collect them all” attitude to independent spaces where everything is just for a line on the CV. I recall an (undoubtedly apocryphal) story about an Amperidis, about to close the doors of 55 for the day when he spied a curator from a major institution walking up the stairs, at which point he turned the lights off and hid until they left. Most people spent a lot of time kissing the arse of this curator, though we all knew that there was something wrong there. As the disturbing details of their behaviour continue to emerge, though who can say if it will ever be made public, I can’t help think that sometimes the politeness of the artworld is totally immoral.
The last few months have been weird, and it seems the loudest voices that seem to think that I have been humbled also belong to the smallest minority. In the other sense, I absolutely have been humbled to discover that my writing has meant something to a lot of people, younger people, even people I have admired from afar that have now taken me into their confidence. Every week, of late, someone that I don’t know particularly well, who I have never, for instance, made plans with, has told me that they love me out of the blue, and I found myself saying it back each time because I felt it too. And I don’t think that I could possibly deserve all of this generosity and support, but it does make me certain that some better world is possible. As an entrenched punk, of course, I find all this “peace and love” hard to countenance, but I am reminded that the famous image of the hippy placing a flower into the barrel of a machine gun was taken when the deeply weird psych band “The Fugs” staged an exorcism at the Pentagon (I learned about that excellent moment in music history listening to the Barely Human podcast by author and punk musician Max Easton).[14] I think that a lot of the hippy era and the possibilities for organising and making things better out of love and solidarity have been purposefully watered down. If the tech barons are so hell bent on having us isolated in our little pods having trouble relating, then it seems like a good idea to stage as many exhibitions for their own sakes as possible, go to some gigs, have a few parties. I never thought that these neurodegenerative technologies would be so addictive, would be this successful, but judging by the gormless array of people walking around like early internet avatars as though they have never had to inhabit space before (whether or not actually plugged into headphones that spare them the mess of human interaction), there is a lot of work to be done. I think we Post-Internet Artists get a bit bogged down in the legacy of the counterculture being Silicon Valley, but if we were really invested in these histories we would spend more time advocating for the commons. Google’s move to monopoly happened almost by accident and it is only the last twenty years that we have allowed trillions of dollars to be literally made up by algorithms and used to further oppress the world’s poor and increasingly the rest of us. Under this current fascist regime made obvious by the genocide in Palestine, but also that of Sudan, which contains so many resources essential to the technology we use and are used by, the mask has slipped off Empire again as resolutely as in the 1960s and ‘70s when The Vietnam War galvanised the counterculture. When my PhD is over and I am no longer writing about how Late Capitalist or Contemporary Art has been shaped by democratic movements that were accompanied by new developments in economics that increasingly dispossessed the poor, I will take some more time to read beautiful things like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s[15] work, Edouard Glissant…[16] Alberto Toscano made a good case in Late Fascism[17] for turning to the black radical tradition, as it is the labours of people who have been living under fascism this whole time, even before the term was invented. Better people than I are writing about that tradition, but I think that it is probably important to follow great examples like Sun Ra and his Arkestra in outrageous costume claiming to be from Jupiter via Egypt, as a way to capture the imagination of African American youth and offer them an alternative version of history that restores the importance of their heritage. He made incredible music with incredible musicians he shared a house with and ran a local store with to remain embedded in his community. Because I really do believe that it beats the shit out of Marina Abramovich and her fucking face cream. The Black Panther movement to which Ra was adjacent set up alternative education and food programmes that were only undone recently. There are many alternative ways of making art to look to that don’t involve furthering the ends of rapacious plutocrats, and I have always seen art as a meaningful way of organising in simply providing an alternative form of value, a hearth around which to sit and share stories in this city where the pubs are otherwise owned by like, three people, and are apparently (and unsurprisingly) hotbeds of sexual assault.[18] Rallies of people mobilising against the genocide in Palestine can be incredibly draining but have also proven to be very heartening. When you get together with tens of thousands of your best friends to discuss politics everything seems possible. (Shout out to Gawronski who has attended almost every rally with a newly painted sign each time.)
I don’t really know what to do or how much use I can be, but I am going to get it together to start my alternative art school, get some interesting people together that we all can learn from. It will probably take the form of a lecture series and discussion group on Sunday afternoons. I applied for a grant from Randwick Council so I could pay people a decent amount to write lectures, but they said there wouldn’t be any interest (lol). I also figured that these meetings would be a good time to start an artists’ union like the one that started ARTSPACE, maybe an artists and unpaid workers’ union. I have been faced with a lot of despondency lately, even on the part of the generally most hopeful, all I can offer is that, just like writing or making art, we just start by doing something and helping anyone who is doing something.
So, I guess I some might say that I should endorse timcel as he does seem to be getting better at writing, though he could benefit from taking more care, making more informed and reasoned arguments. I have been really lucky to have Gawronski looking after me through the long PhD process. He is one of the few people to really shape my writing. I used to use poetry as a kind of shorthand, where one can communicate several different things within the same phrase. It was the best way to work when I was unwell as it required less energy. I will always love poetry and hope to get back to some of it or incorporate it more, on the other side of academia, but have been really appreciative of Gawronski’s fastidiousness in making me properly explain every statement and back up every assertion with sources. He convinced me that what I have to say is worth being stated clearly, and I am grateful he did. I think that timcel may benefit from investing more in the advice of others (Beau Lai did a close reading of this text and was mostly saying that they think I should be harder on timcel). It is hard to properly engage with timcel’s writing because it was initially genuinely hard to figure out what he wanted to achieve by this sweeping and personal attack. That is, until I started to think that those he intends to appease are the people that he quotes as calling me “mad” and “unhinged” like the witch trials never ended, who all seem super lovely. I guess we also have to be wary about those we let into our confidence, be wary of infiltration, remember the lessons of earlier countercultures. No one wants to be called a boomer anymore as it conjures the image of someone who sold out their ideals and the youth, but everyone still tries to appease them to get some small piece of the pie. I imagine this is why the upper echelons of the art world think they can tell me what work to make. And it feels like it is why some cosplay Communist was emboldened to tell me to shut up and paint more reductive, easy to understand versions of socialist art of the past. It’s like the world’s shittest psyop.
[1] https://thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/its-not-what-the-world-needs-right-now-norman-wilson
[2] https://www.maiswright.com/artists/zoe-marni-robertson/
[3] https://rapturetheatre.co.uk/whos-afraid-of-feminism/
[5] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/voltaire-enlightenment-philosopher-and-lottery-scammer-180967265/
[8] https://silk282a.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/antonin-artaud-all-writing-is-pigshit/
https://countess.report/
[12] https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/ehrenreich-barbara/witches.htm
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliban_and_the_Witch
[14] https://www.barelyhuman.info/2020/01/ep-1-fbi-are-mugs-i-like-fugs-and-crass.html
[15] (I have cut and paste the link to the pdf of their book Undercommons) chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf
[16] (Here is the link to the pdf of his book Poetics of Relation) chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://monoskop.org/images/2/23/Glissant_Edouard_Poetics_of_Relation.pdf
[17] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2627-late-fascism?srsltid=AfmBOopXine0yy0k8YB-uZRkVZU0GLD7_WX3BjQ4l2hAS86pZSgmhXJG
[18] Two major Sydney hospitality groups have been accused of a culture condoning rape and misogyny in the past week or so: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-04/merivale-hospitality-group-accused-of-exploiting-female-staff/104303602
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sex-sleaze-and-swillhouse-the-sinister-side-of-the-glitzy-hospitality-scene-20240820-p5k3r0.html