post-protodoctor purgatroid

It is done. finally.

Five years, two months, four deaths, 107000 words, two volumes, five countries, 54 subjects, a messy divorce, two heartbreaks, two house moves, two departments, a stomach ulcer, lots of blogging, lots of chocolate, lots of codeine.

Submission was - of course, delightful - so was sydney - for the first 4 days - and then I came down with a chest infection, that kept me huddled over my laptop, slicing words off the enormous expanding tome, so it could conform to the faculty limits of non-insane theses (ha ha).

I spent the final week feeling weak and wet and overwhelmed, and regretting all the things I couldn't go to, all the people I couldn't see - and then I realised what a relief it is to live somewhere where the pace of life is slower than I am.

On my last day in Sydney - I did two wonderful things - going into AGNSW to sit through the entire Phil Collins (the artist, not the pop-singer) karaoke installation of "the world won't listen".




I don't think I've been as moved by something since hanging out in the Rothgo Room at the Tate Modern.
Inspired - I wandered lonely as a cloud through the botanic gardens down to circular quay where i caught a ferry out to cockatoo island to catch Ken Unsworth's grand piano tribute to his wife, called "a ringing glass".

The space itself is so enormous and overwhelming - it's hard to discern whether I was being affected by the site, or the work. the first four rooms were small, and contained discrete mobile musical installations: a dancing skeleton, a dream sequence, and then a series of miniature grand pianos, and angels - and then finally a discombobulated grand piano suspended from the ceiling.

After this, I walked through two enormous rooms: one set up as a large golden curtained salon with a baby grand in the corner, and the final being an enormous hallway - flanked by parallel sets of five elaborately curtained mirrors, and eight small chandeliers, up to a rather disappointing finale assemblage on the stage, flanked by two large monitors screening the dream sequence projection from room two,

This felt like an interesting translation of the experience of playing piano (the symmetry of left hand and right hand mirrored by the bass and treble clefs, as they span the 5 black keys and 8 white) into walking through a piano playing experience. but the whole thing was so nice and classical, it reminded me of being 10 years old, being a good girl, a docile, well trained, well managed classical music box fantasy of feminine musicality that at a certain point I found it a bit sickening.

Maybe the ghostly emptiness is supposed to evoke grief and nostalgia and the gaps between memory and longing, but I'm not entirely convinced. It's definitely worth the voyage out to cockatoo island - but I felt like I was being let into one man's rather indulgent fantasia - enabled by scale, status and cash, but without a dialogue with the materials or others that would let it transform into something more alive.

So now, I'm back in bleak city, feeling mightily relieved - but - mostly weird.
Lots of people say this is what happens - they describe an emptiness, a feeling of anti-climax, of let-down.

I'm finding it hard to string two words together, and trudge slowly through lukewarm fiction: jeanette winterson's boating for beginners, and gunter grass's memoirs. the weather has hurtled down to single figures and I huddle in bed in my thermals, heater blasting, wondering why I feel so cold here when I survived real winters in the northern hemisphere.

Feeling wary of my tendency to crawl into the study with my morning coffee and sit in front of the computer immobile for hours and hours, I dragged myself into the cold and wet last night to catch Lauren Browns installation at Bus Projects.

After negotiating the treck from the north western to the mid-eastern point of the city, scurrying along and past a myriad of melbourne's famous alleyways with other bay-whipped weather beaten sods, I saw a cluster of jackets outside a doorway, near some bright graffiti and the handpainted number 117 and so I climbed the stairs.

Imagine a stairwell somewhere between 'lanfranchis' and the old 'mop' gallery, opening into a small foyer not unlike 'knot', without the feeling of imminent collapse.

A small foyer, chugged with dark jackets and bare bobbing heads. white painted brick walls, covered with straight red stripes of adhesive velveteen, defining the blobby mob within. someone (the co-colaborator Gemma?) had the canny sense to wear a matching cotton striped top, and the bravery to remove lumpen woollens to display. I wanted to get a photo of stripes on stripes but thought it remiss.

I pressed through the bodies, proffered gold coins for red wine in a white cup, twisted arms towards catalogues, contact lists, and slowly edged my way inwards. Saw a black curtain on my right, and a darkened room on my left. headed to my left, and wandered too close to wear LED's and Bunnings power spots blasted into my retinas,embraced the scheining glare of glittering gold towers of spray painted monochrome glory from the Moreland hard rubbish month, all piled into shrines of mammon.

*sigh* this show was like a jewellery box already; red velveteen fuzz, lining the opening for gloriously glittering golden trash.

I tried to read a catalogue essay from the glint off a spray painted monitor and felt a bit overwhelmed, so I pressed on into the final curtained room, revealing an installation by Julie Traitsis & Rebecca Joseph of lots and lots of speakers and audio players, and monitors, all sequentially squeaking staticky fuzzbots of song fragments. It reminded me of the "guess that song" from triple m, and also of ricky's room in "American Beauty" and I got a bit spooked, and started wondering about cultural capital after I seemed to recognise most of the songs, so I had to leave.

Standing in the golden aweness I overheard one girl saying to another "Yeah... I dunno how someone can come up with an idea, and transform it into.... this, ay? but i guess that's what makes them an artist, and me not". I felt a little more relaxed about my cultural capital and crept on into Lauren's curtained room.

First thing: two death certificates. Second thing, the coffin from her blog, cleaved by white flouro light boxes. Third thing, the row of red painted jack in the boxes, lining the wall. I crept around, felt the objects in the space, wathced others interacting with the works, before winding the handles myself. I don't want to give the game away. It's hard to believe that installation art can have a plot, but sometimes it does...

Opening the curtains, peeking back to the golden room, I wondered why it was arranged like a proscenium, an alter, and why people were gathered around as if it was a stage. Two black clad figures walked into the middle of the set up and animated a couple of suspended golden puppets. To the chants of tibetan throat music, the artists, Nicole Dominic & Sarah Bunting, then garbed each other in golden raiments and latex gloves, and then kneeled at their floor alter, and started to perform a ritualised alchemy of dripping stuff into golden paint. It was so silly as to be exquisitely delightful, and watching the fuddle of the crowd, fumbling for objects that could be dipped and transformed from garbage into glory, spread an ineffable golden warmth throughout the space, of participation, relationship and play. I think that "saints of the apocalypse" is a bit of an OTT title for what was sweet, warm, shiny and funny, but the piece and the performance left me glowing.

Plague

Is it just me? is it just the universe? is it just bad timing?

One of my colleagues made a joke last year, saying 'hell! I'm scared to be your friend! Look what happens to them!"

Now i'm wondering if it's really funny. A close friend has come out of remission, and is about to go into the scary phase described by Predator 5 years ago, and quoted by me 2 years ago:

Cancer treatment is a stop/go journey.
Find something wrong, chop it out. Wait.
Find something else wrong.
Try and find someone who'll chop it out.
Chop it out.
Wait until, inevitably, something else goes wrong.
Can't chop it out this time.
Cry a lot. Get dead. Zzzzz.
My story has been played out in a million other abdomens and I've never heard about them.
Maybe it's like mine.chop it out, what do I do

but wait, that's not all! Over the past 6 weeks, or 8 now - during some kind of weird late feb, march, now april time slowing, spinning weirdness - the missus and I have been facing another Mack truck, creeping slowly, slowly, slowly forward, growing inexorably immense and scary (and I don't mean the linfox supplychain behemoths outside the front windows). My Missus's mum went into the Palliative care unit this week. the missus cries, cries again, and copes.

I never imagined the end of the tome would be dwarfed by so much... err.... ok cloaked in a miasma of anxiety, helplessness and grief. I started the tome as predator quickly succumbed to cancer, and now, as I finish, I'm watching people close to me wrangle with the implications of scary mutant organ eating cells.

The horror of this mutes my capacity to describe it, or to even try. I send kind messages, hug the missus, cook meals, chase up foontotes, consult my style guide and plug away at the tome, watching, waiting, working towards things that come to an end, even if I don't want them to.

Wrapping words

A couple of my blogopshere compatriots have been going a bit of handwringing (if such a thing is possible while typing - maybe my crappy spelling proves that it is ).... and I've had my knickers in a know this afternoon - trying to devise a pithy exegesis of Foucault's anit-humanism - for a footnote.

while taking my eyeballs for a walk I came across the following and fell in love -literally:

[...] I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyong all possible beginnings. at the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an isntant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path - a slender gap - the point of its possible disappearance.

Behind me, I should like to have heard (having been at it long enough already, repeating in advance what I am about to tell you) the voice of Molloy , [WTF - no idea who Molloy is - but I know how he feels] beginning to speak thus:
'I must go on; I can't go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me - heavy burden, heavy sin; I must go on; maybe it's been done already; maybe they've already said me; maybe they've already borne me to the threshold of my story, right to the door opening onto my story; I'd be surprised if it opened.'

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outside, on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnise beginnings, surorunding them with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them.

Inclinations speaks out: 'I don't want to have to enter this risky word of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. all I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck,' institutions reply: 'but you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it - a place which both honours and disarms it; and if it should happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that power.'

Foucault, M, 'The discourse on language', Swyer, R (trans) Social Science Information, Sage Publications, April 1971, pp. 7-30, reprinted in Kearney, R & Rainwater, M (eds) The continental philosophy reader, Routledge, London & New York, 1996, p. 339.

the typos are mine....

Everywhere but Here

The "new towns" of the technological pseudo-peasantry clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the historical time on which they are built; their motto could be: "On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever has." It is obviously because history, which must be liberated in the cities, has not yet been liberated, that the forces of historical absence begin to compose their own exclusive landscape.

From Guy Debord: the society of the spectacle, (ch7, p177)


Now I know it must seem hopeleesly posey to be citing Debord and whingeing about suburban ennui from my little dystopic patch of trendoid bliss in Newtown. And it's probably just because there's been a patch of rain lately and I'm feeling a little bit glum, huddled in front of my bar radiator, drying out various drenched bits....

It's been just over a fortnight since I landed back home. the weather was mostly sunny, warmer than europe, but not too hot, and fun happy pleasant easy etc. I'ts still fun happy pleasant easy etc. but it's also pissing down and the sky and streets are dark by 5pm. Yesterday I staggered out to paddy's - desperate for some veggies that weren't double the price of the bloody UK (fer feks sake!) and not encased in styrofoam gladwrap from a supermarket......

And laughed at the mild humid temperatures and sydney people rugged up in puffy parkas, and grimaced at the crazy SUV drivers mistaking their metal sheaths for sugar based skin compound and zipping madly along George street, and grimaced as my favrouite pearl pink brolly blew inside out and flew out of my hand whisking my scarf away with it.......

Inside the shell of paddy's I smiled at the market sellers flirting and haggling in bahasa and english in the one mouthful - and the others screaming out in thickly accented strine and others easily shifting between english and mandarin or vietnamese - and it felt so foreign, so familiar and nothing like the tampere kauppahali, and yet so strangely like it too.

Sydney - such a funny strange asian city/english colony built and rebuilding itself on black land and white lies - o so many damn lies, divine lies, endless erasure, disclosures, ruptures..... Terra nullius being the first founding words for generations of exiled honkies to write down made stories that excluded somehow the non honky identifying exiles equally living out strange dissonances....

my own dissonances meeting my ex-expat aussie friends at the local pub last night. drinking shite aussie guinness (stout for the fosters generation to swill on St. pats day in their sweaty green singlets - a disgrace but all they had on offer) and cursing at it being the double the price of a decent thick black alcholic creamy pint back in blighty, and cursing the plasma screen blaring sport, the aubergine beige renovations of the bistro, the orange peroxide renovations of the female patrons and feeling strangely at home amid the cursing of what could have been what was, what is, somewhere else but here.

In the loos - texting my friends in a non sodden melbourne - dancing and laughing at a bestiality themed dance party (where was sex pig?) and a now steamy summered finland, and a sunny new york - I have no idea what time it was there, here or anywhere else... it was text time, it's always text time, time for text to take me away from here, from now - into another space where I'm with someone else doing something different, doing something.

I wonder about my text addiction - this constant need to be removed from the present. I'm standing on the threshold of writing up a chapter.... shivering at the waters edge - sticking a toe in and desperately looking around for a reason to stay out of the water...... the chapter- appropriately enough - is an earnest attempt at a geneology of Sydney, of Sydney art education - a nice spatio temporal discursive tracking of where people have stood still and imagined they were somewhere else - and how they have done it, where and why.......

So, reading, confused about time. not wanting to tie things down with a neat tight well told narrative - i go back to favourite theory boys for solace. Debord of course, maybe even Walter B. try to remind myself why this matters. try to remind myself why i'm here, alone, grumpy, underfucked and overfed, scowling at the weather, scowling at myself. trying not to escape into fantasies of sex, smutty texts, porn, wanking, recipes, paintings, long counselling conversations with whoever.Dear blissful distractions - but yes - only distractions......

I actually like writing and like my research and find it interesting. but the 'pressure' of writing, of working, of focussing on the tome - is about the conscious exclusion of everything else in that moment of writing. Of only doing that project, of closing things off, of only allowing myself to occupy one mental space at one time. and anticipating it - that's the worst. the space is - not here, not on my bed, wiht the rain beating agains thte window - mad cackles of a gaggle of girls strolling past in the street, flatties singing, planes screeching. it's not about my stiff neck and sore bum and pickeable nose and filthy ears - it's a strange retelling of other spaces - me taking my mortal coil into transcribing, describing, assembling, reviewing, and despite my little heideggerian dillemmas - re-presenting a set of stories and impressions and histories that people have entrusted to me.

Last week - I drew one of my interview subjects - who did a series of incredible poses - which I felt, at first, compelled to somehow represent, acccurately or elegantly or faithfully. the faith being - to somehow communicated my gratitude, awareness of engagement with and delight in the sheer generosity of what she was doing in taking off her clothes and arranging and presenting her body - for a group of us - to look at. After an hour of gnashing my teeth at my ineptitidue and lack of practice - i relaxed. Realised the act of drawing has to involve a level of faith in my own capacity and fallibility - and that drawing, as a practice can only ever involve a trusting and honest engagmeent wiht myself, in that place, in that moment with all my limitations and desires.....

so i try to think about the tome like this. that the words, ideas, experiences, offered, performed, given by subjects, don't compell me to a defninitive representation of 'them' or of the historical narratives they may cite or trace or describe - but to something else.... which I don't know how to describe yet.

shit! that was almost a perfect analogy!

hence this post.