This text was developed as a catalogue essay for The Burning of Vision by Ash Tower
First exhibited at Floating Goose Studios http://www.floatinggoose.com.au/the-burning-of-vision/
For documentation of the exhibition go to http://www.ash-tower.com/
Full pdf available here
Untitled (Catalogue essay for 'Beside Still Waters' by Fiona Harman)
This text was written as a catalogue essay for Fiona Harman’s Beside Still Waters, exhibited at Pig Melon in 2020.
By the lake, as a child.
Father, explaining to me how the lake is so dark.
‘The tea trees stain it, and because it’s so still it just gets darker and darker’
But where does all the water come from?
‘Caves, underground. There are great underground rivers that people will never see’
I am imagining these rivers under my feet.
‘The water we use on the veggie garden comes from an underground river like this’
Is it the same one that feeds the lake?
‘Who knows? Maybe. Probably. Or maybe the water comes from the lake.’
Me and the lake, staring at each other.
My sister, shrieking as she splashes water on father and I.
Is that safe?
‘What?’
Taking the water from the lake.
‘We don't take it from the lake, and anyway, we don’t drink it. We just use it to water the garden.’
But I eat the stuff from the garden.
‘It’s safe son, don’t worry.’
Me and the lake, staring at each other.
I am unable to tell where the slippery, gripping mud ends and the water begins.
Dark as it is, stained by the weeping trees.
I am ankle-deep in the mud.
Knee deep in the water.
I can feel it tugging at me.
A soft suggestion.
Jump in…
Vertigo.
A terrible spiraling feeling.
I am suddenly precarious, slipping over an edge.
A great pit, endless, opening up beneath me.
I am falling.
Wet, cool and dark.
No time passes where there is no light.
Float.
Cold and senseless.
Forever.
‘Time to go kids’
Mother, calling me back.
My sister taking my hand as we go.
Weaving up the track away from the lake.
And its hungry depths.
That night.
At home in my bed.
Weatherboard stuttering against the wind.
It is raining, feeding the lake.
In my minds eye, it swells.
Its center bulging, distended, far above the water line.
It convulses in ecstasy, feasting.
It bursts forth, up the hill.
Consuming the threaded track.
Erasing our footprints.
Sniffing us out.
A great rumbling in the distance.
It comes.
Trees, branches, stones, swept before it in a cascade.
I stare out my bedroom window, up the hill.
The sound increases, it is deafening now.
The shrieking, screaming orchestra of shattered wood and stone fills my ears.
It bursts over the ridge like a bird taking flight.
Me and the lake, staring at each other.
I scream.
And wake.
By the lake again.
Mother said I must have imagined it.
The lake, coming for me.
She says that going back to confirm it might quell my fears.
And yes, it is true that there is no physical evidence of last night’s terror.
But nonetheless I am suspicious of it.
This supposably bottomless body of water.
How can something be bottomless?
Is it just that no one has reached the bottom yet?
Or that no one is willing to try.
My father says that there are bones in the lake.
Of ancient animals and humans.
And that scientists have found the bottom.
But they haven’t released the results.
I think that they are afraid to.
After all, I can’t see any evidence of the scientists here now.
They’ve all packed up and left.
Vowing never to return, I’m sure.
In bed again, dreaming.
Or finally seeing.
The lake revealed for what it is.
A terror; a screaming, yawning pit of unknown.
It’s dark surface rejecting any insight into what lies beneath.
If there’s really anything there at all.
Me and the lake, staring at each other.
I think it's just a skin, the surface.
And underneath is a body.
A real, living thing.
Incalculably old.
And huge.
And hungry.
Another night, the same dream again.
The surface swelling.
The lake bursting forth.
Inquisitive, it swells upwards.
Up the track, pushing in front of it that great mess of destruction.
The sound. I cannot describe it.
Fingernails on chalkboards.
Metal against metal.
Ice sheets cracking.
Styrofoam shrieking.
And a mess of percussion instruments thrown down a staircase.
It bursts over the crest of the hill.
This time I do not scream.
It is a dream, I tell myself, let’s see what happens.
It rushes down the hill, elated at my defiance.
Our back fence exploding inward.
The vegetable garden, erased in a mess of mud.
It closes the gap across the yard and slams into my bedroom window.
The glass groans.
It shudders.
But it holds, and the water rapidly calms.
And the dirt, stone, back fence and vegetable garden all settle to the bottom.
I get out of bed and approach the window.
My room is shrouded in darkness, all moonlight blotted out by the lake.
I press my face against the glass.
Me and the lake, staring at each other.
It is cold, colder than the middle of winter.
A kind of cold that has never known sunlight.
I stare into the flat, black nothingness of the lake.
And for a moment I see.
Crystals of light dancing across its surface.
Or are they running?
Fleeing from the lake.
Unrecognisable beasts dragged down forever.
Countless generations of humanity drawn to its indeterminate shoreline.
Sparks and fire and wind and coldness.
Overwhelmingly coldness, and indifference, and hunger.
It has been here long before men.
And it will be here after.
And it wants me to know that I can be there with it.
Inside of it it.
Cold and dark forever.
My face, numb against the glass.
My eyes, wide and staring.
Me and the lake, staring at each other.
Something stirs within that silty depth.
A kind of density.
A sense of despair.
Me, knowing this is not a dream.
It rushes towards me.
A sound like a submarine imploding.
The glass of my window cracks.
The water rushes in.
I try to scream, but the water fills my mouth
And my nose
And it forces its way in through the edges of my eyes
And my ears are bursting and I am being pushed down, down…
It’s bottomless.
I am being pushed down forever.
Return to the Sea
This text was produced as an accompanying text for Fiona Harman and Steve Paraskos' installation The Pool, which was exhibited at Smart Casual in mid-2017.
Documentation of this work can be found here: https://www.fionaharman.com/2017-the-pool/
-
It began as a desire to return to the womb.
To float again in perfect equilibrium.
We paid workmen to dig a pit, seven by three metres.
And we coated that pit with cement and then with pacific blue tiles.
To give the effect that the portion of water we would have in our backyard was part of a larger whole.
That all the pools, in all the backyards, could be stitched together into an inland sea.
And ours would be part of that.
So, aquamarine tiles, an illusion of depth.
A paved area to surround this, Mediterranean.
And soon children, to shriek in delight and they pushed and pulled and plunged into its surface over the summer.
The sound of innocent laughter and the dappled splashes of the water at the pool’s edge.
A perfect harmony, to be appreciated from the other side of sliding glass doors, or from the shade of the verandah.
And, as the night falls, and the children are put to bed, the pool is heated.
Now it is different, adult.
The warm water womb-like again, but free of children.
A playful, consequence free space, charged with sexual tension.
Me, swimming laps.
Her, sipping a drink in the conjoined jacuzzi.
But never anything as crass as actually touching.
Just exchanged looks and knowing grins:
We are both imagining fucking in the pool and we both know it.
The water, lit from below, so unlike the surface during the day.
Almost immaterial.
I float.
Warm and satisfied with myself, basking in the steam that escapes the surface.
Perhaps the attraction now is animal.
To the pool.
Perhaps now I do not desire a return to the womb, to become a child again.
But rather I want to go further back in time.
To return to the sea.
All the pools in world, stitched together into an ocean that we might return to safely.
To regress into a fish, and only be able to remember a few seconds of the past.
And to reproduce without touching.
Eggs and spermatozoa mixing in the pristine, chlorinated ocean.
The water an extension of our bodies.
We could float forever, and not really feel anything.
Fleeting moments of experience in a timeless void.
No sense of yesterday or tomorrow.
No sense of narrative.
Of meaning.
Just a cool world of light and salt and stimulus.
Reactions immediately forgotten.
Ah, the bliss that would come with being adrift like this.
In a great void of not-knowing.
But a plane tears overhead and bring me to my senses.
And my fantasy is gone.
There is no womb. There is no great, pristine sea.
The artificiality of my oasis is suddenly apparent.
And the noise and stresses of the world return to me as a wall of sound and association.
And a gust of wind whips at a tree in my neighbours backyard.
And delivers a collection of its leaves to the surface of the pool.
Tomorrow I will retrieve those that still float with a net, while a robot scrubs the ones that sink from the bottom.
And the children will shriek, and one will slip on the wet edge and graze its knee.
And reveal itself to be more than an accessory for the pool.
And I will tend to the wound, and the warm blood on my hand as I clean it will be difficult to distinguish from the pool water I will lay in that night.
And the neighbours will yell.
And planes will tear.
And knowing looks will be exchanged,
And I will fantasise about thinking less, and be interrupted.
And the wind will whip at the tree.
And the leaves will fall.
And so on.
I think.
Feel.
As I float.
ECCO Timeline
This timeline originally appeared as the catalogue for ECCO at FELTspace in February of 2017.
50000000 years ago: Early ancestors of dolphins and humans appear on land.
10000000 years ago: After the early ancestors of humans become genetically distinct from them, dolphins return to the sea.
1324: All sturgeons, whales and dolphins in British waters are declared the property of the Queen.
1660: A ship sinks in the Dover straits. The only survivor is a man named Hugh Williams.
1767: Another ship sinks in the Dover straits. The only survivor is a man named Hugh Williams.
1820: A ship capsizes on the Thames. The only survivor is a man named Hugh Williams.
1835: Mark Twain is born as Halley’s Comet passes by Earth.
1895: The only two cars in Ohio crash into each other.
1898: Morgan Robertson writes Futility, or the Sinking of a Titan, which tells the story of a monstrous ocean liner, which sinks after hitting a iceberg 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland at 22 knots.
1902: Mark Twain dies, as he predicted, as Halley’s Comet passes Earth again for the first time since his birth.
1912: The RMS Titanic sinks after striking an iceberg 400 miles of the coast of Newfoundland at 22.5 knots.
1914: After a series of coincidences an assassin manages to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting into motion a series of events that results in the first World War. The license plate of the vehicle he dies in is AIII118.
The British Navy convert a passenger liner, the RMS Carmania, into a makeshift war vessel. In order to to go undetected, they disguise it as a German passenger liner, the SMS Cap Trafalgar. It sails to Brazil, where it sinks a German vessel of the coast of Brazil. The ship it sinks is the SMS Cap Trafalgar, converted by the Germans into a makeshift war vessel. In order to escape detection they had disguised it as a British vessel, the RMS Carmania.
1918: WW1 armistice is signed. The date is the 11/11/18, (A111118)
1922: Construction of the Hoover Dam begins. Over the course of its construction 112 people will die. The first is a man named J. G. Tierney, on December 20th.
1934: While walking down a street in Detroit a man named Joseph Figlock catches a baby who has fallen from a high window.
1935: While walking down the same street Joseph Figlock catches the same baby who has, again, fallen from the same window. Construction of the Hoover Dam is completed. The last man to die is J.G. Tierney’s son, Patrick Tierney, on December 20th.
1940: A ship is destroyed by a German mine. The only survivor is a man named Hugh Williams.
1950: Soviet Russia begins its secretive weaponised dolphin training program
1960: USA begins its own dolphin training program.
1965: John C. Lilly gives Margaret and Peter LSD
1973: Lilly posits the existence of ECCO in his autobiography The Centre of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space. The same year the film Day of the Dolphin is released, despite Lilly’s attempts to suppress it.
1974: The Dolphin Embassy is proposed by Ant Farm in Esquire Magazine. Neville Ebbin is killed after being struck by a taxi while riding his moped in Bermuda.
1975: Erskine Ebbin, the younger brother of Neville, is killed exactly one year after his brother, on the same street, on the same moped, after being struck by the same taxi, which was being driven by the same driver and carrying the same passenger.
1978: The Dolphin Embassy project is discontinued. ECCO butterfly breeding program begins. Hundreds of butterflies are dropped from aeroplanes around the world in the hope that the movement of their wings might instigate a greater number of coincidences. The largest concentration of butterflies are dropped off the east coast of South America.
1979: Super Typhoon Tip forms. It is as large as half of the North American Continent and makes landfall in Japan, causing large-scale flooding. The storm leaves 11,000 people homeless. The ECCO butterfly breeding program is discontinued.
1980: Lennon shot.
1981: Immediately after giving a speech on the inevitable and random nature of death, astronomer Daniel du Toit chokes to death on a breath mint.
1984: Douglas Adams publishes So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
1991: The Soviet Union collapses. Its dolphin training program is taken over by the Ukrainian government.
2002: Two seventy year old men are separately struck and killed by lorries 600km outside of Helsinki. It is later discovered that the men were identical twins.
2010: BP Oil Spill. Michael Dick travels to Sudbury, Suffolk in search of his estranged daughter, who he has not seen for ten years. She makes contact after spotting herself in the background of a photograph of him in the local newspaper.
2012: Near the Gulf of Mexico a dolphin is discovered stranded. Later scientists discover that she is deaf, but is able to understand some forms of sign language.
2014: After the Crimean Crisis Russia takes back control of the Ukrainian dolphin program.
2017: The year of conspiracy. Donald Trump becomes president of the United States. The term ‘alternate facts’ is coined by his counsellor Kellyanne Conway. ECCO is exhibited at FELTspace in Adelaide.
Breathe in Deep
This text was originally published as a catalogue essay for Totem in Tribute, an exhibition by Sam Bloor and Trevor Bly at Spectrum Gallery Space, Edinburgh UK.
Somehow this year’s Olympics were simultaneously more controversial and more boring than most. There was violence, the Zika virus, green swimming pools, crime, and a general lack of interest. In the weeks immediately following the games Brazil, the host country, impeached their president. Their interim leader, Michel Temer, has been implicated in the corruption allegations that have been plaguing the government for a number of years.
The Olympics; intended be a symbolic gesture towards peace amongst the nations of the world, a kind of proxy for war, has become an expensive joke. The fact that a number of people attempted to extinguish the Olympic torch as it travelled to the opening ceremony could be seen as being indicative of this. However, it might also be seen as kind of protest.
The Olympic torch, or more specifically its flame, is intended as a symbol of the fire stolen from Zeus by Prometheus, and delivered to humanity. Fire, in this context, is symbolic of divine knowledge, control over nature, and the possibilities of magic. It pushes back the darkness. Fire is the alchemical agent. It is the energy that allows for transmutation; from fire to ash and from lead to gold.
Fire is destructive. It is hypnotic. We pretend we can control it, but who has not be burned at least once in their lives? Perhaps we have not domesticated the flame; it has domesticated us. Perhaps fire is one entity, until our intervention kept in check by nature, and then set free to consume the world, until one day the whole world is burning and we become the fuel for a new sun. In this light, the kind thrown by a wildfire, the Olympic torch cannot be seen as anything else except a fiction, a performance of control, much like the games.
But this is not to say that, because of its destructiveness, fire is malevolent. It is democratic in its consumption; anything that can burn will, given enough air to breathe and the touch of a naked flame. Perhaps the fairest presentation of the information contained in the Library of Alexandria was as ash. The best museum might be one that has been melted down into a kind of liquid alloy, possessing all the best traits of the work contained within, and none of the impurities. The role of the Olympic torch might be to consume the materials along its journey, so that the flame might experience the world.
Fire is not just a kind of energy; it something experienced. The flame causes a pleasant sensation, it hypnotises you, it reaches into you and brings memories of warmth. You want to reach out and touch it, but if you do you know, from other memories, that it will burn you. Smoke, like petroleum, can smell good. You breathe it in. It does not smell like what it is consuming. Something happens to the object as it burns. It becomes pure.
Smoke is seductive. It can get you high. It can kill you. It can be used to communicate. When Baldessari burned all of his paintings in a crematorium, did the smoke smell witty? If I burn my paintings on one side of the world, the smoke might travel up into the highest parts of the atmosphere. Cruising at 40,000 feet, it might disperse. Small bits of my paintings, held in the smoke as atoms, might descend from the atmosphere and into your bedroom, where you are sleeping. You are snoring on your back. You breathe in deep, and a small part of a painting, one of the parts I liked the most, goes up your nose and dissolves into your bloodstream. It travels around your body and ends up in your brain. Now you are dreaming of my painting.
When I die I want to be burned. I want to be burned on top of the highest mountain, so that bits of me can travel high easily, and break apart. When I die I want the bits of me to travel the world, to go to places that I never went when I was alive. I want bits of me to go up your nose while you are asleep, and to travel into your brain. When I die, I want you to dream of me.
- Kieron Broadhurst 2016
The Island catalogue
03-100-402
This text was originally published as a catalogue essay for Trouble at Times, an exhibition by Jack Wansbrough and Maria Paris, Free Range Gallery, Perth Wa.
Walking home at this time of night is always stressful. Long shadows, getting deeper, more black. Figures moving indistinctly in the peripherals of my vision - I am frightened until I lift the latch on my front gate and begin up the path which crosses the front garden. Approaching the front door of my house activates a five hundred watt, motion-activated spotlight which illuminates the front yard like a border crossing. A motion-activated CCTV camera, which is on a seperate motion-detecting circuit than the spot, and which has its own IP address, meaning that I can look at the camera’s recordings on any of my media devices from anywhere with a decent internet connection, tracks my movement as I skip up the steps to my porch. I retrieve my keys from my pocket and unlock the three locks on the front door. Blue, green, orange - each of the eleven keys on my keyring is colour-coded to a corresponding lock or device around my home and office. Only I know the locks they belong to.
Now that I am inside I punch in the six-digit code to our NESS R16 Wireless Alarm Kit. The code is a combination of my deceased grandfathers’ birthdays. I place my keys on the shelf next to the security keypad and retrieve the three remotes which are housed there when I am not at home. The first is for my Somfy Motorised Interior Blinds (Venetian), which, with the press of a single button, descend with almost no sound, covering each of the windows in the living and adjoining kitchen / dining areas. The second remote is for my Daikin Split System Air Conditioner, left on during the day so that I can return to a scientifically maintained ambient temperature of 26 degrees Celsius. The third remote is for my Paradigm Wireless Multi-Room Audio System, installed by Crown Security, the same company that installed our NESS R16 and our home CCTV system.
I turn on the audio system. It is already tuned to a commercial television station, so that even though the screen isn’t on, and I’m actually not even in the part of the living room with adjoining kitchen / dining area where the screen actually is, I can hear an advert playing. Imagine the future of security… I make my way to the kitchen / dining area and retrieve a beer from the fridge based on cellular technology rather than insecure phone lines… I am drinking the beer and thinking about my day. Imagine if security could grow with you, into a larger home, or a larger family… I turn on the screen. Imagine if security could keep you connected to the people and things that are important to you, no matter where you are… I smile. I am content here, safe with my things.
A father and son have been charged with assault after severely beating a man with iron rods. The father and son claim that they caught the man breaking into their home, and that they had defended their property with appropriate force. The news is always just a sad list of reasons to trust your neighbour even less than you already do. I get up, go to the kitchen to get another drink. While I’m there I lift one of the slats that make up the blind above the kitchen sink and peek out, over the fence, and into the neighbours’ kitchen. He is pouring wine into two glasses on the kitchen bench. She is sitting at the table, talking (to him, I think). I can’t see their child. I wonder what they are talking about. They only have these thin cloth curtains in their kitchen window. They are welcoming and semi-transparent, so even when they do have them closed you can still see into the room, but everything has a kind of purple, floral filter over it and is a little indistinct.
Abruptly he looks up, out the kitchen window, over the fence, through my kitchen window and straight into my eyes. I can see that he sees me. He had been going to take the wine glasses over to the table, but now he places them back on the bench and squints. I do not move. He turns back over his shoulder and says something to her. She stands up. I drop the blind and gasp. I am suddenly deeply afraid of what the neighbours are planning to do to me. I breathe in deeply and try to calm myself. They are good neighbours, I think to myself, they are not violent people. The fear is in my gut, feeding. Sweat stands out on my forehead, beads, drips down my nose and onto the floor. I stare at the droplet on the polished wood. Deep breaths. The police are only the push of a button away.
The fridge chimes at me. I have left the door slightly ajar after retrieving my second beer, and also the milk is going to expire tomorrow, as the LCD screen on the door reminds me before I close it. I smile at the reassurance of the chime, happy that, despite everything, the fridge is looking out for me. The fridge is a Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator and is the Korean manufacturer's latest and boldest attempt at the smart fridge. With a 21.5-inch touchscreen on the door and cameras on the inside that keep watch over your leftovers, it's arguably the smartest - and inarguably the smartestlooking - smart fridge to date. It has a Flex Zone in its bottom right corner which can be customised on a sliding scale between fridge and freezer settings, and a black stainless steel finish. It is beautiful.
I return to the couch. On another channel an advert is playing for Somfy Motorised Interior Blinds. Those are my blinds, I say out loud to no one. Wake up to motorised blinds, powered by Somfy… I feel pride that I do wake up to Somfy. With Somfy, there’s no need to even get up… The family on the couch in the advert smile as they make their blind descend via remote control. I think about how there are other people watching this advert right now who desire Somfy blinds but don’t have them. This makes me smile again. I am smiling with the family on the couch. The woman in the advert places a baby into a crib next to a window with a Somfy brand blind the exact same colour as the one covering the window on the wall behind the television. And with no hanging chords, you’ll never have to worry again. I am happy that the baby in the advert will not die of strangulation.
Another advert comes on. It is for Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting. In the advert people are being reminded to not forget about objects in their lives by the lighting in their houses. A woman is reminded to retrieve some muffins from the oven because the lights in her house start flashing at her. A deaf man better communicates his mood by accompanying his signing with atmospheric lighting. Children perform a play for their parents, the lights helping them to communicate their narrative. The same children leave the stage and construct a cubby house made from pillows, sheets, chairs and blankets. They install Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting in their cubby, and their parents show them how they too can have total control over the atmosphere of any given room in their house. I am happy that the children are content, safe with their things. I change the channel.
- Kieron Broadhurst 2016
Culture and Value
This text was originally published as a catalogue essay for Alternative Australian Currency by Oliver Hull at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, VIC.
The text also forms part of the An Event narrative.
This is an experiment in finding the symbolic potency of objects.
Please answer the following questions in your own words.
1. Imagine a device like a microwave. You can put objects in this device and turn it on and the device will transmute the objects into twenty four carat gold. This device is mass produced and fairly ubiquitous. How would the world be changed by this device?
2. What is value? How is value significant? How does what you value differ to what your neighbour values? What are values?
3. Look at a beer can. How is it unique in relation to other objects like it? How is it similar?
4. If I told you that this can was used during nuclear experiments related to the effects of radiation on fluids, would your perception of beer can be altered?
5. If I melt the beer can down and make a coin out of it is it more or less valuable?
6. Draw a circle. This circle is a coin. What kind of pictures should go on the coin?
7. Find some mud. Is the mud of value? Take off your clothes and dive into the mud. Cover yourself in it. The mud changes you. Have you changed the mud?
8. Combine two of the following objects: a meat pie, a bottle cap, an onion, a pineapple ring, a thong, a bullet and/or a beetroot. Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
9. In what ways is a seagull like a crocodile?
10. Which is more valuable: a seagull or a crocodile?
11. If a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a tornado on the other side of the world, what are the ramifications of nuclear warfare?
12. Explain how you understand the term “alchemy”.
13. Explain how you understand the term “Australian culture”.
An Event floor sheet
An Event is an investigation into the speculative potential of inserting fictional narratives into the history of Western Australia.
O: Is it though?
K: I’m not sure...
O: One thing I am interested in is disrupting ideas of research-based practice.
G: I am interested in how fiction might be a tool for navigating cultural landscapes.
K: I am interested in fiction too, but for different reasons maybe.
G: Thank you (person who is reading this) for coming to our show. I couldn’t make it. I was going to catch a cargo ship over because I am concerned about my carbon footprint, but then I didn’t because it would have cost a lot of money and taken a long time.
O: I’m sad you didn’t Giles that would have been a cool thing to add to the show.
K: Yeah me too, but I do get not wanting to be on a ship for three months.
G: I was going to make a science fiction movie about my journey on the ship but instead I invented this band called Pluto Gang.
K: The band is still cool though. I like the band.
O: Hey (person who is reading this) are you standing in the office yet?
K: You can play with the computer if you like...
G: And touch things...
O: Touch the things in the office.
K: But not in the gallery because those things are imaginary.
O: Yes the person in the office is imagining the things in the other areas of the gallery.
G: And things that are imaginary aren’t real so you can’t touch them.
K: Some people think you’re not real.
O: We tried to tell them that you are real.
K: But they didn’t believe us.
G: I’m not sure that it matters if I’m real or not.
K: Hey (person who is reading this) If you really want to know if Giles is real maybe you should Google it.
O: Maybe we should mention what is happening outside the office?
K: I suppose we should even if the things that are happening aren’t real.
G: I like how orange the gallery is.
K: It looks like a Cheezle.
O: It’s meant to look like a set for a movie or something.
G: I saw some photos and I think it looks like a gallery with the floor painted orange.
K: There are things in it now though.
G: What kind of things?
K: There is a big monolith and some rocks and a flag and some prints and some other things.
O: There is some bones and some fake rocks and some real rocks and some sand and some tvs in the roof.
G: That’s pretty cool.
K: I think the kind of movie that might happen in that part of the gallery is something between Indiana Jones and Wake in Fright.
O: That sounds horrible.
G: To be honest most of Australia sounds pretty horrible and really beautiful at the same time, although I’ve only seen it in pictures.
O: Just because it sounds horrible doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be an interesting film. Although I think the movie that could happen in that part of the gallery is something more like Wolf of Wall Street combined with Billy Maddison combined with an old tourism advert for Western Australia, and it would be a B movie and also be educational about geology.
K: Maybe both films would use the set and only die-hard fans of both franchises would notice.
G: That happens quite a lot in Hollywood, re-using sets.
O: Do you see the darker space as a sequel to the film from the orange space?
G: I see the darker space as ground zero of a nuclear explosion.
K: When bombs explode in the desert they turn the sand to glass.
G: Maybe that’s why they blew them up on islands off the coast of Western Australia instead.
O: Maybe, or maybe they just really hated turtles.
K: Hey (person who is reading this) what film do you think would happen in the gallery space?
G: Keeping in mind that whatever it is is just being dreamed up by the person who owns the office.
O: Who does own the office?
K: An person investigating whether or not UFO sightings around Hutt River are real or not, but when they start investigating they uncover an elaborate conspiracy and it sends them crazy.
G: A member of Pluto Gang who had to get an office job to make ends meet in his mid-thirties and now his political beliefs are being compromised by his participation in the mechanisms of capitalism, and all of this makes him very depressed so he day-dreams about the desert where he grew up, and the adventures he had there, and the adventures he imagined that he would have had there.
O: I kind of thought it was a hobbyist researcher who has a kind of casual interest in some aspect of Western Australia, but through their weekend research they have accidentally uncovered some fragments of the Event and they are not sure how to react to this.
K: What even is the Event?
G: A nuclear explosion of some kind.
K: A meteor impact.
O: I thought it was something we can’t event classify, like a black hole or something.
- Kieron Broadhurst, Oliver Hull, Giles Bunch, 2016.
Cult of Genius
This text was originally published as a catalogue essay for Alex Maciver's exhibition New Works at Buratti Fine Art in Subiaco, Western Australia.
The gesture of bringing the hand to the forehead - which we enact almost without realising it in moments of confusion and disorientation, when we seem almost to have forgotten ourselves - recalls the ritual gesture of the cult of Genius.
A magician can conjure things from thin air. A hypnotist can put someone to sleep by touching them on the forehead. In 2011 the well known British hypnotist Derren Brown managed to implant in an unsuspecting member of the general public an ‘assassin’ persona which could be activated through exposure to a polka-dot pattern and a phone ringtone. When entering into the assassin persona the subject of the experiment would touch himself on the forehead in the vicinity of the third eye. Afterwards he would be unable to recall anything that he had done whilst in the trance, including firing a gun (filled with blanks) at Stephen Fry. This experiment mirrors the claims of Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert Kennedy and who claims that he was the victim of a conspiracy, possibly conducted by the CIA in relation to the MKUltra program, that he was hypnotised or in a trance state when he shot RFK, and that he cannot remember firing the gun. Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death in 1969, but this was later commuted to life in prison in 1972. The subject of Derren Brown’s experiment had his assassin persona erased.
The author’s gesture is attested to as a strange and incongruous presence in the work it has brought to life.
In 2013, at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela, a sign language interpreter failed to form a single intelligible sign while translating for a number of dignitaries including Barack Obama. He would later claim, in a interview with The Star, a South African newspaper, that he suffered a schizophrenic episode during the broadcast, that he had been hearing demonic voices, and that he had seen angels in the stadium that day. The incident is described as an embarrassment to the deaf community and Mandela’s memory. Another official sign language interpreter would later state that “only he can understand those gestures.”
The same gesture that deprives the author of all relevance nevertheless affirms his irreducible necessity.
During lulls in the swell or poor conditions surfers will sometimes pray to the semi-satirical surf-god known as Huey. This is often done by intermeshing the fingers and placing the knuckles of the thumbs against the lips and blowing (which can produce an owl-like whistle) or whispering the phrase “come on Huey bring us some waves.” Huey may also be presented with offerings in the form of spilt milk or handfuls of ocean water. It is unclear if anyone actually believes in Huey.
The author can only remain unsatisfied and unsaid in the work. He is the illegible someone who makes reading possible, the legendary emptiness.
Cleromancy is a form of sortition; the casting of lots, whereby things that might otherwise be considered the result of chance, such as rolling dice or the distribution of objects tossed into a preordained space, are instead elevated to a the status of magic or evidence of the divine. This form of divination occurs frequently in the Bible, including the book of Jonah in which the desperate sailors who count Jonah among themselves cast lots to see whose god is responsible for the storm they are enduring. When Jonah’s god is shown to be the culprit he is cast overboard and the storm immediately calms. The sailors then offer sacrifices to Jonah’s god and, as a consequence, Jonah is saved from drowning by a large, whale-like fish, which eats him. He then spends three days and three nights in its belly, desperately praying for forgiveness, before the giant fish-whale vomits him back up.
This definition agrees with the ancient tradition scrupulously followed by Kabbalists and Necromancers according to which magic is essentially a science of secret names.
Tacitus, a Roman historian who lived during the first century AD, describes in his monograph Germania the method of divination employed by the Germanic tribes. A branch of a fruit-bearing tree would be cut into small pieces and small symbols and runes would be carved into these pieces. These pieces would then be cast at random over a white sheet and read by either the village priest or the head of the family. In the ninth century a Frankish missionary named Anskar described how this process of divination was used by Danish people as a method of deciding whether an action would have the favour of the Norse or Christian gods. In one case a soothsayer determined that a man had offended the Christian god. That man later discovered a book in his house which his son had stolen from a Bishop. It is unclear whether the Norse gods approved of this theft.
Each thing, each being, has in addition to its manifest name another, hidden name to which it cannot fail to respond.
There is a conspiracy theory which claims that Lil Wayne, the well known rapper and producer, is the head of the Illuminati. This theory further claims that Young Money Entertainment, the record label owned by Lil Wayne, is in fact a cover for the the inner echelon of the secret society, and that the various artists signed to the label, including Nicki Minaj and Drake, are members of this inner circle. These artists are presumably aware of this conspiracy and seem to intentionally provoke its continues existence through gestures which they throw up in photographs online. One of these gestures is the ‘all seeing eye’ wherein the thumb and pointer finger and placed together while the rest of the fingers pointed directly upward, and the hand is placed against the forehead or one of they eyes in a fashion not dissimilar to the ‘evil eye’ used to curse or ward off evil in some European countries. Another is the ‘pyramid’ - where both hands are placed together to form a triangle, with the thumbs forming the base and the pointer fingers forming either side, in order to reference the famed pyramid motif of the Illuminati, present in many forms from the Egyptian pyramids to the American dollar bill. The most recent intermeshing of this conspiracy and the images produced by Young Money Entertainment is the permanent commitment of the ‘all seeing eye’ motif as a tattoo on Lil Wayne’s chin.
Pornography, which maintains the intangibility of its own fantasy in the same gesture with which it brings it closer - in a mode that is unbearable to look at - is the eschatological form of parody.
There is a story, something of an urban myth, that at some point in the history of the Vatican a particularly prudish Pope was so offended by the many exposed members of the marble sculptures around the holy city that he ordered them removed and replaced with fig leaves. The Vatican has denied this, instead claiming that the penises in question are removable and that they easily fall off. This myth bears some resemblance to a series of events which occurred in and around the Pincio Gardens in the Villa Borghese in 1985. Over eighty sculptures, including works by Bernini, had been vandalised, their noses smashed off. Eventually Italian police caught the culprit red-handed. He was discovered with a plastic bag containing the missing noses. He told police that the KGB were following him and then handed them a note which read “I am a UFO.”
The secret name is not so much the cipher of the thing’s subservience to the Magus’s speech as, rather, the monogram that sanctions its liberation from language.
Ectoplasm is a substance said to be excreted by mediums and ghosts during seances, possessions and other communications with the dead. It is often excreted from the orifices of mediums or draped over objects and people by spirits. The substance is sometimes visible and sometimes not, but can always be felt by the body. Ectoplasm can take the form of threads, ooze or lace-like webbing. The existence of ectoplasm has been deemed a hoax. It is often constructed from cheesecloth, butter or egg whites.
- Kieron Broadhurst 2016
*all italicised quotes in this text are from Giorgio Agamben’s Profanations (2015).