Don't Steal Music
Think Local/Act Global
(I don’t know why I said that?)
A few years ago Blair Trethowan showed me all the bits of metal screwed on a ledge in the Arts Centre in Melbourne. I hadn’t really noticed until that point that they were put there to stop people ‘doing what they want-to-do', like skateboarders, I guess, riding and sliding along that ledge. Same thing with the Yellow Peril, it had another use. Some people really like that sculpture for completely different reasons than art. They want to use it for what they want. Over and over and keep using it with skateboarding or as a place to sleep. Doing stuff that may even obliterate its original function. The correct use of The Yellow Peril was as formalist sculpture, then the Queen, the council, the Melbourne establishment all hated and banished it. Being so disliked gave this work some libido it wouldn’t otherwise have had. The correct use of a ledge is what exactly? It's already a wall, a seat, a bed, a barrier, a way of containing, a bench, a social place. People inhabit places for different reasons and in different ways. Expressing new ways of inhabiting a space is art. Artists inhabit spaces like painting, installation and sculpture and the world. Yet someone has put metal plates all along this bench to attempt to maintain it’s correct use.
When Blair and Jarrod Rawlins started their Uplands gallery in Melbourne the architects put in an air-line type counter at the entrance. Like most other galleries, a sophisticated, sleek, reminder of international travel that the staff stands behind at the point-of-sale. After a couple of months they ripped it out and put in a kind of granny’s dining room table. What immediately struck me was that everyone who sat at the table would face their pubic region to each other rather than have it protected or hidden by the barrier of the airline counter. I started to look forward to a bit of libido in this new space that was called a gallery. Like round-table discussions.
Rock star Dave Graney once said at an exhibition launch, “I really envy you guys [people] you get to go to openings and ignore all the people you know”. It’s a joke, I guess he means that’s the accepted appropriate behavior in a sleek minimalist space. People who try to go to galleries and museums and inhabit them for different reasons are often thrown out. Inappropriate behavior. What about people who want to come to say what they want rather than learn what they should think. If you go into a cinema you think ‘am I getting what I want?', when most people go into an art space they think ‘what am I meant to be getting?’.
When Blair went to art school he did inhabit that pace differently yep. He brought skating and Melton there. Didn’t only ask what culture could do for him but rather what he could do for culture. He was kind of threateningly open for that place. No menace, no violence but kinda No Fear (no, not like Nike) but rather not afraid of what art was meant to be. An open, simple unafraid inquiry for 3 years. Let’s just say he didn’t get very high marks.
Like the skaters who want to do different stuff with the landscape they’re given Blair interfaces a set of possibilities with a new and open mind. And the world needs that.
And like the skater the artist must also be fearless.
I wonder what skateboarders are really like – I’ve known a couple but not well enough to know what they share. Perhaps it’s lack of fear, or the thrill of fear. Good at making split second decisions, perhaps they all like the same music… Terrible generalizations, I don’t really know.
Blair’s art, from painting on boards to sampling the ‘sign of art’ from cultural products (ads, films, mags and so on) makes use of already produced forms. He’s not dealing with a blank slate but a way of inserting the means of production into a flow of production that challenges passive culture and passive consumption. It is a kind-of reconfiguration of knowledge.
Skaters find a way of inserting themselves into the flow of passive culture, negotiating and challenging the given environment, taking it over to make it their own. And, like in art, it seems that there is often going to be someone around to say ‘you can’t do that’, someone who is going to attempt to uphold the imagined values of the passive culture, with the intention to tame the skater – the artist.
And so to be a fearless skater is to be a fearless artist.
End
We travel for a living, often cheaply. It would be impossible to find a never-ending stream of work in one city, even a city like New York. Our art is a kind of service. So we travel to where we’re invited to and find out new things. It’s hard to know what ethics to live by on-the-road. One day the cheap airline doubles your fare with excess baggage then arrives two hours late at a remote airport where the bus service has closed, you double the cheap fare again with a two hour taxi fare. I’m full of moral indignation and plan letters. Started out at $11 London to Milan, add fees and taxes its $70 add real-life extras it’s much more than a regular flight. The next day we are with friends eating and drinking and I can’t be bothered thinking about it. Still we travel to escape to find a system of ethics we want rather than one imprinted on us. It’s the idea of thinking that we can get out of what we are meant to/have to do and do what we want, that drives us most.
As we travel we find all sorts of corporate geographies: we were stopped walking across Kensington Gardens for an hour coz Johnny Depp was making a movie about Peter Pan there. The public good. PAL and NTSC video formats make it impossible to move, change regions and make video works without maddening extra expenses and restrictions. DVDs (which could have ended the previous geography) have special needless and worthless regions put into them so you cant send them to a friend in another country to play. Our computer notebook will change regions 4 times then it will forever remain the same.
I used to believe that to have ethics about stealing was important for your own piece of mind, but I feel we’re being methodically done over here by restricting where we can go and imagine. The software that was so idealistically designed to be shared and downloaded, more recently can’t be copied at it often has special encryption to stop you sharing with your friends and acquaintances. It’s like creating the copyright system that will benefit Elton John the most. Even your friends tell you ‘you can’t do that’ with copyright. Now that Napster’s defeated apparently you can download a life-time record collection to an I-pod in a few minutes. It’ll change music totally like ‘turning on a tap ‘I read. Changed by an excess you never really asked for.
I saw a guy talk in New York who said that communism and capitalism were the same in that their first and most important aim was to create an excess. Socialism tries to distribute the excess more equally but production for both always relies on vibrant excess. It’s like it’s better to use something once for one reason then throw it away and get another one. This shits me.
Maybe it’s not the world doing this to me, maybe it’s great, I am pretty happy. A psychologist once told me that whinging ‘greases the system’. Maybe I’m complaining to throw some light how I want to inhabit where I am.
A Constructed World
'Don’t Steal Music' Slam magazine issue 67, p77 (catalogue for the show of the same name at Uplands Gallery 2002)
(I don’t know why I said that?)
A few years ago Blair Trethowan showed me all the bits of metal screwed on a ledge in the Arts Centre in Melbourne. I hadn’t really noticed until that point that they were put there to stop people ‘doing what they want-to-do', like skateboarders, I guess, riding and sliding along that ledge. Same thing with the Yellow Peril, it had another use. Some people really like that sculpture for completely different reasons than art. They want to use it for what they want. Over and over and keep using it with skateboarding or as a place to sleep. Doing stuff that may even obliterate its original function. The correct use of The Yellow Peril was as formalist sculpture, then the Queen, the council, the Melbourne establishment all hated and banished it. Being so disliked gave this work some libido it wouldn’t otherwise have had. The correct use of a ledge is what exactly? It's already a wall, a seat, a bed, a barrier, a way of containing, a bench, a social place. People inhabit places for different reasons and in different ways. Expressing new ways of inhabiting a space is art. Artists inhabit spaces like painting, installation and sculpture and the world. Yet someone has put metal plates all along this bench to attempt to maintain it’s correct use.
When Blair and Jarrod Rawlins started their Uplands gallery in Melbourne the architects put in an air-line type counter at the entrance. Like most other galleries, a sophisticated, sleek, reminder of international travel that the staff stands behind at the point-of-sale. After a couple of months they ripped it out and put in a kind of granny’s dining room table. What immediately struck me was that everyone who sat at the table would face their pubic region to each other rather than have it protected or hidden by the barrier of the airline counter. I started to look forward to a bit of libido in this new space that was called a gallery. Like round-table discussions.
Rock star Dave Graney once said at an exhibition launch, “I really envy you guys [people] you get to go to openings and ignore all the people you know”. It’s a joke, I guess he means that’s the accepted appropriate behavior in a sleek minimalist space. People who try to go to galleries and museums and inhabit them for different reasons are often thrown out. Inappropriate behavior. What about people who want to come to say what they want rather than learn what they should think. If you go into a cinema you think ‘am I getting what I want?', when most people go into an art space they think ‘what am I meant to be getting?’.
When Blair went to art school he did inhabit that pace differently yep. He brought skating and Melton there. Didn’t only ask what culture could do for him but rather what he could do for culture. He was kind of threateningly open for that place. No menace, no violence but kinda No Fear (no, not like Nike) but rather not afraid of what art was meant to be. An open, simple unafraid inquiry for 3 years. Let’s just say he didn’t get very high marks.
Like the skaters who want to do different stuff with the landscape they’re given Blair interfaces a set of possibilities with a new and open mind. And the world needs that.
And like the skater the artist must also be fearless.
I wonder what skateboarders are really like – I’ve known a couple but not well enough to know what they share. Perhaps it’s lack of fear, or the thrill of fear. Good at making split second decisions, perhaps they all like the same music… Terrible generalizations, I don’t really know.
Blair’s art, from painting on boards to sampling the ‘sign of art’ from cultural products (ads, films, mags and so on) makes use of already produced forms. He’s not dealing with a blank slate but a way of inserting the means of production into a flow of production that challenges passive culture and passive consumption. It is a kind-of reconfiguration of knowledge.
Skaters find a way of inserting themselves into the flow of passive culture, negotiating and challenging the given environment, taking it over to make it their own. And, like in art, it seems that there is often going to be someone around to say ‘you can’t do that’, someone who is going to attempt to uphold the imagined values of the passive culture, with the intention to tame the skater – the artist.
And so to be a fearless skater is to be a fearless artist.
End
We travel for a living, often cheaply. It would be impossible to find a never-ending stream of work in one city, even a city like New York. Our art is a kind of service. So we travel to where we’re invited to and find out new things. It’s hard to know what ethics to live by on-the-road. One day the cheap airline doubles your fare with excess baggage then arrives two hours late at a remote airport where the bus service has closed, you double the cheap fare again with a two hour taxi fare. I’m full of moral indignation and plan letters. Started out at $11 London to Milan, add fees and taxes its $70 add real-life extras it’s much more than a regular flight. The next day we are with friends eating and drinking and I can’t be bothered thinking about it. Still we travel to escape to find a system of ethics we want rather than one imprinted on us. It’s the idea of thinking that we can get out of what we are meant to/have to do and do what we want, that drives us most.
As we travel we find all sorts of corporate geographies: we were stopped walking across Kensington Gardens for an hour coz Johnny Depp was making a movie about Peter Pan there. The public good. PAL and NTSC video formats make it impossible to move, change regions and make video works without maddening extra expenses and restrictions. DVDs (which could have ended the previous geography) have special needless and worthless regions put into them so you cant send them to a friend in another country to play. Our computer notebook will change regions 4 times then it will forever remain the same.
I used to believe that to have ethics about stealing was important for your own piece of mind, but I feel we’re being methodically done over here by restricting where we can go and imagine. The software that was so idealistically designed to be shared and downloaded, more recently can’t be copied at it often has special encryption to stop you sharing with your friends and acquaintances. It’s like creating the copyright system that will benefit Elton John the most. Even your friends tell you ‘you can’t do that’ with copyright. Now that Napster’s defeated apparently you can download a life-time record collection to an I-pod in a few minutes. It’ll change music totally like ‘turning on a tap ‘I read. Changed by an excess you never really asked for.
I saw a guy talk in New York who said that communism and capitalism were the same in that their first and most important aim was to create an excess. Socialism tries to distribute the excess more equally but production for both always relies on vibrant excess. It’s like it’s better to use something once for one reason then throw it away and get another one. This shits me.
Maybe it’s not the world doing this to me, maybe it’s great, I am pretty happy. A psychologist once told me that whinging ‘greases the system’. Maybe I’m complaining to throw some light how I want to inhabit where I am.
A Constructed World
'Don’t Steal Music' Slam magazine issue 67, p77 (catalogue for the show of the same name at Uplands Gallery 2002)
posted by speech at 3:28 pm
1 Comments:
An amazing piece of writing
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