Uplands Gallery

Frieze Artfair London 2004, Jarrod Rawlins and Blair

Artissima Turin 2003, Jarrod and Blair

Tara Rawlins and Blair

Uplands Team during the first year or so of the gallery

LOVE who you are. Who are you?

We had a suicide bomber in New Zealand in the 1980s. He blew up the Wanganui Computer Centre, the place where the New Zealand police records were kept, in protest. Neil Roberts was his name. Just prior to this he spray painted on the wall opposite the building ‘we have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity’. He had a tattoo saying ‘this punk won’t see 23’. He didn’t. He had something to say, and he said it. In many facets of our existence there is silence. People are scared to speak. When do we have a voice?

Love 2005 is a suite of five collages on bark. On each bark Blair Trethowan presents a snapshot of his experience in the world - a moment of reflection - a panoptic mirror. In his discussion on dialectics, Robert Smithson writes “art critics and artists have for a long time considered the shell without the context of the ocean”. In Love 2005 the ocean becomes a complex sea of society, politics, culture on which floats barks and images as shells, empty, waiting to sink from atop of its viscous surface. Although this might sound rather cosmic, there is good reason.

Blair was conceived in the early 1970s, and although this might be plainly obvious, this it is where the work begins. The barks that Blair uses in this work follow a loose trajectory of his existence - from conception to adulthood. In doing so, he questions the contexts he has moved through, a journey in which he has noticed gaps. These gaps become spaces in which to pose questions.

Each of the five works in Love 2005 unravels a particular story or moment in Blair’s life. Love 2005 draws on a pattern gleaned from a craft art book published the year of his conception. In using this book as source material the artist considers the cultural climate in which his parents were beginning a family. The design’s soft kitsch-ness provides a point of reference, a nod to the past. The 1970s cliché of free love is pivotal – how free is love?

'Fuck in the back seat' has a sense of freedom, or is that free love. The work stems from Blair’s encounter with a kid in a skate park who had covered his bike with stickers that said ‘fuck in the back seat’, which were altered with a Texta from the intended meaning - ‘buckle up in the back seat’. The freedom here is in the choice. The boy made a choice about how he would be in the world, and he made some changes to his possessions that reflected that. This shift from safety message to an expression of disregard can be seen as a test site, an act of defiance against prescribed ways of being in the world.

How, why, and when can we act? 'Led Zepplin Mutlu' traces an act of innocence made myth, by Melbourne artist Mutlu Cerkez who as a child apparently painted Pink Floyd’s dark side of the moon album cover on the wall of his parents kitchen. Blair emulated this by reproducing a large mural of a Led Zepplin cover on the wall of his parents house (as an adult, as an artist), on top of an existing painting of pelicans. As opposed to Mutlu’s apparently disengaged act, Blair made a conscious decision to politicise this act as a sign of admiration for Mutlu’s vision. As a pop cultural symbol the Zepplin is universal, it’s commodified.

Jokes are funny when we understand the context. And they are supposed to be funny. 'The Queen’s Teeth' is a kind of joke. It’s something i imagine someone discovered while drinking a beer alone at the pub. When a five dollar note is folded, the Queen’s pearl necklace becomes teeth, her neck a penis. The folding carries the notion that sex and power are inextricably bound. I’m not sure if that was considered at the point of its discovery. However, resting on the surface of the bark the note takes on an oblique reference to colonisation in Australia. The joke’s not funny anymore. Or is it?

'Sweat Skulls and Love Hearts' reflects a physical state the artist experiences when he skates. His body, in a seemingly cathartic response, produces sweat marks on his t-shirt that form an uncanny set of signifiers – the skull and the heart. In the context of these works, these signifiers carry weighty reference. The head and the heart become symbols for thinking and feeling, they are the central reference of this investigation – how do we think? And how do we feel? Artist Lee Ralph is a skateboarder. In a work installed at Uplands Gallery, Blair asked the artist about the meaning of the Tiki figures and other iconography, Lee Ralph responded saying that he didn’t quite know what they were, or where they came from, it was in his blood.

Our place in the present is defined by history. Frederick Jameson suggests that capitalism creates a historical amnesia, where we are destined to live in the perpetual present. It’s true, we have lost sight of the past and in many ways, as we amble around in a collective confusion without a sense of the ways history informs us in the present. Within the structures of capitalism looking back becomes a delay. We are encouraged to keep our eyes firmly poised on moving into the future. Maori believe that you must walk backwards into the future, so as to always have our ancestors before you. The past is something to look forward to and the future’s always behind your back. I am interested in this because it defines time and experience as non-linier, as critical to our make-up. In a sense Blair is trying to unpick the structures that suggest what is right to say, and when to say it. The cultural context of Blair’s use of bark, and the presentation of more personal experiences in his life, creates two polar elements with a seemingly large divide in between. Within this divide there is a silence in which he raises questions. In this silence, we are encouraged to consider, or to speak.

In 'Skate Sequence', Blair performs a skate trick. Stitched to his jacket is a patch of Jon Campbell’s Yeah flag. The flag, recently been championed by A Constructed World as the new Australian flag through a petition site, represents a site of resistance against the current Australian flag, and what it represents. The trick that Blair is performing seems experimental, yet has a certain confidence in its opening up to failure. I guess this is the attraction in skating. Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose, but it’s about taking risks.

Art is embedded in a history of appropriation - everything is ripe for the picking. Materials become signifiers on top of already loaded signifiers. Here barks frame an uneasy discussion about colonisation in which the work embarks on a critical unravelling of thinking about place - or at least act as a springboard for these considerations. While it could be easy to read these works as an exercise in dalliance, they are not purely diaristic – embedded in these works is a sense of agency. Love 2005 reminds us of potent political issues that we face in the course of our existence – like how, why and when we deal with the ‘bigger issues’ like colonisation. Is there a right time to ask these questions? Currently, these questions are not being asked, which is why Blair attends to them. Art has always defended the impossibility of answering the big questions. It is this ability, to be both engaged and reflective, that makes art critical.

It seems in looking back that Blair is mapping out a way forward. These moments, and fleeting experiences are embodied as objects for reflection amidst a lingering question of how, through self-reflection and definition, we can engage our attention towards a bigger picture of our situation in the world. Hal Foster describes art as the ‘running room’ between life and experience, a space for critical thinking. Love 2005 has all the markings of the running room. The work creates a space in which questions are foregrounded, room for critical investigation. If art exists in this space, is it then free to speak as if it is both inside and outside of culture and society? I think it can.

Danae Mossman
Catalogue essay for Blair's Love 2005 exhibition, Studio 12 Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces September 2005

Blair's work

Thanks mum, paintings by Anne Kearney. Blair Trethowan

Blair asks his Mum to do paintings for him.

There are a few things that come to mind. The first is Pedro Almodovar’s film All About My Mother. In it Esteban asks his mother, Manuela, if she would prostitute herself to protect him. It’s hypothetical, of course, but Manuela replies that she has already done almost everything a mother could do for him. The movie unfolds and Esteban dies. The hypothesis – perhaps Manuela did do all that she could... except tell Esteban about his father, who happens to be a
HIV-positive transsexual prostitute.

Secondly – a longer, personal anecdote:

My mother always hated art, primarily because she thought it was about being a good drawer and she wasn’t. She thought that she couldn’t understand it – that it all went above her head. I suppose I kind of used to think the same thing.

Anyway, my mother dies, and you have to clean a whole lot of shit up. Which is hard ‘cause you find things that you didn’t know about. And then you have to throw stuff out, which is harder because you’ve already lost the person they belong to and throwing their possessions out is like negating their existence – even when you know, theoretically, this isn’t true – that you have memory and all of that.

Anyway, I kept this book that mum made.

She was sick for a long time and watched a lot of TV. The lounge-room was filled with videocassettes of the programs she couldn’t watch when broadcast because the show was on at 4.30 in the morning or at the same time as another. I went around there on Sunday’s - we watched telly and instead of talking about the obvious, we got on to doing crosswords together. We both liked trivia and quizzes and, probably more so, we liked competing against each
other (not that this was ever said). Like the obsessive compulsive she was, crosswords came to occupy much of her time.

The book – it has a turquoise hard cover and is spiral bound in black, the pages within are lined... basically its your standard A5 notebook that you can buy from Officeworks for approximately 4 bucks. Each page in the book is filled with information – a page per TV show, about 60 in all. By no means is it a comprehensive guide to pop culture, but it’s reasonably extensive. For each TV show the director, producer, shooting location and casts are listed. There is information crossed out and written over, various pens have been used and her handwriting changes in size – it was added to on a regular basis. I suppose the book is like a self-compiled dictionary or encyclopedia. The order was determined as the information came
to hand, not alphabetically or chronologically. Mum had no access to the Internet or reference books. Basically the book sat beside her on the couch and as she read something, watched something or found the answers to last week’s crossword; the information was systematically entered into the book. Occasionally, when I was visiting, she would quiz me and my answers would be added. But the book, which had kind of started off as ours, became hers. The pages are well worn and although it seems there is no apparent order, she knew where all the answers were when needed. Inside the book there are also snippets – hand-written notes, clippings from magazines and newspapers with information underlined, waiting to be catalogued.

I had always wanted to do a series of drawings based on this book – like an illustrated dictionary I guess – not as a kind of tribute but more like my addition to the information, the part I could’ve played I suppose – kind of daggy and sentimental (I know). I haven’t though, and doubt that I will. The value in this book, I suppose, is that it is like evidence of an experience. As personal as this is, somehow it transgresses just my own experience. I’ve shown it to other people (much to her dislike – she used to say to me, already embarrassed “I bet you show this to your friends”), and they see a value in it as well – maybe this is because they know me – I like thinking that it’s not. It’s funny – the book is filled with errors, it’s not perfect, it doesn’t tell you things you really need to know or information you can’t find out somewhere
else, so in a way its kind of wrong and in the greater scheme of things it’s not a significant artwork. But it feels like one.

Just before she died, I was trying to do a crossword with her to keep her awake, I was asking her the questions and filling in the blanks, she looked up at me from her dozy state and said, “Are you stupid or something?”

Maybe I am.

Thirdly – the book Vernon God Little, written by Peter Findlay under his nickname of DBC Pierre. Vernon has been wrongly accused of a high school massacre. His mother, Doris, refuses to mention and acknowledge that he has been arrested for murder at any point during the novel – the hypothesis: families don’t to talk about shit – it’s all somehow encoded in Doris’ persistent questioning – “Are you eating well?” “What did you have for dinner?”

Lastly – Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Bob Harris whispers something into Charlotte’s ear. In the tender gesture, the audience is given the power to make up and interpret the meaning of the unheard words.

“Surrounded by voices of dubious authority we should practice being blind and silent’.” Elizabeth Newman quoted it from Eden Liddelow and sent it to Geoff, Geoff sent it to Blair, and then Blair sent it to me. Perhaps Liz is right. But... perhaps... we shouldn’t be too blind and too silent.

Maybe.

——
Lisa Radford
(Lisa wrote this text while she was living in Kyoto during 2004. It was published in Natural Selection, Issue 2: 2004)
www.naturalselection.org.nz

Change

Blair's studio at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces where he was in residence
until the end of February 2006

in Sue Dodd's studio at Gertrude late 2005

Troy

Sometimes there are friends that become more than ‘just friends’, they become part of your family. I’ve been pretty lucky in my life cos I have a few friends like that. Although in March my family got smaller.

I met Blair in high school, he came into my class one day and made an announcement that for his year 10 project he was gunna set up a skatepark at the school the next day. He pointed out me and a couple of other kids who skated and said that he had arranged for us to have the afternoon off school if we bought our boards. Fuckin sweet! What a great start to a relationship, don’t even know the dude and he gets me out of a maths class.

Well, we weren’t best friends immediately but from the start I knew this guy was out there. He had new ideas about things, and he had huge balls. As a kid I once saw him get in trouble from a teacher and he was asked to spell his name so that she could write it down and report him to the principal. He patiently and obediently spelled it B- L-silent P- Silent H, silent U, silent C and she was gullibly just writing all this down not even really listening to what he was saying. He always got away with stuff like that, all the time, no one else I knew could do that.

Blair was a better skater then than I have ever been but even though at the time, to him, skating meant so much he didn’t really care about that. He encouraged those who were with him to be better than what they were. He gave out confidence and he made you believe that you could do things you wouldn’t have thought possible if he hadn’t told you that they were. And he backed this up by doing things on a skateboard, and in his life that seemed impossible.

Lots of who I am was shaped by him. It was him who got me excited about going overseas for the first time when we went to Hong Kong with his mum. And I’m sure it was him that taught me (or at least proved it to me) that you needed to take big risks to get anywhere good. In fact my wife picks out little things and personality traits about me all the time she reckons I stole from Blair. Maybe I did and I’m keeping em.

Blair loved his friends, he was as proud of us as we were of him.

One of the best things about having a friend that is part of your family is that their friends become more than just ‘friends of a friend’ they become family friends. There is a difference. I might not have Blair anymore to laugh with, or at, to share what is happening in my life or his but through him I have a lot of family friends and for that I am grateful.

Troy

Vicki & Bill Trethowan

On the 2nd April, 2005 we had arranged to meet and spend time with Blair
in Santa Monica. Blair had left in February to commence an Artists in
Residence scholarship for three months organized by the Arts Council of
Victoria.
Arriving at approximately 4pm we met Blair on 3rd Street and wandered
down to the Santa Monica pier for a drink Blair talked about the work
he had undertaken thus far he had decided to collect signs from
homeless people offering them money in return for their sign. On the
way down to the pier there is a walking track that runs along the beach
we walked along this track for a while to observe the types of signs
Blair talked about many of the signs were on cardboard that appeared
to be from a carton of some sort on their piece of cardboard they had
written things such as homeless please give some money; blind and
homeless; I am homeless, homeless spare a coin; I need money, I am
homeless and the likes.
Offering these people money Blair said had proved to be quite difficult
the homeless people he had approached to date didnt want to part with
their signs even though he offered them money in return for their
sign!
Blair showed initiative he decided to take with him cardboard and
texta and money to further the prospect of trading with his chosen
clientele. This he explained had still proved difficult with most of the
homeless people he approached he said he thought they must have
decided he was trying to steal their personal belongings and he felt
sorry for this. He would continue with his quest he indicated and now
wanted to discover why the resistance to parting with the sign when they
could make another and gain $5. New strategies required was his comment!
We shared a meal and a few glasses of wine with Blair and Erica at a
Sushi Bar in 4th Street balmy night, very enjoyable.
Next day Blair took us by bus downtown! He said we should have a
cultural experience of central L.A visit the markets, take in the
ambiance, try the culinary delights and observe the architecture. We
wandered through the Chinese sector before heading to the fabric
district blocks and blocks of clothing stalls, not dissimilar to the
Victoria Market much, much more crowded though.
Lunch was at a dodgy Mexican Caf we didnt know any of the dishes on
the menu took a punt with Blairs help and comments about the thrill
of not knowing what we were eating the atmosphere lent itself to our
enjoyment of the experience!
Blair then took us for a wander to observe the architecture of some
building in downtown L.A. he gave interesting commentary on specific
features of some of the buildings. Back on the bus to Santa Monica off
to our Sushi Bar for dinner.

Next day we visited Beverley Hills very commercial. Blair and Erica
took off on their bikes. That night Blair cooked mussels and vegetables
for Dinner at the studio Blair had created a little haven for himself
the studio had a number of artworks in progress he was as he
explained getting a feel for the homeless people of Santa Monica and had
collected a few signs these were on display for Blair to ponder.
Blair had ingeniously determined if you cant have the skate park near
your residence why not build one in your studio! he gathered the
materials required from pieces of board other artists had left behind or
from his French neighbour and had built quite a large ramp at the
bottom level of the studio (the studio had 3 levels bedroom and art
space at the top, middle was living area, kitchen, bathroom and laundry
and the lower level a garage or art space or a skate ramp area you
only had to put the roller door up and you had an excellent sized area
leading up to the ramp.

Blair appeared to be happy and relaxed in Santa Monica the days we
spent with Blair will be treasured memories forever.

Guy Benfield

“mud honey with tap shoes”

where are all the girls running (blair)?
why are they running from me (me)?
don’t fuck me im (sic)
Strength
btw the lines laid freedom of …..
beyond the lines lied freedom
personal abstraction
satisfaction guarantied
quisnos with no dose
subway with my way
viscious without sid
knife
water
happy days without fonzie
jumping the shark
spiritual invasion between the morter
silly morter
its not solid for the surface is becoming an angel in despair with out a job on its own
why duz a led balloon sink
I love B
Because B
B makes me happy
where are all the girls running (blair)?
why are they running from me (me)?
happy days without (Y)
pump up the volume in a bed without a shred of cotton that isn’t touched by a hair from the head of his chinney chin chin.
I hope you lay down in a valley of ghosts that are good to you because you need lots of love
Rails, blocks, transient displays and trucks.
Peace (out)
its not over
g

Mark Misic

Melton lad.

Blair is a Melton lad, he grew up amongst the houses, grass
and dust of that mad mad wonder dust town of the west ...like a
few of us he is a Melton lad.

Blair is a zone 2 lad, somewhat city, somewhat country or as they
say in these parts, city livin, country style.

i did not know Blair growing up in melton. i meet him through the TCB
mob but actually i realy meet him on the train from melton to zone 1.
He was still living out in Melton with Amanda at the time.
It was on that platform, seeing him with fag in his hand puffing in
that early morning when a bit knowledge about Blair arrived,
he's a Melton Lad, still livin Melton.

Blair is an artist lad.Part of a wild bunch
Melton has top artist you know, Stellac, T.Mcmonagle, M.Burnes.B.Lee.
VCA was full of Melton freaks in the 90's.

Blair is a melton lad
Blair is top guy , a top artist, a top man

mark

February 2006

Jarrod Rawlins and Blair with Matthew Griffin's work at Uplands Gallery

Brendan Lee

It's hard to come to terms with the loss of Blair. Harder still to come to accept that he took his own life. He could have gone out with some freak skate accident trying to ollie the Block City set, or taking too much acid, or even crashed his unregistered car whilst thinking up his next work of art, but he didn't. He went out quietly and silently as all those who visited him in hospital would have seen. A big quiet guy. I've known Blair since we were kids. One day he showed up at my friend Smile's house to skate the crappy ramp we built. We must have been about 16 at the time and we'd all heard about this Blair kid who hangs out with the Prahran and Geelong skaters. He must be a really good skater we thought. Then when he showed up following a rumour of a ramp we welcomed him in. He had a roll or two with Gav Fisher and cordially thanked us and left. (if memory serves me well I heard one of them say 'this is shit', but I could be wrong). A bit later that year a new skatepark was built called Rivers Edge in Geelong. We'd gotten pretty good at skating fairly quickly and had taken to riding all the new parks that were springing up about 1990. So we made it to Rivers Edge on the way home from somewhere. Smile's mum had a huge VHS video camera so we shot some footage at some point of the park, but maybe not on that day. We had a skate of the park and I was a bit tentative and lacked confidence in 'performing' for the crowds that watched each of the ramps. I remember looking up and seeing Blair up on the railing of the capsule bowl with Travis Pertzel and Tas Pappas. He pointed down at me and said proudly 'watch this guy, he's from Melton'. He then called out for me to do my signature trick over the spine ramp...I can't remember ever doing a nose-blunt over a spine before (a spine is two ramps joined together back to back like an upside down V), but Blair gave me the confidence to try it...I didn't make the first one but did on the second. It was the first time I think that anyone had seen one of them done and they all let out a huge cheer....this is what inspired me to get better and push myself beyond the safety level that I'd always sat behind. Eventually Blair and his mum moved into my street and we got to hang out every day skating and picking up girls...(or fending off the ones Blair set up for me). The older we got the more daring we became...It seemed obvious to us that we were going to become artists and by the time we left high school we'd convinced each other that when we gave up skateboarding we would pump all of that energy into art...well, we did, but what we didn't count on was returning to skateboarding when our bodies couldn't take the adult punishments we were giving them.

Probably about 1993 Blair started smoking way too much weed. He vanished from our radars and would only emerge at stoner parties or when Professional skaters did a tour of Australia. I did my part as a friend to try and break him out of that awful cycle, but was met with hostility at every meeting. My mentor and good friend had abandoned me for a group of friends who he could listen to the Doors with. I felt rejected and went to school in Ballarat (seeing a girl there played a part in it too). A lot of Melton and Werribee skaters were making the trek to Ballarat on weekends and it wasn't long before Blair finally resurfaced (he must have been annoyed at not knowing what we were up to). We had a drunken party up there one weekend and Blair confronted me about our eroded friendship. Whist still sober he confided that he'd deliberately avoided me all this time because I represented the end of his stoner binge. I was a symbol of self conscience and responsibility that he didn't want to have to deal with yet. He wanted to stay irresponsible and a fee spirit. We hugged and stayed friends since. Whilst reliving my past I've come to recollect him say a few things along similar lines recently. He feared commitment in his later years and would often tell me about how he didn't want his youth to end. He fell in love easily and feared looking into the future at life long commitment. His mind had become full of contradictions of which we were trying to sort out together. Was making art the best thing, how long can we continue skating and is marriage on the cards? In the end Blair didn't want to be lonely. He loved having friends as we all could tell and those who knew him well enough had a reciprocated relationship with him. It's heartbreaking to lose someone as close as Blair was (is). I can feel his warm presence here in Los Angeles within the studio he occupied this time last year. Lily can feel it too in his old Gertrude studio. So his parting isn't a clean break, especially someone as loving and kind as Blair. His memory lives on and still brings warmth to my heart when I think of all we went through and did in the short amount of time afforded to us. He'll continue to inspire me and I'll always think fondly of him.

and Blair, I forgive you for throwing a bottle at my head that time...I deserved it.

Brendan

May 2005

during the show Together again ACW + Jon Campbell at Uplands Gallery

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)