A Free-dragging Manifesto

Patrick Jones a free-dragging manifesto (HOW TO DO WORDS WITH THINGS)

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All writing is propaganda. —Derrick Jensen (among others)

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Only words and conventions can isolate us from ...

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... the entirely undefinable something which is everything. —Alan Watts 1

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Leaving books Early in 2004 Jason Workman walked into my bookshop in Trentham, a town neighbouring the Wombat Forest, north-west of the Australian city of Melbourne.

The region, known since white occupation for its timber, spuds2 and radioactive spring water, was originally inhabited by the Djadja wurrung people – possum skin coat-makers who traded survival textiles for European pathologies. Workman left some hand-made books and a short note that effectively said, Perhaps we’re on the same page?

At this time he was working three shifts a week as a nurse at a home for elderly folk, writing essays, farming Namibian sheep, gleaning from roadside fruit trees and bottling the fruit, and nearby I was attempting to make a living from second-hand books.

While waiting for customers I was drawing poetry and writing art, sleeping atrociously (a new father) and, for actual income, building on my days off – bread and butter money in John and Janette Howard’s3 building boom bubble.

Among the publications Workman left was his essay Practising in the Space of the Everyday, which is both a critique of culture capitalism and a personal treatise for art-making.

In this essay, Workman explains a way of making art that takes place and is experienced in everyday social space, that observes intimate life as poetical and material banality – sensitive to place, unheroic, simple, gestural, philosophical, non-exploitative, humorous and tending towards the loose. Workman: Art work is ‘supposed’ to signify something other than what it appears to be. The process required to decipher this ‘hidden’ meaning renders common, everyday subjectivity inadequate as one requires recourse to the code which enables the specialised language of contemporary art to be ‘read’. Artists ‘make happen’ but they do so predominantly through the utilisation of mediating constructs that hinder the possibility of direct experience.4 At art school I was initiated into a tradition of art framed by its white definition: art is a skill as opposed to nature. I came to art school with a simple desire to make life with art, but direct experience was not what the institution had in mind for its students, with the exception of one lecturer, Glen Dunn. Dunn articulated art practice as being like a child that wakes you in the night and requires constant attention and nurture.

Dunn was focussed on the unfashionable principle of observation. In life drawing he asked us to look at the body, find five tones, squint, then ten, look harder, fifty and draw them down. While the work we produced may not have been particularly consequential, it was the practice of squintsight – the idea of seeing everyday life intensely – that enabled me, at age twenty, to begin to be aware of a world of generality, hype and spin.

But I also came to understand that the flip side to critical observation is dislocation – from other things, other people, and potentially from the environment in which you live: the romantic notion of the artist as removed, strange and alone.

1. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: a Message for the Age of Anxiety (1951), Rider, an imprint of Ebury Press, Random House, 7th edition, 1997.

2. Potatoes 3. John Howard, Liberal Prime Minister of Australia 1996–2007, and his spouse Janette.

4. Jason Workman, Practising in the Space of the Everyday, privately printed booklet, Victoria 2004.

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By 1967 inventorist Marshall McLuhan believed the singular age of observation had given way to a new age of pluralism – one of social interdependence triggered by electrical information: The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology – mechanization.5 McLuhan likened mechanisation to a very linear logic, which he believed was ill-equipped to function within the electric drama of the new age.

Renaissance Legacy. / The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement, / Detached Observer. / No Involvement!6 Let’s be monist!

To see critically – to practice observation and scrutiny – is to find surprise in the smallest, most inconspicuous, everyday things. This is involvement.

And once you find surprise in intimate and everyday things, the spectacle of consumer culture – the dominant hegemony – is revealed as dull and vacuous, abusive, dualistic and turgid.

While electrical and digital technologies have encouraged some unification and involvement – the partially self-governing environments such as YouTube, blogsites and Wikipedia, for example – McLuhan did not foresee the continuation of linear mechanised patriarchal logic remaining with such brutal force within the environment of his global village.

In outlining his approach to practising in the space of the everyday, Workman advocates non-exclusivity between observation and involvement.

Workman: Life imposed upon by the dictates of the dominant capitalist hegemony carries with it a price. What is that price? The substitution of quantity (surplus) for quality (meaning), the substitution of survival for that of living. The ‘art’ of the spectacle is to ‘dress up’ survival as life.7 If we lose the ability to observe the interlocking tones that make up the body of the dominant hegemony, we lose the ability to see and therefore act against the ecocides and genocides that are its inevitable corollary. For, capitalism is not a success story, although we are repeatedly told it is.

Industrial civilisation has fuelled population growth necessitating increased food production. Over the past decade the US Food and Drug Administration, stacked with former Monsanto executives, has relentlessly pushed seed privatisation onto the global village and begun to dump its terminator (or suicide) gene technology into the environment.

Monsanto’s terminator seeds, which grow only when sprayed with glyphosate based Roundup, become sterile after one generation. This Bush Administration-endorsed Roundup Ready (Rapture-Ready!) bio-terrorism could potentially obliterate seed diversity on the planet, with catastrophic effects for the majority of humans and non-humans alike.

In this post-democratic corporate age, diminishing biodiversity – caused by global warming, gene privatisation and economic theories based on profit growth – is already radically reducing our ability to live with and from the land. And Governments are not helping.

The natural world works by a synchronicity of adaptive and haphazard processes that feed and roll, build and collide. We are decisive as much as involuntary beings, conscious and self-sovereign as much as powerlessly hopeful and enslaved.

By leaving his work for me at a small rural bookshop, Workman was strategically rolling dice. The black dots that appeared face up on the counter at Reverie Books – spelled out the future anarchical and chance-based practice of WorkmanJones and, inevitably, the cut-and-come-again seed of this Free-dragging Manifesto.

5. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, New York: Bantam Books / Random House 1967, p8.

6. ibid, p53.

7. Workman, Practising in the Space of the Everyday.

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In the chance Cage …the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. —Albert Camus 8 The word freedragging has no useful or logical definition to speak of. It is a term coined by Jason Workman and I to mark a type of street art that we have practised since 2005.

Where Workman’s reading of Situationist International texts greatly informed our practice, I brought to the partnership the influence of John Cage.

A significant early influence on Cage was Sri Lanka-born Ananda K.Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), a translator of Indian culture and philosopher of Indian art.

Coomaraswamy’s statement that art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation became a key premise upon which Cage built a life’s work – creating musical scores, lectures, essays, poems and art prints, while instigating numerous collaborations with other artists, dancers and musicians – involving social and ecological principles of participatory anarchy and non-duality. Cage made non-linear, de-authorised, non-representative work that could, like life, mimic, mutate and regenerate. Composer and conceptual composter, Cage

practised a mimetic, ‘postmedium’9 art that included its environment; that became its environment; and he believed that a work of art, like any environment, is never static.

Cage’s broad practice coincided with the land art movement. In the 1960s Eastern thought was once again having a substantial impact on Western art, and as a result the natural world was back in focus. As capitalism’s main thrust since the 1920’s has been an everexpanding war on natural ecosystems (with Monsanto a consistently leading player), land art and eco-poetics have been direct responses from artists and poets.

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) is a cornerstone of the land art movement. It is an aggressive intervention of dirt and rock spiralling out 500 metres into Great Salt Lake in Utah.

This work is an artist’s direct, sleeves-rolled-up, encounter with the land, albeit with radical ecological disturbances to the habitat caused by his bulldozers. While it could be said that this artwork is another case of industrialised brutality, Spiral Jetty has no museum humidifier or white-glove treatment that usually signifies Western culture’s perceived dominion over nature. Instead, indeterminately and in its own time, this giant scarification will gradually crumble or subside into the lake.

The lack of museum preciousness and the honesty of this work has more in common with the subsistence and ritual land practices of traditional communities – sacred earth mounds, agricultural terracing, carved rock housing, strategic renewal burning – than with the civilised foundations of Western art.

McLuhan: The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience…Since the Renaissance the Western artist perceived his environment primarily in terms of the visual. Everything was dominated by the eye of the beholder.

His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface consisting of formal units of spatial measurements.10 Australian cultural commentator Marcus Westbury, in his 2007 ABC television series Not Quite Art, observes that despite the Sydney Opera House being a major global tourist landmark, he cannot think of one important opera to have come out of Sydney since the building’s inception. Westbury’s argument is that museums bury culture, not generate it. Similarly he argues that classical orchestras are exceedingly expensive coverbands, venerated by a cultured elite and funded by governments and corporations who recognise art as either quantifiable antique or the display of ‘genius’.

8. Albert Camus, ‘An Absurd Reasoning’, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Penguin Modern Classics, 1975, p.34.

9. Michael Farrell used this term in regard to my practice, at a talk in Japan on Australian poetry. He first encountered it in the writing of American art critic, professor, and theorist, Rosalind Krauss.

10. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, pp.53, 56.

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In contrast, John Cage’s ideal context for art is not artificially segregated from life. When confined to the monoculture of the concert hall, the assembled life is an integral part of the work, as with his composition 4’33’’ – the ‘silent piece’. In this work the sounds of the audience’s coughs, mumblings, chair squeaking, shoe scratching etc. are heard for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The performer, employed to create the prompt for an environment of listening, sits motionless at their instrument. So there is no virtuosic talent on display – the expected convention at a concert.

A Shakespearian actor recently told me that the most powerful sound to be heard during a performance is the spontaneous cry of a baby. You can’t compete with it, he said. We were discussing Cage’s use of chance after I had asked him to read a randomnly selected Shakespearean sonnet backwards at a 2007 realization of Cage’s Musicircus in Melbourne – an event at which as many musicians, actors, dancers, artists, poets as were interested, came together at a nominated time and place, where they performed independently but simultaneously in a mass freefor-all. Here the late composer, or rather the well-turned humus of his thoughts, continued to provide a conceptual framework for an event where we, the natural world, were materially and directly responsible for its multilayered form.

Where evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins uses the words luck and random to split hairs over the existence of chance in evolutionary life, fellow evolutionist, Douglas J. Futuyma, is less pedantic: Chance means essentially that you cannot predict the outcome … Philosophers and scientists use “chance” in the sense of unpredictability … Evolution certainly does involve randomness; it does involve unpredictable chance.

For example, the origin of new genetic variation by mutation is a process that involves a great deal of chance.11 Workman and I found by incorporating chance into our practice, and therefore by not being able to predict or determine the outcome, we could lessen the clutch we had over the things we were making, writing and doing.

Cage’s interest in relinquishing control lead him to what he termed mesostics. A mesostic is a centred acrostic – an acrostic being a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out the subject word of the poem when read vertically down the left side of the page:

considerate of others while immobile to our militant rains – pathologies turn beneath the orange-active skies of transformation.

In a mesostic the subject word falls in the centre of the page with lines extending to the left and right. Cage believed that conventional representations of thought as printed in books did not facilitate the discovery and expression of non-linear, non-hierarchical ideas, but rather endorsed uniformed, authorised codes – words lining up like soldiers of conventional logic, marching across the page in ordered formation.

Here is the first of 20 mesostic poems from Cage’s book Anarchy: the peter kropotkin mesostic, composed in 1988 with the aid of a computer program to simulate the coin toss of the I Ching.12 I sPirit of him for onE corporaTions arE failuRe Know-how of aRe idOls will free rePublic each thrOugh Them in maKe I to me aNarchism 12

11. Futuyma in conversation online: www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/futuyma 12. John Cage, Anarchy, Wesleyan University Press (1988), 2001. p.1.

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Following the lead

In introducing Anarchy, Cage writes: My mesostic texts do not make ordinary sense. They make nonsense … if non-sense is found intolerable, think of my work as music…13 By this I believe Cage also means think of my work as matter.

Joan Retallack, a poet and scholar of Cage’s literary and philosophical work (whose own book How to do Things with Words, is a catalyst text for this publication) writes: Ludwig Wittgenstein, who felt the language of poetry could express certain things unspeakable in ordinary language, lamented the effects on philosophy of a general reluctance to change language habits.14 13. John Cage, Anarchy, Wesleyan University Press (1988), 2001, p.vi.

14. Joan Retallack, ‘What Is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?’ Jacket 32, April 2007, http:// jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml 15. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England, 2007, p3.

16. Thomas De Zengotita, Mediated: how the media shape your world, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, p46.

17. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Bantam Press, 2006, p176.

18. Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth, place, publisher.

19. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, p56.

20. Gertrude Stein, The World is Round, (1939), Barefoot Books, Boston and Bath, 1993.

Cage’s mesostic experiments visually demilitarise and semantically lessen the clutch he had over his texts. They are a model of doing-saying that is directly involved with the physical world, antithetical to spin-doctoring and authoritarianism – chance being an antidote to spin because the result is determined by an indifferent collective (nature) – even though the facilitating framework is constructed strategically by the author.

Liz Kotz in her book Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art, states that the materiality of language is enormously complex, making it difficult to treat words purely as things.

By their nature, words are both here – concretely and physically present on the page, or in the moment of utterance – and yet also elsewhere – referring to, evoking, or metaphorically conjuring up sets of ideas, objects, or experiences that are somewhere else.15 Cage’s mesostics are both here and there; things and words, not only matter, not only nonsense or music, but observation: corporations are indeed failure.

Scratch any educational philosophy and you’ll uncover a political scheme. Every time.

—Thomas De Zengotita16 Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival… but the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. —Richard Dawkins17 Today my five-year-old son is figuring the relationship between letters and the natural world. He has just enlightened me with his Ns and Zs are from the sky, daddy. I look over to the page on which he is drawing. Ns and Zs bring thunder and lightning daddy.

I’m not sure why this understanding of the pictorial form of letters in relation to the natural world is such a revelation to me. I’ve read with awe Johanna Drucker’s Alphabetic Labyrinth, which painstakingly illustrates the evolution of letters from pictures, and pictures from life.18 Perhaps it has something to do with how I continue to take the physical properties of the alphabet for granted, despite my practice of poetry being very much focussed on the materiality of language.

Or perhaps it is just that Zephyr’s non-specialised, pre-schooled mind is a free and responsive conduit to nature.

Carl Orff, the noted German composer, has refused to accept as a student any but the pre-schooled child – the child whose spontaneous sense perceptions have not yet been channelled by formal, literary, visual prejudices.19

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In 1939 the American writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas met a little girl called Rose d’Aiguy and her family, while holidaying near the village of Bilignin in France. Rose became the heroine in Stein’s only work for children, The World Is Round. In this work Stein imitates the music and eloquent nonsense she finds naturally present in Rose’s imaginative speech. It starts: Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it round and round.20 In this work a child’s speech dictates to the artist, and the artist intelligently follows the child’s lead. But in the writing, the child is neither foreground nor background; no Gestaltian division of space occurs, rather she is part of a Cubist field, diffused throughout the whole environment.

I look again to Zephyr’s drawing and think about the world he is defining, the world he’s stepping into and think about Rose in France in 1939, and what was ahead of her.

But, even if the skyworks thunder and blast the Ns and Zs above the land base Ohs, for the culture of occupation you’re raised the world is round like an O, and you can go on it round and round —

ZZ NZ Z

N

N

NZ Z

O

Z

Z

N

Z N

Z

Z

ZZ N N

Z

OZ Z

Z

Z

N

N

Z N

Z N

N N

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A contemporary of Stein, Wyndham Lewis, discloses his own literary prejudice when he brands her work with crit-tags such as child-personality and child cult.21 Here the significance of the child’s mind is lost on the grownup; the primitive, childlike or uncivilised is arrogantly dismissed by the overly serious and authoritative.

The schools that I attended were not designed to follow the lead of a child’s free and unspecialised mind, or even meet it half way.

In fact the direct opposite was true. The curriculum was topdown authoritarian, and neither practical nor philosophical.

We didn’t, for example, learn to change a tyre, grow food, recycle water, compost or build shelter. Nor were we encouraged to understand our activities as affecting our environmental footprint, despite what we’ve known at least since Henry David Thoreau (1817–62).

The young today (1967) … encounter instruction in situations organised by means of classified information – subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint.22 Conformity and militarism in mainstream schools is continuing still. I have recently witnessed children in both Christian and secular schools beginning a formal education in which art classes comprise each student colouring in the same photocopied line drawing.

Art is taught as a completely separate thing to English, English as separate to science and so on.

This type of education primes the child for a life alienated from natural world processes – compartmentalising knowledge so that the links between things are severed. If we cannot see the links between where we have come from, what we become, what we eat and drink and breathe, how we say things and what we do, as part of biological life, then we have little to offer ourselves or anyone else.

In schools the militarising effects of uniforms, rows of desks, lunchtime detentions, sports fields, assemblies, hierarchical social structures and time-sirens all contribute to creating an environment and calendar for the production of the nextgeneration consumer and consequently the next-generation abuser.

Of course some people will come through the modern mainstream school system and find significant counter-points to a dominant capitalist hegemony. But sadly, most will become mere instruments of commerce – blind-led consumers following their parents down a path of debt and a lifetime of interest on it: Christian-capitalists, corporatist abusers, humourless fundamentalists, proto-babyboomer-multiple-propertyowners, cashed-up-bogans (who, according to the Australian writer Catherine Deveny, are folk whose TVs are wider than their washing machines) or weight-orientated (either the bulimic or unburnt-fat variety) pop-fascists.

The newest subset that can be added to this list is one of the worst, and one of the most camouflaged – the wealthy ecobourgeois shopper. Like the English writer George Monbiot I believe the zeitgeist of green consumerism is just another pox on the planet, where ‘ethical’ purchasing enables a plant-atree-here-so-we-can-offset-thefuck-up-we’re-making-over-there mentality.

Monbiot: If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing – one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first ... the middle classes rebrand their lives, congratulate themselves on going green, and carry on buying and flying as much as before.23 Considering the civilised world’s indifference and aggression towards the natural world that supports it, and its dependence upon compliant citzens, it is not surprising that children and other uncivilised [sic] and vulnerable beings are the focus of intense recruitment and oppression.

21. Wyndham Lewis, The Revolutionary Simpleton,” The Enemy, no.1 (Jan.1927), quoted in Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, Princeton, NJ., 2001, p8.

22. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, p100.

23. George Monbiot, ‘Ethical shopping is a charade of the rich’, The Guardian Weekly, August 3, 2007.

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A sonnet for Zephyr (mesostic version)

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A sonnet for Zephyr The Stolen Generations of Australian aborigines, created through a partnership of the Church and the State, is one relatively recent example of this oppression. Richard Dawkins makes the point in The God Delusion that there is little or no difference between feeding children the pill of religion, the pill of Marxism, or that of nationalism or consumerism. But in medicating kids with ideology some things seem to be more acceptable than others.

Today, thanks to marketing psychologists, child-focussed consuming opportunities (whether birthdays or religious events such as Christmas and Easter) occur almost every day of the year. Treats of food, toys, clothes and gadgets proliferate and are abundantly available to nearly every child born under the banner: Ally to the American Empire.

In our civilised societies, along with petroleum, sugar is a key material of exploitation and distraction, effectively constituting a culture of child-abuse. The average Australian now consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar every day.24 While in rich nations responsibility-relinquishing pathologies such as ADHD and ADD are understood to be exacerbated by highlyprocessed, overly-refined food and cheap distractions, rather than modifying high-sugar diets, many parents still prefer to give their offspring sedatives.

24. Rennee Switzer, “The Bitter Sweet Truth”, Business Age, The Sunday Age, 17 June 2007.

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Two Harriers circle above you PrepAring ground for summer’s breed

TwoNoH arriers circle above you moRal pathology brings reed or stick

A breed Your small body playIng bones on the hill No moRal pathology brings reed or stick No transformativE punishment No weighty aiR of god to push – calls you herR e Your small body playIng bones on the hill Parents circle around you No transformativYour E punishment Preparing beds on neArby hills calls you heRe Cruel phantoms cReep your happy books ring for—summer’s Prep ai No weighty god to push R ofground

The myths of gods bEd lit to push –

P you No material punishmenT Preparing beds on neArby hills callS you here Cruel phantoms cReep your happy books The myths of gods bEd lit to push – early-onset multilingualism, Added to this, the schism father’s read Your body tucked N’er your after-school tuition, the right between our industrialised and Nodigitalised materialpsyches punishmen TV shows and clothing brands, helps to T and a ready supply of sugar-rich generate tremendous anxiety callS you here food treats. Modern parents are in parents, which is transferred Your body tucked father’s read N’er your Your arents circle around

to children, making them competitors and thus servants in the global village. What McLuhan failed to foresee in his electroromantic worldview, is that the pathologies of civilisation and progress – whether mechanised, industrialised, electronic or digitalised – are essentially against nature, and for the commodification of every aspect of life.

The anxieties of parents are multiplied and intensified by a smorgasbord of activities invented and packaged for and around children – prenatal university, Baby Einstein, musical instruments drills,

being increasingly pressured or pressure themselves to choose more and more from this smorgasbord because they are terrified of being out of step, of compromising their children’s opportunities – terrified of unconventional surprise, of unscripted play, of raising children who resent convention and cultural militarism – and terrified of lives that enjoy a simple, everyday intimacy with the natural world while questioning the imperatives of supermarkets, fast foods and sweatshop-produced brand names.

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The problem of civilisation Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by “our” side.25 —George Orwell We’re at the start of this new wave where the environment is going to be economically priced but there’s a long way to go … it’s a bit early in the piece to start patting everyone on the back.

26 Dorjee Sun, a young Sydney businessman, 2007.

We are enslaved by debt, made docile by entertainment, addicted to some substance or situation, and hopeful that somebody or something will deliver us from it all. This is the general state of pop-fascism in which we live, governed by corporatism – the private control of trade and industry in collusion with the state – to the detriment of the environment and society at large.

More urgent and pragmatic than Cage’s conceptual, eco-anarchical writing and Gertrude Stein’s world-as-everything experiments concerning the seeing of things before the speaking of words, is Derrick Jensen’s recent work.

25. George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, May 1945, Essays, Penguin Classics, 1994 p.300–317.

26. Dorjee Sun, “Bali’s Business Bonanza”, Business Day, The Age 14 December 2007

Like Cage, Jensen is multi-skilled – an environmentalist, writer, smallholding farmer and teacher.

His work is founded on a central question: If civilisation is destroying us and the earth, do we need to bring down civilisation?

Where Cage saw authoritarianism, and by association abuse and exploitation, embedded in the conventional setting down of thought, Jensen sees these things enmeshed in the spin-speak of corporations and governments.

My dentist, a Muslim Melbournian, added a line to my (post-Christian) definition of pop-fascism: “No longer is a Goebbels-style propaganda ministry required,” he said. There is no single office of propaganda that can be held accountable or shut down because such obvious and visible authoritarianism would not be tolerated today.

Instead, political parties and corporations thread propaganda through the very fabric of things making it harder to identify and oppose. Through their deviousness and our own passivity, trust and hopefulness, we have unwittingly become pop-fascist subjects.

Australia’s representative democracy, like the USA’s, is essentially a parliamentary system with two main parties, both of which are further to the right politically than the general population. According to my slow food cook friend Gary Thomas, while aspiring representatives may be motivated by a genuine commitment to their local communities, once in office they become increasingly subservient to national and global industry needs.

The constituency’s acceptance of this situation, and our reluctance to organise active participatory democracy in the form of grass-roots, selfgoverning communities, assists this state of centralised popfascism. Demoralised by debt, our political will is weakened and, although cheered-up with spasms of pop culture, we accept top-down government. We have become apolitical in the wrong way – anti-intellectually.

Anarchism and participatory democracy have more in common with each other than representative democracy, which today favours monocultural corporatism. This essentially means, in rich nations at least, that existence within the global village is the enslavement of a majority who appear rich, for the benefit of a few who are genuinely rich.

Just as Al Qaeda is simply the collective name for many variedscale transnational Islamic militias connected by a common cause, pop-fascism is a collective name for many varied-scale transnational corporations (and their supporters: the shareholders/consumers) connected by a common cause. And in American styled pop-fascism (including secular, Christian and Judaic brands), as in jihad, the propaganda is instilled in the children early on.

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Capturing this shopping/ bombing dichotomy a friend of mine, Toby Sime, graffitis Et in Al-Qaeda ego around and about our small eco-tourist, slowfood town, after the Latin Et in Arcadia ego (meaning I too was in paradise).

I recently subjected an excerpt from a Jensen podcast to a decentralised Cagean mesostic procedure, to create an example of what I want to call slow text – a text where the once streamlined words become a little disobedient on the page: so, if you can sliDe your premIseS by people you’ve got theM... so, in the new book I didn’t wAnt to do that. I waNTed to Lay out my prEmises in bold faCe so, If people don’t like the premises they won’t get suckered in... so, the first premise of the book is that industrial ciV I L I Z A T I O N is not and can never be sustainable.

Here we begin to encounter a resistance to the eye.

In his talk Jensen went on to say that any population centre reliant upon the importation of resources can never be sustainable. He is a primitivist.

It’s very easy to argue his case that progress is killing us. If we have the will to squint five or ten tones through the spin in any direction, we can see this.

Jensen believes that the only truly sustainable level of technology was that developed in the Stone Age. Masdar, a small, oil-funded city being built in Abu Dhabi in conjunction with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), is hoping to challenge this view. Masdar will be the world’s first zero-carbon, zerowaste, car-free city, making it, according to its creators, a global benchmark for sustainable urban development.

However there is still the problem of the city, especially the millions of extremely toxic pre-existing cities which Masdar does not address. This city’s concept seems like another case of Monbiot’s parallel market – a technologydriven, design-based eco-bubble.

On the Masdar website (www.masdaruae.com) the Abu Dhabi government and the developers list a number of key objectives, which in principle sound like commonsense. But the urban mentality is a deeply conceited one, and so when I read the following objective, my already diminishing enthusiasm gave way to full-blown cynicism:

HABITATS AND WILDLIFE – All valuable species to be conserved or relocated with positive mitigation targets.

I’d like to slow this sentence down in a tonal way and suggest some subtext and critique by means of a greyscale.

All valuable species ... whose values and what are the criteria for these values that determine one species’ worth over another’s? ... to be conserved ... the gentrification of some of nature is an acceptable compromise for our important new city ... or relocated ... the inconvenience of the natural, uncivilised world is apparent when the planner rules straight lines, draws up objectives, walls a city off from undesirables or forcibly relocates them ... with positive ... spin mitigation ... a legal term to make a crime appear less serious ... targets. habitats and wildlife can be managed by stats, numbers and lines on graphs and spreadsheets – the sort of simplistic arrogance that has necessitated the building of this city in the first place.

Did you spot all six tones, or, rather four between 0% white and 100% black?

Note: after the ‘with positive’ entry I have written the word ‘spin’ with 0% ink, but it blends in so well it is invisible.

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The clutch we have over things as artists, architects, designers and planners is precisely the clutch we have over things as people. This is the psycho ogy f s t il l o un us ainab ity – ma in art that red c s the sim le k g u e p infinity of nature into simplistic little boxes and straight lines.

Masdar is a grandly-designed pilot plan conceived by heroic architects and designers for the rich. The civilised world’s answer to the question of the future city will be walled to protect food crops from the harsh desert winds. But as we have seen throughout history, walls serve many purposes, and I wonder if the switch to efficient buildings, renewable energies and organic foods will be enough to shift the exclusive, destructive and elitist mindset of its inhabitants?

But let’s reduce the scale of change to the everyday, to the here and now and imagine the impact it would have if our newspapers, tomorrow, were printed in slow text with vegetable-based inks – so that the words of our court journalists and spin doctors couldn’t slide by so fast, and so that our composts could become less toxic. Generated by chancebased computer programs, the type might look something like the paragraph above.

There is no artifice or clever design here – dice were rolled to create variation throughout the text. The ‘soldiers’ look more like deserters or people of all colours and persuasions. How possible would it be for corporations and governments – with their fast texts – to slide their premises by us if they were dressed-down in slow text? Would propaganda survive as successfully if it were more slowly accessed; if there was more resistance to the eye? Imagine a billboard with the words cities can never be sustainable treated in slow text, replacing the giant Hummer SUV advertisements currently posted above Melbourne streets.

In The Wisdom of Insecurity: a message for an age of anxiety (1951), Alan Watts outlines what he perceives to be the human mind’s limitations in understanding its displacement

from the rest of the world: The root of the difficulty is that we have developed the power of thinking so rapidly and one-sidedly that we have forgotten the proper relation between thoughts and events, words and things.27 Like Gertrude Stein, Watts is particularly conscious of the civilised mind’s dissociation from the body, and he points the finger at language: Words and measures do not give life; they merely symbolise it.28 Accepting this goes some way to explaining the idiocy and cruelty of centralised societies, and how a reliance upon the importation of resources, for instance, that seemingly make us ‘civilised’ (meaning ‘of the city’) in real terms make us abusers and selfabusers.

27. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: a message for the age of anxiety, Rider, 1997 (first published 1951) p.41.

28. ibid, p.45.

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Æmpiricism>– b Watts again: We have been taught to neglect, despise and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains. Indeed, the specialised disease of civilised man might be described as a block or schism between his brain and the rest of his body.29 Watts refers to the knowledge of traditional communities when he writes that the body is contiguous with the rest of the world, so that the air and water are as central to us as our lungs and heart. It seems crazy that this simple statement is a revelation for us today – its foreignness goes some way towards explaining why in rich nations we so blindly disregard that which truly supports us. Monbiot agrees: The rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie … The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false.30 Another lie specific to industrial-digital civilisation, and one used especially by members of the American empire, is the super-gentrification of barbarism – suited men and women spinspeaking the word – democracy – but not practising the thing – by the people for the people.

Jensen illustrates this when he shows how a CIA Torture Manual becomes a Pain Compliance Manual becomes a Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, 1993.31 Three easy language shifts create an enormous lie – that torture is a considered practice that can be acceptably taught and applied by the rational and sane.

b

o

b

o m

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o

m

b

o

m

b

s

m

b

s

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refugeesearefugeesearefugeesearefugeesearefugeesea s

The civilised mind tends to create a gated existence – individualistic and detached from a consciously active, actively conscious relationship with the natural world. This makes it easy for us to elect and re-elect governments who place a higher priority on individualism and self-interest, than on collective social and environmental health.

McLuhan: The idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world.32 When the former Australian immigration minister, Phillip Ruddock, a key player in the recently ousted Howard government, visited the concentration camp he had helped create in 2001 on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, it was reported that he walked past a welcoming line-up of detainees ignoring every single one of them. For Ruddock to have personally acknowledged the incarcerated Iraqis, Afghans and

Iranians he would have had to face the personal horror he was subjecting these people to – no news, no services, no place to call home, no work, no access to communications, no future.

These refugees – many of whom had fled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes, and who might well have been seen as allies in the War on Terror – put on brave smiles to mask their misery, in the hope of some word of liberation from the Amnesty International badge-wearing Ruddock. Not only did he not acknowledge them, he left them on the island for a few more years.

In 2003, the 95 Iraqi refugees were sent back to the country Australia was helping to plunge into civil war.

29. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: a message for the age of anxiety, p.53.

30. George Monbiot, Bring on the Apocalypse: six arguments for global justice, Atlantic Books London, 2008 p43.

31. Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization, Seven Stories Press, 2006.

32. McLuhan The Medium is the Massage, p61.

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Warming up

Meanwhile, back in Australia, our cities filled with governmentproduced posters requesting that we report anything suspicious – such as baggage left in public places – the implication being that terrorists might already be among us. Also raised was the possibility that groups of refugees attempting to reach our shores in small leaky boats may well include terrorists. In late 2001, with falling popularity before his third-term election, John Howard declared: We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

And he romped back to power.

With Nauru, Australia outsourced its abusiveness, at home the Howard regime successfully frightened the public enough to maintain the right to behave in this way for six more years.

Scientists talk about the improbable origins and subsequent evolution of life on Earth as the result of a Goldilocks Effect – a set of conditions for life to occur that are not too much, not too little, not too hot/ cold, wet/dry, but just right. They speak about the origins and evolution of life being activated by a combination of ingredients such as prehistorical detonations of a stellar porridge pot rich in oxygen, iron, carbon, and silicon; and the Earth’s optimum distance from the sun. And they talk about a Greenhouse Effect – a natural system of cooling the Earth at night, by releasing from the atmosphere infrared radiation which is generated by the sun during the day. This keeps the Earth’s average temperature at around 150 Celsius. Humans have thrived under these conditions for thousands of years, growing and hunting food, working collectively in small groups, making art and inventing gods to celebrate the earth that supports them.

Within a relatively short period of time the average temperature on Earth is expected to rise to 180 Celsius. This is due to a radical increase in greenhouse gases, which act like a blanket covering the Earth, and prevent the heat generated by infrared radiation from escaping the atmosphere.

The increase in temperature is already causing the glaciers and the permafrost to melt, sea levels to rise threatening low-lying coastal areas and islands, and climate zones to change – some cooling, some warming. Soon we will begin to see an increase of extreme weather events, a decline of wetlands, a scarcity of fresh water, a decrease of agricultural productivity, environmental refugees, an increase in pests and pathogens and the expansion of tropical diseases.

Scientists cannot accurately predict the future effects that melting glaciers will have on ocean currents; they can’t foresee which areas of the planet will freeze and which will overheat.

A consensus of scientists and analysts, however, have estimated that well before the year 2100, global warming will have caused such a scarcity of food and water that the remaining years of human existence may degenerate into a horrible bloodbath.

The pop-fascist effect is Goldilocks without her sensory faculties. She no longer knows what is just right, rather she is unwittingly extreme right, and her tongue has blistered to show for it.

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Lalgambook Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed.

They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources – gold, oil, and so on – can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities. —Derrick Jensen33 At a public lecture in Castlemaine, the historian Ian Clark read aloud excerpts from the journals of early European farmers, who had settled in the Castlemaine/Loddon area.

Some recalled that significant numbers of Djadja wurrung men (of the Kulin nation) had become farmhands almost overnight, replacing white hired-help who had deserted for the goldfields.

In the Loddon region today, however, the resource most exploited is not cheap Djadja wurrung labour, but cheap Djadja wurrung water.

Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) and a number of companies including Cadbury Schweppes and Fosters (trading as Spargo) have been buying groundwater in the area for just over $2 per megalitre (5c per tanker!). Privacy laws make it is impossible to obtain accurate information from GoulbournMurray Water (GMW), the company that monitors the commercial use of this Djadja wurrung resource. However, Richard Carter from GMW confirmed that both CCA and Cadbury Schweppes have been taking water from the area for the past two decades. Bore water, otherwise known as groundwater, is transported to the city in trucks, bottled in plastic, and sold as a convenience commodity for around $2.50 a litre, at the time of writing. This compares with a cost of 1c per litre for tapwater.

The CCA product, named after the significant Loddon region landmark Mt Franklin, is the largest brand of bottled water in Australia, and has approximately 70% of the national market. Before settlers and gold miners had dispossessed the Djadja wurrung of their land and resources this ancient volcano, from which the brand name derives, was known by the Djadja wurrung as Lalgambook.

33. Jensen, “The Problem of Civilization, Premise Two”, Endgame Volume 1, p.IX. 34. Ian D Clark, Place Names and Land Tenure – Windows into Aboriginal Landscapes: essays in Victorian Aboriginal Histroy, Ballarat Heritage Services, 2003, p.117.

On its website CCA claims: Mount Franklin water comes from the most pristine and sustainable water sources in Australia. It took a mere 30 years of European occupation – between the mid1830s to the mid-1860s – to see the Djadja wurrung eradicated from the region, the last refuge being the Loddon protectorate at Mt Franklin.

Despite the sympathetic efforts of the chief protector of Victorian Aborigines G A Robinson and the Mt Franklin protector Edward Parker, the miners and squatters who appropriated the land had both official and unofficial authority of entitlement to it. In his research paper concerning the massacres and killings of Victorian Aborigines, Ian Clark writes: Edward Parker believed that by the time he had established his permanent station at Mt Franklin in 1841 the Djadja wurrung had recognised the overwhelming power of the whites to exclude them from their lands…When the local aboriginal people first met [Edward Parker], they ... enacted the ceremony of the tanderrum, or ‘freedom of the bush’, a diplomatic rite symbolising the landholder’s hospitality, in which strangers were allowed temporary access to clan resources after a ritual exchange of gifts. 34 I have conservatively estimated that for each $2 CCA spends on “purchasing” Djadja wurrung groundwater, the profit after production, salary, advertising and distribution costs is in the vicinity of $1–3M.

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One day last year, I spent seven and a half hours walking every street in Melbourne’s CBD locating and testing public drinking fountains. Of the 28 that I found, only 19 were fully operational. I made a map for myself and others, showing where to access free drinking water while visiting the city. An estimated 710,600 people use Melbourne’s CBD every day.35 This means there is approximately one working public water point for every 40,000 people.

The only thing we can reasonably assume from this is that the City of Melbourne wants people to buy their water packaged in plastic, that it fully supports the privatisation of water, and is happy to encourage unethical corporate behaviour.

35. Referenced from the City of Melbourne website, 2007 36. Julian Lee, “Message on a bottle labelled as greenwash”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 February 2008.

37. Jason Koutsoukis , “The real cost of bottled water”, The Age, 19 August 2007.

38. Source: The Australasian Bottled Water Institute Inc. 2006.

39. Derrick Jensen , “Bringing Down Civilisation”, http://www.tucradio.org/ 0913jensenone.mp3 and http://www. tucradio.org/0920jensentwo.mp3

CCA’s spokeswoman (former ABC radio schmooze) Sally Loane, doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. In a recent Age article she was quoted as saying, Any individual who claims that we ‘rape the environment’ is speaking from the depths of ignorance … we are committed to being a good corporate citizen, particularly when it comes to water.36 In an earlier Age article, titled The Real Cost of Bottled Water, she stated, There is a market for it.

Consumers like the convenience of bottled water. A lot of people believe it tastes better. It’s nice and cold. That’s what consumers want, and that’s what we’re giving them.37 Loane is effectively saying that it is ok to burn 314,465 barrels of oil every year to produce the plastic for Australians’ bottled water 38; that the large number of these bottles that end up as landfill and general waste has little to do with her company; that it’s ok to have polluting trucks running up and down our highways for the sake of a resource already gravity-fed to our taps; and that the renaming of Lalgambook to Mt Franklin is an appropriate exploit in light of how her company occupies Mt Franklin as a brand name today.

At the Oakland talk last year Derrick Jensen paused from his address to the large group of students and digressed: If I had a thing of bottled water I would hold it up and say this is why we’re not going to have a revolution, because if people will pay for water bottled in plastic they will suffer any indignity.39

As Jensen reminds us in Endgame, if you abuse downwards on the societal ladder there is far less accountability or scrutiny than when you abuse upwards. But what really makes our highend abusers so camouflaged, so protected from scrutiny? The recent film The Corporation – which Rupert Murdoch tried to have censored – lays out a meticulous answer to this question, namely: When corporations want things they attain the same legal rights as a person, but when corporations are scrutinised they can miraculously turn themselves back into a thing; a brand or a label that cannot be held accountable in the same way a person can.

Jillian Broadbent’s corporate portfolio is a stunning trifecta when it comes to bottled water. As well as being a director of CCA, she sits on the board of Woodside Petroleum and has just been re-appointed to the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia. The chapter of Broadbent’s résumé related to the arts assists with her corporate camouflage. She has been on the board of the Sydney Theatre Company, a founding director of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, and a Trustee, Vice President and Treasurer of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in 2005 she was appointed Chairman of the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

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PAN O PLY FASCISM

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Art of the problem

In rich nations such as Australia the arts act as capitalism’s moderator or patronised spouse. For many high-end arts organisations, employing corporate fiscal strategies and personnel simply means continued – and often increased – high-end patronage.

My own low-end cultural practice, as played out in the film Lalgambook, is in the form of poetical terrorism or physical graffiti, where public space is disrupted – even terrorised – by ambiguous and poetical interventions. At commercial outlets I leave stickers on the caps of bottled water directing consumers to a website (www. myspace.com/justfreewater) where they can access a range of articles concerning water, packaging, governments and corporates – counter-propaganda.

When I see a vending machine selling refrigerated water and junk food items, if I can find the switch I turn it off. This simple act of anti-corporate activism in the everyday is a liberty-chaser.

A small shock of adrenaline charges through my body as I flick the switch. It is not from a sense of hope that I carry out these physical poems – poems that practice in the space of the everyday – but rather from the consideration: traditional forms of poetry seem ridiculous this late in history.

UK economist Nicholas Stern’s gloomy ‘Report on the Economics of Climate Change’ does not cause me to fly to Thailand and live out civilisation’s final years in a debauched and drug-crazed reverie, although it’s tempting.

I will stay in Djadja wurrung country as long as I can, ’fess up to white occupation and continue to compost. When the crash does come – with mass death caused by failed crops and lack of water – the role of people like Broadbent and Loane should be publicly known.

Regularly switching off vending machines that sell water bottled in plastic makes barely a ripple in terms of tackling our problems with the physical world, but conceptually it’s a big leap forward. Acceptance of a reliance upon the importation of resources is our civilisation’s zeitgeist – our cultural pathology – and it needs to be switched off.

If we are killing people and habitats for oil to maintain our toxic lifestyle now, then what future violence awaits us with diminishing water supplies taken from small communities and bottled in plastic for massive global shareholder profits?

Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.

—Alan Watts40 Long before reading the likes of John Cage and Derrick Jensen, I spent a considerable amount of time making, moving, planting and installing things in the area of the Wombat State Forest that lies between the upper tributaries of the Loddon and Coliban rivers.

I made graffiti in the bush.

The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award is an annual Australian art prize that takes place at Werribee Mansion, just west of Melbourne. I’m not normally interested in an event or activity like this, however the prize money could keep you alive for years. For this reason in 2005 I sold out and bought a ticket in the lottery, submitting some of my bush graffiti works. I was a short-listed finalist with a one in twenty-nine chance of winning.

Needless to say I didn’t, but as I’d come close, I tried again the following year.

While developing my 2006 submission I walked around Werribee Mansion’s grounds, thinking about the building and its history. It is a classic example of occupationist architecture – a colossal monument to colonial empire-building by private money, in bricks and mortar. I stood on the vast, water-thirsty lawn where drought-hardy wallaby grasses had once grown, and I faced the building.

40. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, p.46

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It stood to attention, humourless and arrogant, surveying its own wealth. My eyes fixed on the forty metres of sandstone balustrade spanning the second storey balcony. I imagined adding to its already locatable and mortared repression at home, expansion abroad appearance 41 a blaze-red vinyl banner with my own ‘expression fixé’: Everyday consensus is no counter power to the psychopaths of everyday rule.

Werribee Mansion began life as a shrine to stately imperialism and was then a draughty Christian seminary for a few decades. These days it is an exclusive, centrally heated restaurant and luxury hotel geared to accommodate highend corporate conferences – and in its grounds, a yearly national sculpture prize.

In 2006 my proposal wasn’t even short-listed, so I gave up the gambling game and went back to doing what I do best – making temporary autonomous zones.42 Following is an excerpt from the document: The Australian Law Reform Commission Inquiry into Schedule 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act (No. 2) 2005 and Part IIA of the Crimes Act 1914 Submission by The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) 10 April 2006, which describes the background to one of these zones.

41. Adapted from the quote: Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home. Stanley Diamond quoted in Derrick Jensen, Endgame (Vol 1), p.15.

42. Hakim Bey, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone”, Ontological Anarchy, Poetical Terrorism, Autonomedia, second edition, 2003.

7.4.3. In 2006, just prior to the staging of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, the Victorian State Government used the Commonwealth Games Arrangements Act which gave it the power to remove all graffiti, stencil art and political posters from public places in Melbourne. Premier Steve Bracks was reported as declaring this intention publicly, vowing that within two hours of posters going up they would be removed. Melbourne City Council followed through by painting out and obliterating all the street art it could find in a bid to present a “clean city” for the Commonwealth Games.

Artist Patrick Jones initiated a protest against this act of cultural destruction and censorship.

Melbourne is internationally renowned for having one of the most vibrant and creative street art scenes in the world, something Jones was keen to protect and promote. So he photographed stencil and graffiti art at risk of being cleaned away and made a series of placards with these images. He joined with a group of friends and carried the placards through the city [over several days during the time of the games] as a roaming wall of protest. Jones was questioned by police for the action but was allowed to continue unhampered.

At this time Jason Workman and I were helping each other with individual projects. We had days in Melbourne handing out bogus leaflets and pasting up our own public notices, carrying out what we called reverse thefts or add-ins to retail spaces.

When Workman moved to Brooklyn in 2007, he found employment fabricating large-scale sculptures at a reputable art foundry. After some weeks he told me that the conditions for the workers were pretty terrible, especially as it was summer and full body suits,

masks and goggles had to be worn in an unventilated workshop.

The foundry’s clients included highprofile artists such as Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy and Chris Olfili. Workman told me that the hazardous waste from the factory is dumped directly into the gutters, and the toxic resins, plastics and fibreglass particles are allowed to blow around the streets of the local, largely Polish neighbourhood.

I should add that foundry employees were never invited to the exhibition openings of the works that they had made. After a few months the social and environmental conditions became too much, and Workman left.

I googled Kruger to find some apt quote of hers regarding abuse and/or misuse of power – there have been so many. Her widely documented art text Abuse of power comes as no surprise, and that of her contemporary, Jenny Holzer: Protect me from what I want, had first sprung to mind. But I wanted to find something less notorious to capture here. Instead the following Sotheby’s online catalogue entry spoke to me: Lot 353 is a fine large photographic silkscreen on vinyl by Barbara Kruger (b. 1945). Entitled “Not Stupid Enough”, it measures 109 inches square and was executed in 1997. It was included in the retrospective exhibition on the artist in 1999–2000 at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It has an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000.

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We will never attain the level of sustainability required to save our species from annihilation while our culture is founded on such pathology that a photographic silkscreen print is worth $250,000 or more. As civilisation and its cities have developed away from natural world cycles, our art has become a pointless, dislocated commodity of abuser culture. Artists who choose to dwell in cities make art based on the pathologies of their urban environment, and then sell their work in order to survive there.

It’s a narrow, self-serving cycle of resource wasting.

A recently-seen documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, puts Kruger and Co into some perspective. It’s a film about the everyday life of a farmer, John Peterson, who grows food and makes art inclusively, with little separation between tilling, despairing, writing, constructing, failing, loving and heaving. Unlike Kruger’s art, which attempts to critique Western (specifically male) brutality but itself ends up as another power base fighting for both capital and egotistical space – for transformation – Peterson’s documentary highlights an art that belongs to the farm, to a specific location and to natural cycles – art that centres on making in the space of the everyday; art that involves many participants. But the transformationists are never far away.

For twenty years Peterson endured the wrath of his Christian neighbours for not thinking the baby Jesus a particularly interesting figure in the scheme of biodynamic life.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John surveys a life’s body of work. It documents the trials and tribulations of an independent farmer in the midst of the corporatist welfare state that is US agriculture.

Peterson’s collaborations with singer/songwriters, filmmakers, playwrights, poets and artists are inculcated into daily life on the farm. One of the most impressive results of this life’s work is the year-round provision of biodynamic fruit and vegetables to around 6,000 Chicago families from Peterson’s small Round-up Ready-free farm.

Just as Peterson’s agricultural output is not museum quality, so too his filmic memoir has not generated the waste typical of civilised art.

As an occasional set builder on films I have experienced firsthand the tremendous waste that results from their production.

In direct contrast, Peterson is an example of the kind of artist whose work the world could really eat now.

Tonight a friend emailed me requesting a radio advertisement for a student sound project she was doing. I responded: EXCLUSIVE only to reformed collectors of fine art comes COMPOSTED ART TEA! Cultural waste product has never been so available so we’ve DESIGNED a product to take care of the surplus and, what’s more it can be delivered to your door free of charge. Impress your friends with AFFORDABLE ART at its most rotting.

When you need that extra something for your garden hang the expense and think: COMPOSTED ART TEA! Dribble some on the lettuces and in a few weeks see them explode with a simultaneous contrast of colours. Garlic has never tasted so delicious; rhubarb never possessed such form!

So, in order to meet future standards in art practice the BEST of modern culture has undergone our most rigorous aerobic pitchforking.

We’re talking painting, sculpture, writing, drawing, installation art, pop and folk shopping music, fashion, set construction, design – even gallerists and museum staff are in the mix.

COMPOSTED ART TEA! Mixing art with the whole environment!

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image captions All images are by Patrick Jones unless otherwise indicated front cover • untitled photograph (yellow road sign) 2005 (detail) • Nicholas Hansen (Mutiny Media), documentation of WorkmanJones’ practice, Melbourne CBD 2006 (detail) inside front cover + p1 • entrance brass, Reverie Books, Trentham, Victoria, 2005 • untitled photograph (yellow road sign), 2005 (detail)

p.19 • The mind and matter of human hope (city version), ink drawing, 2007 (previously published in Going Down Swinging #26 pp.20–21 • be your own Ian, street sign intervention, Melbourne, 2006.

Photograph: Mel Ogden p.22 • Swanston Street tree intervention, Melbourne, 2006. Photograph: Jason Workman

pp.2 –3 • untitled photograph (yellow road sign), 2005 (detail) • front room Reverie Books, Trentham, Victoria, 2005

p.25 • Jason Workman, Words against Capitalism booklet, add-in (reverse theft), Melbourne shoe store, 2006, (previously published in, Patrick Jones, “The Word as Art”, Artlink vol 27 no 1, 2007) • Jason Workman, add-in (reverse theft), tourist bureau intervention, Melbourne, 2006

p.4 • Dualism~Fuelism, Patrick Jones, White-Ant #2 anthology, How do you know what the truth is? White-Ant Press, Melbourne 2005

p.27 • bus-stop add-in, Melbourne, 2005 • Department of Lost Liberties, letter sent to Liberal and Labor politicians, 2005

p.7 • Cage books, personal library, 2005

p.28 • phone booth add-in, Trentham, Victoria, 2005

p.9 • painted rock (with Zephyr), Wombat Forest, Victoria, 2005 (detail) pp.10–11 • painted rock (detail) • Homage to Duchamp, coffin intervention National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2005 (detail) • Chance, film still (with Toby Sime and Michael Farrell), Centre Place, Melbourne 2006 (original footage: Ivor Bowen) (detail) pp.12 • Chance, film still (detail), with photograph intervention (single dot)

by Peter Tyndall p.15 • Zephyr’s play, Melbourne, 2006

p.17 • The mind and matter of human hope (a country party version), ink drawing, 2007

p.31 • Letter to the editor, The Age, 5 July 2007 • free-hand graf, Melbourne, 2006 p.32 • Double white Australia line policy (A4 version), Trentham-Daylesford Road, Victoria, 2005 • Lalgambook film still (with Josh Bowes).

Image: Meg Ulman, 2008 p.34 • map of Melbourne’s public drinking fountains, drawing, 2007 p.35 • Roundup Ready public water drinking in Melbourne, 2007 p.36 • Just Free Water, participant, New Years Eve Parade, Daylesford, 2008, Photograph: Kyle Barnes for The Advocate newspaper

p.37 • concrete poem with Mt Franklin water bottle stand, 2007 p.39 • Pine for the scarce hell leaky cum primates and the war gas, Wombat Forest, Victoria, 2003 • unsuccessful HLNSA proposal, 2006 p.41 • A Temporary Autonomous zone – Roaming Graffiti Wall (with Jason Workman, Peter O’Mara, Ivor Bowen, Tim O’Sullivan, Petra Beuskens, Nikki Blanch, Cath Ryan, Tara Gilbee, Jeff Stewart and Jasmine Salomon), 2006. Photograph: Penny Stephens (reproduced courtesy of The Age) • Jason Workman, public notice intervention, Melbourne 2006 p.42 • Jason Workman, stencil, Carlton park, Melbourne 2006 • Situationist quote (1969) intervention, (with Hen and Millie Cheshire and James Holden), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006 pp.44–45 • home compost with hand-shredded Free-dragging Manifesto draft manuscript, Daylesford, 2008 pp.47 • Nicholas Hansen (Mutiny Media) documentation of WorkmanJones’ free-dragging practice, Melbourne CBD, 2006 (detail) pp.48–63 • Nicholas Hansen (Mutiny Media), documentation of WorkmanJones’ free-dragging practice, Melbourne CBD, 2006 pp.64–65 • home compost with family pitchforker, Daylesford (with Meg Ulman), 2008 p.67 • More Prohibitions in the Age of Interpretative Signage, 2005 (CAD drawings by Multiplicity)

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a free-dragging manifesto Page becomes stage transfigured into time-bracketed instances of a continuous present; written language becomes a surprising performance of its charged materiality. —Joan Retallack1 PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICHOLAS HANSEN

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Wishfulness is conscious defeat.

Hope is delusion.

Hope is fast food for the demoralised. unburnt fat. the

Hope is

Hope – an addiction concurrent with

h g – u r mainstay pat olo ies of civilisation s ga -oil-drugs-

c gods et .

Hope is the desire for transformation.

1. Joan Retallack, ‘What Is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?’ Jacket 32, April 2007. http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml

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Hope is no good matter. spin.

Transformation is

i n m l e Spin is counter to the rotat o of aterial if .

Hopefulness is mind over matter.

To trust

the pathological stakeholders of civilisation – monotheistst o i o u d governmen s-corp rat sts – is h pef l efeat.

Spin

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is the first cousin of hope. pin is the art

S

wa

u stef l.

e f Spin is ast t xt.

p g l h e of selling somethin hopefu w ich nds u

Hope is waste.

Waste is the non-

compostable by-product of the centralised – the civilised. e b u Wast has no o nds.

A city’s reliance upon

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the importation of resources impoverishes its citizens who in turn impoverish and toxify the land.

The

Cuban says: ‘the food has to be walking distance’2.

In the

rich

t na ions the reliance upon the importation of

u e u u br t resources occurs thro gh th o tso rcing of u ality – 2.Roberto Perez, visiting Cuban permaculturalist, speaking at Daylesford Town Hall, Victoria, Australia, 3 April 2008

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forests cleared, soils contaminated, air polluted, soldiers shipped, oceans vacuumed of life and used as dumping grounds.

It is hopeless.

practice of hopelessness.

Free-dragging is the Free-dragging is monist.

We practice hopelessness with the acceptance that

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material life is all we have and when it is over it is over.

Hopelessness becomes inspiration – inspiration, n y c d t o s oo the te acit to a t in ependen ly f government and g ds

and gods.

Fear

Anxie y is h pe e ig d n f t o fuln ss transf ure i to ear. empo ers e aut orit of governments an w th h y d

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goods and gods – the debts of which demoralise and enslave.

This entire cycle is wasteful and hopeful.

We

e e o s a are nslav d t amaterial structure - taxes cre te borders – d a s and armies – t e illing sc dule p ocee s bor ers cre te god h k he d r on

our side’s

af beh l .

Hopelessness as practiced in

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free-dragging is liberation – which manifests materially as poetical t rrori m – the material tran fere ce o which s none s s n f i

delusional play – civil disobedience.

Free-d aggi g is r n

aerobic poetry of the body – free-dragging is pitchforking. e r n tr h m Fre -d aggi g is anaerobic poe y of t e ind – we

56

m n two wor s forever crawli g.

We are materialists

because we are purely mind and matter.

We need two

good meals a day and the ‘irreducible complexity’3 of the i nd r o . h a s a sun, so l, seeds a wate t have this T e Cuban s y : ‘c tch your own water, grow your own food, say

hello to your

3. from Darwin’s ‘organs of extreme perfection and complication’, as revisted in Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006.

4. ibid. Roberto Perez.

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neighbour.’4

The ear

u th, air and water as l ngs,

heart and brain.

s h f The aesthetic-athletic and et ics o

free-dragging are indeterminate and mutable. is no authority here. constraint.

There

Authorship is immutable

t Authorship is court journalism – he

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dutiful reportage of spin and greenwash. dr

gin

ag

g is the

Free-

poem writt n b the bo y – physi l graf i i e y d ca ft

kicking in the street.

God obsolete.

o n n t w o As s o as it is ritte i is g ne.

In nature cha ge is rec rre t. n u n

Seeds grow publicly and find opportunities for

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autonomy.

We defend this.

in the space of the everyday.

We practice We r pen and fall li e i k

public fruit, bletting on the street.

a We underst nd

enslavement when we

We understand

free-drag.

the conventions that enslave – paying interest upon interest.

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In small collectives we act for ourselves. We do not d r a t . nee supe m rke s

We share water and grow food.

No need for governments. We defend ourselves in small communities.

ation-states dis o ve. C ge s s: s l a ay

N

‘We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence

5. John Cage, Anarchy, Wesleyan University Press (1988), 2001.

on government.’5

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The waste architect packs thermal

l re h g mass into o d car ty s ­– rammed earth off t e rid.

Night falls.

We drag each other through the city and

i u l i k t jump nto b i d ng s ips, our s ockings ladder. p

Oil

. Lying on the i ume u hands in th soil ur it ver. eaks bt no r e t n o

62

63

64

65

This work is compost ready.

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Patrick Jones A Free-dragging Manifesto [how to do words with things] Published by Tree-Elbow Publications July 2008 Edition 750 isbn 978–0–9580307–4–8 Jointly published with subtext: Peter O’Mara / Patrick Jones. All rights relinquished © with the exception of the following images: p.36 © Kyle Barnes, The Advocate cover, pp.47–63 © Nicholas Hansen, Mutiny Media (www.mutinymedia.com) p.41 © Penny Stephens, The Age acknowledgements A Free-dragging Manifesto has been made possible through the generosity and support of a number of friends and Peter O’Mara put the flint to the stone collaborators. in suggesting it was time we produced a joint book. His friendship is purely and simply a central mechanism for this work.

Jason Workman believed in co-originating a practice of self-liberation. His considerations, poetical activities and friendship are at the core of this work.

Kate Fagan provided an early editorial framework and suggested the title.

Filmmaker and photographer Nicholas Hansen provided quality photographic documentation and important editorial input.

Verity Higgins (RAV) assisted with the funding process and helped Peter and I to mediate our language for the application.

Peter Tyndall, both formally and informally committed his support to this project.

Vivienne and Ross Ulman gifted hours of proofreading, critical editing and belief.

Thanks to Vivienne Shark LeWitt for some timely and helpful comments.

Ian Robertson once again provided an important philosophical environment with the design.

His ideas and friendship significantly shaped this work.

Jude Walton provided a critical eye to our practice, and laughed and frowned at appropriate and inappropriate moments.

Zephyr has kept me on my toes and fingertips, and has taught me everything I know and don’t know about being a dad.

Meg Ulman essentially funded this work with love. Her sensitivities to other people and the planet are a daily source of inspiration.

funding This project has been made possible by the Australian Government’s regional arts program, the Regional Arts Fund, which gives all Australians, wherever they live, better access to opportunities to practice and experience the arts. The Regional Arts Fund is administered in Victoria by Regional Arts Victoria and funded by the Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts. The Regional Arts Fund is an Australian Government initiative supporting the arts in regional and remote Australia. production Graphic design: Ian Robertson Printing: Finsbury Green Printing, Melbourne Printed using vegetable oil-based inks on Printspeed Laser – a paper produced with elemental chlorine-free pulp derived from sustainable plantation forests tree-elbow publications PO Box 482 Daylesford Australia 3460 Email treeelbow@gmail.com.au

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subtext Peter O’Mara

(HOW TO DO WORDS WITH THINGS)