Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
Art has been checkmated for a long time. Against
Now theorists, with their special brand of murky grace,
In part the energy derives from sheer market turnover:
But for many art is nature's consolation prize for dying,
Is this another theoretical program? or moral sermon? or
...sloped or slumped on my grey couch, trying to light
He had come from a country that had seen cathedrals
The West's romance is seen as the ability to leave one's
In this country, with its hum of a clamorous and anxious
One actionistic work he performed in Holland. He was
The risks he founded his art upon accumulated, the odds
If Piotr's friendship was a hard thing to shoulder, his
But every day is a gauntlet now, at the tail end of the
Here, in Bondi waves crash like sections of glass on the
Beuys was a hero of Piotr's, his Free International
In his triangular flat in Bondi there was no food, but
Art's the stairwell where you drop all your mistakes.
Piotr would visit for a meal and we'd watch TV. Or at
One night we watched Mad Max. The film clarifies the
We don't believe in explanations anymore, only in the
"Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their
It's nine months since Piotr died. After urgent calls both
Piotr and I would smoke dope together. Often we could
When Piotr left for Europe he was having passport
Courage deserts in small quantities, unnoticed. There is
Nonetheless Piotr scraped together the money to go,
Just as the French for London is Paris, in Australian
The problem is that now even alternative spaces require
Piotr knew that in One-Party regimes they hear the word
Today we are sinner-saints with a Radical Worry List:
And I have all this stuff in my head: hermeneutics and
I had a dream about Piotr recently. The Fourteenth Dalai
Ringing The Bell Backwards
Furious Power, Fierce Fate
My writing about the art world has been a kind of cold
armistice between these two terms. Pessimism of theory,
optimism of art making.
relentless opposition the game consists of seeing how
near you can get to extinction without the neutralisation
that awaits you as a mortal on our overexposed piËd-a-
terre. The modernist film jams, begins melting and the
picture turns black. And yet there is this extraordinary
will to live of art, even as the chessboard has been
stripped and the bodies carried off the stage. Art is
sentenced to a stiff rope and short jump aesthetic and yet
it jokes about it with a kind of gallows humour. Like Ad
Reinhardt's perky stammer, "the end of art is art as art.
The end of art is not the end". Like Sam Beckett's, "I can't
go on, I'll go on".
triply distill this already hard liquor for drinking at art's
wake. Now we have an Information Age update on this
condition, i.e. that art is dead, but its support systems
remain. From Allan McCollum's Surrogates in the States
to Peter Tyndall's detail / A Person Looks At A Work of Art /
someone looks at something here in Australia - jokes are
made on the art gallery setting and its frameworks of
display, parodies of generic packaging and namebrand
products.
Now Art, New Art, How Art, Who Art. Capitalism, like
trouble, rides a fast horse. Yet despite the Post-
Everything climate where if you believe in anything it is
probably wrong, there are still those who fly to
artmaking as though to a refuge. Like friends who are
likely to stay alive, knowing somehow that you expect it.
I drag them or they drag me like a tattered baffled army
over one more ambush: Art is just another obsessive
form of capitalist production. Blam! Art is the
exhausted code of a doomed class. Blam! There is
nothing at stake in the visual arts anymore. Blam! Blam!
Blam!
some antidote to the cynical, auraless TV test-pattern
nothingness of everything else. Art's central principle is
this: to recover more than has been lost. Not just to goose
the market along. Art is a hard habit to support and a
harder one to quit.
utopian vision? No. It is like that knowledge between
love affairs, that the heart is made to be broken, and after
it has been mended, to be broken again. It's a hardwon
knowledge that grows up not knowing it is knowledge
at all.Artist Descending a Staircase
another cigarette with a spent Bic lighter, dear Piotr,
Olszanski Piotr, the young beanpole Pole. Or at his
place, lean and loping with black coffees in polystyrene
cups brought from the restaurant over the road, because
his cupboards were always bare (though once he put a
book on Polish logic in the freezer compartment of his
vintage fridge - as a work). Poor Piotr he spent all his
money on canvas, stretchers, paints etc. He had a soft,
beautiful face, fair beyond fairness, but strained often,
smudged under the eyes, and dark, nearly purple lips.
Piotr was an art insomniac, endlessly painting,
endlessly making sound tapes and super-8 films, fecund
always with projects. In those last months, after a bitter
winter in Europe, and back here in Sydney, he was
filling notebooks with emblems from electronic circuitry
- resistors and voltage dividers - struggling like Houdini
against knots. "Everything is falling into places", he said
to me then.
burn to ours with its shiny dentless cars whose hubcaps
reflected stunning sunsets. He had grown up under the
long shadow of war, his father Rylko an "inzynier
architekt" had gone loopy walking barefoot in the snow.
His mother Maria Szweda, inclined to carry her
imagination above history by way of sublimated leaps
into religious exstasis... and why not? Poland had
known too much history - invasions, divisions,
humiliations, rapes. 1 in 5 dead: 6 million of thirty
million.
home and never return - change your life, your lover,
your location. Don't let the past catch up, otherwise each
fresh start becomes the double of a deathly memory. He
left Poland for Amsterdam, when he was 25, in 1979.
Three years later, after a trip through Asia, he came to
Australia where he was in awe of the Southern skies.
They became screens for him to project the residue of
apocalyptic memories and a kind of stubborn hope. His
last paintings showed a heart leaned on by two skies: the
cold and harsh winters of Poland and the hot dry
summers of Australia, while they aspired to an upper
space from which the intimidating reality of human
nature may appear as smeared gesticulating forms and
colours. Cataclysms of predawn decadence done in a
rigid tinsel, with world power grids demarcating
interplanetary values, a fractal space where Franz Marc
translated into wedges of light the electromagnetic
formulas of Nikolas Tesla.
culture about to jettison its innocence, Piotr's name
became "pee-otter". Confronted with that cul-de-sac of
double consonants, Australian tongues had a hard time
unscrabbling the ghostly trill. The result was like gills
gasping for water. It makes you think that identity is a
difficult and painful process to accomplish. Speak a
foreign language and you ricochet off syllables like a
pinball on a machine, lighting up all the wrong bulbs,
missing all the bonus scores until inevitably the sentence
ends with a TILT! But how does the native say
"controversy"? Very few people when teaching a
foreigner their own language admit limitations.
However you talk, you never saturate a linguistic code in
its fullness. Piotr would say "awangarde" and talk about
his early "actionistic" works.
living with perfor- mance artists Ulay and Marina
Abramovic (allegorical lovers), known for their work of
tormented endurance and passive aggression,
Hearing/Touching/ Slapping each other. At Positive
Zero a music theatre in Amsterdam, they brought
together Tibetan Lamas and Australian aborigines. But
in 1980 Piotr gathered objects he found in a studio
gallery and built a pyramid to a small high window. He
climbed up to it, broke the mirror with a hammer and
not knowing what was behind it, jumped into the
unknown. A photographer in the courtyard below
caught him in a flying blur, a long streak with his feet a
few inches from the ground.
bore down on him. On the last day of April 1987, a cold
malevolent day, Piotr strung himself up with a
Kambrook electric cord from the top bannister of his flat
in Bondi, heels jarring on the stairs. The night closed in
on the flat. His flatmate had come home after an
exhibition opening, had been reading for an hour before
he saw him hanging, not standing, in the shadows with
his feet a few inches off a step. With my friend Julie and
his ex-wife Jill we went to the morgue in Arundel St
Glebe. Cramped in a Ford Escort we made our way
through the black ectoplasmic night to make an
identification. The girl with the name-list asked if we
wanted to see him on the video monitor or for "real".
This seemed ironic as Jill is a video artist. They wheeled
him out covered with a white sheet. They uncovered a
wrung face in a bruised, angry sleep. He must have bled
from the ears and nose. He didn't snap his spinal cord,
he asphyxiated slowly; his nerve relays like static, his
vision fuzzy-edged, consciousness a kid's toy winding
down, unedited rushes of a minicam film. Julie said he
looked like an Arnulf Rainer Totenmaske.
corpse was heavier still. Nobody deserves to die. Death
is a terrible thing to have to whitewash. I said I didn't
know what happened to people when they died, but
nothing in the universe is ever lost. Light becomes leaf
becomes coal becomes light.
20th century. (A postcard he sent from Gdansk on his
birthday, 4.2.87, apropos our disastrous relationships
with women: "One day we will sit on your grey sofa and
laugh it out. One day - in 13 years time we will not
notice 2000 to come".)
sand. A police chopper overhead fine slices the
atmosphere into altered states of movement. Don't look
down the years they say, or it's "whoosh!". Like the
coyote in Roadrunner, you hear a little "whoosh" and find
yourself in a museum or a job packing crates of artworks
or a room full of ambulance men dropping ash on your
carpet and there you are outlined in chalk. Or like the
coyote Joseph Beuys spent a week with in a New York
gallery playing with copies of the Wall St Journal. Wall
Street where we hear another "whoosh", a cross between
the sound of a roulette wheel and space invaders, where
stock prices don't represent real values, only capitalism's
will to power. If the rich could hire other people to die
for them, the poor would make a wonderful living.
University and the way he combined dharma and art "as
a way of preparing a living body on the planet". He
showed me a book where Beuys was in conversation
with the Lama Sogyal Rinpoche. Tibet was the highest
country in the world (4000 -16000 ft). "Dalai" is
Mongolian for ocean. The soldiers of Communist China
had sent the Dalai Lama into exile in India where the
Tibetan script originally derived from around 350 AD.
Monks in burgundy robes and pilgrims travelling by
horse, yak or dzomos garlanded with small bells, were
no longer welcome under the flat roofs of turquoise tiles.
Prayer flags no longer fluttered from the tall masts in the
middle of their courtyards.
there were copies of Flash Art. His work, after the
Conceptual-Konstructivist works in Poland, was
politicised in Holland where he showed with other East
Bloc artists. In one of his works there he painted a series
of portraits from the front page of a Dutch newspaper:
Sadat, Haig, Mugabi, Aldo Moro etc. He slept in the
gallery for the duration of the show. Later, however,
especially here in Australia, he succumbed easily to the
great capitalist turnover, and he changed his styles like
jackets: Zeitgeist Neoexpressionism looked like it was
offering the opportunity for lucrative angst; then Neo-
Geo with its cost-effective catatonia seemed all the rage.
No artist who cares about his or her work wants it to
stand on such slippery ground. Piotr couldn't sell a
picture. Each week there was a new flavour. He lost
focus and that led to a kind of fatal abstraction: the
Sublime impaling the struggling soul like a moth on a
pin, the Absolute caught in a mousetrap.
Art's invitation isn't just to pleasure, but to struggle, hard
and sharp, and often closer to self-annihilation than to
gratification. Or so it seemed, downwind of the
bullmarkets.
least I would - he was always so preoccupied, so
abstracted, as though his mind was on some far off
sounds (spitballs from collapsing stars) or as though his
astral body was already in Tibet. My feeling was that
pop culture has a way of jelling social life different from
High Art. And in the teeth of the New Right's reaction,
popular culture is more a dialogue than a canon. But
Piotr's attitude to network TV was, You are the world,
brother, with its family objections to me.
fact that incidents do not exist anymore except as a series
of cuts: cut to wife fleeing in terror down the bitumen /
cut to bikie's hand on the throttle / cut to motorbikes
whizzing by as a rubber ball and a child's shoe bounce
into frame. Then there was a cut to that week's Lotto
draw, the number-balls rattling down the transparent
conduit to a race-caller's commentary. Then the AIDS
"Grim Reaper" ad came on - the ultimate State lottery
done as Biblical punishment. It frightened the fuck out
of Piotr who'd had a minor urinary infection at the time.
He had been to Europe to see his girlfriend in K–ln, his
mother in Gdansk and an old art buddy in Milan. This
was the winter of '86 - '87. He hadn't been back home for
7 years. "When you're a boy in a small town," wrote
Peter Schjeldahl, "you practise dying, deliciously, late in
the day on soft lawns with mother nearby, about to call
you into dinner".
interruptions of thought. The glitches, the breaks or
jumps of irregularity in sound and visual tracks. Can we
ever master them? Can we manage the little deaths and
losses by and in representations? Because now I'm
writing this to get over his loss. And I don't know if
going over it all again makes it lighter or heavier. Death,
says Sontag, is so unremittable, so non-negotiable.
Suffering is so untidy. The suicide of a friend is not just
a semiotic quest self-divisible by one. We were all
implicated and we all have to walk a few miles in his
shoes before we tag him, ship him back to Poland and
forget. The heart's not a computer. If it were it would
say: I can't handle your transaction now. Happy
Birthday Australia.The Silence Of The Sirens
song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such
a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that
someone might possibly have escaped from their
singing, but from their silence certainly never." (Kafka,
Parables)
here and overseas, and the logistics of cremations (we
played his own shimmering sound piece Mizja-Za-Pa
and also the Tantras of the Gyuto: a terrifying metrical
chanting sung in the lowest part of the bass register by
40 Lamas), there was nothing to do but weep and walk
the windswept cliffs of Bondi. Now it seems like years.
But so far his mother has yet to receive his ashes and
therefore grieve for him properly. Jill said something
about Polish red tape and I suspect it might be
insufficient postage.
only afford leaf or what they call "shake". It doesn't even
get you high, it's just the contact, the mesmerizing
gathering of the smoke itself, the deep inhalations, turn
and turn about. There is this need to link desire with
burning, to procure carbonised flowers for the blood in
doubt, a way of dealing with fallen regimes of meaning,
to let us know that we are Tollund peat or dreams
thrown on cigarette smoke, to remind that the earth is a
cinder in an infinite night that gives back nothing.
hassles. Red tape again. This was enough to activate his
Eastern Bloc hermeneutics of suspicion. There is a
surplus of informing. Anonymous phone calls, letters
weave a blanket of indeterminations over the surface of
control so that one can keep participating in plots and
blackmarket deals. The delay meant however that he
would be able to attend the opening of a Christmas Art
Show where his work and the work of his German
girlfriend would be hung among the other artists. In fact
Piotr had much to do with the organising of the
exhibition itself. As it turned out the others didn't hang
the work. So when he turned up unexpectedly it was
somewhat embarrassing for his friend, who shared in the
curatorial responsibility and was taking over Piotr's flat.
Friendship is ambiguous sometimes, pointing to vast
terrains of emptiness in each other.
no hostility, people simply become too familiar with
turning away, with abnegation. There was more to
make Piotr paranoid. A cruel review by a critic who has
no idea how difficult it is to actually make work. A State
gallery that hung on to his work, promised they would
buy it, for months and months, then didn't. But the State
- East or West - exists to depopulate an excess, rather
than to populate an order.
longing to see Medi in K–ln. He kept saying the word
she had told him over the phone, stretching the syllables
over the long distance line: fan-taas-tic! fan-taas-tic!
across the tiddly sea.
idiom, Washington equals Canberra and Sydney gets
translated as New York. The problem is Sydney
cynicism. Ambition is its sex drive. If it wasn't for
competition Sydney artists wouldn't have intercourse.
"I'm OK, you're not OK" is Sydney's hump-along. Hence
its flourishing culture of arts administrators and coffee-
fetchers, its Assertiveness Trainers and Good
Weekendniks, its middlemen and middlewomen, its
Influence Skillspeople and its hot-from-the-Fine Arts
Departments-majored-in-Museum Studies curators. If
Piotr had lived more vicariously he might have been
alive today.
sophisticated management techniques, need bankers,
lawyers, real-estate agents. Here even radical art
secretly hopes for the maintenance of power structures in
which their work can be tolerated, purchased, cherished
as art.
culture and they take out their Kalashnikov rifles,
whereas in our Supermarket Democracies they take out
their chequebooks. Here the Old Left and the New Right
are the only options. The Soviet regime was once
required by the West in order to sustain the West's own
illusion of freedom. Now, through the Glasnost darkly it
is less possible. Now self-cancellation becomes the
ultimate form of freedom. We are in the age of Stalin's
holidays (John Forbes); when Lenin says, "Coca Cola -
It's the Real Thing" (Komar and Melamid). One needs an
enemy at all costs, even if it means that the only enemy
to be found is oneself. Now academics and marginals
are no longer opposed but are one and the same. Now
Heads of Art Colleges write subversive manifestoes,
establishing radical texts into reading lists, course
structures, bibliographies, assessment procedures. Now
unreconstructed Frankfurters can't tell a bucket of blood
from a restaurant where seven waiters bring you the
Moet-Chandon. Now, if you play your cards right, and
make like Jay Gatsby, "an unbroken series of successful
gestures", you'll be farting through silk.
we don't want to be locked up by thin money; we do
want some critical success plus perks (visiting teaching
gigs, artists-in-residence). We align ourselves with a
dissident tradition (rads, alchies, junkies, crack-ups,
suicides) and we want the Real Money in film and
paperback contracts. We are caught between the
loneliness of a long-distance set of values and the Vanity
Fair celebrity heat of Francesco and Julian and Laurie.
blood sugar levels, anamorphosis and returned MSS, Lee
Remick and the Recession, Terence Trent D'Arby and
Eugene Terr'Blanche, the fairy tales of the Left and
postblahblahblah.
Lama was in it looking serene. But instead of his
burgundy and saffron robes, he was wearing an old
butcher's apron.
People are trying to be busy, too busy: daylong do this
People are trying to be cool, so cool they look like they've
People are trying to be Nerds, they watch Garbage of the
For William James the continuous self was a belief
A stone lies in the river and a log jams up against it.
Stories last longer than people, stones than stories, stars
Shared memories help. Love lasting as long as there are
As I sit typing and following my breath going out there
This is a kind of oblivion we have sometimes, we
The sea half replies to these questions that our bodies
After Poland, Piotr and I walked the cliffs around
If Piotr and the surfer swapped bodies? The surfer
Van Gogh: "The more I think it over, the more I feel that
The principle of art is to recover more than has been lost.
To get to Europe Piotr had to work. Most of us do.
To make money Piotr had to pack and crate artworks for
In K–ln, love failed him. His whole being leaned
Writing bleeds as much as it nourishes, obfuscates as
In the West the division between the sexes has never
In Gdansk there were the effects of the Chernobyl
Back in Sydney he was fragile and watery and had been
A computer game developed in the West is called LIFE.
And now they're telling us that computers can get
What if the virus broke through the Iron Curtain Defence
We are all taking part in a war no one can see. Piotr
You can kiss someone goodbye and then a truck runs
You remember a song long forgotten, and forget it again,
I am reading Art Forum and suddenly it seems a
There's just too much traffic, we're lost in the aisles of the
How are we making contact? How aren't we making
In Tibet state oracles look for reincarnations of
A small and infinite landscape full of questions.
A lot of force is necessary to challenge life. We are here
Most of us feel we're too unbalanced to brood on the
Let me end in hesitation: two discarded epigraphs -
George Alexander
People Are Trying To Laugh
do that be here be there buy this sell that gimme gimme
gimme metropolitan rag. The self-obsessed, hey-why-
shouldn't-I-get-mine?, would be fine if it didn't put
friends into a kind of moral coma, force love to lose its
sense of timing, for it's often not how well you love as
when you love, that's crucial. Too busy to abandon
typewriters, mixing boards, darkrooms, rehearsal
studios, to talk a jumper off a ledge. Some people would
sell their souls for an economy flex-fare ticket.
got cramp. Piotr and I walking past the anorexic rich
sitting under the neon at Lamrock cafe - they look
affected and affectless. People at the Picadilly (what a
feminist acquaintance called Pick-a-Dicky), everyone
looks like they stepped off a Calvin Klein ad or are
aspiring to blow-up status in Interview magazine. The
clothes look oddly out-of-scale too: oversized kiddy
wear, braces and long shorts (kneebusters) or Daddy's
dinner jackets. They dance to James Brown like they
were sucking Arctic mints. The DJ doesn't groove, but
toys with the participatory narcissism in cruel cat-and-
mouse games with the dancefloor. In fact it's closer to an
insider-trading floor filled with postadolescent futures
brokers. It's a behaviour not a power, a concept not a
struggle. But if you say there is no duende here, none of
the fire that is the constant combustion of mortality, if
you say there is no blood knowledge here, they just
advise you to clean your display screen. And then make
love to you in the language of a prospectus.
Rich and Famous and Leave it to Pee Wee Herman. Out of
the deadly suburbs of nowhere people get fried in the
cross-circuits of Fad Tribalism. They eat Fritos, Natchos,
Cheez Wiz, Frozen Pizzas and CrackerJacks, read armed
service manuals and worship 50s Packards with bodgie
tail-fins. They believe in White Noise Suprematism and
press their faces against copy machines. They exist in an
economy where low grade junk bonds pay higher
interest rates than regular bonds.
People are trying to make gossip a form of participatory
democracy. Gossip is a form of prestige, opportunity
and the illusion of power. Gossip becomes the only
means of being able to say, "I am a part of this society".
People are trying to invent a new kind of laughter. It
racks you as unexpectedly as vomiting and you're not
quite sure whether it feels like an improvement on it.Stones, Stories, Stars
Charms, VÈvÈs, White Magic
constructed out of the endless sequence of thoughts
which overlap and in the process pass along an illusion
of ownership, "like the log carried first by William and
Henry, then William and Henry and John, then by John
and Peter, and so on". All real units of experience
overlap.
Dead leaves, branches caked with mud, collect around.
Weeds settle and birds make a nest and are feeding their
young among blossoming water plants. Then the river
rises, the earth is washed away, the birds migrate, the
flowers wither and the branches drift away. No trace is
left of the logged island, but a stone submerged by the
water: such is the self - the body's deterritorialisation.
than stones. Piotr painted stars.
marks to read. The contextual frame becomes clearer,
like reflections in stilling waters. Re-membering nights
with Julie and Jill and Kurt jamming in the Surry Hills
studio. Everyone improvising music, adding bits like
components of some carbon compound, like bio-tech
rehearsals for leaving the body. "The eyes seeing the
response of eyes / Bring out the stars, bring out the
flowers". (Robert Frost)
is a space just before the in-breath comes back in. It
might occur to me at this point that the next breath may
not come and I may suck it in, not letting it happen by
itself. But if I can let myself keep experiencing that
moment when nothing exists, right at the end of
exhalation, I begin to learn how to let go. Briefly I am nobody.
practise it, but somehow we know it will end. That
flickering here-and-gone thing lives in rhythm, of tides
and of music. It's in the syncopation which doubles the
value of the heartbeat, where the moment of fulfillment
is the moment of spending. It's in the drumming, time-
milking wrists of Africa. It's in most soul-funk
improvisation when they're nailing on the One, keeping
that ride thing happening (like the surfer sitting the
current as if it were a horse, riding its relay), when they
get a centre to focus on while applying quantum
mechanics to the Newtonian physics of the groove.
frame. The sea breathing its green pulse. The endless
kneading of the bread. The sea is uneasy marble, blue
mud, grape-bloom silk, and yet these are not the sea,
they are static instants, hence untrue. They simply tell
you about the sea going by. The sea never returning to
the same beach once.
McKenzie's Point to Tamarama. We watched the surfers
work their skatey little boards - triple-finned jobs with
vÈvÈ emblems and day-glo legropes. In fluro wet-suits
they looked like rubbery tropical fish, the last sun of the
year drying their backs in a mosaic of tiny shatterings.
Beyond the punchy shorebreak they were taking off the
top into double-ups, hitting the lip with its blistering
blowbacks, and going through the lip and snapping
back. The good ones working their way across the face
of the waves with a few S-turns. Piotr said if only he
could swap bodies! The surfer gaining speed across the
face of the wave was spending his gravitational
advantage as the wave steadily regenerated beneath him:
it was a perfect matching of rates, if only this precession
could go on forever! The surfer makes a reentry and
achieves free-fall - whoosh! - over the white water
floater, but then the wave peters out, and the surfer stalls
in the cutback.
would become a 14 year old perfect master, a roshi,
swami or middleaged realised being. Piotr would
become a waxhead that said: "Sometimes I feel so happy
/ Sometimes I feel so blue - I mean surf that bro, slash,
slot and float it, bus in and amp out of the reckless wash
of snit-snit bubbles, each a galaxy in itself!"
there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."Present Indicative
There was no grant money - he didn't seem to fit
anywhere except as a multicultural. The State Gallery
said no sale. The Museum sublimates work into a form
of ultimate merchandise, by the sacralising entry into Art
History or, at least, the Trustee's catalogue of purchases.
The Museum is not looking to discover great works, it
constructs them and burnishes them with "aura".
Grace Fine Art. He liked it there and they accepted him
back after his trip away.....but it made me think: does an
original valuable painting possess "aura" for the person
who dusts and wraps it? And, apropos Benjamin's
discussion of the loss of aura in photo-mechanical
reproduction, doesn't the cheapest print of Raphael's
Madonna in the bedroom of a Polish peasant in Sopot
have all the magic of an icon? Now, maybe, only dealers
have "aura"?
forward for 14 months. Waiting for the passport kept
him suspended in the air. Magnetised by "fan-taas-tic",
the word's warm breath fogged the future. Medi had her
own problems: a serious operation, struggle, poverty.
Piotr wrote to me on New Year's Eve, 1986: "Fire is
burned, warm ashes amongst mostly cool coals...Every
day I adopt myself better and better to the new situation.
Basically I'm glad that I finally made the journey. For all
those 14 months of my solitude I preoccupied my mind
too much with false dreams. Now the reality of day to
day living is bringing me back to myself. The context,
Europe, with its old grey cold monuments is reinforcing
the feeling of familiarity. That helps me seeing the
actual situation of drained love as something natural -
hence, no regret, no pain." What then? The certainty of
loneliness, that there is no one and one is no one? That
everything is motionless at the midpoint of the leap into
the void? "I cannot make any conclusion now. I don't
want to sum it up now, yet I need this evaluation, write
down in clear way all that is happening and is unclear
yet has the definite direction - apart."
much as it enlightens. It sucks air and peels the flesh
from the subject. It digests, dissolves, dispels.
been more marked, but never have women and men
become more exchangeable. In the East people are not
looking to communicate with each other because it is
already happening outside anybody's control.
Totalitarian strength is good for sex. Fascism has a lot of
respect for the libido. In the East men establish what
should and what shouldn't turn you on. In the West it is
women. Women and men take turns to be sex objects: a
cock becomes a frightening abyss, a hand with no
fingers; a cunt is all muscle, a hand that is all thumbs. In
the West AIDS assures that fucking will be the means to
the end; here everyone wants the next fuck to be the last.
In the East, even when the Churches are empty the
people listen to the priests with hands on the organ, and
AIDS is the John Paul II of viruses; there the next fuck is
the first.
disaster. With anxiety, Piotr told me that on crisp
mornings warnings of radium counts were given, and
everyone stayed indoors even as the sun was out. His
mother gave him a crystal pendulum and a Polish Bible.
He met a Polish girl from his childhood.
prone to the common cold virus, and with it some
pneumacocci, some infection. East and West were
complicit in a precise historical-political intersection: the
West's AIDS panic met East Bloc Nuclear Disaster. Piotr
was drawing endless Tesla Coils and parallel circuits,
they were sketches for paintings.
The rules of LIFE are elementary: Picture a grid, each
square is a "cell". Each turn of the game called a
"generation" determines a cell's fate. A living cell
bordering on two or three living neighbours survives.
With fewer neighbours a cell dies of isolation, with more
it is fatally stifled by overpopulation. A dead cell
bordering on exactly three living cells is "born" and
becomes a live cell. The patterns are often hypnotically
beautiful until the almost inevitable end: a stable "still
life"; a loop where a colony pulses between two patterns;
or a blank dead screen. Exceptions to extinction are the
hardwon self-replicating patterns.
viruses. It might start with a simple seasonal greeting on
a PC. Now when a program gets loaded from the disc
(like Listeners), the virus goes with it and is activated in a
Dos command like DIR or COPY. The virus is
transferred to your hard disc or any floppy that is
running in the machine. The virus then replicates itself
four times. Chews up all the information leaving them
blank and unrecoverable.
system? East of the Urals a technician sweats into his
grey overalls. His computer is malfunctioning and is
programmed for military thriller games involving hot
lines and instant decisions. In milliseconds you must
juggle time, temperature, filters. Check valves,
condensers and core vessels. Everything is modifying
everything else. If you lose that water in the pumping
system say hello to Pine Gap and find out what to tell the
Central Committee. Liquids flow and colours change as
heat rises or sludge builds up. Warning bells ring. Red
light on red telephone flashes.
began to feel people were following him. He thought
Death was living in his loins. No one could help him.
He took the phone off the hook. And courageously,
precisely, he took himself out.Long Distance Calls
them over. The moment before, you thought they were
safe.
from which nothing follows.
senseless activity savagely outstripped by the reality of
...reality, of the Social Security Office in the high-rise
shopping mall at Bondi, where a black guy in a track suit
chants in a kind of mantra, "Dey tryin to destroy our
people. Dey ask us for urine and dey take our blood.
Dey ask us for urine and dey take our blood. Dey ask us
for urine and dey take our blood." He then turns to the
uniformed guard, "You look sick. If I was you, I'd hang
meself."
department stores of Information. Too much software,
hardware, fleshware, too much in-put and too many
connect-time charges.
contact? You'll have to speak up I don't have a
telephone.La Gl’ce Sans Tain (The Transparent Mirror)
predecessors in curious cloud formations, seen, for
example, in the North East from Lhasa. Or if the dead
Dalai Lama begins to face South after facing East, that's
where to look. Or if on a wooden pillar on the North
East side of the shrine there develop strange star shaped
fungi, the direction for the new Dalai Lama is sought
there. If the child chooses prayer beads or a walking
stick. If the village where the child comes from suffers
hard times, like hailstorms when the barley is ripe....
Everything means too much. Or does not signify
anything other than its event. Whales beaching, or
aboriginal deaths in custody, or two paintings by Barnett
Newman called Now.
to use ourselves up, to burn out. Piotr is like that
character in a surrealist poem that demanded the sun in
the middle of the night and the police were called. There
must have been an incredible sun within him, to be on
his own, to miss a dinner date, to take the phone off the
hook...it was a certainty that did not require others to
warm him when required. He was not manic-
depressive, he didn't have an insecure self image or
groundless feelings of unworthiness. Maybe it was some
moth-and-candle preoccupation, fed by hopeless love
and some post-Chernobyl fear, maybe it was just a
sudden desire to eff the ineffable, pull his own switch
and complete his own circuit.
past. We take each day at a time, play it by ear. Most of
us don't understand what we know. My cattledog
teaches me existence without thought, guilt, ugliness.
We play in some prepsychological way with immediate
sensations, appetite or bounce. Let blank be. Here in
Bondi Coppertone summers persist: an atmosphere of
chlorine and coconut oil, pastries and seaweed, baked
bread and petrol. People dress in the colours of
industrial safety materials, or lead, black, chalk, white.
They laugh only on their left side.
Palinurus: Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden
keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we
run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure
lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink
them, and we choose our direction. (The Unquiet Grave)
Susan Sontag: Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don't
have to chain me. Stand back! Roll it up - up, up.
And...down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I'm
on my feet again. See, I'm starting to roll it up again.
Don't try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could
tear me away from this rock. ("Debriefing", in I, etcetera)