Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Lunch bars
From cream buns and vanilla slices to cheese-filled sausages and salad sandwiches, working-class culinary culture would not be the same without the lunch bar. Typically tucked away in a corner of the city’s suburban, industrial and commercial districts, lunch bars have sustained the work force with an array of no-frills fast food since the 1950s.
Cosy, all too cosy
I had such fun doing the project, which was sort of like organised yarn bombing... It was a project for a specific area, a swimming hole in a small town outside of Warrnambool, and I created floating waterlilies that went in the pond as well as birds and nests and things that went in the trees – about half-a-dozen pieces.
The watergaw
One of the first poems MacDiarmid wrote, with his new name and his new sense of what was required of his existence, was ‘The Watergaw’. No doubt it came as a bolt out of the blue and required much fastening to the jinker, but it reads like a bit of the earth’s speech. It’s a burn steadily chanting over the brae, as they’d say in his part of the world.
Possession
Bennett chose to excavate representations of colonial history. Old paintings, drawings, stamps, newspapers and textbooks – the kit and caboodle of scenes, images, stories and tropes that, in sum, form something like Australia’s visual common sense. It is just this assemblage that Gordon Bennett sought to unsettle in Possession Island.
Looking for Johnny Burnaway
In suburban Brisbane, Johnny discarded his teenage nickname, Zap, and adopted a new identity: Johnny Burnaway. The name, which he took from a minor character in Anthony Burgess’ cult novel A Clockwork Orange, served as both punk persona and an accurate description of his future.
The empathy machine?
A cursory Google search soon reveals that ‘VR as the ultimate empathy machine’ – as VR filmmaker and proselytiser Chris Milk calls his 2015 TED talk – is not just a niche academic research interest, it’s a movement. And like all movements, it has its prophets and zealots. According to Milk in a 2016 TechCrunch interview, VR promises the ‘democratisation of human experience’.
‘The True Hero Stuff’
I grew up in a Queensland still so saturated with racist ideology that my own identity was hidden from me until as a teenager I started bringing home questions about our family’s tan skin and curly dark hair. Forty years later I was very well aware that non-First Nations writers usually mine a vast well of ignorance and stereotype when they attempt to bring Aboriginal characters or themes into their work.
fifteen ways to be erased
When my son was surrounded by dozens of students, being called a faggot after his ‘friend’ announced to the whole cohort that Saul identified as pansexual, the new guidance counsellor spoke at length about the school’s supportive culture for queer kids and avoided the F-word in case saying it would manifest a faggot before him. Like to see that guidance councillor de-escalate a fist at the point it regrades a face. Like to know the last time someone reduced him to a noun.
In case of education emergency…read this
Indigenous peoples have a right to self-determine their education, as outlined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These rights recognise that systemic power has been taken away from Indigenous peoples due to the ongoing impacts of colonisation and that subsequent interactions with schools, education departments and universities occur within a power imbalance.
Conflicted feelings
Cardboard boxes have long been closely involved with artists and art institutions, playing a supportive and mostly unremarkable function. They’re taken for granted as banal, domestic, practical. By elevating the quotidian box, Santiago makes the invisible not just visible, but deserving and significant.
Handmade transcendence
Multimedia installation artist Shireen Taweel knows that copper often finds its way into objects of ritual. It adorns places of worship in the mosque; it fuels sites of public cleansing and sociality in the hammam; and it provides the vessels of eating and drinking via cookware. Copper is ubiquitous in the rites that bring humans together, worked and processed through collective labour.
Infinity plus one
It is a zero, measured at a millimetre, that represents the barrier between two lovers, no matter how closely they touch. It is that zero that Fielden drew 800,000 times to create The Veil, aided by an architectural pen and a magnifying glass. These thousands of zeroes are lined up neatly, row upon row, and from a distance they create the effect of blurring lines. Up close, however, are the zeroes: individual, spaced, painstakingly arranged, the task of many months.
