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.
‘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.
Within my blood, this love for land
Her artwork demands that the viewer spend time with it, too. Absorbing, thinking, feeling. It’s necessary to move closer to examine clusters and individual figures, noticing both patterns and anomalies. There are areas of saturation – overlapping bodies, crowds, bottlenecks, and areas of sparseness – absence, stillness, danger. In the serene, climate-controlled space of a gallery, the viewer is invited into notions of exclusion and dislocation.
Domestic. Suburban. Mother.
The materials that frequently appear in Brescia’s work – cleaning wipes and kitchen sponges, toilet cleaners and feather dusters – expose the comparative poverty of a canvas, or a piece of clay, as if regular artists’ tools can’t render feeling or emotion. They don’t say, this is what it’s like to be here, to be me.
Wish you weren’t here
You will put all your belongings in a locker. Everything. You can’t give your friend the photos you’ve brought. Photos of him in better days: on country days, dancing ceremony, playing footy, his kids. You put the photos and your jewellery, along with your phone and backpack, into the locker. You remember to take out your cardigan. You’ll need it to cover your suggestive shoulders.
The final choice
The Netherlands and Canada boast the most progressive VAD laws in the world. Time will tell how they might be tested. Time will also be the judge of whether Australian laws go far enough. Dementia Australia forecasts that 1.1 million people will be living with dementia by 2058.
Restoration, recovery, renewal
When Europeans first invaded Australia, it was common for them to comment on the verdant grasslands and gardens of the country. Few acknowledged – and most probably couldn’t conceive – that these features had been created by Aboriginal agricultural methods. Many of them, however, noticed the sudden deterioration in the colonial landscape and its soils after their arrival.
Into the deep
Although few scientists take seriously the aquatic ape theory that postulates our ancestors returned to the water for a time, there is no question our bodies remember other, older ways of being that connect us to the water.
