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.
On the contrary
I think it’s just [about] really trying to put yourself in the pain of the person you disagree with most. I think that’s the trick. If you put yourself in that place where you really understand why they think the way they think and why they behave the way they behave, that it comes from this pain they have – once you put yourself there and you start writing jokes, you have a different kind of freedom, and I think that comes from compassion.
Through the looking glass
My research and practice centres on the home as an ideological, political and economic contradiction. Images and screens and consumer, decorative and utilitarian objects all function in the home with a level of deceitfulness. Aside from their utility or aesthetic pleasure, these images and objects enter the home with ulterior motives, as they are key to the dissemination of the neoliberal agenda – an agenda we may only be subconsciously aware of. However, Gestures of Retribution considers the exterior of the domestic object to be masking that object’s use as a physical, not ideological, weapon. The objects used in the work are not ‘real’ – that is, they have no physicality but are photographs of objects that I’ve extracted from the internet and projected into a darkened void.
Up for debate
Debate emphasises different ideals. You are forced to argue for positions you don’t believe and, regardless of your stance, you learn always to consider the opposing perspective. That is quite literal: after preparing your case, you turn to a different sheet and write the four best arguments for the other side or mark up your argument for its flaws and inconsistencies. Paper and pen. That is countercultural at a time when we expect a tight nexus between speech and identity, and I think there is something to be gained from such role-play. By relaxing our certainty, we leave open a crack through which something like empathy might arise, through which a richer connection might form.
The great divide
In the ’80s, and maybe the early ’90s, fashion was a political statement just like art was…and real art wasn’t about selling out or succeeding in a mainstream context; it was the opposite. The whole idea was that you didn’t want to conform. Anyone who was trying to make money off your art or helping you make money was corrupt or compromised. The last thing you did as an artist or a writer in the ’80s was self-publicise – it was so naff, it wasn’t done. Street cred was what mattered. And I’ve been watching, with social media and the internet, this 180-degree shift over the last few decades.
Put your house in order
For me, collage is about relationships. I’d written the poem using Cicero’s first speech but sensed there should be something more. And I was just so in love with the Latin text on the left-hand side of the book that I wanted to do something with that. I spent some time going through my book collection, stumbled upon Australian Housing in the Seventies and made the connection.
It takes two
Most actors and painters and writers have got this strange combination where the public looks at them and thinks, Oh, I see that person on film all the time; they must be doing so well, and then if you get to know them you know that the last time they worked was four years ago. That’s a writer’s life.
Ask me anything
You don’t ever want to go so off the rails that you encourage somebody to blow their life up thoughtlessly. It was always helpful to remind myself, ‘The most I can do is offer someone a useful suggestion that they will consider. They still have to make their own decisions based on how they want to live their lives.’ If you take yourself too seriously in that position, you feel like, my God, I’m responsible for the wellbeing of all of these strangers, what if I mess up?
The comfort of objects
Objects can be powerful mnemonics that connect us to stories and the places they were acquired. I have always had an interest in the things we collect and the way we arrange them in our homes. Being an artist, I like to create a place for these objects – an installation of sorts – within the domestic space, for my pleasure and for those who visit. The objects that appear in Open House are still lifes that the sitter interacts with and gives reason to their being.
Past-making within the present
The Marranbarna Dreaming story is a central story to Gudanji, and that essential story forms our beingness. My kids grew up hearing that story from when they were tiny babies – they heard it through my words and they heard it through the words of their grannies, so they could embed the story within their own sense of identity and then retell it. Both of my girls are mums now, and they retell that story to their daughters all the time, so it just becomes a normal part of who and how they are as Gudanji people.
Always was, always will be
If Aboriginal people are all dead, you don’t have to negotiate a treaty with us and you certainly don’t have to go around feeling guilty about stolen land and stolen wages and stolen children; the subjects of that injustice don’t exist anymore if you choose to believe that we’re dead or all assimilated, which isn’t the case. It’s a very practical kind of assimilation strategy.
The sentimentalist
I’ve positioned myself as somebody who’s constantly going through the trash of yesteryear with my raccoon paws and saying, ‘Wasn’t it grand?’ I think it’s more that I’m drawn to things I misunderstood rather than things that are just old, and I’m also interested in diagnosing the culture through what we loved, what we made and what we despised. It’s becoming much more clear to me the older I get.
Escaping the frame
All my work as a writer and activist over the last fifty years has comprised various attempts at what I call ‘escaping the frame of European colonisation, European story and European ways of telling story’.
