The art of appropriation

About the author

Brandi Salmon

Brandi Salmon is a proud Wiradjuri Artist living and working on Palawa Country in Lutruwita (Tasmania). She explores her Culture within her creative practice...

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FictionThe wind feels strange on his face. He hasn’t stepped outside in too long. He hesitates in the doorway. He really doesn’t have time for this. He needs to write that last chapter. He needs to finish what he has promised. What separates humans from everything else is our urge to create. He turns back towards his computer but then he is outside and locking the door and it feels like he has no agency over this. His body wants to go for a walk and so he must walk. He catches a glimpse of something bright poking up through the mulch at the base of a tree. A mushroom. Then suddenly they all come into focus. Mushrooms everywhere. Mushrooms on tree trunks like little shelves for fairy books, mushrooms in the mud and mushrooms in among the grass. There are even little net-like things around red stalks. Weird Cronenberg mushrooms, half fungus, half machine.

Resisting the ‘Content Mindset’

Non-fictionWhen we hear publishers, broadcasters or gallerists describing creative work as content, we know immediately that their approach is transactional. When we hear people describe their own work as content, they have already become complicit in their own exploitation. Social media profiles the world over feature bios identifying their owners as ‘content creators’: people who produce interchangeable matter to fill someone else’s space. Social media accounts are available free of charge on the basis that we will keep creating the work that feeds and evolves the algorithm, provides a culturally authentic context for ad placement and keeps us all scrolling – our number-one self-selected addictive behaviour.

Culture warrior

Non-fictionMishima’s use of science-fiction tropes to describe contemporary life alienated critics and readers in a way that his reactionary psychodramas did not. That the Mishima Incident was met with public horror does not obviate the fact that his literary overtures to Japan’s imperial past – replete with the veneration of death central to Bushido, and the taboo-ish trope of lovers’ suicide – were a hit with audiences. However eager the Japanese public might have been to forget World War II in its sincere commitment to postwar democracy, the past remains more legible than the future, let alone the present.