Things I am listening to and reading, hearing talked of and seeing about the place, always seem to end up having little conversations with the art I am making. So in attempt to get to the bottom of what it is I am doing here with this body of work, I think it is only appropriate for me to list these things I do so like to think about...
....ahhh - that little ditty references a lovely Foucault quote:
"I only write a book because I don't know exactly what to think about this thing that I so much want to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think."
- Michel Foucault. (2000) [1980]. "Interview with Michel Foucault". In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The
Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press, pp. 239-40.
His thinkings - my linkings...does it really follow, as the postmodernist nihilists would argue... that there is really truly nothing that has not been thought before?...
...which makes me always think of the particularity of the way I have been taught to think of time - and further to that, how it never made sense to me - how I feel a peculiar affinity to the conception of time realised in many Australian Indigenous groups - a cyclical notion rather than the Standardised Anglophile Linear Model....
....again this tangents into thoughts about education (and this is my worry in becoming a teacher) - I am still uncertain all this institutionalised education is actually good for you....
...here I want to argue with myself for a moment, I tend to do that a lot...
...so the list...
Listening:
A whole lot of ABC Radio National, or what I like to call 'the Public education channel' (I seriously believe I learnt more from "Rad. Nat" then I have at university). Musically, I am going with early Paul Kelly, Dan Sultan, Franz Lizst, Kev Carmody, and the The Herd: a rather broad variety of predominantly Australian music. Lizst is for when I am frustrated with the work I am producing for this project - it is like valium for me I think.
Reading:
Well, firstly lots and lots of articles and studies in journals, more than I would like to actually, this is due to my other studies: the themes include political science, sociological theory, science studies, educational theory and philosophy of education, anthropology, criminology (very odd discipline indeed), and art theory.
For this specific practical work I am doing though, I have touched base with a few old relics of our colonial heritage - Voss by Patrick White, The journals of James Cook by the man himself, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by A. Manguel & G. Guadalupi.
Watching:
The election coverage, too many current affairs programs, too much internet news.
All the time I am asking of these texts - Who is it we tell ourselves we are? - as Australians I mean, and How do we relate to this place we call Australia - how do we picture ourselves in it?
This is not in any way a quest to essentialise some notion of a singular "Australian vision" - I recognise further that these are old questions - but I do think that these are intriguing, pervasive, obsessive, seductive questions, especially in art.
In my travels through these - I revisted an old Radio National broadcast - a wonderful four part series
The Australian Landscape - A Cultural History
...I am off to listen to Part 4 now....
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