MELBOURNE NOW: EGYPT & SYRIA PROTEST FEDERATION SQUARE 25 AUGUST 2013

I haven't really been feeling very well over the past week or so, but dragged myself into Federation Square, Melbourne on Sunday afternoon to hear the talk given by Peter Tyndall and John Nixon in association with the Mix Tape exhibition at the National Gallery of Vitoria.  When I went outside, I was caught up in the huge protest against the recent atrocities in Egypt and Syria. The speakers delivered some stirring thoughts, the crowd was filled with passion and emotion, the police were standing by. I spent about 40 minutes walking through the crowd to identify those who looked calm amidst the rally cries and concentrated primarily on depicting, young people together, older people and men grouped in one spot. Here are some of the images.

On Photography - Piss Christ and Kulturkampf

I don’t believe in culture. Don’t believe artists produce it, for example, or that television advertisements create it. Analysis of culture, for example from a marxist perspective on capitalist monopolies, or from an epidemiological perspective on the causes of violence, require some initial leap of faith: you have to believe in culture as deterministic, cause and affect, a mechanism, or a force-field, when there is scant evidence of any of those.

In many theoretical perspectives culture is presented as a fog that needs peering through, an organisational chart, a guided tour rather than a lived experience. The word is a handy generalization, sure. You can look at the edges, borders and overlaps between geographies, histories, circumstances, and what those might have in difference or in common. But boundaries, epistemologies and zeitgeists are fluid, liminal, shifting, and no great help for getting to the heart of what's inside.

It would be dishonest, though, to leave what are popularly called the culture wars out of a discussion of modern photography. Conjoining culture and war leaves an impression in my mind of...something shapeless and vague, shadows in twilight perhaps, or Goya's giants endlessly bludgeoning each other.

Thinking about this is further complicated by the strategy I’m using that follows  Elaine Scarry’s critique of aesthetic critiques in On Beauty And Being Just. I’m using beauty in the sense of notability, like that black eye is a real beauty, or (from football) what a mark, you beaut!. Something notable, in other words, rather than something of beauty in the ordinary sense of being pleasing to the eye. Elaine Scarry wrote:

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.
and
The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.
(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)

Both arguments are in play in consideration of Andres Cerrano’s photograph Piss Christ. The photograph itself is described here, the artist’s website is here. I didn’t see the photograph when it was exhibited. I’m not familiar with the artist’s work, methods or rationale, or the series of photographs of objects in fluids of which it is part. My interest here is solely in the idea that its exhibition in Melbourne is storied as an engagement in a larger war of and on culture.

It will be no help referring to European statesman Otto Von Bismarck's difficulties with Catholicism in 1870s Western Europe, or referencing early twentieth century Italian Marxism, or the 1933 Säuberung.

I want to leapfrog those ideas into recent experience, into modern Melbourne. A further complication for me is some ideas from the study of macro economics. I have no background in the study of economics at all, but I am going to borrow ideas about exchanges from discourses on macro economics. My (limited) understanding is not all exchanges have to do with money, some are to do with ideas and associations and even making friends, but nevertheless play their part in a whole that is often, but not always, described as an economy.

The facts are straightforward. Pre publicity for an exhibition of Andres Cerrano’s photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 saw the photograph or its description included in prominent print and electronic media. The Catholic Church in Australia sought an order preventing the photograph from public display at the gallery in the Victorian Supreme Court, arguing precedents in both Canon and Common Law on blasphemous libel.

The Catholic Church argued "Both the name and the image Piss Christ not only demean Christianity but also represent a grossly offensive, scurrilous and insulting treatment of Christianity's most sacred and holy symbol. It is calculated to outrage the feelings of Catholics and other Christians."

The National Gallery of Victoria argued the photograph had been the subject of a television documentary, published in newspapers and books and its exhibition would not add to any perceived offence against the Catholic Church.

The Victorian Supreme Court rejected the application as having no foundation in law, and found no legal basis to prevent the exhibition.  "A plural society such as contemporary Australia operates best where the law need not bother with blasphemous libel," the court decided.

In the week after the exhibition opened the photograph was vandalised twice, leading to the arrest of three men, two of whom had acted in concert. Concerned that it could not prevent such determined attacks, gallery management closed the exhibition.

Using the term ‘calculated’ to describe the production and exhibition of this image places ideas about determinism, conspiracy, authenticity, and deception on the table. To paraphrase: blasphemous libel is a wrong social arrangement. In labelling the photograph art, including it in an exhibition, making it on object of sustained regard, the gallery is a willing accomplice to, or alternatively an unwitting element in, an overarching - devilish perhaps - subterfuge.

Holding the photograph in high regard certainly led to attempts to destroy it. But there is no evidence to support the existence of a calculating, conspiratorial, organized enemy force, no sign of an evil empire poised to make revolution for or against ideology, national self-determination or even religion. If it really were an engagement of a culture war there are no visibly organised protagonists beyond a few  ivory towers blasting away at each other’s values at megaphone volume.

The photograph did not produce a force field that compelled individuals to act in these ways. The artist didn’t produce a predetermined train of events. With no epidemiology of violence to trace, and no rapacious capitalist to blame, or media personality to boycott, the episode has become a muted controversy over artistic and curatorial freedom. But it is explicable in terms of spontaneity and self-organisation, terms often used to describe market economies and a free exchange of goods, or in this case ideas.

Arguments for and against exhibiting the work became more sophisticated. The second act of vandalism was more determined and certainly more complex, and through use of distraction and concurrent action, demonstrably more innovative than the first. These might not be predicted in theories of culture, but they are predicted and comprehensible in theories of markets. I guess the absence of any concrete transaction, for example money for service, undermines an economic perspective. But call the events a series of exchanges, rather than transactions for profit, with outcomes the result of self-organisation rather than any centrality of planning, and you get a glimpse of a free population testing, contesting, reformulating, rejigging, muddling through, as one economist I read put it, one way and another, the limits of its own freedom.

It just might be, from a secular Australian perspective,  that is all the culture wars are.

The last post in this series is here

On Photography - damned either way

Public interest in wrong social arrangements are the heart of most photographic controversies.

Two images come to mind in particular that illustrate tests of public interest,  one far too ordinary, the other not ordinary enough. Both were said, by contemporaries, to distract from, or amplify, somehow, wrong social arrangements.

There is a photograph archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, of  Alexandra Feodorovna, Anastasia and Olga Nikolaevna bathed in light, women of the Russian royal family in 1915, seemingly unposed.  The family are busy with needlework, one has her feet up, relaxed, ordinary, familiar even: there is a wrinkled rug in the foreground.  It feels candid, unforced, intimate, real, a photo from a family album, although it is not any more.  It is a moment and a history all at once, and now part of a greater story the library's collection frames - revolution, dislocation, suffering, murder. But perhaps "rare" is a somewhat misleading description: after the Soviet Union disbanded an estimated 150, 000 photographs of the Russian royal family were discovered in secret government archives, suppressed,  in the public interest, from public view by their communist successors for nearly 100 years

There is a photograph of film star Julia Roberts by Mario Testino for a L'Oreal cosmetics advertising campaign in 2010, happy, bright-eyed and unblemished. The photograph  and advertising campaign was banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority after complaints from Scottish  Liberal Democrat member of parliament Jo Swinson that the images were digitally altered, and "not representative of the results the product could achieve." Swinson is a long time campaigner against what she describes as overly perfect and unrealistic images of women in magazines and advertisements.

Communist political parties are, of course, long time campaigners against royal families. But it seems to me that the absence of any regal trappings in the photograph, the ordinariness of the setting and the commonplace and all too human appearance of the Russian royal family posed the greatest threat to the new russian ruling class.  Demonising a ruling elite is one thing. Disappearing women that look like someones sister, aunt or wife is something else altogether. The humanity of the women that belies perceptions of wrong social arrangements had to be disappeared as well.

In modern times it is "overly perfected and unrealistic images of women", and the "deification of beauty", that must be disappeared. Photographs of supermodel Christy Turlington and actress  Rachel Weisz have also disappeared from English magazines. Ms Swinson told the UK Daily Mail  there was sound medical evidence that faked - airbrushed or photoshopped -  images cause harm. "There needs to be much more diversity in advertising – different skin colours, body shapes, sizes and ages."

What was ideologically impermissible somewhere a century ago is essential to the public interest somewhere now. In parts of the world such contradictions are avoided by suppressing images of human bodies altogether. In Western tradition, the human body is central to our humanist  heritage and what we think and say about ourselves, although depictions of it are often contested.


Upon the Protestant reformation the Catholic Church compiled and circulated huge lists of forbidden books, and demanded the censorship of painting:

... all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust...

Seventeenth Century poet, polemicist and propagandist John Milton is often quoted arguing against clerical censorship:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties (1644)

Ironically, by 1744, Samuel Johnson was observing that a century of democratization of writing and publishing had rendered traditional systems for evaluating their worth shambolic. It was easy to publish and obtain books but difficult to trust their contents.

There are echoes of Johnson's world-weariness in controversies on photography today, and echoes of the old religious and political dogmas in conversations about them. Ironically, it may be that the failure of both religious dogma and political ideology to solve problems of wrong social arrangements that keep those controversies relevant.


The Australian Christian Lobby argued

...it is problematic to measure community standards by the number of complaints generated by a a particular broadcast or telecast. It would come as news to a great number of people within the community to learn that their view of the contemporary media environment was judged solely on their formally complaining...  (2011 Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee Inquiry into the Australian film and literature classification scheme pp10)


Historian Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Canberra Times

...the fact that an image or a bunch of words may offend someone and is therefore a reason to ban or severely restrict them is a Draconian and intolerant position. I'm offended by lots of things these days - Question Time, alcohol and cigarettes sold in supermarkets, reality TV and religious fundamentalism - but I don't use this as a reason to try to ban these things merely because it's just my opinion.

A very modern case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - An Angry Country?

Much has been written about the 2008 seizure of Australian artist Bill Henson’s photographs, and their subsequent restoration to his Sydney dealer, innocent, along with the artist, of overwrought allegations against them.

Child protection campaigners labelled Henson’s images of a nude thirteen year-old pornographic. Art critics argued the images were, well, art. Ultimately the independent Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the images a PG (Parental Guidance advisory) classification, and State prosecutors advised the child pornography charges against the artist would not succeed.

Watching an art gallery’s contents emptied into a truck on television I was grateful to whoever had thought the operation through: the police seizing artworks weren’t visibly armed. Later, as Henson’s photographs disappeared from the walls of Australian public spaces I wondered for how long?

There is, rightly, a great deal of sympathy and support for child protection campaigners. And like any other special interest involved in the political process those campaigners are expected to vigorously prosecute their agendas. However, as noted by sociologist Frank Ferudi and others, populist policy actors of all colours who adopt child protection agendas as their own simply cannot be trusted to act upon anything except self-interest, in the end. There have been some notable witch hunts in modern times that have ended without any beneficial outcomes at all, save for the self-advancement of those involved.

Worse, rapists have had their sentences cut, and victims brought to tears and bewilderment as newspapers seek to increase circulation with name and shame gambits. Criminal investigations, especially those involving crimes against children, have not been well served by regimes of continuous speculation. And there is evidence - for example the labelling of corporations as pedophiles - that the current panic over child protection serves only the political ends of ivory towers. Frank Furedi wrote:

Mention the word ‘child’ and people will listen. Raise the moral stakes by claiming that a ‘child is at risk’ and people will not just listen but endorse your demand that ‘something must be done’. For instance, campaigners against poverty understand that they are far more likely to gain sympathy for their cause by focusing attention on what is now called ‘child poverty’. It is as if abstract socio-economic injustices are simply not compelling enough on their own terms: they have to be recast as something afflicting children

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill writes: 

Everyone treats the ideal or at least the word freedom seriously. Everyone pays lip service to it...This does not mean, however, that freedom as a lived experience is not under threat. It absolutely is. Many of our core freedoms, especially freedom of speech, are being undermined by a political class that doesn’t trust us to live freely. But here’s the thing: such is the value still attached to the idea of freedom that now even attacks on freedom get dressed up as an expansion of freedom. Even the killing of freedom is disguised as freedom.

It seems fair to say that contemporary Australian creatives: artists, photographers, writers, publishers, film makers, polemicists, poets, and their audience, regard each other with suspicion. Photographs, web pages, television programs, newspaper articles, internet cartoons, broadcast pranks, speeches and even privately expressed opinions have all been discussed, dissected, boycotted, divested and otherwise sensationally prosecuted during the past few years.

There is a mood to compel the media to act for the public good, an expansion of media regulation to include public interest tests put to parliament (but defeated), a looming general election contested in part on issues of public interest and in part upon issues of free speech.  Where once free speech and public interest seemed inextricable, polemic is inexorably wedging them apart.

Newspapers’ circulation has fallen off a cliff.  Newspaper journalism is routinely outsourced overseas, our commercial TV networks are two-thirds owned by foreign banks, our commercial radio networks caught in spirals of cost-cutting and falling audiences. And Australians have turned their collective backs on government-approved and financed Australian films.

It is as if people can only bear to see and hear what is already known and agreeable.

The speed at which issues are churned online is overtaken only by the almost instantaneous coagulation of opinion around them. The occasional scholarly article lamenting, for example, media coverage of climate change issues, is liked and twittered and decontextualized and resignified at breakneck speed, contested and deconstructed and decried at length and likely to be of historical interest only long before any old fashioned op-ed or editorial response appears in the next edition of a daily tabloid or weekend broadsheet.

The sclerotic nature of internet discourse has been noted by many, an interesting counterpoint to what is  otherwise imagined as fluid lines of communication. To venture an opinion, for example on a blog, is to risk deletion. Anything you say can be held against you. Simultaneously, anything you say can be turned into something else - fixed! Somehow, it all seems to make sense, even if your original post had nothing to do with cats.

Durning the past few years Australians have campaigned for sackings, boycotts, internet filters, seizures, closures, divestments, damages, apologies, corrections, and even arrests over cultural artefacts, published words, pictures, videos, sounds, that for one reason or another became controversial. Alongside the large mass media outlets other, lesser, publishers have come under pressure: notably film festivals but also art dealers and even the management of assorted privately owned and operated public venues, like those hired for controversial Dutch politician Gert Wilders and British climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton.

But while there is a mood to allow the display of those publications, artworks, photographs, books, magazines, films, ideas, only if they are in the public interest, there is next to no clarity about what the public interest might be. Outrage has replaced clarity in so much of public discourse we can start to think about crossing out lucky and substituting angry in front of country.

At the very moment the freedom of unlimited communication beckons we rush to shackle ourselves in chains of mindless rage.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - Eyes In Skies

There is a scene in Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner which goes something like this:

Deckard: (pretending to be from the American Federation of Variety ArtistsConfidential Committee On Moral Abuses)  Oh yeah. I'd like to check your dressing room if I may.
Zhora: For what?
Deckard: For, uh, for holes.
Zhora:  Holes?
Deckard:  You'd be surprised what a guy would go through to get a glimpse of a beautiful body.
Zhora: No, I wouldn't.

Although it seems a little redundant to say so, the AustralianOffice of The Information Commissioner says there is a high level of community awareness of the use of surveillance cameras in our public places.

Former Assistant Privacy Commissioner Mark Hummerston says it is difficult to offer a single, consolidated figure of the number of surveillance cameras in Australia.  There are already 53 fixed surveillance cameras and 2 mobile camera-equipped vans operating in public places in central Melbourne alone.  Last year the Victorian State Government offered Melbourne local councils three million dollars to install more. At 30,000 dollars each, that’s an extra 100 to add to the unknown quantities already installed in public places.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance told ABC news last year “There’s a study out of the UK which shows, certainly in London, surveillance cameras have been responsible for solving one crime for every thousand cameras.” The Victorian Government recently ordered Victoria Police to audit the number and type of surveillance cameras in the State.

Despite Australian national privacy principles requiring that, where practicable, consumers must have the option to transact anonymously, every Melbourne taxi, automatic teller machine, train, tram, bus is camera equipped and many retailers photograph their customers. The Office of The Information Commissioner says concerns about surveillance cameras include misuse of stored photographs or videos, loss of anonymity, discomfort about being watched and the effectiveness of surveillance cameras achieving  their stated goal of crime prevention. Around eighty percent of people responding to surveys about surveillance cameras expressed no concerns about them at all. Five percent were 'very concerned.'

Last year the Melbourne Age newspaper bemoaned the spread of surveillance cameras as undermining “the sense of liberty that is part of the fabric of this city and this nation” (Saturday Age Editorial September 29 2012)  Brenna Krenus wrote a few days later that more cameras: “will not engender feelings of safety: they will heighten feelings of fear” (The Age October 2 2012).

Despite their ubiquity surveillance cameras do not unexpectedly present “an intentional intrusion (whether physical or otherwise) upon the situation of another (whether as to the person or his or her personal affairs) where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy; and the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities” (D Butler '(2005)'A Tort of Invasion of Privacy in Australia?’  Melbourne University Law Review 11)

What does present as intrusive, invasive and unexpected is a new generation of cheap, lightweight airborne cameras mounted on surveillance drones. There is a good example of their capabilities here on youtube

ABC journalist Mark Corcoran told the Sydney Morning Herald "The day is fast approaching where the small personal drone will be an obligatory part of the tool box for journalists, photographers and bloggers"

The Australian Privacy Foundation worried that Kate Middleton “and many other people besides can rest assured that their bare breasts are fair game, anywhere, any time,” after Australian Woman's Day published candid photographs of the pregnant Duchess in a bikini. It is legal to operate a remotely piloted drone in Australia below four hundred feet for non commercial purposes.  In Victoria it is illegal to knowingly use an ‘optical surveillance device’  to record a private activity without consent.

Anxieties about surveillance technologies are often expressed in the same vein as general concerns about photography: a potential loss of anonymity, discomfort about the photographic ‘gaze’, misuse, for example through publication, and the offensiveness of the images themselves. In one notorious case photographs of a dead child were obtained from a helicopter and published without the family’s knowledge.

The grieving parents wrote:

"We are not arguing the fact that the media have an important role to play, what we want is the media acting in a responsible, sensitive and ethical manner for grieving families such as ours and many others...At the time of Molly's loss of life we would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to share with the media in our own time and in our own words the story of her life”

As if to confirm the worst of general anxieties about photography, so-called ‘body scanners’,  cameras that see through clothes to the naked human body, are installed at eight Australian airports.

The Australian Government says The current generation body scanner is equipped with automatic threat recognition technology. This removes the need for screening officers to view detailed or ‘naked’ images and instead highlights areas of concern on a generic ‘stick’ figure. In addition, the body scanner is not able to store personal information about passengers or the screen display generated from individual scans.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - In Trouble?

A woman meets relatives in a busy inner city shopping strip. There is banter, hugs, and before they say their goodbyes, a moment to take a couple of photographs. Later, she relaxes over a coffee in a nearby cafe, peeking at the photos on her camera’s liquid crystal display.

The woman, a friend, a respected artist/photographer, writer and academic, had her camera out again several days later when she was approached by the cafe's owner, who said he'd had complaints from four other patrons that she was 'photographing children'  Being a mother herself and a woman of standing, she was naturally upset and confused by what sounded to her as an accusation and was prompted to write this account:

...I was thoroughly shocked, insulted and offended yesterday when a Manager/Owner of a coffee shop in Camberwell said when he saw me with my camera, that if I brought out my camera again then they would not serve me. Apparently (according to him) he'd had four complaints from people saying that they didn't want their children photographed...

We often speak of transformative technology breathlessly, as if it were a desired, rather than lived, experience. Perversely, the lived experience of transformative technologies is often a negative one.

Anxieties about cameras are as old as the manufacture of film. The tools of photography are notionally extensions of natural, embodied phenomena - the camera a prosthetic eye and the photograph an augmentation of memory - that provided the basis for modern visual communication and began to globalize human experience long before the internet.

The incident itself bears the postmodern imprint of internet-speed culture. Something is remarked upon, there are likes, a critical number is reached, a moderator implements a ban - fixed!  In a spasm of autonomic reflex an artifact with no place in the social body is ejected, and the symbolic order of things restored.

The internet changed photography. Analyses of contemporary photographic practice give next to no account of the wirelessly interconnected lenses embedded in and peeking from everyday artifacts. Everywhere you look, they look back. From doors, walls, cars (both inside and outside), telephones, tablets, television screens and more, existing predominantly not to augment human bodies, but to make and store and categorize recordings of them.

Anxieties about surveillance are as ancient as writing itself. We live in times where old fears are magnified at every turn by experiences of photography as command and control. Those experiences are not novel in Western culture. Whole categories of people, for example those with disabilities, suffer forms of surveillance for the whole of life. The experiences are not novel but have become much more common, and have brought the invisible aspects of photography, the composing eye and controlling hand, to prominence in discussions about photography.

Where the photographer was previously almost invisible, a tabula-rasa upon which events imprinted themselves through an indifferent mechanism, now the question of what is not in a photograph is as salient as the question of what is. The composing eye is inexorably linked in culture on the one hand with expressions of power, and on the other with perversions of it. Chris Munroe writes, in Tracker, of Norman Tinsdale famous 1930s photographs of Aboriginal peoples:

Critics suggest the forlorn expressions staring back at the camera tell a tale of a sorrowful people treated like museum exhibits, firstly measured, weighed then forced to pose awkwardly for photos whilst clutching serial numbers. Many have compared the exploitative look of the images to those of police mug shots. A closer examination of the Tindale genealogical photographic collection reveals almost none of his subjects are smiling at the camera or seemingly engaging at all in the compulsory process either. They look resigned and defeated – an enduring reminder of the dark days of mission life and the Protection Board era.

There is a photograph by Bettina Rheims of style icon Kate Moss, bare-breasted, part of Rheims's Modern  Lovers series. In 1989, when the photograph was taken, Moss was 15. News columnist Andrew Bolt poses a problem with Rheims's photograph better than most:

Hear how Moss herself has described the pain that is the reason for laws to protect children from being forced to expose themselves for the sexual pleasure of others.

and

...This is art, we are told, not pornography. Perfectly fine to stare in a state gallery at a picture not too different from those for which a Melbourne stalker now faces jail. So ogle away, dear art lovers...

 (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Thursday February 14 2013 pp15)

Despite previous controversies over the works of Bill Henson and Ella Dreyfus, the Art Gallery of NSW said it had ''no issue'' displaying Rheims's photograph of Moss. "We exhibit art, not pornography" the gallery told anyone who asked.

Controversies over photography often inhabit a kind of cultural underbelly and are often conducted at megaphone volume between contesting ivory towers. We have all seen politicians, for example, falling over each other on the way to denounce the latest photographic outrage. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, for instance, denouncing a photographic exhibition he hadn’t seen by an artist he’d previously never heard of discussed in a newspaper column he hadn’t read. While many claim outrage, few talk sense, and I think Chris Munroe and Andrew Bolt succinctly express cultural anxieties about who is  watching and why.

Here then are a couple of peaks, or ivory towers, landmarks in the cratered landscape contemporary photography finds itself labouring over. Cultural tensions over history, power, privacy, nudity, art versus porn - a battle some cast as ultimately between good and evil extremes.

Professor of Aesthetics Elaine Scarry provides a substantial contribution to the controversy, from an academic ivory tower, in On Beauty and Being Just

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.

and

The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.

(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)


I'm interested in the first axis of argument because it directly states (but does not solve) a problem often raised. It seems to me that wrong social arrangements are at the heart of Andrew Bolt’s critique of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Beauty has the capacity to wound, not only others but also is itself at risk from the attentions it draws. This line of inquiry goes directly to the heart of anxieties over photographs of children. To paraphrase, innocence is at risk of destruction from the attentions of photography.

Around the same time the Art Gallery of NSW was organising school tours of its new photographic exhibition, Chi Magazine published photographs of a bikini-clad, pregnant, Duchess of Cambridge.

The controversy over those photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge turned upon ideas about public and private moments, privacy versus surveillance. In the photographs themselves the subjects are unaware and unposed, the (anonymous) photographer concealed from their view. The British Royals were reportedly “outraged”, inside their  white-walled palace.

"They are images of such unexceptional normality that there is only limited mention of them on the cover of the magazine," Chi's editor, Alfonso Signorini, told the BBC.

There was, however, many lengthy mentions of the photographs on the covers of other publications. I don't know how many covers above normal circulation a bikini clad aristocrat is good for, but you can bet that every editor who published those photographs worked it out beforehand. Style sells, celebrity sells, and I want to place by example in this geography of mind a market, not in any particular point,  but one which can displace the landscape anywhere, inconveniently, like a blemish upon an already cratered and pockmarked cultural underbelly.

Australian Woman's Day editor Fiona Connolly told News Limited she had no qualms about running the photographs of the Duchess, claiming they were taken by a fellow holiday maker on the Caribbean island of Mustique rather than a paparazzo. "It wasn’t a hard decision to run these photos," she said, and  "we are sensitive to photos that shouldn’t be published, for instance I haven’t laid eyes on the nude photos of Kate."

Nude photographs of the Duchess, also covertly obtained, were published in Grazia Magazine earlier this year. Designer Bella Freud, speaking to Vanity Fair last December about her time as a stylist with a large fashion retailer, describes walls and mood boards pinned with pages torn out of Grazia Magazine of daily sightings of (Kate) Moss. “Whole clothes lines have been made out of one look she put on one morning.” Grazia is typical of many such style, scandal and surveillance pictorial magazines sourcing photographs from long-lensed paparazzi and advertising from the fashion industry. Nudity sells, and what it sells is, paradoxically, apparel.

It seems to me that objections to these photographs are along the lines suggested in Elaine Scarry's second axis of argument, that when we stare at the beautiful Duchess, make her an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the Duchess. The immediately visible destruction is of her privacy, but that is only the beginning. Publication of private moments pose a danger to her moral integrity as well, and none more serious than to the childlike Kate Moss.

Fashion ivory towers Vogue Magazine and Cosmopolitan have traded blows over what Connolly described as sensitivity to photographs of Moss that shouldn't be published.

Corinne Day’s photographs, styled by Cathy Kasterine, of Moss for British Vogue “showing how we all wear our underwear when we’re hanging around the bedroom” as Kasterine put it, were described by competitor Cosmopolitan’s outraged editor as “Hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the pedophile market. If I had a daughter who looked like that, I would take her to see a doctor”. Moss herself shoots back “Ridiculous. I must have been 19. I’m standing in my underwear. Really controversial.” But Moss has described herself as depressed, and pressured to bear her breasts for the cameras as a sixteen year old in the famous Calvin Klein heroin chic advertisements. New York is a beating heart of uber capitalism, and Moss’s work experience there frames one of the best arguments I know for unionism and the formation of industry associations dedicated to protecting members from moral exploitation.

Photography polarizes opinion at every turn. Worse, dialogue about moral issues are from a distance between the vested interests in ivory towers that sense some worth in their being conducted at megaphone strength. Photography is in trouble. Part of the problem is discourse. At the very moment the camera became ubiquitous, leaders of public opinion, who might be expected to step up and fulfil their self-proclaimed roles as authorities of specification and delineation, are divided and defensive behind the walls of their ivory towers.

Photography is in trouble. At any moment a photographer’s work might be seized, even photographs that previously hung with pride in public spaces, as happened to Bill Henson’s works in recent times. Or a child might be declared a sex offender for life, for posting a naked picture of someone somewhere from their phone, or downloading one to it in an email.

At any moment a woman with a camera in her handbag might become the object of scurrilous whispers and unwelcome attentions. Since one way or another we all carry cameras with us now, the problem can only get worse.

Beginning with this and continuing in the next few few posts on the topic, I'm going to attempt to sketch what I see as marking the boundaries of the problem, and the pathways to them, a geography of mind pursuing the tangled landscape of Civilization itself.  And I'm hoping against hope that it does not follow a trajectory of the photograph from treasured memory to the scene of a crime.

Spectators (Postcard from Zarathustra)

even the spectators often behave like actors

Thus saith the fool: "Association with men spoileth the character, especially when one hath none." The one goeth to his neighbour because he seeketh himself, and the other because he would fain lose himself. Your bad love to yourselves maketh solitude a prison to you. The furthest ones are they who pay for your love to the near ones;and when there are but five of you together, a sixth must always die. I love not your festivals either: too many actors found I there, and even the spectators often behaved like actors. Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman.  Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chapter 16, Neighbour-Love)

The Loving Ones (Postcard from Zarathustra)

Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples: no greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than the creations of the loving ones....
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chapter 15, The Thousand and One Goals)

I survive only as code?

Clone - Julie Clarke - Exogenous, Public Office, Stairwell Gallery, West Melbourne, 1999

 

Last night I was having a discussion with Shaun about the Pell and Dawkins Q & A session a few days ago; about matter and anti-matter, the visible and unseen world, quantum theory (not that I know much about that) and spirituality. At one stage we went outside to look at the evening sky and it was clear and full of small bright stars. I told Shaun the story of how Erin and I had seen last year, quite by accident a comet racing across the sky. This made me think of the Heaven's Gate cult and how members believed that a space-craft that would take them away to a higher level of existence was trailing the Hale Bop comet that passed over the Earth in 1997.  According to Wiki, the Hale Bop comet was the most seen or observed comet of the 20th century and it was also the brightest. I actually wrote part of this blog post in 2009, so thought that I would revisit and re-post it this morning since it deals in part with  some of what Shaun and I were discussing. We both agreed that not knowing was probably a healthier state of mind, rather than the position of knowing, which can engender dogmatic viewpoints.

In 1999 I was gathering thoughts and began to think about life and death, the visible and unseen in relation to cyberspace, however I was drawn into thinking about The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999). Within the narrative, spirits who carry the inscription of the cause of their death are phantoms that inhabit and haunt the psyche of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). In traditional horror genre, revulsion is derived by the representation of body mutilation; disease and deterioration of bodily flesh; and the visceral presence which inscribe these phantoms, confront the viewer with their own mortality and fear of an untimely and traumatic death. In this film it is not only the frightening representations of damaged bodies that is confronting to the child, but the fact that death has somehow entered his space, and he see these apparitions and simultaneously hears the messages they transmit.

After thinking about this I wrote - Cyberspace is like this, a site of death where the undead roam the space of non-forms within text which moves forever and ever, receding into a soft hiss in a cool void. There is no real passion in cyberspace and so the non-body, the electric body (and we all desire to be electric bodies) is stimulated by the screen – soliciting a strange knowledge and intimacy with the other, as the non-space of ourselves.

In both these examples the human body is perceived as colonized by an unseen energy. I was also reminded of the rhetoric deployed by those involved with the Heaven’s Gate cult who believed that aliens from the Evolutionary Level Above Human (HALE backwards), incarnated and took over human bodies. This cult solicited much interest after the bodies of 39 men and women were found after they committed suicide. The cult members, some of which had been castrated were found dressed in black jeans and tee shirts. The web-site was closed down and the CIA declared it a crime site, inscribing the video images as abject.
The unseen controller is a theme that runs through the history of humankind and continues in contemporary discourse.
In his beautifully illustrated and poetic text Angels, A Modern Myth (1988) Michel Serres uses angels as a metaphor of all things carried or transmitted and finds a magical quality in this bridge between the physical and non-physical world. It is interesting to note that as carriers and transmitters, Serres does not associate angels with viruses because this would afford them negative connotations. Although Angels inhabit space, they do not enter human bodies.
According to Serres angels are responsible for almost everything 'they send jailers to sleep and set prisoners free' and 'can pass through windows.' (1998:.84) Angels are the bridge, the essence contained in all things and all events. Almost everything may be explained by the existence of these angels. Somewhere in Serres description of angels as metaphors there is a fundamental notion that humanity is not responsible for its actions and the writer’s desire for lightness and flight is symptomatic of a fear of corporeality and its legacy of disease, liminality and alienation.

 Later in 1999 I held an exhibition entitled Exogenous; I included a digital image of a hybrid face (a combination of a photograph of my Auntie before she drowned at twelve years of age and my own face, cloned and distorted). Not only did the faces become alien, but in making the image an 'alien' face appeared in the middle of the dark section. On the image I wrote the words: 'I survive only as code'. I was thinking about how this image could be circulated throughout media and that in fact my Auntie who died too soon would somehow be 'resurrected' as electronic information or digital code. When I consider my own websites and the citations of my writing and other work on the Internet I realize that in many ways, not only do we live much of our lives being electric bodies of text based communication, but that evidence of mind, if not mind itself, continues as electronic information.

Repetitition and Difference: Torch

Image from my journal: Julie Clarke 1991.

Digital images of black and white paintings. Julie Clarke 1991.

We are almost certain that fire is precisely the first object, the first phenomena, on which the human mind reflected; among all phenomena, fire alone is sufficiently prized by prehistoric man to wake in him the desire for knowledge, and this is mainly because it accompanies the desire for love. (Gaston Bachelard)

Each art has its own imbricated techniques of repetition, the critical and revolutionary potential of which must reach the highest possible degree, to lead us from the dreary repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and ultimately to the (symbolic) repetitions of death...  (Gilles Deleuze ‘Répétition et différence, 1968).

Repetition and Difference is a project that revisits an older body of work entitled Torch that I have never exhibited. It is an attempt to reanimate, restart or repeat. In 1991 two theoretical issues inspired the project. Firstly, my reading of Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1968), which provided a rich analysis of the significance of fire to the human psyche—particularly life, death and expression. Secondly, I had an interest in the growing rhetoric of genetics and its reduction of human complexity to a fixed code. In my visual journal at that time I covered a page with multiple black and white photocopied images of a torch covered with a large red X (the mark made as a signature by those who cannot read or write, which homogenized their identity and erased their individuality—also X is a sex-determining chromosome ). Next to this image I wrote: 'multiple images are cellular compartments each containing their own unique characteristics – like genetic codes they differ slightly one from the other'. I was attempting to articulate that human difference was important and that it was through visual and written language that our difference and passion is expressed. Much of my creative endeavors have circulated around text and image, writing and art. The visual impetus for this project actually came from 1990 magazine photograph of Peter Garrett (Australian musician, environmentalist and politician) holding a torch.

After several journal entries I embarked on a series of 30 monochromatic paintings on 8” x 10” artist board (see examples above) that included similar elements—a torch, surrounded by amorphous shapes that could be perceived as stick figures of humans, horses, dogs, birds and planes—as hieroglyphs, or simply bits of information. Each successive painting provided a variation on the original, in that the size and location of the elements was slightly changed so that when placed side by side they appeared as distinct cells of an animation. Engaging in these paintings, which depicted difference and repetition affirmed for me ways in which meaning and language could be disrupted through mutation. This repetition and transmutation of the forms engaged on some level with genetics, technology and communication, since black mark making on a white ground is commonplace in writing, typing, photo-coping and film-making. Using black, white and shades of gray, rather than color enabled me to invert usual expectations of a flame, which evokes warmth, glow, fire and light. Indeed the paintings seemed to me at that time to be more about the language of painting and how we make meaning from limited forms – a comment I suppose on how genetics appears to try and fix human nature, rather than its boundlessness. 

In 2008, with the assistance of Community Media Services in Melbourne I digitally photographed the 30 paintings so that I could repeat existing images, manipulate them in Photoshop and create an animation.This proved very time consuming and is still not finished. I'd love to see the original paintings installed side by side on a wall. What I need to do is find a wall. I originally posted this entry on my blog in 2010, but have decided to re-post it.

Mars - not a teat!

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/mars/olympus_mons.jpg

Watching the night sky as I do, last week I noticed the planet Mars - easy to spot because it glows red. For as long as I can remember Hollywood has had a passion for the planet Mars and has exhibited not just a fear of those 'little green men' - a stereotype of extraterrestrials born out of alien sightings in the 1950s, but a general xenophobia of all things alien.  Recent photographs of Mars and America's continual search for 'life', has prompted me to consider what they actually mean by 'life'. I've always liked Margaret A. Boden explanation, which is that ‘Metabolism is a criterion’ (1999:231). Metabolism being 'a type of material self-organization which…involves the autonomous use of matter and energy in building, growing, developing, and maintaining the bodily fabric of a living thing’ (1999:237) and further that it 'involves material embodiment – embodiment, not mere physical existence‘ (1999:240). However, since all life is used in some fashion, I'm wondering if America's search for 'life on Mars' evidence by the half a million photographs taken with the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), a multi-band camera on the NASA Mars Odyssey is less a philosophical concern about life itself and our human place in the universe and or whether or not Mars is colonized, and more to do with how they can eventually exploit any potential life form and make a land grab before any other nation. The fact that they are investigating safe landing areas and monitoring dust activity tells me that they intend to invade this planet at all costs. But why? Apparently Mars is an extreme planet with changing weather patterns and its terrain is likened to that of Death Valley in California or Siberia. The best thing about NASA's photographs is the absolute beauty and terror of the planet, which we would not otherwise see. My view is Mars should be considered an amazing body. Am I old fashioned in my viewpoint? I'd like to think that we humans can appreciate something from afar without having to invade and destroy it, which bring me not so subtly to Q & A last night and a comment made by Germaine Greer about the fact that America did eventually get its act together about land rights for Inuit Indians, but that Australia has yet to work out vital issues in regards to land  rights with Indigenous Australians. That strangely beautiful image above, tells me that Mars is not a teat on which America can suckle - look, don't touch!

____________

Margaret A. Boden (1999). 'Is Metabolism Necessary?' British Journal of Philosophy and Science, Oxford Uni Press, 50 pp. 231-248.

Suffering & the higher man (or woman)

Contemporary bio-medicine, which strives to create and enhance the human species, may be considered a vehicle for producing the hitherto but unknown individual of the future. However, with its dependence upon technology and animals the species created may be more than human and less than human in a humanist sense. I am interested in whether Nietzsche’s notion of the higher man or Ubermensch, is useful in considering this human of the future, even though, contra the human produced through biomedical intervention, the superman is a spiritual overcoming, rather than a physiological remaking, one that is, according to Nietzsche dependent upon suffering. I am wondering whether Nietzsche’s call for a morality which is beyond good and evil, is akin to some of the tenets of post ‘humanism’ since post-human theorist’s alert us to the blurring or erasure of the boundaries between male/female, good/bad, human/not human that is occurring in biomedical as well as communication technologies and which challenges some of the basic tenets of secular humanism. What kind of morality might develop out of an erasure of dichotomies and an acknowledgment of our alliances with and dependence upon not human others? How can the morality of Nietzsche’s higher man be used as a model for us to consider a new morality in the twenty-first century? Nietzsche explains:

First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origins of these designations and believes that the quality ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences…by taking for cause what is effect. (A Nietzsche Reader, from Human, All Too Human: 71).

And further,

In the most noteworthy passage of his self-portrait…La Rochefoucauld certainly his the mark when he warns all reasonable men against pity, when he advises them to leave it to those common people who need passions (because they are not directed by reason) to bring them to the point of helping the sufferer and intervening energetically in a misfortune. For pity, in his (and Plato’s) judgment weakens the soul. Of course one ought to express pity, but one ought to guard against having it. (Human, All Too Human: 49).

He argues that emotions cloud the issues.

One example we could draw upon is the woman ‘in the boot’ case in 2005 of Maria Korp, who was on life support after being found in a coma after being placed in a boot of a car by a jealous girlfriend. Arguments for taking her off life support and allowing her to starve to death (which could take two weeks), is that she is brain dead. However a response from the medical professional to those who have accused them of intentional euthanasia and cruelty, are that they will have her on painkillers for the period of time they are depriving her of nutrition. My question is, if she is brain dead and presumably has no quality of life, why then do they need to alleviate her of pain if she is so insensate? If she still feels pleasure or pain then does she have the right to live even if that pleasure or pain is incommensurate with individuals who are living normal lives? Are we judging her life to be less valuable because she cannot enjoy life at the same level that we enjoy ours? Is the morality of the crowd defending her position born out of the fear that they might want to live in similar circumstances even if their life is greatly reduced? Those that watch as the medical fraternity determines what is considered alive or not, might fear that life once objectified and described in scientific terms, such as biological functionality does not allow for the value of that once embodied life. What I mean by this is that life, defined purely in functionalist terms disavows the relationship of that person’s life with others. Since we understand life not only as a descriptor of biological function, but also of the relationship or interaction with others and the world, we cannot reasonably separate the life ascribed to a body without reference to that particular individual in the world. Indeed, the body of the individual on life support, whilst brain dead, must be understood in relation to the life of others that his/her life has affected. A life, which had both a rational and emotional relation to others and things and which had similar relationship to her. The reason why Korp was taken off life support is because her brain would never again be alive and she cannot sustain normal function without medical support. We might ask: Why maintain a person in this condition on life support in the first place, if not for the family to hold onto an unreasonable expectation that her condition might change? We as a society value brain function as a measure of who were are as human beings, rather than just the existence of our slave body, however those individuals who are born extremely mentally and physically disabled, are valorized as human beings worthy of life and care. Does removing an individual from life support because they have extremely limited brain function undermine the well fought for rights of mentally disabled individuals? Can we make any claims that brain death is in any way similar to extreme mental disability? What of the individual who is born deaf, dumb, blind and physically disabled, should they be given the ‘good death’ because they have no value for us and are simply a burden to society? Or might we consider that as a society we value from our benevolence to others who are less fortunate than us? Nietzsche maintained:

Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life’s {sic} disinherited and condemned; through the abundance of the ill-constituted of all kinds which it retains in life it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect. (The Anti-Christ: 118)

Is he saying that pity for others thwarts our attempts for greatness? I am wondering if what makes us virtuous is that we have an ability to identify and empathize with others less fortunate than ourselves, because we rationally know that given a different toss of the coin we too could have been less than we currently are. We also know that life is fragile and we value it all the more because of this. Yes, we admire the strength born out of the fragility of life’s existence, but this strength of spirit would not have been possible without life’s imperfections in the first place. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche meant when he said:

Zarathustra is gentle with the sick. Truly, he is not angry at their manner of consolation and ingratitude. May they become convalescents and overcomers and make for themselves a higher body! (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 60).

He wanted to impart the notion that in order to become strong an individual first needed to become sick, in order to experience that condition and to overcome it. It is only by overcoming that one can become better.

He further argued:

spiritual progress depends on those individuals who are less bound, much less certain, and morally weaker; they are men who try new things, and many different things. Where-ever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type; the weaker ones help to advance it. (Human, All Too Human: 138).

If we decide to go against the grain of the moral position of keeping someone alive when their condition does not warrant the expense and burden to society and does not afford anyone, particularly them, any pleasure, what if any, is the new morality sustained from this behavior? Is this still a moral position? Is this an argument from ‘the greatest pleasure for the greatest number’? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (Star Trek).

Are medical developments born out of pity for individuals who are sick, because the primary aim of medicine is curative, or because sickness is a financial and psychological burden on society? Sickness (disease/accident) provides opportunities for ‘curative action’, and involves knowledge about the body as well as employment for those in the medical profession (researchers, drug companies, etc). Is it possible that compassion or empathy for others suffering is a prime motivator behind those who enter the profession of medicine? Is research being driven solely by a need to know – by a yearning for knowledge itself? Is there anything inherently wrong with this if human suffering is alleviated? If as Nietzsche maintains, that higher man cannot flourish without suffering, does the alleviation of suffering put the ‘higher man’ into jeopardy. In other words is biomedical development, whilst providing opportunities to alleviate suffering also mean that those who could become ‘higher men’ are robbed of the occasion to experience pain and suffering. I am wondering if Nietzsche was actually referring to psychological suffering, rather than physical suffering (or a combination of both). I think that his rationale was that if we seek only pleasure, like the herd, then we would not pursue our projects, which might contribute to an advancement of humanity, or perhaps more importantly to our own advancement or overcoming (becoming).

that which here glorifies itself with praise and blame, and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herding human animal: the instinct which has come and is every coming more and more to the front, to preponderance and supremacy over other instincts…(BGE:68)

Is the ‘higher man’ important purely because they stand outside the herd, because they challenge the status quo? Does science now provide the human of the future?

To teach man the future of humanity as his will, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of “history” (the folly of the “greatest number” is only its last form) – for that purpose a new type of philosopher and commander will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. (Nietzsche, BGE: 70)

I have no answers, I only know that through suffering we gain empathy for the suffering of others.

Life is refuted! (Postcard from Zarathustra)

Riddles, mysteries, enigmas

I was living in a share house in suburban Melbourne more than thirty years ago when the brother of one of my housemates was shot through the leg by police.

There had been a burglary, a chase on foot through dark suburban streets and a deserted railway yard. Shots were fired, my housemates brother fell, and I recall a first thought that it was literally a shot in the dark that he was lucky to survive.

I knew the victim only slightly but remember the sudden, immense, shock and pain felt by his sister, and shared amongst us all, in the moments after the news came. And the struggle to make sense of the event, to bring reason to the aftermath of an inherently unreasonable situation.

The inquest into the death of knife-wielding fifteen year old Tyler Jordan Cassidy in Northcote on December 11 2008 during a confrontation with four police officers recounted the shock and bewilderment felt by many in the broader community after that dreadful event. During the inquest various rational explanations were offered, including a suicide by police hypothesis. That was discounted by the coroner, who found that the unfortunate teenager was probably incapable of forming the necessary intent to die at the hands of police. "He was so overwhelmed by his emotions that it is not appropriate to conclude he was acting voluntarily", Judge Jennifer Coate found.

Judge Coate also exonerated the police involved in the shooting, but clearly they have been profoundly affected by the unfortunate teenager's death. "One day my daughters are going to ask me if I ever used a gun, and I don't know how I'm going to answer them", one anguished officer told the inquest.

Judge Coate said "(Tyler) was desperate that night...perhaps seeking some distraction from the inner despair he was in for reasons, sadly, we can now never know."

We try to make some sense of that terrible night, but never can. Not really. All we can do is endure, somehow, try to transcend the shock and pain and be human, which means sometimes life offers mysteries, riddles and enigmas we can never quite solve, no matter how great the desire to.

Nietzsche, the Cardinal, and a leap of faith

It was interesting to read a Thomist argument in a daily paper this week. The Australian published an address to the Global Warming Policy Foundation by leading Australian Catholic, Cardinal George Pell. Cardinal Pell invoked the spirit of Thomas Aquinas in a vigorous prosecution of the case against global warming. I don't care one way or another about the polemic but I'm always intrigued by Thomism. The speech is here (pdf)

Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth century friar whose life's work was the partial reconciliation of fragments of Platonic and Aristolian thought. In the (somewhat unkind) words of contemporaries, Aquinas and his followers laboured mightily to reconcile in death those who never agreed in life. Drawing from Platonic and Socratic traditions, Thomist philosophy in part underpins modern, secular ideas about universal freedoms and rights. Following Aristotle, Thomist doctrine asserts the necessity for accurate observation that underpins the scientific method.

Thomism teaches that a thing is not necessarily so just because a majority says it is. It is up to individuals to see for themselves, and to work out what is true and what is not. And Thomism teaches that not everything is knowable. Where things are not knowable through observation, Thomism teaches an intellect is sustained by faith, because faith does not end in a true or false proposition, but rather in a reality beyond knowing.

Thomism offers a model of mind as a continuum of knowing and believing, a model rejected by both modern positivism and its postmodern adversary, post structuralism. The modern positivist model of mind is a discontinuum of knowledge and ignorance in which believing depends upon knowing, and ignorance is a kind of poverty of mind, to be pitied and where possible cured. The postmodern, post structuralist position abolishes both objectivity and belief, substituting a continuum of subjective uncertainty, a phenomenological shell game of deceived and deceiving minds. Thomist thought is a handy antidote to both.

I don't care one way or another about the dispute over weather forecasts that preoccupied the Cardinal . The intrigue in the Thomist world view is, for me, the model of the individual human mind as a continuum of knowledge and belief. Classical skepticism, after Pyrrho of Elis (c360-270BCE) tried to develop methods of continually testing knowledge and belief. Old school skeptics were comfortable with what they comprehended as the limits of their knowledge, although those boundaries continuously changed, and promoted methods of suspending, rather than passing, judgement. An age later, Descartes introduced the idea of absolute certainty only after declaring he believed that God would not allow his eyes to be deceived, a leap of faith any Thomist might have taken.

The model of human mind as a continuum of knowing and believing is evident in the self-belief of Nietchze's ubermensch, in Thomist metaphysics, in the origins of the scientific method itself. There is always some tension between knowledge and belief. I believe in freedom. I believe in free speech. I can't objectively prove those exist, somewhere, as universal archetypes. But neither could Plato. Or Descartes, for whom the leap of faith - that God would not give him eyes only to cruelly deceive them - preceded rather than followed any evidential trail.

In Thomism I can see an answer to Nietzsche's call to grow long legs, to see further and to leap from peak to peak. Before I know anything else I need faith in at least myself. Faith I can survive the ordeal, belief I won't fall into the chasm between what is spoken and what is done.

Written with his blood

interactive jesus (robotic installation, 1997)

Understanding Friedrich Nietzsche enough to comment on his great allegory Thus Spake Zarathustra feels to me, at times, a utopian project, the unsatisfied longing for an unreachable goal. Almost a year ago I barely mustered courage enough to begin a sometimes faltering journey through Zarathustra's strange interiors. Those I dared to wander, so far, are here.

Now I come to chapter seven, labelled Reading and Writing, and wonder if I can really write with my own blood.

OF ALL that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.

There is perhaps no journey more perilous than one through a human mind. "It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood", observes Nietzsche, who urges readers to learn by heart, to grow long legs, and to leap from mountain peak to peak -

The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and the spirit full of joyful wickedness.

Affecting delicacy, as Nietzsche predicts in this chapter of Zarathustra, I guess a leap from mountaintop to mountaintop will take the weight from my trembling legs. And I have engaged with the demanding and perilous chapter before, in a comment upon communication called Interactive Jesus (First Site Gallery, Melbourne, 1997). Here, in part, is Nietzsche's dancing God, communicating in blood.

Years after, and still wondering if I can, really, muster the courage and passion to write in my my blood? I put one faltering foot before the other and wonder am I there yet? Becoming, can I ever arrive?

Putting the mob in its place

The brutal suppression of a peaceful protest in Melbourne City Square on October 21 by riot police using attack dogs and chemical weapons signifies a changing relationship between government and governed.

A State government clinging to power by a single vote would not normally set attack dogs upon voters. But these do not seem to be normal times.

This month Australian business heavyweight Don Argus declared war on Australian shareholders unhappy with the average five million dollar paycheck for Australian corporate executives running top 100 companies.

The corporate gravy train is threatened by laws which give Australian shareholders the right to protest against excessive corporate pay packets. Shareholders can move to reject company directors salaries at annual general meetings. But according to Mr. Argus they should not.

Shareholders unhappy with executive remuneration could, he said, sell their shares. And Australians are selling their shares, driving equity markets to historical lows, while executive pay packets soar to new heights.

The town or city square is historically a place for ordinary people to meet and to sometimes protest. Melbourne's city square is an uninviting place surrounded by businesses paying exorbitant rent to trade in a people's place. It is difficult to think of any public space in Melbourne which has not been encroached upon by commercial interests, but our city square represents, after years of mismanagement by Melbourne City Council, the biggest example of an overly commercialized public space in Melbourne.

Don Argus and Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle have turned upon the Australian public who own what they, temporarily and at great expense, control, and there is very little ordinary Australians can do about it. Except vote them out at the next opportunity.

The strange rules of Australian corporate governance guarantee that a single vote against exorbitant executive remuneration is not enough. Shareholders have to vote against corporate remuneration policies at two annual general meetings in a row, to force a change. Company directors only need to vote once to increase their pay. Strange times.

Another strangeness about these times is that freedom has become divisible, with Melbourne's Lord Mayor suddenly acquiring the right to declare a time limit on free speech. This limit exists only in the Lord Mayors mind, and that of the Federal and State political class who endorsed his actions.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights says:

All human rights are indivisible, whether they are civil and political rights, such as the right to life, equality before the law and freedom of expression; economic, social and cultural rights, such as the rights to work, social security and education , or collective rights, such as the rights to development and self-determination, are indivisible, interrelated and interdependent. The improvement of one right facilitates advancement of the others. Likewise, the deprivation of one right adversely affects the others.

The rights of corporations to profit seem to outweigh the rights of citizens to ask questions, to discuss, to assemble, and to protest, at least two to one. It is by any reasonable standard a situation which is probably not fair. It is certainly an indication that individuals have less social gravity in modern affairs than corporations. And that will be welcomed by the political classes, always on the lookout for ways to profit, and cling to power, and to demonize and brutalize what they have called "sheep" and a "mob" opposing them.

Bent and troubled by invisible hands (Postcard from Zarathustra)

The pale criminal (Postcard from Zarathustra)

'Lo! the pale criminal hath bowed his head: out of his eye speaketh the great contempt. "Mine ego is something which is to be surpassed: mine ego is to me the great contempt of man": so speaketh it out of that eye. '

Birds and charming songstresses (Postcard from Zarathustra)