“Disaffective Play” at Bus Projects
“Disaffective Play“- text from performance at opening of “Bodies of Work” (8/5/2019), curated by Benison Kilby. Image: Bus Projects. Background of image “Raw Material”, 2016, also Zoe M. Robertson.
Begin again, end again. To ask for this: to belong to it, having had something to aspire against, it was what had forged these relationships, a foreknowledge of the despair that would eventually take humanity for all it was worth. My loves that were enough and were only enough, though our survival may be artificially predicated on more, on more than the earth contains, on more than can be contained in a relationship. But to desire only what one may need was enough to subject oneself to a life of scarcity in the current economic climate. Little to make a virtue of, so little. These radical and required shifts in consciousness and the manifestation of prosperity, like a whole earth emptied of its substance, its earth, reforged into something of use on the surface, burnt away into so much ash that will never settle and compress as its source material from and to the earth, like running out of atoms, these things that have obsessed me for a life, this living guilt.
Like a lawyer or spin doctor, just like a contemporary artist, deliberately misconstruing the work of philosophers who have argued convincingly against the total quantification of life. I know I am supposed to write about Affective Labour, about my place as a woman... I could just refer you to the dismal pay assigned to anything that potentially brings any joy in and of itself, which is something they say for caring... jobs with higher pay often imbue the worker with little or no sense of purpose... they very often have no purpose... What it means in real terms is that the largest rise in homelessness is among women in their 60s, subtly disadvantaged at every turn, often so burdened by acts of love that fell on them as though necessarily, whether or not they raised children, lost out in a divorce, cared for an elderly relative... they did it all with less pay and fewer employment options available... stretches without superannuation... and a failure in the superannuation of their value as human beings, as elders, as they were cast aside in their experience by a society that had deemed itself fair in the values that it monetised. This might amount to the only real redemptive factor in engaging with art... not that it can be virtuous, as some try to position it, but that, like the sick child that I was, it has no real use. I thought it was a way out... But the Precariat issues well beyond the obviously disadvantaged, and we all come closer to being so as we accept casualisation, as we accept that those with the greatest wealth have it because they deserve it.
Most forgive their responsibility to take a breath in this country... to belong to it is to fail to take part... you could go somewhere not very far from where you live and look at painting that predates this language system that I here use... painting that is just as good and as relevant as anything in production right now. But instead we take for granted what is handed down by overseas interests, this lie of progress, like to isolate is to die... We fail to reject a system that creates inequality everywhere, making stars of anyone that has money simply because they do. I thought that I could take back what was good, university degrees not worth the paper they were printed on giving me extra time and access to resources to learn whatever I wanted to (recently lending a friend in the same boat a book on mediaeval political theology, because sometimes it helps to know the origins of our accepted beliefs, not that there's a market for that)... I thought it was good to go to exhibitions, support everyone, have places to go to talk, and drink cheap drinks that no one profited by, I thought that was some kind of way out. I laughed at the rise of professionalism as absurd given the potential earnings of any of us... One can assert the importance of community to the end of living for the company of a bunch of drunken, shallow, narcissists to no one's ultimate benefit. There's no such thing as individualised solidarity. I think I will leave you all for dust.
They brought me on point of utopia, the best thing to do was the best, we accepted that this was not a lucrative path, and why we were so resigned, I could never tell. We were the primary producers of a multibillion dollar industry that attracted the larger tourism numbers than most others, but I guess that was always all. The worst of it was where it got between us all... I had long since been marked out as a liability for standing up for what I believed in, though I supported anyone that wanted to make art. This game laid foundational rules for the rest, like all forms of degenerative gentrification, it started with Contemporary Art... at best we might help to build neighbourhoods too good for our neighbours and then too good for us, and in the process, settling for less, we invented the gig economy, to wit, cultural capital was without. This all had something to do with art being liberated from patronage, as first occurred during the height of the Dutch school, where colonialism created such wealth as to allow for artists to paint without a direct commission, to sell on an open market, the beginnings of a speculative art, as even peasants owned paintings... and there is decidedly little difference now as our wealth is reliant on human misery somewhere out of view... and now, with all material made cheap, the waste... it's not more than what a person with a real job can afford to take from the world, but it's not good. Again we were sold the lie that the only history was Western, that this was the only way to be an artist. But it was only a reflection of the market.
Barely a thought for a couple of pages, disparate quantities without addition, like no cumulative knowledge, no accumulative effects... to be free of it like I can't be, where it is tied up in the fabric of my being, like some oil painters I knew... the build up of heavy metals, that accumulate until they poison... something so unnatural about things produced from materials from deep within the earth, just as was petroleum, the compressed deaths of millennia, fuel of all the plant matter, all the animal life that walked the earth, and with fewer and fewer reserves, our lives pitted against millions as usual, our lives pitted against millions of years. And this is what we had to show for it.
