https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site zoemarnirobertson Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:15:32 +0000 https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site en https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Home Mon, 15 Jan 2018 05:48:40 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Home ZOE MARNI ROBERTSON Prose poetry, painting, sculpture, video, sound. https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Footer Mon, 15 Jan 2018 05:48:41 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Footer CARGO COLLECTIVE, INC. LOS ANGELES, CALIF. 90039—3414 https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Project-Nav Mon, 15 Jan 2018 05:48:41 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Project-Nav Index &nbsp; &nbsp; Next ︎ https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/latest-blog-ALL-POETRY-IS-INCEL Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:15:32 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/latest-blog-ALL-POETRY-IS-INCEL “ALL POETRY IS INCEL” latest blog offering, in progress︎&nbsp;https://robertsonz.substack.com/p/all-poetry-is-incel-part-one PART ONE: GLP1 AGONISTES (WHY, WHY, WHY, DELILAH?) When people talk about witch trials they will tend to evoke the medieval period, or worse the “Dark Ages” when “humanity” (or at least those on the Western side of Europe, and furthest from West Asia) fell hopelessly to ignorance and superstition after the fall of that great civilisation of Rome. Indeed, at the pub after Onrie Radovic’s (excellent) exhibition at Minerva at the end of last year a poor, unsuspecting man used the term “The Dark Ages” in exactly that way in a conversation with me, and I was confronted with the truth of all the memes that talk about how men are always thinking about the Roman Empire. I queried him on what he actually imagined to be so “dark”, and he mentioned superstition and Christianity, to which I replied that it was the Roman Empire that actually spread Christianity, hence “the Roman Catholic Church”. (I was, at the time, dressed colourfully enough to believe myself to be “passing”, in a yellow top with black crochet overlaid and a long colourful patchwork print skirt, and yet shortly after this conversation, another man immediately clocked my leanings when boasting of his Transylvanian heritage, such that it seems that it would be reasonable for anyone to have judged that I might have some skin in the game concerning “the Dark Ages”). <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ghyj!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ca44fe-d05c-4774-aa35-02a55b6c207b_1080x1082.jpeg" width="1080" height="1082" style="width: 829.35px; height: 830.886px;"> After I had made my point about the imperialism of a world view that turns European indigenous cultural practice and knowledge into something from a backward time that we should be embarrassed of, he turned to me thoughtfully and told me “I like talking to you it makes me feel... stupid”, in a way that came across as disarmingly charming. There is something very sexy and masculine about a man who is confident enough in himself that he is unafraid to confront what he does not know. But woe betide the man that uses the expression “the Dark Ages” pejoratively in my presence and is unmoved by my counterarguments (Radovic’s immediate response to me relaying the exchange: “he had no idea who he was dealing with”). Nonetheless, when the same man came to compare himself to the aforementioned vampire, he simply assumed that I was interested in the latter because of his superior looks, which was very weird and off-putting. I don’t think anyone I know would be remotely surprised if I chose the weirdest of goths over the handsomest of men (I think about the Roman Empire a lot as well). And any difference in physical appeal was negligible, and any greater attraction I felt exclusively came down to the difference between someone talking at me and someone taking the time to read me. Does this mean that women are actually more attracted to men who are more manipulative? Probably. But I am possibly the worst case study that womankind has ever produced in practically every sense. I thought of this encounter whilst reading a study on incel psychology that found, contrary to media speculation, men who identified as such were likely to have lower standards for a partner then the rest of the population; and also that all men imagine women to have higher standards regarding men’s looks than they actually do (hilarious and strangely obvious), and lower standards regarding things like “kindness and understanding”.1 But I mention all of this, because, once again, I find myself attempting to write about something seemingly very contemporary, i.e. the “viral” phenomenon of “incel” language, and instead writing about the cultural construction of Modernity (by which I mean the period beginning in the 15th century) and therefore this Imperialist logic we all seem to be continually oppressed by. Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation in Germany was expressly opposed to any sexuality that it found “unproductive” (making the sexuality of older women a subject of ridicule, for example), where it had become godly to reproduce for the glory of the fatherland. Before this time, i.e. during the “Dark Ages” there was markedly less of an organised system by which to put an end to witchcraft, i.e. the mass torture, rape and murder women for practicing traditional empirical sciences, or otherwise deviating from the norm. Which is why I would place not misogyny itself (where woman have been property throughout most of European history), but an instrumentalised misogyny, firmly in the modern period. I specifically mention the case of Germany, because it was the site of a quarter of the European witch trials (and the fervour spread throughout Protestant and Catholic aligned territories) as the appropriate roles for women were assigned through a campaign of terror, where these “trials” claimed the lives of at least (and conservatively) 20,000 women from 1560-1660,2 which, I think means that just under 4 women per week, were murdered by agents of the state over the period of 100 years (in a population of around 13 million). A couple of years ago I was relaying to a friend how funny I found an interview on Novara Media between journalist Ash Sarkar and expert in the field of incels, William Cosgrove, because said expert was so disarmingly charming that Sarkar was almost blushing. He asserted that perhaps men that were having a hard time could actually use a form of coaching that was respectful to women unlike “pick-up artistry” and then basically, and apparently totally inadvertently laid out the prospectus. He achieved this by listening to Sarkar (weird). There was a moment in which he said that it would make sense that “incels” were very mad when she self-described as “femcel” as she is a very attractive woman, in such a no-nonsense way as to make it sound objective fact (as it may well be). He thereafter continuously affirmed her insights and her experience whilst respectfully disagreeing with her. He did this seamlessly, to the extent that even I thought there might be something to his assertion of the “transactional” nature of relationships, and was glad that Sarkar could remain incensed by the assertion, as a good Communist, even in the midst of such a congenial conversation. The friend I was explaining all this to almost exasperatedly replied that only I could be watching that interview and have that as the takeaway. So I will take it under advisement. And aside from my moderately creepy parasocial enjoyment, there are some insights that seem very important; such that the fact that despite what people perceive, a significant proportion of “incels” are actually men of colour,3 and there is strong evidence that racism plays a large role in their marginalisation. Like, the media have even managed to colonise and erase the experience of incels of colour. I should point out, that having become moderately interested in this field of discourse, I have read a lot of statistics such as that less than 10% of self-identified incels engage in “misogynistic online-hostility”4, and that “38.85% of the incel participants were right-leaning, 44.70% were left-leaning, and 17.47% were centrist”5, making the media hysteria on the subject even more suspicious, in my opinion. Another point that stayed with me from the interview, was Cosgrove’s assertion that there have always been large groups of sexless men that have tended to cause trouble in society, to such a degree that there is a term for it in Evolutionary Psychology; “Young Male Syndrome”; and that these men once would have been sent on Viking raids, or off to war, or to the monasteries.6 Apparently, there is increasingly more evidence for “Young Male Syndrome”;7 I am personally fairly wary of the field of “Evolutionary Psychology” (I feel like many of my reasons for this are actually evident in the name itself)(I am natively hostile to everything related to biological determinism, which I will write about further later in the series). And I also think there are some counterarguments to be made on such a sweeping view of history, that would blithely state that there are and have always been large numbers of men that should be simply sent off to die because they are surplus to civil society. There are Viking burial grounds in parts of England where as many as half of the warriors are women, for one example.8 But there is a kernel of truth in it, that I am quite interested in teasing out. And I think it comes down to the world view in which such a statement may be made, the premises of their being any form of life that is useless, or worthless, which seems essentially modern, and which I take exception to (notwithstanding my personal feelings regarding certain individuals, lol). Why I suspect this has something to do with modernity, as usual, where I am concerned, has to do with what Karl Marx termed “primitive accumulation”, which he describes thus: “...the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”9 ...but which also is precedented in Protestant theology. The (at least ideally) volcel (or rather, ideally volcel and/or super gay) arrangements of the monasteries and convents were, after all, dissolved so that there would be more men and women to repopulate the fatherland. In reality, there were of course other worldly factors, such as the invention of printing press, which would have had a role in their demise, as the illumination of manuscripts had hitherto been a very profitable industry for religious orders (making books extremely valuable), until they became so easily reproduced, thus making the workforce of the orders essentially redundant. There are usually material economic rationalisations for everything. In the 100 year period of the operation of the Dutch East India Company, which was supposed to have generated massive profits, the Dutch population actually stagnated, apparently partly because (conservatively) 1 in 3 Dutch sailors would never return from their journeys.10 Such that the Protestant ethic was very much in force, where men and women would be set to work repopulating the wealthy shareholders with children who would grow up to be (sometimes literal) cannon fodder. Obviously, there have always been lives deemed to have been of little value, slavery has existed for thousands of years, soldiers of inferior skill have always been set upon strongholds during sieges in order to starve those resisting. But I think this exact form of rationalisation is a product of the modern world view. Indeed, before the term “cannon fodder” there was “food for powder”, as expressed by Falstaff, in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I (1598), of his army he earlier describes as: “the cankers of a calm world and a long peace”. Falstaff is, of course, a comic figure, and the extended description of his army of “pitiful rascals” is funny because it is ridiculous.11 Among the fray as described are “younger sons to younger brothers”12, because, you know, armies used to be ideally comprised of the best of noblemen, and shit. Instead of people who have few options fighting on behalf of the ruling class in asymmetric warfare against the world’s poorest. No one wants to be treated like they are worthless, and so we deny people who feel worthless even their feelings on how we have treated them, and then try to make out that they’re dangerous. My own recent marginalisation has presaged another relapse of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, where I am barely able to move or to think, and am constantly in pain. I have always hidden it as best I could, which was apparently pretty well. But for the longest time I thought couldn’t get a job using my intelligence because people knew how difficult it was for me to read. Of course, it never meant me reading less than other academics, and it was rare that anyone would figure out how bad it is unless they actually lived or worked beside me. And it seems now more like I probably couldn’t get a job because I might ask too many questions, and I might cause trouble. But then, it seems like most of the smartest people I know work quite stupid jobs because intelligence is basically surplus to requirement in this society. I don’t think that any life is worthless, but I disdain those who put themselves above others. But, whatever my values, the things one says to oneself in the middle of the night, assessing myriad failures, are another story. I have always believed myself to be worthless as a partner, because I can never tell when I am not going to be able to get up, and because I could never get a real job, and I would never be able to contribute to the two-income household necessary to family life under capitalism (which at this point almost has the character of hyperstition, to borrow Nick Land’s stupid term). As a bedridden teenager, I used to think that in another time, people like me would have been just left out in the cold to die. I thought I was selfish, always to persist. I don’t think I could have been any more wrong in this internalised ableism. The ideology, always an undercurrent in our society, that I describe, is fascism. And, in the end, I probably have quite a lot to contribute that will probably never earn me anything like a living, lol. I feel totally worn out by this notion of worth tied to social status in a society that seems to privilege the most craven behaviours. So fuck “disability awareness” in place of safe and secure housing, and not having to work myself half to death, until the ghoul of chronic illness finishes me off. There is nothing so dangerous to health as stress and no stress as encompassing as financial stress. But now I am wondering if I haven’t developed a case of Young Male Syndrome, and how to organise so that we actually are a problem, because fuck the way things are. When I started writing this months ago, a treatise on the pop-cultural phenomena of incel vernacular (of which I am quite enamoured) and the debasement of aesthetic theory that is prevalent in media coverage of “Looksmaxxing” (what the fuck is “beauty?”), which I have decided is much more dangerous than Looksmaxxing itself. What was almost a flash-in-the-pan of excellent memes regarding contortions of language for which the “manosphere” were responsible, was a reminder of the power of invention… in a deadened world watching multiple screens where the cues from ominous music, and stupid, formulaic scripts riddled with exposition (so you can keep scrolling while you watch) that everything is stated to the degree that nothing is said. In an interview with comedian Adam Friedland, the most famous of the Looksmaxxers: Clavicular, spoke of the efficacy of GLP-1 Agonists, the class of weightloss drugs to which Ozempic belongs, because thinness all-important to this version of beauty (which, in being racist to the extent of phrenology, in no way deviates from the mainstream). I think about the poet John Milton who wrote “Samson Agonistes”, following his famed “Paradise Lost”, which went on to inspire revolutionaries across the globe as explained by a new book by academic Orlando Reade (What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost). In many ways it is another story of Modernity, with Milton’s ties to the English Civil War and the establishment of British Parliamentary Democracy. His writing is also shockingly misogynistic, brimming with rejection, to the extent that the story of Samson and Delilah would have obvious (and cringeworthy) appeal. At the end of the American Empire, seemingly all we are allowed to hear about is white men and their loneliness. But I don’t believe that this is something limited to white men or that viewing the world in terms of transactional relationships and use-value is in any way fringe. I am tired of the male loneliness epidemic being cast as separate from the loneliness epidemic, as though we must now all be lonely in our loneliness except for men, who are necessarily entitled to something more. And it is the media that engineers this polarisation, such that I think the only appropriate response is solidarity. The agony of all of this is so palpably universal, the fear and sadness that threatens to take us all under. And our art institutions have proven totally incapable of meeting the moment, interested solely in positive representation, while they sweep away connections to donors actively making things worse for ordinary people, donors who make their money off of problem gambling, donors who use our public institutions to launder the reputation of a foreign power currently committing genocide. Hany Armanious’ excellent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art feels like a miracle or a mirage. And yet, the museum director made some bizarre comment on Hany’s work being good for not being “polarising” as though strong formal properties somehow preclude the political, because the political can only be a statement without nuance, the absolute correct way to view things and express them, the humourless, miserable, output of the Liberal thought police. Reading about the camaraderie of incels, it’s hard not to imagine that I have pulled myself out of the same thing in the arts: “Alternatively, incel identity provides a sense of fraternity (Crimando, 2019), virtuous victimhood identity (Ok et al., 2021), a common enemy (Lindsay, 2022), and a rich lexicon of humorous in-g(roup terminology (Gothard, 2020). It may be preferable for many incels to reinforce their incel identity than to participate in what they perceive as an anxiety inducing mating market (Costello, 2020).”13 I have lost all pleasure that I once derived from this self-styled “world” of art, and I began to abandon it toward more solitary literary pursuits for the sake of sanity. To have something, finally, that is just my own, to stop giving it all away, which is something that, in itself, people seem to hate me for… “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” I change my mind, and will continue to bury your medicine in your steady diet of gossip, my faithless hounds. But still, I hate to think of the energy that I have wasted when I look at what is now on offer in our Institutions. But it is evident, that in this, at least, I am not alone. And this loss of pleasure in things, hallmark of depression, is also a phenomenon that actually bears closer inspection, as even bad art will tend to mirror life. I suppose then, that the presence of the GLP-1 Agonist weightloss drug, which quite literally works by suppressing pleasure (that tied to eating but everything else as well)14 becomes a metaphor for the present moment, and the valourisation of misery that seems to encapsulate the ruling class. “Why, why, why, Delilah?” 1 William Costello, Vania Rolon, Andrew G. Thomas &amp; David P. Schmitt (2023): The Mating Psychology of Incels (Involuntary Celibates): Misfortunes, Misperceptions, and Misrepresentations, The Journal of Sex Research, DOI: 10.1080/00224499.2023.2248096 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2248096 Page 21 2 Bengt Ankerloo, William Monter, &amp; Stuart Clark, “Three-quarters German? European Witch Trials 1560—1660”. In Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 4, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001). 3“The Truth About Incels | Ash Sarkar meets William Costello”, Novara Media, May 20, 2024, 4 Cosgrove, Rolon, Thomas, Schmidt ibid., p.6 5&nbsp;https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/news/incels-are-not-particularly-right-wing-or-white-but-they-are-extremely-depressed-anxious-and-lonely-according-to-new-research 6 Cosgrove, Sarkar, ibid. “...sexless young men typically throughout history throughout time have been the group to worry about so strongly associated with violence, that we call it the Young Male Syndrome in our field, that this has always been a huge huge problem now throughout history you had kind of cultural or social institutions to deal with your population of incels so for example the monastery the monastery would be one for sure give a high status position to kind of channel these extra guys into you’d create Vikings out of them the Vikings were likely incels not not the sexy kind of Netflix Vikings that you think from the TV shows uh the Portuguese explorers there’s strong evidence that they were incels basically sent on purpose missions to kind of basically get away from causing trouble around the for everyone else.” 19:19 7&nbsp;Cosgrove, Rolon, Thomas, Schmidt ibid., p.25 8&nbsp;https://www.thevintagenews.com/2015/10/03/better-identification-of-viking-corpses-reveals-half-of-the-warriors-were-female/ 9 Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation, Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm 10 Hochstrasser, J. (2007). Still life and trade in the Dutch golden age. Yale University Press p.256 11&nbsp;William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act 4, Scene 2, line 65. 12&nbsp;William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act 4, Scene 2, line 28-29. 13&nbsp;Cosgrove, Rolon, Thomas, Schmidt ibid., p.27 14 I do not mean that these drugs are not medically effective, as they seem to be effective for a lot of conditions outside weightloss. I also have no judgement on anyone taking them for purely aesthetic reasons. That said, I know some people who have taken them who have had terrible side effects. I have no comment to make on anything medical, except that, as someone who lived with comorbid chronic conditions that mostly effect women, I really fucking hate doctors, lol. I comment on the GLP-1 Agonist because it is an awesome name and also because I simply love the idea of the suppression of pleasure, for I am something of a vampire. <img src="https://cdn.buymeacoffee.com/buttons/v2/default-yellow.png" alt="Buy Me a Coffee" style="height: 60px !important;width: 217px !important;">(Buy me a coffee link where you can literally buy me a coffee for this post if you have a mind to support, thanks!) PART 2: GOONING FOR GODOT Between the media frenzy regarding the “manosphere”, and what seems like an upsurge in violence towards women in the city that I live in (the horrific ordinariness of the intimate partner violence statistics,1 combined with two recent gang rapes of teenage girls by boys from private schools)2, I have found myself again wondering what exactly the difference between a man and a woman is supposed to be, that would justify this dehumanisation. Thinking around this again, “what is a woman”, I am reminded of a story beloved by internet edgelords, where in reply to Plato’s definition of a man as being a “featherless biped”, Diogenes famously countered by raising a (pre-prepared) plucked chicken and shouting “behold—a man”. In my youth, and after and in-between years of abuse by a medical system that barely studied or acknowledged health conditions predominately experienced by women, I can recall being mystified by the stupidity of the notion of the male body as standard, writing a throwaway line somewhere; “our doctors just assumed you were a woman with an outie”, which is, incidentally, a reasonably accurate description of how the penis is formed in utero. Based on my own experience, I would say that men are basically just like me except less witty, and that if I find them quite sexy, it is most likely based on my innate and very womanly sense of pity for the poor creatures. But basically whilst thinking around this subject, I keep having the same vision as that of one Julian of Norwich (1343-after 1416) of Jesus’s side wound: <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ws6x!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e965b0e-5220-4bce-8973-9ee502ca936f_1024x616.webp" width="1024" height="616" style="width: 829.35px; height: 498.906px;"> Wound of Jesus Christ from the Psalter and Prayer book of Bonne de Luxembourg, ca 1345. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty) “THEN with a glad cheer our Lord looked unto His Side and beheld, rejoicing. With His sweet looking He led forth the understanding of His creature by the same wound into His Side within. And then he shewed a fair, delectable place, and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love.87 And therewith He brought to mind His dearworthy blood and precious water which he let pour all out for love. And with the sweet beholding He shewed His blessed heart even cloven in two.”3 Julian would also have visions of Jesus lactating, and verily I imagine her lifting a doll-sized Jesus on the cross, replete with vaginal side wound and glistening nipples shouting “behold—a woman!” Of course, I am not sure that Julian had beheld these now internet-famous images of the side-wound. But patriarchal religion has always found itself in a double-bind concerning creation myths, where somehow the miracle of childbirth must be subverted and appropriated by its central figures, with occasionally bizarre results, like Jesus’ side wound. It also reminds me of a dream I had where an itinerant trans person of my acquaintance approached me only to be revealed as the Norse Allfather, Odin, who then handed me his eye patch, in an unmistakable gesture towards my determination to live as warrior poet. Up until that point in the dream I had been praying beneath Yggdrasil to Freya to teach me how to be better at picking-up, which I would take as yet more evidence that my subconscious shares my unfortunate sense of humour, that I was essentially trolling myself for being a fighter and not a lover. I woke up to do a crash course on Odin, and discovered that when he rises from the dead to bring the world runes, in the original Norse, there is something like a gestation metaphor. I also learned that he practised magics usually reserved for women. Enby fairy. The supplanting of the miracle of birth with the written word is really only the more blatant in this example, where all the most practised modern religions can trace their lineage to the creation of script. Does it then follow that sexuality came to be seen as an impediment to work, to philosophy? The writings of Julian of Norwich are actually the oldest surviving works in the English language attributed to a woman, and reasonably rare examples of early vernacular theology. I have heard many of the more disgusting men over the years talk about how the whole world was built (by men) in service to getting laid. Now we are basically plunged into slop illiteracy where our creations, that once at least represented, if not created, our systems of reverence, are emptied of context and meaning in order to make more money, ultimately to be distributed as slop pornography, which is supposed to capture all our young men. Anchorites like Julian, were people, more often women, who would shut themselves away from the world, and thereby have some agency in their religious practice, as existing outside the prescripts of the church, and the society at large (in which women were property). Anchorages were often built on the sides of churches and anchorites were also consulted by the community for spiritual purposes. Julian’s works began during a long convalescence, after which she decided to go into isolation in order to finish them. In the medieval period, following the doctrine of Original Sin (which was first put forth by Saint Augustine in the 4th century), it was thought that women were inherently over-prone to carnality. “Julian’s placement of God on the margins sanctifies this female space and defines it as suitable for God rather than sullied by sin. This is a challenge to the patriarchal alle enclosed within the universe she holds in her hand, a stark rejection of its decree that her carnal sensuality should make her unfit for direct communion with God.”4 I was thinking of how strange this all is from the vantage point of a modern era in which men are cast as the almost violently carnal, where male sexuality is seen as something that needs to be tamed for it will inevitably otherwise do evil. It is a truly bizarre reversal, and not anything I have ever come across a justification for, especially as all good data would seem to suggest that all sexuality is a spectrum. Obviously, the one through-line from the medieval period is that the blame is to be placed with the woman as the object of temptation. Because this version of male sexuality isn’t so much a sanction to those who find themselves loveless, the ones the media would have us reject even more fully, but a justification of all the rapists and murderers whose acts of violence are basically promoted as normal, especially through the always wild headlines in the mainstream media, sympathising with the motives of these crimes against women. I am not sure that anyone will have this memory experience of a solitary Covid lockdown, but I seem to recall some memes about the difference felt when living on one’s own, and not being projected onto by society. A lot of the discourse in that time was funny to me as a large number of people came to experience a fraction of what it is like to be bedridden for years (and were usually completely horrified, the amateurs). Of course, I was forced out of structured education at the tender age of fifteen after contracting Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and, as such, spent years bedridden and barely able to move, reading books like, and including, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (which will become funny later), which is often put forth as one of the best books in the English language, though surprisingly few people seem to have heard of it or of her. I have had the peculiar experience of my formative years being framed by my own ideas and what I could glean predominately from 19th century literature. And when I finally emerged, I thought of myself as myself, and not of how I was supposed to comport myself for validation from without. It was then, and has continually been shocking to be cast as a “woman”. And it has become very evident that there is a still totally different set of parametres surrounding free speech when you are not a white man. At first, I basically internalised what has happened to me over the past three years as my fault, but I have spent months now of talking to older women who worked in other industries who basically find my stories quite shocking. Recently, I was reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in the break room at work and a volunteer asked me if I knew anything about the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and I responded that I knew that it was widely considered misogynistic because someone had written a blog about me entitled “Who’s Afraid of Zoe Marni Robertson?”. The volunteer took a sharp intake of breath in utter disbelief. I have been called “mean” and “crazy” and continuously ostracised for all of this time because misogyny is not an exceptional viewpoint within this society, but rather the norm, and practised most perniciously by those who claim to be the most progressive. This is true also of how all “others” are treated when making salient points about how things operate. In the initial offending post I challenged the quality of another woman’s work who was receiving a lot of opportunities at the time, which is routine enough behaviour among male artists. Soon after, someone I considered a friend asked to meet up at the pub as though to support me, and then ambushed me with another person wanting to tell me how “mean” I was. The same “friend” came to my birthday a couple of months later to talk behind my back to my friends about how “mean” I was. I had a delayed reaction to this person because a community that I had been a part of wanted to impress upon me that I was a terrible person, and so I thought that I had to take whatever I got from whomever would remain in my life. But the older women around me have made me develop something like self esteem. Because I essentially lost my art career and my capacity to work as an academic for writing art criticism, and this would tend to strike outsiders as seemingly contrary to how art “works”, making it plain to me, also, that I have been suffering bullying and discrimination. Naturally, I also made the mistake of writing about corruption, but that is not something seen as particularly extraordinary when attempted by a white man, and frankly something that more people should have the guts to engage in. I emerged from that lockdown when people were experiencing their own interiority, with what I then assumed was the beginnings of a novel where the protagonist thought entirely like me whilst being a man. In hindsight, the distribution of this text was not so much an attempt at a career-change as a sociological experiment entirely consistent with my art practise, which frequently presents as social engineering (I bring out the worst in people). Ironically, a lot of men seemed mildly attracted by this act of impotent literature, which was the funnier for including this passage: “My writing sometimes inspires a kind of awe, as though in making my alienation relatable I have truly connected with this vast network of strangers, women are always unloading all of their trauma on me and their poetry like I am Kurt Cobain.” A man who is a serial philanderer complimented the text for the surprising twist of the gender when this internal monologue was so “sensitive”. Similarly I had a fruitless argument with a friend who could not believe, account for, or sanction my desire to write as a white man, because white men cannot be “sensitive”...? I argued that it was a pretty bad idea to let white men off the hook like that, especially where the presumed sensitivity seemed to come from passages exhibiting empathy. If there is a good counterargument to that statement, none was proffered, it was simply rejected because “white men” are “bad”. I found myself on the back foot explaining that I actually know quite a few sensitive white men, men who have nurtured me through some of the worst times in my life. In reply they said that they didn’t know them, which was as good as to say that it wasn’t true or even possible, which is solipsistic to the point of narcissism, but has basically been a pretty ordinary way to argue, post-internet. The thing is, this is not a methodology that belongs anywhere near anti-imperialist or anti-racist discourse, because it is not an opposition to racism, but rather an acceptance of it, in the form of biological determinism. I should say here that I love complaining about white men, and I am not accusing my former friend of really believing in racial nor gender essentialism, but simply trying to confront a methodology that has been normalised in “progressive” circles that I find deeply worrying for the propensity to stop short of any structural analysis. I am quite conscious of “rationalisation” being used as a blunt instrument, the disgusting justifications of imperialism that have taken the guise of reason, and of how white men as a group have come to represent trauma to a lot of people. After working in a store that was frequented by marginalised men who would almost constantly threaten me with sexual violence, it took me around six months for me to feel safe around men, and not constantly driven to a fight or flight response. There are a lot of men with a lot to answer for, but more than that there is a society that enables and encourages these behaviours. But bad rationalisations are not undone by unreason but better reason, something that I believe that women and others will tend to have an advantage in expressing, seeing as we have already experienced a world that was not built for us, and are probably more able to enumerate its flaws. But because men are occasionally okay and sometimes even capable of reason, I would point to this quite eloquently-worded statement by Conrad Bongard Hamilton structurally examining this kind of discourse in “The Social Formation of the Far Right”: “The essential hypocrisy of liberal ideology stems from the way that, while it avows itself to be anti-racist and anti-sexist, it cannot identify their systematic function, lest it be forced to reject a capitalism that depends on them. This is not merely a perspective; rather, it corresponds with the logic of the purified, capitalist mode of production. Though no stranger to strategic irony, the far-right plays no such games. It knows that sordid forms of oppression are the essential stuff of our system. Proceeding from the side of the social formation, it therefore puts forth a thought-experiment: what would it mean to actually end these prejudices?” There seems to be no end to media coverage of how men, or the school-age boys, whose opinions are apparently now constantly surveyed, now believe that feminism has “gone too far”, which is at once terrifying and confusing. I don’t think I have ever heard of a study seeking to correlate these statements with the constant media attention this kind of “academic” work is given, or what the framing of these questions does to encourage these responses. I find teenagers utterly repulsive, and yet, even I can empathise with being an antagonistic hormonal nightmare and responding to stupid adult questions stupidly, just for the hell of it. One thing that seems certain is that if it is widely publicised and contemporary universities seem to have endless budgets for it, their are vested financial interests in these studies and indeed in “highlighting” these divisions. The “manosphere” is certainly abhorrent and contributing to the misogyny of this society, but it is a mistake to couch it as pushing ideas that are, in any way, fringe. And a feminism focused solely on “empowerment” and advancement within capitalism can be as sickening to feckless, poor women (if I am anything to go by) as it is to the kind of men apparently obsessing over what incels call “Sexual Market Value” or SMV, something referred to by the mainstream as evidence of their wrongheadedness, but which basically tracks. Which brings us to these solitary spaces of male sexuality that are basically cast as aberrant, “incel” practices, the “porn addiction” of it all. In the most instructive article on the practice of “gooning” and the associated “community” I have read Daniel Kolitz explains: “Gooning is a new kind of masturbation. More precisely, a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime. The act itself resembles “edging”—repeatedly bringing oneself to the point of climax without actually climaxing. But gooning is more goal-oriented and more communal. The gooner goons to reach the “goonstate”: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time.” Ah yes, with each new generation comes a new form of masturbation...? And since when does “more communal” masturbation not just count as sex? (I don’t know what it is about the framing of that rhetorical question that lead me to imagine myself writing that in my bourgeois sleepwear, in my girlie apartment with my face illuminated by the glow of my Macbook, a communist Carrie Bradshaw.) (Suck shit, Alistair, you can’t troll me if I publish it first, lol.) The “communal” aspect of gooning is most normally linked to sharing and curating porn images within the community. Honestly, sharing decontextualised porn images in order to arrive at a state of thoughtless nihilism, where in one is nothing but a machine of consumption pumping out hot slop supposed to create new life or a luxury good (but which will inevitably end up in tissue in the bin) sounds a lot like art school these days. This is indeed the goonstate of Contemporary Art, decontextualised images to take the pleasure out of pleasure. Kolitz goes on to state that: “If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them. “Ruin your mind,” “go deeper,” “give up on life”: these are goon porn’s basic slogans, the movement’s rallying cries. “5 Whatever the physical practice the phrase has come to be associated with locations i.e. “goon caves” (self-explanatory but imagine many screens) in a way that means that it has taken on more of a sense of chronic masturbation. It also puts a whole new spin (pun intended) on the beloved Australian pastime “goon of fortune”. Suffice to say, along with the chronically online, and all sorts of gross dudes, I laughed my arse off when I saw this unfortunate kerning this artwork quoting Samuel Beckett, a post, which has since been deleted by Whitechapel Gallery in London (I am sorry to potentially retraumatise the artist and/or gallery, which I actually hold in high regard): <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vbef!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6a0026f-e442-47be-a17b-c89f59f9e821_1920x1080.png" width="1456" height="819" style="width: 829.35px; height: 466.509px;"> From the original post: “Alfredo Jaar ‘I Can’t Go On. I’ll Go On’ by Alfredo Jaar, is a neon work, created at a unique size for Whitechapel Gallery. It pairs a line from Samuel Beckett with the visual language of public signage…” Beckett of failure, his entire ouevre: goon. Philosopher Catherine Malabou evokes in particular the plays of Samuel Beckett in speaking to the narrative of the neurological case study, speaking particularly to a form of “wakefulness without consciousness”, exhibited, sometimes, in those with traumatic brain injuries (tell me about it). “The theater of absence is the privileged expression of affective impoverishment and destructive metamorphosis. Its rhetoric comprises figures of interruption, pauses, caesuras—the blank spaces that emerge when the network of connections is shredded or when the circulation of energy is paralyzed. This theater is what Gilles Deleuze calls the theater of exhausted identity. Such identity is the possible born after the exhaustion of all possibles.”6 And so, there is something quite beautiful in this trajectory of bastardisation, where Beckett is so often taken out of context to become inspirational (which is utterly insane). I once presented a class of Masters of Architecture students with an example often touted by tech bros “Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” Some four paragraphs later in the novella: “ First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either.So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none.Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.“7 I was trying to get the point across that they were very unlikely to make anything approaching art in that one semester, because most of the work that people that call themselves artists produce is not art. Needless to say, I failed for good. But Beckett remains a balm, like the revenge of the broken psyche against the whole. Of course, in Alain Badiou’s reckoning, the subjection of his characters edges ever towards transcendance: “Beckett’s writing attempts, at one and the same time, to speak unrepentantly of the stony ingratitude of the Earth, and to isolate, according to its proper density, that which exceeds it. This is why we must begin with the beauty in the prose. It is this beauty that tells us what it is that Beckett wishes to save. This is because the destiny of beauty, and in particular of the beauty that Beckett aims at, is to separate. To separate appearance, which it both restores and obliterates, from the universal core of experience.”8 I also looked into the “community” of female gooners or “goonettes” (fucking hell), who inevitably cast their “lifestyle” as a positive engagement with porn that can also include going out into the world to live out porn fantasies through gloryholes, for one example (I can’t help but think that the advocates in the associated article hardly can represent all those who identify as such).9 This would seem to contrast with the expectations of the other gooner community, of incels in general. The “sex positivity” surrounding it would even preclude the kind of examination in something like the Steve Macqueen film Shame, where the protagonist, played by Michael Fassbender, is attractive enough to woman but trapped in a porn obsession and isolation. The corresponding goonette literature would rather be Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation in which an independently wealthy commercial gallery worker drops out and drugs herself out of consciousness for the better part of a year (which has haunted me with its aspirational banality, as much as with Moshfegh’s literary collaborations with fashion houses). It is routine, and yet never ceases to be disappointing that existential horror is formulated in this society so as to apparently elude cis women, as though the only proper subject for feminism is positive representation. We can never be ugly and broken, ashamed, digusting, except in the eyes of internet trolls, for the “good people” we are only “mean” and “crazy”. When women began to be taught to read, in the vernacular, as opposed to a proper Latin/high Arabic/Literati tradition (etc., etc.), literature, as we know it, came to be. Jesuit priest and media theorist, Walter Ong, would argue that women “Styled themselves in a different, far less oratorical voice”,10 progenitors of this interiority. And only a few hundred years later it is all but lost to us, as patriarchal religion again mutilates the idea of what a man is in order to appropriate the miracle of creation (and thank god for that). Of course, I imagine writing about gooning isn’t for me, the manosphere will be mad (boo hoo). Though, anyone looking to police the land of the gooner would do well to watch the YouTube series “Interior Motives”, where celebrities are shown the room of a person and asked to guess their age, gender, sexuality and location, and which essentially proves that all people are disgusting. I was particularly grossed out by a bedroom resembling the grimness of my own, with stacks of books I probably own i.e. Marx, Hegel, Thomas Bernhard, Lacan, overdubbed with Courtney Love’s repeated assertion that “this guy fucks” and “I would fuck this guy”, while the panel debated this anonymous person’s political leanings, because that bookshelf could be far right..? Someone needs to pay for the idiot effectiveness of Horseshoe theory. I digress. This happened without any of them questioning that “he” would have to be a straight man (to some extent fair given the lack of women’s clothes), with a “beautiful mind”.11 (I mean I probably just read that shit so that men will like me, right?) Though, I believe that the only thing said to have separated this particular room from “goon cave” was a lack of screens (I’m not sure who is really lacking in imagination in this scenario). Have I masturbated all day? Sure. (Sorry: TMI). But never with the requisite shame nor the requisite pride to be able to claim the title of gooner. Contemporaneously, transcendence, like existential dread, is unladylike (nevermind these things are almost inherent female traits). Gooning for and with the attention economy is trade coded. Nevertheless, I seem to understand and even feel in this description of “gooner” a somehow spiritual state of acute nihilism. It articulates something important to the moment, and to the impression of being valueless. But what of the, somewhat related, pornification of beauty? In some Instagram reel a writer from the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino is quoted in having coined the term “Instagram face”12 to describe the filled and smoothed faces now augmented for optimisation on the app. In a more recent article “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare: As cosmetic procedures become both more invisible and more extreme, our connection to reality is fraying”13 this smug, middle-class doomer op-ed accepts current beauty standards at face value (no pun intended), writing of the capitalist imperative demanding these changes while lamenting that “the face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul,” in what appears to be a contortionist act to avoid speaking to any structural material analysis. The two articles form a thesis basically asserting that the way that faces are augmenteed or re-formed via surgery is due to a standardisation that most find attractive, where a composite of a population will work out to be basically agreed to be beautiful, the beauty standard being said composite — basically white and Western, but with lip fillers thrown in. Of course, the population that is composited in these preferences is basically that of the United States, which is still predominately white (like, around 70%), and is famously exported around the globe, though by no means representative of it. And it is true that this methodology has been perfected by AI, and it is certainly creepy that a lot of it has been trained on porn (though Tolentino otherwise shies away from writing about that industry’s influence on beauty standards). The issue is that all of this is basically accepted as a foregone conclusion, where a computer-generated composite may represent a universal beauty standard, which is not necessarily the same as someone recognised as especially beautiful, at least before this end stage capitalism made us all aspire to standardisation for the sake of re-sale value, it is something very specific to this milieu. There is a very strange tacit acceptance of the standard, as though the technology actually represents an advancement in “beauty”. Those who study aesthetics will tend towards having very weird taste, which is a product of cultivation, where through looking at thousands of works, and doing even apparently unrelated research in dedication to the imperative towards art, will make one aware of minor deviations and references within works which will animate them with a knowledge that can only be communicated visually. I was recently awe-struck by Stephen Bram’s paintings at Sydney Gallery and was reminded why I like art so much. But it is sometimes easy to forget whilst we are collectively now supposed to have the taste of a teenage boy from a private school, doing high school art, because deep down we know that these are the only people who have a future in this society as long as we allow things to continue as they are. The success of the Neoliberal era in degrading the importance of fields of understanding that are not immediately profitable has done civilisational damage. I made it pretty far into researching several different possible exgeses for my PhD, and while I was writing about the invention of the printing press and its relevancy to the change brought about by the internet, the next leap in logic was surely to write about the losses and gains surrounding the invention of the written word (lol). So I have really done my homework on the loss of literacy, and far from an alarmist, I had figured that new forms of understanding would take the place of the complex reading of scripts (where I mean for script to encapsulate alphabetic and calligraphic writing, as reading can obviously be used to describe all forms of information sharing)(language is hard). My assumption was that the divorcement from script would be accounted for in different forms of especially audio-visual literacy, which has long been my experience when surrounded by artists, and indeed my own experience of coping with neuroimmune disorder. But to my great surprise, it turns out that I have been a techno-optimist because the illiteracy absolutely extends to visual illiteracy. My description of the kind of art as asset, aspiring to be luxury good, currently being churned out through witless art faculties as a kind of porn slop, is probably counter-productive, and yet, there is a very real problem with a lot of the work being pushed by the institutions basically lacking the formal qualities that would have once been essential to “beauty”, through a focus rather on professionalism and a very warped sense of virtue through representation. In terms of local “feminist” art, the human form is either rendered exactly from technology to where it is truly naked, and not nude, essentially a corpse, as in a new sculpture by Nell on the Museum of Contemporarry Art Terrace: <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cr8V!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc9b08bee-ab63-44b7-b4df-eafdec8198fb_1857x878.png" width="1456" height="688" style="width: 829.35px; height: 391.891px;"> (I never thought I would so miss the affectation of a contrapposto stance) …or a heavily derivative (Matisse) and crudely rendered abstraction (which I write as someone that obviously likes crudity) that adds absolutely nothing to the sculptural continuum as in this work by Sanné Mestrom, entitled “What the body knows”, 2026: <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oIlk!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0da4ba56-3cb7-4a05-a4d5-d526407c75fe_617x899.jpeg" width="617" height="899" style="width: 617px; height: 899px;"> These forms of feminism suffer for failing in their perceived object of being representative, choosing rather to be representational. Also, I have never understood the repeated assertion that women representing the female form is inherently feminist, like it probably has to say something more than that. Even attempts to broaden the ideal of beauty generally fall short of Rubens. The inherent virtue is being signaled through how they are positioned, as reproductions of a privileged class, at a point in time when it is dangerous to do anything genuinely subversive. Because beauty isn’t just a slab of meat or a lazy repetition of the work of the great white man. In the conclusion to the aforementioned article,14 Tolentino states “I occasionally feel the urge to reject modernity and embrace the religion of my childhood”. There are probably many issues I should have with articles of this nature that lament the inherent racism of the beauty standard but which demonstrate an incapacity to reject it (for fear of failing on an open market), but it is one throwaway line that gets under my skin. For the theological turn Tolentino takes is the aesthetic theory of Hegel: “It does not induce unhappiness and compulsion but makes desire withdraw, as Hegel put it, because the beautiful object is revealed as “inherently free and infinite,” “an end in itself”. Because somehow these plastic surgeries are of the material world, and so we must get away from the material world and see beauty as an expression of god’s truth? I actually can’t conceive of anything more masturbatory than this replacement of physical chemical attraction, of empirical beauty, and of art, with fucking Hegelian Idealism... like she would have us all gooning for god. (It should be noted that the aesthetic branch of philosophy has always made me almost irrationally furious.) It is also hilarious that where Marx famously turned Hegelian Idealism on its head with Materialism, a Liberal New Yorker writer now presumes to save Capitalism from itself by going with god, as some mirror to right wing discourse. (In fairness to Tolentino, she once caused outrage by talking about how she shoplifts on a podcast with Hasan Piker — deadset rebel.) Where the only motivation can be profit (extraction) capitalism turns all human endeavour into masturbation. If we are to abandon aesthetics to anachronistic studies of faith-based virtue or its bastard: market-based virtue, why not damn psychoanalysis similarly to the pre-modern confessional? And if capitalism is god, and it’s method of supplication the wankathon, then these gooners, these modern day anchorites, may as well be our spiritual advisors. Where there is the pathetic there is pathos. Embrace degradation, it may well be the first step to overturning these very material circumstances. 1&nbsp;https://theworlddata.com/domestic-violence-statistics-in-australia/ 2&nbsp;https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-18/nsw-four-charged-six-hour-sexual-assault-teenage-girl-liverpool/105429832, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/nsw-three-boys-charged-over-sexual-assault-girl-sydney/107034192 3&nbsp;Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter XXIV, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.xi.i.html 4 Matthews, Thai-Catherine. “On the Margins of ‘Alle’: Feminist Theologies of Enclosure in Julian of Norwich and Harriet Jacobs.” Speculum (Cambridge) 99, no. 2 (April 2024): 331–57. https://doi.org/10.1086/729301. 5&nbsp;https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/ 6&nbsp;Malabou, Catherine. The New Wounded : From Neurosis to Brain Damage, Fordham University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=3239638. Created from usyd on 2023-11-09 01:56:18. Xviii 55 7&nbsp;I thought it was funnier to leave the hyperlink to the very academic source of some random Lyric generator site, which was for some reason the only version of Worstword Ho I could immediately get my hands on. Gratifyingly, since Beckett was his own translator, this is likely pulled from the only version. 8&nbsp;Alain Badiou, On Beckett, Clinamen Press 2003, 44 9&nbsp;https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/goonettes-gooning-women-porn-sex-addiction 10 Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition. 3rd ed. London: Taylor and Francis, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203103258. 11 12 Jia Tolentino, “The Age of Instagram Face: How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look”, the New Yorker, December 12, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/decade-in-review/the-age-of-instagram-face 13 Jia Tolentino, “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare: As cosmetic procedures become both more invisible and more extreme, our connection to reality is fraying.”, The New Yorker, July 11, 2026, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/our-plastic-surgery-nightmare 14&nbsp;Tolentino, “Our Plastic surgery nightmare” ibid. <img src="https://cdn.buymeacoffee.com/buttons/v2/default-yellow.png" alt="Buy Me a Coffee" style="height: 60px !important;width: 217px !important;"> (Buy me a coffee link where you can literally buy me a coffee for this post if you have a mind to support, thanks!) PART III: FASCIST FASHIONS Doomscrolling Instagram the other week, I came across a name for something that I felt had long wanted articulation: The Great Male Renunciation, that point at which men ceased to adorn themselves in elaborate dress, in favour of more neutral fare. The idea was developed from the work of member of the Men’s Dress Reform Party in Britain in the 1930s, John Carl Flügel (who called the same phenomenon “The Great Masculine Renunciation”). Flügel, was, in fact, a notable psychologist, and someone who helped to popularise Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Oedipus concept, as well as the person who coined the term “homosocial”.1 The term “homosocial” has been used subsequently to explain the maintenance of male dominance in society, the “desire” within male relationships of at an at least ostensibly heterosexual nature. It is a good term to use in relation, also, to the not dissimilar “Looksmaxxing” movement, which I still haven’t really gotten to, but whose use of language, in particular, actually inspired this now unaccountably long text. One need look only at the veneration of idealised male bodies in the expression “mogged”, etymologically extended from “AMOG” or Alpha Male of the Group, to see historical parallels. They also run parallel in terms of white supremacist ideology very much couched in paranoia of “the other”. According to the Men’s Dress Reform Party: “(d)ress reform was necessary not only for the sake of enhancing masculine beauty, but also to prevent the further degeneration of the ‘British race’.”2 Flügel traced the origins of this turn to the the end of the 18th century, when tailoring became decidedly austere, “the occasion when men ‘abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful’ and ‘henceforth aimed at being only useful’”.3 (Oh, to live in a time when men were useful, lol.) The aspirations of said party were really quite modest, and generally concerned with introducing shorts, for example, where their only lasting impact was on leisurewear, and the introduction of skimpier men’s bathing suits. At a time when fashionable “flapper” styles spoke to women’s emancipation, certain groups of men had become envious of the comfort and freedom of these new styles, perceived as an extension of female suffrage and participation in a much broader range of professions following the The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919.4 Dress Reformer and famed eugenicist Caleb Williams Saleeby was chair of the Sunlight League, which argued for greater sun exposure in a move towards cleaner air and general heathfulness, where this movement was also preoccupied by their insecurity over being mogged by the healthy natural bodies of the indigenous people they were then (and still are) colonising.5 Historian Joanna Bourke explains: “Men were decidedly threatened. Just as men feared that they had become mere accessories to women, so, too, men’s clothing was said to have become simply a foil to women’s clothing. Men needed to become ‘as beautiful as women’. Male liberation was their catch-cry: it was time to do away with all symbols of masculine frustration.”6 The same men also feared the rise of the working classes, especially after World War I, tracing the origins of men’s dress to the French Revolution when aristocratic men had had to blend in or face the guillotine. This modern invention of masculinity as an extension of Enlightenment ideals like democracy, has often been said to account for this new and observable plainness in European men’s dress more broadly, and is often pointed to as a virtue, especially among members of the left who like to reduce the pleasure of adornment to the waste and frivolity of the fashion industry. Historian Chloe Chapin, however, places the genesis of this development in the time of the Glorious Revolution, and English Parliamentary Democracy, and it does seem, that rather than being a universal expression of Enlightenment, the trend is decidedly English. Because, prior to revolution, French fashions throughout the 18th century had remained colourful, often made with French silk, as Lyon had been the centre of European silk production since the Renaissance, made with “excessive fabric draped and patterned to fall over architectural understructures.”7 In fact, “Post-French Revolutionary fashions for dark woolen coats and riding boots, which replaced brightly-colored silk coats and stockings was known as “Anglomania,” the term itself pointing to the reality that this esthetically plainer fashion had already been popular in Britain.”8 Some of you will recognise “Anglomania” as the diffusion line of Vivienne Westwood, whose sensibility could be said to generally embody this level of intelligence. As noted by Chapin, historian David Kuchta “argued, the English aristocracy viewed the wearing of domestic woolen products as particularly symbolic of national pride and a matter of patronage since at least the Restoration, and understood silk (at least to some degree) as a foreign (and often feminized) import from the French.”9 Further than this, Kuchta undermines the notion that this turn is truly democratic, where the particularly English slurs regarding “effeminacy” were generally traded between aristocrats and the middle-class,10 as suffrage was always limited to these groups in the English model, and certainly neither wanted very much to do with the working class; the “Glorious Revolution” (1688), in which James II was deposed and the powers of Parliament enshrined, certainly excluded suffrage of the working class, women and members of the “colonies”11. (All of this will become weirdly relevant in my further examination of incel poetry, as we note this new codification of men’s dress as being practical, democratic and rational, as opposed to the feminine impractical, hierarchical and irrational, characteristics imposed on all “others” ever since.) In “The Making of the Self-Made Man 1750-1850” Kuchta examines the expansion as opposed to the rejection of the masculine ideal even by Radicals, following the Glorious Revolution, which, in turn, was adopted by the middle classes as a means to criticise both aristocrats and the working classes. Kuchta writes: “In middle-class radical rhetoric, it was habits of consumption, rather than the relation to the means of production, that ultimately distinguished middle-class men from working-class men. It was middleclass men’s sober relation to the means of consumption— in contrast to the luxury and indulgence of both aristocrats and workers— that defined the middle class as a class.”12 Masculine forms of dress were also, of course, famously advanced by one Beau Brummell, credited as the inventor of the suit, in the early 19th century, and (for a time) close friend of then Prince Regent (and future King Charles IV), and influencer of democratic fashions that became essential to the aristocracy. Brummell was also friend of poet George Gordon Lord Byron, who, in his epic poem about a man travelling the world fucking wrote: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.”13 Byron is often credited as the inventor of the “rockstar” mythologeme. Yeah. There was, of course, changes and developments of this ideal along the way, and while it seems almost difficult to grasp now, that the aristocrats would have found ways to criticise the effeminacy of the middle-classes, it could be something that is seen to have resurgences throughout fashion and popular history in terms like “nouveau riche”, as well as even in the rather more contemporary phenomenon of “quiet luxury”. In this, we can now see a real fusion of gender identities within the upper classes, where feminine dress has become similarly muted, if we are to look to examples like the “viral” fashions of Gwyneth Paltrow in court. Paltrow is, of course, the poster child for “Liberal Z1onism” particularly in the form of being the spokesmodel for luxury apartments in Isr*el (whose parent company have developments in occupied territories), a position every bit as nonsensical as earlier “Dress Reform” eugenicists. The concluding chapter to Kuchta’s book, written in 2002, is, from this vantage point, somewhat amusingly titled “Inconspicuous Consumption”. The term “quiet luxury” seems to have become popularised along side the popular television series “Succession”, one of many, which, though critical of the machinations of empire, essentially valourise and place the spotlight on the ultra wealthy (it can sometimes seem like all television now surrounds the lives of the ultra rich as though to somehow make them interesting). In another American television series “Your Friends and Neighbours” the lead character, played by Jon Hamm explains in a voice over that the men are wearing almost identical shirts by Brunello Cucinelli, which a cursory internet search informs me retail for USD $1,150. I have processed these (boring, though well-made) shirts second hand and found myself wondering if their value expires by season, like a membership to an exclusive club, if you could have bought it second hand then how can you signal your extravagance? One might trace these origins to the Wall Street era of the 1980s, where men’s dress again became “masculinised” toward the suit as we understand it today after the gender experimentations of the 1970s, doubtless made possible by the Welfare State. The relaxation towards resortwear as well as luxury brand hoodies is, in effect, a continuation of the same rationalisation of fashion along class lines, the co-option of streetwear towards the consumption politic of the upper classes is another assertion of their robustness against the “effeminacy” of those forced to conform to uniform dress codes. But, of course, “quiet luxury” is not the only game in town, and changing beauty standards for men are in no way localised to the extreme right, more classically “feminine styles” have been common on the red carpet for years now particularly through figures like Pedro Pascal and Alexander Skarsgård, because why not expand markets for beauty products and more elaborate costumes into new ideals of masculinity? The luxury market is no doubt perfectly capable of infinite variety. It is spectacularly unsurprising that it was the English that originally caused this perversion, where being attractive as a man became something “effiminate” in a way to distinguish the “democratic” from the wantonness of a literally disenfranchised working class. The Looksmaxxing and Men’s Dress Reform Movements may be seen as another fascist correction of the corruptions of liberal democracy, fascists love a return to feudalism, after all, and it is hilarious that they missed the memo when it came to “effeminacy” where both groups certainly hold women in no high regard. That said, your boring outfits and your disdain for anyone who enjoys dressing up, do not make you better than anyone else, just part of a long tradition of asserting your spurious superiority in an endless circle jerk of enfranchised masculinity. And you should all do your best to look pretty for me. There is nothing inherently “fascist” or inherently “democratic” in any aesthetic, one of the great joys of aesthetic production is in subverting forms. And all forms of visual literacy are actually important, and it is so weird that it is becoming something so little appreciated in a society apparently obsessed by image. Capitalism created the fashion industry as we understand it, with industrialisation undermining millennia of literal cottage industry, clothing made for warmth, and love, and expression. The history of revolution (the Luddites etc.), as well as the history of computing are synonymous with the industrialisation of the textile industry, and yet an awareness of how fashion operates is still seen as stupid and effeminate, as though “effiminacy” is inherently a slur. My work in repurposing waste is just about as vital as I can think of as a thing to do by any metric, but I am treated and paid badly, and my “fashion sense” is dismissed as frivolty even when I put things together as I would in art. And I am tired of lazy men telling me what I should be interested in, while billionaires threaten my livelihood and give platforms to those who threaten my life. And denying the joys and the almost primal importance of adornment (as often the most central of creative urges) is utterly counterproductive. 1&nbsp;Chapin, Chloe. “Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine?: Revisiting J.C. Flügel’s Psychology of Clothes.” Fashion Theory (Abingdon) 26, no. 7 (November 2022): 983–1008. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2021.1952919. 986 and 989, respectively. 2 Joanna Bourke “The Great Male Renunciation: Men’s Dress Reform in Inter-war Britain”, Journal of Design History Vol. 9 No 1 O 1996, 23 3&nbsp;Bourke, ibid. 4&nbsp;Bourke, ibid. 24 5&nbsp;ibid, 25 6&nbsp;ibid, 24 7 Chapin, ibid. 996 8 ibid. 9 Ibid. The Restoration period was that subsequent to the English Civil War and the decapitation of King Charles I (1649), which introduced Parliamentary Democracy under Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell (and briefly, his son), until instability saw the return of Charles II from exile in 1660 (hence “Restoration”). 10 Kuchta, David. “The Making of the Self-Made Man 1750-1850” in The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850, University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=223407.Created from usyd on 2026-08-29 04:47:55. 133-172 11 Suffrage was limited to property-owning men until the Reform Act of 1867. 12 Ibid, 142 13 In Don Juan, could not be arsed finding the correct page number etc. <img src="https://cdn.buymeacoffee.com/buttons/v2/default-yellow.png" alt="Buy Me a Coffee" style="height: 60px !important;width: 217px !important;"> (Buy me a coffee link where you can literally buy me a coffee for this post if you have a mind to support, thanks!) https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Retrosynthesis-Ekphrasis-The-Cognitive-Elite Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:45:57 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Retrosynthesis-Ekphrasis-The-Cognitive-Elite “Retrosynthesis(Ekphrasis): The Cognitive Elite” at Blenheim House, Randwick︎&nbsp; <img width="5293" height="3529" width_o="5293" height_o="3529" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7779d3e4f0b55b5afa3d857c93de97f7248f067da5cde0706e000b1d403a7b7f/_48A7869.jpg" data-mid="171686209" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7779d3e4f0b55b5afa3d857c93de97f7248f067da5cde0706e000b1d403a7b7f/_48A7869.jpg" />Overview, Photograph: Jessica Maurer.Ekphasis: Directly below there is a series of explainations as to why these paintings happened, that may or may not be misleading. The idea of ekphrasis, to learn between disciplines like this appealed to my sense that sometimes things were better painted, better written. I realised that I have always made paintings as a way of understanding the world, which is why I do not concern myself so much with their alleged end-goal as luxury goods. I make them for myself and I think about things as I look at them and they are mine. I make them out of waste products and they are cheap and very precious to me. These paintings can be explained in many different ways, perhaps as one would use a Powerpoint, but more layered, textural. They are also much better in person. Realising that there is something fundamentally oral about my “writing”, I come to terms with the way that I organise things through refrain, an a-chronology like in an epic poem with occassional image to jog memory. “The Cognitive Elite” is a term favoured by billionaire, Peter Thiel, describing “innovation”. It was quite funny to me as someone cognitively impaired, and seeing as this “elite” seems to look a lot like it always had (despite our best efforts at representation). So I paint them, these invisible rulers alongside the invisible thinkers and artists. The subjects are sometimes awful sometimes excellent, a throughly ambivalent insight into things and people that I am thinking about. I would not paint the “others” among the artists and thinkers because we are watched quite enough, and our objectivity challenged by the objectification. I wanted the room to overwhelm the viewer with a sense of mens’ eyes upon them, sharing my experience like a novel of old. <img width="2339" height="3308" width_o="2339" height_o="3308" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/857d4c4d93b28f10c0900bd2a9a73eb72be79efbf94b1b690a7913f0e7170af2/rando-A3-poster-retronsynthesis--cognitive-elite.jpg" data-mid="171686956" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/857d4c4d93b28f10c0900bd2a9a73eb72be79efbf94b1b690a7913f0e7170af2/rando-A3-poster-retronsynthesis--cognitive-elite.jpg" /><img width="3840" height="5760" width_o="3840" height_o="5760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81bd64839262e2f18ec5cf7e992213a326d0c3b1aa3f479c812a5ca8f3c2d343/_48A7902.jpg" data-mid="171686147" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81bd64839262e2f18ec5cf7e992213a326d0c3b1aa3f479c812a5ca8f3c2d343/_48A7902.jpg" />“Counterpoise (Varoufakis Vittorioso)” MMXXIII. Acrylic on found board. Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="1229" height="860" width_o="1229" height_o="860" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7008bb4e352034a6fe695b7dcd2ad897f949725c49c206712148a8a61df2ea0b/Another-Reformation-Meat-Diet.jpg" data-mid="171687826" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7008bb4e352034a6fe695b7dcd2ad897f949725c49c206712148a8a61df2ea0b/Another-Reformation-Meat-Diet.jpg" />“Another Reformation Meat Diet: The Princes (Looks/Trade-off)” MMXXIII. Acrylic on (discarded) board. Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="2407" height="1757" width_o="2407" height_o="1757" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1d5fb0dbbb70073a65cedc5ab79d3b6097adc812d8d992ee48d3affc2aaa4c95/Pure-Colonial-Backwaters-Academic-Art.jpg" data-mid="171688605" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1d5fb0dbbb70073a65cedc5ab79d3b6097adc812d8d992ee48d3affc2aaa4c95/Pure-Colonial-Backwaters-Academic-Art.jpg" />“Pure Colonial Backwaters/Academic Art (Don’t Cross Daddy)” MMXXIII. Acrylic on (found) (drawing) board. Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="1332" height="1188" width_o="1332" height_o="1188" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f0ac84d0bcb0f0b41cd42856598bbb963ea255a75815941e219b7dcc877017ea/Shaking-the-Penis-Tree.jpg" data-mid="171688599" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f0ac84d0bcb0f0b41cd42856598bbb963ea255a75815941e219b7dcc877017ea/Shaking-the-Penis-Tree.jpg" />“Shaking the Penis Tree (Jan Verwoert sex dream after the Massa Marittima Mural, lockdown 2020)” MMXXIII. Oil, rabbit-skin glue, stretched poly/cotton.&nbsp;Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="5760" height="3840" width_o="5760" height_o="3840" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1c1a6155cdf0f19e10ce8a72552b8bc4f1b32881df6c08ab66ae661d7a8bd323/_48A7880.jpg" data-mid="171686141" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1c1a6155cdf0f19e10ce8a72552b8bc4f1b32881df6c08ab66ae661d7a8bd323/_48A7880.jpg" /> Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="5690" height="3793" width_o="5690" height_o="3793" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/20ae66f90932523e38aeab9e6cf5f024f859e211bb2fbbff65a11eadf78c87e4/_48A7886.jpg" data-mid="171686210" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/20ae66f90932523e38aeab9e6cf5f024f859e211bb2fbbff65a11eadf78c87e4/_48A7886.jpg" />“(Projection) Aesthetic Ascetic: Christ on a Wine Press” MMXXIII. Lime wash, stretched cotton (discarded bed sheet). Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c0b76adf2a3d9e36264a32026825171649377be0c88330c46925961a4e87c5ce/DSC_2050.JPG" data-mid="171689048" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c0b76adf2a3d9e36264a32026825171649377be0c88330c46925961a4e87c5ce/DSC_2050.JPG" /> Detail:&nbsp;“(Projection) Aesthetic Ascetic: Christ on a Wine Press” MMXXIII. Lime wash, stretched cotton (discarded bed sheet). <img width="3840" height="5760" width_o="3840" height_o="5760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1031cb34362d80561674181931fce57c4c335300d78ce0d416bb9cffd5556617/_48A7894.jpg" data-mid="171686143" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1031cb34362d80561674181931fce57c4c335300d78ce0d416bb9cffd5556617/_48A7894.jpg" />“Cultural Capital/Sun King (Hipster Fascism)” MMXXIII. (Found) Masonite, acrylic.&nbsp; Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3583" height="5375" width_o="3583" height_o="5375" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/701114bbe369d3e79e959b0b1e456e1d53a55b806c889c75dd678097b58aa7e6/_48A7906.jpg" data-mid="171686149" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/701114bbe369d3e79e959b0b1e456e1d53a55b806c889c75dd678097b58aa7e6/_48A7906.jpg" />“Print Screen (Cast-Light Horology)” MMXXIII. Oil on (discarded) glass. Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3840" height="5760" width_o="3840" height_o="5760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0994a6ca7002334a436d1d46715abe2931ebd2fb21df9c7fa207971a8d5d059b/_48A7909.jpg" data-mid="171686150" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0994a6ca7002334a436d1d46715abe2931ebd2fb21df9c7fa207971a8d5d059b/_48A7909.jpg" />“(Projection) On Reflection,” MMXXIII. Oil on glass.&nbsp; Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3718" height="5577" width_o="3718" height_o="5577" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a803644d0163434359ace3b5a07fbfbae6c1285abe2d4fd09ce867bf0884120/_48A7918.jpg" data-mid="171686200" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9a803644d0163434359ace3b5a07fbfbae6c1285abe2d4fd09ce867bf0884120/_48A7918.jpg" /> Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3127" height="4690" width_o="3127" height_o="4690" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9f62f9a2a27c26594fafc57600c62bf38bcd5ff047fada3e035943a073d155af/_48A7897.jpg" data-mid="171686144" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9f62f9a2a27c26594fafc57600c62bf38bcd5ff047fada3e035943a073d155af/_48A7897.jpg" />“Distribution/Consumption (Blue Origin of the Gods),” MMXXIII (Found) Masonite, acrylic.&nbsp; Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3840" height="5760" width_o="3840" height_o="5760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3370ccde27da03bd9d58596e7ad53c3fe2f494f3a118851890572406e52327c1/_48A7900.jpg" data-mid="171686146" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3370ccde27da03bd9d58596e7ad53c3fe2f494f3a118851890572406e52327c1/_48A7900.jpg" />“Benevolence (The Emperor’s New Clothes/You Can Leave Your Hat On) ” MMXXIII. Acrylic on (found) (drawing) board.&nbsp; Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3840" height="5760" width_o="3840" height_o="5760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9f8bbc6d39ec3e0539468267a7ccdc2636b550fd027c535849122d96ba20f32c/_48A7913.jpg" data-mid="171686152" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9f8bbc6d39ec3e0539468267a7ccdc2636b550fd027c535849122d96ba20f32c/_48A7913.jpg" /> Photograph: Jessica Maurer. <img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8bad07be8b7b4b66afd406258e79c7073ccab4b515cba4aad76b5bb0d24c3920/2-Framed.JPG" data-mid="171688564" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8bad07be8b7b4b66afd406258e79c7073ccab4b515cba4aad76b5bb0d24c3920/2-Framed.JPG" /><img width="480" height="622" width_o="480" height_o="622" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/09c6655dde8d6957f043c013db3af6276bc249c5ea40893fb1e007f267d8fb86/4-invite.jpg" data-mid="171688571" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/480/i/09c6655dde8d6957f043c013db3af6276bc249c5ea40893fb1e007f267d8fb86/4-invite.jpg" /><img width="768" height="768" width_o="768" height_o="768" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ce44053a749999fd7ab3b2273b1a22180923fd543ad36cd23d2544e5048c0c15/1-likeness.jpg" data-mid="171688555" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/768/i/ce44053a749999fd7ab3b2273b1a22180923fd543ad36cd23d2544e5048c0c15/1-likeness.jpg" /><img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3035911d499da8ffeab7375ec52c13e1afc2455348b708bcd179cbb1fdcd6bcf/DSC_1943.JPG" data-mid="171688805" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3035911d499da8ffeab7375ec52c13e1afc2455348b708bcd179cbb1fdcd6bcf/DSC_1943.JPG" /><img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/99f989ae916ba90755ee703acf7c780adc345bb5a7dc847dee22019fcc1488e5/3-vanities.JPG" data-mid="171688570" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/99f989ae916ba90755ee703acf7c780adc345bb5a7dc847dee22019fcc1488e5/3-vanities.JPG" /> https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/On-Academic-Art Fri, 25 Aug 2023 03:10:40 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/On-Academic-Art On “Academic Art”︎&nbsp;ELAM Project Space The following text explains the painting that explains the text. It is part of a larger project called Ekphrasis//Ekphrasis which I will be publishing on Substack. On Academic Art: by Zoë Marni Robertson EKPHRASIS: <img width="2407" height="1757" width_o="2407" height_o="1757" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1d5fb0dbbb70073a65cedc5ab79d3b6097adc812d8d992ee48d3affc2aaa4c95/Pure-Colonial-Backwaters-Academic-Art.jpg" data-mid="188838123" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1d5fb0dbbb70073a65cedc5ab79d3b6097adc812d8d992ee48d3affc2aaa4c95/Pure-Colonial-Backwaters-Academic-Art.jpg" />“Pure Colonial Backwaters/Academic Art (Don’t Cross Daddy)” MMXXIII. Acrylic on (found) (drawing) board. Photograph: Jessica Maurer. ABSTRACT/SYNOPSIS (BROAD STROKES): In "Pure Colonial Backwaters/Academic Art (Don't Cross Daddy/Hlodewig)” Post-internet artist Simon Denny sits atop the tomb-like raft of the “Sons of Clovis II”, a 19th century “History Painting” owned by (and on, apparently permanent, prominent display in) the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 19th century “History Painting” (also known as “Academic Art”) is a much-maligned movement (or term that straddles a few movements) that basically refers to paintings with very literal and ‘realistic’ interpretations of historical (or allegedly historical) events. The source painting, by Évariste Vital Luminais, depicts sons that have risen up against their father only to be “hamstrung” (have their tendons severed) by their mother, Saint Bathilde, in retaliation, a story cobbled-together from others from early French history (the Merovingian dynasty which began around the 5th Century, after the fall of the Roman Empire). Luminais was referred to variously as the painter of the Franks and the Gauls, popular after the revolution for depictions like these of Frankish brutality (because they had apparently decapitated the Franks during the revolution leaving the innocent Gauls to rule)(who were then brutality suppressing populations elsewhere). So much of the work being produced lately conforms to the ideals of 19th century History Painting/Academic Art in quite literally representing its source material and intentions (though in ways that are more formally more divergent). Denny’s exhibition “The Founder’s Paradox” delves heavily into material surrounding Silicon Valley Billionaire Peter Thiel’s purchase of 190 hectares of land around Lake Wanaka in Aotearoa. Thiel’s intention was to build a doomsday property in which to outlive the collapse of society. Denny demonstrates the theory that is the background for this in artworks in the aesthetic of board games, pitting Thiel’s Techno-Libertarianism against another possible scenario modelled on cooperation. In “Pure Colonial Backwaters…)” the sons of Clovis II float near-death on the pure waters of Lake Wanaka unaided by the artist/observer atop their lifeboat as the world descends into a brutality that Billionaires such as Thiel champion. It almost seems as though the Contemporary artist is also, if not actually, hamstrung, in the necessity of creating “subversive” work that will appeal to the market. EKPHRASIS: PAINTING AS HOAX: An Australian art historian once quipped that “The Sons of Clovis II” was a fitting purchase for the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a reminder of what happens to naughty children.[1]This is mentioned in a book which takes its title from the painting, dissecting Australia’s largest literary hoax, the “Ern Malley Affair” (with reference to a 19th Century French literary hoax Adore Floupette the fictional Symbolistepoet whose first poem refers to the other “Sons of Clovis” painting: “Les Enerves Jumieges”). According to Blue-Mountains-based artist Ian Milliss, “The Sons of Clovis II” was/is a pilgrimage for the hungover of Sydney[2](fitting for its origins in 19th century French salons). Aside from “The Sons of Clovis II”, one of the major attractions of The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), and the most visited exhibition, is that of Australia’s richest art prizes: The Archibald (for portraiture of prominent Australians), The Wynne prize (for landscape) and The Sir John Sulman (for murals/subject/genre paintings i.e., History Painting), which run concurrently before touring the country. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71b4b1375bac0ef047b7257769dd585b2aa28a025cf5b331aea8564138885b77/img-simon-denny-1_104905961183.jpg" data-mid="189467712" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/71b4b1375bac0ef047b7257769dd585b2aa28a025cf5b331aea8564138885b77/img-simon-denny-1_104905961183.jpg" /> Photo of Simon Denny by Sebastian Kim for Interview Magazine, November 29, 2011. BACKWATERS:[3] Rereading about Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Aotearoa/New Zealand “doomsday” property and Denny’s exhibition on the subject, “The Founders Paradox”,[4]while thinking about the references to the pure, clean waters of Lake Wanaka, lead to the strange conflation of these works (i.e., “The Founders Paradox” and “The Sons of Clovis II”). Thiel was famously the only person in Silicon Valley to donate to the Trump Campaign,[5]a believer in some strange theories concerning the kind of doomsday prepping that would allow for Billionaires to basically carry on business-as-usual after the apocalypse,[6]and sometime backer of internet-alternative “Urbit”, with its stated aims toward a feudal system of online governance.[7]The static view of the “pristine” environment of Aotearoa/New Zealand, continually referred to by Billionaires (several of whom have bought property there for when the world grows more uninhabitable), would seem to suggest that it will always be so, as though the world is not alive, and there is somewhere far enough away that you could wait out the end of humanity without being affected by it. It is the lot of the Antipodean to always be positioned at the end of the world (the word itself means something like “their feet against our feet”). In the aforementioned exhibition by Denny, two separate spaces contained the two representations of possible political alternatives; pitting the game-like competitive futures favoured by Silicon Valley, against an alternative as postulated in an (Aotearoa/New Zealand) best-seller “The New Zealand Project” by Max Harris, apparently “a blend of old Keynesian economics and modern millennial values”[8]that is “influenced by Māori beliefs about society.”[9] The “binary opposition” of these views (apparently) largely summed up by hostility-to or belief-in broader state control (Techno-Libertarianism versus the Welfare State).[10]Denny’s art objects are essentially modelled on tools of “Visual Communication” reproducing the clean professionalism of toy companies or museums directed towards the education of minors, they are perfectly ugly. What is offered is a kind of suite of merchandise surrounding the (as Peter Thiel himself pointed out “meticulous”[11]) research. And, though the work does not necessarily speak to any inherent acceptance that “Small Government” and “Big Government” are the only considerations for political futures, the formal aspect engenders the kind of trust that is built into the design of educational materials, as we are taught to accept them.[12]The apparent acceptance that these two options represent polar opposites is perhaps troubling: John Maynard Keynes, was, after all, considered a conservative,[13]before the current era (from roughly after the 1980s) of generalised acceptance of free-market economics. By presenting an alternative future whose “left” politics are what would traditionally be considered conservative we have a reflection of the current situation where “the centre” is seen as the happy medium, and yet it is somewhere much further “right” than the policies of conservative governments during the 1970s. (This is not to disagree with the ideals of the Harris Project.)[14]But then, perhaps the point of “The Founder’s Paradox” is that in these “doomsday” projections “the right” provide no real alternative, no future, so much as violent ends (Thiel was said to find the black mirror reflection of his values quite unsettling).[15] On the other hand, a quote from one of Harris’ (most grumpy) critics argues against the same perceived inefficacy of Harris’ vision, in a way that seems to fit seamlessly with Denny’s exhibition: “All the talk about What Must Be Done starts to feel less like activism and more like a form of fantasy roleplaying, only instead of pretending to be dragon-slayers, or vampires, progressive intellectuals pretend to be people who are relevant to contemporary politics.”[16] Perusing the (sometimes very thick) volumes attached to Denny’s numerous major exhibitions, one thing that stands out is that (in these exhibitions whose very work necessitates thorough research) the essays are generally written by people other than Denny himself. It is as though Denny functions as not so much an academic, but as a one-man Arts Faculty. “The Founders Paradox: A Compendium” was written by Art critic and writer Anthony Byrt, who, begins by explaining that he was widely quoted after the publication of his 2011 book “This Model World”, after writing that: “I have never been able to entirely figure out whether (Denny) is a critic of the corporate neoliberalism that provides him with so much of his subject matter, or an artist deeply embedded within, and beholden to, that system.”[17](One might say, cynically, that coming to work with and even employ one’s critic is in itself a classic Neoliberal strategy.) Perhaps the major issue with the humanities being put-to-work in this way is evidenced in what passes for a literature review in which Byrt (without explanation) quite blithely endorses and dismisses major recent works of internet-centric theory (Angela Nagle’s “assertions” are “unhelpful”, Hito Steyerl’s writing is “brilliant”), reducing the paradigm of research to a matter of personal preference (Byrt, is after all, essentially a journalist and not an academic).[18]While Denny’s position may be difficult to ascertain, in the aforementioned aside, Byrt expressly endorses art theorist Mackenzie Wark’s (to put it blithely)meaningless notion of “vectoral capitalism”, and Harris’ work concluding that: “we actually have abundant resources available to counter an economic structure that determines value through scarcity. For Wark it is data which has the potential to be used by hackers against the “vectoral” class. For Harris, it is what we might call “moral” resources – specifically love and empathy.”[19] Byrt writes that it is rare for Denny to make a declarative judgement regarding the material that he presents, explaining that his position is “honest” in “(highlighting) the status of the artist in late capitalist culture: the contradictory desire to be a freelancer and entrepreneur on the one hand and a voice for resistance and progressive change on the other.”[20]Denny, for his part, identifies as a sculptor,[21]marking these works out as something static, the archive and game design evoked for neither’s informational properties but as aesthetic… even the art critic/academic as aesthetic: meaning as sculpture. <img width="614" height="424" width_o="614" height_o="424" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8c88376d98111b847afef00655e158d091c9016a6b5e7c463fb57ff91029c717/enerves.jpg" data-mid="189467723" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/614/i/8c88376d98111b847afef00655e158d091c9016a6b5e7c463fb57ff91029c717/enerves.jpg" /> Évariste Vital Luminais, “The Sons of Clovis II”, 1880. Oil on canvas. 190.7 x 275.8 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales. THE MEROVINGIANS II (The French are not Franks): Luminais was referred to variously as the painter of the Franks and the Gauls; in “The Sons of Clovis II” and its sister-work “Les Enerves Jumieges” (the two of which were the most successful and celebrated of Luminais’ works apparently for being so arrestingly macabre), the Frankish Merovingian dynasty is depicted to impress a sense of the particular brutality of that lineage. This subject was popular in 19th century France (after the initial Revolution and in the following period of instability) for its perceived justification of the “Reign of Terror”, as it was widely held that the Gauls had simply been restored to their rightful position as rulers of France, after centuries of Frankish rule (the Franks were of Germanic origin unlike the Gauls whom the French public widely identified as the descendants of).[22]In an article entitled “The Merovingians from the French Revolution to the Third Republic” historian Edward James writes of the extent of the efforts to characterise the former ruling dynasty as somehow ethnically violent. He explains that much to the annoyance of many of his contemporaries, François Guizot, “the leading figure among the liberal historians of the Restoration period,” introduced his own spelling of Frankish personal names, “The familiar ‘Clovis’, for instance, disappears in favour of Hlodewig. The purpose of this was clear: by going back to what he imagined the original Frankish form of the words was, he persuaded his readers to think of the Franks as foreign conquerors, rather than as comfortably assimilated Frenchmen.”[23] James also offers that the express purpose of teaching history at school, according to eighty percent of candidates for the baccalauréat moderne in 1897, was to instil a sense of patriotism.[24]Meanwhile, in the 19th century, “Gallic” France was nevertheless brutally suppressing colonised populations across the globe. THE DREAD HISTORY PAINTING: [25] “History Painting” existed long before the 19th Century but takes shape as a self-conscious form in that time as the invention of photography, combined with exposure to art from the rest of the world, seems to have caused some self-reflexivity regarding both the subjectivity and formal aspects of art within Europe.[26]Pre-19th century European art was, of course, dictated by financial and social limitations which meant that art centred around roughly the same themes of the prizes at AGNSW: representative images of the social elite; landscapes; or images of religious themes and/or European history from antiquity onwards. To have the history of European art laid bare so laconically, has long been an annoyance for Australian artists trying to function in a global continuum.[27] There is perhaps something lost in the slippage between intent and actualisation that may be what makes the work of both eras of “Academic Art” so widely disliked.[28]The technical prowess of history painters such as Luminais never made up for how bland and somehow bad the paintings are, just as the (usually computer-generated) technical proficiency and sound logic of Post-Internet Art does not always quite add-up to satisfying work. I would refer to two articles published by Melbourne-based art publication MeMO about very different exhibitions. Lecturer in art history and theory at Monash University, Luke Smythe writes admiringly about John Martin’s (History Painting) “The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum,” 1822,[29]which was a work that people once paid a fee to see and experience (a kind of 19th century equivalent of watching the apocalyptic Netflix series “Stranger Things”)[30]. Of course, Martin was both exceptionally popular and very widely derided in his own time (William Makepeace Thackeray called his work: "huge, queer and tawdry").[31] A Martin retrospective in Newcastle (in the United Kingdom) caused these historical debates to be raised anew, but it would seem that in Melbourne, Smythe was simply taken with the grandeur and spectacle (not that there is anything wrong with that). It is the changing expectations for painting that are interesting here, and perhaps the fashion of the moment is such that many of these 19th century works will be assessed anew. In another review for MeMO, Gemma Topliss writes about Petra Cortright’s recent Post-Internet Art exhibition, describing it as belonging to the nostalgia for such things as “American Apparel tennis skirts, Lana Del Rey, washed-out digital images à la Terry Richardson, and blogging”[32], as though it goes without saying that art is necessarily subject to the whims of fashion. Cortright’s “paintings” made in Photoshop and printed on aluminium embrace newness and technology above all else, reducing the long painting tradition of contextualising one’s practice within the continuum, to absurdity. Topliss states that: “The aluminium is reflective and the paintings glow like dull screens, catching the light at certain angles to produce a luminous flash. They float, impossibly thin, like mounted flat-screen TVs.”[33] Much of the article refers to the artist’s desire to represent “beauty” in such a way as would be perfectly in keeping with the motivations of the most apparently backwards of painters/critics (of the kind that would take such prizes as the Archibald with the utmost seriousness). (Writing to a friend about the article on the Cortright exhibition I finally articulated my general feelings on the associated movement: “like most post-internet art, it seems interesting and possibly terrible”.) There are, however, outliers in any movement and History Painting has been alternatively used to call history into question (for purposes other than to rally Patriotism), Théodore Géricault’s critique of ultra-royalism, “The Raft of the Medusa” (also containing themes of abolitionism) comes to mind.[34]Post-Internet Art also transcends its modishness when it actually interrogatesthe present. Certainly, there is merit to works that allow for investment in research. There is, however, something missing when a work of art is only an argument. In the absence of a nuanced approach, we return to these problems: art as didactic panel, again without vestige of what originally animated a thing as art: that point at which human understanding fails. WORKING CONDITIONS/ACADEMIC ART: The work of Academic artists diverges from traditional academia due to the allegedly “subjective” nature of their/our work, meaning they/we are able to speak to more broad political issues. Best practice within academia is after all offering the complexities of a specific subject, even becoming expert by narrowing the field,[35]whereas artists will behave like bowerbirds taking ideas from everywhere and repurposing them. But in practice artists, too, tend to focus on very narrow fields as a means of self-marketing. Artist/Academics are bound by performance indicators and must seek public engagement as any academic, though with the added constraints of the art market, which would (famously) call for artists to simply reproduce the same works for sale. At the same time, there is a financial and social inevitability to the prevalence of “Academic Art” with so many artists becoming academics out of necessity, as less specialised work can no longer guarantee an income enough to keep up with the rapidly increasing cost of living.[36]Within the university, the increasing qualification requires PhDs of lecturers demanding a particular form of work and engagement, justifying itself through “research” paradigms originally designed for the sciences. Highly casualised and ultimately poorly compensated academic work is nevertheless highly sought after. In a strange “debate” between anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and Peter Thiel, the two, though diametrically politically opposed, generally agree on a there being a cultural and scientific stagnation definitive of the present. Graeber, speaking to his experience in Anthropology departments in the U.S.A. and London gives a breakdown (mostly) endorsed by Thiel, which could equally describe the working conditions of artists/curators within Contemporary Art Institutions: “…in social theory, basically what we’re doing is writing these endless annotations on French theory of the 1970s, sometimes the 1960s or ‘80s. I call it the “Classic Rock Phenomenon” (…) if you want to have maximized possibility of unexpected breakthroughs it’s pretty obvious what the best policy is, get a bunch of creative people, give them the resources they need for a certain amount of time (…) basically you leave them alone. Most of them will probably not come up with anything but a few of them will come up with something that will even surprise themselves. If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs take those same people and then tell them they’re not going to get any resources at all unless they spend the majority of their time competing with one another to prove to you they already know what they’re going to create...”[37] Art schools similarly function in the continuum of (predominately) French theory from around the 1970s, as well as referring almost exclusively to artworks from the same period. At Sydney College of the Arts, for example, there is a Second-Year assignment called “Art In The Expanded Field”, after the Roslind Krauss essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (published in October Magazine in 1979).[38]The essay refers to “Land Art”, much of which has been recently reassessed in terms of environmental impact, as well as the colonial aspect of reshaping the natural world (especially in unceded territory such as North America). Recent articles on Michael Heizer’s monumental structure “City”, for example, in (left political magazine) Counterpunch[39]and (online art publication) Hyperallergic[40]thereafter, question the merit of building an empty monolith in proximity to a site of significance for Native Americans. The original article seems dated and somewhat wrongheaded in arguing for this “new” art that Krauss expressly places above the proposed utility of spiritual sites such as Machu Picchu, in arguing for this art pour l’art… (or art for rich, white men with tractors).[41] &nbsp;Of course, all Land Art is not equal (Agnes Denes’ “Wheatfield”, 1982, has aged very well, in evoking food scarcity, for example). Within the framework of the university-based art school, it is not the merit (or lack) of the Land Art movement that is important so much as the oddly stagnant cultural assumptions, still perceiving the work of the 1970s as the work that is current, where art must be a grand gesture of contemporaneity in line with the production of spectacle. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” had a significant impact on the way that we understand art, and yet perhaps what is perhaps a more interesting question, some 40 years later, is what art is not in ‘the expanded field’? In a sense the purported newness of this method of working serves to undermine art historical works, continuing the strange antagonism between “Painting” and “Contemporary Art”, as though painting never exists/ed in the world. The fetishism that is encouraged in schools of painting (the glorification of oil paint and stretched canvas as though one could not possibly make anything of value with the wrong pigment) undermines the art historical works it simultaneously glorifies, for, what work of “the canon” is canonised for being simply well-executed? Many paintings that remain admired from the Renaissance are still relevant for having worked within the narrow confines of Christian art to produce something outside it, in ways that were often subversive. Titian’s “The Tribute Money” (around 1516), is an interesting example, painted for the door of the Duke of Ferrara’s famous coin collection. As explained in the didactic panel at The Old Masters Gallery in Dresden: “The subject here is the provocative question posed by the Pharisees as to whether it is right to pay taxes to the Emperor in Rome. Christ cleverly avoided the trap by asking for a coin bearing the head of Emperor and saying “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s…”” While the theme is certainly suitable for its destination, there is also something fundamentally subversive about rendering a coin collection, a display of wealth, with the image of Jesus in the act of demonstrating the ungodliness of money.[42] THE “NEW” ACADEMY: In the 19th century, History Painting/Academic Art functioned as Academic/Post-Internet Art does today in prosaically and proficiently illustrating its didactic ends, though it could be conceded that the patriotism of the original movement is in diametric opposition to motives of contemporary academia with its (at least generally stated) anti-imperial and postcolonial ideals.[43]Denny’s ambivalent position, even lack of a (at least visible) position enables him to work within the Contemporary art market and broader neoliberal framework in a way that has demonstratively been revoked from increasingly-threatened disciplines within the Humanities, whose overtly antagonistic positions have regularly been cited by (at least) the Australian Liberal Party as a threat in (the rather more banalised Australian version of) “the culture wars”.[44]Of course, extremes of anti-imperial discourse have been repeatedly instrumentalised in justifying university cuts everywhere (that belong to a greater trend towards austerity). In her 2021 polemic “Virtue Hoarders: The Rise of the Professional Managerial Class”, academic Catherine Liu writes of a well-funded conspiracy within North American universities to create an ahistorical counternarrative so extremely (and alienatingly) to ‘the Left’ as to promote individualism and relativism over working-class consensus, concluding that: “Liberals have abandoned history, because they have to believe they are superior to elites of the past and the contemporary working class at the same time. Members of the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) believe themselves to be virtuous vanguardists, floating above historical forms and conditions, transgressing boundaries and inventing new ways of being and seeing.”[45] It is possibly the idea of “the new” that is ultimately so troubling. It is difficult to overlook that Denny’s research comfortably fits within the ideology that it ultimately promotes understanding of, whether or not the conclusions are flattering.[46] The result is a kind of Warhol-esque flatness. It represents and engenders contemporary ambivalence. (I can never figure out if I love it or hate it, but, ironically, it does make me feel something.) HAND-DRAWN CONCLUSIONS/HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VECTOR: Strangely, it is the dearth of education in art history that leads to these ghosts of historic forms, this ‘universal’ European continuum. The failure to learn to appreciate the trajectory of Western art history (and the history of Western thought in general) has led to a stagnation in mainstream Western culture further exasperated by income inequality and the corporatisation of universities (both public and private). Art schools may have been among the first in the university to jettison tradition for the sake of “relevance”, to where the focus has become near chronophobic, perpetuating only iconoclastic works of the 20th century that purport to exist outside of the economic system, outside of national boundaries. In Western cosmology, the obsession with the “new” serves to impress the idea that the human can be perfected alongside technology. Though artists such as Denny are very informed regarding art history, Post-Internet Art is institutionalised (by Museums and Academia, though mostly the market) to sometimes critically observe the effects of Technocracy on society and sometimes embrace this new era, but always to privilege technology in line with the ideals of the Technocracy. This kind of art now commands immense profit in corrupt markets that encourage insider-trading, further exasperating the unequal distribution of wealth. Now every university department must demonstrate that it can be similarly instrumentalised or face inevitable decline (in a strange turnaround, Sydney College of the Arts is doing very well economically). Academic Art may demonstrate some value in encouraging and visualising forms of closer reading that are now considered an indulgence, but in this “information age” more knowledge is being lost by economic conditions than can ever be replaced. It is in this historical myopia that we may discover why the present seems so insurmountable. This Ekphrasis//Ekphrasis Project will continue via Substack: @zoemarnirobertson Zoë Marni Robertson is an artist, writer and Sessional Academic/PhD candidate at The University of Sydney (SCA). Zoë's research-based work encompasses video, painting, prose, poetry and performance, often using found materials. She has exhibited across a wide network of Artist-Run-Initiatives as well as various Institutions such as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (MCA) and The Murray Art Museum, Albury (MAMA). Instagram: @zoemarnirobertson [1]David Brooks, The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a Secret History of Australian Poetry, St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2011. [2] Ian Milliss’ Facebook [3] It sometimes feels as though half my generation of Antipodean artists left for the greener pastures of Europe, accepting the notion that we are at the edge of the earth, that Europe and North America (or Berlin and New York) are at the centre of art. [4] Actual exhibition texts written by Anthony Byrt are hard to come by outside the “Founders Paradox Compendium” sold by Denny’s Auckland-based gallery, Michael Lett, so the story, and subsequent appearances by antagonist Peter Thiel would seem to now be archived solely in this “long read” by Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand”, The Guardian, 15 February 201, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand [5] James Duesterberg, “Among the Reality Entrepreneurs: Urbit goes downtown”, The Point Magazine, September 9, 2022, https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/among-the-reality-entrepreneurs/ [6] O’Connell ibid. [7] Duesterberg ibid. [8]Thomas Coughlan, “Thomas Coughlan: The brilliance of The NZ Project,” Newsroom, April 26th 2017, https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2017/04/25/20680/thomas-coughlan-the-brilliance-of-the-nz-project last accessed: 17/08/2023 [9] O’Connell, Ibid. [10] O’Connell ibid. [11] Ibid. [12] This is (likely intentionally) reminiscent of the popularity of the game “Monopoly” which was, of course, designed as a tool for demonstrating inherent ills of capitalism only to become uncritically accepted as a fun pastime. [13]Brue Bartlett, “Keynes Was Really A Conservative”, in Forbes Magazine,August 14 2009, https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/13/john-maynard-keynes-conservative-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html?sh=60148e837605 [14] I have not yet read it, and I am a big fan of The Welfare State. [15] O’Connell ibid. [16] Danyl Mclauchlan, “The New Zealand Project offers a bold, urgent, idealistic vision. I found it deeply depressing”, in The Spinoff, April 22, 2017, https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/22-04-2017/the-nz-project-offers-a-bold-urgent-idealistic-vision-i-found-it-deeply-depressing#.WPp69pyGTEg.twitter [17] Anthony Byrt and Simon Denny, “The Founder's Paradox: A Compendium”, Michael Lett Gallery Publications, 2017. P. 9 Quote in: Byrt, Anthony. This Model World : Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art, Auckland University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4689774.Created from usyd on 2023-08-27 01:32:40. P.195 [18] Byrt and Denny Ibid, p.40. [19] Ibid. [20]Byrt, Denny Ibid. p.10 [21] Ibid. [22] Citizen Ducall asked for the abandonment of the word ‘French’ – ‘we are pure blood Gauls’ – while Anacharsis Cloots wrote in 1793 that ‘The French have emigrated or been guillotined. The Gauls have become men by crushing their conquerors under the ruins of the Bastille.’ James, Edward. “The Merovingians from the French Revolution to the Third Republic.” Early Medieval Europe 20, no. 4 (2012): 450–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/emed.12004. [23] Ibid. [24] Ibid. [25]&nbsp; On general disdain for Academic Art/History Painting, take for example, an article on the legacy of Gustave Moreau: “Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and histories of art associate Gustave Moreau with fin de siecle Symbolism or Decadence. While this categorization has undoubtedly helped to save Moreau's oeuvre from the oblivion in which despised nineteenth century "academic" art lay for so long, it has also distorted our understanding of his achievement. Art historians are now beginning to recognize an essential fact that was self-evident to Moreau himself, as well as to his contemporaries: the author of Oedipus and the Sphinx and Salome was, above all, a history painter.1 Indeed, not only did Moreau proudly describe himself as "peintre d'histoire" on his visiting cards but also, to the end of his life, both as a practitioner and as a teacher, he maintained an unshakable loyalty to the ideals traditionally associated with the genre that he preferred to call "le grand art."” Cooke, Peter. “Gustave Moreau and the Reinvention of History Painting.” The Art Bulletin 90, no. 3 (2008): 394–416. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20619619. [26] As the 20th century would see Western artists diverge from tradition by appropriating themes from “other” cultures, particularly from African art and Eastern Philosophy. [27] It is slightly mortifying… and yet also very funny when one considers how much North American and European Art of the 20th century aimed to present itself as universal and “new” while stemming from exactly this narrow European tradition. If this is quite a nihilistic perspective it is perhaps fitting in the context of the feeling of cultural stagnation, which I believe to stem from material shortcomings, i.e., the unequal distribution of wealth, rather than any inherent lack on the part of artists of the present. [28]In a podcast hosted by Joshua Citarella, curator of KW Institut in Berlin, Nadim Samman discusses his new book on Post-Internet Art making reference to a time “Before Post-Internet Art was a dirty word.” Joshua Citarella with guest Nadim Samman on Substack “Cryptids and Conspiracy in the Technocene w/ Nadim&nbsp;Samman” [29] Luke Smythe, “Light: Works from Tate's Collection” MeMO Review, 6th August 2022. https://memoreview.net/reviews/light-works-from-tate-s-collection-at-australian-centre-for-the-moving-image-acmi-by-luke-smythe [30]John Gayford, “John Martin: the Laing Gallery, Newcastle” March 15, 2011. The tagline for the article is: “John Martin, the subject of a new exhibition, was a painter whose apocalyptic visions prefigured Hollywood.” [31]Mark Brown “Derided painter John Martin makes a dramatic comeback” in The Guardian, March 4, 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/mar/04/artist-john-martin-comeback [32]Gemma Topliss, “Petra Cortright, haunted lemon hunted spirit” MeMO Review [33]Ibid. [34] I am indebted to Alex Gawronski for the suggestion. [35]As pointed out by Umberto Eco: “Finally, remember this fundamental principle: the more you narrow the field, the better and more safely you will work. Always prefer a monograph to a survey. It is better for your thesis to resemble an essay than a complete history or an encyclopedia.” Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis, MIT Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=3339948. Created from usyd on 2022-05-18 01:59:57 P.13 [36] See Liu Ibid. [37] “David Graeber vs Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go" David Graeber vs Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go - YouTube [38] Krauss, Rosalind. Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October. Vol. 8. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1979. [39] Char Miller, “Monstrosity in the Nevada Desert: Michael Heizer’s “City””, in Counterpunch, August 26, 2022. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/26/monstrosity-in-the-nevada-desert-michael-heizers-city/ [40] Chris Fernald, “Michael Heizer’s Empty Empire,” Hyperallergic, September 26, 2022. [41] The Krauss essay itself is (somewhat more sensitively) critiqued by Jan Verwoert and Hugh Rorrison in the article: “Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It’s a Good Idea.” Afterall 12, no. 12 (2005): 7–16. https://doi.org/10.1086/aft.12.20711583. [42] At the National Gallery in London, beside a later version of the painting, the didactic panel reads “Asked about paying taxes, Christ identifies Caesar’s name on a coin, noting that it belongs to his government, thereby emphasising that taxes are not in conflict with his teachings…” which seemed quite a funny way of neutralising the work, though I am no theologian. [43] History Painting of the same kind practised in the 19th century, of course, still exists, its trajectory from Ancient Greece to Modern Europe and North America make it the kind of art favoured by American Conservative to this day. It is also the major theme of Australian art prizes; aside from the Archibald there is the Portia Geech, The Dobell, etc. There will always be people working within outmoded continuums, but these are not of interest to us here. [44]See, for example, discussions between former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and late businessman Paul Ramsey which resulted in the founding of “The Ramsey Centre for Western Civilisation”, which was supposed to infiltrate the Australian National University, but has ended up at the University of Wollongong. As claimed by Abbott: “every element of the curriculum was supposed to be pervaded by Asian, indigenous and sustainability perspectives. Almost entirely absent from the contemporary educational mindset was any sense that cultures might not all be equal and that truth might not be entirely relative.” As quoted by Mike Seccombe, in “Howard, Abbott and the Ramsay Centre” in The Saturday Paper, June 16-22 2018, https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2018/06/16/howard-abbott-and-the-ramsay-centre/15290712006378 [45] Catherine Liu, ““Transgressing” the Boundaries of Professionalism” in Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. University of Minnesota Press. 2021 https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv1fkgbjxp.34. [46] As written by (former academic) philosopher, literary theorist, and political theorist, Armen Avanessian: “(Criticality) criticises within the system, but it does so without assenting to the system as such, aware that an absolute position outside the system is impossible, and that even the most radical criticism has a legitimate legitimising affect. The “smuggling” of embedded criticism thus names the strategy of sidestepping or going behind an order and of hollowing out legitimacy from the inside. Imminent criticality takes pleasure in the self-reflexive paradox of holding on to a subversive behaviour it knows to be unsustainable.” Armen Avanessian, Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge—Poetics of Existence, London: Sternberg Press, 2017. P.38. https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Subject Tue, 04 Oct 2022 05:50:58 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Subject “Subject” at The University of Sydney (Gallery in the Sky Bridge)︎&nbsp; “Representation of Dead White Men”, MMXXII. Acrylic (house paint mis-tints) on (discarded) canvas (banner). Approx. 5000 x 2000 mm. “Atropos, The Countess of Lopfen”, MMXXII. Acrylic (house paint mis-tints) on (discarded) canvas (banner). Approx. 5000 x 2000 mm. (Goya’s “Atropos, the Fates” conflated with a probably apocryphal story from the German peasant war of 1525, in which the Countess of Lopfen demanded that 1200 of her serfs find her snail shells to use as spools for her thread... the fates, of course, would spin the thread of a man’s life and Atropos would cut it at its end.) “Technofeudalism II: Great Replacement”, MMXXII. Lime wash on (discarded) poly/cotton (bedsheet). Approx. 2100 x2100 mm.(Elon Musk and his many children... he keeps talking about population collapse but any demographer will tell you that it’s not a thing... exept in the European population... gross.) “Cephalophore, Cure for M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis)”, MMXXII. Oil on canvas. 1016 x1016 mm. “Paleo Monolith on Neolith”, MMXXII. Oil on canvas. 1016 x1016 mm. (Neolith is a kind of “engineered stone, of the kind that keeps giving stonemasons silicosis. The meat is a painting of Paul Thek’s “Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box”.) <img width="5184" height="3888" width_o="5184" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ecbe752acc331eb024360c87e20adc097b2cd5148a3cc919012a5b71161e6255/P1088518.JPG" data-mid="154882314" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ecbe752acc331eb024360c87e20adc097b2cd5148a3cc919012a5b71161e6255/P1088518.JPG" /><img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6329a854d80c5a81e01f2a9e7ef24fdc36bf62004284c2fcfa0549d00c9dbc56/DSC_1699.JPG" data-mid="154882356" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6329a854d80c5a81e01f2a9e7ef24fdc36bf62004284c2fcfa0549d00c9dbc56/DSC_1699.JPG" /><img width="5184" height="3888" width_o="5184" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8e5d9d2294e6feecce72178fa83d230f3de85a827c47bbe995f8912b606b90f1/P1088517.JPG" data-mid="154882313" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8e5d9d2294e6feecce72178fa83d230f3de85a827c47bbe995f8912b606b90f1/P1088517.JPG" /><img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84e33b24fec46c29c0c9f71784f7f8a57b4895505500df6add5a28e40533a18f/DSC_1723.JPG" data-mid="154882304" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/84e33b24fec46c29c0c9f71784f7f8a57b4895505500df6add5a28e40533a18f/DSC_1723.JPG" /><img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f50c5f889435e2b623978c41d5704ba7de027ef35cb3a7885ab7a7b339d6ae46/DSC_1702.JPG" data-mid="154882447" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f50c5f889435e2b623978c41d5704ba7de027ef35cb3a7885ab7a7b339d6ae46/DSC_1702.JPG" /><img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/609ee828109ed39c8c1572aefcdc2a1e99ad5e76d3a96ccaf927ddacbf9b0d6c/DSC_1685.JPG" data-mid="154882301" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/609ee828109ed39c8c1572aefcdc2a1e99ad5e76d3a96ccaf927ddacbf9b0d6c/DSC_1685.JPG" /><img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5dc97786c4f5ba78c3a5d07ec4ec955103c895cd54a3e2fd0eef680ca8d5a821/DSC_1684.JPG" data-mid="154882300" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5dc97786c4f5ba78c3a5d07ec4ec955103c895cd54a3e2fd0eef680ca8d5a821/DSC_1684.JPG" /><img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f6413a44a3fbae90baed52d79a0c52bda9d373c956417e66839d02c65e4c8b0c/DSC_1722.JPG" data-mid="154882302" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f6413a44a3fbae90baed52d79a0c52bda9d373c956417e66839d02c65e4c8b0c/DSC_1722.JPG" /><img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/823d642ce60f09df2180367d13a3b99ba967b66a330909fd431aa1222fca96c0/DSC_1695.JPG" data-mid="154882485" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/823d642ce60f09df2180367d13a3b99ba967b66a330909fd431aa1222fca96c0/DSC_1695.JPG" /><img width="5184" height="3888" width_o="5184" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f70abccd86f6a7240c3ee3590f296f40d44c1be4024e0ba1b8b892d7bbaf6f2e/P1088533.JPG" data-mid="154882315" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f70abccd86f6a7240c3ee3590f296f40d44c1be4024e0ba1b8b892d7bbaf6f2e/P1088533.JPG" /><img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/382399ef43128401692897cb35250e838b41c63184459f20cab346c8b8e7db09/DSC_1734.JPG" data-mid="154882542" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/382399ef43128401692897cb35250e838b41c63184459f20cab346c8b8e7db09/DSC_1734.JPG" /><img width="5184" height="3888" width_o="5184" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/751937cc332d9e1b761ad0a704c2b4a6243c29fe3e8a1a1650590e225e371e74/P1088535.JPG" data-mid="154882316" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/751937cc332d9e1b761ad0a704c2b4a6243c29fe3e8a1a1650590e225e371e74/P1088535.JPG" /><img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6fd9d2115223a8b4abd5395827c704b8617705a5ccaecbb1a28cc788416418bb/DSC_1650.JPG" data-mid="154881242" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6fd9d2115223a8b4abd5395827c704b8617705a5ccaecbb1a28cc788416418bb/DSC_1650.JPG" /><img width="5184" height="3888" width_o="5184" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f242452182043bddd371ccf165ed51d6661c80f868e1495dea636dcc4ba6ba3c/P1088537.JPG" data-mid="154882317" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f242452182043bddd371ccf165ed51d6661c80f868e1495dea636dcc4ba6ba3c/P1088537.JPG" /><img width="5184" height="3888" width_o="5184" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/60bd853d6c6efea2962cdfcc658e6aaa410d96a125c87429d8645620bf853e9c/P1088540.JPG" data-mid="154882318" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/60bd853d6c6efea2962cdfcc658e6aaa410d96a125c87429d8645620bf853e9c/P1088540.JPG" /><img width="2448" height="2448" width_o="2448" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0dded83b73b43a4e1a27c5efcb2513fa70dcfc95152d4eb7073a22468e293bc2/DSC_1673.JPG" data-mid="154882298" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0dded83b73b43a4e1a27c5efcb2513fa70dcfc95152d4eb7073a22468e293bc2/DSC_1673.JPG" /><img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/11d7e6055ea0a76e3d661218e7776c770852cdc4ad3dedfb4b377d45cd3f9a68/DSC_1743.JPG" data-mid="154882305" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/11d7e6055ea0a76e3d661218e7776c770852cdc4ad3dedfb4b377d45cd3f9a68/DSC_1743.JPG" /><img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0424ebf054761e48d1fa92cef5377a2591331f8b553cc35623dbef98f8846c6f/DSC_1674.JPG" data-mid="154882299" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0424ebf054761e48d1fa92cef5377a2591331f8b553cc35623dbef98f8846c6f/DSC_1674.JPG" /><img width="5184" height="3888" width_o="5184" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/28f1916b5799dd6feb544938bd17e0f4c0a03acbb8af2e3ce1114955e63bb319/P1088543.JPG" data-mid="154882319" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/28f1916b5799dd6feb544938bd17e0f4c0a03acbb8af2e3ce1114955e63bb319/P1088543.JPG" /><img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e1c46dcf0d15633af0f85d76c2e7ce4eb41aea776917e8da61ffac3daf51c7bc/DSC_1745.JPG" data-mid="154882306" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e1c46dcf0d15633af0f85d76c2e7ce4eb41aea776917e8da61ffac3daf51c7bc/DSC_1745.JPG" /> https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Eddy-Gelato-Cafe Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:07:59 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Eddy-Gelato-Cafe “Eddy” and “Gelato Cafe” with Minerva Gallery︎&nbsp;https://minervasydney.com/ Group exhibitions in pop-up galleries “Eddy” and “Gelato Cafe” with Minerva Gallery, November/December MMXXII Eddy: “ Design Classic: Control (Nostalgia for a Future)”, MMXXII. Acrylic on (found) masonite. Approx. 1210 x 1210mm.(3 figures) “ Design Classic: Control (Mutually Assured Destruction)”, MMXXII. Acrylic on (found) masonite. Approx. 1210 x 1210mm. (Singular figure). “Technofeudalism II: Great Replacement”, MMXXII. Lime wash on (discarded) poly/cotton (bedsheet). Approx. 2100 x2100 mm.(Elon Musk and his many children... he keeps talking about population collapse but any demographer will tell you that it’s not a thing... exept in the European population... gross.) “Technofeudalism I: Meta Cephalophore”, MMXXII. Lime wash on (soiled)(discarded) cotton (bedsheet). Approx. 2100 x 2100.&nbsp; (Work in foreground by Phillipa Hagon). Gelato Cafe: “ Habeas Corpus (You Should Have the Body) ”, MMXV.Discarded lime wash and enamel on discarded canvas. (Work in foreground by Phillipa Hagon). <img width="2395" height="1597" width_o="2395" height_o="1597" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3c37e64a33d004112c8d53eafc5a2a007052d93c39c61e167b982aedeb0a1cf0/_48A2383.jpg" data-mid="167515537" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3c37e64a33d004112c8d53eafc5a2a007052d93c39c61e167b982aedeb0a1cf0/_48A2383.jpg" /><img width="5470" height="3647" width_o="5470" height_o="3647" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/04fad10bd8c771fa7011848eb6ebbf0921bfd494b04362679db51434e506857e/_48A2385.jpg" data-mid="167515538" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/04fad10bd8c771fa7011848eb6ebbf0921bfd494b04362679db51434e506857e/_48A2385.jpg" /><img width="5086" height="3391" width_o="5086" height_o="3391" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8db0d889cbc377f47cc2e45802f6fb6f20b5619b82f3aed025f1109c86cc321d/_48A2372.jpg" data-mid="167515536" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8db0d889cbc377f47cc2e45802f6fb6f20b5619b82f3aed025f1109c86cc321d/_48A2372.jpg" /><img width="3840" height="5760" width_o="3840" height_o="5760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a0af16409b5fc2d70723db757b3e34432da6350431343b719d54318f779e3c2a/_48A2469.jpg" data-mid="167515541" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a0af16409b5fc2d70723db757b3e34432da6350431343b719d54318f779e3c2a/_48A2469.jpg" /><img width="5561" height="3707" width_o="5561" height_o="3707" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b6a773c51153ae851df093b5dcff114ba54b32b976b11dea9dee11db067803cf/_48A2265.jpg" data-mid="167515531" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b6a773c51153ae851df093b5dcff114ba54b32b976b11dea9dee11db067803cf/_48A2265.jpg" /><img width="5451" height="3634" width_o="5451" height_o="3634" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7be37434b7e96b851bca40ce846352f8596f05f6cc1c77b313a4451a8a085cb1/_48A2274.jpg" data-mid="167515532" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7be37434b7e96b851bca40ce846352f8596f05f6cc1c77b313a4451a8a085cb1/_48A2274.jpg" /><img width="3840" height="5760" width_o="3840" height_o="5760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f829b47f28838e4dadf6836e911ae259fe5e43b94e5ae008b500969994b06f43/_48A8628.jpg" data-mid="167515542" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f829b47f28838e4dadf6836e911ae259fe5e43b94e5ae008b500969994b06f43/_48A8628.jpg" /><img width="5760" height="3840" width_o="5760" height_o="3840" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/364da6de3774a475001b8a561c944af702bfdc436eeda72b4e0eeadbe06db0c8/_48A8635.jpg" data-mid="167515543" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/364da6de3774a475001b8a561c944af702bfdc436eeda72b4e0eeadbe06db0c8/_48A8635.jpg" /> https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Apophenia Fri, 13 May 2022 05:50:29 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Apophenia “Apophenia” at Prop Gallery︎&nbsp; https://www.instagram.com/prop.gallery/ <img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71e83b187689f47cf134f60295b1378da8458c9c3a5227485b93363f22360431/DSC_1181.JPG" data-mid="145355550" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/71e83b187689f47cf134f60295b1378da8458c9c3a5227485b93363f22360431/DSC_1181.JPG" /> “Atropos the Countess of Lopfen”: Apophenia Explained<img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/55c5df74d39bd69bb6410a384a586812487aa2328cb896e995eca0aa81b9d145/DSC_1234.JPG" data-mid="145355553" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/55c5df74d39bd69bb6410a384a586812487aa2328cb896e995eca0aa81b9d145/DSC_1234.JPG" /> In 2016 I was included in an exhibition called “New World Order” at Casula Powerhouse, which was curated by Ella Barclay. Apparently, the institution had wanted an exhibition about conspiracy theories (which seemed incredibly daggy at the time) but was subtly dissuaded by Barclay to the end of this (actually quite excellent) show also featuring the works of Hany Armanious, Simon Denny, Beau Emmett, Eva and Franco Mattes, Soda_Jerk, Jess Johnson, Alexis Mailles and Yujun Ye, Ryan Presley, Suzanne Treister and Pope Alice Xorporation. Last year I messaged Barclay upon reading an article (one of many) linking the conspiracy theory, QAnon, with a large anonymous Italian art collective from the 1990s, Luther Blisset... whose members included Eva and Franco Mattes... Luther Blisset began their work, interrupting society through art, by demonstrating how easy it is to manipulate the media. They staged fake Satanist human sacrifices, thereby exposing the falseness of the “Satanic Panic” then enveloping Italy. Of course, artists responding to such climates of fear-mongering is nothing new, one of the most famous examples being Francsico Goya’s “Caprichos”: the scholarship over which is divided into two camps, one which see the depictions of witchcraft etc. as an enlightened critique of superstition and the Catholic Church, and the other who see the depictions as expressing an ominous view of the depravity at the base of human nature. (Goya would go on to paint his paintings of horror on the walls of his own house, the “house of the deaf man”, showing no signs in his dotage of having devloped a more positive outlook on human nature. (One of these “black paintings”, “Atropos the Fates”, is chosen as the top half of the painting associated with “Apophenia” as an avatar for the needleworkings of oligarhy while the original depicts the fates as old women, somewhat removed from that original habit of spinning fate through their work, through talking, as was supposed by many cultures in which spinning was an essential occupation). It seems strange that generations of art historians would debate his intentions as though there had to be a simple, didactic answer, like trying to empty poetry of its nuance. Maybe what makes the “Caprichos” so compelling is that they both rail against the ignorance of these persecutions while simultaneously dooming humanity to its worst excesses. It seems about right to me. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5bce4f3278a93f831a70d71fbfdb8e054e43b49107569c6b5283155dd391c08c/DSC_1343.JPG" data-mid="145355579" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5bce4f3278a93f831a70d71fbfdb8e054e43b49107569c6b5283155dd391c08c/DSC_1343.JPG" /> Wine/Film/Fruit Flies. Back in the recent past, the work of Eva and Franco Mattes from New World Order (and since) has largely focused on documenting the experience of the human moderators in charge of taking down explicit content from YouTube and Facebook. Most recently, they had these young Berliner moderators doing makeup tutorials as they described their experiences, the worst things that they had seen moderating Facebook, the homophobia and the violence, the things that people would say among themselves... described as “bad things” only “bad people” would say among themselves. Four of the artists involved in Luther Blissett would go on to write a book called “Q”, which, it has been suggested is the basic playbook for sabotage employed by the person or people responsible for the “Q drops” that have spawned QAnon. Several commentators, including those of the QAnon Anonymous podcast and the artist/theorist Brad Troemel have suggested that QAnon is a mass-writing project in which oblique cues are published in order to generate wild theories, usually based on a mixture of fantasy and coincidence. It certainly is a writing project, whatever else it might be... I will not necessarily comment on individual theories or the “Q drops” that however spuriously suggested them, or the quality of what is produced but rather on that of its likely antecedents in literature and art, seeing it, as a phenomenon as markedly more effective or “impactful” than the awareness-raising that makes up much of the production of “radical” Contemporary Art, though formed by the same principles (and perhaps the same people). <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64720bc6bf6896ad38c166312c943d7d66f313a1fa700da961dbf5c668bb0ca0/DSC_1344.JPG" data-mid="145355580" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/64720bc6bf6896ad38c166312c943d7d66f313a1fa700da961dbf5c668bb0ca0/DSC_1344.JPG" /> Detail of detail. Reed Berkowitz, has proposed to describe QAnon as “guided apophenia”, apophenia being a term used often in game design describing the phenomenon of users finding patterns that were not designed or planned and are ultimately meaningless and misleading (as far as progressing within the game, thus something that game designers actively avoid). Instead of trying to dissuade wild theories QAnon has employed them as a feature, allowing for a great deal of creative scope for its adherents. Certain narratives are ultimately if still obliquely affirmed by “Q” in subsequent drops, apparently in order to perpetuate the notion that the same adherents are actually able to contribute to the narrative, participating in politics, culture and even society in such a way as many of the more marginalised among them would otherwise be unable (in an environment in which culture also belongs to monopolies, and few of us are able to participate in it, even within contemporary art). Brad Troemel further explains that guided apophenia: “conditions you to find whatever evidence you can to prove the conclusion you’ve already determined to be true. It’s the opposite of the scientific method, which is why QAnon has the creative freedom to bring in literally anything it wants as proof.” (I first found these descriptions unsettling as they could so easily be applied to so much Art as Research). I would argue that what is happening is not so much a conflict between rational/scientific methodology and what is basically wild nonsense about children being harvested, as it is indicative of a rejection of the equally unscientific propaganda that has more and more effectively convinced the marginalised to act against their own interests, which may have lead up to this point of the rejection of all public authority. In “Taking the Risk out of Democracy” Alex Carey charts this progression from the first decade of the 20th century, citing myriad well-funded campaigns by business interests looking to scuttle especially unionized opposition to poor working conditions and pay, even suggesting that “the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.” Further than this, it is also a rejection of the monopolistic world view of the same oligarchic business interests that pretend that everything can be known and quantified, in the same way that a Conspiracy Theory might operate (as a shadow of that model of certainty). Even within the university “knowledge production” can go against thousands of years of philosophical discourse that might encourage a healthy level of agnosticism, rejecting the ideals that universities were founded on, rationalising away “the humanities” in economic terms for failing to be productive. <img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/170ab3cf52207f85d8c27e416fc113dd567188db3e48fdefb6841801a5053726/DSC_1314.JPG" data-mid="145355569" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/170ab3cf52207f85d8c27e416fc113dd567188db3e48fdefb6841801a5053726/DSC_1314.JPG" /> I am reminded of a work by Simon Denny, “Introductory Logic Video Tutorial”, which was the culmination of his residency at Artspace, Sydney, during which time he undertook a course in “Introductory Logic” in Philosophy at The University of Sydney. (He was printing on canvas and connecting the canvases to build rudimetary sculptures that stood in for the monitors in the Artspace inventory, all of which have doubtless been replaced now by flat screens. I still remember him saying to a friend of mine something to the effect of “why would you paint when you can so easily print to canvas?” ...leading my friend to assume that he was one of my philistine philosophy major friends.) The choice of “logic” was much to my mystification, having found that particular subject utterly abhorrent in my undergraduate Arts degree, in which I instinctively rejected the notion of there being a correct way to argue, becoming particualrly annoyed by the idea that “Circular Logic” was necessarily fallacious, as will become more apparent as this text, as it were, unravels. Even those fifteen years ago when I started an arts degree, it very quickly became clear that the reserves of knowledge in the humanities were being threatened by market forces, making these latent understandings both dangerous and redundant. Humanity no longer had any use for itself. The universities were only the more honest in their modern imperialist mission as finishing schools for those who already ruled, to qualify themselves in that position in order to do exactly what they were always going to do, which was to organise society so that most of the world’s resources, often human in origin, would remain directed towards them and theirs, or more likely towards their betters (the even smaller minority of billionaires). The Philosophy department, as it then was, before the culls, was a fantastic and terrible place of the anglophone school, in which the French were seldom mentioned but to be derided, and everything could be known for certain, only to be supplanted by the next argument. In Denny’s work, the canvas prints of monitors sporting fake video, remote content, in subject matter in which contact is somehow essential, particularly disturbing after years of remote teaching... As it now also provides a paean both to the now obsolete monitors and the School of Philosophy, as it then was, at The University of Sydney (though I am sure the dubious logic of logic still remains, in what remains of the department).<img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9cc125971e870310d24d1d9c6d147d8dd16ceb2f6797a38f54de0011926206e1/DSC_1319.JPG" data-mid="145355572" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9cc125971e870310d24d1d9c6d147d8dd16ceb2f6797a38f54de0011926206e1/DSC_1319.JPG" /> Art by research, like conspiracy theories, provides a shadow doctrine of certainty made absurd. The real threat posed by conspiracy theories is not that so many are lost to them, on one level, there is some comfort that these usually marginalised subjects have found some sense of community in which they are valued, while having long since being devalued by this society (which its increasingly normalised, while more and more people find themselves poorer and poorer). The real threat is that their representation of evil, insofar as it is bad art, creates this fiction of villainy to such a cartoonish design that it makes its experience feel comparatively benign, assigning evil specifically to entities who set out to harm the innocent with malicious intent. The evil they represent harbours no self-delusions, it covers-up rather than hiding in plain sight; it is honest and earnest in its regime of terror as opposed to prone to gaslighting the greater public with its apparently altruistic intentions. The truth is worse than conspiracy. There WERE groups of men in board rooms that decided to obfuscate the climate crisis rather than address it; billionaires made the same billions with interest that the billions lost over the course of the pandemic. If only Hilary Clinton drank babies’ blood and was not in bed with Wall Street, responsible for the invasion of Libya and murder of Gaddafi after he attempted to establish a gold-backed African currency... maybe something could be done about it all. If only one could, like a singular American action hero, pick up a gun and resolve these situations, as one might have taken a gun into the centre of that pizza restaurant during PizzaGate and freed the innocent children in the basement. The very idea that all of the elite (and not simply the associates of Jeffrey Epstein) are engaged in these paedophile rings/this child harvesting, ascribes a sovereignty and preciousness to the bodies of the fictitious children being molested, while all over the world children ARE molested and children ARE murdered, they ARE consigned to refugee camps, they ARE made homeless. Children even become adults that terrible things happen to, they are put in cycles of debt by predatory lenders, now they can never find stable work, some of the terrible things just recur because their bodies hold the memories of everything that came before, they are subjected to lives of chronic illness and pain. But we do nothing for “them”. These imaginary children are rescued and require no rehabilitation, they are our redemption. There is no sanctity to human life, there is no discernible market value in studying the human, only in extracting its base desires in the service of more efficient consumption. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e02805f3ba150a7df42eb3f8ddb9e1b7b52c2eff277fc92789c64ef1caf207ef/DSC_1328.JPG" data-mid="145355576" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e02805f3ba150a7df42eb3f8ddb9e1b7b52c2eff277fc92789c64ef1caf207ef/DSC_1328.JPG" /> I like to think of conspiracy theories in terms of the carnivalesque of Mikhail Bakhtin: as an asinine mass, reflecting the world back through its debasement, just as medieval peasants might do during the “Feast of the Ass” supplanting Jesus with his donkey. These practices of making fun of power obviously had some resonance in the oppressive conditions of Stalinist Russia, but who can say if ambivalence is a political or an apolitical turn? Ambivalence is, however, where art rests. And I believe that there is an instinct toward the same ambivalence being a great casualty of our times. Not to save the world but to be able to bear it. I still harbour some strange hope that even if it is in simply this function, “Art by Research” and conspiracy theories could be powerful tools for the forming of community around ambivalence, for mobilisation against the outright lies... if only it were self-aware, and perhaps more importantly: funny. Some restoration of the centrality of the peasantry against all the meaninglessness of class, as the Social Sciences spend so much time inventing new terminology, only detracting from the actual plunder of technofeudalism. The novel “Q” is a retelling of the events of the German Peasant War of 1525, coinciding with the Protestant Reformation. (It should be noted that repetition is utilized throughout “Q” as a device for propaganda, much as is subsequently done by the person posting as “QAnon”.) In the novel, the character of “Q” is a shadowy figure loyal to the papacy who sets about sabotaging the efforts of the peasants. The German Peasant War of 1525 is a fascinating subject matter, notably written about by Friedrich Engels as a precursor to communist discourse. It was lead by Thomas Müntzer whose catchphrase was “omnia sunt communia” or everything belongs to everyone, arguing that a true Christianity would share resources among the people (in this apocalyptic doctrine coinciding with the emergence of early capitalism, which even in the 16th century seemed like the end of the world, though it could not align with the end of the world as then understood by a truly Christian cosmology). Basically, the future that Müntzer proposed was not so much a better world as equally a future as apocalypse, albeit one where there would be heaven on Earth, as was the obvious result of the radical sharing of resources, which is after all, largely what Jesus Christ had advocated for. (I would it were an apocalypse like that one that we are now facing.)<img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b6bee66fd3b382f63bf027d1f34a22d0219e47c33e098f5b6fa34b1f926e91ad/DSC_1322.JPG" data-mid="145355574" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b6bee66fd3b382f63bf027d1f34a22d0219e47c33e098f5b6fa34b1f926e91ad/DSC_1322.JPG" /> There are certainly interesting parallels between the political situation of the Reformation, of Martin Luther challenging the papacy only to side with the princes against any material reshaping of the society (reminiscent of the apparently oppositional two-party system of our own experience as receivers of North American culture), all against the radicalisation brought about by the new technology of the printing press (and in the early 2000s, the internet). Martin Luther and his enlightened and “democratic” religion now distributed in the common tongue, (Democrats to the essentially Republican illiberal stuckists of the Papacy). As I carried on in apophenic discovery, I found totems of inevitable decay across centuries of history after the introduction of complex mathematics and credit. Broader or perhaps more dubious searches of the German Peasant War of 1525 lead me to the likely apocryphal story of the other name for said war, “The Snail War”, apparently the result of a thoughtless noblewoman (the Countess of Lopfen) insisting that rather than the subsistence farming her serfs would otherwise be engaged in (the enclosure movement did not really begin in Germany until the 19th Century), they (1200 of them) would be set to work finding her snail shells to use as spools for her thread. I was not otherwise aware of this usage of snail shells, as spools, it was strangely earthy and appealing, and amazing to think that it could even be suggested that such a vast number of people could be set upon such a task. All of these material realities, the reams of thread hand-stitched into clothing and homewares... it is unfathomable how much longer the production of life once took, and yet we do not seem now to work less... In fact, we would seem to work much more than medieval peasants. Thus in the painting “Atropos, the Countess of Lopfen”, Atropos acts as an avatar for the needleworkings of oligarchy, choosing the fates/ending the lives of the (contemporary) peasantry, while the original (of Goya) depicts the fates as hideous old women, somewhat removed from that original habit of spinning fate through their work, through talking, as was supposed by many cultures in which spinning was an essential occupation.) (The word text comes from the Latin “textus”: “thing woven”,). The base of the painting depicts peasants, as we are now, accepting this work at the expense of our survival.<img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e4f6de776edabf9fd8ab8f910d9f0235dcd8881900bb98c45f78d75396f97c6/DSC_1327.JPG" data-mid="145355575" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3e4f6de776edabf9fd8ab8f910d9f0235dcd8881900bb98c45f78d75396f97c6/DSC_1327.JPG" /> I could only go on. Marking the passage of time more markedly, accounting for every notion set to work, just as busy but with none of the same illusions. I hoped to redistribute my own very specific wealth of time, of my stake in that, a surfeit of unquantifiable labour and inevitable surplus. I have been working, for some time now, to buy my time back from the system. Work titles/Information:“Atropos: The Countess of Lopfen”, MMXXII. Acrylic (mis-tints) on (discarded) canvas banner. Approx 5400 x 2300mm. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a8cad3c2d7edf07012de5edff97121f0a6931d9e4a444441e404174a336c6122/DSC_1329.JPG" data-mid="145355577" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a8cad3c2d7edf07012de5edff97121f0a6931d9e4a444441e404174a336c6122/DSC_1329.JPG" /> “Apophenia”, MMXXII. Artist book, 18,000 words, thermally bound.<img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0c94dec8fef7277f68ceb85720719856d59a14237cfa5d7653132a1840bfe766/DSC_1238.JPG" data-mid="145355554" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0c94dec8fef7277f68ceb85720719856d59a14237cfa5d7653132a1840bfe766/DSC_1238.JPG" /> “Souvenir: Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”, MMXXII. Etching on (found) crystal. <img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/05275221bf992eb73814d73943e2e5c7bac0fb4f79de5f869aef23b356a50fa7/DSC_1312.JPG" data-mid="145355568" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/05275221bf992eb73814d73943e2e5c7bac0fb4f79de5f869aef23b356a50fa7/DSC_1312.JPG" /> “Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia II” , MMXXII. Etching on (found) crystal. <img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dd7d256798066b845ab0e22d68d5846e90266e152a1506281670407a803571d8/DSC_1302.JPG" data-mid="145355562" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dd7d256798066b845ab0e22d68d5846e90266e152a1506281670407a803571d8/DSC_1302.JPG" /> “Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia I (Janus Arch, III heads)”, MMXXII. Etching on (found) glass. “Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia IV”, MMXXII. Etching on (discarded) bottle.“Souvenir: End History Now (Upside-down Protest)”, MMXXII. Etching on (discarded) jar.<img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c3ee5422d5df3cfd10906491db08097587c9f2d0477cb23f16bd2a1f47319074/DSC_1303.JPG" data-mid="145355563" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c3ee5422d5df3cfd10906491db08097587c9f2d0477cb23f16bd2a1f47319074/DSC_1303.JPG" />“Souvenir: Technofeudalism”, MMXXII. Etching on (discarded) jar. “Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia II (Lugh, III Heads)”, MMXXII. Etching on (found) marble wine glass. <img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d970770a41265ce5a8a5610261675fbbaae242df47ff621c691380c0c76a7d9a/DSC_1299.JPG" data-mid="145355561" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d970770a41265ce5a8a5610261675fbbaae242df47ff621c691380c0c76a7d9a/DSC_1299.JPG" /> And so on and so on... <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eaf2a2a30b723491e4c3013e60694433d2dbdd6dd046a93c5a708325f7717e9b/DSC_1348.JPG" data-mid="145355581" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eaf2a2a30b723491e4c3013e60694433d2dbdd6dd046a93c5a708325f7717e9b/DSC_1348.JPG" /> https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Transplant Thu, 01 Jul 2021 03:16:35 +0000 zoemarnirobertson https://zoemarnirobertson.cargo.site/Transplant “Transplant” at Sydney College of the Arts Gallery and Knulp︎&nbsp; https://www.knulps.org/transplant&nbsp;https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/schools/sydney-college-of-the-arts/galleries-and-exhibitions.html March 5- April 15 2021, at SCA Galleries and Knulp, curated by Alex Gawronski and also featuring the work of: Dylan Batty, Fiona Connor, Mitchel Cumming, Alex Gawronski, Helen Grogan, Shane Haseman, Dane Mitchell, Debra Phillips, and Elizabeth Pulie. <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0c3361cb19bf65bf87928b4a4892125097de3c1a95378d980a36f741c42099b9/26.-Transplant-SCA-Zoe-Marni-Robertson--1.jpg" data-mid="112770859" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0c3361cb19bf65bf87928b4a4892125097de3c1a95378d980a36f741c42099b9/26.-Transplant-SCA-Zoe-Marni-Robertson--1.jpg" /> Installation view: “The Bathers or Artist’s Impression of Men’s Courtyard (replete with statue of naked youth presenting flaccid/passive eels)”, 2021. Acrylic and lime wash on paper. 4020 x 5720 mm.&nbsp; Text reads: “I always thought that when I was better I would be able to say eveything in plain sentences like a ruling. It was amazing I had ever believed in such a thing. Philosophers re-invented words that excused themselves from usage. I bested myself only against a universe of enquiry generating nothing (at best) one could find a citation or have one’s palm read... the future would be paid for in advance at its own expense, at the cost of the present. All debt had been cancelled only against its daily real-ity. No one would see the appreciation of their labour in the assets extracted.” <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/41373aa91668d55a159d5fca5f60c5585f25072af411cc88ee9cdb5d5618a107/27.-Transplant-SCA-Zoe-Marni-Robertson--2.jpg" data-mid="112770860" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/41373aa91668d55a159d5fca5f60c5585f25072af411cc88ee9cdb5d5618a107/27.-Transplant-SCA-Zoe-Marni-Robertson--2.jpg" /> Detail (as above). <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e47547617f2b815120ddb3e6824e4378fd2b615129eac5edd0726f7be4a15ede/18.-Transplant-SCA-Room-Helen-G--1.jpg" data-mid="112770863" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e47547617f2b815120ddb3e6824e4378fd2b615129eac5edd0726f7be4a15ede/18.-Transplant-SCA-Room-Helen-G--1.jpg" /> Installation view: Transplant, SCA galleries.