​‘I​ ​DO​ ​NOT​ ​BELIEVE​ ​THAT​
​THE​ ​REAL​ ​LIFE​ ​OF​ ​THIS
NATION​ ​IS​ ​TO​ ​BE​ ​FOUND​ ​EITHER​ ​IN​ ​THE​ ​
GREAT​ ​LUXURY
HOTELS​ ​AND​ ​THE​ ​PETTY​ ​GOSSIP​ ​OF​ ​
SO​ ​CALLED
FASHIONABLE​ ​SUBURBS,​

​OR​ ​IN​ ​THE​ ​OFFICIALDOM​ ​OF
ORGANISED​ ​MASSES.​

​IT​ ​IS​ ​TO​ ​BE​ ​FOUND​ ​IN​ ​THE​ ​HOMES​ ​OF
PEOPLE​ ​WHO​ ​ARE​ ​NAMELESS​ ​AND​ ​UNADVERTISED​ ​AND​ ​WHO,
WHATEVER​ ​THEIR​ ​INDIVIDUAL​ ​RELIGIOUS​ ​
CONVICTION​ ​OR
DOGMA,​ ​SEE​ ​IN​ ​THEIR​ ​CHILDREN​ ​THEIR​ ​GREATEST
CONTRIBUTION​ ​TO​ ​THE​ ​IMMORTALITY​ ​OF​ ​THEIR​ ​RACE’.

THOSE​ ​WORDS​ ​ARE​ ​IN​ ​SUBSTANCE​ ​AS​ ​TRUE​ ​TODAY​ ​AS​ ​THEY
WERE​ ​THEN.​

​(JOHN​ ​HOWARD,​ ​QUOTING​ ​ROBERT​ ​MENZIES,1997)

Counter Monuments and Monument Building in Australia.

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“The picture was clipped from a newspaper so carelessly the caption is missing. It shows a monument of a man on a horse, atop a tall granite pedestal. The rider, a figure of herculean build, is seated comfortably in the saddle, his left hand resting on its horn, his right pointing to something ahead (probably the future). A rope is tied around the neck of the rider, and a similar rope around that of his mount. In the square at the base of the monument stand groups of men pulling on the two lines. All this is taking place in a thronged plaza, with the crowd watching as the men tugging on the ropes strain against the resistance of the massive bronze statue.

The photograph captures the very moment when the ropes are stretched tight as piano wires and the rider and his mount are just tilting to the side—an instant before they crash to earth. We can’t help wondering if these men pulling ropes with so much effort and self-denial will be able to jump out of the way, especially since the gawkers crowded into the plaza have left them little room. This photograph shows the pulling down of a monument to one of the Shahs (father or son) in Teheran or some other Iranian city. It is hard to be sure about the year the photograph was taken, since the monuments of both Pahlavis were pulled down several times, whenever the occasion presented itself to the people. “

( those occasions where the official frame is dismantled by rival images)

[ Aleppo Pine ]

“The Central Australian Pioneers Memorial was erected in 1955 to the memory of John Ross and all pioneers of Central Australia. Also known as the John Ross Memorial, the memorial was restored in 1994 and is now contained in a metal cage. The plaques are very difficult to read and photograph. There is some graffiti on the memorial. The “John Ross Memorial Fund” was commenced with the modest sum of £26 in the bank. John Ross was Central Australia’s first explorer-pioneer, and it is therefore only right that the fund should be in his name. Both he and his small son, Alexander, aged 10, made a hazardous journey right into Central Australia in search of fresh pastures as early as 1868-9. It is a story that would thrill any Australian school boy. John Ross was also the explorer, who discovered the Alice Springs (on March 17, 1871). Immediately after him came the surveyors and constructors of the, Overland Telegraph Line. These, men constitute our very first pioneers."

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- Banal Nationalism = virtue, mateship, resilience, loss, hard work -

Ahok’s Flower Boards

Recently, floral tributes have appeared in their thousands
around Jakarta’s city hall as a sort of memorial to/
celebration of the city’s outgoing mayor Ahok. The photogenic
flower boards have since become a media sensation, with their
mediated form being distributed extensively within and outside
of Indonesia. Littered with references to popular culture, the
flower boards’ playful expressions coalesce (one of many
competing) undercurrents of life and politics in Indonesia.


Standing in for the bodies of their owners, the flower boards project this undercurrent onto the Indonesian media landscape, enshrining their interpretation of Ahok’s controversial fall from grace and power as a tragedy.


They are a very visible expression of certain popular tendencies suddenly and unpredictably coming together. Who first decided to dedicate a flower board to Ahok? How did others see it and decide to
follow suit? Or did many people spontaneously decide on the same gesture? At what point did the gesture take hold and feed off its circulation via social/ mainstream media? What do the flower boards say about the modern polity that is Jakarta and Indonesia?


How does a memorial like this differ in tone and in
how it affects an audience compared to more structured, state
planned ceremonies and acknowledgements? In their very
photogenicness, melancholy, and playfulness, are the flower
boards the ultimate solipsistic political gesture, occupying
media time but saying very little? Did the workers who burnt
flower boards on May Day, spontaneously riffing off the
affective charge of the flower boards (and also receiving
plenty of media time), make a similarly empty statement?

Althusser’s View of How History is Made:

The​ ​rain​ ​of​ ​life​ ​pitter-patters​ ​down​ ​in​ ​the​ ​void​ ​of pre-history,​ ​before​ ​the​ ​beginning​ ​of​ ​time​ ​and space,​ ​steadily​ ​it​ ​falls,​ ​raining​ ​atoms,​ ​the​ ​dance of​ ​atoms.​ ​Everything​ ​falls,​ ​atoms​ ​in​ ​parallel​ ​with one​ ​another.​ ​Atoms​ ​rain​ ​as​ ​bodies​ ​falling​ ​through empty​ ​space,​ ​straight​ ​down,​ ​under​ ​their​ ​own​ ​weight. They​ ​fall,​ ​unconnected​ ​from​ ​one​ ​another,​ ​blind​ ​to one​ ​another,​ ​restricted​ ​from​ ​one​ ​another.​
​They
fall,​ ​
fall,​
​fall,​
​until,​ ​they​
​ swerve;​
​something intervenes,​ ​something​ ​contingent​ ​breaks​ ​the parallelism,​ ​so​ ​small​ ​that​ ​it​ ​is​ ​hardly​ ​noticeable.
And​ ​yet,​ ​it​ ​alters​ ​the​ ​whole​ ​course​ ​of​ ​history, because​ ​in​ ​some,​ ​almost-negligible​ ​way,​ ​the​ ​swerve induces​ ​the​ ​encounter:​ ​one​ ​atom​ ​of​ ​rain​ ​encounters other​ ​atoms;​ ​vertical​ ​falling​ ​rain​ ​crisscrosses with​ ​other​ ​drops​ ​of​ ​falling​ ​rain;​ ​they​ ​connect​ ​and rain​ ​into​ ​one​ ​another,​ ​​strike​ ​one​ ​another, encounter​ ​one​ ​another,​ ​pile​ ​up​ ​with​ ​one​ ​another.
Just​ ​enough​ ​of​ ​a​ ​swerve​ ​for​ you to call it a change of course.

Afghan Cameleers Monument, Alice Springs

The Prime Minister is touring the battlefields of France where his father and grandfather fought, carrying with him one of their wartime diaries. Is such wallowing in the past healthy? Sounds like black armband travel to me.
— Lucashenko, 2002

November 11th 2000, - Villers de Brenoux, France

Bleary eyed I turned over as the marching below reminded me of the coming dawn. Pull out, digger! The dogs are pissing on your swag. Treading khaki, clutching grandpop’s diary looking up at the bold granite, the wife at my side, the last trumpet notes ringing out.
“No place on earth has been more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than these fields in France”, I whispered to Janine. (She didn’t hear me.)

Bringing the angry god out of hiding: Defacing Money

Did John Reid know of the laws about defacing money before he cut up the several thousands of dollars he received from selling his treasured plot of real estate on the south coast, eighth wonder of the world, so as to begin, in 1982, a collage about the plight of political prisoners in Latin America?

In 1984, by which time Reid has cut up twenty-five hundred bills, mainly denominations of one, five, and twenty dollars, a colleague anonymously sent the Fraud Squad of the Australian Federal Police fifty two of the cut-up bills, with Reid’s name attached as evidence.

On the wall of Reid’s studio the police discovered the unfinished figure of a larger-than-life naked woman, spread-eagled on her back, being beaten by clubs. Below lay the artist’s raw materials: cups containing

squares, rectangles,
and crescent-shaped pieces of money,
sorted according to
shape and colour;
Australian paper money comes in gorgeous colours,
like monopoly money,
the colours
varying in intensity across the bill,
perfect for flesh tones,
bruises, and wounds.

Some bills had the Queen’s face carefully cut out in sweeping semicircles, leaving mysterious dark spaces between coiffured hair on one side, and the Australian coat of arms, held by a kangaroo and an emu, on the other.

Hardened fraud-dicks that they were, the police nevertheless were aghast.They returned with tweezers, gloves, plastic bags, and a forensic photographer to arrest Reid,under a 1959 law, on fifty-five counts of willfully mutilating Australian bank notes in his studio in the Canberra School of Art in the Australian National University.

_______________

He was the only statue of an Aboriginal in all of Perth, it seemed to me,and he was hidden away on Herrisson Island as though you wadgulas was ashamed of him. Some bastards stole his spear and, once, he was painted white as well. Often some wit would put an empty beer can in his hand or by his feet so he looked like nothing but a drunken Abo.

Confessions of a Headhunter

I must have decapitated ten Queen Victorias, probably twenty Captain Cooks and numerous explorers, botanists, soldiers, founders, anthropologists, archaeologists, men of learning and sundry heroes.

Cement Fondue

Cement fondue was what Greg Taylor used to make his statue of the naked royals, and he coated it with an iron oxide material so it would rust quickly.
Active decay, reminiscent of Dada, was thus built into this work, which in the space of three days, beginning with the decapitation of the Queen, burst into a riveting ‘happening’ at the centre of national attention.

To erect a statue is to take revenge on reality.


Contemptible consideration: Statues have a strategic built-in desire to be violated, without which they are incomplete. Defacement brings inside outside. It fastens onto objects as insects fasten onto leaves.

Money, bronze or a nation’s flag. Defacement of such things brings a very angry god out of hiding. This is the public secret.

“This sculpture has been ceremoniously vandalised” said
Neil Roberts, coordinator of the Canberra National
Sculpture Forum 95.

“But organisers say it will stay. It is more relevant to be left as it is - as a symbol of intolerance,
irrelevance, disintegration.”

We are troubled by our own complicity but we do not speak because we know that “without such shared secrets any and all social institutions – workplace marketplace, state and family – would founder. […] Wherever there is power there is secrecy, except it is not only secrecy that lies at the core of power, but public secrecy.” The public perception of justice – the figure of its appearance – relies on the public not acknowledging that which is generally known. Stolen elections, illegal wars, and state violence could be described as “unknown knowns” – the unstated fourth term of Donald Rumsfeld’s “redundant formulations.”


As we know, There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.


Donald Rumsfeld – Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Logically, Rumsfeld failed to mention “unknown knowns” – the things we know but won’t know we know, the public secrets.

Recorded onto Celluloid, Absorbed Into Memory: Confessions of a Makeup Artist.

(edited script taken from Permanent Shadows, a commemorative performance by Irwan Ahmett and Subarkah Hadisarjana)

My name is Subarkah. Although I am a makeup artist now, I started off as a painter. For me, make-up, dressing up and other forms of disguise are not so different from conveying the narration of history; accepted in lens, recorded into celluloid then absorbed into memory… becoming a permanent shadow for all who see it.

Otro govierno, misma impunidad means “different government, same impunity.” Each claim has been backed by performative evidence—the placards with the photo IDs, the list of atrocities, the identity of repressors
Much as the Abuelas relied on DNA testing to confirm the lineages broken by the military, they and the Madres continue to use photo IDs of their missing children as yet another way to establish “truth” and lineage. This representational practice of linking the scientific and performative claim is what I call the “DNA of performance.”

What does the performative proof accomplish that the scientific cannot achieve on its own?

How does this representational practice lay a foundation for movements that will come after it?

The embodied performative dimension of these protests was as important as the scientific evidence because it brought attention to the national tragedy in the first place. Abuelas and Madres performed the proof. On a state level, human rights trials and commissions, such as Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappeared (which issued Nunca Ma´s [1986] to report its findings) or South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, understand the importance of live hearings in making citizens feel like co-owners of the country’s traumatic past. In-between and overlapping systems of knowledge and memory constitute a vast spectrum that might combine the workings of the “permanent” and the “ephemeral” in different ways. Each system of containing and transmitting knowledge exceeds the limitations of the other. The “live” can never be contained in the “archive”; the archive endures beyond the limits of the live.

DNA functions as a biological “archive” of sorts, storing and transmitting the codes that mark the specificity of our existence both as a species and as individuals. Yet it also belongs to the human-made archive, forensic or otherwise. This human-made archive maintains what is perceived as a lasting core—records, documents, photographs, literary texts, police files, fingerprint and DNA evidence, digital materials, archaeological remains, bones—supposedly resistant to change and political manipulation. What changes, over time, the archive maintains, is the value, relevance, or meaning of the remains—how they get interpreted, even embodied.

The scientific, archival “evidence” of DNA offered by the Abuelas was clearly central to their strategy of tracing their loved ones while accusing the military of their disappearance. Testimonial transfers and performance protest, on the other hand, are two forms of expressive social behavior that belong to the discursive workings of what I have called the “repertoire.” The repertoire stores and enacts “embodied” memory—the traumatic or cathartic “shudder,” gestures, orality movement, dance,song—in short, all those acts usually thought of as “live,” ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge. The embodied experience and transmission of traumatic memory—the interactions among people in the here and now—make a difference in the way that knowledge is transmitted and incorporated. The type of interaction might range from the individual (one-on-one psychoanalytic session) to the group or state level (demonstrations, human rights trials).

Week after week in the Plaza de Mayo, the Madres accused the military of disappearing their children and demanded that they be returned alive (aparicio´n con vida). After the worst moment of military violence passed, Abuelas and Madres started carrying a huge banner in front of them as they walked around the Plaza. With the return to democracy in 1983, they began to accuse the new government of granting impunity to the criminals.

Using loudspeakers, they continued to bring charges, naming their children and naming those responsible for abducting them. They called the Plaza their own, and inscribed their emblematic scarves in white paint around the perimeter.
Even now, they continue their condemnation of the government’s complacency in regard to the human rights abuses committed during the Dirty War .

Each Thursday afternoon, for the past 25 years, the women have met in Plaza de Mayo to repeat their show of loss and political resolve. At first, at the height of the military violence, 14 women walked around the Plaza two-by-two, arm in-arm, to avoid prohibitions against public meetings. Though ignored by the dictatorship, the women’s idea of meeting in the square caught on throughout the country. Before long, hundreds of women from around Argentina converged in the Plaza de Mayo in spite of the increasing military violence directed against them (see Taylor 1997:186–189). Ritualistically, they walked around this square, located in the heart of Argentina’s political and financial center. Turning their bodies into billboards, they used them as conduits of memory. They literally wore the photo IDs that had been erased from official archives.

_______________

On the Madres del Plaza de Mayo: Argentina’s mothers of the disappeared:


from The DNA of Performance by Diana Taylor

The spectacle of elderly women in white head scarves carrying huge placards with photo IDs of their missing children has become an international icon of human rights and women’s resistance movements. By turning their “interrupted mourning process” into “one of the most visible political discourses of resistance to terror” (Sua´rez-Orozco 1991:491) the Abuelas and Madres introduced a model of trauma-driven performance protest.

Secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself. The secretly familiar. The sayable unsayable.

Public secrecy becomes a principal arm of wise governance; the hegemon’s infrastructure. For example, a classroom with a curtain running down the middle.

Every secret is explosive, expanding with its own inner heart.

The public secret is also an ingrained poetry of daily habit. It has to be spoken in order to preserve it. We make facades for the secret. It is unmasked so as to preserve it. Depth becomes surface in order to remain depth.

Piotr S

Click here to read more on the public secret

Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative. Click here to access.

Lanne's skull and body were never reunited. They were guarded jealously by the respective mutilators in the interests of science.

Colonial Headhunter