Following last night’s exhibit and reception for the finalists and winner of the $40k young artist award at Artspace, today I was invited to attend, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the staff curatorial walkthrough of the “Primavera” exhibit (also with a prize) on emerging Australian artists. It was a strong and curated, show on the theme of “formless.” I was struck by the photography, which in the two cases involved photographs which were cut into or cut apart.

I started the day at 8am, headed to University of Western Sydney for a presentation I was to give in the department of engineering (actually the home of industrial designers). The professor is Abby Lopes, associated with Design Philosophy Papers, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the ecology of the image. My presentation was similar to the two others I gave, focusing largely on art and design relations. Nonetheless, there was interest and a fruitful Q&A.

Between these two events, I stopped by Mark Titmarsh’s home and studio. He is an artist teaching in the city, who is working on his Ph.D. focusing on painting in an extended field. This studio degree allows for both his art practice, which positions painting in an environment interacting with a variety of media, and for a theoretical component.

So now I depart with San Francisco my destination. I don’t have any particularly pithy conclusions to all this traveling just yet – I’ll wait until it all sinks in.

So, more later.

An all day walk: from near the top of one peninsula to the tip of another, meandering. From patchouli-scented Glebe Street, to the student area of University of Technology Sydney on Broadway, to the central business district (CBD) and finally to the pier.

My aim, for around 6 pm, was to attend the unveiling and reception for a $40k prize given to an artist no more that 5 years out of school. Quite a sum, so it seemed the whole art world of Sydney was there.

The one piece that stood out for me (I was actually able to take a part of it with me) was about the Redfern area of Sydney, between the city center and the airport, and traditionally an area that many urban aboriginals live. It is now ripe for development, and the artwork invited you to explore the issue. Frankly, it was the only piece for me which stood out – much if not all of the rest of the work was well within the safety zone of globalized art.

The Great Eel at Boora Birra

A long time ago, when there was no evil in this land, the sea was further to the east than it is today, and the place called Boora Birra stood high in the deep valley which it guarded. This valley was the home of the Parra Doowee, the Eel Dreaming Spirit. Now Borra Birra was a special place for women, who, when needed, carried out the ceremony called Butowee there. Every child, when they reached a certain age, was taken to the Boora Birra where they were taught certain things, and received protection from any evil spirits which could enter them and cause them to do evil things.

Because the land between the deep valleys and the sea shore was flat and easy walking, with plenty of food, the people became fat, lazy and forgetful. The men no longer honoured the spirits of the animals they hunted and killed, and they wasted much of their prey, eating only the parts they liked most and leaving the remainder to rot away. And the women no longer taught their children the ways of The People, they no longer paid their respects to the Earth Mother, or gave thanks for the food they received so easily.

The children grew to manhood and womanhood without being taught the laws, and why it is necessary to obey those laws. They formed themselves into bands that roamed the flatlands, destroying the gunyas of the old, stealing fishing spears and hunting weapons, and using them to fight the members of other bands.

The People heard them coming and would conceal themselves high upon the Boora Birra. From this vantage point they watched with trepidation as one band approached the home of the Great Eel guarded by the old warrior, Kamarai. Kamarai heard the noise of an approaching group, and went to welcome his visitors. But he was quickly surrounded by the lawless ones who laughed at his clumsy actions as he tried to avoid the jabbing of their spears.

Bleeding from many wounds, the old man fell to the ground. In a deep pool in the river the Great Eel heard the commotion and heard the cries of help from his old friend. It swam up to the surface of the pool. The lawless ones saw the Great Eel and threw their spears at him in fear as it pulled itself up out of the water. Its great body moved towards its old friend as the last spear of the lawless ones struck its tail.

When it saw that Kamarai had died of his wounds, it cried out in grief and pain, and struck the ground with its great tail, dislodging the spear. The Earth began to shake violently, and a great chasm opened up in the ground, following the fleeing lawless ones and swallowing them as they fled towards the flatlands. Then a storm came in from the sea, and the waves crashed across the flatlands until they reached the cliffs that marked the beginning of the highlands.

“Let this be a warning,” The Great Eel said. “The laws of This Land must be obeyed, and the proper ceremonies must be carried out in the proper manner. It turned to look at the Boora Birra, slowly being engulfed by the waves. “And the Boora Birra will now be a place where the sea creatures take their children to teach them the laws of The Sea. But you may visit, safely from time to time, so that you will remember why the laws must be passed on to the young. And because good lessons can always be learned from evil, this place will be safe for The People, to hunt and to fish, and live and teach the laws.”

The Great Eel slipped silently into the water, and with a splash of its tail disappeared beneath the waves. The People watched the waves, hoping for a glimpse of the Great Eel as it made its way to its new home. One of the children, a young boy, went to the water’s edge, then looked back at his mother and smiled. And spoke in a voice that was not his: “Until we forget again,” he said. “Until we forget again.”

There is an interesting initiative that is taking place through the Museum of Contemporary Art that has relevance to a redirective practice. Judith Blackall, the head of artistic programs at the museum told me that the MCA has invited artists – locally from Sydney, from Australia, and internationaly – to undertake “interventions” within three industries or sectors: aged care, waste management, and a football club (which is also going into housing finance). Although not specifically geared towards sustainability (or any other buzzword), it seems a fascinating experiment into what artists can bring directly into an arena of social agency. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with (might take another trip to Sydney).

I was also able to see a show of contemporary Latin American art now showing there. Latin American artists aren’t afraid of politics. Much of their history has required it. Sometimes, artists don’t have the luxury of not wanting their art to change anything. Maybe none of us has that luxury anymore. Maybe being able to conceal the unsustainable is a good working definition of luxury

I stopped by the National College of the Arts yesterday, which is allegedly the oldest art school in Australia (Brisbane also claims one). It is housed in a former jail, which consists of a maze of heavy buildings that are, however, rounded on their ends and with windows on the top overlooking surveying the realm. A curious mix of prison camp and village, with a bit of panopticon mixed in.

I stopped by the gallery, which is currently hanging the Blake Prize exhibit on religious art, whose jurors included an artist, an art historian, and a religious person. The prize has an interesting history, having been a battleground for the shift in Australian art from figuration to abstraction in the early days the prize’s existence. It was an interesting and eclectic mix of art but hard to envisage before Katie Dwyer, the curator responsible for hanging, does her work.

Meandering over to the student exhibition space, I encountered a room full of collected and recycled objects, full of newspapers, shoes, bras, a television, and silica gel packets, among other things. The artist – Bernadette Jones, who is completing her honors degree (a 4-year bachelors the only some students complete) in sculpture. She was in the midst of it all, at a bit of a standstill trying to figure out where to take it next.

In our discussion, we talked a bit about sustainability – although she had participated in a sustainable arts festival in another city in Australia, and her current work recycles objects from an overconsuming world, she is reluctant to pigeonhole her work that way, understandably for an artist. She was obviously concerned about the issues of global warming and overconsumption but expressed the commonly-held view that “artist’s don’t change the world.””

Why not, I wonder? Does art have any agency in the world? Why do we train our artists to think that their valuable thinking about difficult questions and shaping them into compelling form for viewers has no capacity for change? And then we train designers always to have an effect in the world, regardless whether it leads to an unsustainable one?

This is why I’d like to see a practice emerge which has the symbolic resonance of the best art and the capacity to act, like the best design. Maybe what this artist is doing is the beginning of something like this, even if she might not be aware of it.

I viewed the Sydney Opera House today: it is real. It gives me faith in the televisual – I’ve spent decades knowing that form and wanting to visit Sydney. Maybe the two are connected. There was often, if not always, the imagination of a social reality of Sydney that existed outside of the image of the Opera House. I don’t know if the Sydney I know now conflicts or coincides with the image I had. I’m a stranger. The people I meet aren’t part of the televisual; rather, they exist in a web of connections of the past with the present and possible future. But there still remains the Opera House: a meme that consolidates memory, desire, imagination and whatever else is needed and packs it all up in a few strokes of an architect’s pencil and a massive feat of engineering. It isn’t this latter which is so remarkable; rather the fact that it situates itself in my mind for so long – not at all obsessionally and with neither strong good nor bad connotations – but that it is reactivated as real when I am within site of it. Bravo.

There is no drought, at least in Sydney, today. From morning to night the rain was steadily pouring, sometimes lightly or, like right now, like a deluge. Nonetheless, I walked the 35 minutes to the museum and back, stopping at the Sydney Fish Market both directions, first to look, then to eat.

I struggled with the Powerhouse Museum. I went there knowing that many of the events of this last day of Sydney Design Week were centered there. It was Sunday, and it was filled with screaming kids. The museum combines design and industry in a spectacular mix. It was enervating.

There were two events I planned on attending. The first was “The K-Way Show” with design impresario Krispin K. It has the subtitle of “Doing Good with Design.” I entered the theater thinking it would be a sanctuary from all the industrial waste outside and, temporarily at least, from the screaming kids. Not to be.

Krispin K. introduced himself as an international trends forecaster, and it was clear from the over-amplified mic and the aggressive need for audience participation that it was anything but sanctuary. We would confront Design in all of its deformed glory. There were some clever observations: of barbed wire (it’s good design – good can be bad and bad can be good); a particular consumer typology (retrosexual); and a neat name for an advertising media placement that got some attention (some crafty entrepreneur placed an ad for his online poker site on a homeless man’s sign – it’s now called bumvertising.

Now that he held the audience, he brought to bear design’s “good”: portable water storage units, a mask-cum-pacifier for giving babies anaethesia, a “Lifestraw” that filters water from rivers immediately upon sucking it up, and a few other genuinely good designs “for the other 90% of the world.” So everyone went away feeling happy.

The next event was introduced by curator Anni Turnball, a curator for the museum with an interest in sustainable design. She introduced a documentary film on Florida futurist Jacque Fresco by a short lecture on Australian futurist Beauvais, a designer in the mode of a Raymond Loewy. Fresco actually is quite similar in his ambition and, to an extent, even his style. As a kid he saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and loved it (except for all the suffering masses); he was determined to create a future that was equitable for all. He calls is “sociocyberneering.” Not only does he see himself as a designer but, similar to El Lissitsky, sees himself as a “social engineer.” The imagination is endless, as far as it goes, with idea after idea shaped into some desirable form. It was 1939 World’s Fair revisited and reshaped for our times. There were audible murmurs when another of his models was unveiled. But he kept talking about changing society, and all I saw was more of the same techno-idealism, a colossal failure of social thinking. His work deserves to be in a museum – an archeological one following the collapse of the society for which he dreams.

So that set the stage. I prowled through the exhibits and collections avoiding the screaming kids, like I was in a badly managed department store. I walked home in the rain – a pleasure after my visit – and found a Dave Hickey book I have been looking for, for over 4 years, in the Gleeb Bookstore near my hotel, where I am now pleasantly ensconced.

Arrived in Sydney around mid-day on Saturday, with no Opera House in sight. There was a big, beautiful bay, some visible bridges, and in the distance outside the development a huge forest. I struggled with bags overloaded with books, and a back overloaded with bags. In the midst of these I’m trying to gingerly protect a large tubeless copy of Stuart’s is/not, the size of a medium didgederoo.

My hotel is located in the Gleeb neighborhood, which was described to me as “Sydney’s Haight Ashbury.” I thought it would be nice to try someplace away from the touristy centers. After checking in the hotel, I strolled down Gleeb Point Street, smelling more patchouli oil than car fumes. Maybe that’s good. But I could see what looked like excellent bookstores, and I think it is close to the Uni.

As I was meeting a colleague Katie, who is a gallery curator at an art college, for a Saturday gallery walk, I caught a cab to the Wooloomooroo area (?), on Cowper Wharf road. We me in front of a huge pier building which had been converted to a hotel and condo spot, where we stopped for a drink. The galleries are all spread out, and even though we walked a great deal it seemed, we only touched the surface of Sydney’s constellation of galleries. We went from wharf to center to hill-nestled neighborhood, to bustling avenue. In a way that one can only do when you first come to a new place trying to place it in what you know, I thought it resembled a tropical Britain. The city is spread out – more people refer to it an American model city unlike Melbourne’s European quality – and it has gently reminders of London, also spread out, and also meandering between a similar topography of linked neighborhoods.

We saw a range of art and types of places to see art, from a funded center to an “ari” (artist run initiative) to established galleries. We saw an exhibition of installations created through performance, to decorator painting, to mesmerizing digital art, to clever tableaus of art world shenanigans. We were climbing hills and stairs, avoiding cars at small roundabouts, negotiating sidewalks on Oxford Street, and once we finished to tour, we found ourselves yelling at each other at a pub to hear each other over the extraordinary din of Aussie Bloke Culture. Men were taking off their shirts and putting them back on, and yelling and screaming. We found a corner of the pub which was quiet, but allowed us a view of some stumbling bloke en route to the loo holding his mouth. Looked better exiting, I must say. It took two weeks, but finally was able to experience this phenomenon. Today, once I organize myself for the week, I’ll see if I can see the Sydney Opera House. Unless, since it is pouring, I find a bookstore on the way.

It’s coming to the end of two weeks in Australia, and the last night before I leave for Sydney. Time to take a breath before the final leg of my journey. Feels like I need it – the week in Brisbane and the one in Melbourne have each presented me with an intense set of experiences and openings into areas I haven’t explored.

Today was representative. I started out at a small art college, the Victorian College of the Arts; took the tram to Swinburne University, which has a competing program to RMIT; came back to explore the Australian Center for Contemporary Art, and finished my day talking to a designer, Stuart Geddes, who publishes a local magazine that is posted around the city.

The magazine is called “is/not,” and each issue is organized around a dichotomy: for instance, the first issue was “Love ‘is/not’ lust.” Various writers – some local, others Australian, and some international – submit writings exploring the topic from various directions. It is designed on one extremely large sheet of paper (I want to say A-double-00, but I could be entirely wrong) that is posted like a mini-billboard around both Melbourne and Sydney. It is text heavy but includes a comic and crossword puzzle and is designed in a playful and accessible way. I’ve seen a few in cafes.

The project is collaboration between three designers and five editors, and partly emerged during Stuart’s Masters degree work at RMIT. I think it points heavily towards the value of a research culture in design, something the Australians are putting a lot of serious attention in – not only in design, but in art and all other university disciplines. Swinburne University faculty member and administrator, John Bassani, told me that you can actually have a sophisticated design conversation with the Minister of Finance of the state of Victoria about design!

There is an initiative at Swinburne, which I visited on Friday, that 80% of staff at the University should hold their Ph.D.s. There are also pressures from the central government for specifying “outcomes” in order to justify research dollars (easier to do in quantative terms for the sciences that for design and art – a controversial subject. The “outcome” for Australia is to position itself in the region and world as a leading nation for learning and for an educated workforce. I guess that’s what you have to rely on when you don’t have a military with the capabilities that the United States does to enforce its influence.

Even at Victorian College of the Arts – which only focuses on the fine arts – there is some pressure for research, including Ph.D.s in studio art. What I think is encouraging is the diversity of options, which Jan Murray, the acting head of the College of Art at VCA, explained to me. There still are many artists who receive a 3-year Bachelors education before beginning their journey as artists. There is a fourth year Bachelors with Honors in Australia for a selected few – some of whom plan on going for a Masters degree, a studio degree in which research plays a significant part. Artists then have the opportunity to pursue a Ph.D., which allows them to develop their art in the studio while exploring issues germane to their work.

Regardless of what you might think of the necessity of studying for a Ph.D. in order to practice art (probably not much), it also functions as a way that artists are able to carve out more time for themselves in the studio, in a decently funded environment, compared to the dire state of higher education funding in the U.S.

It is still a controversial direction for art and design departments, however. The time will perhaps come when the Ph.D. will be required for a job teaching studio art – how will that shape practice in the future? The need to define outcomes of research in order to receive funding applies an unresolvable pressure on the studio art, and in effect favors the sciences more than the arts. Some fringe courses like performance are already being cut by some Unis, in response to these pressures. Design is a different matter, as outcomes are an accepted part of the practice. But the emphasis across the Universities is towards an overlord managerialism, which works fine within a totally productivist society, but less well if at all within the soft nodes of cultural activity.

In the midst of all this intense exposure to ideas – and academic debates – today, I was able to make my way to the Australian Contemporary Art Center, where I entered a sound art installation, which blew me away, as well as an exhibition of Roni Horn photographs.

Now, it’s time for packing.

After a bush and braindraining day yesterday, wandering around the city today. Visited a site on the Yarra river that is a traditional Aboriginal gathering place, and am now in a district where the artists have apparently moved, around Gertrude Street.

Still absorbing a lot from yesterday. Some great conversations, and some good conversation incited about design, truth, and sustainability after the presentation I gave,together with one of Melbourne’s respected branding designers.

Some photos of Melbourne.

After meeting Stephen Langdon of lab3000 (a Victoria State agency for design) about a conversation I am having at RMIT university, I made my way back to Federation Square to take a guided tour of the aboriginal galleries at the National Gallery of Victoria.

I was lucky – I was the only one waiting when Chris, the volunteer docent arrived. I’ve never taken a docent tour before at a museum, but I was so overwhelmed and confused about the art I saw that I felt I needed an orientation. I’m glad I did. Chris was knowledgeable and passionate about the art we were viewing together.

Entering the galleries she pointed out the video. This is Woiwurrung land, and the video depicts a tribal member welcoming us to their land. All art made by Australia’s aboriginal people is about land, and Federation Square, a major tourist destination with the museum, the National Design Centre, a museum of digital and moving arts (where a Pixar exhibition is currently showing) is – I suppose like all of Melbourne – on Woiwurrung land.

The first thing I needed to get straight is how this work fits into a gallery. Aboriginal art has specific functions within its culture, and painting on canvas (or chipboard) is not a traditional one. As the video attests, however, the art does as well – it is a claim on land. We are here.

Their collection spans “early” work from the 1920s or so, which represents a practice that could be considered traditional, in continuity with more ancient practices, to work begun in the 1970s in the first attempt of white people to work directly with Aboriginal people to make art, to work made last year. A living art.

The early work that Chris pointed out was an educational aid (I’m familiar with educational design having worked for Scholastic, Inc. – but this was not that). It is painted on bark, using brushes made from twigs – the brush itself being the unwound fibers of the wood – and using rock pigments. It was used to begin to teach children the elements of stories.

(I really want to know what Edward Tufte thinks of Aboriginal information design, not to mention mapping!)

In the 1970s, a guy named Geoffrey Bardon moved to the Northern Territory and began to work directly with local tribal people. It must first be acknowledged that due to the cumulative effect of colonization and displacement, the traditional culture was in danger of being lost. Consider simply this: Australia is a country rich in natural resources, and its economy has been sustained by extraction of these (today in the Australian Age, it was announced that the “green light” had been given to sell uranium to India). For a people whose whole existence for millennia has been spiritually embedded with the land, what would this mean? Imagine that all of a sudden, all of the iPods were “extracted” from the developing world and were destroyed – that would represent only a fraction of the crisis that the natives peoples of Australia went through.

After the first art was produced and exhibited publically, there was a terrible backlash. Many of the elders felt that too many tribal secrets were being given away – keep in mind that the “art” that has traditionally been made is based on ongoing initiation into increasingly privileged realms, and is used in the context of storytelling and ceremony. So no art was made for a while. Another interesting fact is that women, who were traditionally excluded from most forms of painting, were eventually allowed to begin to make art – as the stories were getting lost, and the women were more reliable, not least because of the effects of higher alcoholism among the men.

Today’s Aboriginal artists run the gamut from traditional weavers and craft artists to those involved in aboriginal politics, to others lilke Tracy Moffat who move pretty seamlessly between the worlds.

When I think about it, I am amazed I don’t ever remember seeing an acknowledged aboriginal artwork at MoMA during the 5 years I worked there (or at any other time). Their painting puts Kandinsky and Mondrian to shame nonetheless.

A note from Anne-Marie with some corrections. I include them here for anyone who has been following the blog. For new readers, I have made the corrections retroactively.

“Can’t keep my inner editor quiet – a few corrections: Monday you visited Lake Cressbrook. On weds you went to Toowoomba. Tony picked up bales (not bushells) of barlely hay. Thurs you met artist Keith Armstrong (not Howard) !!”

My day started and ended with the trains. I finally got out of the Central Business District (CBD). Melbourne has an extensive tram and train system. I caught one at Flinders Station to travel to Caulfield, to visit the Monash University campus where the Art and Design faculty [department] resides.

The head of design, Arthur De Bono, met me for lunch with Michael, a Ph.D. student and faculty in Industrial Design who is researching sustainability. He had worked for Ford for 10 years, and was disappointed with their movement on sustainability. I am generally amazed at the amount of research into design and design theory that the Australians are doing – though they don’t think it a lot. But there has been a brain drain of Australian design theorists to Parsons in New York for several years, most recent brain of them Cameron Tonkinwise, who has been affiliated with Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis through both the EcoDesign Foundation and Design Philosophy Papers.

Michael felt that at Monash, the art theory was more developed than design theory, which he thought was good – as the art theory department exposes the students to more social theory than the design theory department does. This is unfortunate for design but not surprising – since the 1980s I’ve been, with few exceptions, disappointed with the technocratic nature of design theory – as if we needed to lubricate our minds with the right thoughts to properly and efficiently make the world more unsustainable!

Arthur also was able to introduce me to Russell Kennedy, chair of the visual communication department and a board member of Icograda, the international design organization. (Their annual meeting is in Havana this year!) Russell’s been developing for Icograda an initiative called Indigo.org, which aims to provide a forum for indigenous voices in design. He also introduced me to several interesting projects and exhibition, among them an Icograda/Unesco collaboration called Big Words, a project meant to deal with the phenomena of Creole languages by partnering a designer from a specific country with an indigenous person from the same territory to work together. Icograda hopes to expand their base in Latin America through the Havana conference, and is looking to Africa as well. Based on my conversation with Russel, I can assume it will be in the spirit of learning from the wealth of resources they have through their indigenous traditions, rather than furthering the development of a globalizing design industry.

I was also today able to link up with Stephen Banham of Letterbox, who was recommended to me by Jason at Inkahoots. Stephen has been involved in many typographic projects, as the studio’s name might indicate. However, what is most interesting to me is not specifically his typography, but his commitment to design as a cultural practice. Besides running a design business revolving around typography, he teaches, writes, publishes books, organizes public lectures, and teaches. When discussing the problem of uttering the s-word of Sustainability, Stephen suggests instead “making a contribution,” which is without the pedantic and overused connotations of the former. (Tony’s strategies include focusing on the unsustainable rather than sustainability; hyphenating the word sustain-ability to suggest the condition of sustaining rather than merely a tendency to sustain; and substituting the word Sustainment for sustainability, which suggests the need for a cultural project as ambitious as the Enlightenment has proven to be.)

One project Stephen has deservedly received a lot of international attention for is a survey of typography around the area of his studio in the Central Business District, called 1000 Meters of Typography. He engaged in a very thorough survey of which fonts were being used on a walk of 1000 meters. He then, in a self-published pamphlet, indicated graphically the results. As one approaches the corporate-dominated area, typographic diversity goes down in frequency, favoring (of course) Helvetica. A fascinating thing to see the block-by-block breakdown of serif and san serif, Helvetica and not, from the arty environs of one end of Flinders to another more corporate end.

The model of practice Stephen maintains is one that is available for any designer. The notion is that it is necessary to bring your personal beliefs into your work. He told me “it is no use providing models that can’t survive.” This could be taken at least two ways: I think in one sense it might be a critique of theory – the kind that sounds good but doesn’t translate into practice. One the other hand, it can be seen as a substantial critique of a design profession which, more often than not, contributes its force to perpetuating an unsustainable culture. It is a classic “rob Peter to Pay Paul” strategy of doing commercially viable design projects to pay for design whose import is to create culture.

As we were conversing, Niels came over to tell Stephen his had to leave, as he needed to catch a plane to Sydney to install a show of paintings at a gallery called Monster Children. Stephen afterwards pointed out his practice of only hiring people who had other things going on in their lives than graphic design – something I’ve always noted the value of. Let’s hold on to something real, after all.

Following my meeting at Letterbox I made my way, via tram, to Fitzroy on Brunswick Street, an area of funky restaurants and cool bars (including an excellent bookstore). Morph East Village together with the Haight Ashbury and (Portland’s) Hawthorne Street and you might have the right image. Catching the tram back, I reflected on the design of the vehicle in relation to the type of culture: the all-seats-facing-forward of American trains, which undermine encountering another; the wall seats facing the standing crowd like the subways and buses of New York, for instance (crowd the bodies in for efficiency); and the seats facing each other of the Melbourne tram (the European model) which might assume that we might have something to learn from encountering each other. The pull-down shades were also a nice touch.

After getting over-involved in electronic dementia (at the internet café) I made my way to the National Gallery of Victoria again to see the Aboriginal collection. I hope this doesn’t sound merely predictable, but I was floored by the work. No doubt there are significant issues in translating a practice which originated in the everyday and found site-specifically and in ceremonies, into a conventional mode of Western art making – but so what? Aboriginal art of Australia is the oldest continuously living tradition of artmaking. And it is beautiful, profound, stimulating, opaque, colorful, retinal, spiritual… My answer to those who suggest what is shown in the museums doesn’t authentically represent their art is that perhaps it isn’t art, but design – great design. In the midst of still-continuing threats of cultural genocide or simply the entropy of colonized dysfunction, these extraordinary works have agency, they represent – in translation – the deep structure of culture in order to counter those who would readily assume it should be incorporated into our own, through police or military means or any other perniciously arrogant way.

Today, after breakfast at McDonald’s (the joys of traveling) and picking up a section of the newspaper, I finished packing and headed to the airport. While waiting to go through security, someone screaming filled the room with uncertainty. Upon sitting down to read, the emergency siren at our gate starting screeching. An auspicious start for what turned out to be an inauspicious journey – except for what I learned in the paper section I swiped.

The front page’s headlines read “Desert Sweep” and refered to the draconian emergency legislation that was enacted by the Australian government to deal with the massive dysfunction in the Aboriginal community. The government will be spending about 1/2 billion Australian dollars to radically refashion the communities in the Northern Territory [an Australian state], where a large part of the Aborigines live.

An initial raid was covered in the American press: Australian police descended upon some communities to deal with the reported problems of child sexual abuse, one symptom among many that consitute the failure of reconciliation of the two societies and the dysfuntion that results.

No doubt it sounds like a decent humanitarian gesture, but one has to keep in mind the previous attempts at gestures by Whites towards the Aborigines: in fact, the current elders were once displaced children, taken by Australian authorities from their parents and sent to missions to be raised.(For a great story about this period, rent the film Rabbit Proof Fence, based on a true story about 2 young girls who escape a mission to walk 1500 miles back to their family.)

The Prime Minister, John Howard, wants to inject a little bootstrapping into the communities so they have the opportunity to enter our inestimably unsustainable economy. No more nomadism if you want to pick up your check.The Federal Families, Community Services, and Indigenous Affairs minister, according to Nicolas Rothwell writing for The Weekend Australian, “gains complete control over Northern Territory indigenous community governance. He can suspend and take over Aboriginal local councils and any of their associations, including art or resource centers, and transfer their assets to the new local government shires [counties] being designed.” This current legislation is being called “cultural genocide” by some, with good reason.

This has echoes of the legislation that was passed by the American government and signed by Nixon in 1971 dealing with native peoples’ land rights to Alaska. Our government reduced native Alaskans land rights from almost all the state to about one-ninth of it. The government then made this the land a corporation, distributing shares to individual native Alaskans. This of course flies in the face of native cultural economy. Its intent, of course, was to privatize the state so it would become easier to drill for oil.

Last year I was in Argentina while the Mapuche Indians of Patagonia were in the midst of a struggle over land. The Argentine government sold 2 million acres of land to the Benetton corporation, beloved by some in the design community (including Tibor, who designed their Colors magazine). Problem was, the Mapuches have been living on the land for about 13,000 years, but now need to ask for corporate permission to fetch their water. (You can imagine the poster campaign opposing the land grab.)

Of course, none of this is new – 500 years-old maybe? – but we tend to forget that the massive injustices which have been done to indigenous peoples in order to fuel our society’s unsustainability isn’t something historical. It continues, inexorably, to today.

It seems that, in order to address the unsustainability of our world, a good first step would be for the developed countries to learn from the native peoples upon whose back our societies were built – and not to initiate more paternalistic, greedy, and coercive measures that reduce the future available to all of us.

After working the morning in our rooms, we walked downtown for a few meetings at Inkahoots, a small studio that started in the early 1990s as an artist-community silkscreen studio, in time becoming what it is now. The one person left from the silkscreen days, Robin, now mostly takes the role of studio manager and art director; Jason is the main designer. (Jason did a stint in London working on Eye magazine and the work of the studio has been featured in the Australian design issue.)

The studio works solely with community and cultural organizations, in a collaborative spirit. The work is expressive and elliptical, away from the catch-up functionalism of much nonprofit work I’ve seen in the past. It is done in an open spirit, socially committed but without the patronizing tone in much work of this type. He can hit an appropriate strident voice, for example in a recent poster called “Unsettled.” When Britain claimed Australia for the crown, they deemed the country “terra nullis,” (meaning uninhabited), despite the fact that 1-1/2 million aborigines were then living on the continent (there are now about 200,0000 left). In the 1990s, an aboriginal activist named Eddie Mabo fought a long and hard campaign to regain recognition for the legitimacy of native title. In the poster, you see a photo of John Howard holding a map of Australia that shows in an inflammatory way the reduction of non-native territory to a fraction of the continent saying, in effect, “your land is under threat.”

When Tony returned he brought with him an interactive artist and sculpture artist Keith Armstrong (who recently returned from a term as a visiting artist in San Luis Obisbo, and the architect Jim Gall, a collaborator with Tony on a competition “Building a Sustainable World: Life in the Balance” (sponsored by the the L.A. chapter of the British Royal Institute of Architects) in which they designed a sustainable city called Boonahtwo (they received 2nd place for a pro. 1st place was given to someone who had been involved in EcoDesign Foundation that Tony and Anne-Marie founded in Sydney in the 1990s).

The group gathered to discuss a music-and-visual performance called Fundamental Sound, which will take place in early December at the Conservatory of Music in Brisbane. It will involve the people mentioned, plus a leading Australian jazz musician Sandy Evans, percussionist Jon Jones, composer, musician Ian Blake, and an internationally acclaimed didgeridoo William Barton. The piece revolves around shifts in human habitation: 100,000 years as nomads; the transition to permanent settlements starting in Mesopotamia (due to climate change); and leading to our current situation 12,000 years later – unsettlement due to climate change. The corollary theme is that whereas culture revolves around difference, sustainment revolves around unity. We exist in commonality insofar as we seek to create sustainment under the conditions of the unsustainable.

Tomorrow I give my presentation and participate in a seminar at an art college. Time for final preparations.

After attempting to arrange some back-up accommodations, we arrive at the Customs House Restaurant for a six o’clock meeting with a group from the Department of Primary Industries (which deals with agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the like). Lucky me: one of the best restaurants in Brisbane, a winter night warm enough to wear a t-shirt and open sweater, and a seat on the outside patio overlooking the Brisbane River and suspension bridge in the distance. I also get to observe redirective practice in action.

The person responsible for calling the meeting, Richard, directs a DPI program in Continuous Improvement and Innovation. He is a former vetenarian and originally from South Africa. With him are a biologist, a geneticist, and economist among a few others. They are all affiliated with the Department of Primary Industries though the central government Collaborative Research Center. The are all working on the cattle sector.

The project that brought the group to the table with Tony involves a breed of cattle that are unique to Africa. Through an aid program, the government of Australia wants to help create a branded value chain that will deliver the meat of this cattle to high-end stores in Europe – in a sustainable way. They had found Tony’s work on the internet (I imagine through Design Philosophy Papers), and are meeting to discuss how to make sure this is done in an absolutely sustainable way.

An interesting discussion followed. Tony asked questions for clarification and articulated his approach, and Richard provided more context while seeking an answer as to how you specify outcomes. I was impressed with the significant commitment to sustainability evidenced by the whole group representing a government initiative on an international project.

At the heart of the discussion was an interrogation of the term “continuous improvement,” a basic concept in project management that, I believe, originated from Toyota’s innovative manufacturing process. What is continuous improvement in the context of sustainability? If, as anthropocentric beings we are by nature unsustainable, how do we frame continuous improvement? If we exist in an unsustainable society, isn’t continuous improvement simply being more efficient at being unsustainable? What Tony was meaning to suggest is that in such a situation, it is necessary to transform rather than improve, to put it in simple terms. Finally, we all seemed to come to a consensus after Tony brought it back to its Greek root. The translation of “economy” in Greek is “the law of the household;” of “ecology,” the “maintenance of the household.” In these terms, continuous improvement would be the continual approach of economic exchange to the state of ecologic exchange. In George Bataille’s thinking (articulated in The Accursed Share), the movement would be from the restricted economy we operate in now (where exchanges are limited and “externalities” (such as the cost of cleaning up a polluted river) aren’t factored into the exchange towards the general economy, one that acknowledges the full meaning of expenditure.

It was a pretty exalted discussion of cattle, over a meal of Australian lamb accompanied by my first taste of Australian beer. Lucky me. And lucky too that in the midst of this the motel called with a cancellation, so we had a place to retire for the night.

Yesterday we left the farm for Brisbane: first stopping in Crow’s Nest; then to Toowoomba for lunch, money exchange and an electrical adapter; stopping off to pick up 4 bales of barley hay for the few steer; and finally to the City Star motel where I now overlook four or five farmers here for the A-exhibition. The hotels are booked solid with farmers for the most important agricultural event in Queensland, a strong farming state.

Along the way to the city our discussion centered on the relation of art to design to “redirective practice” (a term Tony uses to suggest the need to redesign design in face of the unsustainable. My own thinking in recent years has been that design needs to reclaim the symbolic space of art that it has had for eons before the Industrial Revolution; and art needs to move into a social space where, in fact, it already exists but only in an unacknowledged way. Art has agency, in other words, and as such already designs.

In terms of a practice which actively (en)counters the unsustainable, it seems that design is best positioned to “solve” this problem (which can’t be solved, as anthropocentric humanity is by nature unsustainable). Yet, as I reflect upon my own life, which has been overwhelmingly sustained by the encounter with art, I am reluctant to think that it isn’t an essential element that can counter the unsustainable.

Tony in reply suggests something I’ve often thought myself: design can be art, but art can’t be design. Design, in other words, can use the practices of art in order to make something happen (i.e., to have agency) within a particular field of constraints. Conversely, once art tries to “do something” outside of the institutions of art that give it its meaning, it stops being “art” and becomes “design.” (I sometimes wonder whether artists don’t have a different definition of design than I do: that is consists of the formal or even decorative elements that always exist in art in order to convey the larger intent of the artist.)

Does painting sustain? Can we look at the work of Jasper Johns, say, or even Warhol as engaged at its base in (en)countering the unsustainable? It would be an interesting, and novel, interpretation of Warhol. By throwing in our culture’s face that the hallowed museum box is no refuge from consumer culture, from Pop, didn’t Warhol create a fracture in the history of art where disinterested contemplation of art is blockaded by the mirror of what our culture has become? Of course, one has to balance this aesthetic gesture by a host of other considerations involving the celebration and ironic use of unsustainable consumer culture which has seemed to be an effect of his work. Also, one can never ignore the legitimating effect of fine art on the dominant culture’s values: if anything, this is where fine art’s agency has tended to lie.

As many artists over the last few decades have attempted to show, art can gain significance by its placement outside the gallery’s walls into the space of the social. But can it contribute to the sustainable? It will need to be a different creature entirely, in Tony’s view, if this is to happen.

Our conversation comes to a pause as we pull into the City Star around 4 pm and find our room reservation didn’t arrive at the motel. We might be without a room on a night all accommodations are booked.

This morning Anne-Marie, Tony and I walked the dogs, on the way back stopping by a grove of tall eucalyptus trees rising over an understory of wattle trees (a pioneer species), native ginger, and euodia trees.
They have spotted around 70 species of birds on their farm, among them the ones we saw and heard today – the Kookaburra, King Parrots, Rainbow Lorikeets, and the Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo. From sonic gutturals to conventional tweets, the thicket of sounds they make as a community of birds is rich and diverse.

I’ve been navigating my way through a thicket of ideas also, unraveling my way towards an understanding of what sustainment means and looks like, getting caught in economics here, politics there, the visual all about and the ontological covering the ground.

Tomorrow we leave for Brisbane for a few meetings on projects Tony is involved in, from a collaboration with regional government to a music-text performance.

This morning I went hiking among wallabies and kangaroos.

Not what I might have imagined I’d be doing my first day in Australia. My intent is to spend three weeks on the eastern coast of the continent – in and around (from north to south) Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne – meeting with design theorists, practitioners, and educators in order to learn more about the issue of sustainability and how designers in this part of the world are dealing with it.

Australians have reason to be concerned: the continent is in the midst of its worst drought in 1000 years, whose acknowledged cause is global warming. On our hike, I viewed Lake Cressbrook, a reservoir whose water level is at only seventeen percent normal capacity. The evidence of global warming is visible. Unlike less prosperous parts of the Southern Hemisphere, like Darfur, massive social crises over lack of water have not appeared. But who knows what the future might bring, for all of us.
Design must deal with this future. It creates the world-to-be, as it has already created the world of our present, shaping us. This fundamental observation is the basis for much of the work of Tony Fry, articulated in his book and in the journal Design Philosophy Papers, edited by himself and Anne-Marie Willis. The recognition of this has enormous implications for the practice and profession of design, and the education of designers. What does it mean to design a future, under the conditions of unsustainability which currently exist? Most of what designers do, working within existing cultural, economic, and professional parameters, must by nature either actively create conditions of unsustainability or sustain the unsustainable – what Fry terms “defuturing.”

I chose to come here to meet him and Anne-Marie, who live about two hours west of Brisbane, in the northeastern state of Queensland. They co-founded the Eco Design Foundation in Sydney in the 1990s, and started the online journal Design Philosophy Papers, which they edit from their weatherboard house overlooking their small herd of steer and modest, sustainably managed plantation of trees. After a few days of talks and walks, we’ll go to Brisbane for a few meetings and seminars. I’ll spend the next week in Melbourne and the final week in Sydney, meeting others in design, who are thinking or practicing with future in mind.

Here I am attempting to solve my last computer problems before training to Los Angeles, and then to Australia. Would I be able to experience Australia if I weren’t fully wired? Why is this stuff – including this blog, I should mention – so important? What if I went with nothing except a pencil, a pad, a book, and some postcards?

I’ve chosen to bring these accouterments with me, and to blog, but I wonder whether it makes for a more satisfying, and sustaining, trip.