The Broccoli Maestro

36 min. A chamber opera in two acts for six voices and six players and two-channel tape. Libretto by Slave Pianos after writings by Tony Clark and his circle. First performed on Friday 22 June and Saturday 23 June 2001 at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Commissioned by Chamber Made Opera.

THE BROCCOLI MAESTRO

in Two Acts, for Six Voices, Six Players and Tape

Libretto by SLAVE PIANOS after writings by Tony Clark, Judith Pascal, Stephen Bram, Angela Brennan, Geoff Lowe, Rose Nolan, Jacqueline Riva, Jane Trengove, Gary Wilson and Constanze Zikos.

8.00pm Friday 22 June 2001
8.00pm Saturday 23 June 2001
North Melbourne Town Hall
Cnr Queensberry & Errol Streets

CAST

MUSICIANS

Conducted by Adrian Kirk

CREW

Prelude

The Broccoli Maestro

The Broccoli Maestro

THE BROCCOLI MAESTRO draws together materials from four sources: 1) the writings, musical compositions, paintings and ANTI-MUSIC/OPERA of Tony Clark; 2) the writings of Clark’s literary pseudonym Judith Pascal; 3) musical compositions and commentaries on Clark’s work by his colleagues Stephen Bram, Constanze Zikos, Rose Nolan, Geoff Lowe, Angela Brennan and Gary Wilson; and 4) historical musical correspondences with Clark’s seminal painting ensemble The Technical Manifesto of Town Planning, 1982. The unifying figure of Tony Clark provides a mechanism to bring together musical, artistic and theoretical discourses spanning eight centuries and three continents by relocating Melbourne artists in 13th century Paris.

TONY CLARK belongs to a generation of artists whose practices have been informed by both conceptual art and popular culture. In Clark’s case, this position is all the more revealing for the artist’s strong interest in the history of classical art and architecture, and the attendant areas of interior design, decoration and music. Tony Clark’s work demonstrates a technical virtuosity, at the same time that it embraces a slapstick and off-handed anti-painting posture, in its investigation of the threshold between the properties of painting, sculpture and installation. Clark’s work issues from a longstanding interest in the history of taste, architectural embellishment and the disputes between classicism and popular culture. These issues are articulated by a deliberate amateurism whereby the concept of failure is built into the work, not only for the organic and uncanny possibilities it affords, but also to offset the lofty and transcendental values characteristic of Classicism. Tony Clark’s project is relentlessly contemporary, domestic and local - a travesty of the classics. Clark’s work assumes an anti-art position reminiscent of the historical avant-garde, and low-tech serial productions characteristic of pop. These forms are incorporated for their historical register in order to underwrite the artist’s historical inquisition from a contemporary position.

Clark was a founding participator in the activities of ANTI-MUSIC, a collective of visual artists initiated by John Nixon in 1979. ANTI-MUSIC shared an interest in politically and economically progressive means of sound production, which they called “industrial folk music.” Their practice is informed by the legacy of Futurist, Dada, and film music and coupled with a DIY attitude first associated with Punk. With Nixon, Clark explored the musical corollary of his interest in the Renaissance, which he described as ANTI-MUSIC/OPERA. The Synopsis (see facing page) of Clark’s own anti-opera Aquinas forms the conceptual framework for THE BROCCOLI MAESTRO.

The present libretto folds Clark’s scheme for Aquinas onto a series of anecdotes and critical responses to the painter’s work by fellow artists. It uses the form of Clark’s lyric drama as a template for inserting the painter himself (a complex and highly theatrical persona constructed as a deliberate part of his art practice) into the central Aquinas role with his feminine, scholarly alter ego, Judith Pascal as Philosophy. The conflation of textual sources - Clark’s ANTI-MUSIC/OPERA and the Colloquium - which are seemingly contradictory in both a historical and geographical sense - is in fact consistent with Clark’s desire to give expression to a “St Kilda version of classicism”.

The interleaving of related but disparate textual materials has a direct parallel with the musical structure. The fourteen scenes of the opera correspond directly with the fourteen canvas boards of the Technical Manifesto. Two streams of musical materials, one derived from Clark’s involvement in the original ANTI-MUSIC activities (1979–1981) and the other from his wide interest in classical formal structures, are folded together and presented simultaneously.

SLAVE PIANOS is an organisation devoted to the collection, analysis, performance, and recomposition of sound work by visual artists. In the last year SLAVE PIANOS have presented exhibitions and performances in Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Glasgow, Kassel, New York, Los Angeles, St Petersburg, and Moscow; and have collaborated with DJ Olive, DJ Kuya, DJ James deCruz, the Flux String Quartet, the Krasnyi Quartet, the Elektra String Quartet, the DeFLOCKeD String Quartet, Barney McAll, the Anti-JAZZ Bentet, Graeme Leak, Astra Chamber Music Society, RMIT Gallery, CEC International Partners, La Trobe University Music Dept. the Burley Griffin Brass Band, the National Gallery of Australia, and the research division of QRS. An anthology of SLAVE PIANOS will be released by Revolver Publications, Frankfurt in September.

The Virtuoso of Failure

From the moment he burst onto the Melbourne art scene with his Technical Manifesto of Town Planning (1982), Tony Clark has been a virtuoso of failure. He has failed and failed again, failed and failed better, and has orchestrated his efforts with consummate professionalism. The paradox of Tony Clark is that he has harnessed an obvious lack of artistic talent to a ‘couldn’t-care-less’ attitude towards technique and finish, and placed the results within a frame garnished with the intellectual equivalent of costume jewellery — to capture the hearts of artists, critics, dealers and curators.

This is a very late–20th century phenomenon, and, it is tempting to say — a very Melbourne phenomenon. Although Clark has made his mark in other Australian cities, and gained a toehold in Germany after being included in Documenta IX in 1993, he owes his rapid rise to a special set of circumstances. In the early 1980s, Australian art was emerging from a long, boring winter of conceptualism, minimalism, earth works, feminist polemics, trade union banners, and embarrassing performance pieces. Sensing that it was time for a change, the young critic and social climber, Paul Taylor, had launched the magazine Art & Text, with the aim of promoting a new wave of emerging Australian artists. The new work was an unlikely alliance of ‘TransAvantGarde’-style paintings, and late-blooming Pop art. The intellectual pedigree came largely from Roland Barthes, and from Dick Hebdidge’s book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

Within a few years, the Art & Text putsch had conquered the citadels of contemporary Australian art. The artists who had been promoted by the magazine — including Jenny Watson, Mike Parr, Imants Tillers, Dale Frank, Peter Tyndall, Maria Kozic, John Nixon, Howard Arkley and a host of others — had become obligatory acquisitions for public art museums, and were first choice for overseas travelling exhibitions. The Marxist professors who had championed trade union banners and feminist art, were seduced by the conspicuous coolness of the new art, and jumped aboard the bandwagon.

In retrospect, the whole episode seems like a triumph of hype over substance, just as the financial boom of the 1980s was characterized by spectacular displays of wealth bouyed up by imaginary money. The best of the ‘new wave’ artists have maintained a presence in the Australian art scene, but there is no longer any suggestion of a small, closely-knit vanguard dominating every public exhibition.

In 1982, when Tony Clark made his artistic debut, Paul Taylor had put together an exhibition called Popism for the National Gallery of Victoria, as a showcase for his favourite artists. Iconoclasm was the order of the day, and Clark’s Technical Manifesto of Town Planning was a breath-taking new addition to the field. The work consisted of thirteen small canvas boards and one photograph arranged on a shelf. Each canvas board featured a piece of classically-inspired architecture, painted in the roughest, most awkward fashion. Clark’s method has been described as “Expressionist”, although it could just as easily have been called ‘inept’. Moreover, it was self-consciously and comfortably inept, as though it would have been beneath the artist’s dignity to expend any greater effort.

By this stage, Clark had already collaborated with the artist, John Nixon, on a series of equally raw musical pieces that appeared in 1981, and have recently been resuscitated by SLAVE PIANOS. His next venture was a set of Sacro-Idyllic landscapes of 1982–84, which led quickly to Clark’s Myriorama, a seemingly endless series of small temples painted on canvas boards, according to a formula devised by Englishman, John Clark, in 1824. Tony Clark started on this project in 1985, and by 1997 it was still crawling along. Quite possibly it remains a work in progress. Other projects have included the Chinoiserie landscapes of 1985–89, which began with a plasticene model of a Chinese temple, depicted on a series of small canvas boards against a decorative background. The Kufic landscapes of 1991 introduced Islamic characters into the mix, while the Jasperware paintings of 1993 borrowed from Josiah Wedgwood’s decorative schema of a white emblem, in bas-relief, against a flat, monochrome background. Another, much-touted work of 1994, called Important Contemporary Sculpture, translated a ‘formless’ rope sculpture by Eva Hesse into a silhouette wall piece, painted in gold.

Common to these diverse projects was the capacity to activate a series of art historical paradigms to produce a vertiginous impression of erudition and profundity. To the uninitiated viewer the works may appear amateurish, incompetent and repetitive, but to those alert to the play of references, Clark’s work took on the status of a philosophical investigation. It held a special appeal to those artists, writers and curators who felt able to decode the work’s iconographical associations, and explain how Clark ‘subverted’ various canons of taste and style. In brief, Clark allowed his admirers to enjoy the satisfying feeling of being ‘insiders’, while the rest of the world may have remained blind and deaf to his wisdom.

This process is documented in the catalogue of a survey exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, Heide Park, Melbourne, in May 1998. In his preface to Tony Clark: Public and Private Paintings 1982–98, the museum director, Warwick Reeder, discerns both “technical virtuosity” and an “anti-painting posture” in Clark’s work. This sort of paradox is repeated on almost every page of the catalogue. His painting is described as “punk classicism”; it inspires both “desire and revulsion”; it is positioned somewhere between “homage and satire” or “belief and disbelief”. In a “colloquium” a group of Clark’s artist friends discuss his work, admiring the way Tony “gets it wrong without even trying.” They compare him to Vermeer, “without the fourteen children”. They find certain pictures to be simultaneously “lumpy and horrible” and “beautiful”. They note that a mural Clark painted for St.Kilda public library in Melbourne is “really hated” by staff — which leads to the thought that “if it is disliked then maybe that’s the sign that you’re onto something.”

So too with a 1997 show of paintings on single stretcher bars, to which “people responded really badly”. One participant confesses his fear that “there is some quality like he hasn’t done any work, that he doesn’t give a shit about you, that he is trying to send you up…” Another speaker decides this is “really good,” since it provides “a tension”. For the next speaker this means Clark is to be praised because “he doesn’t give you any easy solutions.”

This extraordinary exchange of opinions, which is without parallel in Australian art publishing, has provided Slave Pianos with much of their libretto for The Broccoli Maestro. Further contributions are drawn from Clark’s own writings, and those of his female alter-ego, Judith Pascal.

By now it should be clear that Tony Clark’s reputation has soared on the wings of paradox and contradiction. He is not being praised for his skill and hard work, but for his “slapstick” and careless approach, which denotes a dandy’s contempt for the conventional social and artistic values. The fact that he has painted with a stick of broccoli, or allowed a picture to be covered with stray hairs from his lounge room carpet, is a sign that he is working on a higher plane from those artists who strive to achieve a pristine and unified surface. His most persistent preoccupation is Classicism or Neo-Classicism, which he debunks by painting classically perfect forms in the most incompetent manner. The references that he drops — to Mantegna, Wedgwood, Aldo Rossi, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux or St.Thomas Aquinas — to name only a few — are bewildering to most of his audience, but serve as shared badges of belonging for those included in the loop. In the world of Tony Clark, failure is success, trivialization is homage, incompetence is the highest form of skill, and mere names are passports to the realms of philosophy. Even pretentiousness is ruled out, because to be deliberately pretentious is to take shelter under the mantle of irony.

One realizes the mystical power of this position when reading one of the essayists in the Heide Park catalogue, who tells us that Clark’s work is “a depiction of the (almost) literal disintegration of western culture itself… a declaration of the impossibility of any such markers of cultural centrality or originality.”

To a mutually-supportive avant-garde sheltered at the ends of the earth, it must be comforting to think that cultural centrality and originality are all washed up. Neither is it a small matter that one artist from St.Kilda has single-handedly debunked the entire Classical tradition, using a piece of broccoli as a brush and his lounge room floor as an easel. Truly, this is the stuff from which grand opera is made.

John McDonald
Canberra, October 2001

The Broccoli Maestro

THE BROCCOLI MAESTRO draws together materials from four sources: 1) the writings, musical compositions, paintings and ANTI-MUSIC/OPERA of Tony Clark; 2) the writings of Clark’s literary pseudonym Judith Pascal; 3) musical compositions and commentaries on Clark’s work by his colleagues Stephen Bram, Constanze Zikos, Rose Nolan, Geoff Lowe, Angela Brennan and Gary Wilson; and 4) historical musical correspondences with Clark’s seminal painting ensemble The Technical Manifesto of Town Planning, 1982. The unifying figure of Tony Clark provides a mechanism to bring together musical, artistic and theoretical discourses spanning eight centuries and three continents by relocating Melbourne artists in 13th century Paris.

TONY CLARK belongs to a generation of artists whose practices have been informed by both conceptual art and popular culture. In Clark’s case, this position is all the more revealing for the artist’s strong interest in the history of classical art and architecture, and the attendant areas of interior design, decoration and music. Tony Clark’s work demonstrates a technical virtuosity, at the same time that it embraces a slapstick and off-handed anti-painting posture, in its investigation of the threshold between the properties of painting, sculpture and installation. Clark’s work issues from a longstanding interest in the history of taste, architectural embellishment and the disputes between classicism and popular culture. These issues are articulated by a deliberate amateurism whereby the concept of failure is built into the work, not only for the organic and uncanny possibilities it affords, but also to offset the lofty and transcendental values characteristic of Classicism. Tony Clark’s project is relentlessly contemporary, domestic and local - a travesty of the classics. Clark’s work assumes an anti-art position reminiscent of the historical avant-garde, and low-tech serial productions characteristic of pop. These forms are incorporated for their historical register in order to underwrite the artist’s historical inquisition from a contemporary position.

Clark was a founding participator in the activities of ANTI-MUSIC, a collective of visual artists initiated by John Nixon in 1979. ANTI-MUSIC shared an interest in politically and economically progressive means of sound production, which they called “industrial folk music.” Their practice is informed by the legacy of Futurist, Dada, and film music and coupled with a DIY attitude first associated with Punk. With Nixon, Clark explored the musical corollary of his interest in the Renaissance, which he described as ANTI-MUSIC/OPERA. The Synopsis (see facing page) of Clark’s own anti-opera Aquinas forms the conceptual framework for THE BROCCOLI MAESTRO.

The present libretto folds Clark’s scheme for Aquinas onto a series of anecdotes and critical responses to the painter’s work by fellow artists. It uses the form of Clark’s lyric drama as a template for inserting the painter himself (a complex and highly theatrical persona constructed as a deliberate part of his art practice) into the central Aquinas role with his feminine, scholarly alter ego, Judith Pascal as Philosophy. The conflation of textual sources - Clark’s ANTI-MUSIC/OPERA and the Colloquium - which are seemingly contradictory in both a historical and geographical sense - is in fact consistent with Clark’s desire to give expression to a “St Kilda version of classicism”.

The interleaving of related but disparate textual materials has a direct parallel with the musical structure. The fourteen scenes of the opera correspond directly with the fourteen canvas boards of the Technical Manifesto. Two streams of musical materials, one derived from Clark’s involvement in the original ANTI-MUSIC activities (1979–1981) and the other from his wide interest in classical formal structures, are folded together and presented simultaneously.

The Broccoli Maestro

SLAVE PIANOS

Artext No.75
REVIEWS, p.86

SLAVE PIANOS
NORTH MELBOURNE TOWN HALL, MELBOURNE
JUNE 22 - 23, 2001

Slave Pianos has been mixing things up for several years. Its four members - Danius Kesminas, Rohan Drape, Neil Kelly, Mike Stevenson - have transcribed well-known as well as marginal recordings by twentieth-century artists for all sorts of wide-ranging re-mixes, using anything from a player piano to world-renowned Krasnyi or Flux quartets to Dj Olive and the Burley Griffin Brass Band. And they’ve amassed a substantial archive of recordings and scores, too (a collection forthcoming through Revolver publications in Frankfurt later this year): Brecht’s hair-comb music scored for piano, or Kippenberger’s New York Auschwitz for string quartet.

Their latest “opera”, The Broccoli Maestro, performed at the North Melbourne Town Hall by Chamber Made, is based on the esoteric Australian painter Tony Clark (indeed, the work absurdly realized Clark’s own ambitions at one time to pen an opera on Aquinas). Clark was a linchpin of Melbourne’s art and music scene in the ’80s, blending his interests in classics and Sufistic philosophy with a rank, punk amateurism. His paintings combined classical motifs and Cyrillic script within sfumato landscapes, becoming increasingly abstract in later years, and celebrated in a 1998 survey at the Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne.

An early, 14-panel Clark “masterwork” provided the formal structure both of the opera’s staging, complete with large copies of Clark’s paintings, and the libretto, which derived from a colloquium held at the time of the artist’s retrospective. The roles of soprano, tenor, or baritone conformed to one or another local artist talking about Clark’s work (“I think he wants to be Eva Hesse”; “He paints beneath himself”; “I loved the show!”) or otherwise quoting from Clark’s extensive writings (“My figure is present with its absence”).

The music was a heady brew of obscure artist forays into music (A Constructed World doing pop songs, or Marco Fusinato playing noise guitar), which was first of all sourced, then transcribed for orchestra and set amongst “classical” bits from such pieces as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or a Bach chorale. The whole was performed by Melbourne’s leading chamber opera company, and was a surprisingly affecting experience - despite the composition-by-numbers structure. Familiar classical motifs were partially obscured by throbbing guitar feedback (here transposed for strings and percussion), while the occasional artspeak rang out in operatic fortissimo. Many more things were “extruded” through the singers, cellos, violins, bassoon, and trumpet. Indeed, there were grand, fulminating moments where the sheer excess of material seemed like the giddy whorl of culture itself.

A clever, gentle mocking of high-art seriousness on one hand, The Broccoli Maestro revealed the constitution of local visual art culture on the other, since the even instrumentation and voices rendered everything in consistent high camp, suffusing the incidental details of the local milieu with the generic passion of grand opera. Local hero Clark, his work, his influences and his peers were all stark features in this eccentric and unauthorized portrait of 80/90s Melbourne.

The transposition from one context to another, however, released something else, something atmospheric, a texture appealing to other senses; it left behind a kind of ozone or some other thrilling smell, no doubt arising from the rapid turnover of references in the mixed score and libretto. Perhaps the excess in the Slave’s rampant, fever-pitched citation is the burning of that ether in which art and culture usually function more slowly.

STUART KOOP

SLAVE PIANOS, The Broccoli Maestro, concert performance with Chamber Made, North Melbourne Town Hall,June 2001, projected paintings by Tony Clark.

From the lip: myth, word, aesthetic recycling

Alistair Riddell

This concert proved a fine example of a hidden jewel in Melbourne’s winter cultural world. Buoyed by an enthusiastic and substantial audience eager for that magic which breaks the bonds of musical convention, the second of the from the lip concerts (produced by Chamber Made Opera) tackled issues of authenticity, integrity and originality. In an historical sense it was not experimental but each work contained elements that seemed to reference the idea of the experimental, while being set within essentially conventional contexts.

The concert began with Narcissus and Echo, an opera by Robin Fox and Elizabeth Parsons. Here the myth found a sympathetic interpretation through a range of challenging sounds and performance practices. Rich in detail, the work utilized a bewildering array of sound sources including pre-recorded sound, traditional instruments, turntables, fans with records on them (yes, vinyl!), a tape loop, speakers and singers. The theatricality of the performance effectively suggested ‘too much’ and, of course, ‘obsessiveness.’ The visual feast and complex sound established a compelling momentum of excess with which the audience could readily empathize, perhaps to the detriment of those moments of subtlety.

In stark contrast, Ania Walwicz’s solo reading of her text, Diana (a reference to Princess Diana), was equally spellbinding. As a delirious, self obsessed, verbal barrage, punctuated by changes in tone and subject, Walwicz’s accomplished performance was dearly a part of the experimental performance tradition of the last 30 years. Solo readings by Chris Mann came quickly to mind because of the musical treatment of the text. In many ways, Walwiczs performance was both refreshing and passionate and moreso through the raw and powei-ful experience of witnessing the composer as performer.

Finally, The Broccoli Maestro. This visual and aurally impressive chamber opera in 2 acts, for 6 voices, 6 players and tape by Slave Pianos, unfolded as a challenge to contemporary musical thinking. An aesthetically complex work and perhaps exemplary of how the reputation of Slave Pianos is spreading as their working methodology becomes more widely appreciated and understood. This methodology may be summarized as: the use of re-composition, in this case, composing with other people’s music; the use of other art forms and intellectual subjects including literature, painting, philosophy, religion and politics; explicit reference to other artists (in this case Tony Clark) and a complex performance context which forms a nexus and crucial point of originality. All of this adds up to a sophisticated means of substantiating and legitimating the immediate work.

The effect in performance was as a massed force which advanced on the audience from all directions, forming a convincing experience through the sheer weight of the artistic evidence. The musical component was reminiscent of digital sampling, which is often a crude and frequently short lived experience in comparison to the juxtaposed instrumental material found in this performance. As a collaborative enterprise, The Broccoli Maestro was a formidable example of aesthetic recycling with its many levels of reference and representation. A product of an institution, or society in this case, it was also a fantastic work of synthesis, of the moment and worthy of further discussion.

ChamberMade 2001: from the lip, Concert No.2, The Experimental, North Melbourne Town Hall Melbourne, June 22

RealTime 44 August - September 2001 p.42

realtimearts.net/article

Art. Isn’t it the kookiest thing?

By Chris McAuliffe

Is ART a laughing matter? The hushed atmosphere of art museums, the sobriety of art historical texts and the intellectual’ intensity of art magazines suggest it is not. It is as if the caption of that legendary Australian cartoon “Stop laughing, this is serious” had become a kind of high cultural commandment.

But art is often the butt of humor. Perplexed or pretentious responses to abstraction have fuelled many a New Yorker-style cartoon; “His spatter is masterful, but his dribble lacks conviction”. And Tony Hancock’s 1961 film, The Rebel, established the bohemian farce as a cinematic genre, later employed by greats such as Scorsese (AfterHours, 1985) and, less successfully, Paul Cox (Lust and Revenge, 1996).

Two very different variants on these themes have recently been staged in Melbourne. David Williamson’s play, Up For Grabs, still showing at the Melbourne Theatre Company, revolves around fierce bidding for a Whiteley painting, orchestrated by a dealer whose tactics include infidelity, bisexuality, hyperbole and deceit.

An opera, The Broccoli Maestro, produced by the Slave Pianos collective and staged as part of Chamber Made’s recent program, From the Lip, hovered between parody and homage in its treatment of Melbourne artist Tony Clark. If the plays have in common their willingness to laugh at art, the different ways in which they construct their humor is telling.

Williamson’s play joins Art, Six Degrees of Separation and sundry others in using the competition and status-seeking of the art market to reflect on both the decline (moral) and inflation (commercial) of value in contemporary culture. Seeing the two as synonymous is perhaps where the weakness of the argument lies; the risk is that art will be seen as the corrupter rather than the corrupted. When the market is the whipping boy, the sins of the middle class — ambition, avarice and amorality — are visited upon art wholesale.

If Williamson’s medium is broad parody, Slave Pianos’ is the construction of an elaborate in-joke.

Consisting of artists Danius Kesminas and Mike Stevenson, and composers Neil Kelly and Rohan Drape, Slave Pianos appropriate the arcane languages of avant-garde art, and, by inflating the scale and formality of their presentation, hope to see them collapse under their own weight.

The humor, smelling suspiciously of the emperor-has-no-clothes variety, lies in the translation of Clark’s deliberate amateurism into a medium in which the expectation of profound metaphor leaves the audience hanging on every word or gesture.

But The Broccoli Maestro is beyond a joke. So elaborate is Slave Pianos’ involvement with Clark’s oeuvre, so willingly do their performers adopt his position, that what might have begun as parody concludes as homage. Constructing a libretto from published comments by Clark and his colleagues, Slave Pianos paints a picture of an artist acutely conscious of the conceptual and cultural limits of his work.’ Where Williamson focuses on what should not be done with art, Slave Pianos throws the spot on contemporary artists’ sense of what art can no longer do. The negative tone of The Broccoli Maestro lies not in Slave Pianos’ pastiche, but in Clark’s own refusal to be swept away by the transcendence of art. It is the latter that Williamson’ throws to his characters as a lifeline; redemption dawns when it is realised — in a suitably awe-struck epiphany — that there is more to art than its dollar value. There is no such lifeline for The BroccoliMaestro, only an art prepared to engage with the threat of inadequacy.

Williamson’s humor lies in the failure of his characters to live up to the standards of art. Slave Pianos’ success, inadvertently but more productively, emerged as their subject transcended the standards of their humor.

Chris McAuliffe is the director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne.

Fuck the Polis

by Judith Pascal

[from Strolling catalogue 1998]

For architects, an Old World teaser: can the Great
Old cities
house the living?
No, the problem’s really how
to get survivors out,
and keep the empty buildings
as Museums of Themselves.
From City into Monument,
proceeding from the precedent:
Alhambra,
al-Hamraa,the Red.

Recite:
the Cities are places
of collective Memory;
and Memory
itself formed
of objects and places,
as the City is.
The locus, the citoyens, citoyennes,
make up the image of the city,
its architecture and its landscape.
Some artifacts enter Memory
and some new ones form.
And once there were Great Ideas
they flowed
through the history of Cities and gave them shape.

And when in the marketplace, someone asked
‘what
are we to do? ’you
said ’here
is where
we are’.

More anciently, with animal masks

feet moving
in time
with the moving skies:
that was language

the stable meanings
case with the skills
and various habits
of our body
‘The collective
is a body
too’.