The Julie Ruin

Men make art, Men make music. For women to make art and music is in itself (sadly still true) a political statement. For women to make killer rock and roll with a Smash The State, Smash The Patriarchy power that The Julie Ruin brings to the stage is a revelation, a revaluation, and a revolution.

On the third day of visiting the 2014 MONA FOMA I was lamenting to myself the lack of political engagement of the artists. Sure there were many cool things to see, and hear, and taste, and there were many cool folk to mingle with and to chat. But in terms of anything that faced the urgencies of our time, there was very little.

And I wandered about the auditoriums and court yards and thought of Nietzsche:

This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Where was this music? Where was this reflection?

Art is enough singer Kathleen Hanna told the crowd, mix art with activism, with community building she further suggested to the audience. She discussed the need for unity, the need to get over that that false leftie sort of idea that we should be pure, and we should constantly cut down those who; for example, still drink milk in their fair trade tea, as opposed to the purity of soy milk. This is all crap and what is needed at this time is unity.

The band spoke warmly and honestly to the audience, and they were able to engage the usually passive Hobart crowd. Anyone that missed this show, missed a lesson in music and a lesson in politics and most vitally the missed a lesson in how music and politics can be fused as we dance round the grave about Kapital.

On a side note I thought it was of interest that the keyboard player was a bloke, was this a happy coincidence or a statement on the fact that many times there are bands in which the keyboard player is the only woman.

During the final song of the set the crowd was able to witness all the actual nature of class and gender relations in our “ freedom.” Two young women, rock and rollers and full of passion and energy, and desirous of change hurdled the barrier, into that special space between audience and performer, that space reserved for the elite few photographers and their bully boy escorts. Of course the big burly he-men bouncers pounced and man handled the women back into the seething mass, where they obviously belong.

One could see exactly what The Julie Ruin were saying. Any divergence, any deviation of the rules can not be allowed, can not be tolerated. There can be no dancing, save in the nominated places. Much like the horrid free speech areas which are popping up all over the Western World, which do no more than silence dissent.

swarms of wild animals

Like the authors mentioned in a journal note by Kierkegaard most of our critics write with so little individuality that almost any citizen of our sun-burnt commonwealth could sign their name to the work and be done with it.

Most authors write with so little individuality that almost anyone in the kingdom could be the author of what is written, and since the name becomes a very trivial accessory, one perceives that anonymity has significance also in a poetic sense; on the other hand, authors who have individuality have no need of appending their names. (S. Kierkegaard IIA 412, May 6, 1835)

So we see this type anonymous writing coming from the fertilising heroes of the IPA. One such individual wrote a piece about a recent art installation/performance in Melbourne. The art work was called Goldene Bend'er, the critique in one of the major daily fish wrappers was titled “Should you foot the bill for execrable waste of human resources?” The title of the critique being a nice bit of rhetoric, clever pun, for the art work under discussion had the performers sitting on transparent toilets and defecating.

Our individual loving, Voltaire quoting, free speech defending, IPA critic Chris Berg shows us this movement of anonymity at the very start, with the title of his work, with his telegraphed and unreflective turgidity of words. Let us dive into the cesspit. The title is a rhetorical question -- “Should you foot the bill?” Straight away we can see that the anarcho-capitalist, philistine, race to the bottom, purposefully divisive, quaintly populist attack on social funding of art will be a feature of the opinion. And so it continues “for execrable waste of human resources.” Here we have a multi-layered fecal pun worthy of Aristophanes. If the reader was not sure as to how to think, she is given a not too subtle joining of shit with government funding. Finishing off with a the side effect of using the dehumanising capitalist ideal of human resources; when we get to forget real authentic human beings involved in the daily production and reproduction of life and instead looks at humans as a one sided alienated resource.

What of style? What of the critic's style that -- to again use a Kierkegaardian idea -- is the author's external birthmark? What we get as style is no more nor less than one would expect; a sneering, looking down upon, faux-news style. We get to read a mocking of artists and the obligatory sneer across the bow of the art/government bureaucracy. Any number of citizens, driven as they are by common sense, could easily have given their name to this piece. Any number of tired, cynical, jaded, bitter with the world men, who feel that the world is naturally dirty and ugly could have written this critique. Any number of haters could have penned this piece. However, only a select few of those who rail against elites have the wherewithal to have such a piece published in a major newspaper. Any number of white men oppressed as they are by feminism, and aboriginals could have come up with this argument; it is an old argument. Any art work that involves excrement is low hanging fruit for ideologues. Of all those who rail against the elites, only those who have large institutional organisations behind them and ready access could have had this article printed. The great mass of drink addled, brain neutered sheep have to content themselves with beating their wives and children and crying into their beer mumbling about uppity women and the sorry state of the art world at the local suburban hotel.

But why the fuss? Living as I do in the covert wiles of Tasmania I was not able to visit Melbourne to see this work, so I have to assume that our intrepid reporter not only was at the opening of the show, but that he had an in-depth conversation with the artist in an attempt to figure out what was being done and why the work was structured in such a way. While I think that Berg's critique of this installation as being faux-radicalism may be a bit harsh; I have to agree that shocking the bourgeoisie in this manner (if indeed it was the intention of the maker) does no good. The proper way to shock the bourgeoisie is by appropriating their wealth, and overturning their power structures.


From my brief research it seems the shitting was an integral, but not dominate fact of a two hour dance piece. Reading the Berg critique one gets the impression that the shit was the main point of the show. “On a Friday night less than a fortnight ago, six dancers from a company called BalletLab performed an artistic work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art at Southbank. This involved them sitting on toilets and taking a dump.” Or so says Berg]. Looking at this article one reads this “The two-hour act saw the six dancers, masked but naked beneath sheer garments, move around a room in the gallery before sitting on transparent stools and performing - only if they were moved to do so - what is usually one of our most private and rarely discussed daily acts.”


There would seem to be a difference of aspect in the two reviews. One placing the controversial movement in context, the other designed, it would seem, to angry up the blood. With the blood angering mentions of artists and public money, one can be overawed into thinking that the bourgeoisie in Australia is waiting with open wallets and bank accounts to fund a new wave of provocative art, if only the government would just get out of the way.


But let us briefly touch on what the artist was interested in; it seems that the artist Mikala Dwyer (never mentioned by name in the Berg article -- was this done to dehumanise the artist?) was interested in “the body, transition and transformation.” Which raises the question -- what in our daily life better shows transformation than the daily changing of rich yummy chocolate cake into horrible, stinky fecal matter? Excreting is a seemingly alchemical process, fraught with wonder and horror, a transformation which in a very personal way shows the unity of change, that teaches of matter in it's various forms, a transformation that proves the Hegelian ideal of the blossom superseding the bud, not destroying, but transforming and negating in an organic whole.


I spoke to my thirteen year old, fount of all knowledge, daughter about the Berg review; she noted that it is lazy journalism to mount the argument that excrement has been used in artworks before. All art she maintained has been done before, in the same way that much science is the repetition of experiments. Why bother she continued, working herself up into a home schooling frenzy of debate, even waking up in the morning; after all it has been done before? Why indeed; here I joined in the general rebuttal frenzy, do we hold grand finals when it had been done before? Then my charming partner noted -- why bother writing an article about waste and governmental funding of the arts, when it has been said before? Said by any number of anonymous critics.

Phoibos - the bright one

---

Number 21: Apollo

O bright one! 
The swan beats 
time with wide wings, 
And
Loudly sings 
of you 

and settles 
the river bank 
beside
The ever flowing
River 
           Peneios. 

Of Thou;
The sweet sounding singer 
carrying  a clear toned 
lyre

First and last, 
Always 
She sings. 

Hear my rejoicing 
In you,
             Master.
 
I appease you with song.

Straight away I liked the image of the swans flapping wings to bring about a successful landing on the river bank. Singing and keeping time with wing beasts. All in honour of Phoebes Apollo. Phoibos, the bright one. Who was, in revenge for a mocking Eros who was bragging how he was a better shot with the bow, was shot by an arrow of the butt of his humour. Apollo fell in love in Daphne, and like the equally cursed Kassandra, she scorned him.

Daphne, fleeing the lust of Apollo, prayed to her father, Peneios, one of the potamoi. The Potamoi were the 3000 river gods, sons of Oceanus (Okeanos) and Tethys (Tethus). In a short sighted attempt at protecting his daughter, Peneios turned her into a laurel tree. The laurel became sacred to Apollo.

I could not refuse myself the small echo of Heraclitus, in describing the Thessalian river bank where the swan settled.

Hear my rejoicing 
In you,
             Master.

This line caused me some pain. The word in Greek is Anax.

Anax is from an earlier word wanax, which is found on Mycenaean inscriptions, meaning Lord or Master. This word can be found in Homer, and is used to describe Agamemnon, anax andron, leader of men. (Iliad 1,442). Xerxes and Darius are called Lord King. In the tragedy Persians by Aeschylus line 5 we see anax Xerxes basileus. This word is also used in sense of master of the house (oikoio anax); and in a descriptive and telling Homeric simile from the Odyssey (10,216) 'As when the dogs fawn about the lords during a feast.' All of this seemed to me to show a hierarchal relationship. So, as I was forced by dictionaries to choose between lord and master, I chose master. Lord, while fitting, and being the more traditional translation, had a Christian connotation that, for various reasons, I was happy to avoid.



Master has a brutal simplicity, or if you prefer a simple brutality, and this simplicity is able to quickly describe the master/servant relationship of the Deathless Ones (athanatoi) with the Brotoi, the Clots of Gore.

Pleasant enough it is in our easy chair to, while glowing in opium dreams of Swinburne or the more austere Nietzschian tumult, to romanticise the relationship the Greeks had to their gods. To the Deathless humans are mere playthings. Zeus wanted to depopulate the Earth, he brought forth as a conspirator Momus, a scoffer, the personification of reproach, blame and disgrace, or spoke to Eris as the personification of strife. Or maybe it was Themis. It all depends on what you read and take to canonical. Themis being one of those untranslatable characters. She is a Goddess of Order, of 'Doing the Right Thing.' In the Cypria it is the pity that Zeus feels for Gaia that is the origin of the Trojan War. `There was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide-dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth, and Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of men by causing the great struggle of the Ilian war, that the load of death might empty the world. And so the heroes were slain in Troy, and the plan of Zeus came to pass.' And Plato agrees `That it is Zeus who has done this, and brought all these things to pass, you do not like to say; for where fear is, there too is shame.' Regardless of how it was brought about we can clearly see that the Gods are only to happy to commit any number of crimes, murders, rapes, kidnappings etc using humans as toys. Leaving a trail of abused and broken mortals in their wake.

Like all good tyrants the Gods cheat when it suits. In a musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, Marsyas had played Apollo to a standstill, with Apollo playing the lyre against the flute of Marsyas. Apollo fearful of losing to a mortal challenged the satyr to play his instrument upside down, and then again while singing along. The flute playing satyr of course could not do these things. Apollo celebrated his victory by flaying Marsyas alive.



So quickly we move from the epiphany of the wide winged swan to the ever present threat of instant death, for the Deathless Ones will brook no insolence. They know their power and are not afraid to use that power, depending on the whim that strikes. Leaving the author of this hymn to beg for the attention and pleasure of Apollo. Like the Homeric fawning dog at the banquet table hoping to appease the master, and so gain a crumb of affection or dinner. Much like the members of the 99%.

Or said much much better than I ever could - Rilke First Duino Elegy (coincidentally) Duino is just outside Trieste where Joyce was living at the time.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.