Exhibition

Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense - Lisa Radford

Sometime late last year, while I was experiencing a little case of self-indulgent introspection, I mentioned to a friend of mine that perhaps I should try writing for other people, other artists, ones I haven't known for a long time. He told me not to be stupid. At first I took offence - wasn't I good enough? When I thought about it, I realised perhaps he knew me better than I realised. What I liked about writing was the conversation. I liked talking about art in the world via experience. Mine and theirs, and mine in relation to theirs, theirs to mine. I've always had a hard time separating one thing from another, the links between things always seeming so pertinent -writing being one way of trying to figure them out. I met Jon when I was studying at TAFE. He was the drawing teacher. He came from the suburbs like the six or so of us that were left in second year, he had the same $3.50 Sonic Youth T-shirt from Forges as four of us, and he seemed to make work that was part of his life and ours. I don't think any of us have the Sonic Youth t-shirts anymore, but we're all still friends.

It was probably about this time that Colleen and I started speculating about playing music instead of being artists. We wanted painting to make us feel like it did when we listened to records. Maybe it was about the ability of some songs to make you feel like you wrote them, you owned them. I remember reading an essay by Laurent Gourmarre. He talks about an idea of the viewer becoming the subject. I guess most music has this intrinsically - somehow existing outside, alongside and inside your life. So do Jon's paintings.

Music - Straight up, a little bit honest, takes a risk at being cheesy, soft, wacky, catchy, most times a song is aware that it's not the first, or for that matter, the last - aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense.

$23,000,000 would buy a hell of a lot. Trillonario.com, a site that allows you to buy lottery tickets outside the country of your residence, had a jackpot for that amount last weekend. Trillonario's proclamation - A great service that allows lottery enthusiasts to make the most of their money and time! Goethe's Faustian bargain takes another twist - global gold from local money / local gold from global money.  Buy a paper ticket from the US to have my suburban dream and book an overseas holiday in Australia. Buy a ticket and you could build a ceramics plant in Vietnam, cover the administration costs of an NGO delivering aid to Burma or buy a house in Hollywood. Whatever tickles your fancy.

I don't know many people who would turn down $23,000,000. U2 did. They couldn't bear to part with the music to "Where the streets Have No Name". Happy to work with Apple, not so content to work with a new ad suitor. It's a nice idea, to be able to take $23,000,000 home without the responsibility of spending it or, on the other hand, having to reject it for a falsified integrity. $23,000,000 is an abstract concept to me. I can't picture it, count it, or accumulate it. If it's a neon sign, I can keep the dream without having to sell my soul or turn paper into gold. 

Richard Prince started collecting signed cancelled cheques when he came across them accidentally while looking for signed portraits. I don't know how much his Jack Kerouac's $10 bounced cheque would have cost. Prince talk's about choosing the cheques; he says It's all about whom you choose. He wouldn't buy Richard Nixon's bounced cheque, he would much rather find one of Lee Harvey Oswald's'. Assessment and accumulation of intangible value, the cost and worth of ethics and integrity. Jon's $23,000,000 is just a bright sign; he'd like you to take it home. A gesture and a concept to shift between lives. Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense.

A friend of mine Evelyn, has a solo music project called Pikelet. Before Pikelet, she was mainly a drummer in some hardcore bands. She still does that too. She started the solo project because her mum was sick and she wanted to make some music for her. Simple melodies - accordian, hand claps, a floor tom and electric acoustic guitar, when looped her melodies and songs create the possibility of a type of suburban backyard ethereal chant. A type of folk I guess - ambient pop. There is a song she has written called 'A bunch'. Six lines of lyrics, looped and repeated like the music.

To all of those that I love so dear.

Thank you for surviving this far and making it here.

For making Now Now

You're so familiar it's clear.

You've been here before it's like you've always been here.

And you're here now now

It's addictive and repetitive. It's an everyday kinda song, perhaps awkwardly sincere, it's about a tangible type of value, and the listener is the subject. Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense.

She called her solo project Pikelet when recalling that her mother made them often when she was a child. She remembers loving them - sweet, warm comfort food. It was only later that her mother confessed to making them because there was no other food in the house, that this was what she could afford to make. Food that was needed, music that was just needed. Not to change the world, but so as to be in the world.

Wikipedia refers to pikelets as small, thick colonial-style pancakes. A scotch-pancake. A drop-scone and states they were was once part of traditional Welsh teas within the mining communities. Perhaps the pikelet derives form the word piglet, or the Welsh "bara pyglyd" meaning "pitchy bread". Either way, it's an ordinary food, run of the mill and can be appropriated as a staple. Made by anyone, for any one 'Tom, Dick or Harry'. 

My brother the butcher, talks in rhyming slang. Most of the time I can't understand him. I have to ask what the fuck he is talking about, where it came, what it means.  Some of the phrases I recognise. My favourite is 'Stuart Diver' meaning 'survivor'. I like the remnants of meaning existing in the slang. Most of the time it seems against meaning,  perhaps in the way I remember Goumarre suggesting - no to prohibit meaning, but to prevent it from being the keystone. Rhyming slang is impermanent. Evolving and changing over time. What was once Jat Crackers for 'knackers' may now be Kerry Packer's. No-one really knows when it first appeared in Australia. It finds its roots as an underworld language and was eventually taken up by the street-traders of London in the early to mid 1800's. Used primarily by men (there are 15 phrases for wife and only one for husband), rhyming slang was employed when other language was considered inappropriate or rude. It is learnt through experience, not taught per say - a language of dissidence or a language formed for the sheer fun of spontaneously inventing and using a phrase where the meaning slips - I don't know. But maybe....

Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense.

It's all square when it's round.

Your talking bout nothing, I'm talking bout everything.

Pikelet, A Bunch, from her self-titled album, 2007

1 Eddie Current Suppression Ring lyric from the song It's all Square, from their self-titled album, 2006

Gloss Enamel lyric from the song I'm talking.