burdens of this engagement from which we recoil,
the recoil being perhaps the most acute form of the
from dreamtime to primetime
(1)
HERE'S another, even more curious thing. We are
formed by what we see and hear. We copy, therefore we
are. We are, therefore we speak: that's our fatal
compulsion, even for the most reticent of us. To
experience, to express - these are the twins of our
existence. Siamese perhaps, they make up the inert
matter of our inert lives or the lofty principles by which
we seek to engage, take your pick, if not indeed the
engagement there is. If we're prone to angst of that
existential kind - that old on-the-road kind of angst you
find in the beats or that immediate post-war year-zero
type angst you find in those classic adaptations of
Dostoevsky or Camus novels so well done by a certain
Italian neorealist auteur whose name, not to make it too
obvious, begins with a V - then that makes it even
worse. Such is the complexity of our reflexivity, the
serpantine twisting of our terms, which makes
our minds want to speak in serpantine tongues. For
although it is certainly true that the deaf may see, the
dumb may hear, the blind may speak, it is also true that
we inhabit a world of the language of words, a world for
whom words make up so much the matter and patterns
of our consciousness. It's these same words which gang
up with their associates and stooges, signs and all
manner of subliminal advertising and spam email, etc
etc, not to mention the seductive pictures. And the
music. Don't get me started on the music. Anyway, I
think you get my drift. We have a severe problem
of mind maintenance. The culprit's all this detritus, of
culture I think is the phrase, making for untidy
craniums, and it's no easy matter, I've found,
personally, to keep on top of it, it's more than just
a mental hygiene thing, running the hoover through it,
filing the important bits away, keeping things in a
semblence of order in a more or less nonchalant
way without letting it become obsessive, because that
would be very uncool. Prioritise is the word which
comes to mind. You can forget the deaf, the dumb, the
blind, much less the starving, the dispossessed, the
insane and, certainly, the catatonically stupid. This is
your classically elitist position speaking. Yes, let us be
clear about it, we are the elite, and we have much to say,
of value. It's all stored away up here, in folders, if our
minds're tidy. My experience is your experience, that is
the law of universal experience - although, and this is
the scary bit, of the 355,000 words in the OED, 2nd
edition, 2003, a subset of the millions of "modern"
words in the Oxford English Corpus, there seems to
be none to adequately express it, yours and mine,
judging by the efforts of philosophers and poets, whose
failures have been abject, not to mention radio jocks,
but which logic dictates we must cognitively have (the
experience I mean), and so we naturally assume it's a
quantifiable phenomenon. Wouldn't anyone?
It was thoughts like these I was thinking only the
other day while I was sitting in the lecture hall watching
the man at the end of the hall pointing to his stats on
the chart on the wall and saying to us all that the end
of all art would be over by the end of the fall. Now what
fall would that be, I was thinking. And for your next
assignment, was saying the man, you will write five
thousand words describing the behavioural symptoms
induced by the postmodern virus, referencing as many
periods in the history of art as you can, from the
scratching of markings on the cave wall at Lascaux to
the mixing of crushed rock with linseed oil in a pestle in
Florence to the pumping out of pixels from high-end
graphics processors in your typical nerd's bedroom. He
paused and there was a hush as he surveyed the myriad
upturned faces. A virus. Yes, that was apt. And heavy
enough to put most of us here into remission. I would
have to start at the beginning where it all began, and
bring it up to date, with numbers of footnotes from the
fattest book I could lay my hands on. It's important to
have a plan b. I closed my eyes and sat there quietly
thinking of my strategy, and in no time at all random
snippets of theory were turning into footnotes, until it
seemed that it was only a mildy perplexing problem
that needed to be solved. All would be safe under the
great Michael Angelo's dome in the great Vatican Hall
and God would bless us all if I could only work out who
put the post into modernism. Sure it was no problem at
all. Before I knew it I'd got so far out of it or into it that
I hardly noticed the voice had faded, until I opened my
eyes and saw that the man with his white stick had gone.
He’d simply walked off and who had walked on but this
fat git and he was throwing all these books up in the air
and I tell you the place just bloody erupted.
But I don't want to get into that. That's been gone
into elsewhere. Right then, I wasn't really interested in
the mayhem. I just wanted to think - I was into
deductive reasoning. This was where art theory loved
to be, and what attracted me to it was its unrepentent
broadmindedness, its cerebral wackiness, its fondness
for making nonsense from sense, for making all sides
of a point equally pointy. It was all so inebriated, so
cafe Guerbois. It definitely suited my fondness for
looking into matters while drinking. I was already
starting to feel thirsty. But first I had more urgent
business to attend to. I wanted to check the edition
number, the published date, on the book I'd just got out
of the local library, because I intended to heavily crib it
for footnotes, and the last thing I wanted was to be
busted for plagiarism.
It was just as well I did. It turned out to be already
sadly passé. Do you know that feeling you have when
you're reading that book written only last year and you
have the feeling it doesn’t seem very current? Well, the
chances are you’re experiencing the intangible feeling,
quite ethereal really, of discovering that your mind has
been marked out for duping by the book. You should
realise it was probably back referencing stuff
from some preceding time, some old-hat stuff whose
uncanny creepy prescience, a commonly found property
of old stuff, has given your present reading its semblant
resonance. This was precisely the feeling I was having
with the book I'd borrowed from the library. Sure, it was
fat and had lots of pictures, and it was profusely
footnoted with footnotes just begging to be cribbed. But
mainly it seemed to be referring to things which had
already happened. At first I supposed this was
something to be expected, but then I noticed a curious
thing - it tended also to speculate about what was yet to
come, and this for some reason struck me as highly
dubious, quite odd, a sure sign, I figured, of authorial
hubris, especially of young authors who think they know
everything, but in fact know next to nothing, and what is
even worse, painfully, don't even know they know next
to nothing, not even their arse from their anus if you
know what I mean. Sure enough, a glance at the dust
jacket revealed the author to be a young person of
hubris. Of course I would have to read the book to be
sure, but it goes without saying that if it turned out to
be mainly talking about the present - which is most
unlikely, because as we all know the present doesn't
really exist, does it, even in a postmodern world - then
I'd have to not take it seriously at all. It was just as well I
wasn't in some kind of time warp here. With worse luck
I could have been reading the book in the library, say,
in 2045, according to which scenario I'd be reflecting
either a posteriori on something prior, or a priori on
something future, with the something (let's call it an
event, occurring in, say, 2006, in the former case, or in,
say, 2047, in the latter case) being relative to the time
the writer wrote it (which is to say, say, in 2007), and,
this being now 2045, in either case I'd be benefitting
from the advantage of closer proximity to that event.
Even if that later event, too, would have passed. And
knowing my luck, why wouldn't it have? Can you
imagine yourself in that position, stuck with such a
book? I'd be willing to bet that if you're in any way like
me then your interest in the event would have
diminished with the passing of so much water under the
bridge, and in fact, are you still following me, it being
the case that the book's author would have probably
already tended towards obsolescence well before you,
might even have died by now probably if he hadn't been
a young author when he wrote it (or equally a she, the
point not being affected), and with you yourself by this
time also sadly probably fading fast, the whole affair
would be taking on a rather glum demeanour, I'll
warrant, when viewed in this light. Not that I wish to
put a mocker on your lifespan. Nevertheless you can see
it's getting more depressing by the minute. It might be
your fate to have this feeling when reading, to continue
with the example, years after it was written, an account,
let us say, of a movement in art (since we're talking
about art) recently passed, if you haven't already had
this feeling. I know I have. We often see, don't we, with
hindsight, perhaps more than the author saw then,
when he first wrote it down, whenever that was,
whatever it was he felt impelled to write down, on the
particular subject, whatever it was. In this case a
movement in art. And equally with a she, the case still
standing. So with our particular example, it's not hard
to imagine both the art movement referred to and the
commentary itself being considered, perhaps, in this
manner, somewhat old-hat, by now, with the passing of
time. By now I mean at the time of the reading. This is
getting terribly complicated. Naturally, this is only the
case with expositions of a subject matter of a temporal
nature. There are, you will say, themes or ideas which
are ethereally timeless. But do these really exist? This is,
of course, not clear. This is never clear.
Thinking about all this made me ask myself whether I
should even bother to read the book. I ended up
deciding to return the book to the library. I'd have had
to do that anyway. Whether I read the book first or not,
there was no point in putting off the inevitable. It came
down to a choice between reading the book and
returning it, or not reading it and returning it, or
keeping it indefinitely, read or unread, and suffering
the heavy fine. And that was unthinkable. Sure, I might
read it later after reborrowing the book, or buying it.
On the other hand I might end up reborrowing the
book, or buying it, and not reading it. But that would be
unlikely. And of course there were other variants of this,
etc.
I decided to forget about the book. I'd make up my
own footnotes. Once I made that decision the rest was
easy. I put the book back on the shelf, where I could
take it down later and return it to the library, and sat
down to seriously think about what I could contribute to
the subject, which you will recall was the postmodern
virus.
Before I knew it I was thumbing through the OED,
searching for words. It is well observed that negatives
can be made into positives through sophistry, for
language is not mathematics. Indeed, mathematics is
not immune from this sleight of hand either. Yet you
would never think that Vonnegut's idiosyncratic
arrangements of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten
numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks could
beckon such a realm of complications. I hoped they
would be adequate to talk about pictures. At least useful
for that. The room inside my head was beginning to feel
a strange place. Almost. Not quite. Even when I closed
my eyes it was really still just a space inside a blank
rectangle.
I spent a long time staring at my monitor.
(2)
ONE'S first task is always to start. Often, when sitting
down to consider a thorny subject, it pays to start off
with something dramatic, some attention-grabber to
focus the mind of the expositor, and in due course the
prospective reader. Here's what I came up with: Giotto
is a postmodern artist. Joseph Kosuth is a modern one.
Tomorrow's man is today's art student who will
become the enfant terrible of some future avant garde
and in an even later century will be hanging
in a neglected corner of a museum in Balbao. If he's
lucky. That is to say if the museum is still standing. Not
the artist lucky. The museum lucky. To be still standing.
Why was this so? Thinking about it long and hard the
only thing I could come up with was that it was because
I said so. Because all time was geologic. Because my
office was an art gallery, and the pile of manilla folders
on my desk was an art work when I gave it the full
respect it as an object deserved, unlike the words on
my monitor which were purely subliminal as I focused
on the cursor. There was no post or modern to art. It
was just what got my undivided attention.
At this point I got up and made myself a coffee.
Reading over the previous paragraph, I made a mark in
one of the margins. Something fell from my hand, the
pen’s shadow which I thought was very unreal.
It’s like when you get up and make yourself a coffee.
Reading over the previous paragraph, you make a mark
in one of the margins. Something falls from your hand - modern. Or rather, he was modern, then. But then,
the pen’s shadow which you think is very unreal. today, I might consider him postmodern because his
style was unlike that of any living painter within my

This was no less real. Giotto was postmodern, I went limited sphere of knowledge. That is, modern in the

on, because the word postmodern had been given my sense that only five centuries of refinement, and my

own personal meaning. But if I were to make some puke knowledge of art history, could make me think him

concession to common sense, what then? I might postmodern. Of course, there'd be the objection at once

downgrade Giotto to a mere category-four modernist. that Giotto was dead. Well, yes, admittedly we were

I'd hedge my bets, say something to the effect that he's talking seriously dead here. I got up from my desk and

modern in relation to the statues of ancient Rome, thought about that for a while. Unfortunately there was

blithely ignoring arcane counter arguments such as nothing stronger in the fridge. But what had age got to

there being no shortage in public spaces of Rodins or do with it? Couldn't you just tap your foot to that? What

Henry Moores besmirched by twenty-first century had age got to do with it? Was Giotto a real dead dude,

pigeon droppings. (Of course there'd be a counter or a concept in my mind? There was once a time when

argument to that - the droppings would be falling from all artists were entirely anonymous, that is to posterity.

the orifices of birds long after the marble had lost its Now, their statues were in the Louvre, if you went there,

soft fine sheen.) This would put the near-miss monk in two halls up from Heironymous Bosch. Vainly

an historical perspective, which some might argue was attempting to remain pristine in the air-conditioning. If

his rightful place. Because of his newness he was only the pyramids could have been so lucky. On the
other hand, Kosuth was not dead, last time I checked,
and he was modern because he followed and preceded
others. I felt that point deserved to be put another way.
Kosuth was preceded historically by others. He didn't
necessarily follow others like you do when you follow
someone into a tram, if you are in Melbourne, or a train,
say, in the Paris metro. And similarly he was followed by
others, in that strictly temporal sense. In other
words, Kosuth was not a strict innovator. He borrowed
from his predecessors, and lent to his successors.
(Exactly what Polonius advised against). He was in the
loop as it were. And this had been defined by theory as
exactly what you'd expect of a card-carrying modernist.
But whether that made him postmodern was another
question. Whereas by another definition Giotto and
Kosuth would take reverse rolls. Giotto was modern
because he was the innovator paid by the Pope. Kosuth
was postmodern because he worked it all out on his
lonesome using a theorem. Of course, not the theorem
in Theorem where the artist pisses on the canvas.
Kosuth's pissing was of an entirely more conceptual
nature. And tomorrow's man would be the Salon's
darling because he thinks that all original ideas have
been used up. The one sensible idea he has left is that,
in the washup, the smart money's always going to be on
the Salon, because the Salon represents the almighty
power of the franc, the livre, the ducat, the sterling, the
euro, the yen and the yankee dollar. In this sense, all
smart artists were posmodern. Point of sale modern.
This would be all plain as day to tomorrow's man, who
aspires to being both a great artist of the subliminal
underground and a smart arse operating in the post-
modern playground.
But still - did all this make Kosuth postmodern? That
question had me scratching my head.
(3) postmodernist theory on page 29, which is hardly
surprising considering the planet is home to 6 billion,

THIS rough argument needs polishing, corners each one individually a breathing theory in some

knocked off, edges bevelled. Shape is important. It's sense. In any case, certainly you'd expect such an

clear from the above that what goes around in the overcrowded cosmic ball of dust to throw up a decent

background keeps coming around in circles in the dose of postmodernist theory, right? And the ball being

foreground and even the latest gadgets are circular. dominated by big money and Bill Gates's software

Platters give way to cds, and discs are in cylindrical would alone explain the squillions to cultural

form as are the pupils of your eyes. But lcd screens are institutions, you'd imagine if you were the type who

rectangular because visual representation follows a long thought that way, ie in cynical and superficial

western tradition. That's why if you go into an art aphorisms. Certainly someone has to write this stuff to

gallery, like the one in Canberra, you will find millions go with the pictures. We could hardly expect people to

of taxpayer's money locked up in rectangular con- attend a cocktail party in a chic gallery without being

structions of the modern and postmodern kind and even appraised of the postmodern implications. I mean, let's

conceptual video installations will be projected not be ridiculous. And look what happened to the Italian

rectangularly due to the screens being of a shape neorealists. Where are they today I ask you? Working

likewise ubiquitous. You can bet the catalogue you for Pixar. What happened to the novel? Text

bought is likely to have a squarish shape to it too, and messages on cell phones. Concept artists?

look out for the dumbed-down version of Entrepreneurs. Portrait painters? Enterers into
competitions. Video artists? Thinking of submitting to
tropfest. Is there a point I'm making here? Not that I
can detect.
From what you've been reading you might be
tempted to think that what I'm attempting to say in a
roundabout way is that modern art is ancient art
speeded up. You wouldn't be wrong. Because there is
such a thing as history, post cannot be denied its
historical significance. The number of art students per
generation has increased exponentially. I exaggerate.
But only slightly. Science has worked out that the
download factor has been marching in lockstep with the
megahertz and according to a google search the number
of art books published last year alone is too much for
my local library to keep up with, even allowing for the
interloan system. The newspaper articles of the mid
nineteenth century were the first creeping incursion in a
tide of art theory which has since grown to proportions
only a buzz word like tsunami is capable of adequately
describing. Spot the trend. Religious commissioned
painting precedes the Renaissance which (via a few
Dutchmen) precedes the Salon which ushers in popular
art criticism which precedes Impressionism which
precedes modernism which ushers in heavy-duty art
theory which precedes postmodernism. Somewhere
back there a couple of Spaniards had been thrown into
the works. No matter. A detour. Mere trifle.1 Exceptions
proving the rule prove really that rule-based theory is
immune to exceptions, lead Lyotard to proclaim that
postmodernism precedes modernism. Perhaps he has it
back to front. The question is fertile ground for a post-
doctoral thesis on game theory as applied to modern art
practice. Giotto is not reappraised as a serious
postmodernist innovator. Yet.
Looking back, as is our wont, over the long stretch
we've come through, from primordial times, when we
first became fixated on the phases of the moon, to the
1 And let's forget the four fifths of the world that's not Europe.
present day, governed as we are by calendars and
timepieces, it's our inevitable insight that we tend to
look at things from a time perspective, and so it's
natural to see art's standard artifacts, whether in
museums or in book illustrations, as markers of art's
natural genetic mutations. We see them there, cat-
scanned on their temporal grid, beneath that cold
dissecting light, objects of our desire to sequence their
genes, but alas far too insubstantial these, far too
conceptual to be put on the slab, as it were, for
examination and dissection. Looking at them, these
objects, these incarnations of objecthood, these
mysteries, we ask ourselves whether it is some
organism or, loosely speaking, some type of virus we
see before us, its vision before out eyes. Well now, it's
not exactly something you can poke a finger into, that's
for sure. You can only say one thing, by its works shall
you know it. Really, it's no more self referential, or
less, than its human hosts, so in that respect, at least,
it's all too human too. A glance at our spectographic
gizmo readout is enough to show it's still passing its dna
down through the generations since last we looked. That
function, at least, is still working. No doubt it's what it
best does, and what indeed could be more natural,
diddling its way to fatherhood, towards ever new
incarnations of itself, however fondly the fosterparents
of its bastard foundlings choose to name them,
sid, nancy or postmodern.
Time ticks on. It is the great accretor. Somewhere,
sometime, some ancient tinkerer, probably as a
consequence of ingesting some halluginogenic
substance, and whose bones are now permanently
decayed as will all matter in its day decay according to
the immutible laws of its radioactive half life, someone,
then, of whom we can at least assuredly say preceded
Plato, must have been the first to rub two thoughts
together in a quasi-logical manner: the first theorist let
us call that sexless artificer. The references have been
piling up ever since. That is a property both of
references and of time. Theory, we might say, is
references' bright clothing. We are now well beyond
buttons. The postmodern is but the zip on modernism's
kevlar zoot suit. We, the fashionista, proclaim it to be
the latest in thought styling. Or at least we did. Twenty
years ago. Last century. Past. Past, all is past. Only to be
referred to is to be saved from total oblivion. Make no
mistake. As a thinking art student, which is as close to
an artist as a mandrake baboon to a human, I say this: I
reserve the right to refer to anything I please, if you
please. Thank you. And that includes stuff that is recent,
current even. And old, as old as old stone. Pre pigment.
Let not that old, old postmodern stone go
unreferenced.
So now it's time to say that time has come. And once
that's said, it's gone. For time, time is immutable. What
will postmodern mean in 500 years time? Probably
what it means now. If you can find it in the static. By its
quirks shall you find it. The old bastard has a mind of
its own. Running its own agenda. Its evolution
speeding up, like everything else. Now that the many
have money, there goes art in the back of the black
Lexus. But take heart, here it is again, back at the art
mart. Reinvented as a consumer item pushed by niche
marketers on the back of a few innovators and theory
bigwigs. The bigwig announces to a packed audience
that art is now an industry, a career choice, a chic mid-
twenties thing before the kids arrive, an entertainment.
That since building costs and property values have
skyrocketed art is now a cost-effective strategy for
smart apartment decoration. But in effect he's really
just pushing a bunch of cultural studies to fill the maw
of university curricula spreading everywhere insatiably
as apologia for global capitalism. If you're inclined to
think that way. So then art is a lifestyle thing, right? The
obligatory pap for newspaper magazine inserts. Well,
yes, but it's the safe investment choice for the
seriously monied, too. That insight strikes a resonant As if, whatever it is, wherever they are, time would give
chord. It is observed that bought at wholesale prices in up its secrets.
the western desert, western desert art can be retailed at
exorbitant markups in Vienna and Houston, even
allowing for rip-off commissions from insurance and
auction-house agents Those Houston collectors really
dig their western desert art. From Seurat to pixels, the
dots have it. Coming, going, gone. Old man, look at my
plan. What that you doin, black man. Ochre dots, that's
what. Been doin it long time, white fella. Go look in the
cave. Your cave. My cave. Ochre markings of half-life
bones. So I went down to Canberra, looked in the cave.
Looked up at Johnny's on the wall. Into his ochre
dots. Thinking for a moment I might find what it was
the old man had been talking about. But the dots just
neat markings. Patterned out on their grid. Like Seurat's
two halls down. As if each its own meaning. Winding
back into their dreamtime. But they meant nothing to
me. Stupid me white fella. As if they'd tell me anything.