Category : mountaintop musings

The period 1970 to the mid 1980s is often called the “Renaissance of Australian Cinema”. Discuss the ways this period can be considered to be a Renaissance through the construction of identity and nationalism? A list of suggested films includes: “Walkabout”, “Wake in Fright”, “The Cars that Ate Paris”, “Sunday Too Far Away”, “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith”, “News Front”, “Mad Max I – III”, “Puberty Blues”, “Breaker Morant” and “Gallipoli”.

The Australian film renaissance, also known as the New Wave of Australian cinema, was a period in which some 400 films were produced over roughly 15 years ¹. It was driven primarily by two government policies, which occurred sequentially. The first, was in the 1970s, when the Gorton & Whitlam governments established financing bodies, which would directly contribute to projects. The second phase occurred in the 1980s with the introduction changes to taxation law that encouraged private sector funding of film ².

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Discuss the way in which a concern with the politics of sub-cultural identity and difference animates the work of an artist of your choice.

As Carol Hanish was paraphrased ³ with the title of her essay The Personal is Political, I would like to explore the way an artist examines the sub-cultural personal politics of those who self-identify within the Goth / Industrial subculture. In the spirit of the post-Modern denial of a natural or valid distinction between “high” and “low” culture, or of the arbitrary assigning of labels such as “good” and “bad” to these culture-forms respectively, and to do my bit, however small, to push back against the stigmatisation that comics and comics practitioners have suffered ⁴ at the hands of cultural and academic hegemonists. I will be basing my exploration on the work of American artist and writer Jhonen Vasquez, and in particular, his graphic novel work Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (JTHM) ⁵.

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So here’s the latest project I’ve been working on – a field airbrush.

Much as I love airbrushes, they’re not that outdoors friendly. My current studio setup is a waist-high compressed air cylinder, going through a regulator and “powering” a pair of airbrushes. I’m probably going to replace this with a portable compressor setup soon, but in the meantime I wanted to be able to have the ability to use an airbrush when out of range of power. You can get aerosol cans to do the job, but I wanted something a bit more sustainable and able to be recharged in the field.

The main component is a 5 litre garden spray bottle. This has a pump handle in the lid to compress the air inside. Normally you’d put liquid in it that you wanted to spray, but here we’re keeping it dry.

The brass fittings are attached where the sprayer wand is unscrewed from the handle. The connection of plastic to metal is a bit tricky – you need to bulk it up with teflon plumber’s tape and silicone sealant to get a good seal. The brass fitting will cut into the tape and plastic, so the silicone is necessary. The smaller brass piece only needed tape to seal. I bought the brass fittings from a plumbing supplies place so they were able to match the airbrush’s airline cap thread and diameter.

The way it works is that you pump up the cylinder (which has a safety release valve so you can’t over-pressurise). The original trigger for the sprayer is still inline so that allows you to unplug the airbrush without losing pressure. It also allows you to isolate the metal / plastic connection from constant pressure. The trigger has a button to lock the valve open, so you don’t have to keep it pressed by hand.

In use, you get about 4-5 minutes continuous air from one fill of the tank. You can easily keep the system pressurised by continuing to pump the system with your other hand while using the airbrush.

Total cost, about $35.

Lens flares for all.

SALAMI RAIN!

This is an essay for the Modernist Sculpture elective in Art History & Theory at the National Art School. It received a High Distinction result. There’s a few issues with it that were largely symptoms of the constricted word length – such as the description of European isolation not placing enough emphasis on it being artistic isolation, while Europe was in fact very connected to the rest of the world through trade and imperial power. I also had to cut a discussion of Modernist architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright onwards being a result of FLW’s encounter with Japanese architecture at the Chicago World’s Fair. So, with those flaws in mind…

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Just want to note down some impressions of the SCA graduate show, while it’s still fresh in my mind. Of course, it should be noted that I’m a sculptor who works in fairly “solid” materials, and have been trained is a relatively formalist manner, or at least have been trained to work from the premise that a piece must succeed on composition alone, before anything else is taken into account.

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There’s a bizarre meme which seems to have cropped up in the technology journalism world, which can best be summed up as follows:

The iPad is a content consumption device, but has little value for content creation.

Now, if you look at Apple’s more advanced apps such as the iWork versions, iMovie, or the stunning new Garageband version, what you see very clearly, especially with Garageband, is that the iPad paradigm already does some things for content creation better than a desktop OS can. Application designers have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible, when freed from the necessary mindset of everything rotating around moving a single point focus-assigning dot around the screen.

The next extension of this meme seems to be that the iPad is poor for content creation specifically because there’s no programming tools on it – that in effect, you can’t create iPad software with an iPad. Some lament that this relegates the iPad to an ancillary role, forever enslaved to a desktop computer.

This argument has two main problems:

1. So?
2. Programs aren’t content, they’re tools.

I would argue that programming is not content creation. Content is what you make with programs. By way of analogy, consider a small village, in which you have a blacksmith, and a woodcutter.

The blacksmith uses his anvil to make axeheads, which the woodcutter then uses to cut down trees which both feed the blacksmith’s furnace, and produce rudimentary furniture. Is an axehead any less of a tool because it can’t make other axeheads? Is it any less of a tool because it can’t be used to make a hammer and nails to hold together the wood it cuts to make furniture? Do we think the axehead is a doomed or stupid tool because it can’t do these things?

Do we seriously want to use an anvil to cut wood?

The reality is that for most people, most of what they can, or would use computers to do can be done as well, if not better on an iPad. If your computing needs can’t be met by an iPad, then you’re probably not in the “most people” category. That’s something that never fails to amaze me – technical geeky types who are completely oblivious to the fact that their preferences for how technology should work are so far removed from what the general populace wants, that they can’t actually recognise that fact. You see it in tech journalism all the time, usually regarding Apple products.

This essay was produced for my Mechanical Image art history & theory elective this year, and is more or less the manifesto by which I produced and sell my Nervous Spaces prints. The essay got a distinction result, so I’m reasonably happy with it. Oh, it was also a topic I created, rather than one the lecturer set, and is heavily pruned to a word limit.

Essay Question: Does the digital process affect the concept of scarcity underying the sale of photographic prints, and how can photographers establish a “valid” scarcity in the era of digital printing?

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suffer the poor salami.