I assume you’ve probably answered this before, but what exactly is the underlying politics of this blog? I don’t quite understand the connection between neoliberal capitalism and pictures of desolate housing listings.
Thanks if you take the time to reply! -anon
We live in a bizarre intermediate period where capitalism appears to be eating itself. I originally came across the Gramsci quote in the header via Noam Chomsky in 2015/2016, when he was using it to refer to the pre-Trump lunacy that was taking over the Republican Party. In the US, this seems to have been a sort of cancerous outgrowth of decades of austerity and privatisation and deregulation that began with the end of Bretton Woods and took off in earnest in the 80s under Reagan. Similar processes have been at work to varying degrees across much of the world, throbbing occasionally with particular enthusiasm depending on the elected government, abating temporarily during other periods of Third Way-ite labour stagnation. Housing is at the core of these recent historical trends, and of the relationship between the government and its citizens. I don't know if it could exactly be called the main driving factor, but it plays an enormous role in how we work, how we form relationships, and how we interface with society generally. I remember reading a quote from a conservative politician in the UK in the 80s, responding to a question about why they didn't build more public housing to address the growing homelessness problem; he said something to the effect of 'that would just breed another generation of Labour voters.' I think the cannier politicians (and business leaders) are very aware of their capacity to shape our lives through housing like this.
A similar process has been at work in my country since World War II. We had a succession of two very good Labor Prime Ministers during the 1940s: John Curtin and Ben Chifley. They developed our version of the vast postwar public housing programs that most Western countries had. This provided stable, affordable (or often just free) housing for a huge chunk of the population who wouldn't have had access to it before the war. After Chifley, a conservative government under Robert Menzies came to power in a wave of anti-communist hysteria. Menzies appealed directly to a class of the population which he called the 'forgotten people': people in the middle strata of society who, in his characterisation, didn't get involved in trade unions or radical political organisations, didn't protest, and just wanted to get on with their lives in an apolitical solitude. In reality, this was less of a class of people that already existed and more one he set out to proactively create. He did this, in part, by altering the public housing scheme to give the baby boomers the right to buy the property the government had given them. This entrenched home ownership and, arguably, introduced a level of scarcity to the public housing stock in the long-run, and set the groundwork for later government support of housing as a financial asset, guaranteed to appreciate. It also, in a way, helped create that class of 'quiet' Australian: a solid middle 75-80% of the population that could be guaranteed a comfortable, suburban lifestyle, within an apolitical bubble quietly guaranteed by interventions into the economy by the government and regulation of the housing market in their favour. Over the years, this proportion of the population has gradually decreased, more markedly so since the overt financialisation of housing under John Howard in the early 2000s, and it's fallen off a cliff since COVID.
There's a tradition in art that I've been interested in for a while which involves broadening creative fields (in artmaking or criticism) through direct engagement with fields of work, of machine production, of lived experience or other symptoms of the oppressive political reality we live under (realism in the Linda Nochlin sense). You see it in the controversy around Courbet's paintings of manual workers, much of Andy Warhol's work and general contempt for the art world (his silkscreens of graphic photos of car crashes he found in the newspaper stand out to me), or more recently some of the controversy that came from Tracey Emin's installations. More broadly, there's something to be said about the conscious effort to make transparent and use aesthetically the machine behind the reproduction, or distribution, or amplification, etc., of art. The use of feedback in music seem to me to be an example of this. To use a couple of examples of a period of music I'm particularly interested in, grunge is one example, but so are reggae sound systems which use custom-made valve amps that give an enormous low-end to vinyls they would play, to the point of using the records as instruments to create a sort of rumbling distortion (Jah Shaka's sessions seem to have premediated alternative rock, operating on parallel tracks). These forms of creative production seem to organically emerge from the detritus of industrialisation, and seem to respond to its alienation and atomisation of human relations. I'm interested in breaking the functionality of illegitimate systems. At uni I took a series of photographs of the backs of shops. There was something comforting in identifying how a commercial entity wanted to be presented visually, and then representing it in the exact opposite way. Similarly, though I don't know if this could be considered an art project, I like an incompetent realtor. The aesthetic qualities of a real estate listing that completely fails in its intended purpose can be quite rich, in some ways liberating. An enormous amount of imagery is generated by the institutional machinery of commercial institutions, much of it ephemeral. If you rescue some visual artifacts from this increasingly engorged flood and look at them against their intended purpose you get a little window into the broader world, where advertising agencies and algorithms and real estate agents and SEI specialists, etc., aren't constantly grabbing your face and forcing you to look at the most boring and monetisable parts of the visual world. You have the opportunity to experience fear, hate, genuine nostalgia and melancholy, various other complex passionate experiences inaccessible in the neoliberal digital machine perversion of visual culture and creative experience.
This is a kind of a roundabout way of answering your question. Maybe part of my motivation has something to do with the relationship between art and work. If you reject the art as some higher, privileged category interpretation (i.e. this is just a photograph, but this other photograph is Art), then the boundaries of what constitutes art, or what can be read as art, are pretty porous. The machinery of industrialisation and capitalism took away the ability of people working in home workshops to have some control and creative involvement in their own working lives and turned them into atomised, specialised machine parts at the mercy of their employers and the market. The parts of work that could be considered contiguous with what we call art have been severed. Art and artists have suffered the same effects; contemporary artists seem to me not that different from other independent professionals. If you go to a dentist's office on Cambridge Street in Perth they'll often have a brochure with a blurb about their history and their mission as medical professionals, etc., on the front counter, and by the same token every artist in an exhibition is taught to provide their own little didactic overview of their niche interests, mostly independent from deeper, shared commitments (lumped together like a sack of potatoes, per Marx). I feel it makes sense to reach back out into other parts of the economy force art into them.
