Even if his name is not, Adrian Mauriks’s public sculptures will be familiar to many Australians. As they are in every major Australian cities — in Melbourne, there are sculptures in the Docklands, in Laverton, and Richmond.
From multimedia installations to spiky, monumental forms and then curving smooth white biomorphic creations; Mauriks was a prolific artist who kept on developing his art rather than reproducing the more of the same kind of works.
Influenced by Arp Mauriks’s white curving sculptures with their organic forms were surrealist without being pretentious, for this was not surrealism of hyperreal dreams but the poetic totems. Landscapes of surreal white gardens with gateways and organic growths. Maurik’s Silence, 2001, commissioned by MAB Corp for Docklands, New Quay precinct, Melbourne is part of this later body of work.
A teenage Adrian Mauriks arrived in Australia in 1957 from Holland. He went on to get undergraduate and post-graduate degrees at the Victorian College of the Arts. Through his teaching at various tertiary institutes, including the University of Melbourne and Ballarat University he influenced many young artists. But it will be his many sculptures that will be his longest lasting legacy, a legacy that is not for an exclusive few but everyone, for people like me have never met him, but who enjoy his art.
Guy Debord is Really Dead by Luther Blissett (Sabotage; pamphlet edition, London 1995)
Guy Debord is dead but is he really dead? Guy Debord is considered by many to be the philosopher who articulated avant-garde art, the post-modern equivalent to what Andre Breton was to Surrealism, providing the intellectual framework for both punk and the May 1968 revolts in France.
Twenty-five years after it was published, I found the pamphlet by Luther Blissett on my bookshelf a few books along from Debord’s tract, Society of the Spectacle. A pencil mark on the cover indicates that at the time I paid $3 for it.
Is this a case of zombie situationism where dialectics demands an anti-thesis to progress? Or is this an elegy for the Bore (Debord) written shortly after his death? And what does this critique of the Debord and Situationist International mean today on the internet?
Goodreadshas 21 ratings for the forty-page pamphlet averaging out at 3.86 stars. It also has one review that is a link to a WordPress blog that reproduces the entire text (the complete text is available online at multiple locations). Goodreads correctly identifies (if ‘identifies’ is the right word to use in the situation) Luther Blissett as a “multiple name”.
This open identity is more than just a pseudonym or a disguise, for multiple identities are essential to Blissett’s argument. For he, whoever he is, is critiquing the spectacle of Debord, which he calls “the Bore”, rather than the French guy who was alive between the 28 December 1931 and 30 November 1994. It condemns the Bore for becoming a conservative spectacle that denies meaning to any action. Reporting in pointless detail arguments against any dogmatic approach to situationism. The obvious problematic contradiction is that if Blissett’s argument is correct, then his text is as dead as the Bore.
Amazon’s customer reviews rate it as one star and offers it for sale at a ridiculous price. It has two “customer ratings”. One describes it as a “mean-spirited tirade” and the other “one of the worst literature on the subject”. I don’t think that either of the reviewers got the joke, prank, and punk iconoclasm.
In his introduction Stewart Home describes Guy Debord is Really Dead as “a ludic excursion” and notes the relationship between the Lettrists and the Parisian hash trade. And although it would be incorrect to summarise, Guy Debord is Really Dead as a studied parody of political history, Marxist orthodoxy and disunity, it could easily be read as one.
“Guy Debord Is Really Dead” is also a CD single by The Playwrights (Sink & Stove, release date: 2004-11-01). It has not been rated and is free to listen to on eMusic.
Stewart Home rated Blissett’s pamphlet five stars on Goodreads. (Home doesn’t list it on his three pages of books, so I am assuming that he didn’t write it, but I could be wrong.)
Desperate to see some new art, I have searched the laneways of Brunswick and Coburg for graffiti. These northern inner-city Melbourne suburbs are old enough to have a network of granite paved laneways that make for excellent and discreet locations for painting.
I have this paint-spotting addiction that can’t be satisfied by seeing photos on the internet. I want to do two contradictory things: to get up close to the wall to see the technique and to look around at the whole location.
Often very suburban locations: the sides of garages, parks and garden walls. For, although there still are factories and warehouse in Brunswick and Coburg, they are being demolished to be replaced by high-density housing. I hoped to be able to see more graffiti revealed by demolition. However, I couldn’t many places where I could photograph anything.
There are some fantastic pieces of wildstyle graffiti overflowing with style and energy. A few old-school pieces along with bombs and tags. Love the bomb from Nong, a tag with a nod to old Australian slang for ‘stupid’.
I was intrigued by this wall in suburban Coburg that had a mix of techniques and styles. There was everything from old-school bubble letters to experiments that mix street art techniques, like stencil with aerosol graffiti. It made me think of the new possibilities.
Black Mark 