un Magazine
Blueprint for Another World
Is the best way to create a new world to work through broken but powerful systems, or to exit and oppose them? Timmah Ball reflects on her disillusioning experiences in urban planning and the productivity or lack thereof of 'creating in the negative, adopting a permanent critical position to imagine another world'. (Note on access: this essay is available in audio format.)
'The only way through is in the belly of the architect. To physically slip into the schemes and acts that dispossess us in order to write a new zone from within. It is possible, I’ve seen it happen...But I hesitate for too long, concerned that if I enter I might never come out again.'
I Can’t Apply for Another Grant
'Arts funding is a cancer. Applying for it has become its own job, a job no one enjoys or wants. I’m not sure that anyone is even funding the arts, really — it feels more like art happens by accident as a decorative footnote to the work of endless applications, assessments, acquittals and evaluations. I’m sure some of these elements were once designed as accountability mechanisms, but they have grown monstrously out of control.'
Is there a way to fund the arts that doesn’t make artists exhausted and demoralised and that doesn’t reduce art-making to a matter of 'merit'? (Note on access: this essay is available in audio format.)
––––––––––––– complete –––– replacement
The industrial imaginary leaves our bodies behind, adrift in a reverie of largely meaningless misreadings. Nutrition is a broken mirror, a poorly executed 'god trick' peddling human dominion over nature.
Forgetting Architecture and the new Aboriginal Kitsch
Craftier than producers of earlier kitsch, producers of new Aboriginal kitsch position themselves as socially minded, decolonising agents. New Aboriginal kitsch mimics characteristics of decolonisation in an attempt to fool people into celebrating colonising forces, by making them think they are celebrating decolonising forces. It dislocates the ethical component of the formative action from the aesthetic, reaching for pure affect.