my secession party

MY SECESSION PARTY
James Newitt
My Secession Party
presented as part of Iteration:Again
supported by Contemporary Art Services Tasmania (CAST)
Curated by David Cross
September 24 – October 15, 2011
September 30th, towing island into position
James Newitt
My Secession Party
My Secession Party was presented as part of ‘Iteration:Again’, an exhibition of 13 temporary
public artworks installed in Hobart and Launceston between 24th September and 15th October
2011. During this period each work changed or developed 4 ‘iterations’ over the 4 weeks.
Over a 4 week period My Secession Party transformed from beginning as a rumour, to forming
through a social action, to developing into an independent island, to disappearing with a farewell
celebration.
Week 3: SAT 1 OCTOBER
(Iteration 2): Procession and setup
Week 1: SAT 17 SEPT
(Project opens): Announcement
Assisted by the Tasmanian Police Pipe Band, the Tasmanian Cheer Squad as well as friends,
colleagues and family - I processed to the Montrose Foreshore where I climbed into a small
blow-up dingy and rowed out to the new island which was my home for the next 2 weeks. The
procession gradually disseminated as I set up on the island.
A public announcement is published in local and social media platforms (Glenorchy Gazette,
Facebook, email, etc). The announcement is open-ended and doesn’t refer to the project as an
artwork. Rather it simply announces:
Week 4: SUN 2 OCTOBER – SAT 15 OCTOBER
(Iteration 3): Existing
My Secession Party
Montrose Foreshore Community Park
October 1–15
For 2 weeks I remained on the small island without leaving. During this time there are several
organised performances, some of which are not advertised publicly and rely on chance encounter.
Over the 2 weeks the Police Band bag piper visited me and played 3 times a week, I am also
serenaded from the shore by Maria Lurighi.
Week 2: SAT 24 SEPT
(Iteration 1): Flier walk
During these 2 weeks the island’s existence is acknowledged by the ferry taking people to the
Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), the ferry sounds its horn and makes an announcement as
it passes by in the distance.
I walked from Glenorchy to the Montrose Foreshore Community Park over a 4 hour period with a
banner/sandwich board handing out fliers and letter dropping the invitation to help celebrate ‘My
Secession Party’. Walking a few meters ahead of me was a drummer who plays a repetitive beat.
When asked I explain that I am seceding from Tasmania and establishing a new island in Elwick
Bay the following weekend and that they are invited to the procession the following Saturday.
The flier reads:
My Secession Party
Join the Procession, 12pm October 1
Montrose Foreshore Community Park
Week 5: SAT 15 OCTOBER
(Iteration 4): Farewell
This was the final day of secession and it marked the closing of the project and the sudden
disappearance of the island at Elwick Bay. At 3pm people gathered at the shore, volunteers
prepared food and handed out drinks. At 3pm I inflated the blow-up dingy and rowed to shore
where the crowd waited. As I climbed ashore the Police Band bag piper played a lament to the
island and for the secession which was now finished.
ITERATION 1: FLIER WALK
September 24th, flier walk and letter drop
400 fliers were handed out and letter dropped over 4 hours
The flier walk ended at the site where the island was to be located
ITERATION 2: PROCESSION
October 1st, public procession
ITERATION 3: ISLAND
October 1st – 15th, living on the 3x5 meter island
ITERATION 4: FAREWELL/RETURN
October 15th, 1 hour before rowing to shore
October 15th, 4pm, secession concludes
Critical response by Mick Wilson
www.iterationagain.com
I.
“Come to my party – I’m leaving.”
A man walks through a small satellite district of Hobart with a small drum beating out a rattling,
somewhat martial clatter of rhythm. He is announcing the approach of another man who walks
ten steps or so behind the drummer. This second man is wearing a sandwich board with placard
raised and distributing small coloured flyers that declare in the graphic idiom of a local election
campaign: “My Secession Party, Join The Procession, Saturday 1st October, Meet at 11.45am
in the carpark, Montrose Foreshore Community Park, Bring instruments, balloons, banners,
Refreshments provided, ALL WELCOME, something lost will be something gained.” For several
hours the somewhat awkward and occasionally self-conscious man with placard distributes flyers
in letter boxes accompanied by the drummer. Along the way, through the suburban streets, on
the doorsteps and in the shopping strips, he talks to sometimes bemused, sometimes curious,
sometimes chatty, sometimes reserved passersby and Saturday shoppers. Some question the
motive – “Are you protesting something?” Some question means – “Are you getting money for
this?” Some query the details – “Secede to an island in the Derwent?” “Leaving our Tasmanian
State?” “What’s the point?” “A procession or a secession – what’s up?”
In these conversational exchanges, the artist James Newitt, wearing his blue sandwich board and
bearing aloft his red placard, indicates an intention – “I’m an artist and this is my work…” The
project, it emerges, is to process with all due ceremony to the bank of the river on the following
Saturday, and from there to boat out to an artificial island. On this island he will – he announces
prosaically – have seceded from his Tasmanian homeland and the community of friends and
strangers that constitute that home, place and polity. Throughout the walking, drumming, talking,
and handing out of flyers, there is no arch showmanship nor pushy salesmanship nor selfregarding assuredness. This is not the suave posture of haughty abandon. It is the very cautious,
though a little brazen – that rattling drum rolling along and those brash blues and reds – and all
the more ambivalent, declaration of intent. It is tinged with a gentle but unmistakable melancholy.
Perhaps it is the strange intellectual melancholy of a self-annulling wish for future recognition
in absentia. The affect here, the mood, is subtle but decidedly off-beat and anticipatory. There
is a slight nervousness, as when a politeness announces a rudeness. There is a concern to not
mislead, but also to not give the game away – if indeed there is a game in play. What is it to want
to secede? What is it to want a passerby to know that you are passing them by, but that you want
them at the goodbye party too?
II.
“I will be loved where I am lacked.”
A week passes and the appointed hour arrives. A small crowd of well-wishers and curious souls
has assembled at the nominated spot and balloons and hooters have been distributed. A marching
band now leads the way down to the river shore and a troupe of cheerleaders chants the noisey
procession to the place of disembarkment and the moment of secession. The secessionist rows
out in a small yellow and grey inflatable dingy. There is a hint of comedy as in a silent movie’s
relentless rehearsal of a rowing-boat heading for its destination. He now installs himself on a
small artificial island platform that is covered with artificial grass and furnished with one ersatz
palm tree and a small pitched shelter. The shelter is just enough to provide a modicum of respite
from shoreline viewers and the rain. Now that the secession is enacted, it seems to be all over bar
the after-match analysis.
The art criticism blog “supercritical” has pointed out that secession has a multiplicity of
references ranging from an older sense of personal separation from one’s former friends and
associates to the political re-ordering of sovereignty; from a formal withdrawal of association to
an avant-garde strategy of self-institution beyond official state culture. But how does it operate in
this instance?
In a discussion on “autonomy” held in the courtyard of the University of Tasmania Centre for
Creative Arts two days after the secession party, one participant hazards a connection with the
question of Tasmania’s potential to secede from Australia. Another suggests that the issue is about
leaving Tasmania itself. In other conversations people allude to the personal imperative to get away
from a familiar and established setting. Someone else indicates the paradoxical dependency of the
newly seceded islander on his support systems and friendship networks onshore. Others reflect
on the need or wish or hope for the artist to assert a cultural agency that exceeds the demands
of representing and announcing the local and all its particularities – most famously Tasmania’s
natural environment, landscapes and ecologies and their related tropes in the visual culture of
Tasmania. The artist himself has, in an earlier and informal conversation with the writer, indicated
a degree of ambivalence about the condition of self-enforced isolation on a tiny platform with
rudimentary hygiene facilities and minimal personal comfort. So what’s going on here – political
secession, personal separation, counter-cultural self-institution, psychological withdrawal, social
refusal, inchoate protest, self-dramatisation, or faux-spectacle or something else altogether?
Playfulness or hubris? Provocation or protestation? Which way of reading the significance of the
work works best?
This mode of questioning – questions of the order of “how should we read the work?”– may
need to be asked cautiously and with a little circumspection. Indeed, why is it appropriate to
assume that we are looking at something that requires “reading” as opposed to some other mode
of engagement such as “witnessing” or “celebrating” or “playing” for example? These other
modes would seem to require some degree of “reading” (i.e., we need to ascribe meanings
of some order to cognise the work as a celebration or a game or an event to be truthfully
attested). However, these other modes of engaging the work do not prioritise the action of
ascribing meaning – the process of reading-off our interpretations. Rather these other modes of
engagement suggest activation of the work as salient for usage in ways that exceed the priority
of interpretation. On the other hand, and purely on an anecdotal and preliminary basis, it seems
that the actual effect of the work, in its first two moments of iteration, is to seed discussion and
posit itself as a “thing-to-be-interpreted”. But will this be the sustained reception of the work?
Will the man who withdraws himself from circulation among us continue to circulate within our
discursus?
III.
“There’s a man on an island over there.”
Some days have passed, and I am standing in an alleyway expecting to hear a singer perform and
forming myself into part of a temporary public gathering around another Iteration Again project,
Lucy Bleach’s Homing in Mather’s Lane in central Hobart. I am waiting for this other work to
unfold, anticipating the mournful and yet charismatic song of Rebekah Del Rio. While standing
and watching the small audience build, I begin talking with the woman beside me about the
larger context of these projects – the Iteration Again curatorial strategy. This is the framework
authored by the Curatorial Director David Cross, whereby curators and artists are asked to realise
temporary public artworks that are ‘iterated’ or re-authored in someway over a four week period.
Further folding a process of critical writing – and mediation – into this strategic construct,
writers have been invited to evolve a critical text on four occasions, thereby following in response
to the iterations of the artworks. The current text is one such attempt at critical response and
it is being produced by a participant in yet another of these projects, Fiona Lee’s and Paul
O’Neill’s free school under the banner of “Our Day Will Come”. So the production of this piece
of criticism is yet further folded into the many layers of the Iteration Again research platform.
Indeed, it is so in ways that for some appear potentially problematic.
My partner in the casual conversation that structures our time, and our short relationship of
waiting together in the street for a singer to sing, shares with me some of her sense of the
problematics that are at work here. She introduces a number of themes. Firstly, my interlocutor
expresses some concern about the nature of the ‘public-ness’ entailed in these iterative temporary
public artworks. She seems to be proposing a distinction between an informed or elective public
(people who know there’s stuff happening and actively seek it out) and a casual or accidental
public (people who come upon the work unwittingly). But, there is a sharper critical edge to
this – it seems to be also a matter of suggesting that there is a kind of ‘in-crowd’ formation at play
whereby a kind of self-selecting group of cognoscenti are constituting themselves as ‘the insiders’.
She elaborates the analysis further by citing the James Newitt work in the Derwent. “It’s not
serious. He hasn’t seceded. He is in the river there, close enough that you could throw a burger
out to him.”
Both these criticisms strike me as important (i.e., worth thinking and talking through further)
though neither seems to me to be exhaustively true or necessarily as delegitimizing as my
partner in conversation appears to believe them to be. But they are interesting challenges and
good provocations for thinking. I tell her that there is this really interesting and recurring issue
about the desire for critique and the apprehension that the conditions of critique are somehow
compromised in the local milieu. This issue keeps coming up in the conversations at exhibition
openings, in chatting with people at the art school, in the dialogues at the free school, at the
school dinner events, and in the other gatherings around Iteration Again projects. I ask if she has
considered publishing her critical challenges somewhere – I suggest that she might write out the
arguments that she had shared with me. I suggest that it would be worth posting these criticisms
on the “supercritical” blog for example (which I am now shamelessly plugging a second-time
out of new-found loyalty to other partners in conversation here in Hobart.) She responds by
suggesting that nobody is really writing there – “It’s the same people.”
I carry her criticism with me in my head, thinking through the questions that this text has
set out above: “Will the man who withdraws himself from circulation among us continue to
circulate within our discursus?” There is a presumptive collectivity invoked by saying “among us”
and “our” when the text produced has an undisclosed readership: a readership that is not-yetconstituted-as-a-“we” (if indeed it ever can become so.) This deployment of “we” and “us” and
“our” is a unitary rhetorical strategy that I have come to use, in spite of the many difficulties that
it engenders. (No doubt these difficulties multiply in this text as the presumptive use of “we” is
complemented here by the frenetic use of “I” and the unanchored use of “she”). It is a rhetoric
that seems to summon into co-presence even those who do not wish to be with us. It summons
“them” and “us” to see that we are among them and they are among us: It declares we are here
together now, not as a lie nor as a truth, but rather as a summoning into the co-production of
thinking, as a summoning of the readers into reading together apart. This rhetoric is tricky, of
course. Indeed, just as the rhetorical declaration of secession is tricky, so too is this rhetorical
call to collectivity. These are tricky and slippery announcements in the same way that the task of
thinking about art, and doing so textually, is tricky.
Some more days pass and I go to the riverside – to look out upon the man on that artificial island
who claims to have seceded. It is my first time to see first-hand and not through the mediation
of anecdotes, statements of intention, photographs, video, texts and conversations. I am now a
witness. I know something that you might not yet know. There’s a man on an island over there.
He has said he would leave us, and this is him: Gone. I have seen him: Gone. Over there.
I am here in the riverside park with a small audience gathered by the river. Now we wait upon
another singer who comes to sing out across the water to the clearly visible man who is reclining,
feet raised, reading a book, relaxed on his floating platform. The platform rotates erratically, yet
gracefully, in the ebb and flow of the calm-seeming water. A woman approaches with a solid
purposive gait and walks herself to the river edge, not giving much notice to the small troupe
of onlookers and the several cameras arrayed in anticipation of her arrival. She pitches her body
into an oratorical pose and sings out to the island, declaiming in her song that: “There’s a man
on an island over there…” Her voice is strong, dense, compelling and the onlookers seem to
forget the man on the island for a moment, and instead attend upon her singing. Just beyond the
singing woman, I notice some people on a nearby path, walking their dogs, evening strollers,
middle-aged couples with their well-behaved animals on leashes, conducting themselves together
along the park path in a conversational and relaxed huddle. For a brief moment, they look on at
the small crowd that we have gathered ourselves into: they look at us but they do not join us nor
pay attention to us for very long. They seem reserved but also somehow sufficient to themselves,
enjoying their own convivial perambulations through the early evening riverside parkland.
The singing continues and shifts register, moving first into a bluesy torch song and then emerging
into an operatic effusion of longing. The singing moves and I am moved along with it. The
operatic theatricality is emphatic. The singer moves in a lurching gesture of impassioned address,
moving now right to the river’s edge. She is reaching out in strained address toward the man on
the island. A flotilla of ducks sails past close to the shore: A bright-eyed young woman smiles in
delight at this contingent event. I forget to register the secessionist’s demeanour during all this.
Was he interacting? Was he responsive? Did he have a casual jocular manner? Was he awkward and
self-conscious? Damn. What happened? Was I looking at the wrong thing?
It is later. I am in that great huddle of sociable chat again down at the city’s central waterfront, having
left the suburban park in order to adjourn to the harbour and the handsome quayside. There are more
discussions of criticism. People swapping stories of artworks encountered elsewhere. Then the rain and
the wind blow hard, and a tremendous squall has suddenly broken out in the night harbour. How will
the secessionist fare in this? Surely he can’t stay out in this? The restaurant people ask us to withdraw
inside from where we are seated. They say the awnings may snap in such a gale.
I’m on the comfortable couch inside, looking out at the smoker sneaking his last blast before accepting
the waiter’s instruction to retreat. And as I watch, I keep thinking of the man on the island; and the
ersatz palm tree – more properly a New Zealand cordyline, I have since been informed: I think of
the old Robinson Crusoe device and the novelistic nature of the narrative conceits in this text you
are reading. I think of the “insider” group I appear to be inside; about the pro-filmic nature of the
performances I have seen; about the documentation imperative that is so strong, especially when there
is an unresolved ambivalence about the geographical and cultural particularity of the place of initial
production; and now, finally, I think about the artist reading this later and being irritated that his work
has become the occasion for my diaristic indulgence. But then I think “well, after all, it was he who left
me behind first.”
Then, it dawns upon me: perhaps the iterative format could be deployed as an episodic narrative
device, in the great tradition of epistolary novels, or of what old Dublin slang calls a “follow-er-uperer” (and old Hollywood slang calls a “cliff-hanger”). So I have the temerity and chutzpah to suggest
that all narrative and critical threads will find themselves resolved in our next episode. Stay tuned. It’s
not over until…
IV.
Part 1: “My eyes filled up, and I don’t even know the man.”
Dear reader. Such things as have transpired these last few days do not admit themselves of an
easy report. However, given the manifold expectations on the matter of the dissolution of all
attenuated questions and critical worries – that we may presume to have been promoted among
our good, fine and noble readership these last few weeks – it is necessary to proceed in the vain
effort of the full and frank disclosure of the events at Glenorchy and environs over these last three
extraordinary days. In order to parry forth in this urgent task, and regardless of risk of personal
injury or insult, let us move jauntily forward via a circuitous routing backwards and thereby first
recall those important insights of the late great Prof. De Selby as recorded in his “reflections on
the economy of winds in those uncertain parts both anterior and far southerly.” (On these and
related matters, the reader is directed to the notebooks, unpublished at the time of De Selby’s
death having been produced – as most scholarly commentators now agree – during the period
of his work on the analogues of black air and shuddering temporal displacements. The reader is
reminded here that the notebooks are now stored in the capacious and well-used archives of the
state library.)
It is to De Selby’s great credit that he has foresworn the linearity of the temporal continuum – a
linearity otherwise ubiquitously endorsed in the moving pictures and all manner of televisual
devices and vehicular transports that furnish the modalities of personal transplacement and
disarrayment so characteristic of our woefully unreflective, though allegedly modern, times. (And
yes, indeed, these very plurabellious times may be altogether too modern in that very degree of
their avowal of linear progression that is assumed so grievously uncritically in the complacent
declarative “modern”.)
It is in these greatly understudied notes by De Selby – which incidentally are soon to be brought
out in a handsome volume, with a fine system of scholia, footnotes, indexes, commentaries,
cross-references and trilingual glossaries, under the careful editorship of our own much-loved
philosopher and practitioner of the dark arts of Hermes, Professor Malpas of the Universality
of Tasmania Tropicalis in Temperis Fides – that De Selby declares himself convinced of the
cyclical nature of the temporal manifold. Indeed, De Selby has gone so far as too suggest that
a triple rotary system applies across the temporal manifold. It may be worth noting that in this
development of his ideas he has, perhaps wittingly and in full possession of his own posterior
analysis, precipitated a controversy among his scholarly commentators as to the significance of his
move from the earlier Freudo-Nietzschean “duplicity of returns” model (as manifest in his dualchamber or bi-cycling quantum paradigm) toward a later, and admittedly less readily assimilated,
Marxian-Freudo-Nietzschean “triplicatory returns” model or what some have called his tricycling schematism of temporal re-judderation and repetitiousness.
I ask that the reader would briefly recall to mind that the triplication of returns model comprises
of three moments of non-linear continuity-rupture-turnings – (If one were producing a technical
paper on the matter, perhaps one would incline more properly to speak of modalities rather
than moments, but as this text is a modest non-technical paper addressing itself to a de-general
readership such fine grain details of terminology – of the “dis, dat, dese and dose” varietals –
need not be taken as a matter of any great significance in the contrivance of our commentary here
or indeed in their becoming else-whereabouts later).
De Selby’s model then entails the Trinitarian doctrine of repetitions or re-ring-ings (some have
preferred to say “re-bellings” in recognition of the sonority of tone required for the high abstract
schematism of the tri-repetitiousturningbackarsewards) namely: (i) a real repressive cyclicking
return; (ii) a tragically historical far-cycle return; and (iii) of course (as he was understandably
under the Nietzchean influences of late 19th Century nationalism once again) a prodigal
unpardonable near-cycle internal return. I am convinced that if we wish to make good the
investment of the reader’s time and energies in the pursuit of the meaning, nature, implication
and consequentiality of the recent events at Glenorchy and environs, we have no choice but to
invoke and make appeal to De Selby’s triplicating-of-returns model.
Unfortunately, De Selby’s paradigmatic re-modelling of the post-scalar (and, as others have
written elsewhere, the attendant postpartumtitiousness and presumptive heteroglocality of
this) and multi-rupturous temporal de-continuum brings a significant overhead in terms of
the requisite terms. In a word, indeed summatively, one might say De Selby’s model brings
linearity back in through the backdoor sideways, thereby off-setting the earlier gains in terms
of a re-lossing of the rear-entry-linearity, again. Indeed some would say the tri-cycling model is
inherently flawed and that a more properly or more comprehensively weakened ontology requires
us to engage a quadruple repetitious model and bypass the tri-cyling system altogether. These
critics of tri-cycling, the so-called four-folders (or self-styled, under their own steam as it were,
auto-motivated four-wheel re-re-cyclers) have declared unambiguously that a quadriheteroic
model is required. And again, such positions have been re-iterated elsewhere, so we will not
pursue them in greater detail here.
To proceed then, with the aid of De Selby’s model, and taking as supplement Lacan’s re-reading
of Freud’s “beyond the pleasure” in principle we can be left in no doubt whatsoever that at
Glenorchy what transpired was a quartering return of time fortrighly across the two week period
and with an astute mobilisation of bagpipes in order to quell the rising emotion of the musiclovers gathered in anticipation of that great food for thought, that is indeed a meal in itself,
namely the victuals (lately barbequed up for many minutes to grab salads and glassed on the
breakages.) This was enough to bring tears to the eyes of one spectacle-wearing onlooker.
I have been interrupted I am afraid. I see that the young man who butlers for me on Tuesdays
after mass (a daily communicant no less) has returned from his errancy and is about to pre-serve
breakfast just now for me on a table that I am not yet seated at, as I have yet to get up this fine
morning. (Although I have been awake for many hours now, as I was awoken quite heartily earlier
in the morning by a garrulous young man with a cap and some fast talking clothes who doorstepped me with well-wishes for leaving and letting me know that there was little need of my
return.) So, reluctantly, I must allow the interruption of my cogitations here for a few moments,
and I will return to you, dear reader, with a fuller explication of the Glenorchy episodes after I
have had the opportunity of some breakage in my fast and some outages in modest though urgent
intestinal re-adjustments and having attended to some sundry related practical matters shifting
myself now toward a small half-lit alcove to repast. Bear with me and we shall have further chance
to pursue our critical quarry here, to wit, the nature, meaning, function and iterative cast of
public withdrawal on a private matter by the secessionist at Glenorchy. I expect we shall have been
regurgitated sufficiently by late afternoon to proceed toward the closing remarks. Thank you for
your temperance and patience.
IV.
Part 2: “Yes, you may leave now, but…”
I must apologise to my readers, but a certain subterfuge has been required of me these past
few days, as I have had to make good an escape from the dread island of Transmania where all
manner of intrigue and conspiracy has been afoot. I am afraid that when I indicated that my
butler had returned to prepare breakfast yesterday, I committed a most egregious untruth. The
fact is that I was making good my escape with the assistance of a fellow rhetorical technician.
Unfortunately, we had to make the escape without allowing the relevant authorities enough time
to prepare the necessary warrants for our arrest and deportation from the island, hence the need
for skulduggery and misdirection. There has been therefore no breakfast but rather a fast break for
it. By employing the stunting effects of De Selby’s well known “black air” in its most concentrated
form, my fellow escapee and I were able to shrink ourselves in a thickened fog of the said
air (what Robert Anton Wilson later described as a super-dense coagulation of teratological
molecules). With our size thus reduced by a factor of ten, rendering us down to a discrete half
a foot or so (shrunk by the black air from our normally formidable six foot three inches and
six foot two inches respectively), we were able to conceal ourselves inside some pretty boxes
wrapped in flowery papers for the purposes of smuggling. We then had ourselves transported,
thus disguised as a set of the complete works of Victor Hugo, to a safe house in Melbourne. It is
from there that I must now complete my work and assert that the events, rumoured to have taken
place this past month in Glenorchy and environs, thereabouts and nearby, have not yet taken place.
Rather, by some grim trickery of quadraheteroic temporal folding a pre-emptive repetition urge
has overtaken the small and much maligned community of artists, ne’r-do-wells, conspirators
and general trouble-makers that live there. The full intention and probable consequences of such
nefarious temporal re-juddering near but boggles the unprepared mind.
My fear is that my fellow escapee and I have not managed to really get out in time, as the effects
of the temporal mischief wrought by unknown forces ripple out to engulf us even now. It may be
that we are doomed to a prior return: Having completed the future farce ahead of time, it seems
now that we must engage the preceding tragedy that is yet to be realised. I fear we have no choice
but to experience the repetition’s origin that lies ahead of us somewhere. What dark minds have
worked their infernal arts upon us here? When will their day of reckoning have already come
upon us?
Whilst, I cannot give good estimate of what animates such dark minds, I am reminded of De
Selby’s student’s famous remarks:
“We have seen an urge to repeat, an urge to return, as a means of performing a desire to
overcome a failed earlier attempt to master the circumstances of life. We have also seen that
this urge to repeat and to return may be seen as an impulsive attachment to the trauma as a
thing desired for itself. We have something that is not the seeking of pleasure or the seeking
for pleasures to be ended or even repeated: It is the seeking of something beyond the pleasure
principle. It is not the autonomous ego that seeks this or is guided by this unknown seeking. It is
the thickening of the black air in the congested lungs of the dead that shrinks us into echoes of
what has yet to take place. Therefore the politics of love is the politics of dying. All death is social
death, and it can only be experienced by the social without me. That is why we must go back to
where we have yet to be.”
I must leave off writing now, as I am due an urgent reversal of size lest our hosts in the safe house
in Melbourne should decide to read their newly acquired master pieces of French literature and
cause all of us an unpleasantness we could well live without. Tell no one that you saw me, in case
they were already looking for me. These are dangerous and secretive times that we have been
living towards, and I am afraid you will have heard no more from this particular student of De
Selby for sometime that is to come. Until that day, I must bid farewell and adieu dear reader.
immediate, “presence” of the modernist autonomous artwork. Formally, this work manifests as
a distribution of elements over place and time so as to frustrate any attempt to fully master and
possess the work. (This issue was rehearsed with great clarity by Marko Markon in his keynote
for the Iteration: Again symposium.) On the other hand the actualisation of the work manifests
a strong pro-documentary instantiation – the being-toward-camera and for-later-display – and
one senses that there is a strong practical imperative to generate a representation of the work
that will function as the surrogate of the work. This surrogate, once finalised, one suspects will
be inserted into the circuits of distribution in the artworld, effectively reinstating the discrete
mobile autonomous-seeming artefact-spectacle that contradicts the initial disposition of the
work. This formal contradiction may in turn be responsible for a certain lack of resolution in the
multiplicity of “public” moments of the work whereby the accumulative, generative, and opento-discovery potentials of the work are shut down in favour of a sustained serial realisation of a
discrete work which is fully “authored” and mastered from the artist’s position. This last issue
is not inevitably a problem, but it is problematic in terms of its mobilisation without evolved
or considered reference to the thematics of secession, sovereignty and self-institution and the
relational dynamics of togetherness and apartness, of inclusions and exclusions, and of territories
contested (in an age of displaced non-persons and stateless-persons – a theme the artist has
engaged elsewhere).
Coda
Early on in the process of thinking about James Newitt’s work, the following question was posed:
Why is it appropriate to assume that we are looking at something that requires “reading” as
opposed to some other mode of engagement such as “witnessing” or “celebrating” or “playing”
for example? The reader may rightly wonder if this question has been properly elaborated, or for
that matter any of the many other questions posed throughout the different stages of the text.
One might feel perhaps that these questions have merely been left hanging in the air, somewhat
ponderously, and without any real effort to come to grips with them. On the other hand, one
might wish to settle for a sense of the work as quite simply this provocation to ask ever more
proliferating questions. Yet another strategy might be to read the form of written response
presented here, the shifting modes of discourse adopted throughout, as the performative response
to all these questions. But perhaps there remains a certain frustration. Perhaps a reader might just
feel cheated and want simply to know: Is the work under discussion any good or not?
I experience an ambivalence here on two registers: (i) an ambivalence as to how this question
might be asked and whether it is the pertinent question to ask: and (ii) an ambivalence as to how
I would wish to respond. But let’s play along, in spite of these reservations.
This work manifests a series of different elements which are threaded in different ways around
the proposition that the artist will withdraw and secede in someway from something. The
elements comprise of various performances, different signs, gestures, actions, announcements,
artefacts, events and various mediations of these. On the level of form, this work initially
manifests the “weakened ontology” of artworks that abandon the self-contained, and apparently
In the earlier questioning of the work, it was indicated that it seems that the actual effect of the
work is to posit itself as a “thing-to-be-interpreted”. At this point, it seems to me a problem that
the moment of interpretation has been externalised from the work, rather than made to be a
constitutive process of the work’s formation over its iterative staging. The form of the work is a
series but the generative moment of the work is not this iterative series: the work has been preemptively authored and finalised with minimal latitude for the unplanned to take priority or to
have any real effect in the formation and disclosure of the work over time. The critical response
I have produced has been somewhat unplanned and irregular, and I have attempted to honour
the iterative process as a generative one and to join in with the work of James Newitt’s work in a
small way.
This is an important dimension of the critical response. This project is one worth engaging with,
attending to, and thinking through. I believe that this work is not yet finished and that it can
actualise its potentials precisely in a re-configuration of the modes of after-life determined for
the work. My ambivalence about the question “is the work any good or not?” is that it risks short
circuiting the generative moments of the work, and its potential, by finalising too soon something
that should be still in formation. But I also want judgement and I want to take responsibility for
saying something and asking to be given your time to say something to you. (This is after all a
very longwinded piece of writing that risks abusing the opportunity of online publishing and its
capacity for limitless columns of text).
My proposal is that the work is not yet as good a work as it could be, because it has made an
unsatisfactory compromise between being an iterative and generative temporary public artwork
and being a self-contained autonomous and singly authored artwork. This is problematic, because
precisely the tension between the sociality of temporary publics and the autonomising selfinstitution of the author should be a key axis for a work that posits the possibility of “secession”.
This axis of the work appears to me as not fully developed. However, it may be that it is precisely
in critical responses such as this one that the work activates these potentials. That has been my
hubris which I have performed here, suggesting in someway that I can co-author the secessionist’s
work without his permission or approval. It is a gesture performed in convivial play.
Do you want to play ball or not? Do you want to say “it’s my football, and we play by my rules”?
Or “it’s my ball and I am taking it home”? Or can we have a kick-about and jostle in friendly
competition, trying to score occasional goals against each other, but also seeking to delight in the
sheer poetry of moving around each other in responsive transactions that summon us into the
game as co-dependents pretending to seek self-sufficiency?
Mick Wilson, 2011
Photography: Fred Assenheimer, Hannah Olding and James Newitt
© James Newitt, 2011