WAR ON SPARROWS !
Australian Galleries, 28 Derby St. Collingwood May 30 – June 17
The Four Pests campaign was one of the first programs of the The Great Leap Forward under chairman Mao from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rodents, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is all so known as the Smash Sparrows Now Campaign! or the Eliminate Sparrows Now Campaign! The war on sparrows resulted in severe ecological imbalance and is regarded as being one of the causes of the following Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, the campaign against sparrows was ended and redirected to bed bugs.
Sparrows were accused of stealing approximately 2 kg (4 pounds) of grain per sparrow per year. Sparrow nests were smashed, eggs were smashed, and chicks were killed. Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, their goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion worked. The ground was littered with dead and disabled birds. During the officially prescribed times of official noise making the sky was full of falling birds – making umbrellas essential for protection. The umbrellas where able to break the bird’s otherwise fatal
fall to the ground but meant that the surviving sparrows had to spend the rest of their lives with some
part of their body trapped in an umberella.
Some sparrows sort refuge in foreign embassies. The staff at the Polish embassy refused to let people come into the embassy to scare away and kill the sparrows who were hiding there and as a result the embassy was surrounded by people with drums, pots and pans. After two days of constant drumming, whistling and some shooting, the Poles had to use shovels to clear the embassy of dead birds. Prominent ornithologist Tso-sin Cheng pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of the insects that ate the crops, so in fact sparrows saved more grain than they “stole “. By April of 1960 The War On Sparrows was
ended by the party (not Mao ).
They turned the cemetery into a hospital then the hospital into a grain warehouse and then into an art museum.
Australian Galleries, 28 Derby St. Collingwood, May 30 – June 17
A narcissist requires a world available to interpretation, nothing is defined or acted upon by the past or the people from it. Descartes talked about empting every belief out of your head like empting a barrel of apples and then carefully examining every belief and only returning those beliefs to the barrel that pass your particular standards or in the Cultural Revolution’s case those apples that are “useful “.
add field deatail
Martina Navratilova vs. Chris Evert Lloyd
Artist’s talk, Saturday 2pm, June 3, Australian Galleries 28 Derby St. Collingwood
The biblical proverb “As iron sharpens iron, so one woman sharpens another”
In the late 70’s and 80’s when people watched Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova play tennis, they saw freedom vs. communism, hetro. vs. homosexuality, Christians vs. the atheists, beauty vs. aspiration, they saw a supermarket vs. a line to be let into a supermarket. But to compete with someone you must agree to run on the same track, to play on the same field or court. To compete with someone you must do what she is doing, to follow the same set of rules and share the same goals. The only way you’ll differentiate yourself is by doing precisely the same thing only slightly better. Thus, though performance may improve, the chances are that you will become increasingly like the person with whom you compete.
Martina Navratilova’s dad left her family when Martina was 3 and he committed suicide when Martina was 8. Martina’s early coach was then her new stepfather. Martina grew up in communist Prague
where even if you had a living and present father he was horribly emasculated by the government system which demanded obsequious obedience. The government made the decisions for the family not the father. Many office buildings in Prague had tennis nets painted on the outside of them with distant fathers working inside them and neglected daughters hitting against the walls, the balls never penetrating and always coming back.
In her mid-teens – chaperoned by middle-aged male communist officials – Martina took her complicated psychology to the women’s tennis tour of the early 1970’s where women players were forced to play in wedding dresses and where the women players were given mops, cleaning detergent and ovens for winning tournaments.
Chris Evert grew up amongst a big middle class suburban family. The family constantly posing with tennis trophies in white stiff tennis clothes and under metres of newly shampooed blonde hair. Chris’s
dad was a tennis coach and Chris – no more talented than her siblings determinedly rose to the top of her father’s affections with faultless ground strokes and a steely focus.
As the women’s world tennis tour grew in the early 80’s it soon became a celebration of poor parenting. The women playing for money and fame could not compete against an opponent playing to
win her father’s (coach’s) love. Most of the girls farmed out to the tennis tour had barely developed
out of the fairytale and ponytail stage. Underdeveloped and needy they live in hotels and airports, relentlessly compared and assessed, sponsored and then not. Finally – exhausted and injured they are left
in a pile somewhere in a foreign country with only torn tennis dresses to wear and a suitcase full of plastic trophies. They walk the streets looking for the joy and big hugs their fathers gave them when
they used to win.
FEAR OF MEASUREMENT
People have a desire to evaluate their opinions and abilities – their worth, and that in the absence of objective criteria (a scoreboard ), they will make these evaluations by comparing themselves to others – other people very much like themselves, those who play by the same rules. Given the brutality of human measurement it’s not surprising that most white middle aged men prefer to use surrogates, professional sports teams and individual athletes. Hemingway- a pathological fearer of measurement depicted “sport as an escape, of sorts, from the social world in which self-worth was measured with objective certainty”. As a child watching a horror film through gaps between his fingers middle aged men can spectate not participate in professional sporting contests and indulge in bearable bits the fear of having their
body and character being measured, compared and then failing. Some of these men become amateur sports coaches and some of those, coach their daughters.
PANOPTICONICAL GAZE
The women’s and men’s tennis tour became a television product from the mid-seventies. Television reduces athletes to images and then those images become both commodities and signs. It is the
reader who writes the text and the watcher who creates the value .The maintenance of capitalism comes from teaching children the successful manners of commodity. And that by actively engaging
children in sport, it is showing and proving the cultural importance of their bodies and identities as the commodities and signs of inclusion.
French social commentator Michel Foucault writes of a panopticon – umpire’s chair – this is used as a powerful discipline facility. This particular design form utilized a tall tower in the centre, from which
one authority could see into each incarcerated cell – within the white cage painted on the court(pun unintended )therefore, causing visibility to ensure the umpire’s functioning power. The visibility is what
inspires players to discipline themselves- behaving within acceptable parameters/rules.
The growing popularity of women’s tennis both on television and the crowds that attend and surround their games intensified the disciplinary surveillance of the players and after their father/coach it
acts as a second line of loveless attention. This disciplinary surveillance is internalised and becomes what Foucault calls a docile body one that does not question or argue. This body simply accepts
the power and surveillance that it is situated. The athlete is not expected to appreciate and internalize the reason for rules and regulations; she functions under a system of fines and penalties levied
against her that force her, like a child, to behave. The grim fairytale quality of the player’s life is suggested by former NFL player Merlin Olsen “the athlete doesn’t have to grow up because the coach lives his life for him.” He continues on, “the sad thing is that it actually benefits the team to keep the player naïve and
dependent.” Chris Evert came to a similar conclusion understating that because of the life elite athletes are living, it takes them “longer to grow up than other people”.
Elmyr de Hory and Fernand Legros in Poyais.
Opening 6-8pm Tuesday 30 May, Australian Galleries, 28 Derby St. Collingwood
During the 1950’s there was many “houses of the stars “ tours in Hollywood. Amongst the
hundreds of excited and guilable waiting in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to be picked
up by a painted over school bus was once Elmyr De Hory and at another time Fernand
Legros. The host of the “houses of the stars “ tour stands in the front of the bus and tells the
passengers which star’s house the bus will stopping at next. The gaping passengers are told
that behind this latest in a series of tall and wide, brick and stuccoed walls lives Fred Astaire.
The passengers take photos of the wall and lean into it and perhaps to hear the sound of a
shower draining or car starting up.
For the –soon to be – most successful art forgers in history, Elmyr de Hory and Fernand
Legros it was clear that the whispered name of the star was enough, all they had to do was
provide an old school bus and a big empty brick wall.
A passenger who came alone on the tour asks the host, rather routinely “how do we know
this is Fred Astaire’s house “.The host then walks to the letterbox in the wall and slides his
fingers into the letter slot and pulls out a letter addressed to “Mr. Frederick Astaire !”. The
gasping passengers line up to look. This detail is particulairly appreciated by Elmyr De Hory
and then later by Fernand Legros.
French social commentator/philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggested that Disneyland was
created so that Americans could be convinced of the reality of their own world by
comparison with the fantasy /unreal world of Disneyland. But Disneyland became so
successful that it grew to include the entire life of the average American. Baudrillard went
on to suggest that pornography was created to convince us that our sex was real, that
financial markets were created to convince us that our money was real and history was
created to convince use that our past was real. Art forgers Elmyr De Hory and Fernand
Legros found out that art history was created to convince us that important art was real.
LOST IN A SUPERMARKET
DeHory and Legros both orphaned early in their lives grew up during World War Two and
had a very urgent sense of the plasticity of both personal and public history. De Hory in
particular – a jewish, homosexual, Hungarian orphan surviving in Nazi occupied Germany
learnt the virtue of deceit. Both orphans used the freedom that came with not being
tethered to a family name and family members. They understood the possibilities that come
with the familyless brand of anonyminity and unaccountability. The two art forgers did not
live in a world of objects, places and people created by and for the past. Their world was a
great supermarket full of places , people and things that were there for their needs and for
their needs now. For De Hory and Legros facts, truth and honesty were verbs not nouns.
POYAIS
During a time of war military spokesmen are encouraged to use the language and imagery of
movie trailers when talking to the public about the progress of the war – that way the war will
sound real to them. Many people feel their romantic relationships aren’t real unless they have a
quirky first meeting story and an almost immediate obstacle to overcome like the love stories in
books and at the movies. For people to know an artwork is important it needs an origin story;
the artist’s mental illness, the artist’s persecution, the artist’s early friends and associates or in
the case of the Mona Lisa that the artwork was once stolen.
In 1820, at the time of the Colonizing frenzy, Gregor MacGregor made up a fake country called
the Republic of Poyais. He then opened offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London where he
sold Poyais real estate and exchanged real money for the Poyais the dollars his mate – who
worked at the mint printed for him. After months in a boat doing laps of South America, the few
Poyais investors who had survived the trip realised there was no Poyais but refused to accept
they’d been duped.
During the 50’s and 60’s Elmyr de Hory specialised in forging the fauves, the bright, simple and
unreal colours of Matisse, Dufy ect.. Fernand Legros was an illegal immigrant from Egypt who
pretended to be a former ballet dancer and with his lover Canadian backpacker Real Lessard
they sold De Hory’s forgeries to some of the biggest art museums and art collectors in Europe
and the U.S.
Once they approached the collectors and museum directors with a Matisse painting, Modigliani
drawing or a print by Picasso the excited/ frenzied buyers were interested only in knowing that
the artworks were real – really made by the names/the brands. No-one was interested in the
work itself.De Hory and Legros had to make the provenance first and then the art would follow.
De Hory and Legros proved that the fine art world was as brand gullible as any bunch of
branded – up teenagers you find loitering in any suburban shopping mall.
“The Great Leader Declared War on the Four Pets”
Australian Galleries, Melbourne, May 30 – June 17. Opening Tuesday May 30th 6-8pm
The “Four Pests” campaign was introduced in 1958 as a hygiene campaign aimed to eradicate the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease: the mosquitos responsible for malaria, the rodents that spread the plague, the pervasive airborne flies and the sparrows -specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow – which ate grain seed and fruit.
With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the The Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the The Great Chinese Famine. The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.
The Cultural Revolution had rejected the five values of Confucianism – kindness, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and faith and replaced them with lists of things or reasons to; hate, suspect, fight and report. The “Nine Black Categories” were landlords, rich farmers, anti-revolutionaries, bad influences, right-wingers, traitors, spies, capitalist roaders and (ninth) intellectuals. In November 1951, Mao formally launched the Three Antis Campaign (san fan). Its purpose was to eradicate three specific ‘evils’: corruption, waste and bureaucracy
A second campaign, the Five Antis (or wu fan), was launched in early 1952, almost concurrently with san fan. The five ‘evils’ nominated by Mao were bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing economic information.
All of these party enemies and behaviours were to be surveilled, policed and fought by all citizens during the Cultural Revolution. Of course, the easiest way not to fall into one of the categories was to accuse and hate as many of these party enemies as you find, imagine or lie about. The process of avoiding being accused started with writing accusations about people in your town, that you barely knew, on big poster paper and pasting it on public buildings. With the support of other like-minded people, you then organise a struggle session where you could be seen accusing your target person of the impossibility of not avoiding one category of the impossible to remember-never ending list – of anti-party behaviours. Mao had learnt from the Catholic Church that you must keep creating sins to keep ahead of your power to forgive them.
The war on the four pets: budgerigars, cats, dogs and rabbits was a logical reaction to a political program that had exhausted the conflict weary population to the point that they could only experience the world as being on one side or the other of a political and social see-saw. Having fought with and against friends and enemies again and again, declaring war on domestic animals was a state sanctioned (no apology needed) form of forgiving each other.
MENGELE in ARGENTINA
Australian Galleries, Melbourne, May 30 – June 17
After his time as a Nazi doctor during the war Josef Mengele had to escape Europe for Argentina to avoid being tried and put to death as a war criminal. In Argentina he wanted to develop his research and recording information about identical twins in the lounge room/kitchen, and bathroom in the caravan that he shared with his maid/lover and her daughter. Mengele was particularly interested in identical twins, people with heterochromia iridum (eyes of two different colours), dwarfs, and people with physical abnormalities. Most of Mengele’s experiments involved separating eyes from brains – the eyes are tools for measurement the brain an instrument for understanding. Eyes are excited by detail while the brain considers the context. The eyes tell you why things are different the brain why they’re the same.
Despite being an ocean, a war and decades away from his life as a war criminal in Auschwitz, in Argentina Mengele still imagined a world of people all sharing the same genetic traits – his. Mengele could only create these visions with his eyes closed and during sleep because wartime is like sleep because in both people aren’t fully seen; their past ,their future, their families, their opinions ect. People merely represent the raw material the story you are telling yourself needs.
In Mengele’s Argentina all people sharing the same biological origin become copies of copies and go on to make more copies. A certain amount of diversity and subversion is needed for the health of the human system. No-one wants to be a plumber, everyone a lawyer or a doctor, there are so many doctors in Mengele’s dream that they are unemployed and on park benches feeding pigeons, they are over crowding prisons for petty theft – Mengele himself was jailed for a time in Argentina for practicing medicine without a licence. Over feed giant pigeons roam the streets bullying and killing more exotic and weaker animals.
When people share the same personality type individual idiosyncrasies and small differences are elevated to the status of pop culture and celebrated in mass rallies. In 1950’s Argentina the Guinness Book of World Records began the painstaking recording of the longest fingernail; the biggest earlobe, the furtherest backwards walk ect. When everyone sees everything the same way then there is no surprise, no lying, no art and no advertising. The Guinness Book of Records can store their growing collection of records in abandoned art galleries, theatres, libraries and courtrooms. Only in a dream could someone imagine changing the way people see as preferable to changing what they see.
STRUGGLE SESSION
AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES MAY 30 – JUNE 17
Struggle sessions evolved from ideals of criticism and more
importantly self-criticism popular amongst Russian communists in
the 1920’s. Chinese communists were slow to take up struggle
sessions as they conflicted with the more traditional Chinese ideal of
“saving face”. Later during the Land Reform Campaign! struggle
sessions took off as the people needed to demonise and get angry at
the people they were taking land from. Peasants were encouraged to
accuse land owners of all sorts of crimes and call them all sorts of
names in struggle sessions promoted as “speak bitterness “sessions
and “give utterance to grief “sessions.
Struggle sessions and then denunciation rallies filled the gap
otherwise filled by the news and then social media. People were at
first bonded by the spectacle of someone else being humiliated in a
public setting and then protected by their ability to name some else
to be humiliated, defamed and beaten – in a public setting.
Constantly accusing was the best form of protection against being
accused/struggled.
The process of avoiding being accused started with writing
accusations about people in your town, that you barely knew, on big
poster paper and pasting it on public buildings or hanging them from
the loud speakers that screamed party slogans from street corners.
With the support of other like-minded people, you then organise a
struggle session where you could be seen accusing your target
person of the impossibility of not avoiding one category of the
impossible to remember-never ending list – of anti-party behaviours.
One of the few powers available to the peasants was the most
powerful – the power to transform through judgement. Struggle
sessions gave the peasants the chance to turn a rich landlord into a
“capitalist roader”, “class enemy “or “counter revolutionary”. A
persecuting government official could be transformed into “a
rightist”, “a western spy” or even a “Krushchev”. Most seductively
you could turn a stranger into someone of whom you know
everything important there is to know.
Committed judgement doesn’t end at a funeral. In order to feel
comfortable in the present it is important to judge and then label the
past. This sets the past in place and stops it from coming up from
behind contradicting your present. We have to re-label past
relationships and de-friend them on facebook and so the natural
logic of the struggle session was to transform the people of the past
through judgement to stop them humiliating and contradicting the
people of the present.
In the End Pavlov Saw Only Bells and Saliva
AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES, Melbourne 30 MAY – 17 JUNE
Ivan Pavlov never used bells and he just as commonly used orphaned children as he did dogs to experiment on. After Pavlov won the Noble prize in 1904 the scientific community promoted the bells and dogs – rather than the drilling holes in children without complaining parents -angle.
Pavlov had his own bell though. Pavlov carried around with him his wife’s shoe and later his dead wife’s shoe. Pavlov would look at the shoe, feel the shoe and smell the shoe when he didn’t want to feel insignificant and pointless. Pavlov wanted to discover the natural (eternal and internal) systems that determine human behaviour and human feeling. Pavlov and his assistants Vul’fon and Snarski were not just interested in the natural reflexes (salivation) and the conditioned stimuli (bells). Pavlovian conditioning is also about the learning of emotions, preferences and aversions and likes and dislikes and how these can be expressed (salivated) in many different ways.
The most important outcome of Pavlovian conditioning was not the success of the fake stimulation (bells) but the capacity of the fake stimulations (bells) to change how the individual responds to the initial real stimulation – dog food. In Pavlov’s dog foodless world people would become attracted to only fake stimulations and then objects that stimulate a mere memory of or unconscious response to an already established fake stimulation of the first initial fake stimulation. In Pavlov’s dog foodless, saliva drenched world the initial real food or stimulation would be first ignored as regressive and then loathed as humiliating and then dissolved and disappeared all together.
Men in strip clubs respond to the fake stimulations of the lights; music, costumes, make up, podium and pole and the stimulation of the other men. Shoppers in a handbag shop respond to the brands, the photos of models, the celebrity endorsements and the stimulation of the other shopper’s stimulation. Politicians, artists and musicians must have the conditioned stimulation of an origin story to be understood as an authority and as worthy.
Every living thing and every consumable object must be drenched in and floating on the saliva of newly trained fake stimulations in order to be reacted to and made visible. Pavlov dreamed of a world where saliva ran like water through all the pipes and gutters of the cities and irrigated all the farms in the country side. And saliva would drain through rivers into the seas and oceans and create new, ugly and completely inedible marine life.
MAIN PHOTO CREDIT ; Cameron Hayes In the End Pavlov Saw Only Bells and Saliva, 2007 oil on linen, 2 panels overall size: 82 x 100 inches Photo: Hermann Feldhaus Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York
Detail
cameronkhayes 
“And Mao said let the fish be for the heavens, let the birds be for the earth and let the people be everywhere and nowhere. And Mao saw that it was good…
Australian Galleries, Melbourne, opening May 30 6-8pm artist’s talk Saturday 3 June 2pm, show finishes 17 June
AND MAO SAID….
A narcissist experiences the world in crime sized bits – crimes against his or her omnipotence. For chairman Mao and later and alongside Madame Mao the cultural revolution was an attempt at crushing a crime spree.
RICE SACKS
Being just one in the biggest population in the world and your generation just the latest in an infinite number of proceeding more interesting generations leaves you with living a life of constant humiliation and envitability. For the people of pre-cultural revolution personal significance was an impossibility. The cultural revolution offered the possibility that their place, race and time was the most – potentially the only time, race and place of significance. Rice in general being one of the most important things in the world and world history but a single grain being the most insignifant of objects – rice became a symbol of the power of shared common things, ahistorical essential things, venerating the always overlooked things made the poor people who owned them feel at first special then as always follows – superior. People first dressed in clothes made of rice sacks then inevitably they just wore rice sacks.
DESTRUCTION WITHOUT REPLACEMENT
In massive populations there is the fear of disappearing – in third world politics there is the fear of being disappeared. Mao was shocked by the way his comrade Stalin was disappeared after Stalin’s death during the 50’s and 60’s in Russia by Khrushchev and his followers. Mao didn’t just see Khrushchevs in his government but he saw them in every member of his enourmous population,and in every statue of a past great ,every symbol of religion or europeanism and in every page of historical and creative record. The steam rolling and cementing over of cemeteries, the burning of university libraries and smashing of churches was for Mao and the people the ultimate narcissist fantasy of destruction without replacement.
GENESIS 1. AND GOD SAID….
And God said let the birds be for the sky….and God said let the fishes be for the waters and God saw that it was good. And God said Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness….and God saw that it was good.
Mao and his followers could change the course of rivers, the height of mountains and even the populations of mice, mosquitos and certain types of sparrows. Because they destroyed all the ornamental fish ponds in China, Mao’s red guards had to pile up plastic bags half filled with water and gold fish until they reached the sky. Mao’s war on sparrows meant that the land was covered in birds and Mao’s cult of personality saw everyone dress, talk, think and look like one person. The people could turn historic iron gates into frying pans and pianos into work benches and paintings into floor mats and university professors into cleaners. Street names, shop names and people’s names were no longer set by an alienating past and protected by a yet to be determined future. Everything would belong to the now and the here.
TRAFFIC LIGHTS WITHOUT INTERSECTIONS
By breaking away from his communist party and criticing and encouraging criticism of it, Mao exposed the great swindle of western democracy that of giving the people the choice of two of the same thing. During the cultural revolution and beyond, Mao created divisions in the party to give the people a sense of choice but when the people share a common one direction, choice or symbols of choice ; art religion ,fashion ect… became merely decorations like traffic lights on a road that has no intersections.
TERRACOTTA WARRIORS
The cultural revolution was able in some part to turn the public and historical into the private and contemporary. The shared public humiliation of the previous two hundred years of bulling by foreign nations had the Chinese looking for a completely new way of seeing themselves and the world. The farce or tradgedy of trying to solve systematic problems with biographical solutions was one of the defining qualities of the cultural revolution. People high on the power to change the world to meet their needs turned zoos into supermarkets , aquariums into fish markets, farms into factories and people into tools..The fear of personal impotence was solved by the mass torture of exotic animals. Visitors to the art museums had their portraits painted over the heads of historically important works some not taking of their rice sacks covering their heads. The work done by talentless but well trained party artists.