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
“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
Chinese restaurant in Xinjiang province : versions 1 and 2
In 2008 I was in Xinjiang province in the northwest of China. Xinjiang was the last province incorporated into modern China by Moa it was mainly full of farmer Muslims from the neighboring….stans they are called Uyghurs, or Uighurs or Uigurs pronounced wee-gars. The CCP is trying to breed out the Uyghurs by subsidizing Han (native Chinese ) Chinese to move to Xinjiang and take all the powerful jobs at the same time jailing (re-educating ) as many Uyghurs as they can without attracting too much criticism. The painting shows a Han Chinese business party at a traditional Uyghur restaurant. The Uyghur restaurant owner is carrying another sheep to be slaughtered for the Chinese through the restaurant, the sheep starts crying when it sees his family members on the plates of the Chinese business party – amixture of fear for himself and grief for his family.
related picture about the Olympic torch relay through Xinjiang on 2008
Cameron Hayes
The Olympic Torch Relay in Xinjiang Province, 2011
Oil on linen
80 x 80 inches
Photo: Bill Orcutt
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Marriage Cake
life is a choice between loneliness and vulgarity
When you lie you lose a bit of yourself and replace it with a bit of everyone else AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES SYDNEY SEPT. 3 – 22
WHEN WE LIE WE LOOSE A BIT OF OURSELVES AND REPLACE IT WITH EVERYONE ELSE
At a funeral it is the custom to lie about the dead person and his/her life to the extent it’s no longer possible to identify the body. Even after death we live a lie.
Cameron Hayes
When You Lie You Loose a Bit of Yourself and Replace it with a Bit of Everyone Else, 2016
oil on linen
60 x 72 inches
photo: Vince Ruvolo
courtesy the artist and Ronald Felmdan Gallery, New York
.
A woman reads from a prepared eulogy- nothing lies like a eulogy – the mourners listening to it are trying to make sense of its parts and are trying to re-assemble the dead body is like trying to put together an IKEA table but they are confused by the contradictions and implausibility of the life they were hearing about and the life they thought they knew . Above them a couple sit exasperated holding an allen key and IKEA directions to a table with pieces that don’t look like they belong to a table.
In the centre of the picture there is a marriage cake, both bride and groom have already taken pieces out of the wedding cake and replaced the pieces with other bits of cheaper cake to hide their theft. For the sake of the wedding the couple walk down the isle already missing pieces of themselves in an attempt to accommodate their partner. The bride’s leg is replaced by a bike wheel her arm is a crutch, the grooms head a rubbish bag. The bridal gown’s train catches bits of the couple as they walk and two groomsmen trail behind with wheelbarrows to collect and reattach the couples missing bits
marriage cake
Some people lie so much that they become empty sacks – scarecrows. Their loved ones hunt around with lie detectors trying to find the lost bits of them in an attempt to refill real parts of them back into life. A giant public lie detector is used by many desperate people who dance around the lie detector in adoration with personal objects wired to it that they know wont lie to them ; pet rabbit, pot plant, golf club…ect..
A man with his pants down is thrown out of what looks like a public toilet, only to realize the cubicals are selling computers and the toilets are computers. Dogs are also fooled into thinking what looks like a park is a park- it is really a plant shop. A pet shop is made to look like a police station, market research is made to look like a school and a bed and furniture shop is made to look like a hospital. The beauty shop looks like a church with statues of Mary and Jesus replaced with six packed models .Art museums are fronts for gift shops. Even buildings are actively lying.
Loose bits of people are clogging up the streets and garbage men use people’s empty outsides as bin bags to clean up the mess, they throw the body bags into the dump truck and take the bits of people to the bucket factory. At the bucket factory bits of people are melted into plastic and moulded into empty plastic buckets so they can re-roam the streets waiting to be filled with lies and deceit. People are born as originals and die as copies
“By a lie a man annihilates his dignity as a man” – Kant. At the job interview applicants are seated in front of giant posters of shapes they are expected to fit into ,they are given the waiting time to self-mutilate so as to fit the required shapes they loose and gain body parts while trying not to drop the CV’s they brought from the lobby vending machines. Those long term unemployed have no uninjured parts of their body left and only their heads emerge from their bandaged bodies rolled around on wheelchairs
“There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity” – Schopenhauer .In the background cars are dressed up as aeroplanes – the lies we tell ourselves about the things we are going to do. The cars drive to the ethnic restaurants to who’s countries we will lie about going to and then to films who’s books we will lie about reading. Also in the background are cardboard skyscrapers populated by a single angry man with a computer who tells himself 1. That he has something important to say and 2. That everyone will agree with him if only they understood him. These skyscrapers have names like ; The Institute of… and The Coalition for …. and The Committee for…. and The People Against…..
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.