'I think we are displacing our anxieties and our isolation into these received lives, and it's a safe and passive way for us to not have to think about our problems and the fact that we are complicit with terrible political situations.'

Sue Dodd.


Source:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/03/1078295442582.html

'WHETHER we regard them as constituting a sea or a cesspit, we're drowning in them. Celebrities. In their shallow lives and shabby deaths. Our media and our minds are filled with celebrity affairs, celebrity marriages, celebrity honeymoons in celebrity resorts, followed by celebrity adoptions (the approved method of celebrity parenthood, in that they can cast the child as they would a kid for a movie - as opposed to taking the pot luck of conventional pregnancy) followed by revelations of trips to celebrity rehabs and celebrity divorce in celebrated brawls conducted by celebrity lawyers.

We have celebrity defendants in murder trials and celebrity candidates for elections, and can watch minor celebs on celebrity quiz or reality shows. And if the mainstream media is momentarily distracted from their meretricious doings by war or climate change, there are always specialist celeb mags and cable channels.

If there's one thing the fans love even more than a celebrated and worthless life it's an appropriately tawdry ending, preferably by overdose. Though I'd managed to be blissfully ignorant of Anna Nicole Smith?s existence, it became compulsory after it ended. As are the lives and lofty examples of our thuggish sports stars (now, there?s another devalued word) and the antics of the Barbie Doll army. Not to forget those other role models - the drug-addled models who totter like derelicts up and down the catwalks.

Semi-talented rock stars, boof-headed rugby players who treat women like dirt and gross businessmen whose claim to fame rests on obscene salaries join the conga line of those notorious for their notoriety.

What's going on here Are our lives so meaningless, so lacking in imagination or energy that we have to waste our time, money and neurons on this human trash It's a serious social illness if for no other reason than these useless idiots distract us from the achievements of people who really are worthy of our attention.

All this came to mind when I was helping launch the Caroline Chisholm Education Foundation in Melbourne, a marvellous venture to help kids over the hurdles. Chisholm was a secular saint, one of those indomitable women who profoundly changed the world around them, whether that world was Madras or Melbourne, Sydney or the bush. In her day she was cherished as a hero, a reputation gained through her work, not through a personal publicist. Now we see her face on our money - but not one in a hundred knows a damn thing about her.

Yet who isn't cursed with the knowledge of Paris Hilton This trashiest of all celebs makes the trailer trash on Jerry Springer look like European aristocracy. Eliminating junk email isn't the problem. How do we screen out all further reference to this megabrat.

Real fame, enduring fame, relates to achievement - whereas celebrity relates to ratings, cover stories and social pages. I'm not saying they don't blur and overlap, that mass marketing cannot commidify authentic, genuine fame and make it into nonsense - symbolised in the T-shirts of Einstein poking out his tongue at the celebrity he'd never wanted or sought. The full-time celeb wants and seeks nothing else.

Fame is often an unintended consequence of work in a lab, a jungle, a hospital, at the coalface of suffering. Whereas celebrity is pursued for its own sake, pulled along by a dog-team of showbiz hacks. At fever pitch for decades, the psychopathology of celebrity now seems a terminal disease - eclipsing the work of the unsung heroes who cure terminal diseases.

The opposite of fame isn't obscurity so much as infamy. (Somehow 'fame' seems inappropriate to a Hitler.) In a sense anonymity is the antonym of celebrity but, on another level, celebrity is its own opposite. The word evokes triviality, inconsequence, worthlessness. The only good thing Celebrity has the shelf-life of yoghurt. Celebrities are tissues (you choose between facial and toilet) compared to the chiselled marble of enduring reputation. Though as a trip to Westminster Abbey reminds us, even marble has its use-by date.

We live in an era when more US citizens vote for contestants on TV's American Idol than for their presidency (and then elect and re-elect a dolt like Dubyah), in a time when Paris Hilton defames both a hotel chain and a city, when Madonna can happily infringe the Vatican's copyright, and the Dalai Lama depends on the endorsement of Richard Gere. You wonder whether the weather is, after all, the greatest of human crises. Isn't the gush and tosh of celebrity culture (sic) every bit as threatening.

With climate change, we might all be drowned by rising sea levels. But wouldn't you rather drown in seawater than in the rising tide of celebrity bullshit?'

Source: http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/phillipadams/index.php/theaustralian/comments/why_celebrity_portraits_are_just_fake_art/  ( Saturday, April 28, 2007)

'We live in an image based culture, in which most of the images we see come out of Hollywood, most of them are faces, and most of them are faces that have had cosmetic surgery. All of us are part of that culture, its not something that is going to go away.

Makeover culture refers to all sorts of things that we feel the need to makeover, so those could be; buildings, houses, our careers, our bodies and faces, our gardens, our homes, and I think that is what cosmetic surgery is about, its not about achieving a point of beauty that is static and final and definite, its actually about showing that you are a happening individual in makeover culture... that you are in a continual  process of self improvement.'

 Meredith  Jones - Author "Makeover Culture" 

'A lot of people like to renovate the house, um decorate. I like to renovate me, and decorate me. I don't think it's vain, because I mean, people may say its vain, but they have there hair coloured, they wear high heels, they wear bras, they put make up on, and are still announcing themselves, so i consider this announcing me, I hope.'

Joan Wilkinson - Cosmetic surgery veteran

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20061023/default_full.htm (16 April, 2007)

'But suppose we thought about representation, not in terms of a particular kind of object (like a statue or a painting) but as a kind of activity, process, or set of relationships. Suppose we de-reified the thing that seems to stand before us, standing for something else, and thought of representation, not as that thing, but as a process in which the thing is participant, like a pawn on a chessboard or a coin in a system of exchange. This would bring us back to the notion of representation as something roughly commensurate with the totality of cultural activity, including that aspect of political culture which is structured around transfer, displacement, or alienation of power. culture understood as an economy, a system of exchanges and transfers of value'

Mitchell, W. J.T, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. (1994, University of Chicago Press)

'Pictures are things that have been marked with all the stigma of personhood and animation: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively; or they look back at us silently across a gulf unbridged by language. They present not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder. In short, we are stuck with our magical, pre-modern attitudes toward, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology. If we indeed are living in a time of the plague of fantasies, perhaps the best cure that artists can offer is to unleash the images, in order to see where they lead us, how they go before us. A certain tactical irresponsibility with images, what I call 'critical idolism' or 'secular divination', might be just the right sort of homeopathic medicine for what plagues us.

Walter Benjamin concluded his meditation on mechanical reproduction with the spectre of mass destruction. The dangerous aesthetic pleasure of our time is not mass destruction but the mass creation of new, ever more vital images of life-forms  terms that apply figuratively, as we have seen, to everything from computer viruses to terrorist sleeper cells.  The epithet for our times, then, is not the modernist saying, things are falling apart, but an even more ominous slogan: things come alive. Artists, technicians, and scientists have always been united in the imitation of life, the production of images and mechanisms that have, as we say lives of their own. Perhaps this moment of accelerated stasis in history, when we feel caught between the utopian fantasies of biocybernetics and the dystopian realities of biopolitics, between the rhetoric of the post-human and the real urgency of universal human rights, is a moment given to us for rethinking just what our lives, and our arts, are for.'

Mitchell, W. J.T, What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. (2005, University of Chicago Press)

'It was an attempt to diagnose the 'pictorial turn' in contemporary culture, the widely shared notion that visual images have replaced words as the dominant mode of expression in our time. Picture theory tried to analyse the pictorial, or (as it is sometimes called) the 'iconic' or 'visual' turn, rather than simply accept it on face value. It was designed to resist received ideas about 'images replacing words', and to resist the temptation to put all the eggs in one disciplinary basket, wether art history, literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, or anthropology. Rather than relying on a pre-existing theory, method, or discourse to explain pictures, I wanted to let them speak for themselves. Starting from metapictures, or pictures that reflect on the process of pictorial representation itself, I wanted to study pictures themselves as forms of theorizing. The aim in short, was to picture theory, not to import a theory of pictures from somewhere else.

I don't mean to suggest, of course, that Picture Theory was innocent of any contact with the rich archive of contemporary theory. Semiotics, rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethical and ideological criticism, and art history were woven (probably too promiscuously) into a discussion of the relations of pictures like description and narration; the function of texts in visual media like painting, sculpture and photography; the peculiar power of images over persons, things, and public spheres.'

Mitchell, W. J.T, What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images (2005, University of Chicago Press).

'Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves onto the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from the old; the moment of importance came not here but there, so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work apon feeling and not upon conviction, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'

Woolf, Virgina. 'Modern Fiction', printed in The Common Reader, Hogarth Press, 1925.

'She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination'

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. (Wordsworth Editions Limited 1996)

'The cultured and facinating liar, is both an object and source of desire. The liar is important because he or she contradicts not just conventional morality, but its sustaining origin, 'truth'... art runs to meet the liar kissing his 'false' beautiful lips knowing that 'truth' is just a matter of style.'

Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence. (1998. Clarendon Press)

'I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.'

Bill Cosby (1937 - )

I view my work as working with artefacts, the magazine image is the original artefact, and by painting over it I enact a form of reverse restoration. Through the painting over, highlighting and accentuating elements of the original, I reveal symbolism within the image... but instead of revealing new colour and form through a process of removing dirt and accumulated blockages to meaning, as with traditional restoration. I reveal layers in reverse by adding, highlighting and exposing elements of the image, investigating visually and metaphorically the culture that created it.  I make a puzzle or fragmented mosaic out of an image that had an initial appearance of wholeness and uniformity as a printed image on paper, now reworked to be a constructed physical representation of the puzzling  and fragmented collective cultural and psychological space that we encounter on a daily basis.

Our individualist driven culture espouses that we all have the capacity to access the financial bounty on offer, if we work hard enough. That, we all have the opportunity to rise above our innate lack of financial security, if we are unlucky enough to be burdened with this journey. (Others, like Paris, have it easy it seems?) Figures of success (rags to riches) are held up as proof that capitalism rewards those who aspire for the pivotal symbol of success, money!  

But what happens to those who do not fit this picture? Who do not base their own success on these lofty ideals, if they were blessed with the opportunity and or the intelligence to do so? They are left in a powerless position that robs them of personal dignity. Through a gradual erosion of the welfare system and reforms of Industrial Relations laws (In Australia), this divide is sure to grow,leaving us who are not fortunate enough to have found a place for ourselves on top of the heap (If our ideology could allow us to do so?) begging the question, why?   

 Our social and cultural fabric should not be built upon a financial system that propagates social inequity - It should not be 'financial', it should be based upon building community and self sufficiency among citizens, not disenfranchising and disempowering people - placing them in a subservient role that ensures they are not able due to the position they are placed, capable of demanding for or actively creating a situation that is more equitable.

 We live in a barren landscape, the 'drought' is more than just environmental - it is psychological and cultural - as long as globally we are prisoners to a financial market that is detached from the 'human' and 'environmental' forces that in the end must be acknowledged - we destroy our natural environment, severing our humanity and capacity for compassion in the process... creating a disconnect with our ability to connect on a meaningful level, collectively and individually. 

You construct an environment, so if I deviate from your prescribed path I place myself in a precarious position.

I live a life consisting of pre-emptive measures, to ensure my own safety on the unstable wire I now walk.

You erode my safety nets, so there is no guarantee of my welfare if I fall from grace.

You lessen your humanity, and validate your actions by asserting 'economic prosperity' as proof of your 'good management'.

'In order to defend the position that current trends in world communication and their different forms of impact contribute to the disempowerment of people, it should be clarified what disempowerment means. The term 'disempowerment' literally means making people powerless. It refers to a process in which people loose the capacity to control decisions affecting their lives. Disempowerment is the reduction of people's ability to define themselves and to construct their own identities.

Disempowerment can be both the outcome of a deliberate strategy (the process is intentional) or the unintended outcome of human acting (the process is coincidental). In the case of the latter process, disempowerment can be the result of a series of mutually reinforcing factors that in themselves do not indent to incapacitate people. It may even be that acts aimed at enabling people have an unintended opposite outcome. Disempowerment as a strategy often employs the deceit of making people believe that existing conditions are desirable and preferred out of free will. The most perverse form of disempowerment makes people accept their own dependency and second rate position. Intentional disempowerment serves hegemonic purposes and is employed in a variety of social situations where some actors stand to benefit from the submissiveness of other actors.

In disempowerment strategies communication is often recognized by those intent on reducing peoples power as an effective tool. World communication furthers people's disempowerment since the major technological trend (digitization) creates new forms of dependency and vulnerability, the trend towards consolidation and deregulation reinforce censored access to information and limit use of knowledge resources, the trend towards globalization creates a cultural environment that victimizes people, spreads compulsive consumerism and reduces local cultural space.'   

Hamelink, C J. Trends in World Communication: On Disempowerment and Self-empowerment. (Southbound : Third World Network, 1994.)

'After all, if freedom had always had to rely on governments to encourage her growth she would probably still be in her infancy...

The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, as far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice...

Freedom is the concern of the oppressed, and her natural protectors have always come from among the oppressed...

And if freedom is regressing today throughout such a large part of the world, this is probably because the devices for enslavement have never been so cynically chosen or so effective, but also because her real defenders through fatigue, through despair, or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from her. Yes, the great event of the twentieth century was the forsaking of freedom...

Since that moment a certain hope has disappeared from the world and solitude has begun for each and every free man...

And because bourgeois society talks of freedom without practicing it, must the world of workers also give up practicing it and boast merely of not talking about it?

...In conclusion, the characteristic of the world we live in is just that cynical dialectic which sets up injustice against enslavement while strengthening one by the other...

How then can this infernal circle be broken? Obviously, it can be done by reviving at once, in ourselves and in others, the value of freedom - and by never again agreeing to its being sacrificed, even temporarily, or separated from our demand for justice...

The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates... humiliates the intelligence, and vice a versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation '

Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. (Vintage Books, 1974.) Excerpt from speech given at the Labor Exchange of Saint-Etienne on 10 May 1953.

'The purchased object seems capable of transfiguring itself into a variety of pleasures; ...The object conceals its utility behind an image of its real or implied value. Roland Barthes illustrates some of the properties of the consumer object with a three-part definition of the garment. He has suggested that any fashionable item, such as a piece of clothing, exists on three separate planes at the same time. It exists as a real garment, a used garment and a represented garment.

The real garment refers to the process of manufacture and design. Every object, after all, has to be manufactured and engineered in a factory, in a workshop, by someone somewhere. The real garment then refers to the economic aspect of the object. The used garment is the object decontextualised; it is from other places and times. [a sweat shop perhaps?] The represented garment is the category of greatest interest, as it refers to the manner in which goods are presented to us where we encounter them ? say, on display in the department store, or being worn by someone... The represented garment is in magazines and on television and film; it is in our imagination. We want to own such goods because of their tantalising appeal. However, most often, after we purchase or obtain the represented garment and put it on our backs (or in the garage), we are immediately disappointed. It does not truly resemble its image. It may still deliver pleasure, but it is not the same as that which drew our attention when it was only an image. Thus aesthetic illusion can be seen to have important social and material consequences.

With this analysis, Barthes makes the point that, in practice, we never encounter the real garment, as we are always in pursuit of and fascinated by the image, the aesthetic illusion of the represented garment. Each time we buy the object of our dreams we find, almost immediately, that its allure has faded or failed, and thus we become vulnerable to fresh advertising that draws us back into the consumer role, in pursuit again of the perfect item. It is at this point that the importance of consumption becomes apparent as it directly connects the private, personal and interior sphere with that of the public and visible.'

'There are various viewpoints on the effects of consumerism. William Leiss rejects the true-needs/false-needs dichotomy, observing that all needs are cultural and that there are no fundamental or true needs, making it impossible to categorise some human desires as more natural and more justifiable. He is interested in the ungovernability of needs, and states that even with an increased global awareness of ecological limits, humans are still attributed with a natural drive or Faustian impulse to find true happiness: 'There is no apparent end to the escalation of demand and no assurance that a sense of contentment or well-being will be found in the higher reaches of material abundance'.'

Finkelstein, J. & Goodwin, S. The Sociological Bent; Inside metro culture. (Nelson Australia Pty Limited, 2005.)