Constellations on the Horizon

Society of the OCD'd Late capitalism, the society that we inhabit in the privileged West, is a society rife with repetition. Since the Enlightenment, specialisation. has come to be seen as a good in itself. The Jack of all trades, is a master of none. In its imperative dominance of nature, this society has privileged repetition above all else as a way towards perfection. Art is no different. In Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti we see the artist as obsessive compulsive. Gauguin is concerned with two things, to be sure, but both to the same purpose. Firstly he is obsessed with painting and secondly with finding the truly pure existence along side his idol, the noble savage of the French colony of Polynesian Tahiti. He has no insight into his drivenness towards the heavily familial tribe that accepts him as a curiosity, or of the fact that this tribe is colonised bye his culture; that of France and the Western European project of modernity. He finds comfort in the primitive and he

In a way it's great to have a post that no one reads. I mean, I can write whatever I like and no one will ever know. Or will they? I suppose one day, someone, somewhere will stumble across what I have written and published and glean something from what I have taken the time to put down on my pixellated screen. Well, here's to that day. So now, for what it's worth, I have cleared the political flotsam and jetsam and left a path towards developing an aesthetic. Many people in Australia poo-poo the very idea of having an aesthetic, or a discussion on the matter in any case. It reminds me a bit of a quote by Bertrand Russell from memory, to the effect that a person with no philosophy is over a hundred years out of date. I think it's fair to say that much Australian art suffers because of this prevalent anti-intellectualism. A cursory trip around Melbourne's galleries for instance, will reveal a surfeit  of  what appears to be superlative works. And in a way they a