The Writing on the Wall

Against official narratives. This Watch This Space discursive noticeboard operates as a space for artists, researchers, autodidacts and amateurs to share the matters, insights, and methodologies that they think are most urgently needed in the world. These may take the form of research or creative works-in progress. ‘Curators’ of the noticeboard are expected to work with a mixture of love, hope, and urgency to produce a social space through which to address, and be addressed by, others. Each curator is responsible for providing content to be wheatpasted onto the noticeboard over the course of one month, before passing their role on to a person of their choosing, chainmail style. The noticeboard is intended both to intervene locally in Alice Springs, and connect local dynamics with narratives specific to other places and people.

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The Central Australian Pioneers Memorial

“The Central Australian Pioneers Memorial was erected in 1955 to the memory of John Ross and all pioneers of Central Australia. Also known as the John Ross Memorial, the memorial was restored in 1994 and is now contained in a metal cage. The plaques are very difficult to read and photograph. There is some graffiti on the memorial.

 The “John Ross Memorial Fund” was commenced with the modest sum of £26 in the bank. John Ross was Central Australia’s first explorer-pioneer, and it is therefore only right that the fund should be in his name. Both he and his small son, Alexander, aged 10, made a hazardous journey right into Central Australia in search of fresh pastures as early as 1868-9. It is a story that would thrill any Australian school boy. John Ross was also the explorer, who discovered the Alice Springs (on March 17, 1871). Immediately after him came the surveyors and constructors of the, Overland Telegraph Line. These, men constitute our very first pioneers. The pastoral pioneers of Undoolya and Owen Springs stations came next, in 1872. Upon authoritative suggestion, a site immediately to the west of the oval gates and almost directly in front of the Wilkinson Memorial, has been selected. This site would give the general public access to the drinking fountain, which form it is suggested that the memorial take. Situated, as it will be on Will’s Terrace, the drinking fountain memorial will serve a threefold purpose

 — 1. Central Australia could not exist without water, which our explorers and pioneers strove to locate, and without which so many perished. 2. From the historical standpoint, the site would still be authentic, as all parties must surely have camped in the close vicinity of the proposed memorial, once they arrived on the banks of the Todd River. 3. Wills’ Terrace was the first inhabited street of the township of Stuart (now Alice Springs), and its inhabitants were therefore all pioneers. Proudly then, if belated the effort, the ‘John Ross Memorial Fund’ is declared ’ open to all Australians, and in fact, to all people who have in their veins true rich blood of the pioneers.” Centralian Advocate (Alice Springs), 13th August 1954.

This memorial was unveiled on 17 September 1955. It was erected to commemorate the work of the early pioneers of Western Australia. The design, in the form of a horseshoe, signifies the contribution made by the beasts of burden. Beneath the roof are located the names of many of the better known and some of the not so well known pioneers. The central fountain represents the necessity of life - water - without which exploration and settlement would have been impossible. The four plaques on the fountain commemorate Members of the Overland Telegraph Line Exploration and Construction Parties; and Pioneers of the first fifty years of settlement; the Postmaster General’s Department and the Pioneering Hayes Family ; and a Century of Pastoralism. A further four plaques located on the outside of the seat, commemorate pioneer Lewis Bloomfield; Lutheran Church workers at Hermannsburg; Lutheran Church Workers at Kilalpaninna, S.A; and the Beast of Burden. The memorial was restored in 1994 by the Alice Springs Town Council with assistance from the McDouall Stuart Branch of the National Trust of Australia (N.T)

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Recorded onto Celluloid, Absorbed Into Memory: Confessions of a Makeup Artist.

(edited script taken from Permanent Shadows, a commemorative performance by Irwan Ahmett and Subarkah Hadisarjana)

My name is Subarkah. Although I am a makeup artist now, I started off as a painter. For me, make-up, dressing up and other forms of disguise are not so different from conveying the narration of history; accepted in lens, recorded into celluloid then absorbed into memory… becoming a permanent shadow for all who see it.

I was born in Pare, a small village in West Java, Indonesia. At the age of 9 I experienced a great shock that I would never forget. The horror was very clear, like a permanent shadow! It’s still there even when I close my eyes. I saw bodies drifting in the Brantas River. Mother tried to close my eyes, but that tense feeling still penetrated, it was seared into my eyelids.1

Why did they choose to kill them?

****** 

Sometimes in life there is no choice. I was chosen to be part of the film Production of ‘The History of the New Order’, which was later renamed and is better known as G30S/ PKI (‘The Treachery of the September 30 Movement/Indonesian Communist Party’). In fact, I didn’t have previous experience as a makeup artist. I didn’t expect to be involved in a state produced film with an unlimited budget, right when the State Film Centre was in the midst of its golden era. Why did they choose me? At first, I said No! I refused! But the letter of duty left me no choice but to participate.

The days of production of G30S/PKI were days full of both stress and creativity. All the limitations made me and the creative team more sensitive to the details of things. That which was captured on camera, incredibly, became moving pictures, which were then projected in cinemas. Various publics and students watched the movie, and sublimely, it was built into a collective memory. Throughout the New Order regime, the G30S/PKI film was screened publicly in schools and neighbourhoods annually. Despite the extreme violence it depicted, it was compulsory watching for children. Film production of G30S/PKI ran smoothly, unhindered by barriers of cost or permission. We could easily use real army members as cameos, real gunshots from real weapons…

In the process, I conducted very intensive background research, digging back into memories from dangerous years. I was given the freedom, provided in a bundle of magic letters, to visit mortuary rooms and observe how human bodies decomposed. Later, I had an opportunity to have a conversation with the amphibious force who took part in excavating the bodies of the generals whose killing the film depicts, the medical officers and corpse hunter troops who handled the corpses. The stories of torture were crammed into me. The horror caused by the enforced elimination of ideology. Sometimes, my creativity caused me personal issues. For example, when the artificial blood accidently exploded in the studio at night, red color was throbbing, flowing over the floor, causing a tremendous panic as if there was a big workplace accident. My brother once expelled me because I brought home some coffins containing fake bodies, full of wounds and rot. Fake flies were also produced, perching on and swarming the bodies.

For me, Arifin C Noer, the film’s director is a role model as an expert in imagination and a protective figure. His trust in me made me a different person. At that time, the director Arifin C Noer had chosen Katamsi to play as Suharto. I was trusted to choose Umar Khayam as Sukarno. Subarkah making up Umar Khayam as Indonesia’s first president Sukarno Once, after I had finished working on his make-up, Umar Khayam walked into a room at the Presidential Palace and all of a sudden, the housekeepers were screaming and crying hysterically! They thought Sukarno had come back to life. At such a young age, the pressure of working with so much blood and cruelty made me numb and depressed. Perhaps it brought up the permanent shadow from my childhood of seeing floating bodies in Brantas river. I didn’t know if it was day or night… when to eat, or sleep. One thing I rarely expressed was that I had to take antidepressant pills to finish the movie. You can imagine my masterpiece happened at a very young age, when I didn’t know the consequences of this movie.

The impact on myself… on the audiences… on the victims. The impact on people’s minds! The impact of propaganda! Today, I feel a different tension, like a river stream dragging floating bodies, sucking people who have no common sense towards a dark hole. There are some people who know because they do know. There are some who pretend not to know when in fact, they know, There are some who know but choose not to. The dangerous ones are those who don’t know but act like they do. 33 years have passed since 1984. The wind direction has changed, the world has changed. But I’m still overshadowed by one question. 

Why me? Why did they choose me?

Perhaps it is simply because it will always be considered crucial to dress up power and ideology in order to keep things under control.

 Subarkah would have been 7 years old in 1965 when, ‘defending the nation’ from an alleged coup attempt by the Indonesiancommunist party (PKI), the military led by general Suharto, seized power from Indonesia’s first post-colonial president Sukarno. In the first few years of the ‘new order’, as the regime called itself, a mass murder of suspected  communists, sympathisers and ethnic chinese occurred throughout Indonesia, carried out by both military and the general population. It is estimated that between 400 000 and 3 million people were killed during this time.

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WHAT IS KNOWN

Secrets are the opposite of information. There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are “public secrets” – secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself, like, “don't ask, don't tell.” The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are “public secrets”.

The public perception of justice - the figure of its appearance - relies on the public not acknowledging that, which is generally known. When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism, poverty, addiction, abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical. The trick to the public secret is in knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. 

“[K]nowing what not to know lies at the heart of a vast range of social powers …the clumsy hybrid of power/knowledge comes at last into meaningful focus, it being not that knowledge is power but rather that active not-knowing makes it so.” We fall silent, slip into denial, when faced with massive sociological phenomenon such as racism, poverty, addiction, abuse, torture, or economic and political forces like globalization, privatization, and militarization.

We are troubled by our own complicity but we do not speak because we know that “without such shared secrets any and all social institutions – workplace marketplace, state and family – would founder. […] Wherever there is power there is secrecy, except it is not only secrecy that lies at the core of power, but public secrecy.” The public perception of justice – the figure of its appearance – relies on the public not acknowledging that which is generally known. Stolen elections, illegal wars, and state violence could be described as “unknown knowns” – the unstated fourth term of Donald Rumsfeld's “redundant formulations.”

As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld – Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Logically, Rumsfeld failed to mention “unknown knowns” – the things we know but won't know we know, the public secrets.

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KAUNAS, MAY 18-19 1960

Despite limited public information about the young man who had set himself on fire in front of the Musical Theater on Sunday afternoon, word of his act spread through the city of Kaunas. People talked about it in their workplaces, in schoolyards and on city buses. Kalanta’s funeral was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, four days after his self-immolation.

The authorities announced on the radio that a forensic-psychiatric commission had determined that Kalanta suffered from schizophrenia, but other rumors circulated about the reasons for his death. Some people heard that he had killed himself as a result of a fight with his girlfriend. Others speculated that his death had something to do with the hippies who congregated in the city center.

Local authorities were concerned that the funeral, the time and date of which was evidently known by the inhabitants of Kaunas, would attract attention and took action to prevent it from becoming a public event. During the week, Party activists engaged in “explanatory work” designed to promote the “correct appraisal” of Kalanta’s death. Men in suits came to classrooms in secondary schools throughout the city and warned the young people to stay away from the site of Kalanta’s self-immolation in the city center. They emphasized that the young man who had killed himself was mentally ill and that there was no reason to attempt to attend his funeral.

In the days after Kalanta’s suicide, the authorities increased their presence on the streets. Police and Komsomol brigades patrolled Laisvės Alėja. In the square in front of the Musical Theater, men in plainclothes – assumed to be KGB agents – watched everyone who came by. Official concern of a sympathetic public response was not unfounded. Throughout the week, people attempted to lay flowers at the site of Kalanta’s self-immolation. KGB officials and police officers immediately removed any flowers left on the site.

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On the Madres del Plaza de Mayo: Argentina’s mothers of the disappeared:

from The DNA of Performance by Diana Taylor

The spectacle of elderly women in white head scarves carrying huge placards with photo IDs of their missing children has become an international icon of human rights and women’s resistance movements. By turning their “interrupted mourning process” into “one of the most visible political discourses of resistance to terror” (Sua´rez-Orozco 1991:491) the Abuelas and Madres introduced a model of trauma-driven performance protest.

Each Thursday afternoon, for the past 25 years, the women have met in Plaza de Mayo to repeat their show of loss and political resolve. At first, at the height of the military violence, 14 women walked around the Plaza two-by-two, arm in-arm, to avoid prohibitions against public meetings. Though ignored by the dictatorship, the women’s idea of meeting in the square caught on throughout the country. Before long, hundreds of women from around Argentina converged in the Plaza de Mayo in spite of the increasing military violence directed against them (see Taylor 1997:186–189). Ritualistically, they walked around this square, located in the heart of Argentina’s political and financial center. Turning their bodies into billboards, they used them as conduits of memory. They literally wore the photo IDs that had been erased from official archives.

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Week after week in the Plaza de Mayo, the Madres accused the military of disappearing their children and demanded that they be returned alive (aparicio´n con vida). After the worst moment of military violence passed, Abuelas and Madres started carrying a huge banner in front of them as they walked around the Plaza. With the return to democracy in 1983, they began to accuse the new government of granting impunity to the criminals. 

Using loudspeakers, they continued to bring charges, naming their children and naming those responsible for abducting them. They called the Plaza their own, and inscribed their emblematic scarves in white paint around the perimeter. Even now, they continue their condemnation of the government’s complacency in regard to the human rights abuses committed during the Dirty War. Otro govierno, misma impunidad means “different government, same impunity.” Each claim has been backed by performative evidence—the placards with the photo IDs, the list of atrocities, the identity of repressors.

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Much as the Abuelas relied on DNA testing to confirm the lineages broken by the military, they and the Madres continue to use photo IDs of their missing children as yet another way to establish “truth” and lineage. This representational practice of linking the scientific and performative claim is what I call the “DNA of performance.” 

What does the performative proof accomplish that the scientific 

cannot achieve on its own? 

How does this representational practice lay a foundation for

 movements that will come after it?

  DNA functions as a biological “archive” of sorts, storing and transmitting the codes that mark the specificity of our existence both as a species and as individuals. Yet it also belongs to the human-made archive, forensic or otherwise. This human-made archive maintains what is perceived as a lasting core—records, documents, photographs, literary texts, police files, fingerprint and DNA evidence, digital materials, archaeological remains, bones—supposedly resistant to change and political manipulation. What changes, over time, the archive maintains, is the value, relevance, or meaning of the remains—how they get interpreted, even embodied.

The scientific, archival “evidence” of DNA offered by the Abuelas was clearly central to their strategy of tracing their loved ones while accusing the military of their disappearance. Testimonial transfers and performance protest, on the other hand, are two forms of expressive social behavior that belong to the discursive workings of what I have called the “repertoire.” The repertoire stores and enacts “embodied” memory—the traumatic or cathartic “shudder,” gestures, orality movement, dance, song—in short, all those acts usually thought of as “live,” ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge. The embodied experience and transmission of traumatic memory—the interactions among people in the here and now—make a difference in the way that knowledge is transmitted and incorporated. The type of interaction might range from the individual (one-on-one psychoanalytic session) to the group or state level (demonstrations, human rights trials).

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The embodied performative dimension of these protests was as important as the scientific evidence because it brought attention to the national tragedy in the first place. Abuelas and Madres performed the proof. On a state level, human rights trials and commissions, such as Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappeared (which issued Nunca Ma´s [1986] to report its findings) or South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, understand the importance of live hearings in making citizens feel like co-owners of the country’s traumatic past. In-between and overlapping systems of knowledge and memory constitute a vast spectrum that might combine the workings of the “permanent” and the “ephemeral” in different ways. Each system of containing and transmitting knowledge exceeds the limitations of the other. The “live” can never be contained in the “archive”; the archive endures beyond the limits of the live.

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"ICONISM  The tendency to “iconism” still exists, even today. 'Iconism' is the habit of “selecting”, “choosing”, or “finding” the image that “stands out”, the image that is “the important one”, the image that “says more”, the image that “counts more” than the others. In other words, the tendency to iconism is the tendency to “highlight”; it’s the old, classical procedure of favouring and imposing, in an authoritarian way, a hierarchy. This is not a declaration of importance about something or somebody, but a declaration of importance directed at others. The goal is to establish a common importance, a common weight, a common measure. But iconism and highlighting also have the effect of avoiding the existenceof differences, of the non-iconic and of the non-highlighted. In the field of war and conflict images, this  leads to choosing the “acceptable” for others. It’s the “acceptable” image that stands for another image, for all other images, for something else, and perhaps even for a non-image. This image or icon has to be, of course, the correct, the good, the right, the allowed, the chosen - the consensual image. This is the manipulation. One example is the icon, much discussed (even by art historians), of the “Situation Room” in Washington during the killing of Bin Laden by the Navy Seals in 2011. I refuse to accept this image as an icon: I refuse its iconism, and I refuse the fact that this image - and all other “icons” - stands for something other than itself. To fight iconism is the reason why looking at images of destroyed bodies is important

Thomas Hirschhorn

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‘We respect your feelings’

from MAIN ROADS WESTERN AUSTRALIA Roadside Memorials Policy and Guidlines

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Art, art, you're a work of art!

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A Short Manifesto on the Subject of Defacement

To erect a statue is to take revenge on reality.                   

Contemptible consideration: Statues have a strategic built-in desire to be violated, without which they are incomplete. Defacement brings inside outside. It fastens onto objects as insects fasten onto leaves.

“I didn’t sleep much last night,” the other one says. “I knew it was going to happen. I just had a gut feeling that the bastards were going to come around and finish it off”.

Defacement is like Enlightenment. It animates the thing defaced. Defacement and sacrilege thrive on bringing dead and apparently insignificant matter to life.

Like sticking a needle in the heart of a figurine, defacement is seductive.

The public has brought disgrace on itself by allowing this filthy thing to be displayed!

Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language, and overlaps with caricature and parody. Does it destroy the object, or lend it power?

Defacement hovers between boredom versus embrace of the power of the defaced. Along with our weapons and our computer skills, we lovingly care for the Queen’s head in a nice box on a purple cushion as the centrepiece of a strange new cult empowered by defacement.

Money, bronze or a nation’s flag. Defacement of such things brings a very angry god out of hiding. This is the public secret.

The public secret is a banal situation where people dare not state the obvious.

Defacement is an invention that comes out of the public secret.

“This sculpture has been ceremoniously vandalised” said Neil Roberts, coordinator of the Canberra National Sculpture Forum 95.

“You’re totally bloody disgusting”.

“But organisers say it will stay. It is more relevant to be left as it is - as a symbol of intolerance, irrelevance, disintegration.”