I make collages. I have been doing so since at least 1986, probably longer—surely I made some in my school daze?
Random if important influences: Hannah Hock, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Max Ernst, Gerald Keaney.
The collage above was made in April of this year using images and text from a magazine and comic book + glue. Is it a message from the unconscious? Is it some random stuff stuck together? Both? Neither? You decide.
In 1986, age 18, I made a christmas card that I distributed among friends and family. It was produced by way of cutting up newspapers and magazines to produce a collage that was then photocopied on a coin operated photocopier at my local: the St George College of TAFE library in Kogarah, Sydney. In part, I had been inspired by my older brother Martin who had made birthday and christmas cards in the 1980s written on the back of photocopies of quotes and phrases from books and magazines. In part, I had begun my long encounter with the fruits and flavours of artistic modernism.
Today, across the intervening years of rapid technological progress, I can still recall just how impressed I was in the 1980s with the possibilities I detected in the photocopier. At 10 or 20 cents a slice a method of photographic mass production was placed at one’s disposal. Admittedly it is low res by today’s standards. But the charms of this burgeoning aesthetic were not lost upon us. Indeed, it was a boon to what could be rung out of a photocopier, given time and experiment.
The same year I made my first collage christmas card I came across stories of André Breton and the original surrealists—for instance, in Lisa Golstein’s speculative fiction novel, The Dream Years. Soon after I tracked down a copy of Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism in the original Gleebooks in Sydney, near the lofty top of Glebe Point Road.
Thus, I was priming myself for making collages, among other things.
*
I will post more collages over the coming weeks.
Every Tuesday will be Collage Tuesday.
Or should that be choose-day (or chews-day?) as I will not only post new collages, like Today’s feature, but also choooooooose from my back catalogue of over 30 years.
Next week I will take you back all the way back to 1993.
fig. 1. Somewhere in Sydney, Australia, c. 1969 A.D.
The photo above was taken some time between my first and second birthday. That would make it most likely 1969. I like to imagine that I have been left all alone while the rest of my family has gone to watch the moon landing on the tele.
A few toys scattered around. Some pathetic beads on the inaccurately named play pen. The magnificent desolation of the family home. My sad eyes betray the truth of the situation, imprisoned behind a stockade that I learn to push around as I gain in strength. The literal prison that I gradually internalise and push around for the rest of my life.
I don’t remember the moon landings—and yet I do. Not from when they happened, but shortly thereafter. In the 1970s I became childishly obsessed with Project Apollo. I awoke to it not long after it ended—perhaps as it ended. My first clear memories of the space race are in its immediate wake: Skylab in 1973 and 1974. Puzzled and amazed by the few pictures appearing in the newspapers, a desultory epilogue with none of the fanfare of its earlier, grander cousin.
To my child’s mind, thirsty for sensation and experience amidst an ocean of naivety, Apollo quickly came to represent the apex of human achievement. The great adventure beyond the atmosphere, the first step on the road to the stars. Surely this was the old dream become fact of the science fiction I had already begun to consume; paperbacks passed down from my siblings on high: Robert Silverberg, Arthur C. Clarke, C. S. Lewis, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Philip Jose Farmer. And so on—all the begats in a newfound materialist pantheon.
The 1970s passed. And the inexplicable monotony and random violence of school became as familiar as the weather, as my growing awareness, awash with the confabulated fancies of just so stories of space and time, became fitfully aware of the adult world of work, economics and other miseries.
When did I lose the desire, that pressing need to be an astronaut just like Colonel Steven Austin? That perverse longing to be simultaneously less fictional and more fantastical. Would it be possible, in my onrushing adult life, to juggle the struggle with fembots and bigfoot while furthering Neil Armstrong’s mundane triumph?
The never-ending delays to the launch of the first Space Shuttle played a role in my creeping disillusion, as age and a changing world alerted me to how far we had fallen from the dizzy heights of the all too brief space age. To have missed it, even though I was born a full 18 months before the first human set foot upon the moon, was surely the greatest misery in my life before my eleventh year.
When the 50th anniversary of the moon landings rolled around back in 2019, before the pandemic came to remind us that life is far more fragile than the jokers who rule us would have us believe, I tried to reconnect with my first love. I bought Lego. I bought more Lego. I built the kits and tried to feel connected to my past—real and imagined. I even framed an old, National Geographic moon map from February 1969, replete with “proposed Apollo landing sites” dutifully marked out on this map of my future life in space. But I felt little other than the cloying taste of nostalgia, overripe for demographic targeting and other lamentable scams and marketing opportunities. Indeed, I made a fake ad in the style of the 1960s that attempted to summarise my critical anxiety and fascination with July 1969.
fig. 2. “When will all these shadows of god cease to darken our minds?”
The space race failed as surely as the so-called struggle between the East and West: one shitty system masquerading as communism, the other disguised as freedom. Both miserable mirrors of each other’s spectacular claim for human apotheosis.
Meanwhile, in the veritable ruins of the last century and more we wonder more about the unbearably hot days soon to come upon this Earth. Other viruses have invaded our collective imaginaries, none quite so bright or as faintly ridiculous as the childish wish to live out there among the stars. Still, for those of us unfortunate enough to have been struck by the bug, the fever dreams of space exploration and extra-terrestrial colonies that never came continue to haunt the bleak future that did arrive. And the paltry visions of the current hucksters of commercial space exploration does nothing to mollify this, only rendering more starkly what we have lost in all its aching, dayglow imagery.
For more information regarding the image, “When will all these shadows of god cease to darken our minds?”, see here.
fig. 1. “No doubt it played the part of transition from ape to man.”
The following first appeared as A Christmas Tales of H. B. Shamass, 1921, in print December 2017. Since then the meandering misadventures of that equivocal figure have been relaunched under the title of A Shamass New Year. As the day approaches for this years Shamassian missive, and amidst the percolating expectations I regularly have to navigate, I thought it would be wise to look again into the singular role Doctor Shamass played in one of the twentieth century’s pivotal moments. Indeed, revealed below is the gruesome truth that lies at the heart of that quixotic attempt to storm the heavens and refashion human nature once more.
* * *
“Shamass!”
He stood upon my doorstep. I had not seen him since that business with the underground Taborite sect in southern Bohemia—almost fifteen years.
In southern Bohemia Svobada had saved us, dragged us unconscious from the grip of the tele-ideomat in the town of Tábor. When we had found a cell of Clockwork Men at the heart of these machinations, buried in a hidden labyrinth near Žižka Square, Svobada alone had briefly seen through their mechanised visions of barracks like happiness. Now he was lost to us—blind, mad, wailing.
On the doorstep Shamass pulled at his roll-neck sweater beneath pale sunken eyes. The rain undercut his silent face, his imploring eyes. So I helped the Doctor into my study.
Within the plush velvet carpets and thick lining of books he sat and wheezed. I brought him brandy and, when he requested, stimulants. His vision cleared, and he held me in his gaze, his glistening eyes.
“Verity…” he managed.
I held him, cradled his head upon my carriage.
“I have seen …” he said and then drifted away.
Drawing upon a range of stupefacients he returned to us and told us of his various passages, his journey into the depths of what it means to be a human relation.
It was during a Civil War. Shamass had found himself a passenger, sometime actor upon an armoured train. His adherence to the revolutionary faithful became more tenuous with each day. He read the arguments that wracked the International, caught up in the revolution and its bloody conditions of being—accidental and planned.
“In the snow, during an unplanned furlough from battle, I found myself in a lonely corner of the Second State University. I stood on the threshold of the All-Union Experimental Zoological Institute (Annex) with instructions from the Councils.
“The building was more porous shack than stolid structure closed off to the world. One could almost imagine that the snow drifts were important supports, flying buttresses made of water and the ephemeral dreams of tomorrow.
“A single light stuttered above the door. This close we could hear the generators scream each time the light flickered, filling the air with ozone. I hammered on the loose door, it slammed open. The light and a strange humidity struck me as I stumbled beneath the stark light of the interior. A short corridor struck off ahead to a door. Beyond the sounds of machine and animal interpenetrated.
“What we found inside was inhuman—but human, definitely human. I cannot explain it any other way. ‘Nothing that is human is foreign to me’.
“You have perhaps not heard of Ilya Ilyanov, biologist. In those days we still fought out the revolution, defended it from its enemies without and within. What we did not suspect at the time was that the latter would prove more insidious and persistent.
“We had stopped the Allied attempt to destroy the revolution by routing the Whites. Meanwhile other forces buzzed over and amidst the dead and dying body of the armed proletariat. Ilyanov was one of them. Not much later he would clearly ally himself with Djughashvili; but at that moment he was building a monstrous simulacrum of the coming disaster of iron and wrought steel.”
“Ilyanov?” I asked.
“You know him as …”
“Jacks!”
“… my chief antagonist…
“We found him in the very centre of the building, bent over a creature shackled to an operating table. Part man, part I did not know what—hairy and thin and bent in a peculiar fashion upon a metal surface. Framed in reddish brown hair it’s face looked like no person I’d ever seen, ape like and yet more than ape. No doubt it played the part of transition from ape to man.
“Like all caged animals its terrified eyes bespoke a desire to be free.”
“The fabled Salango!” I gasped.
Shamass nodded. “The very one. A pathetic creature. More itself than any other beast of Earth could claim—and so, so lonely. Jacks, under the guise of Ilyanov, had produced what some would call the ‘perfect worker’—the total man of breeding and the mechanisation of fancy. In the open, under the most orthodox of guises, Jacks confabulated a future—turned the dream of freedom into a nightmare vision of proclaimed efficiency and despair.”
“So what happened?” I asked
“Happened…?” Shamass fixed me with his rheumy stare.
“Nothing happened, so long as you can call the lab being broken up and Salango… disposed of… ‘nothing’.”
*
There is no need to repeat here what happened to Lord Jacks upon his capture that day in 1920. Like a diminishing few, I swear I ran into him once—Lord Jacks that is—on a tram on Crown Street in the 1950s. I was getting off and bumped into him as he mounted. He looked back at me from his window seat as the tram clattered on toward Oxford Street.
And what of Shamass? No doubt this interests you more, interests us all. In the morning he was gone from the bed I had made up for him amidst the study, little sign of his presence apart from a terse note. “Don’t.” it read—all of his farewells said that. I never saw him again. I last heard talk in an article in the Dreadnought, telegraphed whispers that he had joined up with the rebel sailors of Kronstadt. Did he fight Lev Davidovitch’s murder troops and die?
fig. 2. Stamp from the other world.
More than fifty years later, in Sydney of the late 1970s, and aged beyond repair, I received a note, a bit yellowed and tattered no doubt, but recognisable—legible even. The stamps were all wrong. On two of them was repeated the striking image of Great Pyramids floating in ranks that marched off to vanishing. The Pyramids were suffused with a preternatural light. Beneath their bulk, a single craft, little more than an indistinct smudge on the stamp, navigated the waterborne shadows of those impossible structures. These identical, stamped tableaus were marked “Arrival of the Strangers, 1949”. The third stamp was less familiar. The three heads of a generic woman, man, and the necessarily generic Old One overlaid above a single phrase: “The Alliance”. The Pyramids reminded me of my too brief travels across the wastelands of N’lleros. But what of the Old Ones and their gossamer “Alliance” with the humans? Had Shamass really managed to escape death and cross over, to live on in the Other World?
Maybe. Perhaps. I’d prefer not to speculate.
And inside the envelope, written on the letter?
fig. 3. In the Hall of Shamass, Museum of Peripolis, on N’lleros.
fig 1. Monday, 11 September 2000, outside the Crown Casino in Melbourne. Much like Where’s Wally I am somewhere in this photo. The logo in the upper left is unknown to me, but I assume is related to the source of this photo.
S12 by way of S11
On September the 11th, 12th and 13th, in the year 2000, exactly a year before the more famous 911, there was S11. ‘S11’ was the campaign we protestors organised to blockade the World Economic Forum (WEF) round held in Melbourne at the Crown Casino. Looking backward on the year 2000, from the year 2020, I recall things of little consequence, the stuff of idle chatter and gossip from that time. We wondered—inevitably—what we should be calling the days after September 11. Was S11 the entire protest, or just the first day? And if S11, why not S12 and S13?
Still pondering such quandaries twenty years later, I was struck by the 20th anniversary mostly because people I both do and do not know began posting about it on twitter. Looking over these various comments, articles, pictures and other reminiscences, and ruminating on my own recollections, I stumbled across a mostly forgotten document on a mouldering hard drive. A draft of an email I sent to a friend soon after I returned home after the Melbourne protests.
Love & Rage was the group who I felt the most affinity with back then. I think I became a member either during or immediately after the S11 protests. I later helped set up a Love & Rage “branch” in Canberra. Among what I call the Love & Rage crew or gang in the email below, there were also probably people from the Revolutionary Action crew from Wollongong. When I wrote the email in 2000 I was not completely clear about the differences or relation between LR and RA. There was definite crossover. The LR and RA milieu were motivated by a variety of ideas that broadly were opposed to both Marxist and Anarchist orthodoxy. The group was a relatively eclectic mix of leftist and libertarian Marxist and Anarchist thinking, syndicalism, councilism, a dash of the situationists and post-situationists, feminism, queer radicalism, all of the posts (postmodernism, poststructuralism, and post-Marxism), and especially ‘Autonomist’ Marxism. I have written on Love & Rage, but only in passing, in an article called Dead Real (2013). I was also involved in editing a Love & Rage related zine called This Is Not A Commodity published in early 2001, and available here. Included in the zine is an eyewitness account of S11 by a comrade entitled S11: Make Crown a prison, the criminals are already inside. For more on Love & Rage, though unfortunately from a relatively hostile, syndicalist perspective, see two accounts available here and here . These articles are descriptions and criticisms of two different Love & Rage meetings in Sydney in February and July of 2001, published in Rebel Worker—the paper of the Australian based Anarcho-Syndicalist Network (ASN). I attended both of the Love & Rage meetings mentioned in these articles, and probably have notes on them somewhere, in some forgotten notebook.
Below, I’ve re-written my email from the year 2000 in part, mostly to clarify some of the more telegraphic sections. It’s mostly self-explanatory, and very much from a first-person perspective. Wisely, at the time I chose to concentrate on two distinctive memories, one of a frenzied fight and struggle with some security guards on the first day, S11. The other a clownish attempt to liven the boredom of blockading on the second day, so-called S12. That’s all it is, a fragmentary first hand account with little or no critical analysis. From the less than sublime to the more than ridiculous.
And so, with no further ado….
Dear K.,
S11 was a blast! It was like nothing I’ve been involved in before. Despite the cop violence it was probably the most “peaceful” demonstration I’ve been involved in—a testament to the sheer size of it. I heard estimates of up to 20,000 demonstrators on Monday the 11th of September.
Early on Monday morning I caught a train into the centre of Melbourne with some other comrades. I’d been staying at one of their places since arriving the day before. When we arrived in the city centre, I split off to go find the Love & Rage (LR) group from Sydney. I was a bit spooked as I walked alone across the grey concrete south bank of the Yarra toward the Crown Casino. The sky was overcast and dull. I remember thinking that if it poured down it would be a wash out. It did rain for a while in the morning, but not too heavily and it then it stopped. The first day was simply massive, we shut the Casino down and made life hell for the rich delegates and their willing stooge, Labor Premier Steve Bracks.
I was involved in some biffo, mostly on the first day. I helped hold back the horse cops on Monday morning on two occasions that were gloriously successful. The picture above is after one of those occasions (I can’t remember which—maybe the second?). S. was there at the first occasion. After that I lost track of him. I’m sure he was mixing it up elsewhere at the Crown Casino over the three days. I haven’t seen him since returning home. The last I saw of him he was handing out Texta-pens wrapped up in paper to assist in the beautification of the Casino.
Later that same Monday morning I was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the Casino. I found myself loitering around a picket line covering an access ramp to the Casino carpark, I think on the southern face of the building. At this point I think—I’m not sure—I was with some comrades from my town, L. and Z., not the LR gang. The picket was relatively small, somewhere between 10 and 20 people. This picket, away from the main entrances to the Casino, was not a very popular one at this point. After battling the horse cops I’d been scouting the perimeter with some comrades, pondering the possibility of breaking into the Casino and causing some havoc. A few of us had been hanging around a concrete ramp that led into a car park in the Casino. At the carpark picket the Casino’s private security detachment was relatively small, maybe around the same number as protestors on the picket, maybe not even that many—say around ten security guards. Me and my confederates thought this was a perfect place to break into the Casino, not much security, and no cops at that point. If only we had enough people to overwhelm the guards. Crucially we needed people who wanted to and were capable of breaking through. As luck would have it, at the exact moment we were discussing this, a column of several hundred protestors suddenly appeared behind us with a woman in the lead, a veritable new millennial Boadicea, eyes ablaze, hair streaming behind her, pointing at the line of security guards and yelling, “through the line!”, or something to that effect. I was electrified, who wouldn’t be?
Facing the column of angry and combative protestors bearing down on them, the security guards freaked out and went berserk, punching on with those of us up the front. And then it was on for young and old. The fact of our now overwhelming numbers should have secured us an easy victory. Unfortunately, there were a few people up front that didn’t want to be there, who had been caught by the sudden appearance of the column of demonstrators. I tried to help some of them out of the way, but it was too late. The press of the column of protestors was overwhelming, and the security guards had already begun to savagely attack us.
Unfortunately, because quite of the few of the picketers who were already there wanted no part of the flying column’s push to break through the security line, our frontline quickly fractured. All around us demonstrators were trying to get through the security lines. To be honest, I wanted to be fighting the security guards with my comrades, but I was also struck by the palpable distress and anxiety of those picketing comrades who didn’t want to be there. I knew what it was like to be in a hairy demo situation with seemingly no way out. At the so-called Federal Parliament House “riot” of 1996 (that’s what the law & orders called our mass attempt to break into the “people’s house” while the ACTU sold us out from their nearby “protest”) I remember being close to breaking when I thought I was about to be spattered by shattered plate glass amidst the crush to break through the main doors of New Parliament House.
Being at the point of the intersection of struggling demonstrators and security guards or cops is always shitty, even when you want to be there. It’s pretty easy to get badly injured by the blow of a baton, a punch or a kick. Under these circumstances, hemmed in by the sides of this concrete access ramp, and with the press of this column of protestors, the reality was that you didn’t have much choice in the matter, particularly because you had started up near the front on the picket line.
The strangest thing then happened to me and a few other protestors amidst the tumult. I recall trying to pull a security guard off someone only to have the guard turn on me. In the scuffle, the security guard who was attacking me, the young guy I had saved from the guard’s beating, and two or three other unfortunate protestors, ended up on the wrong side of the skirmish. Which is to say, behind enemy lines, on the far side of the security line.
We were precisely where the rest of the protestors who were struggling with the security wanted to be—but there was only three or four of us. What to do, make a quick dash to the door and get into the Casino? But just as we found ourselves here, so deliriously close to the entrance, more and more cops began to show up on the side we found ourselves on. Quickly the idea of making a dash seemed a bad idea. The far side of the security line was rapidly becoming a bad place to be. I recall myself and at least one of my other harassed comrades trying to placate the security guard who was still facing us there. I even tried to shame him for having beaten the young guy I had saved.
Somehow, we got back to our side of the line, with the rest of the protestors. But by such time our chance had passed, and the cops had arrived to reinforce their beleaguered private security comrades. Perhaps it had been a crazy idea trying to break in at that point. Later we knew that there were at least one thousand cops in the Casino and several thousand private security. But hell, it would’ve been fun to have run rampant in the Casino before being caught.
At some point while the skirmish was still on we were treated to the bizarre sight of cops pulling some of the security berserkers off protestors. The private security had totally lost it, savagely attacking the picket and the protest. Which isn’t to say that the cops were much better, considering the yet to come brutal cop assault by the Tactical Response Group on one of our pickets on the following night, Tuesday the 12th. But on that morning, Monday morning, the security dogs were much worse that the cops.
With all this talk of columns and skirmishes and yelling and punch ups I’m sure I’ve given you the wrong idea about what S11 was really like. Despite the florid length of my account, the confrontation with the security guards took up all of about 5 minutes—it was a slow and frenzied time of abrupt and violent action. The confrontation with the horse cops earlier in the morning had been a little scary too, but then there were a lot of us, and we forced the cops withdraw. But mostly, over the next three days there was a lot of waiting, walking, talking, silliness and other stupidities. Just like in any war!
Unlike Monday the 11th when I’d been one of the wandering horde of protestors, on Tuesday I spent most of the day on one of the blockades with the Love & Rage (LR) crew from Sydney. By the afternoon my co-blockaders and I had become bored. To address the boredom LR gathered together and we discussed the possibility of alternate actions.
What did we discuss? After the Monday shutdown, we knew that the state, Crown management and the cops had shifted to transporting WEF delegates in and out of the Casino by launch. As a result, our blockades that had worked so effectively against car traffic on the Monday, were now more hostile encampments than a watertight siege.
The jetty entry points on our side were both heavily guarded and somewhat mysterious in nature. But on the far side, it seemed as if no one was guarding the jetty at which delegates both embarked and disembarked by launch to and from the conference. So, someone suggested in the LR meeting, how about we occupy one of the jetties on the unguarded far side?
So, after much talk and a little wandering, we did precisely this. We set off, running across the nearby bridge to the far side. But as so happens at times like this (like the carpark and the fortuitous column of protestors) a launch full of delegates just happened to set off and head for precisely the jetty we were heading for. We descended upon the jetty, whooping and leaping and shouting at the approaching launch and whoever. What a noise. Sure enough, the boat veered off and proceeded further down the river. Victory! Of sorts. The other jetty was too far away to stop them, so we returned a little deflated and desultorily back to the blockades on the other side of the bridge.
There’s about 20 Love and Ragers at this point. As we start back over the bridge, a cry rings out, “Delegate! Delegate!”. Someone has seen a WEF delegate. And then we’re all running back the way we came, but veering off toward an entryway to the Melbourne Exhibition Centre near the Casino.
I’m pretty buggered by this time, too many cigarettes god damn. I recall trailing the LR pack with C. We were talking loudly in cheesy Russian accents about our despicable plans for world conquest. The performative space of the protest is so alluring. We follow the rest of the gang into the entry of the exhibition centre, a through road that runs through the building and out the other side. As we pass into the road, low and behold we’ve stumbled into a cop staging area with tonnes of horses and cops wandering about. Strangely they leave us alone. It’s damn spooky as we wander through, as if all these horses and cops are a part of a conceptual art installation. And then we come out the other side with the rest of the LR gang to see the “Delegate!” in question being bundled into a car and driven off at speed. So, there we are, pondering our unsuccess, and I suggest that we get the hell out of where we are. So many cops and security float about—too many for us to get away with anything. I remember thinking that I should climb onto a nearby barricade and begin performing at the cops, in my best seductive movie star style, but decided against it in the face of some rather mean looking security-thugs near the barrier in question.
So, we wander off, back through the exhibition centre. But sure enough the call goes up again, “Delegates! Delegates!” rings out and the point of the LR gang are running up a ramp that takes you into the bowels of the building. By the time I arrive at the top of the ramp the Love and Ragers are plastered against a glass wall that looks upon an escalator void in the building. All of the comrades plastered against the glass are hammering on it and shouting, “scum! scum!”. As I stand there, bashing on the glass and yelling insults at the besuited figures crowded onto the escalator, I notice that they are all women. All of them. Not a single man on the escalator. Pretty much we all begin to realise this at the same time, and our thumping and yelling starts to diminish. The women on the escalator look at us strangely, their faces a mix of fear and disgust.
It’s another conference entirely. Fuck! As we walk away, embarrassed and a little ashamed, a door pops open from the exhibition centre. A woman exits, looking a little frazzled, one of those we shouted at on the escalator. One of our number calls out, jokingly, “that’ll teach ya for going to a conference!”. More usefully, a comrade walks up and reads the conference logo on her backpack: they call back, “It says The Nth Women’s International Conference on Healing”. Fuck! And then there are more women, all attendees of the conference on healing pouring through the exit, past the remorseful and shamed eyes of their onetime attackers. We all, simultaneously, start calling out apologies, “sorry!”, “so sorry!”, “we thought you were from the WEF!” etc., etc.
Having, hopefully, learnt our lesson, we shuffled back to the blockade of the Casino with our collective tails in hand. Whoops! And let us never speak of this again… until now!
Yours,
signed, Me.
sf & critical theory join forces to destroy the present
the sinister science 