A Residency at the Big Ci in Bilpin Australia
“You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of ready-mades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.”
Marcel Duchamp
I wrote another essay about this in the essay section of my website but now that I am approaching the end of the residency and have five days left, I have some other thoughts on the experience and what I made.
Duchamp’s ready-mades were detached and ironic and Beuys were personal, emotive, intellectual and about healing himself and society.
“I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time.”
Joseph Beuys
There are several elements to the residue of my studio work here at the Big Ci. There is a blue neon sign saying compassion that boils down to a single word a whole Buddhist philosophy inspired by the Dalai Lama, a video of me dressed as Charlie Chaplin reading a book of drawings about the Obama family and six large scale drawings with oil crayons that feature text and portraits.
There is, also six white t-shirts with hand drawn text and portraits and two large A0 photos of me wearing the t-shirts bare foot in the bush with gumtrees behind me and bark and leaves under foot.
On the open studio day, I shall be dressed as Joseph Beuys. Kurt Cobain said “It’s a waste of the person who you are trying to be someone else. “
I like this quote but to get my obsession with Beuys out of my system I intend to dress up as him.
