RADICAL TRANSMISSION
Dear Komninos
my sincere apologisies,
my spelling is appalling and I will add your name to
the spell check list I am using.

I am an admirer of your compositions and have been so
for a long time. You have been a pioneer in this area
long before the rest of the mob. Your earlier animated
works are landmarks in the genre. I intend no
professional disrespect to you and your name.

I know what you mean by having a name ruined by typos.
You are probably lucky that you changed your name
later in life and have only endured the pain of typos
or mispronounciation for relatively shorter time than
I have. The Dutchman Johan Deumens, has me as Ruwark,
Antigone Kefala always writes it Ruac, so you're close
- Marianne Bailleau just renamed me after the Lativian
mountain painter Rawrich - and the mispronounciations
I enjoy most are more varied but diacritics will fail
me here.

What I was picking up on in your comments about space
is a very different topic though, and are you not
side-stepping a simple criticism and missing something
in your smoke screen.

Here in Sydney, 'space invader urban consolidisation'
is a very fascinating economic and social phenomena,
certainly a class warfare exists in the zone/s of
gentrification in an area like Kings Cross for
example. This really the same model the land surveyor
intiated in the colonial expansion in 18th/19th/20thc
throughout aboriginal Australia and the rest of the
Pacific. It is based on land useage and its value.
Simply a culture of economic values. The Cross has
been for a long while a cultural melting pot, where
itinerants, the displaced and homeless, the visitant,
the immigrant, the tourist, the artistic flotsam and
jetsam and the enigmatic Australian Broadcasting
Commission(TV<Radio and the orchestras) was welded
together with the high rollers and the apartments of
the establishment. But this is all changing now. OK,
the space merchants as they are called, invade every
inch, rationally. Many of these young yuppy
individuals are not locals but highly paid globalists
with a very set formula. Govermentally, there can
never be any apologies for these sorts of profiteers,
only compliance and due process. Space is the cancer
of modernism, all consuming, never sated, and always
needing more terrain. This consumptive tendency of
consolidation is as much a physical thing as it is
philosophical and it is a poltics of excess. Certainly
poetry like painting struggles high and low to come to
any relevant relationship this age of the consolidated
spectacle, media is the poetry and visual art of the
consumer. Perhpas the magnificents of the Olympic
Opening ceremony was adored because it was good ole
analogue pantomine. It was a theatre of cultural iseas
rather than a spectacle in the corporate design. That
attempt to represent the poetic essence of place was
generated by artists who worked with a sympathetic
political apparatus. It would have been very different
had it been run by the Conservatives.

Is not the cyber attitude not disimiliar or the same,
or part of this gross invasiveness of the economic
factor. I am suspicious of space talk, it is an
imperialism, disloyal to anything other than progress
and the consumption of everything in its way. I have
seen that Aboriginal people are dispondent,
depressed deprived because they have been small
players in the economics of colonialism. There's is an
economic model of deprivation. White Australia, such
as your good selves know it in philosophical terms,
you struggle with in poetic terms, ultimately in the
melting pot you mmay join the political struggle. It
is politics of language I feel, not of definitions or
complexiity as everything is and basically simple,
actual and virtual.

I also worry that your concept of an Australian
landscape absent of its indigenous people is
mystification.

You don't want to maintain the gate-keepers posture,
it is a numbing ineffective impotant state of body and
mind, there is enormous need for radicality in the
culture of politics at this point of time. It is
called radical transmission. The young are organising
actaul resistances to Glabal economic expansion the
cultural concepts of S11 in Melbourne are about
defining regional environmental and cultural issues
and 'advertising' employing the few resorces that is
legally allowed to them. I like that, for they express
complexity using abstract strategies they exploit from
the space in-between. I think that is where Henri
Michaux was in residence too most of the time.

(You know Professor Elkin in his forward in Karel
Kupka's "Dawn of Art" of 1965, said that, "The absense
of gardens, houses, and villages had led many
observers to underestimate the ability and even
humanity of the Australian Aborigines". And that was
was just two years before The Commonwealth Govement of
Australia gave citizen rights to Aboriginal people. Of
course Andre Breton in the same livre says, "Should
the untutored eye, by which I mean the eye uninformed
about what is to confront it, the eye uninfluenced by
the Occidental "way of see" that for centuries has
been the conditioning influence, be allowed to wander
over these bark paintings brought from far-off Arnhem
Land, it will find its reward first and foremost in
their exemplary harmony".

Komninos you said, "despite all attempts of genicide
and clearing of the aboriginal people from the land,
there are still other spaces where they exist, which
are not
physical, which will never be able to be conquered,
surveyed, sub-divided."

Its an interesting observation and comparing it say,
with the miniscule written accounts of the clearing of
Jewish Warsaw, memory is a quite magical conduit. But
the cemony goes on....and Aboriginal presence is alive
and well, and place/space occupation in much of the
continent is a reality, as is the languages, and
painting, legal challenges, it all exists and is in a
state of flux and constantly changes and adjusts to
the challenges of the future. Noel Pearson is
encouraging by asking all people to take an optimistic
outlook to build up the culture and people and
self-esteem. So today I expect that the families;
Rontji, the Entata, the Moketarinja, the Inkamala, the
Pareroultja the Landara and Namatjiras are hopefully
having a good time out at Hermansburg, and in
Milingimbi those family clans like Djambarbuingu and
Rirajino, Gubabuingu and Liagalawumiri, are having
time-out for a long-weekend and a Bar-B-Que on
Australia Day, and I wish them a good time at it.
There there man!

and as you say, this is just my opinion

cheers
Ruark Lewis


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