Tetherd Cow Ahead

I know you have all been waiting breathlessly for the second stop in the Bad Public Art Tour of Sydney and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed as we pull over here in Kings Cross just east of the city centre. Cameras on the ready?

This nine year old piece is one of the more controversial on our tour, and the controversy continues even to this day. Unveiled in 1998 to howls of outrage, sculptor Ken Unsworth’s ‘Stones Against the Sky’ quickly earned the alternative title ‘Poo On Sticks’.

There’s no getting around it. This is a monumentally ugly sculpture. If you have some idea of Unsworth’s other work, you can see what the general object was, but it has to be said that here he has failed spectacularly. In Unsworth’s defense, there was evidently an original plan for the sculpture to be sited among straight-trunked trees, and perhaps that might have mitigated the awful spectacle somewhat. Outside that context, however, it is one of the city’s more miserable artistic tragedies.

I have to admit that I am in general a big admirer of Unsworth’s work. He makes art that is whimsical, challenging and humorous and I would place him halfway along a sliding scale between Andy Goldsworthy and Len Lye. His wonderful ‘Suspended Stone Circle II’, in permanent exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a delightful achievement, and the illusion of the weightlessness of its large smooth river stones is at once impressive and charming.

Sadly though, ‘Poo On Sticks’ is likely to be the most widely encountered of Ken Unsworth’s creations, situated as it is in one of Sydney’s busiest centres. As I mentioned, the controversy over the piece continues. It has in recent times come under threat of urban terrorism ((A group of art students calling themselves the Revolutionary Council for the Removal of Bad Art in Public Places threatened to destroy the work. And no – I am not affiliated with this movement…)) and not too long ago it was clandestinely, and, I believe, with no consultation with the artist, given a drab coat of slate-grey paint (admittedly this does have the effect of removing the resemblance to big lumps of excrement, the boulders having been originally painted a shade of turd brown, but it does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the hideousness).

The moral to this story – when creating works for public display first ask yourself this question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how close is my work to the physical resemblance of bodily waste?”

If you’re pushing 6, start again.

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Photographs ©Ginger Stick 2007 – thanks Cissy Strutt

In a reasonably crowded shopping mall this morning, man talking loudly on mobile phone:

Hey Mike, what’s the entry code for the Nelson Street Studio?¹ No. Yeah. Uh-huh. No – Nelson Street. Annandale. Across the road from the church. Yeah? 4523? OK. Great! Thanks.

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¹The details of this exchange have been altered to protect the dimwitted.

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Valentine’s Day 1961. Morty Crepe makes final adjustments immediately prior to the launch of the ambitious, yet ultimately fatally miscalculated Love Potion #8.

He never showed his face in public again.

I bought these ‘pesto’ scones for lunch today. They taste really good.

But now I’m wondering how I tell if they go mouldy…

Q: What’s the difference between John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia and a weasel?

A: One is a secretive, sharp-toothed, dimwitted opportunistic scavenger and the other is a small furry mammal.

I hate this man.

There are not many people for whom I reserve that strong a negative feeling. But I hate John Howard.

Why? Because he is (amongst other things) a small minded, short-sighted, stupid, materialistic, sycophantic little bureaucrat who through animal cunning and cynical manipulation has found himself with altogether too much power.

I hate him usually, but this morning I hate him with even more vehemence because yesterday, in a nationally televised interview, he voiced this opinion regarding Barack Obama’s announcement of nomination for the US Presidency:

‘If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.’

It took me a night’s worth of thinking to work out exactly why this distasteful pronouncement galls me more than most things he says. It came to me at about 3am:

I think John Howard really would prefer that fundamentalist radicals caused chaos in the world if a progressive black man takes control of the American Nation. So he could gloat. You can’t read it any other way. That kind of thinking is the thinking of a child, or a sociopath. Perhaps even a psychopath. No balanced, normal individual who really cares about the state of the world would make such a judgmental and odious declaration. That’s a statement that says ‘If I can’t play I hope youse all have a really bad time and lots of rotten things happen and pus comes out your nose and you die and go to hell. Nyah nyah nyah.’

It is the distasteful spluttering of a small person. It is the ungracious and disagreeable whining of a tiny intellect infected with inferior morals.

John Howard, you are a pathetic excuse for a man, let alone the leader of a nation.

Where are all the people of real principle, the visionaries, the courageous thinkers, the Statesmen? Oh how we need you right now.

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UPDATE: To my immense disappointment, Barack Obama responded to John Howard this morning in an equally feeble way:

‘I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops in Iraq, and my understanding is Mr Howard has deployed 1,400, so if he is … to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq.’

I’ve seen children behave in a more dignified manner. Mr Obama, you should have just ignored the little turd. He’s successfully wrangled you down to his gutter-level world.

That’s what he’s good at.

Some Questions, Some Answers and Some Observations

Sally sent me this today, and I am forced to make the assumption that Sally is in cahoots with Fountain-In-The-City on account of the strikingly similar accomplishments in the field of graphic arts displayed in The Secret Key and The Prophetic Code (of which you will recall I have spoken previously).

Let us begin.

The Questions: (if you feel so inclined, read them out loud in a deep reverberant voice for full effect):

What is The Secret Key?

I don’t know, but judging by the picture it gets you into a room with retina-scorching bright light. I am not entirely sure why this would be desirable.

Did you see the Oprah Show about the Law of Attraction?

No. Unless it was the one where Tom Cruise went bananas jumping up and down on the couch. I’ve seen that one. Is that typical of the level of credibility of Oprah shows?

Have you seen the movies The Secret or What the Bleep?

No. But I am familiar with the kind of dopey pseudo-science claptrap they peddle. Does that help?

Some Observations:

OK, this is what I deduce from a semiotic reading of this image: The man in the picture is definitely in need of The Secret Key. At least, he really needs to get into the room with the all the Persil-level luminance since he’s evidently having a lot of trouble making out his Ancient Wisdom by the light of a solitary candle. The hourglass is telling me that he’s running out of time, and the globe of the world under his arm obviously indicates a trip to foreign climes, perhaps to join forces with Tom Cruise on one of L. Ron Hubbard’s old ships to look for hidden treasure. The thing in the top left of frame looks suspiciously like a mandrake root and from this I conclude he intends (once he has some decent lighting) to make an homonculus. He possibly intends the homonculus to be interviewed by Oprah.

Aha! The whole thing falls into place! It’s so frighteningly clear that I knew exactly what I would see when I clicked on the link!

Did you?