At a time when gates are being closed to people and trade; when walls ["I WILL BUILD A GREAT WALL"] are being raised rather than tumbled down; and when damning and down-stream water security is increasingly a matter of vital (life!) concern for many... we were interested last weekend to revisit one community's 1982 street banner, paraded in support of the (1976-1983) NO DAMS IN S-W TASMANIA and SAVE THE FRANKLIN campaigns.
Daylesford & District Historical Society IncFacebook : 4 December 2016
Margaret Leunig and Dianne Parsons spoke at the Museum on the occasion of their handing over the 1981-2003 Daylesford Embroidered Banners Project archive. The group photograph is of those people attending who contributed letters to the project.
The bloke in the photo, who had also stitched an alphabet letter, is holding a scroll from the LET THE RIVERS FLOW banner.
Below, the assembled banner leans against the old Victoria Hotel, ready for the 1982 New Years's Eve Parade : 6 painted scrolls, 16 letters, sign writing, a display structure and willing carriers.
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A bit more about that black and white scroll. This is it in the studio, a week before the parade.
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As well as the meandering black flower, there was also a text written in pencil, extracts from the book "Anti-Oedipus" :
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The full quotation :Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: "and . . ." "and then . . ." This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows. "I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund."* Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects. Every "object" presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object. Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing. But a connection with another machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or "sees" its own current interrupted.
*Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Ch. 13. See in this same chapter the celebration of desire-as-flux expressed in the phrase: ". . . and my guts spilled out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute."
Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow connective synthesis also has another form: product/producing. Producing is always something "grafted onto" the product; and for that reason desiring-production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine. We cannot accept the idealist category of "expression" as a satisfactory or sufficient explanation of this phenomenon. We cannot, we must not attempt to describe the schizophrenic object without relating it to the process of production.
Richard Lindner - Boy with Machine (1954)
The satisfaction the handyman experiences when he plugs something into an electric socket or diverts a stream of water can scarcely be explained in terms of "playing mommy and daddy," or by the pleasure of violating a taboo. The rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary production: the production of production. A painting by Richard Lindner, "Boy with Machine," shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring-machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical social machine—which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does.
- extracts from :Also on the scroll, the now-familiar formal meta-Title
Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze & Guattari (Publ. French 1972, English 1977)
from The Desiring-Machines, Ch.1 (translated by Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem)
as we follow the flow
to the see :
LET THE RIVERS FLOW
LET ALL THE RIVERS FLOW
LET ALL THE FLOWERS FLOW
AAA_Art Archive Australia
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Banner at the ready --flowing flowing flowing
keep them doggies rollin'...
Daylesford Community Banner Project, 1982
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detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
POST SCRIPT : On 5 March 1983, the Australian Labor Party won the federal election with a large swing. The new prime minister, Bob Hawke, had vowed to stop the dam from being constructed, and the anti-dam vote increased Hawke's majority - some federal Victorian seats were notable for having a strong interest in the issue . However, in Tasmania, the vote went against the national trend and the Liberals held all five seats. Hawke's government first passed regulations under the existing National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1975, and then passed the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983, which prohibited Franklin River dam-related clearing, excavation and building activities that had been authorised by Tasmanian state legislation.
However, the Tasmanian government ignored both the federal regulations and legislation and continued to order work on the dam. The issue was brought before the High Court with the first day of hearings on 31 May 1983... (continues here)
