Here’s a review published about another Weed Tour i set-up in 2002.
well, well, well, here’s the blog.
by now i have worked on the website/databse for about 2 months non-stop.
i know, sum ppl wip -up such a thing in less then a week, but i never wrote a website, therefore you can immagine the steep hill i had to climb.
nevertheless here we are, i probably will upload online this mammouth task within the next two weeks, and here’s the blog.
decided as a first entry to uploade a review Lucas wrote of the weed tour i did in collaboration with Sister Joan in 2002, mostly to show appreciation to a man which helped me throu this website task.
so, thanks lucas, n here it is….
Dear…..Out at the Kingswood campus of the Uni of Western Sydney there is a beautiful decrepid old drive-in cinema. It was operating from the ’60s til 1984, when the manager said that it was the onset of video rental stores that was forcing him to go outta business. (Diego found that in a local paper from the time – I love that such a document can help to pinpoint a transitional moment in the history of technology)… anyway its now owned by the Uni and they’ve used it as artist studios for their masters students, and a bunch of ex-honours students nearly succeeded in setting up a gallery in the old projection booth, but the uni shut it down and now the building is condemned. The whole site is pretty amazing tho, there are those undulating bitumen crests where you used to park yer car, and the whole area under the ex-screen is like a forest of weeds.It’s in this weed kingdom where Diego and Emma located their project “WeedKiller/PestController” – they created an audio-tour of the weeds on the site. You get a CD walkman and a glass of champagne, and follow the trail of numbered stakes hammered into the ground throughout the scrub. Cheesy instrumental tracks fade into detailed and quite scientific botanical data about the particular weed, its origins and distribution, threat to the ecosystem. It_s hilarious that they’ve treated lowly weeds with the same reverence as a botanist would lecture on rare and exotic succulents. And it_s really interesting, too, to note that some of the most common plants we see everyday are classified under the “Noxious Weed Act 1993″, and landowners must “fully and continually supress and destroy all W2 weeds growing on land for which they are responsible”.The analogy between weeds and squatters is clear to the artists…it’s just as clear that the classification of weeds is arbitrary, changeable and political (just as has been the introduction of foreign species (including European humans) into Australia). Weeds find a place to live and thrive, often in otherwise inhospitable terrain…I have a book of short stories by dissident chinese writers from the 1950s called “Fragrant Weeds”… Tonight Jane cooked “Foeniculum Vulgare”, Caramelised Fennel with Creamy Polenta – fennel occurs mostly “as a weed of wastelands, alluvial flats, river banks, roadsides, railway embankments and irrigation channels. It is capable of forming dense infestations which exclude other vegetation”. It is delicious.
[...] That said, one thing went by which needed more consideration. Is by now well over this blog first birthday, September 25, which you wanted to mark by re-posting a selection of past articles.. you can still do it, didn’t happen yet though. [...]
[...] The result is commendable and although you’re partisan as both the Uncollectibles and the Weedyconnection projects are featured, you really liked the nerve of the guy. We’re talking here of an art program who questions the reality of cultural activity within a social context using street art and unauthorized activities as examples, positioning them along side the high art which we , as viewer, are use to be presented with in mainstreams forums as the ABC TV. “We, as viewer,” is a bit of an over-statement as the other night when you went to a friends house to watch the program, was probably the first time you laid down your eyes on the biased media tool since the world cup (a year n a half ago), and before that the period of negation of attention was just as long. Regardless of what you think of the medium, you enjoyed the program. I enjoyed also very much the commitment of Marcus Westbury, who diligently went in a number of forum discussions sparked by the program and answered first person the difficult questions arising from it, see here. So, here is the link to the second episode, where the Uncollectibles and the WeedKiller project are featured. It’s quite long, so it may be a bit heavy on low-speed internet users. If you have problems you can alternatevily try this link, or this one from the ABC site, which i believe will not be alive for much longer, and where you will find the all series. [...]
[...] The first one was in 2002, a collaboration with Maxine Foxxx, in a abandoned garden in Western Sydney. Details here and short doco here. [...]