MCA 1997
at the Ian Burn show

    there’s a badly recorded

b&w video of Ian Burn

    & colleagues     performing

anti-authoritarian art spiels—

drumkit, keyboards, guitar, voice—

    it’s the ‘Art & Language’ days,

the mid-seventies—recorded

    most likely, on a Sony portapak

        (I set one up—a tripod

    in the lounge room

        of our communal house

& let it run     full twenty-minute

        brackets     to film quotidian comings

    & goings).

ah—here’s Terry Smith

    with plenty of hair—a stringy beard

&, possibly, an Afro—singing along

        in the refrain—

“…ee…gal–it–tar–i–an…ism…!”

        gustily.

I’m chuckling now—this is

    amazingly cheering—I feel

        it’s my culture—or was—&, easily

    could become

                      karaoke!

as it contains, for me,

    equivalent nostalgia.

ingenuous, idealistic

                            and schismatic!

direct-action practising populist artists

    (anti-institutional-intellectual-academy)

vs

theoretical conceptual post-object artists

    (yet not always nor certainly pro-academic)

it was my schism too,     our exegesis,

        “artists think”?     well, maybe—

they did,             for a decade

all under the same

                                     tin roof