brogan bunt

It occurs to me that this project has an ambivalent attitude to communication. At one level, it has a highly private aspect and engages with dimensions of silence. At another level, it makes all kinds of efforts to communicate – via sculptural samples, photographs, drawing and writing. Yet these apparent efforts at communication draw their energy from never literally constituting or enabling a communicative circuit. For instance, while these blog entries run publicly on the web and are distributed in print form in the gallery, I refuse to be bound by the hope that they will actually be read. I refuse to make it a condition of my writing. In this sense the work resembles my programming based projects that preserve a necessarily oblique relation to any form of communication. They pass through layer after layer of obfuscation and distance, to the point that any sense of communication seems tenuous or fatally deferred at best.

Ultimately, I have the sense that my communication is intransitive. It lacks an object. It cannot adequately produce or imagine one. It is motivated not so much by the thought of reaching another person as by an intimate engagement with the escarpment field. The latter demands efforts of mediation because the field is endlessly elusive. It is never simply itself.

Unlike the 60s land artists, I do not feel that mediation is extraneous, that it is only possible to experience environmental works by traveling to see them, because even to visit the works in situ is not to discover them as such. Any actual site can only be properly approached by rendering it in other terms. For my purposes, mediation is not only oriented by the need to communicate. It takes shape within the texture of things, events and experiences.

In the case of ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE there is actually no work as such to visit. There is only a set of procedures, their ephemeral performance, an obscure set of cut out door panels, a small collection of removed pieces, some photographs, a drawing or two and this text. Each element is insufficient on its own. It is only in their integral refraction and displacement that the work takes shape.

Within this context, my final summative walk is less the perfect, most authentic point of access to the overall work than itself a point of departure. Although I suggest, while standing in the mud before the first car panel, that no image can do justice to this place, it is only by walking down there, only by cutting out a square piece, only by taking photographs, only by writing about it later that I can attentively engage with that inexplicable scene.

I should note that I have decided not to suspend the cut out pieces from the ceiling. Instead they will be simply balanced against one another to form an overall line on a small, unpainted pine table. I like the idea that the overall table and arrangement of pieces may easily topple over.

I practiced balancing the pieces in a line on my balcony.

Balanced pieces

I am also planning to include a large version of my hand drawn map, which will be printed on basic white drafting paper and pinned to the wall. I am hoping that there will be sufficient wall space.

I will also include the sequence of photographs that I discussed earlier. I could possibly leave them out, but feel inclined to show them.

And finally copies of this document will be placed in a cardboard box or in a neat pile, probably close to the wall.

And finally here is the completed map composed of sketches produced at 15 minute intervals. It took some work to separate the pages and decipher the scribbled times in the upper right hand corners. I should note that this map, although produced in the interests of this project, also suggests further procedural trajectories. It seems the only way to draw a close to one set of procedures is to discover the inklings of another.

ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE map

For the past week I had not been thinking much. Too many other things to do. If the work was not satisfactorily finished then let it fade away. There was now simply the practical necessity of installation, which really didn’t absorb me greatly. Installation seemed to be the point in which the work became opaque for me, in which it fell apart.

But yesterday I woke up with a greater sense of clarity. It was windy and raining. Autumn leaves were spread all across our back lawn. It occurred to me that ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE is partly marked by the transition of seasons. The seven walks happened in the final few warm weeks of summer. Now there was a sudden shift to autumn. Now it made sense to do the walk one last time, to visit all the sites once more. To do this in the grimmest weather, with heavy rain pouring down.

Apart from returning to each individual scene of cutting and taking a photograph, I also had another idea. I would stop every fifteen minutes and draw a small map of the path I had followed in the previous quarter of an hour. Upon my return, I would assemble these fragmentary images into an overall map of the journey.

I dressed in appropriate lightweight wet weather gear and placed my camera and paper and pens in separate dry sacks. Then I put both sacks inside my day pack.

I left home at 9:15am, walking first up towards the Jumpers. I had the feeling I always have of starting up the steep hill too quickly – puffing after just a few hundred metres. I was especially aware of my breathing because I had my jacket hood pulled over my head to keep out the rain. The track was soaked. Rivers of water ran down the mountain bike track and pooled beneath the collapsed ramp jump near the fallen tree. I hopped up the muddy steps beside the boulder ramp, moving swiftly to stay warm and keep the leeches at bay.

I wondered how I could possibly get to all the sites in this weather. I was especially concerned about having to descend the steep forest beside the Mt Nebo slide. Bracketed my doubts and kept going.

The rain got heavier as I approached Mt Keira Road. The orange lights at the road block blinked on and off. I could see that I had some chance of reaching Byarong Park within 15 minutes so I switched from a walk to a jog.

There was a small National Parks cover at Byarong Park, but even then I could tell I was going to have trouble keeping my map drawing materials dry. I quickly sketched my rough path since I’d left home, jotted the time in the upper right corner of the page and got the next page ready. I had decided on an ‘Exquisite Corpse’ style approach, in which the last point at the top of any one page would provide the corresponding bottom point on the next page.

Placed everything back in my pack and headed off again, this time up the Ring Track towards the Jumpers. The steps were pools, but I was already so wet that it didn’t matter. Further up, waterfalls splashed down the steep bush beside the track. Everything was dark like dusk. I was half running, half walking.

Another fifteen minutes up just a few hundred metres short of the Jumpers. No chance to get out of the rain. Everything drenched as I drew a quick map sketch and risked a single photograph of the track, which had become a small creek. No matter that the image is blurred.

Track become creek

Followed the track up to the Jumpers and took a photograph of the cut that I had made in a blue panel (walk 5).

Jumpers - blue panel

I also took another image of the flooded track.

After the Jumpers

Hurried on again for a few minutes, but then realised that I had completely forgotten to photograph the other Jumpers vehicle that I had cut (walk 2). I had stupidly walked straight by it, mesmerised by the flowing path. I briefly considered not worrying about this omission, but then thought better and doubled-back. I also did some quick math, deciding to discount this detour from the current map drawing interval calculation. Within a few minutes I had retraced my steps and found my way down the gentle incline to the glistening green panel.

Green panel

This mistake reminded me to be more attentive. In order to make up for lost time, I ran the next 10 minutes or so to the lone white car panel on Clive Bissel Drive (walk 3). A cold fog blew in from the coast, obscuring any possible view. I drew another small map and took a photograph.

Clive Bissel Drive panel

An uphill slog back to Mt Keira Road. Feeling ok. Turned right towards Picton and Harry Graham Drive. The fog was so thick that I could scarcely make out the road ahead. Turned left at Harry Graham Drive and then immediately left again towards the Robertson Lookout walking track. Followed a power lines access road through deep pools of water to the track. Then pushed the pace again to get to Robertson Lookout within the fifteen minutes. I knew there was another small National Parks cover at the lookout, but at this stage it did not make a great deal of difference. The sheets of map paper were a gluggy, glutinous mess and I had to take great care to separate off any new sheet.

A sip of water and then descended the old forgotten trail that runs beneath the Harry Graham slides. Very quickly reached the rusted vehicle covered in purple graffiti (week 7).

Graffiti car

I decided to see if this low trail would connect to the next slide. Feeling a bit uncertain, I jogged along looking for any signs of burnt out forest and a high gap. Needn’t have worried. The trail led straight beneath the slide. Old tyres lay on either side of the path and variety of rolling detritus – soccer balls, hubcaps, bits and pieces of engines – led up to the wrecked cars themselves. The slope was very slippery, especially the barren section of ash just beneath the cars.

The rusted panel that I had photographed and cut (walk 6) was now largely obscured by a dumped boat and trailer.

Obscured panel

I was standing only 10 metres below the road, but decided to descend back down to the track and see if it connected up with the track that leads down to the Water Board trail and Mt Nebo. The track grew increasingly faint as I headed South. I grew increasingly concerned that it would disappear altogether, but it eventually came out just where I expected. I hurried as quickly as possibly down through the rainforest and the slippery mountain bike track, stopping just once to draw another map.

I could feel myself tiring once I reached the relative ease of the Water Board track. Fifteen minutes elapsed and found myself at the top of the steep paved section. I tried to find some shelter from the rain, but it was useless. Still, I managed to find one last useable sheet of paper and sketched yet another hurried map.

A few more minutes and I was standing at the top of the Mt Nebo slide. I committed myself to heading down. It was as slippery as I had expected and I had to cling to trees to have any chance of staying upright. Even then I often lost my footing and went sliding down the muddy slope. I hoped that it would be easier to get back out. Finally, I recognised the red panel at the bottom of the slide (walk 4), approaching it as carefully as possible to avoid sliding down further into the creek, which I could hear, but not see, roaring down in the undergrowth below.

Nebo - red panel

Just one panel to go – the very hardest of them all. By this stage I had become grimly determined and didn’t worry about constantly slipping over in the mud amidst car parts, lantana, stinging nettles and glass. And then there it was, right there, the final panel – the original white panel (walk 1) with its light lichen fur suspended in weeds in the middle of the slide. I took a photograph, but no image can do this place justice.

Nebo - white panel

The struggle up the slope was much more difficult than I expected, perhaps because I was becoming increasingly tired. I strung together a line of trees, roots and junk to haul myself back up to the road.

From there it was just an easy stroll along O’Brien’s Road back to Mt Nebo and the descent down to Valley Drive. I stopped along O’Brien’s Road to draw one more map. The rain had stopped and drawing suddenly became easy. I should have drawn another map on the final descent, but I knew I had no hope of recovering another blank sheet. The map had become an undifferentiated wad of pages with ink seeping everywhere.

Byarong Creek was running high but I walked straight through it, unwilling to make the long detour across the Koloona Avenue bridge.

Walked the final few hundred metres home.

It was 12.50pm when I dropped my stuff beside the rear door.

As much as I do my best to adhere to the various rules that I have established for myself in this project, there are always elements of failure. Sometimes it is because the specific rule only occurs to me in the midst of things. For instance, I decided after the second walk to keep all of my used grinding blades. I had already, however, discarded the first blade, so in the end I was left with just six. I could, of course, have just ground another blade until it looked suitably worn, providing me with an apparently scrupulous full set, but this would infringe an even more important rule, that I cannot cheat any of my procedures. It is not just that I am averse to cheating, but that the work depends precisely on attending closely to whatever it is that actually occurs (or seems to occur). Abandon this principle and the whole work collapses.

6 Blades

I must show this one image, if only to express a doubt. The image is a composite of all seven of the cutting actions. The seven sets of four images are each two feet wide and four feet high. They will occupy a whole wall in the installation.

I worry that they transform the event into something too neatly visible (and composed), but it is too late now. A kind of blindness pushes me to this visibility. Events become visible once they disappear.

Composite

All of my walks have been made alone.

A week or so ago, however, on the afternoon of the 11th of April, I organised a group walk around the large Mount Nebo, Mount Keira circuit. Visiting artists, Simon Pope and Julian Priest, together with Kim Williams, Ilka Nelson and Ailsa Grieve, joined me for a convivial walk up to the wrecked car sites. It was a lovely warm afternoon. We started out around 2pm and returned just before nightfall.

I had just completed the 7th walk two days before and at that stage regarded the project as essentially finished.

It felt odd to do the walk in different way and to discover different responses to the wrecked cars.

This walk somehow made me aware that I was not finished. Something more was needed. I wondered whether this was a long piece of reflective writing – a kind of project summary – but realised that I had nothing specific to say that I had not already said. I also realised that I could not write from outside the event structure that I had established. Writing was only possible within the context of walking. But there was no need to collect further car parts. On what basis then could I write anymore?

I could write about the plans for the installation and its practical development, but I have no wish for this to become a journal. These assembled posts do not simply provide a background to the project. They are intimately tied to it. I walk and I write. I have walked and I have written.

I have been advised to leave this writing out – to just display a limited set of documentary materials. Some have suggested that I am leaving no room for imaginative viewer response, others that I am making unreasonable demands on the viewer’s time. This writing risks then two forms of exhaustion – an exhaustion of viewer imagination and an exhaustion of viewer engagement. But I am prepared to take this risk. It is more important for me to avoid obscuring the total complex of practices that constitute this work.

Actually this process suggests new possibilities for me for writing. Writing becomes tied to action. It becomes an aspect of action. It shapes and informs other dimensions of action and discovers a renewed sense of openness and freedom by not being entirely book based, by discovering associations with walking, cutting and image-making, with all kinds of currents of ordinarily silent action.

I realise that the name should change. It should no longer be “A Line Made By Walking and Assembling Bits and Pieces of the Bodywork of Illegally Dumped Cars Found at the Edge of Roads and Tracks in the Illawarra Escarpment”. Instead it should be “A Line Made By Walking and Cutting Out Bits and Pieces of the Bodywork of Illegally Dumped Cars Found at the Edge of Roads and Tracks in the Illawarra Escarpment”. The emphasis is not upon assemblage (sculptural, symbolic, reconstitutitive) but upon a problematic gesture of intervention. The focus is upon action and reflection, rather than upon shaping a transformative aesthetic thing. In a sense the gallery assemblage of metal pieces, photographs and text represents simply another, subsequent axis of action, not dissimilar, in a way, to the action of cutting in that it also signals a removal, an absence, an uncertainty.

Back from my trip away and there was the sense of the changing of seasons – Summer passing into Autumn. I had one last walk to make.

Arrived home on the train late on Friday evening with a lingering flu. Showers from Sydney down to Wollongong and the air much cooler than a week ago. By Sunday, however, it was fine. No chance, however, to get away until 3:30. Day light saving time had finished that morning, so it felt later in the day. Long shadows and ominous clouds on the Western horizon. I hurried up the hill as quickly as possible. Despite the flu, I felt much better climbing today than I had a week ago. I was heading up to the long slide on Harry Graham Drive – the one that I’d seen on my last trip, but not explored.

I walked swiftly up to the Jumpers and then across to Robertson Lookout. I thought of my trip away – the all night drives, the hotel rooms, the volcanoes, the people that I met, the films that I watched on the plane. All of this made the walk go more quickly.

The piles of rubbish had disappeared from Robertson Lookout. Instead there was a nice, shiny Mercedes. No sign of the owner. They must have been enjoying the view. I half expected to see the earlier trash tucked into the bush somewhere nearby, but it had been scrupulously cleared away.

The Sun passed behind clouds and late afternoon grew dark and gloomy.

I approached the slide with a sense of trepidation. Once again I’d have to find some awkward way down through the adjacent jungle to the pile of wrecked cars. This time the bush was wet, so I was expecting leeches. I descended through a section of thick vines into the forest below and traversed across towards the cars. There were many more than I expected. It was a cathedral of dumped vehicles. I recognised the late model wrecked Land Cruiser that had been visible from the road, but was particularly struck by a rusted vehicle covered in bright graffiti. Initially I assumed that the car had been painted before it had rolled down the slide, but now wonder if it hadn’t been painted afterwards, suggesting that there had been other vandalising parasites before me.

Cathedral of wrecked cars

Settled on a portion of the door panel painted with a large pink ‘B’. My initial. So it seemed suitable as a found signature for the overall work. I took the usual preliminary photographs and then prepared myself for one final effort of cutting. The grinder cut smoothly through the metal skin. There was no backing glue or awkward bit of hidden structural metal. Once I made the final cut, the square piece simply fell out of the larger panel. A few more photographs and I was done.

As I traversed back through the bush to my original point of descent, I noticed a faint track continuing low in the forest towards Robertson lookout. I realised that this was an old walking track that had fallen into disrepair. So instead of ascending back to Harry Graham Drive, I followed the neglected trail back to the lookout. Then it was simply a matter of retracing my path back down to Mt Keira, the Girl Guide camp and home. I half ran down the hill to ward off the gathering darkness, making it back just before 6pm.

And not a leech to be seen.

Graffiti car

'B' panel

Cut out

Square

[Written swiftly on a sleepless night in the small NZ coastal town of Whakatane, prior to leaving at 3:30am to drive back to Auckland. It belongs in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE only in as much as it provides a general context for my current actions. I will not, however, place it specifically within the numbered set of ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE entries.]

Before I learnt programming or thought about walking
I used to build fences and simple farm sheds
- really just animal shelters.
Both of these involved a concern with lines.
Lines of wire from one spot to another.
Posts lined up straight via a crow bar.
Lines of uprights.
Lines of corrugated iron.
All material – I can particularly remember the heat and flies and
At other times the coldness, the numbness.
But also abstract – notional geometries, notional divisions, notional structures,
Entirely temporary, endlessly in need of maintenance.
So two things – the lived line and the abstract line.
The play back and forth.

I spent close to twenty years as a programmer.
In the end I could write a workable 3d engine from scratch.
But I have abandoned all that. Too old to spend time programming.
Too old to want stare at screens.
Too old to believe the elusive promise of “hello world!”.
But it was through programming that I found a way back to walking.
Although I have no idea what walking represents.
How so?
Leaving aside the meaning of walking, the multiple investments in this practice,
Programming led me to the problem of the iterative subdivision of simple shapes.
This led me in turn to recognise the aesthetic potential of mechanical iteration.
Art does not have to be exclusively conceptual or critical.
Art does not have to defamiliarise or deconstruct.
Art can simply perform.
Art can simply repeat.
Or, more precisely, art cannot escape these operations.
They are not the other of art.
Indeed art exists in this tension between knowledge and skill and
Performance – repetitive enactment,
Which always confirms and undermines repetition,
Which is strangely, despite all the manifest constraints,
And with no effort at deliberate resistance,
Also a space of freedom.
Of a freedom that happens within the interstices of
Determination.

So I no longer wished to have a neatly conceptual relation
To these processes,
So I wished myself to become iterative,
Which is to say open to the possibility of the event (Badiou).
So I returned to walking.
I followed the pattern of walking.
My aim once again is not to defamiliarise,
Not to estrange walking and the experience of space,
But to acknowledge within walking its own staging of freedom.
I know we need artists.
I know we wish to be stirred,
But I also want to acknowledge a field of experience
That requires no lofty justification,
That need not employ the term “art”
That is constitutionally aesthetic,
If not putatively.

And it may be that walking absolutely cannot be positioned as art,
Not absolutely.
This may just be an interim stage – a stage of reflection.
Because walking undermines not just the notion of a material work,
But much more radically,
The notion of an audience for the work.
Of a division between artist and consumer.
Just as walking is an ephemeral act,
Just as it signs an essential contract with disappearance
(The walker should never leave any trace),
It also does not require an observer.
Something happens but it disappears and does not need to be seen.
In this way, walking suggests a new amateurism.
Or an art without art.

I can imagine other, possibly smarter and wittier, works.

I could, for instance, fashion replica national park wildlife information signs that contain information about the nature of illegal dumping activities. These could be placed prominently next to various dumping sites. They may drolly refer to the nocturnal activities of the genus scumbagus wollongongus, etc. Additionally there could be wildlife tours of the relevant sites, with little brochures and maps depicting particular routes, features and views. But all of this, however potentially useful as an intervention, strays away from my genuine, unfunny, confused response to the wrecked vehicles and associated rubbish. That is why I prefer a less sophisticated response.

Remaining with my current strategy of cutting, it is clearly possible to imagine carving something more elaborate and precise, even whimsical, but this risks detracting from the naivete of the square shape. Crucially, for me, the roughness of the latter indicates a kind of failure of response. If it is eloquent at all, it is precisely in terms of its directness, simplicity and manifest inadequacy. It is as abject as the cars themselves.

No intention any longer to connect the pieces together with hinges. Instead I will simply hang them up from the ceiling in a line at roughly upper body or shoulder height. I am envisaging that they will be suspended by vertical wires at the top left and right corner of each piece. It will be possible to walk around the squares, but not between them. The side facing out from the relevant near wall will be the exterior painted side. The interior side, which is often in better condition, will face towards the wall. The wall itself will display a line of seven overall images, each composed of a column of four photographs. The line of photographs will correspond to the line of suspended pieces and will display the four states that are recorded for each cutting event: a wide general view prior to cutting; a mid shot of the uncut panel; a corresponding mid shot or closer shot of the cut panel; and a final shot of the removed square. I am also considering including a hand drawn map of the various walks and places where I found illegally dumped cars, but I doubt that I will have sufficient room. This may have to go in accompanying pamphlet that contains these blog posts. I am also contemplating arranging an actual walk that takes in all the sites, not so much as an opportunity to view the cut out panels in situ, but as a means of conveying something of the experience of walking through the escarpment bush – the strange mixture of beauty and desolation this entails.

I am also coming to the nagging realisation that I should be exhibiting this work in Wollongong. I will look into local exhibition possibilities once this Sydney show is finished.

So I had a whole day in front of me – all of Good Friday – to collect the final piece. That would have concluded things nicely. I am going away for a week tomorrow. But I woke up feeling unwell. Some kind of virus thing has finally caught up with me. The weather too has changed. It is much colder. I could hear the wind blowing all during the night and waves of little Eucalypt seeds falling on the roof and deck. So I decided not to go, to leave it another week before I make the final walk. Not certain about this, but it gives me time to think. It makes things less rushed. I was shocked by all the garbage on the last walk. Need to think more carefully about my relation to this trash before I climb up again to Harry Graham Drive and remove one last square.

To be a parasite upon an unhealthy host. To vandalise vandalism. To intervene by making an inconsequential mark. No point in cutting a whole car in half. I am not, like Gordon Matta-Clark, responding to systems generally. I am not trying to create something large. The squares are small, deliberately small. They are a size that I can easily carry home in one hand.

Ok, all nostalgia gone. Must get this project done while the weather holds. Indian summer can’t last. So though I hadn’t slept the night before, and the night before that as well – bloody moon – knew that I had to get walking or I had no chance of getting the two last squares before I’d be away for a week.

Spent the morning at work. Headed off up into the escarpment just after 1pm. Very hot. The pack felt heavy and no amount of pushing the pace seemed to get me into the necessary zone. Everything felt hard. I had a meeting in town at 4:30pm, so needed to hurry.

My plan was to make the big circuit – up Mt Nebo, then south in the direction Mt Kembla, up and west to Harry Graham Drive, north along the road to Robertson Lookout and back down finally via Mt Keira and the Jumpers. I was hoping there would be cars somewhere along the Harry Graham Drive section, but wasn’t sure. I had a back up plan in mind – if all else failed I would remove a piece from another wreck in the Jumpers – but was keen to discover a new site rather than just continue to move back and forth between the Jumpers and the Mt Nebo slide. Discovered a small green car panel at the edge of the track as I walked through the gate on the water board land up beyond Mt Nebo. Thought of just stopping there and cutting that, but knew that I needed to do the full circuit up to the very top of the escarpment, linking together all the various sites into a single walk.

The rough track up to Harry Graham Drive was overgrown with weeds, so much so that in places the track was scarcely visible. I did my best to walk confidently to scare off any snakes.

I was still struggling to move swiftly up the hills. My tee-shirt was utterly soaked in sweat and I regretted carrying so little water. But eventually I reached the dark top section of rainforest and came out at the derelict mining depot on Harry Graham Drive. No sign of dumped cars.

Derelict mining depot

Dumped tv

Just a short way north along the road, however, I came across a large slide full of fresh household waste and wrecked cars. An associated fire had burnt out a portion of the bush opening up a fantastic view of the Port Kembla steelworks, Five Islands and the sea. I tried to take a photograph of both the hillside strewn in trash and the distant view, but it wasn’t possible. The contrast was too great. The distant view was too bright and the sordid forest scene too dark. So I photographed them separately, though they properly belong together.

Coast view

Slope

I had to make my way down to the twisted mess of burned out vehicles, but could not safely descend the trashy slope. Managed to squeeze down through some tangled vines and then traverse across to an exposed rusted door panel beside a sordid double mattress. I took the photographs that I always take, put the battery into the angle grinder, donned my safety equipment, switched on the grinder and, taking care not to stand too close or to cut too deep, removed a square from the panel. Once again, even though I made a lot of noise and was working right beside a paved road, I attracted no attention whatsoever. More photographs of this incomprehensible place and then an awkward scramble back up to the road.

Only a hundred metres or so further I came upon another longer and even more desolate slide. I realised at once that this would have to be my destination for the final trip.

A little further again, at the entrance to Robertson Lookout, there were a number of heaps of household garbage. This area has become more remote and less frequented since Mt Keira Road closed, making it easier to dump with impunity. Clearly all sorts of people prefer to sneak up during the night and trash the local state conservation park rather than pay the new higher tip fees. Standing there, having seen this place deteriorate so much over the past few months, there was no way that I could regard this in terms of some blurring of the natural and the cultural. It just seemed like the most abject vandalism.

Robertson Lookout car park

Continuing on it occurred to be that the only saving grace of people who do this kind of thing is that they are not hypocrites. They don’t care about the escarpment. They don’t care about the consequences of their illegal dumping. They are happy to consume and discard wherever suits them. But what about me? I oppose their dumping and yet continue to consume stuff. Do I really imagine that there is some proper place to dispose of all my junk, some effective remedial process that makes it somehow safely and inconsequentially disappear? I guess I am confident that there are better ways than tucking it away illicitly in the bush, but how genuine are these alternatives? Is it conceivable that all of my junk can be discretely recycled without having any wider deleterious impact on the environment? And not only the environment that I may wish to walk through, but also the environment that escapes my immediate attention, that is way high up in the air or ten feet underground, that may be difficult to see or muddy, slushy, inaccessible and un-beautiful?

With these gloomy thoughts in mind, the square of rusted metal in my hand and an eye on the time I hurried down the final track home.

Rusted panel

Close up

Cut out

Square

A work, what work?

It seems to me that the work is constituted precisely in terms of a complex of ambivalent elements. Walking that is not simply walking. Cutting that is not simply cutting. Writing that does not simply represent events. Images that gesture towards the unseen.

And the set of cut out squares are just a residue. They are not a sculpture. They are a set of samples arranged in a line.

Note to self: read up again on Land Art.

Hunch: the Land Art tradition intervenes in the natural landscape to produce monumental statements. I intervene within an impure environment to produce small, inconsequential statements, phrased as simple, inexplicable absences.

Observation: so these cars have spilled down the escarpment hills on dark and drunken evenings (or so I imagine, perhaps the truth is less colourful and violent, perhaps the violence only takes proper shape when the cars slip over the edge – when gravity kicks in – perhaps prior to that there is only the dull thought of getting rid of an unwanted thing), but as soon as they halt their slide, as soon as they come to rest, they gradually become something else. They are absorbed within the forest. They become habitat for lizards and possums. Their skin grows mottled and less reflective. That is what I notice the most – the shininess disappearing, passing into something else – something that I cannot quite describe. Abject and desolate perhaps, but also calm and oddly transcendent. Transcendent not of the forest, but of whatever originally shaped their existence. The wrecked cars remain at once very obviously cars, but at the same time, as dumped things, as things slowly decaying in the forest, manage to transcend their identity as cars, manage to transcend even the sense of ruin and simple decay. They gain another indeterminable skin.

And now I am feeling sad that I have only two more walks left. Before I was focused on getting the seven walks completed as quickly as possible, but now would like to slow things down.