It took me 18 months to work out what Sculpture was exactly and equally as long to surrender my preconceived ideas about it. I quite liked the sensual feel of clay beneath my fingers, or the magic of plaster, but such activities were looked upon with a sort of glazed over stupefaction by my lecturers rooted in the establishment of SCA in the seventies as a Conceptual Art School. Making stuff out of clay, plaster or wood was viewed as being quaint and old fashioned.
In my second year, at my second semester 'crit' my lecturers said to me in all seriousness: You don't have to make anything Caroline.
It wasn't that my pieces were so disastrous, mostly I 'made' Installations from found objects strung up to the ceiling with nifty gizmos found in the fishing supply shop on George St. I found doing installations a complete joy that required limited skill to execute, which was just as well, and eventually convinced me that anyone could 'do' an Installation. I would walk the streets of inner Sydney nutting out how someone with my limited skills could organise an installation, of elements A B and C, feeling compelled to make or mould some aspect of it, even though apparently this was superfluous to requirements as far as my lecturers were concerned. It certainly wasn't a restrictive field. Here was Uranus in the 9th in projected form. Academia was pushing my own boundaries in terms of what I considered to be Sculpture.
Ten years later when I studied Ancient History, I was alarmed to discover that the period immediately prior to Homer's Greece seemed to have suffered an alarming dearth of women, but that this didn't seem to be of terribly much consequence in the general scheme of Ancient History as taught by the academy. I couldn't seem to get anyone terribly excited about a global phenomena where approximately half the population (a rather important half) had found themselves in great demand owing presumably to terrific short supply. But the official line was a given -- women were in short supply at the beginning of the Homeric period, end of the story. Later I got another bee in my bonnet about the unique differences between the lifestyles and subsequently the lives of the women of Athens compared to the women of Sparta but I couldn't really get anybody excited about that either. Again, it was a phenomena but of little consequence.
In 2009 I embarked on a 12 month diploma course in 'Organisational Communications'. I forgot, as we are prone to do, about Uranus in the 9th, which came out in full-scale rebellion at what I considered an insipid, corporate-arse-licking course, which promised much but delivered little in the way of much needed reform or an improvement in honest communications. I withdrew when I saw I was being trained to be some sort of corporate apologist. As far as I could see the root problems with industrial relations policy lay with the issue of an anachronistic master/slave paradigm, something I dismally realised I was powerless to do anything about and if I wanted to continue this line of study I would have to toe the bullshit line. Building bullshit on more more bullshit.
Uranus in the 9th will not toe a bullshit line. What would be the point? (ffs!)
Fortunately for me, also in the early nineties, in a living room, across town in Balgowlah, the most remarkable man I have ever met was giving lectures to a small group of 20 -30 people about exactly what Uranus in the 9th was seeking.
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| Gentleness Sleeps on the Inside, Installation by Link. SCA 1993 |
