Artist as Family: A Direct Action

Saturday, 27 March 2010

A Direct Action

The problem with so much of the art we see today is that it is reduced to the symbolic; it is a mediation, and is not really of the world.

What we are trying to do with our food forest project is say: abstracted life has lost its appeal, it has caused too much division and separation. With a forest of food as a public art work, we aim to show how art can again be of the world, a part of it and not merely a symbol of it. It can put back in, not just take and make waste.

Our systems, based on growth capital, have failed – resource wars, divided society, pollution, class wars, mental illness, alienation – and however glaringly obvious the fact of all this is, the level of denial remains in the symbols that surround us. Be they on billboards, television, online or in galleries, our symbolic medias are powerful and manipulative, they collectively report back to us that we are advanced and thoughtful people who can live in a world unrelated to the microbial world below our feet. This is ecological disembodiment, and the ramifications for this separated, abstracted life are proving to be disastrous for the planet.

As a mass culture we have been flattered by a sense of our own progress and sophistication, and artists and ad people have worked hard to keep this middle-class myth alive, but beyond the seductive veneers and images, progress, and the mediation of progress, is concretely killing us.

If we are to re-embed ourselves in the cycles of wild nature, and by doing so have a chance at surviving what lies for us on the horizon, then our symbolic and domesticated states have to be confronted. Our symbolic, mediated, head-only orientations require interventions by our bodies, and those things that are essential to life – air, water, food, soil, dynamic ecology, habitable climate – become again the things most highly valued and respected.

The project of world peace, to think big, is the project of dismantling the spells of mediation, symbol and image that annul, disempower and calibrate us to the dominant ideology.

Art requires a direct action that's no longer ironising and cowardly, no longer self-conscious, anxious or innovative, but rather real and essential; a re-embodiment of natural systems.

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About Us

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr. We live in Daylesford, Australia on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University on Djaara peoples' country.

We base our creative practice on our concept of permapoesis, which simply means permanent making or regenerative living – an antidote to disposable culture. We practice an art that participates in what it represents; an art of social warming in an era of global warming. Food ethics and politics are central to our practice. Generating food that brings human and ecological health and global justice is our creative call to arms, within the sphere of the local. We teach a unique skill set of radical neopeasant homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, poets, artists, video makers who also make music, but mostly we're a family who belong to a bloody great community and therefore we're much more than the sum of our parts.

Past and current projects

Artist as Family have conducted a number of fruitful projects in the past including '17 Days' (2009), commissioned by the Lock-up Cultural Centre in Newcastle and 'Food Forest' (2010–), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, our work was featured in the international anthology of ecological art, 'Art & Ecology Now' (2014), and we wrote the Art of Free Travel (2015) about our 400 day cycle adventure to Cape York and home again in Central Victoria, which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016. We continue to give talks to sustainability groups, art schools, university students and community organisations. We teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) from our home, at Tree Elbow University, which is the site for The School of Applied Neopeasantry in Daylesford, Victoria.

17 Days (2009)

'17 Days' involved foraging for anthropogenic waste along the coastline and throughout the city of Newcastle. Day after day we carried out the same simple task of walking or bike riding to collect countless bags of rubbish. We swam, played in the sand, picnicked, rested, communed with locals, gazed (as inlanders) in awe at the sea and picked up other people’s discarded refuse. After 17 days we had amassed a monumental pile of industrial food and drink packaging, which we exhibited at the Lock-up Cultural Centre as simply: the everyday detritus of hypertechnocivility as collected by a family on holiday.

Food Forest (2010–)

'Food Forest' is a public artwork that doubles as a community garden, a work that aims to foreground biodiversity and demonstrate that materially art can be generative, can be a resource unto itself, rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources to make market desirable products. In other words art can be generative contiguous with ecological functioning. Food Forest is therefore a work that attempts to blur the traditional western line between art and that estranging term ‘nature’.