Crawl Before You Walk

The following work is part of a forthcoming partnership public art project (working title Crawl Before you Walk) between Architects for Peace, RMIT Public Art and one Melbourne University's architectural design studio. Works will be located beneath the Kings Way overpass, at the corner of City Road, Queensbridge Road and Kings Way, to be held on one night only on Monday 23 October, coinciding with the Walk 21 Conference.



“IMAGES DETACHED FROM every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation…The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.” G. Debord (1967)

Jaguar Lacroix is a new media artist whose work considers the paradox of modern life. She is concerned with the abject and the detached and the connection between this detachment and the necessarily irreconcilable notion of our complicity or culpability in this hopelessness.

Abattoir of Dreams presents two concepts set in the non-place beneath the appropriately named Kings Way overpass, at the back of the Crown Casino that is the built form of government’s addiction to gambling both metaphorically and financially. In Victoria, gambling is approaching 18% of State revenue.

Abattoir of Dreams – detail. Tattooed Bodies.

In the first work, the advertorial text of state sanctioned gambling along with its inherent risk of addiction is stamped literally onto the bodies of the state victim, here represented as a conveyer belt of gutted and denuded carcasses (the bodies of ‘dumb’ animals) – submitting to their role of transformation into state revenue. Taunts eliciting the realization of the dream of power inscribed on the front of the casino edifice (the processing plant) constitute lures of promise, but only via participation: – play the game, go all in, test your skill. Worship at the altar of the golden calf and you will be crowned, king – for a day - in CrownCasinoNeverLand, a day that lasts forever. The consumer, having swallowed the fetishised lie, becomes in turn the consumed product of the state machinery. Machinery rigged to guarantee the continuing prosperity of the larger hegemony and the power of the invisible few. Hooked on the promise, revolution will never cross your mind.

“ THE WHOLE OF LIFE of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Ch. 1. Separation Perfected. p. 12. 1967 Buchet-Castel

(2) Abattoir of Dreams

As a culmination to this apparition of violence / mis en scène of horror, one may as well coin a term – glamourhorror: The spectacle of excess co-existing with the reality of death. We come to the Event as commodity: The representation and reproduction of the ‘other world’ as spectacle. The destroyed structure of a city, a symbol of human habitation and industry, existing in parallel time to the modern city we inhabit is projected onto a structure of permanence - a city overpass. The viewer is invited to comprehend the meaning this collision of realities might for them evoke. A sow, offensive to at least two religions is left to swing over the abyss of meaning and the concrete rubble – a lasting symbol to the barbarity of war and the violence of which we collectively remain capable.

“ THE WORLD THE SPECTACLE holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce”. p 26. Ch. 2. The Commodity As Spectacle. Ibid

See Jaguar’s work and the work of RMIT and Melbourne University students for one night only, Monday 23rd October, below the Kings Way overpass, at the corner of City Road, Queensbridge Road and Kings Way, as part of the Walk 21 Conference.