In October 2006, in a conversation in the bar of the Menzies Hotel in the Sydney CBD, the Director of the 2008 Biennale, Caroline Christov-Bakargiev, suggested an idea for a seemingly minimal piece that kept gathering little nuances while we discussed it. I told her I'd already collaborated on a project called 'Conversations.'  'Well,' she said, 'this might be 'Conversations II.'

I went away, thought about it.  I liked the two I's looking at each other in  'Conversations II'.  I & I talking.  

A couple of days later I sent the following email to CCB.

CONVERSATION PROJECT: “The first thing I like about the word ‘conversation’ is that it has ‘verso’ inside it . Verso — like the fold of earth made by a plough blade; like the layout of paper in an open book. These things that can turn over productively. 

"A conversation can bring people together to cause something to turn over. In this respect a conversation can involve revolutions and tropes — events or places where turns happen. Tropes — points or lines or places where things turn. Hence ‘the tropics’. We have these words like ‘the tropics’ — ‘trope’ places, places where ship captains changed direction. All good conversations have tropes and possible revolutions in them.

“This idea of turning is central to what we’ve been discussing. I like to think of art as a situation where peoples’ assumptions and habits get turned around or inside-out, where change can occur … change to habits, values, expectations. So, a conversation about art (or about anything, actually) can help with that turning, that revolution.

“The crucial thing about a conversation is that no one involved (’involved’: to be folded in) can know exactly where it will go. People involved in conversations follow twists and turns and end up in surprising places. For me, a conversation is close to a real-time essay which commences, according to Montaigne, with the question: ‘What do I know?’.

“A good conversation starts with an intriguing topic and with a sense of safety and conviviality shared by the people involved. We would establish these basic conditions in the Biennale project. We would advertise a few basic rules which would allow the conversations to commence with a focus and then flourish. As one of the people in each conversation, I would not promise to explain anything. I would just be present as an important, responsible agent within the drama of twists and and turns as each conversation proceeds.

“We will need to define the rules precisely. Eg, how long will each individual conversation will last? How should the entire project be advertised to the general public and to the participants? How would each conversation get started?

“From these simple rules, over time, a complex set of ideas and emotions would emerge in the form of a record of the Biennale conversations. It is important to ‘capture’ this complexity, to show how this complexity emerges during the Biennale and how it establishes a context for continuing the conversation day by day.

“How to capture the emerging ‘history’ of the Biennale conversations? I would like to ‘map’ the main topics of each conversation, to show how themes, ideas, words, feelings, references all gather to make patterns over time, to show how these patterns cause more patterns, to show how any conversation is both free and predetermined, like life, like art. 

To capture these patterns, I would take brief notes during each conversation and then at the end of each day I would post my summary of the topics (or ‘trophies’ — another word about tropes or turning-points) that came up during the day. Over time, all these postings would become a network of inter-related themes and prompts for more conversations.

“In the room, I would like a laptop connected to the internet, as an aid to conversation.

“For me, the project is not explicitly an artwork, although it is certainly a sustained creative act of some kind. I would like to avoid the project being perceived as an individualistic ‘conceptual art’ piece. For me, it’s more like the collaborative work that a dramaturg does with a theatre company. The dramaturg sits with the theatre company during rehearsals and helps the company draw out, discover, invent or recognise special qualities in response to the text. The dramaturg is a ‘catalyst’, helping special potentialities emerge.“Also, the project is like a meditative ceremony, a ritualised activity that is carefully designed so that the participants can find some quiet clarity amidst all the information both of the Biennale and of the contemporary world. In this way, the project is quite like certain ritual activities that interest me greatly, for example certain Zen exercises, for example a Jesuit ritual designed by Ignatius of Loyola, called the ‘Spiritual Exercises’. The ‘Spiritual Exercises’ work like this: for thirty days, five times a day, the participant examines a set of simple questions concerned with responsibility and desire. This rhythm, caused by pausing five times per day to try to get clarity, this is what appeals to me about the project. Thus, every day there would be five conversations, adding up to approximately four hours of concentration for me. It would be exhausting, but I would learn a huge amount from it.

“Mostly I would learn a huge amount about myself! But for the public, it would NOT be a project about me. It would be a project about collective thinking, exploring, speculating … and about conviviality, courtesy, tolerance.

“In all the study I’ve done of Sydney’s history, one of the most striking things about the early colonial days is how much suspicion, distrust and lack of friendliness defined the town. All these petty police, dispossessed incumbent, landgrabbing incursives, misfits, embittered men, vulnerable women, criminals and victims of crime — they were all pressed together in the town, and nobody felt safe to offer each other conviviality or simple friendship. These terrible early conditions still shape the town, and I’ve always felt that the only way to transcend these beginnings is to enact ceremonies of conviviality, generosity, creativity. This is one of the reasons why I want to do the project, even though it daunts me greatly.

“Another note in the margin: despite how grim and suspicious everything was in the early colonial years, there were also some astonishingly creative and generous conversations. For example, next time we speak, please remind me to talk to you about the relationship that developed in the first years of the colony, between Lieutenant William Dawes and a young indigenous woman called Patyegarang.”

Small talk … it’s really about rhythm. The fact that it can be mostly ‘meaningless’ is beside the point. Small talk is phatic rather than informatic or semantic. It’s concerned with the experience of people being with each other, becoming accustomed to each other, feeling secure, even contented, with the close proximity.

With small talk, it’s feelings that get generated and exchanged. Meanings are secondary.

'INSPIRATIONS?'   Someone asked. 

RG: Barbara Campbell’s 1001 Nights Cast [ http://1001.net.au/ ]

Interlocutor: What about Tehching Hsieh? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehching_Hsieh ]

RG: YES! And Miranda July and everyone she works with on http://learningtoloveyoumore.com   .

After about ten minutes, if the rhythm has started to work and the trust is growing alongside the comfort that the rhythm gives, that’s when the stories come through.  Before that, it’s question and answer.  

When a story gets offered, you can feel the gears shift.  

The old idea is that an artists take some raw material, some chunk of physical matter, and then work changes on it.   According to such a logic, this is where the art is: in the turning, in the ARTiculation that takes the matter through transformation till it gets some new form.

If there’s any physical matter that gets fashioned in an artful conversation, maybe it’s BREATH.

Another word for breath  =  SPIRIT.   Hence ‘respiration’. Hence  'conspirators':  people in conversation who get close and quiet so they can breathe together.

…  when you think about it and talk about and have the next three months devoted to it, you notice such people everywhere you look.

According to David Hume, there is a proportional relationship between the robustness of a nation’s commerce and the extent and quality of its conversation.  Ie adeptness at conversation influences (NOT vice versa) the size and civility and innovative abilities of a nation’s metropolitan commercial centres.  

( Stephen Miller, Conversation: a history of a declining art, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 60.  Also, see Hume  “Of Refinement in the Arts”.)

One of them asks, what’s the difference between a conversation and an argument.  After a beat or two, his mate next to him says, maybe an argument is a dominated conversation.  Another boy says to no-one in particular, you want to win an argument, or control it at least.

but maybe that's the point  …  it's kind of austere   …  it looks like you want it to be almost nothing.'

Thus spake a visitor today.  He's discerned correctly.  The austerity is in the design.  I wanted the simplest and barest of pattern of specifications that might give the project an emerging shape.  Not something random.  Not too productive.  Nothing more than the minimum.

Ivan Illich on the topic of austerity:   ‘[it is] a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness.  For Thomas [Aquinas] austerity is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue which he calls friendship.'

Ivan Illich,  Tools for Conviviality,  New York:  Harper & Row, 1973, p.xiii .

Once there’s a sense of comfort, there’s a rhythm of exchange that provides the basis for the lines of thinking.  The lines of thought are like a melody insinuating the rhythm of the exchange between the two speakers.  Keeping the rhythm and  the melody in a supportive balance is part of the art.   One can cut across a line of thought and change the melody, thereby emphasising the rhythm, but if it’s nothing but rhythm  –  ie if it’s just Q&A  – then the melodic flow of the thinking is impeded.  In this way the entire conversation becomes a mesh of interconnections across a field of interest rather than a single braid going from one point to another along a line of argument or predetermined inquiry.

In three of the five main conversations today, an eavesdropper sidled up and loitered nearby, saying nothing.   There was a different eavesdropper each time.  Each time — a conversation with two and a half participants.   

None of us was sure about what was appropriate behaviour in this situation.   But as my conversant kept on talking, we all decided there was no need for the interloper to be ejected. 

Transmitted through body language, the mood moved quickly from caution to acceptance to amicability until someone in the drama (a different someone each time) made a comment that drew the eavesdropper into the scene.   

The last eavesdropper  –  a man  —  thanked us finally and excused himself.  Three minutes later he was back with a book of his own poetry, which he offered as a gift.  Then he bowed minimally, smiled and turned heel to walk away.

Overnight someone unknown had left a copy of the Australian Journal of Aboriginal Studies.  It’s unclear whether this is a gift or a lesson, or a prelude to something that will develop soon.   

In the ten feet by ten feet room where the conversations take place, there are three pictures on the wall.  One is an image of a serpent from Yolngu country in Northern Australia.  

A serene, elderly woman walks over, sits and talks.  She has a self-assured smile.  After some small talk, she says she wants to talk about the painting -- the painting of the serpent. 

‘That’s a benevolent spiral  …  In the southern hemisphere,  anti-clockwise is the benevelont way.  It’s because of how the sun goes anti-clockwise across the sky.  It’s opposite in the northern hemisphere.  Clocks  …  They were invented in the northern hemisphere.  It’s why clocks go around the way they do, going to the right at the top of the dial.  If they were invented down here below the Equator, the hands would be going round the other direction.  The sun tells you what’s the natural way.’

… all the people engaged in this kind of ‘participant art’. Would there be 10,000 of these people in the world? And could you really map them, showing the connections and degrees of separation among all these people when their projects start to ramify and interconnect?

Eg, imagine someone doing a ’social aesthetics’ thing in in Gdansk … could you show the project affecting a short network of people until it crosses over with someone doing a different project in Sydney? How many degrees of separation would you need to go through make the segue?

(Check out Mark Lombardi’s beautiful, spooky network drawings.)

Back to this ’social aesthetics’ idea — identify the appeal to the senses in such projects — identify how the projects tweak the senses or work on your intuition or make you exclaim ‘what a beautiful idea!’ Eg, Emily Jacir’s Palestinian projects — carrying messages and gestures into the garrisoned territories.

Note how the most compelling of these projects really DO have an aesthetic aspect to them. Otherwise, who cares? Where’s the wonder? Where’s the transformation?

Beuys’  ’social sculpture’ ideas are coming back, but with more trust in the collaborative impulse? Call them ‘dialogic’?  Might we think of such art projects as algorithms?  Don’t they work best when founded on metaphors that sit so close alongside lived experience that they don’t feel like a comment so much as an engaged commentary on the world. Or think of the artists as catalysts activating a system that they are stimulating out of latency into dynamic activity.

“I have an old man in my head,' says a youngish man, in the middle of our conversation.   "He gives good advice.  But I’ve only recently started listening to him.”

I spent a full 20 minutes, in the middle of a conversation, swapping stories and advice about riding in taxis.   We discussed how therapeutic some rides in a cab can become.  How some passengers believe that a conversation is part of what they’re paying for.  How so much depends on proximity  – front seat or back seat  …  eye contact  …  tone of the voice   …  readiness for small talk that might lead to a line of chat  … signals from driver or passenger concerning exhaustion or vivacity   

This got me remembering that wonderful book purchased in the New York Public Library many years ago:  Taxi Driver Wisdom.  

Remembering also a taxi driver in Perth who once explained to me that when a discussion turns therapeutic or traumatic, you must never stop the car, because the forward motion of the vehicle helps the passenger get through the crisis.  Sometimes it's the last thing you want to do, to receive all this trouble, to listen to it and have some response.  'But if you are the driver,' the Perth cabbie said, 'and you refuse such a moment, this refusal will diminish you in the long run, because here is a human being who needs your help and you are capable of giving it and yet you go and fail your own humanity!  This refusal will diminish you, for sure.  If not straight away, then in the full length of your life's journey.'

I chat with a very fit-looking woman.  It's hard to guess her age.  

She tells me about a routine that is becoming life-long.  She’s been doing it at least once a year for twenty years so far.  When she takes a holiday, she travels only to places that are not served by roads.  For example, she has been tracing the entire course of the Darling River.

This readiness to respond to the variations in the immediate terrain  –  seeking permission from the locals  –  improvising with the prevailing tendencies  –  immersed in the details and immediate trends, attentive to them, but also reflective and analytical about them  –   this ability to be simultaneously inside and outside a system that’s somewhat organised but constantly altering.  That's what it's about.

An interlocutor named John tells me about the ‘Living Book’ project that was part of the most recent Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Organised by the Ministry for Volunteers, the ‘Living Book’ project offered up several different people who were available for a discussion about several nominated themes. It was staged in the State Library.  Similar but different to Conversations II . The contexts — similar but different.

Amongst a thousand other topics, John and I speak of a poem that he made recently in collaboration with a bowerbird. Seriously.  It’s a beautiful idea, the way he set it up.  20,000 words, in the long run.

I’m walking in the Domain, on a break from the Gallery. I’m still in ‘conversation mode’ without even knowing it.

A man who’s been sleeping rough in the park says something to me. As a reflex I check whether I have any coins. But he’s not panhandling. He wants a chat, and automatically I respond. Outside of this project, I probably wouldn’t have paused. That would have been my loss.

He gets up off the ground. He’s tall as me, standing close, eye to eye, very direct, while we talk. There’s grass in his hair. The smell of a possum. He tells me he’s back in Sydney for the first time in a year. Back for his birthday last week, which turned out to be the day his mother died. It was the smoking that killed her, he says, and he lets fly a little homily about tobacco and booze, testifying that he will never go near them. His speech runs at about twice the pace of mine, but he has a rhythm where he stops himself by asking questions and he really works to make himself wait for me to reply. Do I come from Sydney? Would I rather be somewhere else? He’s off to Adelaide tomorrow. He’ll pick up rides at truck stops. The trickiest part is getting out of town. Saying this, he takes off walking at twice my average speed. I hustle to keep up with him while he explains that before he leaves town he wants to walk around ‘ANTI-CLOCKWISE’ from the domain to Darling Harbour to the city to Kings Cross and back to the Botanical Gardens. Last time he was here, he went around clockwise. “I like Sydney,’ he says as he waves me to stop and then steps into the day.

He’s heading across the lawn where the office-workers play soccer on weekdays. On this Saturday morning, the whole expanse is empty. Only now do I notice that he’s carrying a Puma kit bag. It bangs against his right knee as he rattles into the distance.

Intense, the curiosity I feel about the contents of the bag.

If there are three people standing up in the space, looking at the pictures or reading the wall text, this scene always attracts more people, two or three at a time until there can be as many as ten people crushed in there; they are there just because other people are already there; and then after fifteen seconds or so, they all disperse. Once every hour or so, this little pulse of communal curiosity. An urge to form a herd?  Or is it that Californian syndrome named in blogs and talk-shows as ‘FOMS’, which is ‘fear of missing something’?

This seventy-year-old bumps in quickly, carried by little steps rapidly stuttering together till he stops and stands well composed, announcing with his East European accent: “I won’t stay for long. My verbosity is at its lowest ebb, it being a Sunday, the Lord’s day, although I cannot claim ever to have seen him and the landlord has requested that I avoid being absent when he comes for the rent. Permit me to read this to you … ”

He extracts a page of note-paper from his wallet and recites something handwritten, in the genre of a letter to the editor. Around two hundred words, the letter is a spirited defence of the character and behaviour of the muppets on the TV program ‘Sesame Street’. He is particularly adamant about the laudability of Oscar the Grouch, who is so frequently ill-judged. Also Big Bird is impugned often, chiefly because of anxiety about the ordure that he might drop whilst in conversation.

None of these characters, he declares, deserve to be pilloried. With this emphatic conclusion he turns and walks out of the room.

I arrive five minutes late and find two people sitting in the space, talking happily. A mum and her daughter. Sophie is 8 years old with a glowing smile and blonde hair to match. I stand and we all discuss what the coming day holds. They promse to return for a chat after they’ve gone around the gallery.

An hour later, Sophie strides up, the smile still working a treat. Mum goes off somewhere while Sophie and I sit and talk. Her favourite work in the show is the same as mine! We love that. There’s plenty to discuss — sailing, travel, stories, friends, school uniforms, how you can look at some pictures and never get tired of them, how some pictures always make you feel warm

Sophie says this brilliant thing: ‘the gallery is weird because you’re never sure what’s what. It’s like everything is a question. It’s good.’

The fast-talking polysyllablist from yesterday bustles up to my table.  Smiling, he hands me a note.  He is happy, almost serene, more than just mischievous.  He winks, taps a forefinger to the side of his nose, turns on one heel and trundles away somewhat in the style of Chaplin's Little Tramp.

The neat handwriting says":  

Dear Phyllis.

I write to your recent letter. I received it and promptly put pen to paper. I heard you say often, we know very little about ourselves, very little why we can be difficult to understand.

Certainly I left my so different world, because it is still dreamlike. In substance, in structure.

Cookie Monster I dreamed I was, not sitting side-by-side, but being the CM. His rapport with kids was great. Whereas the kids never felt alienated, as Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird were always there.

They taught me not to take myself too seriously , ‘cos even though modern life is not a bowl of cherries, there is still some sweetness left.

Yours,   Cookie Monster.

A day spent talking with visitors to the AGNSW shows how the place is used and loved for many different reasons.  It’s not just ‘the artworld’ that turns up. 

The list from yesterday goes like this:

– nurses from a cancer ward on Oxford St, they drop in after shifts ‘just to unwind’;

– ditto a psychiatrist from a palliative car unit;

– a documentary maker from Germany who has just finished a short ‘city symphony’ film about Sydney  (he has a dvd which we load on to my computer)

– hundreds of schoolkids, aged between six and seventeen, from all over the state, including two hundred indigenous students on a national program showing future education options in the city;

– retired people with grandchildren in tow;

– 'special charter' bus drivers who have dropped off a load of school kids and are now mooching around the Gallery;

– a young journalist writing a story on spec re. the Biennale, hoping to sell it on to a music or street life paper;

– community worker from New Dehli, visiting with a friend from Melbourne.

The Gallery is a kind of valve that draws and blends Sydney residents and visitors.

Towards the end of a conversation, a woman remembers a house she lived in, a neglected old mansion that had been turned into single-room apartments.  Every room had a padlock on it.  And behind every door there lurked a single resident plus a bed plus a sink and a stove.  

She remembers receiving an invitation one day to see an old man’s art.  Behind his unlocked door, he flourished an outstretching arm to show floor-to-ceiling daubs of flour appliqued on one entire wall.  A kettle was steaming on the floor so that the flour could slowly puff up and congeal into a sticky embroidery emitting a smell that would slowly generate different tones of sweetness and rankness till the bugs and roaches would eat all the daubs away, leaving the wall ready for a new artwork.

From the outside I look like one of those anthropological displays described in accounts of C19th German museums — people from exotic climes, dressed in their traditional garb, performing their everyday tasks. Me, in my Snowgum travel-wear and Camper shoes, pecking away at the laptop.

From the inside of my cell, the world outside is framed and organised.  Oddly soothing  -- how the crowds flow around either side of the aperture (which is formed by the absent fourth wall of my little pretend TV-soundstage).  The light -- changing through the day as it wafts and pings sometimes off the marble floor that stretches away towards the sandstone bluff above Woolloomooloo in the distance outside the glass walls of the lovely recent extension to the Gallery.

I’ve been thinking about this aperture and remembering an interview I once conducted with Bill Viola when he told me about the ‘templet’ or focussing frame that monks often build into their cells. With such a templet, focussing on the sky as if through a tiny James Turrell piece, you get contemplation. The world is compressed and intensified thus till, paradoxically, it opens out into your clarified and momentarily boundless imagination.

An art student who is spending a semester at the University of Canberra: she drops in to chat and it turns out that she is from Kyoto. We know the same tiny, ’secret’ coffee shop, upstairs in a two-metre-wide lane just east of Karawamachi!

The talk flows easily now, of course.  Remembering the Kamo River  …  Friday nights on the western bank  …  the Fire Festivals in the mountains  …  Temple light-ups in spring and autumn,  etc, etc.

She’s feeling a little homesick at this moment, it’s true.

A conversation drifts over to the notion that we could be closer than anyone imagines to the collapse of every single major city in Australia — all those cities that have been designed on the presumption that individual car ownership is the most affordable and efficient mode of making a spatially vast city hang together. Without easy car transport, what happens to the expanses of suddenly unserviced suburbs? Where do the residents go, once these roadbound settlements tend toward starvation and uninhabitability? Where are the market gardens and food supplies within a short walk or bicycle ride?

We go quiet for a bit.

The man opposite me quotes an old adage: ‘civilised society is always only only 9 meals away from anarchy.’

‘Mad Max.’

‘Yup. The Road … Cormac McCarthy.’

‘Uh-huh.’

A couple drop by to say I remind them of someone they haven’t thought about in years: the Man in Blue at Central Railway Station. They’re not saying I’m like him. They’re just saying that seeing someone in a designated room, prepared to respond to comments or questions, well, this reminds them of the M.I B. whom you could approach with any question pertaining to the rail system and timetable. The M.I.B. has not been on the State Rail payroll for two decades or more. But he’s someone worth remembering.

Speaking with a young woman. She wants to know if the project is mostly analytical, or do you expect to lose yourself in the conversations? We talk about how there are these experiences everywhere now, experiences of immersion, interaction and reaction, where the system that you are in can only be known by being IN it rather than by adopting an excised, critical distance on it. And even though your being in it changes the system, it’s all you can do — act and watch the system (and yourself, given that you are part of the system) react. She explains that she is an actor and is presently deep into a method that follows principles similar to what we’re discussing.

A young woman drops by with one quick question: ‘is boredom something that is encouraged or sometimes even beneficial in art?’

She has this proposition: ‘in art you often get these carefully designed passages of tedium that sometimes lead to a revelation; this tedium is death to entertainment, but it seems a trademark of a lot of art’. [As she speaks, I think of a Robert Wilson performance, or music by Oval or Valentin Silvestrov or Arvo Part.]

Our ten minutes of talk carries on like this: boredom — it’s something relative and negotiable … and it’s governed by context … context — it’s governed somewhat by institutions and somewhat by individual sensibilities.

I say: ‘William Blake — the world in a grain of sand.

She says: ‘Watching paint dry.’

A physicist from Dunedin in New Zealand. He wants to talk about the Bill Viola piece, ‘The Tristan Project’, downstairs in the Gallery. He tracks down every Viola piece that he can. Viola’s work often gives him some new apprehension of many of the elements that physicists work with: water, time, gravity, inertia, fire, air, heat, cold, energy expressed as sound and light.

‘If you make some kind of intervention in a situation, and the intervention is not clearly directive or deterministic, aren’t you doing it purely to cause a change, just selfishly to experience the power of your effects … or might you looking for some kind of improvement?’

This question comes from a young art student. When she booked the session she indicated that she wanted to talk about ‘relational aesthetics’. It’s the set of ideas informing most of her work at present. For example, her flash-mobbing projects. For example, ‘irrational’, ritualistic interventions in everyday life, such as a project she did recently that turned the ordinary process of moving house into a slightly surreal and improvisationally communal event.

Back to her original question, because it’s such a good one … we talk about how, if faced with a choice between stagnation and disturbance, you’d probably choose disturbance. And we talk about how disturbance is almost always galvanising because even if you decide to resist the disturbance, at least that has been an action based on analysis, evaluation and determination. So, even seemingly aimless interventions bring activity into a potentially inert system. But how do you avoid damage? Idle nuisance value?

Then we talk about algorithms — sets of simple rules that ARE deliberately designed to cause envisaged improvement even though there’s an acknowledgement that the system may take off with unexpected reactions. We say that gardening is a bit like this.

Two young women from Melbourne, they tell me about a man they see regularly in the park near their home. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, he brings food for the possums. He lies down amidst the food so that all the possums — a dozen or more — climb and roll all over and around him. He looks like a man made of possums.

If you’ve been following the blog, you know about him already.

He drops by again, grinning, to tell me: ‘I am currently at work on a new schtick … it’s a Yiddisher word … SCHTICK … which I have called “Neil the Paper Boy”.’  (There is a Northumberland accent involved.)  ’Neil once sold the Miroir to schlemeils in the street … there was a picture Neil once sold of Eva Braun stepping from the sea … she looked exactly like a sea urchin’.

On the table — drinking water in a blue bottle. One glass for me. Five glasses for the visitors. As the five glasses get used, they are stored on the shelf under the Tommy McRae picture. They are the clock that measures my day.

Water: it’s a basic matter and a basic idea in the conversations.

I commence each day by replenishing the bottle and polishing the glasses: I end each day by washing and drying all the glasses and aligning them equably on the shelf.

That Japanese saying: ‘everything starts and finishes with cleaning’.

A woman stands very close to the Tommy McRae picture and covers her left eye with her left hand. She looks for a minute or so and then repeats the process with her right eye and hand. Then she drops that hand and looks closely with both her eyes unimpeded.

She explains to me that she has recently had a succesful cataract operation, such that what used to be 40% vision has increased to approximately 90%. This is a great joy to her and she has taken to examining pictures through different degrees of optical clarity until she arrives at full perception. This process intensifies the experience of looking and reminds her to take nothing for granted.

She has a Seurat print that hangs above her TV. Since the operation, she has enjoyed looking up and away from the TV to gaze on the Seurat. She says she doesn’t care much about what is on the TV but she never tires of looking at the Seurat

She remembers an idea she had when she was five years old when her mother first brought her to the Art Gallery. She thought at the time, ‘why don’t they put the pictures down low so that children can really see them?’ This idea has stayed with her for seventy-five years. And the question still pops into her head whenever she visits the Gallery.

I converse with an artist/writer from Venezeula. He’s happy about the safety he feels here. And the work he does for money causes him no stress. But he finds he can’t write in either of his languages at present. Spanish seems detached from the intensities of his experiences right now. And when he uses English, he knows he doesn’t have the finesse for expressing the delicacies and subtleties that make writing worth the effort.

The question is coming up plenty of times at the start of conversations, not inimically or even sceptically, but with genuine interest:  ’how is this art’?  

The answer has to be more than just: ‘It’s art because it’s in the Gallery’, or ‘It’s art because I say it is’.

My riposte has become fairly polished by now: there is artistry in it, or artfulness, if some moment of startling transformation occurs, some ‘turn’ that wasn’t readily predictable or obviously prescribed in the preamble to the artistic moment or process.   Obviously, the project doesn’t attain the qualities of art all the time.  But we hope for the occasional transformation.  In this project, matter is not being transformed, but moments and minds and sensibilities might be, even if only for a moment.  Having said this, I always rush to emphasise:  there are no big claims being made for this  …  it’s just something that has a chance of working at a very basic and personal scale.  

This refusal of bombast reminds me of a favourite quote from Ozu: he aspires to be just as good and useful as the neighbourhood tofu-maker, nothing more.  

In a half hour period today, I have quick encounters with five different people with executive jobs in the international artworld.  Each one would have known and been keen to catch up with all the others, but none of them was aware that the others were even in the city, let alone the gallery.  

Lines ALMOST interconnecting from:  New York, Pittsburgh, Guanzhou, Sydney, Canberra. 

This question ‘where do you belong’ is coming up repeatedly in conversations.   For some people it’s a melancholy theme — a feeling of detachment from the place where their lives are unfurling.  For some luckier folks, they feel right, right here where they are.  Eg, I’ve talked with a man from Wellington NZ who feels he is from his place and knows some of its subtleties and its wishes even though he is sharply aware that he can trace no indigeneity in his family history and he knows the political intricacy of this feeling.  For others  –  and I’ve been talking with plenty of these people  –   there’s a sense that this quest-for-homeland has never been a relevant concern for them, that they were born into families or cultures that are always on the move and that they choose not to feel deficient because of their placelessness, even though it tends to be a less comfortable or privileged way of being in the world.

1. A secondary school art teacher from Dubbo. Her school has a 40% enrolment of Indigenous students who come in not just from Dubbo but all around the western plains. Many of these students are always on the move, in one household or district for a couple of months and then off to somewhere else. Of course, the curriculum and the schooling system are not the least bit attuned to this longstanding way of living.

2. A couple of Year 12 secondary school students from Albury. They are such good friends, so easy and considerate with each other. And so thoughtful. It’s impressive how informed they are, but it’s even more impressive how equipped they are — equipped with the ability to think things through, to accept issues as specific and challenging rather than as aberrant topics provoking rushed judgement. They’re working their way through all the different sites of the Biennale. Even though they’re really in town for a two-week intensive course in French conversation at the Alliance Francaise, they confess that they’re tempted to spend big portions of their days at the Biennale.

Four times now, after the conversation has been going for twenty minutes or so and we’ve noted how it’s good to take some time to get into the rhythm of an open-ended but concentrated conversation (which is pretty much how most of the project’s talks shape up), the visitor raises concerns about how their children  (age range 6 to 16) have developed extremely clipped and compressed and disengaged modes of communication within the family, which each parent proclaims is more than just kid-surliness and is most likely a symptom of screen-based  and online enthusiasms.  (This observation — all in one sentence.  It’s the opposite of the compression that’s worrying the students!  Opposite, not necessarily better!)  

Me  –  I can only think that each instance is its own specific issue and I’ve got no way of judging.  All I can say is the pattern of anxiety is getting distinct.  I do think, however, of the polemics in Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad is Good for You.

One young woman turns up, as per the booking.  She’s an art student from Brisbane.  We’re doing the back-and-forth for a minute, asking questions, figuring how to get the flow going, looking for the intriguing threads to pull on.  Her phone goes off.  She answers it and hands it to me.   Another young woman is on the other end, starting a new conversation.  I’m looking at the first visitor while talking to the new caller whose face I can only imagine.  The communication is out-of-whack in pretty much the way I imagine they’ve planned it to be.  The phone cuts out.  I hand it back to visitor1 just before a text message comes in.   Visitor1 asks can Visitor2 come into the room.   Sure.  We all talk, first about the phone scenario and then about art school, what they’ve been learning, what they aspire to.  Because there was no menace in the phone scenario  – rather it was kinda ‘conceptual’ and playful  – the conversation promptly flows amicably.  They use the situation to find out more about what they each think about their looming vocation of being an artist.  Good friends.  It’s a pleasure hanging out with them.  

I realise that most of the conversations in the past three weeks have hummed along pretty efficiently.  Only a couple of the chats so far have had that looser sense of ‘hanging out’.  The other such conversation was with Sophie, the eight-year old who understood that ‘everything’s a question’.  

No big surprise, this.  For hanging out, you need to know each other already.  Or not care too much about drying up in silence.  So this means I want to avoid the silences? 

A young woman visits. Sincerity shining in her smile. She’s done a range of different arts courses and now is enrolled in postgraduate study. She wonders out loud, partly about this project and partly about her own practice, how do just open yourself to an experience even while you’re thinking about it … can you do this double-thing simultaneously … or at least in superfast, shuttling succession? We agree that this is THE question of contemporary culture. She’s done performance training in the past. This question is at the centre of just about every dramatic situation that unfolds in real time. It’s the immersion/reflection quandary. It’s the question about the insufficiencies of critical distance applied to interactivity and involvement. She notes how hard it can be if you are completely open to experience, completely involved, exposed, without recourse to reflective distance. We talk about the singer, Nick Drake. That film about him, called A Skin Too Few.  The title, a perfect summation.

I’ve been trying to catch up with a friend from the western suburbs for weeks. I say, why not come in to the Gallery and we’ll sit and chat for an hour. He’s in his twenties, running his own crew who do lots of different film, dance and media activities with youth from across the dozens of different cultures in the west. He’s super-smart, talented, confident, completely committed to what he’s doing. ‘Yeah, I came to the Gallery once, with school. Just the once. Anything I should see here, you reckon?’

There’s not much reason for him to come into the city. Out in the west, it’s a world to itself.  Eg, a friend of his went quite a long way in one of the ‘Australia decides’ talent quests on TV. This guy was a part of my friend’s crew.  I say, it must have changed the dynamic in the crew, all that attention on him. My friend says, nah not really … everyone in the city was thinking it was this big thing, but it was just television … nobody in the west even thought about it much.

As I’m leaving for home, I have a standing-up conversation with a woman who’s saying ‘you don’t want to talk with me, you don’t want to know what’s on my mind!’.   Actually she’s lucid and funny, although she readily admits the truth: that she’s a bit wound up!  

She’s wound up about what’s happened to Bondi during the past twenty years. I ask, ‘have you lived there long?’  She responds, ‘about a hundred and twenty years!’   It turns out that both sets of grandparents settled in Bondi when it was all sandhills.  Her parents grew up there, as did about eight aunts and uncles, as did she and about forty cousins.   So in many ways, she’s right to claim the hundred and twenty years.

She’s wound up about how the Domain has been completely locked off and police-protected for close on a fortnight  … ‘because of that damned Popefest!’.   The Domain is called what it’s called because it’s supposed to be an open range for all Sydneysiders.   ‘Damn right.’   She says, ‘I want a World Youth Day run by the Muslims!’  She says, ‘do you think that’s gonna happen!  Ha!’  

And she strides off, still fully wound up.

I chat with an ex-therapist.  (There have been several of these folks now — they all seem to be interested in the way someone who is a non-professional uses the conversation genre.)  She says that long-term therapeutic relationships usually entail a lot of listening while waiting, waiting for some valid patterns to become discernible, interpretable. 

I realise, this blog is similar. At this stage, about a third of the way in, I can see that there are some recurrent issues getting clearer.

At what stage should I lock these down? Should I leave this to the readers? Is it too early to interpret information that is still evidently emerging? The visitor says, these same questions turn up all the time for the therapist.

But we both agree, this Biennale project is NOT therapy. Not explicitly, at least.

Before any conversation can start up with me, four different people (all strangers to each other) converge on the room. They read the labels and start conversing with each other. One of the conversations ropes me in peripherally, but the four visitors are already rolling, no need for me to keep anything moving. This goes on for thirty minutes or so. I rock back in the chair and just watch it happen, all four visitors standing in the room talking like the south wind. Eventually three of them leave in three different directions, having exchanged cards. The fourth person stays, sits down. We chat for another hour … about networks of connection in art movements, architectural movements, also about growing older, the sense of home and purpose, the urge to study, to make things. At the finish, WE exchange cards.

Quoting him directly:   ‘My sense is that Buddhists seem to be saying that we fear boredom because it means being fully aware of our bodies and minds. So we crave entertainment, our prison of fear.

‘This desire begets Karma, attaching us to this world and people as if they are objects to have or use.

‘I gather that meditation is sometimes described as ‘learning boredom’, to sit without seeking anything, not even ‘proper’ meditation, which would be desire at another level (”I’m really calm, I’m a balanced guy, look at my pure mind etc”). We have to become bored with boredom.

‘Maybe our pixellated, manic western minds are unable to be that focused on boredom (I know I am a pretty weak meditator) so we need art or music or other artful entertainment, to trick us into being bored, in the moment, free… ‘

A passerby says: ‘The picture of the snake on the wall  …  It’s like a speech bubble above your heads, when two of you are talking underneath it   …   the way it starts at the mouth and curls around and around and gets bigger as it goes.’

People have asked if he’s come back.

Yes, several times. But he’s changed his genre. No longer the letters to the editor or to Phyllis. Now he turns up and recites short sections of dialogue from imaginary dramas — a different drama each time — usually involving affectionate bickering between people who seem to have known each other a long time. I listen to discern if the dialogues have been lifted from published work that I recognise. But they sound completely original. Even so, they DO resonate with precedents. For example, the earlier monologues and letters were indebted to Sesame Street. And these dialogues echo with Waiting For Godot.

A woman stands and tells me about having just seen the Viola piece downstairs. She had come into the dark enclosure at the point where there was only a tiny spot of light on the screen. The room was profoundly dark and she was not sure how to venture in further. She was thinking of turning around and leaving, when a soft hand reached out carefully and a girl’s voice said, ‘I’ll take you over to where you can sit down’. Finding a seat this way, the woman then contemplated the piece for about twenty minutes, never sharing another word with her helper. By the time her eyes adjusted, there was no one else in the room.

She says that, figuratively and literally, it was a touching encounter.

An artist visits from an arid region of Australia. We drink water while we talk. We discuss the economics of bottled spring water — flying it around the world. Desalination plants. Recycling scare campaigns. Stormwater salvage. She asks about what we’re drinking right now. (It’s in a bottle, but it’s from the tap.)

She says, ‘Water and land … that’s pretty much what everything comes down to in this country.’

Three women stand in the room, reading the explanatory note on the wall. A conversation starts up with me. About where the idea came from. About why, or first whether, it’s worth doing. After a while, one of the women says, ‘So it’s not a thing, it’s an idea.’ Her friend on her left says, ‘Isn’t that a thing … it’s something real, after all.’

Talking with an art historian. He’s wondering about the how dominant words can be in bearing witness to an experience. Isn’t it smartest to stick with words? Isn’t language more likely to change someone’s mind than, say, objects in space? I’m about to wonder aloud about that, when he over-rides himself and says, ‘No, I’ve been changed by encounters with objects in space’.

We go on to talk about how those major experiences happen in timetoo, for years afterward, and how during those years the ideas and feelings that make up the afterlife of the original experience get tangled in language too. And besides, all modes of experience — including language, and touch and proprioception and taste and smell and vision, and hearing etc, etc — were already intermingling when you first encountered the objects in space.

Maybe it’s mostly a question of having all the senses ablaze and in relation to each other as continuously as possible.

Aesthetics! They’re about engagement rather than detachment. There’s politics in them, therefore.

In conversation, these ideas keep developing between us.

A painter talks about the process of working in the studio. It’s so different from this Conversation Project, she says. Painting is so involving.  In the studio, the hand and the entire, active body seem to know what’s going on, at least when things are going well. 

I say that I think the conversations flow like that too. It’s just that the embodied aspect is so much more minimal, almost subliminal. But even so, I contend, there’s no denying that posture, rhythm of looks and nods and interweaving statements are all as much physical as psychical.

Neither of us is sure.  We talk about the differences. Are they differences of degree or of kind?

Several people have expressed concern that I must be very bored.  In this context, they usually want to go on and talk about the entertainment/art issue.  And this often leads to a discussion about the idea of ‘difficulty’  --   whether art should or should not be ‘difficult’. (Partly it’s a response, I reckon,  to how thorough and effective the educational and public programs seem to have been in this Biennale.) During one conversation I remember an essay that I studied thirty years ago.  It had a title something like ‘On Reading Shakespeare and Other Things Difficult For Thought’. The idea was that difficulty has its rewards and it can lead to places and sequences of comprehension that ease avoids. Sometimes difficulty is mistaken for obscurity, and sometimes the experience of difficulty is treated as boredom. In one conversation, we get to this idea together: ‘boring but compelling — that’s a GOOD combination!’.

I spend a day without any pre-booked conversations, but I have a dozen lengthy exchanges with a stream of World Youth Day pilgrims who are bumping around the Gallery.  Now that their scheduled routines are over, they are ranging the town.  

An Italian performance artist studying at the university in Roma tells me of his Masters thesis describing John Cage as a spiritual composer.  

A Malaysian grandmother says she finds it very luxurious and laudable that buildings such as the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art are open free-of-charge for the education of all citizens and that there are people in these places who sit and talk like priests freed from authority or responsibility!  She notes how the little cell where we’re talking is like a confessional, but more luxurious.  She says this word ‘luxurious’ several times.  

Over the last two days, I’ve encountered two completely unrelated visitors who are in their late 20s  –  one from England, one from the Netherlands  –  who have put their high-achiever jobs on hold while they go travelling to see if some new direction might become clear and compelling to them. One is a government policy analyst, the other is an economist.  Each is looking for work where they can see direct effects of their actions.  Work that comes from and goes to the heart and soul, not only for themselves but also for the people to whom they deliver the work.  

The woman from the Netherlands is genuinely shocked by the recent ‘anti-annoyance’ legislation that was created by the NSW Government to clamp down on Popefest.  She is worried that such creeping infringements on debate and civil liberties never get repealed, once a government has grabbed that little bit more power.  I note that this point has surfaced in many conversations during the past month, but her disquiet is so genuine, it really hits home.  ’I never expected something like this’, she says, ‘here, where everyone looks so relaxed.’  I reminisce about growing up in Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland.  She mentions how she’s been staying with friends in Brisbane and she’s heard some of those B-P stories.  Is there some meek acceptance of overbearing authority here?  This quiet, sullen readiness to comply.  It’s not what she expected.  The Englishman says that this is the most English thing about Australia.  The class system is flatter here;  but people still tend to ‘stay in their box’.  The only time people play up is for unimportant issues.  “For absurd things rather than the existential things.”

Over the last two days, I’ve encountered two completely unrelated visitors who are in their late 20s  –  one from England, one from the Netherlands  –  who have put their high-achiever jobs on hold while I’m trying to get ahead of some deadlines, so I have print-outs of a couple of bits of writing that should have been sent off to editors by now.  When no one has booked in, I sit and work on the texts.  I’m concentrating on one of them, reading a good stretch where I don’t have to mark the manuscript.  Inevitably enough, after a while,  I have to strike a phrase.  I move the pen to that spot on the page.  A couple of metres away, a woman lets out a little shriek:  ’I'd just decided you weren’t real!’

I go back through my notebooks to compile this list of books that have been mentioned during the past six weeks of conversations,  These are just the ones that I wrote down.  Sometimes, in the flow of conversation, the moment wasn’t right to record titles:

Richard Hamlyn, The Invention of Clouds

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes

Keith Smith, Bennelong: the coming in of the Eora

Richard Price, Lush Life

Richard Price, Samaritan

Alan Ginsberg, The Collected Works

Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems

Dan Siegel, The Mindful Brain

Vilayanur Ramachandran, The Emerging Mind

Steven Johnson, Emergence

Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map

Risa Mickenberg, Taxi Driver Wisdom

Mark Turner, The Literary Mind

Akeel Bil-Grami,  Self-Knowledge and Resentment

Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies

Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: the story of a sound

Geoff Batchen, Each Wild Idea

William Fox,  Areality

William Fox,  The Desert of Desire

Joseph O’Neil, Netherland

Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Barry Lopez,  About this Life

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

David Harsent,  Legion

Christopher Logue, War Music

Talking with a Dutchman.   He says, ‘back home everyone works so hard to be tolerable to each other.’  I say, ‘Is that different from being tolerant of each other?’  He says, “O yes, quite different, and much worse.’

Two visitors, one sitting on the floor.  They’re voluble, feisty with each other.  

I say, ‘How did you two meet?’  

He says, ‘We’re friends.’  

I say, “Yeah, but how did you meet?’  

She says, ‘We’re Friends.  Quakers.  We met at a Meeting.’

A few times, I’ve been stood up.  I mean, a booking doesn’t show up, and I’m sitting there, kind of hovering.  

I confess to a counterpart that sometimes, at 15 minutes past the hour, when the booking’s not shown, I feel a little zing of pleasure, like I’m getting away with something.  She says, ‘you’ve become a shift-worker, you’re always looking to skive off’.  

True, there’s a bit of that.  I remember when, as a student, I used to work on the print-floor in the night-shift at the Courier-Mail — how great it was when the conveyor belt seized up and the alarms went off  and all us schlubs could just sit and goof around while the engineers turned up and tried to get everything rolling again.  

So, a booking doesn’t show up  –  it’s like the conveyor belt’s busted.  But it’s trickier than that, because I also feel disappointed, cheated, jilted and a tad testy.

It’s ten foot by ten foot, which is a standard measure of a Japanese tea-room, and pilgrim huts.  This size was deliberately chosen.  

It’s working, as a place where I’m happy to spend long stretches of time, which is a great relief.  Within the first two days, I knew it wasn’t an oppressive space.  All the design theory actually worked this time.  The dimensions are such that there’s intimacy inside but it’s not creepy.  It’s secure and cosseting but not claustrophobic.  I like the light down the gallery.  And the view as people flow past on either side.  They look back, to see something odd but familiar, comprehensible in a blink.  A kind of ‘Parkinson’ TV-soundstage.  Also a cafe, but not.  A confessional, but not.  A bus station. An artfair booth.  A doctor’s room.  Kids enjoy playing peek-a-boo games at each wall.   The carpet on the floor marks a thin frame and a threshold where the fourth wall is missing, making a place available for artfulness without being stagey. Or too stagey.  It’s easy enough to step in.  But the frame is there too.  Everyone is aware of it.  

The threshold that makes a frame, it’s the subject of an aesthetics discussion, where my counterpart says that you know you’re with art when there’s a frame inviting separation of the quotidian, a frame inviting contemplation, and a space allowing discourse to flow around, through and from the thing framed as art.  The frame asserts that the thing is art; the discourse haggles over the validity and value of the assertion. You’ve got the artworld right there, in its cleanest form.  

When matter and moments are intentionally made available for transformation.  Art.  Poesis.  Changes wrought.  

Cocteau: ‘Astonish me’.  

Aristotle: ‘Instruct and delight’.  Which is just the start, and not enough.

“Do you think you’ve hit cruising altitude now?”

“With the project, you mean?”

“Yes.  No more surprises.  It’s evolved all it’s gong to?”

“I dunno.  People keep on coming.  And everyone’s got something.  And me  …  I’m going to get tired.  Maybe grumpy.  And then, with a couple of weeks to go, I’ll start dreading it finishing.  There’s a dynamic in it.”

A visitor informs me she’s a therapist.  She mentions how she likes to think of people not as clients or patients but as ‘counterparts’.  She says the word is not exactly right because of the power gradients that are inseparable from therapeutic relationships.  But she likes the intent of the word.  

‘Counterparts’ feels like the closest description I’ve heard for most of the people who have sat opposite me during the CONVERSATIONS project, particularly when relations have equalised quickly and we freely offered each other ideas and stories

If you are present long enough in public, as with this project, portions of your past float will by inevitably.  I’ve had several encounters with old acquaintances whom I haven’t seen in ten or fifteen years.  Some have simply noticed me in the cell.  Others have found me on the website, accidentally, while looking for something else.

More than one person I’ve been conversing with has been found by old friends in the same way.   People from my counterpart’s past have come up cautiously to interrupt, and then I sit back while the reunion plays out. This has included people from the other side of the world.

I have a long and involving discussion with a doctoral student who’s investigating neuroscience, with a focus on questions of memory and narrative.   During this time, on another level of the gallery, carpenters are running powers saws through sheets of ply.  A minute or two after the sound, here comes the aroma that I’ve reflexively anticipated.  I know the smell from years of mooching around my carpenter dad’s workshop. This particular memory is intense, involuntary, registering not only in the mind.   It wrenches my thinking out of the conversation for how knows long?  As sometimes happens when driving a car, I come back to consciousness realising I’ve been carrying on the main activity for a few minutes without any conscious awareness of the conversation.  Completely polite, my counterpart doesn’t complain.  

A young woman sits talking and smiling easily.  She radiates when she smiles.  Maybe in counterpoint to how readily she shines, we drift into talking about crying.  She asks, have people cried during the project.  Yes, one person in particular.  (It’s too personal to recount in detail.  I promised I wouldn’t tell.)  She mentions that as she gets older, she feels herself getting clucky, and most startling of all, it’s TV ads that start her sobbing, for example airline ads!   Her smile blooms out to become a laugh.  And Morgan Freeman too, she says, he can do it.  His voice.  His dignity.  The last scene of Shawshank Redemption, she explains, as her eyes moisten while she smiles at me. 

A young man is about to announce to his parents that he has made up his mind to go against their wishes.   They arrived in Australia with a few dollars and went on to build a world for the family.  The son has qualified to acquire the money and security that take highest precedence in the parents’ world-order.   He knows they want him to have everything they think is important and he knows that his rejection of their values will feel to them like something hateful.  He emphasises how much he is in awe and appreciation of his parents.  ”I have to get them to see that this is self-assertion from me, not selfishness  … or foolishness.”

One of the many things the project has been teaching me is that I am small-minded and foolish when I make judgements about people as they come toward me.  Such ill-advised profiling can start as early as the initial online correspondence that sets up a booking.   As I administer the website, I am often tempted to gather covert expectations by picking clues out of the email addresses, or out of the language and tiny snippets of information that gleam in the messages accompanying the requests for sessions.  Later comes the chance to make judgements based on a person’s appearance or comportment as they approach the table.   But a hundred times already, it’s become clear in some conversation or other that my counterpart will trump all my ‘profiled’ expectations.  It becomes clear that if I had insisted on shaping my thoughts according to my prejudices, I would have missed an extraordinary exchange with a surprising, delightful and usually flat-out admirable person.  The prejudice diminishes me every time, even though I’m doing much the same thing that everyone else does, in the way I’m always looking for an interpretive grid to help me navigate through the doubts that abound in the world.  So, the moral of this enterprise is that while everyone seems to need to do the profiling in order to make it through the world, everyone is also actually dimming down the world as they do the profiling.

Moreover, not only can I be banjaxed by specious signs that stimulate over-interpretation or dismissive stereotyping or self-befuddlement.  I’ve also found often that the most important, deep-down, cardinal details defining a person are apt to go past my first impressions, completely undetected.   This is the opposite side of the same self-dimming conundrum.  Today, for example, a full and fascinating discussion about ethnicity and racism emerged with a counterpart in whom I had not presaged any sign that such a topic would be relevant.  

How often does a profiler seize on entirely the wrong clue and then completely miss the most germane and generous thing!

Today the Gallery is a racket of noise.  There’s been a dozen different groups of schoolkids, who get parked nearby the conversation-room.  Mostly this is a logistical manoeuvre — there’s nowhere else to assemble them, especially when the rest of the gallery is already clogged with groups moving through the exhibitions.  On top of the kids’ chatter and visual smatter (all of which is fun to observe, by the way), there’s been demolition and power-saws downstairs tearing the air every ten minutes.  It’s like being in a factory  — not at all conducive to a venturesome conversation.  Or to say it another way, the conditions make for very pointed, informatic exchanges — get in and get out without any deliberate softening of focus — because the noise is just plain tiring.  

Most workplaces are like this, of course.  Such conditions prevent speculation and innovation, which the industrial system wants to discourage in its workforce anyway.   But it also engenders testiness, physical lassitude and emotional volatility.  

Luckily the clamour of today is not typical.  If it were, I’d have been gone after a week.  Talking and thinking  –  they need the right environment.

What do they want?  Do they identify a particular desire beforehand?  A topic?  A bee in the bonnet?  

Amazing to me, the fact that 80% of the people turn up having decided that they will not prepare a list of themes.  Rather, they decide to come along deliberately ‘empty-headed’, to see what will happen.  This certainly does not mean they come along dumb or dull-minded.    

I find this openness astonishing.  These folks are so much braver than I expect I would be.  Often I use this admiring observation to get the conversation rolling out of small talk.  It’s a genuine wonderment to me, how people are prepared to be unprepared and unprotected like this.  And because it’s a genuine wonderment, it genuinely propels the conversation when I divulge it.

When an unannounced conversation might be about to commence, when someone is wafting nearby the entrance to the room, maybe they’re reading the label and getting curious or skeptical, the attitude showing in the body  …  there’s often a series of peripheral-vision assignations playing out — them to me, me to them, back and forth  –  when each of us is trying to figure the other’s availability or aversion to an exchange.  The drama, risk and uncertainty of this moment tend to generate an energy in each person, and as with a magnetic force, these two surges, when brought to proximity by a direct gaze,  will instantaneously prove to be either repellent or attractive.  If attractive, the awkwardness of the peripheral sequence is often the first thing to talk about.  If repellent, well the dynamics in that particular moment were just not conducive to a conversation.  This concerns only the moment; it doesn’t mean that these people could never talk.  At another time, in other circumstances, the dynamic might be right and ready. 

There are several names for a blog that’s dormant and going nowhere — ‘clog’, ‘nog’, ‘dog’, ‘billablog’ — and there are several millions of these lapsed projects.  

I apologise for being dormant over the past week or so.  I’ve been trying to deliver on a couple of big deadlines.

The conversations have kept on ticking over, however.  The words have kept spritzing the air.  

On this process of generating carefully considered words …  while I’ve been banging away at the keyboard for other purposes, all the time worrying about not doing the blog, I’ve also been talking every day.  You start to wonder whether you should ration your words.  I remember reading a wonderful book on writing, by the superb crime writer Ross Macdonald, where he said that everything you write changes you — EVERYTHING — and therefore you need to take utmost care with every single word that you put down on a page or a screen.  

Everything you SAY changes you too.  Therefore, at this time when I’m talking out and typing out so many words, how much sloppy blather is getting produced, and how much is that changing me into someone who is becoming even more sloppy than I was before?  Or is all the talk making me mentally fitter?  What is the relationship between talking and writing?  Maybe a good ratio is:  more talking - less writing?  Or the other way round?  

It is striking how often professional writers proclaim that they know they’ve got no more than 1000 good words in them every day.  This feels exactly right to me too.  So this becomes the main question … how do you pan those golden words out from all the email blather, all the blog chatter and admin sludge?  

Alongside that question, this supplementary one:  can you turn talking into something that fills you up rather than empties you out?  With good conversations, this can really happen, I’m sure.

The conversation is desultory till some trust develops.  Then it turns out that this young woman has already had and lost a marriage. The details of the loss are not offered over.  Fair enough.  She’s from Scotland originally, living in Brisbane now.  The husband was Korean.  They met in Guyana.  They lived several years in Japan –  sharing a sense of them both being suspect outsiders at the same time as they loved the courtesy and the gentleness of the small-town life.

I ask do you feel that you belong somewhere?   She says that it’s just not an issue for her, that she knows it means a lot to some people, but for her it’s an irrelevant question.

I’ve conversed with so many people like this  — travellers rather than settlers  –  defined by their momentum rather than their place.

A young woman tells me about her photography project: she takes quick portraits of people waiting on the Town Hall steps. Always, she asks permission before doing so.  This often leads to a conversation afterwards.  That’s the point of the project:  ‘I like talking to strangers’.

She notes that when she started the project, 90% of people turned her down, until she printed up a rudimentary business card that gave the project a name and a ‘flickr’ url.  Now, if she hands over the card at the outset, 90% of people assent to being photographed.

I chat with a quiet man who is famous in the country where he was born.  Nowadays he lives there for just a few months every year.  He can only stand the fame these days if he lives here in Sydney for the rest of the time, here where ‘I’m just some guy who’s trying to find a good mechanic to fix the transmission on the car’.  

He has an easy smile.  And a look in his eye that says, ‘I’ve seen it all and don’t want it anymore’.  But he’s happy.  He’s producing difficult work now, not pursuing popularity anymore.

(I google him to check.  It’s true.  He’s a superstar back home.)

A woman who is a marketing director comes along unannounced, reads the blurb, and then sits and chats.  She says, “You’re doing qualitative research!  Is the blog a report?  Can you validate the claims you make, as if they constitute knowledge that people could act on?”  She says all this cheerfully and with genuine curiosity.   We talk about people like Hugh Mackay, who party reflect the moods in the populace but also partly influence them by synthesising the information and reporting it back to the populace. 

I note that I do regard the project as research but I’m not promising anyone anything, and there’s no particular client.  She replies that this is often when the most surprising and useful knowledge arises, when it’s assiduous but unaligned. 

‘But usually,’, she says,  ‘no-one is prepared to commission research in such a loose way!’

I enjoy yet another conversation with someone who works in therapy.  This time, it’s a man who facilitates anti-violence programs in prisons.  As with most of the other therapy counterparts, he’s genuinely interested to see how someone else does the talking routine.   It’s the main reason why he booked in and came along.

Not surprisingly, he’s extremely good at the talking routine himself.  The session flies past as we discuss a slew of subjects: work, the rhythm of thinking and talking, and whether the standard hour-long session is somehow organic or whether it’s just a cultural thing.  If it’s the latter, where did the extent of an hour come from in the first place?  Why is it 3600 heartbeats and not, say, 2000 or 6000?  After a couple of hundred  of conversations in this project, I have to say there seems to be something ‘natural’ about this portion of concentration.  Time and again, just as the concentration starts to tail off, you look up and notice that it’s the top of the hour again.  That portion of time --  done. 

With this particular conversation — the way the talk has flowed so easily, so convivially — it seems entirely appropriate:  the quick hug we exchange as he leaves. 

A group of half a dozen people watching from further down the gallery are immediately intrigued.  No sooner has my counterpart left, than this crew rattle into the room with a flurry of questions and some loud good humour.  They’re a bunch of liberal arts students from Melbourne, in town for a week to study the Biennale.  They’ve done their research: one of them knows about some of the books I’ve written!

Astonishing to me  … how often people from elsewhere finish the conversation by handing over their card and scrawling their mobile phone number on it, saying ‘Don’t hesitate to give me a call if you come to my town!’

I talk with yet another Dutch person.  We discuss the similarities between Australia and Holland.  For example, there is a sense that both societies kid themselves that they are compassionate and sophisticated communities.  If it’s true that we kid ourselves, then the accompanying sense of cosmopolitanism may be delusory in both cases too.  For example, consider the proposition that false sophistication is what prevails in most of our cities.  In other words, outsiders might be allowed in and sometimes they might even seem to be feted, but in fact they are being used for the glamour of their strangeness.  In such a scenario, the ‘host’ culture is not prepared to experience alteration in the encounter with the newcomers.  ‘We decide who can come into our country and under what circumstances.’   

In a truly cosmopolitan culture, the benefits of immigration are earned through the host’s preparedness to change as a result of the exchanges wrought by immigration.  This attitude is inherently dynamic rather than conservative.  A truly cosmopolitan society does not say, ‘You can come in only on the undertaking that you will become exactly like us.’   In truth, this is the opposite of cosmopolitanism:  aggressive, intansigent parochialism.  Hermetic, even though the society seems receptive. Such conservatism can engender a sense that, as it manages habitually to avoid change, the society feels comfortable and relaxed.  But in no time at all one sees how such a static system is incapable of evolution or adaptation or quick innovation.  This is a major liability in a world where, all around you, other societies are innovating energetically.  

Cosmopolitan societies, on the other hand, are hard work, but as a result of the hard work they are nimble, venturesome and capable of improvisation.

In one day, two different conversations about living as a traveller rather than as a settler.  

I speak with a woman who whose father moved from job to job every six months or so.  A dozen different schools in her childhood.  All her adult life, she’s been a photographer, mostly chronicling rock and roll for the weekly magazines.  So she’s still travelling.  No mortage, no superannuation, no security.  The romance of such a life doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, even though she can’t imagine doing forty years of nine-to-five.

Next I chat with a woman who has come to Australia to study art, after thirty years raising a family mostly in America, although she is from Europe.  Leaving behind a house full of things accumulated over half a lifetime, she is living out of two suitcases now.  This has been the biggest education, she says.  Things  –   you don’t need them    …    but they hold your memories.  And you really need your memories!

I chat with a woman from the USA.  Her partner has taken on a big, challenging job in Sydney.  Smiling, relaxed and contented, she’s living here for an indeterminate time, enjoying leave after an intensive bout of recent work in San Francisco.  This means she spends her days exploring the town with all-day bus and ferry tickets, visiting fruit and vegetable markets, walking along the harbour edges, exploring the 19th-century parks and gardens, investigating galleries, cafes and libraries, especially the City Central Library in Customs House (which is a secret treasure of the town, for sure).

Mooching around  – it’s what this town is designed for!  But how few of us are smart enough to do it nowadays?  

Even though I’m still thoroughly enjoying every single conversation, I have reached some kind of limit  –  ten weeks without a weekend.   How great would it be to just mooch around at home for two whole days!  But this durational commitment, of course, is part of the project.  So now it’s a matter of simply experiencing the shorter patience spans and the lapses in concentration — experiencing them and learning something from them.  And maintaining and manifesting my continuing and genuine interest in every counterpart.

We know there are people who are ‘all tip and no iceberg’.  Then there are the people who are just about all iceberg.  

A man drops by, without a booking.  He is casually dressed, groomed as if he’s purposefully disarrayed himself, like someone affecting the nonchalant mien of ‘rumpled debonair’. 

As we converse, it turns out he’s visiting from Queensland.  

‘Yes, I’m in the arts, kind of.’  

‘Meaning?’  

‘Well, I run drama workshops for homeless men  … mostly self-esteem exercises, helping people see how they can imagine characters and scenarios for themselves.’  

‘How did you get into doing this.’

‘I was homeless myself, just for a short while  … I got away from the system –  the hostels and the food lines  –  after about three months I got away.   While I was in the system I felt like I’d woken up as Tarzan.   But I never went deep into homelessness; I never lost the loincloth.  Some of the guys go to some completely other place in their minds and they set up a whole other system around the things that they value.  No  …  around the ideas they value.  Not the things.  They don’t have many things.  And you can’t judge them.  Whatever they’re doing they’re doing, and usually they’re not hurting anybody.  But if they’re suffering and they want to change some aspects of what’s going on, then I’m available.  It’s up to them’

‘When did your homelessness happen?’

‘About ten years ago.  Everything just unravelled for a while, and there I was.’

‘But you’re back in the world now?’

‘Well …  back in the world  …  what does that mean, really? I’m doing something that connects me with a few different worlds, including the government, which is funding some of the programs.  So  … there you go  –  in the handout routine again!  In some kind of dependency routine again!  But It’s not like I’m waiting for things to change, not like I’m waiting to start my life again   …   I live in a caravan park.  And they are special places, caravan parks .  The one I’m in now, I’ve only been there for six months, so the longtermers still don’t accept me.  Not yet. anyway.’

‘And traveling to Sydney  …  visiting the Biennale?  It was something you planned?’

‘Sure!  You’ve gotta keep up with everything. You’ve gotta stay awake.  For me art is like that chilli chicken ad on TV  — it can give you a smack on both sides of the face.  That’s gotta be good.’

‘Where do you stay when you travel.’

‘Oh  …  I  …  improvise.  And I do have some money.  I’m careful with it.  But I use it.’

His default setting is an easy smile.  He’s like a thousand Queenslanders I know.  But he’s got his own wavelength too, his own special signal.  My first impressions of him were entirely inaccurate, giving me no indication of the nuances and generosity of spirit he would actually offer to me.   Once again, my profiling reflex has almost closed me down.

I’m running late.  But as I approach the Gallery, I receive a text message saying the next booking has been cancelled.  So I make a different appointment on the phone and I’m not fussed when I come around the corner to find a man and a woman sitting in the room, engrossed in a conversation.  I cruise on past and leave them to it, thinking ‘give them five minutes or so  …  who cares  …  they’ve probably just sat down to take the load off their feet for a while.’  I notice that one of them has a walking-stick, which strengthens my assumption that they’re just relaxing for a bit.   I retreat down the other end of the gallery and look back on the scene, realising that this is first time I’ve been able to to see the project from the outside, to see how it looks from the public view across the minimal proscenium that is formed by the aperture of the missing fourth wall of the room.  I’m thrilled to see the piece, to see how engrossed the two counterparts are in their cinversation, how truly engaged and animated they seem to be.  

Fifteen minutes pass by!  I start thinking, ‘this is getting a little odd.’  So I approach the proscenium.  As I get close, the man says, ‘Are you Ross?’   When I confirm the fact, he says, ‘You can’t be, because I’m Ross!’  I think to myself, ‘maybe it’s true, maybe Ross is really his name too.’  We both grin.  The woman is intrigued, looking as if she’s just sensed that the ground has shifted under her.  

The man and I start some light-hearted banter about calling the security guards, when I notice that a crowd is gathering around me.  As this crowd of five men and women chip in with their own banter, some of the comments get properly nutty.  

Then I realise that I recognise these folks.  ‘You’re the pranksters!’, I say to the crowd.  They say collectively and somewhat sheepishly, ‘Well, yes, that’s true!’ 

I’ve been observing these folks during the past couple of months.  They come in on weekends every now and then to do weirdoid, vaguely anti-social actions that are, technically, not illegal.  In truth, they’ve more light-hearted and K-Mart-surrealist than anti-social.  For example, today (ten minutes or so from now) they will move elsewhere through the gallery, performing super-slow-motion versions of Martha-Graham-style modern dance.   In the past, whenever they turned up, it’s been clear that the gallery guards don’t like them much, but they’re not doing anything to justify being ejected. 

Anyway  …  they are the pranksters!   Here they are, messing with my project!  What’s more, the woman sitting at the table, talking with faux-Ross is also one of the pranksters.  Faux-Ross is NOT one of the pranksters, even though he is his own kind of prankster!  Until I turned up, the woman has been believing that she was pranking me, but it turns out she has been pranked by faux-Ross.  Everybody, myself included, thinks this is a beautiful set of happy scams and accidents.  We have all been made into a confederation of the fooled.  And we are all happy about this!  

As the six pranksters get up to go about their slow-mo dancing, faux-Ross and I tarry and talk.  His story goes like this:  he was in the gallery yesterday and he saw the project.  So he came back this morning, thinking he’d just sit and wait for me to show up at 11.00 (as the note on the table promised I would).  He expected to have an impromptu conversation with me.  However  — best laid plans  –  I was running late and while he was sitting there alone, a woman showed up all chattery, saying, ‘Are you Ross?’  He thought, ‘What the hell  …’  and assented.   Five minutes later I wander by and saunter further up the gallery.  He sees this out of the corner of his eye, but he is not absolutely sure it’s me.  He keeps the conversation going for a good while longer, until I stride up and the crowd gathers around.  Which brings us all, including you — the reader — up to date.

So this is where the project has got to!  It’s self-sustaining and it’s self-deluding!  I don’t even have to show up now.  As I keep chatting with faux-Ross, whose real name (I presume it’s his real name!) is Mark, a voice in my head says to me, ‘Your work here is done!  The project has developed a life of it’s own.  ‘  

Later in the day, after I’ve gone out for some lunch and kept the appointment offiste that I had made on the phone while approaching the gallery, I return to find this note from Mark on the table:

Dear Ross   …   post mythical conversation  …   I so enjoyed being you.  In many ways it was very different to being me.  And being you, I felt I had become part of your conception.  It not only raised a number of questions about your sacred, confessional space but my own presence raised another issue  –  about identity.  Even though you were not here, you were.  I love this idea.   All the very best.

In my absence  –  lunch breaks or between days  –  all kinds of subtle interventions happen in the space.  I’ll come back to find: someone sitting in the chair impersonating me (see the post entitled ‘Self-sustaining, self-deluding’); the table pushed into the corner and the chairs creatively rearranged; notes left on the table; the bottle and glasses artfully arrayed; the water emptied from the bottle; the bottle disappeared; the Biennale guide folded and reconfigured into an origami Sydney Opera House with an inscription on the paper forecourt saying ‘MY GIFT TO YOU’; magazines left on the table, opened at pages that I presume display a message I’m meant to heed.

Again and again the perfectly valid question:  how is this art?

After ten weeks, I’ve got the definition polished now:  you know you’re encountering art when you are engaging with an intentional act that causes surprising transformations in matter or in the moment.

Then there’s the criticism definition.  What is good criticism?  Here’s my pocket definition of something I’ve been banging away at for thirty years: you are thinking, talking and writing well about art when you bear witness to it, and then engage with it in the terms that it offers to you, and then describe it thoroughly and provocatively and accountably to yourself and to an audience, and then analyse how it hangs together and how it works, and then evaluate it in relation to other works of art and tendencies in culture. 

Ten weeks in, two weeks to go, there’s enough critical mass in the stats now.  So it’s worth reporting some patterns.

75% of counterparts have been female.

5% have known who I am and what my work’s usually about and want to talk about it.

15% want to talk about art.

10% are aged above 70 years; 10% are aged between 60 and 70 years; 15% are aged between 50 and 60 years; 15% are aged between 40 and 50 years; 20% are aged between 30 and 40 years; 20% are aged between 20 and 30 years; 10% are aged between  8 and 20 years.    

5% want to talk specifically about the Biennale (although the overwhelming majority are enthusiastic about it, in passing).

10% come with some pre-determined topic that they insist on addressing.

40% work in the arts.

10% work in some therapeutic capacity.

60% are ‘anglo’.

30% grew up in Sydney.

1% disparaged the project to my face.

3%  are Indigenous Australian.

I talk with a bright young guy from Boston.  Previously a scientist, now a musician and an artist.  Very much a Bostonian.  

‘What characterises a Bostonian?’

‘We’re the most impatient people in America.  No one in Boston’s interested in red lights.  We leave New Yorkers way behind.’

I’m surprised at first.  I always think of Boston as staid, cosy.  But then I conjecture: ‘The push into the entire content, it came out of that northeastern seaboard.  There must be an energy about the culture.’

‘And an urgency, yes. It’s never eased off.”

He mentions how he wants to develop an interdisciplinary career — arts, sciences, different cultures, all conjoined around common aims.  

I describe some of my experience in these interdisciplinary areas.  Everything takes twice as long as you expect it to.  ’It’s going to test your Bostonian impatience,’ I say.  

‘Uhhuh.  I’ve been thinking about that.’

An odd moment.  And surprisingly poignant.  A movie star  --   a HUGE Hollywood star  --   who lives sometimes in Sydney, wanders in with no booking, sits and asks if he can have a brief conversation.  

Sure.  

But it doesn’t work.  The briefness that he specified, it’s part of the problem: because the exchange is specified to be brief and completely under his control, the interlude becomes an intensified performance by him, for whoever he can attact to watch.  It’s all orchestrated by and for him.  (‘Kinda pathological’,  I’m privately thinking.) 

It’s a curiously poignant moment, almost as if there’s some desperation in the action.  I can see how it must be close to impossible to stop being this persona when you’re in public.  His vocal intonations, his tics and gestures are almost self-parody, but he’s just being himself, or he’s playing at being himself, at the same time as he seems compelled to be impressive somehow, to be ‘on’ at all times.   This must do your head in.  Every question and comment becomes a scene to milk for effect.  

Quickly enough it’s evident that neither of us sees much point in continuing this out-of-rhythm micro-drama.  So we finish cordially enough.  After all, the deal was for a brief conversation.  So neither of us has egg on his face.  But neither of us feels it went well.

As I review the interlude, it’s striking to me how such self-consciousness, such neediness to impress and such a buffer of self-insurance have not featured in any other conversations during the past three months.  Almost all the other conversations have been curious, venturesome,  remarkably humble.  

Yep, it must do your head in, simultaneously being and performing this kind of star-thing.

A visit from a woman who works in marketing in London.  She’s from Sydney originally but has been in the UK for the last 20 years.  She says she’s shocked by how withdrawn and unimaginative the general mood of Australia has become in the past ten years. 

‘Compared to what?’  

‘Well I can only compare it to what I know  … meaning London …  where it’s become normal to encounter artistic objects and events absolutely everywhere …  There’s no doubt this makes the whole society more innovative.  The whole society accepts that it’s healthy, to be always encountering things that mess with your head.  It wasn’t like that ten years ago in England.  So it looks like London went in the opposite direction to where Sydney has been been going during the last ten years  …   It doesn’t have to be so dull, everything could turn around the way it did in London,  but really, right now, it’s kinda shocking here.  I’d love to come home.  But there’d be no work for me here.’

A young woman stands and chats for a while, after reading the room sheet that explains the project.  ‘It must be like in retail,’  she says, ‘where people tell you these stories and fill you up with all these feelings and then just walk away, leaving you tied to the counter, holding moods and muck that you never asked to collect.’

Except I have asked for it.  And really, in my case, the promised service and the transactions are quite different from something mercantile.  Even so, it’s beautiful and concise, the summation that she’s given of the retail transaction.

She sits and we talk about her studies  –  Humanities at Monash University in Melbourne.

The Cookie Monster [*see previous posts] comes by.  He says, ’Can I put to you a question?’  

I say: ‘You just did!’

CM chuckles and carries on: ‘ It’s Frankfurt  …  between the Wars  …. Goering is walking around with the boys in his brigade.  They’re all wearing brown shirts.  Goering sees this little fellow shuffling along the street. G. says to him, you’ve got the goods, the charisma, why not be the Fuehrer!  Hitler says, what are we going to do with Hindenberg?’

CM pauses for effect and says: ‘It’s a good question!’

And then he walks off, in his usual sly and affable way.

A young woman and a young man bump in unannounced.  Small talk leads us to the information that the Gallery was the location of their first date, arranged by friends.  Two years ago.  Now they’re two months away from their wedding.  

We talk about talk, how you don’t need valuable objects to make good talk.  Which leads to talk about wealth and goods and real estate.  These latter topics should be uppermost in the minds of newlyweds, you’d expect.  But they want to resist this pressure.  They want to base their marriage on immaterial and unquantifiable factors.  

I think to myself, the signs are good for these two.  The way they share their talk  –  it’s equable and patient, but in no way solemn.

A man in his seventies  –  spry and smiling  –  he sits and says, ‘Would you say you’ve found yourself yet?’   

I baffle around a response for a while.   

He helps me out by explaining that it’s a question that is in his mind constantly these days.  It was first put to him by his sister, who had left Australia permanently  to study Japanese Buddhism twenty years earlier.  She had put the question to him while he was still working in his high-powered city-job.  This questioning moment was the start of his withdrawal from the world of law and finance.  When she died seven years ago, he felt her absence terribly, but as he has recovered from that pain he has felt her presence increasingly. 

Then he says this extraordinary thing to me: “In the beginning was harmonics, I believe, not the word.  And austerity is the basis of all knowledge.’

A dapper old man strides up, explaining that he’s been strolling in the Botanical Gardens and he’s come into the Gallery to get out of the rain.   He asks can he sit down for a bit, to catch his breath before going home.  He’s 86 years old, he explains.  

Sit down!  Where’s home? 

Bondi. 

He says it the way oldtimers say it: ‘Bon-DIE’.  

Expecting to get a good story about childhood in the sandhills before the suburb became respectable, I ask him if he grew up there.  But it turns out he’s from Brisbane.  I let him know that’s my home town too.  We compare suburbs.  He’s from Stone’s Corner.  I tell him I know Stone’s Corner well  –  toughest suburb in the old part of Brisbane, no doubt about it. 

When did he leave?  1941.  Joined the army.  Ended up in New Guinea.  Fought and survived the entire Bougainville campaign, from the first day till the last.  Got demobilised into Sydney at the end of the War.  ‘After that, I needed something to take care of me for the duration.’  So he joined the Christian Brothers.  Eventually ended up back in New Guinea for thirty years before he got ‘burned out’.  Most of the time, he was setting up mission schools in Moresby, Rabaul and high in the mountains.  

I tell him I went to a Christian Brothers school.  He asks which one.  Hmmmphh!  He went there too!  Me in the 1970s, him in the 1930s!  He asks me who was teaching there during my time?  I can’t recall any names at all.  Then one name  —  someone I really disliked  –  pops into my  head.   

My counterpart laughs and says he knew this fella: ‘What a nasty old coot!’ 

Here we are sitting, looking at each other.  Almost four decades apart  –  innumerable differences in life experience and moral systems  –  one degree of separation! 

Talking with a woman from Hobart.  We drift into discussing those quintessentially Australian myths of ‘heroic failure’.  Burke and Wills, Leichhardt, Sturt, Ned Kelly, the Socceroos, the ANZACs.  Claude Levi-Strauss’s analysis of myth comes up,  how myths are stories that we crave and need because they enable us to live with ineradicable,  potentially paralysing contradictions. Take the ANZACs example.  The contradiction was that (a) the new nation wanted to feel complete and significant in relation to the world of other nations, but (b) the established world didn’t give (and doesn’t give) two hoots and will readily trash a small player like Australia whenever the extermination suits.  Told well, the myth ‘distracts’ us from this dispiriting contradiction by concocting a glorious, transcendent drama out of the military disaster, such that the feeling of transcendence in the well-told tale compensates and insulates us against the truth in the contradiction that the tale synthesises.  Myth is a kind of magic act, therefore, performed to take our minds off a nasty reality.

As we talk this through, my counterpart says that she’s getting teary and then she starts gently weeping but also smiling for a few seconds.  It’s not an uncomfortable moment, but it’s mysterious in different ways to both of us.  

We talk about this.  She says that the poignancy of myth is very touching — how much we want and even need myth but how much it goes against all pragmatic truth about the workings of the world.  It shows how much we need truth too, but don’t always want it and so often avoid it.

A little while later, after the conversation has finished,  I mention this moving interlude to the next counterpart, saying how touching it was for both of us.  The new counterpart says she can understand it, from her point of view, because she has family legends about her grandfather, whose heroic failure and associated suffering still touch the lives of all his descendants. 

The booking is made online, and it comes with an inquiry:  does the conversation have to be one-on-one, or can two people come along?  I write back: two people no problem.  

When they turn up, the young women are identical twins.  I’ve already fetched an uncomfortable improvised seat for myself, so that they can have the two proper chairs.  Happily they counter my hospitality by insisting that I should have one chair and they can share the other.  The offer strikes me as brave on their part, because they must be aware of how they’ll look, identically perched together on the one chair.  This thought passes through me and then passes away, because they mention that they’ve read in the blog about how the venue is based on the dimensions of a Japanese tea-room and therefore they’ve brought green tea in a thermos, plus some Japanese biscuits!   I’m distracted and touched and completely charmed.  (This has come a few minutes after a passerby has doubled back in between sessions, to give me a delicious sesame-seed snack.  The project keeps attracting kindness from strangers.) 

So we begin to converse.  One of them knows Japan very well, better than I can ever hope to know it (and plainly my hopes and wishes are BIG, regarding Japan!)  Furthermore, the women are artists and they work together, quite intensively, on a longrunning project that entails conversation, negotiation, exchange.   So it turns out we three have a great deal in common.  For example, there are the things we’ve learned about people and about art from our different talky ventures.  

Which leads us through to more talk, more details.  I discover there’s a minimalism and a modular aspect about their work, such that matchboxes are a kind of emblem for them.  This term ‘matchbox’ leads by association to mention of the phrase ‘blood match’ which, I learn, is a medical term that often comes up in the world of twins. 

We sidle around to discussing the culture, psychology, sociology of being a twin.  I have a strong sense that I don’t want to make this the main topic, because I presume it’s something they encounter ad nauseam.  And besides, we’ve already found so much else to discuss.  But the talk has drifted over to the ‘twin topic’ easily and associatively, so we go with the flow for a while and discuss what it’s been like, being alike.  I learn that the idea of ‘profiling’ or of rushing too quickly into judging a book by its cover  –  an idea I’ve featured in the blog a few times  –  is a theme that resonates very strongly with them. 

I realise I’ve never before thought clearly about the pressure of stereotyping  that  twins must experience.  This brings back to my mind the bravery and forthrightness that I had sensed straightaway in these two young women.  One of them says now that, over the years, they’ve just had to learn not to care about the assumptions that people make or about the judgements that get cast peremptorily down heedless of any careful observation or reflection.  I realise and say out loud that they must have arrived at such tough insouciance only by enduring a good deal of pain.  Without turning the topic into a big note, they agree and re-emphasise that all you can do is refuse to care abut it, refuse to endorse the prejudicial stupidity  …  you just can’t indulge a feeling of injustice about peoples’ readiness for quick judgement.   

I sense they’ve learned to counter bitterness with tenderness plus toughness.   But I  keep this idea to myself  –  not wanting to sound too naff and obsequious.   

With most people engaging with this project, the conversations enable the counterparts get to know each other.  With a smaller fraction  –  people I have known already  –  we’ve been catching up.  

A more challenging exercise is when you want to get to know someone you already know, when you want to go beyond the obvious opportunity of catching up with them.  

It’s trickier than you’d expect —  the inertia of familiarity, complacency, in the worst of cases a whiff of contempt  –  but it’s a great boon when further knowledge happens.

The audience-research counterpart (see previous post) observes that the project appears to be framed by guarantees of courtesy (vouched not only by me but by the Biennale and the AGNSW) and that this is one reason why the big majority of participants have been women.  ’Courtesy is something valued and sought out by women’, she observes.  Then there’s the fact, she says, that conversation is so integral to network cultures, which women tend to maintain as a matter of course. 

I learn from a counterpart who has already analysed the project very clearly.  She is a specialist in audience experience and audience research, and she can see theoretically into aspects of the project that are only intuitive to me.  She sees how this blog has to maintain a balance between reporting and concealing, because the entire project must honour the trust that gets developed delicately in the paradoxically public context of the open room’s privacy.  The project is founded on trust, enriched and tested by divulgence and constantly threatened by betrayal at one extreme and by retreating into generalised, anodyne reportage at the other.  She sees how the differences between blogging and conversing and gossiping are subtle but definitive here.  She observes that a blog has to be selective and somewhat confidential unless the people being reported have expressly asked to be identified. Blogging is writing, not talking. Conversing is talking, not writing.  Impermanence vs permanence.  Ephemerality vs documentation.  The blog leans over to the archival side.  But the writing has to have a seemingly easy technique; it has to read like talking.  It has to be painstakingly written so that it reads like extemporised talking that is discreet, considered but light as the air that talk rides on.

Confusion abounds, but why not go with it? 

I turn up early for the day’s first appointment, and I find that the room has gone!  I knew it would go, temporarily, later in the day, to clear the concourse for some big function that will assail the Gallery tonight.  (It turns out the function was a dinner honouring Edmund Capon, Director of the Gallery at the time.)  I understood that we’d agreed that the move would occur later in the day, after my scheduled conversations had been completed.  But for whatever reasons, the move has happened half a day early.  I can’t say I’m surprised; which is different from saying I think it’s OK but … what can you do.  There’s a promise that the room will be back in place first thing tomorrow morning, when I have some long-standing bookings racked up.

So here I am, looking around and wondering.  The table and chairs have been placed over in the Old Gallery.  (This placement is a compromise that the AGNSW folks and I negotiated yesterday, but with the end of the day in mind.)  The furnishings have been backed into a corner, a schmaltzy Julian Ashton painting looming above.  In this new locale there are no focussing walls left and right, no demarcation of carpet on the floor, no sense of a haven or a tea-room.  In other words, the frame is gone, the edge of the ’stage’ is missing and all context has been removed, including the three paintings and the wall-sheet.   As today’s conversations occur, they will be undistinguished from the huge void-like space of the old hall.  This location is extremely exposed and antipathetic to the contemporary mind, what with  all those classics of antipodean impressionism trying and failing to shimmer in the dull light.  If I wanted to let it rise, a sense of agitation could amplify to anger and panic easily enough.  But, screw it  – life is short.  Next I notice how the feng shui is very tricky — vision and noise come in from every direction, mostly from behind, out of one’s control.  And the Old Gallery itself has a sucking Victorian sombreness and a silence that can be counteracted only by my actively disregarding it, only by making a conscious decision to speak at heightened volume, to laugh out loud, to make gestures bigger than the hushed hall seems to allow.  

Such are the challenges presented as I wait for my counterpart.  Moreover, I know that the conversation might start out tricky.  The additional reasons go like this: when he booked late last night, his text indicated that we had met once before, in a particular context.  I have no memory of the meeting or indeed of the context  –  but then again, you could write a book filled with the things I can’t remember.  I half-suspect that he has mistaken me for another Ross, a friend who will laugh at this because Ross1 and Ross2 have enjoyed this identity-confusion during the past couple of decades.  (R1 and R2 occasionally have to forward emails to each other when messges have been inadvertently sent to the wrong R.)  When accepting the booking online last night, I decided not to raise the possibility of the identity-confusion, thinking we can sort it out on arrival.   My main concern is that the counterpart will feel humiliated or he’ll feel that I’ve set him up somehow.   And now the protection of the box is gone too!  He could feel doubly uncomfortable.  Truth to tell, the exerience is shaping up as pretty shabby, regardless of it being not of my conscious control or volition.  

This could get tricky.

The counterpart turns up and he’s all apologies and admissions of embarrassment.  I see his embarrassment and match it with apologies and assurances. 

He explains how he has realised ahead of time that he has mistaken the Ross-identities and that he’s coming to meet a stranger.  And to add to his vertigo, he now sees that the protection of the box is gone.  Furthermore, he’s been following the blog and interpreting it by matching the prose and ideas and sentiments to OtherRoss.  Now he has to unravel all that interpretation in order to reformat it rapidly to some character he doesn’t know, doesn’t yet trust, maybe doesn’t feel he wants to encounter.  

In good humour we share all this information, feeling a kind of free-fall of comprehension as we try to tune into each other.  More than that, we try to reassure each other, straightaway and by automatic reflex.  

Which means we both want this encounter to work.  Indeed, if it is to work, it needs to work against the odds, and therefore there’s a chance it may well work very well.  We already have candor between us, plus vulnerability, and admissions of error, insufficiency, mutual forgiveness.  We’ve broken through several layers of estrangement quickly and reached depths of divulgence.  This is like speed acquaintance!  

I say I admire him for turning up.  After all, on top of the ordinary anxieties about meeting a stranger, he has vaulted over embarrassment and confusion, and still he’s come along.  Tensions abate.  We smile and proceed to sit in the crappy new environment. 

He notes how dodgy the feng shui is!  I explain that the alignment of the seats is the best I can manage, taking into account how I’ve lessened his exposure to anxiety by letting him have the doorway in peripheral view in exchange for me being able to have my deaf ear pointed away from him and toward the cavernous hall of sombre painting.  

Some background: my deaf ear has strongly determined the design of the original room.  In every social situation there is a need for me to be on the right hand side of people and to have limited reverb and minimal clattered noise in the environment.   Hence the carpet on the floor.   All in all, the project’s 10-foot by 10-foot dimensions, the intimacy of scale, furniture and decor are all the functional (and successful) syntheisis of several pragmatic and aesthetic imperatives.   

Anyway, back in the cavernous hall, my counterpart and I understand that we are in this predicament together and that our reflexive actions have already shown each other to be ready to be compassionate and humorous, in a shruggy, schlemeil kind of way.  So, why not sit and talk like a couple of what-can-you-do schlemeils?

We’ve had a long, stuttery preamble, but it means we’ve got off to a good start  –  we’ve experienced a stack of phatic communication, plus we’ve exchanged a surprisingly big dose of intimate information about each other.  For example, he’s divulged that he knows plenty about therapeutic techniques and philosophies.  Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that he is prodigiously and analytically well informed.  

Therefore, an hour of quite riveting discussion ensues about the various functions of conversation  –  psychic functions, organic and neurological functions, historically-contexctualised functions.  In turn I get to talk about some of my  … ermmnn  … philosophical angles on team sports.  Next we take in systems theory, addiction-psychology, evolutionary neurology, aesthetics, pedagogy, network theory. 

We round out the chat, at last, having swapped a few confidences that neither of us would tell to a stranger.

It’s developed into a conversation that, for all the impediments that have been put in its way, feels to me like a culmination of the entire project.  The talk has been rhythmically quick and generative, open-ended, challenging, startling and compassionate without being in any way meek.  It feels like a gift, coming at this tired end of the proceedings, when my energies and patience are waning.

Talking with a counterpart about this issue of staying ‘pure’ by doing bugger-all  … she says, ‘I’ve got to a point where I reckon if you believe you can do something that makes a situation better than it was before, well then you’ve gotta stop caring too much about the people who are going to act all offended or outraged  …  otherwise nothing ever gets done.  Everything’s going to get messy anyway.’  

This topic has come up because another counterpart has just been telling me about her work with people younger than her, how ‘the young folks don’t seem to have the critical suspicion and paralysis that our generation was trained into.’  Me: ‘What they’ve got, maybe, is a slightly blissed-out readiness to trust too much?’  Her:  ’Maybe, but at least it’s generative rather than corrosive.’

Writing this kind of blog, you want to bear witness to the richness of each conversation, each peculiar dynamic, each paradoxically singular but dual transaction.  However you don’t want to betray trust or confidences that were offered in emotionally private moments that emerged within the somewhat public frame of the project.  

Slippery,  the ethics and the issues for communicative technique  – the ephemerality of talking vs the durability of writing.  

You want to make the reports because the experiences are often so rich and valuable.   (They are more widely valuable than the affective and informative span of two people.)  There are several kinds of politics in the reporting, therefore.  You want to make the reports compelling, intriguing, sometimes even dramatic, but you don’t want to be exploitative and you don’t want to reach for easy tricks of journalism.  And all the while, laziness is luring an odd puritanism over to its mission, suggesting you shouldn’t do anything at all until you feel you’ve put yourself in some cosy place that’s exactly, unimpeachably right.  

Counterposed to this voice, there’s the impatient one hissing: ‘you can stay pure and do nothing, or you can do something’.  

It’s time to sum up.  Time to synthesise the project. 

But of course, there’s no way to encompass it all.  

Maybe the best approach is to re-tell an anecdote that I found myself offering a few times throughout the twelve weeks.   It’s a bit of talk about talk.    …    I remember seeing a TV interview, more than twenty years ago, with Gore Vidal.  The discussion strutted over to the state of the American union  –  all the promise in the nation’s commencement, all the tawdriness in its Reaganite present.  Momentarily Vidal mollified and beamed as he spoke of the Declaration of Independence, the way it conjured a possible world nearby in time, a world verging in from an envisaged future that was shaping the present.    Without any of his customary wryness or irony, Vidal asserted that the Declaration is one of the supreme creative products of human history.  How, he wondered, how did a tiny gaggle of isolated idlers produce one of the great imaginative and pragmatic artefacts of human culture?  

Vidal rocked back in his chair and allowed a few beats of silence to herald his own answer to his own question.  

It happened, he said, because these people were NOT idlers, even though they may have appeared so to an outside observer.  In fact, they were busy conversing, and thus they were inventing a world of possibility, a world first looming in the weightlessness of their conjoined minds and then emerging in the heftiness of law.  They envisaged a new world by observing, reading, listening, talking and responding to each other.  In the utopian language of the Declaration, they made a realm of possibility and inaugurated their glory.   Next in the legislative language of the Constitution, they commenced their failure, not least because they failed to expunge slavery from the emerging Union.  (The clauses protecting the right to bear arms would backfire a long time later.)  

And now, he intoned glumly, the promise of that world has been thoroughly sullied by generation after generation who have declined to continue the ever-evolving conversations that brought the idea of independence up to the verge of reality.  

So the sullied outcome of contemporary America is not a flaw in the conversations, Vidal concluded, rather it’s a flaw in the actions that occurred after and in spite of all the originating talk that made America.

For ‘America’, read ‘democracy’.  

And go figure.  

I asked the question.  'Kogarah,' he replied.

‘Is that where you grew up? ‘

‘Nah … the money’s moved into where I grew up. That’s how come I’m living where I live now. You go where the cheap money’s sticking firm  …  I mean the cheap rents … but really, there aren’t any cheap rents … not cheap enough to let you do what you want. Except if I moved out of Sydney  …   but the main thing I want is to live in Sydney!’

‘How come?’

‘Oh, y’know  …  the surf, Chinatown, the light.  The late afternoon light.’