Plein Air Sculpture 2020 Painted timber c. 90cm x 90cm x 160cm
There’s no grounds for speculation on swearing. Ironically, the interrogation of swearing is taboo. Any interrogation of swearing will be perceived as uncool.
Swearing is king. It is part of the woke upgrade. There is a universal endorsement of swearing, which is trans-cultural, trans-racial, trans-continental. Watch any film made anywhere in the world in the last ten years and swearing is an important tool employed in communication, even in the gentler cultures of South-East Asia. There’s just five or six words, available in all languages. Each word relates to body functions that occur as far from the brain as you can get. The words refer to reproduction and the tools employed for reproduction. They refer to human waste in both solid and liquid form. Strangely both birth and death offer no prospects for strong language, even though both conditions might offer scope for an equivalent strength. I guess they’re not body parts enough.
Everyone is on the swearing bus. We were collectively, universally, in the need for release, given the collapse of old world certainty, apparently.
It’s not that I don’t swear. I swear as a bodily response to shock, mainly, and it works really well, like a shock absorber works. I immediately feel better after swearing, good medicine wisely used.
For me though, day to day employment of strong language is lazy. Minute to minute swearing is like watching a crowd of high vis workers clocking on or off, assembled together. At a certain point high viz is no viz. It’s better to find scope for high viz in the the usual rainbow spectrum.
Please see attached image.
We all breathe and swear and swear and breathe, to get by though.
I came back to Sydney as a fourteen year old, from five years in Europe and England. On my first day at school, I had the usual first day at a new school anxiety, but all the boys were swearing as they had not done in England. It hurt my Englished ears and caused a pain I was required to use to make myself strong. ‘Toughen up’ was what was implied.
Thanks, but no. I will make my own way, find a strength somewhere else.
I will never forget. The boy next to me in English asked me whether I was a deadshit. I see him sometimes still, in Balmain, a retired barrister, doesn’t recognise me. He asked me dead pan. I had no idea what a deadshit was, at the time. It’s gone out of use a bit now, but it’s quite a good word. A deadshit is someone who tries and fails. I believe I said no I wasn’t, but it was only a hunch.
Australians were the first to toughen up in this way. The coming here from England made it necessary to come to terms with the different weather and trees and the other criminals and their enforcers.
It turns out we were scouts on an emerging global condition that required everyone everywhere to toughen up in the same way. We led the swearing way and we are now a world of Australians.
When I was learning about art, I even learnt it at school, you don’t use black to divide colours to make them bright. You need to establish relations between the colours on their own terms. Using black to make colours strong was cheating. Naturally, rules are made to be broken, but as a general rule, I try to make language flow without using black. Even telling the deadshit story crossed the line a bit, the word jumping out on the page like a pimple on an adolescent.
This account of swearing will inevitably find little sympathy, such is the depth to which we have collectively swum.
It was important for me to make an account of the idea. Any idea, good or bad, gives rise to form, which is the task of this blog, to explore.
Plein Air Sculpture 2020 Painted timber c. 90cm x 90cm x 160cm at The Sawmiller’s Sculpture Prize 2021
Background sculpture by Ron Robertson-Swann