The Object The Host The Terrain

An essay on Patrick Lundberg, Oliver Perkins and Richard Bryant.






Adoption and Adaptation  

A series of four essays written for Circuit exploring medium fluidity.


Absorption
Refraction
Testimonial
Duration




Recent Writing (2015-2022)



Artist Essays


Oscar Enberg



















"it's understood that sentence making has more in its sights than donuts", jdr sixty (may, 2016)

"...the radio, wiped each morning, is not just the piped in externality of an otherwise hermetic laboratory but an irreducible agent, an object that mediates all those that come into contact with it. Such concerns are directly relatable to the promise of legibility, of transmission, a concern signalled by Lacey’s decision to make a homeopathic remedy from a typeface designed to be read at speed. Which is to say that we are also talking about digestion. That is, we are talking about a legibility geared towards transmission, fast uptake, ease of digestion.’'

short essay on sonya lacey's show, infinitesmals  Engine Room, April 2016.


 























JDR 59 (DECEMBER 2014)
"GLEN O'BRIEN's SELF-EMPLOYMENT RATE"

Long Before ZOO JEANS the ever entrepenurial Glen O'Brien new which way the wind was blowing.

30 page notebook with joke.
(sold out)














JDR 58 (THE JOHN DORY)

Turns out John Dory is also a type of sailing vessel. So yeah, of course, we commisioned a series of ships in a bottle. It's perfect as a bookend for your johndory collection! 

(sold out)   








































BARACUDA 23 (SPRING 2014)
TERROR TROLLS

"we're down grading/ to zero hour function/ had a whole supply / of daily quantums, / now its gigabyte hour/ caller can't hold.../ not that long. I'm fullmeister's dome on / steroids. runup crack / bill me at day labour / wage. like all that / stereotype of traffic / light management... / expedient labour pools / as new sweatshop xxxxxxx/ measure, another poor, annoint them the new / proleteriat, like that / will help".

more bad language
26 pp
(sold out)
















JDR53 (Souvenir)
Used betting slip. Various dates, Various denominations. 
(sold out)















JDR 54
"THE BRENT SPAR" by RICHARD FRATER

"I don't want to represent L.Pertusa but I am sharing in its contemperaneous experience of time. How? We have heard how the coral ameliorates Greenpeace's activism simply by remaining active at the scene of the Brent Field. I have asserted the corals' likely presence, not at some hidden depth but mingling with the topography's piecemeal parcel. Lophelia quietly calcified backstage during Greenpeace's two-week band camp. It worked there until the final decommission stunt and it continues to work on the remaining platforms in the Brent Field..."

36 pages plus multiple
$20










JDR57
SECATEURS; OR THE POLEMICS OF SHOE WORK PLATFORM APPARATUS

"If we know what secateurs are, do we know what a non secateur might be? Can we not assume that anything other than a secatuer might be a non secateur? Of course! But surely that is an entirely redundant phrase. Things are casual enough! We need not extend such arrangements. No. Better to suggest that the non secateur the title comes from is due to the very forms on display. The hook shape table tops Reynolds puts to work. They do after all resemble secateurs, at least one side of that tool’s pairing of blades. Reynolds’ cast forms are even metallic looking. Indeed they are fashioned out of cast aluminium. So they are in a sense secateurs, blades more than capable of being sharpened and fixed with a spring so that they too might retain the potential pincher manoeuvre so beloved of actual secateurs. Perhaps, then we might call these big over-extended non secateur’s outsized clippers.  Why if these were secateurs just think how unlikely it would be to lose them!"

Digressions on Martyn Reynold's show, NON SECATEUR at Gloria Knight
26 pages plus artist multiple
Edition of 20
(sold out)















BARRACUDA 22 (WINTER 2014)
NEW AGE WASTRELS

"they were orchestrating the whole machination. forget the baby doing d&g on the contrapuntal relation, buy a bag of wood, pocket the change, write your report. send it, via overnight courier; nihlism rarelly felt so good!"

Mealy mouty types doing bad languaguage
SOLD OUT.





JohnDORY 56
Ruminations on Paul Johns 2013 show Mum


"I have been hyphenating photo-graphing largely to induce a sense to which Johns’ show is less about representation the more it is about topography. That is, it is less a show interested in the discursive representation of an earthquake’s aftermath the more it is a reclamation and stamping out of an entire history that only happens to begin from this momentary absence. Which is why at this stage it is entirely appropriate to conjure something of the descriptive matrix through which the show comes together, so that what we witness is not just the melancholic rendition of a former theatre as civic institution, but instead a socio-collective history garnered through the testimonial élan of the artist’s mother.."

28 pages, colour cover (if you're lucky)
(sold out)
read the essay here


JohnDORY 55 
"Creative Capital"
Reprint of found freelance photographers 2013 diary.

38pp (black and white)
SOLD OUT
&


REPRINT WITH NEW EXPANDED TEXT OF JDR51 "CITY AS ORGANISM" 

"If we take a sign of life to be the ability to draw attention to oneself, to express a certain consciousness, can we not say that the city performs as such! Let us look simply at the scrawled writing that populates so many cities, that which covers fences, allotments, hoardings and buildings.  Do we not call this writing, this graffiti the language of the dispossessed? That is, do we not lump it together less as the petty vandalism of unique individuals, the more we recognise it as the expression of a whole social class.  Perhaps though we fail to recognise this, after all we deploy whole agencies to combat such problems, so that even such habituated expression, this language of the dispossessed is really only uttered in the most laconic of ways so that we do not really mean it. Nothing seems to exemplify this more than the reception that followed Luke Willis Thompson’s exhibition of the roller doors that ultimately lead to the death of one particularly graffito. There we have a kind of diagramming in which such language becomes attached to the very building itself, now extracted and posed in the gallery as an object of political-ethical import. Which it is, but why settle so easily into this routine in which the very scaffolding of the city is on display and not comment on the force flowing through it"

20pp
(sold out)







The Future We Deserve
  

It’s no joke to suggest that Manchester’s periphery of suburban residences was civic planning miming doll’s house construction. That city's flight of the middle-class in 18th century not only emptied the city core of its dormitory populations, but also dramatically segregated Manchester's distinct socioeconomic strata. In fact, as Engels notes, suburbia was never simply a compromise in which the wealthy chose to inhabit ex-centric residences but instead a coercive restructuring of the industrial city which stretched from the cities interior where the middle-class housed their business, factories and show-rooms out to the picturesque domiciles of this suburban Eden.  Accordingly, Manchester’s civic leaders specifically carved out the shared social terrain of the civic sphere as their own privatised arena forcing the unlucky populace to make do, either as a banished supplementary populace on the margins, or genuflecting loyalists dependent upon the sycophantic peccadilloes of the leisure dollar. This divisively cordoned the city, running its façade of a public terrain straight into the highly polished charters of today's entertainment-destination retail.  So there’s nothing really surprising about this make-over, in fact it’s little more than the trickle-down economy, only brutishly manifest.  Today’s version is no different it is just more insidiously coded, folded into urban appraisals rather than overlaid upon them, but if we’re not careful it’ll become (if it hasn’t already) the future we deserve rather than the future we want.  

22page essay exploring suburbia's relation to tilt slab retail
jdr52 (September, 2013).  


JDR 51
August 2013

"If we take a sign of life to be the ability to draw attention to oneself, to express a certain consciousness, what happens when we insist that the city constantly writes its own story. Be that through the daily newspaper, or the syndicated magazines, deploying its journalists like so many lieutenants, succumbing them to the passivity of mere functionaries ... perhaps that legibility is too obvious, we pass it by too easily. What then might we say of the story of our trash. Could we not say that our rubbish heaps are not just indexes of consumption, but also forms of writing. How easily we could spread such similar sentiments over graffiti, that form of writing we say is the language of the dispossessed. Of a habituation that is disenfranchised... Looked at from the point of view of circulation we can see that such writing points to the much larger story of the city, one that is multiple, that includes humans but is not limited to them. That’s the story that makes the city something more than just where humans work and live. It’s the story the city is writing itself."

30pp (colour).
(sold out)





New Edition of Marking Wilderness Display

"As Richard Mabey points out, the tendency with which ‘Nature [is] irrevocably opposed to Man’, not only victimises nature’s cordon in wilderness preserves as something in need of protection but also devalues its permeation of human environments... No longer then, are we to see the urban yard as a purely quirky experience of nature, but as the crucial, foundational platform in which human’s play an increasingly interdependent role within nature".

32pp (colour photocopied onto green paper stock).
$10 or $15 carbon offset. 
postage included.






















"The Local Kindergarten Called, They Want You to Run Their Next Painting Class". 
Edition of 26. Each unique.
Special Anniversary Issue with Oli Perkins.
JDR50 (April, 2013).
(sold out)