Victoria’s Public Secret
A couple weeks ago we were in Sydney attending the opening festivities for the 19th Biennale of Sydney, an international event especially fraught this year by issues of funding ethics. Everyone involved with the Biennale (artists, directors, curators, staff, benefactors, patrons, publicists, venues, etc.) struggled with our implication [more]
A couple weeks ago we were in Sydney attending the opening festivities for the 19th Biennale of Sydney, an international event especially fraught this year by issues of funding ethics. Everyone involved with the Biennale (artists, directors, curators, staff, benefactors, patrons, publicists, venues, etc.) struggled with our implication in inhumane governmental policy via the Biennale’s patronage. How do you respond when you realize your friends, who support you financially and otherwise, make much of their money from taking contracts that are complicit with cruelty?
Victoria’s Public Secret, Chapter 2
Queen Victoria’s Diary
Great Exhibition: 1 May 1851
This day is one of the greatest and most glorious days of our lives, the empire the dirty empire, with which, to my pride and joy the name of my dearly beloved Albert is forever associated! And the penal colony, the children the dirty children. It is a day which makes my heart swell with thankfulness. I’m only on my knees to prey on you. The Park presented a wonderful spectacle, crowds streaming through it – how about a carpark? a public plaza named for me? how about organizing our own eviction? how about a b-classification heritage building, or a- (urgent need of acquisition), carriages and troops passing, quite like the Coronation Day, and for me, the same anxiety. It seems like everything I find beautiful is crying about this hopelessness, and the irreducibility of being alone. I wish I was a pervert, with something inside me that burned, and could never be made manifest. My secrets are so boring.
Lean upon my lacey balustrade. The day was bright, and all bustle and excitement. At half past 11, the whole procession in 9 state carriages was set in motion to overtake my effortless cinema. Vicky and Bertie were in our carriage. A stage! –my stagecoach grand drive George street strip. Vicky was dressed in lace over white satin, with a small wreath of pink wild roses, a presentation of flying horsetail weed, in her hair, and looked very nice. Bertie was in full Highland dress. The Green Park and Hyde Park were one mass of densely crowded human beings, in the highest good humour and most enthusiastic. The confessional work transforms my audience. I never saw Hyde Park look as it did, being filled with crowds as far as the eye could reach. Even the birds came back to ornament and act, even to us – you assholes who are so lazy – we don’t deserve them. The world is perfect, plus the world and that is perfect and we’re such fuck-ups, you ruin and kill everything. But the birds come back, which is an amazement, a bafflement, and there are even lowly badgers, even muskrats; there are even the rank and stinking bats. You are my absolution. You say this: this shit of our minds is beautiful because it is the world at the same time as it cannot possibly be. The ranking bats.
A little rain fell, just as we started; but before we neared the Crystal Palace, the sun shone and gleamed upon the gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of every nation of every prison were flying. We drove up Rotten Row and got out of our carriages at the entrance on that side. It was day one of prison poetry class: number 01 told me to get fucked. I take her very seriously because she is the queen and being a queen I take royalty seriously. She said she got no vernacular she got only dialect. She quoted Hegel: I’m sorry I don’t understand a word you’re saying. We build prisons because we don’t know where to stand without walls. She said fuck yourself I didn’t build this prison, queen bitch. I put Wrecking Ball on my headphones and she played it on repeat until the end of the session. Then she wrote down three words. (I mouth you.) The glimpse through the iron gates of the Transept, the moving palms and flowers, the myriads of people filling the galleries and seats around, together with the flourish of trumpets, as we entered the building, gave a sensation I shall never forget, and I felt much moved. When they use the non-vernacular they make their prison and they shut up they make something we call it poetry. It is sweet but it doesn’t save the lives of asylum-seekers. We’re a volunteer, she helps the beasts. Powers open windows in prisons or so they say; the power openers, the cranks of older vehicles, and poems make prison walls or so they say.
In a few seconds we proceeded, Albert leading me having Vicky at his hand, and Bertie holding mine. We are guided toward salvation precisely by the companion who has lost his way. The sight as we came to the centre where the steps and chair (on which I did not sit) was placed, facing the beautiful crystal fountain was magic and impressive. The bead of light that emerges from our defects and our little abjections is nothing other than redemption. The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, the lofty ornament my interior rotundral scheme, with all its decorations and exhibits, the sound of the organ (with 200 instruments and 600 voices, which seemed nothing), your magpie perch a song in polyphonic lament, and my beloved Husband the creator of this great ‘Peace Festival’, a tonal easement grows a tiny lung, uniting the industry and arts of all nations of the earth, all this, was indeed moving, and a day to live forever. God bless my dearest Albert, and my dear Country which has shown itself so great today. What swag this marvelous detention affords!
Medusa’s raft a raking stage of un-stinking flesh, of hunger, of irrelevant ineptitude traded for research in online morgues. The gorgeous palette of survival writhes living images, grasping at the parts to pick the right rhetoric: this sail this said, this mast this must a should a could a shoulder to have in the hold and to hold that, had that. Wild ocean rough as tiny brushes threatens to untangle this hair with tasteful arrangements violently, a sky split in two.
The Nave was full of people, which had not been intended and deafening cheers and waving of handkerchiefs, flourishing ravenous thumbs punching at their pockets, continued the whole time of our long walk from one end of the building, to the other. All parties are ‘collateral damage’ in a complex argument. Every face was bright, and smiling, where the hastily deleted conversations once groaned, oozing pixels of false memory, great flat wounds of light at 1136 by 640. Each a tracery, and many even had tears in their eyes; leering drips the filigree trim weeping at the eaves. One could of course see nothing, but what was high up in the Nave, and nothing in the Courts, but a latticework of acronyms. The organs were but little heard, but the Military Band, at one end, had a very fine effect. The moulage of my criminal investigation purposes your scrollwork.
We returned to our place and Albert told Lord Breadalbane to declare the Exhibition opened, which he did in a loud voice saying “Her Majesty commands me to declare the Exhibition opened,”, and “Like them, we are inadvertently caught somewhere between ideology and principle,” when there was a flourish of trumpets, followed by human suffering, followed by immense cheering. Everyone was astounded and delighted. The return was equally satisfactory – the crowd most enthusiastic and perfect order kept. While being mindful of valid concerns, it is this Board’s duty to act in the interests of the Biennale and all its stakeholders – selfless philanthropists, uncertain bi-partisan politicians, drowning collateral, starving founding partners, generations of money separated from its children, working groups. Without the grillwork walls of the royal big house our interior slammers would not exist: around the sticky wicket a calm reflective trough.
We reached the Palace at 20 minutes past 1 and went out on the balcony, being loudly cheered. Could I abandon my view of the cloud, of the colony, as it screeches the night over the harbor, as it roosts in groves of rotting figs? Strange fruit, ambiguity is my sheepish ornament. That we felt happy and thankful, – I need not say – proud of all that had passed and of my beloved one’s success. Investment’s flows are indiscriminate and undistinguished, its joint ventures hinge on 11.9%. The place of lack or of desire is where the dream doesn’t hold together. Dearest Albert’s name is for ever immortalised and the absurd reports of dangers of every kind and sort, set about by a set of people, – the ‘soi-disant’ fashionables and the most violent protectionists – are silenced. Thumb the reverse view option: Medusa’s gaze into my tiny compact frame. Gasp! it’s myStorm, my set of fools to drown. It is therefore doubly satisfactory that all should have gone off so well, and without the slightest accident or mishap.
I am vindicated by your attention.