Grounded

Andrew Newman, 'In the backyard. Underneath the wattle tree my brother planted. Out of sight from the window of the kitchen, where my mother was drinking wine. She wore fuchsia pink underpants. I would pluck clumps of grass out as we spoke. Afterwards her back was pink and had the impression of a Pollock painting.' LAMDA print, 125cm x 125cm, 2009

Andrew Newman,

We don’t disappear into thin air. There is something left behind. There is our shit that disappears down the drain. There is our piss soaking into the earth. There are our toenails, fingernails, our pubic hair, our facial hair, our snot, our cum, our smegma, our earwax. There is the sleep that sticks to our eyes, there is our dandruff and all those flakes of skin that dance in the sunlight. Daily our bodies fall apart and touch the earth. Our bodies end in the earth. Discarded. Excreted. Grounded.
We step over this earth. Hover above it in our apartments. Guard against it with the soles of our shoes. But there are moments when we are grounded.
There is a kind of tragic beauty in these bodily discharges. It is the beauty of the break-down of the body, a body that lives, even though it is already dead. As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote in Corpus:

All of its life, the body is also a dead body, the body of a dead person, of this death that I am living.

The clean death, the death where we wait for it all to disappear, is the death of fiction. The real death, is the death we die each day, our body breaks down. As Heidegger writes that being “is always already dying: in its “being-towards-its-end.”

About

Andrew Newman is an artist and researcher. His performative art practice poetically utilises methodologies from the communication sciences to examine value construction in contemporary culture. He is currently researching the application of Joseph Beuys’ concept of social sculpture to economic markets and is exploring the existential elements of the economic theory of Andre Gorz.

Newman completed a MFA under Ryszard Dabek and John Conomos at the Sydney College of the Arts, exploring the application of Roland Barthe’s notion of pothos, the desire for the absent being, to televisual art practice. He has studied experimental media under German filmmaker Karl Kels at the Universität der Künste, Berlin and journalism and communication at the University of Technology in Sydney and the University of Hamburg. He has had his work exhibited in Sydney, Berlin and Tokyo.

Artworks

Writing by Newman

Writing about Newman