HUMAN WORK

DALE NASON

MP Fikaris is a child of this millennium, raised in the vacuum of the post twin towers terrorist attack that put ‘the west’ on a fake news war footing. In the 80’s we had a gas mask fetish as the Cold War maintained a threat of nuclear annihilation. In the 2000’s one might have adopted the look to empathise with those breathing the depleted uranium rounds of the Brits and US in Fallujah, Iraq. But there was LOTS going on.

With Wikileaks emerging on the heels of Iraq Body Count and journalism by Robert Fisk, it seemed the world had inverted. At minimum the oxygen of the critical had gone. Kids were getting around unable to breathe. A new electric blanket of what was ok to say and what was not ok to say had layered itself down into the masses. Silent Army, Fikaris’ long standing underground publishing imprint, also began in 2002. 

Not so long after the Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi nationalists sieg-heiled to Metallica at the 2004 Big Day Out, to the vocal disdain of James Hatfield, we had the 2005 Cronulla Riots. Any youngster must have thought freedom of multiculturalism expressions was dead. But they were probably busy at work jumping online at the newly minted Youtube, Facebook and the other streams of content now available which were subverting the mainstream.

The gas mask that Fikaris adopted as a motif protects the figure from the poison atmosphere. It filters out the dangerous contaminants. It’s all-over face covering, and caricature of opacity, riffs on the 2003 4chan enabled Anonymous hackers group’s use of Guy Fawkes as the collectively anonymous hacktivist, many actors behind the same face mask. 

This trend was substantial, but already in action with faceless graffiti artists damaging public and private infrastructure, in Melbourne led by the 70k crew. With the Iraq War the sublime globular glyphs written everywhere by Bones spoke so loudly, and that Gang of Four were hunted down. The January 2006 edition of the Herald Sun screamed Attack on Graffiti, juxtaposed by a bared chested, Aussie flag waving life saver looking bloke. The article exclaimed that 70k and all graffiti artists were essentially enemies of the people. But we were in the middle of a wave of hate.

As more and more footage of atrocities emerged online from Iraq, as people figured out that the internet was the way to collectivise the critical counter culture, the regulatory forces of government security converged. Almost at the same point that Collateral Murder was released, the walls closed in. Around this time, again not so coincidentally, Silent Army moved indoors to ‘the store room’. Not the front of house, not the open shop, but the back end where those close and trusted might converge to draw, discuss and publish the softly spoken words that might maintain a countercultural thread without the threat of being hunted down by the cops.

In this vein Silent Army picked up where collective publishing like that of Crypto out of Tasmania left off. The early 90’s issues of Crypto echoed the end of the free student publishing in Universities, but in a more purely outsider, and visual only way. Antony Riddell’s prescient drawings in Crypto collided with the detailed illustrations of non people in non places. The early 980’s featured the first Iraq War. It was when Julian Assange danced to techno, and the Cyberdada Manifesto was published in the Melbourne University’s Farrago as it went pre-web viral, mostly via fax machine. Years later Riddell’s drawings would appear in the 2004 Silent Army Artist Edition titled True Fantasy.

These threads of culturally transformative collectives of artists, writers, and creatives seem to intervene, or interweave, with war and political greed and violence played out destructively in everyday peoples lives. More than ever people should get together in drawing the way forward, demonstrating how to construct the new realities, or to reconstruct in the radical reimagination where the myopic hate we are surrounded by vanishes and our world becomes animated and colours the rubble into which we move. 

Apart from the sociocultural imperative that Silent Army is fluently expressing, the format of the Artist Book as it relates to DIY Publishing, and the adoption of print in its many forms, is worth a mention. At every stage where a counter culture is forming and needing to communicate, modes of communication develop.

The history of this is far reaching and not limited to the expected political leanings of an underground student or artists group. In the time Silent Army has been publishing Zine Culture has arguably blossomed. In Melbourne this was significantly impacted upon by Sticky Institute. But the photocopier was not a fixation for Silent Army as they moved between offset newsprint (think 1960-70’s radical newspapers), photocopy (fanzines), and risograph (the newer cool kids). Michael Fikaris extends this fascination through encounters with the European outsider underground publishing scene of late 80’s - early 90’s where the likes of Bon Gout (Berlin) and Le Dernier Cri (Marseille) blew up, raising up the rank outsider to limited edition, amazingly coloured books of undoubted artistic significance. The pure pigments of the silk screen inks takes the artist books of this work into an optically charged dimension.

This niche of publication making is where the counter cultural outsider and the artist book formed a hybrid. In France this is informed by the radical activism of Paris 1968 where hand produced & urgent screen printing because a large part of that aesthetic, merging with the disenfranchised and disabled through the earlier Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet produced screen printed posters connecting the early 20th Century abstraction with the outsider of Art Brut, creating the ground from which a counter cultural movement leads to today’s awareness of ableism and the rights of a person to their own empowered identity inclusive of their own uniqueness in regards to ability, ethnicity and gender identity. 

In the present moment the community of practice Silent Army move within this intent on the new reality only growing more effective. This intent  is evident here now also with the book you are currently reading from. 100 connections available and willing to partake in a project together. Creating something in unison to celebrate the idea of connecting, coming together and being part of something more than yourself through the work. This is Human Work.