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The New Sins (2001) is the public art project created by artist, musician an cultural commentator David Byrne for Sydney Festival 2002. Adorning 26 bus shelters, telephone and information booths around Circular Quay between George and Loftus Streets, The New Sins is Byrne's first exhibition in Australia and the most significant outdoor installation of his work to date. |
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| An avid photographer
and collector of images, Byrne employs a variety of photographic media and
digital processes in the service of "elevating the mundane to the
level of art, creating icons from everyday material and finding the sacred
in the profane." His work, which also includes audio and sculptural
elements, has been widely throughout the US and Europe and appears in
three publications A Strange Ritual (1995),
Your Action World
(1998) and The New Sins. A pocket size volume with the appearance
of a bible, it forms the basis of these lightbox images. Originally
created for the 2001 Valencia Biennale, where it was placed anonymously in
hotel drawers. Byrne has reconfigured the series and added a new sin(!)
for its Sydney installation. |
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"I love the idea of art appearing somewhat anonymously in the world. Work percieved and discoverd in the street, in out-of-the-way places, allows the reader, listener or viewer ... to take part in the creative process ... (it) allows the work to be more affecting, more in the world, more confusing, vexing and beautiful." |
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How can Charity, Sense of Humour, Beauty, Thrift, Ambition, Hope, Intelligence/Knowledge, Contentment, Sweetness, Honesty, Cleanliness and Temperance be considered as sins? With characteristic wit, humour, irony and sincerity, Byrne admits that "one may be tempted to laugh at the suggestion that one's most treasured virtues are indeed sins ... One may, however, upon reflection, come to accept this fact and then find a strange, calm centre, a new model, a place of Astonishment and Peace."
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These images were installed installed throughout Circular
Quay in JCDecaux lightboxes in Sydney, Australia.
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CharityCharity is voluntary giving of one's wealth or labour to another in need. One wonders how this institution came about. How did intuitive, spontaneous, altruistic behaviour become formalized into an "act" as opposed to being a natural part of living? How did the sense and intuition to aid and shelter members of the community who had fallen behind turn into an obligation born out of agression or guilt? Are we, as some maintain, imagining that there once was a time that charity was unheard off? Well, certainly it did not exist to the extend to which it is performed today. Charity today is powerplay, a means by which one person or people, using the pretext of aid, may exert not so subtle control over another party. The seeming gift becomes the cattle prod, the fence or the corral. Every accepted gift is received begrudgfully with full knowledge that there is an implicit obligation and power relationship being esthablished. Received in bitterness. Inspiring hatred and fear. No one likes to feel inferior, except some S&M party people, so most rebel - in subtle and less subtle ways - with sullen, angry, pissed-off attitudes that say: "You thing that you're better than me, but see, I'm still not happy and no amount of your imperious charity can make me happy." Yes! It's true! This hidden agenda of charity is obvious to the reciever, but invisible to the giver. The poor sinner is unaware of his or her subterfuge - they tremble on the week with their acts of kindness.
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Sense of HumourHumour is the snap, the breaking point, the straw that breaks the camel's back, and allows us to turn misery into something else. What is that something else? A clacking, ape-like, non verbal noise. A chuckle, a weezing, a sputtering unmusical disruption. Humour is painful to experience. The expressions of this pain are noises emanating from the sufferer who has reached the saturation point and can only hoot, howl and heave like a being possessed. Laughter, indeed, is a kind of possession - a leaving of one's senses characterized by a series of inarticulate stuttering moans. One is possessed by something inhuman, cruel and contagious. Humour allows us to turn others into objects - objects of derision, irony and amusement. To direct our suffering and paine outward to the nearest helpless person, animal or thing. Laughter is the sound of animals in distress, helpless and pathetic. Broken at the waist, holding on for dear life. Whole groups in bars, restaurants an in theatres being tortured and pretending that they are enyoing it. Society encourages expressions of humour to relieve this pressure, to desensitize the population, to render that which has no name. To feel something in the belly, now surging up the throat and out of the mouth. TV writers and comedians keep a helpless population in stiches.
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BeautyHow can Beauty be a sin? Is Beauty not what makes life worth living? I was walking in my garden the other day - actually I was walking on a street in Pensacula, Florida - and the day was bright and the air was clear. I had an impuls to say the day was beautiful, but I knew better, for I have known the tricks and masks that Beauty wears. The sunny day, the blue sky and the brisk breeze created the illusion that all was well. That the sewage treatment plant was no longer plumping its sludge and toxic wastes into the bay, that the lawyer behind the door of his office was engaged in the pursuit of justice. That the tanker anchored down the street was loading and unloading goods that were honestly made. Beauty masks the Truth of the Matter. The rotting corps under an impressive work of funerary art. Beauty is deception, falcification, deceit. Buyer Beware!
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ThriftThrift, a value and attribute which follows the often quoted dogma "Waste not, want not", is one of the most insidious deceptions perpertrated on mankind. What pleasures, enyoiment, loves and happinesses have not been forstalled, postponed and denied in the name of this vice? How ofthen a mother tells her child: "Don't eat it all now," or "Why don't you put this in your savings account?" There are 16 types of holding back, including Keeping It for a Rainy Day, Leaving Some For Later, and Being a Marthyr. Thrift, skilfully maquerading as the absence of waste, would seem to be, on the surface at least, an admirable quality. But know it to be truly a sin. Yes!
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AmbitionA cousin of agression, accumulation and attrition, ambition is the motor, that drives the entrepreneur, the performer and the politician - all of them even artists, working their scams on friends and foe alike. The ambitious person, lauded publicly and privately for his hybris, ego and pride, is never lacking for encouragement. Neviness is considered a virtue, a good machine, an energy that builds nations, businesses and dynasties. Handed down from generation to generation, like a raustic strand of DNA, it infects the unhappy, the unfortunate and the unlucky, and turns them into desperate strivers, prepared to do anything to realize their ridiculous ambitions. To strive, to achieve, to abandon one's family and friends for a shot of fame and fortune - is this a value to hold worthy? Is this the kind of life that is good and true? Is there room for all of us in that big room? No, the doorman only lets in the ambitious.
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Intelligence / KnowledgeThe more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know. Oh. It's sounds funny, but it is serious. Self-knowledge, in particular, is a dangerous thing = the more one knows oneself, the smaller one's opinion of oneself, in most cases, and to this there is no advantage. For what does it gain one to have a realistic, but small and unimpressive, picture of oneself. Nothing. Nothing At All. Self-knowledge brings self-doubt. Self-doubt brings indecision, confusion, pain, suffering and a whole complex of emotions. There lies the commondrum. Unlike the assumption of our legal system, in which ignorance is no guarantee for innocence, in life, and what comes before and after, the opposite is true: Ignorance Creates Innocence. A Glorious Thing. an unfair thing, A Difficult Thing. A Bost of ideas, worldviews and concepts swirl inside one another, each one replacing the other in rapid succession, none of any more worth than the next, An Intellectual Mahlstrom of logical, rational and useless ideas, the precessors to Digital Thinking and all things Binary in our contemporary world. A philosophical concept, the way nylons are made, the succession of Kings, the way to tie a slip knot - all seemingly usefull things to know and possess, but to believe one actually KNOWS is to err.
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ContentmentContentment is a feeling that apparently comes over one as a result of 3 conditions: 1. One has completed a task succesfully In fact, number 3 comes closest to the thruth, for Contentment - a feeling that all is right with the world and oneself - is not only an illusion. It is most often born of a lack of oxygen to the brain - the usual effect of a post-prandial condition. Therefore a philosophical and moral state of mind is merely a result of that very mind not functioning properly - of a kind of mental dizziness, simular to the hallucinatory feeling when one holds one's breath. Oxygen deprivation leads to a sense of wellbeing and to add mental assumptions, but it is nothing more than this - a disruption, a false euphoria. Yes!
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SweetnessThe voice of Sweetness is the snake that offered the apple. The soft murmurs, the whispered nothings, the gentle words - they still the heart and cover poison with sugar. Sweetness dwells in the heart. The Heart is like the Sea, wherin dwells the Leviathan, and creeping things innumurable. The Heart is like the Egyptian temples - full of spiders, serpents and snakes. It is a treasure house of sin. A gilded palace in the lake of fire.
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HonestyHonesty presumes an essential truth, a truth that is self evident, obvious and agreed upon by all concerned. It presumes that facts don't lie, that objective reportage is the news, and that any portion of the truth is as valuable as all of it. But can we not see that this is plainly not so, that fiction more often conveys the essence, the truth brhind the truth, the golden seed that lies at the core of an event or person. A fiction, a lie , a blatant yet well-told untruth - do these not conveys more of the essence of the matter or person, more of the reason why and who? The more fanciful this fiction, the more fabulous, inventive and mercurial - is not this imagined universe more real than the one broken down into legalese, endless streams of data, charts and graphs? How and why should love be honest? Love is a lie, a beautiful lie, a lie told by God to all his creatures. Is not this Lie better than Dirty Honesty? Our loved ones demand honesty, but what they really want is better fiction.
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CleanlinessCleanliness is not next to Godliness. Cleanliness is an artificial concept, a state that actually does not exist. This in itself is not a sin, of course, but the striving for it is. Clean fingernails, excessive bathing, sterelization and pasteurization, water filtration - all have done as much to increase disease and suffering as they have done to alleviate it. The presence of impurities creates a kind of natural immunization, and modern life, in its sterile bubble of safety, is truly a sin against nature.
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