Baudelaire’s .egg.

Introduction.
I was invited by Poetry Sydney to be part of an event to celebrate Baudelaire’s birthday and .egg [the proposed theme]. I don’t know Baudelaire’s work but I have known many eggs. I was happy to accept the opportunity as I realised there was something I could do. I would get an egg. One I hardly knew. Set it up on the streets of Sydney and see what it did? What it made me / and other people or maybe birds.. do/// The results were presented at a beautiful event at the El Rocco Bar in Kings Cross in April 2025.. curated by Michael Aiken and presented by the wonderful Angela Stretch of Poetry Sydney. Baudelaire was honoured and Angela’s cat – recently passed – Panache was celebrated.
Baudelaire was born in 1820;
Darwin was born in 1809
a non-idealistic;
aplatonic;
contingent-upon-the-past kind of science –
perhaps a science of the romantic era;
anti-enlightenment;
an enter-the-wildness-kind of science;
not coming from the mind;
walking into the wild….
Discovering its order
On its terms.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) © Hamburger Kunsthalle

my performance approach to measurement.

It resonates with a romantic ideal.. which is

not against science or reason..

a reaction to Platonism.. that there is a perfect ideal towards which we are reaching – an enlightenment dream..

I dream rather an

experiential..

walking out

into the (urban) wild.. like

Baudelaire;

You can understand Jack Kerouac in this context.. wisdom comes from experience

like Darwin.. letting the question / measurement – emerge in the wild..

Abraham.. an early influential measurer.

Walked into the wilderness away from his Paternal Organising Principle (POP!)

like in a Caspar David Friederich painting it removes the centrality of the platonic mind.. as the source of where the wisdom must come from.. allows it to emerge empirically..

 

“Are you a doctor?”

“No. A scientist.”

“What kind of scientist are you?

“An artist.”

 

Notes on .egg.

performing on the streets of Bondi with .egg. raises questions

.egg. to begin was an object.

Then got stepped on.

In that moment .egg. approached non object or minimal object.

I stayed with this – minimal object.

 

Objects exist all around us.

But in some sense only come into existence when we enter relationship with them.

Me and .egg.

We formed a functional unit together. We were coherent. If you measured this system you would find patterns of behavioural motion.

Then .egg. broke

I wondered if the performance was over, but due to the constraints I had placed on the experiment I had to remain with remnants of .egg.

remain

What determines our relationship to objects? This relationship came from rules I had established. Axioms of the experiment. Through the systemic behaviour that emerged as a result of the axioms.. behaviours emerged –

feelings towards .egg.

I was no longer indifferent to .egg.

even though it was an egg I barely knew

what comes to mind is our consumerist relationship to objects. Because of factory farming and mass production things become consumable;

disposable

genuine relationship

is eroded

I have noticed that in my studio objects have a different nature. I can’t throw things away. They manifest a quality of relationship – I place different value onto them.

I love these objects

I bend a wire

It becomes a character in my world and not just a bent wire… and I ask: what is your purpose / your teleology.

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Minimal objects.

What are the limits of an object?

Is it only about its boundedness?

When an object is deformed is it still the same object or is it another object.

Is there only a single object?

The universe as an object.

Objects are about resolution and scale. On earth and at our scale we have a view of certain objects. A clod of soil to us is an object. To an ant walking on it.. it is discerning many objects to our one – that is around it.

Is how we relate to an object what makes it an object – so even when the object is no longer there..

we still have a memory of it

Objects exist in both space and time.

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Note added in proof.

I am not sure that the stage is where I like to perform. I prefer the street. It is not raised. But when I do perform on the stage I like to be accompanied by something. That something seems to always be chicken / toaster hybrids.. which like to say something.. in their own way about the current state of the world. At the Poetry Sydney performance. .egg.and.spoon.race.chicken accompanied me.