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MUFF 777 Jury
Statement by Alex Spalck
JURY MEMBERS
Alex Spalck (Pankow) - President
Eric Pipersbreg (Boutique)
Briony Wright (Vice mag)
Rebecca Sutherland (Polyester, MUFF)
Andrew “Stumpy” Leovold (Trash Brisbane)
PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT
Imagine. Munich 1911. Wassily Kandinsky decides to challenge the local art dignitaries and establishes Der Blaue Reiter... Expressionism...Georg Trakl feverishly creates a canon of poetic masterpieces, before dying from an overdose of drugs on the Polish front a few months into the 1st World War...Expressionism... Munich 1919. Ernst Toller and other Anarchists try to overthrow the Bavarian Government and create the Bavarian Soviet Republic. He’s going to end up in jail where he will write a few groundbreaking dramas about the inevitable and discomforting link between revolution and failure...Expressionism...Berlin 1920. Robert Wiene directs ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’...Berlin 1922. F.W. Murnau directs Nosferatu...Superb non-realistic attempts to go beyond the boundaries of public and visual morality...Expressionism...Berlin 1923. Karl Valentin wrecks havoc in German theatre by dissecting language and extracting outrageous anarchist humor from absurdist verbal balancing acts...Expressionism...Everything comes down to one thing: Der Urschrei (the Primal Scream). Dionysus defeats Apollo, emotions trample all over rationality, passion annihilates reason, destruction wipes out creation. The aesthetics of Revolution, the desperate urgency of using rage and instinct to return to the original status, Chaos. And Chaos will reign...
Imagine. Firenze (Florence) 1981. A 20 year old physically retarded and mentally deranged specimen, with wild eyes and soiled fantasies, joins a local electronic band, Pankow. That would be me, Alex Spalck, FM (the real genius behind the legend) and a few other arrogant pricks. The band already has a cult-following, but we want more, we want to rip out the heart of orthodoxy and bang it against the wall until it produces the one sound that we are looking for...Expressionism...Every concert, every piece of music, every fragment of noise is just part of our endless anabasis towards the ultimate form of expression...Urschrei...We play everywhere, and every night we consciously and subconsciously try to die... We release albums, videos, statements... We work with H.R Giger, Gottfried Helnwein, Adrian Sherwood, Rico Conning etc..., We write music for theatre, ballet, short movies...We use metal bars, bones, blood, gigantic theatrical scenographies, giant spiders, ballet dancers...we write tales of amorality about mental illness, anarchy, violence, destruction, confusion, absolute freedom, failure, suicide, we dedicate a song to the German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof (it’s my favourite)...we’re being accused of pornography, violence, blasphemy, corruption of youth, fascism, communism...we’re being shot at in Houston, Texas, we’re being assaulted in Miami, Florida, we’re being chased by Neo-Nazis in Halle, Germany...and then, one day, we burn out very painfully, and simply self-destruct. We have failed, yet again...
Imagine. Wangaratta/Melbourne (Vic) 2005. One day I get an e-mail from Richard Wolstencroft. He knows Pankow, he wants to meet me and talk about a possible co-operation. We meet, he tells me all about MUFF, about his perennial battle with the establishment, with the state-sanctioned fake morality of our times, I watch his movies, I read between his ranting lines...And I can’t help thinking of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism. In his Manifesto (1909) he writes:
“...We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing... ...Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stoke holes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls...”
And then he goes on and makes a list of the 10 Futurist Commandments, and the first 2 are:
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt...
And so here I am, happily failed & retired former Electronic-Wannabe-Revolutionary, living in Country Victoria with my wonderful Debra and sipping wine, oblivious of the past and indifferent about the future, and suddenly ‘Courage, Audacity and Revolt’ break into my quiet quasi-rural world and I just have to let them in. Someone is still raging, someone is still screaming, bleeding and cursing and I just love being part of the action. Richard and his gang of seditious knife-throwers are still celebrating the power of resistance, the joy of sabotage, the vibrancy of morbidity and disturbance. MUFF was established as a bastion of absolute uncompromising artistic independence and nothing has changed. Hollywood crap is banned, mainstream propaganda is powerless, MUFF thrives on controversy and counter-propaganda and no external force can subdue its natural incoherence, MUFF would rather explode in millions of tiny digital pieces...
MUFF is the arena where we’re going to play our own little games, and the rules are...We’ll make them up as we go, and then we’ll turn them upside down... Play it hard, play it wild, imagine it’s the last movie, the last form of expression you’re ever going to experience in your lifetime. Don’t leave anything unsaid, unseen, exhaust all your resources and then burn out quickly, as you should... And to use one last quote from Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, let me say that‘’...Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!...” |
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