Make Awkward Advances Towards Women Not War : Latter Day Pamphleteers

The three issues of Backlogue, The Journal of the HALFTIME Club, under the editorship at various times of Peter Brew, Felicity Scott, Paul Minifie, Michael Markham, Dean Boothroyd, and Gina Levenspiel.  Became the apotheosis of that period.  Edited and contributed to by the students of the original HALFTIME founders and members Backlogue 1-3 reads like a  compendium of pamphlets bound together in a distillation of history and production.

“ The Half-Time bibliography was undertaken as a way of providing a tertiary visual library to the material presented at the meetings. It contextualises the club’s intuition within a body of knowledge as well as providing historical ballast. This bibliographic weave intersects issues raised at the club with histories as documented by official journals, books and institutions of the day. While not exhaustive, it is the initial mapping of a contemporary history which seemed always to understand that local is international.”                       Dean Boothroyd & Gina Levenspiel, Backlogue Vol 3.

  Despite the slick production, Backlogue maintains the sense of a provisional culture, an architectural culture built on contested ground.  Ideas are up for grabs.  Architectural likenesses still being formed.  Backlogue signposts another metamorphosis for the pamphlet.

Subplot and Subaud were independent publications.  Diane Peacock, who spoke earlier today, founded Subplot as a personal missive.  It was printed using a dye line printer.  Several artworks were produced in conjunction with the pamphlet forming a single cohesive body of work.  Eventually the ammonia ran out.

Subaud was founded as a fanzine by Christos Kastaniotis, Damon Otto, and myself out of frustration with mainstream architectural criticism at the time.  Subaud, from Issue 2, was designed by Urchin Associates, each issue a different and more eccentric format. Our belief was that Subaud was not a series, not representing a progression, but born anew each time, born of the ever-present.  It was initially photocopied, hand made bound, and stamped with various slogans including Make Awkward Advances Towards Women Not War, This is Not For You, and Seidler Sux.  We, too, were threatened with litigation.

Subaud later evolved to be part of the conjoined publication Mongrel – a single bind of Issue and Subaud.  The earnest with the undergraduate.  Mongrel, while shortlived, was an experiment in pamphleteering; an attempt to conjoin the aggressively propositional with a document of record and analysis.

But perhaps this is not the place of pamphlets and fanzines.  Pamphlets, and perhaps architecture, cannot resolve the crises or reconcile the volatility of our discourse.

Peter Corrigan, as is so often the case, put it best.

 The whole effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with this great cosmic force, the source of vitality which gives strength and energy, sun-life, earth-life, and to thus translate “dream-power’ into their everyday lives.  The relationship of these original Australians to the outback left the office at something of a loss.  What clues could they offer?  The “dream time” seemed real enough, but our nerves failed, as well it might.

The rhetoric of the pamphlet cannot sustain the magnitude of the idea, it is left without the vocabulary or the nerve to tackle the ineffable.  Pamphlets are most at home with the provisional.

Recently ARM have begun another metamorphosis in pamphleteering.  The Pamphlet as vanity publishing.  This publication is edited and produced in-house by Amanda Wallace, Simon Castricum, and myself.  We are used to seeing the beautiful architectural monograph.  Many lusciously produced and critically engaged.  But is there another way to write an architect’s history?

The pamphlet allows us to write history on the fly, a provisional history, not authoritative, not final.

The first of a bi-annual series to be produced by ARM directly documents the conjoined projects of the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Melbourne Recital Centre.

Several of the old voices are trucked out.  Peter Corrigan, Ross Jenner, Ian McDougall and, for good measure, Naomi Stead writes her way through the architecture.

The vanity pamphlet treads a fine line between cynical commercialism and a genuine engagement with the architectural discourse.  Only available through the AIA and at the venues.  It is a fanzine.  It invites analysis and heckling in equal measure.

So after all that, no talk of new media.  The medium is of less interest than the intent toward critical insight.  It seems to me that the best pamphlets and/or blogs are born out of or are in the process of forming a clan, they have their own patois, their own obsessions and propositions; they attempt to form a likeness of our times by writing architecture.

This paper was given at the Writing Architecture Symposium held in Brisbane. There were some very interesting (and slightly heated) questions afterwards regarding the role of women in the pamphlet scene, a role I have almost entirely omitted. While the role of women was not my focus for this particular paper there are others who a paying the subject its due attention. Please visit the Women in Architecture Forum and engage with their ongoing work.