This picture was made whilst I was on a poodle walk in the early morning. It was made just after sunrise.
It is coastal erosion along the sand dunes at Hayborough, a suburb of Victor Harbor in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The erosion along specific parts of coast east and west of Victor Harbor appears to be increasing and the Council is only concerned withe erosion alonhg the towns's foreshore.
The promise of the avant grade in the first third of the twentieth century (Dada and surrealism) was a rupture with the art institution and art's autonomy in a world dominated by the means end rationality of capitalism's exchange value. The avant-garde's attack focused on autonomous art represented by aestheticism as a necessary step in its project to overcome the separation between art and life.
Modernism, as it was usually presented in Australia, was a purely internal artistic phenomenon. Modernism's claims to novelty, negation and non-trivial experimentation in the late 20th century had finally diminished in their impact as they have become exhausted. The avant-garde’s attack on the art institution had failed. The art institution had demonstrates its strength by embracing its attackers and assigning them a prominent place in the pantheon of great artists. Avant-garde categories such as rupture and shock gained admittance to the discourse of art, while at the same time concepts such as harmony and coherence became suspected. The model of heroic transgression against repressive authority has lost its credibility.
It is the art institution, rather than a work’s intrinsic qualities, that defines what counts as art. So artistic genius is not the source of aesthetic value. The art institution only allows a a few photographers inside the gate it guards.
We were driving back to a rust bucket Adelaide from Woomera and Andamooka when I saw this tree in the middle of nowhere. It was the Xmas decorations that caught my eye. The decorative signs humanise the empty landscape--what many see as the dead heart of Australia. Hence the snapshot.