Pastoral Fail: Reflections on an Art World Call-Out

Tamsin and I are sitting on a log at Third Beach. It is a clear, crisp November afternoon and we are looking west. I ask her what she sees and she says, “This fiction.” I ask if she can describe it and she says, “Rather than describe it, I will offer a critique.”

Without calling them freighters, Tamsin talks of “steel hollow-bodies” backed by “enormous sums” that have come here to “demonstrate and extend the wealth of their directors.” These bodies “are real,” she adds, “like the robots reading our computers are real, whether we believe it or not.” It was Tamsin who first introduced me to the Thomas theorem: “When people define situations as real they become real in their consequences.”

“And the people who operate these freighters?”

“Drudges,” she says. “Drudges and parasites.”

I had asked