David L. Johnson
The enclosure of the commons—land traditionally held and used by the public—began in medieval England, and has continued ever since. In his 2014 book Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, American historian Peter Linebaugh contends that the enclosure and privatisation of the commons was inseparable from England’s industrialisation, as well as the development of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, enclosure played a foundational role in the rise of racial capitalism—a global system of value extraction and capital accumulation dependent on what abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.” Linebaugh identifies three major waves of enclosure.
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Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
“It is no longer my face (identification), but the face that has somehow been given to me (circumstantial possession) as stage property.” — Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium
The Tennant Creek Brio’s art isn’t a legible script, a tidy lineage, or an easy metaphor—it’s a rupture, a refusal, a site of resurgence. This story sends us somewhere else, reaching for something that came before or after, looking for what’s out back, round the back of the house, the shed, the art centre, the “outback.”
