Our experience of life as observed by our limited faculties and skills show it to be complex, confusing and over-determined. But we’re capable of shaping, refining, reducing, decorating, and twisting what happens around us into an acceptable image or object. Often, and with only a slight shift, the image or object or formula is then taken to be a truth, an absolute.

This habitual activity is the arena in which I work. I look for the multiples that a singular image contains—all of which are equally valid, but most of which are ignored. I don’t aim to produce a more ‘truthful’ paradigm, formula or explanation, or to tidy up the given image. I take an existing, commonly known or evident image and pull it apart, show how it is partial, and expand it. I do this through three procedures:

1. outlier or extra-curricular parts of the image are embraced; 
2. the logic of the given image is taken to its limits and sometimes beyond;
3. I make many new images, all of them within the logic of the original image.

The arbitrary nature of the initial image becomes evident from this activity. Because the original given and socialised images/objects are to some degree already a creative work, my works are creative extensions of them, but critically so. This critique re-figures the relationship between the over-determined source and its reduced representation. 

At the same time, I know that an image must become a useful fiction so that life can flourish. Although it may be an arbitrary concoction, it must be agreed to, if not by everyone, then by most of us. Festivals and periodic rituals often function as a display of the arbitrariness of such images, where they are played with and celebrated before we return to the zones of useful fiction. 

Projects which clearly take up this theme are

1. *The monotones*, which take a single word, ‘monotone’, conventionally used to describe a reduced, unchanging circumstance, and reworks it through typographic and drawn compositions to exhibit abundance, variety and difference. 
2. *1 to 9*, which uses a grid of numbers (abstracted from a small illustration of a medieval maze) as the structuring diagram for a range of poems, graphics, texts and architectural projects. The structural pattern appears in many art traditions, so any/all of my works using that pattern are in dialogue with those.
3. *The Innisfail Section*, which is an architectural figure explored through models and drawings. As in the 1 to 9 works, all new works are in dialogue with all other examples of this architectural figure found all over Australia, and sometimes elsewhere.
4. *Rivers of Light*, which takes the unwanted vertical line of white that sometimes appears in typesetting and which tricks the eyes into flowing down the text rather than across it. Typographers call this line a river of white and try to remove it when it occurs. I exploit its effects which links a text to the space of the page and its potential state of whiteness. White is an allusive quality of some complexity for us, particularly when it is embodied in paper.
5. *The Southern Cross*, in which the acceptance of the fifth star (as shown on our national flag) and use of the usual constellational rules of joining points and NOT crossing lines, generates many non-cruxic versions of the Southern Cross. It shifts the Euro-Catholic interpretation of the constellation to a secular profusion. 
6. *Purgatorio* explores a fortuitous description of Australia written in the early 1300s using a medieval model of purgatory as a mountain in the southern hemisphere. This model is used to structure various kinds of works, including some suites and sets, and is finally translated to modern Australia as an epic poem.  
7. *Mack’s Stack*, in which a pile of die-cut cardboard pieces, meant to be folded into cup-cake holders is folded in alternate ways along its given grooves to produce many sculptural variations, some of which are more elegant cupcake holders than the intended original, and some of which are humorous objects.

Most of these projects result in a cloud of similar-looking objects, especially if restricted to the same medium and material over the range of works.  Exceptions are Innisfail, Purgatorio and Floats, where the variations and different versions slip from media to media and produce works of quite different appearance and presence. 

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Alex Selenitsch
November, 2024


NOT JUST LIKE THIS, BUT LIKE THIS, OR THIS, OR THIS …

1.\
MOSTLY THINGS ON A TABLE, IN THE HANDS, 
SOMETIMES ON A WALL
Small objects, related to handling.
Some larger objects, but still related to the arms/hands.
A few large installations on walls by commission, fixed in place, mostly destroyed.
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2.\
A4, A3, A2, A1
Sizes related to manufactured boards and papers, also standard timber, metal and plastic components.
Furniture and architecture at standard domestic scale; models at standard practice scales.
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3.\
MULTIPLE OBJECTS, MOSTLY IN SETS, SOMETIMES IN SERIES, RARELY IN SUITES
Typological variation.
Small works in narrative flows.
Some objects and works grouped via a functional context.
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4.\
PAPER/CARDBOARD/WOOD/PERSPEX/ALUMINIUM/ ADHESIVE TAPES
Easily worked manufactured materials, often used without further work or size reduction.
Simple fixings, exposed.
No apparent finishes to materials, finish and colour ‘as found’.
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5.\
NO PAINT
Ink, pencil, charcoal, pigment pen, chalk, liquid paper, adhesive tapes, adhesive vinyl sheet, but no paint.
Gold acrylic an exception.
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6.\
WHOLE SHEET COMPOSITION
Gestures derived from and refer to the whole sheet or extent of the object
Centre or edge orientation.
Often a left-to-right vectorial composition, as for reading.
Balance of dynamic movement and stasis, hard-edge/waney-edge contrast.
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7.\
GEOMETRIC/OBJECTIVE
Definite shapes, hard edges even when blurred.
No ‘personal’ hand/arm gestures in making; ‘objective’.
Technique that anyone can achieve, no virtuosity.
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8.\
ARBITRARY
Where any form could be used to the same effect, use of artificial systems of forms and divisions such as circle/square/triangle, simple number sets, sometimes Fibonacci series.
Found objects and fragments used as stencils.
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9.\
FOUND OBJECTS
Ordinary objects interfered with to deny their usual function, shifting them to a semantic zone.
Treatments often through some taboo action.

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Alex Selenitsch 
January, 2025


STYLE GUIDE  (Works by AS)

(LITERALLY) 
: On paper, in print, ink, paint, graphite, pigment; in the conventions of print and representation, language as a NEW NATURE;

(PERSONALLY) 
: In the unnoticed, unacknowledged and marginalized; drifting in the liminal, making the stereotype nervous;

(SOCIALLY)
: In the ‘artist’ as a social construct, ‘poet’ as an explorer of language; ‘culture’ as the amniotic fluid of creativity;

(NUMINOUSLY)
: In the singularity through profligate variety, the singularity through profligate abstraction; a fluctuation between, or the simultaneous presence of both.

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Alex Selenitsch
16 June, 2024

MAYBE THIS IS WHERE I WORK

Where does all of this work come from? This question immediately drops him into a pool of inherited abilities, parents’ influence, schooling, mentors and artist colleagues, the culture he grows up in—what in simple terms is the nature/nurture dialectic. English is his third language, third to Russian and German. His Russian and German belong to the immediate post WW2 period, therefore are languages of recent animosity, but also long-standing communion. This dissonant fit of cultures is played out in Australia, and leads to a complex of connections to English culture, but with imagined links also to German idealism and art education, to the experimental periods in Russian art. His Australian education teaches him that London is the centre of the world, and only through a visit there does he realise that it is not so for him. His centres are plural, more like Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg. He has no sense of a clash of cultures that the migrant is supposed to experience, nor is there a drive to assimilate, or to ethnic distinction. 

He views Australia as an exotic place. But some aspects turn out to be familiar in tone. He is an exile, just as the English convicts, the Naval Forces, and the difficult members of the English gentry were. All faced an exotic country to which their descendants are still not reconciled. In sympathy, he is attracted to the simplified architecture of Georgian Antipodeia, its diagrammatic paintings, its cedar furniture, Indian and Chinese textiles. He notes that that era’s necessary strategy of doing the most with the least is a platonic rule worth following. While the Georgians faced a new country and culture, his exotic host has been the English Settlement, which, he notes with wry amusement, occasionally refers to itself as ‘European’.  

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By accident, or luck, or fate, he finds employment in a design school which presents him with abandoned paper, cardboard, glues, drawing tools, crayons, paints, liquid paper, shredders and a workshop with tools, and even more leftover materials. All of these provide direct and available answers to questions of appropriate vehicle, medium, size of work and colour. Less than a third of his output uses these given materials, but he still develops a reputation for up-cycling, bricoleuring, for using found objects. The aesthetics of office work comes with this cornucopia and links it (without any intention on his part) to Conceptual Art production by others.

He is unskilled and finds ways around this. Interestingly, he avoids confronting this directly, and refuses to do any instruction or training. To his delight, he belongs to a generation for whom skill and workmanship are guarantees of craft and not art: therefore, the way to denote ‘art’ is to demonstrate ‘not-skill’. Lack of skill creates another working habit: the long gestation time needed to map out strategies which involve the least amount of work, or rather, the least amount of skilled work. His preference for composing material analogues of his subject matter, so that the materials and the making of the work contribute rather than just support only adds to the gestation time. Despite the lack of skills – perhaps better described as conventional ‘artist skills’ – his realised objects and images seem to be clean, neat and precise. This precision, meant to be transparent and neutral, is taken as his aesthetic by some. He is irritated by these interpretations of his work, as if the viewers and readers have missed the point of it all. 

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Another description that puzzles him is ‘geometric’. This particularly struck him when a colleague referred to ‘those geometric drawings of yours’. (“What geometry?” was his immediate reaction; “I don’t do geometric works”). Always thinking about relationships, he had assumed that the geometry would be seen as arbitrary, neutral, and instrumental. After this encounter, he was indeed startled by the sharp geometry of one his recent exhibitions. This has directed him to a-geometric forms, or rather to forms which emerge from the properties of matter, sometimes near-living matter such as lichen. He is dismissive of ‘organic’ forms, as they quickly draw attention to themselves, and carry too many unwanted associations.

He always works in multiples, or variations or iterations. A single word can mean many things: this is the central meaning of his lifelong project of exploring different configurations of the word ‘monotone’. The same idea can slip from genre to genre. Books and prints easily fit this multiplicity. In making books which are ‘unique copies’, the contradiction of industrial production against specific circumstances comes to the fore: this dialectic is an undercurrent of thinking for him. Multiple also means an output of many small things, as the work is self-funded, and disconnected from commercial distribution systems.

He wonders if the accumulation of work amounts to anything larger than a collection of bits. As they are being done, each bit seems to promise insights into daily life and language. He notices that some works fade away over time, and others renew themselves or rather, reveal aspects not noticed by him when they were being made. While he is preoccupied with current ideas and projects, others seem more interested in works done a decade or two ago. He notes that this is so common an experience for creative workers that Woody Allen has the aliens in one of his films advise him to continue working, saying that “we enjoy your films, particularly the early, funny ones”.

He balances, or controls, his nagging self-doubt with a refusal to engage in art and poetry politics, and in particular prizes and awards and competitions. This is simply scorn for fashionable forms and ideas, based on the faith that an artist’s total output, or a large sample of it, must be judged as a whole on its own terms – and this brings him back to the crisis of what it all amounts to. But it also echoes the multiple nature of his practice and of his upbringing. None of it fits easily with traditional categories or genres. He has noticed, that his best audience is a non-art one, one that is receptive but innocent of cultural propaganda and theory. He wonders whether this is because his works come out of, and belong to language. In a literate culture, this means anyone who has had a few decades of experience with speech, writing, and handling print in all of its forms, and is therefore familiar with language, its rules and manifestations.

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Alex Selenitsch
April, 2024


THIRD PERSON

1. A word is selected/found/suggested. Often suggested by others, it is attractive because it refers to current interests, has an exploitable shape, or a curious combination of letters, some or all of these.

2. A poem is what is done to or made of the actual word, not out of its connotations or meanings, although these can contribute. The purpose of the new work is to suggest new connotations against, or in spite of, those already floating around. 

3. If a group of poems emerges, any one poem can be understood singly, or they can be gathered as small groups or seen as the totality of them. 

4. Often, the accepted word is on stand-by for new situations and variations as they might arise. These new situations are not programmed or planned, but just occur.

5. The ‘subject’ is always the same: the discovery of the overlooked. 
The ‘overlooked’ is always somewhere in the material properties of language, of the word.

6. What is noticed is turned into an object (the poem) that invites the viewer to read/unpeel it and have the same experience of discovery that initiated the poem.

7. This discovery is ‘actual’, not a description of it, and is in the moment of reading, of perception. This brings the poem and the reader into the same actual time and place.

8. The physical work is scaled to the letter, the page, the book, the computer screen: between the hands, so to speak. This also contributes to the effect of presence, of reader and text occupying the same time and space.

9. A side effect of this is a fleeting experience of wholeness, of presence. It could be that this is the main reason for the poem’s existence, and may be this poet’s chief motivation.

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Alex Selenitsch
31st May, 2024


MAYBE THIS IS WHAT THIS POET DOES

I give a talk about exhibiting artworks to students, and in his introductory remarks, my host lecturer tells students that what they are seeing is a small part of my output, all of which holds together as a complex bundle (those are my words, I can't remember how he said it).
 
I am aware of this but only in a dim way, so I begin to wonder if there are formal qualities that hold the works together. I have done surveys of my work before but mainly on thematic grounds. What constitutes my way of composing, of inventing, of making things, is only implied by such an approach, and analysis and interpretation is then left to others. The questions, then, are: how does someone recognize one of my works? Do the works share stylistic qualities? How do I go about organizing an idea? 

I think there might be four formal strategies I use:
 
## MINIMAL

This is probably the underlying strategy, in which a single action or gesture is made so that it relates directly to its context. The context and gesture become the composition. Works include:
- taped, cut, liquid-papered, soaked, torn books (action + book = the work)
- concrete poems (letter in a word, word on a page, so that letter + word = the work, or word + page = the work)
- objects made by the one process, repeated (stick + rotated stick + rotated stick etc = the work)
- drawings where the sheet generates the image, from blemishes or shape.
 
The context materiality is generally taken as found, the gesture is often related but in opposition to it: the book is nearly cut to shreds, or totally taped up, the letter/word patterns are optically dense and so on.
 
A typical work is 201 versions of the Southern Cross, where the SC constellation is silkscreened onto black A4 cards, and the five stars joined up in all possible straight-line configurations, one constellation per sheet. The work is nx(SC + taped lines) and can make a stack of sheets like a folio, or a large mural-like wall-piece of dancing figures. (In which case, VECTORIAL tendencies emerge.)
 
 
## VECTORS

This comes from reading and writing, from the left to right direction of our visual language.
 
Firstly, on any page, the flow of data is left to right, and the page sequence goes from left to right also. The movement is along lines, or from area to area, and at a constant rhythm, letter by letter, word by word, page by page. This implies a rhythmic approach to charting duration. Secondly, there is symmetry, clearly shown by an open book, or the two hands in front of you. Consequently, there are works which oppose LH and RH parts, but nearly always do so to be read from left to right. There are also works which are structured by sequence, also going from left to right, page by page.
 
Sometimes found sequences are used to structure a composition: numbers, the alphabet, Newton’s spectrum of ROYGBIV, the consecutive letters of a word. Sometimes there is a constant change from page to page, or word to word, or constellation to constellation.
 
A typical work is The Hanuman Shelf, which uses an incomplete found sequence of published books, and inserts a ROYGBIV sequence of coloured slats to occupy the spaces of books missing in the sequence, thereby combining consecutive numbers and the colour spectrum.

Other typical works are lightning (rivers of light #4) and lightning monotones (rivers of light #5), where the host word fills each consecutive page, letter by letter in the same sequence that the letter appears in the word, and different white lines are placed into each page of the typed texture.
 
 
## COMGLOMERATES
 
This comes from the clutter of everyday life, the complexity of heritage and history, and the complications of materiality. Similar to collage or assemblage, this is a method whereby discrete and heterogeneous parts are combined and their individual qualities are magnified, rather than combined or hybridized or blended.
 
This is rare in my work for individual works, but is often the effect of collating various manifestations of the same idea in different materials, at different scales and in different genres or disciplines.
 
A typical project is the 1 to 9 project, where a structural grid of numbers, reading from the centre to the corners is used to compose poems, colour paper works, drawings, sculptures and architectural projects. The subject, size and materials of each manifestation are very different, but the work is intended to be seen as a whole and the differences noted as much as the constant underlying structure of the pieces. Another example is how angels are seen by us, in which five objects suggest the five vowels, but are discrete, found things without consistent form – except they are all common industrially produced things, which have all had one gesture inflicted on them (see MINIMAL & VECTOR, above).
 
## FIELDS

This comes from combining the geometry of natural flocking patterns, with the philosophical ideal of a balance between liberty and responsibility. In these works, a similar if not identical element is repeated to produce constant eye movement, and to constantly direct attention to local element-to-element relationship.
 
In all of these, an arena is established, or in the case of the sculptures, an armature, and elements which are identical but biased in shape so that they can be rotated to show difference, are distributed so that the whole arena or volume is filled more or less equally but with no central focus.
 
Typical works are found in the Whurlie Groups drawings and collages, and in the flotsamandjetsam drawings and sculptures. In the Whurlie Groups (orange series), the paper arena is filled with three elements, each of which are placed in response to different properties of the paper (oblique line edge to opposite edge; in the centres of the sheet; at blemishes in the paper). In the flotsamandjetsam drawings, a ‘little house’ shape, plus ovals and other found shapes occupy a frottaged area. In one of the drawings, just in pencil line, the elements are nearly all different, but all roughly of the same size to give a field effect.
 
 
## Coda: THE PRESENCE OF GEOMETRY
 
Much of my work uses Euclidean geometry, appears to exude precision and accuracy, and avoids personal expression and evidence of hand marks.
 
This relates it to classic minimalist practice which linked art-making to fabrication in high-end small batch industrial workshops. It links the works to design, because design uses a similar aesthetic of geometry, measure, precision and machine finish. As well, there are similarities to the ordinary world of building, fabrication and do-it-yourself. Materials are now mostly available as processed sticks and sheets, along with proprietary fastening systems. A wide range of personal power tools is associated with this aspect of suburban life: large supermarkets are full of materials and tools bursting with latent precision, accuracy and absent human touch.
 
This makes for a kind of industrialised lingua franca of materials and manufacture. It allows work like mine to be equally viewed as art, design or craft. The same work would then engage with different discourses depending on how it is classified – and this is the role of the audience or consumer.  To work in this way with materials has not been an explicit aim of mine, but is a condition of making things in this culture without recourse to traditional materials and techniques.
 
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Alex Selenitsch
8 September, 2015
 

Alex Selenitsch (1946–)

NOT JUST LIKE THIS, BUT LIKE THIS, OR THIS, OR THIS …

STYLE GUIDE (Works by AS)

MAYBE THIS IS WHERE I WORK

THIRD PERSON

MAYBE THIS IS WHAT THIS POET DOES

FORMAL STRATEGIES IN MY WORK