Real Hustlers Dont Sleep

Kiss my ass!

 “You should only believe about 90 percent of what I say. As a matter of fact, don’t even believe anything that I’m saying at all. I could be completely fucking with you, and the world, the entire time.”

It's not me and you

Don't Look Back

Beware

 West Space - wed 26th June 2013 

Howard Arkley & Juan Davila, Blue chip instant decorator, 1991

X detail X detai	Since the late eighties Juan Davila and Howard Arkley have been engaged in an extensive collaborative partnership that has been taking place almost imperceptibly in the gap between their individual oeuvres. In 1991, at Tolarno Galleries in South Yarra, the evidence of this project surfaced for the first time in a back room installation titled Blue Chip Instant Decorator. Arkley and Davila continued to modify this work as it was exhibited again briefly in Melbourne and Sydney before being put into storage. They still exchange ideas with the intention of further collaborations but Blue Chip Instant Decorator remains the only manifestation of a remarkable partnership between two of Australia's most prominent painters. The significance of Blue Chip Instant Decorator is immediately evident in the way that Arkley and Davila have reinvented the concept of "collaboration". Rather than evoking the cosy pluralism of group projects from the seventies, or the dry hybridity of multiple-author works from the eighties, their exchange has been full of surprises and false starts. It is as if they were continually negotiating temporal personae in a virtual environment or hyper-textual novel. Their collaboration has, in effect, functioned like the stage set for a comedy of misadventure. Juan Davila: I see our collaboration as a wonderful travesty. Howard might not see it in these terms, but we are two transvestite painters, or camp decorators, who have no sense of taste, and we produced an intentionally bastard result. It has the appearance of a proper painting but as you come near the whole thing blurs, like make-up on a transvestite. We talked about being two prostitutes who would offer to decorate anything. Howard Arkley: The paintings went back and forth between our studios in Prahran. There would be one of us at each end of a canvas, carrying it through the streets. On a windy day it was like riding a sail board down the street. You'd have to swing out into the traffic and the cars had to stop while we were twisting and turning the canvas, being dragged along like it was a big kite. It was very much a part of Chapel Street. We used to talk about the work and walk up and down the street window shopping, saying "look at this, look at that, let's put it in the painting". I would fling open the door of a place like a building society, drag Juan in, just stand there giggling at the carpet and then race out. There was a lot of energy.
X detail	Despite the obvious formal differences between the work of Arkley and Davila, they share a certain ethic of open-ended experimentation. In Arkley's work this is apparent in the fuzzy contours that zig-zag, glide and spiral across the canvas, spreading out a zone of indetermination between the flat planes of colour and the floating airbrushed line. Davila, on the other hand, improvises to the disjunctive rhythm of collage and quotation, assembling a network of experimental and temporal connections. The success of their collaboration undoubtedly owes something to how they offer each other different ways of realising this ethic of experimentation. Traversing one another like the woof and warp of a garish new fabric, they recreate themselves in each other's conceptual gaps. As Davila explains, it is a battle between two pictorial systems: "Howard does not touch the canvas whereas I paint in a dirty tactile way. So the question is how to position two pictorial systems once you've set up a mutual image. Each hand proceeds in its own way." For both artists, the incentive to collaborate was the possibility of finding a counterpoint that would give something new to their work and take it in a different direction. This is particularly obvious in Davila's work, where decorative screens and ornament have become an important feature of his solo shows since beginning the collaboration. "Juan had used patterning in the past," Arkley reflects ironically, "but this project really kicked it along. I set it up thinking that I would get a lot out of it, but it turned out differently."
X detail	The unpredictable nature of the exchange becomes apparent when they are asked to explain the origins of the project, because in effect there are no origins. Everything happened in-between. Davila: Howard traced the interiors straight from a Lichtenstein. Arkley: No, it wasn't a Lichtenstein. Davila: Yes, but it was a Lichtenstein system. Arkley: The images came from a book John Nixon gave me. I wasn't aware of Lichtenstein's interiors. Davila: I was, but we didn't talk about it. The process involved trust. Arkley: Lichtenstein probably hadn't even done them at that stage. Juan showed me later, and I was shocked. I thought Lichtenstien must have been copying me! (laughter)
X detail	Blue Chip Instant Decorator occupies a pivotal place in the oeuvres of these two artists, but its significance also extends to the broader currents in contemporary Australian art. Arkley and Davila showed work together for the first time in the renown "Popism" exhibition of 1981, curated by Paul Taylor at the National Gallery of Victoria. This event harnessed the concerns of a new generation of Australian artists and indexed a conceptual shift into problems framed by Postmodernism and Post-colonialism. Like most of the artists in this exhibition, Arkley and Davila take up provincial perspectives on popular art and culture, testifying to the displacement and complication of identity at the ends of the world. But fifteen years later these issues have become institutional cliches of Australian art, issues which are complicit with our government's "Pacific rim" policies on trade, arts and tourism. What once seemed politically subversive is now a necessary criteria for inclusion in most survey show of Australian art. The theme of interior decoration in Blue Chip Instant Decoratoris quite literally the vehicle for parodying the commercial ends to which Postmodern and Post-colonial debates have been turned over the past decade. The tensions between Arkley's cool stylisation of suburban dreamscapes, and Davila's purulent pop imagery from non-Western contexts, run like fault lines across the parochial domestic scenes in the paintings. Blue Chip Instant Decorator provides a timely critique of the mix and match exotica that inadvertently persists in Post-colonial aesthetics. As Juan explains: "Howard and I were tackling the history of the interior and the institution of the art scene here, very precisely. There was a clear background for our pictorial battle. Our context is that of Australian artists aspiring to commercial success in the gallery, and using the debates of appropriation in the early 80s as a fashion device to give them the right look." Blue Chip Instant Decorator is more than a curious art object pieced together in Arkley and Davila's spare time. It poses important problems for the two artists and for Australian art; problems that could perhaps only be developed in the margins of their careers, in an interval of trust and friendship. As such it is a singular event, a remarkable coordinate in the matrix of contemporary art. Stephen O'Connell 1996 (Excerpt from a forthcoming Tolarno Galleries publication)

N

Nigger is a noun in the English language. The word originated as a neutral term referring to black people, as a variation of the Spanish/Portuguese noun negro, a descendant of the Latin adjective niger ("color black").[1] Often used slightingly, by the mid 20th century, particularly in the United States, it suggested that its target is extremely unsophisticated. Its usage had become unambiguously pejorative, a common ethnic slur usually directed at blacks of Sub-Saharan African descent.

Etymology and history

Main article: Negro

The variants neger and negar, derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the now-pejorative French nègre (negro). Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced [ˈniɡer] which, in every other grammatical case, grammatical gender, and grammatical number besides nominative masculine singular, is nigr-, the r is trilled).

In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. Later American English spellings, neger and neggar, prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia's Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name "Begraafplaats van de Neger" (Cemetery of the Negro); an early US occurrence of neger in Rhode Island, dates from 1625. An alternative word for African Americans was the English word, "Black", used by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Among Anglophones, the word nigger was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted "black-skinned", a common Anglophone usage. Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of nigger without racist connotation, e.g. the Joseph Conrad novella The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897). Moreover, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain created characters who used the word as contemporary usage. Twain, in the autobiographic book Life on the Mississippi (1883), used the term within quotes, indicating reported usage, but used the term "negro" when speaking in his own narrative persona.

During the fur trade of the early 1800s to the late 1840s in the Western United States, the word was spelled "niggur", and is often recorded in literature of the time. George Fredrick Ruxton often included the word as part of the "mountain man" lexicon, did not indicate that the word was pejorative at the time. "Niggur" was evidently similar to the modern use of dude, or guy. This passage from Ruxton's Life in the Far West illustrates a common use of the word in spoken form—the speaker here referring to himself: "Travler, marm, this niggur's no travler; I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!"  It was not used as a term exclusively for blacks among mountain men during this period, as Indians, Mexicans, and Frenchmen and Anglos alike could be a "niggur".

By the 1900s, nigger had become a pejorative word. In its stead, the term colored became the mainstream alternative to negro and its derived terms. Abolitionists in Boston, Massachusetts, posted warnings to the Colored People of Boston and vicinity. Writing in 1904, journalist Clifton Johnson documented the "opprobrious" character of the word nigger, emphasizing that it was chosen in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "colored."

Established as mainstream American English usage, the word colored features in the organizational title of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reflecting the members' racial identity preference at the 1909 foundation. In the Southern United States, the local American English dialect changes the pronunciation of negro to nigra. Linguistically, in developing American English, in the early editions of A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), lexicographer Noah Webster suggested the neger new spelling in place of negro.

By the late 1960s, the social progress achieved by groups in the United States such as the Black Civil Rights Movement (1955–68), had legitimized the racial identity word black as mainstream American English usage to denote black-skinned Americans of African ancestry. In the 90's, "Black" was later displaced in favor of the compound blanket term African American. Moreover, as a compound word, African American resembles the vogue word Afro-American, an early-1970s popular usage. Currently, some black Americans continue to use the word nigger, often spelled as nigga and niggah, without irony, either to neutralize the word's impact or as a sign of solidarity.

Gold Digger

Haters Gonna Hate

I know you've been hurt,

I can tell by the way you carry yourself,

you can't sleep,

So you cry, 

tears all in the pillow,

I'll be there for you, 

I will care for you,

you hate being alone,

you ain't the only one,

I know you've been hurt,

If you let me,

I'll take care of you,

I'll be there for you,

I'll take care of you.