Memo to so-called staff

Sincerest apologies for being out of touch for the last few weeks. Extracurricular activities on behalf of the MoDoMoD required my presence elsewhere. Activities of a rather dubious nature; you know – if I tell you I’ll have to kill you, sworn to secrecy, ASIO/CIA/ETC, commercial and confidential and so forth. Anyway - a word to the wise - if, in the evening, you notice a faint glow to the North in the vicinity of the Nebrosk Rapids don’t go there. Modern explosives are so, um – final.

However, that just explains part of my time away. Apart from trying to find the book I was reading – it was an early Tom Clancy opus – I have been researching inter-heirarchical status signifiers - their design and manufacture, and the dialect between implicit and explicit value they imbue. I know I left the book in amongst some works I was hanging for an exhibition. I go away for a while and come back to find someone has been stomping around the gallery and my book is missing! I ask you…

A fascinating part of the mission I undertook that, remarkably, falls outside the secrecy provisions of my contract dealt with the use of mimes in modern gallery strategic planning. My research of these hideous but effective weapons shocked me. Land mimes are not the only variety. Sea and air mimes exist and have been used in previous global conflicts. Apparently, South Korea’s galleries are protected from an onslaught of Socialist Realism and sloppy film-making from the North by somewhat near two million mimes. To the best of my knowledge these mimes are buried (thankfully) in a belt of land that runs across the peninsula.

Cambodia, a nation on its way to acceptance in the league of civilised societies, is in the midst of a mime eradication program. This program has been supported by luminaries and rockstars. The United Nations and the European Commission deplore the use of land mimes. The civilised world is moving away from the very idea of employing such ordnance for any reason. I for one heartily agree.

Recently, while out shopping with some friends, I witnessed a family of four assailed by one of these horrors. One minute they were a happy family the next instant, in a blast of silence, the mime was upon them. I had to giggle. Personal experience and the wish for global respect insist I make the following statement. The Museum of Dust will never resort to the use of mimes.

Anyway, on to the hierarchical signifiers. Although no one seems to do anything around here apart from Cog and I (and I sometimes wonder about her), and apart from the fact that we don’t really have any staff around here, if you ignore the guy from Idaho(?) whose possibly going to work in the bone collection – when things get better we will need badges for identification. So I drew some. I think they are rather splendid. You’ll have to imagine them in gold and studded with diamonds. I also designed a shoulder patch of which I have made a coloured-paper mock up. I had this very impressive spider-bomby-leggy thing I had knocked up but that has gone missing too. This is just too much.