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Buried Not Dead
Buried Not Dead is a collection of writings on art, literature and performance, sexuality, activism and the life of the city. In these essays, written over twenty-five years, Fiona McGregor documents performance artists, writers, dancers, tattooists and DJs, some of them famous, like Marina Abramović and Mike Parr, while others, like Latai Taumoepeau, Lanny K and Kathleen Mary Fallon, are less well known. In capturing these figures and the scenes they inhabit, McGregor offers an expansive archive of art and life of a kind rarely recorded in our histories.
Fiona McGregor’s immersion in her subject matter comes from a deep and enduring involvement in the worlds she represents. She came of age as an artist during an outpouring of performative queer culture, in a community that celebrated subversion, dissent and uninhibited partygoing, and in her writing she observes the shift from that moment towards new forms of cultural repressiveness. McGregor is a participant in her essays as well as a witness – she sees through an artist’s eyes and records what she perceives with a novelist’s insight. In excavating the lives of others, she reveals her own, and shows the possibilities that rest beneath the surface of our culture.
Fiona McGregor’s immersion in her subject matter comes from a deep and enduring involvement in the worlds she represents. She came of age as an artist during an outpouring of performative queer culture, in a community that celebrated subversion, dissent and uninhibited partygoing, and in her writing she observes the shift from that moment towards new forms of cultural repressiveness. McGregor is a participant in her essays as well as a witness – she sees through an artist’s eyes and records what she perceives with a novelist’s insight. In excavating the lives of others, she reveals her own, and shows the possibilities that rest beneath the surface of our culture.
- GenresNonfictionArtEssays
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 30, 2022
3.5
Very interesting to read about Abramovic’s work from a more critical perspective, far from the infallible artist presented in say, The Museum of Modern Love.
Interesting analysis of performance art, especially in the Queer Australian sphere.
Very interesting to read about Abramovic’s work from a more critical perspective, far from the infallible artist presented in say, The Museum of Modern Love.
Interesting analysis of performance art, especially in the Queer Australian sphere.
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May 17, 2021“Things fall apart as soon as they form.” And nowhere more so than in the cultural scenes surveyed by Fiona McGregor in her debut essay collection. Its subjects range from performance art through to refugee policy, gentrification, friendship, and the joy of queer scenes.
This last subject accounts for much of the book’s pathos – the sense of how, when we look back on the past (that vanished and endlessly receding place), we realise how almost everyone we once knew there is gone: he moved out, she fled the city, they died of AIDS; each a dull, subterranean shock.
In one of the collection’s best profiles, McGregor’s 2013 homage to the DJ Lanny K, she reflects on artistic longevity and community; how there is inevitably “something tortured about [the artist’s] isolation, the Icarus urge”. The profile doubles nicely as a mini history of Australia’s DJ scene (“Most punters dancing to Fatboy Slim on their first Es at Big Day Out would not have realised this phenomenon was pioneered by Latino and black American gays.” )
McGregor’s warfront missives recall Kathy Acker on Reagan’s America (read, for example,'The Meaning of the Eighties', in Bodies of Work): “After their brief, spurious career in anti-terrorism, Labor premier Bob Carr’s sniffer dogs retrained to detect drugs.” This is how the dream dies, from Rome to Berlin, Amsterdam to Sydney. By now, of course, all over the globe, every former experiment in communal living and organising has been transformed into a Starbucks: gutted and hollowed by cops, rising rent, drugs, violence, vagrancy, and that newly-settled small business owner looking on in shame and pity, “but it used to be so nice here...” .
There is also a memorable account of Mike Parr’s MIRROR/ARSE installation at the 2008 Sydney Biennale, and a lacerating critique of the OzLit scene – especially its dogged reliance on Magical Negro tropes (see Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, or the writing of Trent Dalton). It’s a thoughtful appreciation, too, of author Kathleen Mary Fallon: “Working Hot zings […] one chapter, ‘Sextec’, a sort of glossolalia through cum-soaked lips; another, ‘Cursedevidence’, a gruelling expose of misogyny.”
Continue: https://www.theage.com.au/culture/boo...
This last subject accounts for much of the book’s pathos – the sense of how, when we look back on the past (that vanished and endlessly receding place), we realise how almost everyone we once knew there is gone: he moved out, she fled the city, they died of AIDS; each a dull, subterranean shock.
In one of the collection’s best profiles, McGregor’s 2013 homage to the DJ Lanny K, she reflects on artistic longevity and community; how there is inevitably “something tortured about [the artist’s] isolation, the Icarus urge”. The profile doubles nicely as a mini history of Australia’s DJ scene (“Most punters dancing to Fatboy Slim on their first Es at Big Day Out would not have realised this phenomenon was pioneered by Latino and black American gays.” )
McGregor’s warfront missives recall Kathy Acker on Reagan’s America (read, for example,'The Meaning of the Eighties', in Bodies of Work): “After their brief, spurious career in anti-terrorism, Labor premier Bob Carr’s sniffer dogs retrained to detect drugs.” This is how the dream dies, from Rome to Berlin, Amsterdam to Sydney. By now, of course, all over the globe, every former experiment in communal living and organising has been transformed into a Starbucks: gutted and hollowed by cops, rising rent, drugs, violence, vagrancy, and that newly-settled small business owner looking on in shame and pity, “but it used to be so nice here...” .
There is also a memorable account of Mike Parr’s MIRROR/ARSE installation at the 2008 Sydney Biennale, and a lacerating critique of the OzLit scene – especially its dogged reliance on Magical Negro tropes (see Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, or the writing of Trent Dalton). It’s a thoughtful appreciation, too, of author Kathleen Mary Fallon: “Working Hot zings […] one chapter, ‘Sextec’, a sort of glossolalia through cum-soaked lips; another, ‘Cursedevidence’, a gruelling expose of misogyny.”
Continue: https://www.theage.com.au/culture/boo...
April 29, 2021
Here’s a fantastic book of essays on art. Fiona McGregor writes with an unabashed sophistication about the queer art scene she cut her teeth on, one sprung from nightclubs, drugs, dancing and what could be naively called live pornographic cosplay for the 90s. As Sydney’s underground performance art scene moved out of the pubs and into galleries, she was watching, making, recording. Her style of reportage is city chic and philosophical. She writes passages like this: ‘There I sat with my lips stitched, looking at my audience one-on-one for eight hours, in Newcastle, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Manchester. There was more to You Have the Body than this, yet despite the praise it received, I question it now. Why let strangers into our eyes that easily? Are we exploiting people’s natural desire for intimacy with one-on-ones? How much should the instinct to privacy be overridden in the name of art?’ I lifted this from an essay on Marina Abramovic – the essays in Buried Not Dead occasionally reach beyond Sydney. What I most love about this book is McGregor’s placement of herself inside the essay, inside the art. The writing has a present-ness to it.
December 6, 2025
The essay on working hot by Kathleen Mary Fallon is incredible, and I will keep this for that. Also loved anything about the queer and dyke scenes in Sydney. Again (by which I mean like other books) I have trouble maintaining interest in art world discussions/the essays on performance art.
Btw I bought Working Hot in Academic Remainders in Canberra when I was in year 12, and may not have come across it otherwise.
Btw I bought Working Hot in Academic Remainders in Canberra when I was in year 12, and may not have come across it otherwise.
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March 15, 2022necessary Syd reading
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews