Odradek

The colour of Faculty Gallery, Monash Art & Design

Join the Faculty Gallery and Associate Professor Domenico de Clario for a series of sound performances and installations.

• RED
  Wednesday 15 August from 5:30pm
  Elaine Miles & Eugene Ughetti
• ORANGE
  Saturday 18 August from 5:30pm
  Michael Graeve
• YELLOW 
  Wednesday 22 August from 4pm                        
  Tom Nicholson
• GREEN
  Saturday 25 August from 4pm
  Solver (John Nixon & Marco Fusinato)
• BLUE
  Tuesday 28 August 5.56pm until 6.46 am 
  Domenico de Clario & Eugene Carchesio
  all night performance
• INDIGO        
  Wednesday 29 August from 5:30pm                  
  Lily Hibberd
• VIOLET
  Friday 31 August from 5:30pm
  Eiichi Tosaki & Steve Adam

Franz Kafka’s short story The Householder’s Concern was written in August 1917 and published two years later in a collection of short stories titled A Country Doctor. In The Householder’s Concern Kafka posits the problem of the existence of the odradek, a fictional creature who has no goal in life. The odradek cannot die and therefore has not worn itself out through the trials and worries that burden ordinary mortals.

What can one ask of a creature that seems to have lost or outlived its usefulness, but paradoxically is only alive because it’s no longer useful? One might be tempted to compare the odradek to art, or even in extreme moments some may be tempted to compare the life of an odradek to that of the artist.

On each of five late winter afternoons one of odradek’s colours lights the interior of a large room located next to a busy highway running through the largest southernmost city in the world. Here we gather to hear what the colours of an odradek might sound like ninety years after his existence was first acknowledged and then noted for us by an anonymous bank clerk in Prague.

Associate Professor Domenico de Clario
July 2007