Waiting

A week or so ago in the mail I received a guide to the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art which begins at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane on the 5th of December. I received the guide as part of my Queensland Art Gallery membership, the benefits of which I don't use nearly as much as I would like.

The guide was a 'Preview/Cinefile special edition' and while perusing its pages I came across a still from a Sri Lankan film, The Forsaken Land (Jayasundar 2005), a film that I saw at the Brisbane International Film Festival.

Click to view full image

The production still in the guide is not cropped to the extent this picture from the APT6 site is. The trunks of the trees in the surrounding bush and the bleached sky beyond them extend out of this frame to convey a sense of isolation and claustrophobia all at once.

The recent news of Australian-bound asylum seekers from Sri Lanka had already made me think of The Forsaken Land and, in particular, I recalled two things. The first was the mood or tone of the film. It is masterful film-making, conveying life as it goes on while waiting for random, unannounced explosions of military violence. It was very affective; utterly devastating.

The second recollection is about the question and answer session with the director, Vimukthi Jayasundara, after the screening. It was an odd Q & A session to the extent that it was so forcefully chaired by the representative from the film festival. The chair was determined that the audience not read the film as political. Or, if that isn't quite correct then we were, according to his instructions, to acknowledge that it was political, but then recognise that it was 'so much more'.

In this he appeared to be fulfilling the wishes of Jayasundara, who seemed to be well and truly tired of discussing the political situation in Sri Lanka instead of the merits of his film. Part of me has some sympathy for the director's schedule here, but I wonder at the assertion of the existence of a clear distinction between content and form that such a forceful request is premised upon. For me, it was precisely the various aesthetic components of the film that so effectively conveyed the weight of living under such conditions.

I think this is an important film, one that Australians must see, and especially now. I urge you to view it as political.

Bubble n Squeak

For a moment I toyed with calling this post 'Rain and Bird shit' as a way of registering my irritation with some of the comments over at The Orwell Prize blog. In particular I'm talking about those comments which express dismay that things Political didn't occupy Orwell's thoughts all the time. On this point, that many of the comments take the liberty of referring to Orwell by his birth name, Eric Blair, rather than his pen name, strikes me as especially ironic. What after all are the expectations of the personal diaries of a man with whom they presume such familiarity? It seems to me that there's a mordant fear of banality, in the sense of something trite or trivial, evident in the comments. It's as if the commenters are convinced that if they betray any interest in someone interested in the change of seasons or the ripening of various fruits and crops or, yes, the colour of the local birds' shit, then that will somehow reflect upon them in such a way that is incommensurate with their sense of themselves as people who only think Important Thoughts.

One can only hope, on their behalf, that Orwell's perspective on the outbreak of WWII will prove to be a suitably interesting contrast to all that terrible banality. Hmmm, isn't that an old Chinese curse?: 'May you live in interesting times'.

I suppose my irritation with these comments arises from the fact that I have a less fractious relationship with banality. Meaghan Morris reminds us that banality also means 'commonplace'; it is the ordinary and everyday aspects of life that many humans have in common. When banality is understood as a 'common place', then it is a place to arrive at rather than flee from. This is much of what cultural studies is concerned with. So, on that note, I will say that it's also getting warmer here in Brisbane as Spring is officially but a couple of days away, and the shit that concerns me most right now is that of fruit bats: why do they have to splash it all over the side of house?

***

I eventually decided upon 'Bubble n Squeak' because, although you wouldn't know from that diatribe above, this was planned as a kind of bits and pieces post. I have a few things to mention that probably warrant dedicated posts, but I don't really have the stamina to write all the posts I want to, or think I should be writing, right now. As well, I can't resist a culinary pun when there is one to be had.

So, I'm sitting here, with a glass of red wine in hand--my first since my sister scared me with all her talk of fatty liver disease--and munching on vitaweats with hummus bi tahina and roast capsicum, trying to figure out how to make my thoughts concise and orderly.

Even as I say that, I have to go off on a tangent immediately to tell you that I did have a glass or two of white wine last Friday when I went over to Clare's new house-sit. There, I was commandeered as a pillow by the cat of the house. All was going very well until even this cat-deprived cat lover had to go to the bathroom and so disrupt said cat's slumber. Who needs LOLCats to interpret the language of cats? It was a very clear message: 'Pillow. Ur doin' it wrong'.

***

I wrote some notes on the way home, on the back of a template for a mask I picked up from the kids section of the 'Picasso and His Collection' exhibition, to remind myself of the things I wanted to tell you. Let me go and get it.

***

I pilfered the 'Make A Mask' template to give to my niece next time I see her. I did the same with the Kids' Activity book from the Andy Warhol exhibition that GoMA hosted earlier this year. She had a fun time with that. Now, whenever she says something is boring, I ask her 'What did Andy Warhol say?' She's never terribly impressed by that come back.

These exhibitions, along with the Meaghan Morris lecture I linked to above, are definitely events I think I should have blogged about, not here so much as over at Sarsaparilla. I haven't posted over there for a while, and I do feel some responsibility to represent Brisbane and Queensland since I'm the only contributor from these parts.

Anyway, just briefly, I enjoyed both exhibitions. I liked the way the Picasso exhibition placed the artist so firmly in the context of his influences, making the point that he was able to make something new because he was an avid collector and admirer of other artists' works. Like writers who read, he was an artist who was better because was literate in his chosen medium.

Overall, I think the Andy Warhol exhibition was better as an exhibition. Perhaps that's due in part to Warhol's own marketing savvy (certainly the gift shop offered a better range of merchandise). It felt far more dynamic than 'Picasso and his Collection'. I'll make special mention of the time-line in the Picasso exhibition, which was just so wordy and cumbersome, a blockade in the middle of the exhibition. I decided I could read about Picasso's life in the exhibition's catalogue that I would inevitably purchase.

I suppose one could argue that the equivalent of the time-line in the Warhol exhibition was the cabinets jammed with the ephemera of Warhol's shoe-boxes, but perhaps because it was ephemera and not an historical time-line, I was happy to take a far more aleatory approach to the material.

It was good to see some works by Henri Matisse that I hadn't before. What colours!

***

Looking at my notes, I seem to have been a bit crankier on the way home than I am now. I've noted that while looking at the exhibition there were a couple of times when I hung back to let a few voluble 'experts' move ahead of me. I like silence when contemplating pictures, or rather I like the head space to think things through. A ridiculous expectation to have in a public art gallery, I know.

I did have to laugh when one young boy was acting as a guide to some younger children, pointing out the various anatomical features in Picasso's more abstract works so they could make sense of the figures.

***

On the way home, I walked across the Victoria Bridge and saw the preparations for the Riverfire fireworks tonight. There were people waiting on the bridge, up to 2 hours before the fireworks began. That's committment.

On the bridge, there were tubes filled with those plastic bread bag seals, accompanied by signs that said some extraordinary number of them had been fished from the river. I've forgotten the number. The statistic that stuck in my head was the one that said if they were stacked on top of one another the line would extend 1km.

Book Club

Book club met today. We went to a cafe for breakfast and to discuss The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I was the only one who had read it, but that's okay, I didn't read the book for our last meeting, or the one before that, and maybe even the one before that.

We still managed to talk about the general themes. I might have dominated the conversation. Someone else had seen the Coen brothers' adaptation of No Country for Old Men, so we discussed that too.

I watched Oprah's interview with McCarthy on YouTube when I had not long finished reading The Road.



I was impressed by his quiet presence. I liked the way he held himself: laconic, refusing to be 'passionate', content to just like doing what he does.

There's not much that I can add to the plethora of reviews out there. Yes, it's harrowing.

Next, I planned to read something a bit less so. Shop Girl, maybe. I picked it up at a 2nd hand book store. And I watched the film on TV last night. But I've found myself picking up William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! I got that in the same haul at the 2nd hand bookshop.

I laughed when I read the first sentence. If McCarthy's prose is taciturn, then Faulkner's is not.

In the middle of reading The Road I stumbled into an arcade in the Valley and came across a photography exhibition by Simon Obarzanek, 80 Faces. I learned that he's a Melbourne-based photographer, but, still mired in the damaged vision of America, I imagined that these might be the faces that haunted McCarthy's wasted landscape.


The next book for this book club is Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. It's a book I've started before and not finished.

I'm meeting up with some other friends and we're going to have a Gothic-themed book club. The Monk by Mathew Lewis will be our first read. I've started that too.

80 Faces reminded me that I've wanted to write something about the art of portraiture for some time now. It was an impulse first prompted by seeing Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.




And I was reminded of it when Brisbane was treated to the recent Andy Warhol exhibition.



But I'm yet to get over my own navel-gazing inertia.

Signs Of The Times

Apropos of Laura’s post this weekend at Larvatus Prodeo where she asked if anyone had seen any crimes against grammar in the great world of advertising, I thought I’d share this picture that I took with my camera phone earlier this week.


Okay, it’s not advertising or even a grammatical faux pas, but this Post-It Note was on a lift door in a University building housing the offices of Humanities and Social Science scholars. Is it deliberate? At first I thought not, then I thought because of the context it had to be, now I can’t decide.

At any rate, I was wondering whether, with a few judicious insertions of some punctuation and an extra letter, it might become the universal sign for signalling that you’re taking a rest from blogging?:

Out; Off Other[s].

***
Speaking of judicious changes to signage.

Do you remember my post about the glorious artwork on the old Ice Works at Paddington in Brisbane? The building has long been knocked down and work has begun on some ‘exclusive’ apartments. Here’s the banner that currently graces the fence to the building site:


The positioning of the sun in this photo is fortuitous, because I couldn’t see the picture I was taking at all, but it seems appropriate to me that ‘all’ includes the sun.

Anyway, if I were more of a risk-taking social activist, rather than of the arm-chair variety, I would have gone out and bought myself a can of spray paint and inscribed the following on the banner:


As you can see, in keeping with the manner of arm-chair activists everywhere, I’ve used Paint, a Microsoft program to communicate my disapproval of the sentiment expressed by the developers.

I don’t know that I want to live so close to people who feel entitled to demand ‘everything’. There’s so much that’s wrong with this attitude, I can’t begin. Well, maybe I can: we live in a world of finite resources people; this kind of in your face consumption is socially irresponsible; why don’t developers devote more of their resources to ‘inclusive’ housing, especially in these times of exorbitant rents?

All I can say to the future owners is that I hope you demand top-of-the-range sound proofing and security too, because living down from Caxton Street and across the road from Suncorp Stadium, amid the detritus left every weekend and after every football game by the alcohol fuelled mobs is not going to be quite the experience that the marketing promises.

***
Here’s a far more pleasing example of bill posting:


I found this example of stencil art on Melbourne Street at South Bank whilst walking between the Cultural Centre Bus Station and past the Convention Centre; it was on the same side as The Fox Hotel.

Emu Dreaming

Here are a few pictures of the Emu Dreaming platter I bought when I went to Mt Tamborine, in the Gold Coast Hinterland, for my birthday a couple of weeks ago.


There was a piece of paper accompanying the platter that gave pertinent details, including the artist's name.


I would normally have provided these details and probably various links so you could explore further, but the fact is I can't find said piece of paper.


I haven't thrown it out, I just can't locate it in the rubble of my abode right now. When my housekeeping skills reassert themselves, I will find it and update this post to satisfy your curiosity.

I do know the platter is by a Central Australian artist and that the glass is fashioned using a kiln.

And I'm not sure my photographs do it any justice.

Post

I took this photo of a culture-jammed poster on the side of a bus shelter along Petrie Terrace in Brisbane late last year.


The original ad was part of a series advertising Cougar Dark Rum. The posters employed an image of ironic masculinity: Barry 'The Cougar' Dawson, resplendent in 70s garb and interior decoration, saying terribly ironic things like, 'I enjoy my rum the way I enjoy my women: on the rocks'.

What made me laugh so much about the culture-jammer's modification of the poster was the way s/he so successfully punctured the deceit of so much irony, particularly when used in the service of reasserting good old-fashioned sexism.

I had viewed the original posters and not really found them amusing, but reasoned that I wasn't the target market for Cougar Dark Rum. However, it also occurred to me at the time that the posters had missed the boat of the ironic 90s. Hadn't we already seen this particular advertising strategy ad nauseam? Could such an ad now be read as anything other than actually sexist?

The genius of 'finish me off', to my mind, was that it captured the post-ironic moment, I think we now find ourselves in, quite perfectly. As a statement it required no convoluted tools for interpretation. It responded to the poster with a simple directive 'enough is enough'; perhaps, 'that joke isn't funny anymore'; or 'everyone sees through this disingenuous attempt to use sexism in the service of sales, and get away with it'. That 'finish me off' might also refer to finishing off a drink, elevated the tactic deployed by the culture-jammer into the realm of the sublime.

Anyway, all of this, has been a convoluted way of directing you over to Sarsaparilla to read my most recent post there. You'll see the connection, eventually.

Erté and Byron

Moonlight (Erté 1984)

***

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that 's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

(Lord Byron 1814)

Pretty

Last year, I think I mentioned that I had started to make some Origami. When it was time to choose a new desktop calendar, I decided upon one that offered an Origami project for every day of the year, thinking it would be ideal for a beginner (some of this Origami is quite difficult).


Each page of the calendar has instructions for an Origami project on one side, and is coloured, sometimes patterned, on the other. The idea is that you save the piece of paper from the day before to use for the following day's folding.

It's a wonderful idea, but, as a guide to Origami, the calendar has presented me with something of a dilemma. The trouble is that I would like to keep the Origami instructions for future reference so I can repeat the projects and so build up my skills. At first I thought I would keep the calendar in tact and just use other paper. But then I saw the paper.


There are such nice colours and patterns amongst the sheets; colours and patterns that would make for perfectly decorated Origami objects. And I think they're just pleasing to look at first thing in the morning when I flip the calendar over to a new day.

After I made a nightingale on the first of January, I also discovered that the paper folds very easily; it stays firm and makes very sharp fold lines, which is the exact quality you want in Origami (at my level).


I've been holding off on folding any of the other pages until I remembered to photocopy the instructions of at least the first month of 2007. I did that photocopying today, and while I was around the office equipment at work, I decided I would scan some of my favourite patterns from January, so you could look at them, and maybe feel all lovely too.

98 Reasons For Blogging: 13

This is a photograph of me and one of my Sarsaparilla colleagues, David, who also has his own blog, Lorraine Crescent. We’re standing inside Soul Under The Moon an installation by Japanese artist,Yayoi Kusama, which is part of the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, now showing at the newly opened Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane until May.

I’m the one in the glowing t-shirt. David’s clothes were clearly more appropriate for delivering a conference paper—as he did earlier that day—than rendering him visible amongst the mirrors and glowing moons to your curious gazes.

The Gallery bought the work after the last APT in 2002 and, I’m proud to say, I made a small donation at the time towards its purchase. I love it. You enter the installation through an opaque sliding door, which closes behind you, onto a short catwalk platform surrounded by water. The water forms a reflective surface that works with the mirror-covered ceiling and walls to form the illusion of an infinite space. The various orange and green spheres are lit by the fluorescent purple lights, adding to the sense that you’re hurtling through outer space. You can stare into the distance forever.

Of course, the trick is not to become disoriented and hurtle into the water, a feat made more difficult if you’ve been drinking beforehand as David and I had both been. We were attending the Academic Viewing hosted by the Gallery as part of its programme for the combined opening of APT5 and its new premises. It was the Gallery’s education division that plied us with alcohol and encouraged us to wander amongst the art.

Normally I’d be too rules conscious to take a photo in an art gallery, but there I was, inebriated, teetering on the edge of space, and unduly influenced by David, whose first thought on entering the installation was whether or not a photo could be taken. I had to know too, and that’s how I discovered that at least three could be taken with my phone’s camera. David was also a bad influence on the two other people who were viewing Soul Under The Moon at the time. In the end, we all left the installation giggling like naughty children to the bemusement, I’m sure, of the Gallery staff member presiding over the automatic door.

Here, I should just note that we resisted running through another installation, this one comprised of intricately carved totem-like poles, arranged in a kind of forest. There were signs saying ‘Do Not Touch’, which was difficult, because their carved surfaces were just so inviting. I really wanted to walk amongst them and explore their surfaces with my finger tips. I had to fold my arms and rock from heel to toe, but I did not touch.

I’ll revisit the exhibition and write about it in more detail in another post, but for now, I just wanted to say how excellent it was to meet David and hang out with him for a bit. He’s the first blog person I’ve met that I haven’t already known outside of blogging.

98 Reasons For Blogging: 12

Ampersand Duck has led me astray to an excellent site for the procrastinator in everyone called Mr. Picassohead.

I thought I was being clever when I called my effort Thesis Descending Staircase, which I thought would be an homage to a work by Picasso himself (and a suitable comment on the progress of the thesis), but it turns out that before Marcel Duchamp began submitting signed urinals to galleries and daring to call it art, he was a dab hand at Cubism:

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912)

Study For Rind

Ice Ice Baby

This is a converted ice factory near where I live.


For a while there, it was some kind of production studio. I'm guessing video, television or film production, from the painted images.


I liked the way that, in the conversion, the site's history was incorporated .I remember, when the building was first painted, I thought how stunning the colours and images were.


I was thrilled to have something so visually creative on the street scape.


I watched in wonder as this inverted face emerged from patches of seemingly disconnected colour.

The building is on a corner. This is around the other side.

Soon, according to a newly erected sign, the building will be excavated and an apartment block, known as The Ice Works, will be built.

The current building is quite old, and I'm sure it's not terribly safe. Still, I will miss seeing these wonderful street images. Would the architects and owners of the new building consent to this kind of facade?

The building next door used to be an independent stationers, but I guess it became more difficult to stay in business when an OfficeWorks opened up not far away. Now it's the shopfront for what looks like a staging production company.

Although from the window display, it looks to me as though they do some kind of interior design and lighting work. I don't know if the two businesses are connected.


I love the humour of all of these images. This bluebird flying around the skull and cross-bones tickles my fancy.