David Jones, artist and poet (1895-1974) begins his PREFACE TO THE ANATHEMATA :

'I have made a heap of all that I could find.' (1) So wrote Nennius, or whoever composed the introductory matter to Historia Brittonum. He speaks of an 'inward wound' which was caused by the fear that certain things dear to him 'should be like smoke dissipated'. Further, he says, 'not trusting my own learning, which is none at all, but partly from writings and monuments of the ancient inhabitants of Britain, partly from the annals of the Romans and the chronicles of the sacred fathers, Isidore, Hieronymous, Prosper, Eusebius and from the histories of the Scots and Saxons although our enemies . . . I have lispingly put together this . . . about past transactions, that [this material] might not be trodden under foot'. (2)

(1) The actual words are coacervavi omne quod inveni, and occur in Prologue 2 to the Historia.
(2) Quoted from the translation of Prologue 1. See The Works of Gildas and Nennius, J.A.Giles, London 1841.


29 September 2013

2013 conceptuAFL Grand Final

       
"Half-a-kick in it..."
- Gerard Whately
  ABC Grandstand
  3rd Quarter
             

collection : Heide MUMA   
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA
    
      
 P.S.
 Final Score : Hawks 11.11.77 - Dockers 8.14.62
      
       
        

27 September 2013

Purple Haze!

      
Things we never imagined (continued) : 
a tribe from the West, the Purple Haze, to descend upon Melbourne for the 2013 AFL Grand Final.

And yet, tomorrow at the MCG :
Hawthorn Vs Freemantle

            
Melbourne enveloped by purple haze 
Rhianna King / The West Australian (article here)
27 September 2013
       
Coincidence or a purple cosmos? Today, Melbourne's World Food Books has PURPLE FASHION (published by
at the top of it's online listing.
       

  
Also today, one of our older staff members brought his 1967 Purple Haze E.P. into the office. We've been playing it. Loud! The great here-we-go tritone intro. One perfect air guitar office orchestra. 
         
  Argh! Argh!
     Argh! Argh! 

        ... Purple Haze! 

              'scuse me while I kiss the sky!
    

    
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA


      

26 September 2013

BEER FRAME

       
Cosmic Psychos, Dead Roo  (1991)
      



 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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 LOGOS/HA HA


      

25 September 2013

AUSTRALIA : Puppet Culture Framing System


This is a political ruse. It is about framing the debate to suit the government by managing public perceptions; if asylum seekers are not constantly mentioned, then the public might begin to believe they no longer exist.

THE AGE : Editorial ( here )
25 September 2013
               
"There is a distinctly Orwellian tinge to the Abbott government's move to constrict information flows about asylum seekers arriving by boat..."
                  

        
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA


      

24 September 2013

'AUSTRALIA' at the Royal Academy (2)

       
In 2008 Baz Luhman launched his "epic historical romantic drama film" AUSTRALIA. We haven't seen it, but we know that it was variously criticised. Literally, a projection for love(rs) and hate(rs).

 
                   
The National Gallery of Australia has now joined with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, to produce another such projection AUSTRALIA.

"Marking the first major survey of Australian art in the UK for 50 years, this exhibition spans more than 200 years from 1800 to the present day and seeks to uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its art."
  
    
Value added : well, this exhibition now showcases a lot more than its constructors would ever have anticipated...

If there are weaknesses from the curatorial side, as the initial reviews have suggested (here), there are now also some extraordinary, additional, associated exhibits to consider : displays of ignorance (particularly of Australian Indigenous art), insult and spleen.
        
This from Brian Sewell in 'The Standard'
19 September 2013
read full article here

Australia, Royal Academy - exhibition review
A vast survey is wasted on ‘cultural cringe’ that only goes to show what the ‘whitefella’ did to Australia and its art

                
"The exhibition is divided into five sections, of which the first is Aboriginal Art — but of the present, not the distant past, at last “recognised as art, not artefact”. By whom, I wonder? For these examples of contemporary aboriginal work are so obviously the stale rejiggings of a half-remembered heritage wrecked by the European alcohol, religion and servitude that have rendered purposeless all relics of their ancient and mysterious past. Swamped by Western influences, corrupted by a commercial art market as exploitative as any in Europe and America, all energy, purpose and authenticity lost, the modern Aboriginal Australian is not to be blamed for taking advantage of the white man now with imitative decoration and the souvenir. The black exploits the white’s obsession with conspicuous display and plays on the corporate guilt that he has now been taught to feel for the ethnic cleansing of the 19th century — a small revenge for the devastation of his culture — but the Aborigine offers only a reinvented past, his adoption of “whitefella” materials and, occasionally, “whitefella” ideas (Jackson Pollock must surely lie behind the longest of these canvases) undoing his “blackfella” integrity."

Sewell concludes :
       
What on earth does the National Gallery of Australia — provider of half the exhibits and almost all the catalogue text — hope to achieve with this inadequate exhibition? The English have no romantic engagement with Australia that justifies our having to inspect such consistently provincial trivia, and though we may be amused to see the Australian Cultural Cringe so compellingly demonstrated, the demonstration (as with Australian humour) wears thin with repetition. I can see the point of an exhibition of pre-colonial Aboriginal artefacts, for it might be as provocative and illuminating as the recent investigation of the Ice Age at the British Museum (how about a show comparing them with the survivals from the earliest sites of civilisation in the Americas, Africa and Asia?). I willingly argue that we need to be reminded of the few Australian painters who achieved international fame in the mid-20th century — Boyd, Tucker, Drysdale, Perceval and Nolan among them (though Nolan was as much English in later life and, in death, posthumously became an Irishman) — yet these are almost entirely neglected here. The Royal Academy’s exhibition, in the end, amounts to nothing but sad Reader’s Digest stuff."
       

'Cascade of diarrhoea' : 

UK critic savages Australian art exhibition

Date
Nick Miller / Sydney Morning Herald
23 September 2013
read full article here

"Much of the so-called cream of Australian art is lightweight, provincial and dull, and some of it is reminiscent of liquid crap, says one of Britain's leading critics.

In a searing review of the Royal Academy's new 'Australia' exhibition which opened this weekend in London, the Sunday Times' Waldemar Januszczak describes indigenous art as “tourist tat”, Frederick McCubbin's famous The Pioneer as “poverty porn”, and Fred Williams' desert landscape as “thick cowpats of minimalism”."

         

A desert of new ideas
Date
Waldemar Januszczak / The Sunday Times
22 September 2013
read full article here if you are prepared to pay

Some extracts :

"The bad news is the art itself, which isn'’t impressive enough, often enough, to warrant such a weighty inspection. Every now and then something interesting comes along, but as an overall national achievement, the contents of this display feel lightweight and provincial. Considering how much power there is in the land itself, —what a unique and fiery landscape we are dealing with here,— the response of Australia’s artists has a tinny tone to it, a lack of muscularity, that feels wrong. Here is a nation, I ended up musing, in which the wrong people became artists. The stockmen should have grabbed the brushes from the chaps who went to Paris, or those who came to London to join the Royal Academy."
       
and...
      
"The German journeymen and the painting convicts were not, of course, the first artists in Australia. That sad honour goes to the indigenous Aboriginal peoples, who were shunted aside, murdered and betrayed. Their presence in this show continues to feel problematic and tokenistic. Having seen fragments of their ancient art in situ —carved onto rock faces, scratched into lofty overhangs — I know them to be the creators of a mighty artistic tradition that seems actually to be baked into this great land. Aborigine art, in situ, driven by the huge survivalist imperatives that created it, is an art of tremendous power and pertinence. Exactly what the show needs. Exactly what it doesn't get.

Instead, there are dull canvas approximations, knocked out in reduced dimensions, by a host of repetitive Aborigine artists making a buck. Out of a tremendous indigenous tradition, fired and inspired by an enormous natural landscape, the Australian art world has managed to create what amounts to a market in decorative rugs. Opening the show with a selection of these spotty meanderings, and discussing them in dramatically hallowed terms, cannot disguise the fact that in most cases the great art of the Aborigines has been turned into tourist tat. Only Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, in a dense and undulating landscape of cosmic dots called Warlugulong, successfully
evokes the vast rhythms of the outback."
    
and later Januszczak concludes :
      
"Fred Williams, a particularly mannered member of the less-is-more school, splatters the delicate emptiness of the desert with thick cowpats of minimalism. As the show grows ever browner and yellower, John Olsen’s Sydney Sun, a giant panel of art installed above your head, successfully evokes the sensation of standing under a cascade of diarrhoea. I think he was actually trying to record the harsh tangibility of the Australian sun.

The crassness that characterises these repetitive responses to the Australian landscape is also in evidence, alas, in the figure paintings of the times. I take the point that Albert Tucker was seeking to portray the sunbathers on an Australian beach in 1944 as lumps of sun-baked meat — no arms, no legs, no heads — for existential wartime reasons, but, jeez, what an ugly painting. And for a complete absence of grace or sensitivity, you would be hard pushed to find an image that could overtake Arthur Boyd’s horrible black studio scene in which a flaying figure with a paintbrush jack-knifes across the canvas like a man being thrown out of a bar.

It’s not until the show enters its final stretches, and we reach the contemporary world, that Australian art becomes properly varied again, and a whole new range of moods and tonalities pop up. In a set of exquisitely crafted sardine-tin sculptures by Fiona Hall, the tin has been cut and twisted into delicate examples of Australian flora on the outside, and energetic episodes of Australian porn on the inside. In a pictorial reprise of Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic feral world, Danie Mellor gives us an ancient Greek necropolis overrun by koalas, kangaroos and Aboriginals. The imported European civilisation is in black and white. The rightful inhabitants of Australia are in colour."


Q: Okay smart arse, what would you do?

As an exercise?  If for some reason an exhibition of/about Australia/land/landscape painthings had to go to the Royal Academy of Arts, London?

A start date somewhere around 1970.

Geoffrey Bardon stands in front of the mural on a school wall in Papunya, August 1971. Photo: Robert Bardon

Room 1 :
Show again the same Indigenous works already in this exhibition - look again, do some research! 
(And don't float Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Big Yam Dreaming (1995) so ridiculously high. Way above the yam giving earth? Over a doorway?)
            
Margo Neale, principal curator of Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye with Japanese media in front of Big Yam Dreaming 1995, at the the National Art Center, Tokyo from 28 May to 28 July 2008. Photo: Sonja Balaga - more here
        
Room 2:
Fred Williams : from the early links to London and via French and North American art, he develops a local view.

Room 3:
Ian Burn : as mentioned in the previous post (here), the 'Value added' meta-landscapes of his Collaborations exhibition, 1993.

Room 4:
Juan Davila : another insider/outsider re-imagines Project Australia : The Moral Meaning of Wilderness

Juan Davila, A Man is Born Without Fear (2010)            via Art Blart
     
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA


      

21 September 2013

'AUSTRALIA' at the Royal Academy

       
The exhibition 'AUSTRALIA' opens today at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

21 September 2013 - 8 December 2013
Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London
in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia 

              
The reviews so far are mostly disastrous. 

However, from another perspective, this return to the Old d'Art with a Royal Academy show - Robert Menzies would be tickled pink - could be seen to have brilliantly anticipated the new backward-looking isolationist head-up-own-bum posture of Operation Sovereign Borders AUSTRALIA under last weekend's newly elected Abbott coalition government. 
          
 .  .  .  . 
        
Australia at the Royal Academy : 
Ned Kelly to the rescue

Adrian Searle / The Guardian
17 September 2013
read full article here

Searle's conclusion :

"It is a great deal easier for curators to deal with a single medium like painting, and to convey a sense of its continuity and divergences, than it is to deal with the multitude of strategies artists now work with. What we end up with is a horrible sort of group show. How might art be different in Melbourne or Sydney, Perth or Cairns? How has Australian art engaged with immigration, or tackled politics and racism?

Whatever artists have to say about these issues is reduced to a few one-off gestures. I want to see something tougher and more prickly, art with more bite. I am not interested in what might constitute some sort of Australian artistic identity, because I doubt there is one. The fertility of Australian art is a product of successive, unending waves of human migration, as well as part of a global dialogue. It is hard to recognise that here, bar a few isolated examples. The show signals divergence, without actually explaining or expanding on it. What about the relationship of Australian art to film? Or doesn't film count? The exhibition just sort of gives up, representing neither the artists, nor Australian art, in a meaningful way. I thought the days of shows like this were over. They ought to be."

          
 .  .  .  . 
          
ScapeLand :
Kelly blasts the w/hole idea 
       
The Interior ] spatial concept (
FIAPCE  
-1953-1978- 
collection : Heide MoMA
          
 .  .  .  . 
        
Australia's London art spectacular is a 'clumsy embarrassment'

John McDonald / THE AGE
19 September  2013

read full article here 

McDonald's conclusion :

"By the end of the show the tendency to include one work an artist has become an embarrassment. When I attended an early preview, one of the London critics asked: "Surely you've got better artists back in Australia?"

Not only do we have better artists, we have much better examples of work by artists who have made the cut. If the colonial part of the show is questionable, and the indigenous works seemingly chosen at random, the contemporary rooms are beyond redemption.

It is not the quantity of art or artists that counts in a successful exhibition, it is the clarity of the presentation. A display does not consist of names but of carefully chosen pieces. It is hard to believe that Australian curators could put such rooms together and feel satisfied with their efforts. It is clumsy. It is provincial. A great opportunity has been wasted."

          
 .  .  .  . 
        
Golden Slumbers :
The Harsh Australian Light 
         
Golden Slumbers ] The Harsh Australian Light (
Performance by Theatre of the Actors of Regard 
National Gallery of Victoria, 1985, at the exhibition
'Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond'
photo courtesy : The Debt Collection 
        
 .  .  .  . 
        
‘Australia’ at the Royal Academy : 
dreamtime meets the incomers

Jackie Wullschlager / Financial Times
20 September 2013
read full article here

Wullschlager's conclusion :
 
"Today’s globalised Australia is bigger, better, more connected, than this. Disastrously absent, for example, are acclaimed contemporary sculptors Ricky Swallow and Ron Mueck. Their exquisitely crafted still-lifes and portraits exhibit true tragic sensibility, the power of time rather than place – universal not local concerns. By excluding work of this quality and range, this show remains finally, insistently, unnecessarily provincial."
        
 .  .  .  . 
        
"Disastrously absent..." also, we suggest, is the final exhibition of Ian Burn's 'Value added' landscape(s) from his Collaborations, 1993, at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. 

One whole room for those, surely.
                   
click image to enlarge   

'Value added' landscape No.14
Ian Burn and Hans Selke
1993
       
        
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA


      

18 September 2013

PM regards bLOG Title


The new Australian Prime Minister presents as a simple man. 

“From today I declare Australia is under new management and is once more open for business.”   

What could be simpler than 
simple things ...

Q : Global Warming?
A : "The argument is absolute crap
." (T.A. 2009)

SOLUTION : For the first time in 80 years, there is now no Minister for Science in the Australian Government. 
"There has also been a purge of department heads, and a cleaning-out of staff from the now defunct climate change department is also expected. Abbott’s government has already instructed public servants to begin drawing up new legislation to repeal the carbon price, new treasurer Joe Hockey sent a letter to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation instructing it to cease making loans, and preparations are also being made for the dismantling of the Climate Commission and the Climate Change Authority."
Tony Abbott sworn in, turns against climate programs
Giles Parkinson, 18 September 2013 ( article here )
"Anyone who understands and cares about the environment and economics will know ditching the carbon tax is not only crazy, it is absolutely suicidal."
Tony Abbott will doom future generations if he ditches carbon tax
David Suzuki / The Age, 18 Sept 2013 ( article here )            
          
SOLUTION : A Minister for Sport, at Cabinet level.
 
put simply ...
    
Q : Refugees? Asylum Seekers?
A : Stop The Boats 
        
SOLUTION : "Tony Abbott appoints Angus Campbell to lead Operation Sovereign Borders policy" ( article here )
      
for simple people.

This Toxic Tax! This Toxic Tax! This Toxic Tax!
   
.  .  .  .
     
How will the New Simplicity affect local PRAVDA? 
What changes might our readership expect to see?

We sent one of our reporters to investigate.

Q : Prime Minister, we know you like to keep things simple. How do you regard the Title and meta-Title below, regularly featured at bLOGOS/HA HA ?

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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LOGOS/HA HA

A : Prime Minister Abbott:  

"Everything that is significant is obviously of concern to an Australian government but it is possible to take things very, very seriously indeed without feeling they need to be included in people's titles because we are just getting to a situation of title inflation and frankly I want to avoid title inflation." ( here )

Thank you, Prime Minister. And, just before you get back to work, could you give us a back-to-basics glimpse of how you see y/our new government?

"If you go through the list you will see...

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
 If you look at the list of the Cabinet...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
If you look at the outer ministry, you will see...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
If you look at the ranks of parliamentary secretaries...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
You may notice that one of the things that I have attempted to do with this new ministry is avoid the proliferation of titles,
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
the sometimes grandiose titles of the former government,
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
where it sometimes seemed that ministers needed an extra-large business card to contain all of their various titles."

Tony Abbott : Press Conference, Parliament House, Canberra 16 September 2013 ( here )

Thank you, Prime Minister. I think we've already well covered that last matter.
        

Our reporter presents his business card.  

You can probably guess what's tattooed on the back of his head...

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
      
         

16 September 2013

Reading the weekend papers


Reading Peter Craven on Reza Aslan's Zealot : the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus of Nazareth aka The Christ aka The Logos

Look up for a mo... and blow me down if that's not the ultimate return of the gaze. Snap!
   
   
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA


      

13 September 2013

bLOG post full of holes

           
I read the news today oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
I'd love to turn you on

 

A Day In The Life
Lennon & McCartney (1967)

            
     
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA

The image above accompanied Robert Nelson's review ('Monuments to the failure of modernist architecture' : The Age, 4 September 2013) of Monika Sosnowska : Regional Modernities at ACCA.
      
       
The caption The Age placed under this image was : 
Facade, a crumpled metal sculpture, portrays the failure of the curtain wall.

We were talking here about this photograph/ this image/ this image and caption text/ this sculpture/ this installation/ this theatre set/ this performance event/ this Theatre of the Actors of Regard.  One of our team referred us to the Melbourne artist Guy Stuart's Lattice full of holes, exhibited at Harald Szeemann's 1971 Kaldor Project 2 at the National Gallery of Victoria. 

The NGV acquired Lattice full of holes in 1977. Searching for an image of it, we visited the NGV online Collection page for works by Guy Stuart. We found there, instead, a meta-lattice full of holes : a grid of seven word-works, each Image not available and these with three CHANGE VIEW options.

click image to enlarge      
             
Looking elsewhere (here) we found a photo of Lattice full of holes as installed at the NGV in the 1971 exhibition. (The NGV Collection page gives the date of this work, exhibited in 1971, as 1972.) That's it hanging on the back wall, in the image below.


             
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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 LOGOS/HA HA

"Harald Szeemann was the most celebrated and influential curator of the late 20th century. With a career spanning almost 50 years, he invented the modern idea of exhibition making; pioneered the display of conceptual art and performance; created some of the first cross-disciplinary, non-chronological exhibitions; and experimented with non-museum spaces. For Project 2 in 1971, at the launching point of Szeemann’s long career as he prepared for the documenta 5 exhibition in Kassel, John Kaldor invited him to visit Australia and curate an exhibition of the latest contemporary Australian art. The exhibition, I want to leave a nice well-done child here, was shown in Sydney and Melbourne and was the first major exhibition of conceptual art in an Australian museum."

read full article (here)
       
*Note also our recent post (here) about the first Conceptual art exhibition in Australia: Burn / Cutforth / Ramsden at Pinacotheca gallery, Melbourne in 1969


Guy STUART with Lattice full of holes at the 2012 Heide MoMA exhibition Less is More: Minimal and post-Minimal Art in Australia.

Here are a couple more moments from the 1971 NGV installation photo: 
      
1. grid-panelled exhibition wall with an open door (Lattice full of holes) and an Actor of Regard (Lattice full of holes)



 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA
          
2. exhibition display panel with a grid of articulated projection-spaces (Lattice full of holes) and a grounded semi-in/visible Actor of Regard (Lattice full of holes)
        

      
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA