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.


31 October 2013

Diogenes still looking...

     
Those children of Australia who were suckled at the breast of Pap Murdoch will en masse this evening unnaturally bother the old diggers and retiree drover types of their die-verse neighborhoods.

Today is Halloween, we are told.

And even as the elders tut-tut such foreign culture imports and call for stiffer Sovereign Borders, they too are readying their clobber, cobber, with clip-on black ties and displays of gold mined for their own hallowed eve celebration of the dead. 

News Corpse execute-ive chairman Rupert Murdoch will, as the sun sets, reward them with a trick-or-treat maLOGOS/HA HA at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney.
We are delighted to announce that our tenth anniversary Lowy Lecture will be delivered by Rupert Murdoch, AC. One of the ambitions of the Lowy Institute is to amplify Australian voices on the world stage, and no Australian businessman has had more success on that world stage than Rupert Murdoch.
Mr Murdoch is Executive Chairman of News Corp, the largest news and information services provider in the English speaking world and Chairman and CEO of 21st Century Fox, the world's premier portfolio of cable, broadcast, film, pay TV and satellite assets.
Since taking control of News in 1954, when the company’s key asset was the number-two daily newspaper in Adelaide, Mr Murdoch oversaw its expansion into one of the world’s biggest media companies, before its separation in July 2013.
The lecture will be black tie and will delivered at a dinner at Sydney Town Hall, 483 George Street, Sydney on Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 7.00 pm.

Lowy Institute for International Policy

We're not going. We'll be having a few media f(r)iends around for drinks and attempted sobriety. For reasons that Groucho Marx would understand, we don't call ourselves the The Diogenes Club - nonetheless, our toast this evening will be, as usual: "To Diogenes".

This relates to an old framed page that hangs in the bLOGOS/HA HA office. Be the light you seek, that sort of thing, a reminder. Page 308, taken from a U.S. journal, Harper's Weekly, 15 April 1876. 

The page carries an illustration by the "Father of the American Cartoon", Thomas Nast. 

But before we get to our own print by Nast, here's another by him (Harper's Weekly, 6 June 1874, p.480 ) in which, tongue in cheek, he asks the pardon of certain Republicans who feel themselves wounded by his sketches
      

 
As can be seen by the Republican Platform spelled out behind the Speaker's Chair, this could just as well be about the Supply-blocking antics of the Republicans in the US Senate earlier this month. The caption on the illustration:
“PEEVISH SCHOOL-BOYS, WORTHLESS OF SUCH HONOR.” “Apollos, pardon my great Profaneness; oh, pardon me, that I descend so low!”


 click image to enlarge                                  

Our page by Nast depicts Diogenes in rags, still with his staff and lantern, now come to Washington, and STILL LOOKING for an honest man. 
          

 click image to enlarge                                 collection: bLOGOS/HA HA
            
Vain and self-(ap)pointing, the press barons gather to receive him, each in the delusion he will see in them the virtue he seeks. Their mastheads suggest otherwise: The New York Hoax, The Washington Hatchet; the Daily Rumour, The Chicago Daily Pernicious Gossip Times, The Daily Canard, The New York Tribulation - The (Mis)Leading Paper in America, The Daily Slander, The Daily Busy Body, The Innuendo...

The caption on the illustration: 
DIOGENES STILL LOOKING. - "WE ARE THE GENTLEMAN YOU ARE IN SEARCH OF."

Update, below : 
Diogenes at the Lowy Institute, still looking ...
         
      
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA
      
      
      

28 October 2013

Reinventing the Wheel : Fourth Title


Sebastian Vettel today claimed his Fourth Title :
    
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA
    
      
So excited is he to achieve this, in the centenary of

To see the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames.

- Marcel Duchamp : Arturo Schwartz, The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, p.442
     
Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century
      
Monash University Museum of Art
Caulfield campus
3 October – 14 December 2013
Presented in association with the Melbourne Festival

... that he spontaneously performs a Circle Burn.



  
This is it, viewed from above. Worthy of Giotto!
     


In prostration, the artist first acknowledges his instrument, Hungry Heidi.
     

     
In salute, he accepts the victory.

           


In respect, he bows to the Theatre of the Actors of Regard



... who complete the Circle of Recognition.
   

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

24 October 2013

Reinventing the Wheel : The Medium Is the Medium Is the Message Is the Massage

    
Yesterday our sales rep. traveled to Acronym City to spruik at MADA and MUMA for blogs and bLOGOS/HA HA.

Loman says he was well received - the presentation well attended and the TAR attentive - but, again, no sales. 

At the conclusion of his spiel, Bill asked for a show-of-hands : Who here has a blog? No one. Why not, asks Bill? Old media, they told him.

Loman is long-in-the-tooth old media too, but he reckons this threw him. Apparently he then asked if Publication is now old media?

All morning he's been going on about Fukuyama and Black Mirror and Marshall McLuhan and The medium is still the message : bloody Painting, bloody post-Conceptual bloody Twitter bloody bloody bloody...

We're a bit worried about old BL. 

Here, to regard your regard, an image of the amused and mediated Mr. McLuhan.
      


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


      

23 October 2013

Reinventing the Wheel : A Restoration Comedy

       
To see the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames.

- Marcel Duchamp : Arturo Schwartz, The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, p.442
    
Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century
     
Monash University Museum of Art
Caulfield campus
3 October – 14 December 2013
Presented in association with the Melbourne Festival
                   
"Many curiously significant remarks are made about silence in the trilogy. Molloy, for example, says: 'about me all goes really silent, from time to time, whereas for the righteous the tumult of the world never stops.' The Unnaneable says: 'This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says, too old perhaps and too abased ever to succeed in saying the words that would be its last, knowing itself useless and its uselessness in vain, not listening to itself but to the silence that it breaks.' Only when one is sufficiently detached from this compulsive babble to realize that one is uttering it can one achieve any genuine serenity, or the silence which is its habitat. 'To restore silence is the role of objects,' says Molloy, but this is not Beckett's final paradox. His final paradox is the conception of the imaginative process that underlies and informs his remarkable achievement. In a world given over to obsessive utterance, a world  of television and radio and shouting dictators and tape recorders and beeping space ships, to restore silence is the role of serious writing."

  - page 236 : Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage 
    ed. by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman

'To restore silence is the role of objects'


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

22 October 2013

Reinventing the Wheel : the air of Ville de Regard (1887)

     
The year is 1887. The postman of Ville de Regard is doing his rounds on one of the new diamond-frame safety bicycles.

As he approaches Blainville-Crevon, a farming village by the banks of the river Crevon (in the Pays de Caux, some 16 kilometres northeast of Rouen)... Parbleu! A puncture in the back tyre.



Monsieur postman is known throughout the commune for his diverse interests, his artisanal skills and his good humour. As he does with most phenomena, le facteur observes this event with the welcoming awe of a child. 

He listens to the sound of the air of Ville de Regard as it escapes the capsule circulaire

He makes in his mind a notation of this sound. 

He visualises next a transparent text bubble, much like a speech bubble but one that gathers instead a meta-script: the Label of his Present Regard.

He figures he could blow a glass of that shape - this is only one of his many skills - and seal it to hold forever a certain volume of the air of Ville de Regard. 

Such phials, of the air of Ville de Regard, he could give as special gifts. Perhaps the first as a present to the newborn son of his friends Monsieur Eugene and Madame Lucie at Blainville-Crevon.
   
       
Thirty-two years later, in another place...

Air de Paris 
Marcel Duchamp
1919


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

19 October 2013

Περισσότερα σκηνές από τη σπηλιά του Πλάτωνα

          
What word is that? (after Neville Cayley)
or
More scenes from Plato's Cave


Tacita Dean : FILM

now at ACCA for FESTIVAL MELBOURNE


     
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
      
         
An unattributed snap. Is it the positive or the negative?
             

               
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
 
LOGOS/HA HA
           
       
An 1818 film of paint...

by Caspar David Friedrich

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
The wanderer above the sea of fog
       

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

      
          

18 October 2013

Reinventing the Wheel : Here comes the Grinder Man, singing :

     
Sharpen your wits!
Sharpen your wits!

To see the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames.

- Marcel Duchamp : Arturo Schwartz, The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, p.442
    
Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century
     
Monash University Museum of Art
Caulfield campus
3 October – 14 December 2013
Presented in association with the Melbourne Festival
         
For those who would like to go into this business, we outline the details. Two ordinary strips of iron, about 1″ wide and 1/8″ thick, are drilled to accommodate three bolts and a bicycle hub axle. By means of a bolt, the iron strips are fastened together at one end, and the strips spread by hand; a small piece of iron pipe is then dropped down close to the bend, and the strips are again squeezed together, first by hand and later with the vise. This forms a clamp for the bottom of the bicycle frame. The top cross-bar is properly located, and the iron bent around it in a similar way.

The grindstone is now fitted to a bicycle wheel hub (the flange being first cut off); a pully wheel is attached and, except for the drive, the job is complete. The simplest drive is an ordinary wooden baby-buggy wheel, from which the rubber tire and spokes have been removed. This is attached to the spokes of the rear wheel by small brass lugs, as shown. The brass lugs are made in pairs; six pairs will be enough for mounting the wooden wheel. They measure 3/4″ x 1-1/2″ for those that are to be attached to the rim and 3/4″ square for those to be used as clips. These are drilled to take 8-32 bolts in a slip fit; the holes being drilled through one clip and lug at the same time. Two small holes are also drilled in the lug, and the lug is then mortised into the rim and screwed fast to it. 

With thanks to MODERN MECHANIX, March 1936
          

  reconstruction tableau above by Theatre of the Actors of Regard    

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

     
        

17 October 2013

Reinventing the Wheel : All is grist to the mill

           
COGNITIVE
IN THE
WHEEL HOUSE

To see the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames.

- Marcel Duchamp : Arturo Schwartz, The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, p.442
    
Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century
     
Monash University Museum of Art
Caulfield campus
3 October – 14 December 2013
Presented in association with the Melbourne Festival

Observe the mind wheels grind.


         
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something ...
 
 LOGOS/HA HA
 ] round ground information assemblage (
      
     
        

16 October 2013

TEAM WEST SPACE IS GO!

       
Congratulations TEAM WEST SPACE

This news received yesterday :
    
West Space: rental free for artists in 2014


We are excited to announce that in 2014 West Space will be rental free for exhibiting artists. As an artist led organisation, West Space is committed to supporting artists at all stages of their careers. We strongly believe removing rental fees will allow artists to invest more resources into their art practices and enhance the strong and vibrant artistic culture of West Space.

Through a number of fundraising initiatives such as our recent Melbourne Marathon campaign, our new Patrons Program and our highly anticipated Annual Fundraiser exhibition, West Space has strengthened and diversified its funding capacity. In 2014, West Space will also have the stability of receiving triennial funding from all three levels of Government for the first time after recently securing Arts Victoria Organisational Investment Program funding.

Removing rental fees that artists pay to exhibit has been a long held priority for West Space and we are thrilled to deliver this in 2014.  


         
Team West Space success at the Melbourne Marathon Festival

After months of training and blanket coverage across social media, in the early hours of Sunday morning the ten members of Team West Space finally laced up their running shoes, pulled on their Jon Cambell designed running gear, and took to the streets of Melbourne to compete in the 2013 Melbourne Marathon Festival.

The slightly overcast conditions didn't dampen the enthusiasm, as all of the team were successful in completing their distances, with a few team members even setting new personal best times.

Through this 'one-off' special fundraising initiative, Team West Space managed to raise a combined total of $13,109, which is a truly amazing effort. Thank you to all of the supporters who donated to this great cause.

Thanks also to Jon Campbell, Stewart Russell, Alexandra Apostolidis, Joan Spiller, Meyers Place, Lyndal Walker, Nick Waddell, Rosina Prestia and all of the volunteers for the extra assistance.

The ten members of Team West Space included West Space staff, Director Danny Lacy (Marathon), Program Curator Kelly Fliedner (Half marathon), Gallery Manager Christina Apostolidis (Half marathon), Education Intern Tamsen Hopkinson (Half marathon) and Special Projects Intern, Rosina Prestia (10km) + West Space Program Committee member Ieuan Weinman (Half marathon), Ulanda Blair (Half Marathon) from ACMI, Torie Nimmervoll (Half marathon), Aaron Maxwell (Half marathon) and Estelle Ihasz (10km).

      

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


      

15 October 2013

DUALISMUS : Kunst und die LOGOS

       
A fabulous moment ] for a rare Kunst Kult few ( on last night's episode of Breaking Bad. The final series is now on free-to-air TV at ABC2.

On one side of a door, we see about-to-be-broken bad student Mr. Schüler.
                     
         
Unseen, on the other side of the door, Chief Inspector Kunst aka C I Kunst aka See Eye Art announces himself into being.

What's more
Kunst wants a Word/HA HA


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


      

14 October 2013

Reinventing the Wheel : Dualism and the Hedonic Treadmill P/L

     
This ancient wheel
with so many names
turning still/         


 Sisyphus by Titian, 1549 
 Groundhog Day, 2 February/1993
        
And yet...

To see the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames.

- Marcel Duchamp : Arturo Schwartz, The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, p.442
    
Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century
     

Monash University Museum of Art

Caulfield campus

3 October – 14 December 2013

Presented in association with the Melbourne Festival

    
The Laughist...
                    


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


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


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


      

11 October 2013

anti-Competitive

 
We've already received some great entries for our Melbourne Now poster competition.

Here's one from MaAASK : the Melbourne after-Art Anarcho Syndicalist Kollective. Thanks guys.
     

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


      

10 October 2013

"In this sign, sing!"


          
Constantine's justification for Holy War doesn't hold sway around here, in any tongue.

ἐν τούτῳ νίκα

en touto nika 

In hoc signo vinces

In this sign, conquer
      
Nicolaus van der Horst (Antwerp circa 1598-1646 Brussels) 
The Vision of Constantine before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge


That being so, we were double delighted to receive an advance copy of the Pointer Brothers latest album of Liberation Songs, "IN THIS SIGN, SING!"
     

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