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.
Original sketch of Ned Kelly
with Chinese coin as monocle
located by researchers of TAR
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
AAA_Art Archive Australia
click image to enlarge
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
Marcel Mariën, L'introuvable, 1937
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
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Dark Mofo artist Hermann Nitsch's 'ritual' slammed by animal rights groups The Age
Herman Nitsch at Dark Typo :
The Age, 20 April 2017
Dear Theo
Send more paint.
Vincent
Dear Sigmund
Send more blood.
Hermann
Dear Father
Send more wine.
Jesus
Memories of observing the malaktion (above) by Hermann Nitsch and his assistants at the 1988 Sydney Biennale. Never felt so Catholic as then.
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
1. On stage, the enso scroll :
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
2. Among the many in the auditorium, certain practitioners of clear seeing :
3. For those not yet so fortunately endowed, we recommend Enso Spex by TAR :
advertisement
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
click to enlarge
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
Modern Merican Painted Canvas didn't always float free to be seen in Independence Daze on the staged walls of Theatre of the Actors of Regard.
Various photos of Barnett Newman in his studio show him with heavily-suspended stretched right-angles of canvas anchored by chains before during and after the paint.
These proof sheet photographs are from the 1965 studio portraits of Barnett Newman by Ugo Mulas.
In the mid-1940s Newman painted a small number of mostly untitled circle/sun motifs. One was clue-titled Pagan Void. After that, the vertical line motif ("zip") on the field (of colour) motif predominated the play.
His 1948 consolidation work - one vertical zip centred on a vertical format canvas - he titled Onement (at one out of atonement). The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he had studied philosophy in New York and it all showed. Soon came By Twos (1949).
We do wonder about the presence/influence/role/
dynamic of the suspension chain verticals 'outside'
on the painted verticals 'inside'?
Photos of the early exhibitions of these artworks, such as at Betty Parsons gallery, show them still in obvious suspension, not 'free floating'.
We conclude this now with the Sight Gag song as...
Barnett Newman conducts the Choir of Eyes (TAR)
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
Two boys of TAR en regarde Malevich 'Black Square'
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
Woman of TAR delighted to behold TARd Edge Label
extract from Diary of a TARd Edge Teen
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
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In my Father's house are many mansions:
if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you.
- John 14 : 2 (King James Bible)
Rene Magritte, Le Regard Mental, 1946
Those houses!... Just like in my dreams!
FIAPCE (Black Bats) at Architectura Picta, Ewing Gallery, 1984
click image to enlarge
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
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...has fallen down again.
Imagine that all the elements suddenly collapsed...
FIAPCE (-1975-)
collection : Art Gallery of South Australia
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
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Patrick Pound's grandest work so far opens at the National Gallery of Victoria this month. Four thousand of his own collected objects and photographs will be installed amid his selections from the gallery's collection. Hubristically titled The Great Exhibition, it's Pound's version of a world expo.
"It's a mad folly," he says, erupting with laughter.
Pairs (and the double), 2016−2017 (detail)
"It's another version of the world," he says. "A tragic comedy of the world through things. It's a bit like Balzac's Human Comedy – that vast novel cycle that had all of Paris in it. The whole world can be pulled into this one constraint so that it can have things about race and class and gender, and history, and culture, and the everyday life and death, and fun and daftness or serious implications, but they are all drawn in by one thing. And it makes us look at what they are differently.
The photographer's shadow, 2000-2017 (detail)
"It's collage meets a car-boot sale," he says, before bursting into laughter.
Patrick Pound's The Great Exhibition is at NGV Australia, Federation Square, March 31-July 30. Patrick Pound In Conversation, April 1, at 2pm.
- Extracts above are from From eBay to the NGV: Patrick Pound's 'mad folly' makes art of our cast-offs by Ray Edgar in the week-end AGE/SMH.
Positions Vacant :
photo courtesy the aether of j
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someone looks at something...
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Théâtre des Acteurs du Rire
Learn to Laugh at Art this weekend :
Serial and Conceptual Photography
Works by Rooney, Coventry, Tyndall, FIAPCE, Ruscha, Huebler, König, Boltanski, Feldmann, the Bechers, Tajiri, Groover, and more.
Spare Room 33
Canberra, Australia
open Saturday 25 March and Saturday 1 April 2017
11.00 am - 4.30 pm
and by appointment
FIAPCE Education, 1974
click image to enlarge
FIAPCE Education, 1974
click image to enlarge
written under the photographs
IF YOU'RE REALLY SERIOUS YOU SHOULD BE LAUGHING
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Robert Rooney, Melbourne artist photographer writer reviewer and musician, died last Tuesday,
21 March 2017.
Robert Rooney was born on 24 September 1937.
Every artist born in 1937 so far located
1970-2009
Robert Rooney
Medium ballpoint pen on 204 cardboard index cards,
cardboard box
Measurements (1-230) 9.8 × 15.0 × 13.7 cm (overall)
Accession Number 2009.501.1-230
Department Australian Prints & Drawings
Credit Line National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Robert Rooney through the Australian
Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2009
Gallery location Not on display
During the last decade, Robert made colourful paintings from black and white line illustrations derived from a 1937 edition of the weekly French magazine Le Rire (The Laugh/Laughter).
Robert Rooney, Le Rire: Beard and Baby (PIcq), 2008
Several years ago, on Robert's birthday, we were able to send him the edition of Le Rire published on his actual birth day, 21 Sept 1937. Such fun.
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Our first encounter with Robert was in the early 1970s at The Source in central Melbourne.
Others also associated him with that excellent bookshop.
Sol LeWitt, 1967 :
Ian Robertson, today :
clearly remember buying poetry books from him in Sweeney Reed’s bookshop in Exhibition Street in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s
… I think it was called East End
we always had cryptic conversations and he perpetually wore a small and somehow quite private smile, something was quietly amusing him
in ’89-90 I visited his house with Philip Brophy when putting together an issue of Stuff on Graphics, to which Robert contributed a compendium of quotes from Ed Ruscha
the house was like a 3D spotless scaled up image from a late 1950/early 1960s Australian Home Beautiful pictorial, perfectly maintained…
the pantry was memorable, with rows and rows of tinned foods and packaged goods as though in preparation for a Nuclear bomb
a glimpse into his room has left an image of packed bookshelves on four walls
From Robert's more recent bookshop associations, pinned to our office wall here, is this Black Square edition of his design for the Sainsbury's Books tote bag.
AAA_Art Archive Australia
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Robert Rooney was the only artist to be included in these two generations of breakthrough exhibitions at the NGV :
The Field in 1968 with
Kind-hearted kitchen-garden IV (
ref.)
Robert Rooney, Kind-hearted kitchen-garden 11, 1967
...and
POPISM in 1984, curated by Paul Taylor.
(
Philip Brophy essay : Re-Generation: Robert Rooney as Pop)
Robert Rooney, Portrait of Paul Taylor, 1984
Robert was also a key inclusion in Melbourne Cool, curated by Daniel Thomas and Mary Eagle at the NGA in 1983.
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ROBERT ROONEY
I have always preferred to work from secondary sources, particularly mass-media ones, rather than paint or draw from the actual subject. Robert Rooney 1986
The sources for Rooney’s highly regarded 1960s abstract paintings were breakfast cereal cut-outs and other found material such as knitting patterns. His work has changed considerably over the years but the one constant, as Charles Green pointed out in 2000, is a ‘love affair with the legible signs of nomadic suburbia (logos, trademarks, street signs).’
From the 1990s Rooney’s hand-painted acrylic pictures have been based on illustrations in esoteric children’s books. More recently he has been concerned with artworks made by children themselves, though it is not his aim to draw or paint like a child. Rooney’s interest is more in ‘modern Art (or Modernism) and childhood, or, if you like, the early childhood of Modernism.’
Acknowledged as one of the most important abstract painters in the landmark 1968 exhibition The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria, Robert Rooney has exhibited widely during his long career. A major retrospective - From the Home Front - was held at Monash University Gallery in 1990.
His work has always had the freshness of youth but also the elegance and intelligence of maturity. It wears wonderfully well, and therefore must be as good as any works of art can be.
- Daniel Thomas 1997
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In the 1980s we were able to acquire one of the edition of two Corners, Robert Rooney's photo series of Bruce Pollard's Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond. Such a treasure. Corners 1/2 is in the collection of the NGV; Corners 2/2 now at AGNSW.
Robert Rooney, Corners, 1972 (click to enlarge)
Two other Robert Rooney photo series are now on show at
Spare Room 33 in Canberra.
Robert Rooney, Luna Park: St Kilda, January 1975, 1975
Robert Rooney, Scorched Almonds, 1970
This exhibition, Serial and Conceptual Photography, opened on Tuesday last, the day of Robert's death. That sad news has reached us only today. Vale Robert.
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Robert Rooney, Portrait photographs 1978–1987, Tolarno Galleries, 11 September–11 October 2014
At the 2014 opening of 'Portrait photographs 1978-1987' :
Jon Campbell, Robert Rooney, Doug Hall and a photographer
all photographed, and here regarded
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someone looks at something...
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Have you dreamt of a private tour in the Gallery’s collection store with Gallery Director, Jason Smith? One lucky Gallery Member who joins before Friday 31 March will go in the draw for a one-on-one tour.
Treat yourself to a Geelong Gallery Membership, and try your luck by following the link:
Image : Gallery Director Jason Smith, and Georgia Chara inspecting Peter Tyndall’s ‘detail: A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something…’ 1989, in the Gallery painting store.
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
Spare Room 33 concluded their 2016 home gallery program with a Lawrence Weiner Early Works exhibition.
They return tonight with Serial and Conceptual Photography.
Works by Rooney, Coventry, Tyndall, Ruscha, Huebler, König, Boltanski, Feldmann, the Bechers, Tajiri, Groover, and more.
open on Saturday 25 March and Saturday 1 April 2017
11.00 am - 4.30 pm
and by appointment :
Spare Room 33
Canberra, Australia
Spare Room 33
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someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
