Reporting Season

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Smack Bang centre-stage on the Stocks page of today's The (Melbourne) AGE, this bottom line summation of your
avant-garde investments.

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someone looking at something . . .

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someone looking at something... is a West Space project curated by Kelly Fliedner. It closes on Saturday.

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someone looking at something...
by Ross Coulter and Meredith Turnbull
Two Half Faces
single channel looped DVD

someone looking at something...
by Patrick Pound :
Egglestone Near Minter City and Glenora, Mississippi
mobile phone photographs

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someone looking at something...
by yours truly

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(Theatre of the Actors of Looking)

Shadow Play

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Continuing the ground, path, shoes and shadows theme is this recent addition to the bL heap. Bought online, it was titled or described there as MAN OBSERVES WOMENS SHADOWS. Theatre of the Actors of Looking presents "Shadow Play".

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Ground and Path

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Sophia Loren 75 today

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Self, light and other.
Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1961.
LIFE Magazine caption: Actress Sophia Loren reading newspaper by candlelight while in costume for role in movie “Madame Sans Gene.”

(from Ordinary finds )

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Head in the clouds, feet on the ground : someone looking at something...

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Shortly after posting the previous blog, with it's final image of a barefoot monk looking at a sky-scraper City, at Vanity Fair online I encountered this 1996 Josef Astor photograph of architect Philip Johnson.

Yesterday I travelled to Melbourne for the opening of three new exhibitions at West Space. It rained all day and the city appeared exceptionally gray.

This seemed appropriate and auspicious :

Then back to west space that night to paint some walls... I'm going to paint the room a dark gray.

and later

(now) all I need to do is go and buy some cool down lights because the ones I have installed at the moment are too warm.

Kelly Fliedner, curator of someone looking at something...

Here is a photo of the lights and of the feet they show and the shadows they cast of someone looking at something...

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ICONOLOGOS/HA HA

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bL went to Castlemaine yesterday for lunch and a catch-up with KF prior to this Thursday's opening of the group show someone looking at something... at West Space. At the next table members of Punctum ; people on the street; cafes spilling out. All in all, Castlemaine seemed very buzzy.

At a secondhand book shop, bought another cover for my small Comic Depictions of Art/Artists sub-heap.

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Have been interested for yonks in the mythoLOGOS/HA HA of the one-eyed strongman Popeye. (Wikipedia on Popeye here )

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In particular, Popeye's 1933 self-portrait song "I Yam What I Yam" has exerted a special fascination.

I Yam What I Yam
(Lyrics from the 1980 soundtrack album of Popeye.)

[spoken]
You don't have to be no fish to tell when you're flounderin'
What am I? Some kind of barnacles on the dinghy of life?
I ain't no doctors but I knows when I'm losin' me patiensk
What am I? Some kind of judge, or a lawyers?
Aw, maybe not; but I knows what laws suits me
So what am I? I ain't no physciscisk, but I knows what matters
What am I? I'm Popeye, the sailor

[sung]
And I yam what I yam what I yam and I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam 'cause I yam what I yam

And I gots a lot of muskle and I only gots one eye
And I never hurts nobodys and I'll never tell a lie
Tops to me bottoms and me bottoms to me top
And that's the way it is 'till the day that I drop
What am I?
I yam what I yam!

I yam what I yam what I yam what I yam what I yam

I can open up an ockean I can take a lot of sail
I can lose a lot of waters and I'll never have to bail
I can pushk up Madagascar grab a whale by the tail
What am I?
What am I?
I yam what I yam!

I'm Popeye, the sailor
I'm Popeye, the sailor
I'm Popeye, the sailor
I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam
I yam what I yam what I yam what I yam
I'm Popeye the sailor man!

With a Judeo-Christian upbringing, to my ear Popeye's self-declaration has long echoed of another : Yahweh / YHWH

I Am that I Am (Hebrew: אהיה אשר אהיה‎, pronounced Ehyeh asher ehyeh [ʔehˈje ʔaˈʃer ʔehˈje]) is a common English translation (King James Bible and others) of the response God used in the Bible when Moses asked for His name (Exodus 3:14). It is one of the most famous verses in the Torah. Hayah means "existed" or "was" in Hebrew; "ehyeh" is the first person singular imperfect form. Ehyeh asher ehyeh is generally interpreted to mean I am that I am, though it more literally translates as "I-shall-be that I-shall-be." (Wikipedia : more here )

The foundling Swee' Pea appears to view 0r interpret Popeye through the philosophical filter You Am What You Eat.

I'm Popeye the sailor man!
I'm Popeye the sailor man!
I'm strong to the finich,
'Cause I eats me spinach.
I'm Popeye the sailor man.

When young we were told " If you don't/eat your greens you'll be...

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something to look at : In Our Time

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It was today's second image that reminded me of this famous first one above. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938, before the microphones and cameras of the world, holds up some thing to the crowd and declares, "A Piece of Paper in Our Time". (click here for more info)

Looking at the image below (from a contributor to adski_kafeteri under the heading War Art), after a while it was the moustache and the turned collar that set it, for me, in the period of that similarly appointed public salesman Chamberlain. Otherwise, it is both of our time & timeless.

I-Be-Hold
+
U-Do-2

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The Mystery of the Golden Frame

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Late last night on SBS TV we watched the first half of the 2003 production of "The Mystery of the Yellow Room".
What fun, what wit!

The Mystery of the Yellow Room: Extraordinary Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille, Reporter (Le mystère de la chambre jaune) by Gaston Leroux, is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels. It was first published in France in the periodical L'Illustration from September 1907 to November 1907, then in its own right in 1908.

It is the first novel starring fictional detective Joseph Rouletabille, and concerns a complex and seemingly impossible crime in which the criminal appears to disappear from a locked room. Leroux provides the reader with detailed, precise diagrams and floorplans illustrating the scene of the crime. The emphasis of the story is firmly on the intellectual challenge to the reader, who will almost certainly be hard pressed to unravel every detail of the situation.

( Wikipedia entry : click here )

CHAPTER VII. In Which Rouletabille Sets Out on an Expedition Under the Bed

Fabulous chapter headings. In this chapter, in the 2003 film version, we see reporter Rouletabille (Roulette Table? Roule ta Bille translates as Roll your Ball) examining his view of the world from under the bed. He is moved to exclaim, "The immensity of what we cannot see." (I noted it in my Moleskine (below): Rouletabille also makes notes in his Moleskine.)

Later, lest the import of this realisation might have escaped us, he repeats it to his photographer assistant. "The immensity of what we cannot see." What can a photographer of the visible do with that?

In Leroux's original, which can be read online here, this observation is given in the third person.

The reporter then reappeared. His eyes were sparkling and his nostrils quivered. He remained on his hands and knees. He could not be better likened than to an admirable sporting dog on the scent of some unusual game. And, indeed, he was scenting the steps of a man,—the man whom he has sworn to report to his master, the manager of the "Epoque." It must not be forgotten that Rouletabille was first and last a journalist.

Thus, on his hands and knees, he made his way to the four corners of the room, so to speak, sniffing and going round everything—everything that we could see, which was not much, and everything that we could not see, which must have been infinite.

Ah yes, the locked room genre : The Mystery of the Golden Frame

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Held in high regard

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Edward Kennedy, "the liberal lion", dead at 77.
(Washington Post editorial here.)

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Theatre of the Actors of Looking : Shirin

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Again a follow-on from the theme of the previous blog, with an emphasis not so much on the given as on the activity of regard. Today the recent film by Abbas Kiarostami, Shirin : our regard of the faces of 113 women as (if) they watch a certain film.

bL has not yet seen Shirin - it was shown this year at the Sydney Film Festival but not at the Melbourne Film Festival - but has been reading about it. Here are some online articles:

Shirin as Described by Kiarostami
by Khatereh Khodaei

It may be an odd experience to sit in a dark movie theater, stare at the screen and see fellow audience members watching a motion picture. Personally, I believe the experience of watching a movie in which the sound of the story that we hear is different from the pictures that we watch can be more interesting.

Shirin is the latest feature film by Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami. It features simple close-ups of the faces of 113 actresses who are watching a movie.

After watching the film and talking with Mr. Kiarostami, I found out that the women, whose faces appeared in perpendicular frames in the film were not actually watching a movie at all; a few fixed spots had been installed above the camera and they were acting with Kiarostami’s special improvisational technique.

What makes the experience doubly interesting is to learn that the story was decided on after shooting was over. It is the love story of Khosro, Shirin, and Farhad, a masterpiece by the great Iranian poet Nezami Ganjavi. The work features effective editing and an attention to details which, as always, render Kiarostami’s movies simple, different and absorbing.

Abbas Kiarostami characteristically attaches a special significance to audiences. In his latest production, Shirin, he goes as far as explicitly suggesting that the silver screen would be non-existent in the absence of audiences.

“Shirin” is the story of the empathy of audiences—the audiences who are watching the empathy of the other audiences.

( click here for full article )

Kiarostami's 'Shirin': watching a movie about watching a movie
by Jeff Strabone

While the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it's important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has a new film out called Shirin that adapts—sort of—a twelfth-century romance and offers the world a stunning new achievement: a feature-length film whose narrative is made up entirely of reaction shots.

( click here for full article )

A Conversation with Kiarostami
by Arsalan Mohammad in Tehran
(A.K.): I just read an article today about Shirin – a critic who said, ‘I don’t understand what he wants to say, really, it’s complicated, I don’t even like it, but what I know for sure is that he is saying something. Let’s give him time, to see actually what he is saying – give us time, then we’ll understand what he is saying. I am sure he is saying something, he has something to say.’

( click here for full article )

P.S. 26 August 2009: By a happy coincidence, news just in that "Shirin" will receive a Melbourne screening this Thursday afternoon :

Presented as part of the Film and Television Studies UNDER CONSTRUCTION seminar & screening series – selected, introduced and especially subtitled by André Dias. Refreshments and discussion will follow the screening.

4-6pm, AUGUST 27 2009, ROOM S704, MENZIES BUILDING 7TH FLOOR, MONASH UNIVERSITY - CLAYTON CAMPUS. FREE ADMISSION. ALL WELCOME! BRING A FRIEND.

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It's other name is "Double Taker"

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Following on from yesterday's "Double Feature", this morning Petrus referred me to the 15 minute online presentation Golan Levin makes art that looks back at you. ( click here )

In it artist engineer Golan Levin ( website here ) succinctly demonstrates half-a-dozen playful works of his devising that use and reflect upon the performance activities of the beholder. Here are a couple of glimpses, the first is from Eye Code.

In another, Jaap Blonk performs Kurt Schwitters Ursonate with reactive real-time typography sub-titles mixed into the visual record.

"The idea behind this last project (Snout) is to make a robot that appears as if it's continually surprised to see you. It's other name is "Double Taker", taker of doubles. It's always kind of doing a double take."

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"Double Feature"

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Adrian Tomine titles his cover image for the latest New Yorker "Double Feature". ( here )

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It could be seen as a communal celebration of The New Yorker's own enigmatic house character, Eustace Tilley. He is usually depicted looking through his monocle at a butterfly.

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Our resident inspector Baby BlockOS/HA HA takes it one step less.

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����� P/L

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This poster scene of playful synæsthesia is by Uncle Charlie.

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The Re-emergency

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Hello again to regular readers. After a week confined to Sniffletown, your correspondent re-emerges in the role of cubo-muso Philip Lemarchand.

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Lulo Lo Lo Ks @

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View Mix

Lul0 lo lo ks at a guitar.

We look at Lulo side-on; Lulo looks at the guitar side-on.

The guitar looks at us front-on; we look at the guitar front-on.

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Reg♭ ♭ ard ♭ : Everybody talks about the

Tonight at the Corner Hotel...

EVERYBODY TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER is a one-off showcase featuring four titans of the Melbourne exploratory music/avant-rock scene in a blistering, bone-shaking display from the far corners of the sonic spectrum. Oren Ambarchi (guitar/electronics), Robin Fox (laser/electronics), Marco Fusinato (guitar/electronics) & Anthony Pateras (electronics) all perform rare solo sets in a memorable night for anyone sick of talking about the weather and wanting to talk devastating sound devoid of any bullshit trend or flash in the pan cyberhype…

more info here

The violinist Isaiah looks at a Stradivarius
stolen from a concert at the Mariinsky Theater

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Who else is with me?

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Yesterday, the regard of proximate consciousness. In that dream, the mighty being came so close at one moment I drew back in trepidation.

This morning, looking at Andre Dias' cinema blog We have yet to start thinking, I saw again a familiar and similar image to that of my dream; but here the exchange is actually in the water/
consciousness and it is not going well. Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) :

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"On November 26, 1965, Beuys put the hare into the leading role in an Action. The title: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The place: Galerie Alfred Schmela, in Dusseldorf, a gallery that had commited itself early and strongly to Beuys and had done a great deal to promote his reputation. Beuys sat on a chair in one corner of the gallery, next to the entrance. He had poured honey over his head, to which he had then affixed fifty dollars worth of gold leaf. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, which he looked at steadfastly. Then he stood up, walked around the room holding the dead hare in his arms, and held it up close to the pictures on the walls; he seemed to be talking to it. Sometimes he broke off his tour and, still holding the dead creature, stepped over a withered fir tree that lay in the middle of the gallery. All this was done with indescribable tenderness and great concentration."

Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, Abbeville Press, New York, 1987, (Translated by David Britt) p.135

Several days ago another such image, one of a more equal regard, arrived in the mail: this poster, FACE TO FACE (2004), by Lindsey Kuhn of (as chance would have it) Swamp posters.

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Greetings comrades, the image has now changed its status* [again]

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Greetings comrades, the image has now changed its status* : great topic and title, thought bLOGOS/HA HA. Especially the phrasing that has "the image" to be self-governing, the rest the mere town crier reportage of a passing ideoLOGOS/ HA HA. Imagine that: self-creator Image. Or rather, "That, imagine you!". If these graffiti covered walls could speak they would surely text bubble :) {Created in the image of G-d"]

And so it goes, and so it goes: projection-space Other spinning through mutable dualistic imaginary space-time :

Tommaso Siciliano
The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism
1585

Pavel Poluyanov
Downfall of the Theater and Triumph of the Cinema
1925
cover by N. Il'in

A. Latsis and L. Keilina
Cinema and Children
1928
cover by Varvara Stepanova

A. Latsis and L. Keilina
Cinema and Children
1928
cover by Varvara Stepanova

Greetings comrades, the image has now changed its status*

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[* Kodwo Eshun, February 2009]

Curated by Bridget Crone

"What is the status of the image today? Where does the image start and stop? Characterised by the speed of its dissemination, the image might be understood as the transmission of digital information, as a fleeting visual impression, as affective experience, as an important factor in the gaining of knowledge, expanded, compressed, archival, educative, celebratory and informal... It might be all or none of these. Contingent. Staged. A restitution. A refusal."

Greetings comrades... is a discussion around the question of the image (particularly in relation to the image in film/video and text) and its role in contemporary culture, its purpose and affect.

Greetings comrades... will take the form of two screening programmes of artists' film and video, and a reading by Justin Clemens from his new book, Villain; selected works from the screenings will also be exhibited in the gallery space alongside a single work on paper by Nikolas Pantazis, Neon Lights 2008.

[Screening programme one]
Cut up. Immersion. Immersion. Dispersion. Restitution. Immersion.
Sunday 2 August, 15.00 hrs
Justin Clemens, Villain 2009 (reading)
Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Another Proof of the Preceding Theory 2008
Maryam Jafri, A Staged Archive 2008
Cerith Wyn Evans, Degrees of Blindness 1988

[Screening programme two]
Immersion. Dispersion. Cut up. Cut up. Restitution.
Saturday 8 August, 15.00 hrs
Bea Gibson, A Necessary Music 2008
Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System 2008
Amanda Beech, Statecraft 2008
Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire 1969

Sunday, 9 August, 15.00hrs
Harun Farocki, Prison Images

Those interested in attending a reading and discussion group focussing on ideas of contingency in relation to the image and the event, please contact bridget_crone[at]mac.com


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