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.


Showing posts with label our Office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label our Office. Show all posts

05 April 2014

Vale, The Announcement


We have recently received some fabulous printed announcements for exhibitions. 

From Heide Museum of Modern Art, a matt print (below) for EMILY FLOYD : FAR RAINBOW
   

click image to enlarge  
      
Regrettably, for those who appreciate and even collect such things, most commercial galleries no longer produce this material. Tightened belts plus the ease of digital distribution have combined to end the ritual print Announcement.  

Hear He, Hear Ye : 'Tis the End of Such as This.

There's an irony in this as the technology of print and paper production has, arguably, never been so high or so widely available.

For the moment, the state funded galleries and museums still 'go to print'. As well as the Heide-
Emily Floyd gift, other pin-ups currently adorning the offices of bLOGOS/HA HA are Stephen Bush Steenhuffel, from the Ian Potter Museum of Art; Brook Andrew DE ANIMA, Bendigo Art Gallery; Rod Moss Whitegate, Burrinja Gallery; and this ripper from the Art Gallery of South Australia for their exhibition Netsuke and Other Miniatures:

On the front of the AGSA folded card is a front view of a late 19th century Japanese okimono : Karako playing blindman's bluff.

That 'set' reminds us of another such Buddhist image, one we've shown here before: The Supreme Goddess as Void, with projection-space for image.    
        
On the back of the AGSA announcement card we regard the verso view.



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24 December 2013

Truly, madly...


     
SEASONS GREETINGS

to our readers, regarders and supporters

from everyone at

bLOGOS/HA HA



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15 November 2013

Announcement : The Saturday Paper

          
       
bLOGOS/HA HA congratulates Morry Schwartz


Good morning,
 
Later today I will be officially announcing my plans to launch a weekly newspaper. I wanted to share this news with you in advance of the general public.
 
Called The Saturday Paper, this publication will make up for a lack of quality and diversity in Australian journalism. It is a project of which I am extremely proud.
 
I have been wanting to launch a paper like this since I started in publishing 40 years ago. Like its sister publications, the Monthly and Quarterly Essay, it will produce definitive accounts of the country’s most important news. It will be investigative, provocative and – I hope – compulsory.
 
We will have more information for you shortly. In the meantime, I am happy to be telling you first and I hope you will come with us on this ride. We will start taking subscribers next year.

Best,

Morry Schwartz
Publisher
The Monthly
Quarterly Essay
The Saturday Paper

            
        
         

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 ...
         
      
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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.
      


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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!
    

    
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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 ?

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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...

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 If you look at the list of the Cabinet...
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If you look at the outer ministry, you will see...
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If you look at the ranks of parliamentary secretaries...
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You may notice that one of the things that I have attempted to do with this new ministry is avoid the proliferation of titles,
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the sometimes grandiose titles of the former government,
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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...

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20 July 2013

"Now, where were we?"

      
In our previous post, we quoted Henry Blofield's description of the bowlers' run-up marks chalked on the green at either end of the Lord's wicket.

"It's like a crossword puzzle that had, perhaps, a drink too much."
          
We have been much entertained since, imagining the antics of drunken crosswords.

Not quite that, but not far off, is this early 2oth century crossword puzzle from the archive of our Paris office. Concours de perspicacité No.3 (literally Insight Competition No.3).
    


 click image to enlarge  
We imagine it re-captioned : "Members of Lord's scramble to decipher drunken crossword."
       


    
We imagine, too, that 'Blowers' gets there first and, seeing it to be a meta-map, declares: "My dear old things, it appears we are here already!"
    



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20 June 2013

Take a chair (apart)


and/or

Re.(gard) a thing and/or its parts 
      
after Van Gogh's (Van Gogh's) Chair, 1888

after Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912

comes this buster meta-re-de-composition,
for auction today at Sotheby's London :
Fernand Léger's Composition a la chaise (c. 1930)
          

     
after which, after WW2, Corporation America's  
The Office Chair, 1961
       


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then, hereabouts, Theatre of the Actors of Regard performance en passant at the National Gallery of Victoria, 1975 :
          

 T.A.R. after Hugh Ramsay Jeanne, 1901  
         
     
now, upon a chair and/or its parts ...
     
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06 June 2013

The Outsider

          
Our favorite blacksmith is John Madigan. 


A few days ago The Weekend Australian wrote of Senator John Madigan :  

He is the "most outside of outsiders" in federal politics but come September, the DLP's John Madigan might find himself at the centre of the action 
JOHN MADIGAN FORGES THE HEAVY METTLE OF DLP
Stuart Rintoul / The Australian
1 June 2013
A photo in that article shows Madigan at his forge, not far from our own office.
photo : John Nowakowski 


John set up here as a blacksmith when still a boy.
       
In the late 1970s, one of our staff commissioned him to make a branding iron in the manner of the early hunters and hearders of the Canvas Animal.


 
Above and below, John prepares two equal-length iron lines of inter-dependence for the ideogram brand.
      

   
The parts are then heated soft in the forge, ready to smite and shape together.
   

    
The result...
    


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03 June 2013

The facts are the facts and the facts are these ] Albanese meta-mix (

         
For our sins, bLOGOS/HA HA sometimes watches Question Time of the Australian Federal Parliament. 

Below is an edited detail of an exchange that tickled our fancy last week during the 28 May 2013 House of Representatives Question Time.


The SPEAKER: The member for Kooyong will resume his seat. There are other forms of the House in which to raise that concern. The Prime Minister has the call and will be heard in silence.

Ms GILLARD: The facts are the facts and the facts are these : ...

Opposition members interjecting —
           
Ms GILLARD: ..................... — for those who are yelling, and I know the facts do not suit you but these are the facts — ..................... They are the facts. The Leader of the Opposition should stop misrepresenting them and this despicable — (Time expired)
                
Mr ABBOTT (Warringah—Leader of the Opposition) (14:11): Madam Speaker, I have a second supplementary. I refer to ......................

Ms GILLARD (Lalor—Prime Minister) (14:12):
The Leader of the Opposition may be startled to learn that .......................  Nothing the Leader of the Opposition can say or do, nothing he can shout, no spectre that he an raise of fear in our community changes those facts and I direct the Leader of the Opposition's attention to them.

The SPEAKER: Is the Leader of the Opposition seeking to table a document?
          
Mr ABBOTT: Madam Speaker, I seek leave to table the speech yesterday from the member for Holt describing these matters as .............................
          
The SPEAKER: Order! The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat. The Leader of the House, is leave granted to table the document?
           
Mr Albanese: I seek your clarification, Speaker.

Opposition members interjecting —
           
The SPEAKER: Order! As I said gratuitous advice is wearing very thin. The Leader of the House has the call.
              
Mr Albanese: I seek your advice, Speaker, over whether it is possible even to table Hansard in Hansard.
             
The SPEAKER: Leave is not granted.     

         *Read the full Hansard record of this on pages 21-22  HERE      



 FIAPCE                            National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 
          

FIAPCE : The facts are the facts and the facts are these :


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24 April 2013

Brack, Rooney and the Time Traveller

        
First, two announcements from the CCP about their current season of Robert Rooney artwork.

.  .  .  .
  
Robert Rooney: A Night of Talks
TODAY! Wednesday 24 April 6—8pm

CCP : Centre for Contemporary Photography


Artist Philip Brophy, writer and curator David Homewood and Martyn Jolly, Head of Photography and Media Arts, ANU School of Art, speak on and around the work of Robert Rooney.

Children and adolescents are often seen as ragged kid-flaneurs, re-mapping familiar urban or suburban spaces. Using a diverse range of historical Australian sources, Martin Jolly will explore these secret, under the adult radar, territories and trajectories.
Martyn Jolly is Head of Photography and Media Arts at the ANU School of Art. He is an artist and writer. His book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography came out in 2006.
David Homewood's talk will discuss the negation of artistic intention in Rooney's work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. It will focus in particular on the serialised depiction of the commonplace in several of his photographic works.
David Homewood is a writer and curator who lives in Melbourne.
Philip Brophy will discuss how Robert Rooney's painting draws upon a conceptual understanding of the figurative and iconic, and how that legacy relates to current modalities of painting-as-thinking-about-painting.
Philip Brophy writes on painting among other things. 
philipbrophy.com
A discussion will follow, lead by the exhibition curators, Maggie Finch and Patrick Pound.

.  .  .  .
      
THE BOX BROWNIE YEARS 1956-58
CURATED BY MAGGIE FINCH AND PATRICK POUND
WITH ROBERT ROONEY


An exhibition of never-before exhibited black-and-white photographs taken by Robert Rooney with his Box Brownie camera between 1956-58. Created when Rooney was a student at Swinburne Technical College and influenced by Charles Blackman and Ben Shahn, among others, they demonstrate an early fascination with childhood, repetition and seriality—themes that have persisted throughout his long career.

A sense of freedom in the action of the children—playing on suburban streets, in schoolyards and at a suburban quarry and tip—is evident. The youths also play to the camera. There is a sense of complicity, awareness without self­consciousness. The apparent innocence of the now nostalgic scenes, however, is undercut by a melancholy note: this state is transitional. There is also the potential for danger.

These marvellous early photographs will be shown alongside three key paintings from that time, and a recent film The Quadrangle 1956 (2009) made with these early images. 

.   .   .   .
    
bLOGOS/HA HA enjoys and appreciates the art of Robert Rooney. As we do that of John Brack. 
   
Brack (who died in 1999) and Rooney are two distinctively Melbourne artists with much in common. Both rooted in their plot of Melbourne, both working at home and rarely traveling outside their routine. (Of the same generation, Gerald Murnane similarly comes to mind.)  Both, through their reading and other communications, very knowledgeable about the larger world of art and ideas. Both of a mind mostly satisfied to find their reference material immediately about them. In the objects and routines of their own homes, streets and suburbs, and in the daily street theatre of stage set Melbourne. Both cool and formal in their productions. Free within their chosen genre limits.

Robert Rooney's art has previously been linked in kind to that of Howard Arkley and Ed Ruscha. (Downtown: Ruscha, Rooney, Arkley at the Museum of Modern Art Heide, 1995)  In this CCP season, mention is made of the influences of Charles Blackman and Ben Shahn. In the advertisements for his 1983 NGA exhibition Melbourne Cool, Daniel Thomas specifically linked Brack and Rooney. (Read here Memory Holloway's THE AGE review The School of Cool.)

On first seeing the 1956 Rooney image The Quadrangle, part of the promotion for this CCP exhibition, we were immediately struck by the similarity to John Brack's The Playground of 1959. And in that, from that, a greater commonality than previously appreciated. With a view from time further passed, certain things now appear closer together. Time and place, the personal and the social.
        

 Robert Rooney The Quadrangle 1956
        
 detail of The Playground, John Brack, 1959
     
Everyone's in place. But where's the dog?
     


 The Playground, John Brack, 1959            click image to enlarge

There she is now, outside the bLOGOS/HA HA office window. Zeitgeist traveller, Dogtor Who.
  


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