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.
Polly Borland: Polyverse presents new and recent work by the celebrated Australian-born, Los Angeles–based artist. While perhaps most widely known for her portraits of prominent figures including Queen Elizabeth II and musician Nick Cave, many works included in the exhibition explore more surreal imagery in which magnetic visual qualities embody a distorted, punkish humour. Through […]
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NGV AUSTRALIA, FEDERATION SQUARE
LEVEL 3, CONTEMPORARY ART & DESIGN
28 SEPTEMBER 2018 - 3 FEBRUARY 2019
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Continuing ACCA’s ongoing series of significant solo exhibitions by leading international artists, ACCA is excited to present a major show by Irish-born, London-based artist Eva Rothschild.
Curated by Max Delany and Annika Kristensen,
Eva Rothschild: Kosmos brings together new sculptural commissions with recent work spanning the last decade of the artist’s diverse yet distinct practice. Shaped by a myriad of influences from minimal art of the 1960s and 70s to classical architecture, spiritualism and pop-culture, Rothschild has developed an international reputation for sculptural works that are both striking and spare, as sharp geometric forms morph into flamboyant, enigmatic compositions. Stripped of excess, Rothschild’s abstract arrangements draw the mind into spaces where power, ritual, the architectural and the existential intersect.
Eva Rothschild,
Crystal healing 2018,
fibreglass, polyurethane, jesmonite, paint, concrete plinth,
247.0 x 30.0 x 30.0 cm,
installation view,
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.
Photograph: Jacqui Shelton
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Recently overthrown Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who has since resigned from Parliament, yesterday described fellow-felled hangers-on Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd as 'miserable ghosts'. It rings true.
From the TAR files, snapped from the 27 August ABC Four Corners episode 'A Form of Madness' (another quote from Turnbull), former Prime Minister Tony Abbott stands in a Parliament House interior courtyard before an artwork by Akio Makigawa.
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This is Nobel Prize announcements week.
Due to a sex abuse scandal within the Swedish Academy, however, no Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded in 2018.
Earlier this year, before the cancellation announcement, a profile of Gerald Murnane and his writing featured in The New York Times Magazine. The article, by Mark Binelli, was titled
Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?
photo by Morganna Magee for The New York Times
Last week, The Wheeler Centre (Melbourne) published online an audio record of a conversation between Gerald Murnane and Sean O'Beirne. Heartily recommended.
Sean O'Beirne and Gerald Murnane - photo by Scott Limbrick
Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.
My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.
- the opening of The Plains (1982) by Gerald Murnane
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terminology
ˌtəːmɪˈnɒlədʒi/
noun
the body of terms used with a particular technical application in a subject of study, theory, profession, sport etc.
AFL TARminoLOGOS/HA HA
AFLˌTARːmɪˈnɒlədʒi/
noun
the body of terms used with a Theatre of the Actors of Regard application to Aussie Rules Football
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Lowering The Eyes – See : intent
Intent – Term of dubious provenance and application used with great flourish and emphasis by football people to mean more or less whatever they feel like at the time. Conspicuously fails to correspond to identical-looking expression in the dictionary.
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... this year it's lower the eyes used to tell a player running forward to look to closer options rather than bombing it long. Once again, I have never heard the saying prior to this year. Listen tonight fellas, you'll hear it at least twice a qtr.
I've tried it, playing footy with my 9 & 6 year old sons about 3 weeks ago. Left the "fat side" of the park, starting "running the lines", looked up to see that there wasn't any "plus 1's", (there wasn't), I thought, shit is there a closer option, so I lowered the eyes and fell flat on my stupid ******* face. Give it a try, stop what you're doing, trying running a half a dozen paces and then actually lower your eyes. There's a fair chance you'll be head-butting the floor.
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The term lace out has generally been used by commentators in the past to describe a perfect foot pass to a leading forward. The kick used is generally a drop punt, which spins backwards, the ball is kicked to a leading forward who marks it on his chest lace out, referring hypothetically to the main laces at the area where the ball is pumped up. (Not the stitches that connect the four pieces of the ball but the main laces at the top centre.) So, when the forward has marked this ball on his chest, the back of the ball is hugged to him and theoretically the laces of the ball are facing outwards... it's not anything that is ever practised or realistically is aimed for, it is just a piece of verbal hyperbole used by the commentators when they say, "Look at that, delivered lace out to the forward" ...
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this night's full moon
Hakuin's little bird
on one branch
...I’ve appended in my teaching notes a comment by Chuang-tzu: “Even in the densest wood, the wren is content with one branch.” Isn’t that wonderful?!
- R.P.
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A wedge-tailed eagle is driven out of a magpie’s territory with
some aggressive dive-bombing. photo Scott Turner
Here's one for our older Melbourne sports fans as Uncle Doug on World Of Sport (Channel 7) looks to next weekend's footy final between the Magpies (Collingwood) and the Eagles (West Coast).
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We read with compounding interest the Rex Butler article Tom Roberts, Shearing the Rams in memo review yesterday.
Tom Roberts
Shearing the Rams 1890
Oil on canvas (lined onto board)
121.9 x 182.6 cm
Signed and dated l.l. Tom Roberts/1890
Felton Bequest 1932
National Gallery of Victoria
Original frame by Melbourne frame-maker John Thallon.
Approaching his conclusion, Rex writes
But what is the meaning of this young girl holding the tarbrush and catching our eye at the quiet centre of the painting, I kept asking myself? (And it was increasingly being speculated, against previous scholarship, that she was even the model for the slightly older boy to her left holding the shorn fleece.) Why did she seem after all the hidden secret to the painting?
Click go the shears, boys, click click click
And then it clicked. Roberts' late addition of first a girl with a broom and then turning that broom into a tarbrush was a last-minute nod to the act of painting his picture ... That tin into which she is about to dip her brush in order to seal any small wound inflicted by the shearers on the sheep is strikingly like the palette and paintbrush Roberts used to make his painting.
Actually
In other words, what we are actually looking at in Shearing the Rams is nothing less than the various stages in the long process of Roberts making his painting.
various stages : a view from the TAR pit
In other words, what we are actually looking at in Shearing the Rams is nothing less than the various stages in the long process of our re|making ourselves as pain|things, a Theatre of the Actors of Regard*.
TAR* here Jack!
a postscript jot c.1980
"One day in the early 1970s, I was looking at Tom Roberts' famous painting Shearing the Rams (1890) at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Beside me were three women.
The figure of the youth with a tar brush ('...tar here Jack'), the only figure in the painting recognizing
the presence of the painter constructing the painting and us re-constructing the painter's painting, who
I had always thought to be a young boy, was being addressed by the three women standing beside me.
On either side of a very old woman were what I guessed to be perhaps this woman's nieces**. It was she who had been the youth with the tar brush.
Now, some eighty years later, she was looking at
this painting, answering her nieces' questions, remembering the time the artist painted this painting."
**Have just found this online video...
click the arrow above to watch video or go to here
... in which family members Dorothy and Gayle Ambrose describe this one and only visit by 'the tar boy' Susan Bourne with her daughter-in-law and sister-in-law to the NGV to see her younger actor-self in Tom Robert's Shearing the Rams, as witnessed by your TAR correspondent :
click image to enlarge
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Q. Where did your grandmother first see the original painting?
A. (Dorothy Ambrose) Well, she saw it in the gallery in Saint Kilda. It was the National Gallery, I think. And she was seventy, at least. And her daughter-
in-law and her sister-in-law took her to see it. And
she stood in front of it and looked at it and said,
"There I am." And she hadn't seen it ever before. And she only saw it the once."
Susan Bourne died in 1979.
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takujō no
sushi ni me samushi
Kangyotei
the sushi on the table
has a chilling effect
Fish-Viewing Pavilion
- Yosa Buson, transl. Cheryl A. Crowley
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Natasha Johns-Messenger
Water-Orb 2018
Ian Potter Sculpture Court, Caulfield Campus
MUMA is pleased to launch our Ian Potter Sculpture Court Commission with a new work by Natasha Johns-Messenger, Water-Orb 2018.
In this work Johns-Messenger uses simple optical physics to activate a chasm between what we think we see and what we know. Employing an ocular-like form, the work beckons our observation of a dynamic body of water that appears to defy gravity as it flows.
Supported by MUMA Contemporaries.
Photo : Christian Capurro
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