Look-ing @ Paint-ed(s)

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From the Art & Photography section of Readings' Summer Reading Guide, three book covers.

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

LOGOS/HA HA

See No Boundaries

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If seeing boundaries is a definition of impaired vision ...

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

LOGOS/HA

Blot On Black

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Following on from A Troubled See, from the bLOGOS/HA HA blotter collection comes BLOT OUT BLINDNESS!

( click image to enlarge )

Of these several hundred blotters, most are white to cream, then yellow, pink, green or blue. A light ground for a dark blot.

Only two provide a black blotter. Understandably, the Dependable Photostat Service of the Commercial Reproducing Company (1933 - Phone 6428: Detroit, Michigan) is proud of its rich blacks. Black on black. The other is the verso of BLOT OUT BLINDNESS!

When this you troubled see ...

( click image to enlarge )

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

LOGOS/HA

The Good Oil

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For reasons best known to themselves, the Advertising Dept at bLOGOS/HA HA has been pestering Editorial to share with you this weather-beaten old JPEG. Joseph's Oil : Antidote for A Troubled See.

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

LOGOS/HA

> review > Re-view > dis-regard >

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Re-attribution Pick of the Week (below) is from the review section of today's Weekend Australian.

The name of the recommended exhibition, from which Peter Henry Emerson's Gathering Water Lilies (1885) is visually re-attributed ? Re-view

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

LOGOS/HA

projection-space with crown

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We first looked at this image during Grail Week. ( here )

Not commented upon in that post was the crown-like flourish atop the golden-framed mirror-stand. It's as if the mirror's frame also wears a hat, to echo or endorse the prospective hatted one.

This reminded bL of an old reference friend :
The Supreme Goddess as Void, with projection- space for image.

What's the connection? Not knowing, but surmising : the top section of the silhouette above is reminiscent of the sun and moon disc motif. Could this be the origin and form of the common hat? (In the way, for instance, a Christian bishop's mitre derives from a fish head.) A cosmic crown?

History of the Hat
----------------------
projection-space frame
with sun & moon adornment
((((o))))
projection-space frame
with hat adornment

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

LOGOS/HA

Original Frame

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Because this post has been held back, I've had this image on screen for the last two weeks. At once full (The Great Openness) and empty (The Great Openness), in that time it has appeared to this projector to fill fuller and flow emptier. Profounder & funnier.

The image accompanied an article by Michaela Boland in The Australian, Family portraits reunited with rescued gilt frames,
31 October 2009. It begins

WHEN John McPhee stumbled across a pair of colonial gilt frames in an antique shop in Inverloch, southeast of Melbourne, he suspected they were valuable.

The then deputy director of the National Gallery of Victoria asked the gallery to buy them, which it did, for $600.

But it took another 12 years and some clever detective work for the frames to be reunited with the portraits they were originally made for. That happened yesterday at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

"It is very rare you can put a painting back in its original frame," said McPhee, a curator and art valuer who thought the frames could be attached to paintings at the NGV but never imagined they would be reunited with their original paintings.

( full article here )

Why does bL find this all so profound and funny?

1. National Portrait Gallery/HA HA

2. Original Frame/HA HA

3. Original Face/HA HA

4. LOGOS/HA HA

Cease practice based
On intellectual understanding,
Pursuing words and
Following after speech.
Learn the backward
Step that turns
Your light inward
To illuminate within.
Body and mind of themselves
Will drop away
And your original face will be manifest.

— Dogen

You cannot describe it or draw it,
You cannot praise it enough or perceive it.
No place can be found in which
To put the Original Face;
It will not disappear even
When the universe is destroyed.

— Mumon

Picture Your Original Frame

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

LOGOS/HA HA

Please disregard

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A number of posts were put on hold to cover Grail Week and the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Several feature gold frames, and it was to these we intended to return today. Yesterday, however, the following emails arrived. So, we turn to gold via them.



******/** **, surprise! You've turned Gold

From: Velocity Rewards : noreply@members.velocityrewards.com.au
Reply-To: noreply@members.velocityrewards.com.au
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:08:42 EST


----------------------------------------------------------



IMPORTANT.
Please disregard our last email titled "You've turned gold."

From: Velocity Rewards : noreply@members.velocityrewards.com.au
Reply-To: noreply@members.velocityrewards.com.au
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:08:42 EST

Hi ******/** **
Velocity Membership Number: **********

Oops! You've received our previous email titled "You've turned gold" by mistake, please disregard the free upgrade communication as unfortunately you do not qualify for that upgrade.

We also note that you have elected to opt out of Velocity Communications. Please accept our sincere apologies for sending these emails to you without your consent. Unfortunately the email was extended to our entire database by mistake.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Warm regards,

The Velocity Team

( )
--------
Once dust,
flesh and bone
was turned to gold.
Now flesh and bone again
thanks for nothing
no, really
--------
) (

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

LOGOS/HA HA

Symbolismsmus | Madnessmus

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Sword and Shield : Seal of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR

After watching The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) on SBS.TV last night - it's a 2006 German film about the monitoring of the East Berlin cultural scene by agents of the Stasi - one more souvenir of that madness came to mind.

It is a pennant flag of the GDR, found in a rubbish bin at some newly (re)occupied offices in East Berlin when your correspondent was there in 1992 for an exhibition: DOUBLE CROSSED AGAIN | DEATH TO ALL MIRRORS! Overturned, the pennant is pinned as shown in the bLOGOS/HA HA Office Complex.

The GDR Coat of Arms was intended to represent the factory workers (the hammer), the intelligentia (tellingly, the compass) and the farmers (the wreath of grain). To this reader, it now appears more like divide (the Compass of Dualism) and conquer (smash!).

At a meta level, as a consequence of these two-or-more readings, it appears as flickering relative view. And therefore, as a further consequence, as mere projection upon mere projection-space. That is, also as absolute view, empty.

Same old
(something or other)
Same old
(empty of something or other)

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

LOGOS/HA HA

The Immured

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The heap bought seven glossy 8x10s from an ephemera street stall in Rome in 1988. A stamp on the back of one indicates they are by Berlin photojournalist Joachim G. Jung.

They witness the building of the Berlin Wall.

( click the image to enlarge it )

First, barbed wire. Men with guns, glasses and a camera. A dog.

Each photo has a typed text pasted on the back, presumably by the photographer, to further describe the scene. This is the one on the photo above, dated 28 September 1961.

( click the image to enlarge it )

An officer with a gun. Wreckage, workers, watchers.

( click the image to enlarge it )

A sign points to the unavailable.

Eye level. A boy on a bike gets a better view.

A soldier hides behind a sign of the cross. It is documented elsewhere that mirrors were used to deflect the sun in attempt to blind the cameras of the West.

Immured in Regard
-----------------------
we, through an aperture,
regard the back of a woman
who, through an aperture,
regards the back of a man
(with bayonet and gun)
who, through an aperture,

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

LOGOS/HA HA

Regarding STYLE

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Today is the 2oth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On an evening walk in that divided city in 1985 your correspondent delighted in an unexpected offering of style.

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

LOGOS/HA HA

Vale Sue Ford (1943-2009)

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Such sad news this morning : the death of Sue Ford.

Sue Ford: Self Portrait 1961

As a star, a mirage or a butter lamp,
As an illusion, a dewdrop or a bubble,
As a dream, a flash of lightning or clouds,
All compounded things should be seen like this.

- from Praise to Shakyamuni

Sue loved swimming and being near water.

Through this merit, may all beings attain the omniscient state of enlightenment,
And conquer the enemy of faults and delusion,
May they all be liberated from this ocean of samsara
And from its pounding waves of birth, old age, sickness and death!

- from Praise to Shakyamuni

Sue Ford:Self Portrait 2004

Sue Ford's last exhibition, that I am aware of, was Last Light.
(at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne and Watters Gallery, Sydney)
These are the final paragraphs from Robert McFarlane's review
(Sydney Morning Herald, January 30, 2008).

The pictures in this exhibition also easily transcend an enduring photographic cliche: the coastal sunset. With subtly added colours and people reduced to silhouette, they evoke virtual, imagined tourism, one step removed from reality - creating abstractions of the truth that the writer Norman Mailer, had he applied his wit to photography, might also have named factoids.
In perhaps Ford's most haunting picture, Silhouette 2007, a young woman stands in profile, photographing a scene in which five people swim in a curving bay beneath gently serrated hills that follow the line of the shore. Ford's composition gives the woman's figure enormous scale and mass against the psychedelic colours in the receding landscape.
Ford's achievement in Last Light lies in her ability to create such pictures - pregnant with imagining, rather than literal photographic storytelling. And by reducing the woman's face and body to a black, impenetrable profile, she enforces the absolute privacy of her experience.
( full review here )

Sue Ford: Silhouette 2007

Update :
On Monday 16 November a two hour memorial attended by several hundred friends and family was held at Tara (Buddhist) Institute, Melbourne.

Later, with chai and chat, we looked at photos of Sue, her family, her many friends.

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

LOGOS/HA HA

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Blog

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The final day of the Spring Racing Carnival in Melbourne is Stakes Day, also known as Family Day. (Everything aka Everything Else.)

The Judges have called for a photo. Our final exhibit, in this sequence through recent days, is an ink blotter from the USA.

Travelling blotter salesman Willy Loman gets talking to petrol monkey Johnnie Bouma. You should advertise, he says. It really works. Give folks something they need - people can always use a good blotter - and they'll remember you, right. They'll come back. He shows Johnnie his catalog of images. What about something funny, Johnnie? Sure, why not, says Johnnie. What about this one - a monkey on a boomer. Get it, Johnnie? Boomer, Johnnie Bouma. Sure, why not, says Johnnie.

What of the original image? As the signature shows, it is by Lawson Wood.

Painter, illustrator and designer: Lawson Wood was born on 23 August 1878 in Highgate, London to a family in which watercolor painting had been a tradition for two generations. He was the grandson of the architectural artist L.J. Wood RI and eldest son of the landscape painter Pinhorn Wood. He studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art, Heatherley's School of Fine Art and attended classes at Frank Calderon's School of Animal Painting...
( full article here )

verbing to a Void
--------------------
jumping to a Conclusion
arriving at a Judgment
drawing to a Close
coming to a Stop

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

LOGOS/HA HA

The New Crown

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Thursday of Grail Week in Melbourne is Oaks Day, also known as Ladies Day. We, however, will continue with the crowns of gentlemen.

Melbourne milliner extraordinaire and oft-seen on-field dandy :} Richard Nylon features prominently among the fashion reports. This is he at the 2006 Melbourne Cup. (photo Simon Schluter, THE AGE)

The 1880s trade cards featured here today and yesterday are what bring Monsieur Nylon to mind, as he returns to this Victoria an extravagant flourish of another Victoriana .

The golden suited milliner applies his trade and crowns a would-be-king.

"Form so ill-defined,
what melancholy vision here regards
your new king?"

(Now there are three!)

"Spectres,
do you not know this crown?"

They answer together:
"Know us."

The one below:
"Appearance past."

The one above:
"The same, unborn."

Face-to-face:
"I am Illusion's Crown."

(What place is this?)

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

LOGOS/HA HA

The New Cap

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Today, as Grail Week continues in Melbourne, a cap fit for another aspirant.

Does my Head look too big in this?
------------------------------------------
Oh, Sir.
No, Sir.
It's perfect, Sir.
Sir looks quite divine.

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

LOGOS/HA HA