Vale Seamus Heaney

      

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney has died.

Tributes paid to ‘keeper of language’ Seamus Heaney:
Poet's death has brought a 'great sorrow' to Ireland
The Irish Times : read article here
Friday 30 August 2013  
                

       

What a refuge and inspiration, still, to listen to Heaney online.

         

Click here for Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf

      

To be reminded of the power of language at this time in Australia when we are a week from a Federal Election and everyone is sick to death of the bombardments of exhausted and debased wordage.

Click here for Seamus Heaney's 1995 Nobel acceptance speech

"It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power..." 

  

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Regarding No Visible Means of Support

      
"Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger."

Psalm 8:2 (King James Version)

     

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1969: The Black Box of Conceptual Art

For many years, Ann Stephen has been the foremost advocate for the art work of Ian Burn.

Now she is re-staging an exhibition by Burn, Mel Ramsden and Roger Cutforth first shown in 1969 at Pinacotheca Gallery, St. Kilda, Melbourne.

1969: The Black Box of Conceptual Art  
at the University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, until October 25.
     
The full catalog is available online : click here
      

 l - r : Ian Burn, Roger Cutforth, Mel Ramsden in New York, 1969

In the online version of an article about this 
re-exhibition - Shock of the new still reverberating by Nick Galvin - we observed above the reference to Ian Burn's Xerox Book ...

The third work, from Ian Burn, is a series of books made up of 100 sheets of paper copied and re-copied on a commercial Xerox machine.

''The books accumulate a kind of electrostatic layering,'' Stephen says. ''As you go through, the layering thickens. It begins, in a sense, with nothing and is a work made out of time."

... an advertisement for Yellow Pages (the telephone directory) with a yellow Post-It note attached. Of course, in the great enfolding, yesterday's concept is today's promo for anything.
 

We might further image Xerox Book as the model for 100 iterations of the 1969 exhibition. Over the years, degrading upgrading grading un-becoming re-becoming being, even

#1_1969_Pinacotheca Gallery, St.Kilda, Melbourne

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#2_2013_University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney

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#3_2015_Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane

        

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#4_date yet to be set_Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 

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Australia Votes : Focus Groups

  
So-called!
  

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Get Better

          

a meta mural

for a

baw baw paw paw

pal
          

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JN & PT @ NGV

     

detail : Julie Clark made some impromptu portraits of John Nixon and Peter Tyndall. 

J.N.

click on images to enlarge  

 

 P.T.

 See these and others at Anything But Human

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That was then, this is now

Tomorrow, Messrs Nixon & Tyndall will be at the NGV to talk about their contributions to Mix Tape 1980s: Appropriation, Subculture, Critical Style.

NGVA Fed.Square

Third floor: Mix tapes 1980s

2pm : Free event

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98

blogA to blogB. over.

do you read me blogB. over.

 

Melbourne Now countdown – day 98

16 August, 2013 | By Simon Maidment
Category: Exhibitions, Melbourne Now
Tags: artists, Melbourne, Melbournenow

Peter Tyndall is a well-respected, and rather funny, conceptual artist, who has developed a number of tropes that engage with recursive relationships between art, language and meaning. Language shapes what is possible to know; at the same time meaning shapes and changes language. Art often brings other kinds of knowing into being; at the same time we don’t always know what art means. Contemplating and discussing a painting attaches meaning to it, although it was never a blato begin with (well, unless it was…).
click here to read article at NGV BLOG
        

 blogB to blogA. over.

 i read you blogA. over
       

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100

     
First, 100 days.

NGV counts down – 100 days until Melbourne Now opens :

August 14 marks the 100th day until the opening of Melbourne Now, the largest initiative ever undertaken by the National Gallery of Victoria. Bringing together over 200 contemporary artists, Melbourne Now celebrates the latest art, architecture, design and performance to reflect the unique cultural landscape of Melbourne." 
              
Read the full NGV media release here

Now, 100 years.

Here are The Three Figures.

 They perform for Theatre of the Actors of Regard

as a rebus  
a tableau vivant
a turning 100 

        

Let's start with Figure 2.  That's Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel of 1913. A circle, a cycle, and the first turning of a revolution in Art. Re-conceived in 1915 as the first "Readymade".

        

                    

In the 1960s, Duchamp said to Arturo Schwarz:

"The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn't even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment where you live. Probably, to help your ideas come out of your head. To set the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of flames."

2013 is the 100th anniversary of this simple unlaboured act of regard.

Later this year Monash University Museum of Art will mark this anniversary with their exhibition Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century.

.   .   .   .

Next, Figure 3. Kasimir Malevich's Plane in Rotation, usually referred to as Black Circle. Another turning circle, another revolution.

           

Another 100 years. Some references give the date of this work as 1915, but just as Duchamp's 1913 "Readymade" was so designated in 1915, so too 1915 is only when Malevich first exhibited this radical work, as one of his "Suprematist" paintings in the 0.10 exhibition. Camilla Gray, in her book (our ref. here) dates it with Black Square and Black Cross as c.1913.

Malevich wrote:

“…in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the burden of the object, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field”. 

.   .   .   .

Figure 1. is a form of ...
/ideogram of dependent-arising...

 Peter Tyndall    -1978-    Collection: National Gallery of Australia
       

/consequence and its cause...
/foil to The Thing-In-Itself
/projection-space suspended...

/something because...
/someone because...

      

By the close of Melbourne Now, in 2014, 
it will be the 40 years anniversary of 
/this uncertain something...

                 

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Hindsight

       

Following on from yesterday...
   
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LOGOS/HA HA : a magnificent example

       

Would-be Prime Minister, Tony Abbott today stunned a gathering of the Liberal faithful when he told them:

"No one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom."

    

 Mr Abbott : Hindsight is rare

       

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Autoritratto Mentre Osserva un bLOG

    

... is the title of the proto-Futurist painting that Giovanni Boldini has pictured himself looking at.

     

 Autoritratto Mentre Osserva un Dipinto

 Self-portrait while looking at a painting

 Giovanni Boldini, 1865

      

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Three Little Ideo

     

Thanks to Mr D for the pointer to The Guardian article :

       
Three-word slogan generator:  
create your own political catchphrase

 

Though it might seem to anticipate it, the drawthing below was made well before the Three-word slogan generator.

Made in appreciation of a very different world, that of Iggle Piggle; Makka Pakka; Upsy Daisy (and her Orange Megaphone through which she declares "Pip pip onk onk!"); the Tombliboos (Unn, Ooo and Eee whose names reflect phonetically how a young child might count to three); the (red) Pontipines & the (blue) Wottingers (both families constantly chatter, making high-pitched "mi-mi-mi" sounds and "farting" noises); the Haahoos; the Ninky Nonk and the Pinky Ponk. These are the characters and lingua ignota of our compulsive TellyViewing :
In The Night Garden, ABC TV2 nightly at 6.30.  
           

      
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No More Slogans! No More Slogans! No More Slogans! No More Slogans! No More Slogans! No More Slogans! No More Slogans! No more Three Word Slogans!

      

Yesterday, over lunch, we were watching the Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture on ABC 24. 

(Alan Saunders died in June 2012. For many years, he presented The Philosopher's Zone on ABC Radio National.)

Well into the lecture, it stops mid-sentence...

as an excited ABC24 presenter tells us "We are just breaking into that program because Kevin Rudd has left Brisbane and is currently in the air, heading to Canberra...". 

Election Fever! 

They never did return us to the philosopher. Before his abrupt dismissal, Simon Blackburn had already noted the general lowering of regard for the role and contribution of philosophy. Below science... below politics... below entertainment...

In place of the lecture, we were now shown LIVE! imagery of the closed gates of the Governor General's residence at Yarralumla. Homage to Andy Warhol. Intermittently, we were also shown LIVE! images of the TV crews who were filming the closed gates of the Governor General's residence at Yarralumla. All this as back at the studio the political journalists wet themselves in anticipatory speculation.

Anything yet? 

Nothing yet.

Several hours later we turn the telly on again. Now, in place of the lecture, LIVE! images of a lectern in front of a door at the Governor General's residence at Yarralumla.

After 15 minutes of this LIVE! still-life, Kevin Rudd appeared and announced what the journalists had already told us would be announced: an election on September 7.

Being grumpy, we had the sound off/spectacle on. A screen sub-caption quoted the politician :

"Three word slogans

one two three 

don't solve complex problems

one two three

they never have

one two three

they never will."

one two three

 K. Rudd : Count my lips : No More Slogans!

Earlier, the cut-down philosopher had broached the pecking order of power and influence: science and politics above philosophy...  Whither the Arts?

Yesterday was a Sunday. 

On Sunday nights, when most have surely gone to bed, the ABC presents/ranks it's best Arts programs.

Sunday Arts Up Late is ABC Arts weekly arts documentary showcase on ABC1 hosted by highly regarded playwright and director Wesley Enoch. Every week, Sunday Arts Up Late features high end, cutting edge arts content from Australia and around the world including feature-length documentaries, short run series and one off specials.

Last night it was Soundtrack for a Revolution (a history of the 1960s Civil Rights struggle in the United States, and the music associated with that) ending at 11.45pm; and Trumbo (about Dalton Trumbo, an oscar-winning screenwriter who was blacklisted and jailed during the period of McCarthyism in the US) ending at 1.20am. Such a cynical contempt for the ABC arts audience. Excellent programs, but who can watch them late on a Sunday? And they are not available on iView. So why do they bother at all? Perhaps it looks good on some Arts stats chart when the ABC reports to the politicians in Canberra.

Go figure!

The thinking of the ABC : this image is from the web-page for the Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture

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discipline 3 _ launch

                    

discipline _ info

          

David Homewood   

          

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SCREAMING TEENS MOB VOID

                

Great gig by Fill in The Blank at the Gaping Wound last night!

                  

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