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.


28 September 2014

Captions Courageous


AFL Grand Final Day : Swans v Hawks

Today's finals formalities begin here with The Coodabeen Champions on the radio.


Their weekly cross to Sam the Sub at 'Outside Football' for his reading of the headlines is a must for all at the offices of bLOGOS/HA HA.

Sam the sub from Outside Football (Round 12)

14/06/2011

Punchy Pies Pres Points Pen - Borderline Brickbat Bozo Bears Brunt of Biro
Full colour wrap around for Queens Birthday in black and white of a pasty pom pensioner in a pies parka
  
After Sam's segment today, and before we all 
settle-in to watch the game on TV, we award our own end-of-season best-on-ground footy sub- awards : The Captions Courageous

This season's winner was unanimous : awarded to the sub for Jake Nial's article Head head head (The Age 27 June 2014), taking the cake in all three categories.

Best Headline :  
   

     
Best Caption :
     



Best Quote :
     

    
Even Buddy got a look-in!


  
After a terrific finals series, the Grand Final is a fizzer with Hawthorn dominating throughout. 


Hawthorn 21.11 (137)   Sydney Swans 11.8 (74) 
  
At least it produces another wordthy winner :
         
Neologism of the day :
                
"It's been an absolute destroyation!"
- Mark McClure on ABC radio at 3/4 time


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24 September 2014

Vale Robert Hunter ( -1947 - 2014- )

























                                                                                                              


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23 September 2014

UNEDUCATED


Curator : Kym Maxwell

Artists : Annette Krauss (N.L), Tom and Simon Bloor (U.K), Room 13 the early years (with Robert Fairley U.K), Elizabeth Newman, Antonia Sellbach, Nick Selentisch, Annabelle Kingston, Dan Arps, Lane Cormick, Peter Tyndall, Kym Maxwell, Nathan Gray, Sean Peoples, Anastasia Klose, Dr Peter Hill, DAMP and Emily Floyd.
     
13 September, 2-3:30pm : The educational philosophies of Frederick Schiller and Jacques Ranciere, a lecture by Sam Cuff Snow and Gene Flenady from Monash University and Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.
     
25 September 25th, 6-8pm: The role of cognition in viewing. The importance of not knowing: what the Greek Skeptics might call a suspension from certainty; or cognitive indeterminacy. Nick Selentisch talks with Dan Arps and Peter Tyndall.


UNEDUCATED
Counihan Gallery, 233 Sydney Rd Brunswick, 
5 September – 5 October 2014



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21 September 2014

Abstractionist tells : I Was A Teenage Hard-Edge Cubist !

    
The less there is to see the more important it is to look
Ian Potter Museum of Art
last day today
   
The more there is to see the less important it is to look
first day today



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18 September 2014

What is it about Melbourne that it continues to generate these slave actions?

   
SLAVE GUITARS  
(1979 - )
here  here  here

SLAVE PIANOS
(1988 - )
here  here

Christian Capurro : SLAVE
(at ACCA until 28 September 2014 - )
here  here  here  here
 

Entranced: A work from Christian Capurro's exhibition Slave at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Andrew Curtis
    
The image-caption above is from Robert Nelson's review in the online version of The Age : 
Christian Capurro: A slave to the screen?
  
The
newsprint edition's caption for this image is :
    

Christian Capurro's Slave raises questions about both artist and audience. Photo: Andrew Curtis
     
Since we first re-published these two captions, information received now corrects them both to :


Entranced: A work from Christian Capurro's exhibition Slave at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Christian Capurro
  
Christian Capurro's Slave raises questions about both artist and audience. Photo: Christian Capurro


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16 September 2014

Right Drum + Right Frame = Right War


The drums of war are sounding, again     
It now appears highly likely that Australia once again is headed for war in Iraq, perhaps not with masses of ground combat forces as occurred last decade, but with military force nonetheless. It is imperative that the militant brigades of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) be halted. They have waged terror across Syria, Iraq and into Lebanon, and conducted unspeakably brutal crimes. Whole cities are now in its grip. But The Age urges the government to consider Australia's position with caution before plunging headlong into this venture. The momentum is building, but the strategy for eradicating ISIL remains elusive..

Editorial : THE AGE
13 September 2014




War Frames

     
As Prime Minister Tony Abbott oversees Australia's deployment of troops to Iraq from his temporary office in the Garma Knowledge Centre on the Gulkula plateau, politicians and observers are looking for the right frame to describe the military operation. The Labor Party has fallen into line behind the government, accepting Abbott's assertions that the mission against the Islamic State is unlike others in the Middle East and that while this mission is essentially humanitarian, there's also a national security component: if allowed to expand, the Islamic State would inevitably pose a threat to Australia. Mark Kenny reports in the Fairfax press that "sources close to" Abbott insist that he's acting on a clear moral sense of duty, which flows from the simple characterisation of the Islamic State as "evil". This perhaps explains his eagerness to involve Australia, which has been much quicker off the mark than Britain.

The Greens and others, on the other hand, worry that Australia's eagerness looks too much like its traditional deference to its "great and powerful friends". Christine Milne yesterday pointed to the lack of a time-frame or even clearly-defined objectives to Australia's mission, and raised the concern that Australia's involvement will only encourage the radicalisation of disaffected and alienated young Muslims. Although Abbott and ASIO's outgoing Director-General of Security David Irvine have denied any such correlation, ASIO's own report to parliament in 2012-13 acknowledged that Australia's military operations in the Middle East do raise the risk of domestic terrorism.

In Washington, journalist Paul McGeough points out that the US-led mission lacks clarity. Those urging military action in the US, Britain and Australia are particularly animated by the potential dangers posed by "returning Jihadists", but those governments are rarely asked to quantify that threat in any way. Meanwhile there appears disagreement on either side of the Pacific as to whether the mission should even be described as a "war".

Russell Marks
Editor : The Monthly

16 September 2014
        

FIAPCE  -1983- 
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15 September 2014

so what does the action Learn from its agent? (though in a yoyo youreonyourOwn economy, a bank isabank isabank. or


- Chris Mann, from 
notes ( on the user as software

TAR presents : 
FIAPCE YO YO Champion in 
'With mindful regard 
these things on strings 
this spinning ideogram mandala'


Theatre of the Actors of Regard 
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14 September 2014

Ideally, nothing

      

Robert Bresson talks about his film Mouchette.
 
Mouchette stands at the gate of the rides of the fair, looking at the people in the rides.   
       

Theatre of the Actors of Regard 
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11 September 2014

i feel sorry for the facts. but that dont mean i feel indulgent. my moneys on those words offshored, or at least pAid offshore, the pretty polly Cracker of a code. (.. somewhere in there theres an idea eating away .. but its like that. that moment when crap was only crap, that was not a good moment. this then is to indemnify the misery as mere Unhappiness, or ode to the aesthetics of attention. theres those bits that fIt, andWords, what other words think of as a form of inoculation. therapy for minors. Ambient Habit. a justintime Relapse. or Brick. (i mean according to homeland security its illegal to travel without your habit.) and as your status remains Classified, ( .. though could facts be even a little more self conscious if they tried? i mean that words might Know, is really quite an idea.

        
bLOGOS/HA HA are longtime fans of Chris Mann]

 (i mean just coz they ignore you doesnt mean youre rIght,
    
Here's Chris with Philippa Cullen in 1974 at the Ewing Gallery, Melbourne for Events/Structures. The final image of this post shows another of Chris's contributions to that exhibition, curated by Peter Cripps.
          
click image to enlarge       photo : AAA_ArtArchive Australia

His website theuse.info is our favorite website, the default heavy mental brain grind accompaniment to the rumble of the presses : 
click on a dot and or two
or
Fuck Off. get your Own fucking silence.

For yonks we've reckoned there should be a Melbourne International Festival dedicated to Melbourne's Chris Mann; built around his work and that of certain like-minded composers (sic) such as Ives, Schwitters, Grainger, Cage, Beckett, Ionesco, Murnane, Warren Burt, Ron Nagorka, Jim Denley....
        
 its only when they bestowed agency on the Pause that .. 
 
So it was great to read the recent post at Gertrude Contemporary seeking workshop participants for this tribute project by Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang :

CONCEPTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF CHRIS MANN
Saturday 27 September 2014
3pm-6pm
Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne
FREE

  

 from the above :

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09 September 2014

Auction Waiting Room IV


Speaking previously of poignant images, or rather of recognising our projections of poignant regard, this image and its title, from the September auction list at Joels, summoned that again. 
Jeffrey Bren
Hospital Waiting Room IV
oil on canvas
91 x 121.5cm
Jeffrey Bren (1944-2007) : a student of John Brack, and an artist we once followed seriously. Lost track of. Trial by Hospital Waiting Rooms. Click here to read his obituary in The Age.
Jeffrey Bren 
Theatre of the Actors of Regard :
Trial by Auction Room   
ESTIMATE : $800 - $1,20o

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07 September 2014

P.S.


Albert Guillaume published three books of his drawings of military life, including 'Mes Campagnes' in 1896. A large number of these were re-published as postcards.
courtesy : The Debt Collection   
       
POST-SCRIPTUM is a poignant favorite. Postscript to an army life, the amputee postman doing his delivery rounds  à la carte (postale).
   
'Postman Joseph Roulin and the correspondents : 1888-2014' at West Space, November 2014.
         
         


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05 September 2014

Open for Inspection

      
Today, Theatre of the Actors of Regard received from Belgium via the Sydney Gateway Facility (SGF) this green-taped documentation of a Customs Inspection.
              

Theatre of the Actors of Regard 
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A note placed inside the envelope by Australian Customs stated that officers opened it when alerted by a light and siren sound apparently issuing from within the envelope. Here's what they encountered:
   

    
One hundred years ago, in 1914, this hand-painted postcard of an urgent postman or customs inspector was posted by M. Joseph at Waereghem to Mlle. Emonts at the Hotel des Arts, Liege

'Postman Joseph Roulin and the correspondents : 1888-2014' at West Space, November 2014.
         


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03 September 2014

Terry Smith at NGV


The weekend seminar 'Kiffy Rubbo and The George Paton Gallery : Curating the 1970s' was a great success. Lots for the head and the heart.
         
Various of the seminar speakers referred to the 1975 protest by artists at the National Gallery of Victoria. That protest was organised at the George Paton Gallery after the removal by the NGV, without consultation with the artist, of an installation by Domenico de Clario commissioned for the NGV exhibition 'Artists' Artists_Sculpture'.

At the George Paton Gallery meeting, the following document was prepared, then issued at the protest.
       

click image to enlarge               AAA_ArtArchiveAustralia

One of those prominent at the George Paton Gallery meeting was Terry Smith. Re-reading the PROTEST document now, it seems a fair guess that the information in the following paragraph from motion #1 might have been contributed by Smith, an active member of A & L between 1972-1976 :
This action, following the arbitrary removal of the Art and Language Show to the Art School of the Victoria College of the Arts is the culmination of a long history of prejudice against experimantal art.
In the photo below, of the 1975 artists protest at the NGV, that's Terry Smith on the right. The artist John Davis is in the centre and Eric Westbrook, then previous NGV director, is on the left.


click image to enlarge              AAA_ArtArchiveAustralia

In 2004, when the free pencil movement organised another day of protest at the NGV, they re-used this 1975 photo on their protest poster above to indicate how little had changed at the NGV since 1975.

For info about the 2004 Artists Protest at the NGV:
Sketch-in Protest @ the National Gallery of Victoria  here

NGV : something to really scream about : AGAIN!  here

free pencil movement : REBEL YELL  here
For info about the 2012 Artists Protest at the NGV :
NGV Renews Bans   here

Pencil power can never be erased : Age Editorial   here

NGV vs The Public Blot  here

NGV Out of line   here

HATE YOUR NGV   here

NGV Recidivism   here

X-Rated NGV   here

No Note-Taking = No Review   here

NGV : Vox Pop   here
       
Tonight Terry Smith returns to the NGV for the latest in the Gertrude Contemporary/Discipline lecture series, to reconsider aspects of his 1974 essay "The Provincialism Problem" (click here to read the essay online), first published in the New York magazine Artforum
      

click image to enlarge                     FIAPCE, 1990 / AAA_ArtArchiveAustralia

"World Art Now, The Provincialism Problem Then: 40 years of contemporary art" : That all seats to tonight's lecture by Terry Smith were reserved overnight when it was announced a month ago demonstrates the level of interest and audience for such matters. 


 Dr Terry Smith

For this and for so many other such events, all praise to our Melbourne art curator-historians : from Janine Burke - in 1975 Janine curated 'Australian Women Artists, One Hundred Years, 1840-1940' at the Ewing Gallery and George Paton Galleries, and last weekend it was she who organised the free seminar 'Kiffy Rubbo and The George Paton Gallery : Curating the 1970s' - to the energetic younger group of Helen Hughes and her generation of artist/curator/historians. VIVA!
    
      
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