weep for painting

In 2010, Domenico de Clario curated the exhibition painthing (as one) at the Australian Experimental
Art Foundation, Adelaide.

 .  .  .  .     

Opening tomorrow evening at MARS Gallery, Melbourne, is the exhibition weep for painting, again curated by Domenico de Clario.

rosslynd piggott

anne scott wilson

steven rhall

eugene carchesio

yhonnie scarce

neil fettling

adam boyd

peter tyndall

david palliser

nick mourtzakis

helen smith

laura cionci

gregory pryor

annette lawrence

danielle freakley

adam fuss

sophia hewson

giles ryder

domenico de clario

click here to read
weep for painting : seven non-occasions
by Domenico de Clario

click here to listen to
weep for painting
by Domenico de Clario

 2017.08.30 Domenico de Clario painting today at MARS 

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Eclipse

  
We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

- Carl Sagan

HAND SPACE Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

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Total eclipse / partial eclipse / across the US 
an arc of darkness produces stupidity and awe ...

Plato's Cave Junior TAR  

... from teachers to The President.
 

Go Blind Is Fake News : President Trump Looks At The Sun  

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Total Eclipse ] of the Art ( cough cough

Two artists, a century ago : a cultural revolution for one - Alexander Rodchenko in Russia - and a rare natural coincidence of revolutions for another - Howard Russell Butler in the United States.

Aleksander Rodchenko :

 Aleksander Rodchenko, Non-Objective Composition (1918) 

 Aleksander Rodchenko, White Circle (1918) 

Howard Russell Butler :
 

 Howard Russell Butler, solar eclipse painting (1918)

 Howard Russell Butler, "Solar Eclipse, Lompoc 1923"
 - article here

Theatre of the Actors of Regard :
   

 TAR space-time actors                                                FIAPCE

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Re. Square One

FIAPCE  

Gary Card  

 Antony Gormley  

 

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A script within a script | a play without actors. How bizarre!

In last night's SBS re-run of the original Batman TV series, the illusionist Zelda the Great and her clever criminal companion Eivol Ekdol watch through periscopes as Batman and the Boy Wonder enter the Inescapable Doom Trap : 

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

 Look, Batman, a note on the counter :

 "To whom it may concern. Try interesting volume

 on top shelf last book of back row."

 Gosh! Could it concern us? It certainly could.

 Look at that title : The Truth About Bats.

 Wow! That book worked a concealed switch.

 Let's see how the plot goes, huh? 

 Bizarre! A play without actors.

 This script could be for us.

 One way to find out.

 Let's get in the limelight.

 Look, in this booth : It's a bat.

 I bet it means something. 

- Episode 10 : A Death Worse Than fate (1966)

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Color Me Ken

Last week we attended the impressively credentialed workshop Art and Translation : Ian Fairweather’s The Drunken Buddha lead by Claire Roberts at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University. 


 Towards an Abstract Mood : The Drunken Buddha, 1965

While there, we also regarded (and translated...) The Potter's current exhibition The Score, curated by Jacqueline Doughty :

A musical score is a form of translation. It transcribes sound into drawing, by representing the aural complexities of pitch, rhythm and tempo as visual symbols.

The Score expands upon this spirit of transformation to ask, if music can be represented by notes on a staff, why not by colours? If a song can be performed by the voice, why not with silent hand gestures? And how would dance based upon the syllables of a poem, or music based upon the shape of a leaf manifest?

photos by Jodie Hutchinson   

excerpts from The Score of Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

Now, following The Score, we're listening again to Ken Nordine, to his 1966 Colors album, an extension of his 1964 7" EP Fuller Paint 'Color' Spots made for the Fuller Paint Company. 



The ad man Bob Pritkin gave Ken Nordine this opportunity. That's Bob below, on stage with the Fuller Four Paint Performers doing their conceptual Can-Can-Can-Can for TAR. This info and these images from the excellent audioarcana.

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

COLORS has thirty-four tracks, each around 1' 35" of cool jazz hip bop advertisement copy for the chosen colors. It's available on Spotify and YouTube. 

cover design Daniel Czubak  

Flesh is ... color-centric thinking

Flesh, as a color is in an awful mess, yes
Ask anyone with flesh, they'll tell ya
Flesh, as a color is about as close to a problem as a color can get
Some people think the only color flesh color should be is the color their flesh color is
Which, pure and simple, is color-centric thinking
Popular in some corners, but you and I know, though, 
That the proper color flesh for flesh to be is the proper color it is
Varying from complexion to complexion
But if black flesh
And white flesh
And brown flesh
And red flesh
And yellow flesh
And tan flesh
If all the fleshes that are flesh want to establish a sensible similarity among differences,
We better forget the flesh, and the colors it can be, and think on the Spirit, and its singular light
Otherwise, flesh as a color could be black and blue,
Or even a bloody hue

Tracklist
01 Olive
02 Lavender
03 Burgundy
04 Yellow
05 Green
06 Beige
07 Maroon
08 Ecru
09 Chartreuse
10 Turquoise
11 White
12 Flesh
13 Azure
14 Puce
15 Magenta
16 Orange
17 Purple
18 Muddy
19 Russet
20 Amber
21 Blue
22 Black
23 Gold
24 Crimson
25 Brown
26 Rosey
27 Hazel
28 Mauve
29 Fuschia
30 Sepia
31 Nutria
32 Cerise
33 Grey
34 Coral


TAR presents regarding Abstract Mood (for Ken N) :

Ken Nordine  

 Towards a Drunken Buddha : Haymes 'Interior Colours' chart, 2017

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Annual Grudge Match : Constructivism versus All Comers

It's the Australian Football League's version of Tomasso Siciliano's 1585 Vatican ceiling fresco 
The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism,
performed each AFL season whenever St Kilda (The Saints) and Melbourne (The Demons) clash at the MCG TAR (Melbourne Cricket Ground Theatre of the Actors of Regard).

Depending on how each Regardist regards the unlimited binary opportunities afforded by these two opposed teams of players, the match is tween
Saints v Demons, Good v Evil, Heaven v Earth, 
Sky v Ground, Levity v Gravitas, Wings v Horns, Light v Dark....

FIAPCE  

If guided by the club colours or jumper designs, the battle might might be between, say...

Constructivists v Sheep Dippers 
(the latter based on an old advertising slogan 
Red White and Black/The Tri-Benzyl Pack (sic)



Today's result : 
The Triumph of ... Constructivism! 
(14 12 96 def. 10 12 72)

The battle continues at :
Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art 
Heide Museum of Modern Art  (5 July 8 October 2017) 
 

FIAPCE  

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Cooeeeee! Capital and the Call of the Avant-Garde

“Into Production!”: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism

Christina Kiaer

In the first issue of the Russian avant-garde journal Lef, in 1923, the Constructivist theorist Osip Brik wrote a brief article with the title “Into Production!”. Taking Aleksandr Rodchenko as his example, he opens: “Rodchenko was an abstract artist. He has become a constructivist and a production artist. Not just in name, but in practice.” He continues: “Rodchenko knows that you won’t do anything by sitting in your own studio, that you must go into real work, carry your own organizational talent where it is needed – into production.”[1] Brik was one of a group of theoretically-informed, Marxist critics and writers within the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (or INKhUK) who began promoting the so-called “Productivist” platform of Constructivism in the fall of 1921. Some of the most prominent Constructivist artists, such as Vladimir Tatlin, Karl Ioganson, Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova, and of course Rodchenko, attempted in various and significantly different ways to enter into Soviet mass production after the Russian Revolution. Yet if the debates leading to the formulation of Constructivism and Productivism in 1921 had emphasized “laboratory work,” industrial technology and engineering, a great deal of Productivist work ended up being less about technology and the factory, and more about the invention and theorization of new kinds of useful material objects that would transform everyday life under socialism. In this essay, I consider these artists’ different models of “production art,” and suggest that the Productivist idea of the “socialist object,” in particular, might still be relevant to radical cultural production today.

(full article here)

This "Into Production!" came to mind yesterday, watching TV of the CEO of the CBA, Ian Narev, defending himself and his bank against allegations of turning a blind eye to the facilitation of money laundering via the CBA direct deposit ATMs. 

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

Ian Narev (r) in front of the CBA (Commonwealth Bank of Australia / Constructivism's Bastard Art) expanded Logo field.

The TAR CBA mise en scène above is lineage product(ion) progeny, surely, of Picasso (Cubism), Malevich (Supremetism), Rodchenko (Constructivism), Mondrian and Van Doesburg 
(de Stijl) ... through to 'Pure' Corporation Art. All grist to the mill of mis|appropriat|ion bottom-line Capital|ismus.

click image to enlarge  

Featured on the cataLOGOS/HA HA cover of Sotheby's RUSSIAN PICTURES November 2016 auction, Alexander Rodchenko’s Construction No.95 (1919) sold for a record £3.6m with fees, eclipsing its previous auction record of £420,000.

We remember when the new CBA logo by Ken Cato was announced and was much discussed. The 2012 article extract below is from Desktop :

Described as “bold, strong, modern and progressive” in a bank press release, the Commonwealth Bank’s current logo was introduced when the bank enlisted its new identity in September 1991. According to the bank, the design is based on the formation of the Southern Cross constellation with the yellow section linking the five stars of the Southern Cross, and the black portion completing the geometrical shape. Yet, Ken Cato, the designer appointed in 1989 to create this new corporate identity, disagrees: “It doesn’t mean the Southern Cross; it means the Commonwealth Bank,” he says. “We needed a shape that could still include the colours yellow and black (as this distinguished us from all of the other banks’ colours) and it had to be a memorable shape in contrast to the bank’s competition and a diamond seemed like a good idea, plus it breaks up the black and yellow colours,” Cato adds.

According to the Commonwealth Bank, the current logo shape is               based on the Southern Cross constellation

*see also : Warwick Thornton's film 'We Don't Need A Map' (Ed.)

1989 (current) logo by Ken Cato

The story behind the development of the trademark’s single, extended character, double M typeface is also surprising. “It simply came down to having very uncomfortable words placed together,” says Cato. “It was a very long word followed up by a descriptor word like ‘bank’ and I needed to make the word ‘Commonwealth’ as short as I could. There was also a picket fence in the word where the double ‘M’ forms an awkward arch, so these were the decisions behind the joining of the letters and the legibility was not lost – only a designer would pick it up.”

While the Commonwealth Bank declined to comment on the controversial price of the revamp, Cato says he has to smile when people bring up the so-called $11 million redesign budget. “In today’s world, that figure is considerably small when it comes to the branding of big corporations, which have to replace all of their building signage and stationery – it’s almost laughable as it was done incredibly cheaply.”

aside : Ian Narev's current wage package is around $10million/year. Yesterday, the CBA announced it's annual financial result, a profit of around $10billion. Dating from 2012, there are an alleged 54,000 CBA breaches of Australia's money-laundering laws for which the CBA faces a potential $1trillion in fines. Previously, the CBA overcharged its customers by more than $100million and... and... Banks Inquiry, anyone?

Man and His Symbols, Karl Jung, 1964

On the weekend, we read with interest Rex Butler's consideration in Memo Review of the current Heide MoMA exhibition Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art.

... It is not that it is art-historically calculating in any sense, or even somehow self-prophesying, but rather that the real interest it possesses is to serve as evidence of a particular time and place. It serves as the marker of a "scene" – Brisbane in the early 1980s, Melbourne throughout the rest of that decade and into the '90s – and the same could be said of the artists who followed him also in the show: Stephen Bram, Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Melinda Harper, Kerrie Poliness and Gary Wilson. There's virtually nothing to look at in their work, almost nothing of visual interest, except for the fact that it points to a certain kind of artistic activity.

In other words, the principal – if not only – significance of the work is socio-historical, or in more up to date language relational. The work – unlike the original Russian Constructivism – does not point somewhere else but only tautologically to itself and its own existence.

So that in many ways the show is not any kind of exploration of what happened to Constructivism when it arrived in Australia, but merely demonstrates the fact that there were artists here who made work in its name. The result is not any kind of art history but more a social history. Or that, at least, is how it appears once the 1970s begins.

- the extract above is from :
THE ART EXHIBITION VS ART: 'BRAVE NEW WORLD: AUSTRALIA 1930S' | 'CALL OF THE AVANT-GARDE: CONSTRUCTIVISM AND AUSTRALIAN ART', BY REX BUTLER 

Heide Museum of Modern Art    

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Professor Laughwell

Young and old at bLOGOS/HA HA have been enjoying the Friday evening re-screenings of the 1960s Batman television series on SBS Viceland.

The most recent, episode six - Batman Is Riled, featured our favourite supervillain The Joker played by Cesar Romero.


 Cesar Romero as The Joker : "HA HA! Look, I've been framed!"

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Holy Headline #1 : 

The responsibility of the press

Robin: All the same! "The Joker is wild!" "Batman and Robin foiled again!" Holy Headlines, do we look like page one dumbbells!

Batman: Too true, Robin. The responsibility of the press is to report the truth, despite what it might do to our public image. Our main concern is to a frightened public, whom we seem to be failing.

Robin: Gosh, you're right. I can't help thinking of only myself. I'm sorry.

Batman: Well, that's okay, chum. We all have the right to be selfish sometimes.

Holy Headline #2 : 

Holy grammar!

Joker: Batman and Boy Wonder? Are your blindfolds in place? Very well, then. Ask yourselves, "What is wrong with this sentence?" "He who laughs last laughs good!" [laughs]

[Batman turns off the television.]

Robin: Holy grammar! Is that all?

Batman: He who laughs last laughs best, not good! Best! Best! Best!

Robin: Do you suppose "blindfold" might have something to do with it?

Alfred: If I may venture an opinion, sir, I think Master Dick may have put his finger on it.

Batman: Blindfold?

Alfred: No, sir. Grammar. The sentence was gramatically incorrect. One does not laugh good, sir. One laughs well.

Batman: Why, that's it, Alfred! Laughs well! Laughwell! Professor James J. Laughwell!

Robin: Holy safari! The one that just got back from Africa, with a collection of rare masks and objects of art!

Alfred: That's where the blindfold part would come in, sir.

Batman: And they're being stored at the Lasts Longer Warehouse! To the Batmobile!

Masks of The Joker : Theatre of the Actors of Regard 

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Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...

Michael Fullilove, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, addressed the National Press Club of Australia yesterday. His topic, 'Australia in the Trump era'.



He concluded his speech with this anecdote :

Ladies and gentlemen, I was last in the United States in January. I left just before Mr Trump’s inauguration ceremony.

I’m very fond of America. I admire its energy and its idealism and, for all its flaws, I believe the country does much more good than ill.

I have many friends and colleagues in Washington, which was once my home… and I didn’t want to be there to see what followed.

Because I left town before the twentieth of January I don’t have any first hand information for you on what Sean Spicer memorably described as, “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration period, both in person and around the globe”.

But, I was part of that huge crowd on the National Mall in 2009 for President Obama’s first inauguration. And before the proceedings began in January 2009, I looked up to see a bald eagle, Americas’s national symbol, soaring and swooping over the Capitol dome. And I found this quite affecting, I’m a romantic by nature, and I turned to the stranger sitting next to me and I pointed this out to her.

But she turned out to be a very conservative Republican, and she said to me, “That’s no heavenly sign, that’s a trained eagle that the Obama campaign has put up in the sky to attract positive media attention.

Now, at the time, I found this world view merely disappointing. In retrospect, I see it as pretty disturbing. It was an early case of a new more dangerous strain of partisanship in which Americans are willing to ignore reality if it does not fit with their prejudices.

I was present, I believe, at the first instance of fake news : where I saw an eagle, she saw alternative facts.



And, ladies and gentlemen, this is the world, Trump’s world, in which the United States and Australia must now make our way. 

Thank you

EPILOGOS/HA HA 

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...

or rather, we are...

Theatre of the Actors of Regard!

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