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.


30 March 2019

Basho, Kerouac, Canned Heat... On The Road Again



TAR + TAR = TAR  
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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something... 
         
 LOGOS/HA HA


28 March 2019

skywriting SKYWRITING CASTROLOGOS/HA HA et al




Theatre of the Actors of Regard  
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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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 CASTROLOGOS/HA HA


  

27 March 2019

Eye Flower Show*


There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;
there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

- Matsuo Basho
  translation R H Blyth

If it flows
it's a flower

- poeTAR

  translation FIAPCE


Theatre of the *Anthos of Regard  
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*florilegium : from Renaissance Latin flōrilēgium
 calque of Ancient Greek ἀνθολογία 
 (anthología, “flower-gathering”) 
 (compare English anthology), 
 so called because flowers were used as symbols 
 of the finer sensibility of literature. (Wikipedia)



25 March 2019

A Centre for Everything | Shapes of Knowledge



Wednesday 27 March, 1-2pm
G104, Building G
Monash Art, Design and Architecture
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
FREE /// All welcome


A Centre for Everything will discuss their project for MUMA’s international group exhibition Shapes of Knowledge in relation to global shifts in art and activism that have influenced their work. Maps of Gratitude, Cones of Silence and Lumps of Coal explores how the fossil fuel industry ingratiates itself to the Australian public. The project adopts A Centre for Everything’s signature triadic formation, bringing together the topics of Ice Coal, Data Networks and Collective Activity to converge in generative and revealing ways.
A Centre for Everything is an independent creative and pedagogical project that engages individuals and communities to learn, create, discuss and eat together founded by artists Will Foster and Gabrielle de Vietri. Their collaborative events bring together diverse topics through performances, presentations, workshops, readings, discussions, demonstrations, critiques and meals. Recurring themes include active responses to current political issues, game-play and its application to wider modes of social behaviour, collective creativity, and the intersection of artistic, social and pedagogical thinking.
A Centre for Everything are participating in Shapes of Knowledge at Monash University Museum of Art, 9 February – 13 April 2018.

 Image: A Centre for Everything, Solar circles, Crepe circles & 
 Munari’s circles 2015.

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24 March 2019

Shapes of Knowledge


Shapes of Knowledge
MUMA | Monash University Museum of Art
9 February – 13 April 2019

Participants A Centre for Everything (AU), Asia Art Archive (HK), Chimurenga (SA), Lucas Ihlein (AU), Annette Krauss & Casco Art Institute (NLD), Alex Martinis Roe (AU/DE), Kym Maxwell (AU) and The Mulka Project (AU)



Curator : Hannah Mathews



Shapes of Knowledge brings together eight projects from artists, collectives and organisations from across Australia and the globe to reflect on the different platforms, spaces and timeframes in which knowledge is produced and shared.

 Image: Kym Maxwell, Objects of Longing Project research 
 phase with Dandenong Primary School (July), 2018. 
 photo: Keelan O’Hehir

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -   

Theatre of the Actors of Regard 
 Francis Picabia, 1919, Danse de Saint-Guy
 The Little Review, Picabia number, Autumn 1922



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

  

22 March 2019

360koan : Daruma on a board


Daruma Crossing the River on a Reed
Fūgai Ekun (1568-1654) 


click image to enlarge  
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  A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
  someone looks at something... 
         
  LOGOS/HA HA


18 March 2019

School Strike 4 Climate : STAR Quadrille


- Providing the weather is fine, its* Grandeur
     cannot be surpassed.

The quadrille is a dance movement that was fashionable in late 18th and 19th century Europe and its colonies. Performed by four couples in a rectangular (later, a diamond matrix) formation, it is related to American square dancing.

A Climate Change Quadrille* 
T R U L Y    A E S T H E T I C

Theatre of the Actors of Regard   
Sun Theatre of Applied Renewables   
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  A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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16 March 2019

STAR ] Sun Theatre of Applied Renewables ( SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE


Victory over the Sun 
Victory over the Sun (RussianПобеда над CолнцемPobeda nad Solntsem) is a Russian Futurist opera premiered in 1913 at the Luna Park in Saint Petersburg.
The libretto written in zaum language was contributed by Aleksei Kruchonykh, the music was written by Mikhail Matyushin, the prologue was added by Velimir Khlebnikov, and the stage designer was Kazimir Malevich. The performance was organized by the artistic group Soyuz Molodyozhi. The opera has become famous as the event where Malevich made his first Black Square painting (in 1915).
The opera was intended to underline parallels between literary text, musical score, and the art of painting, and featured a cast of such extravagant characters as Nero and Caligula in the Same PersonTraveller through All the AgesTelephone TalkerThe New Ones, etc.
The audience reacted negatively and even violently to the performance, as have some subsequent critics and historians.
A documentary film about the opera was made in 1980.
...However, the original performance was far more about rejection of the secure past than of a fear of the future: the sun itself was a favourite Symbolist motif, and hence suitable as a target for Futurist attack.

A more appropriate approach is El Lissitzky's 1923 analysis of the work as a celebration of man's technological capabilities: 'the sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.' This understanding of the work seems closer to the original spirit than Hollander's fear of the future.


A newspaper photograph of the first performance of Victory over the Sun, St. Petersburg's Luna Park, 1913

Suprematist Composition 

...Retrospectively, Malevich declared that his backdrop for the second act, fifth scene of Victory over the Sun was the first public display of Suprematism. Certainly, the large square divided diagonally recalls his painting "Black Square." 
Still it is possible, in the context of the play, to see this design as symbolic of the split between night and day, and therefore as, at least in principle, representational rather than purely abstract.



Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition (1915) 

World Without Sun
 
Without the Futurist hubris, Jacques Cousteau's World Without Sun (1964) reintegrates a respectful world view. We watched this film at school in 1968 and discussed it in our weekly film club. It has stayed with your correspondent. 

As this post is a response to yesterday's international mass action SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE we also recall here that a copies of Vance Packard's The Waste Makers and The Hidden Persuaders were also doing the rounds of our class... fifty years ago!



Theatre of the Actors of Regard 
Sun Theatre of Applied Renewables

Theatre on a stick. A sneak preview, before the curtains fully open...


Theatre of the Actors of Regard  
 STAR at SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE, Melbourne, 15 March 2019

Sun Theatre of Applied Renewables  
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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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 LOGOS/HA HA


  

13 March 2019

Crime Scene


The current exhibition at ACCA (until 24 March) is The Theatre is Lying. We are reminded of this 
in relation to matters below.
The Theatre is Lying is the first in this series of exhibitions, encompassing major works by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, Sol Calero, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Matthew Griffin and Daniel Jenatsch. 
Constructed as an exhibition in five acts, The Theatre is Lying brings together artists who create alternative narratives and worlds through illusionary, cinematic and theatrical devices, including installation, misé en scene, historical re-enactment, digital montage and compositions with video, light and sound. In a series of new commissions, participating artists explore the manipulation of information and images, notions of artifice and illusion, ideas of transparency, reflection and phantasmagoria, and an engagement with the representations and misrepresentations of cinema and media. 
Through the white cube of the gallery and the black box of cinema, The Theatre is Lying proposes the gallery as a transformative threshold addressing ideas of truth and fiction, perception and abstraction, and the warping of time and space. The exhibition also considers the role of the spectator as an active agent in a world in which we are all actors, and the increasing interplay between subjective and objective, or psychic and social structures. Set against theatres of media and politics that are increasingly informed by trickery and sleight of hand, The Theatre is Lying offers a means to reflect upon, critique and even escape – if only momentarily – the everyday reality of our fictive life and times.
Today, Cardinal George Pell was sentenced to six years imprisonment for child sexual assaults at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, in 1966.


 Cardinal George Pell
 by David Roberts
 2007 (printed 2012)
 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra



 HIS EMINENCE, CARDINAL GEORGE PELL
 by Andrew Gow 
 2015

This portrait was commissioned through the Knights of Malta to commemorate Cardinal Pell's inauguration as Prefect of Secretariat for the Economy. The Cardinal is a "a Bailiff Grand Cross of the Knights of Malta, that’s the decoration around his neck," Gow said. 

In 2016, the portrait was unveiled in the Vatican to commemorate Pell's inauguration as one of the Vatican’s most senior figures, Prefect of Secretariat for the Economy.


 cover portrait used for :
 Quarterly Essay #51 - September 2013
 by David Marr
 The Prince : Faith, abuse and George Pell


Last night, as a prolog to today's sentencing, this was the crime scene on the set of Saint Patrick's Theatre of the Actors of Regard, Melbourne.

 
Tonight in so called Melb on Wurundjeri land, we honour child sexual abuse survivors, and those who didnt survive. Gather together to tie ribbons to the fence and projections from 8pm to let the catholic church know, we are watching them. 

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


   

10 March 2019

Tibet : Lest We Forget


This Sunday 10 March is the 60th anniversary of the first major popular Uprising against China's rule - in Lhasa in 1959 - when the Dalai Lama was forced to escape from Tibet (below, centre). He reached safety in India on 30 March 1959.



Whilst Tibetans are paying tribute to the courage of generations both past and present, China is preparing to befuddle the UN Human Rights Council with its response to last November's Universal Periodic Review. As previously, China has rejected most of the Tibet-related recommendations, include basic requests for UN officials to visit, calling them “inconsistent with China’s national conditions, contradictory with Chinese laws, politically biased or untruthful.” Bizarrely, China claims to have "already implemented" a recommendation to restart dialogue on Tibet, when in fact there has been no acknowledged formal contact with the Dalai Lama's representatives since 2010. - International Tibet Network 

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


  

09 March 2019

Apollo and Venus and Susie by The See


Recently rediscovered in Des Moines, USA, and now restored, is Apollo and Venus (c.1600) by 
Otto van Veen, the teacher of Rubens.



Also recently found, this one in Australia, c.1900, 
Venus and Susie at The See, Apollo Bay.


                                                         
It is thought to be painted 'after Whistler' by one of the Heidelberg School artists, a playful Antipodean response to the 1897 Bliss SandsCo publication Venus & Apollo in Painting and Sculpture by William Stillman.


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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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08 March 2019

International Women's Day : Venus Rising from The See


We weren't able to get to Canberra today for the ANU Japan Institute symposium OBJECTively - Connecting Australia and Japan: objects, cultural stories, people.

However, online, we have just enjoyed a similar symposium lecture from 2012 by Louise Allison Cort.
March 15, 2012, Louise Allison Cort, Curator for Ceramics, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. gives her lecture "Fine autumnal tones": Charles Lang Freer's Collecting of Asian Ceramics ( click the lecture title to watch video ) for the symposium The Dragon and the Chrysanthemum : Collecting Chinese and Japanese Art in America organized by the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection, March 15-16, 2012.

 from the lecture : Charles Lang Freer in 1903 looks at his 'Venus
 Rising from the Sea' by Charles McNeill Whistler (c.1869-1870)


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


  

06 March 2019

Exhibition news

                                another downfall
                                                               flows to the see

Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿 is the first retrospective of leading contemporary Chinese artist Xiao Lu. The exhibition is anchored by Xiao Lu’s performance work
Dialogue from the landmark China/Avant-Garde exhibition at 
the National Art Gallery, Beijing, in February 1989. This work, 
in which the artist fires a gun at her own art installation, is a milestone in the development of contemporary art in China. 
It has also has been read as a critical turning point in China’s recent history. While Dialogue remains an iconic work of that era, it is also one of the most misunderstood pieces of contemporary Chinese art. Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿 examines Xiao Lu’s creative interest in deep emotion, extreme action, and chance. Spanning a period of 30 years, the exhibition presents significant performance works by Xiao Lu including a new commission that explores the artist’s ongoing connection to Australia.

 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, until 24 March


 Xiao Lu, One, performance, 5 Sept 2015, Valand Academy
 University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Photo by Lin Qijian

Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia 
represents the current state of contemporary photography in Australia through the work of thirteen artists including several whose work is being shown in the United States for the first time. The featured photographers were nominated by five Australian senior curators of photography; finalists were selected by MOPA’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, Deborah Klochko.

The exhibition shows that art-making in Australia is not just about the flora and fauna of the country. The artists reflect many different perspectives on the creativity that exists in the country. The nomination of four Aboriginal artists touches upon the country’s relationship with indigenous people, and the ways that history affects art-making. Defining Place/Space is more than what people will expect...


Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, until 22 September


 Pat Brassington, Fall (2016)         courtesy of ARC ONE Gallery

The two images above presented around the same time, along with this Mount Fuji, Dragon and signature brushwork by the renowned Samurai swordsman and Zen calligrapher Yamaoka Tesshū (1836-1888)



...flow to the see


Theatre of the Actors of Regard  
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something... 
         
 LOGOS/HA HA