bLOGOS/HA HA: August 2019

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.

31 August 2019

Wish-fulfilling Vases of the Void (continued)

see : Sotheby's :

A Sneak Peek into Hong Kong Autumn Sales

HONG KONG.- Sotheby’s Hong Kong Chinese Works of Art Autumn Sale Series 2019 on 8th October will be led by A Highly Important Beijing-Enamelled Pouch-Shaped Glass Vase, Blue Enamel Mark and Period of Qianlong, arguably the greatest example of Qing dynasty art in private hands.

AN ENAMELLED JEWEL, THE LE CONG TANG COLLECTION.
A HIGHLY IMPORTANT BEIJING-ENAMELLED POUCH-SHAPED GLASS VASE,
BLUE ENAMEL MARK AND PERIOD OF QIANLONG
18.2 cm
Estimate upon request
(Expected to fetch in excess of HK$200,000,000/US$ 25,000,000)
This truly extraordinary glass vase, enamelled by imperial command of the Qianlong Emperor in the early years of his reign, is arguably the greatest example of Qing dynasty art in private hands. Enamelled glass vessels were by far the most complex and demanding of all works of art commissioned at the Beijing Palace Workshops, and the current example is the most successful of all surviving examples, in the intricacy of its pouch-shaped form with simulated pink sash tied at the neck, and with its unique and brilliantly enamelled design of a pair of phoenix soaring amidst clouds and peonies, one bud with the blue-enamel mark. Emanating from the legendary collection of Prince Gong, it later passed through the hands of A.W. Bahr and Paul and Helen Bernat, before being acquired by the present owner in October 2000 for a then record price. Its appearance on the international art market now is a moment of celebration.

Theatre of the Actors of Regard Thoughts of TAR and this faint Japanese Edo scroll. Hotei, sack on head, regards a hōju宝珠 or
hōju-no-tama 宝珠の玉 aka wish-fulfilling jewel
aka flaming pearl of wisdom. Value inestimable.

hoju ringed (click to see full image) collection FIAPCE

Theatre of the Actors of Regard

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

27 August 2019

amuseoLOGOS/HA HA : Dagger Definitions of TAR : Towards Amuseum(s) of Regard

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.

- from James Joyce's ‘Ulysses’, an account of one person in one place on one day, 16 June 1904, published 2 February 1922.

Today, 27 August 2019, we spotlight the following HYPERALLERGIC editorial and accompanying article about re/defining The Museum.

August 27, 2019

Letter from the Editor:

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) released a new definition of "museum" this month, and not everyone is happy. Danish curator Jette Sandahl, who lead ICOM’s commission on the new definition, suggested, among other things:

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.

Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

Some immediately considered the definition too ideological, but it raises bigger questions as to whether we actually have a working definition for the institutions that are the foundation of the art world. And is defining them even possible nowadays?

I think the question of what a museum is today is just as complicated as defining what art can be. We're more likely to recognize when something isn't a museum (or art) rather than when it actually is. In an era of more private vanity museums than ever, ersatz corporate entities designed for selfie takers (Museum of Ice Cream, etc.), and the push toward expensive spectacles that require outside funding, the meaning of museum is changing.

The final para of the HYPERALLERGIC article :

In April, ICOM began publishing a crowdsourced list of new museum definitions from around the world. Currently, there are 269 entries on their website from countries including Spain, France, Japan, Cameroon, and Iran. The proposed definition, however, was not chosen from any of these submissions but was picked internally by Sandhal’s commission. Voting for the new definition will be held at the organization’s Extraordinary General Assembly in Kyoto, Japan, on September 7.

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

- from James Joyce's ‘Ulysses’

At the International Council Of Museums website
page headed Museum Definition : Creating a new museum definition – the backbone of ICOM, this is the Museum image that has ICOM provided :
a grid of Right Angles in shades of white/ similar-sized rectangles of regard floating unsupported on walls/ NO PEOPLE or other living beings. Off to The Amuseum with that lot.

Towards Amuseum(s) of Regard

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

23 August 2019

AUSTRALIA NULLIUS | IL TUO PAESE NON ESISTE | YOUR COUNTRY DOES NOT EXIST

o o o o o o o o o o

Shaun Micallef’s MAD AS HELL : ABC.TV 21 August 2019

Shaun Micallef : Finally, when Parliament resumes in September, the first order of business will be repealing the Medivac laws, and it’s not just far right wackos who want them removed, it’s also perfectly reasonable One Nation senators like Malcolm Roberts

Malcolm Roberts : “We must end this Medivac abomination and lock our country’s front door once again.

S M : But, if I may nitpick on one small element of Malcolm’s argument, he also said this :

M R : It is providing a back door way for queue-jumpers to come to onshore Australia.

S M : You see, he’s suggesting that the back door is also the front door. Now that’s only possible if the intermediary space doesn’t exist and Australia The Destination has no thickness. But let me tell you...

(laughter and applause continues ... long pause...)

S M : ...I don’t need to give you the punchline. Goodnight.

o o o o o o o o o o

AUSTRALIA NULLIUS
IL TUO PAESE NON ESISTE
YOUR COUNTRY DOES NOT EXIST

In this photo from the Govenment House website,

on Hany Armanious's T shirt is writ

*IL TUO PAESE NON ESISTE*

*YOUR COUNTRY DOES NOT EXIST*

left to right : Hany Armanious, Australia’s artist for the Venice Biennale, 2011; Her Excellency Quentin Bryce AC, Governor General; Kathy Keele, CEO, Australia Council; His Excellency David Ritchie AO, Australian Ambassador to Italy; Michael Bryce AM AE.

o o o o o o o o o o

FIAPCE

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

22 August 2019

Hotei in the guise of a street TARist

Hotei in the guise of a street performer

HAKUIN Ekaku

-1685-1768-

Hotei in the guise of a street TARist

Theatre of the Actors of Regard

after HAKUIN Ekaku

-1981-

Hotei in the guise of a street TARist

Theatre of the Actors of Regard

Bourke Street, Melbourne
photo by FIAPCE
-1981-

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

20 August 2019

a void pissing in the wind

We recently read the Jacquelynn Baas essay

Before Zen : The Nothing of American Dada with it's further consideration of the ...Duchamp/Mutt/

Wood/Steiglitz/Norton... 'Fountain'.

Alfred Stieglitz, photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, as published in Beatrice Wood, The Blind Man, No. 2, May 1917.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

Then, Buddha of the Bathroom by Louise Norton (1917). Here's an extract :

When the jurors of The Society of Independent Artists firmly rushed to remove the bit of sculpture called the Fountain sent in by Richard Mutt, because the object was irrevocably associated in their atavistic minds with a certain natural function of a secretive sort.

Yet to any ‘innocent’ eye how pleasant is its chaste simplicity of line and color! Someone said, ‘Like a lovely Buddha’; someone said, ‘Like the legs of the ladies by Cézanne’; but have they not, those ladies, in their long, round nudity always recalled to your mind the calm curves of decadent plumbers’ porcelains?

At least as a touchstone of Art how valuable it might have been! If it be true, as Gertrude Stein says, that pictures that are right stay right, consider, please, on one side of a work of art with excellent references from the Past, the Fountain, and on the other almost anyone of the majority of pictures now blushing along the miles of wall in the Grand Central Palace of ART. Do you see what I mean?

And more such (from wikipedia) :

In a letter dated 23 April 1917, Stieglitz wrote of the photograph he took of Fountain: "The "Urinal" photograph is really quite a wonder—Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful—And it's true—it is. It has an oriental look about it—a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman."^[2]^[25]

In 1918, Mercure de France published an article attributed to Guillaume Apollinaire stating Fountain, originally titled
"le Bouddha de la salle de bain" (Buddha of the bathroom), represented a sitting Buddha.^[26]
. . . .

Since the photograph taken by Stieglitz is the only image of the original sculpture, there are some interpretations of Fountain by looking not only at reproductions but this particular photograph. Tomkins notes

"Arensberg had referred to a 'lovely form' and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha or, perhaps more to the point, one of Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."^[1]^[42]

It all reminded us of this 'wall-gazing Daruma' scroll by the Zen master Nantembō (1839–1925).

collection : FIAPCE

The inscription as translated by John Stevens :

The form of our Grand patriarch

facing the wall in meditation
or is it a tasty melon or an eggplant

from around here in Yahata?
(signed)

Eighty-five-year-old Nantembo Toju

Theatre of the Actors of Regard

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

17 August 2019

figure with guiTAR

We go together

like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

We go together
Like rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong
Remembered forever
As shoo-bop sha wadda wadda yippity boom de boom
Chang chang changitty chang sha-bop
That's the way it should be
Wah-oooh, yeah!
We're one of a kind
Like dip da-dip da-dip doo-wop da doo-bee doo
Our names are signed
Boogedy boogedy boogedy boogedy
Shooby doo-wop she-bop
Chang chang changitty chang sha-bop
We'll always be like one, wa-wa-wa-one...

We Go Together : songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil

Cubism and guiTAR go together
like Picasso and Braque

Pablo Picasso

Guitar, Gas-Jet and Bottle

1913
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Georges Braque

Man with a Guitar

1911-1912

MoMA

And later, like...

Roy De Maistre
Figure with guitar
c.1932 – 35
soon for auction in Sydney :

smash and guiTAR go together

like Simonon and The Clash
Hendrix and The Who
Tai-ki, Sengai and the
slave guiTARs of the ages

guiTAR Theatre of the Actors of Regard

Slave Guitars of the Art Cult | The Laugh-ist
- 1979 -

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

15 August 2019

( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( Words In Winter ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )

We've had this pinned-up in the ediTARial room for decades.

Isamu Noguchi

Now, it keeps company with this :

Josh Bowes

Theatre of the Actors of Regard

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

14 August 2019

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

Theatre of the Advertisements of Regard

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

13 August 2019

tantamount

Supreme Goddess as Void, with projection-space for TAR

Theatre of the Agit-tarTAR of Regard

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

12 August 2019

Peak Art

Theatre of the Auctions of Regard

ART : TOO BIG TO FAIL?

Imagine that the elements all suddenly

collapsed

FIAPCE -1975-
click image to enlarge
collection : Art Gallery of South Australia

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

10 August 2019

Wind On Canvas (sic)

Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481)

below, from

Performed in the Storm

Observed in the Calm

Theatre of the Actors of Regard
- 1976 -

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something...

LOGOS/HA HA

09 August 2019

Not the Wind, Not the Flag

The Gateless Gate #29

Not the Wind, Not the Flag

Two monks were arguing about a flag.

One said:

'The flag is moving.'
The other said:

'The wind is moving.'

The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by.

He told them:

'Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.'

Mumon's comment : The sixth patriarch said: "The wind is not moving, the flag is not moving. Mind is moving." What did he mean? If you understand this intimately, you will see the two monks there trying to buy iron and gaining gold. The sixth patriarch could not bear to see those two dull heads, so he made such a bargain.

Wind, flag, mind moves,
The same understanding.
When the mouth opens
All are wrong.

The Gateless Gate, by Ekai, called Mu-mon, tr. Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps [1934], at sacred-texts.com