Vale the great Glenda Jackson (1936-2023)

We first saw Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday in the early 1970s, in Peter Brooks 1967 film of 'The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade'. 

The title is usually shortened to Marat/Sade, after a 1963 play by Peter Weiss. She, the film, the play (we even bought the Peter Weiss script) all impressed greatly. 

Theatre of the Actors of Regard ] TAR ( has its beginnings t/hereabouts.

Jackson quit acting in 1991 to concentrate on politics – she had joined the Labour Party at 16. In 1992 she was elected as a Labour member to the House of Commons in the UK Parliament where she remained for 23 years, before retiring at age 79.

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Three Colours : TAR

 Krzysztof Kieślowski          Three Colours : Red          - 1994 -

       QAGOMA  

 with PUPPET CULTURE FRAMING SYSTEM                                     - 1979 - 

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Tibetan Children...

                       

Shocking new information has come to light that as many as one million Tibetan children & youth – as young as 6 years old – are being held in China's colonial boarding schools, removed from their parents, families, culture, and religion, and faced with intense political indoctrination.

Please take action to demand Chinese leaders stop the use of colonial boarding schools in occupied Tibet.

TAKE ACTION NOW!

Tibet Action Institute's report shares heartbreaking stories from survivors and witnesses about the brutal impact of China's colonial boarding schools.

One anonymous witness told them, "I know of children aged four to five who don’t want to be separated from their mothers. They are forced to go to boarding schools. In some cases, the children cry for days, sticking to their mother’s laps, begging not to be sent away."

This spine-chilling practice is similar to historic residential schools for indigenous children in Canada, the US, and Australia that aimed to destroy their indigenous language, culture, and identity. We can’t let this happen again.

Please take a few minutes to email China’s Vice Premier and Minister of Education to demand this practice is stopped?

We're now developing plans and resources for Tibet groups to build more urgent action about China's colonial boarding schools to ensure Tibetan children are not forgotten.

Thanks for all that you do to support Tibet.

Mandie, Lobsang, Pema, Terluz and the team at Tibet Network

TAKE ACTION NOW!

Read more about China's Colonial Boarding Schools:
Separated From Their Families, Hidden From The World
Tibet Action Institute

The horrors of Canada’s residential schools are being repeated in Tibet
Globe And Mail - Tsering Yangzo Lama

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- in defense of freedom of press and human rights for all.

Ai Weiwei

https://www.instagram.com/aiww/

The high court in the UK overturned a ruling earlier this year and judged in favor of the US in appeal to extradite Julian Assange. Since 2012 he has lived under asylum and imprisonment, and his health has deteriorated. He suffered a stroke in prison and would not be able to survive the conditions he would be held under if sentenced to 175 years in prison in the US.

Today, freedom of press is under attack and journalists’ safety is at stake, as the powerholders circle and suppress those who provide real information in defense of social justice. Assange represents the fairness of press, which is the most important foundation to guarantee the development of a healthy society. It is only with this foundation that we can measure human rights in a society. Without freedom of press, the entire society’s human rights will be damaged.

In October 2016 Julian Assange gave me a treadmill as a present when he was at the Embassy of Ecuador in London. Today I decided to make a video of myself running on the treadmill and would like to call for everyone’s involvement through uploading short videos of running on a treadmill on the Internet. With this performance, we can show our concern with human rights and freedom of press, as well as our pursuit of social justice. Please upload your videos with #RunForOurRights and #Treadmill.

#RunForOurRights

- in defense of freedom of press and human rights for all.

@aiww

treadmill runner at Bonzaview

https://www.instagram.com/p/CX-UlKctNws/

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TAR and the Wheel of Life

Yesterday's drawing by Josh Bowes is dreadfully and personally familiar.

by Josh Bowes 

TAR and the Wheel of Life, made in response, 

"as driven by desire/attachment." 

Bingo! 

click image to enlarge

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slice + dice

Santilla Chingaipe : Are ‘race’ and ‘caste’ synonymous, or are they mutually exclusive?

Isabel Wilkerson : In the ways that I am hoping and urging us to see past what we are accustomed to seeing and to recognise that we can learn so much when we look from the perspective of the infrastructure of the society, to recognise that a society, or a hierarchy, a caste system, can use any number of metrics in determining the arbitrary nature of division. These things are arbitrary; this is not real. I mean, this is like, you choose a particular characteristic and you need to get the work done and you use this characteristic as a thing that will assign an entire group to the bottom and lift up another group to the very top. And so, the idea of race, one way of looking at it, is that caste is the bones of the infrastructure of a society, it is more of a universal impulse to rank and divide and to keep people in a fixed place to have a hierarchy to have a ladder of value assigned to people in a particular society, and you can use any number of metrics in doing that. It just so happened that this was the metric that was convenient for European colonists, and I’m speaking about the United States and the English colonists in particular. Of course, this also created, between colonisation and enslavement, created essentially a global caste system that was based upon the standards that were set by those who had the power to colonise and to enslave. And that’s what we all have inherited as a species.

'Caste' (extract)

Recorded 1 May 2021 Sydney Writers Festival

Broadcast on Big Ideas ABC.RN - 10 June 2021

   Skylight guillotine at Sinclair Gallery, Castlemaine Art Museum

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Catch and Release

RITA FELSKI

200 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2020

How does a novel entice or enlist us? How does a song surprise or seduce us? Why do we bristle when a friend belittles a book we love, or fall into a funk when a favored TV series comes to an end? What characterizes the aesthetic experiences of feeling captivated by works of art? In Hooked, Rita Felski challenges the ethos of critical aloofness that is a part of modern intellectuals’ self-image. The result is sure to be as widely read as Felski’s book, The Limits of Critique.

Wresting the language of affinity away from accusations of sticky sentiment and manipulative marketing, Felski argues that “being hooked” is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Hooked zeroes in on three attachment devices that connect audiences to works of art: identification, attunement, and interpretation. Drawing on examples from literature, film, music, and painting—from Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to Thelma and Louise—Felski brings the language of attachment into the academy. Hooked returns us to the fundamentals of aesthetic experience, showing that the social meanings of artworks are generated not just by critics, but also by the responses of captivated audiences. 

University of Chicago Press:
Literature and Literary Criticism:
General Criticism and Critical Theory

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Sign of the Void : on empty(ing) iconography

 
Instruments of the Passion (continued)

Sign of the the Cross
Sign of the Guillotine
Sign of the Electric Chair
Sign of the ...
Sign of the Sign
Sign of the Void :
In this sign, conquer/HA HA

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Theatre of the Artists of Raphael  

"In hoc signo vinces" (Classical Latin: [ɪn hoːk ˈsɪŋnoː ˈwɪŋkeːs], Ecclesiastical Latin: [in ok ˈsiɲo ˈvintʃes]) is a Latin phrase conventionally translated into English as "In this sign thou shalt conquer".

The Latin phrase itself renders, rather loosely, the Greek phrase "ἐν τούτῳ νίκα", transliterated as "en toútōi níka" (Ancient Greek: [en túːtɔːi̯ níːkaː], Modern Greek: [en ˈtuto ˈnika]), literally meaning "in this, conquer". 

- Wikipedia  

  

Jeremy Irons' character in 'Night Train to Lisbon' :
"If Jesus had been put to death with a guillotine, 

we would be praying in front of a big shiny blade. 

Or, if he'd been electrocuted, we'd be genuflecting 

in front of a chair."

 Andy Warhol, Electric chair (1967)     collection NGA, Canberra

Lenny Bruce is said to have earlier said :

'If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.'

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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 -  

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What did you do in the Sign Wars, daddy?

At an intersection +

Pootilla, Victoria, Australia  

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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

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 Francis Picabia, 1919, Danse de Saint-Guy
 The Little Review, Picabia number, Autumn 1922

FIAPCE 

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

Victory over the Sun 

Victory over the Sun (Russian: Победа над Cолнцем, Pobeda 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 Person, Traveller through All the Ages, Telephone Talker, The 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.

Wikipedia

...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.

Zaum and Sun: The 'first Futurist opera' revisited (Central Europe Review)

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.

- Early Twentieth Century Russian Drama

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

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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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