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.


Showing posts with label The Actor of Looking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Actor of Looking. Show all posts

06 August 2023

TAR : Taking After Redon


The exhibition 'Photography and the Performative' at Sydney University's Chau Chak Wing Museum, displays a work by Imants Tillers, If I close my eyes. His instagram website describes it thus :

Curated by Katrina Liberiou, the show explores the intersection between photography and performance.

Imants Tillers
If I close my eyes (2021)
189 Polaroids 1980–1982, nos. 112966–113161
10.7 x 8.9 cm (each); 75 x 239 cm (overall)
University of Sydney Art Collection

This conceptual work comprises 189 Polaroids made between 1980 and 1982. Tillers carried a camera with him during his daily life and documented those he encountered, asking his sitters to close their eyes. Interspersed with these portraits are landscape scenes depicting the view from his flat overlooking Sirius Cove.”
click image to enlarge  

‘Taking After Redon’ re-imagines ‘If I close my eyes’ with the views of Sirius Cove replaced by views of Odilon Redon’s ‘Les yeux clos’ (Closed Eyes) c.1890.

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

14 February 2023

The Look of Love, on this very special day...

click image to enlarge 
Teatro dell'Amore e della Rivelazione 
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something...
  
 LOGOS/HA HA
       
     
       

30 December 2021

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.



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


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

Theatre of Actions for Rights  
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
  
LOGOS/HA HA
  
     
   

19 December 2021

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday


Today is Sunday. 
Three Sundays ago in New York, members of the Broadway theatre community gathered in tribute to Stephen Sondheim.
Together they sang 'Sunday' from 'Sunday in the Park with George.'

ALL
Sunday,
By the blue, 
Purple, yellow, red water
On the green, 
Purple, yellow, red grass
Let us pass
Through our perfect park,
Pausing on a Sunday
By the cool, 
Blue, triangular water
On the soft, 
Green, elliptical grass
As we pass 
Through arrangements of shadows
Towards the verticals of trees
Forever ...

By the blue
Purple, yellow, red water
On the green
Orange violet mass
Of the grass
In our perfect park,
Made of flecks of light
And dark,
And parasols ...

GEORGE
(Hums as he works)
Bumbum bum bumbumbum
Bumbum bum ...


ALL
People strolling through the trees
Of a small suburban park
On an island in the river
On an ordinary Sunday
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday



Below, Lin-Manuel Miranda reads from 'Look, I made a hat : Collected Lyrics (1981-2011)'.

"This is the only lyric I've written that consists of one long incomplete sentence. I wanted it to be like the descriptive caption you might read in a museum next to the painting."


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

     

10 April 2019

55 PHASES OF LOOKING


Long Play is a boutique Cinema & Bar
in Melbourne that has a bar up the front,
and a small dedicated cinema at the back

INFO FOR ALL SCREENINGS

As seats are limited, please book by emailing 
Bill Mousoulis at bill@innersense.com.au
The venue is at 318 St. Georges Rd, Nth. Fitzroy. 
Do not go to St. Georges Rd, Northcote.
All sessions start at 7:30 pm. If booked out, 
there may
be (no guarantee) another session at 9:30 pm.
There is a small entry charge of $5 per person. 
Cash only, and try to have the right amount on you.

Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema is a series of semi-regular screenings curated and presented by Chris Luscri & Bill Mousoulis, featuring the best of Australian indie cinema, both new and old, narrative and non-narrative, with discussions with most of the filmmakers, presented at Long Play Cinema. 

read more

--------------

Thursday, April 11, 2019, 7:30 p.m.
$5 entry. To book a seat, email bill@innersense.com.au

55 PHASES OF LOOKING
(2018, 53 mins, James Clayden)

Intro & Q&A with James Clayden

Recently, James Clayden has been experimenting with web-based video forms, consciously refining his practice through a unique methodology that makes extensive use of prior film and video works. The culmination of this is 55 PHASES OF LOOKING– comprised of re-filmed and digitally altered fragments (some originally shot on Super 8) from almost a half-century of film-making, “chopped and screwed” to profoundly personal effect, tremulous with anxiety and deep melancholy. 

(Chris Luscri)

Apart from 
55 PHASES OF LOOKING, the short film GLASLOUGH 64 (2018, 3 mins) will also screen.

The project began about eight years ago with the working title LOOKING FOR CÉZANNE (Perception & Illusion). After shooting material in France, I thought I knew what I was doing but I struggled to find my way to put it together.

Then by chance, I read a book – THE ENTANGLED EYE by James Krasner – which inspired me to abandon my original idea, out of which came 55 PHASES OF LOOKING. My approach was to treat the everyday things that took my fancy in the same manner that I treated my dreams and memories in my previous works, more or less like an improvisational visual essay, with Darwin’s “entangled bank” in the back of my mind, as if making improvised music, where the way it feels is everything.

The idea of making the piece for a small screen appealed to me a lot, as it does to have no protagonist or victim nor obvious narrative, as in painting the mystery is an essential thing.

-- James Clayden

This presentation of 55 PHASES OF LOOKING is something of an experiment – borne of curiosity but innately animated by something more mysterious. A way of testing the limits, both audience and artist? Of parsing over, imbibing, 'turning' the object, glint by glint against the light? Of plumbing hidden depths, of image blown all out of proportion? All of these things, for sure – but this list is not exhaustive. No other Australian artist works with texture quite like James, so definitive and violent are his interventions. To suggest a canonical presentation gestures toward an inert deadness, a sense of composure and containment that I suspect James would instinctively react against: tools in hand dissolved, awash in the interstitial sensations that arise from the practice of looking, perceiving and reacting. For all the dizzying and rhizomatic formal complexities at play, the motivation is as simple as this – an Impressionism borne of deep personal truths (as in the inaugurably canonical GHOST PAINTINGS series) and passionate devotion to his vocation, complete with its own iconography of wonders, terrors and trancendents. James Clayden is an extraordinary human being.

-- Chris Luscri (curator)



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


  

19 October 2017

quinterossential viewing


The winner of the 2017 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize of $150,000 was announced yesterday.

Terms and Conditions (2017) 
1. The artist and sitter must be Australian citizens or residents for at least one year prior to 30 August, 2017. 
2. The portrait must be: 
• an original work, painted and owned by the submitting artist; 
• a recognisable likeness of the sitter; 
• painted at least partly from life with the sitter known to the artist and aware of the artist’s intention to enter the 2017 DMNPP 
• completed within 12 months before the Moran Prize’s 2017 closing date; 
• painted in oils, acrylics, watercolours, egg tempera or mixed media; 
• on a suitably prepared surface; 
• essentially two dimensional; 
• a maximum size of width 2 metres by height 2.5 metres, including frame, and a maximum weight of 50 kilograms. 
3. The Prize is acquisitive and the winning portrait immediately becomes the property of the Moran Arts Foundation and part of the Moran Arts Foundation Collection. 

1,130+ artists entered this year's competition
thirty made the semi-final cut
for judgement

.   .   .   .        

We were keen to regard the new work by the young, gifted and Samuel Quinteros.

This is his 2012 Quinteros kabuki sTAR.


 Samuel Quinteros, 働きがいの怒りで2012,
 oil on canvas, 120 x 80 cm


...then, being, off stage, in the mise-en-sne...


 Samuel Quinteros, Laughing, vanishing: A wound in the side
 2016, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 61 cm


Now, for the Moran, from the stage to the tea room, a return of persona, calmer, contemplative, colour subdued, rhetorically reflective...

"Draw all day, all night" : the stages ...

 Underdrawing for self-portrait in ink... here

 Self portrait with tea utensils (work in progress) / acrylic and 
 ink on canvas (base layers) "Song of Seven Cups" by Lú 
 Tóng: "The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second 
 cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren 
 entrail but to find therein some five thousand volumes of odd 
 ideographs. - The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration, all 
 the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth 
 cup I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of 
 immortals. The seventh cup ah, but I could take no more! 
 I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves. 
 Where is Horaisan? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and 
 waft away thither."  here


 Samuel Quinteros, Self-portrait with tea utensils, 2017
 acrylic & oil on canvas, 91.5 x 61 cm


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


    

02 February 2017

Pozible | Audience Book

    


Ross Coulter introduces the project 
The “Audience” book is derived from a series of photographs documenting an audience standing around an empty gallery, in which there is no art, watching a performance that doesn't exist.

By drawing on the visual language of 1970s performance art documentation images, I have constructed a photographic archive of an audience witnessing a number of performance events in art galleries around Melbourne. The series is a portrait of the audience and gallery spaces in and around Melbourne. And in 20 years time it will be important. Really important.




The series of photographs will be shown in March 2017 at the NGV as a part of the Photography Festival, (along side Brook Andrew, Zoe Croggon, Patrick Pound and other notable artists).

To coincide with the exhibition I have produced a much anticipated (ahem) book.


There have been over 850 people who have participated as audience members and the photographs have taken place in 95 gallery spaces.




How The Funds Will Be Used
The funds raised from this campaign will go towards the printing, binding and transportation of the "Audience" books.
   


The Challenges
Some initial funding was provided by the City of Melbourne, however the scope of the project has grown considerably since 2013. The more spaces I shot, the more galleries became involved in the project. It turns out that there are over 90 gallery spaces in and around Melbourne. As a result I have photographed over 850 people and made 446 analogue prints (please don't tell me there is another gallery opening up).

The project has subsequently grown and the publication now has extended to two volumes. Of course this blows out the initial budget; hence this Pozible campaign.


In Return
Project supporters can receive, in return for pledges from $10 to $1500, a variety of returns : from a set of postcards to the Audience Book to a day's fly fishing for two.

For the Pozible site and further pledge info click below 


AAA_Art Archive Australia   
 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something...

 LOGOS/HA HA 
    
   
   

12 October 2015

Spy v Spy


Further to the previous :
      
"Yes, this is he. To whom am I speaking, please?"


           
 Thanks to Tash of TAR for alerting us to the cover of 
 UNDERCOVERISM :
             


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

 LOGOS/HA HA 
         
     
         

10 June 2015

I AM THE LOO KING

         
Theoria Rex
                
] who with unblinking gaze (         
        

Theoria : the act of looking, the act of regard 

TAR :
Theatre of the Actors of Regard
           
Theoria Rex : The Loo King 

'I am the Loo King' : Anthem of the Loo King. Sung at the Court of TAR to the melody of Russell Morris's 'Real Thing' (1969).
Come and see the loo king, come and see the loo king, come and see
Come and see the loo king, come and see the loo king, come and see
There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing
Come and see the loo king, come and see the loo king, come and see
 
I am the loo king ! 
Oo mama mow-mow
Oo mama mow-mow
Oo mama mow-mow
Oo mama mow-mow
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something... 

          
LOGOS/HA HA
         
Oo mama mow-mow
Oo mama mow-mow
Oo mama mow-mow
Oo mama mow-mow
                  
             

02 May 2015

PRINTED MATTERS (Melbourne, NGV)


Melbourne Art Book Fair
1–3 May
National Gallery of Victoria _ International
180 St Kilda Road


1 Corraini Edizioni (Italy)
2 Hatje Cantz and Distanz Verlag (Germany) 
3 Books at Manic 
4 Focus on Japanese art book publishing presented by Tokyo Art Book Fair and HeHe (Japan) 
5 Printed Matter, Inc. (USA) 
6 City of Literature small press stand 
7 Deanna Hitti 8 Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison 
9 Assemble Papers 
10 MACK (UK) 
11 Idea Books (The Netherlands) 
12 Gagosian (USA) 
13 Uro Publications 
14 The Lytlewode Press 
15 Rainoff 
16 Independent New Zealand publishing presented by DD/MM/YY (New Zealand) 
17 Theo Strasser & Peter Lyssiotis 
18 The Good Copy 
19 Perimeter Books 
20 3-ply 
21 No One Special 
22 The Blackmail 
23 un Magazine 
24 Discipline 
25 Lyn Ashby 
26 Bus Projects 
27 Motto (Germany) 
28 World Food Books 
29 Happy Endin’ 
30 Bloom Publishing 
31 Heavytime Books 
32 Gertrude Contemporary 
33 Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) 
34 West Space 
35 Institute of Modern Art (IMA) (Brisbane) 
36 Surpllus 
37 Particle Books 38 Romantic Press (Japan) 
39 Ilam Press (New Zealand) 
40 Metasenta Books 
41 MONA (Hobart) 
42 Dott Publishing / Art & Australia 
43 Black Inc. / Schwartz City 
44 Thames & Hudson 
45 Momento Pro 
46 Bruno Leti 
47 Emblem Books / Omo Books (Sydney) 
48 Melbourne Books 
49 NGV Design store

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

LOGOS/HA HA
        
        
         

22 February 2015

LOGOS/HA HA or Who Speaks There?


The editorial WE thought we had more or less finished this run of Malevich-referencing posts, after yesterday's report that the great artist will run onto The Field for the Essendon Bombers in the 2015 pre-Season.

Then, today, we encounter this splendid photo...


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

 LOGOS/HA HA
 ]The Red Cardigan(
  
... and its problematic headline ...
   
Kasimir Malevich's 'Black Square': 

What does it say to you? 
   
... accompanying a July 2014 article by Michael Glover in The (UK) Independent. It begins :


The painting itself sits in a relatively darkened room at Tate Modern, where a major retrospective of the career of its creator, Kasimir Malevich from Kiev, opens today. Given that the painting is black from top to toe and hip to hip, and that it is often said to represent a pivotal moment in the history of abstraction and the art of the 20th century, this strikes the onlooker as an odd decision. Why not be given the opportunity to see it as clearly as possible? 
                    - read full article here
     
Given that (one meaning of) Logos is 
The Speaking into Being of the World,
and given therefore that this Logos includes
The Speaking into Being of... say, 
Kasimir Malevich's 'Black Square'

... we at bLOGOS/HA HA 
would, with instinctive reflex, recast that headline, 
and its conceptual confusion, as :

Kasimir Malevich's 'Black Square' : 

What do you say to it?


Not that you must say anything to it. As with any other projection-space, to be silent is an option.

Salvatore Rosa's 'Self-portrait' : 

What do you say to it?

Consider another artwork, a severe favourite of ours at the National Gallery, London : Salvatore Rosa's c.1645 self-portrait :

        

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  
Rosa plays hard eyeball with his Actors of Regard while his hands hold firm to the dictum board :
AUT TACE, AUT LOQUERE MELIORA SILENTIO (Do not speak unless your words are better than silence).



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

 LOGOS/HA HA