TAR : To Apprehend Relativity

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Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack : "I'm certain that we'll absolutely look at it."

We recently quoted Scott Stephens (ABC.RN) bewailing 

"...the hyperbolisation of language." He mentioned some examples that annoy him. 

Our pet hyperbolisation hate is the widespread use of 'Absolutely!' and 'Absolutely not!' when 'Yes' and 'No' would suffice. 

Are you concerned about polarisation? Absolutely! 

Are you concerned about extremism? Absolutely!

Are you concerned about the loss of the middle way?

Michael McCormack & Janine Hendry. 

ABC News: Luke Stephenson

So, yesterday, when we heard Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack's response to March4Justice co-organiser Janine Hendry's demand for him to act on the recommendations of the Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report ... Grrrrr!!

"I'm certain that we'll absolutely look at it."

"I'm certain that we'll absolutely look at it." 

"I'm certain that we will absolutely look at it." 

"I'm certain that we'll absolutely look at it." 

"I'm certain that we'll absolutely look at it." 

Regulars to this blog will know that we 'look at' look at ... a lot.

  
That's about appreciating the visual arts. Our visual arts. The act of looking. The art of looking. It's about seeing, perceiving, conceiving the world into being. About vision and having a vision; our world view and our consequent views. Image, appearance, illusion, all examined. Being conscious, self-aware and empathetic. Having insight and regard for others.

It's not to provide some sincerity-gutted "we'll absolutely look at it" excuse for ignorance and inaction.

That bloke needs to take a good hard look at himself. 

 

- Ed.

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Community Circle

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Hepburn Community meeting in Daylesford Town Hall on Tuesday evening to discuss draft changes to Hepburn Shire's 

Local Laws. TAR representative PT speaking : see text below

Regarding

Local Law 5.3

Dangerous and Unsightly Land

I propose that the word “unsightly” be removed from Local Law 5.3 and that it NOT be used in any draft or future Local Law.

Currently, Local Law 5.3 is as follows :

The owner or occupier of premises must not allow the premises to be unsighty. 

In this clause, "unsightly" means any land on which :

(1) Unused excavation material or general household waste is present and in view.          

(2) Any other thing that has substantial adverse visual amenity impact to the general public in context with the surrounding area.

Draft Local Law 4.3.1 is proposed to replace Local Law 5.3 and is as follows :

The owner or occupier of land must not cause or allow that land:

(a) to be unsightly; or

(b) to be kept in a manner which is dangerous.

NOTE: For the purposes of this clause, the term unsightly means land which contains:

(a)  unconstrained rubbish such as paper, cardboard, plastic bags, styrene, house hold rubbish, second hand containers;

(b) second hand timber or second-hand building material;

(c) discarded, rejected, surplus or abandoned solid or liquid materials; 

(d) graffiti;

*that hoary old chestnut

80 PUNKS IN THIS VILLAGE AND A FEW HIPPIES

Bakers Delight OPEN 7 DAYS

Unofficial 'community' mural and bakery signage on wall of Daylesford supermarket car park

HEPBURN DEMOCRATIC CLUB scrolled on street-frontage wall of the old Macaroni Factory at Hepburn Springs.
(Why don't you all f-fade away - 'My Generation', The Who)

(e) anything being built which is left incomplete and constitutes a detriment to the appearance of the surrounding area

THE T-REX : a long-stalled Shire project in central Daylesford

(f) any other thing making the land visually repugnant; or

(g) detrimental to the general amenity to the area but excludes an enclosed building or structure on the land which complies with regulations made under the Building Act 1993 or the Planning and Environment Act 1987.

.  .  .  .

It’s a truism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

So too is ugliness in the eye of the beholder.

So also, to quote the draft law, unsightliness, visual repugnance and detriment to appearance.

Is it really thought wise that the Shire should legislate all subjective appearance?

Others have long advised otherwise.

This is Matthew, chapter 18 (KJV) :

"Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!

...if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire."

And this is 8th century Shantideva :

"Where would there be leather enough to cover the entire world? With just the leather of my sandals, it is as if the whole world were covered. Likewise, I am unable to restrain external phenomena, but I shall restrain my own mind. What need is there to restrain anything else?"

Accordingly, I move that the term “unsightly” be removed from all Local Laws, to be substituted with the term “sight-seeing”. And that “sight-seeing” be represented NOT as the touristic seeing of this or that sightly place or unsightly object; rather that the term “sight-seeing” be offered to all, residents and visitors alike, as an invitation to look within and without. To visit the make-do construction sites our own individual acts of seeing the world into being : to witness in wonder the well-spring of our streaming projections of ‘sightliness’ and ‘unsightliness’.

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regarding : Portraiture

There are four photo portraits by David Roberts 
in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. 
Three of these can be seen at the NPG website, 
the fourth is represented there thus :

screenshot today      

 
And below is the given text :

George Pell AC
b. 1941

George Pell AC (b. 1941) has been Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney since 2001. At Catholic college in Ballarat he was a good footballer, but he felt called to the priesthood and began studies at Corpus Christi in 1960. After further study in Rome, he was ordained in 1966. He received his PhD in church history from Oxford in 1971. Through the 1970s and early 1980s he served in various dioceses in Victoria, adding a master's degree in education to his qualifications. Appointed auxiliary bishop of Melbourne in 1987, he became that city's seventh Catholic archbishop in 1996; in 2001 he moved to take on the role of eighth Archbishop of Sydney. He was created a cardinal in 2003 and was one of the electors of the 2005 papal conclave that selected Pope Benedict XVI. Generally characterised as a conservative as a consequence of his views on the ordination of women, the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDs, the celibacy of clergymen, divorce and climate change, Pell has written widely in religious and secular magazines, learned journals and newspapers in Australia and overseas and regularly speaks on television and radio. In late 2018 Cardinal Pell was convicted of child sex charges, the crimes having been perpetrated when he was the archbishop of Melbourne in 1996.

Updated 2019

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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. 

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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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Leader of the Opposition (continued)

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 Pavel Pepperstein, Untitled 
 (Oh, here is this fucking yellow triangle again!) 

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Wisdom in the Age of Rage

  

At the centre of Tibetan Buddhism's Wheel of Life diagram, a snake a pig and a rooster hold to each other. They represent ignorance, anger and desire attachment as the causes at the core of our unsettled suffering.

    

click image to see full Wheel of Life diagram    

1. Anger is of most concern among the afflictive emotions. In all the writing and discussion read and heard by this correspondent, in the analysis the diagnosis and the seeking for a way beyond these Trump-focussed troubles, there has been no questioning of the appropriateness of anger in the mix. We regard this as blinkered and unwise.

Righteous anger is typically a reactive emotion of anger over mistreatment, insult, or malice. It is akin to what is called the sense of injustice. 

Righteous indignation - Wikipedia

book by Panjak Mishra, first published 25 January 2017  

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump  Jan 15
For many years our country has been divided, angry and untrusting. Many say it will never change, the hatred is too deep. IT WILL CHANGE!!!!

It /we will not change if not attended to at the root.

2. Ignorance in this schema is further described as ignorance of the true nature of reality. Without here going into a presentation of that view, how is the present climate of our knowledge of the true nature of reality? ...in this so-called "post-truth" (Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year) age? 

Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge (γνῶσις, gnôsis, f.). It is often used for personal knowledge compared with intellectual knowledge (εἶδειν eídein), as with the French connaitre compared with savoir, or the German kennen rather than wissen.    Latin dropped the initial g (which was preserved in Greek) so gno- becomes no- as in noscō meaning "I know", noscentia meaning "knowledge" and notus meaning "known". The g remains in the Latin co-gni-tio meaning "knowledge" and i-gno-tus and i-gna-rus meaning "unknown" and from which comes the word i-gno-rant, and a-gno-stic which means "not knowing" and once again this reflects the Sanskrit jna which means "to know", "to perceive" or "to understand". 

Gnosis - Wikipedia

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. 

Post-truth politics - Wikipedia

Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.
       The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor and Linguist Iain Boal, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. Its name derives from the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, "not knowing" (cf. Attic Greek ἄγνωτος "unknown"), and -λογία, -logia. 

More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before. David Dunning is another academic who studies the spread of ignorance. "Dunning warns that the internet is helping propagate ignorance – it is a place where everyone has a chance to be their own expert, he says, which makes them prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately spread ignorance". 

Agnotology - Wikipedia

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump  Jan 13

Totally made up facts by sleazebag political operatives, both Democrats and Republicans - FAKE NEWS! Russia says nothing exists. Probably..
released by "Intelligence" even knowing there is no proof, and never will be. My people will have a full report on hacking within 90 days!

Jesus : "The truth shall set you free" 

Pilate : "What is truth?"

Trump : "I am your voice"

3. Desire attachment fuels the American Dream and all such dream machines. Every generation of snake oil salesmen sells anew Fear of Loss and the Prospect of Redemption : Paradise Lost and Make America Great Again. We the people : angry, ignorant and would-be/dispossessed project to reflect to elect to follow to reject again the next available suitably framed mirror...



 from 2014 exhibition 'Debris of the Future' by Pavel Pepperstein

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Postscript : 9 February 2017, in today's New York Review of Books, The Age of Total Lies by Vesna Pešić and Charles Simic. And, via that, the March 2012 article Age of Ignorance by Charles Simic.


     

careful wot u mask 4 OK!

'Trump Mask' by Christophe Coppens, from his May 2016 exhibition '50 Masks: Made in America':
         

       

Yesterday, Donald Trump was sworn-in as the 45th President of the United States.
     

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Society Notes

     

Scene about : well-heeled

AAA_Art ArchiveAustralia 

Successful : and well-shod, a who's-who of Melb TAR last night attended the annual end-of-year charity benefit : a performance of the traditional "Sekiri Daruma" (The One-Shoe Bodhidharma).

              

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Ikkyu and the TARget

       
Ikkyu (1394 - 1481)

The poem :

Rinzai’s descendants do not know Zen.
In front of Crazy Cloud, who dares to explain Zen?
For thirty years, on my shoulders I have carried
The weight of Shogen’s Red Thread Zen.
                     
The accompanying calligraphy :

I am teaching you the gateway to essential Zen. 

Zen is endlessly discussed with empty phrases and 
pretentious words; 

all that effort goes on and on missing the mark…

Former Abbot of Murasakino Daitoku Zen Temple, 

Jun Ikkyu, world’s number one venerable priest.

from Zen Art Experience

          

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TAR-presents-STOP-MOTION-mini-cine-or-It's-not-HOW-LONG-is-a-piece-of-string?-JUST-THAT-IT-IS-A-LENGTH-OF-STRING-OK!-1974-Two-persons-regard-a-suspended-projection-space-x-meta-view-person(s)-all-as-perpetual-motion-empty-tempty-teasy-NESS-

     

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