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Ricky Swallow
BORROWED SCULPTURES

Rocking Chair with Rope (Meditation Chair #1)

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

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HAND SPACE  

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Weavers of the Word, Untie!

slag off

Verb

slag off (third-person singular simple present slags off, present participle slagging off, simple past and past participle slagged off)

1. To talk insultingly to or about someone or something.
2. To purify by melting and removing slag. There is a lot of copper oxide, but I can remove that by melting everything and slagging it off. 

 After the launch of After Words at City Recital Hall, Paul Keating launched 
 (into) the Balmain basket weavers.

"The man who talked about the recession we had to have (and sent some fraction of the middle class to the wall) was hated and feared by one part of the Australian electorate and adored by another. Former Hawke government minister John Button once said you could track the stretch of Australian politics with Keating's one-liners. Remember the banana republic and the arse end of the universe?

Keating's tough charm carried him the longest distance with the constituency that adored him, the chatterati he described as "the basket weavers of Balmain". When he declared, "Mate, if you live in Australia and you don't live in Sydney, you're just camping out", we laughed at the sheer insolent wit of the man, however secure we thought we were in our Melbourne houses.

He was one of the greatest talkers in the history of Australian politics. Part of what gave him the right to put his signature on the reformist government that carried Australia into the harder but more profitable world of the open marketplace was that as treasurer and then prime minister he gave a new politics, a tough economically liberal one, all the vernacular charm of an old and familiar larrikinism. "He's got a front on him as big as Mark Foys," he'd say. Or, addressing the question of a politician's privacy, "Mate, we can't even shit in the ocean."

The correlative of that street fighter's charm (which could also be extraordinarily powerful in the negative mode) was that Keating knew how to ice the cake. He gave the basket weavers Mabo; he gave them, as no one else could, the dream of the republic.

He was, in any case, a man of the word more than a man of the book." ...

- extract from
Lyrical larrikinism from the mouth of Paul Keating
Peter Craven / The Australian
12 November 2011

Theatre of the Actors of Regard (Tamworth)  

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Barnaby Joyce - Leader of the Country Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia - likes to employ the Keating "basket weavers" terminoLOGOS/HA HA. 

He did so again yesterday during his doorstop at Parliament House in which he pitted the weaving reprehensibles against "those who want a job."

FIAPCE after Issa  

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model model

         

courtesy AAA_Art Archive Australia  

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The pace that stops a nation.

 
And will this be the face that stops a nation? 

Will it be a fairytale ending? We clipped this pic from the Sports pages some weeks ago. On the weekend, Jim Cassidy announced that after three and a half decades as a jockey he will retire at the conclusion of this Melbourne Cup carnival. 

This afternoon, the Melbourne Cup.
For a nation, the race that stops.

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QANTAS (Flesh)

Open Letter to Alan Joyce

CEO : Qantas Airways Limited

Dear Alan Joyce

One of our staff recently travelled with Qantas from Melbourne to Queensland and back.

Act 1. On the Friday afternoon 1.05 pm flight out of Melbourne, 
this was The Play as recorded by our staff member, who is also 
a member of Theatre of the Actors of Regard :

QANTAS staff : "Chicken Caesar wrap, sir."

bLOGOS/HA HA : "I'm vegetarian."

QANTAS staff : "I'm sorry sir, we don't provide specialist meals.  (pause)   Would you like some rice crackers?"

bLOGOS/HA HA : "No, thank you."

So, our staff member received no meal. Later, some passengers, including the person seated beside our staff member, accepted to receive a second CHICKEN CAESAR.

     

Act 2. On the Sunday morning 11.00 am flight out of Brisbane,
this was The Play as recorded by our staff member, who is also 
a member of Theatre of the Actors of Regard :
            
QANTAS staff : "Would you like a Moroccan Chicken Wrap or a Ham and Tomato?"

bLOGOS/HA HA : "Is there nothing for vegetarians?"

QANTAS staff : "I'll see if there is an apple down the back."

Act 3.  Much later, after no apple was brought, when your staff were clearing away the leftovers, our staff member challenged one of your staff about this miserable situation :
              
"It seems pretty weird, in Australia in the 21st century, that QANTAS does not provide for vegetarians as non-specialist passengers. That QANTAS assumes as its default ethical position that it's passengers will require animal blood sacrifice food? As if that is normal and unremarkable. That QANTAS treats the non-sacrificers as "specialist" and is quite happy/blind to not provide them with any food unless they cause a bother."

"Would it not be more fair and reasonable in Australia in the 21st century to offer everyone something in common? Something we can all eat, something vegetarian? And if QANTAS still wishes to support the animal sacrifice practices of some of its patrons, make death meals the "specialist" ones to be catered for."

Our staff member informed your staff member he would be writing to you about this and pushing it further. 

Your staff member was gracious, made certain explanations, and provided a card with a QANTAS customer comments url. 

Presumably, he also mentioned this conversation to the senior flight attendant who finally brought our traveller... an apple. 

     

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Climate Change?

       
We've been wondering for some years if the culture of Art collecting and the associated connoisseurship might be more-or-less at an end? Gone the way of tulips, antiques and vinyl records? Replaced by the immediacy, constant renewal and second-degree sufficiency of the digital projection-space?
     

      
Had we become so familiar with the appearance of Lazarus moving among us still - even after The Dematerialisation of the Art Object, after Art Is Dead, after post-Modernism, postmodernism et al - that we'd accepted the paradox of the old Art culture continuing nonetheless? With ever grander  temples; record setting blockbusters; million dollar starting bids; art schools still cool and Ph.D the new black, surely all was going well?

As, behind these scenes, galleries have been emptying and their impecunious artists speculating on when this drought might break? Wondering even, is this the new climate of a culture change?

badges from The Democratic Art Show (PT 1974) 

So we read with interest Lucinda Schmidt's double-page feature in today's Age (click here).

"Galleries : going, going gone?"
As the art industry is reshaped by the internet, fairs and tighter rules for collectors, are Melbourne's commercial galleries becoming an endangered species?

quote :

In London, top-end galleries in Mayfair's Bond Street are closing at an ''alarming rate'', according to a March report in The Telegraph. Rents have tripled amid competition for space from global retail brands, forcing out dealers such as Colnaghi, which shut its West End shop recently after 250 years.

San Francisco's downtown gallery district has also been hit hard by rising rents. One displaced gallerist, moving his business to his home after 22 years, told the San Francisco Chronicle his peers in Chicago and Los Angeles were doing the same.

''Ten years from now, traditional galleries will be a thing of the past,'' he said. ''The auction houses and art fairs will have taken over - and the internet.''

quote :

Traditionally, a gallery represents and supports a stable of artists, mounting exhibitions of their work and bringing them to the attention of collectors, public institutions and corporate clients. So tough times for commercial art galleries mean tough times for contemporary artists.

This is spelt out in figures Lowenstein has compiled from a survey of about 100 of his artist clients, comparing their 2008 and 2012 incomes. The total income for Lowenstein's top group, comprising well-established and successful artists, dropped 46 per cent, while the second group of mid-career artists earned 30 per cent less. It was only the third group, comprising young emerging artists, that earned more in 2012.

Honoré Daumier, Two Print-lovers c. 1860–63

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In Search of Lost Time

Anyone who remembers...
       

            
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Passion Play

     
My name is Emma Plane (b. 7 October 1906).



This is me with three of my friends, we of the Rood Frame Players, seen here in a recent still life tableau vivant :
    

Instruments of the Passion 

presents 

Plane To See

collection: Theatre of the Actors of Regard    

   

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Early readymades traced to Australia

It is now thought that Marcel Duchamp's two most famous readymades, the originals of which went missing shortly after they were made, found their way to Australia.

The first of these is Bicycle Wheel.

Bicycle Wheel is a readymade by Marcel Duchamp consisting of a bicycle fork with front wheel mounted upside-down on a wooden stool.

In 1913 at his Paris studio he mounted the bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Later he denied that its creation was purposeful, though it has come to be known as the first of his readymades. "I enjoyed looking at it," he said. "Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace." It was not until he began making readymades a few years later in New York that he decided Bicycle Wheel was a readymade.

The original from 1913 was lost, and Duchamp recreated the sculpture in 1951. Bicycle Wheel is said to be the first kinetic sculpture.

^{- wikipedia}

The second is Fountain.

Fountain is a 1917 work widely attributed to Marcel Duchamp. The scandalous work was a porcelain urinal, which was signed "R.Mutt" and titled Fountain. Submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee. Fountain was displayed and photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in The Blind Man, but the original has been lost. The work is regarded by some art historians and theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger, as a major landmark in 20th century art. Replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s are now on display in a number of different museums.

Shortly after its initial exhibition, Fountain was lost. According to Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins, the best guess is that it was thrown out as rubbish by Stieglitz, a common fate of Duchamp's early readymades.

- wikipedia

Following a lead...

   

 The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954) Friday 6 March 1925 p 6 Article

... QUARTER SESSIONS. No. 1 Court.-Thomas Bath (part-heard). No. 2 Court.-Henry Davis, breaking, entering, and stealing; Raymond Alfred Summerhayes and Spencer Cornford, steal a motor cycle

...researchers from FIAPCE identified, in the archives of the Sydney Central Police, a 1924 photograph of the cycle thief Spencer Cornford behind whom the Bicycle Wheel (1913) and the Fountain (1917) can both be clearly seen.

     

Cornford served as a mechanic with the AIF in France during the Great War. Demobbed in Paris in 1918, he sailed from there to New York, serving his passage as a member of the crew. Having somehow 'souvenired' the famous artist's chair wheel in Paris, he then chanced upon the scandal of the second object when in New York. 

Spencer Cornford traced the urinal to the studio of the photographer Stieglitz and from there added it to his wartime travel collection - something queer to show his mates back home : "Over there, they call this art."

The whereabouts of these two objects is now, again, unknown.

       

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Venice Biennale 2013 : The Encyclopedic Palace

Following on from yesterday's post, "...about the ways some one might order a heap of Art and non-Art things", we note the theme of this year's Venice Biennale : The Encyclopedic Palace.

From a New York Times article :
         

“The Encyclopedic Palace” is the theme. It is taken from the title of a symbol of 1950s-era Futurism - an 11-foot-tall architectural model of a 136-story cylindrical skyscraper that was intended to house all the knowledge in the world. Its creator, the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti, dreamed it would be built on the National Mall in Washington. The model now belongs to the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, which is lending it to the Biennale. “It best reflects the giant scope of this international exhibition,” Mr. Gioni said, “the impossibility of capturing the sheer enormity of the art world today.”

              

courtesy : Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

Within the matrix of interconnectedness : curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, Massimiliano Gioni looks at Marino Auriti's 1950s model of The Encyclopedic Palace.

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Paolo Baratta, the longtime president of the Biennale, said that “after 14 years of having traditional curators I thought it was time to ask a man of the next generation.

“At a time when contemporary art is flooding the world,” he added, “it seemed to make more sense to present a show that doesn’t just include a list of artists from the present but rather looks at today’s art through the eyes of history.”

 
        

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Chinese New Year and Tibetan New Year 2013

     
                                       O

                               One mOOn 

                        Of

                China and Tibet

         fOr bOth Of whOm 

  The Year Of the Snake begins tOday

      

 SOZAN Genkyo
 1799-1868
 Kanzan and Jittoku Pointing t0 the M00n
      
      

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And ...
       

        

fOr thOse Of a meta-mind

        

              

fOr thOse with a view Of inter-dependence

                  

fOr thOse whO incline alsO tO the causes
         

         

nOw is the mOment Of Our OurObOrOs

      

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