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Theatre of the Actors of Reading  

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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

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Le Product Placement

Earlier today we were savouring this c.1890s French chromolithograph card.

FIAPCE  

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  A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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A few hours later we read the following article.

Non, Merci! French Artists and Cultural Workers Reject Giant Jeff Koons Sculpture
In an open letter, 24 artists, curators, politicians, and more called for the costly and logistically complex project to be scrapped.
by Benjamin Sutton


Jeff Koons, “Bouquet of Tulips” (2016), polychromed bronze, stainless steel, and aluminum; sculpture dimensions: 34 ft 1 1/2 in, (38 ft 3 in with base); width: 27 ft 3/4 in; depth: 33 ft 4 3/8 in (image © Jeff Koons, courtesy Noirmontartproduction, 3D rendering of the work in situ)

HAND SPACE  

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HAND SPACE and the Red Regard

R E D ] L A B E L ( G U A R D

This week marks fifty years since the beginning of Mao's disastrous Cultural Revolution.

Support the Great Cultural Revolution's

standard bearer, study and pay respects

to Comrade Jiang Qing!!

 Mao's last wife Jiang Qing (see: Gang of Four) with Mao's Little
 Red Book. Cultural Revolution era propaganda poster.

 Members of Theatre of the Actors of the Red Guard perform 

 'Let Us Raise the Red Rectangle : from Abstraction to Praxis'

 

AAA_Art Archive Australia  

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HAND SPACE presents

R E D ] L A B E L ( R E G A R D

AAA_Art Archive Australia  

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HAND SPACE

   
We've been intending for some time to include 
HAND SPACE among the other syndications here. 

The HAND SPACE manifesto dates from 1981-
       

courtesy AAA_Art Archive Australia  

          

HAND SPACE  

        

HAND SPACE is an exhibition space, founded in the spirit of the barefoot doctor service.
           
HAND SPACE is a human architecture, functioning as a passage for the display, employment and flow (exchange) of contemporary "objecture".

             
HAND SPACE exhibits/exhibitions are available at all times to the energies of analysis and criticism.
           
HAND SPACE is intended as a simple, shared tool, at once illustrating and questioning the forces and relation-ships that support and, maintain our daily living.

       

HAND SPACE  

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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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One for all the posties

Monday. For many it's the first day back at work after Christmas and New Year.

We check the mail box : fourteen envelopes, happily none are bills.

It's a pleasing sight and prospect. A good number, for sure, but far from the one-day record. That goes to QLD artist friend Bob, a regular correspondent for around 35 years. 49 on one day is his record. There's no photo of that, but here's one of 33 on another day. 
      

            
Back to today's 14 envelopes. One large one has a hand drawn Official Stamp and no sender's name.

         
What a ripper! It's from Nick the Postie : a self portrait with his Australia Post motorbike helmet, leaving behind a dog and diving Spring magpie.

click image to enlarge     

We do appreciate our posties, their pre-dawn starts, their trials by weather, their responsibility and good care. (Some months ago, Jeff told me that Nick had told him that for two consecutive days he had no mail to deliver here. Jeff said, they had even considered sending some themselves. Fortunately, on the third day the drought brought and the mail came through again. Top spirit, that!)

Since we've mentioned Jeff, here's his 2014 Christmas stencil card. Another beaut.
        


The card that Nick refers to on his portrait was this one, below, showing a French country-postie on his saddle-packed velo approaching the challenge of a farmhouse dog.

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Nick the Postie and Greg the Postie, who also dropped-in a drawing just before Christmas...

         

    

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... delivered the 25 Christmas cards (and others since - thank you) now hanging on our office wall. 
          

In tribute to all posties post-Hermes and Mercury, who have stamped sorted and delivered the extra-ordinary volume and variety of correspondence between peoples, we have strung this year's cards across a made-in-China oil-on-canvas re-imaging (it too, sent and received through the mail) of an 1888 Vincent van Gogh portrait of his friend and final postman, Joseph Roulin.

Van Gogh and Joseph Roulin met and became good friends and drinking companions. Van Gogh compared Roulin to Socrates on many occasions; while Roulin was not the most attractive man, van Gogh found him to be "such a good soul and so wise and so full of feeling and so trustful." Strictly by appearance, Roulin reminded van Gogh of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky - the same broad forehead, broad nose, and shape of the beard. Roulin saw van Gogh through the good and the most difficult times, corresponding with his brother, Theo following his rift with Gauguin and being at his side during and following the hospital stay in Arles.

- wikipedia ( here )
        
Below, peering through the very apt cards of inter-mediacy by Christian and Tash, postman Roulin returns our recognition.

 

    
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Gough

Being 21, in Australia in 1972...

Remembering still the zeitgeist thrill of hearing for the first time Gough Whitlam address the nation : not under the old imperial hierarchical ranking of "Your Majesty, Your Excellencies, Your Eminence, Your Honours, distinguished guests and so on down the ranks to ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" but by that most simple egalitarian greeting : "Men and women of Australia". To which there was a mighty cheer.

Others will list the great vision and the many reforms of Whitlam and the Labor Party in that brief turbulent period. In coming days we will provide links to some of these.

Usually this blog focuses on aspects of the Arts, so we'll stick with that today. Gough's involvement in this area was as significant as it was in so many others. To his cost, he supported encouraged and actively advocated on behalf of James Mollison's proposal to purchase Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles for the collection of the (then) Australian National Gallery.

We still have our souvenir front page of the Melbourne Herald, the first they ever printed in colour, with the headline editorial addressed to each one us : Would you pay $1.3m. for this? 

 
The reactionary and yobbo media reckoned that Australians would think it stunk. Comedian Paul Hogan...
       

       
Our observation was that people were more open and interested than that.
     

FIAPCE 

Anyway, the public goading only encouraged Gough who responded with a Blues Poles Christmas Card for the comrades.
            
 
     
Being 22, in Australia in 1973...

Your correspondent gave two weeks notice at the old Abbotsford CUB brewery - where his job title was Beer Passer, true - on the day he received the news of a small grant in the first of Gough's new Australia Council Arts Grants. Enough to live for a while as an artist. Thanks Gough, for all you provided to so many. Vale.

On twitter from the National Gallery of Australia :
"Gough Whitlam will be remembered as a visionary of the arts in Australia", Allan Myers AO QC, Chairman, NGA Council
             

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The Week In Review

Hell writ large and small. Suffering and stupidity. More warnings. Acts of compassion and of great kindness too. Business as usual (see: plutocracy, plutonomy).

As we write this, on the radio Robyn Williams, not Robin Williams the comedic mind-mouth genius who took his life this week, but Robyn Williams the longtime presenter of the Science Show is inter-viewing Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, about her novel co-written with Erik M Conway.
          
The Collapse of Western Civilization : 
A View from the Future
     
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Yet another wake-up call! 

Their previous book was Merchants of Doubt : 
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. 

Hence, the front page of this morning's 'Saturday Paper' (here) has the striking headline : 

Abbott's piss and wind power on renewable energy

       
Image of the Week :  "That's my boy!"
A photo posted on social media by the convicted Sydney terrorist Khaled Sharrouf, now abroad with his family and fighting as part of ISIS, shows his seven year old son holding up the severed head of a Syrian soldier. (SMH article here)

Lost for words : Responding to this, President Obama adds the word barbarian to terrorist : "these barbarian terrorists".

What's in a word? Bomber, for instance. One thing (a great reminder of 'The Two Truths') about being a supporter of the Bombers, about publicly wearing a scarf emblazoned BOMBERS, especially on the streets of Melbourne, is that most people hereabouts see such a BOMBERS scarf and think only of sport, of Australian Rules Football, of the Essendon Football Club, The Bombers. Usually, when your correspondent points out this semantic curiosity to others, that The Bombers have nothing (sic) to do with the War On Terror, they say: "Oh yeah. I never thought of that". 

Team Australia : After our Bombers Seek Justice post of 11 August, the stats showed a series of visits to this post from Canberra :
      
and 
                 
If we have nothing to fear but fear itself we have nothing to hide, right? Who is metadata, what is she, that all her swains defend her? 

Another warning : At the start, we mentioned plutocracy (think Clive Palmer, Rupert Murdoch...)
From Ancient Greek πλουτοκρατία (ploutokratía, “rule of the wealthy”),
from πλουτοκρατέω (ploutokratéō, “I rule through wealth”),
from πλοῦτος (ploûtos, “wealth”) + κρατέω (kratéō, “I rule”)
(from κράτος (krátos, “power”, “might”)
         
...and plutonomy :
Blend of plutocracy and economy,
from Ancient Greek roots πλοῦτος (ploûtos, “wealth”)
+ νόμος (nómos, “law”) (English -nomy). 

During this week, in which the Australian banks announced their latest billion dollar record profits,  SBS.TV re-screened Michael Moore's 'Capitalism, a love story' and ABC Lateline showed an interview with 'venture capitalist' Nick Hanauer in which he, too, warns (video and transcript here) of a revolution against the US plutonomy.

Still on this, the nation was shown a further glimpse of the mind-set of the Australian Federal Treasurer, cigar smokin' millionaire Joe Hockey. Even Abbott & Co backed away from this one, such was the odour. Hockey's view of the poor delivered him his own professional-political death sentence:

Quote of the Week : already paraphrased as 'Poor people don't drive cars'.

"I don’t think that a cursory look at the Budget is enough for people to understand what we’re really getting at. You have to look at the detail of what people actually receive now, and people are receiving tens of thousands of dollars in payments from other Australians. What we’re asking is for everyone to contribute, including higher income people. Now, I’ll give you one example: the change to fuel excise, the people that actually pay the most are higher income people, with an increase in fuel excise and yet, the Labor Party and the Greens are opposing it. They say you’ve got to have wealthier people or middle-income people pay more. Well, change to the fuel excise does exactly that; the poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases. But, they are opposing what is meant to be, according to the Treasury, a progressive tax."

- Full transcript here

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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

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Out of the blue, early-1980s memories of the founder-editor of Art & Text, Paul Taylor delivering copies of that journal to Melbourne bookshops in his red MG.
     
Below, as observed by TAR
             leaving Melb Art Fair
                           a Hockey-ite with fat cigar

                                          en route to Oz Saloon car   
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 courtesy : The Debt Collection   

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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

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T.G.T.T.

T.G.T.T. by Duke Ellington must surely be both our favorite Title and meta-Title-with-twist : 
Too Good To Title

T.G.T.T. is track 10 on Ellington's Second Sacred Concert album, 1968. Wordless, sung by Alice Babs. An echo of the ineffable, the nameless, the un-namable, perhaps. 
As in NNFA, No Name For Art, for _rt. 
As in NNFG, No Name For God, for G_d, 
YHWH
T.G.T.T.

The final track of Second Sacred Concert is Titled : 'Praise God And Dance'.

Praise ___ and Dance fits well with this chromo
-lithograph (1880-1900) that we've recently had on show in the office here.
        

       
Our staff artist - who was at Festival Hall, Melbourne in January 1970 when Duke Ellington and his all-star orchestra played at that famous barn - has now re-presented the joyful scene above as 'The Piper of Bonzaview with projection-space ideogram dancers'.

En mesure, mesdemoiselles!

click image to enlarge     

And did our artist know about the 2003 compilation Duke Ellington - Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band 1940-1942 when colouring the 'Label Music' notation yellow, red and blue? We asked. Apparently not.
     


With its three CD discs of yellow, red and blue?  No, apparently not.



Label Music
        

click image to enlarge   

T.G.T.L.


      
_uc_   _rt,  Let's Dance!