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 time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts

18 February 2018

Rage, rage, rage




On Rage last night, 
Billy and Zach of Hockey Dad included in their beaut selection Ariel Pink's 
'Dayzed Inn Daydreams'. It's a favourite here, too. 



Clip follows atypical senior citizen through life in Los Angeles

Ariel Pink has always obsessed over the afterlife of Seventies rock, beginning his career with a handful of home-recorded LPs that sounded like lo-fi transmissions arriving 30 years behind schedule. In the video for his new "Dayzed Inn Daydreams," the singer attempts visualizes this effect: Over the clip's five-and-a-half minutes, he shows an aging musician – part glam and part punk – ride the bus, shoot pool, visit a nursing home and perform onstage. At the end, the character hands a cigarette to and briefly chats with a girl named Angel.

Director Grant Singer went as far as to cast an actual aging musician – the former frontman of the L.A. band the Mau-Mau's – for the part. "The video is the story of a man, played by Rick Wilder, who was once the frontman of a band that existed decades ago," the photographer and filmmaker tells Rolling Stone. "Through a series of scenes depicting his everyday life, we tell his story."
 
- Nick Murray/Rolling Stone, January 26, 2015


Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


- Dylan Thomas


Theatre of the Actors of Regard 
Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to as The Night Watch (De Nachtwacht), is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. It is prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum as the best known painting in its collection. 

Overnight, as the Rage Watch slept, Matrix Mitch sent from Rotterdam this poem by Seamus Heaney, from his 1991 volume 'Seeing Things'.

The visible sea at a distance from the shore
Or beyond the anchoring grounds 
Was called the offing.

The emptier it stood, the more compelled
The eye that scanned it.
But once you turned your back on it, your back

Was suddenly all eyes like Argus's.
Then, when you'd look again, the offing felt
Untrespassed still, and yet somehow vacated

As if a lambent troop that exercised 
On the borders of your vision had withdrawn
Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.


After that, over a late breakfast, comes a tribute on Compass (ABC.TV) to another Irish "searcher for truth", as Peter O'Neill is described on his tombstone. 


O'Neill in abode, un-armoured :


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18 October 2017

The old man and the mountain


Last week we regarded this image from an unattributed Japanese scroll : an unknown old man, bare-headed and bent over, regards a distant mountain, sacred Mt Fuji. Simple and profound, with unread words grid in addition.
Theatre of the Actors of Regard  
click image to enlarge  
Scene of our ongoing existential zeitgeist. Only the details change. 

Below, here it is again, a local moment replete with references that will soon be lost in the dust of time, pictured a few days ago by Alan Moir in the Sydney Morning Herald : the patheticly ineffective Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull humiliated by the toxic conservative ('Climate change is crap') and ceaselessly bothersome former Prime Minister Tony Abbott ... and you know or can research the rest. 

This from Question Time (p.28 Hansard) in the Parliament of Australia yesterday, after the Liberal-National Party COALition rejected the Chief Scientist's recommendation for a Clean Energy Target :
Mr SHORTEN (Maribyrnong—Leader of the Opposition) (14:41): My question is to the Prime Minister. Can the Prime Minister confirm that so far he has supported an emissions trading scheme and opposed it, supported an emissions intensity scheme and opposed it, ridiculed direct action and endorsed it, derided so-called clean coal and embraced it, and supported a clean energy target and today abandoned it? When the member for Warringah [Tony Abbott] is calling the shots, how can any Australians believe anything this out-of-touch Prime Minister says about lowering power bills? 

Alan Moir / SMH  click to enlarge 
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24 August 2017

Total Eclipse ] of the Art ( cough cough


Two artists, a century ago : a cultural revolution for one - Alexander Rodchenko in Russia - and a rare natural coincidence of revolutions for another - Howard Russell Butler in the United States.

Aleksander Rodchenko :


 Aleksander Rodchenko, Non-Objective Composition (1918) 

 Aleksander Rodchenko, White Circle (1918) 

Howard Russell Butler :
 
 Howard Russell Butler, solar eclipse painting (1918)

 Howard Russell Butler, "Solar Eclipse, Lompoc 1923"
 - article here

Theatre of the Actors of Regard :

   
 TAR space-time actors                                                FIAPCE

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31 January 2017

Leonard French (1928-2017)

 
The temperatures of TAR 
When you're hot, you're hot!
When you're not, you're not!
Vale Leonard French 

In her obituary tribute in yesterday's THE AGE (here),
Leonard French's daughter Lisa sums up :

"He was the luckiest of men. He had achieved everything he ever wanted. His cultural legacy is enormous; he leaves behind a large body of work of international standing. Art inspired him all of his life.
His achievements were greater than he could have imagined and he died happy, satisfied, and much loved – none of us could want more."

TAR and the temperatures of others : 
if there's a lesson t|here, it was not for him, it's for us.

Your correspondent had some early brief contact with him and his work and has remained aware of him, continued to think about him and his work, and about the fickleness of the Theatre of the Actors of Regard. 

In this, we note also the online comments by the artist Gareth Sansom, added to the obituary by Ashleigh Wilson in The Australian :

His Legend coffee shop mural based on Sinbad the Sailor had an enormous influence on me - after  seeing it in 1958, and the Melbourne University swimming pool mural, I raced home and started using my father's Dulux house paint on Masonite..... and my first exhibition featured some of those early experiments with paint....he was gruff and confrontational and talked like a Harold Pinter script - but always exciting, and an art star before Whiteley....

Lisa French again :

According to Grishin in his book on the artist, in 1968 the newspapers were running headlines such as "The year of Leonard French" and by 1970 he "was at the peak of his popular acclaim and possibly the most public of any Australian artist of his day".
In the latter part of the 1970s he moved to rural Heathcote, withdrawing from the art scene, until a few years ago when he moved back to Brunswick where he was born. While his place in the limelight faded and many assumed him to be dead, he continued his prolific output for another 40 years. He was a much better painter than he has been given credit for (something I have no doubt history will eventually rectify).
The zeitgeist rolls on...


Melbourne Cool : the Legend Café, 1956, with painted panels by Leonard French and interior design by Clement Meadmore.



Leonard French, Iconoclast, 1957 :


His best known work, the stained glass ceiling of the Great Hall 
at the National Gallery of Victoria :


He continued to paint. Hannah Francis in today's AGE :

On Tuesday the family displayed a photograph of his last "epic" work, Chaos: a three-panel painting completed in 2004 that features a skeleton walking on a tightrope above a chaotic scene. It has never been exhibited.
"It captures this idea of the cyclical nature of time," says daughter Sarah French. "I have always interpreted the skeleton as a symbolic substitute for dad as the artist, who mocks the darkness below. However his own position is highly precarious – he must carefully maintain his balance lest he should fall and become swept up in the destruction."
Major galleries from Bendigo to Queensland have reportedly resurrected French's works from their store rooms and put them proudly on display after news of his death.
A spokesperson for the National Gallery of Victoria says the gallery has no current plans for a Leonard French retrospective.

Below, Leonard French, Journey of the Sun, 1980
collection Bendigo Art Gallery


AAA_Art Archive Australia  
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20 August 2016

Theatre of the Athletes of Regard


Le Louvre
Gold Silver Bronze 
medals not collected


 Jean-Luc Goddard "Bande à part" (Band of Outsiders) 1964

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20 November 2015

TAR-presents-Yo-Yo!-or-Thirty-six-foot-long-Elvis-by-Andy-Warhol-eleven-times-eleven-by-two-persons-by-meta-view-person(s)-all-as-perpetual-motion-regard-machine-



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07 March 2015

Sydney : Where Art Happens

                     
Thirty days hath September
April, June, and November.
All the rest have thirty-one
Except in February, twenty-eight
        
But in leap year we assign
February, twenty-nine.



Twenty-nine less six
Still leaves twenty-three :
That's quite enough for Art Month
Sy-dn-ey.


Theatre of the Actors of Regard (Sydney)  
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28 January 2015

The Reign of La Langue

                            
Marie's words to Jeanne have long since reached the sea and returned into the various atmospheres. 

        Art is dead, Long live Art!
       
    Verbum mortuum est, dum vivat.
               
      
The great circulation of language continues. Below, a new reign falls upon the ground of all, and on those standing around; on the dog, too. 
         
             
In 1808, Théâtre des Acteurs de Regard proposed that this monument should be inscribed with a poem beginning
  'Passants, contemplez cette pyramide…'
  'Passers by, contemplate this pyramid...'  

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...but it never eventuated.
         
A.B. is writing to chere Leontine : the fall of words align with the obelisk (atopped by the funerary vase intended to hold the bullet-pierced heart of Louis Desaix ...but it never eventuated) and with the rood tree, stripped and strung with the lines of the new langue : telegraph, telephone and electrification.
        
   
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03 September 2014

Terry Smith at NGV


The weekend seminar 'Kiffy Rubbo and The George Paton Gallery : Curating the 1970s' was a great success. Lots for the head and the heart.
         
Various of the seminar speakers referred to the 1975 protest by artists at the National Gallery of Victoria. That protest was organised at the George Paton Gallery after the removal by the NGV, without consultation with the artist, of an installation by Domenico de Clario commissioned for the NGV exhibition 'Artists' Artists_Sculpture'.

At the George Paton Gallery meeting, the following document was prepared, then issued at the protest.
       

click image to enlarge               AAA_ArtArchiveAustralia

One of those prominent at the George Paton Gallery meeting was Terry Smith. Re-reading the PROTEST document now, it seems a fair guess that the information in the following paragraph from motion #1 might have been contributed by Smith, an active member of A & L between 1972-1976 :
This action, following the arbitrary removal of the Art and Language Show to the Art School of the Victoria College of the Arts is the culmination of a long history of prejudice against experimantal art.
In the photo below, of the 1975 artists protest at the NGV, that's Terry Smith on the right. The artist John Davis is in the centre and Eric Westbrook, then previous NGV director, is on the left.


click image to enlarge              AAA_ArtArchiveAustralia

In 2004, when the free pencil movement organised another day of protest at the NGV, they re-used this 1975 photo on their protest poster above to indicate how little had changed at the NGV since 1975.

For info about the 2004 Artists Protest at the NGV:
Sketch-in Protest @ the National Gallery of Victoria  here

NGV : something to really scream about : AGAIN!  here

free pencil movement : REBEL YELL  here
For info about the 2012 Artists Protest at the NGV :
NGV Renews Bans   here

Pencil power can never be erased : Age Editorial   here

NGV vs The Public Blot  here

NGV Out of line   here

HATE YOUR NGV   here

NGV Recidivism   here

X-Rated NGV   here

No Note-Taking = No Review   here

NGV : Vox Pop   here
       
Tonight Terry Smith returns to the NGV for the latest in the Gertrude Contemporary/Discipline lecture series, to reconsider aspects of his 1974 essay "The Provincialism Problem" (click here to read the essay online), first published in the New York magazine Artforum
      

click image to enlarge                     FIAPCE, 1990 / AAA_ArtArchiveAustralia

"World Art Now, The Provincialism Problem Then: 40 years of contemporary art" : That all seats to tonight's lecture by Terry Smith were reserved overnight when it was announced a month ago demonstrates the level of interest and audience for such matters. 


 Dr Terry Smith

For this and for so many other such events, all praise to our Melbourne art curator-historians : from Janine Burke - in 1975 Janine curated 'Australian Women Artists, One Hundred Years, 1840-1940' at the Ewing Gallery and George Paton Galleries, and last weekend it was she who organised the free seminar 'Kiffy Rubbo and The George Paton Gallery : Curating the 1970s' - to the energetic younger group of Helen Hughes and her generation of artist/curator/historians. VIVA!
    
      
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01 August 2014

Paul Klee : Der Betrachter [ The Beholder [


Paul Klee the prodigy performs Die Mattscheibe.
[ The goggle-box; the focusing screen ]
         

 Man Ray  
Later, older, wiser. Paul Klee performs Die Pieta.
] The Pieta [



courtesy : Theatre of the Actors of Regard  
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30 March 2014

In Search of Lost Time


Anyone who remembers...
       

            
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