I Am matrix-Curious (yellow)

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

 detail

 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something... 

         

 LOGOS/HA HA
        

 Kazimir Malevich
 Yellow Plane in Dissolution
 1917-1918
     

 Kazimir Malevich
 Complex Presentiment : Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt
 1928-32

        

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

 detail

 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something... 

         

 LOGOS/HA HA

 Who's afraid of matrixial intercourse (yellow) 
 - after Barnett Newman

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

 detail

 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something... 

         

 LOGOS/HA HA
        
        
      

Wittgenstein in the Labyrinth with Handles (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds)

We enjoyed and recommend Christopher Benfey's recent Wittgenstein’s Handles in the New York Review of Books.  May 24, 2016 click here
  

Door handles and lock by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Vienna house he
designed (1926-1929) with architect Paul Engelmann - photo Studio
Hubert Urban, 1972
           

FIAPCE, ideograms of dependent-arising (above) and The Two Truths 
(see: Wittgenstein's Handles) 
          
He begins with a question, to which he responds :
         
What was it about handles—door-handles, axe-handles, the handles of pitchers and vases—that transfixed thinkers in Vienna and Berlin during the early decades of the twentieth century, echoing earlier considerations of handles in America and ancient Greece?

       
From Wittgenstein...

To details like the door-handles, in particular, Wittgenstein accorded what Monk calls “an almost fanatical exactitude,” driving locksmiths and engineers to tears as they sought to meet his seemingly impossible standards. The unpainted tubular door-handle that Wittgenstein designed for Gretl’s house remains the prototype for all such door-handles, still popular in the twenty-first century.
            

Theatre of the Actors of Regard, Seating Viewed in Upright Position
(The Admissions of Wittgenstein), 1951 - note door handle       
         
(Thomas Bernhard was surely evoking his idol, Wittgenstein, when he told a friend that the only way to find an exact replacement for a broken window-handle would be to find another, identical broken window-handle.)
       
Monk argues, more than once, that this design project brought Wittgenstein “back” to philosophy.

         
to the German sociologist Georg Simmel...
         
In his brilliant 1911 essay “The Handle,” Simmel argued that the handle of a vase bridges two worlds,the utilitarian and the non-utilitarian. 


 Pablo Picasso, Personnage avec mains sur les hanches (Vase with
 two high handles), 1953 - note disparate translation handles
         
A vessel, according to Simmel, “unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose—if only symbolically. For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of practical life.”

Thus the vessel stands in two worlds at one and the same time: whereas reality is completely irrelevant to the “pure” work of art and, as it were, is consumed in it, reality does make claims upon the vase as an object that is handled, filled and emptied, proffered, and set down here and there. This dual nature of the vase is most decisively expressed in its handle.

to Emerson, Stanley Cavell, the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus, Bob Dylan, Thomas De Quincey, Coleridge, Robert Frost, a French-Canadian woodcutter named Baptiste , Elizabeth Bishop’s Crusoe, Gary Snyder who recalls Elias Canetti...
           
Snyder invokes the idea of literary tradition as a “handing down,” from father to son and from teacher to student, “how we go on.” In such a transfer, the ax stands in for the pen (in a different context, Snyder compared a laptop to a nice little chainsaw). In his seductive praise of the “craft of culture,” Snyder recalls Elias Canetti’s moving assertion: “It is the quiet, prolonged activities of the hand which have created the only world in which we care to live.”
            

HAND SPACE manifesto, 1981  

Is there some unfinished business here?

         
he asks, and continues...

Was there, for example, any significance to Wittgenstein’s parenthetical joke about handles resembling one another, like brothers and sisters? “We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.)” For Wittgenstein, those handles seem to come momentarily alive; they’re animated...

         

 Theseus at MoMA : Picasso, Tete de taureau (Bull's Head) 1942
 A handle-horned minotaur...
          

 awaits every Theseus...

             

 in the labyrinth of TAR !

           

Theatre of the Actors of Regard  

 detail

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

 LOGOS/HA HA 

                

        

           

One Way To Treat A Work Of Art

             

Before publishing their online catalog for the auction of the Estate of Joy Warren, the auction house Mossgreen wrote to the artist's representative, Anna Schwartz Gallery, seeking image reproduction rights for a 1975 artwork by Peter Tyndall. They attached with their request this muddy image...
         

        
...and indicated the description they proposed to publish :

PETER TYNDALL (BORN 1951) One Way to Treat a Critic  1975 Ink Signed and dated lower right: Peter Tyndall 75 Stamped lower right: FOSTERVILLE INSTITUTE OF APPLIED & PROGRESSIVE CULTURAL EXPERIENCE Signed, dated and titled verso: ONE WAY TO TREAT A CRITIC 1975 PETER TYNDALL 21 x 16CM

ASG consulted with the artist and then informed Mossgreen they could reproduce the image but, rather than publish the proposed Mossgreen description, the following alternative was to be given :

          

  

 
However, when Mossgreen published the catalog, the Peter Tyndall entry was as shown below : click image to enlarge
  

Yes : it did feature an image that appeared as if painted by Bill Coleman - presumably an early postmodern appropriation by Tyndall.


       

   detail
   A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

   someone looks at something...

   LOGOS/HA HA 

                              

No : it did not give the Label/description that the Permission To Publish required


Wrong : the Mossgreen reading of the Tyndall drawing was published as ink. It was in fact pencil.

Tyndall, sometimes regarded as an absurdist, apparently thought this was all very funny. Only on the day before the auction did he alert ASG to the situation. A few hours later, the page in question showed a change of images :
  1. The Coleman image was gone and the Tyndall pencil drawing was now the featured image
  2. Because Mossgreen claimed their automated system ("Computer says No!") wouldn't allow for the Tyndall format Label description, the compromise was that the Label be presented not as the usual catalog Description but as a second image. *click image below to enlarge
        


Lot 380 : the hammer falls and the auctioneer pauses before summing up the result of this -1975-2016- space-time event :
"A hundred dollars is a hundred dollars."

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

LOGOS/HA HA 

                              

     

             

PRINTED MATTERS (Vienna, Gesso)

        
PRINTED MATTERS
April–June
Gesso Artspace

Donaufelder Straße 73-79
Vienna, Austria 

       

| Francis Alys | Kai Althoff | Laetitia Badaut-Haussman | Pieter Brattinga | Marcel Broodthaers | James Lee Byars | Gernot Bubenik | Ernst Caramelle | Henry Coleman | Sister Corita | Tacita Dean | Peter Doig | Marcel Duchamp | Thomas Eller | Josef Frank | Robert Gober | Rodney Graham | les Graphiquants | Wade Guyton | Dan Graham | Marcia Hafif | Gary Hume | Georgia Hopton | Asger Jorn | R. B. Kitaj | Yves Kline | Paul McCarthy | Mario Merz | Olivier Mosset | Richard Nonas | Rudolf Polanszky | Markus Prachensky | Rene Ricard | Dieter Roth | Ed Ruscha | David Salle | Thomas Scheibitz | Jakob Schieche | Erika Schneider | Nancy Spero | Lilly van Stokker | Yoshikazu Suzuki | Gert & Uve Tobias | Peter Tyndall | Helene Ulrich | Victor Vasarely | Franz West | Heimo Zobernig |

            

Printed Matters, Text zur Ausstellung

Marcel Duchamp stellt die Weichen für einen Übergang zwischen Kunst und Alltag mit dem Cover des vierteljährlich erscheinenden Magazins Transition, das er 1937 mit einer Reproduktion seines Readymades comb, einem in Kunst überführten Alltagsgegenstand, zu einem Kunstwerk macht. Das kegelförmige Trafik Zeichen am Katalog Surrealist Intrusion ist keine Reproduktion. Der Druck per se ist das Readymade. In beiden Fällen ermöglicht Duchamp einem breiten Publikum Kunstbesitz. In diesem Sinne liegen auch Francis Alÿs Postkarten als eigenständige Arbeit in Ausstellungen auf, um mitgenommen und verbreitet zu werden. Verteilung und Multiplikation von Informationen und Wissen und somit ein geradezu aufklärerisches und demokratisches Potenzial prägt Druckgrafik in ihrer Geschichte. Plakate können gar ein politisches Agitationsmittel für KünstlerInnen wie Klaus Staeck sein, der außerdem mit
seinem Produzentenverlag die Publikation von Werken seiner Kollegen realisiert. Marcel Broodthaers initiiert 1968 das Musée de l'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum der Moderne, Abteilung der Adler) in seiner Privatwohnung. Über die Teilhabe am alltäglichen Leben stellen die Drucke die Institution Museum von innen in Frage. Die Publikation zu einer Ausstellung konzipiert Broodthaers, der nicht zuletzt über die Deutung eines Buches als Objekt vom Dichter zum bildenden Künstler wurde,1 als Kunstwerk bestehend aus bedruckten Boxen in Boxen. Die Objekthaftigkeit eines Künstlerbuchs tritt im Ausstellungskontext besonders hervor. Die Lesbarkeit tritt in den Hintergrund. So verschieben sich die Texte zu Jorge Pardos Arbeit auf den Oberflächen mehrerer, ineinander enthaltener Boxen und gehen vom Außen zum Innen. Der Grafiker Pieter Brattinger füllt eine quadratische Box mit reproduzierten Rechnungen aus aller Welt. Er erhebt so in einem Umkehrschluss ein Alltagsprodukt ausgerechnet durch die Vervielfältigung zum Kunstwerk. Wade Guytons Künstlerbuch Black Paintings setzt sich, so wie die gleichnamigen Malereien, medienreflexiv mit dem Phänomen der Vervielfältigung auseinander. Die Bücher und die Gemälde wurden mit demselben Drucker gedruckt. Dieser übersetzt die digitale Datei und bestimmt das Erzeugnis zum Beispiel durch unvorhersehbare Störungen mit. „As it is copied and communicated, discrepancies are produced. And these are what now stand in for painting.“2 Das Monochrom wird dabei von Guyton entgegen der modernistischen Unantastbarkeit als Readymade verstanden.3 Die medienspezifische Wiederholung greift Jakob Schieche in seinem Holzschnitt ohne Titel auf. Er überlagert die, diese Drucktechnik auszeichnende, Maserung des Holzes mit der Struktur der Rinde, die er exakt in den Druckstock einschneidet. Im Druck wird die natürlich gewachsene und die geschnitzt abgebildete Struktur auf eine Ebene gebracht. Der Druckstock selbst wird zum Objekt mit inhärentem Potenzial zur Bildproduktion. Dass diese überraschend unkompliziert sein kann, zeigt auch die Serie von Erika Schneider,
die mit wenigen Kartoffeln eine hohe Variabilität an farbkräftigen Kompositionen erzeugt. Umgekehrt passiert die visuelle Wahrnehmung gedruckter Arbeiten im öffentlichen Raum oft wie beiläufig. In der Pariser Metro werden leere Plakatwände mit einer subtilen, grafischen Arbeit von Les Graphiquants gefüllt, deren Stärke gerade in ihrer Simplizität besteht. Noch mehr Menschen können an Peter Tyndalls Blog, dem mittlerweile einzigen, stets unabgeschlossenen Projekt des Künstlers, teilhaben. Jeder ist eingeladen, selbst http://blogos-haha.blogspot.com.au zu besuchen und so man will, auszudrucken. Druckgrafik steht in regem Austausch mit anderen Medien und ermöglicht die Partizipation Vieler an einem Kunstwerk. Eine Kopie ist sie dabei nie. Vielmehr ist sie „das multiplizierbare Original, (...) das in und mit den druckgrafischen Mitteln gedachte und umgesetzte bildnerische Konzept.“4

Gesso Artspace
Zusammengestellt von: Andreas Reiter Raabe

1 Michael Glasmeier, Weitere Würfelwürfe-Offset; in: Künstlerbücher/Artist’s Books. Zwischen Werk undStatement, Gabriele Koller/Martin Zeiller (Hg.), Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien 2001, S. 37.

2 John Kelsey, in: Wade Guyton, Black Paintings, Portikus, Frankfurt 2011.
3 Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton. The New Black; in: Parkett 83, 2008, S. 78-79.
4 Georg Lebzelter, Multiple matters – Grafische Konzepte,http://www.umdruck.at/detail/article/multiplematters-
grafische-konzepte/, 25. 3. 2015.

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

LOGOS/HA HA

        

        

     

pre-meta-predator, or something

        
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a meta-man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

- opening verse of 'Are We Not Meta-Men?' 
after Devo and with apologies to Hughes Mearns. 

Mearns' 1899 poem "Antigonish" was originally part of a play called The Psyco-ed. It's a great title. One that suits well the meta-madness of this last week in the land of the chosen (i.e. not-rejected) whom Prime Minister Tony Abbott now refers to as (also this last week) TEAM AUSTRALIA.

So, BuzzWord of the Week : metadata

And associated with that, the problematic, generally unfamilar, BuzzPrefix of the Week : meta-

The government has indicated it plans to formalise the collection and storage of our internet metadata. But they have struggled to demonstrate to the public that even they, the law makers, understand what they are referring to when they refer to metadata.

The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott : 
'Let's be clear', he begins. Then he suggests a metaphor 4 metadata :

PM_ABC.RN (6 August 2014) :
TONY ABBOTT: "Let's be clear what this so-called metadata is. It's not the content of the letter: it's what's on the envelope, if I might use a metaphor that I think most Australians would understand. It's not what you're doing on the internet: it's the sites you're visiting. It's not the content: it's just where you've been, so to speak."

But, holes soon appear in this explanation, too.
      

 FIAPCE meta-mice infiltrate envelope metadata metaphor

Flushed with the skill and wisdom of his promotion of amendments to the 18C Free Speech legislation, George 'People do have a right to be bigots' Brandis decides that he will have a crack at it.

After all, he's already well-rehearsed this topic at a Parliamentary Committee appearance :

Brandis and the unspeakable metadata 02:07

Fearless, he now riffs metadator live on SKY News :

click the images to view these clips
    
Some background for our international readers : George Brandis is not some rarely-heard inarticulate back-bencher. He is the Attourney General for Australia, the first law officer of the Crown in right of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Of the Crown, indeed, by his preference. Brandis was appointed a Senior Counsel of the Supreme Court of Queensland in November 2006. In June 2013 the original title of Queen's Counsel was restored by the Queensland Government and Brandis was one of 70 (out of 74) Queensland SCs that chose to become QCs. (Wikipedia)

Only partly off topic : how much is a QC/SC paid for their advocacy skills?

QC/SC: 1,000.00 per hour

QC/SC: 8,000.00 per day

Lawyers and Legal Services Australia :Solicitor and Barrister Prices

For our sins, George Brandis is also the Minister for the Arts. 
       
Eventually, that naughty but clever Malcolm Turnbull, Minister for Communications, is sent in to clean up the mata-mess.
      
AM_ABC.RN (8 August 2014) :
MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: "Well, you do accept there was a lot of confusion over the last couple of days?"

MALCOLM TURNBULL: "Well, look, let's, let's... I'll leave you to talk about the last couple of days. My concern is simply to be crystal clear about what we're talking about. I think one of the difficulties with a term like metadata is that it can mean different things to different people. And so you have to be very clear about what we're talking about."
         
Over to you again, James Joyce :
"Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse." (Ulysses, Ch 9)

And, from the world of Golden Oldie Frames between Inside-ers and Outside-ers, beween notions of content and context, here's another metablast fave from TEAM FIAPCE (-1978-) :
      

collection : National Gallery of Australia, Canberra  

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ... 

LOGOS/HA HA

          
         
                 

Spiral Jettison ] The Turd ( after Smithson

  
The Fabric of Regard
  after Buddha
    after Slave Pianos
      after Punkasila
        after The Lepidopters : A Space Opera
          after Theatre of the Actors of Regard

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ... 

LOGOS/HA HA

   

      

Just launched : West Space Journal

   

The opening editorial :

An ongoing, never ending editorial...

Welcome to Issue One of the West Space Journal. As mentioned in our About page, this is an experiment. This online space is intended to ebb and flow after its initial release, as content is added and expanded, and we’ve designed the structure of the site to be completely transformed at each quarterly issue.

Our first issue is broadly focused on the internet — the protocols and infrastructure that this journal exists on. What is the internet (currently)? How are artists and curators using it? Are we anticipating social change via new forms of connection, or playing a self-mythologising game of cultural catch-up? How does internet access converge with and cloud our offline perspectives? What are the tensions between the presented narratives and pragmatics of the online platform? We think that, globally, we’re at a type of breakpoint where many of these questions might have new answers, somewhere within the spectrum between Evgeny Morozov’s charge that “the internet” we believe in doesn’t exist (and won’t save us), and Ethan Zuckerman’s research into a digital cosmopolitanism that we’re yet to embrace.

Happy exploring!

    

click here for West Space Journal

click image to enlarge  

with apologies to Albert Tucker and his Explorers   

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

LOGOS/HA HA

  

   

    

You Are Here

You Are Here (detail #3)

Fig.3  Exploded Diagram

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ...
 

LOGOS/HA HA

      

Dear Diary,

A long discussion yesterday with J and L about the ways some one might order a heap of Art and non-Art things. 

We talked about 'Art and its Objects' (Richard Wollheim). About Logos - the Speaking into Being of the Interverse - and, from the other end of the bag of wind, farts n laughter. About language as thing and as intermediate projection veil. About the possibility or not of Clear Seeing. 

We talked about various Label formats -  past, present and possible. About entity, identity-fication, classification, taxonomy trees and the Axeman Cometh. Archives, files, cataloging and access ability. About the Thing-In-Itself and interconnectedness. About Indra's Net. About vertical hierarchies and the horizontal postmodern plain. Ditto: the structures of institutions and their divisions of regard and responsibility.

Later, neuron drifts ebb toward sleepytown... patterns of connection... floating layers of exploding diagrams...

Snap awake, draw this...

P

You Are Here (detail #2)

Fig.2  Radiance of the Exploding View

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ...
 

LOGOS/HA HA

You Are Here (detail #1)

Fig.1  Exploded View

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ...
 

LOGOS/HA HA

       

      

    

Authenticity when viewing art...

.

We do miss listening to The Book Show (ABC Radio National) with Ramona Koval and her knowledgeable team. What a loss! (Here's the link to Don Watson's comments about this at The Monthly.)

In place of The Book Show is an arts mix, Books and Arts Daily.

One of yesterday's items was right up our street :

NEW STUDY SAYS THE WAY WE VIEW ART IS IRRATIONAL

Imagine this. There's a picture you love. Suppose it's a Picasso. Or a Sidney Nolan. You just love it. Then one day an expert tells you that it's a copy. Or a fake. How do you react? What happens inside the wiring of your brain?

Martin Kemp is professor emeritus in Art History from Oxford University and a leading expert on the Italian Renaissance, particularly the work of Leonardo do Vinci. Telling authentic works from copies is his bread and butter. Now he's got together with a couple of neuro scientists to explore this fascinating question about how our brains respond to fakes and the genuine article.

Click here for that program

The article discussed, as listed at Radio National :

Title Authenticity when viewing art
Author Martin J Kemp et al
Publisher Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 28 November, 2011

The blue link above will take you to the abstract. From there you can link to the original research article. It's full poetic title is :

Human cortical activity evoked by the assignment of authenticity when viewing works of art

Mengfei Huang1†, Holly Bridge2†,
Martin J. Kemp3 and Andrew J. Parker1*
1 Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2 Department of Clinical Neurology, FMRIB Centre, John Radcliffe Hospital, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
3 Trinity College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
† Mengfei Huang and Holly Bridge Joint first authors.

"The expertise of others is a major social influence on our everyday decisions and actions. Many viewers of art, whether expert or naïve, are convinced that the full esthetic appreciation of an artwork depends upon the assurance that the work is genuine rather than fake. Rembrandt portraits provide an interesting image set for testing this idea, as there is a large number of them and recent scholarship has determined that quite a few fakes and copies exist. Use of this image set allowed us to separate the brain’s response to images of genuine and fake pictures from the brain’s response to external advice about the authenticity of the paintings....


✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂ ✂



bLOGOS/HA HA wonders if the core of the reality-instability problem might lie in the persistence of our self-cherishing integrity delusion; in our general refusal to wholly appreciate and practise a view that is not based on a notion of fixity and singularity.

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

LOGOS/HA HA

THIS OFFICE TEMPORARILY UNATTENDED

.

Our editorial and technical teams are taking an end of year break. Some will follow the sea to its source, others the clouds to theirs.

Be assured we'll keep an eye on things. If someone sees something you'll be the second to know.

SEASONS GREETINGS
TO OUR READERS & REGARDERS
FROM THE STAFF OF bLOGOS/HA HA

click image to enlarge

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

LOGOS/HA HA

IN PRINCIPIO ERAT JOURNALISMUS

.

Following on from yesterday's Walkley Awards pillory to (blog) post, and responding to a number of enquiries about our (dis)organisation at bLOGOS/HA HA, here is the first of an occasional series of office glimpses.

Today, one of our journalists at work.

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

LOGOS/HA HA

from Pillory to Post

.

bLOGOS/HA HA watched the Walkley Awards presentation on SBS last night. The most contentious decision - we noted that many in the audience of peers did not clap the acceptance speech - was for Most outstanding contribution to journalism to WikiLeaks.

This award was sponsored by Sky News, which is partially-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. A fine irony.

Appropriately, it was announced by senior journalist and 2010 Gold Walkley winner Laurie Oakes, a past defender of WikiLeaks and someone renowned for his own reports of leaked documents.

Most outstanding contribution to journalism
Sponsored by Sky News

WikiLeaks
This year’s winner has shown a courageous and controversial commitment to the finest traditions of journalism: justice through transparency.

WikiLeaks applied new technology to penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup.

Its revelations, from the way the war on terror was being waged, to diplomatic bastardry, high-level horse-trading and the interference in the domestic affairs of nations, have had an undeniable impact.

This innovation could just as easily have been developed and nurtured by any of the world’s major publishers – but it wasn’t.

Yet so many eagerly took advantage of the secret cables to create more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime.

While not without flaws, the Walkley Trustees believe that by designing and constructing a means to encourage whistleblowers, WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange took a brave, determined and independent stand for freedom of speech and transparency that has empowered people all over the world.
And in the process, they have triggered a robust debate inside and outside the media about official secrecy, the public’s right to know, and the future of journalism.

Laurie Oakes at the Walkley Awards last year :

Oakes criticised Ms Gillard and Attorney-General Robert McClelland for their comments about WikiLeaks' release of US diplomatic cables.

"What they said was ridiculous," he said.

"To brand what the WikiLeaks site has done as illegal when there's no evidence of any breach of the law, I think is demeaning ... I think as journalists we should make that our view."

read full SMH article here

Julian Assange accepted the award on behalf of WikiLeaks. He appeared by video, from his house arrest in England, with a backdrop of the upside down and wrong way around logos of the five major financial organisations that refuse to facilitate funds to WikiLeaks.

click here to watch the video of Assange's speech

Switched then to ABC 24 where there was a formal debate in progress : That WikiLeaks is a Power for Good

The third speaker for the affirmative was Stuart Rees, academic, author, Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation and Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. He concluded with an extract from the once pilloried pamphleteer Daniel Defoe, from his poem A Hymn to the Pillory ( read it here ).

Exhort the justice of the land
Who punish what they will not understand,
Tell them he stands exalted there
For speaking what they would not hear.

The background to that, from here. Sounds familiar...

On 16 July 1703 Daniel Defoe began to serve a three-day sentence in the pillory at Charing Cross (Trafalgar Square), part of his punishment for having written the "seditious libel" of The Shortest Way with Dissenters. This satiric pamphlet had suggested that instead of passing laws against all religious Dissenters - Protestant "Nonconformists," such as Defoe - the quicker, cleaner solution would be to just kill them. Defoe's proposal was taken seriously, if not embraced, by many of the Anglican Tories in office; when everyone realized that it was a put-on, and that the anonymous author was Defoe, they flushed him from his hiding spot and took revenge for their embarrassment: a hefty fine, time in Newgate Prison, three sessions in the pillory.

detail from a much larger scene (here ) Daniel Defoe in the pillory 1862 line engraving by James Charles Armytage after Eyre Crowe

Another of the many who have paid dearly for their efforts to share information/power with the people is William Tyndale. For his translation and publication of the Bible, from the Hebrew and Greek of the educated power elite to the English of the many, he had to flee England. Arrested in Brussels by an ally of the English King, and tried there on charges of heresy, he was "strangled to death while tied at the stake, and then his dead body was burned". (Ironically, it is he who coined the term scapegoat.)


William Tyndale cries out "Lord, open the King of England's eyes". Woodcut from Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563)

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

LOGOS/HA HA