Re. things that are interesting to look at

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Reviewing the year's local art scene, art critic for THE AGE Robert Nelson distinguishes between...

Since the publication of Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics in 1998, you can sense the terms of artistic interest and prestige slowly changing. Instead of seeing art as the product of a unique individual author, relational art prefers the idea of works springing up in dialogue with the user, referring to the social context that artists share...

and reckons...

Alas, the problems with relational art are as big as the theory that supports it. There was once a time when artists immersed themselves in a medium and satisfyingly concentrated on poetic invention within it. As artists abandon the techniques and discipline of a medium and see their role as social facilitators and theorists, they have less and less chance to make a contribution to visual language. They tend not to come up with things that are interesting to look at.

Reflecting on art's paradoxes
Robert Nelson / THE AGE
28 December 2011
( click here to read full article )

The red emphases are by bLOGOS/HA HA

You (who RN nominates as the subject : see paragraph 1 above) may or may not regard these as things that are interesting to look at.

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SEASONS GREETINGS

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De Chirico & C0
Wish All Our Museum Clients
A MERRY METAPHYSICAL CHRISTMAS

May The Supreme Goddess As Void,
with projection-space for image,
Full-Fill Your Every Wish
List

The New Director Eyes The Field : image courtesy De Chirico & Co/FIAPCE

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Dear Highly Recommended Website

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Kim Jong-Il The Dear Leader is Dead.

Here's the NYTimes report:

Kim Jong-il, North Korean Dictator, Dies
New York Times
CHOE SANG-HUN and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: December 19, 2011

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who realized his family’s dream of turning his starving, isolated country into a nuclear-weapons power even as it sank further into despotism, died on Saturday of a heart attack while traveling on his train, according to an announcement Monday by the country’s state-run media.

read full article here

The NYTimes article also pictures Kim Jung-Il as The Great Regarder, greatly regarded by his dear people.

Korean Central News Agency, via European Pressphoto Agency

In this regard, bLOGOS/HA HA is grateful to Mitch at Pharmaikon for alerting us to the following Dear Website (click here) :

the dear leader liked to look at things.
updated every other day
and sometimes on the weekends too.

Here's their December 14 update:

looking at a persimmon tree

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THIS OFFICE TEMPORARILY UNATTENDED

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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

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ABC Classic FM : Classic 100 - 20th Century

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ABC Classic FM runs a Top 100 listeners' poll each year. For 2011 it was Classic 100 - 20th Century.

Each listener could enter 1-10 votes of equal value for their favourite piece(s) of 20th century music.

The final result was announced yesterday. The top 100 can be seen here. Below is the top 1o.

10. PROKOFIEV - Romeo and Juliet Op.64

9. STRAVINSKY - Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)

8. ORFF - Carmina Burana

7. BARBER - Adagio For Strings

6, RODRIGO - Concierto de Aranjuez

5. RACHMANINOV - Piano Concerto No. 2

4. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS - The Lark Ascending

3. GERSHWIN - Rhapsody in Blue

2. HOLST - The Planets

1. ELGAR - Cello Concerto in E minor Op.85

It's not what this office expected. (As mentioned before, we have the Edition Peters score of John Cage's 4' 33" pinned high on the wall here. Apparently 4'33" came in at #121. No other Cage composition made the top 200.)

Our two bobs worth went to...

1. John CAGE - 4 '33"

2. Arnold SCHOENBERG - Pierrot Lunaire

3. Olivier MESSIAEN - Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus

4. Jimi HENDRIX - Third Stone from the Sun

5. Frank ZAPPA - 200 Motels

6. Karlheinz STOCKHAUSEN - Klavierstucke (1-X1)

7. Steve REICH - Come Out

8. Miles DAVIS - Kind of Blue

9. Conlon NANCARROW - Player Piano Studies

10. Philip GLASS - Einstein on the Beach

We celebrate the result with wild tambour and parfums mélodieux. BOUM! BOUM!

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IN PRINCIPIO ERAT JOURNALISMUS

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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.

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from Pillory to Post

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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)

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ENJOY THE IMPERATIVE!

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Some say the National Gallery of Victoria has little interest in contemporary art.

Perhaps the recent run of full page advertisements in the Weekend Age are an attempt by that institution 'to be seen to be' engaged.

This is from today's paper :

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But why does the first line of the promotional image caption say

Visitor enjoying

First : why "visitor"?
Second : why "enjoying"?

What we at bLOGOS/HA HA enjoy about this image is knowing a little more about what is actually happening : knowing that the dewdrops are suspended on strings, though this is not apparent in the advertisement; knowing that the 'visitor' is actually a member of T.A.R. (Theatre of the Actors of Regard) and is not so much visiting as performing; knowing that a fuller depiction of the scene would show the actor's braces are suspending, front and back, a meta pair of dependent-arising ideograms over his naked loins; knowing, too, the cloud of thoughts that bubble forth...

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FACE-OFF

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Cease practice based
On intellectual understanding,
Pursuing words and
Following after speech.
Learn the backward
Step that turns
Your light inward
To illuminate within.
Body and mind of themselves
Will drop away
And your original face will be manifest.

Dogen



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eyemaskingyou2C

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Last year the Sunday Age had an item about Princess Hijab.

Princess Hijab is Paris's most elusive street artist. Striking at night with spraypaint and a marker pen, she slaps black Muslim veils on the half-naked airbrushed women — and men — of the metro's fashion adverts. She calls it "hijabisation".

Another high fashion advertisement targeted by graffiti artist Princess Hijab.
Her guerrilla niqab art has been exhibited from New York to Vienna, sparking debates about feminism and fundamentalism, yet her identity remains a mystery.

full article HERE

Deface of dissent
Angelique Chrisafis / SUNDAY AGE
28 November 2010

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Today something similar. A street artist in Sweden under the name Kelly Gang has taken to a mirror-billboard clothing campaign (YOUR FACE HERE) with Kelly mask paste-ups.

YOUR [OUTLAW] FACE HERE...

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