AUSTRALOGOS/HA HA

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Here are two headlines from today's The Age and The Australian.

Lest one imagines something too grand, both are from the Sport sections. The first refers to cricket, the second to Australian Rules football.

This is the image and caption that accompanied the second.
Man with a plan. (It didn't work - they lost.)

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P.S. In today's local Grand Final footy result, we lost too.
Daylesford 10.12 (72) def. Hepburn 9.13 (67)

⎱ʘ

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bL was one of those who missed out on this tintype photograph in the rough & tumble of last second bids on eBay this morning.

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something to look at : In Our Time

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It was today's second image that reminded me of this famous first one above. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938, before the microphones and cameras of the world, holds up some thing to the crowd and declares, "A Piece of Paper in Our Time". (click here for more info)

Looking at the image below (from a contributor to adski_kafeteri under the heading War Art), after a while it was the moustache and the turned collar that set it, for me, in the period of that similarly appointed public salesman Chamberlain. Otherwise, it is both of our time & timeless.

I-Be-Hold
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U-Do-2

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free pencil movement : CARTRAIN v HIRST

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"On top of Cartrain's arrest, his father, aged 49, was also arrested on suspicion of harbouring the pencils although he was subsequently released."

Here's the full report by Chris Irvine at the Telegraph (UK) :

Last year Cartrain was ordered by the Design and Artists Copyright Society to hand over collages based on Hirst's famous diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, and pay the £200 in profits he made.

In an act of revenge, Cartrain visited Hirst's installation Pharmacy in July, which was being shown as part of Tate Britain's Classified exhibition until it closed last month, and removed a few of the rare "Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series" pencils.

Cartrain then made a mock "wanted" posted that read: "For the safe return of Damien Hirst's pencilers I would like my artworks back that DACS and Hirst took off me in November. It's not a large demand... Hirst has until the end of this month to resolve this or on 31 of July the pencils will be sharpened. He has been warned."

But the stunt backfired when the antiques squad from the Metropolitan Police arrested the artist, informing him the pencils were worth £500,000 as part of the overall installation which was valued at £10 million.

Cartrain is now on bail until September 11, and if convicted, the incident will be one of the highest value modern art thefts in Britain.

"I went to the Tate Britain and by chance had a golden opportunity to borrow a packet of pencils from the Pharmacy exhibit," Cartrain told The Independent.

"The same day (sic) I made up a fake police appeal poster advertising that the pencils had been removed from the Tate and that if anyone had any information they should contact the police on the phone number advertised.

"A few weeks later I went out and I returned home to find out the art and antiques squad from New Scotland Yard had called round with a warrant for my arrest."

On top of Cartrain's arrest, his father, aged 49, was also arrested on suspicion of harbouring the pencils although he was subsequently released.

A spokesman from the Tate Gallery said: "On Saturday 4 July 2009, a member of the public removed a box of pencils from the desk in Damien Hirst's installation Pharmacy. The matter is being investigated by the police."

Below, the 'police' poster outside the Tate Britain.

The poster advertised as a limited edition print at 1ooArtworks, above which it now states : We are sorry to say... For legal reasons this print is on longer available.

Also from the 100 Artworks site :

All posters are signed with one of hirst's pencils.
Signed and numbered by the artist.
Limited edition of 40
Size 21x29 cm approx.

The artwork comes with an official Cartrain cardboard mount just like the artist's street pieces. The mount is stenciled on one side and is not glued to the artwork.

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free pencil movement

John Brack @ NGV Ian Potter Centre : the Giving and Receiving of Regard

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There always seems a further depth to be plumbed within the oeuvre of John Brack.

On my first visit to his recent retrospective ( click here ) at the NGV Ian Potter Centre, apart from the renewal of pleasure and admiration, what registered most was the breadth of French influence, from an earlier period when French Art ruled the roost.

The work that floated to the fore over the following days was Portrait of Dr. Ursula Hoff, 1954 . Something about it intrigued.

There was no plan to the second visit beyond the opportunity for another quick walk through. Soon, however, I am again fixed face-to-face, as it were, before the Hoff study. Such severity. Such unblinking return. So simple. So, what's different here?

Next, around the corner, I stop at Little girl's head (Vicky), 1955. A similar sort of stop-in-tracks seizure as at the Hoff, but different. So clever (laugh out loud). Immediately curates a small Brack exhibition in the gallery of the Imaginarium : just these two works, placed opposite each other.

Go back to the entrance again. Thinks: maybe I'll look at the looking in the work of John Brack. The first work, the host, the one that greets us is Men's wear, 1953. So much that will follow is here already fully realised. Plot the levels and layers of looking, all straight at us.

Also at the entrance, placed side-by-side, two 1948 black and white pencil studies complete the welcoming party. These spectres, too, appear to regard us. A man looks at ( ... us) and a woman looks at (... us); artist and model both look at (... us). The passing (... us).

Immediately curates another Brack exhibition in the Imaginarium : just these two works, placed opposite each other.

No need. Brack had already done this himself and built upon the scenario. Woman and dummy, 1954, brings the desire realm player(s) together. Sense Being Regards Art(i-facere)/someone looks at something. Self and Other, the primal chemistry of duality's infinite congress. You and I; Us and Them; This and That; Inside and Outside; Illusion and Disillusion; Coming and Going; Here and There; on and on through the scenes and titles of his next 40 years.

After these clear-seeing openers, there appears to be a change of strategy. For the players, the fourth wall turns opaque again. For the play, a re-commitment to proscenium theatre. For us, to play the witness of those who, in our period, "strut and fret their hour upon the stage" (Macbeth). Almost no character other than (that of) the artist will look through to us again. Not until Finale, 1992.

The nudes all avert their gaze. Things with no eyes are no trouble to us - still lives, nature morte - flowers, cards, pens and pencils, things without senses. Of the portraits, Hal Hattam looks outward, but from the shadow. Dr Hoff, her body posed at standard oblique, still determinedly fixes her eyeballs upon the artist and to the return view of history.

I imagine her saying, "We've been through this before, John. That's why I wore the cameo for you today."

Occasionally one or other of the children is transparently direct but as a rule the play's the thing. The elaboration of this is in the detail. In The Hands and The Faces, 1987, even there, a generation further distanced, still no painted eye meets ours. At the show I scribbled a note, "an embarrassment of eyes". (A deference of eyes; a politeness of eyes; a sophistication of eyes; a discretion of eyes... )

Similarly with the history cards of Kings and Queens, 1988. Except here Brack has also represented some children's depictions of royalty in the gathering. These, unlike their well-bred wisdom-bound elders, have big open eyes that connect straight through to us.

.. .

In popular theatre at play's end the curtain is summarily closed. Then is reopened for the actors to acknowledge their audience and to be acknowledged in return : we knew you were there/we knew you knew we knew you were there. The villain and the hero, the maiden and the beast, all equal as merely players. All finally acknowledged.

So with Brack. As with the triple greeting at the start, so at the conclusion.
Watching the Flowers (1990-91)
The Celebration (1991)
Finale (1992)

At journey's end the end of the exhibition. We arrive at that point from which we are always beginning (Here and Now, after T.S Eliot) to recognise, if we care to, a performance of our own performance: we, his Actors of Looking, figured here in Watching the Flowers, 1990-91.

Well, that was fun wasn't it. It wasn't? Of course it was/wasn't. We are the busy bodies: we like some/we do not care for others. Now all is Said and Done, let us hoist the Jolly Lot and Dance ourselves to Dualistic Death. The Celebration, 1991. ["They shoot horses, don't they?"]

Curtain closes, curtain opens. Behold, we are your actors of the dualistic view.

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A few personal notes: With John Brack minutes after we first met. Polaroid by Daniel Thomas who introduced us after the opening of Melbourne Cool, 1983.

A jotting made after first visiting Brack's mighty 1987 exhibition at George Mora's Tolarno Gallery, South Yarra.

( click image above to enlarge )

Collins St. 5 p.m revisited. Made after the return visit to the 2009 John Brack retrospective.

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The Mystery of the Golden Frame

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Late last night on SBS TV we watched the first half of the 2003 production of "The Mystery of the Yellow Room".
What fun, what wit!

The Mystery of the Yellow Room: Extraordinary Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille, Reporter (Le mystère de la chambre jaune) by Gaston Leroux, is one of the first locked room mystery crime fiction novels. It was first published in France in the periodical L'Illustration from September 1907 to November 1907, then in its own right in 1908.

It is the first novel starring fictional detective Joseph Rouletabille, and concerns a complex and seemingly impossible crime in which the criminal appears to disappear from a locked room. Leroux provides the reader with detailed, precise diagrams and floorplans illustrating the scene of the crime. The emphasis of the story is firmly on the intellectual challenge to the reader, who will almost certainly be hard pressed to unravel every detail of the situation.

( Wikipedia entry : click here )

CHAPTER VII. In Which Rouletabille Sets Out on an Expedition Under the Bed

Fabulous chapter headings. In this chapter, in the 2003 film version, we see reporter Rouletabille (Roulette Table? Roule ta Bille translates as Roll your Ball) examining his view of the world from under the bed. He is moved to exclaim, "The immensity of what we cannot see." (I noted it in my Moleskine (below): Rouletabille also makes notes in his Moleskine.)

Later, lest the import of this realisation might have escaped us, he repeats it to his photographer assistant. "The immensity of what we cannot see." What can a photographer of the visible do with that?

In Leroux's original, which can be read online here, this observation is given in the third person.

The reporter then reappeared. His eyes were sparkling and his nostrils quivered. He remained on his hands and knees. He could not be better likened than to an admirable sporting dog on the scent of some unusual game. And, indeed, he was scenting the steps of a man,—the man whom he has sworn to report to his master, the manager of the "Epoque." It must not be forgotten that Rouletabille was first and last a journalist.

Thus, on his hands and knees, he made his way to the four corners of the room, so to speak, sniffing and going round everything—everything that we could see, which was not much, and everything that we could not see, which must have been infinite.

Ah yes, the locked room genre : The Mystery of the Golden Frame

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Instruments of the Passion

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To those unfamiliar with commercial TV's late nite offerings of Instruments of the Passion, bLOGOS/HA HA proudly introduces this handy and indispensable revelator.

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MC Hammer

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The Doors took their name from the title of a book by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954). That title was in turn taken from a line in a poem entitled "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by the 18th-century artist and poet William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite". (Wikipedia)

Track 1 and the first single from The Doors' eponymous first album was Break On Through (To The Other Side)

Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side
Break on through
Break on through
Break on through
Break on through
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

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Held in high regard

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Edward Kennedy, "the liberal lion", dead at 77.
(Washington Post editorial here.)

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Theatre of the Actors of Looking : Shirin

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Again a follow-on from the theme of the previous blog, with an emphasis not so much on the given as on the activity of regard. Today the recent film by Abbas Kiarostami, Shirin : our regard of the faces of 113 women as (if) they watch a certain film.

bL has not yet seen Shirin - it was shown this year at the Sydney Film Festival but not at the Melbourne Film Festival - but has been reading about it. Here are some online articles:

Shirin as Described by Kiarostami
by Khatereh Khodaei

It may be an odd experience to sit in a dark movie theater, stare at the screen and see fellow audience members watching a motion picture. Personally, I believe the experience of watching a movie in which the sound of the story that we hear is different from the pictures that we watch can be more interesting.

Shirin is the latest feature film by Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami. It features simple close-ups of the faces of 113 actresses who are watching a movie.

After watching the film and talking with Mr. Kiarostami, I found out that the women, whose faces appeared in perpendicular frames in the film were not actually watching a movie at all; a few fixed spots had been installed above the camera and they were acting with Kiarostami’s special improvisational technique.

What makes the experience doubly interesting is to learn that the story was decided on after shooting was over. It is the love story of Khosro, Shirin, and Farhad, a masterpiece by the great Iranian poet Nezami Ganjavi. The work features effective editing and an attention to details which, as always, render Kiarostami’s movies simple, different and absorbing.

Abbas Kiarostami characteristically attaches a special significance to audiences. In his latest production, Shirin, he goes as far as explicitly suggesting that the silver screen would be non-existent in the absence of audiences.

“Shirin” is the story of the empathy of audiences—the audiences who are watching the empathy of the other audiences.

( click here for full article )

Kiarostami's 'Shirin': watching a movie about watching a movie
by Jeff Strabone

While the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it's important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has a new film out called Shirin that adapts—sort of—a twelfth-century romance and offers the world a stunning new achievement: a feature-length film whose narrative is made up entirely of reaction shots.

( click here for full article )

A Conversation with Kiarostami
by Arsalan Mohammad in Tehran
(A.K.): I just read an article today about Shirin – a critic who said, ‘I don’t understand what he wants to say, really, it’s complicated, I don’t even like it, but what I know for sure is that he is saying something. Let’s give him time, to see actually what he is saying – give us time, then we’ll understand what he is saying. I am sure he is saying something, he has something to say.’

( click here for full article )

P.S. 26 August 2009: By a happy coincidence, news just in that "Shirin" will receive a Melbourne screening this Thursday afternoon :

Presented as part of the Film and Television Studies UNDER CONSTRUCTION seminar & screening series – selected, introduced and especially subtitled by André Dias. Refreshments and discussion will follow the screening.

4-6pm, AUGUST 27 2009, ROOM S704, MENZIES BUILDING 7TH FLOOR, MONASH UNIVERSITY - CLAYTON CAMPUS. FREE ADMISSION. ALL WELCOME! BRING A FRIEND.

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