It all started simply enough...
"Who am I?"
"And what will I have become?"
Block Party, Luca Cambiaso, c.1565
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
04 July 2013
02 July 2013
Recent Up Date
We recently received some eNews from the MCA Sydney. It included this digital image promoting the exhibition JEFF WALL Photographs
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
Also, we recently attended a tableau performance of the rebus C for Your Self by Theatre of the Actors of Regard.
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
01 July 2013
Early readymades traced to Australia
It is now thought that Marcel Duchamp's two most famous readymades, the originals of which went missing shortly after they were made, found their way to Australia.
The first of these is Bicycle Wheel.
In 1913 at his Paris studio he mounted the bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Later he denied that its creation was purposeful, though it has come to be known as the first of his readymades. "I enjoyed looking at it," he said. "Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace." It was not until he began making readymades a few years later in New York that he decided Bicycle Wheel was a readymade.
The original from 1913 was lost, and Duchamp recreated the sculpture in 1951. Bicycle Wheel is said to be the first kinetic sculpture.- wikipedia
The second is Fountain.
Fountain is a 1917 work widely attributed to Marcel Duchamp. The scandalous work was a porcelain urinal, which was signed "R.Mutt" and titled Fountain. Submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee. Fountain was displayed and photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in The Blind Man, but the original has been lost. The work is regarded by some art historians and theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger, as a major landmark in 20th century art. Replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s are now on display in a number of different museums.
Shortly after its initial exhibition, Fountain was lost. According to Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins, the best guess is that it was thrown out as rubbish by Stieglitz, a common fate of Duchamp's early readymades.- wikipedia
Following a lead...
The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954) Friday 6 March 1925 p 6 Article
... QUARTER SESSIONS. No. 1 Court.-Thomas Bath (part-heard). No. 2 Court.-Henry Davis, breaking, entering, and stealing; Raymond Alfred Summerhayes and Spencer Cornford, steal a motor cycle
...researchers from FIAPCE identified, in the archives of the Sydney Central Police, a 1924 photograph of the cycle thief Spencer Cornford behind whom the Bicycle Wheel (1913) and the Fountain (1917) can both be clearly seen.
Cornford served as a mechanic with the AIF in France during the Great War. Demobbed in Paris in 1918, he sailed from there to New York, serving his passage as a member of the crew. Having somehow 'souvenired' the famous artist's chair wheel in Paris, he then chanced upon the scandal of the second object when in New York.
Spencer Cornford traced the urinal to the studio of the photographer Stieglitz and from there added it to his wartime travel collection - something queer to show his mates back home : "Over there, they call this art."
Spencer Cornford traced the urinal to the studio of the photographer Stieglitz and from there added it to his wartime travel collection - something queer to show his mates back home : "Over there, they call this art."
The whereabouts of these two objects is now, again, unknown.
click image to enlarge
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
27 June 2013
The Prince, the People & the Polls
LOGOS : The Speaking into Being of the World
HA HA : from that same bag of grasping wind and gas, disruptive other sounds - burps, farts, laughter
LOGOS/HA HA : the imperfect Word, the broken Promise
bLOGOS/HA HA : a heap of such
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LOGOS/HA HA
[I give you my word / that I will break my word)
[I give you my word / that I will break my word)
. . . .
FRIDAY, 22 MARCH 2013
Statement from Spokesperson for the Hon Kevin Rudd MP
Mr Rudd has said consistently over the last 12 months that he would not challenge for the Labor leadership and that he would contest the next election as a local member of Parliament at the next election. That position has not changed.
Furthermore, Mr Rudd wishes to make 100 per cent clear to all members of the parliamentary Labor Party, including his own supporters, that there are no circumstances
under which he will return to the Labor Party leadership in the future.
Posted by Kevin Rudd at 10:22 : posted at kevinruddmp
"The truth is, if we're all being perfectly honest..."
- Kevin Rudd
. . . .
At 9.15pm Julia Gillard makes her speech-in-defeat to the media.
After this we switch to SBS for the final episode of Borgen.
It opens with a quote from Machiavelli...
...then moves to a TV news report about the latest polls.
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LOGOS/HA HA
26 June 2013
semioLOGOS/HA HA
Yesterday morning, we turned on the office radio to hear excited discussion about the merits or otherwise of a photo in the Australian Women's Weekly that pictures Julia Gillard knitting. Orgy of the semiologists (continued)...
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"Alan Watts gave a party that started in the afternoon, New Year’s Eve, and lasted through the night and the following day. Except for about four hours which we spent napping we were never without food or drink. Alan Watts lived near Millbrook. His cooking was not only excellent but elaborate. There was, for instance, I forget just when, a meat pie in the shape of a large loaf of bread. Truffles ran through the meat, which had been wrapped first in crepes and then in the crust, in which had been inscribed in Sanskrit “Om.” Joseph Campbell, Jean Erdman, Mrs. Coomaraswamy, and I were the guests. Jean Erdman spent most of the time knitting. Alan Watts, Mrs. Coomaraswamy, and Joseph Campbell conversed brilliantly about the Orient, its mythologies, its arts, and its philosophies. Joseph Campbell was concerned at that time about the illustration of his Zimmer book, Philosophies of India. He was anxious to find a picture which would include certain and several symbols, and though he had searched his own library and several public ones, he was still looking for the right picture.
I said, “Why don’t you use the one in Jean Erdman’s knitting book?” Joseph Campbell laughed because he knew I hadn’t even seen the picture.
Mrs. Coomaraswamy said, “Let me look at it.” Jean Erdman stopped knitting and gave her the book. Mrs. Coomaraswamy began interpreting the picture, which was of a girl in a sweater standing in a landscape. Everything, it turned out, referred precisely to the subjects with which Joseph Campbell was concerned, including the number in the upper right-hand corner."
John Cage,
Indeterminacy
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25 June 2013
Scene for a seminar
"So, you want to make something of yourself?"
The artist Thomas Bede, as described by the Law.
Sydney, 22 November 1928.
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
23 June 2013
21 June 2013
Just launched : West Space Journal
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 image to enlarge
with apologies to Albert Tucker and his Explorers
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
20 June 2013
Take a chair (apart)
and/or
Re.(gard) a thing and/or its parts
after Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912
comes this buster meta-re-de-composition,
for auction today at Sotheby's London :
Fernand Léger's Composition a la chaise (c. 1930)comes this buster meta-re-de-composition,
for auction today at Sotheby's London :
after which, after WW2, Corporation America's
The Office Chair, 1961
The Office Chair, 1961
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
then, hereabouts, Theatre of the Actors of Regard performance en passant at the National Gallery of Victoria, 1975 :
T.A.R. after Hugh Ramsay Jeanne, 1901
now, upon a chair and/or its parts ...
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
18 June 2013
Headline
Matthew 6:34
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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