The longer you look at it...

    
   

In   Zen                                  they   say:

            If   something   is   boring   after   two
  minutes,
                                               try   it
 for   four.
                                                        If
  still   boring,
                                                       try
  it   for   eight,

                                                  sixteen,


                           thirty-two,


             and   so   on.



Eventually   one   discovers   that   it’s   not
boring   at   all
                           but   very    interesting.

        

- John Cage, Indeterminacy

.   .   .   .

"How long is a piece of sing?"

- Uncle Doug, The Coodabeens, Saturday 13 July 2013

     

.   .   .   .

         

QUESTION:

But you were also a proponent of carbon pricing at one point?

TONY ABBOTT:

Look, the thing about this tax is that the more you see of it the worse it gets. The longer you look at it, the more of a disaster it is for our country and if it’s true that Labor is on the point of moving from a fixed tax to a floating tax, it essentially has indicated everything the Coalition has been saying about this all along. It’s a bad tax, it’s bad for families, it’s bad for jobs, it’s bad for everyone.
        

- Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition

  Sunday 14 July 2013
  Interview Transcript here

detail

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ...
 

LOGOS/HA HA

      

PIG-IRON DUALISM

       

Last time, we looked at a PIG-IRON BOB poster.

    

 

   

Two things linked together

PIG linked to IRON

Two things linked together

PIG-IRON linked to BOB

Two things linked together

PIG-IRON BOB! linked to POSTER

          

Two things linked together

WORD linked to WORD

   

Two things linked together

LOGOS/HA HA linked to LOGOS/HA HA

Here's another, this one from 1983 :

 

Two things linked together

Person linked to Art

someone linked to something...

          

Two things linked together

Specific-Bonding detail

   

Two things linked together

LOGOS/HA HA linked to LOGOS/HA HA      

 click image to enlarge  

                 

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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something ...
 

 LOGOS/HA HA

      

What goes around comes around

        

The earliest graffiti that we recall is from a time when graffiti was rare, the 1950s. It had probably been painted a decade or two earlier. In large white letters on the red bricks of the railway arch over the road at Golden Square. It said PIG-IRON BOB.

Parents told the story and school reinforced it. Before the war, against the protests of the workers, Bob Menzies sold Our Scrap Iron to the Japs and they'd sent it back as Bombs on Darwin. PIG-IRON BOB

On Sunday night, the ABC Australian history series, Chris Masters' The Years That Made Us, referred to this episode.

They showed this image from 1946. We noticed the young boy looking at that simple effective poster, and wondered if he understood (when we did not, back then,) why these two word-things were linked: PIG-IRON

      

A political protest in Darlinghurst, Sydney, 18 September 1946. 

Bruce Howard Collection_National Library of Australia

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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something ...
 

 LOGOS/HA HA

Also, we made a quick note (see below) to seek out later another fleeting PIG-IRON image. A wharfie looking at a bicycle wheel. So simple, so profound: what goes around, comes around.

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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something ...
 

 LOGOS/HA HA

       

click image to enlarge  

 detail

 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something ...
 

 LOGOS/HA HA

       
     
          

HEAD 2 HEAD

    

THE HEAD OF U

REGARDS

               

THE HEAD OF DJ SHADOW

REGARDS 

THE HEADS OF THE OBSERVERS OF THIS DRAWTHING BY ERHARD SCHON

REGARD

THE HEAD OF U

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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something ...
 

 LOGOS/HA HA

Meet the BlockHeads

   

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

      

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

    
     
      

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.

Bicycle Wheel is a readymade by Marcel Duchamp consisting of a bicycle fork with front wheel mounted upside-down on a wooden stool.

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."

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

       
    
             

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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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ...
 

LOGOS/HA HA
[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

.    .    .    .

      

Today, after challenging and defeating Julia Gillard

"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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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something ...
 

 LOGOS/HA HA

   
      

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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 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

 someone looks at something ...
 

 LOGOS/HA HA

   
           

A favorite John Cage anecdote came to mind. We read it aloud, replacing Jean Erdman with Julia Gillard :

"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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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/

someone looks at something ...
 

LOGOS/HA HA

      

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