David Jones, artist and poet (1895-1974) begins his PREFACE TO THE ANATHEMATA :
'I have made a heap of all that I could find.' (1) So wrote Nennius, or whoever composed the introductory matter to Historia Brittonum. He speaks of an 'inward wound' which was caused by the fear that certain things dear to him 'should be like smoke dissipated'. Further, he says, 'not trusting my own learning, which is none at all, but partly from writings and monuments of the ancient inhabitants of Britain, partly from the annals of the Romans and the chronicles of the sacred fathers, Isidore, Hieronymous, Prosper, Eusebius and from the histories of the Scots and Saxons although our enemies . . . I have lispingly put together this . . . about past transactions, that [this material] might not be trodden under foot'. (2)
(1) The actual words are coacervavi omne quod inveni, and occur in Prologue 2 to the Historia.
(2) Quoted from the translation of Prologue 1. See The Works of Gildas and Nennius, J.A.Giles, London 1841.
There was loud appreciative laughter in the bLOGOS/HA HA Canberra Office this morning when our politics staff heard the ABC political editor Chris Uhlmann accidentally reveal the PM's plan to save his Prime Ministerial skin. Uhlmann stumbled-out that if this weekend's Canning by-election went badly, Abbott just might call "a double disillusion". His pronunciation was clear.
Realising that Uhlmann had inadvertently divulged a confidence, we called an immediate editorial meeting at which an editorial was committed to, several opinion pieces were proposed, tomorrow's banner was sketched (below) and Laughter Models were hired from an agency.
At 4pm it was Stop the Presses : Malcolm's challenging!
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This c.1935 tableau photo of two men in the street is by Dora Maar.
Dora Maar (November 22, 1907 – July 16, 1997), born Henriette Theodora Marković, was an Argentinian-raised photographer of French and Croatian descent, with further known artistic work in poetry, and painting; she is most widely known as Pablo Picasso's muse of nearly a decade (c.1935-44), including for his widely known pieces Guernica and The Weeping Woman.
- Wikipedia
The man on his knees appears to be multi-headed with one or more heads down the darkness manhole and one head resting on the lighted path above, that being either iron-masked (see: L'Homme au Masque de Fer) or actually having the form of a two-eyed matrix manhole cover.
The other man is a TAR passer-by : his suited body in the photographic dimension; his probable head, crop-guillotined, likely exists elsewhere.
Around the time of this photo effacement, Dora Maar was introduced by Paul Eluard to Pablo Picasso. Over their next nine years together, Picasso rendered Maar's visage many times.
Below, three women of Theatre of the Actors of Regard perform
'for and after Dora Maar Untitled c.1935' :
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Not since WW2 and the 1947 partition of India has there been such a mass movement of human refugees.
Often in such extremis, the overwhelming complexity is reduced to a single compelling image; often of a suffering child, as it was in the Viet Nam war, at the Oklahoma City Bombing and during the Gaza Strip invasion in 2000. This time, it's the image of a refugee child at the borders of sea and land, war and peace, life and death.
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a drowned refugee child
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an Official with a notebook
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a photographer
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an image
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Reuters
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editors
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publishers
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as described by news and opinion writers
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as received by us and remade
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as acted upon in thought word and deed
Theatre of the Actors of Regard : photo LM
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At the crease : AB keeps his eye on the ball
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Attorney General George Brandis, who personally chose Dyson Heydon to lead the Royal Commision into Trade Union activities, said recently that Commissioner Heydon "does not have a political bone in his body". Indeed, that...
“This is a man who has no politics, who is entirely free of politics, but has given a lifetime of service.”
Dyson Heydon: royal commissioner decides future
The Australian / Elizabeth Colman, Jared Owens
31 August 2015
Royal Commissioner Dyson Heydon's father was the private secretary to Robert Menzies when he first was Prime Minister, from 1939-40.
What you didn’t know about Dyson Heydon
Malcolm Farr / news.com.au
Q : (Loud appeal by ACTU at Allan Border Field) : Howzat?
A : (Third Umpire, observation) : Dyson Heydon was dismissed (run out, no less) for eight when he played in Sir Robert Menzies' Prime Minister's XI against South Africa in 1964.
TAR : Okay. Let's have another look at that...
Yesterday, after 10 days of deliberation, Commissioner Heydon delivered his self-assessment regarding "apprehended bias".
Apprehended bias
The test for determining whether a judge should disqualify himself or herself by reason of apprehended bias is “whether a fair-minded lay observer might reasonably apprehend that the judge might not bring an impartial and unprejudiced mind to the resolution of the question the judge is required to decide”
Johnson v Johnson(2000) 201 CLR 488 at [11], affirmed in Ebner v Official Trustee in Bankruptcy (2000) 205 CLR 337; applied inMichael Wilson & Partners Ltd v Nicholls (2011) 244 CLR 427; distinguished in British American Tobacco Australia Services Ltd v Laurie (2011) 242 CLR 283; see also Slavin v Owners Corporation Strata Plan 16857[2006] NSWCA 71 and Barakat v Goritsas (No 2) [2012] NSWCA 36.
Surely that is a might might through which a fair-minded lay observer might drive a galaxy fleet of hyperdrive perceptors; and yet the projection-space known as Royal Commissioner Dyson Heydon has judged himself reasonably unlikely to be such a projection by others.
Here's the submission about that as made by lawyer for the ACTU, Mr Newlinds
:
May I emphasise at this point what I call the double "might" test in Ebner. We would respectfully suggest that the use of the two "mights", not only is it rather ugly grammar, it does emphasise that this is actually quite a low bar that is imposed by the High Court in relation to the test, because I don't have to persuade you that the hypothetical observer would think that you harbour a political prejudice. I only have to persuade you that the hypothetical observer, firstly, might think and, secondly, what he might think is that you might harbour a political prejudice. I think that is an important point to emphasise. The test could be cast with the use of many other words but it has obviously deliberately been cast in that sense which creates a low threshold. That is our first submission. We put it forward as a basis by itself that would justify the making of the orders we seek.
p9 of the pdf of the Royal Commission transcript of 21 August 2015
Dyson Heydon would not be run out again - not by the other runner, not as a result of his own error, and not by the other side - while serving in the Prime Minister's XI.
He has declared himself, "Not out".
Three fair-minded lay observers at the crease LM of TAR
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titular
[tich-uh-ler, tit-yuh-]
adjective
1. existing or being such in title only; nominal;
having the title but none of the associated duties, powers, etc.:
the titular head of a shell company.2. from whom or which a title or name is taken:
His titular Saint is Vitus.3. of, relating to, or of the nature of a title.
4. having a title, especially of rank.
5. designating any of the Roman Catholic churches in
Rome whose nominal incumbents are cardinals.
noun
6. a person who bears a title.
7. a person from whom or thing from which a title
or name is taken.
8. Ecclesiastical. a person entitled to a benefice but
not required to perform its duties.
example
9. Laughing Logos (aka Laughing Christ)
Laughing Christ, Noel Counihan, 1970
see also
10. "Owls of laughter from an ole in is Titular Head."
(ornithoLOGOS/HA HA)
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At 10 am today, the Australian Border Force announced Operation Fortitude.
Operation Fortitude seems to have been named using the wrong f-word. Many would work, but let’s go with Operation Farce.
Not since Tony Abbott gave Prince Philip a knighthood has the nation appeared so immediately united in calling out a truly stupid and offensive notion.
It began with a morning press release, announcing proudly that our new “border force” – a revamped and armed version of the frontline activities of immigration and the customs service that began operations in July – would be part of a big “crime crackdown” in
Melbourne on the weekend.
“ABF officers will be positioned at various locations around the CBD speaking with any individual we cross paths with,” said the border’s force regional commander in Victoria and Tasmania, Don Smith.
F is for farce: how Australian Border Force united the nation against it
Lenore Taylor : The Guardian
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Theatre of the Actors of Regard presents
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Steady, steady...
Lines in the mind field : from Lateline, previously, to this online article received recently from Stamm:
Taking notes
A little while back, Terry Smith (Discipline, no. 3, 2013) described the ‘comedy of disciplines’ that is the contemporary art scene. His hierarchy went like this:
cultural studies
art theory
———
art history
art criticism
curating
collecting
art dealing
studio talk
art making
What’s interesting is how Smith draws a line these days between the theorising of the top two and those further down. He was actually in the process of dissing Nikos Papastergiadis for what he read as an arrogant and too-simplistic review of Smith’s own recently published books. He was saying that theory has less veracity in the art world than it once did, and that at best it communicates from the edges of the scene.
A series of seven video recordings of a symposium titled Speculations on Anonymous Materials at the Fridericianum, Kassel, in 2014 is available on YouTube. The videos introduce five speakers, mainly contemporary philosophers, discussing the trend of ‘new materialism’ thinking and the argument along the lines that the existence or non-existence of natural objects is not contingent upon us. The ‘anonymous materials’ of the title is meant as well to catch something of the way contemporary artists are more and more using strangely tangential materials in artwork.
These videos are a beautiful six hours where each speaker attempts to describe their very complex thinking to an audience comprised largely of artists and art professionals. Terry Smith writes about the potential of artists being contingent upon the worlds around them, meaning I think that there is an obvious dependency, but the stretching to connect that happens can be madly entertaining.
One of the speakers at the Kassel symposium, Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, proposed that artists are essentially ‘inference jumpers’, necessarily and inexplicably jumping from one inference to another. And for him the problem lies in artists ‘over-extending conceptual resources’ to the point where, he argues, artworks need objects. Conceptual practices were too often simply art by contract. For Negarestani, art is heuristic, and has nothing to do with rote learning.
In Going Public (2010), art theorist and historian Boris Groys jumps one step further to shift the politics of art by moving past ‘the spectator’s attitude’, and its associated aesthetic privileging of the audience and viewer. Groys instead proposes the viewpoint of production and writes of the necessity to build a poetics of the producer.
Groys sees the aesthetic attitude (i.e. the spectator’s) as culminating in a sociological understanding of art. He makes clear the subordinate position that the art scene allocates to production vis-à-vis consumption. Almost everyone’s interests in contemporary art tend towards collaborative, participatory practices and tactics of project-making.
Groys suggests that we are all invariably producers nowadays. The internet makes nonsense of twentieth-century aesthetic constructs to do with the demands of contemplative viewers. There are no idle viewers any more in any real sense. ‘The politics of art,’ he argues, ‘has less to do with its impact on the spectator than with the decisions that lead to its emergence in the first place.’ It is not a conversation about where art comes from and what it looks like, and art installations are not site-specific.
Terry Smith, ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity: Reflections on Method, Review of Reviews (Part 1)’, Discipline, 2013, no. 3, pp. 191–200.
Speculations on Anonymous Materials, introduction by Susanne Pfeffer & Armen Avanessian, participants Maurizio Ferraris, Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Robin Mackay & Reza Negarestani, Fridericianum, Kassel, January 2014, YouTube, nos 1–7, viewed June 2015.
Boris Groys, Going Public, Sternberg Press, Berlin & New York, 2010.
Mernet Larsen, ‘Taking Notes’, 2004, acrylic, tracing paper and oil on canvas, 122 x 127 cm
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Above the line above is the whole 'Taking Notes' article from Stamm, with the Three Figures of TAR pictured 'Taking Notes' at the end. Their pages for note-taking are fully lined (click image to enlarge) but they've not made any notes yet. That's them ("When shall we three meet again?") below, too.
"Streams of tendency" (James Joyce) to line the field, indeed.
click image to enlarge photo courtesy LM of TAR
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