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"Psssst. Look within!"
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
31 March 2011
30 March 2011
grave but not serious
Following on from yesterday's post [ Puppet Culture Framing System ] is this media release for an exhibition that opens on
April Fools Day at Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane :
MEDIA RELEASE
grave but not serious
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane
Exhibition: 1 April—7 May, 2011
Gallery hours: 1–5pm, Wednesday—Saturday
Opening: Friday 1 April, 6-8pm
Gary Foley and Bob Maza, Basically Black, ABC TV, 1973
Opening on Friday 1 April, David Pestorius will present a thematic exhibition dedicated to the idea of Aboriginal humour and its manifestation in contemporary art and culture.
In his famous Boyer Lectures ‘After the Dreaming’ (1968) W.E.H. Stanner recalled an exchange with an elderly Aboriginal man whose tribe was facing extinction. Reflecting upon his predicament, the old man said “When all the black fellows are dead all the white fellows will get lost in the bush, and there’ll be no one to find them and bring them home.” The observation was related dispassionately — there were no “tears, reproaches or dramatics” — and the old man went off laughing. According to Stanner, this was exemplary of Aboriginal humour, “a wonderful gift, one they did not get from us, of taking us gravely but not seriously.” Today we see something of this gift in the works of Richard Bell (Brisbane), Destiny Deacon + Michael Riley (Melbourne/Sydney), Tracey Moffatt (Brisbane), and Archie Moore (Brisbane), presented here. At once both frightening and funny, this disarming humour is generally understood as the product of a continuing effort to come to terms with white Australia. The exhibition also features Indigenous playwrights John Harding (Melbourne) and Sam Watson (Brisbane), whose works reflect a similar sensibility, while a new piece from Watson’s ongoing collaboration with Dave Hullfish Bailey (Los Angeles) is presented alongside the ABC television spoofs ‘Basically Black’ (1973) and ‘Babakiueria’ (1986). In the process, a long and proud tradition of Aboriginal activism that embraces the agency of satirical culture is alluded to.
In scheduling the exhibition opening for April Fools Day — a day when practical jokes are tolerated — the present moment is reflexively activated in a ploy first utilised locally by another great humorist, the Melbourne artist Peter Tyndall. In 1980 Tyndall set his exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in motion in this way, yet the show itself was a savage indictment of the repressive socio-political and cultural situation in Brisbane at the time. In a similar inversion, the artist’s mock newspaper daybills (‘SCREAMING TEENS MOB PAINTINGS’) from this important exhibition, one of which is included here, pit the solitude of the art gallery experience against the intense communal response that popular music can generate. It is a sensibility perhaps not so very different from the one that Stanner was trying to describe.
Finally, on the closing weekend — Saturday 7 May — Sam Watson and art historian Rex Butler will discuss aspects of the exhibition in situ (bookings essential).
For further information, contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
david pestorius projects
www.davidpestorius.com
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
29 March 2011
Puppet Culture Framing System
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Museums Australia Magazine currently features on its cover a Puppet Culture Framing System component from a 1980 exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
That exhibition began on April Fools Day 1980 ...
... with only one full set of its exhibition components formally on display :
one Work Of Art (Painting)
one (red) Puppet Culture Framing System
one sheet of Art Titles and daily newspaper headlines
one photograph of peoples in action
one newspaper banner SCREAMING TEENS MOB PAINTINGS
red fluorescent lights inside
red filters on the windows
Twenty-nine more of these component sets
- Thirty days hath September, April June and November -
were stacked assembly-line ready opposite the presentation of April 1.
After that
with each new day
another set of world events
another something on display ...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
26 March 2011
Performance Appraisal
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Theatre of the Actors of Regard :The Apprai$al
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
23 March 2011
Your Thought Here
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We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Buddha
The Dharmapada
This old trade card and its gesture of aware cognition flashed into memory last evening when Melbourne University art historian Christopher Marshall did much the same on a program (Artscape - MONA: Feel The Weird) about David Walsh's Museum of New and Old Art in Tasmania.
During the program there were quite a number of references to thinking. The presenter Andrew Frost spoke with "a guru of art galleries", Jean-Hubert Martin :
AF: (... so what does he make of David's vision?)
J-H M: It will certainly be controversial. I guess it will attract quite a lot of people.
AF: Why do you think it will be controversial?
J-H M: If a much larger public comes here they're not just going to see beautiful paintings that will please their eye but they will be challenged and forced, actually, to think and maybe to reverse some of their ideas about art and human kind, actually.
bLOGOS/HA HA particularly enjoyed something that Walsh said almost as an aside
"There's a lot less to art than people think."
The program's final act is a simple archetype. The Actor of Regard looks across the water at MONA and its reflection, then walks away...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
20 March 2011
Invisible Viewers
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This advertisement is from today's SUNDAY AGE.
On the right of it is a tableau by Theatre of the Actors of Regard:
Invisible Viewers
Appropriately, the NGV's label for this TAR Invisible Viewers
tableau is:
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
18 March 2011
argus-tuffed
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Today on Google. True!
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
17 March 2011
What the wild waves
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Dream of some weeks agostandingA week ago
on sand
at sea's edge
watching
waves of script
rolling in
from the horizon
wondering
what they say
who writes them
who might translate them to me
8.9 earthquake under the sea off NE JapanToday
terrible tsunami smashes coast - tens of thousands dead
6 Fukushima uranium/plutonium plants in increasing crisis
with snow falling and the overnight temp at -5 degrees
with relief teams from abroad joining those from Japan
this old trade card tableau of regard reads anew
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
14 March 2011
Jeu de Massacre
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In our heap here we have a number of French cards (c.1880-90) that depict the children's game Jeu de Massacre. (Literally The Game of Massacre ; also translated as The Killing Game.)These come to mind as we the rest of the world regard the present struggle in Libya. As discussions continue in the United Nations and elsewhere about the possibility of imposing a no-fly zone over this region, General Gaddafi 's army and air force are gradually putting down the people's rebellion of recent weeks. Everyone knows these liberty seekers will face a terrible retribution if the Gaddafi forces are successful.
In this tableau two officials of the Theatre of the Actors of Regard observe, with their hands in their pockets, the threat of an armed Government agent.
Come the counter-revolution...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
11 March 2011
<<<<<<<<<<< pulse >>>>>>>>>>>
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detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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