Diary
Lines of thought
February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 April onwards Log
Feb 28, 2007. Newtown
Christine McMillan recently made a piece for installation using the scales of a carp (fish), describing it as a 'dress', and of human scale. Viewers often feel moved, she said, to enter into the absent human form which it defines. A human gesture seems required; people want to get inside it, to wear it. Seeing it for the first time now, I feel the human presence mysteriously palpable through its very absence. Attached with ties to surrounding bushland, the carp dress invites a human engagement with wilderness (our own), reflecting the engagement of the artist to her land.
Feb 27, 2007. Collingwood
The body remembers
Charcoal gestures across large sheets of paper animate a Gondwanan bird in flight. John Wolseley's drawn marks are scratched into the surface as if by sooty body parts of bird: claws, wings, beak.
The Cassowary - whose ancestors roamed Gondwana is another species seriously threatened by land clearance and habitat loss...the charcoal hisses and rumbles across the paper, stamping occasionally as it captures the swift movement of the bird fleeing the smoke and drifting pandanas fragments which signal the approach of fire.
Wolseley, 2007, Artist's Statement, Australian Galleries, Land Marks II, Book launch and exhibition 16-25 February
Feb 26, 2007. Northcote
Nice to walk and talk. Here's a starting point for SMIL:
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/
The piece written by Simon Penny on Body Knowledge and questioning the engineers top down control centre view is at:
http://ace.uci.edu/penny/texts/virtualization.html
Why do we believe that consciousness is located exclusively in the brain, when, contrarily, we put so much faith in 'gut feelings'? Why do we describe some responses as 'visceral'? Why do ancient Indian yogic and Chinese martial traditions locate the center of will in the belly? We believe that we think with our brains, because we have been taught that this is the case. What if we believed otherwise? How differently would we live our lives? I want in all seriousness to argue that I 'know' with my arms and with my stomach. To maintain that the activity which we call "knowing" is isolated to a subsection of the body, is folly. Why am I pursuing this line of thought? Because firstly, the redefinition of human capability in terms of the computer resoundingly reinforces the separation of mind and body. And secondly, because dance, sculpture, painting and the variety of other fine and performing arts are premised on bodily training, bodily knowledge which implicitly contradict the mind/body duality.
I like him. He is a blokes bloke but quite approachable. You may find other things of interest on his site.
Simon Pockley, Secretary: Otway Barham Catchment Landcare Group http://www.obclg.org Duck Digital: repository metadata and research http://www.duckdigital.net
Feb 26, 2007. Hawthorn
Animating the Abstract
Ideas change and evolve. The current version of my Abstract (Follow Studies>Antarctic) has been through many drafts. Animating the Abstract and Language of Enquiry are titles of publications I'm starting to prepare for approaching conferences. The research objectives will be presented in the first, and the second will be an exploration of methodology. As well as delivering hard copy versions for conference proceedings, each will be available on-line.
Plain English
Oliver Strunk (1901-1980) wrote The Elements of Style to encourage plain use of the English language. His book...
aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style...It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature. (Strunk, 1918; Introductory)
http://sut1.sut.ac.th/strunk/
SMIL=Synchronised Multimedia Integrated Language:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/
Feb 25, 2007. Yarra River
Crossing Victoria Bridge with a Koori man and his wife, they suddenly stop and she says "This is where our daughter was born" (in an ambulance on the way to a hospital). They look down into the river and pause a while.
Once there was a waterfall downstream from here, he tells me, where Southbank is today. Dividing the fresh from the brackish waters, the fall provided Aboriginal people with an abundance of different foods. They would come from near and far, crossing over the stepping stones above it to share food and to trade. Colonials destroyed the waterfall so they could get their longboats further upstream from the bay. Since a bridge has been built where the fall once was, this place has again become a centre for meeting and eating and trade.
Feb 26, 2007. Selby
As a Dja Dja Worrong man, I should acknowledge that the meeting place on the Birrurung river (called mistakenly the Yarra, which means 'waterfall' in another Australian language) is actually that of the Bunurong people on the south and the Woiwurrung people on the north side. The top of the waterfall was the only place that you could get from one side of the river to the other without getting wet feet - a bridge, if you will.
Since the British destroyed the falls to get their longboats further up the river, the fresh and brackish waters mixed, destroying the two separate eco-systems. As well as being a meeting place for these peoples, this was the food bowl for the area. This was destroyed along with the ecology.
Despite the virtual extermination of the local people over a period of about 10 years, as well as the desecration of the land, things today are not much different in essence from how they were then.
Eventually, on that fertile and productive land was built South Bank.
What is South Bank?
It is a place where people come to meet and eat.
The Land will not allow things to happen that are not meant to happen.
It will make things happen that are meant to happen.
This is the Power of the Land.
This is the Magic of the Dreaming.
Bryan Fricker, a Dja Dja Worrong man, Victoria, Australia
Feb 24, 2007. Hawthorn
Just before sunrise, the sound of rain on the roof wakes me and I look a little differently at the newspapers waiting by the front door, covered in their protective plastic film. "Sometimes the cognitive and affective components (of our perceptions and attitudes) clash" (Simpson-Housley, 1992; xv): I may be aware that the protective film on newspapers is a pollution hazard yet at the same time I like how it stops them going soggy in the wet.
On opening the 'Age' (A2, p. 12, In a new light), I find Gabriella Coslovich writing about the Australian Impressionist exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, showing works by Roberts, Streeton, Condor, McCubbin and Sutherland.
Impressionism is to art lovers what Boxing Day sales are to bargain hunters - an infallible cue to a queue...conjuring images of sun-dappled trees, felicitous picnics by gently flowing rivers, lazy afternoon boating parties and idyllic gardens rendered in shimmering colour and loose, broken brushstrokes. (Melbourne was)... an accomodating and fertile environment for the budding impressionists of the sunny south...gorged with wealth generated by gold, wool and wheat.
Allegro con brio: Burke Street West c.1886
Roberts knew this place well, with the nearby Yarra river one of those "gently flowing" subjects of his art. He painted the immediacy of his time and place.
Like all cities of the world, Melbourne's booms contributed to the environmental time bomb we face today. Will this exhibition help us to engage more immediately with our own time and place? What can we learn from the the Australian Impressionist methods to find new ways of seeing and responding through our own eyes? Will the show simply offer a pleasant escapist experience? How much will the way it's promoted affect our expectations, and hense perceptions? What do we DO with such beautiful pictures? All of the above?
I look at a Roberts picture and feel alive to the moment he shows me, feeling through his every brushstroke an immediate response to the lands and people he knew. I take this feeling and connect with the people and places I encounter, incorporating the new materials available with the old to shape my understandings of a different world.
"Memories arise from writing detailed descriptions...the ideas flow from the ink." Carmel Bird told us yesterday in The Book Show, ABC Radio National. Here is the first exersise (praphrased) from her new book, Writing the story of my life: the ultimate guide. It reminds me of scores for movement improvization that Andrew Morrish uses in his teaching and performing, providing starting points and frameworks for free association composition. I've used such scores for making drawings, paintings and animations. Carmel offers a recipe, and I can never resist a recipe from someone who makes good things.
Think of a clock or a watch you knew as a child.
Write a detailed description of it.
Write for 20 minutes, allowing your ideas to flow with the ink.
Hear the clock ticking.
My very clumsy version will be replaced soon by the original.
Feb 23, 2007. Hawthorn
As children we cooled ourselves in the summer heat with water running from garden hoses, flooding the lawns and flower beds at the same time. We didn't know any better. Australia is in drought now and my daughter douses her hot babies with water from a cup.
The termperature is expected to rise to 32 degrees today. Taking the Yarra river walk early with friends prepares us for the day. This morning's topic for conversation is academia.
The 1959 Antarctic Treaty promotes international scientific research and the exchange of data for peaceful purposes. This ethos, prevailing on scientific expeditions both at sea and on Antarctic bases, extends into the research undertaken there in the arts. I am exploring ways to conduct my practice-based research in this spirit.
This Blog takes the form of an open journal to share ideas and information and to invite comment. Please only send a comment to this Blog if you are open to its inclusion.
Feb 22, 2007. Hawthorn
A conversation with a retired judge alerts me to the different perceptions people can have of events. Courts will hear different recounts of the same happening from different people, and over time those individual recounts can also change. Psychological tests show that fear can alter one's perception, and memory of perception, as much as one's training and temperament.
Note Paul Simpson-Housley's 'Antarctica: Exploration, Perception, and Metaphor' (1992; xv):
When Shakespeare affirmed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that 'Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind' (I, i, 234) he unintentionally made a statement that is in some ways akin to modern ideas on perception. If the word 'love' were changed to 'a person', we have a phrase which encapsulates a fundamental idea on perceptual theory. Perception is a learned process, and not simply a response to a stimulus. People often see in an object what they anticipate rather than what is actually there. It is not so much that seeing is believing but rather that believing is seeing. Memory and experience condition what we see in a stimulus. Our aim is not to negate the importance of the stimulus but simply to place it in perspective: it is important but not necessarily more so than the perceived perceptual filter which evaluates and organizes sensory inputs. Perhaps the philosopher Whitehead (1949) was correct when he affirmed that we are not comparing a given world with given perceptions of it since both are to some extent deduced concepts.
It is possible to distinguish between perceptions and attitudes. The former require a specific stimulus and are a response to that stimulus, while the latter do not require a stimulus at the moment under consideration and are general responses to phenomena. Thus, we may say that a seashore dweller has a perception of a particular marine flood when he/she moves temporarily to higher land to avoid the consequences of a flood that is currently taking place. If, however, the individual moves permanently to a home further inland, it is because of an attitude to marine inundation in general.
Perceptions and attitudes have cognitive and affective components. We have knowledge about objects, places and people, and we may either like or dislike them. Sometimes the cognitive and affective components clash. We may be aware that coal fires are a pollution hazard yet at the same time we may like their warm colourful glow. Here the term 'perception' is used as a generic term, and certainly it will encompass a whole range of environmental, imaginative, and aesthetic attitudes. The term 'perception' is chosen because its general meaning is understood, and thus there is no need to create a new term.
I see a 1971 Brazilian film, Finis Hominis (The End of Man) and am reminded of the Surrealist films I saw at the Tate Modern just before leaving London.
The film: Sao Paulo-born Jose Mojica Marins is a familiar name to hardcore horror buffs, who revel in his sometimes perverse and always grim series of Ze do Caixao (Coffin Joe) films. In 1971, Marins, perhaps tiring of the relentless nihilism of his facetious Coffin Joe persona, produced this bizarre art film about 'Finis Hominis', a wandering hermit with a penchant for philosophizing and miracle-working. Like the Coffin Joe films, End of Man was shot in black and white, probably out of necessity. This choice, whether artistic or financial, works to the film's advantage, lending an extra layer of quirkiness to this very strange feature.
A Dore-influenced woodcut sequence opens the film, accompanied by portentous narration about the meaning of life and man's place on the planet. We're informed that "the soul knows nothing about the creation of nature...the universe is a mystery...but there is one truth, the creation of intelligence and matter...the existence of man!" End of Man then overlays a scene over the opening credits as our hero - played, of course, by Marins himself - emerges childlike and naked from the ocean. After disturbing the tryst of a (clothed) couple and upsetting other local residents with his shameless display, he rescues a stranded woman and her daughter from a group of marauding rapists - the kind who set up roadblocks to ensnare their victims. The grateful woman takes him home and dresses him in her most outlandish late '60s hand-me-downs, lending him the appearance of a very groovy guru indeed.
John Seal, July 30 2004
http://www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/index.cfm?columnID=8422
Feb 21, 2007. Mornington
Sydney Nolan, Bird, oil on composition board 1220 x 122.0cm, 14 September 1964
Sydney Nolan's Antarctic series of paintings (1960s), have been gathered togegether from private collections around the world by curator Rodney James, and are showing in Australia at the Mornington Peninsular Art Gallery, Victoria. An Antarctic Winterer tells me that he sees the Union Jacks, 'smeared' into several of the painted landscapes, as representing "the irrelevance of flags in Antarctica", and that Nolan was "a bit of an iconoclast, yet had created a few (icons)of his own". The Ned Kelly series was to follow the Antarctic series. Their symbolic representations of the infamous bushranger and his landscape became icons of a white Australian outback.
Nolan's colours and forms are highly abstracted, and have sat uncomfortably, the Winterer said, for some (not he) who have experienced Antarctica closely, and "memory can interfere" with reading Nolan's response.
Feb 20, 2007. Melbourne
Johannah Exiner taught movement improvisation in Melbourne in the 1980s. Lines of movement were drawn within and between bodies, with meanings shaped by patterns made through dance in space and time.
Feb 21, 2007. Alberta
"The body remembers" - as Margaret Brooks entitled one of her art works. Probably body memory is one of the most primitive and powerful of the kinds of memories we have. Like the memory involved in riding a bicycle or swimming - we don't forget. I'm interested in the connection between physical experience and drawing.
Hannah Hinchman describes the kind of physical empathy you feel with things you observe closely while you draw. She writes about how her mouth changed shape while she was drawing the a fat seed pod about to burst and scatter its seeds to the wind. She said her mouth felt as though she was eating two cherry tomatoes at once. I can't find the book just now, but it's called "A Trail Through Leaves".
Sylvia Chard, University of Alberta, Canada.
Feb 17, 2007. Newtown
Writer and poet William L. Fox was interviewed by Alan Saunders on Radio National on 2 April 2005. I found the transcript today at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2005/1335840.htm
...I actually think that one of the values of places like deserts is they're places where we can go and watch ourselves think. You can actually see your mind putting together the world, because it's working so hard to make sense of this place. And I think having the ability to recognise that in ourselves, is one way we understand how to design a habitat on the planet that's not only better for us, but it acknowledges that there's other kinds of life on the planet.
Alan Saunders: And it's not coincidental presumably, that several of the world's great religions were born in deserts?
William Fox: This is a very interesting question. The monotheisms, actually. They are those religions that have one god. And some people have said that's because you go into a desert and it is such a reductive visual environment. Everything is knocked down to simply ground and sky and heat, that that really concentrates the mind, and frames the universe, not in a pantheistic way where if you're in a forest, there's the god of the trees and there's the god of the bushes, and there's a god of the birds. In the desert, it's just one overwhelming reality. And that reality sort of puts you back inside your head, it's related to what I'm talking about, you really begin to look inward, and sometimes people hear voices.
Stephen Eastaugh sends me a link to order William L. Fox's new book, Terra Antarctica: Looking into the Emptiest Continent (Trinity University Press, 2005). I expect it will arrive in about two weeks.
William L. Fox is a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. His numerous nonfiction books rely upon fieldwork with artists and scientists in extreme environments to provide the narratives through which he conducts his investigations...(he) has written eight nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape. On-line accessed Feb 17 2007, http://www.wlfox.net/
Feb 16, 2007. Newtown
Last week a friend told me about an exhibition she saw of Sydney Nolan's Antarctic series, made in response to his 1964 sea voyage with Alan Moorhead. She described his work as
'...crudely painted...which somehow captured the raw beauty and frightening intensity of the polar landscape.'(Sue Walker, Melbourne Australia)
Stephen Eastaugh's Base series (2005) had a similar effect on me when I saw his 2006 TravailogueXIII show in Sydney. There was an immediacy about his pictures, constructed small and seemingly quickly through painted and stitched marks. Hands get cold if you're working in the ice, as he was, making his preliminary drawings. Although many of the works I saw were completed in a Melbourne studio, the quick laying down of paint and thread conveyed the immediacy of being there.
Stephen Eastaugh, MOOP (Man Out Of Phase), mixed media, 2003
In the way they both move the paint, Nolan and Eastaugh transport viewers into their moments of connection with the landscape. It's what the Australian Impressionists did, to connect the European eye with the experience of Australian bush. Their work is physical and gestural.
Are there differences between male and female responses to the Antarctic? The contemplative responses of Sue Lovegrove to the deserts of Australia and to the Antarctic are conveyed through delicate layers of paint, finely cross-hatched in pale tones. Bea Maddock's images....also subdued. There is a delicacy also in the jewelry crafted by Karin Beaumont.
Next week I will go and see Nolan's paintings for myself.
The crudity of the art and artefacts made by expeditioners can similarly express that rawness and immediacy. To repurpose materials at hand so imaginatively and hilariously, seems a typically Antarctic artform. Or perhaps it's just what people do when living in isolated places, with minimum resources, removed from the so-called 'real world'. A green garbage bag wrapped around the body, and Christmas baubles strung around the neck creates a perfect costume for a 'Ladies Night'. Such ephemeral props and costumes made from found materials can be artful. And, in conversation with an expeditioner, I learn that:
Some very skilled people spend long periods of time in Antarctica without the distractions of ordinary life, and make some good things. They have access to good machinery and have time of their hands. Much of the stuff that is intenionally made well, with prior planning and materials procurement, goes home with them. Stuff made with no prior planning, often on the spur of the moment, is made using whatever materials are at hand. This is what happened in Australia 50 to 100 years ago, before mass production made a finished product cheaper than the cost of its materials. For example furniture was made from kerosine cans and their wooden cases, mostly utilitarian in style and construction, but with occasional examples of great craft skill. Those things that were crafted well survived best and are now collector's items. (Ken Wilson, Newtown, Sydney, Australia)
I am reminded that we can't generalise about the aesthetic nature of art and artefacts made by Antarctic base workers. There is very fine craftmanship in the jewelery made by Marine scientist Dr Karin Beaumont and in the photography produced by Dr Eric Woehler, just to cite two examples.
Feb 15, 2007. Newtown
Brown marsh frogs in the backyard pond were recorded on Tue 18 Nov 2003 11:04:22 PM EST.
The last scene of the film Der recht weg [The right way](1983), by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, takes Rat and Bear (their personas)on a journey into the wilderness, and into the wild nature of themselves. The picture postcard landscape through which they travel darkens, their forms silhouetted against the sky merging with trees, rocks and glaciers. Relinquishing the sophistcation of human gesture, they stumble and bumble. Long branches pressed to their lips become horns, as they call, growl and roar.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, costumes of the Rat and Bear from the films Der geringste Widerstand (The Least Resistance), 1981, and Der rechte Weg (The Right Way), 1983. Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
In The Right Way a bear and a rat - the artists reusing the rather shoddy costumes from their film Der geringste Widerstand (The Least Resistance) (1981) - explore dark forests, treacherous ravines and snow-swept glaciers. With no real aim in mind, the bear and the rat bungle along in a folk tale of their own devising, wondering what they should do and where they should go, enjoying nature together, foraging for sustenance, getting lost, squabbling, joking and making music along the way. Both monumental and intimate, serious and hilarious, The Right Way suggests how any way - whether straight, crooked or both - may be made into the right one. (Royal college of Art On-line exhibition catalogue, "The Straight or Crooked Way", 2003, On-line accessed 2007-02-16)
http://www.cca.rca.ac.uk/2003/pages/artistpages/fischliweisspage.html
Feb 15, 2007. Wolverhampton
The use of sound and movement also fascinates me... Multi-sensory experiences and explorations can really engage the spiritual nature of our lives.
Sue Fawson, University of Wolverhampton, England
Feb 14, 2007. Newtown
Overlapping Horizontal Arcs drawn and animated immediately after practising Tai'chi.
The Horizontal Arc gestures of Great Apes are observed by Dr John Matthews, from the School of Visual and Performing Arts, National Institute of Education, Singapore. Such gestures, made by the Apes at his approach, appear to define their personal space. The Horizontal Arc is one of the first drawn marks made by human children. A warm-up exersise for Tai 'chi involves both arms loosely swinging in a sideways motion, drawing the same arc in the air around the body.
Dr Matthews' findings show that expression and representation are not limited to humans, more deeply opening up the question 'What is art?'
Moving lines of thought
A method for arts-based inquiry:
Move.
Make
Animate.
Write.
Communicate.
Test.
Re-move.
Re-make
Re-animate.
Re write.
Communicate.
Repeat from the beginning until lines of thought shape themselves with no need of further intervention.
Feb 13, 2007. Hawthorn
Do we have to do what we want to do?
Joseph Kiraly, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia
Feb 12, 2007. Newtown
Bug
Tickle my foot Fat Cockroach.
Scuttle into view.
Look, then my book, drops down
Dead straight.
Dead bug.
Bugger you.
Feb 11, 2007. Sydney Harbour
Storm
Haze approaches over water,
Silent grey before the rain.
Each drop heavy, unexpected,
All together, all around...
All sound drowned.
Sydney Harbour overlooked
Sleeveless trees bare legged.
Underdressed, yet overheard,
Each word heavy
And expected.
All around here,
Hear!
Feb 3, 2007. Antarctica
Ocean Oddessy
02/03/2007 10:22 AM
No, oddessy is misspelt deliberately - it's a very odd place.
...Down at 54 S 146 E doing oceanography ...
At least 1 more trip south later this year, an Aufust cruise to the sea ice. Should be fun and a lot less stressful than these oceanography cruises rolling round in the open ocean. I don't get seasick but I also don't appreciate bouncing off the walls while showering, and with my bad arm it doesn't get easier... Glaciology trips into the pack ice are another matter.
Peter Wiley, Marine Science voyage, Antarctica
