A small selection of images © Le Flaneur
Hasta lluego, crocadillo
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Mi querido Mexico
(My beloved Mexico)
A small selection of images © Le Flaneur
Hasta lluego, crocadillo
A small selection of images © Le Flaneur
Hasta lluego, crocadillo
Friday, May 25, 2007
Indigenous Health: Close the Gap
From ANTAR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation)'s May newsletter:
Olympic champions Catherine Freeman and Ian Thorpe returned to Sydney's Telstra Stadium recently to launch Close the Gap, Australia's largest ever campaign to improve Indigenous health. They joined more than forty Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations in urging the Federal, State and Territory governments to commit to closing the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a generation. An Indigenous child born in 2007 will live for 17 years less than a non Indigenous child, on average. Indigenous babies are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than non-Indigenous babies. At the launch, Ian and Catherine became the first people to add a hand to our new virtual Sea of Hands website. We are encouraging all Australians to add a hand to show their commitment to justice for Indigenous Australians. Once you add a hand, you can also send a letter to politicians asking them to commit to closing the gap.
Show your support:
Sign the Close the Gap pledge at: http://www.antar.org.au
Bon Soir
Olympic champions Catherine Freeman and Ian Thorpe returned to Sydney's Telstra Stadium recently to launch Close the Gap, Australia's largest ever campaign to improve Indigenous health. They joined more than forty Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations in urging the Federal, State and Territory governments to commit to closing the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a generation. An Indigenous child born in 2007 will live for 17 years less than a non Indigenous child, on average. Indigenous babies are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than non-Indigenous babies. At the launch, Ian and Catherine became the first people to add a hand to our new virtual Sea of Hands website. We are encouraging all Australians to add a hand to show their commitment to justice for Indigenous Australians. Once you add a hand, you can also send a letter to politicians asking them to commit to closing the gap.
Show your support:
Sign the Close the Gap pledge at: http://www.antar.org.au
Bon Soir
Friday, April 27, 2007
The Shaman in Academia: ritual, metaphor and transformation in the arts
ACLA Conference 2007
Puebla, Mexico 19-21 April
This is the full text of a paper presented at the above conference by David Corbet, sans footnotes
© Le Flaneur
1. Art and language
This paper investigates the intersection between so-called ‘shamanic’ practice in the visual arts, and the academic/curatorial/critical context within which such practice emerges, with particular reference to the contradictions inherent in academic research in this area. This arises, appropriately to this conference, from my research into the role of text (and other symbol-based language systems) in the contemporary plastic arts. While painting, sculpture and printmaking have historically often been concerned with depicting events from literature and mythology, their present entanglement with the forms of written language is essentially a postmodern phenomenon. At some point the division between spoken language and the realm of object-making has became irrevocably blurred, with texts increasingly used to add layers of meaning to works of plasticity, at many different levels, from the overt to the implied. As we shall see, certain kinds of artists have always been confident practitioners across image making, language and performance, and their work provides a prism through which to view and explore some of the philosophical issues affecting creative practice in our time. It seems to me that the visual arts are still in many respects playing out an endgame arising from the immense intellectual upheavals of early last century, and that the next great shift of consciousness is not yet upon us, but is certainly coming.
Which brings me to the word ‘shaman’. The enormous literature on the subject would make a two-hour-paper in itself, but a brief diversion into the word’s etymology is worthwhile. According to the Hungarian anthropologist Mihály Hoppál it is the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and spirit guide found in Turkic-Mongol areas of Northern Asia such as Siberia and Mongolia, and translates as ‘he or she who knows’ (from the Tungusic root “sa” – “to know”. The word has passed from Sanscrit (śramana – ascetic) through Pali (śamana), Chinese (sha men), Tungusic (sămán), Turkik-Tungusic (shaman), Russian and German into English. The religious historian Mercia Eliade has described a shaman as “a medicine man, priest, and psychopomp. He cures illness. He directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the outer world.” ‘Shamanic illness’ is also a concept referred to by many scholars – whether literal or metaphorical, and shamans frequently achieve their status by way of extreme personal trauma and out-of-body experiences. These trials and subsequent enlightenments are of course a common feature of many religious figures in history. There is no universal gender requirement, however in some societies (for instance Korea) shamans are always women. Hoppál questions whether the term ‘shamanism’ is appropriate, and proposes the use of the term ‘shamanhood’ as less suggestive of a fixed set of practices, emphasising shamanic knowledge:
A shaman is a person who is an expert in keeping together the multiple codes through which this complex belief system appears, and has a comprehensive view of them in his/her mind with certainty of knowledge. The shaman uses (and the audience understands) multiple codes: he/she expresses meanings in many ways (in musical, verbal, choreographic forms, and meanings are manifested also in objects, e.g. amulets). Thus his/her audience knows the used symbols and meanings — that's why shamanism can be efficient: people in the audience trust it. Such belief system can appear to its members with certainty of knowledge.
He cites Finnish anthropologist Juha Pentikèainen’s view that shamanism is a “grammar of mind, because shamans need to be experts in the folklore of their cultures”. Shamanic practices occur, with wide variation, in most regions of the world, most prominently among indigenous peoples, but with some important manifestations in late 20th century and contemporary western art.
Naturally, there is often a whiff of pseudoscience and mysticism in the air as soon as shamanism or occultism is mentioned, and to a degree this goes with the territory. The term ‘paperback shamanism’ has been coined in reference to some of the popular literature, for instance the works of Carlos Castaneda, with which most Americans would be familiar. This paper embraces a broad usage of the term, drawing on anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, art history and aspects of popular culture. In this broad sense shamanism can be described as a set of practices concerned with metaphysical or psychic processes, and the focus of my research is on three key attributes that appear to be common to all such practice:
knowledge + ritual + transformation
2. The artist as shaman
Two overlapping spheres of contemporary shamanic practice in the arts are observable. The first is the Euro-American tradition from Dada and Fluxus through much contemporary performance, body, installation and environmental art. All such practice occurs within heavily mediated societies where an influential Academia gestates, and often sustains, the artist. The second sphere is the vast body of ritual practice still actively ‘lived’ by many indigenous peoples, where technology is only gradually penetrating rural areas, and oral histories and tribal knowledge remain far more powerful cultural factors than media or formal education. In such societies shamans are often important figures at village level, fulfilling an acknowledged role of seer, maker of sacred objects, conductor of rituals and keeper of arcane knowledge. Although this is changing, historically the artefacts made by such individuals have been consigned to ethnographic museums and excluded from consideration as mainstream contemporary art. Alongside this has prospered the western, primitivist idea of the pure, untouched ‘wild man’ at one with nature. A growing body of scholars, for example the contemporary anthropologist Michael Taussig, interrogates the evolving post-colonial encounter between indigenous and settler peoples, and has comprehensively demolished many of these notions. It is perhaps more useful to think in terms of degrees of 'mediation' when considering cultural production in tribal societies. Based on my own experiences travelling in Africa and Australia, it seesm evident that at the farthest end of the scale (from the tertiary-educated western urban ‘neo-primitivist’) there exists the unmediated tribal shaman, uninfluenced by Academia, and living in such a way that 'ritual' and 'life' are not separate, but are one and the same thing. The expanding nexus between these poles is in fact where we can learn most, and gives rise to a dynamic third force – the third-world artist who is sustained by a tribal network at home, but also functions partially within the international curatorial system, through cultural exchanges, biennales and the like.
In Australia the largest growth in recent decades has been in the ‘genre’ of Indigenous painting (on bark and on canvas), which regularly achieves unprecedented sales figures at auction, and has become an extremely lucrative industry, sustaining many remote communities, dealers of varying reputation, and a considerable curatorial and institutional infrastructure. If one reflects that making paintings – in the sense of discreet, portable artworks that can be bought and sold – is a recent phenomenon among Australian Indigenous artists, with synthetic paint and canvas becoming widespread only in the last fifty years or so, then some might find it surprising that the best work is so very good, and has been rapidly taken up by the major contemporary art collections of the world, transcending the ethnographic tag that has dogged aboriginal art for centuries. The 10-year old ‘art career’ of the celebrated contemporary painter Paddy Bedford (Goowoomji), an 84 year-old senior ‘lawman’ of the Gija people in northwest Australia, is revealing. Bedford began painting on canvas and board only in 1998, and he is one of many extraordinary individuals, such as the revered late artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye (who began at 80) and Rover Thomas (at around 70) who more or less instantaneously began to make significant ‘modern’ paintings at an advanced age. This phenomenon is by no means confined to Australia, and I will return to it presently.
3. Does art matter?
It seems evident that humankind’s undying love affair with the plastic arts is driven by the perception that there are rare works of art have a unique power to move us profoundly – to reveal to us our humanity, our mortality, and our place in the universe. The same can of course be said of great literature, theatre, cinema, dance and music, with some important differences. Walter Benjamin spoke of the “aura” (which he equates with authority and/or authenticity) of unique works of art. In our digitally mediated world of images his central thesis that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of a work of art” is worth revisiting. He defines authenticity as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced”. Benjamin’s concept of aura proposed qualities inherent in the physical object, but he importantly, he acknowledges its ritual origins: “We know that the earliest works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of a work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.”
When we talk today about the ‘power’ or ‘aura’ of a work of art, either ancient or modern, we are surely describing a personal experience which transcends the purely formal or aesthetic attributes of the work – something we ourselves bring to the encounter. Yet I’m sure we have all had the experience, for example when contemplating a major Rothko, of an almost palpable ‘hum of power’ which seems to ‘emanate’ from certain works. Is this the same thing as Benjamin’s aura/authority/authenticity? And if it is, why do many reproductions of Australian Indigenous works retain strong elements of their ‘hum of power’ even on the printed page? Does the Mona Lisa have the the hum? Hard to say – its stratospheric value, dimly lit shrine and bullet-proof glass generate their own potent aura. Does the Rothko still have the hum, if we encounter it out of context? What about an ‘original multiple’ screenprint of Warhol’s Marilyn? What about a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde (Damien Hirst), or more problematic still, Explaining art to a dead hare (Joseph Beuys)?
A 2004 British poll of 500 art experts named Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – a ‘readymade’ (i.e. mass-produced) ceramic urinal – as the most influential artwork of all time. It is inscribed “R.Mutt” – a homonym for the German word armut, meaning poverty, and in this single act the international phenomenon of Arte Povera was prefigured. The British press and public of course heaped vitriol on the poll, and seemed to assume Fountain was a recent work by some attention-seeking young ‘art star’, but of course it has been sitting quietly in the Tate Gallery for decades, and its presence there illuminates a critical articulation point in 20th century culture – the birth of conceptualism, and the subsequent eclipse of ‘retinal’ art. Duchamp’s readymades revealed an important truth – that the significance of a work of art is not inherent in the formal structure of the work, only in the overlay of cultural meaning brought about by the act of creation, or in his case transformation. Although he would not have put it thus, Duchamp was practicing a kind of intellectual shamanism, giving us clues to the cosmic organising principles of the universe. Not only that, but he was engaging in that most shamanic of practices – transmutation.
4. Art and ritual
In considering ritual as a key attribute of shamanic practice, it is interesting to revisit the ontological theories of the once influential writer Jack Burnham, who in the 1970s analysed in some detail Duchamp’s immersion in esoteric knowledge, particularly Kabbalah, and the arcane alchemical and occult references throughout the maestro’s art and writings. Following Jung, Burnham advanced a general theory of universals, which is worth considering for a moment:
Universals account for the formation of three basis types of human communication: speech, gesture and iconicity. All forms of human facturing are surrogates for these fundamental means of communication. This fact [and Jung’s diagram] are crucial to the idea of religious paradox. The primary symbols of many organised religions constitute a formal or geometric basis for the system of universals controlling human thought. They are the containers of the various levels of knowledge. They represent metaphysical insight into the organising principle of life itself. They possess enormous power as sources of psychic energy. They recapitulate the ontology of natural growth, and more specifically the evolution of the human race and the intellectual and emotional development of every child. In effect the code of human universals lies in two contrasting forms: the first is in every human brain, the second is in all artefacts comprising the manmade world. Consequently the code is carried from generation to generation by two separate means: organically through the brain of every living individual, and inorganically through the trans-lingual relationships embodied in every artefact, writing and spacial arrangement. This invites a great paradox. All profound art and writing lies in conflict between being as the essence of spiritual revelation, and the illusional permanence of the written word, the icon, or the sacred space.
The ritual theory of myth espoused by ancient Greece specialist Jane Harrison and explains how storytelling, theatre, dance and music have evolved out of ‘primordial’ ritual, and the plastic arts (iconicity) must ontologically, have a common genesis:
In time ritual sustains itself through the use of icons and religious artefacts. At a later stage these degenerate into works of ‘art’. Just as we lose the art of living through formalised ritual, we began – many thousands of years ago – to transfer our hopes of maintaining the code of universals to inanimate objects: scrolls, books, paintings, sculpture and architecture.
In considering the work of Australian and other Indigenous artists who have created profound and universally acclaimed modern paintings with no formal ‘training’ as painters, and often without a preliminary sketch or any revision, we can see that these artists are in fact painting what they already ‘know’ – essentially the dreamings – creation stories and relationships to land – of their people. They are initiates into an ancient system of knowledge, and lifelong practitioners of body painting and other rituals. Their knowledge is handed down from generation to generation independent of any preserved physical code, and is sustained by ‘lived’ ritual. There are of course many layers of knowledge contained in such works – some of it only accessible to the members of the group whose particular dreamings or tribal totems are invoked, however the western enthusiasm for aboriginal art, independent of any special understanding of its motifs, suggests that something bigger is going on. These works may are very likely triggering within us innate and ancient psychic resonances and therefore, in Burham’s conception, giving us “intrinsic pleasure”.
If this is true, then one can postulate that the power and significance of any work of art lies in the clarity with which it expresses the ontology of our universe – the organising principles of life itself – hardwired into our DNA. This negates the search for ‘meaning’ in the causative sense, and very possibly undermines the basis of much artistic scholarship. Burnham suggests that “this continual coming-into-being has no definable origin or meaning; it in fact appears to be meaning itself.” These ultimately metaphysical attributes are common to all significant art, whether a cave painting, an Etruscan vessel, a ceremonial mask, a Da Vinci portrait, a Rover Thomas painting, a roomful of Roscoes or, in my opinion, a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde. And if the ontological thesis holds up, it is the same code that informs significant architecture, design, writing, performance, music and mathematics.
5. The intellectual as shaman
The problem with this metaphysical approach, and the work of the artists discussed here, is that like poetry, it is resistant to Academia’s taxonomical methods – the tendency to codify formal, aesthetic or cultural qualities assumed to be inherent in the physical object, in a highly structured and hierarchical fashion. According to Burnham:
By living from generation to generation through the medium of objects around us we create a series of surrogate styles and epistemological worlds, but even more important, we induce the permutative reduction of the universals themselves. Gradually the code is separated into thousands of pieces by our arts of historical progressivism. While the code is used daily in everyone’s mental operations, we unknowingly dissect it historically into thousands of pieces for spiritual insight, entertainment and scientific advancement. In the human war between causality and synchronicity, causality slowly wins in the shape of culture and its inorganic handmaidens. Certain classes of objects become enormously valuable without us really knowing why, on the other hand he word ritual become synonymous with boredom, tiring repetition, outdatedness and meaninglessness. And the inversion is complete.”
Duchamp’s cryptic late work The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) is considered by many to be an elaborate allegory for the systematic destruction of the ‘authenticity’ of art by its practitioners, the outward form revered long after its original power has been progressively leached away by contemporary practice, curatorship and scholarship. In this context, much contemporary practice can be seen as a self-conscious project by western artists to recreate the conditions where the art object is once again be seen as “an expendable container for the transmission of lived truths”.
Duchamp’s intellectual successor is widely considered to be Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), the über-model for the 20th century western artist-shaman – part psychic healer, part seer, part guide, social provocateur, volkisch idiot-savant and nemesis of Academia. He was Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (where he had studied after WW2) from 1961 until his expulsion in 1972, following a lengthy stand-off with the school’s authorities over his abolition of any entry requirements to his class, presumably in pursuit of his famous dictum that “everyone is an artist” .
Beuys was himself rather dismissive of Duchamp’s legacy, in a 1964 Aktion (action, or performance) famously proclaiming (and also painting) “das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet” (The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated), “because [Duchamp] stopped at the point where he could have developed a theory based on the work achieved, and the theory he could have achieved I am developing today”. The eighty year-old Duchamp, who died four years later in 1968, no doubt just smiled and said nothing.
The literature on Beuys is vast, and I have to assume the reader has a basic familiarity with his persona and self-created ‘legend’, if not the details of his prolific work and writing.
The art critic Robert Hughes has written witheringly of Beuys: “The late conversion of the Luftwaffe pilot, and the spiritual anguish that preceded it, have become an important part of the legend for his fans. … For them, Beuys’ wartime sufferings have joined van Gogh’s ear in the hagiography of modern art: and particularly the occasion in 1943 when he crashed in a JU-87 and was saved by wandering Tartar tribesmen who wrapped his traumatised body in felt and fat, thereby planting the germ of his later obsessive interest in fat and felt as art materials, emblems of healing and magic”.
The art historian John Moffit has analysed in detail Beuys’ shamanic imagery and personal mythology, and his obsession with anthroposophy – the “pseudophilosophy” enshrined in the writings of Rudolf Steiner. He has explained the artist’s trademark attire, and many of his otherwise inscrutable actions, as a series of ekphraseis – direct text-to-picture illustrations or ‘pictorialisations’ of Steiner’s written texts, particularly those dealing with the evolutionary process leading from chaos to order. He concludes that “despite taking as his immediate subject matter a sprawling body of pretentious and garbled writings … [Beuys] transcends this dross, transmuting his esoteric source materials into haunting, often unforgettable images, many of which breathed an undeniably great poetic and evocative power, some of which are invested with strange but undeniable beauty.”
If forced to choose one seminal Beuys’ work, my choice would have to be the legendary 1974 action at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, I like America and America Likes Me, in which, having been transported from JFK airport wrapped in felt, he cohabited an area of the gallery for 5 days with a live coyote, wielding a shepherd’s staff and protected by a felt cloak. There are many possible interpretations of this encounter. The coyote stands for America itself, but also for persecuted nature and the colonial encounter with Indigenous peoples, for whom the coyote has great mythic significance.
Beuys’ potent mix of arcane knowledge, mythology, Jesu-kitsch, animal spirits, ritualised actions, metaphorical materials and the physical processes of decay and rebirth, has created an artistic legacy that resonates visibly through the contemporary art of our time, although the extraordinary conceptual leap from a urinal signed ‘R.Mutt’ to cohabiting with a coyote is arguably yet to be repeated.
7. Material as metaphor
This sprawling legacy, which I term Povera Internationale, is apparent in the work of a multitude of contemporary artists of many cultures who share a preoccupation with aspects of tribal or ‘folk’ knowledge and ritual, and with complex transmutations – often with ‘poor’ materials acting as potent metaphors for psychic and metaphysical processes. One example is the ‘Cool Briton’ Damien Hirst, who has created some of the most profound and confronting works of the late twentieth century, and will no doubt create more One Thousand Years (1990) presents the viewer with a a large vitrine in which a grisly tableau continuously unfolds – a decaying cow’s head being slowly consumed by maggots in an endlessly repeating life cycle. Hatched flies buzz around the enclosed space, sometimes terminated abruptly by an insect-o-cutor. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992), the aforementioned dead shark in tank of formaldehyde, exerts a horrific fascination even on the printed page, presenting us with a meditation on our own mortality, our ability to contemplate it (or not) and our deepest fears, chemically arrested from natural decay and ironically sanctified as ‘gallery art’ – and purchased in 2004 for $12 million by an American collector.
The French American Louise Bourgeois has largely ignored the art world and pursued her intensely personal work with single-minded purpose for decades, producing extraordinary tableaux and objects loaded with potent overlays of ‘ritualised’ meaning – by turns sinister, lyrical or ominous, seeming to distil her simple materials into objects of archetypal power. The late Jewish Iranian (sic) Choureh Feydzou spent a lifetime creating an immense and ‘living’ record of the accumulated materials of her life, incessantly worked upon, endlessly re-combined, labelled, boxed, bound, woven, bottled, preserved, coated in a patina of black pigment (her metaphor for death and rebirth) – a momentous journey into the life of a stranger through the ‘poor’ detritus of her existence, each tottering shelf or table supercharged with an unbearable pathos. By contrast, the Cherokee American Jimmy Durham, self-described ‘political’ artist, exhibits a deadpan humour worthy of Duchamp, ransacking art history, tribal ‘tourist’ art, found objects, written messages and his own Cherokee mythology, and transmuting his materials into objects of astonishing power and simplicity, “durable because they contain intensely meanings which they can no longer pour out.”
If time allowed, there is a fascinating journey to be had, both chronological and geographical, through the many contemporary manifestations of transformative art. I was fortunate in 2002 to spend several days at Documenta 11 in Germany, which was directed by the Nigerian-born curator and writer Okwui Enwezor, and provided an extraordinary overview of world practice, with an unusually high representation of artists from developing countries. These artists all operate somewhere on my notional scale between unmediated object-making and the heavily mediated western Academy, in a postcolonial biennale-land where tribal work now rubs shoulders with video and sound art, and where cultural identity, individual mythology and personal documentary have become as important components of many works as the physical object or installation.
8. In the beginning was the word
It is difficult to discuss the culrural context of such varied artists without detailed reference to their work, so I will close with a general observation. It is evident that much of this work cannot be solely understood within the framework of the visual arts, for these artists are the shamans of our time, operating across language forms, excavators of the future, spirit guides to our common destiny.
The linguist Roman Jakobson’s famously said that “in relation to language other (semiotic) systems are concomitant or derivative. Language is the principle means of information communication”. As the plastic arts appropriate the forms of writing, storytelling, theatre and cinema, we might conclude that they are just returning to an earlier state, before the specialisations that developed out of the European Rennaissance and Enlightenment. They are after all just different manifestations of the same universal meta-language, the same ten stories told over and over down the ages, the hero with a thousand faces. In response to the self-referential, fashion-driven mannerism that characterises so much contemporary ‘gallery art’ (as well as design, architecture and urban planning), could we be witnessing the re-emergence of the artist as a kind poet-scientist-philosopher-shaman, revealing to us profound truths about our common humanity, “re-living the Mysteries” and guiding us towards psychic wholeness? And if so, how does it affect our practice as creative artists, educators, curators or critics? This may ultimately be a question for pure philosophy, but perhaps there is a general case to be made for a more cross-disciplinary approach to the teaching of the creative arts. Such insights as I have gained from my semiotic adventures through the empire of signs have been immeasurably enriching to my own studio practice. The jury is still out on whether the art lives up to the thesis, but that must be the subject of another paper.
I will close with this thought from the Sioux writer Black Elk:
In filling a pipe, all space (represented by the offerings to the powers of the six directions) and al things (represented by the grains of tobacco) are contracted within a single point (the bowl or heart of the pipe), so that the pipe contains, or really is, the universe. But since the pipe is the universe, it is also man, and the one who fills he pipe should identify himself with it, thus not only establishing the centre of the universe, but also his own centre; he so expands that the six directions are of space are actually brought within himself. It is by this expansion that man ceases to be part, a fragment, and becomes whole or holy, he shatters the illusion of separateness.
From Black Elk Speaks : Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Thank you.
Puebla, Mexico 19-21 April
This is the full text of a paper presented at the above conference by David Corbet, sans footnotes
© Le Flaneur
1. Art and language
This paper investigates the intersection between so-called ‘shamanic’ practice in the visual arts, and the academic/curatorial/critical context within which such practice emerges, with particular reference to the contradictions inherent in academic research in this area. This arises, appropriately to this conference, from my research into the role of text (and other symbol-based language systems) in the contemporary plastic arts. While painting, sculpture and printmaking have historically often been concerned with depicting events from literature and mythology, their present entanglement with the forms of written language is essentially a postmodern phenomenon. At some point the division between spoken language and the realm of object-making has became irrevocably blurred, with texts increasingly used to add layers of meaning to works of plasticity, at many different levels, from the overt to the implied. As we shall see, certain kinds of artists have always been confident practitioners across image making, language and performance, and their work provides a prism through which to view and explore some of the philosophical issues affecting creative practice in our time. It seems to me that the visual arts are still in many respects playing out an endgame arising from the immense intellectual upheavals of early last century, and that the next great shift of consciousness is not yet upon us, but is certainly coming.
Which brings me to the word ‘shaman’. The enormous literature on the subject would make a two-hour-paper in itself, but a brief diversion into the word’s etymology is worthwhile. According to the Hungarian anthropologist Mihály Hoppál it is the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and spirit guide found in Turkic-Mongol areas of Northern Asia such as Siberia and Mongolia, and translates as ‘he or she who knows’ (from the Tungusic root “sa” – “to know”. The word has passed from Sanscrit (śramana – ascetic) through Pali (śamana), Chinese (sha men), Tungusic (sămán), Turkik-Tungusic (shaman), Russian and German into English. The religious historian Mercia Eliade has described a shaman as “a medicine man, priest, and psychopomp. He cures illness. He directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the outer world.” ‘Shamanic illness’ is also a concept referred to by many scholars – whether literal or metaphorical, and shamans frequently achieve their status by way of extreme personal trauma and out-of-body experiences. These trials and subsequent enlightenments are of course a common feature of many religious figures in history. There is no universal gender requirement, however in some societies (for instance Korea) shamans are always women. Hoppál questions whether the term ‘shamanism’ is appropriate, and proposes the use of the term ‘shamanhood’ as less suggestive of a fixed set of practices, emphasising shamanic knowledge:
A shaman is a person who is an expert in keeping together the multiple codes through which this complex belief system appears, and has a comprehensive view of them in his/her mind with certainty of knowledge. The shaman uses (and the audience understands) multiple codes: he/she expresses meanings in many ways (in musical, verbal, choreographic forms, and meanings are manifested also in objects, e.g. amulets). Thus his/her audience knows the used symbols and meanings — that's why shamanism can be efficient: people in the audience trust it. Such belief system can appear to its members with certainty of knowledge.
He cites Finnish anthropologist Juha Pentikèainen’s view that shamanism is a “grammar of mind, because shamans need to be experts in the folklore of their cultures”. Shamanic practices occur, with wide variation, in most regions of the world, most prominently among indigenous peoples, but with some important manifestations in late 20th century and contemporary western art.
Naturally, there is often a whiff of pseudoscience and mysticism in the air as soon as shamanism or occultism is mentioned, and to a degree this goes with the territory. The term ‘paperback shamanism’ has been coined in reference to some of the popular literature, for instance the works of Carlos Castaneda, with which most Americans would be familiar. This paper embraces a broad usage of the term, drawing on anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, art history and aspects of popular culture. In this broad sense shamanism can be described as a set of practices concerned with metaphysical or psychic processes, and the focus of my research is on three key attributes that appear to be common to all such practice:
knowledge + ritual + transformation
2. The artist as shaman
Two overlapping spheres of contemporary shamanic practice in the arts are observable. The first is the Euro-American tradition from Dada and Fluxus through much contemporary performance, body, installation and environmental art. All such practice occurs within heavily mediated societies where an influential Academia gestates, and often sustains, the artist. The second sphere is the vast body of ritual practice still actively ‘lived’ by many indigenous peoples, where technology is only gradually penetrating rural areas, and oral histories and tribal knowledge remain far more powerful cultural factors than media or formal education. In such societies shamans are often important figures at village level, fulfilling an acknowledged role of seer, maker of sacred objects, conductor of rituals and keeper of arcane knowledge. Although this is changing, historically the artefacts made by such individuals have been consigned to ethnographic museums and excluded from consideration as mainstream contemporary art. Alongside this has prospered the western, primitivist idea of the pure, untouched ‘wild man’ at one with nature. A growing body of scholars, for example the contemporary anthropologist Michael Taussig, interrogates the evolving post-colonial encounter between indigenous and settler peoples, and has comprehensively demolished many of these notions. It is perhaps more useful to think in terms of degrees of 'mediation' when considering cultural production in tribal societies. Based on my own experiences travelling in Africa and Australia, it seesm evident that at the farthest end of the scale (from the tertiary-educated western urban ‘neo-primitivist’) there exists the unmediated tribal shaman, uninfluenced by Academia, and living in such a way that 'ritual' and 'life' are not separate, but are one and the same thing. The expanding nexus between these poles is in fact where we can learn most, and gives rise to a dynamic third force – the third-world artist who is sustained by a tribal network at home, but also functions partially within the international curatorial system, through cultural exchanges, biennales and the like.
In Australia the largest growth in recent decades has been in the ‘genre’ of Indigenous painting (on bark and on canvas), which regularly achieves unprecedented sales figures at auction, and has become an extremely lucrative industry, sustaining many remote communities, dealers of varying reputation, and a considerable curatorial and institutional infrastructure. If one reflects that making paintings – in the sense of discreet, portable artworks that can be bought and sold – is a recent phenomenon among Australian Indigenous artists, with synthetic paint and canvas becoming widespread only in the last fifty years or so, then some might find it surprising that the best work is so very good, and has been rapidly taken up by the major contemporary art collections of the world, transcending the ethnographic tag that has dogged aboriginal art for centuries. The 10-year old ‘art career’ of the celebrated contemporary painter Paddy Bedford (Goowoomji), an 84 year-old senior ‘lawman’ of the Gija people in northwest Australia, is revealing. Bedford began painting on canvas and board only in 1998, and he is one of many extraordinary individuals, such as the revered late artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye (who began at 80) and Rover Thomas (at around 70) who more or less instantaneously began to make significant ‘modern’ paintings at an advanced age. This phenomenon is by no means confined to Australia, and I will return to it presently.
3. Does art matter?
It seems evident that humankind’s undying love affair with the plastic arts is driven by the perception that there are rare works of art have a unique power to move us profoundly – to reveal to us our humanity, our mortality, and our place in the universe. The same can of course be said of great literature, theatre, cinema, dance and music, with some important differences. Walter Benjamin spoke of the “aura” (which he equates with authority and/or authenticity) of unique works of art. In our digitally mediated world of images his central thesis that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of a work of art” is worth revisiting. He defines authenticity as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced”. Benjamin’s concept of aura proposed qualities inherent in the physical object, but he importantly, he acknowledges its ritual origins: “We know that the earliest works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of a work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.”
When we talk today about the ‘power’ or ‘aura’ of a work of art, either ancient or modern, we are surely describing a personal experience which transcends the purely formal or aesthetic attributes of the work – something we ourselves bring to the encounter. Yet I’m sure we have all had the experience, for example when contemplating a major Rothko, of an almost palpable ‘hum of power’ which seems to ‘emanate’ from certain works. Is this the same thing as Benjamin’s aura/authority/authenticity? And if it is, why do many reproductions of Australian Indigenous works retain strong elements of their ‘hum of power’ even on the printed page? Does the Mona Lisa have the the hum? Hard to say – its stratospheric value, dimly lit shrine and bullet-proof glass generate their own potent aura. Does the Rothko still have the hum, if we encounter it out of context? What about an ‘original multiple’ screenprint of Warhol’s Marilyn? What about a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde (Damien Hirst), or more problematic still, Explaining art to a dead hare (Joseph Beuys)?
A 2004 British poll of 500 art experts named Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – a ‘readymade’ (i.e. mass-produced) ceramic urinal – as the most influential artwork of all time. It is inscribed “R.Mutt” – a homonym for the German word armut, meaning poverty, and in this single act the international phenomenon of Arte Povera was prefigured. The British press and public of course heaped vitriol on the poll, and seemed to assume Fountain was a recent work by some attention-seeking young ‘art star’, but of course it has been sitting quietly in the Tate Gallery for decades, and its presence there illuminates a critical articulation point in 20th century culture – the birth of conceptualism, and the subsequent eclipse of ‘retinal’ art. Duchamp’s readymades revealed an important truth – that the significance of a work of art is not inherent in the formal structure of the work, only in the overlay of cultural meaning brought about by the act of creation, or in his case transformation. Although he would not have put it thus, Duchamp was practicing a kind of intellectual shamanism, giving us clues to the cosmic organising principles of the universe. Not only that, but he was engaging in that most shamanic of practices – transmutation.
4. Art and ritual
In considering ritual as a key attribute of shamanic practice, it is interesting to revisit the ontological theories of the once influential writer Jack Burnham, who in the 1970s analysed in some detail Duchamp’s immersion in esoteric knowledge, particularly Kabbalah, and the arcane alchemical and occult references throughout the maestro’s art and writings. Following Jung, Burnham advanced a general theory of universals, which is worth considering for a moment:
Universals account for the formation of three basis types of human communication: speech, gesture and iconicity. All forms of human facturing are surrogates for these fundamental means of communication. This fact [and Jung’s diagram] are crucial to the idea of religious paradox. The primary symbols of many organised religions constitute a formal or geometric basis for the system of universals controlling human thought. They are the containers of the various levels of knowledge. They represent metaphysical insight into the organising principle of life itself. They possess enormous power as sources of psychic energy. They recapitulate the ontology of natural growth, and more specifically the evolution of the human race and the intellectual and emotional development of every child. In effect the code of human universals lies in two contrasting forms: the first is in every human brain, the second is in all artefacts comprising the manmade world. Consequently the code is carried from generation to generation by two separate means: organically through the brain of every living individual, and inorganically through the trans-lingual relationships embodied in every artefact, writing and spacial arrangement. This invites a great paradox. All profound art and writing lies in conflict between being as the essence of spiritual revelation, and the illusional permanence of the written word, the icon, or the sacred space.
The ritual theory of myth espoused by ancient Greece specialist Jane Harrison and explains how storytelling, theatre, dance and music have evolved out of ‘primordial’ ritual, and the plastic arts (iconicity) must ontologically, have a common genesis:
In time ritual sustains itself through the use of icons and religious artefacts. At a later stage these degenerate into works of ‘art’. Just as we lose the art of living through formalised ritual, we began – many thousands of years ago – to transfer our hopes of maintaining the code of universals to inanimate objects: scrolls, books, paintings, sculpture and architecture.
In considering the work of Australian and other Indigenous artists who have created profound and universally acclaimed modern paintings with no formal ‘training’ as painters, and often without a preliminary sketch or any revision, we can see that these artists are in fact painting what they already ‘know’ – essentially the dreamings – creation stories and relationships to land – of their people. They are initiates into an ancient system of knowledge, and lifelong practitioners of body painting and other rituals. Their knowledge is handed down from generation to generation independent of any preserved physical code, and is sustained by ‘lived’ ritual. There are of course many layers of knowledge contained in such works – some of it only accessible to the members of the group whose particular dreamings or tribal totems are invoked, however the western enthusiasm for aboriginal art, independent of any special understanding of its motifs, suggests that something bigger is going on. These works may are very likely triggering within us innate and ancient psychic resonances and therefore, in Burham’s conception, giving us “intrinsic pleasure”.
If this is true, then one can postulate that the power and significance of any work of art lies in the clarity with which it expresses the ontology of our universe – the organising principles of life itself – hardwired into our DNA. This negates the search for ‘meaning’ in the causative sense, and very possibly undermines the basis of much artistic scholarship. Burnham suggests that “this continual coming-into-being has no definable origin or meaning; it in fact appears to be meaning itself.” These ultimately metaphysical attributes are common to all significant art, whether a cave painting, an Etruscan vessel, a ceremonial mask, a Da Vinci portrait, a Rover Thomas painting, a roomful of Roscoes or, in my opinion, a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde. And if the ontological thesis holds up, it is the same code that informs significant architecture, design, writing, performance, music and mathematics.
5. The intellectual as shaman
The problem with this metaphysical approach, and the work of the artists discussed here, is that like poetry, it is resistant to Academia’s taxonomical methods – the tendency to codify formal, aesthetic or cultural qualities assumed to be inherent in the physical object, in a highly structured and hierarchical fashion. According to Burnham:
By living from generation to generation through the medium of objects around us we create a series of surrogate styles and epistemological worlds, but even more important, we induce the permutative reduction of the universals themselves. Gradually the code is separated into thousands of pieces by our arts of historical progressivism. While the code is used daily in everyone’s mental operations, we unknowingly dissect it historically into thousands of pieces for spiritual insight, entertainment and scientific advancement. In the human war between causality and synchronicity, causality slowly wins in the shape of culture and its inorganic handmaidens. Certain classes of objects become enormously valuable without us really knowing why, on the other hand he word ritual become synonymous with boredom, tiring repetition, outdatedness and meaninglessness. And the inversion is complete.”
Duchamp’s cryptic late work The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) is considered by many to be an elaborate allegory for the systematic destruction of the ‘authenticity’ of art by its practitioners, the outward form revered long after its original power has been progressively leached away by contemporary practice, curatorship and scholarship. In this context, much contemporary practice can be seen as a self-conscious project by western artists to recreate the conditions where the art object is once again be seen as “an expendable container for the transmission of lived truths”.
Duchamp’s intellectual successor is widely considered to be Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), the über-model for the 20th century western artist-shaman – part psychic healer, part seer, part guide, social provocateur, volkisch idiot-savant and nemesis of Academia. He was Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (where he had studied after WW2) from 1961 until his expulsion in 1972, following a lengthy stand-off with the school’s authorities over his abolition of any entry requirements to his class, presumably in pursuit of his famous dictum that “everyone is an artist” .
Beuys was himself rather dismissive of Duchamp’s legacy, in a 1964 Aktion (action, or performance) famously proclaiming (and also painting) “das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet” (The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated), “because [Duchamp] stopped at the point where he could have developed a theory based on the work achieved, and the theory he could have achieved I am developing today”. The eighty year-old Duchamp, who died four years later in 1968, no doubt just smiled and said nothing.
The literature on Beuys is vast, and I have to assume the reader has a basic familiarity with his persona and self-created ‘legend’, if not the details of his prolific work and writing.
The art critic Robert Hughes has written witheringly of Beuys: “The late conversion of the Luftwaffe pilot, and the spiritual anguish that preceded it, have become an important part of the legend for his fans. … For them, Beuys’ wartime sufferings have joined van Gogh’s ear in the hagiography of modern art: and particularly the occasion in 1943 when he crashed in a JU-87 and was saved by wandering Tartar tribesmen who wrapped his traumatised body in felt and fat, thereby planting the germ of his later obsessive interest in fat and felt as art materials, emblems of healing and magic”.
The art historian John Moffit has analysed in detail Beuys’ shamanic imagery and personal mythology, and his obsession with anthroposophy – the “pseudophilosophy” enshrined in the writings of Rudolf Steiner. He has explained the artist’s trademark attire, and many of his otherwise inscrutable actions, as a series of ekphraseis – direct text-to-picture illustrations or ‘pictorialisations’ of Steiner’s written texts, particularly those dealing with the evolutionary process leading from chaos to order. He concludes that “despite taking as his immediate subject matter a sprawling body of pretentious and garbled writings … [Beuys] transcends this dross, transmuting his esoteric source materials into haunting, often unforgettable images, many of which breathed an undeniably great poetic and evocative power, some of which are invested with strange but undeniable beauty.”
If forced to choose one seminal Beuys’ work, my choice would have to be the legendary 1974 action at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, I like America and America Likes Me, in which, having been transported from JFK airport wrapped in felt, he cohabited an area of the gallery for 5 days with a live coyote, wielding a shepherd’s staff and protected by a felt cloak. There are many possible interpretations of this encounter. The coyote stands for America itself, but also for persecuted nature and the colonial encounter with Indigenous peoples, for whom the coyote has great mythic significance.
Beuys’ potent mix of arcane knowledge, mythology, Jesu-kitsch, animal spirits, ritualised actions, metaphorical materials and the physical processes of decay and rebirth, has created an artistic legacy that resonates visibly through the contemporary art of our time, although the extraordinary conceptual leap from a urinal signed ‘R.Mutt’ to cohabiting with a coyote is arguably yet to be repeated.
7. Material as metaphor
This sprawling legacy, which I term Povera Internationale, is apparent in the work of a multitude of contemporary artists of many cultures who share a preoccupation with aspects of tribal or ‘folk’ knowledge and ritual, and with complex transmutations – often with ‘poor’ materials acting as potent metaphors for psychic and metaphysical processes. One example is the ‘Cool Briton’ Damien Hirst, who has created some of the most profound and confronting works of the late twentieth century, and will no doubt create more One Thousand Years (1990) presents the viewer with a a large vitrine in which a grisly tableau continuously unfolds – a decaying cow’s head being slowly consumed by maggots in an endlessly repeating life cycle. Hatched flies buzz around the enclosed space, sometimes terminated abruptly by an insect-o-cutor. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992), the aforementioned dead shark in tank of formaldehyde, exerts a horrific fascination even on the printed page, presenting us with a meditation on our own mortality, our ability to contemplate it (or not) and our deepest fears, chemically arrested from natural decay and ironically sanctified as ‘gallery art’ – and purchased in 2004 for $12 million by an American collector.
The French American Louise Bourgeois has largely ignored the art world and pursued her intensely personal work with single-minded purpose for decades, producing extraordinary tableaux and objects loaded with potent overlays of ‘ritualised’ meaning – by turns sinister, lyrical or ominous, seeming to distil her simple materials into objects of archetypal power. The late Jewish Iranian (sic) Choureh Feydzou spent a lifetime creating an immense and ‘living’ record of the accumulated materials of her life, incessantly worked upon, endlessly re-combined, labelled, boxed, bound, woven, bottled, preserved, coated in a patina of black pigment (her metaphor for death and rebirth) – a momentous journey into the life of a stranger through the ‘poor’ detritus of her existence, each tottering shelf or table supercharged with an unbearable pathos. By contrast, the Cherokee American Jimmy Durham, self-described ‘political’ artist, exhibits a deadpan humour worthy of Duchamp, ransacking art history, tribal ‘tourist’ art, found objects, written messages and his own Cherokee mythology, and transmuting his materials into objects of astonishing power and simplicity, “durable because they contain intensely meanings which they can no longer pour out.”
If time allowed, there is a fascinating journey to be had, both chronological and geographical, through the many contemporary manifestations of transformative art. I was fortunate in 2002 to spend several days at Documenta 11 in Germany, which was directed by the Nigerian-born curator and writer Okwui Enwezor, and provided an extraordinary overview of world practice, with an unusually high representation of artists from developing countries. These artists all operate somewhere on my notional scale between unmediated object-making and the heavily mediated western Academy, in a postcolonial biennale-land where tribal work now rubs shoulders with video and sound art, and where cultural identity, individual mythology and personal documentary have become as important components of many works as the physical object or installation.
8. In the beginning was the word
It is difficult to discuss the culrural context of such varied artists without detailed reference to their work, so I will close with a general observation. It is evident that much of this work cannot be solely understood within the framework of the visual arts, for these artists are the shamans of our time, operating across language forms, excavators of the future, spirit guides to our common destiny.
The linguist Roman Jakobson’s famously said that “in relation to language other (semiotic) systems are concomitant or derivative. Language is the principle means of information communication”. As the plastic arts appropriate the forms of writing, storytelling, theatre and cinema, we might conclude that they are just returning to an earlier state, before the specialisations that developed out of the European Rennaissance and Enlightenment. They are after all just different manifestations of the same universal meta-language, the same ten stories told over and over down the ages, the hero with a thousand faces. In response to the self-referential, fashion-driven mannerism that characterises so much contemporary ‘gallery art’ (as well as design, architecture and urban planning), could we be witnessing the re-emergence of the artist as a kind poet-scientist-philosopher-shaman, revealing to us profound truths about our common humanity, “re-living the Mysteries” and guiding us towards psychic wholeness? And if so, how does it affect our practice as creative artists, educators, curators or critics? This may ultimately be a question for pure philosophy, but perhaps there is a general case to be made for a more cross-disciplinary approach to the teaching of the creative arts. Such insights as I have gained from my semiotic adventures through the empire of signs have been immeasurably enriching to my own studio practice. The jury is still out on whether the art lives up to the thesis, but that must be the subject of another paper.
I will close with this thought from the Sioux writer Black Elk:
In filling a pipe, all space (represented by the offerings to the powers of the six directions) and al things (represented by the grains of tobacco) are contracted within a single point (the bowl or heart of the pipe), so that the pipe contains, or really is, the universe. But since the pipe is the universe, it is also man, and the one who fills he pipe should identify himself with it, thus not only establishing the centre of the universe, but also his own centre; he so expands that the six directions are of space are actually brought within himself. It is by this expansion that man ceases to be part, a fragment, and becomes whole or holy, he shatters the illusion of separateness.
From Black Elk Speaks : Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Thank you.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
India dreaming
"When you're n India, the rest of the world does not exist."
Some images of Rajastan and Maharashtra © Le Flaneur
Some images of Rajastan and Maharashtra © Le Flaneur
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Marvellous, maddening Mumbai
The sprawling IIT campus (see Design Local Conference, below), set in the once-rural far northern suburb of Powai, near to a lake of the same name, is of some intrinsic interest - a well-maintained example of 60s concrèt brut – I’m told it was a showpiece of Pandit Nehru’s visionary investment in Indian tertiary education, the results of which are so evident in India’s growing global IT prowess today. Well-planned quadrangles, walkways and plantings provide pleasant vistas, with frequent water features and sculptural installations. Outside this almost Arcadian setting lie the traffic-choked roads and high-rise towers of the ‘new’ town of Powai – a suburb on steroids, with its Hutch mobile phone shops and gated enclaves sprouting along the lake to accommodate the newly wealthy, while (as always in urban India) the impoverished workers and their families huddle in shanties across the fence. It reminded me of London’s Canary Wharf under construction in the early nineties, without the auto-rickshaws or wandering cows of course. The rather pristine-looking Lake Powai (which forms part of Mumbai’s fresh water supply) while no doubt providing spectacular views from the residential towers, is disappointingly difficult to access, and it proved almost impossible to stroll along the shore. There is no footpath or much evidence of traditional ghats (public bathing areas) – just a traffic-choked and hazardous lakeside road. Given the Indian love of strolling by and bathing in bodies of water, I was surprised by this.
To really see Mumbai-by-the-water, one must travel many kilometres south to Back Bay on the western side of the peninsula that is downtown Mumbai, where Marine Drive curves northward from Nariman Point to the famous Chowpatty Beach. While the ocean is somewhat toxic, the beach and promenade, especially in the cool of evening, brings out thousands of Mumbaikar families, and the big thing to do is eat kulfi and watch the sun dip below the horizon of the Arabian Sea. I had the rather magical experience of watching this from the so-called Hanging Gardens (Kamala Nehru Park) on Malabar Hill. On the eastern side of the peninsula is Colaba and Mumbai’s even more toxic but atmospheric harbour, the maidans (parks) and grandiose colonial buildings of old Bombay, and the arts precinct of Kala Ghoda (Black Horse) which was buzzing in February with the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. This lively week-long event encompassed numerous exhibitions, sculptural installations, performances, a literary festival, street art markets, information and food stalls. I was also fortunate to catch the last days of a major survey of Indian contemporary art, Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, at the National Gallery of Modern Art.
Fans of architectural monstrosities should venture further north to the outlandish Victoria Terminus (officially now Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus but know to one and all as ‘VT’). Designed by Frederick William Stevenson and completed in 1888, its provenance has been described as ‘Indo-Saracenic-St Pancras-Gothic-Revival’. North of here begins what Mumbaikars would call the ‘real’ Mumbai – the teeming central bazaars and the vast suburbs stretching north to the airports, Bandra, Film City and the lakes, west to the posh beach suburb of Juhu, and east to the estuarine coast – middle class residential areas cheek-by-jowl with decaying flyovers, Asia’s largest slums, and eternally humming street markets. The buzz of Mumbai is akin to that of New York, give or take the odd elephant in the street, and what is remarkable is that despite the chaotic traffic, the press of people, the melting-pot of culture, language and religion, and the appalling disparities of wealth, this metropolis of 15-odd million remains relatively peaceful and crime-free – certainly compared to western cities of similar size. For all its problems, India manifests an immense humanism, as well as an immense vitality, and in a very real sense all life, no matter how low in the caste system, remains sacrosanct.
A visit to Mumbai will leave you exhausted, but you may well come away with a renewed faith in humanity.
Namaste
Monday, March 12, 2007
Design Local Conference, Mumbai
ICOGRADA Design Week in India
5 – 9 February 2007
Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)
Powai, Mumbai, India
This two-day conference was the culmination of week of student workshops, exhibitions and a Design Education Meet organised jointly by ICOGRADA and IDC/IIT. The cavernous Convocation Hall of the IIT has seen better days and presented some inevitable technical challenges, headache-inducing stage lighting, and the whirring banks of overhead fans struggled somewhat to mitigate the Mumbai afternoon heat. There were a number of local speaker ‘no-shows’ (or late scratchings) and the schedule was consequently re-shuffled a number of times, but despite these factors, the conference managed to be a reasonably stimulating ideas-fest. If some western delegates looked a little wilted, the more acclimatised Mumbaikars took the heat in their stride, and attendance numbered in the hundreds – predominantly enthusiastic local students and designers, with a sprinkling of design professionals and educators from other Indian cities, and the world at large.
Keynote speakers were the venerable New York-based architect/designers Massimo and Lella Vignelli, and Massimo got things underway with an elegantly argued plea for less bland internationalism and more of the vernacular, the culturally particular, in design. India has one of the world’s most distinctive visual cultures – as unique as Japan or China’s – with extraordinary architecture, metalwork, decorative arts, calligraphy, textiles and clothing, along with awe-inspiring sculpture and painting traditions. While there are many contemporary expressions of these arts, and Indian films have spawned a worldwide affection for Bollywood popular culture, there is a perceived tendency among young Indians to regard all things Western as self-evidently good. Vignelli argues that in design this is a negative tendency, a sentiment that was echoed again and again subsequent sessions, as one might expect from the ‘Design Local’ conference theme. The great Indian typographer / calligrapher / designer / educator R.K. Joshi gave a passionate presentation of his breathtaking work, and design luminaries Vikas Satwalekar (erstwhile head of Ahmadabad’s prestigious National Institute of Design) and Sudarshan Deer moderated Designing from around the world sessions.
Australia’s Russell Kennedy (Monash University) delivered a thought-provoking paper on that most visible, and contentious, symbol of Australian identity, the national flag, followed by a fascinating overview of several other projects such as INDIGO (Indigenous Design Network) and MIX06 (Migrant Indigenous Exchange). This was complemented the next day by Don Ryun Chang’s (South Korea) excellent paper on place branding and tourism identity in Asia, with a useful overview of world practice. Jacques Lange’s (South Africa) presentation on vernacular trends in South African graphic design, Halim Choueiry’s (Lebanon/Qatar) playful take on hybrid Arabic and English typography, Ruth Klotzel’s (Brazil) overview of Brazilian trends and Omar Vulpinari’s (Italy) survey of the body in visual communications, were all standout presentations from international speakers. Vulpinari is the creative director of the visual communications department at Fabrica, the Benetton-funded research centre in Treviso (near Venice) founded by Oliviero Toscani. The designer as social provocateur seems to be alive and well at Fabrica, and the reaction to his presentation was illuminating. To western eyes, exposed to a decade or more of Colours magazine, the images of bodies (sometimes naked) used in many Fabrica-designed awareness campaigns were not particularly shocking, but it was evident that some participants found them both confronting and perplexing, questioning their relevance to graphic design and their ‘accessibility’ to mass audiences. Vulpinari’s response, that it was about encouraging his students to explore the gamut of communications techniques, seemed reasonable to me, but there were some snorts of disapproval from the floor.
Two additional international ‘grandmasters’ rate special mention: April Greiman USA) and Mervyn Kurlansky (Denmark). I’ve been a fan of Ms Greiman’s deconstructed yet lucid approach to graphic design since the eighties, and her elegiac and seamless slide show of images, set to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, did not disappoint. Mervyn Kurlansky, founding member of the firm Pentagram and now a Denmark-based consultant, gave what for me was the most rigorous and challenging presentation, focussing on the need for triple-bottom-line (plus spiritual wellbeing) analysis of design effectiveness, and the need for design education globally to include mandatory studies in environmentally sustainable practices. His case that green design is also good business was persuasively made, and we designers have a growing responsibility to make a similarly persuasive case to our clients. To paraphrase James Carville’s famous piece of political haiku, ‘It’s the environment, stupid’.
The conference ended with the formal inauguration of InDeas (Indian Design Association), and a rather moving
commemoration and induction of Indian design ‘grandmasters’ into a kind of hall of fame. A pleasant and very sociable alfresco dinner then followed for all participants in the gardens of the IIT Guest House.
Namaste
Monday, February 12, 2007
The Compleat Banksius Maximus
All of the 'official' videos released by Banksy in one handy compilation. Why is it that his witty urban interventions seem so much more relevant than so much 'stencil art' sanctified by institutions. He'll be seen in time a a difinitive early 21st century artist - in the meantime 'zealous municipal officials' continue to obliterate his work.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Style Notes for Australia Day
Amid the unseemly wrangle over the use or misuse the Australian flag, few articles have made as much sense as Neil McMahon's amusingly ironic story 'Red-faced, white skin, so true blue' (SMH January 26), which deals in large part with problems inherent in Les Hawkins' (among others') design for the blue ensign. Ausflag's Harold Scruby is not the only one to think that "... the flag has to go. It divides as much as it unites". It used to be considered quite patriotic to remove the Union Jack from the corner of the ensign – not something you see so much these days. But Canada did it officially, without becoming a republic or dispensing with the Queen as head of state, and for good reason - the maple leaf flag is a beautiful design original which unites all Canadians.
Nothing sums up the Australian conundrum so well as the uniquely horrible stylistic clash of a busy yellow and green Wallabies shirt worn with a cloak (or sometimes toga) of the blue ensign, where the Union Jack falls inevitably over the shoulder. Admit it, they just don't go. Style disaster! Especially when added to this is sometimes the boxing kangaroo, or even (on at least one sighting) the Eureka flag. And what is it with this cloak/toga thing anyway? Are these kids all unconsciously emulating Pauline Hanson's iconic portrait, draped Boadicea-like, carrot hair aflame, in the ensign of the Federated Australian Dominions?
I had the enjoyable experience of spending part of Australia Day at a gathering in Cronulla's Gunnamatta Park – as culturally diverse a microcosm of Australia as you will find anywhere. The knots of fair-haired youngsters draped in the flag elicited only a diffident curiosity among the picnicking thousands of 'non-blondes'. It was as if there was a polite acknowledgment that, bizarre as it might seem, this was one tribe's traditional attire, and good luck to 'em. The only moment of tension I witnessed all day was the unedifying sight of of group of cloaked and plainly beered-up (blonde) kids on the ferry wharf, sporting 'If you don't love it, leave' t-shirts and slabs of VB, making half-hearted remarks about what was obviously a party of Asian tourists innocently spending their dollars in the Shire.
But back to the question of style. Informal soundings about the stylistic wisdom of wearing the Aussie flag, among younger (3rd or 4th generation) Australians of Italian, Greek, Israeli, Maori, Samoan, Indian, Lebanese... even Irish heritage... elicit an almost unanimous view that it is just so... well, uncool, in baby boomer talk. "Really, really daggy'" was also the quintessentially Australian view of not a few Aussies of Anglo-Celtic descent. These comments, ostensibly about youthful style, are revealing. What they tell us is that many patriotic Australians don't feel much love for Les Hawkins' flag design. Yet no-one I know of has a problem with the Southern Cross. It's cool. It's fully sick in fact. So the Union Jack is obviously the problem, but not just the emblem. It's the combinaton of colours – they're just so... dare I say un-Australian? So British. They don't relate to our landscape or our psyche. Where's the ochre of our deserts? The green of our verdant forests? The gold of our beaches and sandstone cliffs? The blue of the Pacific and Indian Oceans? The problem is that with its inbuilt connotations of Empire, the ensign in danger of being perceived as the emblem of only one cultural group within our society – the dominant Anglo-Celtic group. And in times of insecurity about terrorism, globalisation and migration, that group increasingly, literally wears it in a possessive way that can seem to say "...we're Anglo, we got here first, we've got the best land, and WE will decide who comes here... ". Ask Aborigines what they think about that one. One quip I overheard was that Australia Day could be cheekily re-dubbed from 'Invasion Day' to "Fear of Invasion Day'.
Now don't get me wrong. There are tasteful and patriotic ways to sport the ensign. In Cronulla one impressive islander matron wore it as a king of giant hairpin, fluttering above her head, like a galleon in full sail. Who will not confess to a thrill of pride when the horsemen galloped into Stadium Australia to commence the Olympic Opening Ceremony? There is something timeless and reassuring about the flag billowing majestically above Parliament House, or the pennant fluttering discreetly on the Gubernatorial limousine. But I contend we would feel this no less, or perhaps even more deeply, if our flag was simply a yellow Southern Cross on a field of azure – an obvious choice, surely? Minimal change. And something everyone can relate to as a great Australian emblem - uniting us under southern skies. But as clothing? Perhaps not – it would still clash terribly with the Wallabies shirt.
If symbols are as important as the debate seems to indicate, then let's start by finding one we can all love.
Nothing sums up the Australian conundrum so well as the uniquely horrible stylistic clash of a busy yellow and green Wallabies shirt worn with a cloak (or sometimes toga) of the blue ensign, where the Union Jack falls inevitably over the shoulder. Admit it, they just don't go. Style disaster! Especially when added to this is sometimes the boxing kangaroo, or even (on at least one sighting) the Eureka flag. And what is it with this cloak/toga thing anyway? Are these kids all unconsciously emulating Pauline Hanson's iconic portrait, draped Boadicea-like, carrot hair aflame, in the ensign of the Federated Australian Dominions?
I had the enjoyable experience of spending part of Australia Day at a gathering in Cronulla's Gunnamatta Park – as culturally diverse a microcosm of Australia as you will find anywhere. The knots of fair-haired youngsters draped in the flag elicited only a diffident curiosity among the picnicking thousands of 'non-blondes'. It was as if there was a polite acknowledgment that, bizarre as it might seem, this was one tribe's traditional attire, and good luck to 'em. The only moment of tension I witnessed all day was the unedifying sight of of group of cloaked and plainly beered-up (blonde) kids on the ferry wharf, sporting 'If you don't love it, leave' t-shirts and slabs of VB, making half-hearted remarks about what was obviously a party of Asian tourists innocently spending their dollars in the Shire.
But back to the question of style. Informal soundings about the stylistic wisdom of wearing the Aussie flag, among younger (3rd or 4th generation) Australians of Italian, Greek, Israeli, Maori, Samoan, Indian, Lebanese... even Irish heritage... elicit an almost unanimous view that it is just so... well, uncool, in baby boomer talk. "Really, really daggy'" was also the quintessentially Australian view of not a few Aussies of Anglo-Celtic descent. These comments, ostensibly about youthful style, are revealing. What they tell us is that many patriotic Australians don't feel much love for Les Hawkins' flag design. Yet no-one I know of has a problem with the Southern Cross. It's cool. It's fully sick in fact. So the Union Jack is obviously the problem, but not just the emblem. It's the combinaton of colours – they're just so... dare I say un-Australian? So British. They don't relate to our landscape or our psyche. Where's the ochre of our deserts? The green of our verdant forests? The gold of our beaches and sandstone cliffs? The blue of the Pacific and Indian Oceans? The problem is that with its inbuilt connotations of Empire, the ensign in danger of being perceived as the emblem of only one cultural group within our society – the dominant Anglo-Celtic group. And in times of insecurity about terrorism, globalisation and migration, that group increasingly, literally wears it in a possessive way that can seem to say "...we're Anglo, we got here first, we've got the best land, and WE will decide who comes here... ". Ask Aborigines what they think about that one. One quip I overheard was that Australia Day could be cheekily re-dubbed from 'Invasion Day' to "Fear of Invasion Day'.
Now don't get me wrong. There are tasteful and patriotic ways to sport the ensign. In Cronulla one impressive islander matron wore it as a king of giant hairpin, fluttering above her head, like a galleon in full sail. Who will not confess to a thrill of pride when the horsemen galloped into Stadium Australia to commence the Olympic Opening Ceremony? There is something timeless and reassuring about the flag billowing majestically above Parliament House, or the pennant fluttering discreetly on the Gubernatorial limousine. But I contend we would feel this no less, or perhaps even more deeply, if our flag was simply a yellow Southern Cross on a field of azure – an obvious choice, surely? Minimal change. And something everyone can relate to as a great Australian emblem - uniting us under southern skies. But as clothing? Perhaps not – it would still clash terribly with the Wallabies shirt.
If symbols are as important as the debate seems to indicate, then let's start by finding one we can all love.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Latino Visions: Art Safari Santiago Sierra
This is quite old, but funny. Ben Lewis, the documentary maker, has just messed up Sierra's delicate negotiations with the curator of the Dubai Biennale. I think, from memory. Please correct me if I'm wrong
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
The Herd of Elephants in the Room
On this 5th anniversary of 9/11, the question often heard is: "If Al Gore had been elected, would it have happened?" Having read and viewed many thoughtful commentaries on the incident and its motivations, aftermath and implications, it’s apparent that there are two implacably opposed schools of thought.
The first group advocates that these and other Al Qaeda-inspired attacks on Western interests, both before (USS Cole in Yemen, East African embassies etc) and since (Bali, Madrid, London) are a response to decades of unjust US Middle East policy – specifically its military support for Israel, its cosiness with the regime in Saudi Arabia, and of course the more recent debacle that is Iraq. This is repeatedly stated in Al Qaeda broadcasts and suicide bomber videos, and is self-evident to most commentators, including many senior conservative ex-US Administration figures such as Richard Clarke. Our own very sensible head of the AFP, Mick Keelty, voiced the bleeding obvious some years ago, but was quickly silenced by his political masters.
The second group takes the view that the attacks are because of “what we are, not what we’ve done”. This includes John Howard, the Bush Administration and (with rapidly diminishing conviction) the British Government. The fact that New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and most other ‘Western’ countries have not been targeted by Al Qaeda, is dismissed by this group as yet another ‘inconvenient truth’. They argue that these countries are inevitably next in line – because of their civil freedoms, and their religious traditions. However five years of repetition of this mantra has not convinced the fearful population of the USA, and certainly not Australians. Ask anyone.
I think it's quite probable that if Al Gore had been inaugurated as the rightfully elected President in 2000, and the USA had not lurched so dramatically and suddenly towards the fundamentalist, NeoCon-dominated right, the attacks of 9/11 would not have happened, but of course "they did, Blanche, they did".
But consider the possibility, and the world we might now be living in. I don’t argue there would be no problems. There had been a previous attempt to blow up the WTC, and attacks on US interests (USS Cole etc) during the Clinton years. Post Soviet-occupied Afghanistan under a Pakistan-sponsored Taliban was a dangerous result of Western indifference. Then, as now, there were longstanding resentments of US policy in the Middle East – mainly focussed on perceived double standards regarding Israel/Palestine, but also historically in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, linked to a widespread perception that US policy was motivated primarily by access to oil. Saudi Arabia has always been the real geopolitical prize in Al Qaeda’s assault on the US and its allies. For the US, apart from oil security, it represents an important client state and military base in the region. For devout Muslims, the presence of US troops and air bases in the Holy Land of the Prophet is a greater affront to Islam than even the recent invasion of Iraq. Before and since the Iraq invasion, several Al Qaeda attacks on Western enclaves in Saudi Arabia itself reinforce this view.
Despite these historical factors, American Middle East policy was improving under both the Bush Snr and Clinton Administrations, moving towards negotiated multilateral solutions, underpinned by political realism and an understanding of the underlying causes of discontent in the region. In 2000, an apparently viable peace process seemed to be taking hold in Palestine, the Intifada had died down, Israel had good and realistic leadership, dialogues had been opened up with Iran and Syria, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein was kept carefully in check, subject to UN weapons inspections and balanced by powerful neighbours.
There is every reason to believe that the highly intelligent Al Gore, advised by some of the best minds in the US, would have built on this legacy, understanding that America’s long-term interests in the region are best served by building consensus, trust and economic opportunity. There was the potential for events to develop very differently, and to usher in a new era of peace and stability in the Middle East. Even without 9/11 the military removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan may still have been ultimately required, but I have no no doubt that Gore would have ensured this happened under the multilateral auspices of the UN or even NATO (like the successful Kosovo campaign).
Into this delicate realpolitik stepped Bush, the most incompetent and ill-educated president in US history, the NeoCon warriors Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle et al, and the bizarre Condoleeza Rice, with her now discredited vision of a ‘Pax Americana’ – i.e. exporting democracy by force. Only poor old Colin Powell stood for reason and commonsense, and had the experience to back it up. Commentators at the time noted an immediate and extreme lurch to the right in American foreign policy (despite a non-existent mandate) – first felt in a sudden chill in relations with China, North Korea, Iran and Syria, but the mutterings about invading Iraq and finishing off what George Bush Snr had left unfinished, were already being heard well before 9/11. This from those who had helped create the monster under Ronald Reagan.
The result? The worst terrorist attack in history and the resulting ‘War on Terror’ – a misnomer if ever there was one. Terrorism is a method, a mindset – you cannot wage a war on it, or not an effective military one. The only way to combat terrorism is to address the motivations driving it, but that would mean acknowledging that it has causes beyond the “who we are, not what we’ve done” mantra. It would mean acknowledging the herd of elephants in the room.
And what has this ‘War on Terror’ delivered in five tears? Hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, unimaginable suffering and displacement, a civil war in Iraq, the resurgence of a fundamentalist Iran, the creation of a rallying point for millions of new jihadists, home grown suicide bombers in western cities, thousands of US soldiers returning in body bags, and Australians a target of terror for the first time in our history. To say nothing of the erosion of the civil liberties for which this so-called war is being fought.
You have to ask yourself whether this is playing out exactly as Osama bin Laden foresaw.
Maybe it’s no too late to elect Al Gore in 2008?
The first group advocates that these and other Al Qaeda-inspired attacks on Western interests, both before (USS Cole in Yemen, East African embassies etc) and since (Bali, Madrid, London) are a response to decades of unjust US Middle East policy – specifically its military support for Israel, its cosiness with the regime in Saudi Arabia, and of course the more recent debacle that is Iraq. This is repeatedly stated in Al Qaeda broadcasts and suicide bomber videos, and is self-evident to most commentators, including many senior conservative ex-US Administration figures such as Richard Clarke. Our own very sensible head of the AFP, Mick Keelty, voiced the bleeding obvious some years ago, but was quickly silenced by his political masters.
The second group takes the view that the attacks are because of “what we are, not what we’ve done”. This includes John Howard, the Bush Administration and (with rapidly diminishing conviction) the British Government. The fact that New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and most other ‘Western’ countries have not been targeted by Al Qaeda, is dismissed by this group as yet another ‘inconvenient truth’. They argue that these countries are inevitably next in line – because of their civil freedoms, and their religious traditions. However five years of repetition of this mantra has not convinced the fearful population of the USA, and certainly not Australians. Ask anyone.
I think it's quite probable that if Al Gore had been inaugurated as the rightfully elected President in 2000, and the USA had not lurched so dramatically and suddenly towards the fundamentalist, NeoCon-dominated right, the attacks of 9/11 would not have happened, but of course "they did, Blanche, they did".
But consider the possibility, and the world we might now be living in. I don’t argue there would be no problems. There had been a previous attempt to blow up the WTC, and attacks on US interests (USS Cole etc) during the Clinton years. Post Soviet-occupied Afghanistan under a Pakistan-sponsored Taliban was a dangerous result of Western indifference. Then, as now, there were longstanding resentments of US policy in the Middle East – mainly focussed on perceived double standards regarding Israel/Palestine, but also historically in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, linked to a widespread perception that US policy was motivated primarily by access to oil. Saudi Arabia has always been the real geopolitical prize in Al Qaeda’s assault on the US and its allies. For the US, apart from oil security, it represents an important client state and military base in the region. For devout Muslims, the presence of US troops and air bases in the Holy Land of the Prophet is a greater affront to Islam than even the recent invasion of Iraq. Before and since the Iraq invasion, several Al Qaeda attacks on Western enclaves in Saudi Arabia itself reinforce this view.
Despite these historical factors, American Middle East policy was improving under both the Bush Snr and Clinton Administrations, moving towards negotiated multilateral solutions, underpinned by political realism and an understanding of the underlying causes of discontent in the region. In 2000, an apparently viable peace process seemed to be taking hold in Palestine, the Intifada had died down, Israel had good and realistic leadership, dialogues had been opened up with Iran and Syria, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein was kept carefully in check, subject to UN weapons inspections and balanced by powerful neighbours.
There is every reason to believe that the highly intelligent Al Gore, advised by some of the best minds in the US, would have built on this legacy, understanding that America’s long-term interests in the region are best served by building consensus, trust and economic opportunity. There was the potential for events to develop very differently, and to usher in a new era of peace and stability in the Middle East. Even without 9/11 the military removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan may still have been ultimately required, but I have no no doubt that Gore would have ensured this happened under the multilateral auspices of the UN or even NATO (like the successful Kosovo campaign).
Into this delicate realpolitik stepped Bush, the most incompetent and ill-educated president in US history, the NeoCon warriors Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle et al, and the bizarre Condoleeza Rice, with her now discredited vision of a ‘Pax Americana’ – i.e. exporting democracy by force. Only poor old Colin Powell stood for reason and commonsense, and had the experience to back it up. Commentators at the time noted an immediate and extreme lurch to the right in American foreign policy (despite a non-existent mandate) – first felt in a sudden chill in relations with China, North Korea, Iran and Syria, but the mutterings about invading Iraq and finishing off what George Bush Snr had left unfinished, were already being heard well before 9/11. This from those who had helped create the monster under Ronald Reagan.
The result? The worst terrorist attack in history and the resulting ‘War on Terror’ – a misnomer if ever there was one. Terrorism is a method, a mindset – you cannot wage a war on it, or not an effective military one. The only way to combat terrorism is to address the motivations driving it, but that would mean acknowledging that it has causes beyond the “who we are, not what we’ve done” mantra. It would mean acknowledging the herd of elephants in the room.
And what has this ‘War on Terror’ delivered in five tears? Hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, unimaginable suffering and displacement, a civil war in Iraq, the resurgence of a fundamentalist Iran, the creation of a rallying point for millions of new jihadists, home grown suicide bombers in western cities, thousands of US soldiers returning in body bags, and Australians a target of terror for the first time in our history. To say nothing of the erosion of the civil liberties for which this so-called war is being fought.
You have to ask yourself whether this is playing out exactly as Osama bin Laden foresaw.
Maybe it’s no too late to elect Al Gore in 2008?
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Sydney:Voices from the Zone. Eora at SLNSW. London: Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon at Gagosian
Sydney:Biennale of Sydney 2006 – Zones of Contact
“I hear humanity amiss in a sad plethora of print” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, c1965
The long-awaited, Charles Merewether-curated 15th Sydney Biennale has finally kicked off, with credit due to all concerned. Le Flaneur has seen about half of it so far, and there’s too much, too new, for a detailed critique, even if I wanted to provide one, which I don’t. - there will be megabytes of words written by others in the coming weeks.
Le Flaneur’s overwhelming impression, to paraphrase Ferlinghetti, is “I hear humanity amiss in a sad plethora of video art and installations about dislocation, dystrophy and despair”.
Of course, there are some extraordinary standouts – the above is more a comment on Biennale-land, internationally, and I suppose I should be at the symposiums discussing the topic, instead of blogging about it, but … somehow the high seriousness of it all becomes relentless and headachy. Loose Projects (above Mori in Day Street), opened on Thursday with a group show called Cones of Zontact – I have to confess to not having made it there yet, but I’m sure it will be interesting, as will safARI, a loose collection of ARIs currently operating as a sort of fringe event.
Back to the main event though, which is pretty fringey and edgy in its own right, being overwhelmingly made up of artists from the Second and Third Worlds, with a major component from the Middle East and West Asia – not often seen here.
The standout, on scale alone, is obviously the majestic Anthony Gormley installation of 150,000 fired clay figures at Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay (above). Adding a powerful dimension of meaning is the frieze (around the other half of the top floor) of close-ups of hundreds of faces – the Chinese villagers who made the figures with Gormley – with next to each face a photo of a figurine made by that person – all in black and white. I spent a long time looking at these mainly thoughtful, serious and beautifully photographed faces, many of them children, and went away profoundly moved by the whole thing.
Other standouts so far:
• Meschac Ghaba’s (Benin) giant kids’ game Le Maison (MCA)
• Brett Graham and Rachael Rakema’s (NZ) beautiful ceiling installation UFOB (MCA)
• Tawatchai Puntusawasdi’s (Thailand) slate ‘drawing’ series Dwelling (MCA)
• Milenko Pravacki’s (Yugloslava>Singapore) huge mixed media paintings (MCA)
• Navjot Altaf’s (India) video/DVD installation with floor mirrors Lacuna in Testimony #1 (MCA)
• Mamma Anderson’s (USA) beautiful and mysterious paintings (AGNSW)
• John Reynolds’ (NZ) installation in the reception area at AGNSW
• Alfredo Juan Aquilizan & Maria Isabel Guadinez- Aquilizan’s (Phillipines) poignant installation of piles of migrant workers meagre belongings In Transit (Ivan Dougherty Gallery)
This last piece has strong superficial similarities with Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro’s work, showing at GBK Danks Street, but in my view has a ‘ritualised’ power that is lacking in the slightly-too-clever work of Healey and Cordeiro. Perhaps because I felt the genuine poignancy of these poor collections of things that one wouldn’t want – actual people’s things, used and even cherished, neatly arranged in pristine cubes, in a pristine ‘white cube’ – orderly, quiet, sanctified as art… as ironic as it gets.
Finally, what to say about the Biennale Artists’ party at Pier 2/3? For and event where invites were supposedly like hen’s teeth, every art student and ligger in Sydney (including Le Flaneur) seemed to be there – to the event’s advantage – scarved and starved, devouring the tottering boards of thin-crust pizza and freshly carved slabs of ham like there was no (meal) tomorrow. Le Flaneur thought the setting, with Adrian Paci’s giant chandelier as a spectacular centrepiece, and the sight and sound of thousands of panting young artists high on art and the pospect of hot sex, was how Sydney should be every week. The only gripe heard was the fact that there was a paying bar, and prices were far from art-student budgets, with bottled beer and nasty wine at $7.
More Biennale, and especially the fringe, next week.
Sydney: State Library of NSWEora: Mapping Aboriginal Sydney
Left: Nouvelle - Hollande. 'Gnoung-a- gnoung-a, mour-re-mour-ga' (dit Collins.) by Barthelemy Roger (1767-1841) after Nicolas-Martin Petit (1777-1804), Engraving, from 'Voyage de découvertes aux terres Australes' by François Péron, 1811.
Launched on the same night as the Biennale, with a VERY different crowd, is this beautifully curated (by Ace Bourke and Keith Vincent Smith) and designed historical survey of documents, maps and images recording the early interaction between the Sydney basin’s original Eeora clans, and the colonists.
There is virtually no ‘documentation’ from the Eora side, so the show is very largely dependent on colonial documents, and the thankfully enlightened attitudes of a series of colonial governors – Phillip, King, Bourke et al, and the fact that they thought it worthwhile to make a visual and verbal record of the culture of the Eora. And there are of course some very vivid and well-known Eora figures – Bennelong, Bunjery and their families, whose ‘assimilation’ (or not) is an integral part of the story.
I agree with Marie Bashir, who opened the exhibition – every Australian child and adult should try to see the show, which is on for several months, and perhaps come away knowing a few Eora words.
London: Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon at Gagosian Gallery
Opens June 20 2006
Left: © Damien Hirst 'A Thousand Years' (installation view), 1990
Steel, glass, flies, maggots, MDF, insect-o-cutor, cow's head, sugar, water
84 x 168 x 84 inches (213 x 427 x 213 cm)
Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London
It hasn’t escaped LF's notice that these two – one living, one dead, both equally famous – are opening at Gagosian’s London gallery at the same time, on June 20. I also read today that Damien Hirst is now Britain’s richest artist, with a worth of $100 million or more.
Gigabytes have been written about Hirst, much of it hostile, and his firmly ironic post-modern grasp of the zeitgeist (like Jeff Koons’) probably does annoy a lot of people, but there is no denying that he is one of the most profound artists working today – the natural successor to Joseph Beuys dare I suggest? Featured in the London show will be the seminal 1990 vitrine One Thousand Years, you know the one – decaying cows head, insects, insect-o-cutor. Like Beuys, Hirst brings “the powers that exist in the word” (Beuys) into the gallery and the museum without walls, in a horrific and disturbing meditation on mortality, life-cycles, time, and the organic nature of the living world. This work was apparently seen and admired by Francis Bacon in his final days, and Hirst also acknowledges his debt to Bacon, with his own Triptychs (to complement Bacon’s), including a new work The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer. Sounds like a must-see, or at least a ‘must talk-about’ for the chattering classes.
A tout a l’heure.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Brown and Green at Grantpirrie, Destiny Deacon at RosOxley, Souliere at G&A, Capricornia at Belvoir
Sydney
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, GrantPirrie
Confidently riding the ‘new realism’ (my sloppy term) surge in painting so prevalent among younger Australian artists are this somewhat older duo (PhDs and academics both), who make large detailed and closely-worked oil paintings which are not quite trompe-l’oeil enough to categorise as hyper-realism, but are skillful enough to render apparently collaged elements in paint. Such commentary on different types of picture-space, common to so much of this ‘genre’, are not in themselves revelatory – some would say just another manifestation of the eternal preoccupation with ‘questioning the act of painting”. However the subject matter, among it a whole series of small canvasses depicting different views of Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork ‘Spiral Jetty’, an elderly Aboriginal woman holding a white baby, and other repreated motifs of no doubt personal significance, burrow down to new layers of possible meaning in a way which I think transcends and extends the ‘plasticity’ of the medium. Though stylistically and conceptually somewhat different, the work evokes for me Tasmanian James Morrison’s remarkable and obsessively painted friezes which seem to narrate both personal and cosmic stories in minituarised ‘history’ or ‘narrative’ paintings that one could well imagine blown up to giant murals, Diego Rivera style.
Rolande Souliere: G&A Studios
G&A is arelatively new ARI, and generally interesting, usually mounting either group or 2-3-person shows across their two large rooms. I was quite taken with Rolande Souliere’s confident intsllations, particularly Materality#2, conisiting of a series of large wall-mounted cylindrical shapes or vessels, with knitted wool insides and and exquisite layering of bird feathers (different kinds on each vessel) on the outside. It didn’t feel necessary to know what they mean – they have an obsessively crafted, ‘ritualised’ quality that had me going back to gaze at them again before leaving. Watch out for Souliere at an ‘emergent’ show at a public gallery soon.
Hany Armonius: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
I’m a fan of Armonius’ ironic and often hilarious pieces, but this show of 3 or 4 small installations/tableaus/machines feels perfunctory and all wrong in the space. Installations need to have a transformative presence that exceed the mere space they occupy, and though the discared sheets of paper from one of the works appear to do this, it is all quite visually dead somehow, and fails to ignite or charge the space with any added resonance or poetics. The same works would be very different no doubt in their own lit and more isolated context. Plonking them all in a white cube, sculpture-style, may be the ironic intention, but the show doesn’t transcend the sum of its (amusing) parts.
Destiny Deacon: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Destiny rides again, with a new show of recent photomedia works titled Totemistical – large prints blown up from snapshots and/or polaroids, defiantly low-resolution and fuzzy, depicting a series of bizarre miniature tableaus often involving dolls, children’s toys, kitsch souvenirs and household items. These are delightfully colourful, even lurid, as if the saturation knob has been turned right up, and feature the usual deadpan and ironic titles, Continuing her ‘documentary’ strand (with Virginia Fraser), featuring the dressing-ups and antics to camera of young Indigenous children within her large extended family, is the short DVD Shark Dreams which, knowing the children a little over the years, I found fascinating.
Capricornia: Belvoir Street Theatre
To Belvoir on Cleveland (the soul-less Seymour Centre) for Louis Nowra’s Capricornia, adapted 2 decades ago from the famous Xavier Herbert novel of class, race and tragedy in a semi mythical top-end town of Port Zodiac (Darwin). Though long, Wesley Enoch’s simple staging keeps the narrative moving along at a good pace, and good acting, particularly from Luke Carroll as the the main protagonist (the mixed-race Norman Shillingworth) carries it the rest of the way home. Ursula Yovich as the feisty mission-girl ‘Tokkie’ is also a stand-out. There aren’t too many plays where Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky rubs shoulders with a traditional Indigenous language, and I liked the non-didactic way in which numerous themes very relevant to Australia now are woven together in a piece of good storytelling.
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, GrantPirrie
Confidently riding the ‘new realism’ (my sloppy term) surge in painting so prevalent among younger Australian artists are this somewhat older duo (PhDs and academics both), who make large detailed and closely-worked oil paintings which are not quite trompe-l’oeil enough to categorise as hyper-realism, but are skillful enough to render apparently collaged elements in paint. Such commentary on different types of picture-space, common to so much of this ‘genre’, are not in themselves revelatory – some would say just another manifestation of the eternal preoccupation with ‘questioning the act of painting”. However the subject matter, among it a whole series of small canvasses depicting different views of Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork ‘Spiral Jetty’, an elderly Aboriginal woman holding a white baby, and other repreated motifs of no doubt personal significance, burrow down to new layers of possible meaning in a way which I think transcends and extends the ‘plasticity’ of the medium. Though stylistically and conceptually somewhat different, the work evokes for me Tasmanian James Morrison’s remarkable and obsessively painted friezes which seem to narrate both personal and cosmic stories in minituarised ‘history’ or ‘narrative’ paintings that one could well imagine blown up to giant murals, Diego Rivera style.
Rolande Souliere: G&A Studios
G&A is arelatively new ARI, and generally interesting, usually mounting either group or 2-3-person shows across their two large rooms. I was quite taken with Rolande Souliere’s confident intsllations, particularly Materality#2, conisiting of a series of large wall-mounted cylindrical shapes or vessels, with knitted wool insides and and exquisite layering of bird feathers (different kinds on each vessel) on the outside. It didn’t feel necessary to know what they mean – they have an obsessively crafted, ‘ritualised’ quality that had me going back to gaze at them again before leaving. Watch out for Souliere at an ‘emergent’ show at a public gallery soon.
Hany Armonius: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
I’m a fan of Armonius’ ironic and often hilarious pieces, but this show of 3 or 4 small installations/tableaus/machines feels perfunctory and all wrong in the space. Installations need to have a transformative presence that exceed the mere space they occupy, and though the discared sheets of paper from one of the works appear to do this, it is all quite visually dead somehow, and fails to ignite or charge the space with any added resonance or poetics. The same works would be very different no doubt in their own lit and more isolated context. Plonking them all in a white cube, sculpture-style, may be the ironic intention, but the show doesn’t transcend the sum of its (amusing) parts.
Destiny Deacon: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Destiny rides again, with a new show of recent photomedia works titled Totemistical – large prints blown up from snapshots and/or polaroids, defiantly low-resolution and fuzzy, depicting a series of bizarre miniature tableaus often involving dolls, children’s toys, kitsch souvenirs and household items. These are delightfully colourful, even lurid, as if the saturation knob has been turned right up, and feature the usual deadpan and ironic titles, Continuing her ‘documentary’ strand (with Virginia Fraser), featuring the dressing-ups and antics to camera of young Indigenous children within her large extended family, is the short DVD Shark Dreams which, knowing the children a little over the years, I found fascinating.
Capricornia: Belvoir Street Theatre
To Belvoir on Cleveland (the soul-less Seymour Centre) for Louis Nowra’s Capricornia, adapted 2 decades ago from the famous Xavier Herbert novel of class, race and tragedy in a semi mythical top-end town of Port Zodiac (Darwin). Though long, Wesley Enoch’s simple staging keeps the narrative moving along at a good pace, and good acting, particularly from Luke Carroll as the the main protagonist (the mixed-race Norman Shillingworth) carries it the rest of the way home. Ursula Yovich as the feisty mission-girl ‘Tokkie’ is also a stand-out. There aren’t too many plays where Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky rubs shoulders with a traditional Indigenous language, and I liked the non-didactic way in which numerous themes very relevant to Australia now are woven together in a piece of good storytelling.
Melbourne: Clinton Nain 'a e i o u', Lorraine Conelly-Northey at the NGV
Melbourne:
Clinton Nain: Nellie Castan Gallery
Contemporary Commonwealth, LandMarks: NGV Australia, Federation Square
I saw the almost completed work in Clinton Nain’s studio a few weeks ago for his just-opened show 'a e i o u' at Nellie Castan Gallery, and was once again blown away by the way this artitst’s work continues to evolve. I think this will be seen as his most powerful and resolved show to date, but it is very much a progression from the multiple themes and metaphorical use of materials for which he is well known. The recurrent use of words in his work moves centre stage as he comments on the 'tyranny of English’ (my expression), as colonial langauge, and also as an arbitrary sign system, mindset and coloniser of thought processes. Nain's linguistic references are compemented by his own recurrent language of personal symbols - the cross, the 'mission' dress, the target, the winding road – and metaphorically through his chosen materials – such as bleach, bitumen and PVA “house paint” in Aussie 'heritage colours’. This is an important exhibition. For a full and excellent review by Robert Nelson go to The Age : http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/clinton-nain-a-e-i-o-u/2006/05/31/1148956385544.html
Nain has a large bitumen on canvas work titled Erub has a bitumen road now in LandMarks, an Indigenous show on a theme of (obviously) relatonship to the land. The show is curated by Judith Ryan, and well worth seeing, but could be much better – both hung and conceived. The relatively few contemporary ‘urban’ works (for instance Julie Gough’s amusing Indigenous heads as soaps-on-ropes) seem somehow ‘tacked on’ to the show, and not very convincingly. Standout for me was a vitrine of tiny woven baskets in many different materials by Lorraine Conelly-Northey, who also has a large, whole-room installation upstairs at Contemporary Commonwealth which is a must-see if you are in Melbourne, with a huge and cutting-edge screen-based component at ACMI next door. Conelly-Northey exhibits a fascination with transformation of materials and meaning, and while her work is coming from an Indigenous tradition, it would not be out of place in Catalan Spain, that land of blood and rusted, twisted iron. Beautiful stuff. Both shows at NGV are on for just a few more weeks (June 25).
Clinton Nain: Nellie Castan Gallery
Contemporary Commonwealth, LandMarks: NGV Australia, Federation Square
I saw the almost completed work in Clinton Nain’s studio a few weeks ago for his just-opened show 'a e i o u' at Nellie Castan Gallery, and was once again blown away by the way this artitst’s work continues to evolve. I think this will be seen as his most powerful and resolved show to date, but it is very much a progression from the multiple themes and metaphorical use of materials for which he is well known. The recurrent use of words in his work moves centre stage as he comments on the 'tyranny of English’ (my expression), as colonial langauge, and also as an arbitrary sign system, mindset and coloniser of thought processes. Nain's linguistic references are compemented by his own recurrent language of personal symbols - the cross, the 'mission' dress, the target, the winding road – and metaphorically through his chosen materials – such as bleach, bitumen and PVA “house paint” in Aussie 'heritage colours’. This is an important exhibition. For a full and excellent review by Robert Nelson go to The Age : http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/clinton-nain-a-e-i-o-u/2006/05/31/1148956385544.html
Nain has a large bitumen on canvas work titled Erub has a bitumen road now in LandMarks, an Indigenous show on a theme of (obviously) relatonship to the land. The show is curated by Judith Ryan, and well worth seeing, but could be much better – both hung and conceived. The relatively few contemporary ‘urban’ works (for instance Julie Gough’s amusing Indigenous heads as soaps-on-ropes) seem somehow ‘tacked on’ to the show, and not very convincingly. Standout for me was a vitrine of tiny woven baskets in many different materials by Lorraine Conelly-Northey, who also has a large, whole-room installation upstairs at Contemporary Commonwealth which is a must-see if you are in Melbourne, with a huge and cutting-edge screen-based component at ACMI next door. Conelly-Northey exhibits a fascination with transformation of materials and meaning, and while her work is coming from an Indigenous tradition, it would not be out of place in Catalan Spain, that land of blood and rusted, twisted iron. Beautiful stuff. Both shows at NGV are on for just a few more weeks (June 25).
Sunday, April 30, 2006
The History Boys on Broadway, Sherman at Twenty, Tsotsi on film
Welcome back dear readers (all nine of you), from the Easter Break. Hope it was refreshing.
After its critically-acclaimed but low-key run at The Sydney theatre, the NT's (National Theatre, London) production of Alan Bennett's deliciously wordy play, The History Boys, opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York last week, to lavish praise from the serious critics. John Lahr in the New Yorker starts his review by quoting from the play:
"“How do I define history?” asks one of the grammar-school highfliers cramming for the Oxbridge exams, "It's just one fucking thing after another."
This is as good way as any to evoke the whiplash humour and biting ironies of a play that is two and half hours long, but never for an instant lets you feel bored. As in Sydney, this is the original, brilliant London cast and Richard Griffiths excels. All the schoolboys are excellent, with standouts being Jamie Parker (Scripps), Samuel Barnett (Posner) and Dominic Cooper as the much admired class spunk, Dakin. The design and stagecraft is the best, simplest and most theatrically inventive I have seen for many a year. Five big ones - see it if you can.
At the movies, the best thing I've seen lately is the South African feature Tsotsi, which is on worldwide arthouse release, having taken the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, to the obvious astonishment (at the ceremony) of its director, Gavin Hood. Even though the premise (bad boy steals car with baby on board and discovers his humanity) is not that original, there is something uncompromisingly honest and believable about the world evoked in this film, which raises this simple redemption story above mere sentimentality, although there is plenty of sentiment, to paraphrase Somerset-Maugham. The movie does not try to be 'International', and most of the dialogue is in 'Sowetospeak' (my term because I can't remember what it's called), an amalgam of Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, English, Afrikaans and several other languages. The cast are 'unglamorous' in every way. It is this truthfulness to its own vernacular which perversely gives the film its universality. South African film comes of age.
To Sherman Galleries last week for the launch of their impressive book TWENTY, celebrating 20 years in the game. Interesting to see the usual power crowd of black (or tweed)-clad movers and shakers supplanted for the night by black (or denim)-clad artists and their artwives, arthusbands, parents and children - something of a family affair. Gene Sherman gave an enthusiastic and endearingly gauche speech, and Charles Merewether gave a robust and rather rigorous one. Everyone admired the Hari Ho photographs (of each other) on the walls with suitably ironic commentary, and a good time was had by all. The book is excellent, and will be seen as an important milestone in the internationalisation of the Sydney commercial gallery scene. It sets a new, high benchmark for gallery publishing and shows all the evidence of having been properly resourced - a very classy piece of print indeed. Can it be long before we see something along the same lines from Roslyn Oxley? Only better, of course.
A tout a l'heure.
After its critically-acclaimed but low-key run at The Sydney theatre, the NT's (National Theatre, London) production of Alan Bennett's deliciously wordy play, The History Boys, opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York last week, to lavish praise from the serious critics. John Lahr in the New Yorker starts his review by quoting from the play:
"“How do I define history?” asks one of the grammar-school highfliers cramming for the Oxbridge exams, "It's just one fucking thing after another."
This is as good way as any to evoke the whiplash humour and biting ironies of a play that is two and half hours long, but never for an instant lets you feel bored. As in Sydney, this is the original, brilliant London cast and Richard Griffiths excels. All the schoolboys are excellent, with standouts being Jamie Parker (Scripps), Samuel Barnett (Posner) and Dominic Cooper as the much admired class spunk, Dakin. The design and stagecraft is the best, simplest and most theatrically inventive I have seen for many a year. Five big ones - see it if you can.
At the movies, the best thing I've seen lately is the South African feature Tsotsi, which is on worldwide arthouse release, having taken the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, to the obvious astonishment (at the ceremony) of its director, Gavin Hood. Even though the premise (bad boy steals car with baby on board and discovers his humanity) is not that original, there is something uncompromisingly honest and believable about the world evoked in this film, which raises this simple redemption story above mere sentimentality, although there is plenty of sentiment, to paraphrase Somerset-Maugham. The movie does not try to be 'International', and most of the dialogue is in 'Sowetospeak' (my term because I can't remember what it's called), an amalgam of Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, English, Afrikaans and several other languages. The cast are 'unglamorous' in every way. It is this truthfulness to its own vernacular which perversely gives the film its universality. South African film comes of age.
To Sherman Galleries last week for the launch of their impressive book TWENTY, celebrating 20 years in the game. Interesting to see the usual power crowd of black (or tweed)-clad movers and shakers supplanted for the night by black (or denim)-clad artists and their artwives, arthusbands, parents and children - something of a family affair. Gene Sherman gave an enthusiastic and endearingly gauche speech, and Charles Merewether gave a robust and rather rigorous one. Everyone admired the Hari Ho photographs (of each other) on the walls with suitably ironic commentary, and a good time was had by all. The book is excellent, and will be seen as an important milestone in the internationalisation of the Sydney commercial gallery scene. It sets a new, high benchmark for gallery publishing and shows all the evidence of having been properly resourced - a very classy piece of print indeed. Can it be long before we see something along the same lines from Roslyn Oxley? Only better, of course.
A tout a l'heure.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Faulty Memories, the Price of Freedom, V for Vendetta
A busy week past, but not (for me) a particularly arty one. Most notable has been the media spectacle of our Foreign Minister (Alexander Downer) and Prime Minister (John Howard) appearing before the 'Oil for Food' enquiry into kickbacks of nearly $300 million paid by AWB (Australian Wheat Board) to Saddam Hussein's regime, prior to the invasion.
This has been so exhaustively written about that I hesitate to add to the verbiage. Suffice to say that even the most ardent supporters of our current leaders are disbelieving and somewhat ashamed at the mass breakout of amnesia surrounding this disgraceful matter. I am looking forward to reading the spin that right-of-centre columnists such a Gerard Henderson will put on events next week, but it's interesting that even 'New Right' commentators such as Michael Duffy are starting to (albeit rather gently) question the integrity of the Government, see On with the show for the artful dodgers (SMH 14/4/06).
There is perhaps the first whiff of an important change in the political air, worth noting. Could we even be witnessing the moment when the worm turns? The 'Kids Overboard' affair, Tampa, phantom Iraqi WMDs... in all these familiar cases Ministers and the PM claimed not to have been properly informed by their underlings, and got away with it. They may have been somewhat diminished in the eyes of the Australian people, but election results consistently demonstrated that if people thought they were being lied to, they didn't really care, or that good economic management and low mortgage rates were more important. Or perhaps the 'War on terror' has meant that standards of accountability and probity need not be so exacting? We have reached a point I believe, long passed in the UK and the USA, where the Australian populace in general, in so far as it cares at all, now believes that it is routinely lied to. The Aussie way is to shrug and say "Well, they're pollies, what do you expect?"
In response, I quote Wendell Phillips:
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." (1852)
Benjamin Franklin:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (1759)
And best of all, James Madison (4th President of the United States): "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." (1788)
Which leads nicely to the newly released movie V for Vendetta. OK, so its a 'Hollywood' movie based on a graphic novel, with some major script flaws, but remarkably timely for all that. Without going into full detail about the Britain it depicts, set in the near future, the important factor is that does not imagine an Orwellian world where people know they are oppressed (yet), but rather one not unlike the present, where the abdication of freedoms is still actively in progress. In this world a combination of nationalist infotainment (think of Bill O'Reilly on US Fox News and it's not so far fetched) and constant, media-manipulated fear of 'terrorists', disease outbreaks, 'degenerates' and so on, keeps the population willingly in thrall to a 'Big Brother' type Chancellor, played with suitable menace by John Hurt. While people in pubs and at home around the TV set mutter "Rubbish... fuckin' liar", they are sufficiently cowed by fear not to do anything. NOT fear of the Government security apparatus per se, but of the bogies that government and a compliant media constantly conjure up. Sound familiar? Of course, all this changes when a character called 'V' (Hugo Weaving), wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, arrives on the scene. All the performances are excellent, and Natalie Portman is, as always, mesmerising. Three and a half stars.
Still on movies, I watched on DVD the underrated A Home At The End Of The World based on Michael Cunningham's book, which I've never read, but may do after seeing this film. Believable performances from Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Sissy Spacek and Robin Wright Penn - it slipped below my radar on release, and I don't recall anyone commenting on it. Given that the film deals with a complex ménage-a-trois between a gay man, a bisexual man, a heterosexual woman and 'their' child, and throw in a dope-smoking mother and HIV, I found myself wondering what all the fuss over Brokeback Mountain was about. This isn't quite as epic or as well directed, but Colin Farrell is as much a straight leading man as 'Heath'n Jake', and the story presents what is in many ways a more contentious issue in a non-judgmental way - whether two men, a woman and a child can be a family. Four stars from me. Margaret?
This has been so exhaustively written about that I hesitate to add to the verbiage. Suffice to say that even the most ardent supporters of our current leaders are disbelieving and somewhat ashamed at the mass breakout of amnesia surrounding this disgraceful matter. I am looking forward to reading the spin that right-of-centre columnists such a Gerard Henderson will put on events next week, but it's interesting that even 'New Right' commentators such as Michael Duffy are starting to (albeit rather gently) question the integrity of the Government, see On with the show for the artful dodgers (SMH 14/4/06).
There is perhaps the first whiff of an important change in the political air, worth noting. Could we even be witnessing the moment when the worm turns? The 'Kids Overboard' affair, Tampa, phantom Iraqi WMDs... in all these familiar cases Ministers and the PM claimed not to have been properly informed by their underlings, and got away with it. They may have been somewhat diminished in the eyes of the Australian people, but election results consistently demonstrated that if people thought they were being lied to, they didn't really care, or that good economic management and low mortgage rates were more important. Or perhaps the 'War on terror' has meant that standards of accountability and probity need not be so exacting? We have reached a point I believe, long passed in the UK and the USA, where the Australian populace in general, in so far as it cares at all, now believes that it is routinely lied to. The Aussie way is to shrug and say "Well, they're pollies, what do you expect?"
In response, I quote Wendell Phillips:
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." (1852)
Benjamin Franklin:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (1759)
And best of all, James Madison (4th President of the United States): "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." (1788)
Which leads nicely to the newly released movie V for Vendetta. OK, so its a 'Hollywood' movie based on a graphic novel, with some major script flaws, but remarkably timely for all that. Without going into full detail about the Britain it depicts, set in the near future, the important factor is that does not imagine an Orwellian world where people know they are oppressed (yet), but rather one not unlike the present, where the abdication of freedoms is still actively in progress. In this world a combination of nationalist infotainment (think of Bill O'Reilly on US Fox News and it's not so far fetched) and constant, media-manipulated fear of 'terrorists', disease outbreaks, 'degenerates' and so on, keeps the population willingly in thrall to a 'Big Brother' type Chancellor, played with suitable menace by John Hurt. While people in pubs and at home around the TV set mutter "Rubbish... fuckin' liar", they are sufficiently cowed by fear not to do anything. NOT fear of the Government security apparatus per se, but of the bogies that government and a compliant media constantly conjure up. Sound familiar? Of course, all this changes when a character called 'V' (Hugo Weaving), wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, arrives on the scene. All the performances are excellent, and Natalie Portman is, as always, mesmerising. Three and a half stars.
Still on movies, I watched on DVD the underrated A Home At The End Of The World based on Michael Cunningham's book, which I've never read, but may do after seeing this film. Believable performances from Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Sissy Spacek and Robin Wright Penn - it slipped below my radar on release, and I don't recall anyone commenting on it. Given that the film deals with a complex ménage-a-trois between a gay man, a bisexual man, a heterosexual woman and 'their' child, and throw in a dope-smoking mother and HIV, I found myself wondering what all the fuss over Brokeback Mountain was about. This isn't quite as epic or as well directed, but Colin Farrell is as much a straight leading man as 'Heath'n Jake', and the story presents what is in many ways a more contentious issue in a non-judgmental way - whether two men, a woman and a child can be a family. Four stars from me. Margaret?
Sunday, April 09, 2006
British Alchemy, New Design at Object, Norrie at Mori, Judy Watson at GrantPirrie, Musee du Quai Branly
Tuesday 4 saw the opening of Great Brits - The New Alchemists at the UTS Gallery, another exhibition showcasing emerging British talent, curated by London's Design Museum with Paul Smith, originally hosted by "Sir Paul" at the Milan Salone Internazionale del Mobile last year, with much fanfare, and now being toured by the British Council. According to the press release the six designers "share a passion for experimentation with new materials and manufacturing technologies and for exploring the transformative - or alchemical - possibilities of design. Great Brits explores the development of a raw, surreal design aesthetic that transforms base objects or materials and commonplace typologies in unexpected ways." The standout work in a somewhat underwhelming show are Julia Lohmann's "dismembered cow carcass lounges" (my description), and Mathias Megyeri's amusing security railings. One influential Australian design thinker has commented (anonymously alas) that this is "product design trying to be gallery art and succeeding in being a self-indulgent wank". I don't entirely agree, however if one views product design as a discipline aimed at industrial production, then the one-off experimental nature if some of this work could be a problem.
It's interesting to compare Great Brits - The New Alchemists with Object Gallery's rather more sedate annual New Design 2006 show. According to the press release: "This popular exhibition introduces the most outstanding design graduates in the country, working across product design, textiles, fashion, ceramics, glass and furniture." All the work shown is excellent as you'd expect, but in comparison to the messy, noisy, experimental Brits, it seems timid, well-mannered, a little conservative. A subjective opinion of course, and not a crticisism of the quality of the work. Standout for me is Janice Vitkovsky's (ANU) award-winning cast glass piece Moment when the darkness, 2006. Also well worth a look is Poetica in the Project Space upstairs.
Wednesday 5, to Mori Gallery for Susan Norrie's haunting new 'Work in progress 2005/6'. This silent, black and white film, projected really huge on one wall of the main space, begins with an image of a nuclear explosion, and progresses to an almost elegiac meditation in and around the Aboriginal tent Embassy in Canberra. A restless, roaming camera pans and glides, revealing flapping canvas, drifting smoke, distant figures, the stark white architecture of the old parliament buildings. The artist's statement talks of the concept of a "Black Mist", which are the words apparently used by Aborgines to describe the fallout from the British nuclear tests at Maralinga in the 50s and 60s. Norrie's work stands out from so much humdrum screen-based work, although I find it hard to articulate just what is so special about it. For me her pieces have the quality of almost dream-like 'nocturnes', saturated with sadness and melancholy, a kind of grieving for the human condition.
Thursday 6 to GrantPirrie for the new Judy Watson show - impressive works, though rather decorative for my austere taste in painting. However Judy Watson's curved, etched zinc wall at the Melbourne Museum is my absolute number 1 favourite piece of environmental art in Australia, and she is one of the 8 Indigenous artists whose work will be incorporated into the fabric of the 'Rue de l'Université building', one of the four buldings that make up the of the soon-to-be opened Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) in Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel. The other artists are Gulumbu Yunupingu, John Mawurndjul, Paddy Bedford, Lena Nyadbi, Ningura Napurrula, Tommy Watson and the late Michael Riley.
More on MQB soon.
It's interesting to compare Great Brits - The New Alchemists with Object Gallery's rather more sedate annual New Design 2006 show. According to the press release: "This popular exhibition introduces the most outstanding design graduates in the country, working across product design, textiles, fashion, ceramics, glass and furniture." All the work shown is excellent as you'd expect, but in comparison to the messy, noisy, experimental Brits, it seems timid, well-mannered, a little conservative. A subjective opinion of course, and not a crticisism of the quality of the work. Standout for me is Janice Vitkovsky's (ANU) award-winning cast glass piece Moment when the darkness, 2006. Also well worth a look is Poetica in the Project Space upstairs.
Wednesday 5, to Mori Gallery for Susan Norrie's haunting new 'Work in progress 2005/6'. This silent, black and white film, projected really huge on one wall of the main space, begins with an image of a nuclear explosion, and progresses to an almost elegiac meditation in and around the Aboriginal tent Embassy in Canberra. A restless, roaming camera pans and glides, revealing flapping canvas, drifting smoke, distant figures, the stark white architecture of the old parliament buildings. The artist's statement talks of the concept of a "Black Mist", which are the words apparently used by Aborgines to describe the fallout from the British nuclear tests at Maralinga in the 50s and 60s. Norrie's work stands out from so much humdrum screen-based work, although I find it hard to articulate just what is so special about it. For me her pieces have the quality of almost dream-like 'nocturnes', saturated with sadness and melancholy, a kind of grieving for the human condition.
Thursday 6 to GrantPirrie for the new Judy Watson show - impressive works, though rather decorative for my austere taste in painting. However Judy Watson's curved, etched zinc wall at the Melbourne Museum is my absolute number 1 favourite piece of environmental art in Australia, and she is one of the 8 Indigenous artists whose work will be incorporated into the fabric of the 'Rue de l'Université building', one of the four buldings that make up the of the soon-to-be opened Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) in Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel. The other artists are Gulumbu Yunupingu, John Mawurndjul, Paddy Bedford, Lena Nyadbi, Ningura Napurrula, Tommy Watson and the late Michael Riley.
More on MQB soon.
Iraq Update: 'Blood for Oil'
My eagle-eyed brother has drawn my attention to an excellent article in The London Review of Books: 'Blood for Oil?' in response to the post Condoleeza Rice's Pax Americana of March 18, 2006 (see archive).
The Blood for Oil? article, by a group of writers and activists collectively called Retort, considers whether oil was the reason for the invasion of Iraq. Their conclusion, that oil is only a minor factor, is similar to my own thesis, but much better argued. It's long, but is a veritable history lesson in US and Western policy in the Middle East since the 1920s, and a devastating look at the labyrinthine US oil/military/industrial/ construction/banking/ political complex. Here's a sampler question to whet your appetite (courtesy of LRB and the authors, see below):
"The first Gulf War had been a struggle over oil supplies. Saddam was furious that Kuwait and UAE, under US pressure, were producing over quota to keep prices low. His obvious oil-profits motive elicited widespread condemnation in the Arab world and provided a broad multilateral basis for the American military response. What was on offer to the industry in 2003, on the other hand, was unilateral adventurism in the face of a global Muslim insurgency, and the prospect of enraging the most numerous generation of young Arabs and Muslims in history. It risked over 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, the entire Gulf strategy, the wider set of US interests in the region, the radical destabilisation of the entire Muslim world, the active promotion of the jihadi struggle, and blowback of a wholly unpredictable and uncontainable sort. Why do it?"©
For answers see the full article on the LRB website at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n08/reto01_.html
© The London review of Books and Retort, a ‘gathering of antagonists to capital and empire’, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This essay was written by Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, which deals with many aspects of post-September 11 global politics, is due from Verso this summer.
The Blood for Oil? article, by a group of writers and activists collectively called Retort, considers whether oil was the reason for the invasion of Iraq. Their conclusion, that oil is only a minor factor, is similar to my own thesis, but much better argued. It's long, but is a veritable history lesson in US and Western policy in the Middle East since the 1920s, and a devastating look at the labyrinthine US oil/military/industrial/ construction/banking/ political complex. Here's a sampler question to whet your appetite (courtesy of LRB and the authors, see below):
"The first Gulf War had been a struggle over oil supplies. Saddam was furious that Kuwait and UAE, under US pressure, were producing over quota to keep prices low. His obvious oil-profits motive elicited widespread condemnation in the Arab world and provided a broad multilateral basis for the American military response. What was on offer to the industry in 2003, on the other hand, was unilateral adventurism in the face of a global Muslim insurgency, and the prospect of enraging the most numerous generation of young Arabs and Muslims in history. It risked over 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, the entire Gulf strategy, the wider set of US interests in the region, the radical destabilisation of the entire Muslim world, the active promotion of the jihadi struggle, and blowback of a wholly unpredictable and uncontainable sort. Why do it?"©
For answers see the full article on the LRB website at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n08/reto01_.html
© The London review of Books and Retort, a ‘gathering of antagonists to capital and empire’, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This essay was written by Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, which deals with many aspects of post-September 11 global politics, is due from Verso this summer.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Colour Power and Power Games in Wollongong
To the Wollongong City Gallery (WCG) this Saturday past to see the NGV touring exhibition Colour Power, Aboriginal art post 1984, curated by Judith Ryan. The WCG selection appears to be a drastically cut-down version of the original NGV show (judging by the NGV website - the catalogue was unavailable). The survey show looks at the impact of synthetic colour (acrylics) on Aboriginal art, covering most regions, the premise is a good and interesting one, and the work is well hung in a single room with mezzanine balcony - by far the best room in a somewhat dispiriting gallery.
Certainly the gallery Director, Peter O'Neill, made it a dispiriting occasion. I was a guest of an advisor to the AGNSW Aboriginal Collection Benefactors Group - a distinguished and fairly knowledgeable assembly of 15 or so people who had traveled down from Sydney to view the show and hear a talk by the Director on WCG's own Indigenous collection. Possibly because Herr Direktor was forgoing Saturday with his family, perhaps because he thought the visitation from Sydney needed a lesson in arrogance, or maybe because he simply dislikes people not from Wollongong - from the moment of greeting he had "... resentment tucked into his waistband like a 38", to borrow a phrase from Tom Wolfe.
In short order he favoured us with his distaste for Art Express (the HSC student show), Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, the "oddly named NGV" and its inability to supply a catalogue for his show, the fact that he was "neither an expert, nor a scholar, nor a curator", and his view that the fortunate citizens of Wollongong had an immeasurably better cultural life than those in Sydney, having his gallery of course, and their "own newspaper", an apparent reference to that beacon of enlightenment, The Illawarra Mercury.
It would have been quite funny, if it hadn't been delivered with scarcely-veiled animosity towards his guests. Having raised everyone's hackles, he then abdicated from talking about the exhibition, saying "perhaps some of you would like to talk about it".
"It's going to be a delightful day", I thought to myself.
In fact it did get better - marginally. As the afternoon wore on and the prospect of escape neared, he seemed to be making an effort to be pleasant, with mixed results. His slide show was of interest, and though the locally collected work was pretty ordinary, he spoke well about it. The visit ended with a trip to the storeroom to look at the permanent Indigenous collection usurped from the walls by the much-resented Art Express. Except that he didn't really get anything out, except a fake Clifford Possum, despite being asked about the Rover Thomas in the collection. I was glad to escape.
The gallery building is, I gather, an old council headquarters, so has some natural disadvantages as an art gallery, but it feels threadbare, dusty, neglected, gloomy... dispiriting, as I said at the outset. There is a marvelous terrace on the top level, where there could be a great café and bookshop for instance. Perhaps the place is short of funds or, more likely in my view, its Director lost interest long ago, and is serving out his time until retirement. That's what it feels like, and if so, the citizens of Wollongong are being ill-served and deserve better, just as they no doubt deserve a better newspaper.
Pip-pip.
Certainly the gallery Director, Peter O'Neill, made it a dispiriting occasion. I was a guest of an advisor to the AGNSW Aboriginal Collection Benefactors Group - a distinguished and fairly knowledgeable assembly of 15 or so people who had traveled down from Sydney to view the show and hear a talk by the Director on WCG's own Indigenous collection. Possibly because Herr Direktor was forgoing Saturday with his family, perhaps because he thought the visitation from Sydney needed a lesson in arrogance, or maybe because he simply dislikes people not from Wollongong - from the moment of greeting he had "... resentment tucked into his waistband like a 38", to borrow a phrase from Tom Wolfe.
In short order he favoured us with his distaste for Art Express (the HSC student show), Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, the "oddly named NGV" and its inability to supply a catalogue for his show, the fact that he was "neither an expert, nor a scholar, nor a curator", and his view that the fortunate citizens of Wollongong had an immeasurably better cultural life than those in Sydney, having his gallery of course, and their "own newspaper", an apparent reference to that beacon of enlightenment, The Illawarra Mercury.
It would have been quite funny, if it hadn't been delivered with scarcely-veiled animosity towards his guests. Having raised everyone's hackles, he then abdicated from talking about the exhibition, saying "perhaps some of you would like to talk about it".
"It's going to be a delightful day", I thought to myself.
In fact it did get better - marginally. As the afternoon wore on and the prospect of escape neared, he seemed to be making an effort to be pleasant, with mixed results. His slide show was of interest, and though the locally collected work was pretty ordinary, he spoke well about it. The visit ended with a trip to the storeroom to look at the permanent Indigenous collection usurped from the walls by the much-resented Art Express. Except that he didn't really get anything out, except a fake Clifford Possum, despite being asked about the Rover Thomas in the collection. I was glad to escape.
The gallery building is, I gather, an old council headquarters, so has some natural disadvantages as an art gallery, but it feels threadbare, dusty, neglected, gloomy... dispiriting, as I said at the outset. There is a marvelous terrace on the top level, where there could be a great café and bookshop for instance. Perhaps the place is short of funds or, more likely in my view, its Director lost interest long ago, and is serving out his time until retirement. That's what it feels like, and if so, the citizens of Wollongong are being ill-served and deserve better, just as they no doubt deserve a better newspaper.
Pip-pip.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Who the hell is Richard Diebenkorn?
Was.
Maybe the greatest American painter of the 20th century.
Oh all right, him and Mark Rothko.
Pollock? Basquiat? Hopper? O'Keefe? Rauschenburg? OK, OK, OK!
The point is, his is not a name that many people are familiar with. He died in 1993 in Berkeley, Caltifornia.
I saw a retrospective of his work once, at the Whitechapel in London, must have been... maybe 1980, thirteen or so years before he died, and the memory of that show has never quite left me. The catalogue of the major 1998 (posthumous) retropective at the Whitney (NY) remains the most looked-at book in my library. And when I have lost the heart to paint, of haven't painted for awhile, I look at it, and invariably I want to paint again.
I've been thinking about him again lately, indeed earlier today on a trip south along the coast to Wollongong, seeing the angular new housing developments, I thought particulary of his semi-abstact 'cityscapes' (more 'suburb-scapes') from the early 60s – the period between the 50s 'organic' abstracts and the 70-80s 'Ocean Park' abstractions.
Anyway, came across this last weekend, quoted in John Elderfield's essay 'Leaving Ocean Park' in the Whitney cataloque, with the permission of Phyllis Diebenkorn, and I repeat it here courtesy of those individuals:
Richard Diebenkorn: Notes to myself on beginning a painting:
1. Attempt what is not certain, certainty may of may not come later. It may be then a valuable delusion.
2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as stimulus for further moves.
3. DO search. But in order to find other that what is searched for.
4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
5. Don’t discover a subject – of any kind.
6. Somehow don’t be bored – but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.
7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.
8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.
9. Tolerate chaos.
10. Be careful only in a perverse way.
I think these rules are extraordinary, and although he wrote them about the scary adventure that is painting, I imagine they would have a resonance with most visual artists, writers, composers, choreogoraphers, and even philosophers.
Thanks Bob, your thoughts live on, and your painting still inspires.
Maybe the greatest American painter of the 20th century.
Oh all right, him and Mark Rothko.
Pollock? Basquiat? Hopper? O'Keefe? Rauschenburg? OK, OK, OK!
The point is, his is not a name that many people are familiar with. He died in 1993 in Berkeley, Caltifornia.
I saw a retrospective of his work once, at the Whitechapel in London, must have been... maybe 1980, thirteen or so years before he died, and the memory of that show has never quite left me. The catalogue of the major 1998 (posthumous) retropective at the Whitney (NY) remains the most looked-at book in my library. And when I have lost the heart to paint, of haven't painted for awhile, I look at it, and invariably I want to paint again.
I've been thinking about him again lately, indeed earlier today on a trip south along the coast to Wollongong, seeing the angular new housing developments, I thought particulary of his semi-abstact 'cityscapes' (more 'suburb-scapes') from the early 60s – the period between the 50s 'organic' abstracts and the 70-80s 'Ocean Park' abstractions.
Anyway, came across this last weekend, quoted in John Elderfield's essay 'Leaving Ocean Park' in the Whitney cataloque, with the permission of Phyllis Diebenkorn, and I repeat it here courtesy of those individuals:
Richard Diebenkorn: Notes to myself on beginning a painting:
1. Attempt what is not certain, certainty may of may not come later. It may be then a valuable delusion.
2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as stimulus for further moves.
3. DO search. But in order to find other that what is searched for.
4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
5. Don’t discover a subject – of any kind.
6. Somehow don’t be bored – but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.
7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.
8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.
9. Tolerate chaos.
10. Be careful only in a perverse way.
I think these rules are extraordinary, and although he wrote them about the scary adventure that is painting, I imagine they would have a resonance with most visual artists, writers, composers, choreogoraphers, and even philosophers.
Thanks Bob, your thoughts live on, and your painting still inspires.
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