Posts tagged 'art'

Is nothing sacred? It’s a subject that continues to torture the stylish brows of French literary types following the bombing of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week. Last week’s edition – titled Sharia Hebdo – had reported on the triumph in Tunisian elections of an Islamist party and featured on the front page a cartoon of the prophet promising readers 100 lashes if they didn’t “die laughing”. As a result, the magazine’s Parisian HQ has been firebombed, its website has been hacked and death threats have been aimed at its staff (full story). Readers wondering how the magazine would respond to the events will discover on their newsstands today (Paris time) this cover featuring a magazine cartoonist and an Islamic man locked in passionate embrace under the headline, ‘Love is stronger than hate’.

Towards the end of his recent Skype appearance at the Wheeler Centre, UK fashion designer Gareth Pugh was asked to sign off with some advice to aspiring fashion designers in the audience. Here’s what he said:

“People get very confused, I think, when thinking about fashion and design. Especially with fashion because obviously you see it everyday …. I think if you want to be a designer and do it for a long time, you have to not think at all about how you’re going to sell those. You shouldn’t think in terms of commerciality. It should be more about the ideas, because without the ideas you don’t have anything. You just have a collection that you could get anywhere or you could see anywhere. It needs to speak to people on a level for people to actually believe it and to want it ultimately.”

Pugh’s appearance was presented in partnership with the State of Design as part of a series of ‘9 to 5’ talks, in which Melbourne’s leading designers posed nine critical questions to five of the world’s most important design thinkers. Other videos/podcasts in the series: interior designer Ilse Crawford, design group Troika, Korean urban designer Kyung-won Chung and US designer-illustrator Milton Glaser.

(Click to watch video.)

By Mark Mordue

The Rolling Stones song ‘Emotional Rescue’ is a seduction song thinly veiled in romance. The urgency and strut that it exudes, Mick Jagger’s startling use of falsetto – it’s all about getting a woman to leave her husband and join him in bed.

By surrendering to her desires and to his, the singer will come to that woman’s emotional rescue. It’s likely to be a very temporary liberation, however. As Jagger hints early in the song, “Don’t you know promises were never meant to keep.”

There are often gaps between what we say and what we mean, of course. Some conscious, others subconscious. Our listening can involve similar arts of opportunity and self-deception. There are messages we don’t want to receive. Others we need to have, whether they are present in what someone says or does – or not.

Our emotions are rarely singular, and pass over us like one cloud hiding another and perhaps another again. The argument would be we should use our mind to read that weather more clearly, to make sense of those feelings that impel us, and then to see ourselves and perhaps act more wisely. Or to surrender – because we want to surrender – to something that at first glance is irrational, wild, destructive or thrilling, as the case may be. To be rescued, as it were, from the rational world that dulls us and even imprisons us.

Art is a kind of tarot for our feelings, a set of stories and symbols through which we can see ourselves. In Shakespeare’s time the connection was more ordered and universally understood, a universe of bodily humors from which character and all human destiny stemmed.

Though we lack such an elaborate and living map of the self today, I find I am still able to read another map, a map that is not fixed but somehow flowing, visible within the arts available to me. And that through these encounters I can examine what my feelings are – and even reinvigorate them by listening to music or reading a book when modern life seems to extinguish those sparks.

In a recent interview, Laura Marling – the young English singer most often compared to Joni Mitchell – declared herself to be an anti-romantic rationalist, to be all about logic over feelings. Marling is a woman barely 21 years old who’s produced a supreme second album entitled A Creature I Don’t Know (oh the irony). It’s hard to recall a record of such up-tempo and annihilating dispensations emerging since Chrissie Hynde appeared on the scene with The Pretenders some 30 years ago. Though arising out of an English folk-pop background, Marling’s voice also echoes the smoky, side-on snarl of Hynde at her best. Her lyrics are not only literary, they venture into a dark yet ultimately optimistic aloneness that seems rare: neither soporifically happy, nor darkly cliched. She works towards stripping away illusions about romance while sustaining a deep poetry and sense of mystery to her lyrics.

At the same time I started listening to her new record and absorbing her world-view, I found myself hurled backwards – somewhat nostalgically – by the documentary Autoluminescent. A depiction of the life and loss of former Birthday Party guitarist, Rowland S. Howard, Autoluminescent takes some of its hard-edge romance from the influence of 19th century French poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, both of whom Howard echoed in his looks, lyrics and ambience.

In the documentary, Howard talks about writing his first important song, ‘Shivers’, when he was only 16. He had noticed his schoolmates indulging in their emotions to hysterical extremes. It was all too much. Thus the withering lines of a jilted young man who might well be Howard himself: “’I’ve been contemplating suicide/but it’s really not my style.”

Howard could look back at the song and laugh at his own bravado, and his insight into excess emotion. “Says me”, he observes wryly in the documentary, “a guy who has always had a glass heart on his sleeve.”

Howard died last year of liver failure brought on by complications wrought by hepatitis C, contracted from intravenous drug use as a young man. Ultimately Autoluminescent is about promise unfulfilled, but it’s also about the great things Howard gave us as a musician and songwriter. It’s a legacy at once genuinely tragic and yet luminous, leaving you with a far-from-singular feeling – one that might best be described as ecstatic grieving.

A great artistic encounter brings something truthful to how we feel about ourselves and see the world. It’s a mysterious tension – an overlapping, contradictory richness – that somehow makes sense without ever reducing things to an easy answer or summary. It may be this is the only emotional rescue we can ever count on. In the meantime, we continue to seek our freedoms in the strangest ways – as often as not in spite of ourselves – jolted back into awareness by a wave of music, a line of poetry, a painting, a song … then continuing on our way.

Mark Mordue is the 2010 Pascall Prize Australian Critic of the Year. He is currently working on a biography of Nick Cave.

This weekend is the last chance residents of and visitors to East Gippsland have to take in an exhibition of book art. The Books … beyond words exhibition at the East Gippsland Art Gallery in Bairnsdale has attracted artefacts from across Australia and the world. With a theme this year of ‘evolution’, entries were received from artists as far afield as the US, France, Switzerland, the UK and Germany. All entries were eligible to win awards from a panel of judges.

The overall award, with a $5,000 purse, went to French artist Marie-Noelle Fontan for her piece, Melaleuca’s Book. The $1000 Artist of East Gippsland Award went to Janet K. Howard from Lakes Entrance for her piece, Bird Collector’s House. A $1000 Innovation Award was given to German artist Gerlinde Hofmann for Flotenrolle – Pipes Roll.

The exhibition runs until Tuesday. For those that can’t make it, images of many of the entries are available on the gallery’s website.

Image of Poussin’s ‘Adoration of the Golden Calf’, before it was vandalised, courtesy the National Gallery via Wikipedia

“The art of Nicolas Poussin might obsess someone whose head was full of conspiracy theories,” wrote the Guardian’s Jonathon Jones recently. Jones was commenting on a recent incident in which a 57 year-old British man sprayed red paint on Poussin’s 1633 masterpiece, ‘The Adoration of the Golden Calf’, a painting at the UK’s National Gallery. Jones described it as a painting “about the forces that can destroy civilisation.” It’s unclear what motivated the 57 year-old vandal, although his paint did cover the painting’s nudity.

What is it about Poussin’s centuries-old paintings that continue to stir such passion?During his recent Wheeler Centre conversation with Antoni Jach, noted art historian and poet TJ Clark spoke at length about his own obsession with Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and art in general. The conversation was broad-ranging, linked by the themes of art, love, obsession and futility. “Art,” said Clark, “is the enemy of truth; art is the practice that knows life is an illusion – all the way down.” Here’s a report by WH Chong on the event.

No novel better captures the obsession some of us have with centuries-old works of art than Old Masters, by that strangest of comedic misanthropes, Thomas Bernhard. The novel features an 82 year-old music critic called Reger, who for 30 years has spent four or five hours every other morning sitting on the same bench in front of Tintoretto’s White-bearded Man in the Bordone Room of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Towards the end of the novel Reger concludes, “in the end we are abandoned by all these so-called so-called great spirits and by these so-called Old Masters, and we see that we are mocked in the meanest way by these great spirits and Old Masters.” (It’s a slightly awkward quote, admittedly, but anyone who’s ever read Bernhard would appreciate how difficult it is to quote him.) Perhaps it was that feeling, that feeling of being mocked in the meanest way by Poussin, that drove one 57 year-old British man to decide he must destroy a painting almost four centuries old.

(Click to watch video.)

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been released from detention without trial after almost three months in detention. The government’s official news agency Xinhua reported he was released “because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from.” Authorities say the artist and his production company stand accused of tax evasion and destroying incriminating evidence. Here’s how we covered the story previously.

Image of vintage Smith-Premier typewriter via WikiCommons

Typewriter art has been around since at least 1867, with the oldest surviving example dating back to 1898. Mid-last century, Paul Smith, who suffered severe cerebral palsy from early childhood, was the form’s best-known exponent – at least until it was superseded by ASCII art with the advent of computing. These days, British performance artist Keira Rathbone has taken up the art of the typewriter. Here are a German news report on the artist and samples of her works, which can fetch up to €6000 (A$8000) each.

Previously.

A volume of lavishly-illustrated drawings for children by a pioneering Australian woman will be auctioned next month. Charlotte Waring arrived in Australia in 1826 at the age of 29. She’d been hired to be a governess to the children of John Macarthur’s nephew, but instead she married agriculturalist and author James Atkinson, whom she’d met on her way to the colony.

As well as writing and publishing the first Australian children’s book – A Mother’s Offering to her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales (1841) – an Age report describes Atkinson as “a child prodigy; a fiercely independent, well-educated woman; a single mother of four left to run one of the most important colonial properties in the Southern Highlands; a young widow who was reputedly raped by a notorious bushranger; a battered wife who fled her alcoholic second husband, though it left her penniless.”

In 1843, Charlotte illustrated a 30-page notebook for her daughter Emily’s 13th birthday with coloured drawings of the flora, fauna and indigenous people of the Southern Highlands region. That notebook has come to light after languishing in the drawer of a descendant for some 25 years, and will be auctioned on June 12 by the Aalder’s auction house in Sydney. Another of her daughters, Louisa (1834-1872), became a pioneering writer, naturalist and feminist.

Indigenous artist Richard Bell has revealed that he decided the winner of this year’s prestigious Sulman Prize on the toss of a coin. Bell awarded the prize to Peter Smeeth for his painting, The artist’s fate. Smeeth was reportedly less than impressed by the revelation, admitting, “It’s a bit deflating”. The Sir John Sulman Prize is awarded annually to ‘the best subject/genre painting and/or murals/mural project executed during the two years preceding the [closing] date’. It’s administered by the Art Gallery of NSW, which awards some of Australia’s most prestigious prizes for visual arts, including the Archibald (for portraiture) and the Wynne (for landscape). These two latter are awarded (occasionally to great controversy) by a committee of 11 trustees under the guidance of gallery director Edmund Capon. The Sulman, on the other hand, is determined by a single judge, appointed by Capon.

Richard Bell, who revels in the role of agent provocateur, reportedly compiled his shortlist on the basis that he likes animals, but added that he also felt obliged to break his animal-based method in order to include some of his friends. Defending his method of choosing the winner of the $20,000 prize, he added, “Like every prize, it’s a lottery.” The Sun-Herald reported that, even though winning such a prize can make or break a career, Edmund Capon agrees with the sentiment: ‘'It’s very much a matter of individual taste and instinct and the kind of aesthetic, wit and humour of the individual artist. And I like that.’'

The revelations prompted Crikey’s WH Chong to cite other instances of lotto metaphors for major art prizes: “Kiran Desai, winner of the Man Booker in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss, says: ‘Awards are such a lottery.’ A.S. Byatt, whose novel Possession won the Man Booker in 1990, knows whereof she speaks: ‘I’ve won it and judged it and it’s a lottery.’”

The politics of awards have been much in the news. Locally, the Miles Franklin shortlist raised more than a few eyebrows last week, prompting a personal response from the Wheeler Centre’s Michael Williams: “Suddenly the arbitrary nature of literary awards seems cruel rather than useful.” In the UK, the administrators of the MAN Booker Prize have decided to award a special, posthumour Booker to Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted five times but never won. In a special online poll, about 1000 readers judged her historical novel Master Georgie to be the best of her five Booker-nominated titles (it lost in 1998 to Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam). The special Booker has been derided as a condescending publicity stunt by Robert McCrum. The Guardian’s Sam Jordison denies there was never any conspiracy against Bainbridge, concluding, “Each year [the Booker] is a lottery.”

If bad artists copy and great artists steal, as Picasso quipped, Ai Weiwei has been paid a high, if backhanded, compliment. Chinese art’s provocateur-in-chief has been charged with plagiarism after being arrested at an airport in Beijing on April 3. Foreign governments have called for the artist’s release, according to the New Yorker, which published this fascinating profile of the professional rabble-rouser last year. In his last interview before his arrest, the artist said, “China in many ways is just like the middle ages.”

As part of a recent installation at Tate Modern, Ai Weiwei had 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds hand-made and painted and spread over the floor of the museum’s Turbine Hall (“Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen”). The dust generated by visitors walking over the installation forced the museum to temporarily close it for health reasons.

Websites supporting Ai Weiwei have appeared in response to news of the arrest. Tate Modern expressed its support for the artist by displaying a banner on an outside wall demanding his release, and a protest has been held outside the museum.

(Click to watch video.)

What’s in a finger? More than you think. The thumb hitches rides and expresses approval or lack of it, the index finger identifies and accuses in turn, the middle finger is potently aggressive, the ring finger an indicator of availability if not always fidelity, and a little finger is something to either be wrapped around or to wrap others around.

The finger plays its part in the history of art, too. In a conversation with David Hansen, Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings for the Yale Centre for British Art, returns to his home town to expand on the origins of his most recent book The Finger: A Handbook. With the humble finger to guide him, Trumble has been able to “graze widely in the fields of history”.

Ever wonder what your favourite writers' doodles look like? Back in the days before word processing, writing was a matter of putting pen – or pencil – to paper. As writing is a slow, laborious and often dull activity, writers were prone to distraction or even, perish the thought, procrastination. Often they would resort to doodling.

Flavorwire has published a fascinating overview of doodles by some very famous scribes. Featured writers include Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, Charles Bukowski and Vladimir Nabokov. There is a particularly affecting self-portrait by Jorge Luis Borges, drawn after he had gone blind. While the Wheeler Centre is normally not given to editorialising, we must admit to a particular fondness for Kurt Vonnegut’s doodle. Now there’s something we never thought we’d say.

Blogger, designer and visual artist, Culture Mulcher has been keeping a scrapbook of his visits to the Wheeler Centre and this week of Critical Failure he’s been particularly busy with sketches capturing both quotes and characters from the sessions.

Here’s a selection:

Adrian Martin debates the point at Critical Failure: Film

Fenella Kernebone offered her view on Critical Failure: Film

Peter Craven talked about what makes a good review at Critical Failure: Books

Hilary McPhee said she was “not as despondent as Gideon”

(Haigh countered that he was “not despondent, I’m quite cheerful!” at Critical Failure: Books

We’re looking forward to what Master Mulcher comes up with for tonight’s session on the visual arts.

Alison Croggon (Image courtesy Jacqueline Mitelman)

“As an artist, my relationships are experiential rather than theoretical. I certainly share with scientists and philosophers a desire to make sense of my existence. It is just that my approach is poles apart. It is a fragile, highly intuitive process, in which sensory acuity and memory are subtly intertwined.”

~ Jonathan Mills, State of the Arts lecture 2010

I had an English teacher in high school who one day strode into class, looked around belligerently at his students, and demanded to know if any of us read poetry. I did. I had read the dusty anthologies we had at home from end to end, and supplemented them with random buys from school jumble sales. I was a passionate and indiscriminate reader, devouring Alfred Noyes and TS Eliot with equal enthusiasm.

But this teacher so clearly thought that no one – and especially no one in this class of scruffy 13 year olds – could possibly read poetry for pleasure, that I didn’t dare to raise my hand. I sensed that he himself didn’t like poetry much, and that the price of outing myself would have been his unexpressed contempt. Certainly, he was a bad teacher of poetry.

I guess it wasn’t all his fault: the pedagogical approach to poetry was discouraging. I don’t know if schools still do this, but back then a staple of English comprehension lessons was the question: “What is the poet trying to say?”

This question enraged me. I didn’t think the poet was trying to say anything: the poet said it. The poem was what it said: it wasn’t there to be nailed down to an unambiguous message, but instead, like life itself, shimmered in its sensual ambiguity.

The meanings of a poem exist as much in its sounds and rhythms as in its semantic sense: but it was precisely those material aspects of language that were dismissed in the insistence on a particular kind of comprehension. After all, the suspension of certainty that is at the heart of any work of art is not easily translatable into exam questions.

Later, when I read Baudelaire’s insistence that “a poem must be a debacle of the intellect”, I knew exactly what he meant. Poetry is the place where the legislating impulse of language, even to its very grammar, is exploded from within, where our desire for order and control meets the anarchy of existence.

This subversion of the human wish to control reality is where art finds its power. It isn’t always a comfortable power, but it is always liberating, opening the consciousness to new perceptions of the world we live in. As Jonathan Mills claims in his lecture, art is one place where the many possible ways of perceiving and understanding can be articulated.

It resists paraphrase, claiming for itself a primacy of experience that is parallel to, if not the same as, life. And like life, its liberations are too often chained by the insistence it conform to a very limited idea of what “meaning” is.

In her famous 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag called for an erotics of art. “What is important now is to recover our senses,” she said. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

All anyone needs to understand art is to look, to listen, to feel: all else follows. They are, not uncoincidentally, exactly the same skills we need to love. Yet our education system leads us to believe that this is not enough. I’m sure that this is the primary reason for the hostility so many people, including my English teacher, feel towards art. Having been taught that they ought to look for meaning in the wrong places, art makes them feel stupid, as if they are found wanting.

That’s not the fault of artists nor of those who reject their work. But it does express a terrible failing in our culture, a constriction of our thought, that has far wider implications. And as Mills suggests, if we are to face the challenges of our future world, it’s a failing we need to address.

Alison Croggon is a theatre critic, blogger, poet and novelist. Her blog Theatre Notes is one of Australia’s most respected reviews, criticism and play news.