W W W . S T E P H E N J W I L L I A M S . C O M

[photo]

2011-07-18T18:54:00.000+10:00

[photo]

2011-06-25T23:31:00.004+10:00

My prison [dream]

2011-06-12T01:49:00.000+10:00

I am in a Malaysian prison that has an enormous interior courtyard. It is just like a real Malaysian prison, except mine has a beautiful marble colonnade, with very attractive marble columns and a beautiful white marble floor (very slippery and a lot of fun), surrounding the courtyard. Well, the digs are fine but, nevertheless, a fight ensues ... between the inmates and the guards. And, at first, the inmates appear to be winning. Then it gets serious and, in a far off corner, I see that some men in white uniform are entering the fray. It takes a short while to figure out what they have in their hands. Then, I see they are carrying crossbows and have already begun shooting people. Of course, it is time to retreat. After a short run to push off I slide on my belly the whole length of one side of the marble colonnade and even make it around the corner. Somehow I manage to avoid detection and survive the murderous mayhem that is cutting everyone else down.

No exit [dream]

2011-06-02T23:16:00.000+10:00

Everyone gets off. I head for the stairs and arriving at them remember how long, how impossible they are. There, you can see them climbing along the wall, traversing the wall between floor and the ceiling that is probably hundreds of feet high. I head back to take the more conventional route, which involves negotiating a series of moving footpaths that have been installed for the public’s convenience. The system is simple. You get on a footpath that takes the name of your destination; get off wherever it ends, and continue to look for the footpath that names your destination. If you persist you arrive, eventually. I get on the path for Paris, and it escorts me to the other side of the hallway, where it proves impossible to find another path to Paris. Not very helpful. A bit like de Gaulle airport. I struggle on for a while and come to an empty cul de sac... an open reception area where no one bothers to stay, though the view out onto the sidewalk is quite promising, and makes me wonder how I have managed to become so ‘elevated’. However, I notice that the stairway leading down from this reception area to the station entrance is made of stairs each of which must be fifteen or twenty feet high. The precipice is impossible to negotiate. The architects have omitted to provide a way out. It’s, really, very frustrating. People appear to have found their way out, though. Or have they? The moving footpaths are empty, the novelty of it all having worn off. It looks as though the only thing to do is to get back on a train.

‘Martial Arts, sans Art’ [dream]

2011-05-12T00:10:00.000+10:00

I am taking tae kwon do lessons. There is only one other person in the class, a woman. The instructor is a little old Korean or Chinese lady. We are in an L-shaped room. When the lesson starts the woman and the little old lady appear to be slapping each other around and practising their ‘kicks’. The woman has not had a lesson before, just like me. When she goes to kick the instructor the little old lady says, “No—not like that. We don’t kick like that here—you must kick to the side and outside the legs.” The woman and I think this is ridiculous. If we wanted to protect ourselves we’d kick the person who was attacking us in the balls. “No, no—you must do it like this. It’s safer.” The instructor gives us thin blue sticks about six feet long with which to practice hitting her, and each other. The sticks are very flexible, as though made of plastic, and hollow, and no one could hurt a fly with them. We whip the old lady with these flexible, blue sticks—and she whips us. It’s ridiculous. Someone has just made up the rules of this stupid system and there is no art or reality to it at all. The little old lady brings in another instructor—a big, old lady that looks as though she’s been in charge of the tuck shop for thirty years, and keeping the ‘tuck’ for herself. Her dirty, worn dress has little printed flowers on it. When she approaches me I give her a push and she falls back onto some sofas that line the walls of the L-shaped room. The other student and I whip the tuck-shop lady with our flexible blue sticks. The tuck shop lady is laughing, but pretends to be outraged by our impudence. Both the instructors have had enough of us—their new students—and they decide to call in the ‘big guns’ to bring us into line. The third instructor, a tall and thickset old man in a tired-looking, light brown suit, has masses of wavy, yellowing, ash-blonde hair, and cigarette-stained hands with fingers thick as English sausages. He enters the room with a third and new student trailing behind him. This old man looks like one of the actors in an early episode of ‘Homicide’—an ageing cop who is supposed to be crusty and benign. But he has forgotten the benign bit… He holds out his hands in front of him like pincers—thumbs hovering over finger tips—and walks towards me menacingly. It is hard not to laugh. When his pincers catch me, though, it is no laughing matter: they cause a sharp pain. I return the compliment, but I don’t believe my fingers are strong enough to produce the required effect. The first lesson is over, in any case, and when we return for the second, the venue has changed. It is now a much larger room with floors that appear to be spring-loaded. We spend a lot of time jumping on the spot, higher and higher, until we can touch the ceilings. This doesn’t seem to be a preparation for anything, and I’m not sure we are really supposed to be doing it, but it’s fun and we don’t stop. There are now dozens of students, and the hall in which we have gathered is quite large and seems to have been outfitted professionally. The bouncing students are going up and down in neat rows. The ‘Homicide’ guy has turned up again, and while sitting on a low chair at the front of the room, he looks up at me and says, “I gonna strip you and make you wear this sock.” Yeah, sure, I think. The guy’s crazy. “No, you’re not.” He gets up and starts coming at me with those pincers, and pushing me around. When I put out my hand to push him away I notice he is wearing a nipple-ring underneath his shirt! I grab it… and pull it off, and the whole, old nipple with it. The attack on me is over when the white shirt begins to fill with blood, a dark red stain growing quickly underneath the ‘Homicide’ guy’s jacket.

In museums of beautiful art [poem]

2011-05-10T23:17:00.000+10:00

In each great hall an exhausted tourist or a lover of art

whose life has come to this fine point, standing still as a sign,

is troubled to learn the truth of his companion’s mind, and

cannot calculate how far he’s come to know so little.

He knows the museums of beautiful art are full,

as much with pain as love; and all the masters, old and new,

knew just what we go to them to do… At every other corner

a blood-soaked scene, vengeful, pitiable, famous or obscure,

is excessive proof—with martyrs, slaughtered innocents, rapes,

betrayals—the world was shaved by a drunken barber; and,

at the next corner, the beautiful starvation of youth, which, like a theory

facts have not yet spoiled, reminds us of all longing unfulfilled.

It’s true, as we’ve been told, every dreadful martyrdom

must run its course. Paris, if he is not in love, is just a city

full of old stuff, unhelpful, jaded waiters, and dog shit.

Fall flat on your face in Rue Saint Denis, and Parisians laugh.

On such a day—beyond where Veronese’s butcher-cook hacks

away just above Christ’s head; and, following the signs, in the hall

past the spot where Leonardo’s Mona Lisa woodenly endures

the tourist crush—one more painting waits for him…

Saint John, the Baptist. From within the black world where nature

and hope have disappeared, the saint’s left hand rests upon his heart;

and his right arm, pointedly, shows the way to another world.

He steps into the traveller’s light and, with a kind word and gesture

to offer, smiling, says, “I know that you, too, suffer.”

Meanings that will not bring words to a traveller’s mouth,

the wounds he spoke of to himself at night, are recognised,

fixed forever, in the master’s art and the smiles of artless saints.

The Book of Frenchness [dream]

2011-05-10T18:50:00.001+10:00

Externally, the house looks much like the old Heide farmhouse—but it has clearly been abandoned for many years. Outside, and now inside, it is an accumulation of dust and debris. There is little room to move between the piles of books and discarded papers. I find one that I have seen and read before, a book that I know without having understood any of its contents. It is in two very large volumes with a slip-case that is broken and dirty. There are reproductions of paintings and drawings, moving pictures and talkative text in it. The slip-case, split along a long edge and falling part, has a small speaker inside it; when I open the first volume of the book, some music comes out of the speaker. There are different sounds for every page. The introduction by the author has a picture of him as a shadowy figure that retreats from one room to the next whenever the text appears to make some clear statement of his intentions. Many of the other pictures in the book are drawn in the same way: small, animated ink drawings that demonstrate a simple mechanical principle or just add a bit of colour or movement to a page: a swinging pendulum, for example. A few are very complex; almost everything concerning music and orchestras, mathematics, and The Terror, is shown in great detail. For a brief moment, looking at the thin, red slash of ink that appears on David’s cartoon of Marat in his bath, I believe a cut has opened on the page.

Dream sequence from 'La Science des Rêves' [Michel Gondry]

2011-05-10T18:44:00.000+10:00

Nuit Blanche [video by Arev Manoukian]

2011-05-10T18:41:00.001+10:00

A Chinese Puzzle [dream]

2011-05-10T18:39:00.001+10:00

I am in the foyer of a large block of apartments in China. There are no people to be seen anywhere. There are enormous elevators with heavy, steel doors on the ground floor. The buttons to call the elevators are inconveniently located about seven feet above ground level. I suppose it must be nearly impossible for most people here to reach the buttons and I imagine that one person might have to climb onto another’s shoulders in order to reach them. The elevators, in any case, do not take people to different floors, but instead to different levels of a puzzle the purpose of which is not clear. One floor is a hallway with open rooms, like large cubicles, coming off it. Chinese men in business suits are lounging around the cubicles, seated on banquettes along the walls. Another floor is a decrepit restaurant where everything, the walls, the floors the ceilings, the wooden fittings are all painted with the same dark, cream-colored enamel paint, much of which is either peeling or chipped. Another floor is a series of increasingly claustrophobic, crowded rooms. The last of these rooms is nothing more than a portal into which I must put my head in order to see the interior—so that I seem to be in the room without being in it at all. But from this last room, I find, there is no exit.

The Man in the Red Dress Must Go [dream]

2011-05-09T20:08:00.002+10:00

The man in the red dress must go. I am not sure why, exactly, but he must go. I am not even sure that it is a dress. It looks like a dress. He is a man. I am sure of that. This is not the proper place for a man in a red... And I don’t know what he does. He walks around the airport with a clipboard or a bag, especially in that area where there is a narrow lane way between two streets, approaching people in the street, performing his duties. It is not an airport, or not just an airport; not, in any case, if there are streets and narrow lane ways. I work here. I don’t know what he does. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone knows what he does. He’s not important. He just dresses himself up, comes into work each day and performs his function—which can’t be a good thing. In any case, I don’t know and, perhaps, it is not my business. I am not his supervisor. It is not, strictly, my business, except that I am here, too, and I should know these things. I hate him. That’s it. I hate the red dress. I hate the way he dolls himself up. I hate the way he parades himself in the street pretending to be someone who has a function here, pretending to work. I could say, zeroing in on the very heart of the matter, that it is his redness that makes me red; but that isn’t it, really. It is really his hair. His hair that looks long, black, and like a woman’s, from a distance; but which I remember distinctly appears to be quite normal when viewed close-up. It is the effeminacy of the man that is so guiling. He is not what he seems. I hate it. I have not even met the man—I don’t know who he is—and yet I hate him. His red dress. His black hair. His thin, wily body. His indeterminate sexual presence. He is a man in a dress—a red dress—and I don’t know what he does. He works with me, and I don’t know what he does. I do not have a place to work—not a ‘place’ in the sense of an office, a definite place where I must go. This place, these streets, is where I work.

The Program [dream]

2011-05-09T19:58:00.000+10:00

I get into the wrong elevator. The buttons are placed, inconveniently, on a panel about seven feet above the floor. It is one of those elevators with an entrance/exit on two, facing sides. I get off when it is called to a floor I would not usually visit. I expected the general layout of the floor to be the same as the floor on which I work, however, it is completely different and very disorienting. There’s nothing to do but try get out of the building altogether, which I manage to do, through the basement. I drive out. This is quite a surprise because I don’t have a car or a license to drive. Worse, thought, I don’t recall any of the streets outside. They are all unfamiliar to me. Indeed, I begin to think I may even be in a city I do not know. That would be terrible. How could I have arrived here in the first place? It may be even more serious than that … Who am I? Apparently I am someone who, today, can drive a car … who has a car to drive. I must get myself to a hospital, I think, so I get out of the car and start looking for a place to present myself that looks safe. However, there are no signs to be seen anywhere. This city, wherever it is, looks like an advanced communist state: modern, but entirely without advertising. I head into a building that I think may be a hospital and take a seat next to the receptionist. I begin to explain my situation to her. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. Please don’t be alarmed. I need your help. I appear to have forgotten who I am and where I am. I appear to forgotten everything. Almost everything. I can still drive, which is something I didn’t know I could do, but everything else is gone. I’m very concerned I might be ill.” The receptionist looks at me very calmly for a while without saying anything. I ask her again if she can help me. She thinks carefully. “Listen to me,” she says, in a low voice, almost whispering, though there is no one around us to hear. “You have a choice. You can either wait here for another minute and I will get the paperwork done for you. You will be asked to sign a consent form, and that is the last thing you will ever know about your participation in the program. Or, if you wish, you can walk back along the corridor behind us, turn left, and you will see a glass door leading to the street outside. If you leave, I cannot help you, but you will be free.” She looks into my eyes and can see that I am thinking about her words in my mind. The choice seems stark. Ignorance, or something worse than ignorance, or freedom, but only freedom. What does she mean by “the program”? I stand up and, without thanking her, follow her instructions to find the exit to the street.

Religion is the art of belief [dream]

2011-05-09T19:56:00.000+10:00

In the future the Archibald Prize has become such a big thing that it needs a special building to house all the paintings to be displayed. And the paintings themselves are very strange. I walk around the huge gallery thinking how horrible all the paintings are. One of them has huge sacks of paint hanging off it, a skin forming over the still liquid oil paint underneath. It has not had time to dry before the exhibit. The globs of paint are so large that viewers are encouraged to press the sacks of paint off the painting with their hands, which I do, and it feels a little like sagging flesh. This would be fine if the painting were even a little bit realistic, but it’s not—in fact it’s a mess of abstraction, not really a portrait at all. And I also notice that the paintings are all huge. Doesn’t anyone make small paintings any more? I talk to someone at the exhibition who asks me if I’ve seen the good ones yet, and he points to some inner rooms where all the good paintings are on exhibit. When I go into the rooms all the paintings are still depressing, and even bigger than the ones in the surrounding part of the exhibition. I move quickly through all the rooms, just to be sure there isn’t anything good, and finally come to the biggest room of all—it’s the size of an aircraft hanger! There is only one ‘painting’ in it, a large triptych that occupies every inch of a gigantic wall. As I enter—through the wall on which it is hanging—I am dwarfed by it, and as I look up I see that there are threads or ropes hanging off it, as though it has been stitched together and somehow tied to the wall. This gigantic room isn’t empty. There are enormous ottomans, which seem to be at least thirty feet square and made of red leather, placed around the room so that whole families can jump on them, lie back and look at the big painting. I lie down on one of the ottomans, alone. Everyone one else is just wandering about the exhibition, confused, staring up at the big painting. This is really horrible. I have to get out of here. I leave through a corridor that leads me into a place that feels like a great stone bunker, but I recognise it instantly as the Vatican. I look through a door into a red room that has a small chapel set up in the corner opposite the door I have stuck my head through. A priest is performing mass and some little alter boys are singing their hearts out. I can’t see where the music is coming from but it’s very good. I notice that there aren’t many people in the red room, just a half a dozen or so, dotted here and there, and the mass appears to be for the benefit of the one person who is kneeling, with his back to me, as I enter and take a seat. He is getting up, and as he stands I notice that he is wearing a white cassock, and when he straightens up I see he has a white mitre on his head. Oh, it’s the pope—Benedict!—but he’s already looking very old. It is really the singing that is most beautiful and, as it stops, I’m overwhelmed by the beauty and strangeness of it. My head in my hands, I think about how awful modern art is, what a useless lot of rubbish. A piece of paper scrunched up and left lying on a windowsill. A pattern of bricks. Lead pipes trying to be portrait of someone. The pope is walking by and making his way to a nearby elevator, until he sees that I’m upset and comes over to me. He puts his hand under my chin. I am expected to say something, to explain. “I didn’t understand”, I say. “Religion is the art of belief.” He goes off and, with nothing left for me to do here, I have to go, too. It is easy to get out. In fact, I’m surprised that the exit leads directly outdoors, and that there’s a wire fence, with razor wire on top, very near by. Pasolini would be impressed… There must be poor suburbs just on the other side. I know exactly where I am, and can even picture in my mind where this strange, quick exit from the Vatican was located: St Peter’s hung like a horseshoe on the wall, its arms hanging downwards, the exit I emerged from was just on the right shoulder. It’s so desolate out here. Maybe I should just duck back in?

Signification [dream]

2011-05-09T18:30:00.000+10:00

The blue-haired hero has just had a narrow escape. I am wearing a black suit. My blue hair, a deep, dark blue, is somehow still visible even at night. —Not a great feature, in the circumstances, but I seem to be getting away with it. And I am apprehensive to discover that there is another like me, with green hair, waiting in the dark, at the entrance to what seems to be the only point of escape. I have no choice but to follow him. However, the way he talks gives me some confidence that he knows what he is doing. He takes me into a large network of buildings, part of which is a prison, and part of which is a kind of military headquarters. The whole compound appears to have only a very few entrances and exits. As we walk along a corridor that leads to a courtyard, I realise Mr Green is hoping we will not be noticed if we remain calm. Up ahead of us, standing in the moonlight, is a small group of people talking to each other. They haven’t noticed us coming and, if we’re lucky, we’ll pass without notice. In a moment, we are right on top of them, almost a part of the circle they formed … and we move past. But a voice calls out, speaking in German, and we have to respond. Mr Green raises his hand in a gesture of acknowledgement but does not turn around. This won’t do, and voices are raised. A commotion begins behind us as we make the run for the door. We escape. Why we are not followed into the dark, I don’t know, but as soon as the door is closed behind us we are safe in the dark landscape outside the prison. We are at the rim of a shallow glen. Pine trees, in thick forests surround us, but for the moment we are still in a large clearing. I see, high up on the other side of the glen, the silhouetted figures of a small group of soldiers. We are headed straight for them. I hope that Mr Green knows what he is doing. He leads us so close to them I am afraid we are about to be discovered. When we are so close is it obvious we have been seen, it is also clear the soldiers are Americans and are going to allow us to pass through the woods. We walk by moonlight along a narrow, dirt path into a small town and finally reach Mr Green’s house. He leaves me standing in a stairwell of a building across the street from his house until he returns with a handful of money. He whispers to me while he peels a bill off an untidy pile of notes I know is all the money he has. But he has taken too long and we are interrupted by someone who takes us immediately to a town meeting that is already in progress. For a short while accusations are flying back and forth between Mr Green and other people at the meeting—but it all comes to nothing. Or, so I believed… One of the ‘Northerners’, a bearded, pale man, very old, gets to his feet and begins to talk about past injustices. The language he speaks has a strangely musical and physical quality. I don’t understand a word of it, and yet I’m sure I know, like everyone else in the meeting, what is going to happen. And I know it cannot be stopped. Someone shouts—“No! He is going to kill all of us!” Yes—that is what the old man’s incantation is doing. The sky opens up and a red light pours down on us. Mr Green and I begin to unravel in an orgy of signification, our characters peeling off us like rubber suits. Mr Blue was just a shell that has fallen to my feet. And I also am a skin, which is now peeling off my body and dropping to my feet. Underneath me is another person.

MULTIPLE MONOTYPES: RICCARDO ANGELO (EXHIBITION SEPTEMBER 2005)

2009-04-14T22:28:00.000+10:00

Modern art, art critics, and bad artists, are obsessed with the ‘new’. What else is there? Well, there’s the history of techniques, for a start…

Riccardo Angelo’s art is extremely accessible, at one level, where he paints identifiable figures and poses, but extraordinarily inaccessible at another, where surrealism and private thoughts take over the imagery. I know there’s a theory, popular amongst critics of literature, that the author is dead—meaning, generally speaking, that we do not have access to the intentions of artists. It’s a theory that attempts to dislodge artists from the centre of their own work. It may be an effect of that displacement that art sellers—auction houses and galleries—encourage us to think of artists as in or out of fashion and, themselves, engaged in a struggle to stand for a while at the head of advance guard. It’s to everyone’s advantage that some artists appear to be at the cutting edge of taste, where investments will show a good return, and it is also completely irrelevant to the artwork.

‘Nothingness’, ‘gender’, ‘identity’, ‘post-colonialism’, and a long list other words, get trotted out to support critical claims to seriousness, and often before such claims to seriousness are warranted. Artists learn it at art school, and most never get out of the habit of obscuring what they know with what they learned.

It is a curious thing that the art world, the public language of visual artists, is saturated with artistic "intentions". "What I mean by this is..." "In this picture I was trying to achieve..." "This is a painting about..." "So-and-so is trying to..." We lap up the intentions of painters in a way that we would find intolerable with, say, novelists.

However, I can’t reconcile this effect with the knowledge that no artist I know talks to me about their art that way. (This, I have to admit, may simply show how I made the world I live in!) The more closely I get to know an artist, the less the conversation is about the apparent content and motive of the work than about the struggle to make it—about techniques, methods, materials, errors, frustrations and experiments.

This all amounts to saying that the artist’s history of art is very different to the art critic’s history of art. This is a fact worth noting. To an artist, the history of art is principally the history of the mastery of techniques and the struggle with materials: what is passed on, what is forgotten, what remembered, what can be seen or inferred from the surface of a painting and what must be imagined, what is discovered and what has to be re-invented, what he can do and what he cannot do. No-one who has spent any time with artists, listened to their conversations, and shared their practical daily concerns about their work, could deny that this is a basic truth about being an artist.

In this context, I think that Riccardo Angelo’s Nineteen monotypes exhibition was a litmus test of how to look at art, since its subject was not only the familiar figures that filled up the white space of the paper the monotypes are printed on, but also the technique itself. The nineteen monotypes were made specifically to draw attention to how they were made, and to the fact that the process of making them involved various, sometimes unexpected, stages of work.

The monotypes

Monotypes, as the name implies, should be one of a kind. Ink is applied to a plate that can be made of metal or glass, and may be flexible or rigid. The ink may be drawn on the plate; or painted on; or painted on, then rubbed and scratched off to make negative details. Plate and paper come together, sometimes, though not necessarily, in a press (a burnishing tool will suffice for some variations of the technique). The paper is peeled off the plate to reveal the image. The plate is wiped clean and the process starts again. Degas was a master maker of monotypes and he invented several distinctive variations of the technique, including making further images off the already used plate and hand-colouring the fainter second impressions. The beautifully luminous dancers’ tutus in Degas’ monotypes were made by first rubbing solid black ink on the plate and then rubbing away the ink with brushes and cloths to leave a blank area in the form of a white dress.

Riccardo Angelo’s nineteen monotypes were exhibited at a small, fine art gallery in Melbourne in September 2005. Angelo has made hundreds of these monotypes, usually in groups of about six to twenty. They are all organised by date. They do not have titles. The titles of the nineteen monotypes, taken randomly from superficially appropriate passages of the book of Genesis, were added to the monotypes at the request of the gallery director. The dates tell the viewer that some of the nineteen monotypes were made months before many of the others. Most, according to the dates, were made on a few days around the middle of December 2004.

First impressions: the meaning of ‘monotypes’

A monotype is one of a kind. However, the technique of making them encourages an artist to experiment with how the ink is applied and removed, repeating patterns, shapes and content in evolving sequences. Almost all monotypes are an instance of an evolving process and, of course, sometimes, failed prints are thrown away.

Many of the pictorial elements of the whole exhibition are in these first monotypes, made in August 2004. Birds. Wings. A squatting child. A snake. Two figures kissing. A figure kneeling, legs forming the shape of an inverted 'V'.

In exhibition, the prints are not presented in any particular order. The first impression is confusing. Few viewers appear to spend more than seconds in front of each of the prints. You may look at the details of any print and become lost it its suggestiveness—the ‘drawing’ that forms the basis of the prints is apparently wild, undisciplined, free. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how it would be possible to control the materials to produce a fine effect: the viscous ink, brushes and glass are not ideal instruments with which to draw. Angelo is an excellent draftsman, but his abilities don’t appear, at first viewing, to be on show here.

It is only when viewing the prints from a distance and as a group that revealing patterns begin to appear.

Techniques and variations

Why do many of the monotypes present us with a figure that has fallen to its knees to form an inverted ‘V’ shape with its legs? Man, woman, dog, and creature—they are all the same—all reduced to the same pitiful position. The supplicant, bowed shapes of all living creatures in this world, Angelo seems to be saying, should tell us about something they all share. It is hard to pin down what he might be referring to. Most of the monotypes have some explicitly sexual content, but they are definitely not erotic. It is not even, really, a human theme. In the world of these drawings, man and dog suffer in the same way, men and women are equally exposed, and all nature becomes part of the muddled, expressive, psychological moment of the work and of the exhibition.

Then there are the groups of two or three monotypes that belie the individuality of the print process. It is clear from these prints that Angelo does not always clean the glass plate he uses before beginning work on the next impression. He reworks an image he has already made by making new layers of ink stick to the half-dried layers underneath, and he adds new details.

The monotype process produces unique prints, but Angelo has rediscovered something that Degas knew: the plate, whether flexible metal or inflexible glass (other materials can be used), becomes an anchor that keeps the work on theme. The plate remembers the structure and some of the details of the drawing, and always provides a useful departure point for the next drawing, if one is needed. The process itself is also telling us that the work is not random; not as random as we first thought.

These three prints demonstrate something different. Between one print and another the details may change dramatically, but the underlying structure of the picture can remain the same. On the right hand side of the three prints there is a group of trees, or a tree. On the left hand side: a much larger tree, a female figure (perhaps like a sphinx), and a child's face with its mouth open, crying. Of course, there are birds, beaks, animals and snakes everywhere, making it difficult to see these figures. Look at the prints for a while and you begin to realise that deep patterns have repeated themselves.

The next two prints reveal another variation in the technique.

The second print is a reverse print of the first. This means that the second print must somehow have been printed from the first print, or the image reversed on the plate and re-printed.

What does it all mean?

One of the reasons I wanted to write about this exhibition, and why I wanted to publish a permanent record in print of these nineteen monotypes, is that it allows me to discuss an unresolved question about the relationship between artists and their critics. I include in 'artists' all kinds of artists, though I realise that, increasingly, it is used to refer only to visual artists.

So much of what one reads about art is shallow, ideological or self-serving. Is there an appropriate way to write about art at all? I'm not really sure. I would align myself with Susan Sontag, if anyone. I'm not interested in producing another interpretation, but in what I see and in transmitting some of that excitement about what is visible.

This is, itself, a philosophical manouevre, of course. An 'interpretation' cannot avoid being, at some level, an attempt to master and comprehensively remake the art it is talking about. Interpretations come to stand for the works of art themselves. There's nothing intrinsically wrong about that. In fact, in life as in art, an interpreter is exactly what we need sometimes.

However, it is undeniable, I think, that certain critical 'positions' or theories seek to remove artists from a privileged relationship to their own work. The effect is strange. The public discussion of art is carried on as though art itself were an 'effect' or by-product of the history of ideas. Artists are made to line up while an -ism is pinned to their lapels. At some point the unreality of it may strike you as itself meaningful.

Riccardo Angelo's Nineteen monotypes exhibition invited us to view ourselves in the act of looking, and to notice how many of the artist's intentions and meanings could be traced from one moment to the next. Some of these meanings and traces have been described here, but not exhaustively.

(Originally published 28 December 2005)

PINA BAUSCH MEETS MIDDLE EAST

2008-11-04T21:28:00.000+11:00

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's remarkable Tempus Fugit features dancers from Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal...

KENNETH WILLIAMS: A FLAMING HOT DISH... AND SO WAS SUZETTE

2008-11-04T10:08:00.000+11:00

SPOKEN:
My Next song, is un chant d'amour, a song of lurve,
He loves her, and she loves him, but they cannot be marriéd. Because they are how you say, they are, husband and wife.

It's called, it's called, "Crepe Suzette" which is in English "A Flaming Hot Dish", and so is Suzette..."

SUNG:
Honi soit Qui Mal y Pense, Faites vos jeux, Reconnaissance
Hamersmith Palais de Dance, Badinage, My Crepe Suzette.
Double Entendre, Restaurante, Jacques Cousteau, Yves Saint Laurente
Ou est la plume de ma tante?, Cest la vie, ma Crepe Suzette

Corsage, Massage, Freres Jacques?
Salon, Par Avion, Petula Clarke.
Fiancee, Ensemble, Lorgnette, Lingerie, Eau de Toilette
Mmmm Gauloise Cigarette, Entourage, ma Crepe Suzette

Citron, Mirage, Carvela,
Hors d’oeuvre, BRUT and Chanel-e, Chaise longue, Sasha Distel-e
Fuselage, ma Crepe Suzette

Pince nez, Bidet, Commissionaire,
Mon repos, Brigitte Bardot, Jeux Sans Frontieres.
SPOKEN "It's a Knock out innit? Yeah, the French, not the song!"

SUNG:
Faux Pas, Grand Prix, Espionage,
Brie, Camembert, Fromages
Mayonnaise, All Night Garage
R.S.V.P. My Crepe Suzette

NEW OLD TIME

2007-08-28T15:24:00.000+10:00

HENSEL'S GILDED BONE SELECTED AGAIN

2007-06-20T19:05:00.000+10:00

David Hensel, who last year had an empty plinth mistakenly selected for exhibition by the Royal Academy in London, has submitted the same plinth, this time with a gilded bone and plastic dog, and again been selected for exhibition. It would be tragic if it weren't so funny.

The sculpture is mentioned in the RA's website page about the Summer Exhibition, Gallery V:

"... David Hensel's Bad Dog, a sardonic comment on the fate of another sculpture by the same artist in last year's exhibition. Inexplicably, only the plinth was shown, to the amusement of the tabloid press."

The exhibition opens to the public on 11 June.

But, of course, it's not a gilded bone at all. It's a gilded something else. (See photo.) Bad dog!

CRY BABIES AND BLOGGERS

2006-07-30T10:50:00.000+10:00

Jill Greenberg has been slagging bloggers in the last week. They apparently have too much time on their hands, because why else would anyone, looking at the photos in her latest exhibition, End Times, at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, reach the conclusion that she was a monster who had abused the children who were her subjects? Thomas Hawk thought she should be arrested and charged with child abuse. Jeremiah McNichols weighed in then from a visual arts perspective. The curator, Paul Kopeikin, is complaining about the hatemail and Greenberg has made it all the way to BBC podcasts in what is, without any doubt, an advertising coup for her exhibition and her career as an artist. At last—she can now breathe a sigh of relief—she is famous, and her photographs are, if Kopeikin's suggestions can be believed, walking out the door. And there won't be any police enquiries into child abuse—not unless there are some facts we don't yet know about, or perhaps the parents of the cry babies have some startling revelation about the unauthorised use of electrodes.

Greenberg pointed out in interviews broadcast by the BBC that babies cry all the time, at the drop of a hat, so to speak, and stop crying just as quickly. Babies cry, she told us, because lollypops have been taken away from them. In fact, that is how she got many of the babies in her photographs to blubber: she took their lollies away from them. When that didn't work, and some other method was needed, the childrens' parents were taken out of the room.

Before looking closely at these photographs—they claim to be art, after all, so we must look closely at them—there is one more thing I think it is important to note about this exhibition: Jill Greenberg has already told us what it means. I heard her talking about the meaning of the photographs before I had seen them. When she reminded me that children cry very easily, I felt sympathy for her position immediately. (She is being accused of child abuse, which is a serious thing to say about anyone.) The most striking thing about the conversation with her, though, was her completely straightforward manner in informing me what the meaning of the photographs was.

Jill Greenberg wants to show us how upset these two and three year old children would be if they “realised the world they would inherit” (BBC Radio Newspod 27/7/2006). She feels upset, herself, about the environmental policies of George Bush, and is 'depicting' this distress through pictures of children that are upset. Greenberg has two children herself, a one year old and a three year old, so, naturally, she's been thinking about these issues. The photographs were taken with the permission and co-operation of the childrens' mothers; so there seems to be no question that, if Jill Greenberg was abusing these children, we are bound to hear about it from someone closer to the crime than the bloggers who want to put Greenberg away. Greenberg takes several swipes at the bloggers, saying of them that they obviously have too much time on their hands, that they hide behind a screen of anonymity, and have been careless with her reputation while putting nothing of their own at risk. (Or words to that effect.)

The question of the treatment of the subjects during the photographic session threatens to derail the stated artistic objective of the pictures, possibly because the stated artistic objective of the photographs is weak. It really is striking and ironic that in an age of very sophisticated understanding of art theory it should seem acceptable that a photographer-artist tells us what her photographs mean. Possibly it is just because we do not have direct access to the intentions of artists that they must now tell us what they mean. It is even stranger, really, that having heard what the photographer tells me the photographs mean, I don't believe her—and, actually, I think, the meaning of the pictures is, at least as stated, more than a little bit silly. Greenberg cuts the legs from under the theorem she posits about her own pictures by immediately attempting to demystify the childrens' apparent agonies. Children will cry about anything, and can cry almost all the time, so we shouldn't be worried. Greenberg took their lollies away from them and, if that didn't work, she took their mothers away from them.

In truth, we are being asked to suspend our disbelief for a little while, and consider what a child might do, how a child might behave, if it had an understanding of its parent's generation was doing to the world in which it had to live. Very specifically, the meaning of the photographs is a kind of joke: this is how we should react, Jill Greenberg seems to be saying to us, when we hear that the American military aparatus is torturing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay; and the appearance of the crying child in the photograph entitled 'Torture' is merely the weak, almost irrelevant, punch-line of the joke. We look at the poor girl's face, the corner of her mouth falling off her face, and read the title—'Torture' or whatever is underneath the next photograph on the wall—the same lame joke repeating itself over and over again.

It's very strange, then, to be confronted with both a claim about the photographs in End Times and an obvious truth about the same photographs that are completely incompatible.

The children in End Times are presented to us in much the same way as the apes of Greenberg's previous exhibition. Each child seems to be positioned carfully in front of a bluish, neutral screen, lit so that it is whiter at the centre. The children are lit like commercial objects, their skin and hair displaying a tremendously effective sheen, as though they've really been polished up for presentation to the camera. Some of the children have great rivers of tears flowing down thier cheeks. Some look a bit dry. They are all, of course, without their lollies or mothers, a bit emotional; and Greenberg appears to have done a good job capturing the great variety of expressions that have enabled her to label the photographs so creatively. I can't say that I laughed out loud when I read the titles, so perhaps the titles are meant to be amusing in the 'Oh, that is deep, yes, how could anyone disagree with those sentiments' sense, rather than the 'O, God, please make it stop—I'm laughing so much it hurts' sense. Greenberg has managed to keep the children positioned for the camera with great effectiveness, just as she did with the apes. Perhaps there is a technique she hasn't let on? Were they (the kiddies or the apes) restrained in some way?

Most importantly, the sympathetic impulse one feels when seeing these pictures is qualitatively no different to the impulse one feels when seeing any child cry. There is nothing in the photographs about the state of the planet's ecology, about the betrayal of public trust. Nothing whatsoever. There is just the title, hanging limply off the bottom of the image.

The children in End Times do not look like they are contemplating a terrifying legacy or some ineluctable, depressing future. Actually, they look like young children who have been bitch-slapped by a photographer. They look like exactly what they are.

Just in case you haven't caught my drift, here is a truly disturbing photograph, taken in 1990 by James Nachtwey, of a child confined to a filthy cot in a Romanian orphanage for 'incurables':

There is tremendous artfulness in this picture; all of which has been put to the service of underlining the horror of its subject's predicament.

Looking at a picture of this kind, we do not sense that there is any trail of evidence leading from the child's cry to the photographer. The photographer is irrelevant. Instead, we immediately find ourselves standing in the place of the camera, while very basic impulses rush to the front of our minds.

DAVID HENSEL INTERVIEW

2006-07-04T21:47:00.000+10:00

David Hensel, an English jeweller and sculptor, submitted a sculpture of a laughing head on a plinth to the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy earlier this year. When he went to the exhibition, only the plinth and bolster were on display. After he released news of the mistake to the press, RA spokespersons asserted that the plinth had been accepted for display, because it had merit, and the head rejected. While the Academy turned error into insult, Hensel has been publicly pondering what the mistake really says about the state of art and art criticism. I contacted him by e-mail and the following interview goes over the facts of the RA story, as Hensel recalls them, and looks at Hensel’s work.

Williams: Let’s start by going over the facts of the Royal Academy (RA) incident. I have only read media reports on the internet. Sometime earlier this year you submitted a sculpture that consisted of a head, a plinth and a wooden bolster to the Royal Academy for its June 2006 Summer Exhibition. The RA has claimed, in the reports I read, that the plinth and bolster were submitted separately to the head. It’s not clear why that should be so. Were they in separate boxes? Was there one or two application forms? Did you receive an acceptance letter or acknowledgement of some kind? Eventually you went to see the exhibition and noticed that the plinth and bolster were exhibited without the head. What happened next? Did you speak to the curators? Was it you, or the RA, that notified the media of the circumstances about your sculpture? How did you, or they, do this? If it was the RA, did they show you the media release before sending it out?

Hensel: In May 2006 I delivered to the Royal Academy a single sculpture which, as you say, consisted of a head, a plinth and wooden bolster. The bolster was tied to a loop in the plinth, and the head was loose. They were delivered as one submission: the entry form gave three copies of the same self adhesive barcode, one of which was stuck on the bottom of the plinth, one on a provided tie-on label which went in a rather ungainly manner round the head, and the third went on the entry form. It isn’t true that they were submitted separately: this idea was apparently devised by the self-protection department of the RA and issued broadly in a press release a few days after the start of the furore. I wasn’t consulted or shown it, it just appeared in some of the press. Most of the papers I saw that carried it also mentioned my more honest version. I recently asked the exhibition co-ordinator about this point, but she didn’t respond.

I received an acceptance letter a few days before the show, after the whole selection process had taken place. This just said my sculpture, ‘One Day Closer to Paradise’, had been accepted for the show.

When I went to see the exhibition at the third preview (The first was the ‘Varnishing Day’, Monday. I would have gone then but I was teaching. It was pointed out to me that this is where they pick up glitches. The second was what they call the ‘Buyer’s preview’, Thursday. I went on Friday. The show opened to the public on the next Monday.) and noticed the error. I went to talk with the nearest staff member who was a girl at the desk. She said she remembered handling the sculpture herself for the selection (because it is heavy) and it was just the plinth at that time. She tried to contact the appropriate office but no one answered; so I left it that she would contact them the next day and they would contact me about it. It was Wednesday before they did contact me, by which time the papers had the story. The way this happened is this…

I had found myself dissatisfied with the show, and becoming more and more depressed as I went round. I hadn’t found my sculpture yet, but that wasn’t the issue. The work from the Academicians seemed far more repetitive, old and tired, than usual. An RA member is allowed to enter six without selection. Everyone else, anyone else, can submit up to three pieces to go through the selection process. No problem with that—just the tedium. I don’t know if you know the annual show—it’s huge: one thousand items selected from ten thousand. Usually—I try to go every year—it is inspiring in it’s variation and the quality of the real among the fake among the routine. Why was it different this year? I have to go again and find out (but perhaps I’ll wait until my name is no longer dirt). As I went on round, there seemed to be more and more work that may be innovative or would-be subversive. Towards the end there were a lot of items by the famous Britart brigade [Hensel is referring to Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, etc.], who it appears had been invited in to give the show a boost because the BBC were doing a three-part documentary and not because of artistic merit. I found my sculpture in the last room, on a pair of shelves like a store room. Or rather I didn’t find it. Only the plinth was there. OK, some people can discard a paper bag with such style that it’s almost art, and I agree that my plinth has some presence as an object, especially when viewed in light of the title. (I don’t know whether they saw the title but I’m assuming they did.) It is a monumental task mounting the show. I have huge respect for the organisers—the group of selectors—but there did seem to be rather a lot of dubious quality work there. And you should see the prize winners!

On the way home in the train home I read a terrifyingly scathing article by Brain Sewell. He is usually acerbic, but this time I found I agreed with too much. Something wrong at the Royal Academy, connected with their attempted pose as ‘up to date’. The usual way to sell difficult work is to put it in the white gallery. —But put it, instead, in a context of scholarship, traditional values of excellence, and it doesn’t make it easier to understand.

Anyway, Brian Sewell it turns out was a friend of my late brother in law. Too late.

I told a number of my friends about my missing sculpture. Most just held their heads, some gleeful at the ammunition potential against the fat heads who run the art world. The laughter matches so well the range of expressions of the missing sculpture, including the horror that it has from one angle. I decided to try to contact Sewell to see if he wanted to follow it up. Also I got, from a friend who knows him, the e-mail address of David Lee, who writes a magazine full of unusually well-observed criticism called The Jackdaw. I tried to contact Sewell by e-mail through the Evening Standard, the London paper which had his article. I was thinking about it a lot, somewhat aggrieved but also fascinated, wondering whether it could become a way to say something useful and air some of my views about it.

After the weekend I had heard from no one, but on Monday I was phoned by the Standard, which wondered if I would like to write letter to the paper, for publication on Tuesday. They hadn’t managed to get my request to Sewell or he hadn’t replied. He had been ill. He is 70 or more. So I did, and sent it in the evening. On Tuesday they phoned me again saying they would like to carry the story, as it was, in Sewell’s absence. —Which they did, on Wednesday. The rest is history, as they say.

Williams: Is the sculpture now on display, in part or reunited with its head?

Hensel: The RA did phone me after the Standard’s story, apologies and all that, but they had to ask the selecting artists for their opinion before they could do anything, again relying on experts, and on Friday they still hadn’t been able to get them in to decide, so they started insisting the plinth had been selected on it’s own.

By that time I had seen that there would be more in this by keeping it empty, though I would be willing to reunite them if they insisted. Eventually they said both parts had been viewed separately and the head rejected. I imagine the head wouldn’t come across without a base to stand on, but I know these artists by their work which is very different from mine. Inevitably when selecting from thousands, snap decisions based on taste are made, and if it has presence it can get in. Just because it has presence doesn’t mean it is art: that needs to have something more. Though, I do think it works well in this empty version—and I wish I had thought of it myself! Would have saved a bit of work. An afternoon instead of two months, more if you count learning the new medium I wanted to use.

At no time did I get angry or upset about it because already the words were available to describe the event as an example of cultural theatre in which we in the arts are all actors playing roles self-scripted, inherited from personal background or determined by personal awareness of context and audience and education. If education systems have flaws, they show up in styles of art: thus they are roles which describe the real world through the safety-net of the arts; and I feel this idea is one that can reunite us and save face all round. It’s a difficult concept for some it seems, but we’ll see. (An actor doesn’t need to get upset or embarrassed if his character is unable, slips up, or proves to be unaware.)

Now it is going to remain separate, just the plinth on show, and that suits the next development, which is that The Times is going to auction it as it is, accompanied by a documentation of the event so that it can be seen as a new work of art about the failed one.

Williams: In general, what would you say the public reaction has been to the news of what has happened to you, as distinct, say, from the reaction of the media and the RA?

Hensel: Most people I know have responded with laughter, by clutching their brow in disbelief, or been excited at the potential of the attention. I haven’t met many who are on the side of the contemporary art world, who are generally seen as somewhat fraudulent or stupid opportunists. There’s a recognition that, for dealers, the avant garde is a form of currency that is easy to forge. Of course, there are good artists, but there is a broad recognition that you don’t get fame and fortune by being good or relevant: there are other, esoteric criteria…

A fair proportion of the people I know are artists in one way or another, and they all seem to be delighted, as though it’s a justified come-uppance. There’s a generally held sense that these people deserve it—not the RA really, they’re respected, but the charlatans. Many artists play to the market, but that’s only healthy greed. The cheering is nothing to do with the handling error that caused it, obviously. We all feel the embarrassment they undoubtedly feel.

Williams: Had you ever submitted a sculpture to the RA Summer Exhibition before? I notice there is a piece on your website on a page referring to a previous Summer Exhibition, but it’s not clear whether that sculpture was accepted. It looks like an auto-fellating cherub.

Hensel: Exactly right, that’s what it is. It was accepted for the 2003 exhibition. It was the first time I had submitted anything, so that was pleasing. I couldn’t find that when I went either, but it was there, just high up on a bracket on the wall, presumably out of respect for the old ladies. The title I gave it had reached the stage of ‘The Old Bush Award’, and I saw it as a design for a trophy which would be given annually some time in the future in the name of G.W. [Bush] to worthy world leaders. I had first called it ‘Jerusalem’, after Blake, honoring his wonderful song against the British Empire’s use of Christianity—hence the religious aspect. The foundry called it ‘Angel’s delight’. Later, I changed the title to ‘Fountain’ thinking of Duchamp’s urinal.

Williams: I’d like to know how you describe our own work. You’re a jewellery maker and sculptor, making both indoor and outdoor pieces. Your jewellery appears to be more in the nature of ‘personal sculpture’: many of the pieces are very—how to put it?—visible. They would be hard to miss if someone were wearing them.

Hensel: I once many years ago recognised I couldn’t happily call myself an artist because I didn’t know what art was, so I decided to try to come up with a new definition every day. It’s a useful discipline—keeps the intellect out of the creative process when working. I still don’t know, though, but recognise that the desire to categorise and label is what all artists are trying to subvert, to find ways to get under someone’s skin. So, yes, my jewellery is personal sculpture. I always liked whittling as a child, but that doesn’t make traditional ‘sculpture’ because decisions are made hand-held, not placed on a plinth where they can penetrate the ground and permeate by impersonation into the viewer.

An inspiration in small sculpture was the way I like to find scraps of stuff that had presence, that looked as if they were something monumental, something huge and far away, or I was a giant looking at them. Anyway, it turned into jewellery as a way to have something saleable, and then it made sense to try to make more and more of the found items and to make them out of precious materials. I like finding out how to do the technical parts, getting better at making expressive carving, most of it has involved carving of some material or other—and especially I like the discovery that doing it as jewellery is a way to connect with certain people.

I have to find new ways to work now. It’s getting so disagreeable to work on this tiny scale because of age-related eyesight problems; but also one needs to change because each kind of work supports it’s own kind of thought and I need to move on.

Williams: I don’t want to get bogged down in questions of taste, but staying on question of how to describe your work for a moment, I certainly wouldn’t put you anywhere in the lineage of Brancusi. A lot of your work seems to have a highly stylised, ‘Druidistic’ look to it—possibly in the Blakean sense of the word, relating to a universal, non-Christian proto-religion. Is it something like that?

Hensel: This has happened without any intention on my part. I didn’t study jewellery-making at art school. All my processes have been made up. I am not able to do the fashion thing, the up–to-date style, because you can only work from your own background, in my case rural English, and you can only work towards you own society. I don’t live in a stylistic stratosphere. I don’t design what I do in the way some people work—as adornment, as graphic design, using images and dynamic qualities from advertising, fashion, etc. What I want to do is to make the next thing, allow the fact of making some object, which has it’s own place in the world, to be a way of looking at the world, at people, at myself. I see this is basic to the way art works anyway, it’s a way of looking at the world, provides filters and templates which are the shape of your methods and skills. That people call it druid jewellery (and I was amused a while ago to discover an American agent of mine was calling it just that) is fine. We need to label things both to make them available as well as to protect ourselves from them. What I am most inspired by is being told—and it happens regularly—that what I’ve made for someone is their most beautiful possession. I think it works to make a personal, private mythology for the owner.

Art can work in many ways. A piece of jewellery can be something to hide behind as well as to show off with. Jewellery particularly can be a social way of demonstrating mastery of some aspect of the world, your bank balance, your self image, your emotional depths, and it can be a way of holding in place questions that you need to discover or explore.

Williams: I’ll be honest and admit that my instinctive, first reaction to your work was not positive—I thought it looked like a not completely integrated mash of visual styles and attitudes, including Druidism, pre-Raphaelite and Art Deco. However, as I looked through over a hundred works photographed and presented on a jewellers’ website, I began to sense a very strong imaginative impulse in your work that is both impressive and affecting. There are some smallish pieces, for example, that for the sake of a taxonomy have to be called ‘rings’, but in fact they are more like cabinets that can be ‘unfolded’ to reveal a secret interior design and subject matter. Is it correct to say that you (and your work processes) concentrate more on the imaginative work in creating your art than on resolving stylistic problems?

Hensel: I think you are right. It’s relevant to think about what style means, how much it is a starting point determined by awareness of market fashions, how much it is a set of accepted constraints that represent your sense of where and how you live, within which your personal imagination can flower, how much is it a measure of the balance between your awareness and unawareness. That some people value that handmade quality of my work is possibly an indication that they feel deprived in their own lifestyle. That’s an important function of art: that all art has a bodily or personal purpose.

Williams: I'm interested in what has happened to you from the point of view of 'intentionality'. That is, is what artists mean important, even if we have difficulty getting access to what they mean? It strikes me that what has happened to you is an interesting example of how easy it has become to brush aside the intentions of artists, as though it were both theoretically and personally unimportant what you meant or wanted. I also think it’s interesting that it was, possibly, not an artist or curator that came up with some of the (what seem to me) insulting remarks from the RA, but a publicity spokesperson. Maybe we'll never know for certain.

Of course, the other side of this situation is that you appear to have been quite open to the comic and creative possibilities of the moment, so that what seemed to be an insult has been turned into a conversation about what art is. This says a lot about you as a person and as an artist, though how anyone could separate the two, I don't know.

Hensel: I don’t think you can separate them. One of the long-term processes is the integration of the art and the person. One of the skills in any creative process is knowing how to respond to chance. I just applied that in the real life situation. It wasn’t difficult to agree to the new form of the sculpture, and I will learn from that. If something is stuck, you try to reverse it, and thinking how to reverse the possible insult took a while.

I cheered on reading Brian Sewell’s scathing article about the Summer Exhibition, because I read it returning from going to the preview, where I’d hoped to find my own sculpture. Instead what I found was the empty base, without the sculpture. We know the art market prefers obscure art as somehow more advanced, and anything can be aesthetic if presented well, but selecting an empty plinth seemed to typify the vacuity of a lot of the work in the exhibition.

However, one important way the art world functions is that it is in itself a satirical, staged, cultural performance, a parody of the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of our government, our commercial pressures and their propaganda (sorry, public relations and advertising), with their approach of making us feel inadequate so we’ll go out do more shopping and vote for greater protection. To be effective, propaganda must be invisible, must reduce awareness, and thus selecting an empty plinth could be a taken as a warning.

The conscious intention of the artist, the subject’s story, is only a part of what will go into the work of sculpture. A sculpture can work by choreographing spectator motion, holding out new gesture or stance, which carries attitude or expectation towards new perception. Brancusi was important in clarifying the function of the plinth, which reaches down to the ground, so the sculpture can penetrate through and up into the spectator, hopefully catching and moving them before the intellect is stirred to ‘interpret’. People often go round an exhibition and at then end find the world looks different.

The refinement of a work involves working with these factors. It’s an important part of presence, and the various forms of abstract have been explorations of this.

The idea the artist uses—the meaning or subject—are vital for keeping the work process in focus, but because the end result is going to act through different sense channels, this subject can dissolve as the work progresses. One wants to arrive at a resolution where all conceivable aspects that the spectator might perceive have been considered, seen. The aesthetic balance of all these aspects can mean some aspects are reduced to mere hints and suggestions, and include not just the usual sculptural aspects of awareness of volume, forces, scale, etc., but a respect for the likely familiarities of an audience. The artist’s intentions evolve as potentials unfold.

I feel comfortable with this: I see a subject as a question. One can only work from one’s own background and speak to one’s own society; and any work of art is at some level an attempt to discover more about these. The question is a vehicle used to arrive at something special, something which holds a focussed awareness of life in place, and this only has value if it has a presence for others.

This is quite difficult in our time where we have a very sophisticated ability to find meaning in anything has that quality, where we can project meaning and then believe we have found it. The challenge for the artist is to try to rise above this.

I feel lucky that the ‘new’ version matched beautifully with my original subject. All I have done now is to see this and accept it.

Back-tracking a little—I don’t feel it is correct to say I make Druidic jewellery. I had never heard this term, until about 1990, when it was used to describe my work by an American agent. Now, apparently, I make Gothic jewellery as well—when what is really meant by that label is that I make some pieces that might appeal to a segment of the market called ‘Gothic’! These terms just are not within my conscious awareness. In my own perception, my work is ‘handmade’. Societies and tastes change. One adapts to new markets as far as one’s constitution will permit. Labels are presumptive. I recognise some of the influences you mention. The work of an artist is to explore the invisible within themselves, as a prelude to engaging with something more socially conscious.

One of the primary urges of the artist is to be up to date—a responsibility as well as for fun—to keep the wave-front of consciousness free of opportunism and bias. I feel this mistake in the RA, the one we have been discussing, means they are not paying attention.

Williams: Did we rush to conclude that the person and the artist were inseparable? I remember my feelings of outrage whenever an academic industry develops to point out the political and other defects of an artist who, for one reason or another, has become a target. Virginia Woolf, for example, whose diaries occasionally show her to have been class-prejudiced in a very mean and blinkered way. Artists, though, are often on their best behavior in the act of creation, where an empathic impulse drives the work towards universality. Can we agree on that?

Hensel: This is an interesting question. I think you could say that the artist and the person are inseparable in the same way as an actor and his character are inseparable when he is committed to playing his role for life. Rather than “best behavior”, I would say honest behavior. I feel that the artists who become significant are on one hand the people who reveal in their own awareness, background and obsessions a correspondence with a broader cultural awareness, who are able intuitively or knowingly to explore within themselves and through their technical skills questions that are relevant to others, and by that means to come up with the questions that need to be asked; and, on the other hand, those who manage to make the most eye-watering expressions of being alive. It depends who you work for, though, and what sort of status symbols or control devices they pay you to animate.

Some art commentary tends to blur the relevance, trying to invent and impose their own significance, trying to be seen as interpreter and exponent of desirable taste, and probably being paid to obscure uncomfortable questions. Similarly, historians devise art movements in retrospect, imagining influences, connections and interactions that often seem to confuse, for example, there’s synthetic internationalism, or a demand to be post-modern, labels which I see as divisive, separating an artist from their own native background and natural audience, from their own intuitive engagement with their time and place, which can result in an artificial—although evidently profitable—quality of imitation and fashion.

It’s only through the many stages of working that one can arrive at an expanded sense of universality within oneself. The actual work of an artist is finding what their work is, what their genuine concerns are, shedding adopted influences and assumptions and becoming able to reveal the self as universal, and this is a process that that can be personally agonising, time consuming and difficult.

I want to convey the idea that there’s a sense of responsibility that defines the artist, and I think it’s the artist in each of us who can recognise and respect breath-taking cultural achievements as responsible opportunism. ‘Culture’ is more than party time for the arty: it’s a shared creation of where and how we live.

I know this whole event has been hugely amusing. —Punctured dignity often is. But, looking at the discussions about art, in the press and on the Internet, it’s clear there’s a lot of thought about it. I’m hoping that the interest can persist for long enough for the questioning to turn to why it’s like it is, not so that we get better art—it’s perfect as it is, in that it reveals negative sides to our nature—but so that we can understand a little more clearly how the world works and how the arts reveal that. And I think that’s something we agree is necessary.

L'AFFAIRE DIMOPOULOS: 'COPY' OF 'DIFFICULT' N.Z. 'ARTWORK' INSTALLED AT FEDERATION 'SQUARE'

2006-06-07T08:09:00.000+10:00

Following the controversy, in 2005, about the Melbourne City Council's sensible rejection of Kon Dimopoulos's 'Sacred Grove' project, the Minister for the Yarts in Victoria, Mary Delahunty, announced that the AU$73,000 odd dollars ear-marked for the blue trees would be spent instead on a "site-specific" sculpture "similar in concept" to ones already installed at a Toyota facility here and outside an airport in New Zealand.

The new "site-specific" sculpture has now been installed at Federation Square in Melbourne. An Age editorial mentioned that the sculpture had arrived (7 June 2006), and an article by Jonathan Green, a senior writer at the same newspaper, extracts some comment about public art from notable persons:

Vault eventually moved to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, while Sacred Grove was recreated in miniature for the Hotel Sofitel in Collins Street, a small gesture towards artistic tolerance that was opened by the director of the National Gallery, Gerard Vaughan, a man who had been saddened by the demise of the original elm paint plan. Red Centre is part of Federation Square, standing between its bars and the Yarra.

It seems that little raises the ire of a certain section of the community more than "difficult" public art. "Some people don't like to be challenged, I suppose," said Dr Vaughan.

In the mind of art critic Robert Nelson, the clamour that greets work such as Vault and Sacred Grove points to a fundamental difficulty in introducing serious art into public places.

"The natural air of contention around any art work reaches a hysterical pitch in a public space, so there's an incentive to go with work that is decorative and not particularly challenging," he said.

"You are left with symbolic neutrality … like all those little bronze dogs in the city, they're just slightly pompous garden gnomes."

-- Quoted from Jonathan Green's article, 'Will Red Centre be the new Yellow Peril?', the Age, 7 June 2006.

"'Difficult' public art"? -- I wonder whether Gerard Vaughan is kidding. Here is the "difficult" public art in question:

This detail of the Age photograph accompanying Green's article shows 'Red Centre' in daylight. It is lit at night. The Herald Sun photo, published on the same day, shows that the reeds are red, black and yellow. The interesting thing, though, is that this "difficult" work by Dimopoulos looks very much like other equally "difficult" installations. Make up your own mind:

... The 'Firebird' installation at a Toyota facility.

... The 'Pacific Grass' installation at a New Zealand airport.

(The last four images from the Dimopoulos website.)

... Two more versions -- 'Yellow Carex' (top) and 'Grassland' -- in parks and on private properties in New Zealand. And there are others. (Actually, some of the others are better!) You get the idea.

Someone might like to explain to me (please) what's "difficult" about these installations. When you see them it's difficult to understand what Minister Delahunty's press release meant when it promised a "site-specific" sculpture "similar in concept" to others already installed elsewhere.

Robert Nelson's comments are, ironically perhaps, right on the money. Dimopoulos's installations are not art at all, in my view: they're pure decoration. Pret-a-porter urban design; one-concept-fits-all intellectual laziness where the only things that change from one site to another are the dimensions, the colours, the title and the price tag. Could you imagine New York settling for tripe like this? 'You mean Wellington and Melbourne have them!? OK. We'll have one, too... Make ours just like the others.'

Worse is that the whole enterprise -- both the installation and the commentary on it -- lacks imagination, directness and rigour. In the intellectual vacuum of corporate art it is a positive value to exhibit no imagination, and to repeat, by rote, tricks performed elsewhere; to copy oneself shamelessly.

A writer, by contrast, would not be permitted to abscond with public moneys after having left behind them an already published novel -- no matter how good -- that had been re-typed and only the title changed.

Dimopoulos is not the only 'artist' who behaves this way. John Kelly's remarkable, and deserved, success with his many images and sculptures of cows has led him to repeat the trick maybe more than a few times too often. But Kelly, at least, was for the most part putting his hands in the pockets of the rich to pay the poor (himself). It is a different matter to strike a pose of artistic intention with a title like 'Red Centre', when uncannily similar objects have different titles elsewhere.

THE MEDIUM IS THE SHORT MESSAGE SERVICE

2006-06-03T16:10:00.000+10:00

IS ART ADRIFT ON THE STAGNATION OF THOUGHT?

2006-05-09T21:42:00.000+10:00

I keep thinking about what art is—but that is not art... Wait a moment. I am an artist, sometimes. A poet. A writer. A photographer. Some artists do make art about what art is, having thought about what art is, and they say that is art—so, why are my thoughts, about what art is, not art? Maybe they are. Maybe this is art.

A friend asks me, “What is art, Stephen?” I think that Robert McKee’s answer is as good as any that I have heard recently, and so I say, “Art is what makes the mind stop chattering to itself.” It shuts us up. A novel does this by inviting us into someone else’s imaginative enterprise—the story—and if it succeeds, we lose ourselves in it for a while and by the time we are finished, we are changed in some way. We know something about ourselves, or other people, we didn’t know before. A good painting shuts us up, simply by making us stare into a canvas silently—and, if it is a good painting, our mind is quiet for a while, completely concentrated on a scene, a face, an image that is somehow aesthetically or pictorially engrossing. It seems to be in the nature of music—the music that we like, whatever it is—that it has the power to direct our thoughts, to calm us, to make our chattering minds still. In this way, the artfulness of a great film or a beautiful game of chess are both examples of what happens to the persona of the mysterious poem, ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’, by Wallace Stevens:

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

I like this definition. It is beautiful despite its flaw. Horrors, joys, and good marijuana, as well as art, can also make the mind silent. I like it, too, because it allows me to explain to myself why poetry seems to have lost so much of its potency as a vehicle for thought and experience. I can feel it, in my bones, so to speak, that the world I experience is saturated with artfulness—not ‘art’, mind you, and certainly not poetry—but with omni-present layers of design, sound, pictures, messages, aesthetics, sensations and experiences, all of which can be personalised, recorded, edited, replayed or deleted.

Nearly ten years ago, when I was working at a university in Melbourne, I read John Passmore’s great book, Serious Art. I gave my copy of it to a student painter at the university to read. The results weren’t good. During one of his theory classes he was ridiculed for his representation of one of Passmore’s ideas. Serious Art was an antidote, for anyone brave enough to swallow it whole, against careless thinking.

The whole spectrum of careless thinking and writing about art ranges from journalistic econometrics, which records the art market’s feeding frenzy with ever-increasing numbers of investment dollars paid for masterpieces by Van Gogh or Picasso without ever asking how works of art can be worth such sums, to the sloppy, vertiginously high-blown prose of French intellectuals, whose vocabulary wields an influence in discussions about art way beyond the merit of the argument the vocabulary served, if there was an argument to be served at all. French gobbledegook—Gilles Delueze’s book about Francis Bacon is a tasty, over-baked example of it, choc-full of delicious absurdities—started to invade university faculties in Australia in the early 1980s, and was instantly successful as a ‘mode of expression’. In all such writing, from Derrida and Barthes through Delueze to the present, and in all its international and parochial forms, in French, English or whatever, one problem is that the style of the writing serves to hide violent stratagems of disposing with old-fashioned, still-cherished, already thoroughly discredited anchors of our relationship to the artistic enterprise: beauty, intentionality, meaning… The expression on Christ’s face is beautiful and sad. The author is trying to tell us such and such. “ABC” does not refer to the alphabet, in this case, but to… You get the idea.

Passmore’s question, his starting point, was What is serious art? The question is a sly one, a manoeuvre to avoid the older question What is art? whose answer might follow more predictable lines. How do I know any more which artists deserve my attention if, along every axis that passes through the domain of art, the path to certainty is blocked by an equal number of ruined possibilities? —If intentions were one such axis, for example, I know now that I do not have direct access to the intentions of authors, or any other kind of artist. —If beauty was such an axis, I know that it has been ruined for a long time. —If ekphrasis was such an axis, I know that there is a limit of the extent to which any number of words can contain or exhaust the experience of art. —If money now seems simply the most practical measure of the health of a reputation, I know that fortune and judgement are fickle.

Is art adrift on the stagnation of thought?

The strange case of N55: to ironise or not to ironise the art-world’s dirty linen

http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/DISCUSSIONS/N55_TEXTS/ART_REALITY.html

“N55” is a Copenhagen-based ‘collective’, the core of which is Ingvil Aarbakke, who died last year of cancer, at the age of 35, and her husband Ion Sorvin. The name of the collective is said to be a double reference to a street address where one of its first exhibition-events was mounted and, apparently, the latitude of Copenhagen.

Aarbakke and Sorvin have a lot to say about the way they believe people should really talk about art. For example:

There is no meaning in talking about art without imagining persons, their behaviour, things and concrete situations. When one wants to talk about art, one must therefore talk about: persons and their behaviour with other persons and things in concrete situations. As a precondition that these persons are actually practising this behaviour at all, one has to imagine that they are experiencing it as meaningful. From this follows that one has to talk about: persons and their meaningful behaviour with other persons and things in concrete situations. There is reason to presume that this always stands when one talks about art. Otherwise one would be able to imagine:

art which has nothing to do with persons
art which no one finds meaningful and which therefore has no significance
art which has nothing to do with the behaviour of persons
art which has nothing to do with other persons
art which has nothing to do with things
art which has nothing to do with concrete situations
art which has nothing to do with persons and their behaviour, meaningfulness, other persons, things and concrete situations.

Therefore we now know that:

when one talks about art one must always talk about:

Persons and their meaningful behaviour with other persons and things in concrete situations
or about corresponding factors with the same significance and the same necessary relations.

This knowledge enables us to talk about art in a way that makes sense, and without allowing habitual conceptions, social conventions and concentrations of power to be of decisive importance to our experiences.

Indeed. That makes sense. But here is a problem… N55 loads the gun but does not shoot anything. Perhaps one of those “habitual conceptions” or “concentrations of power” will fly into view like a clay pigeon and you will be able to shoot it down for 200 points. N55 is both interesting and odd. It goes to the trouble of taking a position about how to “talk about art”, and then doesn’t talk about art, or even talk about people who are talking about art. Instead, N55 gives us manuals for how to build shops, bars, rockets, portable living spaces, and even tells us where there is land we can use to live on if we want.

By presenting an unsuspecting worldwide public with solutions to problems it hardly suspected it had, N55 has all the features of a public art movement. Its work works, so to speak.

Well, it kind of works. I don’t think that the idea of living in a tiny plastic drum that can be rolled around from place to place is really going to catch on, however, I also doubt the N55 people would claim that success was measured by whether or not such ideas caught on. N55’s objects and projects have the startling effect of demonstrating the practical and logical limits of certain public discussions about shelter, homelessness, work, business, design, and many other issues. N55’s principal achievement is in the creation of public art events that expose the emptiness of public discussion about important issues.

...

The crux of the modern problem about serious art is in part a problem about money, or value. I’ll admit, before I explain what I mean by this, that is a conclusion based mainly on instinct. I want to point you to a curious fact: while art of various kinds, both in type and quality, is virtually everywhere in the Western developed world, there is no well-developed econometrics of art. That is to say, we do not really know, and there is very little serious study, discussion and theory of the economic values of art, its exchange, and of the decisions that are made about its dissemination. The last several centuries saw fundamental changes in the way art was made, reproduced, consumed, exchanged and discussed. There is a lot of art theory, concentrated almost exclusively in the area of the ‘meaning’ of art, but no commonly accepted or even commonly argued theory about its value. The modern problem about serious art seems to include almost everything after the fifteenth century; every kind of art, that is, which does not rely on religions or a state for its production. It would be easier, though not very helpful in the long run, I suspect, to discuss art in terms of marketing: to discuss artists as brands, as having brand attributes, as being perceived to have values attached to them, and thereby avoid having to think of them as people at all. But there is enough in the behaviour of artists themselves, the ones who behave like franchises of their own personality cult, to know this will not shed any light on serious art.

The question may have to reformulated. Is art adrift on the stagnation of thought? No. There are many artists and others thinking about the role and function of art, their own and others’ art. It is normal to think, like Petronius, that we are drowning in a tidal wave of awful poetry and art. It is not easy, while we are in the midst of it, to tell the difference between good and bad art, art worth taking seriously and art that is a waste of our time. Our personal tastes, instinct, are a guide; but the world is a museum of taste—and tasting: how will we know unless we try? For what it is worth, I think the essential first step is to have my own series of basic questions to interrogate the seriousness of the art before me. I have different standards and questions for different forms of art. (I don’t ask music to do the same things as paintings—or even poems—but I’m occasionally surprised what the modern form of the song can do…)

Some of these questions are, for example (and in no particular order):

Did the artist need to do this? (Barrett Reid, the great editor of Overland for many years, used to ask this question of the many poems that were submitted for publication to the magazine.) In other words, do I get the feeling that this poem or painting comes with some sense of personal urgency from the artist to me? Was it needed?

Is it a monstrosity? … In the sense that T.S. Eliot used the term, to describe the way some writers, striving for effect, or something that is simply new, go out of their way to create a monster, when the recognisable thing would have been better.

What can I really see here? It is useful, I find, to simply factually describe the content of a painting, in great detail, to see what the description reveals about what is in front of me and about I think I can see.

IRONISING THE IRONISERS: EDWARDS DOES BRITNEY FROM BEHIND

2006-04-15T21:26:00.000+10:00

Daniel Edwards' take on the pro-life debate is so outrageously perverse the pro-lifers are beside themselves, not knowing if they should be thankful or horrified. Edwards plants Britney Spears on all fours on a bear skin rug, arse in the air, the head of her baby crowning between her spread legs while her milk-laden breasts hang underneath her. The media release, reproduced below (from Capla Kesting Fine Art), is a finely tuned comedy sketch, from which no-one gets out alive.

The three photographs of the work on the web site (linked from the heading of this article) are all taken from the side or front. There are no 'posterior' shots, so to speak. This leaves some drama for the collectors' vernissage, I suppose, and saves unsuspecting under-age art lovers from throwing up on their computer screens. This little fit of modesty also serves to emphasise the main beguiling feature of the sculpture: Britney has such a calm, sexy (if you like that kind of thing), knowing expression on her face, not at all the kind of look you would expect to find on a woman pushing a baby through her pelvis. Indeed, as little Sean Preston is about to squeeze out the other end, Britney seems to be concentrating on showing the bear a good time. The bear, actually, appears to be enjoying himself, in the middle of a sort of bear-ecstasy and letting out a little growl.

Dedication honors nude Britney Spears giving birth

Pop-Stars Pregnancy Idealized In Brooklyn Monument to Pro-Life

Daniel Edwards
Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston
Show Dates - April 7 through April 23
Opening night reception with the artist: Friday, Apr7th 6-9pm
Capla Kesting Fine Art is located at:
121 Roebling St, 7-8 - Brooklyn, NY 11211
phone: 917-650-3760
Bedford Ave L Train at the corner of North 5th and Roebling.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday from 1:00 to 6:00 pm or by appointment.

BROOKLYN (March 22, 2006) --- A nude Britney Spears on a bearskin rug while giving birth to her firstborn marks a first for Pro-Life. Pop-star Britney Spears is the ideal model for Pro-Life and the subject of a dedication at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Brooklyns Williamsburg gallery district, in what is proclaimed the first Pro-Life monument to birth, in April.

Dedication of the life-sized statue celebrates the recent birth of Spears baby boy, Sean, and applauds her decision of placing family before career. A superstar at Britneys young age having a child is rare in todays celebrity culture. This dedication honors Britney for the rarity of her choice and bravery of her decision, said gallery co-director, Lincoln Capla. The dedication includes materials provided by Manhattan Right To Life Committee.

Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston, believed Pro-Lifes first monument to the act of giving birth, is purportedly an idealized depiction of Britney in delivery. Natural aspects of Spears pregnancy, like lactiferous breasts and protruding naval, compliment a posterior view that depicts widened hips for birthing and reveals the crowning of baby Seans head.

The monument also acknowledges the pop-divas pin-up past by showing Spears seductively posed on all fours atop a bearskin rug with back arched, pelvis thrust upward, as she clutches the bears ears with water-retentive hands.

Britney provides inspiration for those struggling with the right choice, said artist Daniel Edwards, recipient of a 2005 Bartlebooth award from Londons The Art Newspaper. She was number one with Google last year, with good reason --- people are inspired by the beauty of a pregnant woman, said Edwards.

Capla Kesting denies the statue was developed from a rumored bootleg Britney Spears birth video. The artist admits to using references that include the wax figure of a pole-dancing Britney at Las Vegas Madame Tussauds and Britney wigs characterizing various hairstyles of the pop-princess from a Los Angeles hairstylist. And according to gallery co-director, David Kesting, the artist studied a bearskin rug from Canada to convey the commemoration of the traditional bearskin rug baby picture.

An appropriate location for permanent installation of Monument to Pro-Life by Mothers Day is being sought by the gallery.

ANOTHER KON JOB GOES BELLY UP

2006-04-09T08:47:00.000+10:00

Another Kon Dimopoulos bureaucratic disaster, this time from NZ, is breaking news: a wealthy New Zealander, Michael Hill, who dreamed of having a sculpture park in his back yard that could be seen from the moon, has packed his AU$120,000 Dimopoulosiana into the shed, thrown up his hands, and his dreams with them. Hill shouldn't despair: Kon has other sculptures, indistinguishable from Hill's backyard job, still set up in NZ and Australia. And, besides, I've heard the audience for 'art' that can be seen from the moon... let's just say he's not going to be getting many letters of complaint about the cancellation of the gig.

Hill removes art after council indecision
14 March 2006

Jewellery store king Michael Hill says frustration with Queenstown Lakes District Council led him to remove a giant work of art from his garden.

He told NZPA if he ran his business the way the council's resource management division department ran its decision-making process, "we'd just be gone".

Mr Hill erected a five-metre-high $120,000 Kon Dimopoulos reed sculpture on his land around a year ago.

New Zealand artist Dimopoulos is most well-known for a Pacific Grass sculpture located on the roundabout at the northern end of the Wellington Airport runway.

Mr Hill said the artist took a "great deal of care" with the sculpture's placement, taking into consideration "the area, the environment and the mountains must not be competed with".

He said he had also planted fir trees to eventually hide it from the nearest road.

Problems started, however, when he asked the council for resource management permission.

"I really wish I hadn't," he said.

"The Resource Management Act doesn't have separate clauses for art, so the council had to view the sculpture as a house. In the end, it took so long to hear from them I put it up anyhow."

Since then, he said he has been working with the council for consent, but has been left constantly frustrated.

"People in these positions are frightened to make decisions outside of the square of the Resource Management Act," he said.

"It just needed someone to say: put it up, take it down, anything! Any decision is better than no decision," he said, sighing.

"And that's why I pulled it down as you can't carry on anguishing."

The sculpture, which now sits stacked in Mr Hill's workshop, was just one of many he had planned for the area.

"I wanted to have a sculpture competition here, but I won't be able to do that now," he said.

"The valley is going to be lacking a significant supporter. These works of art are not cheap. I was going to put up over a million dollars - the council and most of the community can't afford them, and here was the perfect opportunity."

Eventually, Mr Hill said he wanted to emulate amphibious craft entrepreneur Alan Gibbs' sculpture park in Kaipara, Auckland.

"Art that you can see from the moon ... it's unbelievable ... I would have liked to have done something similar here," he said.

from www.stuff.co.nz

VICTORIA CONTRERAS FLORES: ART~NATOMIST

2006-02-26T14:17:00.000+11:00

When I first saw it I thought Artnatomy was simply a tremendously clever use of Flash in an educational setting. It is ALL of that, which is a great deal, but it is also the inspirational work of an art teacher and artist, Victoria Contreras Flores, who, with a contrary view of the demands of the art market, has decided to concentrate on using new tools and media to express herself.

Her web site is at http://www.victoriacontreras.com.

Victoria Contreras Flores' animation 'Another Day' can be viewed at her web site.

From Victoria Contreras Flores (in a very interesting and expressive Spanglish) to Stephen J. Williams:

In fact I begun to project this ARTnatomy tool just by necessity, as a ‘war tool’ for my pupils, by the time I taught at a little University which had not any subject in Anatomy (during a five years career!). In order to provide them the minimum information, and also make my job easier, I begun this work, which finally I have presented as an academic investigation.

I don't have any agent or gallery. I broke my relation with last one two years ago.

By the time I was a fine arts student, abstract expressionism worked as the real academicism at the Universities and the Art Market. In this lineal and scientifist (and mistaken) conception of progress applied to art, figurative art was despised as old. Nevertheless, I have always be interested in the representation of the world and the human being, and my readings, in the tradition of heterodox thought. I have always been an outsider (I don't like vernissages... [A ‘vernissage’ is a private viewing of paintings before a public exhibition—SJW.]) very critic with the art market: as you see, this is not the best way to become a successful artist.

By the time I discovered digital tools, I begun to find another way to pay my bills and a powerful medium to experiment and mix all of my other interests (music, narration, movies). Nevertheless, as guarantee of ‘seriousness’, the ‘modern critic’ tends to demand to the author a specialisation, for me narrow and suspicious: it is supposed that if you make oil paintings, you cannot be a good escultor, or work with computers, or vice versa; nevertheless, the incursions of Leonardo or Picasso in any scope are well understood as virtues and richness... Far from trying to compare myself to them, nevertheless, I do not put any limits to me, because I work by passion and curiosity (the rest, concerns nothing to me and I am sent to results). Rather than this, I brush often the most unconscious audacity, putting me in lands where still I am only an apprentice (3d or writing, for example. The section ‘Toxtexts’ in my web is where I put my ‘essais’ and my ‘poems’, sorry just in Spanish).

As you see, in this way, I have preferred to have my name forgotten by art critics (as I forgot theirs), to work in freedom. I think the Internet is much more alive than the market of the traditional arts and less won by the ‘intermediaries’. Find more interesting artists in the network than in Arco or Basel, and I do not have any doubt that if Leonardo da V. were raised again, he would be hooked to his computer, ‘playing God’ gladly, with tools that include supports, brushes, pencils, music and movement. If to similar playful possibility we add the reproductivity and accessibility advantage to him to be—not only economically—for any bourgeois, the computer opens for the creation a new door of revolutionary consequences: the real possibility of insurgency of ‘I do all by myself because I don't need anybody else’. As always, another thing is the use that everyone does of the instrument: the new tools raise the challenge to combine with sense creation and technology, to produce an art of quality that assume applications, utility; the objective would have to take care of recover for the creative activity the place and the function in the society (more natural, less sacred) than narrow dichotomies and bad interpretation of history, snatches to him.
—Victoria Contreras Flores

SWINGING PINK FLESH DRIVES INDONESIAN MUSLIMS WILD

2006-02-25T13:04:00.000+11:00

Here is the photograph, reproduced from the Sydney Morning Herald, that is causing all the fuss in Indonesia.

It’s, to be frank, neither very offensive nor very interesting. As usual, scale makes up for what imagination fails to provide: apparently it’s pretty big—“massive”, the journalists say.

However, in truth, as everyone in Indonesia seems to realise, the furore about Pink Swing Park is not really about art at all but about the larger national debate in which power-hungry religious ideologues have decided they will mobilise the passions of their followers by attempting to outlaw whatever will inflame human desires.

Tight clothing, erotica and, who knows, maybe even chocolate (!?) are on their way out in Indonesia.

Women, in any case, should stay at home. That is the simplest way to prevent them inflaming male passions.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I think this is the correct strategy. I believe we should be encouraging the whole Muslim world to introduce radically repressive laws against all forms of indecency, sexuality and anything that inflames desire. While we’re at it, let’s encourage them, also, to reject everything tainted by the unfriendly, unclean hand of the West. And I think we should encourage them to keep their women at home, sheltered, uneducated and forbidden to travel without chaperon. The Muslim world should be encouraged to destroy all its great works of art, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and to destroy as much history and as many books as they find objectionable—anything they don’t like: let it all burn. —Only in their own countries, of course, and as an example to the rest of us.

Navel gazing ruled out as Indonesians button up

Photo: Agus Suwage and Davy Linggar
By Mark Forbes Herald Correspondent in Jakarta
February 25, 2006

ROCKING in a pink swing fashioned from the cab of a pedal-driven rickshaw, Agus Suwage felt at peace. He had just installed his Pinkswing Park exhibit at Jakarta’s international biennale and was surrounded by massive panels with multiple pictures of a near-naked man and woman frolicking in a utopian park—a world away from thoughts of religious furore, public condemnation and possible imprisonment.

The softly spoken, bespectacled 47-year-old seems an unlikely martyr, his only concession to the battle now enveloping his life is a peaked camouflage hat with a skull and crossbones button pinned to its front.

Within days of November’s exhibition launch, Islamic fundamentalists had shoved Suwage to the forefront of their struggle to redefine Indonesia by descending on the biennale, forcing its closure and demanding prosecutions. At first police claimed his work blasphemed the story of Adam and Eve, then last week they told Suwage he faced five years in jail for producing pornography.

The same groups staging violent demonstrations against the West over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad are targeting pornography in their battle to transform Indonesia into a strict Islamic nation. And they are winning: parliament is set to introduce a sweeping anti-pornography law.

Expected to be passed by June, the law imposes a rigid social template; couples who kiss in public will face up to five years’ jail, as would anyone flaunting a “sensual body part”—including their navel—and tight clothing will be outlawed.

Most women’s groups are horrified, entertainment industries believe it could destroy them and Bali’s embattled tourism authorities are alarmed at the prospect of sunbathing tourists being arrested.

Mainstream Islamic organisations are warning of moral decay and backing the bill, while politicians, wary of alienating Indonesia’s Muslim majority, are condoning the growing anti-porn movement.

Plans to introduce Playboy’s soft porn to the Indonesian market next month have become another focus of rowdy demonstrations, with protesters portraying the magazine as a symbol of the decadent West’s attack on Islam. Playboy’s publishers are proposing a bizarre compromise, no naked women will be featured—Indonesians, at least, will be able to say they only buy it for the articles.

In Jakarta, police have seized hundreds of thousands of “erotic” magazines—including FHM and Rolling Stone—and DVDs, after an edict from police chief Sutanto to “eradicate pornography”.

The Islamic Defenders Front spearheads the anti-porn protests. It took two days to track down its leader, Habib Riziek, this week—he was at police headquarters, seeking information about “his men” arrested for allegedly attacking the US embassy in Jakarta last week. Porn, including artworks such as Suwage’s, contributes to moral delinquency, Riziek claims. “We don’t care about the technicality of the picture,” he says. “What we care is that the picture is publicly exhibited and it is pornography and it would damage morals.” Suwage believes his work captured attention because one of the models, Anjasmara, is a popular soapie star. The two models, photographer Davy Linggar and the curator of the biennale, Jim Supangkat, are also facing criminal charges.

Suwage is increasingly bitter about Supangkat’s reaction to the protest. After hundreds of demonstrators arrived at the exhibition, a panicked Supangkat ordered the offending panels to be covered with white cloth. Other artists draped their own works in solidarity and Supangkat closed the biennale, permanently.

Suwage believes his prosecution is linked to pressure to pass the anti-porn law and the desire of fundamentalists to impose Islamic rule on Indonesia. Suwage, who is afraid of prison, says he is determined to fight.

Based at a small cafe gallery in Jakarta’s backpacker precinct, Suwage and a motley collective or artists are mobilising against the new law. “From this case, we make a manifesto for art against the pornography bill. It’s very dangerous for freedom of expression but it also threatens other aspects of society.” Riziek remains emphatic the bill is essential to “guard the nation’s morality” against pornography, which extends past explicit photographs to “anything that could arouse sexual desire”.

Balkan Kaplale heads the parliamentary committee finalising the pornography bill and is confident it will become law this year.

It would halt the publication of magazines such as Playboy, he says. “ Playboy would place a time bomb in Indonesia, what guarantee is there it would not arrive in the hands of our children? Playboy is American magazine. Please, don’t play this game with Indonesians, we have dignity.”

Indonesians also have sensuality, says leading feminist and university professor Gadis Arriva. “Women here have always dressed sexily and in tight clothes, this law is something very alien to us, we have barebreasted women in Bali and Papua, this is part of our culture.”

In Bali, the head of the government’s tourism authority, Gede Nurjaya, agrees. Traditional Balinese art and dance could become illegal, he believes. He is concerned prohibitions against kissing and revealing bodies could be imposed against foreigners, destroying Bali’s faltering tourism industry.

Arriva says most women’s groups oppose the bill. “Most of it restricts women, what they wear, how they act. It even creates a board that would go around monitoring women’s behaviour.”

The new law would also gag a flourishing emergence of young female writers, who write openly about sexuality. “It states it is illegal to express any sexual desire, even imagine sex—how do you prove that?” asks Arriva.

She sees the anti-porn movement as part of an agenda to reshape Indonesia, with pornography a symbol of Western culture to the many Muslims who believe globalisation aims to destroy their culture. Adrian Vickers, Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Wollongong, agrees the debate is “part of whipping up a moral panic about Western decadence eroding Indonesian culture and morality”, with the potential to push Indonesia towards an Islamic state. “Given anxieties about terrorism, a more Islamic Indonesia could see Australia very much as the enemy,” he warns.

A closed society looms, says Suwage. “There would be no freedom, it will have a big impact for us, for artists, but it will go everywhere. I don’t believe a picture can change a person’s morality. Morality starts from the individual, from inside, not from dogma.”

with Karuni Rompies

ARTNATOMIA: SCIENCE FOR ARTISTS

2006-02-21T22:56:00.000+11:00

Artnatomia.net is a great site: the best use of Flash on the web I've ever seen.

Have a play! If you're interested in drawing the human face, you may have found an invaluable resource. Artnatomy is a finalist in an award for the use of Flash on the web.

WHAT ARE GALLERIES FOR? ARTISTS AS INDENTURED SERVANTS.

2006-01-17T23:21:00.001+11:00

Seems like a simple question, doesn't it. A gallery is for showing pictures, of course. Let's be liberal, and say it is a place for displaying works of art, or where people go to view works of art.

I'm not referring to museums of art, or state galleries. The question is really about commercial galleries. The visual artists I know appear to be, now, in a situation something like the position poets were in twenty-five years ago (not much has changed, everything has changed) when there were, in Australia, literally no major commercial publishers of poetry and a few writers I knew got together and formed a small, private press to publish each other. Over the course of the following fifteen years this small unincorporated association published twenty books and had some success. By the end of it, though, it was still publishing slim volumes—we believed in quality—to deafening silence from reviewers. One of its last books was an anthology of more than a dozen writers that did not get a single review. When we asked the editor of a nationally distributed review magazine why no article was arranged, we were told the anthology was “obviously good”. Well, thank you, we said, and the conversation ended there.

Perhaps we failed to be interesting or controversial enough. Self-reliance is not newsworthy.

Visual artists could hardly claim to be in same situation. There are galleries galore. The public listings are full of openings to attend. Opportunities are everywhere. Or, are they?

It's not as though writers or poets can claim there is no publishing going on. What we can claim, I think, is that publishers are interested only, exclusively, in their bottom lines, in seeing their accounts written in black ink. You can't blame them. There is no profit in poetry. And there is no profit in some difficult visual artist whose work cannot quickly establish a market value that buyers are willing to match with dollars. It does not matter if he or she is a genius. Genius doesn't pay the bills.

The principal difference between writers and visual artists from a commodity point of view is that writers create a product that is the art world's version of fast moving consumer goods. Buyers literally take literature off the shelves, in shops that resemble supermarkets. Decisions are made pronto! A book is a standard gift option. Visual artists don't normally make products of this kind. Purchases are considered. The visual arts are not bought to be consumed, and set aside, in the same way books are bought and shelved. This demeans the relationship readers have with literature, but there is a kernel of truth in it.

Commercial galleries plot a course between what one must suppose is a genuine interest in art and the mundane worries of their pockets. Welcome to the world as we know it.

There is nowhere for visual artists to go that is not smell of commercial relationships. Writers, by contrast, are the piece-workers of the art world, huddled in their garrets, earning a pittance for every thousand words: the smell of money rarely reaches their rooms.

Above all else, it's disatisfaction that they share; and isolation from the very people who want to make contact with them.

Commercial galleries, if the system that the galleries describe were to work as perfectly as everyone hopes, offer more than representation. There is supposed to be much else that comes with the relationship: the problem is, really, whether or not this “much else” actually materialises.

Commercial galleries are supposed to:

1] Represent artists—that is, speak for them, and about them; negotiate for them; promote them.

2] Provide exhibitions or shows at least every two years.

3] Maintain up to date records of works held on consignment and try to sell these works.

4] Help to build an artist's reputation by promoting scholarly and other writing about their art.

5] Generally, manage the relationship between the artist and the market to maximise the artist's opportunities to profit from his or her work.

If galleries actually achieved this for more than a handful of the most prominent visual artists, artists would think, no doubt, that the galleries were doing a good job.

But they are not doing it.

A mid-range artist in Australia, for example, exhibiting 30 works at a significant commercial gallery once every two years, and selling perhaps 20 of these (a successful show!) for an average price of AU$4,000, brings $80,000 to the cash register. Forty per cent of this goes to the gallery: $32,000. This leaves $48,000 for the artist. A pittance for two year's work. It's no wonder they have to have second jobs! (Let's not even mention the tax situation.)

No-one attacks the galleries. Why would anyone want to? Even if there were any public discussion of commercial galleries, surely artists would not have anything bad to say about the galleries that are, of course, the very arteries through which the life-blood af art courses...

Absence of discussion and debate does not mean absence of comment. It is well-known, of course, who the bad apples are. (Who knows, we might even get around to naming them here in future episodes: stay tuned...)

It's the relationship between artists and galleries I'm interested in. Now, do you notice anything odd about the following statements quoted, verbatim, from the ACGA website:

Vision:
The Australian Commercial Galleries Association seeks to contribute to the visual arts in a way that enhances understanding of and support for the primary market while cultivating sound entrepreneurial ethics and an ever-strengthening national and international market for Australian art.

Mission:
The Australian Commercial Galleries Association exists to represent, promote and further the interests of Australian commercial galleries whose core business is the ethical representation of living Australian artists. A dual aspect of the Association's mission is to develop Australian artists' livelihood and reputation while contributing to an enhanced public understanding of contemporary Australian art in the primary market.

I think there are several strange things going on in these quotes, not least of which is that the vision statement does not envision anything (unless it is that the national and international market for Australian art is “ever-strengthening”). I wonder, for example, why this organisation is so obsessed with ethics and ethical bahaviour. Has someone accused it or its members of something terrible, or do their consciences need to be salved?

I mention this obsession with ethics in the vision and mission statements of the ACGA because the point at which the code discusses a gallery's right to receive a commission on all sales of an artist's work strikes me as being distinctly unethical.

The partnership between the gallery and the artist establishes commission as payment by the artist for the gallery's intensive ongoing work and representation in the development of the artist's career, reputation and livelihood. As such it should be recognised as an agent's fee, earned by the gallery in return for the type of ongoing services listed under item 4.

Item 4 in the code of practice lists a whole heap of things that galleries barely do at all for most artists, and do very badly most of the time. (Read the whole sad catalogue at the ACGA website.) The code is, in fact, a strained attempt to justify a claim that artists, particularly struggling, unknown artists, but also middle-rung artists, have little or no power to deny to galleries.

Artists, in fact, have to put up and shut up in the face of galleries who do nothing for them between annual or bi-annual shows but still want 40 per cent of sales they haven't been involved in.

Wouldn't it be fairer, more ethical, as a starting point in negotiations between artists and galleries, to say that galleries were entitled to up to 40 per cent commission on any artworks they choose to show, or choose to hold on to between shows?

You can hear the director-fussbudgets of galleries around Australia huffing, puffing and moaning already, can't you? Oh, dear, how will they ever earn a living if they only get commission on the works they really want to sell?

The services these fussbudgets (don't go off to the dictionary: it means one who is overly particular about unimportant things) offer to artists are described in terms that make their gallery businesses sound like retirement homes for librarians. They promise to be monitoring, archiving, maintaining and pursuing. And when they're not doing that, they're cultivating, collaborating and recording. All very important stuff, I don't doubt. Meanwhile, it is the artist who is doing the real work.

The list of services that galleries perform to earn their commission is a furphy, a wild rumour, a tall story, and everyone knows it. Artists make their reputations by sticking at their work. It is a hard slog that, even for artists of acknowledged brilliance, goes on for years. To pretend this isn't the case, and instead put about that the development of an artist's reputation and career is something that is strategised by whispers and nods between gallery directors and clients with too much money in their pockets, is simply to lie. And there's nothing ethical about that.

What is going to change, though? How can the system be changed? Important questions, to be answered in a later post.

SIFTING THROUGH THE RUINS: JARRY AS FORTUNE-TELLER

2006-01-11T21:18:00.000+11:00

Here's an interesting quote from Jarry's Ubu in chains:

“Nous n'aurons point tout démoli si nous ne démolissons même les ruines! Or je n'y vois d'autre moyen que d'en équilibrer de beaux edifices bien ordonnés.”

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

Sounds like post-modernism to me; or a spooky premonition of two world wars.

Either way, what is certain is that Jarry does not get enough credit for his influence on Duchamp and Joyce (he is, though it's difficult to tell, really, a character in Finnegan's Wake).

Some information about Jarry:

(älfrĕd´ zhärē´), 1873-1907, French author. He was well known in Paris for his eccentric and dissolute behavior and for his insistence on the superiority of hallucinations over rational intelligence. His most famous work is the satirical farce Ubu Roi [Ubu the king] (1896, tr. 1961), with a repulsive and cowardly hero based on one of his old schoolteachers. He also wrote surrealistic verse stories, which, although witty, are also blasphemous and scatological. They include Les Minutes de sable mémorial [the moments of a monument in sand] (1894), César-Antéchrist [Caesar-Antichrist] (1895, tr. 1972), L'Amour en visites [love on visits] (1898), L'Amour absolu [absolute love] (1899), and Le Surmale (1902), as well as another play, Ubu enchaîné [Ubu in chains] (1902).

REUTERS REPORT ON OSTOJIC

2006-01-11T18:00:00.000+11:00

Ostojic and Aires withdrew the posters:

The sponsors of spoof posters depicting Britain's Queen Elizabeth having sex with the U.S. and French presidents have decided to remove them from Vienna's streets to quiet an outcry ahead of Austria's EU presidency, APA news agency said on Thursday.

The images on electronic rolling billboards showed two naked female models wearing masks of President George W. Bush and the queen, and a male model with a President Jacques Chirac mask, positioned as if engaged in a sex act.

APA, the Austrian news agency, said the project's organizers together with artists Carlos Aires from Spain and Tanja Ostojic from Serbia opted to pull the images after a public furor that embarrassed the Vienna government.

Part of a series of 150 images called "euroPART", the posters were meant to "reflect on the different social, historical and political developments in Europe", said art project 25peaces, which commissioned the posters.

APA quoted Aires and Ostojic, who created an image of a woman sprawled in knickers emblazoned with the EU circle of stars emblem, as saying they felt it was better that their works should not divert attention from all the others.

Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel had appealed to the artists to withdraw the posters after opposition leaders and the media protested that they demeaned women and damaged the reputation of Austria as it prepares to take over the EU presidency on January 1.

"We regret this development that totally distorted the image of the entire project," 25 peaces said in a statement quoted by APA.

25peaces received 1 million euros ($1.2 million) of public funding for the works. Only three of the 150 images displayed on hundreds of billboards in prominent places across the Austrian capital had sexual overtones.

The poster series is to be shown until the end of January.

—Reuters

PATHOLOGIES OF OUTRAGE

2005-12-31T22:08:00.000+11:00

First, some web sites to look at:

Rhizome.org
Rent-a-Negro
Damali Ayo
25PEACES (German)
Tanja Ostojic

The Rent-a-Negro web site link flew around the internet a while back, many people linking to it as a humorous site. Initially few people recognised that the site was, as well as being very funny and beautifully written, a ‘serious’ art project.

More recently, and more controversially, Tanja Ostojic's poster of a reclining nude in blue briefs with the symbol of the European Union planted over the hidden entrance to an unknown woman's vagina, caused outrage in Austria.

Other posters commissioned by 25PEACES were by Carlos Aires, a Spanish photographer, depicting international leaders (including the Queen of England) having sex.

What are we to make of these web sites and images? The Austrians, currently thinking hard about their relationship with Turkish immigrants and the possibility that Turkey might one day join the EU, were naturally sensitive to Ostojic's image.

The 25PEACES commission of over a hundred works, perhaps naturally, considering their apparent political leanings, contained images that attempted to provoke debate about the relationships of global political leaders.

From this distance—and it is very difficult to judge reactions and emotions through the news and over the internet—what looks like public outrage may only be a storm in a teacup. It is striking, though, that in reports about the public outrage over art works, whether generated for the sake of news or not, there is almost never any real discussion of the 'art' in the art. Is it no longer relevant, because only 'facts' are reported in the news, what an artist's other works are like?

The Ostojic image is the most obvious case in point. International reporting about the controversy over this image blends it seemlessly with reporting about the other posters and of people's reactions. However, there are two facts it is useful to know…

1] The Ostojic image exactly reproduces Corbet's famous painting in the Museé d'Orsay, 'The Origin of the World'. The title of the reference painting, alone, should be enough to make us stop to think what might be going on here.

2] Ostojic's art often focusses on issues where politics and women's bodies collide. Look at this remarkable image, for example, of a woman in a camouflage burka…

To me, this is a much more powerful work than the 25PEACES commission, but I don't expect to be bowled over by everything an artist does. Artistic works of this kind set out to dislodge our thinking from fixed positions.

By contrast, though beginning with exactly the same methodology and materials, Carlos Aires's contribution—global leaders fucking—seems thoroughly tame. Why? Is it, perhaps, because the idea (if there is one) underpinning the images is weaker? Might it be because we sense, as viewers of the works, that Aires has strained too hard and with not enough effect after the outrage the work sought?

These are more typical Aires photographs. Confronting, in a dull way, but competently photographed and printed (on metallic paper: a trick from the advertising industry).

Part of the problem with Aires's contribution to the 25PEACES commission may simply be that he has miscalculated the objects of his scorn. Why is Queen Elizabeth in the group at all?

The outrage over such art works is a good thing. Let's not forget that artists, old and new, sink or swim in the tidal flow of public perceptions. Commentators on art works behave as though this isn't the case, and has not always been the case. The pathologies of our outrage, the process by which we become aware of what has moved us or left us cold, need to expand our peripheral vision beyond the images themselves while not losing focus on what it really is we are looking at.

PURE INTENTIONS OF GAIA: THE RISK-FREE ART OF KON DIMOPOULOS

2005-12-30T17:47:00.000+11:00

The general flavour of reporting about the failure of Konstantin Dimopoulos's tree-painting project in Melbourne was sympathetic. The Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt took at a swipe at the waste of public monies. Aside from that, it was Victorian politician Mary Delahunty who took most of the 'blame' dished out in public over the failed plan.

But Delahunty must have been badly advised from the start. I'm more interested in the quality of the artistic enterprise than the public relations debacle.

First, here is how the Dimopoulos tree saga hit the headlines in Melbourne during 2005 (see below).

Greenies in blue over art project

Herald Sun
Geraldine Mitchell, urban affairs reporter
23 August 2005

Environment groups slammed the Yarra Park project, claiming the Government was vandalising one of the city's most significant avenues of mature elm trees.
They fear the blue elms will encourage copycat artists to graffiti trees.
But artist Konstantin Dimopoulos said the project, called Sacred Grove—the blue forest, would create a magical space.
"Colour is a powerful stimulant, a means of altering perception and defining space and time," he said.
"The fact that blue is a colour that is not naturally identified with trees suggests to the viewer that something unusual, something out of the ordinary has happened. It becomes a magical transformation."
Mr Dimopoulos said the tree trunks would be coloured with a water-based paint similar to the type used on the MCG's turf and would not damage the trees.
"Every horticulturist we've spoken to said it won't do any harm," he said.
Mr Dimopoulos said the colour would last about six months and would naturally degrade, and the trees would revert to their natural state.
Two trees were painted blue and red in a trial in King's Domain nine months ago.
Arts Minister Mary Delahunty admitted the $96,000 project was expensive, but said it would be a "very impressive" drawcard to the city during major events such as the International Arts Festival, Australian Open and the Commonwealth Games.
"It's always controversial and it's expensive, but it can be a great drawcard to the city's parks and gardens," she said.
The State Government confirmed yesterday that it had already funded more than $200,000 of public arts projects across the city this year.
Projects include a $115,000 art work reflecting environmental themes on the Frankston Pier.
Ms Delahunty said the Sacred Grove project, to start next month, was part of a global public arts movement and hoped it would follow the success of a similar project in New York's Central Park.
"The Government's priorities are health, education and public safety, and we're spending billions of dollars improving those areas in this state," she said.
"But there are other requirements in a sophisticated international city."
Mr Dimopoulos said he hoped the project would draw attention to the plight of the world's forests.
"Art has changed a lot, it's not just impressionism. Public art is about taking risks. It does cost money but it brings people together," he said.
Protectors of Public Lands Victoria secretary Julianne Bell said Melbourne City Council's decision to support the project was bizarre.
"This painting project surely does not fit with the master plan for Yarra Park, which respects the original Victorian heritage layout and design for the park," she said.
"It seems that our earlier fears that Melbourne parks will be damaged in the name of the Commonwealth Games are well on the way to being realised."

Dimopoulos came to Australia from New Zealand in 2004, and calls himself a "public artist". This is the kind of heroic claim that should immediately make our ears prick up. I think, considering what is at stake, we might be entitled to a definition of what a "public artist" is. Most of Dimopoulos's work in the past has been, in type and character, distinctly ordinary: paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, and a few pieces that have been placed in spaces that, on the face of it, appear to be accessible to the 'public'. (Mind you, there have also been installations of exactly the same kind of works in very private spaces—properties to which the public does not have access. So, it is possible that, on balance, he also qualifies as a 'private' artist.)

It is also very useful to note the language that Dimopoulos gathers around his project. The 'Sacred Grove' project is no mere work of art: it is an "art action". Other kinds of art—painting canvases, writing books, composing music, and so on—these are the inactive arts: the arts that do nothing, do not get up out of their armchairs and go marching in the streets.

Dimopoulos leaves visitors to his web site in no doubt that painting trees blue is not just a magical aesthetic experience, but one that will help to prevent the de-afforestation of the planet. In this way, he wraps himself and the 'Sacred Grove' project in the pure intentions of Gaia.

This is what the web site says:

Sacredgrove—the blue forest is a public art installation by conceptual artist Konstantin Dimopoulos.
Sacredgrove is a global afforestation art action using art to highlight trees as sculptural forms, and the need to replenish the world's trees.

When the Melbourne City Council finally rejected the 'Sacred Grove' project, and the State Government in Victoria was called on to justify the c. AU$100,000 it had given to Dimopoulos, it came to light that among the expenses for the project were amounts for promotional multimedia materials to be distributed to other cities around the globe. The purpose of these materials was to promote similar projects in other cities: sacred groves growing up all over the planet… Just imagine it!

What a neat little money-spinner the success of 'Sacred Grove' in Melbourne would have been.

As it turned out, a Melbourne hotel took pity on Mr Dimopoulos and allowed him to paint a small grove of trees it manages at the entrance to its Collins Street building.

As a 'public' and 'conceptual' artist, Dimopoulos makes claims that, from an art historical point of view, make absolutely no sense. For example, Dimopoulos is quoted in the article, above, saying to a journalist (who cannot be blamed for not knowing what the next question should be):

Public art is about taking risks. It does cost money but it brings people together.

I think this must be a disingenuous statement. It is simply incredible that a practising 'public artist' would not know about Christo and Jeanne-Claude; or have the temerity to believe no-one would or could make the just comparison between this kind of public art and the public art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. There are obvious comparisons to be made, in both the approach to getting works approved and in the works themselves.

The wrapped Reichstag and wrapped trees: public art costing not a single public penny

For those not familiar with the details, here are the basic facts, to help the comparison along…

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 'Wrapped Reichstag' project took 24 years to bring to fruition. During all this time, and after it was achieved, they did not accept a single cent, or a single pfennig, of payment from public funds. In fact, Christo and Jeanne-Claude never accept any public monies to complete their art works.

It is also instructive to note that the Christo and Jeane-Claude's process for achieving their public art includes having to convince everyone, including the public and any interested parties, that the artwork should be permitted to proceed.

They are justifiably famous around the world for the rigour of their approach. Think what you like about the aesthetic experience of their art, no-one I know of doubts the purity of their practice. They are beholden to no-one. The risk they take for their public art is their own misfortune.

Dimopoulos's plan to make the people of Victoria pay for his project to re-aestheticise the world's parks and avenues does not sound so heroic in this light, does it? His public art does not sound so risky.

Perhaps it would help if his project had the advantage of originality, but it cannot even claim that. Dimopoulos knows that the tradition of painting trees is a very old one in Greece. It survives today, to the surprise of many visitors, in the practical habit the Greeks have of painting roadside trees white where there is no road lighting.

Beyond that, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have beaten him to the tree game as well. (The next two photographs are of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Trees at Riehen in Switzerland in 1998.)

Take a look back at the Dimopoulos website and tell me if you see a striking similarity between these pictures and Dimopoulos's “BLACK PHARAOHS APPROPRIATION 2005”.

[Sometime in 2006, images of the "BLACK PHARAOHS APPROPRIATION 2005" (see left) were removed from Dimopoulos's website without exlanation. Mr Dimopoulos is of course entitled to remove whatever he likes from his own website. I've retrieved a screen image of the missing page from the Orwellian memory hole and republish it here. ]

The communiqué of the 1998 Christo and Jeanne-Claude event said:

Riehen, Switzerland, December 3, 1998
We have seen our work of art, Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, 1997-98, as part of the exhibition The Magic of Trees at the Fondation Beyeler. Together with the Fondation, we had planned that the Wrapped Trees might remain longer than the usual 14 days.

However, as with all of previous temporary work of art, the 14 day duration of the project's exhibition has been an aesthetic choice.

Therefore, after having enjoyed and shared our work of art with so many visitors, as artists, we have now decided that Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, 1997-98 will remain until December 13, 1998. Then the project will be removed and all materials will be recycled.

Statement
The temporality of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow.

The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last—for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives—is a quality we want to give to our work as an additional aesthetic quality.

Magic, indeed. Those were the days—and only seven years ago, too. How quickly we forget.

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE CLOTHES, DUMMY

2005-12-29T16:46:00.000+11:00

Fashion is not about clothes, being an artist, thinking, performance, business or money. It's about expressing yourself. So there.

"It's about plastic surgery," Walter van Beirendonck told me. I knew it wasn't about fashion, or clothes, which is what I had a right to expect it would be about. After all, Van Beirendonck is a fashion designer, and he had just spent an hour or so with an enthusiastic young crowd at the RMIT Storey Hall auditorium, saying several times during the discussion on stage that he was not an artist.

To be an artist, if you are a fashion designer, I began to think, must be something like being branded impractical or noncommercial or incapable of designing wearable clothing.

Van Beirendonck's recent designs, clothes that are much less commercial than the street wear and jeans for which he became wellknown, can still be bought from his shop in Antwerp. Just the place to go if you want an haute couture, plastic, cherry-coloured suit-available in all sizes.

The problem is that van Beirendonck is an artist, or is behaving like one. At a Paris show a few years ago he put his models on stilts (the kind that plasterers use to reach ceilings), covered their faces, turned on the spooky music and waited for a reaction. The resulting 'performance'—it's difficult to continue calling it a 'fashion parade' or anything else that implies display of goods—was tremendously affecting, presenting the audience with the unexpected vision of models who had distorted their bodies to achieve a sort of perfection and had, at the same time, erased their identities. It's no wonder that van Beirendonck's shows are popular.

Transplanted to a theatrical stage, cut loose from the delimiting response of an industry audience, some moments he devises could easily be mistaken for ones by Pina Bausch, the German dancer, choreographer and champion of modern dance.

These effects on the catwalk have not come easily or suddenly to van Beirendonck. It's clear from the videos of him, when he began teaching fashion in Belgium in the mid-1980s, that he used to look and behave more like we imagine a fashion designer should.

These days, fortyish, he admits that a gradual change has overcome him, the result of a desire to be more himself. He's gone through many changes, in fact.

Fashion is the commodification of change, n'est-ce-pas?

He used to say, "Fuck the past! (Kiss the future)." One of the audience at Storey Hall wanted to know why he hated history. He is adamant that he does not; it's just that he does not want to be tied to it.

Now he says, "You are not alone." In the last few seasons he has stripped his designs of all ornamentation and shown us a bland future; dressed his models in hokey cowboy street wear and made them boot-scoot; then presented them all in pale-coloured, knitted, clingy frocks.

In a way, it's interesting: fashion as a vehicle for thought... Do you think it's going to work? Van Beirendonck certainly gives it a go, but the problems are too obvious. One of his recent shows sported the title 'Gender?' It was not about gender at all. It wasn't even about sex (which is what most people think 'gender' is). It was a display of androgynous models. There weren't any women.

"It was a male collection!" van Beirendonck explains. Exactly. Why pretend to be thinking about gender at all?

The reason, I suppose, is that fashion is not about the clothes, and not about being an artist, and not about thinking, or performance, or even business and money. It's about expressing yourself. So there.

Originally published in RMIT's Openline in 2000.

DOUBTFUL KNOWLEDGE: RECENT PAINTINGS BY SHANE JONES, 1999-2001

2005-12-26T17:49:00.000+11:00

Drawing falls and folds of cloth has been a standard exercise for student artists in their teachers' studios. Along with perspective, chiaroscuro, flesh, and hundreds more particular painterly 'rules', mastering this painting exercise is a foundation of depicting human reality. Without it, it would be impossible to present any image of a man or woman in his or her social reality. It is not only the depiction of our clothing that the painter has to master—the space in which it appears, the volume it contains, the sources of light playing on its infinitely varied surfaces. There are also beds, furniture, curtains, and all the rest.

Shane Jones was apprenticed to the depiction of reality in paintings for twenty years before his own peculiar 'take' on realism began to emerge in his work. Virtually all the early paintings—still lives, street scenes, rooms and objects—have been destroyed. It is strange, now, that everything he has learned about painting is pressed to the task of depicting a reality that none of us has ever seen: a realism that looks like pure psychology.

A man dressed in a gray suit and a woman in a long, deep red dress stand with their backs to us. Behind them is a white curtain which reaches from somewhere out of the top of the painting to the surface the figures are standing on. There are actually two curtains: one for each of the figures. We can see, in the middle of the painting, that the two falls of curtain meet and overlap—except at the very bottom, where a small, triangular, black space, tells us that there is nothing or something on the other side of the space in which the figures stand. If you knew the artist, you would immediately recognize the male figure as the artist himself. However, for the purpose of the picture, it is just a man. There is nothing very special about him at all. We cannot see his face. We do not know whether he is anxious or calm, handsome or ugly. His companion, the woman in the red dress, may not be his companion at all: the two figures have adopted the same pose before us, turned away from our gaze, but they are not standing together. Well, they are not necessarily standing together. She has no feet. The dress is just long enough—just the right length—for the feet to be hidden. She seems to hover on the stage. Is it a stage? If it is a stage, are we also part of the performance that is about to begin, or that has just ended? Should we feel relieved and happy that the drama is over, or apprehensive because it just about to begin? The curtain may not be the curtain of a stage at all—perhaps it is only a curtain, a white sheet hanging in a gallery, much like the room in which the picture itself is hanging.

For the past four years Shane Jones has been methodically emptying his paintings of unnecessary clutter. In 1996 he won the Norma Bull Prize for a self-portrait. He emptied the room in which he painted himself by lowering the point from which the viewer seems to look on him: only the ceiling and an empty wall are visible in the background.

In 1997 Shane Jones saw the paintings of Avigdor Arikha (1929-), in particular 'Slippers and Undershirt' [1979]. The discarded clothing in these paintings, arranged like abstractions, seem heavily laden with their absent human bodies and activities. Shane Jones began to paint articles of clothing and falls of cloth. But these paintings are not copies of the effects Arikha achieved, any more than Arikha's 'Self-Portrait in a Raincoat, Peering' (1988) is a copy of Joshua Reynolds' 'Self-Portrait' (c. 1748-9). Jones emptied his paintings of any discernable background and, as well, of perspective: handkerchiefs and cloths were unfolded and flattened to reveal their commonplace designs. These objects, sometimes painted at ten or twenty times their natural size, sometimes at 'actual size', were presented as though emptied of their function. No longer useful or used objects, they became simply something to look at: reality magnified. Articles of clothing, male and female, were presented to us neatly, often actually on their hangers, but floating in black space. Dresses, shirts and jumpers are the ghosts of their owners.

An untitled painting of 1998 went so far as to show only what appeared to be a white sheet suspended in black space, the upper left-hand corner hinting at something that could not be seen—a hook or nail holding everything up. We are forced to acknowledge our first ideas are often wrong when we notice the white sheet is, in fact, full of colour—pinks, mauves and greens.

Underneath the thin veils that now hide his subjects' faces, Jones has painted a real portrait of himself, a model or a mannequin. There is a Japanese flavor in the spatial arrangements and blank interiors that owe much to James McNeill Whistler.

Asked about the meaning of his paintings, Jones sometimes quotes Benjamin Disraeli: “To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.” Or, at other times, he will say: “When I was twenty I thought I knew everything; at forty I thought I didn't know anything at all...” This is really Jones's subject: the feeling that we do not know very much about other people or about ourselves: uncertainty and ignorance painted with pared-down, formalized and quasi-realistic effect: the suspicion that commonplace certainties might some day turn out to be doubtful knowledge.

A Typographer's Eye [short story]

1995-06-07T23:08:00.000+10:00

Anyway, the word from the poor author, who’s writing this because he doesn’t have a ‘real’ job, is that he wants to know what’s going on behind those eyes, why we behave as though we still believe in fairy tales when it’s obvious that the world’s fucked. I’m thirty-something, so you’d think I’d have figured it out already; but that’s just the way it is. I’ve got plenty of time, though, if my heart holds out.

I met an author at a book launch recently and we talked about the painter Francis Bacon. An interview with Bacon called ‘The Brutality of Fact’ begins with the admission that Bacon harboured a sexual desire for his father. The author I was talking to thought this was shocking, impressively honest, very promising; but he was sure that Bacon was concealing something else with this honesty. Well, I’m not so sure about that. I’m mentioning this because I remember now what I was thinking while we were talking about Francis Bacon. I was thinking that when I was a young boy I was fascinated by my father’s sexuality. I loved his body, his big dick and his hairy chest. For years, for most of my adult life, I have maintained the conviction, and touted it publicly, that I hated my father. At my twenty-first birthday party I called him an “elephant’s arsehole”. (Not very nice; but, then, we hated each other secretly: he ‘hated’ me for leaving him; and I ‘hated’ him for treating me so badly when I left.) When I come to think of it, these were almost the last words he ever heard come out of my mouth. Everybody laughed.

Kids are supposed to hate their fathers because they’re the competition in a boy’s love for his mother. Did you ever hear such a stinking lie? This conviction I have maintained, stylishly elaborating it for my small part of the world to hear, is, of course, a load of crap—a load of crap straight out of the elephant’s arsehole, so to speak. The truth is, I loved my father. When I remember him now, in the moments that he touched me, when, for any reason, his arms wrapped around me, I was in heaven. But, even when I was just eleven years old, I knew the boundaries of this feeling, without knowing how I knew them, knew that there were things that could not be done or said, and knew this prohibition was real without ever having heard it spoken.

The point is—to answer the question before it is asked—that Francis Bacon was not concealing something else with his honesty. No, that’s not it. I know what Francis was trying to conceal. In a little while (when I’ve worked out how to say it) I’ll tell you what it was.

It’s hard to say what the truth of ‘style’ is, or with what ‘style’ the truth can be written. I know that I am impatient. I know that poets cannot be trusted. And you know you cannot trust me. You do not know whether I am lying or telling the truth. If those bastards in their ivory towers have their way, no one will know whether this pronoun I am tossing around is the thing that stands for me or is something else. I’ll tell you honestly: it is something else, something that even people who are writers do not know, and people who are readers know even less.

All the most personal writing I have reserved for poems; an idea, a feeling, a gripe with the world, some angry moment or pleasant surprise hunches in a cool, dark place for years, confident that, because it belongs to a writer, no one will arrive with a ‘Use by’ stamp. In a poem, and in some kinds of prose, these moments can be gathered irrationally, bunched like flowers and achieve, without too much thought—apart from concentrating now and then on ‘music’, the need to avoid cliché, and the necessary test of truth—an aesthetic effect. My first poems were not, in any way, personal, except in the safest and most abstract way; they expressed my feelings, but in a way that safely detached these feelings from my person. Perhaps this is the reason, years later, when I read these poems, I’m surprised and grudgingly recognise myself as their author. A few weeks ago, when a Sydney fiction editor wrote to ask if I had any prose suitable for publication in a gay magazine, I was surprised, again, to discover I responded, apologetically, that I write on gay themes only by accident, as though two aspects of my self might collide at an intersection. There are several stories, I explained in my letter, on appropriate themes, but they are all too long and none of them is finished. But, even as I wrote my excuse, I knew that it was not quite true and that I might, some time in the future, have to recant. There are, indeed, long, unfinished stories. It is no accident that they are unfinished. Something has obstructed their completion. There is the story of a man of letters and his boyhood relationship with one of Australia’s greatest painters; a ‘true story’ of which so little detail is available to me that it must be reconstructed from almost nothing: it is like trying to imagine a body from a pile of bones. There is the story of a relationship between a middle-aged man with HIV and a young, straight, drug-addicted prostitute. This is the story from which my last book takes its name: ‘The Ninth Satire’. It is strange, isn’t it, that a book built on the foundation of a particular story should have been published without the very story that prompted it? I like the irony of it. For hundreds of years Decimus Junius Juvenalis’s ‘Satire IX’ was excluded from collections of his satires because it dealt with subject matter which many editors thought unprintable. The relationship of Juvenal to the interlocutor of his ninth satire, Naevolus, has always disturbed me. I cannot fathom Juvenal’s cruelty. And Naevolus is both crudely attractive and repulsive. It is difficult to write about what you do not understand. There is another story, also unfinished, about a young girl who becomes pregnant when she is fucked by a man she later discovers is bi-sexual. This story is about disillusionment, abortion, and feelings of revulsion. These stories have something in common apart from being unfinished. They are all, in some way, stories about my unfinished self, ideas that are waiting for the completion of the person who could be their author.

People like a story that moves forward briskly, sweeps them up in a whirlwind of plausibility and delivers them, not more than a little bruised, to unexpected, credible conclusions: something with a beginning, middle and end. —But life is not like that; at least, none of the lives I know are like that. A story may be composed entirely of things left unsaid, where one thing is not properly related to anything else; and it may move forward only by changing direction. This is a story of that kind. Its author is a character a little like myself; that is, only in the sense that he is also an author.

You see, that’s the problem—Francis Bacon’s problem, one of them—you start out trying to tell the truth and, as soon as you open your mouth, your relationship to it has changed: it is no longer the truth, but something that obstructs something else.

What does it mean when someone writes ‘I’? Geofroy Tory, the typographer and student of Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, once wrote, “I cannot pass here without pointing out that our said letters were devised through divine inspiration. Homer, King of the Greek poets, states at the beginning of Book VIII of his Iliad that Jupiter once said he could, if he so wished, draw to himself by means of a golden chain all the other gods, and even the earth and the sea as well.” Tory imagines this chain, hanging from heaven to where we stand, “well proportioned in length and breadth, suited to the symmetry of our proportional letter ‘I’.”[1] Victor Hugo, on the other hand, believed that “ ‘I’ is a war machine launching its projectile…”[2] Can you imagine two more divergent explanations of the same thing? The upright letter. Tory draws his letter over the figure of a naked man. Anything could hide behind such a monument of typography, an ‘I’ that stretches from its author to the supreme god. Hugo’s letter is a cannon. It shoots its meaning into the heart of a reader, and it does not even have to be aimed very carefully to tear him apart.[3]

Now we understand each other. Now, as the story of this unfinished self goes on, you’ll understand this ‘I’ is both a monument of fiction (the obstruction itself) and the means by which the obstruction is removed. A typographer’s eye is another matter.

Mistake leads to interpretation. A proof-reader’s eye can unleash reverberations in a reader’s mind. Hans Gabler’s ‘definitive’ edition of Ulysses repeated the minor error of Clive Driver’s ‘definitive’ edition of Ulysses by deciding that Joyce had meant to write “lumps of coral and copper snow” at the beginning of chapter 15.[4] The French translation of Ulysses[5] says the phrase is “des couches d’une neige de charbon et de cuivre”—that is, “coal”, not “coral”. Joyce is preparing us for a descent into the underworld, not a sightseeing cruise to a coral reef. While we can imagine that Joyce would have cared greatly to give the correct impression here, the same cannot be said of all writers. It is Proust who interests me; the thousands of pages of digression, one tied to the other, so that a reader becomes lost in purely sensuous wandering, through a garden, along a path, the taste of a little cake dipped in lime-flower tea, the eye stopping for a moment on a young girl’s face. Proust did not seem to care about errors of typesetting. What he cared about was creating yet another digression, and when he received his proofs he added more writing to the galleys instead of reading them.[6]

“I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body”, Proust writes, with a typographer’s eye, in the ‘Combray’ chapter of Swann’s Way, “then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me.”[7]

The eyes are, perhaps, more important than anything—at least, to a person who has the use of them—and there is as much about them in our languages, poetry and morality, as any other part of the body, including the heart. Gray’s Anatomy describes the heart in less than ten pages (leaving aside all the things connected to it) and provides only two illustrations. The eye, however, has at least fourteen pages and five illustrations (not counting the Meibomian glands or the Lachrymal apparatus). The eye is in every aspect of our personality. While we keep the heart and mind separate, all minds have an eye—‘the mind’s eye’—to see things our other eyes cannot. This eye may be green, if we are jealous. And, as we know from the Psalms, having eyes is no guarantee that we will be able to see.[8] Understanding is not only a matter for the eyes—‘an eye-opener’—but the speed with which it happens is measured in the eyes: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”[9] There is an “inward eye”, according to Wordsworth, “Which is the bliss of solitude.” And, as we wander lonely as a cloud, like William, who knows, we might see Mr Dodgson through the looking-glass with our “dreaming eyes of wonder”. But it is all in the eye of the beholder. Some eyes have apples in them; some are jaundiced, some lacklustre; others have bags underneath. Many eyes are found in months—“men’s eyes in April / are quicker than their brains”[10] —and there are a thousand, at least, in every night. Are there more eyes in Shakespeare than in the sky, than in the night sky, plus one, “the great eye of heaven”? “Alas, how is’t with you / That you do bend your eye on vacancy / And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?” Why are there so many eyes in Hamlet? “In my mind’s eye, Horatio.” “… Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.” “The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword.” “… Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres …” The eyes are the site of our most intractable prejudices. Black and white. “Appearances contribute to reality”, John F. Kennedy said. We know that there is something else, but our eyes tell us what we believe will be the truth. Our eyes connect us, by their immediate reaction, to what we know is viscerally, instinctively beautiful or horrible. Magnetic. Attractive. Insatiable. Repulsive. Ugly. An eye is a key that unlocks pornography. And while it is true that they can be closed, unlike our ears, which are always open (and, so to speak, ‘watchful’), even when closed the imagination keeps them alight. Memories stoke the fire. When we are asleep our eyes follow our dreams. The eyes hardly ever sleep. All of our desire is in them, and all desire’s sadness. The eyes are full of themselves and with everything else. It is with our eyes that we measure the world and first recognise ourselves in it. Sight, as Plato wrote in The Republic, stating the obvious, is the eyes’ “proper excellence”.[11] —If only it were true. It is through them that we measure the visible world, and imagine the extent of everything that is hidden. First in the catalogue of human fear is the ‘unknown’, whose most compelling sign is darkness. The eyes are a list of suffering and joy. All of a person’s character may be in their eyes, as Gustave Flaubert knew.[12] —And none of it. The eyes of the paranoiac imagine there is more in the eyes that follow him than there actually is. Why? It is because the content of eyes is very often ambiguous. We hope for love and fear rejection, and never know everything that is behind another’s eyes. A ‘visionary’ is one who saw things we did not, and so is a madman. Visionary and madman are measured by what our own eyes see, or don’t see, as the case may be. (Madness, as the mad will tell you, if you ask them, is mostly in the ears. Thoughts are ‘heard’. The mind is a noisy place. But, after the ears, the eyes are the next to go. Light and dark angels appear where voices were.) And, as Michel Foucault has shown, modern medicine was born in the eyes: “The gaze will be fulfilled in its own truth and will have access to the truth of things if it rests on them in silence, if everything keeps silent around what it sees.”[13] Two eyes are needed to appreciate perspectives. A mystic is helpless without the third. A banker may not have a heart but he keeps at least one eye on the bottom line. Some people “only have eyes for you”, which is a somewhat unlikely compliment. To have eyes like these is, in short, to be human. Even Jews have them! “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?”[14] And niggers, queers, perverts, socialists, women, Liberals and child-molesters have them, too.

Are you following me? Good. Then let’s go to New York—city of many niggers, Jews, Koreans in self-serve salad bars, and millions of eyes. The contrasts are surprising. Times Square is said to have more ‘language’ hanging in the air than any other place on earth; a vortex of signs and speech, a typographer’s dream. Wall Street, on the other hand, where language has been replaced by ‘data’, is a cold, almost signless, windy canyon that, I was surprised to find, has a dark and eerily beautiful graveyard, beside Trinity Church, at its entrance. I walked back from Wall Street to my room on West 48th Street by wandering up West Broadway through Soho and Tribeca (in Spring Street there is an old building now dubbed ‘Poet’s House’—it’s in the NY phone book—where a monthly calendar of literary events and readings is published), the Village and, on the other side of Washington Square, Chelsea, up Eighth Avenue past the General Post Office (“NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS”); a walk that, with occasional stops and small detours, can take a couple of hours. The 40s streets on Eighth could be avoided at night, if you are so inclined: they are full of visionaries, madmen, typographers and tourists. A typographer, I kept my eyes open, of course. There is so much to see. I walked into a salad bar where you can fill a small plastic container with whatever you like and pay, according to the weight of what you’ve chosen, only a couple of dollars for dinner. A tall, white red-neck in the queue in front of me was having an argument with the small Korean woman who weighed the meals. I had seen her here several times before, at all times of day, and concluded that she never slept. The red-neck had had enough of something. Maybe there are just too many people with yellow-brown skin in Manhattan these days. He exploded angrily, made some offensive remark, threw coins on the counter, and exited with his plastic container. The Korean woman said something to me that I didn’t understand, and then she laughed. I smiled quizzically. I was becoming accustomed to having conversations in which less than half of what was said could be understood. The previous night a cab driver had stuck his head out of his car and asked a black woman on the street, “Where is two-thoity-sex?” “Two-forty-what?” the black woman had replied in a well-educated tone of voice. I imagined these two people had spent most of their lives growing up together, one from Brooklyn, the other from the Lower East Side and, with only the East River between them, at this one, chance meeting, effective communication seemed impossible. I picked up my plastic container, which the tireless Korean woman had put in a little bag for me, and continued on my way. My eyes were still open. “Hey! Baldy!” I turned around. I realise, now, that this was a mistake. I should have kept my ears closed but, as I’ve already warned you, the ears are ever watchful and cannot be closed. A little Jewish man with long, messy hair, and dressed in a long, dirty, black coat, was hobbling behind me. He looked, in the moment that I saw him, like a mad and visionary Rabbi—not someone to be messed with. “Wha’do you want, baldy?!” Under no circumstances was I going to stop for this man. He had seen something, I don’t know what, leaning out of my eye as I walked along Eighth Avenue toward my room. Desire, perhaps. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it, and he was going to get me. “Hey, baldy! Wha’do you want, eh, baldy? Bald man!! Stop! Wha’da ya looking here for, bald boy?” he cried angrily. This guy was getting on my nerves. I walked a little faster, consoled myself that West 48th Street was only around the next corner and this nightmare would soon be over. But I was also angry. I was, after all, innocent of everything, except having eyes; and in New York there are millions of those. A moment later I realised that this caustic Jew and I had become a spectacle: ‘AVENGING RABBI CHASES GENTILE FROM PIT OF INIQUITY’. —This is what the German tourists have come to New York to see. What business was it of his where I looked, what my eyes saw? And this ‘baldy’ thing—it was very embarrassing. Had my corner not arrived just in time to save me, I would have turned on him and given him the slanging match he so richly deserved. My trump card was 2 Kings 2: 23-24. A Jewish nightmare, I thought, is a Gentile who knows the Old Testament. “And he went up from thence to Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.” I was shocked to look with my ‘inner eye’, in what should have been the “bliss of solitude”, on great reserves of hatred. Visionaries and bigots—the only way to cure them is to pluck their eyes out. This place, I thought, must be Hell in summer.

It is the same everywhere… In Melbourne, at a friendly Fourth of July gathering of expatriate family and lesbian acquaintances, a woman makes the remark, about a young girl who has just left, “She’s a very pretty young woman. And she’ll go far, if she fixes up her teeth.” The discussion bubbles for half an hour and then erupts. What kind of desire, mingled with business-like cruelty, had looked out of those eyes? In the 1930s, in Queensland, a young boy was receiving advice about life from his father. He recalls, nearly sixty years later, “My father told me there is no God. He was a sensible man. He told me I should not waste my time yearning for the Absolute, that I should be careful with money and that I should never feel guilty about sex. But the most important thing of all for a young man, he said, was to be careful not to get a young girl pregnant. If this happened I would be responsible for the baby before that responsibility was wanted, and it would ruin my life.” Between advice and recollection was a remarkable life, guiltless sex and, I assume, no babies. Once or twice, at the moment when stories haltingly begin, he refers to a self-imposed restraint on how his eyes might wander longingly over a beautiful face because, if it were noticed, some danger that is probably only recognition might present itself. Walk along a busy street, anywhere, behind a beautiful girl or boy, and you can see, in the faces of men and women alike who pass you going the opposite way, how their eyes suck light into an abysmal prison of need, with “that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body”. “He stared at the snake, and the snake at him”, just at the moment before his painful transformation, one body sucked into the other, and both of them transformed.[15] It begins with a stare. Young girls are tarted up so effectively before their images are glued to billboards, you’d think they were old enough to consent. We are in Hell, and all this is perfectly natural here.

My own characters stare out at me like they would stare at the snake. Something prevents me from finishing them off. I slide around them, hissing, for months or, sometimes, years. —An unwillingness to change. That, you see, is how Dante finishes Canto XXV of Inferno: with the change and transmutation of creatures in the eighth circle of Hell, where fraudulent thieves are kept. (So, poets are among them, of course.) Dante’s eyes, he says, are “somewhat confused”, and his mind bewildered.

The eyes have always been the most sexual of organs. Legislators, moral guardians and civil libertarians argue more about what we may and may not see than anything else. The freedom to speak is, just as often as not, the freedom to write and, by implication, the freedom to read; and we live with elaborate administrative systems regulating what may be seen and, every now and then, the rules change. But some things never change and cannot be regulated. At the very beginning of (the first) Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, the author was careful to note that in his own mind he represented the King “not with an inquisitive eye of presumption … but with the observant eye of duty and admiration”.[16] The seventeenth century version of “you were always on my mind”, this was, of course, a lie, and it is clear he was attempting to cover up his ‘original sin’. Eyes are not like that. For both God and man, creation, knowledge and everything begins in the eyes: “God saw the light, that it was good … the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes … and the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked …”[17]

So, when Francis Bacon—the painter—said he harboured a sexual desire for his father, was he concealing something else with this giant truth?

The National Gallery of Victoria has an early Bacon painting, Study from the Human Body (1949). Many of Bacon’s paintings depict bodies of this type. The naked male figure moves through a veil or curtain, steps into a dark space behind the painting, from the visible world into the invisible world, from consciousness into the unconscious, from life into death. His right leg and right arm quietly push the veil aside. His head bends forward into the dark. Two falls of curtain divide the painting—left and right—and the figure is in the centre. The man’s calves have been chopped off at the bottom edge of the frame. We cannot see his feet. The left fall of curtain hangs straight. The more central folds of the right fall of curtain slope gently toward the right. Above the man’s head, between the falls of curtain, is solid grey. The whole picture is composed of sandy-yellows, greys and white paint. The back, right shoulder and right arm of the figure are mostly bare, white paint. We cannot see his eyes, which must be looking down to where a little yellow-grey light is slipping along the floor from where we are to where he is going. Unlike many of Francis Bacon’s paintings, the figure is not distorted or deformed. He is a lover leaving the bedroom. A father disappearing into the past. You can stare into the painting a long time without noticing something else, a small detail that may not be very important: there is a safety pin fastened to the right fall of curtain, helping to hold the veil open. If the figure were absent, if no one had decided to pass through here, or if he had already gone, the gap in the veil would remain open, the safety pin holding it there so we could peer into the dark. In a moment he will be gone. The figure in this painting looks like my father. We want to call him back, tell him not to go in there. We would only need to say something, anything. We would only need to say something else. We do not know what this something else is. No one knows.

This story comes to you courtesy of the Great World between Fact and Fiction, Inc., the eighth circle of Hell, pit of thieves and poets; where everything is changed into everything else; where, Dante reports, thank God for small mercies, smoking is not only permitted but absolutely essential; where poor Mr Bacon and I stare at the snake and wait, with terror, to be changed. Later, in the eighth circle, you will meet fraudulent counsellors and all kinds of falsifiers (generally speaking, the post-modernists). —Have a nice day.

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This short story was originally published in Going Down Swinging Number 15, 1995.

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[1] Champ-Fleury, 1529.

[2] Travel Notebooks, 1839.

[3] Tory and Hugo do not always disagree. To Tory, for example, ‘H’ is “the body of a house” and, to Hugo it is “the facade of a building with its two towers”.

[4] The 1960 Bodley Head edition of Ulysses prints it correctly as “They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coal and copper snow”, p. 562.

[5] By Auguste Morel and Stuart Gilbert, in collaboration with James Joyce, 1929.

[6] Guy Davenport discusses the examples in this paragraph at length in his book Every Force Evolves a Form, Secker and Warburg, London, 1989.

[7] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1, Swann’s Way Part One [1913], trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London, 1976, pp. 192-193.

[8]Psalms, 115:5.

[9]1 Corinthians 15:52.

[10]John Drinkwater (1882-1937), the playwright (Abraham Lincoln and Bird in the Hand), biographer and poet.

[11]The Republic, Book I, 353.

[12]Julian Barnes has written much about Emma Bovary’s eyes in Flaubert’s Parrot, Picador, London, 1985, pp. 74–81.

[13]Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Vintage Books, New York, 1975, p. 108.

[14]William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice III, i, 62.

[15]Dante, Inferno Canto XXV.

[16]Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (1605), First Book, ‘To the King’, paragraph 2.

[17]Genesis 1:4, 3:6 and 3:7 (King James Version, 1611).

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