LoSoRhyMo #4: Love and cash registers

There are so many possibilities for my fourth November sonnet. I’m resisting the obvious subject, a farewell to our weekend visitor, even though said visitor went so far as to compose a final couplet for me:

And now our Rita’s gone away
the world has gone all flat and grey.

I’m also resisting Sculpture by the Sea. It got a sonnet last year and this year I’m completely intimidated by Richard Tulloch’s beautiful blogging (that’s two separate links) about it.

Instead, here’s one about what we did last night:

Sonnet 4:
The AGNSW is
an auction house this rainy night
for things owned by the late Ann Lewis.
Six hundred people squeezed in tight
to bid on art from all her walls:
kitchen, bathroom, office, halls,
Riley, Kippel, Napagnardis,
Walpidi, Williams, packed like sardies.
This vast, exuberant collection
reduced to ‘dollars on the phone’,
or ‘absentee with me’ – soul’s flown.
That life of passionate connection
(Helicopter,  Rosalie …)
here has its hammered exequy.

We were empowered to bid on two works on behalf of friends. Both were sold for three or four times our maximum. If there has been a slump in the art market recently, there was no sign of it last night. Perhaps people felt that Ann Lewis’s name added value, or perhaps they were being generous as a way of honouring her memory.

Talking about looking at painting about bombing Guernica

In my 20s, on my first trip overseas, Picasso’s Guernica and I happened to be in New York at the same time. It had a room to itself in the Museum of Modern Art. I wandered in and admired it with pretty much the same undifferentiated awe as I’d brought to pretty much everything else in MOMA. I suppose I was suffering a kind of low-grade colonial Stendhalism (you know, the condition where visitors to Florence grow faint from exposure  to too much beauty). The only other person in the room, a young man about my own age, spoke: ‘I’ve been wanting to see this all my life. Isn’t it amazing?’ I thought he was some kind of weirdo, either that or an art student.

I saw Guernica again in Madrid five years ago, this time in the context of a major Picasso exhibition, and, having read Alice Miller’s essay on Picasso in The Untouched Key, I saw it a little better.

Last night the Art Student and I caught a bus to town to hear a Sydney Ideas talk by Professor Timothy J Clark, art historian from the University of York in England: ‘Looking again at Picasso’s Guernica’. I came away feeling that when it comes to looking at something like this painting, I’m not much better than a day old kitten.

As the fast-talking professor who introduced the speaker said, we mostly hear Picasso spoken of in connection with erotic adventures and high auction prices. CJ Clark’s interest lies elsewhere. Guernica, he said, is a history painting, already an anachronism when it was painted in 1937, but a history painting that refuses to die: it crops up again and again in anti-war demonstrations. A tapestry at the United Nations building was covered with black felt at the insistence of Colin Powell when the US was bombing civilians somewhere. How to account for its enduring power?

His stab at answering this question took focused on Picasso’s relationship to space. Picasso for him, he said, ‘is a history painter’, and the main history he painted was ‘the end of room space’, that is the traditional subject of paintings – a space built for human habitation, with a roof, walls, furniture and perhaps a window looking out onto external space. That subject would seem to be a long way from Franco’s bombing of the historic Basque town of Guernica. Yet, as far as I could understand the argument, CJ Clarke was saying that the struggle to resolve issues of space – both room space and public space – is at the heart of the painting’s success. The painting was completed in five weeks from its inception, and Picasso spent just 26 days working on the canvas. His ‘muse and lover’ (Wikipedia’s description) Dora Maar took a series of photographs of the work in progress, of which Clarke used slides to take us through his argument: we looked at the way classic motifs were introduced and then obscured, at the importance of the sheer scale of the painting, at the role of geometry, etc etc. We didn’t touch on Alice Miller’s key (she locates the painting’s emotional force in its connection to major childhood trauma) and the erotics of the painting, we were told in an aside, is a story yet to be told.  That is to say, a lot was said about the painting, but there is so many more important things that can be said from so many other valid perspectives, so much more to be discovered in this one painting.

Such close looking may be commonplace for art students – for me it was breathtakingly interesting. I couldn’t see how, or even if, the discussion actually went any way towards explaining the painting’s enduring power, but I’ll leave that to people with better equipped eyes to answer.

Clarke’s next book is Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica. I expect it will be a good read.

Sydney Ideas: Gregory Crewsdon

Sydney Ideas is a program of public lectures presented each year by Sydney University. The Art Student* and I have attended sporadically, always to our benefit. Tim Flannery on global warming, Sara Roy on Palestine and Margaret Levi on trade unions and social justice in the US and Australia, for instance, stand out. All of those lectures were at the Seymour Centre, on the edge of the university’s sprawl. This year, the program seems to have migrated across City Road into the grounds of the University itself. On Friday night we went to see US photographer Gregory Crewsdon in the new Law School building. At least it’s new to me, and as I approached it from the west, I was gobsmacked by the way it opens out onto a view of Victoria Park and the city.

This was probably the best attended talk that we’ve been to in the series., possibly because it was co-hosted by the Power Institute and attracted Fine Art students, possibly because Gregory Crewsdon is a celebrity among those students. Certainly, it was a young crowd.

The talk was interesting, with slides of Crewsdon’s work and books on sale in the foyer. His photographs were described in the publicity for the talk as ‘disturbingly beautiful, large-scale, small-town American landscape narratives’. He chatted interestingly about them to an Art Professor and then answered questions. We left  half way through the inevitable question using words like eidos and had an animated conversation over dinner about artists and entitlement.

You see, ‘large-scale, small-town’ images require enormous resources in the making. Crewsdon started out with what he called a ‘renegade’ process. Without any kind of permit, but with the cooperation of the local people, he took images from a high crane of people doing odd things: laying turf in the main street, planting flowers like traffic calmers and so on. He moved on to creating works on sound stages, that had David Lynch or Hitchcock–like neurosis hovering in the frame. And then, he took ‘the work’ outside again, and here’s where questions of entitlement came up for us. To create the image he wants, he might need to have a house on fire – the local fire brigade supplies him with a dozen houses they are willing to burn down for his purposes. He needs snow but not enough has fallen, so he brings in a snow machine. To create a single image, he has a huge crew, including a Director of Photography. The ‘renegade’ work involved engagement with a community. Once he had official status and access to more resources (no one said where the money came from, but he is a professor at Yale), the process looks much more like big business – all the paraphernalia of a movie set. The Art Student and I had been listening earlier in the day to Naomi Klein’s TED talk about advanced capitalism’s reckless plundering of resources. It was hard not to see Crewsdon’s artistic process as part of that recklessness: ‘I want this image to show a certain psychological state of alienation, and I’ll do whatever I need to do to make it.’ Carbon footprint? Social impact? Cost–benefit ratio? Not relevant. I remember Richard Wherrett saying decades ago – yes, I am a Baby Boomer – that theatrical productions like Jesus Christ Superstar were of dubious morality because of the human cost of mounting them: more than one person died building the sets of the Sydney production. As far as I know no one has died for  a Gregory Crewsdon photograph, but houses have been destroyed in a nation where homelessness is a significant problem. But then, how do you calculate the cultural benefit created?

Sadly, the Art Student, for whom these concerns were most vividly in mind, was too cranky to put them as a question rather than an attack.
—–
* She insists that one journalist calling her an artist doesn’t change anything. She’s still a student, and arguably still in kindergarten.

A near immersive art experience

The one formerly known as the art student (TOFKATAS) and I are just back from a short weekend in Canberra – overnight in a wotif mystery hotel, and most of the rest of the time at the National Gallery.

The gallery’s new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rooms are just fabulous, and I hope to spend a lot more time in them. From early Papunya boards to the work of urban Aboriginal artists, the collection is dizzyingly rich, and the presentation is superb. And occasionally it got personal. Tony Albert’s ‘Ash on Me‘, for one tiny example, consists of the words ‘Ash on me’ painted on the wall and, as you might not be able to tell from the photograph at the link,  decorated with actual ashtrays, most of them with images of Aboriginal faces or figures, some with Australian flora or fauna. It’s a powerful statement in anyone’s terms, but I was grabbed by the throat when I saw this on the S:

In  case you can’t see, it’s a kookaburra with the words ‘Innisfail Qld’. It was borne in on me that this was an object from my Innisfail childhood, that ashtrays just like these with cute, noble, comical or otherwise stereotyped Aboriginal figures were an unquestioned part of the world I grew up in. I was implicated.

We also spent time with James Turrell’s ‘skypace’ Within Without, which from the outside looks like an artificial grassy hill with a rock dome rising from the middle of it, approached by a path between expanses of water. Inside, it’s an ochre pyramid with a huge basalt stupa in the middle, surrounded by eerily turquoise water. The space is filled with the sound of water overflowing. You walk across a flat bridge to enter the stupa – around its inside wall is a bench that seats about 20 people. The bench, it turns out, is heated. There’s a large oculus (a word I know from the Pantheon in Rome) in the middle of the roof, and a patch of coloured stone in the middle of the floor. If I hadn’t been introduced to Turrell’s work on Naoshima in Japan a couple of years ago, I might have had a quick look and moved on, because nothing much was happening. But we sat for at least an hour, and watched the oculus as its patch of sky grew deeper and deeper blue until it was pitch black against the whiteness of the inner wall, which we gradually realised has its own light source, and wasn’t somehow trapping light from outside. The sky couldn’t really be as black as it looked to us, I thought, and announced that I was gong to take a stroll around the inside of the triangle. I walked out the door of the stupa and, looking up at the deep blue, starry sky, took a step to the right – up to my calves in now invisible water. Fully shamefaced, I went back to my place on the heated bench, took my shoes and socks off and endured the amiable mockery of what had become a small community of Turrellites.

If you’re in Canberra, I do recommend that you spend time in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Galleries, and that you let the James Turrell space work on you – but take seriously the signage saying that the work of art does not meet Australian Safety Standards for Buildings.

Goodbye Arthur Boothroyd

I posted about Arthur Boothroyd’s hundredth birthday last October. A lifelong friend of Arthur’s who lives in Switzerland just broke the news to me in a comment on that blog entry that Arthur has died. It happened on 10 February, and the funeral was last Tuesday, 15 February. I’m very sorry to have missed it. He was a gracious presence in Annandale, and created a good bit of the visual environment for generations of Australians.

In October I spent some hours in the State Library trying to get hold of some images of his work, and gave up in despair of ever mastering the necessary technology. This time, Google gave me this, from March 1950:

Described like this:

 

Now I have to stop calling her the Art Student

Today’s Inner West Courier has the story and photo.

You heard about it here first

The Inner West Courier has noticed the little man:

Longtime resident David Lawrence tends to the roadside garden regularly and is mystified as to who placed the statue there.

‘It can be put down as a true Annandale mystery,’ Mr Lawrence said. ‘He seems to be collecting something, maybe it’s part of a bigger theme, who knows.

He said locals have largely welcomed the new addition, and would like to know who created the work of public art.

Well, as regular readers of this blog know, it’s an open secret. It’s nice to see it become a mystery.

Later addition: Two things have happened in the hours since I posted that.

The Art Student identified herself as the sculptor on the Inner West Courier site (over my objection that by doing so she was depriving the Inner West readers of the pleasure of a mystery).

We found a copy of the paper and discovered that the front page photo is much more impressive than the one reproduced on the web (both by Danny Aarons). Here’s part of the front page, for those unfortunate enough not to have the Inner West Courier delivered to their door.

After a year …

After a year as an Art Student, the woman who wishes her older son would make cheerful movies has created these, among other things:

It's a little startling to come upon this plaster chap at the front door ...

 

... called 'Locked In', and modelled on a resident in Mollie's dementia ward ...

 

... and a little disturbing to have this Penny-as-Frida on the bedroom wall.

LoSoRhyMo 4: Sculpture by the Sea

Sculpture by the Sea deserves more than 14 lines but it’s LoSoRhyMo (Local Sonnet Rhyming Month) in this house so an ekphrastic sonnet is all you’re going to get from me. You could pop over to Richard Tulloch on the Road for some lovely images, wittily presented (where I’ve just seen a comment expecting a sonnet from me – no pressure of course).

Sonnet 4: Sculpture by the Sea
We walk among these waking dreams
from Bondi’s cliffs to Tamarama –
dreams hewn from wood, stone, bronze, from streams
of plastic, garbage given glamour.
Weird weed things weep; a stringybark
man meets an old horse on some dark
grief-stricken shore; a corrugated
iron pair look up with bated
iron breath; a steel key
rolls turf back like a sardine can;
smooth abstract beauty from Japan.
These dream things teach our eyes and we
look round: two shags pose grace to grace,
the shelf below’s awash with lace.

If you’re interested, the handful of sculptures singled out for mention are:

• Jennifer Orchard’s ‘Weeping Weeds’, a gathering of her ceramic Plantpeople and Plantanimals
• Stephen King’s “Hello Mate” which got my vote for the People’s Choice Award, pics snapped by the Art Student below
• Hannah Kidd’s ‘The Sky Is Falling’
• Mimi Dennett’s ‘The Irresistible Force‘
• Any number of Japanese sculptures, but perhaps especially Keizo Ushio’s ‘Oushei Zokei  2010 Circle’ and Toshio Iezumi’s ‘M.100901′, also snapped by the Art Student, below.

From Alan Rose’s ‘Iguazu’, a fabulous piece of shimmer which he calls a ‘virtual kinetic work’.

Part of Toshio Iezumi’s ‘m.100901′, one of the many smoothly elegant Japanese sculptures.

Dennis Kalous’ totally gorgeous ‘Bondi Venus’, boldly voluptuous boulders

Detail of Stephen King’s ‘Hello Mate’

Detail of Stephen King’s ‘Hello Mate’

Detail of Stephen King’s ‘Hello Mate’

Detail of Kerrie Argent’s brilliant, glamorous and challenging use of recycled plastic bottle tops, ‘Evidence – The Trail Continues’

Sculpture by the Sea  finishes this weekend. Do go!

Happy hundredth birthday, Arthur Boothroyd!

Today is Arthur Boothroyd’s hundredth birthday. Yesterday he came home from hospital, where he had been because of a chest infection. I posted about Arthur a couple of years ago. Here’s part of what I said then:

Yesterday afternoon Penny and I were walking the dog when we met Arthur coming the other way. Arthur lives three doors down from us. He’s in his early 90s and dealing with encroaching dementia and increasing frailty, but regularly walks to the park and back. When you encounter him on one of these walks he will make conversation from a small supply of stock phrases — about the weather, how lovely the park is, and not a lot else. Yesterday, his mode of progress along the footpath made me fear for his safety: he was tottering, as if the only thing that stopped him from falling forward with each step was act of putting out a foot for the next step. We stopped to say hello, and he put both hands on Penny’s shoulders, leaning in close to her. She asked if he needed help to get home, but he pooh-poohed the idea, even while prolonging the contact for the purpose, it seemed to me, of catching his breath and keeping his balance. After a little while, he asked, ‘Do I know you?’
…..
[Arthur] had been, in the 1950s and 60s, the main illustrator for The Australian Women’s Weekly: in those years, the AWW published short stories and historical features, and as often as not it was Arthur who provided the pictorial elements. He also illustrated a number of children’s books then and into the 90s. I googled him — “Arthur Boothroyd” minus everything that brings up a British audiologist of the same name — and discovered only a handful of references: the most common is to the booklet published to mark the opening of the Sydney Opera House, which he illustrated.

It’s not that Arthur is forgotten, or that he is without honour among the confraternity of illustrators. I mentioned him to a children’s illustrator the other day, just his first name, and she said, ‘Do you mean Arthur Boothroyd? I admired his work so much when I was starting out. He was what I wanted to be!’ He is known and loved by long-term Annandale dwellers. More than one person in our block cooks meals for him. But of all the people, both children and adults, whose visual imagining of Australian landscapes and histories were profoundly influenced by his Women’s Weekly work and his children’s books, how many have even heard of him? A select few artists become household names and get headlines when a work is sold for a million dollars. The great majority fade away, and their work too fades. I think the least we can do is let them lean on us in the street to keep their balance and regain their breath.

Happy birthday, Arthur!