‘You are certainly not better off than you were four years ago. But are you better off than you were three years ago? And who was your President in those three years? And are you better off than you were two years ago? And who was your President in those two years?
‘Would you rather George Bush had stayed on as President? Would you rather his disciple Mitt Romney had served those years? For he was a candidate.
‘If not, why the next four years? Why?’
Name:
“once you’ve had black you can’t go back”
I knew you were one of those.
Its okay darls, your secret is safe with me.
Now what would that be Hilde, am I
a) black
b) homosexual
c) a lover of black women
d) none of the above
But whatever it is, you couldn’t help yourself, you had to come back. Once they try allthumbs they always come back. I hope you are at least a woman, otherwise you have to ask yourself some very hard questions and maybe you won’t like the answers luv.
oh darls you’re a big sook.
I can see right through ya ya poor miserable little bugger.
Come give big aunty Broomy a hug xoxox
Cole and Cole only. Hilde is now on my blacklist. (forgive the pun).
Love you’ve made me put on Whitney and I wanna dance with somebody I wanna feel the heat with somebody. Dance with me love I know you know this one.
Dont ya wanna dance say ya wanna dance dont ya wanna dance woohoo
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair —
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise —
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
TS Elliot, The Weeping Girl
Darlin thats beautiful it really is.
Are we cool, because I need a witness to what just happened above. Do you know in the Godfather film where Brando is telling Michael about who the traitor is, whoever comes to you at the funeral with the deal is the traitor, and it turns out to be Tessio. Hilde is Tessio.
Broomy is
Broomy
pet and
we both know that so
dont get
your knickers in a knot work yourself into one big tizz.
xoxoxo
many days and many hours
You’ve
got a
quip
for
everything.
I lovethat
about
you love.
Give me
a
kiss
xoxo
Broomy ain’t Broomy, Broomy is Cole. We know this because of the violatory verbal sexual harrassment and the speech pattern that is unable to cross swords with any human cultural reality, a symptom of a psychological alienation so profound it forms its own anti-matter, gravitron whirlpool that vaporises all content.
You can’t even fake it right, let alone do it right for real. Useless arse.
I have just been listening to Michelle Obama, she is good enough to the precident. She spoke from the heart, she was inspiring,modest, truthful, genuine, she never mentioned Romney, we need more women like Michelle Obama in this world.
She has also been affirmative actioned throughout most of her life. Lookup her own quote on entering college. She admitted that she was part of a quota, thus denying someone who had earned the spot with entry marks.
Are you acting rationally yourself or are you just telling others to do so; are you in other words saying that you are a voice of reason ?
Churchill promised blood, toil, tears and sweat.
No-one said it would be easy; in fact I said it would be hard, given the difficulties caused by the GFC in 2008 and 2009.
But the economy is recovering, and things are getting better. We’ve heard it all before from the Republicans, with their voodoo economics spurred on by a disastrous misreading of the way things work. They’d cut this and cut that and try to balance the budget - by causing a recession - as if that would work!
I need you, the people of America, to come with me on this journey - for make no mistake, I will lead.
In 2008 I said “Yes we can!” and I meant it.
We can do it together, we must do it together, we will do it together!
(copyright Doug Quixote, requests from Barack will be entertained)
What was that?
Yes we cant?
Ok then.
….and according to the news tonight there are 46 million people in America living in poverty.
I suppose that’s a kind of an achievement, a great country indeed.
The USA isn’t a great country, in fact not a country at all - it is every bit the cotton plantation it has always been, with the same owners and slaves.
The USA is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons or jails — a 500% increase over the past thirty years. That equates to 743 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans. No other nation even comes close to these figures. Furthermore, nearly 40 per cent of the US prison population is African-American, despite the fact that blacks make up only 12 per cent of the national population.
Dali, you might be interested in watching this documentary once it becomes available.
The House I Live In
Thanks for the heads-up, Canguro - that looks excellent.
Hi guys, this one’s from a our last conversation. Sorry its been late coming, I’ve been away for a few days.
**** desire to (inter)act
To enter a space, to enter into time, is to begin to transform it.
Second reality, or prime reality?
It’s an excellent question Canguro.
Perhaps this will situate me in your eyes: I - am one of those who believes the falling tree still makes a sound even if none are there to register it.
Polybius, I too am fascinated by narratives, and in the broader sense I feel this reality of ours is nothing more than infinite and complex forces; vectors of energy, competing trajectories of action, a dense weave of an infinite, pullulating, number of narratives.
I am most particularly interested in that which I am, here, and perhaps in that which we all are, here; the Unreliable Narrator or the Implied Author, who fashions and codifies; who builds syntax and legitimises expression, perspective and privilege.
Something like that, anyway.
There is much in your third paragraph that interests me.
Which is why I’m not that interested in trying to figure out who is ‘really’ who.
The conversation should continue but perhaps it needs to continue in a different forum.
And anyway, I’m starting to get bored with Polybius.
Thanks for that Polybius
Yes, you are right. Wrong place. But hey! it’s a nice break from the usual.
Thinking on a name change?
How about “Unreliable Narrator”?
I’m a horribly unreliable narrator, Fedallah.
Aren’t we all Polybius!
And it’s just that kind of honesty that will see us become friends.
Thanks.
The heteronyms are useful.
They point to the fact that we are not one thing, but a collection of parts.
You say this is not the right place but you keep setting up great conversations!!!
Sorry about that.
I’m starting to feel like we’re imposing on Mr Ellis’s hospitality.
We’re having a conversation in the hall, instead of gathering with the others in the kitchen to argue and throw food.
For an interesting take on ‘parts’, check out Gene Gendlin.
Polybius, I have often felt like that, I hope Bob does not mind.
Polybius will be extinguished before long, there’s not much life left in him.
You’re on the way out?
extinguished, you say
erased from our mind
snuffed and smothered
and prepared to pass.
Godspede, Polybius
You’ll be missed.
I don’t know Canguro.
There’s a part of me that’s sick of being Polybius.
There’s another part that wants to postt under my own name, but maybe that’s a really, really bad idea.
If you want to associate idenityt issues and the internet, google ‘korean dog poop girl’.
Canguro, much obliged for the tipoff. I will keep a weather eye open for it.
Dali, we better start learning Chinese, it ought to be the first second language for our kids….
海尔维，你可能是正确的。
Please, Dali, translations….
Copy & paste into google translator and you’ll see.
Nina was one the best of our time. I’ve got all her music.
hmmmm, Eliot or Houston?
It’s a tough one alright.
But looking at the context - this affaires de cœur- I’d go with Houston.
Two hearts coming together in the first awkward slow dance of luuuurve,
It’s a beautiful thing.
And I’d like to wish them every happiness.
Cheers allthumbs and Broomy!!
Start limbering up those digits allthumbs,
You”re gonna need em!!
Piss off, Cole.
You think Broomy is Cole?!?!?
You are such a Fool, becoming more so with each post.
Broomy is to Cole what LiteraryDelusions is to you.
Foolish, foolish girl.
Broomy? Let me introduce you to Reader1 - once a sharp mind; agile, erudite and cutting.
Now? A soft fool tormented by language divorced of meaning.
You two should get on quite well together.
Hilde like Cole, cannot stay away, it’s impossible, even after they say they are gone forever, goodbye, never to return and then like the tide she returns, and then the help turns up as well. Sorry Broomy, Cole and Cole only. Come on JG, you had to shed Hilde, she was an obvious drag on your intellect, imagine spending the day with her at the Institute in Chicago, “what’s all this hoity-toity shit you look at?” Or is Broomy, Fedallah, with the watermelon arse?
You too?!?!?!
You also think Cole is Broomy?!?!
Ask yourself, seriously, if you really believe that.
Because I don’t think you do.
Or is Reader’s absurdity contagious?
Why do you refer to yourself in the third person, enquires Reader1.
How dare you.
I have a REAL Ken Done on my wall.
I am VERY arty.
I don’t know who you think I am darls but I am me and I don’t know who the hell Cole is.
Anyway I have WORK to do unlike SOME around here so I am going but I will be BACK. I am not afraid of peeps like you darls I’ve been called way worse things by others in the past and I don’t give a RATS anymore.
xoxox
You couldn’t stay away if you wanted to, you poor, obsessed, hollow petal. It’s just the nature of the troll, if you can call that nature.
Fedallah is a vassal like sorbet, a little less creepy but obviously she has “feelings”, unless of course she is not a woman and then that is just a whole other kettle of fish.
When the heteronyms start to act independently without the permission of the auteur, then the author’s existence becomes questionable and you start to put more faith in solidity of the likes of Broomy. Perhaps JG is an invention of Broomy’s?
How peculiar!
First you question the identity of Broomy as a construction of another, then you question the auteur’s existence as an invention of Broomy!!
Your usual good sense has deserted you here allthumbs.
Let’s see how you extract yourself - honourably, or with the flesh tearing excruciating absurdity of a Reader1??
I’m leaning one way, but as it stands at the moment - even money!
Even after all the clues; the stylistics, the conversations with Canguro and Polybius, the give-aways and the frank admissions and omissions, you still succumbed to the soft hit.
You’ve surprised me, again.
Timberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
I can’t let it go without raising my morning cup of tea to Broomy.
Broomy!
Congratulations! You have in the space of a handful of posts scrambled many, otherwise resilient and formidable, minds.
Salut!
Helvi? You claim to know the identity of Broomy - declare it now and bring some calm to the skittish.
Do it please.
It’s not: Frank, Bananaman, shad, Chris, M Ryutin, allthumbs,DQ,Polybius, Ginny L, Gerard, Pearl, Annabelle,me…
Now I have to take Milo for a walk.
Yes let us invoke Helvi, I would be interested to hear her thoughts. I will know straightaway if she is right or wrong, immediately,on the spot, within a nano second, thumbs, imagine if I was called “allthumb”.
Why not call on Helvi?
Her voice is as important as yours, and if she can help clarify your perspective; shed some light on your darkness, then why not?
I call on her as witness not because she knows for certain the identity of Broomhilde, but because she knows for certain the identity of J.G.Cole!
Come on allthumbs, stay on page man!!
Perplexing that Harry Haller hasn’t yet appeared.
Pablo’s moist lips, meanwhile, remain pursed in readiness for the show.
Helvi, perhaps let Nina guide you through the maze…
Canguro, i do not take myself terribly seriously, but I’m interested in what makes others tick, so i do pay attention, it’s not me who needs or wants guidance…
Canguro, thanks for Nina, she’s divine.
I would not talk about Simone or Hesse’s Steppenwulf in same sentence or post as this silly troll Hilde. I hope she jumps on her broom and flies away..
How does one get hold of Cole? Is it like a seance, is Helvi the medium, or does one go the top of a mountain and on bended knee offer an incantation? Or does one go the door and knock gently and enquire “Cole, Cole are you there?”. Is Fedallah like Commissioner Gordon with a phone under a glass bell, or does a light have to be shone into the cloudy sky at night?
You are flailing.
Cole sits right there allthumbs, right there (I am pointing to a table approx. 5 metres across and to the left). I’m looking at it right now. It’s a large desk, quite neat. There are folders stacked on one side, near the phone and the vase of what look like wild grasses. There is a coffee cup, white, near the phone and a small stack of books, 4, just bedside the cup. Sitting on the other side are a series of small white metal cubes, 5 of them appliance white and 3 mirrored.
The chair is not standard issue but what looks like a comfy black leather thing, the kind that you can lean back on. I will sit in it later to confirm that. Behind the chair are two bookcases, one larger than the other. They are both full and the smaller one has books laid out in front of the ones baring their spines. The books are both his topic material and a few personal choices – and for Cole that means the same thing. The books are ordered according to scale. I mean there isn’t a jumble of troughs and valleys; they all seem to be roughly the same size. How interesting. I’d never noticed before. To the side of this bookcase are a series of postcards, 9 of them. Again, they are all on topic and they are all gifts. I know that because one of them is from me – a picture of Picasso’s “Ambrose Vollard”
Above the larger bookcase I can see postage cylinders, 6 of them of varying diameters. 2 have the red ends, whilst the other 4 have white.
On the sidewall he has 4 framed prints, all of them without glass. The large window opposite this wall causes crazy reflections that renders the print images invisible.
And they are, in order, right to left; Kline’s Painting No.2, 1954; a Reinhardt black and blue work from his mid 60’s Black Paintings, Pollock’s Totem Lesson II, and Sean Scully’s “Durango”.
Yes allthumbs, Cole sits there most days.
You want to get “hold of Cole?”
I’d say your best bet would be to ask him something.
That seems to work.
Allthumbs, Cole is not Hilde. He has many pseudos, he always writes well, that’s what gives him away…
Hilde tries to be funny but does not succeed, Cole is male Hide’s creator is female.
Helvi, perhaps you are right, but Cole has form. Perhaps it would be quicker if you could provide a list as to who Cole is or was, and we work it from both ends. Fedallah has implicit faith in you that you know this.
Now allthumbs, are you going to break the news to Reader1, or shall I?
Quick, quick, move out of the way!!
Timberrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!
Oh dear,
Thank you Helvi.
Thank you.
Does that narrow it down to R1 and me? I know it’s not me, and I doubt that it’s R1. I suspect someone here is having a good laugh at Helvi’s conclusions. Is it you, Fedallah? A djinn could do that.
F.I.Kendall, the identity of Broomhilde is of no interest to me other than as a curio.
The point I was trying to make to allthumbs and Reader was that despite their comical, preening, and insulting suspicions, it was not Cole.
Helvi was in a position to stand in as a witness to that fact.
Whether you or anyone else here believes Helvi or not does not really matter very much for the very simple and incontrovertible reason that I know her to be correct .
I suspect that the only one laughing here to be Broomhilde.
And it appears she has been given ample reason.
And to your question: no, it is not me.
Let me return the absurdity: F.I.Kendall, is it you?
Fedallah, but Kendall is R1.
Oh, that’s funny.
and I am Peter Pan. Broom is John Birmingham.
Yes - I agree, definitely a Leftie who thinks they are doing a hilarious impression of a “redneck”.
Bananaman, I think you are funnier than Hilde, I also would not be so sure about her being a leftie.
Thanks Helvi, but BH is totally unfunny. Kath and Kim do it better.
No, Fedallah, not me, and I share your lack of interest. But I resent the suggestion that it’s me, with its implication that I am a liar.
A singularly depressing collection of paintings, Fedallah! One’s taste in art says much about one, I think.
Pollock’s later works are quite special as he mastered his art (and fought his demons).
As for me, I have a fascination for Monet’s sequenced works, such as the Waterlilies and the various bridges that feature in his work over many years. As this masterful painter strove to abstract the very essence of his subjects, the journey itself is fascinating.
Van Gogh is another brilliant master who strove with the same or similar subjects over many years; but I just cannot find the same connection as I do with Monet.
“One’s taste in art says much about one”
It sure does DQ.
Expect a 5,000 word response from Cole upon his return this afternoon!!!
Art is a far more interesting subject than ‘who is…well who’ (what was it, 30 posts to scroll past on that ridiculous ’identity’ exercise?). Being one of those to whom the so-called adage “I don’t know much about art but I know what I don’t like” applies in reverse, Impressionism is consuming, post-Impressionism in there along with cubism but the overriding consideration is what I like, no matter what the period and I will always have an open mind which is prepared to be won over. Rembrandt’s St Matthew and the Angel was one that just knocked me over when I first saw it in the Louvre in 2000 and is a favourite screen saver today. THAT is what I personally love about art and what it does to an individual. Funnily enough, whilst I don’t mind Monet at all, it is not he who takes my attention amongst the Impressionists, but Pissarro (I have prints of day and night scenes of Bvde Montmartre because they were similarly stunning) and Cezanne, some Renoir etc. I have seen a lot of Pollock but none (perhaps because of the colour effect comes close to Blue Poles. Chagall is okay, but my stunner (print now on the wall) is Paris Through the Window. So no love affair with Chagall unlike Pissarro for example, but a commitment to looking, always looking. Visits to the famous art galleries are rewarding and whilst I am not in favour of religious paintings (apart from their symbolism as to the devotion of the artist and patron) walking into a deserted church in Venice years ago and seeing large paintings by Titian and Tintoretto hanging on its walls told me a lot about them.
M Ruytin, you say that Chagall is OK, for me he’s one I most cherish..forever.
I was also most taken by Modigliani’s sculptures and paintings.
On my first visit to Paris the biggest disappointment for seeing Mona-Lisa…
Helvi, lack of space (and going off-topic to escape from the identity-obsession) stopped me in my self-indulgence from going into detail. My point about Chagall was how Paris Through the Window got to me when I saw it in 92 in Sydney and whilst a viewing of more Chagall works than through the net (and my son’s prints of his might have me grow to love rather than like his paintings), that wasn’t my point. In any case I will actually travel to see the Impressionists, yet be surprised to see a Remington sculpture ‘live’ as a far better experience than a photo in a book or the net might indicate.
But to each his or her own. I didn’t get to mention Rodin, for example, and whilst seeing the Burghers of Calais in Canberra was the first up-close glimpse of his work at MY leisure to enjoy it, his museum can never be left off my ‘Paris sights’ list. That said, despite the love of most of his works, especially the rightly famous it was, because of its unfamilarity to me, Fugit Amor which was the absolute stunning surprise when I first saw it ‘in the flesh’ so to speak. That is the enjoyment of ‘art’ to me and when I see a coiled piece of rope (Tate Modern) that leaves me laughing to myself, I am happy in my probable non-conformism.
When I saw the Musee d’Orsey exihibition in Canberra, I found the lesser known paintings more interesting…the ones that you see in Art books and prints had almost lost their shine.
Also I’m not into landscape painting much but I have always loved Lloyd Reece’s misty landscapes, and I would not mind having one of Margaret Olley’s colourful still lives…
Precisely my point really. No matter what the ‘experts’ say, they have, in all fields made many errors of judgement as to what the public should like and we, the public have decided that they were/are wrong.
I don’t mind being the only one in step on such things and, as you say, a ‘lesser known’ work might be the one for you.
That’s why I love looking. That moment. The one where you just have to go back and stop. And sort of stare. Even looking back, walking back, to the one you can’t seem to leave. That is what I remember about nearly every gallery I have been into.
Professor Donald Brook used write articles for ABC Unleashed.
A lovely bloke, but it did not matter what anyone had to say about Art, it was never quite right according to the good Professor…
I like what Woody Allen had to say about some paintings: There is so much of the other nothingness…
So much BS has been said and written about what’s Art.
used TO write
MRyutin, have you seen the Large Pollock’s at MoMA?
There are 4 on the 3rd floor that surpass “Blue Poles” in every respect (except perhaps that of personal aesthetic).
Of their kind they have no peer.
But then what ‘kind’ has any peer?
I have been to MOMA on a number of occasions, including when it was at Queens. I have also seen Pollocks at the Metropolitan, Chicago, Phildalphia and elsewhere (eg from the Guggenheim collection when touring Australia in 92 - can’t see much of the permanent collection at the gallery itself). Nothing diminishes Blue Poles (for me, you understand). Certainly they don’t exceed it, (again, for me).
MRyutin,
The coiled piece of rope is an attempt to articulate a “problem” no less pressing or important than light was for Monet or colour for Derain or balance for Mondrian or the “physical” for Rodin.
You might actually know the artist? A ‘problem’ wasnt the stated aim, but who am I to say, I moved on quickly, but cheered nonetheless.
I didn’t like the concrete insides of a room at the Guggenheim either, even though it had previously won the Turner Prize (don’t even ask me about the elephant dung winner).
Blue poles,1973, my soldier father was a mess, myself and 4 siblings were shaking, dad started having to have long weeks and months off work.Mum worked two jobs , day and night shifts. My older sister and I took time off school to work rubbing the import wax off imported new cars to help the family budget. Tea lunch , was often cheap dented cans of pineapple from the golden circle factory or hollow out a potato and put some pickles in it , eat the sugar out of the bowl for lunch or make a sugar sandwich.Many other vets were no better off and we had been to a few premature funerals and visited broken homes.
I think Pollacks work is crap.
There is some fine Australian art around.One realist’s work became magnificent with failing eyesight. It is an old trick and learnt, to squint to release your scene of detail.Some did it by accident. One high priced well known Bribie resident artist has some magnificent work from failing eyesight. It is in focus for him.
I find no joy in Blue Poles, and the price paid. The American Australian friendship club holds it in high esteem.A celebration of leaving the monarchy behind perhaps or institution gloating at plans fruition.
Is it the dangerous fractures evident or squint your eyes and look at the sunset memory through the snow covered aspens of someone’s youth obsessed with Indian territory.
Each to his own I guess.It cost my father his life and his families including his mother.
Aside from Scully, the prints (artists) stand at the precipice first conceived and mapped by those late Monet (1917 and on) you admire. From Monet Pollock took Order and Space under his arms and literally flung himself off the precipice.
From this great and terrible height, and freed from their historical confines, he (re)conceived the emerging landscape and plotted a new map for the coming art. All of the major artists that followed Pollock had that map in their hands. None escaped either its topographies or its boundaries.
“Totem Lesson II” is the first painting of his that attempts to show both the disintegration of the old perspectival vision and signal the wild ricochets to come.
It is a masterpiece.
I saw it once.
J.G.Cole: There comes a point in mosts, where dilettantes cannot follow. You have gone past this point, and I envy (mildly, not viciously) and respect your understanding and knowledge.
I agree with you on this one, JG. I have wandered through the Louvre for nearly three days (I went back to the hotel overnight!), and the Musee D’Orsay for a full day, and Monet-Marmotan until they threw me out at closing time . . . in seventh heaven all the time.
I found that Goya’s paintings had a very special radiance, one that isn’t really apparent in the reproductions. Something very special.
Just off the top of my head I’ll throw in a couple of not for everyone obvious choices,
Francis Bacon
Eduard Vuillard
Maria Lassnig
Alfred Hrdlicka (also his drawings)
Lovis Corinth
Max Beckmann
Willem De Kooning (Women series only)
Otto Dix
Degas (late pastels only)
Kathe Kollwitz
Late still lifes by Cezanne (nothing else)
Kurt Schwitters
Honore Daumier.
Rudolf Levy
Just reading through your list darls and
Aunty Broomy is thinking you’ve forgotten someone.
Come on you dark horse. You know you’ve got a few Robby Mapplethorpe’s in the back shed.
xoxo
Enough of the charade. Fess up. A fat chain-smoking bottle blonde who champions her down to earth ockerina persona is highly unlikely to be familiar with Mapplethorpe’s ouvre, is she?
So, who are you, sweet boobylicious pretender?
See a photograph of the blogosphere here:
http://rudodegoede.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/george-grosz-widmung-an-oskar-panizza/
I think it’s all in the mind Bob.
Of course we’re better off with a Democrat president, and a Labor PM, but rusted on conservatives will always think the opposite.
We’d have been better off with Latham than Howard, Iemma than O’Barrel, Bligh than Campbell.
We can never be better off under Tories and Republicans!
Come on Pleb, you are in danger of straying onto the topic!
There is a lot of behind the scenes of Rudd type policy changes and implementation going on with all this clearing of the deck for the next election. Turnbull smells it and is making his stamp of independent thinking as well. A lot of positioning before the whirlwind which one thinks Julia realizes, she will inevitably reap. As for the American election it is a non race with Obama a shoo in. Media just like to make it seem close for commercial reasons. It is a forgone conclusion as it was last time. Republican candidates of substance have kept clear of this one and will contest next time
Turnbull rattling the tired old globalwarmingclimatechangeextremeweather twaddle is the furthest one could get from “independent thinking”. Like the fRauDD, he is desperately attempting to appear “hip daddio”, and down with the cool kids in Surry Hills.
Shallow is as shallow does.
Whatever Turnbull’s up to, it’s got little to do with appearing to be hip daddio with the Surry Hills set.
And as far as your analysis of the GW phenonemon vis-a-vis his position, well, your words say it all.
So Monckton’s on the money, and Turnbull’s a crass opportunist?
Wingnuts like you are a hoot. Really.
We’re experiencing record-breaking climatic phenomena on an almost monthly basis, as well as incontrovertible evidence of GW effects like glacial and polar ice-cap melt rates, rising water levels in deltas, Mekong, for example, crazy forest phenomena in the Siberian taiga as the permafrost melts and the conifers lose their anchorage, and so on.
No one disputes these events. Yet the pea-brained ostrich community stick their pea-brained heads in the sand and say, ‘No! It’s a con!’. Geez you’re an idiot. Or a dumb troll looking for a rise.
We have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia/The Weather
SOLITUDE (I)
I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
came at me with their lights.
My name, my girls, my job, all
slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,
further and further away. I was nobody:
a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.
The headlights of the oncoming cars
bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick
of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.
The seconds grew and grew - making more room for me -
stretching huge as hospitals.
I almost felt that I could rest
and take breath
before the crash.
Then something caught: some helpful sand
or a well-timed gust of wind. The car
snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.
A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,
spinning away in the darkness.
And it was still. I sat back in my seatbelt
and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow
to see what was left of me.
- Tomas Transtromer
(translated by Robin Robertson)
I don’t think you are going to make it Poly,see you in your next lifetime. Vale Polybius.
See you, allthumbs.
You’re not leaving, are you?
There’s a part of me that wants to J.G. and I’m not sure why.
But I’ve been thinking about it and there’s another part that would miss a lot of the voices here, like allthumbs and Canguro and you and Fedallah and those that come with you, and there are plenty of others.
There’s even a part that would miss Doug Quixote, although we’ve had our clashes in the past.
Not to mention Mr Ellis, as exasperating as his provocations can be.
Let me sense into it…
Well, see I was wrong. It’s not that there’s a part of me that wants to leave - there’s a part that wants to do something differently, but I’m not sure what that is.
(Actually, JG, that’s what’s known as ‘the edge of the implicit’)
And what a wiffly-waffly, bordering on wimpish post this is - feel free not to respond.
I probably need to be picked up like a baby and shaken brutally.
Stay.
OK Hilde, let’s just take a look at you eh. You have a Ken Done on the wall, I quite like Ken Done, I consider him a greater and more genuine artist than Mapplethorpe, is that too big a call? So your disparaging remarks about Done, are there to try for whatever misplaced reason prove your genuine working class credentials, and bait the left who in your mind would automatically pooh-pooh Done.
Like all good artists, Done consciously appealed to the middle class, who could afford the originals and the very early prints, if you have one of those good for you, if you have a tea-towel on the wall on the other hand you should re-examine your investment strategies.
Mapplethorpe on the other hand supposedly represents the very apex of your ideas about the black homo-erotic. Was it Fedallah that made mention that a person’s choice of the art reveals much about themselves, perhaps, therefore the Mapplethorpe reference says more about you than is intended to say about me. Mapplethorpe, and although the human being is front and centre of his work, he manages to reduce his vision of the mensch to an industrial, shiny, soulless object. My choices are, if you examine them and their creator’s output are the complete opposite of Mapplethorpe’s approach, and that of some of the nominated choices by Cole for instance. Mine are anchored in the very human, his are in the conceptual, abstract, Duchampian tradition, although Marcel had a better sense of humour than Pollock or Reinhardt and especially Kline. Cole has wider tastes than those few he described, but he does seem to have a real passion for Pollock, who I consider to be a third rate artist, but a significant signpost to the end of well, a lot of things. Maybe not the artist Pollock, but his supporters, victims of fashion, but only time will tell.
What I find really depressing about you Hilde and your whole approach is the complete disrespect you show for the “working class” the utter disdain you have for working people with your pretence of classifying them as ignorant of the arts, inarticulate of speech, welfare recipient victims such as your imaginary daughter in law. You depict them as racist, selfish, heartless beasts. You as you have proudly noted are a Liberal, yes you certainly are.
She might be Gina Rinehart.
Hi honey,
You throwin another tanty darls? Over a bloody photographer of all things?
Toughen up princess or I’ll give you a smack on the bum.
How about we all cop an Eiffel of YOU darls. Yeah YOU.
I’ve ALREADY told you who I am and if you don’t believe me then it sucks to be you.
I come from WORKING class stock pet. Where do you come from? Where did you grow up?
For all of your heart pumps custard for the poor bullshit you have a lot of time to do things that other WORKING aussies can’t do don’t you love?
How many of our poor can sit on their coight all day and read a blog during working hours like YOU?
Does the family in the housing commission block have time to study art darlin or are they too busy STRESSING and fighting about how they never have enough moolah for anything.
Those are the ones I care about pet. They are the ones who break my heart.
When I got pissed with Bob for ignoring those of us on the POVERTY line you replied that 250,000 Aussies who can’t pay their bills means NOTHING.
When I said our infrastructure is under stress and we need to fix it FIRST you dismissed me and picked on my WEIGHT, my HEALTH and told me I should be SHOT for being a smoker.
When I said I had a nervous breakdown last year you mocked me and said I had Tourette’s.
And you speak to me of disrespect? You speak to me of distain for the poor?
When I left you poked fun at my broke daughter in law who right NOW in this very moment is doin it real tough love. Do you remember that?
None of that mattered to you at all did it? None of it mattered.
I am just a caricature to you and to the other dim witted dills who know who they are.
Big fat chain smokin Broomy who should be carved up in a week and SLICED through the sternum.
YOU are a hypocrite and a mongrel darls and I have NOTHING more to say to you.
For the second time now keep OUT of my face.
And excuse me while I go now and create some ART in the toilet bowl.
After readin you this arvo pet it’ll be a solid PRO HART job.
Does anybody else want to have a crack at this, anybody?
Gotta be quick though her “coight” has to probably get back to work.
Cole, Fedallah, U1966, this would be a good exercise for you, all of you, sorbet could hold your skirts up while you address Hilde. No?
You poor little lamb.
Come give me another kiss
xoxo
You don’t have to come here and it’s not as though you are wanted. You know no one and no one knows you. You have no proof it is the asylum seekers who are the reason for poverty in the country, and not the 250,000 other migrants driving up house prices, or structural power imbalances relating to capitalism eroding community checks and balances that can only be enforced by hard won laws, often as a result of unions and the like. You are happy to both condemn asylum seekers to drowning, or beheading or whatever fate and vote Liberal, thereby willing away any social safety net. Piss off, and go find a more suitable blog. Not our problem.
I see that Hilde has the same opinion about asylum seekers as you, R1.
Why do you do this? That is not my opinion. Why are you so desperate to take me down? Why not just ignore me entirely? I’ve had no desire to engage with you for many a year now, so why do you keep referring to me, bringing me up and talking to me? We have no relationship. We operate in different spheres. It’s a neutrality. It’s a non. It isn’t. Cease. And. Desist.
“You have no proof it is the asylum seekers who are the reason for poverty in the country”
And nor did I offer it or say that lady MUCK.
Go re-read what I said darlin
xoxo
No thanks, I’ll just go with the misunderstanding.
Jesus Christ, I was thinking about evaporating like the morning mist but I guess I just can’t help myself.
“I am just a caricature to you”
Well, if you deliberately present yourself as a caricature, how do you expect to be taken?
Canguro has already forensically exposed the hollowness of your working-class pose, so I won’t bother going over that again.
I was the one talking about chopping you up. I talked that way because I didn’t think you were ‘real’. I still don’t.
Not that it matters in one way - it’s never bothered me with Cole and Fedallah and company. I guess because they have other interests than simply creating ugliness everywhere they go.
Which seems to be your thing.
I still have a collection of single bed Ken Done doona covers, the kids have gone but I can’t get rid of of those lovely, bold and colourful covers.
(maybe I’ll turn them into tablecloths for outdoor tables)
Lucky your kids didn’t want Franz Kline matching bed covers, imagine the nightmares.
One of the greatest artists to ever live IMO was a teacher at Hornsby TAFE in the seventies. He was a self-styled bushie and I know well the place where he lived and presumably did his painting. While his work was pared back, rough and sketchy, though perfectly formed, often just black and white, it can take you right to the place, to the very spot at times I like to imagine, more accurately and evocatively than any photo. He has a little patch of dirt road at the edge of a national park named after him, with its own street sign. He died young many years ago but somehow had an exhibition last year. I also like the early convict art and the Joseph Banks botanical stuff, by those who were seeing something new and diligently and honestly transcribing it. Those convicts must have been rough as guts but their pictures have a delicacy, lightness and sweetness that I don’t think someone living today could just sit down and replicate. The early Australian Masters off the boat and beyond, had to learn to put aside what they knew in order to paint what they saw and not wind up with oak trees in lieu of gums, as is what happened for a long time. Even back then, if your painting looked as though it could have been depicting a back paddock in Surrey then you obviously weren’t doing something right. They didn’t believe Banks in England when he came back with pictures of platypus’ so the bar for radical realism was set early and high. Without the prelaid signs and symbols to distort or rearrange into new configurations, they had to create an imaginative aura to lend to the scene from scratch. John Glover’s paintings are like a world unto themselves. Aboriginal art is also mapping the terrain but across various dimensions. There is no splitting off of art in indigenous cultures, the dream world is referencing a real world and art serves a practical purpose.
So, Lucy Turnbull is endorsing the Liberals in the local elections because Katherine Greiner called Clover Moore “nutty” re her prediliction for bike lanes, and not “witchy”, which would be sexist. The term “witchy” is never used in conversation. That’s a King Lear on the Heath style argument if ever I heard it. Kind of has me doubting Turnbull’s committment to the cause. The Liberals, meanwhile, in the past few days have been going around the Eastern suburbs putting their posters up ON TOP OF CLOVER’S! That’s the calibre.
Joseph Banks was a very good illustrator, the plants in his drawings look as they are in reality. I would not call that art, art is not about copying…
Boy Helvi, that is wrong on so many levels, ask Cole to point them out to you, make a cup of tea first though, you’ll need it.
To me art about seeing things in a new light, in a different way, going a bit further than what IS,about an extra dimension, something done in way it’s not been done before…
Art is many different things to different folks…
A bit hasty there. Canaletto material is good (maybe I just love the very idea of Venice and its history) and, as for it being photographic, depends on what you like. As an added bonus, his skills on the English paintings make them the best thing we have to colour photos of that era
I shall try this approach.
If I wish to see a human face(form) depicted as a shimmer of pearlised paint; delicate and translucent, I will look to Rubens.
If I wish to follow the path from light to dark I will look at Rembrandt.
If I wish to see light then I look to Vermeer and Monet.
If I wish to gaze upon unprecedented horror then I look to Grunewald”s Isenheim Altarpiece.
If I wish draftsmanship then I look at Ingres, and Leonardo.
If I wish to see tonal relations then I will look at Turner.
If I wish to see the first cracks in the modeling of form I study Manet.
If I wish to see the fundamentals of structure loosen and realign, I look at Cezanne
If I wish to see emotion I look at Gericault and Van Gogh.
If I wish to see colour and reality cleave I look at Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck.
If I wish to peek into the subconscious I look at Munch.
If I wish to see realty reconstructed I look at Picasso and Braque.
If I wish to examine movement and material I seek out Boccioni.
If I wish to sit on a tightrope I look Mondrian.
If I wish to be present at the death of all of these questions, and perversely enough, sit in as midwife to the birth of a whole new set of inquiries then I look to Duchamp and Malevich.
If I wish to locate their most troubled and profound offspring then I look at Pollock.
No one has called into question the fundamentals of art more so that Pollock. There is no formal question, asked by a thousand artists over a thousand years, on space, order, chance, colour, material, that escape the orbit of the canvases painted between 1947 and 1951.
None.
There is no formal question asked after Pollock that is not borne of those canvases.
None.
And again, no artist that came after Pollock; neither Johns, Rauschenberg, Stella, Kaprow, the minimalists, pop, and the artists that they in turn influenced that were able to operate in a space that had not considered Pollock.
To state that he is a third rate artist is demonstrates an almost obscene ignorance.
I am here allthumbs.
What do you want, exactly?
Is it to apologise for your absurdity yesterday?
Strange how you disappeared after Helvi’s revelation. Was it not to your liking, or were simply considering the nature of your extraction from such an colossal misjudgement?
Judging from your posts today I can see that you still labour under that intellect sapping weight.
Just as a quick aside, you’ve tried to bait me now on at least 6 occasions on this single thread.
Is there something I can do for you?
Ask it directly.
I am not Felicity Kendall.
Please take Hilde down, but don’t dumb it down for her, give her the full show, don’t skimp. Even if you agree with her JG, tell her how she should best go about getting a better result for her position, include something on Pollock. Oh yeah, “please”.
It was Helvi’s considered position, I see no proof offered, inklings perhaps, feelings and the like,proof is something else. But that is all yesterday’s, Hilde is where it is at NOW, as she would say.
allthumbs, why would i give you of anyone proof here here about who Hilde. I’m not the only observant person on these blogs. If it’s not Hilde then it’s some other pseudo by this person creating ugliness and discord where ever she appears.
forgive the spelling, got to go
J.G. Cole, can you comment about the distinction between subjective and objective art, as you understand it?
I’m reminded of something I read many years ago, and which has stayed with me since. Here’s the quote, excerpted from P.D. Ouspensky’s ‘In Search of the Miraculous’.
“I do not call art all that you call art, which is simply mechanical reproduction, imitation of nature or other people, or simply fantasy, or an attempt to be original. Real art is something quite different.
Among works of art, especially works of ancient art, you meet with many things you cannot explain and which contain a certain something you do not feel in modern works of art. But as you do not realize what this difference is you very soon forget it and continue to take everything as one kind of art. And yet there is an enormous difference between your art and the art of which I speak. In your art everything is subjective — the artist’s perception of this or that sensation; the forms in which he tries to express his sensations and the perception of these forms by other people.
In one and the same phenomenon one artist may feel one thing and another artist quite a different thing. One and the same sunset may evoke a feeling of joy in one artist and sadness in another. Two artists may strive to express exactly the same perceptions by entirely different methods, in different forms; or entirely different perceptions in the same forms—according to how they were taught, or contrary to it. And the spectators, listeners, or readers will perceive, not what the artist wished to convey or what he felt, but what the forms in which he expresses his sensations will make them feel by association. Everything is subjective and everything is accidental, that is to say, based on accidental associations — the impression of the artist and his ‘creation’”, “the perceptions of the spectators, listeners, or readers.
“In real art there is nothing accidental. It is mathematics. Everything in it can be calculated, everything can be known beforehand. The artist knows and understands what he wants to convey and his work cannot produce one impression on one man and another impression on another, presuming, of course, people on one level. It will always, and with mathematical certainty, produce one and the same impression.
“At the same time the same work of art will produce different impressions on people of different levels. And people of lower levels will never receive from it what people of higher levels receive. This is real, objective art. Imagine some scientific work — a book on astronomy or chemistry. It is impossible that one person should understand it in one way and another in another way. Everyone who is sufficiently prepared and who is able to read this book will understand what the author means, and precisely as the author means it. An objective work of art is just such a book, except that it affects the emotional and not only the intellectual side of man.”
Your response sir, if you care to reply?
“In real art there is nothing accidental. It is mathematics. Everything in it can be calculated, everything can be known beforehand.”
Ouspensky obviously never picked up a brush and worked in oils.
…and where is the creativity in this?
Sounds more like engineering…
The devil’s always in the detail. They aren’t Ouspenky’s words.
And I suspect you haven’t understood the distinction that’s being drawn here.
The same was said of music; that there was once music written and expressly designed to evoke certain emotional experiences, and all those in the presence of that music would experience the same feelings.
You make the mistake of judging from your own perspective, and perhaps fail to appreciate how much modern man has fallen from where he once was, in a certain sense. Our ancients were much wiser than the modern equivalents.
Ouspensky the poor son of a bitch died just as Pollock was hitting his stride.
I know of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, but there are things I have used and dispensed with, I am not consistent, I have admitted that. You guys can deal with heteronyms but not with an inconsistent human being, especially when dealing in the realms of art. I “fail to appreciate how much modern man has fallen”, really? that is up there with “there was no conspiracy to kill JFK”.
Cole has laid down the law and canonized Pollock, of what more should we speak?
Canguro, you quote a complex passage.
I shall do my best to answer it simply (The Polybius/Helvi Dictum still reverberating).
And personally.
I have an argument for almost every line
, and they all centre on this essential proposition (in his final paragraph),
“and precisely as the author means it”
This issue means a great deal to me….and so before I launch into a 10,000 word rant and disperse every one of Bob’s bloggers, let me ask you in return:
What do you make of such a statement?
Do you believe such a “position”; that of the author’s, possible?
What would such a “position” look like?
What would be the conditions of possibility open to such an author?
Is language, and its “meanings”, sufficient for such a task?
What is the role of the recipient (reader or viewer or audience)?
This is me doing my best to refrain from swallowing whole this wonderful question
I look forward to reading your thoughts.
4pm Friday afternoon.
I’m off to enjoy a beer.
Or two!
The best way to look at the question is to listen to instrumental music. Music is the most abstract art there is; if we are told that it is about X then we may well agree, but in what way can a collection of musical notes sounded on an instrument “mean” anything?
It is the ultimate in subjectivity. It matters not what the composer intended, strive though he may.
Beautifully said JG Cole. I can go with that ,but I would also say that even though good draftsmanship is to be admired there always has to something more than that…and in cases of Leonardo and Ingres there was more…
Thanks for yesterday Helvi.
I appreciated it very much.
Beautifully set out, JG. With all of those assessments I will joyfully agree.
The reservation I have is that such an analysis risks pigeonholing a great artist or three. They are all more than just the pinnacle for which they are justly famed.
But an excellent analysis even so.
Thank you DQ.
Who would have thought we’d ever arrive at where we are right now?
Could you do something for me please?
Tell allthumbs that I am not Broomhilde.
I enjoy his posts and company and would hate to argue with him over this absurdity.
Ta.
It is the nature of the beast : it is often more attractive to argue over our differences than to celebrate our agreements. I suppose we are all argumentative creatures, and what is the fun in agreeing with everyone?
For the present, let’s enjoy the art and the beer - Coopers for me.
I gotta disagree with you Doug.
Good to see you put in a word for the best beers in town, Doug. Your revelation sparked a brief frisson of surprise; shocked I was to see that we have more in common than simply posting on the same pages.
JG, I actually got a little hot under the collar when I saw Rubens’ woman in fur, it was one of his wives, Helene or Suzanne, that hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the prints and postcards do not do it justice.
Boccioni is a good call.
In regards to Pollock, I think I show a wilful obsceneness for St.Jackson, as opposed to an obsecene ignorance, it is my considered judgement, the fact that we disagree, overlook it, the world will not dissolve. His reputation is not so frail that it will not weather and survive my view of him.
I never really stopped to “look” at it….let alone linger on its absurd premise. So for you to recommend that I “overlook it” speaks more to your conceit and your pique than to my imagined attentions.
Leave it allthumbs. You are the architect of this Broomhilde calamity; it is none of my concern nor my doing. Even your co-conspirator, Reader, has refused to follow you down this maligned path.
Absurdity has no confederates.
Eschew this nonsense and come back to the fold…lend instead your well demonstrated wit, charm and intelligence to securing Polybius’ return.
Leave it.
I don’t refuse to follow allthumb’s path, that’s not true at all. So long as he’s not off on one of his tangential anti-conspiracy theory idlings, of course, he loses me a bit there.
But I was following you, in a nice way, and I refrained you will note, from continually asking you if we were there yet! Do you like Chopin’s Nocturnes? I need to speak to Doug.
I haven’t mentioned it to Polybius, and this will sound harsh, but before he thinks of using his real name, which he might need later, it is best for him to go, after all what is he doing but just changing cars, especially since his is stuck in the snow. He’ll be around, and apart from anything he called me “a shit” and impugned my Mother’s reputation and perhaps that of my Father?
It was Transtromers car stuck in the snow - of which I am unworthy to polish the hubcaps.
I will be back, but not under my own name, and if I change from Polybius, which I may well not, then you can be sure that you will know that it’s me.
The storm has passed although the leaves are still shaking.
I had a kind of crisis of faith - in what, I don’t know, since I have been happily godless since I opened my eyes in the womb.
I do wonder about the possibilities of establishing another forum though - I feel the conversation has overflowed the banks of Mr Ellis’s blog.
He’s probably regarding the goings on with a baleful eye, and wondering why people are talking of other things when, by all the laws of hospitality established since the Saxons, we should be lining up to help him saw Gina Rinehart’s head off.
Now allthumbs, as to your claims, or should I say vile slanders, one cannot impugn a reputation that long ago was blown violently out of Lucifer’s poop-shoot.
And I did not call you a shit, your own dear old mother did. To spare your feelings I omitted the other terms your mother rasped out - rogue, masher, knut, bashi-bazouk and scandalous scallywag - as she slammed her tankard on the table and beat time to the horn-pipe with her wooden leg.
and now my sooking is done at last
“The same was said of music; that there was once music written and expressly designed to evoke certain emotional experiences, and all those in the presence of that music would experience the same feelings”
Canguro, I will assume this refers to liturgical music, or ceremonial music, religious music. So the music was composed to evoke the same feelings in all that listened to it, optimally at the same time in the same space, I am assuming this was music performed before recording was invented. What about the effect on those in the congregation for instance, that fell asleep? Would the same music performed in a Russian Orthodox Church have the same effect if performed in front of an Amazonian tribe of Indians? Would the music be just as efficacious if it was performed for the community one member at a time, if they all gathered afterwards would there have been a consensus of opinion, a gentle nod of the head and a wink of the eye to indicate they were all on the same page? Did the Composer have to remove himself from the equation in order to create the music for a specific purpose and therefore overcome his own judgement on rhythm, pace, melody, harmony etc and subject himself to the end purpose. Was it therefore craft writing as opposed to art? How did they educate the audience in the meaning of the music, that for instance loud drumming meant danger as opposed to joyous triumph, how was they conveyed before the performance, so that everyone had a road map and didn’t end up getting the wrong message?
That must be some coight you have Broome. Maybe you could send us an illustration. Maybe in the Cubism style would be acceptable
Got to love the elastic meaning of Australian english, eh? In this example, whether it’s coit, quoit, or coight, what exactly is being referred to?
LOL, one blog fellow bloggers are teaching me pronunciation of NZ English, here I’m learning swear-words and meaning of words like ‘coight’….
on one
To MRyutin, in response to: September 7, 2012 at 4:22 pm
Let me clarify my position lest it be calcified for me, erroneously; I am no apologist for the overwhelming bulk of art in the world today. I am ruthless in my critique, and my professional life, and to some extent my personal life, is littered with enemies borne of those critiques.
I also seek to employ that same ruthlessness to those who wish to debase the legitimate questions from a legitimate art. Ignorance and presumption are as dangerous as tedious mediocrity and dull pluralism.
Let me make that clear.
………………..
I have a quick story on the making of “Blue Poles” if you would like to hear it.
Or perhaps you already know it…..the one involving Tony Smith?
…………………
“Blue Poles” though is different to the other ‘47 to ‘51 works.
And it is different in this respect - the poles themselves.
In that single act Pollock reintroduces, for the first time in 5 years - subject; depth, illusion, figure, ground, hierarchy.
It was an act of supreme significance.
It would be akin to Mondrian painting a face in the middle of Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921.
It is, I believe, the first clear sign of his imaginative exhaustion; an exhaustion that would soon develop into the neurotic collapse that haunted him in his few remaining years.
But that’s another story.
Without the poles I would not rate it highly at all.
It is a messy work…..the signs of overprinting and correction are obvious and clumsy.
“Lavender Mist” , “Autumn Rhythm”, “Lucifer”, “Full Fathom Five”, “Number 1, 1948”, “Alchemy”, “Cathedral”, are far superior.
To my eye,…and to my mind.
…………………
Let me ask you: what is your interest in art? It is clear from your gallery visits you are looking at/for something.
What is it?
What? To be moved by art. Once experienced, an easy and no-side effects bit of self-indulgence.
I look at art on a number of levels. Firstly, wanting to see ‘great’ works of art I have seen or read about – with an interest of looking at things which have been indicated about them, whether it be technique or intent. Secondly, now having seen many of them (these ‘classics’ I particularly wanted to see), something I picked up along the way, dating back to 1985 when I first saw a Turner exhibition in Sydney: how visually striking were many of these paintings to my eye. Thirdly, I was (and am still) fascinated by the technique the artist uses to get those visual and emotional effects . In my travels after multiple family commitments were lessened the ‘stunner’ effect of supposedly lesser works (you known the ones, those which the writers and academics tell me are inferior, the ones that might not make their List of the ‘Important works’ of this or that artist) and I happily continue on looking. I must say it has been a most enjoyable and personally rewarding time - and not finished yet. There will always be another Matthew and the Angel somewhere , plus these galleries have paintings I still want to see, even as some are seen again and again. The Haywain, multiple Boulevard Montmatre, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are worth review.
As an addition, this is not a life’s work, or an obsession, but how can you go to various cities for any reason and not get to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (the setting just like being at home at the NSW Art Gallery and how lucky were we when it was the ONE day where entry was free!) or the Chicago Art Institute? And when in London how could you resist the free entry and not just keep going back to the National Gallery while you still can? I can walk in to see the Sydney works whenever I want to luckily.
M Ruytin, did you see the Australian landscapes by William Robinson at Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney few years ago.
I found them quite breath-taking, most impressive, figurative and for a loss of a better word, the style is almost “magic realism” like, hauntingly beautiful…
I remembered the paintings, but it took me a while to recall his name.
I am afraid I didn’t Helvi. In fact I have never seen any of his paintings that I am aware of. Something to look out for.
This is the guy I was talking about, Peter Upward. Legitimacy, hierarchy, neurotic collapse and the poles themselves - the man’s got the full art package. Sorry Robert Hughes, Art Package.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/public-works-peter-upward/story-e6frg8n6-1226075269988
http://pollocksthebollocks.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/jackson-pollock-blue-poles-number-11-1952/
A common web analysis of Blue Poles and Pollack. Just out of interest.
The mind of the mad painters.
Fragile,conflictions in a changing world. Buckets of poisonous chemicals and oxides freely available for paint ,canvas and thinners from turps, toulene, xylene. Later is was isocyanates.
The wet fumes of turps, in seconds starts to fill the brain and lungs with paint oil and chemical as well and it’s own physical and mental reaction. Years of it is, well,Pollacky , Upwardy etc. A long list.
“I settled into it’s constraints, my time,my life and habit, it’s trip, the addictions and trying to function,it owned me. It was an easy step to drugs but I kindly became known as eccentric,a mad hatter and curiousity.To stand in a room of open paint and thinners , leaning over work for hours, days, months, years, is no small feat.
My fate was fame and it distracted my pains and fragilities and I joined the list of madness,illnessness and tumours.” the unknown artist.
Peter Upward died of a heart attack on the completion of a sandstone house which he’d built entirely himself on the top of a hill in the middle of the bush. It was for his new daughter, till then he’d been living in a little wooden shack with a bathtub in the middle and a grape vine and a stream running past, now dry, which is where he’d proudly brought his new wife. I had family connections very close by and came into possession of his work that way. I had no idea he hung out with John Olsen and got around in helicopters. His work is so simple but he just nails it. A zigzag is bracken, a blob is a sublimely proportioned stretch of shadow.
I have vaguely heard of him. I googled up some of his work. Most was very simple figures that came up on the net. His figurines were very good and you could see the caligraphy strokes and styling, girl with head down, but I couldn’t get into a lot of the simplistic pieces that mainly showed up looking like Chinese writing scribbles. Perhaps seeing his best together may have the impact.The east wasn’t kosher to many not so long back. His time may yet come.
I draw the Chinese and Japanese style and paint it and it has merged in aspects into my own work of native plants, birds and animals. A quarter of my great grand fathering is Chinese so that helps. I love the eastern art, Indonesian. There is some fine modern Bali work on the web too. Stylised. Their is some great art coming out now in the East too because of advertising and logo’s.
Upward should have gone to the East,not London. His love and captivation would’ve flowered. He was ahead of his time really exploring into that style.
Girls to bear or love that life would be few and far between but it was other days. I’ve known them, couldn’t find them now. Probably turned from hippy to cranky suburban grandmother by now.
This is the thing, I have no idea what his usual style is, just the ones I’ve seen which may all have been local landscapes because of the significance to the people they were being given to. He could be a Cubist in his other life for all I know. I was interested to read of the Japanese connection as well, Van Gogh was the same. The Japanese have a whole philosophy around the depicting of nature and they could be onto something. Tweak an average nature photo a bit with some basic software and time and again it comes out looking like a two dimensional Japanese design.
His wife was lovely, the two of them were living the absolute hippie pinnacle and they were plainly loving it. Early eighties, just before the fall. Though he wasn’t really a hippy, he drove an Isuzu ute and was very hardy. She was married for a while to an accountant who my brother late one night while doing circle work discovered, had a grouchy, though timid in the face of unexpected sunny diplomacy, my brother’s time honoured tactic, side to him. But she remained nice, she was good. No doubt still is.
Hippy’s in the eighties?
I mixed with those of the late 60/s -70′s.
I think of later as alternative, me with my Grass Roots mag’s going back to number one.
It was that brief period when it became mainstream and there were all those bearded environmental reporters working for the ABC. The last long days of an Indian seventies when the right wing were still just brewing their oncoming concerted backlash onslaught and it was a new thing, a novelty idea, for Duran Duran to display ostentatious wealth and ponce around on yachts in white suits. Before that became the norm.
I remember it well. I was still in holey Levi’s, bike boots and Bali batik t/shirts.
The saviours rise.The dole cues and abuse.I had done the hippy trail to Cairns/Daintree in a Red ex PMG Kombi - follow the oil trail-and spent some time with the naked forest people. Quite a few bought raincoats, jumpers and Banjo’s and moved to Tassie timbers as the North fell. Will run into some down there in the future hopefully.
I have the same Grass Roots collection, Jim, tho’ I haven’t bought it for some time. Meg, Sunshine and the chooks? Loved it.
Mine have gone astray from constant shifting sadly.May yet turn up in a box under a relatives house.I’ve had a lot of fun with alternative energies and crafts kindled by those books.
Bob and Obama are quietly crying, despairing that this thread has gone so off-topic.
Yes. it’s a shame that it’s been taken over in the most part by some failed medical experiments.
A word for Obama. same old .
More work, more promise, things will change, just another 4 years . I’ve already lived through the tricks of the other mob,Mr Romney. With 50 yrs of experience of them it’s either take up arms or at least let them know you know the truth of a President.
Obama is the lessor evil.
Reader is a true enigma.More down to earth and unassuming in his intelligent and content style. A lesson the idiots on this blog should take note
…it’s she, not he.
Love you Reader
Love your cheekbones Helvi
chad, I love ALL of you, have you got brown eyes?
Blue
You are very pretty darls, though I think the do is getting a bit old fashioned now. How about a bit of length and some blonde highlights love xoxo
You have that East European look Helvi. What is your heritage. Are you related to Jana Wendt. Do you have green eyes.
Romney couldn’t win in a fit Bob. Get real. Stop worrying. Have a nice McLaren red and go to bed