Evolution...huh!!!! Stencil work near Melbourne University (no coincidence...).
The Assassin
Just saw the movie The Assassin—haunting, beautiful, visually stunning—a quiet heartbreak permeates the film, never heavy, but powerful. A film about love, honour, dignity and the choice to follow one's own sense of what's right. To find one's own path.
Grimes/Aristophanes: Scream
For anyone with the urge to rip free a horror-flick worthy howl—Grimes and Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes' song Scream, from Grimes' soon to be released album Art Angels is kinda perfect. Been listening to it quite a bit lately—yep—says a lot for my current headspace!
PJ Harvey: songwriter & poet
Poetry and song are entwined.
Historically the Greeks had two types of poetry: epic poetry such as Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, and lyric poetry which was a song accompanied by a lyre.
Ballads have been sung since the Middle Ages and are simply ‘story songs’, passed on from singer to singer. The ‘ballad stanza’ is a common verse structure (the quatrain or four-lines of alternating rhyme) present in both poetry and song lyrics. Interestingly, many of Emily Dickinson’s poems are in ballad form, although her influence is said to be that of the hymn with its similar meter.
Lyrics and music are bound by rhythm—beats. Rhythm and movement go hand in hand, hence the notion of “measure” or “meter” in poetry.
Some argue for a distinction between songs and poetry, with an emphasis on poetry being printed and self-contained as an internal dialogue, while songs require voice and performance to be fully realised. Bob Dylan is often called a poet, but he’s remarked: “Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem.” Yet it can be said that the roots, structure and purpose of both forms seem inextricably connected.
Leonard Cohen wrote poems before writing songs, navigating the genres of fiction, songwriting and poetry throughout his career, much like Patti Smith who doesn’t see much difference between songs and poetry. Many songwriters quote poets as inspiration, and many have written poetry distinct from their songwriting.
So, it’s not much of a surprise that the wonderful songwriter PJ Harvey also writes poetry.
Harvey is about to release her first book of poetry, The Hollow and the Hand. She wanted to explore the people and places of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, so between 2011 and 2014, she went on a series of journeys collaborating with friend, Seamus Murphy, who took photographs to accompany her poems. Previously the two collaborated on Harvey’s album Let England Shake, with Murphy taking photographs and producing 12 short films.
Here is PJ Harvey’s poem The Hand:
Baby Guerrilla
Image: street art by Baby Guerrilla, Melbourne
Another of my favourite Melbourne street artists: Baby Guerrilla. Her floating, flying people are gorgeous to come across unexpectedly.
On Baby Guerrilla's website she describes her street art saying:
'“My mission is to liberate art from just the gallery or the picture frame and make it accessible to everyone. I love the idea of setting art free, setting our souls free to dream and imagine and go floating across a wall…I see drawing on walls as a beautiful challenge…the challenge of space and constraints. Defying gravity, dancing with gravity. The love affair continues…”
Check out her work here: http://babyguerrilla.com/street-art
Salvador Dali & Alice Cooper
Artwork: Salvador Dali, Hologram: First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain (1973)
A pretty wild, and yet strangely cool pair—Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper.
In a recent interview in The Guardian, Alice Cooper tells this amusing tale when asked what was it like working with Dali, who created the bizarre (and appropriate), Hologram: First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain (1973):
“He’d say one word in Portuguese, one word in French, then one word in Italian, as well as some weird surrealistic language. We worked with him for three days then afterwards, at a press conference, a journalist asked me the same thing. I told them: ‘It was great, but I didn’t understand a word he said!’ Then Dalí goes: ‘Perfect! Confusion is the greatest form of communication!” And I look at him and I go: ‘You speak ENGLISH? After three days of BABBLING?’”
Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper—like two worlds colliding!
All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun
It's a beautiful spring day, so here's something sublime.
This song by Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins, Massive Attack) has been kicking around the internet for awhile. First time I heard it—loved it! Fraser isn't too happy that it's out there because it's not finished, but despite that, it's something special.
Two of the most gorgeous voices imaginable.
Light the Dark
Image from one of this week's 'Light the Dark' candlelight vigils held around Australia, protesting Australian immigration policies and showing support for refugees worldwide:
We can always do more. Check out the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre for campaigns, services and how to be involved: http://www.asrc.org.au
be free
Image: Street art by be free, Melbourne
I love finding work done by Melbourne street artist, be free (@befreeart). I smile every time I see them.
St Vincent & noisemakers
Image: St Vincent at Roots Picnic, Philadelphia, photo by Colin Kerrigan
Musician St Vincent (Annie Clark) made a great comment in Mojo magazine (August 2015) about playing her guitar:
“I feel kind of irreverent about the function of guitar in song. I've never been that interested in just chords that strum. I'd rather it be a beast or a monster or a ballerina, and have things feel kinda bubbling and lava lamp-style rather than static. It's nice to just look at things as noisemakers.”
The Bird King
Recently, I was flipping through Shaun Tan's book of sketches The Bird King looking for inspiration. Namely, a character for a story I've been writing has this thing about illustrating and he ends up pasting his drawings on street walls. Also, I was looking at Tan's sketches because I simply love his work.
Inspiration is a tricky thing, and Tan makes some great comments about it in his introduction—about where he gets ideas for his work. Then there is the challenge of facing a blank piece of paper with no idea what to do. To get past the horrid “block”, Tan just starts drawing. And the outcome may or may not become part of a book, animation or finished artwork.
It's similar to writing. Sometimes the best thing to do is just write. It's the Nike philosophy of “just do it”. Write without any sense of the end result. It's all about process and flexing those muscles—imagination, the act of creating and then actually getting something finished!
The first Shaun Tan book I came across was The Red Tree. I was immediately entranced by the images and the simplicity of the words. Tan captured the essence of the girl's loneliness; her sadness and sense of not fitting in. And the wonderful unfurling of hope! Since then I've avidly engaged with his other work, but I keep returning to The Bird King.
Tan speaks of the unselfconscious nature of these small sketches, how perhaps they capture a spontaneity that more polished work lacks. I wholeheartedly agree with this, yet I think I keep coming back to this book because it gives me some insight into his creative process. And when you're looking for inspiration, seeing someone else's process can be exactly what's needed.
At the end of the introduction, Tan comments on these sketches as evidence of the creative process by saying:
“There are few better expressions of the impulse to draw, an instinct that lingers from childhood, with all its absurdist daydreaming and playful seriousness.”
And looking at Tan's work is akin to letting the imagination out to play.
leaf graffiti
Leaf graffiti, Collins St...
Just Kids
I've just finished reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Again. And like the first time, I devoured it.
It’s not simply that I’m a fan of both Patti Smith’s and Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. That’s why I bought it in the first place. What’s so incredible about it, is how it delves into their relationship and reveals how entwined their lives became, as lovers, friends, artists and each other’s muse; how influential they were in their support, respect and devotion to each other’s work.
It’s a truly beautiful memoir.
I was also riveted by the particular time in New York that Patti speaks about. 1970s NY was a hub for artists, musicians, writers and performers. And the fact that Patti and Robert lived in the Chelsea Hotel, where the famous, infamous and anonymous passed through, partied, and cohabited.
It’s not often you get such an intimate insight into an artist’s life or way of working. I was especially fascinated with Patti's insight into Robert's art for this reason. Having studied Mapplethorpe’s work at uni and seen his photographs in various galleries, after reading Just Kids I felt like previously I’d been looking and absorbing his work through a telescope—always at a distance, despite the apparatus giving some focus. I’d studied Mapplethorpe’s work through “issues” such as sexuality, pornography, censorship and the photographic medium. Suddenly, I had this intimate, multi-dimensional view of Robert Mapplethorpe the individual through Patti Smith’s eyes. And it spoke more about what influenced, shaped and drove him as an artist to create his work than anything I’d read before.
When Robert passed away, Patti wrote a smaller work called, The Coral Sea. The poetic lyricism of this work reads like an exquisite elegy. At the beginning of this slim volume, she directs her words to the reader:
“When he passed away I could not weep so I wrote. Then I took the pages and set them away. Here are those pages, my farewell to my friend, my adventure, my unfettered joy.”
If anyone wants to appreciate Robert Mapplethorpe's and Patti Smith's work, I’d say go and find the real thing to look at and listen to, and read “Just Kids”. It’s a pretty good place to start.
Sean Yoro/Hula
A love of water and painting. O'ahu born Sean Yoro (aka Hula)—surfer, artist and tattooist— takes his work to the “street”, painting on a paddle board, with hypnotic results.
Check out his work on IG—@the_hula.
Box of Wonders
Artwork: Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Medici Princess), c.1948, Private Collection, New York
Joseph Cornell’s boxes seem to set writers' imaginations on fire.
Ever since I saw Cornell’s Untitled (Medici Princess) (c.1948), I’ve been similarly intrigued. From his process of finding and filing objects, through to the assemblage of the final art object, his art is wondrous.
That idea of wonder is most often associated with children. It’s no coincidence that Cornell used to loan these box/artworks to neighbouring kids, and that his last museum exhibition in 1972 was curated especially for children. Cornell would often “gift” his boxes, which indicates how he considered these boxes as a part of life, not necessarily objects to be sequestered away in museums and in collectors’ homes.
In many ways, the seemingly random connections between objects in his assemblages (or perhaps it is only Cornell who could truly divine the connection between items in his boxes), inspires a sense of wanting to know; of wanting to figure out the relationships, or simply, to allow the imagination to drift, fathom, meander and leap to find meaning in Cornell’s work.
They are magical in that way of the ordinary and the strange weaving into our lives to be transformed by how we choose to experience them.
In an earlier post on Louise Bourgeois I spoke of how I began writing Art Stories. It was the art historian, Paul Barolsky, who first provided a context for my own art writing with his essay on the imaginative literary tradition of writing about art, ‘Writing Art History’ (Art Bulletin, September 1996, vol. LXXVIII, no.3). In this essay Barolsky also discussed a marvellous book on Cornell’s boxes, the poet Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy.
Simic combines original poems, stories, observations, as well as journal entries and notes made by Cornell, creating a body of work similar to Cornell’s; a mirroring of the creative process as a way to enter into and re-imagine Cornell’s art. This was one of those books that was a revelation for me, not only in the deep understanding Simic had of Cornell’s work, but in the way he chose to engage with Cornell through writing.
Here is an excerpt from Simic's Dime Store-Alchemy:
The Truth of Poetry
A toy is a trap for dreamers. The true toy is a poetic object.
There's an early sculpture of Giacometti's called The Palace at 4 A.M. (1932). It consists of no more than a few sticks assembled into a spare scaffolding, which the mysterious title makes haunting and unforgettable. Giacometti said that it was a dream house for him and the woman with whom he was in love.
These are dreams that a child would know, Dreams in which objects are renamed and invested with imaginary lives. A pebble becomes a human being. Two sticks leaning against each other make a house. In that world one plays the game of being someone else.
This is what Cornell is after, too. How to construct a vehicle of reverie, an object that would enrich the imagination of the viewer and keep him company forever.
Such writing goes beyond simple “appreciation” to become a creative and imaginative engagement with the artwork; its inspirations, challenges, meanings and ultimately, how the artwork has a life through the efforts to unravel its mysteries by the audience.
small stories: flaked cinders
Image: photography by Rinko Kawauchi from Halo series, 2017
Words
flaked cinders,
fall
from a sky
of ash,
a black rain.
The books
are burning,
and voices
smoke
their release
into air and flame,
all smouldering
sparks
lost,
in flight.
© Angela Jooste
Chris Burden 'Shoot'
American artist Chris Burden has passed away. When I read about this, I immediately thought of the one performance piece that stood out for me while learning about performance art, and probably for many others who are familiar with his work. Burden's 1971 performance, Shoot.
It's noted as one of the most extreme and notorious performance art pieces of the 70s. And it's right up there with works from this period such as Bas Jan Ader's three-part performance/action, In Search of the Miraculous, where Ader set sail in 1975 on a solo voyage across the Atlantic only to disappear, his body never recovered; or Marina Abramovic's six hour feat, Rhythm 0 (1974), where the artist invited her audience to treat her body as an object, giving them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted utilising 72 objects, one of which was a gun. Then there's Vito Acconci's, Seedbed (1971), where gallery visitors were met with a blank room, unaware that Acconci was underneath a ledge masturbating while narrating his sexual fantasies about the audience for them to hear.
Burden's Shoot involved getting a friend to shoot him in the arm with a 22 long rifle. The intention was to graze, not penetrate his arm.
Burden says of the act: “In this instant I was a sculpture.”
BRMC 33.3%
Can't wait for this! Black Rebel Motorcycle Club doco by Yana Amur, '33.3%'.
Check out the promo trailer:
drone drawing
This takes street art to another dimension. Katsu's Drone Drawing (2015), New York.
A Yoshitomo Nara Day
Can't find the words today...