ACMI: Future Manifestos

My decade at university pursuing an arts education grounded me in the significance of manifestos. But I haven't really thought too much about them since the early noughties. You know, too busy earning a crust and keeping myself and my brood clean and fed to be pouring over declarative sentences with a call to action (though domestic routine does take me to a rage-full place and in alignment with a midlife crisis a couple of years back things got pretty close to revolutionary). But I got invited to the ACMI /RN talks Sunday 13 March on the topic and I thought 'What the heck!' There must still be room for Ideas in life, right?

Outside ACMI it was one great thrill ride. Moomba, people throwing themselves off bridges, ferris wheels, overstuffed soft toys and jam donuts. Inside studio 1 it was a more serious affair. I enjoyed the intro into manifestos by a proper academic - it was scholarly, engaging, detailed - before Paul Barclay (Big Ideas, RN) took to the stage with broadcaster and author Jeff Sparrow and early career researcher Max Halupka talking Political Activism. How much do we hear and how much do we see? I saw a very warm, smart and competent compere. Jeff Sparrow looked hungover, a tiny bit hostile and not impressed with his sparring parter: Max Halupka. It was like watching a wolf and a peacock. Sparrow was taking things back to the Enlightenment. Halupka was excited by politics in the age of Twitter.

Next up was Professor Anne Marsh and Clementine Ford for a 30 minute bout on Feminism. This session was tricky for Barclay: the ghost of himself as a young man navigating second wave feminism, at a guess. Marsh was very sure of herself and clearly persuaded by the importance of universities in being the epicentre of good ideas (apparently gender politics is really influenced by Deluze's ideas on sexuality right now - though pretty sure he wrote about them forty years ago). I'll probably read about it in a watered down first person confessional story that is so popular in The Age sometime next year. Ford was less certain of herself. She may have been intimidated by the context and who can blame her. I read her writing regularly and I got a better sense of her project and method: call it like it is and then throw a spotlight on the misogynistic men that troll her.

Last up Amanda McKenzie (Climate Council, CEO) and Guy Abrahams (CLIMEART) took to the stage to discuss Environment and Sustainability. Away from the mucky bizness of men versus women, I felt like the room brighten. Sure, the planet and it's demise was at stake but Abrahams brought a very expressive pair of hands to explain how art could make a difference. McKenzie brought a sense of purpose. They steered the conversation to Paris and the Climate Talks. Both had been present for them. It was in their session and this moment that the Future Manifesto's event found momentum. Trading anecdotes of the Paris Metro, billboards and delegates from far-flung places sitting down to discuss the future of carbon emissions and targets they built something - a story that held hope for the future - together.

The Story of Us

Five years ago I was holding an infant Hazel and had a whirling dervish of a son who was crazy about Lego. I think it was Stevie who came home one day with something to show us – a blog titled Leo’s Lego Lab. It was a delightful document of creativity; Leo, aged five at the time, posted various Lego creations with the help of his mum. I remember liking this little kid, and the world captured in his blog. I felt an immediate sense of kinship with his mum. When I read that Leo had taken a break from blogging with the arrival of his little sister Hazel – who not only shared the same name but was the same age as mine – I just knew we were fated for friendship. Other than a vague sense that this crew were Melbourne based I really had nothing to go on. We continued to read Leo’s blog. Hazel learned to crawl.

At the tail end of summer we celebrated a friend’s sixth birthday in the Edinburgh Gardens. The playground was a mangle of kids when Otto found himself in a confusing disagreement with a mum about Hazel. I've got a Hazel, he said. I've got a Hazel, she replied. There were two Hazels. That mum turned out to be the tough, smart, creative and highly original Emma G.

In the years since Otto and Leo have developed a strong friendship. The Hazel's, not so much. Emma and I have drunk our fair share of tea mostly over her kitchen table. Of all of his friends Leo's home is the one in which Otto feels most comfortable. I sometimes wonder whether Otto senses the common thread between us; a life that revolves around art, music, books and family.

Driving down Sydney Road after a play at Leo's last weekend Otto and Hazel asked me to tell them once again the story of how we came to meet Leo and his family, the one recounted here. We started at the beginning. They love to tell it, hear it and add to it. We think of it as the story of us.

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Photo of my feet and Emma's shoes by Emma Byrnes. She belongs in this story too. It was her daughter's birthday that we were attending that fateful day in the Ed Gardens.

Brent Harris: Dreamer

There's no contemporary Australian artist I admire more than Brent Harris. Is there another artist as inventive, courageous, surprising and plain well skilled? Can't think of one. Sometimes when someone has had such a consistent, prolific practice – and Harris has exhibited prodigiously for 30 years – it's difficult to know where to begin? As an artist who has worked across printmaking and painting there's a lot to account for. I'm not going to attempt it here (though keep an eye out for a forthcoming article by M Zagala – she's putting some ideas together on Harris' printmaking in long form). If Harris' current exhibition is anything to go by he is in the rare situation of being both a critical and commercial success.

Dreamer is a beautiful exhibition. I liked the hang that positioned Harris' small canvases close to Tolarno's gallery entry. They have a vignette-like quality, a shifting plane of figurative and abstract elements that recall the figure groupings of religious Italian Renaissance paintings by way of Turner. Harris' brush work is a riveting combination of flat scrubbed back surfaces overlaid with buttery paint strokes. But Harris' real gift to the viewer is the way in which he brings the process to the fore. There is a sense of chance, discovery and serendipity articulated in the compositions that might appear tentative but actually reflect Harris' enormous experience.

In the larger canvases whimsical faces emerge, some tiny little proto-beings,  not more than graphic linear gestures animated by cartoon-like eyes. I was intrigued by the different propositions contained in single works – late 19th century landscape traditions, psychedelic colours, and the human form. In all the paintings it's the human figure – searching, fugitive – that lend these abstracted landscapes a slightly unsettling quality. In them the spectre of the unconscious hovers like an inky presence drawing together the complex spheres of the social, sexual and religious.

Brent Harris
Dreamer
12 February - 4 April 2015
www.tolarnogalleries.com

Images courtesy of Tolarno Galleries

Shibori dreaming

When I take a long break from blogging I return uncertain. How to pick up the thread? How do I connect there with here. That period included a birthday – and a week long hangover during which I almost burnt the kitchen down and ate lots of soft cheese and bread – a trip to Canberra to give a lecture to art history students on collaborative screen printing workshops (1972-present day) and a crisis in my day job. See what I mean? I'm not sure I was even the same person back then. I'm beginning to think this is how a habit can break. You pause. To be honest this intense confluence of events has prompted a period of reflection. That reflection has taken place on a number of levels: on the historical forces that shaped late twentieth century visual culture here in Australia (the lecture), my own life (the 40th) and what the future might hold (the job crisis). Which brings me to the tote which caught my eye when I was googling 'shibori' in a late night stupor a few weeks back. I love it. There is something about the earthy, inky quality of indigo that no other dye seems to possess. It's quietening. I like the bags geometric forms, soft lines and shading. Right now it's the right metaphor for where my psyche is at. This bag holds my uncertain thoughts, unspoken fears, and deep longings.

Rebecca Desnos. 100% organic bags hand dyed with natural indigo. 22 pounds

From the archives: Dolfi Trost

That saying, ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’, I’m not so sure about it. I have a pretty good idea how little I know but what’s the use dwelling on that. I’m still feeling sore about the parking ticket from yesterday. Still, every time I stumble across a new artist, someone I feel like I should have known about years ago, I can’t work out whether my education let me down or new discoveries should fall under the category of new research/internet mania.

I spent years studying modernism and then years teaching modernism. I came at it from different departments – art history, cinema and later design. Sure, by the 2000s there was a lot of hoo-ha about modernisms, plural. But I’m still wondering how Romanian Surrealist Dolfi Trost (1916-1966) escaped my cross hairs. How come I never heard of him? Here was someone who was investigating the surrealist drawing technique entopic graphomania in Bucharest (a youtube tutorial might go like this: Draw dots on a page. Join them together.)

I never knew. He published his drawings in a serious looking publication in French if I’m not mistaken Vision dans le Cristal, Oniromancie obsessionelle (Et neuf graphomanies entoptiques from1945. Then he went to Chicago. What did he do in Chicago? Why was he there? Did he marvel at the skyscrapers designed by that well-known European modernist, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students at Illinois Institute of Technology? At this point we can only speculate.*

*In the English language, on the web, I can’t find anything.