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.

Trente Parke - The Black Rose

Last week I flew to Adelaide for the opening of the Trent Parke exhibition, The Black Rose, at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The exhibition, co-curated by Maria Zagala and Julie Robinson had been a topic of daily conversation between my twin and I for months, if not years.  There was no way I was going to miss it. Sharing my life with two curators I’ve come to understand that every now and again – and it’s really not that often – curator and exhibition subject connect in a powerful way.  I had a feeling that this was that kind of show.

A few things pointed in this direction: Trent Parke’s remarkable personal story, the project’s ambition (only seven years in the making) and the scale of the exhibition (carte blanche to the entire temporary exhibition space). In his early thirties, and newly a father, Parke’s thoughts turned to the traumatic memory of his mother’s sudden and unexpected death from an asthma attack when he was 13 years old. The exhibition charts Parke’s odyssey – an epic emotional, cosmic and vast geographical journey – undertaken with his own young family across the country and ending at his childhood home in Newcastle, NSW. Documenting birth, death, and the everyday banalities of suburban life, Parke and the exhibition curators have collated a selection of the thousands of mostly black and white photographs, in addition to multimedia and installation works, into a series of self-contained rooms that articulated the exhibitions themes.

Apart from the visual material, Parke wrote some 15,000 words to accompany the project: a diaristic collection of notes, recollections, dreams and observation, some of which appear on the walls and as part of the exhibition catalogue. These form an interesting adjunct to the visual works. The photographs, all formally exquisite and technically precise recall the documentary style of iconic mid 20^th century magazines like Life.  (Parke is Australia’s only Magnum photographer – a difficult feat and rare honour). Parke acknowledges that he is not a writer in the short film that introduces the exhibition, and reiterates the statement in the catalogue despite identifying as a storyteller. His prose –  unabashedly pulpy and overwrought – is everywhere.  Parke’s widely divergent skills as a artist and writer had an interesting effect. I literally flipped between Amazing! and Terrible! every second step. The juxtaposition of very different modes – professional and amateur – added a compelling dimension to the exhibition. For Parke, this project was a total excavation.  

Parke’s exhausting and exhaustive search for meaning by way of documentary, vernacular and theatrical form powerfully conveys the messy, dislocating experience of trauma. At the exhibitions end I was in awe of Parke’s capacity for risk – emotional, professional and financial. It seemed to me the definition of courage.

Trent Parke, Black Butterfly from The Black Rose, 2014 gelatin silver hand print 120 x 152cm

The Black Rose

Art Gallery of South Australia

14 March – 10 May 2015

2014 in review

Defaced

At Monash Gallery of Art on the weekend for the opening of the Photography Meets Feminism: Australian Women Photographers 1970s–80s exhibition I found myself on the floor where pencils and paper had been provided for the kids. I doodled with the monkeys who were enjoying the materials and space. Otto found loose sheets of photocopies, reproductions of early photographs and got busy defacing them. Shortly afterwards assembled in the large hall for comedian and art history graduate Hannah Gadsby's opening address things got a bit raucous. Speaking without notes, Gadsby dropped a few expletives. Nothing too outrageous but someone left the room in protest. Gadsby enjoying the unfolding scene called out to Otto "What is the rudest word you know?". Was there something in the cheese? The air? I can't say for certain but it was kinda funny.

Polka dot: child's play

Kindergarten, Rena, Norway

Street Strollers of New York

You know in the couple of years I've been writing this blog, I don't think I have ever featured the writing of Mr Stephen Zagala. The essay below accompanies the current exhibition, New Photography From the Footpath, which opened at Monash Gallery of Art over the weekend. It's a great show and excellent essay. Along with reproductions of Catherine Bell's photographs it's been pulled together into a super cute booklet. You can pick it up for 10 bucks in the MGA shop. 

Images (top-bottom) Catherine Bell, from the series Street Strollers of New York (series no. 48) 2010, courtesty of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne), Catherine Bell, from the series Street Strollers of New York 2010, courtesty of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne).

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Street strollers of New York is a sequence of photographs that document African-American nannies shuttling white children through the affluent mid-town streets of Manhattan. Catherine Bell’s interest in this subject grew out of her own experience working as a nanny in London; she embarked on this project with the notion to pay tribute to an under-acknowledged workforce. While there is a significant tradition in documentary photography of images of heroic workers, Bell’s images of African-American nannies belong to another tradition altogether – that of the clandestine street photograph. In these pictures, taken with a hidden camera and for the most part without the subject’s knowledge, Bell has cast each nanny in the role of a fugitive.

Bell is an artist who has worked in various media, including drawing, painting, video and performance. For this project she chose to work with black-and-white photographs, because of their association with the gritty realism of street photography. In keeping with the candid strains of this tradition, she has used a small, easily concealed camera to capture her subjects while they are on the move. As a result of this, her images pick up some of the formal qualities that characterise the genre, such and motion blur and coincidental composition.

However, Bell’s investment in street photography has less to do with stylistic traits than with the conceptual ambitions of the genre. For many street photographers, public space can be a theatre for tracking the aberrant complexities of human life as it is actually lived. For Bell, the nannies of New York bring to light the messy actuality of motherhood. In contradistinction to press photographs depicting Park Avenue and Hollywood celebrity-super-mums (who infamously adopt children from third-world countries), Bells’ pictures suggest that the maternal duties of Manhattan’s elites being outsourced to the African-American working class.

Street strollers of New York elaborates on Bell’s long-standing interest in the way that, in popular culture and literature, motherhood is often idealised in ways that deny its physical and psychological challenges. In order to maintain this idealised depiction of motherhood, its realities – its loneliness, its emotional vagaries, its messiness – are disavowed as ‘abject monstrosities’. Bell is interested in the ways that these myths permeate actuality.

The African-American nannies shown in Bell’s photographs can play a role in manufacturing this mythology. That is, the nannies help to distance mothers from the everyday messiness of family life, and give them time to uphold the super-mum ideal. But Bell makes the nannies the stars of her paparazzi-style project, celebrating the errant complexities of the street over the static ideal of motherhood.

- Stephen Zagala

New photography from the footpath
Catherine Bell, Glenn Sloggett, Ian Tippett
3 April 2014 to 8 June 2014

Alongside The Rennie Ellis Show, which celebrates the work of one of Australia’s most prolific street photographers, New photography from the footpath points to the ongoing relevance of candid photography in public space. Catherine Bell, Glenn Sloggett and Ian Tippett are all Melbourne-based artists who embrace street photography as a means of capturing the vitality of contemporary life.

Monash Gallery of Art

860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150
Telephone +61 3 8544 0500
T–F 10am–5pm S&S 12–5pm

Yoga for Elephants

I read Hazel a Barbar story tonight. I like Laurent de Brunhoff's stories so much. They unfold at a nice pace, there are always fun details to find and its fictional world is richly drawn. Even at the micro-scale, a single illustration, the qualities that define de Brunhoff's books are evident. Take this illustration, from Yoga for Elephants (2002). Notice the cheerful ducks oblivious to the serious yogi. Or the crowns, and hat, and gasses, put aside for the class. Notice the sense of optimism that even the littlest of elephant's can do this. Obviously regular readers will know I am a yoga nut. But I would not have picked myself for a royalist. Still I like this royal family. On days when I feel knocked around by life I could crawl between de Brunhoff's pages. I could live here.

Best foot forward

The Subway Series #2, Brooklyn, 1980 © Jamel Shabazz

I spent the weekend past in Adelaide visiting my twin. Owing to the extreme heat, toddler and city itself the pace was pretty slow. For my needs it was just right. We did a lot of yack yack, wide-ranging talk the type you can only do in person, face-to-face. We even went through her wardrobe, workshopping her back-to-work look (FYI Sports Luxe). That hour pulling clothes out and trying them on brought back an earlier time, from childhood to young adulthood when reviewing our wardrobes was – aside from attending school – the most time consuming activity of the week. Time consuming and consuming. The passion of early self-expression. I've been wondering lately, does that wane? Or does it just change?

Jamel Shabaz
Represent
1 March – 14 April

gCS Galerie Cultural Speech
Postjesweg 6-8
1057 EA Amsterdam
+31 20-4121741
info@gcs-art.eu
www.gcs-art.eu
Wed-Sat 12-18

Lollies: A love story

Every now and again I catch wind of a spectacularly demented project that captures my imagination. The window display of the Clunes Public Library falls into this category. Look what one family can do with 65 lolly bags, a box full of textas and passion for sweets. Awesome. It’s hard to pinpoint a favourite though ‘Sharing hurts’, ‘Make Friends with a Lolly’ and 'Lollies Make Me Go Crazy’ are favourites. Other knockouts include 'Lolly Fan' and 'Smile for Sugar' (that's a black tooth in that smile) and 'The Lolly Shop Man needs Rest'. If only my clients possessed half the visual intelligence and copy writing skills of Henry, Chet, Will and Audrey, I’d be on Easy Street.

A lot of the sentiments expressed on these lolly bags have a hard time finding expression in public. I understand why. Sugar is bad. People are getting fatter every day. But it’s difficult not to feel as though the widespread hatred of lollies is partly a class issue. (Like, it’s okay to praise boutique artisan chocolates but not a Nestle chocolate bar.) I'm pretty sure political agitation was not on the minds of these creatives. Nevertheless unguarded self-expression can be genuinely subversive.

Live On Lollies. Bottom right.

  

From the archives: Joan Miro

Yesterday at the Alphington Primary School Fair I tackled trashless treasure with a sense of purpose, only to walk away with a broken jewellery box, the kind with a twirling ballerina, and a small tupperware container with pretend lego. It was slim pickings. Later, buoyed by a cup of tea, I ventured into the book hall. I was too late to pick up a good book but propped up against a wall was a 1984 mounted reproduction of Joan Miro's watercolour Huile Sur Toile from 1948, printed in France in 1984. It's a lovely print: colourful, whimsical and cheerful. I remember liking Miro (1893–1983) as a teenager but cutting him loose about the same time as Marc Chagall. They seemed too lyrical for teenage torment. While I am still ambivalent about Chagall, I am happy to welcome Miro's Spanish charm into my home. His kooky lines and symbolic abstracted illustrations are fun. Try as I might I can't find a jpg on the net. So I will photograph it. In the meantime here is another of Miro's paintings, for a bit of atmos.

Early Promise, Little Twin Stars

My five year old asks me a lot of questions like 'What are footy cards for?' and 'How do you spell 'feelings'? while immersed in a close study of ninja's (see: club penguin, LEGO Ninjago). It vividly transports me back to the obsessions of my own childhood, namely Little Twin Stars. These Kawaii (aka 'cute') Japanese characters created by the Sanrio corporation in 1975 were my universe. I didn't so much as study or play with them – I remember a pencil case, ruler and eraser I practically worshipped – it actually felt as though I absorbed them. I must have drawn and traced their wide spaced eyes and protective star dozens of times over the years. Aqua and pink paired together were my favourite colours until I turned 13. I became more fickle in my teenage years. I seemed to spend a lot of time catching public transport to skate parks and eating chocolate sundaes at McDonalds. Did I also forget how to look closely at things? Fossicking through my files the other day I stumbled onto a year 10 school report. I got a lousy 'C' for Art History. Who knew I'd make my bread and butter as an art writer 20 years later? On the evidence of that report, I showed no early promise.