Junk for Code

This could be done in Australia:

Jeff Brouws, Mohawk, Delano, California, 1989.

I wish it were. A lot of the cultural heritage is from the 1940s is being pulled down.

go Clover Moore go

I see that the new Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore is reforming the processes of local government in Sydney to ensure that local residents have a greater say over proposed commercial development in Sydney. These reforms mean that developers wil have to hold special meetings to deal with traffic congestion, public transport, sustainability and public facilities that could go on for the life of a development project.

What an innovative strategy. So different from Adelaide where the official line si that more and more buildings are required, more and more cars are desired and more and more car parks are needed. That equates to economic growth. The residents concerns are sidelined as anti-development.

As you would expect the big developers, who are connected with the Carr state government, are not happy. They fear that the growing number of CDB residents will stymie development opportunities. Residents should not expect suburban amenities in the CBD. Residents should not expect views, trees, carless streets, parks, clean air, friendly public places or good environmental outcomes.

Nope. For the property council the CBD is about business, office towers and shopping. It is not about decent urban spaces for people to interact within.

So we have local government standing in conflict with state government.

Landscape#7

These are Australian trees:

Christopher Burkett, Coastal Eucalyptus Trunks, California, 1999

It is odd to see them growing in coastal California. But it is a globalized world now isn't it.

I read somewhere that those whose views of the sea and coast are obscured by the tall eucalyptus can reguire their owners on the lower slopes to cut them down. In the US people have rights to space and views.

What people do in Australia is to iilegally trim the tops of the native eucalyptus to get their panormic sea views. have t you come across thsoe people who move into a heavily wooded area fill of trees and biodiversity along the coast, build their house, then cut allthe trees down

You get the sense that they hate the native bush. They fancy they are living in Italy judging by the names they give their seaside houses.

Eisenstein's Alexander Nevesky

I do not attend film festivals anymore, or go to a cinema complex to see the latest must see release. I've given up on the arthouse cinema. Now and again Suzanne gets a DVD out (eg., the gay hustler My Own Private Idaho and we watch it. I was bored by Gus Van Sant's film, but I was much taken with Michael Mann's poetic Manhunter, an adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel The Red Dragon and an early Hannibal Lecktor film, as I was with his The Insider.

Last Sunday night I watched a DVD of Sergei Eisenstein's 1930s film Alexander Nevesky. I had seen Eisenstein's silent movies, Battleship Potempkin, October, and Strike---- and the much latter Ivan the Terrible, which was made in the 1940s.

When I was at uni in the 1980s the big conflict in cinema studies understanding of the history of film was between realism and expressionism. The conflict found canonical expression in the writings of André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein. I dutifully read both volumes of What is Cinema? and the two collections of Eisenstein essays edited by Jay Leyda, Film Form and Film Sense. Eisenstein was then in the ascendancy.

But had never seen Alexander Nevesky before.

Nevesky is a finely textured, and carefully crafted patriotic war movie. Its film form is composed from elaborate geometrical patterns, montage and an eye to visual design (eg., the armour of the German knights).

However, the film is an exultation of Russia and call to arms against the invading Germans. Nevsky was made in 1938, when Hitler was threatening his neighbors and war was immanent and is transparent in its anti-German and anti-Catholic sentiments. It was commissioned by Stalin in 1938 to create "a patriotic weapon" to stir Soviet sentiment against a threatened invasion by Germany.

Eisenstein turned to the legend of the thirteenth-century Russian prince who defeated an army of marauding Teutonic knights during a titanic clash on the frozen Lake Peipus. This State-sponsored epic says that the good and noble peasant people of Rus would have fallen before the Teutonic onslaught had it not been for the resilience of one man, a Russian hero. You can see why Stalin loved it.

Not withstanding this, Alexander Nevsky is generally considered to be one of the great achievements of Soviet and world cinema artistry.

The historical epic is matched in passion and grandeur by Sergei Prokofiev's equally famous score. The film was editied to the rhythm of pre-existent music, and not just have the music played or composed to match the film.

However, the soundtrack on the DVD I had was so abused that it muddied the clear arc of the score. The subtitles were close to useless. Still, you can see that Alexander Nevsky has long outlived its original patriotic purpose, and has become an classic of world cinema.

It is generally held that the historic battle on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus, where the peasant army of Nevsky is pitted against the better-equipped German force, is one of the most impressive spectacles in film history.

I was more impressed by film language being built on the construction of the individual images, and the way these were montaged against one another to give a rhythmic sequence. This is a quite different cinematic language to the long takes, unobtrusive editing, linear narratives driven by individual protagonists. and deep focus of realism advocated by Bazin.

What was noticeable, and disappointing, was that the film was less experimental in a stylistical sense than Battleship Potempkin, which made far greater use of creative editing. The images in Nevsky had a posed and static quality-- a series of individual shots. Yet they were very well constructed, highlighting the poverty of much contemporary film making.

For all that Nevsky was a close to a conventional, Hollywood-style war epic where the individual as the hero saves the homeland from the nasty enemy.

What Eisenstein raised for me is the relationship between images and their construction, between the still and the moving image and the construction and interpretation of images. These themes are explored more fully in the Michael Mann films mentioned above.

regionalism: Mallee

I was wandering through the Mallee country the other day and walked across a part of that landscape before moving onto the river country along the River Murray.

Garry Duncan, Acres of Blue.

And I listened to some of this music whilst looking at the Mallee Sustainable Farming project.

The history of the Murray Mallee is one of the clearing of the eucalypt woodland and shrubland in this dry area and its replacement by crops and pastures. Little is left. What is left needs protection.

Jeanette's music in Messenger Bird and Gary's paintings are by people who live within the ecology of the region and understand that it is their home. It is their life, they read nature as if it were a book, and they act to protect their natural heritage.

landscape#6

I'm back in town. I tried to find internet cafe's to post whilst I was on the road because the hotels have no internet connection. I did find one one such cafe but it was closed.

So a quick post before dinner:

Charles Kruvand,Tornillo Creek and the Rio Grand River, Big Bend National Park, Texas, 1991

The Texas waterways look like some Australian ones. What we have is a celebration of natural beauty.

William Clift

I will be on the road for a couple of days travelling through the Barossa and Clare Valleys in South Australia looking at the issues of water and wineries.

Two photos from William Clift of the western landscape in the US. Clift is a large-format photographer.

William Clift,Factory Butte, Utah, 1985

Some see this kind of work as romantic nostalgia of the American landscape. I don't. This landscape is very familar in Australia.

William Clift, Desert Form #1, New Mexico

The problem is that in Australia we do not have many Australians doing this kind of photographic work. This kind of work--a celebration of the desert landscape ----forms a very powerful tradition in the US.

The landscape tradition that William Clift works in celebrates the beauty and vastness of the wilderness. It stands in opposition to the destruction of the land by industrial capitalism.

Clift published a book called Certain Places.

What's the fuss?

This report says that Frank Hurley, is much ado about nothing.

It says that Hurley, the pioneering Australian cameraman and adventurer, "fabricated scenes and doctored image" that he took on Ernest Shackleton's near-fatal Antarctic expedition of 1914. (That expedition has been recreated.)

Hurley had been on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914 led by Sir Douglas Mawson:

Frank Hurley, Sedimentary Rock Formation, between 1911 and 1914]

Hurley was primarily a straight documentary photographer:

F. Hurley, Castaways adrift on the sea ice,1915

An exhibition of that expedition.

We already knew that Hurley worked in a montage way during WW1. What is the problem?

The Guardian article says:

"The poignant photographs recording Shackleton's departure from Elephant Island and the return of his rescue party in 1916 are both misrepresentations of what actually happened. Hurley's frequent use of 'artistic licence' was confirmed this weekend by the last remaining survivor of an Antarctic mission that was officially photographed and filmed by Hurley."

Photographic images cannot be altered seems to be the assumption here. So the manipulation of the images (ie. superimposing images or restaging events) is deemed to be fakery.

This assumes that photography has implicit connotations of authenticity, presupposing that the image is an unmediated transcription of reality. But Hurley rebelled against that view of photography as he used the camera ato interpret the world around him.

Little needs to be said

This says it all doesn't it?

Russmo, Forest health,

It is what is happening in Tasmania now.

urban parklands

Adelaide is blessed with parklands that separate the inner city from the suburbs. Unlike Perth, Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane Adelaide’s urban geography has no river or harbour to define it. The city's geography centres on its unique and iconic encircling parks and gardens. Some of the gardens--eg Veale or the Japanese are badly designed and quite ugly.

However, these public spaces are in a poor state. They are treated in utilitiarian terms as a resource--eg The Formula I Grand Prix, other motor events etc with inappropriate developments, such as the Wine Centre, imposed on them by state governments little money given back to the parklands. The penny pinching means that the parklands are battered and left.

Some exotics have been pulled out and in the more deserted parts there has been extensive and continuing plantings of native trees, with rows of them enclosing and separating the various individual parks and sport grounds.

What all of this indicates is the low quality of the landscape architecture culture in Adelaide. But that is to be expected when the City of Adelaide has been locked in self-induced inertia, marked by a lack of genuine leadership and effective management. As Chris Bowe observes:

"...the City of Adelaide behaves like a town council that happens to be bordered by parklands, the CBD just another set of streets to be cleaned. It is fixated on trivial issues such as the colour of pavers in Rundle Mall, while missing the bigger issue of redeveloping the mall as a generator of activity. The mall is an example of the pursuit of sectoral interests at the expense of the bigger picture: the current push to increase retail activity is focused on helping the retailers and landowners but fails to consider its development and management as a magnetic public space for the wider community."

On the other hand the state government continually acts to ensure that the Adelaide City Council remains crippled.

sustainable cities

This article by Kenneth Davidson in The Age puts the finger on the weak spot in making the shift to a sustainable liveable city. Davidson, writing about Melbourne, says:

'Melbourne 2030 - Planning for sustainable growth, was released in 2002 with great fanfare by Premier Steve Bracks, Transport Minister Peter Batchelor and Planning Minister Mary Delahunty. Here was a vision for the future of Melbourne that would preserve the city's famous liveability in the context of a growing population by focusing development in 115 so-called activity centres that would "reduce the number of private motorised vehicle trips".

Fair enough. But the whole plan was predicated on an upgraded public transport system that would increase public transport's share of all motorised trips in Melbourne from 10 per cent now to 20 per cent by 2030.'

As is happening in Adelaide Davidson points out that the investment in public transport is not happening. The Brack's Government remains obsessed with financing and building the Scoresby Freeway, which is part of a Melbourne ring road that is the antithesis of the planning philosophy behind the professed objectives of Melbourne 2030.

Davidson says that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Melbourne 2030 is simply a fig leaf designed to provide a rationale for the enrichment of developers who have had the foresight to buy up property in the designated activity centres.

As in Adelaide, the Brack's Government is failing to implement Melbourne 2030 in a way that protects and enhances Melbourne's liveability.

The same has happened in Adelaide with Jan Geyl's 2002 Public Spaces and Public Life urban plan that addressed ways to roll back a car invaded city to create more humanised public spaces. Adelaide is unwilling to change its urban culture from car first to people first. It failed the first test to block the east-west traffic flow through Victoria Square to create a more people-friendly public space in the heart of the city.

The argument by the business-dominated Harbison City Council said the city's economy would suffer from humanizing the city. So the plans for a people-friendly city gather dust.

Melbourne and Adelaide become less liveable cities.

Architecture: le Corbusier

Another image from Harry Seidler's architectural tour:

Harry Seidler,Convent of La Tourette, 1975, Le Corbusier, completed 1960

I'm changing my mind about Le Corbusier after seeing his work through Seidler's eyes.

Architecture

I will be on the road for the next couple of days.

Harry SeidlerBeijing, The Forbidden City, Architect: Unknown, completed 1404-20

Sebastião Salgado

This is the work of the Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado:

SebastioSalgado,
War Zone Croatia, 1994

next

text versus image

In Friday's Australian Financial Review John Quiggin has an article called The myth of convergence (subscription only) which addresses some of the themes that have been raised and explored here.

This criticizes the view of the early 1990s that text is on the way out and will be replaced by multimedia, by which is meant the reworking of McLuhan's thesis of the convergence of TV, telephones and computers into a single package. Quiggin's argument is two fold. He says that:

"... contrary to the predictions of Negroponte and others [eg. Camille Paglia], the rise of the internet has done almost nothing for video or multimedia, and is unlikely to do much any time soon."

Though John mentions pornography and file-trading he seems to imply that the internet is a text-based medium. He treats images in terms of video.

He then goes on to argue that the internet has made a huge difference to the distribution to text, by liberating it from the confines of print. He mentions academic databases, online government, online newpapers, magazines and blogs.

John concludes by saying "that we are entering the golden age of text."

Are we? Is this not also happening:

Tracey Moffat, Untitled Adventure Series 5, 2003-2004

What John says is fair enough as far as it goes. John does overlook the pictorial turn, and the development of a visual (consumer) culture (the spectacle of the Olympics and television adverts) that we live within:

What is displaced by this overlooking is the rise of visual literacy and the extent of the visual images on the internet and weblogs.

In our visual culture meaning is produced and conveyed in messages that are primarily visual, with the meanings relying almost exclusively on visual communication cues.

Olympics, Atlanta, 25 July 1996. Alexander POPOV (RUS).

Most signs operate on several levels--iconic (looks like what it represents) as well as symbolic (the Olympic rings, whose meaning is determined by convention) and indexical (links or connects things) Because of the essentially nonverbal nature of images they are particularly rich in complex visual signification.

Grateful Dead: Stepping Out

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon and I'm listening to the Grateful Dead's Stepping Out, a 4 disc CD from their European tour in 1972.
They had the Workingman's Dead/American Beauty classics behind them; classics that paid tribute to the country music of Merle Haggard, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Bob Wills; as well as incorporating the music of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, The Byrds and The Band.

The music was recorded from seven of the Grateful Dead’s eight concerts in England. It fuses these fragments together to form a rather cohesive collection of blues, folksy Americana and the new, jazzier direction that began to take form on a slower, more deliberate, jazz-fusion pace of Dark Star.

Stepping Out has many defining moments, in terms of songs and the jams of the Other one and Dark Star. Europe ’72 was a strong tour for the band. Much stronger than the bits and pieces of the 1970 Festival Express that has been rescued from the archives.

I came across this article in The Age ex-Eagle Don Henley comments about the rock n' roll music business. He says:

"The business is rotten, basically, rotten to the core, and it's always been unfair. Artists have always got ripped off by record labels from day one. It's not quite as egregious as it used to be, but it still has a long way to go in terms of reform....A huge problem is the reduction of independent radio outlets. Radio is now completely corporatised. There's very few independent stations left....This narrowing of the arteries stops the flow of diversity in music. Everyone loses... Payola is rife, but what is more, the music that gets most airplay is abysmal. The radio stations have an interest in playing music that's frankly, dumb. I don't think they want anything with any kind of content that might possibly cause people to think about the state of affairs culturally or politically."

I understand that the Eagles have had a reunion tour, are still touring as a band and will play in Australia this year. Corporate comfort music for baby boomers?

Personally I never thought much of the Eagle's music. Their early country schmaltz became a kind of slick, AM-friendly soft rock that sounded overproduced and sugary to my ears. In the process of breaking from their country roots and turning to went for the most radio-friendly AOR sound possible.they emptied out the substance of country rock that had been opened by The Bryd's Sweatheart of the Rodeo, Gram Parson's Grievous Angel, The Band's The Band and the Grateful Dead's American Beauty which opened up new terrain in popular music in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, Henley's observations on the music business are to the point. The Grateful Dead's Stepping Out CD is a way to around this rootness. It gives us a big collection of very good performances from a strong tour at a very reasonable price from the Grateful Dead Store. This is not junk from thr archives. The Grateful Dead’s concerts from 1972 through 1974 are what many consider to be the band at its best. It was during this period that the group was consistent, its sets diverse and its music exploratory. The Grateful Dead were much better than most of the rock world gave them credit for their songwriting and the spontaneity of improvisational music that went beyond a jam.

Harry Seidler photographer:

Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp, 1955

Press Release

Modernism can be quite graceful. Organic even.

more adventures?

Tracey Moffatt

Sally Mann: photographer

Sally Mann

Sally Mann, Jessie and the Deer, 1984

Tracey Moffat#2

Tracey Moffat

Untitled Adventure Series 5, 2003-2004

Adventure and romance?

A press release.

Waterhouse Prize

The Waterhouse is for artworks in natural history. It is put on by the SA Museum in Adelaide. I managed to find some time to visit the exhibition this afternoon.


Chris Stubbs 'Forgive them Mother', 2004, Clay and wood

It was by far the most provocative work.

My other favourite was this sculpture composed from found driftwood:

Rosemary Woodford Ganf (SA) "Seachange" Driftwood, 2004

What was most striking was the diversity of media and approaches. Most celebrated nature rather than addressed what was happening to it.

Cartier-Bresson#2

Cartier Bresson, Tuscany, Florence, 1933

Cartier Bresson, Asilah Arsila, 1933

Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier Bresson has died.

Cartier-Bresson A café ©n Vieux-Port, Marseille, 1932

A previous post here.

Cartier-Bresson, Shopwindow, Hungary, 1931

A tribute at The Guardian

Cartier-Bresson, Andalucia, Seville, 1933

An exhibition

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from the archives#2

Old Melbourne

Wolfgang Sievers, Pearl Assurance building 1959

Old Melbourne had to make way for the new:

Wolfgang Sievers, Pearl Insurance on left and South British Insurance on right, Bourke Cr. Queen St., Melbourne, 1970,

from the archives

Wolfgang Sievers Miner in forward lode, North Broken Hill, New South Wales, 1980

Lee Bontecou

Somebody recovered from the past. There is a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

An early and powerful work:

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, Welded steel, canvas, wire, and velvet, 1966

Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times gives us some background:

"A star on the clamorous New York art scene of the 1960's, the only woman in Leo Castelli's famed stable, Ms. Bontecou made hulking, ferocious wall reliefs with yawning black cavities. She used Army surplus materials, twisted bits of bristly copper wire and weathered canvas strips of discarded conveyor belts from a laundry below her decrepit studio on the Lower East Side. At the Modern, these early reliefs pack a special wallop, thrusting out from the walls, a battery of loaded weapons threatening to go off."

These are tough and monumenetal. The latter sculptures are more delicate and lacy mobiles suggesting jelly fish:

Lee Bontecou, Untitled,Welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh, canvas, and wire,
1998 (begun in 1980s)

Photographic archives

The modernists have mined the collected photographic work of Wolfgang Sievers to help construct a modernist aesthetic based on asymmetric perspectives.This is what Gael Newton did in Silver and Grey in 1980. What the modernists do is take an industrial shot and construct it as formal beauty:

Wolfgang Sievers Ginninderra Bridge, Canberra, A.C.T., 1977

They then introduce an unusual perspective with its roots in early Eurpoean photographers:


Wolgang Sievers, Mobil and APM buildings off St. Kilda Road, Melbourne, 1960

Then call it art and write about in formal terms.

However, we can view the collected body of Siever's work as an archive of a commercial photographer, which can be carved and represented in a number of ways.

Instead of art constructing the images as aesthetic objects we could construct the images as documentary records, or as historical records of industrial Australia.

David Moore and Rodney Hall's Image of a Nation (1983) was an example of the latter approach of using photographs as a historical record of Australia. This text was a pictorial history that gave the appearance of history itself, rather than being just a form of historical writing. It retrieved a loose sucession of fragmentary glimpses of the past and spun them into a narrative in which the spectator identifies with the camera as a technical apparatus ansd the institution of photography that speaks the truth (the world is like this).