Junk for Code

Bill Henson #4

This is not a picture of a landcape. It is an image of an interior landscape of the modern subject

Bill Henson, Untitled #6, Untitled, 1998 - 2000

We are looking into the unconscious----the dark continent. We are travelling on the highway into our unconscious.

Bill Henson, Untitled #17, Untitled, 1998 - 2000

The images suggest that we are travelling into the darkness of a constellation of intense emotions of a damaged life. The darkness threatens to overwhelm us--our ego or consciousness will be overwhelmed by the dark forces of the unconscious.

previous start

The tabloid gaze in politics

The image below is how Mark Latham, a former leader of the federal parliamentary ALP and so Labor's alternative prime minister, is now portrayed in the media, after extracts of his diaries were made public on the weekend.

Michael Mucci

The Latham Diaries, which describe a toxic political culture inside the ALP, went on sale today. They are represented as the work of an aggressive and paranoic ego that seeks domination.

The older image of the mongrel streak of a political head-kicker from the Sydney suburbs has gone. Latham is not just seen as being out to settle old political scores. He has now become the mad dog full of poisonous bile who will infect people with his vitriol and cause great damage. He must be put down.

This demonisaton of a political figure shows the extent to which a tabloid media culture has penetrated our political culture. It has become tabloid in that it works in terms of crude, highly charged images. The visual and the rhetorical have fused.

At a more sophisticated level Mark Latham is described as having a narcissistic personality disorder. Latham exhibits all the classic signs of clinical narcissism, a condition 'marked by a hard-wired lack of empathy for other points of view and inability to see the world beyond the filter of self-reference.'

What is being dismissed by this kind of visual rhetoric is Latham's arguments about the endemic sickness, poison and backstabbing in our political culture, and the way the media works in collusion with politicians.

What is interesting in the reponse to the Lathman Diaries is the way that reality has become the image. The image has been become adrft from its referent--the real Mark Lathm as an homedadcarign for hsi two boys who wrote an account of his time in politics.

This tabloid image is not a distorting mirror as many claim. We stare in fascination at the circulating images of Latham as we become aware that they reflect nothing outside them.

water crystals

I'm back on deck after a break from being on the road---in Melbourne for several days. I was working and I had little time to post. But I did come across this:

Masaru Emoto

It is an image of a water crystal. Since water is a network of hydrogen-bonded molecules it can form numerous structures, depending on how individual molecules bond together:

Masaru Emoto

Who would have thought that water looked like that?

sexuality and disability

Photographer Belinda Mason-Lovering travelled around Australia over two years collecting images that examine the relationship between sexuality and people with disabilities. Mason-Lovering has created images that reflect the personal emotional journey of people with disabilities by choosing to photograph the intangible----our emotions.

Belinda Mason-LoveringDancing on Broken Glass

The text to the photo says that:

Julia grew up in Oregon and California. She was hit by a truck when she was 11 years old and spent many years recuperating in hospital during which time she had 18 major operations. She went to Antioch College in Ohio then worked as a performance artist and community activist in San Francisco. Julia has been in Australia since 1999 and has recently finished an Arts Management course at the Victorian College of the Arts. She dances every day and highly recommends it.
Julia is the author of 'Body Talk = Survival'. She is a Performance Artist and Arts Administrator... Julia has left side hemiparesis with multiple orthopaedic fractures.

Saturn, Mars, deserts

A great site: It has a picture of the day:

Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn's Enceladus

I really like this one:

The View from Husband Hill on Mars

This recalls this earlier post that suggested Mars looks so like the Australian desert.

Graffiti

This is courtesy of aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada who mentions two recent books on graffiti: Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos. Both sites have plenty of links.

There is some good work at Graffiti Archaeology It is a wonderful site.

previous.

cartoon's critical edge

This superb cartoon is another example of visual cultural critique:

Martin Rowson

It's bite captures this kind of response noted by Wealth Bondage

Rowson's cartoon is an interpretive reworking of a iconic American image from the American Revolutionary War and, more specifically, George Washington's stealthy midnight crossing:

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851,Oil on Canvas.

This in turn is a gesture back to a classic art image:

Theodore Gericault, Raft of Medusa, 1819, Oil on canvas

The inter-textuality gives the Rowson cartoon more depth, does it not?

a war on nature

The Republican noise machine is still spinning furiously around the lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in New Orleans. FEMA's budget has been cut and inept political hacks have been put in key positions.

This insight discloses the way the federal bureaucracy is in a sorry state because the current Republican administration doesn't treat governing seriously.

Brian Adcock

Some satire on the war on nature can be found over at Billmon

New Orleans was built onkeeping the water out.The city has long been crouched behind poorly maintained levees in a river delta. Louisiana has been loosing its fragile coastal landscape as it has not been maintaining the dunes and mud flats or protecting salt marshes and barrier islands.

Maybe they need to learn to live with the water in a more ecological way, if we are to live with global warming and rising sea levels?

politics as theatre

The ongoing saga around sale of Telstra last week was commonly seen a circus or pantomime by the media. That was meant to be taken as a negative judgement--a put down---with Senator Barnaby Joyce cast as the dumb clown from Queensland.

The public policy background on the prrivatisation of Telstra can be found here. The judgement about the quality of the media commentary can be found here.

Consider this excellent Matt Golding cartoon of Telstra as a pantomime:

What the cartoon expresses is the performance model of politics as a form of theatre.

This understanding of politics is one that emphasizes the embeddness of action in the already existing web of human relationships. It assumes that a life without action and speech in a public space is dead to the world because it is through deeds, speech and meaning that individuals disclose who they are.

In this model the political actors create meaning, new relationships, unforseen constellations and so transcend instrumentality and the reduction of meaning to utility by economics.

Mississippi Odyssey?

The Coen brothers' film O Brother Where Art Thou, introduced old time country music to an American population that had lost contact with their musical heritage.

The film's form is a loosely adapted Odyssey in the Depression-era American South.

The escaped convicts run into a variety of characters, from a one-eyed Bible salesman, a corrupt Mississippi governor running for re-election, a blind radio station owner (Steven Root) who records the three convicts singing "Man of Constant Sorrow"; meet the manic/depressive Baby Face Nelson, run into three larcenous sirens and an wife, who is preparing to marry a man she considers "bona fide".

This is a road movie whose storytelling wrapped with eccentric humor.

The episodic travels are used to explore both the music and mythology of the South---bluegrass Mississippi. Bluegrass music, Babyface Nelson and Homer. Interesting huh?

The film is steeped in music---beautiful renditions of country, gospel, folk, and blues under the charge of T Bone Burnett, with some tunes in original versions, others newly recorded. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is like the music video for the Harry Smith-edited Anthology of American Folk Music.

The film is practically a musical, with a fine selection of songs from "the old weird America," as critic Greil Marcus has put it.

Jerry Garcia

in rememberance of a great musician. Robert Hunter's elegy. David Gans' tribute.

Garcia, the late guitarist/singer, was an American musical icon in his own right, as well as a good interpreter of the wealth of material in the archives of American music. Garcia had the ability to play two entirely different styles of music without a hint of musical overlap (rock 'n' roll/blues and country/bluegrass).This capacity opened up a number of side projects.

One of Garcia's side projects was the collaborative the work with David Grisman, with his quintet and other bluegrass pursuits. This began with the old bluegrass tunes of Old and In The Way in 1973, and was rekindled in the 1990s.

Some audio streaming can be found Dawgnet and Acoustic Disc. The improvised interpretations of the old timey music can be found on Shady Groove. This is the musical roots of the Grateful Dead, and it is interesting to hear Garcia revisit, and explore, this music with David Grisman. It lead to the Garcia/Grisman Band playing traditional acoustic music in the 90s. Apparently, Garcia's happiest times in the latter part of his life, were those that he shared with David Grisman, playing and singing this music.

I find the jazzy improvisations of bluegrass on So What to be far more interesting piece of music Listen to the extended bluegrass interpretation involved in the Grisman composition 16/16. What we have is jazz music with bluegrass influences and overtone in the form of a jam session.

accountability

This image shows the way that visual critique can work as a form of cultural criticism:

via Boeing Boeing

Bush was fully briefed about the severity of the storm. He knew what was coming. The Onion decodes the image:

WASHINGTON, DC:--In an emergency White House address Sunday, President Bush urged all people dying from several days without food and water in New Orleans to "tap into the American entrepreneurial spirit" and gnaw on their own bootstraps for sustenance. "Government handouts are not the answer," Bush said. "I believe in smaller government, which is why I have drastically cut welfare and levee upkeep. I encourage you poor folks to fill yourself up on your own bootstraps. Buckle down, and tear at them like a starving animal." Responding to reports that many Katrina survivors have lost everything in the disaster, Bush said, "Only when you work hard and chew desperately on your own footwear can you live the American dream.

Kandinsky

The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) says the gallery was offered the expressionist painting below for a $35 million, but that it would not be buying it as the price tag was too high.

Kandinsky's Sketch for Deluge II is from the Hester Diamond Collection, which was acquired by Sotheby's, who were unable to sell it at auction last year. Bidding for the Kandinsky started at $15 million, ending at $17.5 million, with Sotheby's assigning a low estimate of $20 million.


Wassily Kandinsky, Sketch for Deluge II, 1912

The National Gallery would sure love to own the Kandinsky. There are no major works by Kandinsky in Australia and the National Gallery has only a small international collection. The Kandinsky is about color and form though this painting is on the cusp of leaving the the representational image and going completely abstract.

That is a big concern for art history--hence the NGA's interest. Still, $A35 million is rather steep when it was passed in at $US 17.5 million less than a year ago.

Lost Highway#4: country music and photography

The detractors of country music often claim that it is "primitive" and "mindless." It is the music of ignorance and racial bigotry of the poor working-class whites isn't it? Has not Nashville fostered a conveyer-belt production method that keeps the music sanitized, the artists generically processed, and the prospects of diversity, innovation, and creativity slim-to-none?

Is not corporate country a lost highway?

This highly popular form of musical expression has a tradition which extends from Appalachian balladeers, to Black and white railroad workers, to choirs of country churches, to the Carter Family, Gene Autry, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Randy Travis.

When I watched the Lost Highway documentary on Saturday night, I could not help but think of music, working class, community and the 1930s Depression:


Margaret Bourke-White

Merle Haggard's music recalled the great rural migration from the Midwest dustbowl to California in the 1930s:

Arthur Rothstein"Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma." April 1936

The migrants arrived in in resettlement camps in California from the Midwest every month, driven by unemployment, drought, and the loss of farm tenancy.They settled mainly in the agricultural valleys of California, and during the Second World War many moved nearer the defense plants, particularly around Los Angeles, to work. During the 1950s and 1960s they became populist Reaganite conservatives--rednecks.

Randy Travis' music made reference to an autonomous, authentic working-class culture of the forties and fifties coal miners of Kentucky. The experiences of this culture is the wellspring of musical and cultural meaning of country music. Country music then helps form and express the experiences of poverty, loneliness, and hard times of a particular working-class form of life marked by limited mobility within the economic and social prison of American society.

Update: 7 September
I see that Tim Dunlop of Road to Surfdom, who is now in his home town of Adelaide after spending time in Washington, watched the first episode of Endless Highway.

He does not appear to have watched any of the latter epsisodes. Few in the Oz blogosphere have by the looks of it. Not even FXH over at From a LAN Downunder or Amanda at Flop Eared Mule.

response to Katrina

The Katrina cartoons in the Washington Post are suprisingly tame. Consider these two:

Chip Bok

And:

Signe Wilkinson

See what I mean?

The authorities knew Hurricane Katrina would happen. They had been warned and they knew the consequences for the city if the levees gave way:

Yet little actually happened in terms of emergency response for days.

So why are the cartoons so soft?

Maybe the situation is too difficult for the American mainstream press to handle?

A list of Katrina blogs

Lost Highway#3

This image captures my way of seeing country music--it is morally conservative, republican in its politics, deeply religious, full of rural nostalgia of white rural Americans.

I see country music this way despite my fondness for the Grateful Dead's country roots-influenced music of the blue-collar 1970 Workingman's Dead. It was overlaid with references to the "hard travelling'/hard times ethos, populist sentiments about prison, running from the law and honorable outlaws and the troubles, trials, and tribulations of Southern poor and working-class white people. 'Workingman's Dead' return to their musical roots ignored the poor white's racism, xenophobia and support for the culture of imperialism.

I would acknowledge that southern white working people's single greatest contribution to American popular culture is their country music. From its humble beginnings as the music of a marginalized people, it has risen to become a multi-billion dollar global industry. Country dominates American popular music, and at its best the music expresses the experiences, sorrows, hopes, dreams, failures, love affairs in the dust and grit of ordinary rural life. Much of country music, despite its unreflective patriotism, really mourns the death of the American Dream.

My cliched view of country music---it's more unchanging musical tradition than experimentation--was challenged by this episode of the Lost Highway documentary, that I watched last night. The documentary covered country music I knew very little about apart from the names:--Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks; and it mentioned some that I did know---eg., the cross over artists, such as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

What came through was the diversity of country music which was traced as it emerged in places such as Bakersfield, California and Austin, Texas. The counter tendencies to the Nashville country-pop style re- connected with, and developed, the honky-tonk heritage of Hank Williams, which was the first urban form of country music. This heritage is about travelling on a strange stretch of highway, songs about the poverty, loneliness, and anxiety of the poor man who has had a lot of bad luck and who lives with the blues. He sings of the hard times he has known in which everything goes wrong from love to work and which persists without any hope or solution.

The country and western music industry built in Bakersfield by Okie artists and entrepreneurs, especially Buck Owen and Merle Haggard had a "workingman's blues" take on country music and it challenged the supremacy of Nashville as the country music capitol. They expressed the sentiments, experiences and values of the Depression-era rural working class in an industrialized America in the 1950s and 1960s around alcohol, finances, death, fidelity, faith, broken hearts, trains, desire and the highway.

I know next to nothing about the musical work produced in the 80s by Steve Earle, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Ryan Adams and bands like Wilco, who are pushing country music into new areas.

What puzzled me was that no mention was made of Woody Guthrie in this tracing of the different voices of country music. Why is he excluded?

previous

New Orleans: a descent into chaos

The news reports indicate that the federal and state governments, failed to prepare for a catastrophe that many scientists had warned bout for years. The failure of the levees had been forecast for years, as they were only designed to protect New Orleans from a category 3 storm.

The news reports are saying that New Orleans has become a nightmare landscape of chaos,lawlessness, roaming gangs and random rapes. The tales from inside the Superdome say that the inside was a mass of stinking, hungry, frightened humanity without water, sewerage, food or air. Strangers were crammed against others who robbed them, beat them and raped them while armed guards stood oblivious.

How come the authorities did not airlift basic supplies to the convention centre and the nearby Superdome, where more than 40,000 people gathered in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Katrina?

Meanwhile, the economy is affected as Hurricane Katrina has made half a million people homeless, damaged the energy infrastructure by shutting down Gulf output, devastated transportation networks and trashed the electricity grids. So energy prices soar:

Leahy

Armed gangs have all but gained control of the city. It is the disabled, the poor who cannot afford cars, the sick and the elderly who have been left behind in the inner city. And most of those left behind are the poor and the black.

New Orleans does seem to be vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

Leunig

This cartoon makes me smile as I struggle with the
flu.

I've come down to the weekender at Victor Harbor to look at the flowering wattle trees, smell the sea and listen to the surf.

Davida Allen

Davida Allen has won the Archibald Prize, the premier Australian award for portraiture and regularly exhibits in the international Biennale (modernist and expressionist art).

Davida Allen, Troll lover, Oil on Canvas
A Talk, some commentary

A series of paintings were openly a series of fantasies centring round the actor, Sam Neil, which expressed sexual desire:

Davida Allen, Fantasy of Sam Neil,1980, mixed canvas

Often the traditional impastoed technique--thick paint, scraped back and scratched into--is used to depict frustration, angst, grief.

Davida Allen, Death of my father, 1981-82

Allen's visual skills well deployed to construct a short film (c 50 mins) of a Queensland painter struggling with the conflictual demands of bohemia and suburbia.

political satire

This post is courtesy of---hell, I cannot remember. Oh yes, it is Ashley Benigno's excellent Notes from somewhere bizarre, who got it via Conscientious

Larry Fink, Homage to Max Beckmann

It is from an exhibition entitled The Forbidden Pictures at the Lehigh University Art Galleries earlier this year.

Larry Fink, Homage to George Grosz

It is a political tableaux of satirical images of America’s current leaders, referencing the decadence and style of Weimar artists:

Larry Fink, Homage to George Grosz

This body of work marks a break with Larry Fink's previous "snapshot aesthetic" that located Fink in the tradition of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.