Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 2, 2005. For further information on MANDY MARTIN, refer here: http://www.mandy-martin.com/
If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
adrift on a sea of information at a time when the world's night is a destitute time. In the age of the world's night, the abyss of the world must be endured.
--Adelaide is home. Relaxation is Victor Harbor. I'm a frustrated photographer who has lost his way in life.I have trouble coping in the technological mode of being of our complex digital world.
Joni Mitchell was being played on the car radio ---it was a track from the confessional story telling of Blue. That was no coffee table record. This Mitchell is a poet of personal revelation in the Anne Sexton & Sylvia Plath tradition; one who explores the quandaries of desire and love inside a relationship.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, at Middleton Beach, Fleurieu Peninsula, 2007
The moment reminded me how I've started re-listening to Mitchell-----going back to her earlier jazz-influenced work of the 1970s, such as Court and Spark the more experimental The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Mitchell is an artist, whose experiments in music were rejected.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Middleton Beach, Fleurieu Peninsula, 2007
Though her records age well over time, Mitchell's albums during the '80s (on Geffen) are not given the same respect as her classic '70s albums for Reprise. I do not know the work of the '90s at all. One was a collection of standards with Joni Mitchell performing as an interpretive singer reaching towards a tone poem:
I understand that Mitchell gave up making music in the early part of this century, after the revisionist Travelogue work. Mitchell railed against a corrupt music industry--the whole conglomeration of media, musicians and record labels that loosely defines the music version of the culture industry-- as a "cesspool" populated by "pornographic pigs" and returned to painting.
The sixty panels comprising “Green Flag Song” grew out of an experimental series of photographs Mitchell began taking about a year ago, photographs made with a camera and taken off to a malfunctioning television set. The images, transferred to canvas, are of current events, historical events, and fictional events – all of which interrelate both thematically (through war and ritual) and visually (though their green cast and negative reversal of light and shadow).
This visual work is very different from Mitchell’s previous paintings of figures and landscapes, best known from their appearances on her album covers, the panels of “Green Flag Song” nevertheless continue to address major moral and political issues in a highly distinctive, personalized voice.
| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:15 AM | Permalink
She has just released a superb new CD titled SHINE.