Archive Jan to June 2010

May

See a new video - ‘War Play 153’ in 'The Book of Water', at the Sydney Writers Festival 17-23 May www.sydneywritersfestival.org.au.

One quiet Sunday morning, a poet (who carries a camera everywhere and shoots whatever comes to hand, i.e. a bricoleur) notices play surrounding him. Homo ludens looks one way then the other, but the country remains at war.

April

After 30 years in Sydney we are moving our lives to be near the sea and beside Jagun Nature Reserve in Gumbaynggir territory, ‘Jagun’ is their word for home.

The view from our front door:

How to belong somewhere? Belonging it seems to me is a concept underpinning home / house. Our idea of a house was invented (along with still life painting) by the mercantile Dutch mid 17^th C, as a building / place of one’s own. , but is more an appropriation of place than either:

• Gaston Bachelard’s outdated and deeply nostalgic notion of private seat of dreams; or

• The Kerrigan’s Castle at Cooloroo - their leaky fibro built on a toxic landfill, beneath high-voltage power lines and the flight path; or

• One’s own “Centre of peace and satisfaction” as Virginia Woolf put it.

View of the house:

Houses / homes are reified in Australia, a problem since houses are catalysts for what Clive Hamilton calls 'growth fetishism'; they perpetrate vast ecological footprints. This house is large but with a passive solar design and solar hot water, but no rainwater tanks and no landscaping. We are conscious we owe this place something – having bought a house that sits on a concrete slab that four years ago was forest. We are all part of the problem and have to take responsibility.

In our first week we joined the local bush regeneration group and were pulling out or poisoning lantana, asparagus fern, lilies, bitou and the pretty yellow acacia cassis down by the shore - a pinprick in the infestation of so much of the East coast of Australia.

We need to broaden the notion of home with the help of the concept of belonging, both:

a) affectively – learning to feel at home outside the house – outside nostalgia’s epiphanies , belonging, through skilled practice and a natural aesthetic - not just imagination (contra Bachelard); and

b) culturally/politically, bio-regionally.

The view from my study

To clarify I’ll quote environmental historian William Cronon: ‘We need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness can somehow be encompassed in the word home. Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the place for which we take responsibility . . . [A]nd calling a place home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and working and even killing some parts of nature to make our home.’

Cronon is well known for arguing that wilderness is a dangerous concept which leaves us with no sense of belonging to the natural world. He overstates the case I feel; there are places where we cannot easily live, and where if we do live we destroy that very place.

We eat, we sleep, we shit. It is a great advantage to have a decent view from all three positions.

The view from our dunny

We have a view of the sea, which changes colour like a chameleon.

The wedge of sea, silk not wine

in the form of a Krater, is carefully separated

from the heavens by a slim silver necklace.

Through the glasses white incisions

piercing the entire pale blue torso

are clearly visible.

Next month we’ll keep an eye out

for whales floating north

and forget about Thera’s blue monkeys.

“. . . we arrived on the sea beach, about a couple of miles north of the bar of the Nambucca . . . We now walked easily along the smooth sands, left bare by the tide; crunching under our feet, by thousands, the small blue crabs which issue from their holes in countless multitudes at low water . . . the waves the beach were full of mullet, and salmon, that seemed to swim among the breakers in search of prey.” Clement Hodgkinson, 1842

We explored South West Rocks south of here saw a sea eagle, osprey, kites, black bittern, two species of kingfisher plus many others.

Wetter, Faster

Looking north to Valla from South West Rocks - for Kit & Carol

My hand wants to move, probably to describe the landscape

of receding Sung mountains, their outlines flowing

through Claude’s opaque blue aquatic distances.

It’s not as if I have much to say, but if I did and wrote it down,

the words would not correlate but generate their own

form, style and vocabulary which I’d tinker with

like a weekend mechanic fixing up his beloved Kingswood,

straight six cylinders much easier to handle and the dirt and grease

all part of the fun. The hand wants work within its grasp,

but this is ink, not wood, not bone, not stone.

The Chinese word refers to process and application

(the texture, brushwork and line), I just scribble symbols

on pulped timber, a powerful, irresistible phenomena

but one without bold colour or movement, improvised

wash or technical brilliance to overcome technique

and push one’s art towards t’ien-chen (‘naturalness’)

sounding simple words against the vast smile of view

with its residue of cloud and scudding black cockatoos.

Bellinger at dawn

Exactly 20 years since I canoed down the Zambezi, I canoed down the Bellinger with some friends – no photos, just as well, we capsised in one of the rapids. It’s an interesting river, changing all the time, plenty of birds and water dragons and Bello Hippos, black bulls in the middle of the gravel beds. It’s shocking that farmers allow their cattle into the river, the banks are eroding too easily without any riparian vegetation. The trip triggered a return of my bursitis, back with a vengeance, hard to hold a pair of binoculars up.

March

An exciting exhibition exploring the natural world at various scales from landscape to microbe: Part 2 of Desire Lines with all new works.

Opening - Bondi Pavilion 3 March 5pm (running to Sunday 14th).

Once Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

Could he dream he was female? A female Orchard Swallowtail Butterfly (Papilio aegeus) laying eggs on some black bamboo? Did he recognise Buddha? Would he head round to the front of our house to lay eggs on the lime tree, food for her caterpillars?

I prefer the naturalism of Chuang Tzu, following the Tao-te-Ching, an emphasis on following the natural way, the Tao. He emphasised the principle of wu wei, avoiding working too hard for fame or wealth and being cautious with ambitious politics - going for a simple life to be enjoyed.

He who wants to have right without wrong,

Order without disorder,

Does not understand the principles

Of heaven and earth.

He does not know how

Things hang together.

A pluralistic perspective is required in a world that is processural, dynamic, contingent and historicised.

The perfect man uses his mind like a mirror

Going after nothing, welcoming nothing,

Responding, but not storing.

Feb

We are moving north

to Valla Valla close to Bellingen and Nambucca Heads

(ngambugka, Gumbaynggir for somthing like 'winding entrance to the waters');

north from a smoking pylon

Passages

For the Purcells

1

The body judders, warped as we twist north.

Sydney appears back-lit, sun popping up

straight above the Harbour Bridge,

incandescent mist spilling between the pylons,

the landmarks obvious from this strategic position:

the office blocks drizzled in tamarind,

the trophy harbour, jigsaw ground I walk on

with mercury inlay, cleared by Phillip

on the second day and now and forever, Amen.

From bathtime the Manly ferry has this irresistible

urge to slide forwards and backwards.

We are in process of sliding north.

Half an hour ago on terra firma, in the lounge

I was reading Rage for Curiosity

displaying Evans, Lycett, Watling and Lewin,

even the wonderful Lewin couldn’t see the sublime

for the topographical with the smell of aviation fuel

evaporating. Conrad Martens, laid off from the Beagle

drew the foreshore as he sailed through the Heads.

Beside me, B rapidly sketches the scene

in pen + ink, pen + imagination, pen + optimism

that form can emerge from this interlaced chiaroscuro

of earth and water, shining off and on like one of Homer’s

armies, blood and armour in rusted intermodulation.

Light flows conveniently as mist, west into valleys,

terra incognita, then the plane surges forward

and only sea and sky remain, terra nullius so vast

and wondrous, you could easily imagine

(and we want to, being buried alive in blue)

that there was nothing we could do to hurt them.

2

Jethro Tull vibrates the speakers, Brian is talking about a waterhole

just beyond the rapids, and a platypus just around from the ropes.

Near the Airport a sign warns of koalas playing in the road.

Dwelling is on my mind. An hour ago we were on the Bellinger,

a heron screeched and the river spilled over the canoe

(too small for me) near where the river skids over a bank of pebbles

buttressing a sandbank, supporting ranks of casuarinas

doubled over, but dug-in, holding onto the colour green.

The worst flood in memory failed to scour the midges . . .

Quietly the Hawkesbury uncoils through the hills, their

shadowed checkerboard pattern an architectural conceit

A sole yacht sculpts pinkness between Scotland and Dangar

Islands and smaller uninhabited ones making no sense

but for birds. I had forgotten so many drowned valleys

cover the tracks of so many who lived here so long ago.

An angry purple weal wedges the meniscus of sea/sky

and a white scar of development litters the coastline.

Daylight ages as the Heads come into view.

We are a few miles inland, parallel to our original course,

passing the tightly packed building blocks of Chatswood.

A Tangara shimmers as it crosses the Harbour Bridge

drenched in light, a model simulating Philip K Dick’s paranoia.

I think I’d see more if I could smell more. We get used to

everything, the sun dropping such pretty sunbeams on traffic

shunting the loop of Gladesville Bridge. We slow above Botany Bay,

bright red cranes try to lift the blue sheet, the landing gear jars

the seat, oil’s lucent rainbow slips among the tinnies - are we on a mission?

Can I have one more speech bubble? Wasn’t everything

once made of wood or clay? A phalanx of storage tanks

fresh gleam a future running low and heading underground

Trying to leave

for

Bron in the Never Never, 11 Feb.

I was just thinking this morning how I want art to show me what I don’t know or haven’t experienced. Hence the urge for the new – art is not revelation like an icon that can undergo unlimited repetition – though my definition of good art remains that which repays attention (a definition that applies to natural aesthetics as well as fine art). A paradox?

The marginalisation of poetry

Sent: Thursday, 4 February 2010 3:14 PM

To: john bennett

Subject: RE: Sarah and Maria

Hi John

Sorry it’s taken so long to let you know I did read your two lovely pieces, thank you for sending them to me.

I really enjoyed them both - although I must confess that from the way you were describing your poetry I thought they would not be my cup of tea at all! I was very pleasantly surprised that they were not the way out, avant guard (weird shit) I was expecting. My reading is pretty much confined to prose, I very rarely read poetry having failed to develop any appreciation in school. Quite the opposite, with minute dissection of John Donne et al turning me off for life I fear (although I quite liked TS Eliot). I’ve probably committed blasphemy here, I should probably leave it at that!

Poets always keen to maintain poetry as special, the term itself is knotted around values of high culture rather than mass culture – hence current online skirmishes about the lyric. The plurality of poetry practices (from code poetry at one extreme, sound poetry at another, and poetry slams poetry at the other) shows different values and different audiences.

In oral cultures, poems were cultivated as tools and techniques of memory; bards were valued as archivists, priests, propagandists, and entertainers. David Abram points out that in such cultures, ‘the elite of society were all reciters and performers.’ Poems connected people to their past, and their cultural and natural environments. That changed long ago but poetry remains an amazing and natural form for us language animals. Strange it is in such a state of neglect in western oriented cultures.

Dana Gioia has argued, "It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the sub-culture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead." Gioia over-reacted; interesting poems are being made and heard/read. But our culture has become visually obsessed and speedy (ipods,MTV); attention is shortlived. And school does put people off (it did me), and academic institutions never vitalise any art form.

Sad news

Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, has died.

"The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures. Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue. Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language."

"Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology," Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. "To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else." [The Guardian].

There are currently about 6,500 living human languages, they are fast diminsihing, partly because of all THIS.

[Aristotle founded logic with universalist claims and presumed that everyone sees the world the same way - but Edward Sapir, from his study of American Indian languages, suggested language predispose us to see the world ‘which undermines the possibility of man’s access to the real world.’ Since then, the Whorf–Sapir thesis has been denigrated as determinist, though they carefully used terms like ‘predispose’, and now has empirical support. We think and act as language animals, different languages think differently, even different grammars affect our being in the world.]

Jan 2010

‘Desire Lines’

Sally Merret, Janet Reinhardt and Bronwyn Rodden

Balmain Watch House, Jan 28 (my launch speech)

I recently visited a few galleries up the coast filled with landscapes and flowers, pretty paintings that pass by the gaze and don't repay attention – that’s my definition of good art – rather than Damien Hirst’s definition of great art, and I quote, “Great art is when you walk round the corner and go, 'Fucking hell! What's that?'”

Alternately, the philosopher Richard Wollheim recommended standing in front of a painting for 2 hours so that “the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.” He was thinking of his favourite painter, Poussin. After spending six months looking at two Poussins, the critic Timothy Clark wrote The Sight of Death.

We don’t have to be so serious; though these paintings are seriously beautiful, and look so good against these old sandstone walls. Relax, enjoy how they attract the visual and pre-frontal cortex, and are so suggestive, you follow, backtrack, rest and return to. ‘Desire Lines’ by Sally Merret, Janet Reinhardt and Bronwyn Rodden is a subtle and rewarding show. The artists use many different techniques and materials, each work is an inventive exploration of natural forms, landscapes, fecund nature, and the three complement each other in interesting ways for you to unearth, from the deeply archaic, to marine environments and rivers.

Relax, this is just about enjoying really good art, there are no phone buyers from oversees - no Tobias Meyer, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, selling Martin Kippenberger (who I admit I’ve not heard of). “Meyer ran the bidding up in seconds from thirty thousand to sixty thousand pounds, then to seventy and eighty thousand, until he had an offer of a hundred and seventy. Above Meyer, a large flat-screen monitor converted each bid, as he called it out, into U.S. dollars, euros, Swiss francs, Hong Kong dollars, and yen. . . Meyer seesawed his body back and forth from one to the other in crisp, Kabuki-like moves, and called out each new bid with a note of challenge, as if daring the opponent to go one higher. At times, Meyer fixed a reluctant bidder with a stern gaze and demanded to know if he was truly out - thereby provoking a new bid; at other times, he leaned his elbows confidentially on the podium, gazing at a bidder with a coaxing smile, and murmuring conspiratorially, "One more? Shall we make it one-eighty?"”

I’ll just say that these works don’t need Meyer; they are remarkable value for money, and the commission goes towards maintaining this wonderful Blacket building (1854, traditional Georgian style, it is the oldest surviving lock-up in Sydney).

This show is generous and ambitious, originating from when the three artists worked together for a week at Bronte by the sea, inspiring, encouraging, and learning from each other. They put on an intimate show that inspired me to write a long poem about death, though for different reasons to Timothy Clark.

I’ll read if I may, an extract.

Three women upstairs are proliferating art, making special

marks, gestures, reiterations and improvisations.

I’m outside on the silica pointing at the moon . . .

I climb for a view of recessive headlands stretching south,

the sea bares its teeth on tumbled blocks of sandstone

below a bright running fence, a boardwalk construction.

In the cemetery, starlings perch on memorials like Hitchcock extras,

a cross is as good as an angel, headstone, urn, or broken column

for a view of the sea, arms outstretched with hypnotic authority . . .

I cross the cordon. Everything here makes an effort to live.

In the blancmange-pink oleander a wattlebird feeds a greedy koel

whingeing loudly; wrens chatter away, keeping busy for happiness.

Weeds prise every crack and crevice, birds and bees

service a wild kingdom overpopulated by grasses, daisies,

wild geraniums and the mysteries of life underground, necessary

life in the hands of the Moirae, the three Fates dressed in robes

as pale as all the crosses of the resurrection that surround me:

Clotho spins life’s thread onto a spindle;

Lachesis, the geneticist, measures the thread each of us receives;

and Atropos cuts the thread, choosing the when and how:

leukaemia, diarrhoea, influenza, starvation, kuru, bullet,

industrial accident, bubonic plague, Bloom’s syndrome, car crash,

losing one’s grip, and once in a while a broken heart.

The gods feared these women, even Zeus! . . .

These three women don’t terrify me, their art inspires me, I hope the works achieve that for you too.

Bron's cell

Moving

I've been working in my study not knowing what was lying beneath me, between three layers of old linoleum.

TEETH OF BEAUTY

With artificial teeth I round out sunken cheeks.

and so make you look years younger.

I can choose and arrange the teeth so as to express

YOUR OWN IDEAS.

I then give them a double suction,

and you will be delighted with them.

Evening News, Tuesday, July 12, 1927

Sydney Festival

The opening was a wonderful evening with Bobby Singh bringing together various permutations of musicians in Hyde Park, including Raphael the Flamenco singer, and the Band of Brothers (above, Slava Grigoryan, Leonard Grigoryan, Joseph Tawadros and James Tawadros). They were followed by the Manganiyar musicians from Rajasthan at sunset. We have just come from seeing again in a concert hall.

I appreciated the music, felt it touch me, played along with the conductor leading us into rhythmic intricacies beyond our mental and clapping ability, but this wasn’t quite their music I realised. I wasn’t at a merchant’s wedding or fiftieth birthday party, just as when we listen to a CD of Satie, that’s not listening to Satie as he would have known music, ephemeral, transient, moments to be savoured. Though on the opening night at sunset, the bats flying overhead at the front of the stage inside a huge crowd, these thoughts were completely absent.

I thought of an advent calendar - curtains open, musicians play as the lights come on, then off, as the ensemble varies. But the idea came from Amsterdam.

These were excellent musicians but tightly coralled in boxes, with their improvisatory heritage not on show. At Victoria Falls I reluctantly went to see a dance troupe give a tourist performance, they were fantastic, very good dancers and great drummers. They played up to the crowds and appeared to be enjoying themselves, and the audience enjoyed the evening. They were being paid, and it was our only chance to see traditional dancing. (l had been asking along the way, hoping to catch a traditional wedding or funeral, or some such trigger for traditional music and dance).

It is not a matter of authenticity, but of a different and probably inferior experience. (Lionel Trilling suggested that the emergence of the individual in the sixteenth century went hand-in-hand with authenticity; now we are all individuals as consumers and we all perform and create identity through consuming.)

Komal Kothari collected folksongs and around 1960 came across Antar Khan, a Manganiyar, Muslim entertainers from the desert areas of Sind and north-west Rajasthan. Kothari wanted to record his songs, was preparing his tape recorder turned and the man had gone. “I went to the door and looked out. There he was, sprinting away. I chased him and caught up after some effort. It turned out he feared that if he sang in front of the recorder, the machine would swallow his voice forever! . . . And now, despite their initial reluctance they have quiet rapidly adapted to the new potential. They seek markets, travel the world, deliver professional performances and handle success with great suavity.” [i]

This fear is more usually attributed with photography feared by Chinese and many indigenous peoples. I agree with Lucy Lippard who thinks this is perfectly reasonable. She bought a vintage family portrait, and comments: “the "photos-steal-your-spirit syndrome" . . . is not so far off. The more we know about representation, the more obvious it becomes that photography is a spirit snatcher. I "own" a postcard which permits me to "have" the Beaver family in my house. The Oglala warrior Crazy Horse never allowed his photograph to be taken, and it was said of those Native leaders who did that "they let their spirits be captured in a box" and lost the impetus to resist.”[ii] And in fact, anthropological photographs often subjugate their subjects turning them into objects, both by depicting them in the category of victim, and by depicting them as victims without showing the causal environmental, political and social conditions.[iii] Walter Benjamin considered early photography to have had ‘aura’, the hard-to-pin-down power significant art has, but that aura has withered through mechanical reproduction. This means a loss of power and meaning compensated for in Benjamin’s view by the realisation that religious art objects are art and with political meanings and not with special powers.

[i] From the program

[ii] Lucy Lippard, "Introduction." Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans. Ed. Lucy Lippard. New York: New P, 1992, p38.

[iii] Alison Solomon-Godeau, Photography and the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: U of Minn. P, 1991, p176-80.

Meanwhile in Chinatown, the year of the Tiger approaches:

No New Year's Resolution

but a plan to move closer to natural processes and environments and to work on my book on natural aesthetics.

(lg) Rosemary Laing, Groundspeed (Red Piazza) 2001