O________O

Michelangelo Antonioni, Part 1: "The Passenger" (1975)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 04:55:00 +0000

For me, "The Passenger" is a film about pleasure that masquerades as a thriller. These are opposite poles of cinematic experience and they speak to opposite poles of life experience. On the one hand is an experience of beauty, leisure and peacefulness and on the other tension, anxiety and fear.

On three separate occasions it is pointed out to David Locke (Jack Nicholson) — himself masquerading for most of the film as a dead acquaintance, David Robertson — that the surrounding environment is beautiful. The first is in the Sahara Desert and comes as a question from Robertson when he was alive and well. As they both gaze out to the desert from just outside Locke's hotel room, Robertson remarks at its beauty. Locke isn't sure if it is beautiful. The second occurs just after Locke, now identifying as Robertson, arrives in Barcelona, as per Robertson's itinerary. It is pointed out by an elderly man, a fellow passenger on an aerial tram, that it is beautiful from up there in the tram with its view of Barcelona. Locke leans out the window and spreads his arms as if gliding carelessly and joyfully, high above the water. The third time comes from the Girl (Maria Schneider), a tourist now traveling with Locke, just after they've evaded capture by the police by pulling off the road into the rugged terrain, barren excepting the grassy shrubs which hide them. Locke's car is damaged from their evasion. As he tries to decide what to do, realizing that his options are narrowing, the Girl asks, "isn't is beautiful here?" This time, despite his dilemma, Locke looks out on the terrain and replies, "Yes, it's very beautiful."

This last occasion for recognizing the surrounding beauty is contrasted with the first time we see Locke having car trouble. This is early in the film, when Locke is still Locke, a reporter trying to gather information on guerrilla fighters in Saharan Africa fighting against an unspecified government. Exhausted, hot and frustrated at his failed attempts to make contact with the guerrillas, he starts back to the hotel only to get his Land Rover stuck in a sand dune. He is unable to see how his surroundings are anything but a hindrance or an obstacle to be overcome.

Ironically perhaps, Robertson, who we find out after his death to be an arms trafficker and supplier to the guerrilla forces, has no trouble losing himself in the open spaces, the quietude and the barrenness. He is rootless and free. It is perhaps only his conviction that can point to something about Robertson, the man, himself. He believes in the guerrillas' cause, though he only reveals to Locke that he is, vaguely, a businessman. Locke envies Robertson's freedom, and when the opportunity presents itself to trade places with him, like trading in a car — after Locke is tired and fed up, after this rootless acquaintance with "no family, no friends" unexpectedly and suddenly dies (and who happens to look very much like Locke) — Locke does so. Locke sees identity as a constant, and as such sees the only escape from his endless pattern of expected behavior to be to dump his identity onto the recently deceased Robertson and take up Robertson's as his own. What Locke doesn't realize is that no matter how perfect the circumstances for this bizarre trade-up might seem, a total escape is more complicated, like a vacation is not an escape from reality, just a break from the normal run of things. And of course this is complicated in the extreme by Robertson's gunrunning activities, which become partially known to Locke later. Interestingly, after a surprise encounter and transaction with his weapons buyers in Munich, Locke changes his travel plans to correspond to Robertson's itinerary, with the intention of keeping the next scheduled appointment in Barcelona.

There are allusions to tourism and traveling everywhere in the film. Airports, flight schedules, itineraries, rental car offices, hotels, tourist destinations and language barriers are all prominent and shape the story that unfolds. Random cars are followed by the camera's eye as they traverse the frame, one in one direction, another in the opposite direction, and so on. A sign (in Spanish) that says, "Thanks for your visit." All the while, Locke wanders carelessly into places, hides in places to avoid discovery or goes to places according to Robertson's itinerary. But the places Locke finds himself are places one would visit as a tourist — grand hotels, picturesque landscapes, landmark buildings. The phrase "getting away" comes to mind — a phrase used both for escaping capture and taking a vacation.

Going to places as a tourist and as a man on the run are conflated. Robertson's itinerary is like a vacation planner, with women's names written down as reminders for which girlfriend to expect at each rendezvous. But these names are likely code names and the meetings are about illegal arms trafficking. With each rendezvous, however, Locke's contact fails to show. This doesn't alarm Locke the way it should perhaps, given the type of dealings in which he's involved, but it does effectively remove these dealings from his direct proximity, leaving him with plenty of time to listen to an old man's life story in a Barcelona park, for example, or to take a nap in a citrus orchard. Ironically, each time Locke shows up to these risky appointments with no one to meet him, he is left with moments of peaceful leisure rather than the stress of rebel warfare. It's a strange but intriguing occurrence that is as much an excuse to give viewers the experience of peacefulness and views of beautiful sites as it is about Locke's activities. This is why it seems to me that the experience of pleasure is not just a theme here, but a genre all its own somehow, in counterpoint to the thriller-type plot. Slow pans along the Sahara horizon or a meeting on the roof of Gaudi's Casa Milà with its fantastical chimneys are not just incidental. They suggest a way of appreciating the world around us, both the natural and the man-made, even though it is also a world of ugliness and war.

We know through his wife's flashback that Locke was disturbed, though how much, how little or in what manner is not clear. His frustration with his patterns was apparent, but there was an instability beyond this, a disquiet. Robertson's peace of mind had something to do with his convictions. I believe Locke achieves peace of mind as well, but not by believing as Robertson believes — this is entirely too personal — and not at the expense of his disquiet. I believe he achieves this by giving himself over to Robertson's itinerary. This is itself a kind of conviction. It is a leap of faith that is risky, exhilarating and cathartic. Nor does he achieve this on his own. The Girl keeps him committed when he doubts. She understands that believing in something is important, otherwise there is only running away. That Robertson believed in something has value to her, and so it should even more to Locke. Locke's goal was to escape himself, but the only real way things could change is if Locke owned his decision to become Robertson. The surest way to do this was to keep the appointments in the itinerary. Despite the limited information at the time, this is what Locke signed on to do when he decided to take up Robertson's identity. With the help of the Girl, Locke is able to stay true to his commitment, which under these bizarre circumstances also means he is able to stay true to himself.

Unlike most, if not all of Antonioni's other films, a real connection is made between his main characters. There is no unspoken tension or invisible walls between Locke and the Girl. And in the end, when asked by the police if she recognized him, she replies yes. By becoming Robertson, he was able to reveal himself to the Girl in a way he never did, or could, with his wife.

Also, in contrast to many Antonioni endings, it is a peaceful one, despite tragedy. Life goes on. Children play and elderly couples bicker as they did in the movie, and as they have done throughout time. Locke had come to find his patterns intolerable, maybe even these general patterns of life from childhood to old age a sign of stagnation or a kind of prison. People die, patterns remain and beauty still exists.

The Orphans

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 18:02:00 +0000

Susan O'Malley

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 19:11:00 +0000

A tragic story and message of authentic optimism

Root Division on front page!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 01:13:00 +0000

of SF Chronicle. Really great article by J.K. Dineen about Root Division, the plight of arts organizations in San Francisco and the work being done by the city to help out. Here's Root Division's official announcement.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 06:12:00 +0000

PAINTING COMPLEX 1/15/05

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 02:01:00 +0000

PAINTING COMPLEX from Blake Gibson on Vimeo.

10 years ago yesterday, I performed PAINTING COMPLEX at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Heavily influenced by my experiences in the Land Arts of the American West program, it still stands as my most ambitious project to date.

ptng

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 20:43:00 +0000

Title Here

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 09:45:00 +0000

Giorgio Morandi

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 21:23:00 +0000

Philip Guston Abstractions

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 20:41:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 20:29:00 +0000

TMR in Conversation with Oscar Murillo from The Mistake Room on Vimeo.

Torey Thornton

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 03:30:00 +0000

Norman Bluhm

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 18:26:00 +0000

http://www.lorettahoward.com/content/norman-bluhm-paintings-1967-1974 http://www.normanbluhm.com/paintings/paintings1990s.html

Slay Me.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:07:00 +0000

C-Swing (1974), Guy Goodwin

sections

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 21:13:00 +0000

"Inhabit" at Introductions 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 12:06:00 +0000

7/22/13

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 20:31:00 +0000

Some Paintings

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 21:24:00 +0000

Blake Gibson — Australia Drawings

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 19:12:00 +0000

Alright, guess it's time for me to step to the plate. My artistic exploration in Australia involved solitary walks into the bush, wilderness, woods...whatever you want to call it. I had been working on small-scale pen and ink drawings based on the natural world prior to my leaving for Australia. I did not know how or if this process would find a place in my work in Australia. But I brought a small pad of paper and pens with me, and most of the time these were the only art materials I carried on my walks.

The works are diminutive and minimal — not Minimalist, that's something different. But they are minimal to me. I was interested in objects or views that had an intriguing appearance, but which also would be difficult to draw convincingly without also including information about their context. So, I drew them by themselves, without much information at all about the area around them. They are de-contextualized (which I sometimes accomplished by doing stuff to the drawings later). Fundamentally, these works came from thoughts about my disconnection from the wilderness and my being with that disconnection alone in the wilderness and quiet for extended amounts of time.

Below are images of some of these 9"x11 1/2" drawings. I've included a couple of details in the mix as well....

Heike Qualitz

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:14:00 +0000

Another of our new Australian friends I've been meaning to profile... She always seemed to have her camera and tripod around, and it's a good thing. Many of these photos came from circumstances being what they were and people doing what they do. The images below represent earlier sculptural work, and art photography. Images from Camp Jigamy, including art photos and "highlights" of us I put in the post just prior to this one. Heike sent me a little background info, which I'll relay here.

saturday night on lake mokoan was a work from a field studies trip in 2009. lake mokoan was a wetland in northern victoria that was dammed for a few decades forming a bit of a water feature and fostering recreational sports and was then decommissioned and returned to a wetland a few years back. inside the fuel drum (from a boat motor) is a recording i took (on a sat nite...) of the varied and rich life on the lake - frogs & birds galore and at close inspection a plane overhead. i liked the idea of spatial information and illusion relayed through sound.

solei revisited was made for a group show earlier this year titled solar and celebrating the installation of about 120 solar panels onto the roof of the gallery... the video (a reversed and looped abstraction of a fleeting moment i happened to capture on camera whilst being on exchange in berlin in 2008. its the slanting spring sun hitting a metal chair leg and forming concentric rings around it - a contracting and expanding creature) is projected onto a slowly rotating disc reminiscent of the wooden floor i first witnessed it on, the angle of the disc is referencing the tilt of the earth (~23.4 degrees) the combo of slowly changing image and rotating disc has a peculiar effect too...

Davidson Beach

from Journeys of a Wedding Dress

Nightshade

Saturday Night on Lake Mokoan

Solei Revisited

Solei Revisited (detail)

Heike Qualitz Jigamy Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:55:00 +0000

Jigamy Friday Night

Taming the Chi

Yoshimi

Caroline Huf — Back to the Mallee

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:45:00 +0000

Here's a work in progress from one of the Australian artists we had the pleasure to meet and spend time with at Calperum Station. Her process is stop motion photography, which has a physicality often lacking in other moving image processes. I think her work has a great sense of play to it as well. Enjoy!

back to the mallee from Caroline Huf on Vimeo.

John Reid — Walking the Solar System, Pt. 2

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:28:00 +0000

The statement below from John Reid and a short video of his performance 'Force of Habit' from 2000 sheds more light on his work shown in the previous post (his video from Kioloa can be found there as well).

Friday 3 June Late afternoon: The walk onto the rock platform skirting Snapper Point near Kioloa, NSW, is a disorientating sensory experience. The exposed and slightly off-kilter Permian sediments form the headland on one side and, on the other, is the sizeable rolling swell of the Tasman Sea. It brought to mind a performance work that I did in 2000 titled, ‘Force of Habit’ (see Video 01, the only visual compilation to exist). In it my body is positioned horizontally on a gallery plynth. Armed with a briefcase, I assume a posture as if I’m walking to work. By virtue of being at odds with the force of gravity my limbs fatigue in a few minutes, the walking pose collapses and the artwork concludes. The performance derived some formal dramatic tension from the body being under physiological stress. Conceptually, however, the work was in dialogue with Australian artist, Stelarc, and his thesis that the brain and technology are in a mutinous relationship against the rest of the body in order to attain gravitational escape velocity.

As a sequel to ‘Force of Habit’, I had imagined pinioning my eschewed, walking-to-work body in front of the spectacular Silurian sediments exposed in a roadside cutting on State Circle near the Federal Parliament House in Canberra - in full view of passing peak hour traffic. The cutting provides compelling evidence of ancient landscapes and the habitats of now extinct faunas (Mayer 1995). In this location a performance founded on a visually dislocated figure going about a daily routine in the geological scheme of things would resonate with the proposition – escape the planet or die, and to escape you don’t need arms and legs!

Now several years down the track, is it to be at State Circle in inner Canberra or at Snapper Point on the NSW Far South Coast? The crucial elements for a performance site are similar; and in terms of geological time what’s in a few million years? Instead of peak hour traffic I have a video function on my camera and tomorrow I could invite my new found colleague, Bill Gilbert, instantly savvy as a visual artist and celestial walker, to return to the headland with me.

Saturday 4 June Mid-afternoon: I have a brief case. I’m in bureaucratic uniform. I could be walking to work except I’m on a rock platform at the edge of the Tasman Sea. But I am walking to work. This is a working day. Bill is with me, his finger hovering over the shutter button of my camera, which in turn is bolted to a tripod. Wait! I confide in Bill an overnight thought. Once the figure has been rendered as dislocated from its background, I am sure the viewer will be more conscious of it as an object hurtling through space. Its journey - let’s say for need of some point of reference - in relation to the sun, may well be coincident with the loci of other places in the past or still to come with which the dislocated figure aligns perfectly. One mistake and I could time travel. Bill hits the record button. I do the walk. When it’s done we take a few photographs of a re-walk with a more advanced still camera (see Photograph 01 below).

Throughout the rest of June Several ‘walking to work’ performances are recorded as videos and as still images on the Far South Coast of New South Wales and in the Riverland Biosphere in South Australia. A selection of three videos and three still photographs of these performances were exhibited in the work-in-progress exhibition, Expression of Intent, at the ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery in July under the collective and provisional title, Walking the Solar System (see Photographs 01, 02 and 03 below). The accompanying text read in part: At issue for the final resolution of these recent works is whether to show only still photographs of ‘the walks’, or only the video of ‘the walks’, which ones of either, and to decide on a title as an entrée to the contemplation of the central idea.

Photograph 01

Photograph 02

Photograph 03

John Reid — Walking the Solar System

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:53:00 +0000

Those of us from the Land Arts program who came to Australia owe a lot to John Reid, so it is a real honor to be able to show some of his work on this blog. During the month of June, Mr. Reid focused his time on the body of work tentatively titled, "Walking the Solar System." Below is a brief statement about his working process along with images and a video from the series. The video is the one he showed us at Kioloa, which I wrote about in my post "Report from Kioloa."

The idea of imaging the human figure going about everyday life (ie walking to work) as a body in the solar system began with the 2002 performance, 'Force of Habit.' A similar work was performed in 2005. In 2011, several performances were undertaken in the field for the video camera with the production assistance of Bill Gilbert and Frank Thirion. The disconnect between the figure and the ground raises for consideration the locus of the figure orbiting about the sun intersecting with a particular place that is at that point in space but at another orientation and point in time. At issue for the final resolution of these recent works is whether to show only still photographs of ‘the walks’, or only the video of ‘the walks’, which ones of either, and to decide on a title as an entrée to the contemplation of the central idea.

Bill Gilbert — Walking Constellations and Grids

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 04:32:00 +0000

Not enough can be said about Bill Gilbert, co-founder and director of the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico. The success of Land Arts has helped generate the Art & Ecology area at UNM and continues to play a significant role for place-based art in the southwest.

In Australia, Gilbert had a unique opportunity to focus on his own projects, which are based on the physical act of walking as a means of experiencing place. Below is Bill in his own words about his work in Australia, along with working images

For each map I use an arbitrary system of navigation to subvert my conscious mind and have a direct encounter with the surface of the planet. In that sense my walking is more in line with the Situationists than the Brits (Long & Fulton): sort of a wilderness Derive. I worked on two series in AU both using absurd systems to determine my paths. At Calperum, I did an Australian version of my "attempts to walk the grid." I've now done them in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas (in the states) and Mongolia and Japan. The ground being fairly flat and obstacles few and far between. I came pretty close this time.

At Kioloa, Jigamy and Calperum I did walks in which I used constellations from the southern Hemisphere's night sky to navigate my way across the land. At Kioloa, I followed Scorpio from coast to rain forest, beach to thicket. This walk will be paired with another Scorpio walk completed at the San Rafael Swell, UT in Land Arts, mesa to river bottom. At Jigamy, I traced Lepsus on the forest floor in honor of the year of the hare and AU's problem with rabbit populations. At Calperum, I walked Hercules through the Mallee Woodlands and met a charming, if flustered, Emu. This walk will be matched with another Hercules path I followed at Otero Mesa, NM again with the Land Arts program.

My current struggle is with how best to translate the experiences to the gallery and/or web. In addition to the maps, I am playing with photos, sound recordings, and plant identification info.

Grid near Calperum Station, SA, Australia

Scorpio South— Kioloa, NSW, Australia

Scorpio North — San Rafael Swell, Utah, USA

Lepsus walking points

Lepsus —between Pambula Lake and the Tasman Sea

Hercules South points

Hercules South in the mallee woodlands in South Australia