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INTERNET. Cocaine Another excellent track from the...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:40:03 +1100

INTERNET. Cocaine

Another excellent track from the new Internet album, Purple Naked Ladies. Says it all.

INTERNET. FASTLANE The rather wonderful Syd tha Kid and Matt...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:52:38 +1100

INTERNET. FASTLANE

The rather wonderful Syd tha Kid and Matt Martians (from the Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All collective) play from their new album, Purple Naked Ladies.

The shock of MONA What is the most shocking thing about...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:36:00 +1100

The shock of MONA

What is the most shocking thing about Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art?

David Walsh’s extraordinary new museum has received its fair share of media coverage since being opened a year ago. This often focused on its cost ($75 million of Walsh’s own money) or the ‘scandalous’ nature of some exhibits, such as Greg Taylor’s Cunts: A Conversation pictured above (controversy which the museum seems to delight in). More eruditely, there has been furious debate about whether the collection is simply a rich man’s Cabinet of Curiosities or whether it truly ‘helps us to lead better lives’ (the quaint, almost Stalinist view of the civic function of art argued by philosopher, John Armstrong in Island magazine).

MONA is an exhilarating place to visit. There are any number of reasons for this. The dramatic buildings and site. The eclectic, unblinking nature of the opening exhibition on sex and death: ‘Monanism’. The fact that one can freely take photographs. The irreverent comments by Walsh himself about some of the exhibits. And not forgetting the bar in the basement …

But what shocked me most was the difference made by the absence of any labels or directions whatsoever about how to view the exhibits. Our initial encounter with each artwork is totally unmediated by contextual ‘noise’. Not even the barest detail.

In other galleries, we can ignore the patronising ‘explications’ often displayed next to art works, but cannot help checking the title, the artist, the date. Yet even these interfere with our experience of the work, filtering what the eye sees through everything we may happen to know know about Rothko, about the development of perspective drawing, or Caravaggio’s tempestuous life.

Is that painted carven head from an Egyptian tomb? An anatomical model from the Renaissance? Or a new piece by Damien Hirst? Even the artist’s name or a date mediates how we perceive a work, instead of leaving the individual’s eye to see and sensibility to react.

All you could want to know about any work at MONA is on hand by checking the iPod guide, but this becomes a secondary and optional act to seeing itself. This naked, exhilarating encounter with the artworks at MONA is the museum’s most shocking revelation for the visitor - one which which will long outlast any philistine outrage over the poignant line of pudenda in Taylor’s ‘conversation piece.’

Postcards from MONA

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:29:00 +1100

Postcards from MONA

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:11:00 +1100

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” - Pablo Picasso

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR BOWIE … Sixty-five years young today.

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:58:17 +1100

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR BOWIE …

Sixty-five years young today.

MELANCHOLIA Lars von Trier channels Die Götterdämmerung.

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:17:01 +1100

MELANCHOLIA

Lars von Trier channels Die Götterdämmerung.

HOME SWEET HOME

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:15:01 +1100

HOME SWEET HOME

OCCUPYING MELBOURNE The mood at Occupy Melbourne yesterday was...

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:01:00 +1100

OCCUPYING MELBOURNE

The mood at Occupy Melbourne yesterday was more Woodstock than Wall Street.

Economic conditions and employment rates in Australia are a world away from those in the US, let alone Greece. No Molotov cocktails on Swanston St then. Alongside posters exhorting ‘World revolution today!’ are others urging passers-by to smile, or reminding them that all you need is love.

There is something whimsical, almost bucolic about the Occupy Melbourne site: a waterside tent-village that everyone knows will soon disappear. City workers sip lattés a few metres away from earnest workshops on global peace and biodynamic farming. Children splash and giggle in what is usually a sterile ‘water feature’. It has to be said that the the tent-village, on aesthetic grounds alone, is arguably an improvement on the usual barren, sandy expanse of the City Square.

Will any of this make a difference? The pictures speak for themselves.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs, 1955-2011. Steve narrates this early Apple ad...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:47:00 +1100

R.I.P. Steve Jobs, 1955-2011.

Steve narrates this early Apple ad which captures his spirit.

REVIEW: AFTER ROMULUS The business of growing up starts with...

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:54:00 +1000

REVIEW: AFTER ROMULUS

The business of growing up starts with distancing ourselves from our parents. It ends (as far as it ever ends) with drawing them close again. Instead of disappointing giants, we recognise them at last as fallible, unique humans beings. We recognise them in ourselves, and so they become real to us …

In the October issue of the Australian Book Review, I write about Raimond Gaita’s new collection of essays, After Romulus, which tackles what he calls the ‘unfinished business’ left after the success of his memoir, Romulus, My Father, and the subsequent film version.

The always-fascinating transition of book to movie is discussed by Gaita, along with his continuing relatonship with his mother and father. ‘Biographies often continue after the person whose life is narrated has died,’ writes Gaita - identifying our attitudes to our parents as markers of our own evolving maturity.

For details of After Romulus and to read the review, see the October 2011 issue or subscribe at ABR.

My God, I love a thunderstorm! Shoreham, Victoria, 28 September,...

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:18:00 +1000

My God, I love a thunderstorm!

Shoreham, Victoria, 28 September, 6.14 pm.

In bed with Simone

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +1000

I go to bed a little earlier these days. Sometimes I catch myself looking forward to bedtime during...

AMY WINEHOUSE1983-2011

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 12:18:57 +1000

AMY WINEHOUSE
1983-2011

LUCIAN FREUD O.M. The very wonderful Lucian Freud died in London...

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:56:37 +1000

LUCIAN FREUD O.M.

The very wonderful Lucian Freud died in London last night.

He seemed such a quintessentially English bohemian artist, that it was strange to think this was Sigmund Freud’s grandson: a raffish, gamblin’, drinkin’, fightin’ Londoner who mixed with gangsters as well as royalty, and fathered over a dozen children by almost as many women … none of which matters in the least of course beside the work he leaves behind for us - including the huge After Cézanne in the National Gallery of Australia. (Image: David Dawson)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/8653806/Lucian-Freud-OM.html

SEE SOMETHING OR SAY SOMETHING … Can you tell which city...

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:09:44 +1000

SEE SOMETHING OR SAY SOMETHING …

Can you tell which city this is?

It’s not a photograph from space, but a map of geotagged tweets (blue) and flickr uploads (red) - with white dots signifying both.

Digital cartographer, Eric Fischer’s beautiful images show the difference between where we are moved to take photographs and where we want to say something.

See the excellent Flowing Data website for more images. http://tinyurl.com/6e8uuyg

VENETIAN STONES Ferrovia, the train station of Venice, is a...

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:42:00 +1000

VENETIAN STONES

Ferrovia, the train station of Venice, is a fascist-era structure built in the 1930s. Wide, low, and faced with plain white stone, it is the only modernist building on the Grand Canal. It’s not a bad building, as fascist-era modernist railway stations go …

The twentieth century ambience of the station only makes the shock of stepping outside even greater. For a few seconds, two versions of the city shimmer and then fuse into one for ever: the actual stones of Venice around me, and the Venice-in-my-head that I’ve known and inhabited all my life. Like New York and Paris, especially, we’ve read so many books and seen so many movies set there, that they seem as familiar as one’s own home-town.

Gustave von Aschenbach sits in a deckchair on the Lido waiting for death, while Tadzio strolls on the beach before him. Johnny Depp walks through the Piazza San Marco in a dinner suit, an unlikely tourist, while Henry James watches from a window above. Nearby, Ruskin is painting a water colour. And Donald Sutherland as Casanova breaks through the roof of his prison and leaps to freedom, landing in a water-taxi with Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. The city looks exactly as I always imagined, and this in itself is disconcerting.

‘It’s not a real city, just a place for tourists these days,’ I heard an American voice say as I walked down the steps of Ferrovia. But he was wrong. Even in summer, you can walk away from the main streets and crowds of tourists, away from the endless shops of Murano glass and the African hawkers with fake Gucci handbags spread out in front of them, and walk left and right and across a bridge and … suddenly you are in the Venice where the locals live. Washing hangs from lines high above a peaceful street. A poster advises that a creche’s opening times have changed. A gang of children play hide-and-seek on a building site. Two rabbis sit beneath an apple tree in a cobbled square, in murmured disputation.

Every city can teach us something about the urban environment, and Venice - of course - shows us what a city without cars would look like. One of the most extraordinary things about the city is the leaving of it - by vaporetto through the canals, across the choppy waters of the strait and into the harbour of Marco Polo Airport. How different from the familiar, grim drive out to Melbourne Airport. On my first night, I went to sleep imagining the freeway at home replaced by a stately grand canal, lined by poplar trees, with sleek water-taxis of polished wood making their way along, the drivers humming arias from Verdi …

(1 June 2011)

The cure for laziness writer’s block Radiohead up high on...

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:50:43 +1000

The cure for ~~laziness~~ writer’s block

Radiohead up high on the headphones - works better than a double espresso ….

SLEEPING BEAUTY Julia Leigh’s strange and beautiful new...

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:04:00 +1000

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Julia Leigh’s strange and beautiful new film (and yes, it’s Australian).

THE BRIDES OF KRZESLICE Deep in the Polish countryside,...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:06:38 +1000

THE BRIDES OF KRZESLICE

Deep in the Polish countryside, surrounded by heathland, lakes and forests of birch and pine, lies the Palace of Krzeslice.

Wide lawns surround the house, but it cannot be seen from the road or nearby village, nestled in its own surrounding woodland of broad oak trees. Like Sleeping Beauty’s domain, it sits undisturbed, with the old iron gates overgrown by ivy thick as a child’s arm. Here I woke this morning (24 May 2011) and imagined all the brides of Krzeslice.

After lying in ruins for half a century, the Palace was restored in the 1990s as a country hotel. There are few guests (for Krzeslice is not on the way to anywhere), but it survives, even flourishes, as a venue for weddings from villages and towns in the surrounding area. The brides-to-be arrive every Saturday as nervous girls, surrounded by their giggling friends wearing too much makeup. After the ceremony and the celebrations they climb the stairs with their dark-suited husbands to the great bedroom over the castellated entrance. Early the next morning, the couple rise and drive off for their honeymoon before anyone else is awake.

There must have been over a thousand of these brides over the years in their gowns with with garlands of flowers round their heads. Before them, thousands more must have married at Krezlice, for a Palace has stood here since the 1600s at least, occupied by Polish and Prussian aristocracy. All this stopped when the Germans invaded in 1939. Then after the Russian takeover at the end of the war, the building fell into ruin till the 1990s, when the brides returned.

I imagined them, these legions of Krzeslice brides. The long-dead. Those married just this summer. And others - middle-aged now, in offices or shops or stuck in traffic while taking the children to school. Each one had woken in this room and, almost trembling with happiness, seen the morning light climbing through the slats of the shutters and realised that she would never feel like this again, that life was changed utterly.