WARREN BURT
Correspondence
August 31, 2010
Wollongong
Hi Kris!
My cousin Wilbur has been doing genealogical research, and although he's found some interesting stuff in the past (we're very distant relations with both Walt Whitman (yay!) and Dick Cheney (boo!)) he's finally struck gold. My grandfather's grandfather John Burt had a brother, Foght Burt, and Foght had a son Richard, who became a civil war hero and a poet. Had quite a few things published too. You'll be happy to know that the stuff is pretty amazing doggerel - William McGonagal comes to mind. Here's a sample:
http://www.warrenburt.com/richard-welling-burt-archive/
We did a bicentennial piece, of course, in 88. Richard beat us to it by 112 years. I've only read the first page, and I have no doubt that that's all you'll read as well. However, out of misplaced family loyalty, I think I'll try to make it through all 20 pages. I might even have some computer voices speak parts of it - although I don't know how far I'll get with that. Read it and weep! Tears of hilarity, I hope.
Cheers,
Warren
oOo
I have read the dialog with you and Cathy [Kris Hemensley & Catherine O'Brien, Art & About in Vientiane, #2, August, 2010, re- Hans Georg Berger's photography & etc.], and found it fascinating. That the abbot had a huge photography collection is not surprising in one
sense, but a delightful surprise in another.
There are a lot of amazing stories of East West contact. One of my favorite is about the Japanese composer of the 30s and 40s - Mr Ozawa (I forget his first name). He studied with Schoenberg in Berlin, then went back to Japan, and wrote orchestral music in a style very similar to the French neo-classicist Francis Poulenc. Things like the Kamikaze Piano Concerto (not related to WWII suicide bombers, but the experimental fighter plane of the 1930s, which was quite an innovation when it happened, apparently). These days, my Japanese composer friends are more than faintly embarrassed by the renewed interest in him in the West...but it is pretty amazing - the unknown "Sept" of "Les Six" and he lived in obscurity in Tokyo......
---------------------------------------------------------------
JUSTIN CLEMENS
3 POEMS
*
Space Pen
The manufacturer informs us:
It writes UNDERWATER!
In 400° CENTIGRADE!
In ZERO GRAVITY!
So tell me, my friend —
where do you plan to use it?
*
Perfective II
EMPTY fur-flesh
skin-fear uneffaced;
even meat there found
its letter-plug
litter of silenced earth.
*
Oh to hello ago I go agogo
The more I know his trumpet ‘tis truly so
me trumpet’s trumpet pinned his pegs akimbo,
clyster-pipes and organs humpherumphing happily
hanging a tail by many a wind instrument that blew
the bag-men’s big cheeks pup-puffing up to kiss
the equipment of their pleasures — reserve
this vessel for my lord! they insinuate,
as if they’d walk to Palestine for a touch
of his nether lips and a long hard look down the gyrating barrel
of the biggest revulva youse or I’s has ever seens.
---------------------------------------------------
TINA GIANNOUKOS
from SONNETS
III
When you touch me it is the hand of God.
I agree to restrain the gravity of this emotion.
I begin the long march in death's dominion.
I bear the thought imperfectly that I'm alone.
Mona Lisa's smile remains enigmatic.
This is the only wisdom I possess:
They marked you. They marked you all your life.
Moonlight still shines on what you left behind.
The will is muscular. Like muscle, it tears.
You sentence me to hard labour. Once,
I was beautiful but that was rapture.
The tongue of love tastes tough in these bull days.
This is the conspiracy of the figure two:
the flowers in the garden grow mottled.
oOo
XXX
When the time comes, whenever that be,
I shall look back to my ancestors,
seafarers all, gliding over oceans,
now coming into ports. This earth,
this blue planet, will not circumscribe me.
I will sail across the empty doom searching
for cyclopean marvels; a half-horse, half-man
figure will appear from behind that band
of stars beyond the edge of the Milky Way.
The astrophysics of our encounter,
this dark energy of love, are unknown.
In a singular moment the explosion
that drove all things apart drove us too.
In space I hold the horn of plenty.
------------------------------------------------------------
JENNIFER HARRISON
Ian McBryde’s The Adoption Order
(published by 5 Islands Press 2009)
[Launch Speech presented at Collected Works 15.10.09]
Rapture be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer
(Rapture, lyric by Blondie)
It’s a privilege to launch Ian McBryde’s sixth major collection of poetry, The Adoption Order, here at Collected Works by grace of Kris and Retta Hemensley. Thanks to Ian and 5 Islands Press for the honour. I hadn’t actually seen the book until tonight but I can see the fine publishing job accomplished by Kevin Brophy, Dan Disney and Lyn Hatherly at 5 Islands Press. When I was reading Ian’s book in manuscript form, as I have several times over the last few weeks, I began to think about the light and dark, the beauty and horror, that makes Ian’s poetry so wild and impressively individual. The French poet René Char once said (quote taken from The Poet’s Work):
‘behind the poet’s shutter of blood burns the cry of a force that will destroy itself
because it abhors force . . . Read me. Read me again. He (the poet) does not always come
away unscathed from his page, but like the poor, he knows how to make use of the
olive’s eternity.’
Or as Blondie expressed it in a lyric from her 1981 single Rapture:
Rapture, be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer.
In The Adoption Order Ian does not flinch from the dark and desolate places of the heart. From the dystopian palace in the poem ‘News from the Palace’ to the abandoned landscape of ‘Tunnel 3’ with its nameless station, its unknown slope, its unreadable lights, its rusted, unused rails, its uncertain carriages and clammy track to nowhere, we enter an imagination that is surreal, tender and savage. Take, for example, these memorable lines from the poem ‘A Second Lake’ (the quote is the entire poem):
Deep in the interior water has cut stone open, filled in
the scar, iced over. No fish swim beneath this seal,
and no animals venture down to test the edge
of this ripped shore, this brittle lace,
this ghost of gauze over the old
and frozen wound.
Take note of the arrangement of the words on the page, the inexorable tightening of skin over that strange and frosty wound. An Ian McBryde poem is never un-imperilled. Words are never wasted. His imagery is both elemental, often of the sea, the dream, the cave, the animal - and his imagery is sharper than the sound of the words that make the image—by which I mean it is the visual elements of Ian’s imagery that etch themselves so sharply on the mind. Whether this particular talent comes from Ian’s drawing and illustrative abilities I’m not sure. It is a talent.
Blondie’s Deborah Harry, was also adopted and although many of the poems in Ian’s The Adoption Order do touch on that theme, the poems seems less interested in recording or evoking confessional feelings about adoption or loss and more concerned with embodying the ongoing struggle of words to ground themselves in a world where loss, separation and grief happen. I spent some time thinking about why these poems, despite their sometimes bleak imagery, are so moving, so emotionally chiselled and fulfilling to read. I did not experience them as nihilistic, but as generous. I think it has something to do with what, again, the French lyricist poet René Char (1907-1988)[1] said (as reported by Edward Hirsch in How To Fall in Love with Poetry): that ‘the poem is the realised love of desire still desiring’. The Russian poet Tsvetaeva asks ‘what shall I do as I go over the bridge of my enchanted visions that cannot be weighed in a world that deals only in weights and measure?’
Whether it is the child who desires a mother or father they might never know, or a lover who desires the one they might never attain or keep, or the adult who desires a childhood that continues to mesmerise time, Ian is exploring marooned desire, a grief that somehow becomes a wound of history because we are always losing the present and never in perfect harmony with the world. Perhaps love and loss are the Castor and Pollux of poetry, the twinned forces which poetry attempts to reconcile yet ultimately fails because the past, the beloved are beyond the temporality of language. As Ian says in the last stanza of the villanelle ‘We Touch On and are Lifted from the Earth’:
All our art is the murmuring of surf
Love is where the sea spray meets and marries.
We touch on and are lifted from the earth.
We now are past the moment of our birth.
and later in ‘38th Parallel’: ‘ I have learned nothing but thirst, the only truth of the marooned’.
And later, still, in ‘A Silhouette on Water’:
The image quivers, disperses, splits into
patterns of shadow and elusive light which
never really finish, never really begin.
We often talk about the strength of image in this or that poetry or in this or that poem, as though it is in opposition to weaknesses of image. In Ian’s poetry imagery isn’t a strength, it is the essence of the poetry. The book is a beautiful imagining of imagery. And so beautiful. Here in the poem ‘Before Waking’: ‘I dreamt rain on slate. I dreamt fine china carefully arranged on the floors of caves.’ When I read these images, these lines, I think of carefully arranged words in the darkness of the poem’s cave, I think of all the cultural history of civilisation from the cave to Doulton’s fine bone china factories and I think of human skulls, Pompeii and the fragility of bones. Every poem in The Adoption Order is a scene of spare, concentrated imagery, a dramatic distillation of the lyric’s power and each poem is a play where the self takes centre stage as landscape, as divided mirror or as a numbed survivor on a raft drifting.
The whispering of the poems is intimate as though it’s assumed that you, too, are familiar with the longhouse, the disintegrating palace, the old and frozen scar and the faces of the other children of the raft. The language is very precise and the choice of a particular word often startling. For example, consider the final lines from ‘Instead of Your Breast’ (again reproduced here in its entirety):
Instead of your breast
a ghost treasure,
an alarm sent out.
Instead of your voice
the locked wing,
the lightning shield.
Instead of your breath
a jungle of drums
and the gathering dusk.
Instead of your hands
the terminal, the stretched
mile and instead of your
presence, the faces of
other children of the raft.
Instead of other possibilities (other children on the raft) these are the children of the raft: children who are perhaps destined for dangerous sadness, adventure and drifting. When I read these lines I think of Klaus Kinski in the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, The Wrath of God, (the final scenes of the film when monkeys overcome the raft); I think of asylum seekers adrift, I think of the literature of shipwreck and of the often vulnerable children I work with as a child psychiatrist. This power of imagery does not open a small niche in experience – this imagery opens a tender Pandora’s box of history, both personal and shared, both particular and ethereal.
The Adoption Order is about the power of families. It begins with a poem called ‘Genealogy’ and ends with a poem called ‘Motherlode’. In between are poems about the loneliness of childhood, about the pain of adoption, about the Irish diaspora. And there are magnificent elegies for lost parents. The poem ‘Satellite’ from Ian’s first book The Shade of Angels (1990) re-appears and Ian and has given us another poem/chapter from the ongoing sequence ‘Reports from the Palace’ a sequence which threads through his earlier published works, with versions appearing in The Familiar (1994), Flank (1998) and Equatorial (2001). Thus, in terms of the process of the book, poems can be traced back to past collections as one might also trace the genealogy of a family (or be unable to do so, at least in the past, if adopted). The Adoption Order is the fruit of many generations of poems, not only Ian’s. McBryde’s ‘Icarus’ joins a long tradition of Icarus poems including those of Auden and William Carlos Williams to name just two. This is one of my favourite poems in the book, although to say so feels a little unfair to myself as I value so many. In this Icarus tale, the son’s fiery death is the final triumph which frees him from family and, strangely, this poem seems to capture the actual moment a real event becomes myth.
Icarus (Last Words)
As I fall I watch
my father float
to safety on less
rapid atmosphere
His wings intact,
he hovers high above
me as I plummet.
And yet long after
he lands, long after he
is held in my mother’s
grieving arms it is not
his wisdom but
my bright death that will
be celebrated.
My ribbons of wax.
My shout in the clouds.
A glassy sea beneath
me as I melt and am
finally unfeathered.
At last I have
honoured my island.
I have passed beyond
family. I will be
Falling for centuries,
suspended forever
in the rich, dense air
of legend.
This is a classy, humane book. It deserves great respect and recognition. Although working at an interface that is almost pre-speech, pre-definition these poems are paradoxical artworks of precise speech, chiselled lyricism, formal refrain and earthy textures carved into the cave wall of a page. The Adoption Order is a book of dreams, a book of riddles and a book which fears the end of dreams. René Char said in ‘The Formal Share’: ‘It is from a lack of inner justice that the poet suffers most in his relations with the world. Caliban’s sewer window, behind which Ariel’s powerful and sensitive eyes are angry.’; Ian McBryde says:
I bit the rain.
oOo
Notes:
[1] Rene Char’s mature poetry was published in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France; his poetry is at once a lyrical summoning of natural correspondences and a meditation on poetry itself; his single line famous poem To the Health of the Serpent’—published in Fureur etmystère, Éditions Gallimard, 1962—for me has a kinship with Ian’s fabulous one-line poems published in Slivers, Flat Chat Poets, 2005.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
THE PORTRAIT
I am hung
next to paintings
about the same size -
an unorthodox
(conservative-wise)
gesture
nailed into place
One precise metre
from the curlicues of
my frame
a landscape with tower
is abstracted into
vertical planes
defying depth
From the other side
florid dahlias
in their crystal vase
suggest a tasteful encounter
with the zig-zag
rhythm of my
portrait's scarf
These companions
are unknown to me
(and I to them)
though we are linked
capriciously for a month
as intimates
on public display
------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID SHEPHERD
KING KONG GOT IT WRONG:
NO MAN IS A MANHATTAN
That ain't no monkey on my back
It's a gorilla
That insidious old ape
Still crouches on my shoulder
He's perched up there
Like Goya's grinning ghoul
He just climbed up
My skyscraper spine
You can still see
The marks he made
He razed my city
To the ground
And stole my loved one
With his gnarled hand
He's too big
And heavy
To stay up there for long
One good bi-plane
To the back of the head
He'll fall a hundred stories
And crush everything
Then I'll be rid of him
Until the next organ grinder
Comes to town
And his simian side kick
Casts his dark shadow
Down my long haul
Whispering
Every man is a Manhattan
[2004]
oOo
ACROSS CHERRY LAKE
Smokestack
Bellows black
Bluffing its way
Into innocent clouds.
Turner's torrid trowel
Smears
The bloody sunset
Grey
Broken winged duck
Last spastic dance
On dim mirror plate.
Chimney vomit
Turns white
Near night.
Atomic bomb crucifix
Smites the sun
Of man.
Burning tonsure.
Cold halo.
[Winter, 2010]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
WARREN BURT prolific composer & performer, for many years on the Melbourne scene, currently in Wollongong. His website is www.warrenburt.com
JUSTIN CLEMENS active in literature, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, art criticism, & is the author of several books including The Mundiad (Black Inc, '04), Black River (re.press, '07), Villain (Hunter Publishers, 2009). Phew! He teaches at the University of Melbourne.
<>
TINA GIANNOUKOS has published In A Bigger City (Five Islands Press, '05). She teaches at University of Melbourne where she is completing her PHD. In 2010 addressed a conference in Shanghai, read at the Beijing Bookworm & gave lecture in Beijing. Link to the review of In a Bigger City
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ras/article/view/444/490
Her review of Angela Gardner's Views of the Hudson in Jacket 40:
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-gardner-rb-giannoukos.shtml
JENNIFER HARRISON has published several collections including Michaelangelo's Prisoners ('95), which won that year's Anne Elder Award; & most recently Folly & Grief (Black Pepper, '06), & Colombine : New & Selected Poems (Black Pepper, Melbourne, '10). Co-edited with Kate Waterhouse, Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry, 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, '09).
ANNE KIRKER, well known as a curator of modern & contemporary painting in New Zealand & Australia; appears in Poems & Pieces, # 1, & #8. Her website is, www.annekirker.com.au
DAVID SHEPHERD's website is http://www.terrorlostralis.blogspot.com/ which contains extensive biography. Similarly see http://fitzroydreaming.blogspot.com/ for recent feature with Dave Ellison on Karl Gallagher's illustrious site.
Showing posts with label Anne Kirker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Kirker. Show all posts
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Thursday, January 1, 2009
THE MERRI CREEK #8, 2008/09 : POEMS & PIECES
SAM BYFIELD
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
Sunset, I step outside and catch
the west's last luminous seconds, the sky
evolving through its leafy spectrum,
before stars and the high pitched rhetoric
of crickets. Currawongs call in their alien
tongue, bring to mind the gentle language
of seduction, how it plays itself again
in dreams. Every evening this week
I watched the sun threading away,
into the ranges and desert belly
of this country, and I've imagined it
reaching you, setting into the Indian
Ocean, hoped that you would soon be
watching it, wishing that Winter
would hurry, so that I might return.
*
RETURNING TO LA NINA
A lizard's curiousity in the verandah's arched shade.
The smell of farms, a profusion of living after
the monotony of droughts. The garden overflows
and pulses like rainforest, spiders as big as fists
my mother tells me and I'm glad I wasn't here
to see them. Frangipanis hang like eggs, broken
and suspended. The birds are restless and the leaves
are restless. The wind and the heat. Sun's dapple
fascination. Feather pattern on the horizon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLIVE FAUST
MAXIMS, MINIMS, SQUIBS AND ESSAYETTES
1. I didn't know that Phil Whalen had lived next door to Cid in Kyoto, nor about the regular meetings in San Francisco when young. "... and we used to solve the world's problems together." Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations (in my case, with Ian Watson, say) all these years later; but that's mainly so those two young men could stay free of second thoughts , and continue being young. Besides, part of the correction would be to the hope they had; and I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope.
2. Whenever they concoct a new antibiotic for golden staph, the bacteria evolve into strains resistant to it. The micro-organisms are not stupid.
3. People come in and out of our lives casually and accidentally, as if our train were late, and we had to ask a stranger if he knew whether they'd rescheduled it, or whether this one was still meant to be departing on time.
4. I like the sound of a stamp --and on an ink pad too.
5. And real materialists, like Hume, who deny the supernatural, will usually pull some very unlikely deity out of the hat --like the "invisible hand of the market" he invoked for his friend Adam Smith. A lot of obeisance to that Deity round the bourse cathedrals of the world.
6. Blackberries hidden in prickles.
7. "Everything will be forgotten in the days to come." But only if there are days to come. And if there are no days to come, will everything still be forgotten?
8. In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you.
9. All alone one New Year's Eve, so I recalled friends, and had my Auld Lang Syne with the dead.
10. Losses of people. I don't really know how to cope. Oddly enough, the ordinary consolation that it is inevitable and universal, is more desolation than consolation for me: the idea of so much absence, and the dwindling in meaning of any one particular absence in the light/dark of that thought, of that truth in fact, is pretty much unbearable. I think how little now deaths of a hundred years ago mean, or fifty, or from one's earlier life. And how blase was one's own attitude to the death of grandparents, as being inevitable with such old people? And it was --but ... .
11. What happens after After is in the lap of the Gods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THINGS
1
sharing
the tight lipped
outside the world we love
shines attraction more crushing than
ourselves
packets
of compassion
visualise oasis
demons season and spring whisk soups
real zest
welfare
and thorny styles
imbues testy postures
detailing people gives notice
on pride
concerns
of give and take
are parlous excuses
calm moods texture reverie as
armour
full hopes
immerse on trains
while forks cut unawares
with nearly all things quiet and
trafficked
2
Judas
was double crossed
blamed on my ticklish sleeve
as delusion and faults forfeit
friendship
shiners
and leather shoes
fail to impress folklore
open myths verify jackets
tailored
bonfires
not gaiety
are love variances
heaviness radiates roaming
murmurs
umpires
and exchanges
pitch result for losers
a transplant injury mounts new
heart pumps
counsels
rouse my lament
and indict defences
what's the exposed image of lone
wedge tails?
3
lovers
and lapsed rhythms
sour most ardent courses
single mercies cherish pacing
dance steps
rackets
and landing strips
out of nowhere alight
details inflate my wanting to
crash land
milkshakes
lime and raspberry
salute a boy's penchant
while gritty dynamics secure
favours
reviews
and articles
riddle my excitement
incumbent chargers fiddle gripe
lambaste
the soul
cautiously let
have you been here that long?
Godot might ask, are you looking
at me?
[NOTES:
Judas Iscariot (died April, AD 29-33) was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve apostles, and was apparently designated to keep account of the 'money bag' but is traditionally known for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
READING
Academically
She insists
The book is about
Needing to
Observe and extend
Freud's political
Unconscious
When Graffito
Rubs against
the Holy Mary
But he quietly
Counters that
It is merely
And wholly
About Love
Memory paths
Ingrained
The grips of grief
And desires
Thwarted
And so
The Weekend
Begins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Does it help that billions of miles away
planets spin in patterns drawn from spirographs?
Swirls within swirls, fractionally rotating
in invisible patterns, like the way a lily
won't open before your eyes, or how
you might even be that lily, if you don't
concern yourself with the parasite inside;
But that lily I mean, the one you didn't notice,
it's all brown petal now, so make sure you don't step on it,
instead watch your child grow taller, and allow her to lean
away, toward a parallel orbit, accept you are peripheral
and though you might have walked around here for days
and months and years, thinking you must be moving
toward something, each day was simply busy
with its own rewriting of grander patterns,
where you fit, only as a swirl, tracing another
swirl, within another swirl,
that's within another swirl.
*
THREE GOOD THINGS
On any day it might all come down
to three good things, or the way
kindness can return unpredictably
Not everyone believes these things
but today I repeat them as a mantra,
my own song that lifts up and banks
out of the littered street,
the plastic bags whose
contemporary beauty
only serves to remind me
everyone is either buying
or selling, then discarding
These words are too weak,
a breath or two might blow
them out, as a child blows
at candles on a cake.
Three good things
candles, cake, a child.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
SAM BYFIELD, born in 1981, grew up in Newcastle and after stints in Canberra & China now lives in Melbourne. He has published one chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, and his first full-length collection, Borderlands, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney). He has been published in Australia & overseas, most recently in Heat, Famous Reporter, Meridian & The Asia Literary Review.
CLIVE FAUST lives in Bendigo to where he returned in the early '70s after several years in Kyoto. Contributed to The Ear in a Wheatfield in the '70s, featured in the 4th series of Cid Corman's Origin magazine in 1978, included in John Tranter's New Australian Poetry (Makar Press) in 1979, and has published 5 chapbooks (3 with Origin Press) and a selected poems, Cold's Determination (University of Salzburg Press). His review of John Phillips' Language Is appears in Jacket #32 ('07).
ROBERT JORDAN, see note in Poems & Pieces #4
ANNE KIRKER, see note in Poems & Pieces #1
ANN SHENFIELD, see note in Poems & Pieces #2
[Compiled November/December, '08 and typed up this 1st day of January, 2009
Kris Hemensley]
________________________________________________________________
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
Sunset, I step outside and catch
the west's last luminous seconds, the sky
evolving through its leafy spectrum,
before stars and the high pitched rhetoric
of crickets. Currawongs call in their alien
tongue, bring to mind the gentle language
of seduction, how it plays itself again
in dreams. Every evening this week
I watched the sun threading away,
into the ranges and desert belly
of this country, and I've imagined it
reaching you, setting into the Indian
Ocean, hoped that you would soon be
watching it, wishing that Winter
would hurry, so that I might return.
*
RETURNING TO LA NINA
A lizard's curiousity in the verandah's arched shade.
The smell of farms, a profusion of living after
the monotony of droughts. The garden overflows
and pulses like rainforest, spiders as big as fists
my mother tells me and I'm glad I wasn't here
to see them. Frangipanis hang like eggs, broken
and suspended. The birds are restless and the leaves
are restless. The wind and the heat. Sun's dapple
fascination. Feather pattern on the horizon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLIVE FAUST
MAXIMS, MINIMS, SQUIBS AND ESSAYETTES
1. I didn't know that Phil Whalen had lived next door to Cid in Kyoto, nor about the regular meetings in San Francisco when young. "... and we used to solve the world's problems together." Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations (in my case, with Ian Watson, say) all these years later; but that's mainly so those two young men could stay free of second thoughts , and continue being young. Besides, part of the correction would be to the hope they had; and I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope.
2. Whenever they concoct a new antibiotic for golden staph, the bacteria evolve into strains resistant to it. The micro-organisms are not stupid.
3. People come in and out of our lives casually and accidentally, as if our train were late, and we had to ask a stranger if he knew whether they'd rescheduled it, or whether this one was still meant to be departing on time.
4. I like the sound of a stamp --and on an ink pad too.
5. And real materialists, like Hume, who deny the supernatural, will usually pull some very unlikely deity out of the hat --like the "invisible hand of the market" he invoked for his friend Adam Smith. A lot of obeisance to that Deity round the bourse cathedrals of the world.
6. Blackberries hidden in prickles.
7. "Everything will be forgotten in the days to come." But only if there are days to come. And if there are no days to come, will everything still be forgotten?
8. In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you.
9. All alone one New Year's Eve, so I recalled friends, and had my Auld Lang Syne with the dead.
10. Losses of people. I don't really know how to cope. Oddly enough, the ordinary consolation that it is inevitable and universal, is more desolation than consolation for me: the idea of so much absence, and the dwindling in meaning of any one particular absence in the light/dark of that thought, of that truth in fact, is pretty much unbearable. I think how little now deaths of a hundred years ago mean, or fifty, or from one's earlier life. And how blase was one's own attitude to the death of grandparents, as being inevitable with such old people? And it was --but ... .
11. What happens after After is in the lap of the Gods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THINGS
1
sharing
the tight lipped
outside the world we love
shines attraction more crushing than
ourselves
packets
of compassion
visualise oasis
demons season and spring whisk soups
real zest
welfare
and thorny styles
imbues testy postures
detailing people gives notice
on pride
concerns
of give and take
are parlous excuses
calm moods texture reverie as
armour
full hopes
immerse on trains
while forks cut unawares
with nearly all things quiet and
trafficked
2
Judas
was double crossed
blamed on my ticklish sleeve
as delusion and faults forfeit
friendship
shiners
and leather shoes
fail to impress folklore
open myths verify jackets
tailored
bonfires
not gaiety
are love variances
heaviness radiates roaming
murmurs
umpires
and exchanges
pitch result for losers
a transplant injury mounts new
heart pumps
counsels
rouse my lament
and indict defences
what's the exposed image of lone
wedge tails?
3
lovers
and lapsed rhythms
sour most ardent courses
single mercies cherish pacing
dance steps
rackets
and landing strips
out of nowhere alight
details inflate my wanting to
crash land
milkshakes
lime and raspberry
salute a boy's penchant
while gritty dynamics secure
favours
reviews
and articles
riddle my excitement
incumbent chargers fiddle gripe
lambaste
the soul
cautiously let
have you been here that long?
Godot might ask, are you looking
at me?
[NOTES:
Judas Iscariot (died April, AD 29-33) was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve apostles, and was apparently designated to keep account of the 'money bag' but is traditionally known for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
READING
Academically
She insists
The book is about
Needing to
Observe and extend
Freud's political
Unconscious
When Graffito
Rubs against
the Holy Mary
But he quietly
Counters that
It is merely
And wholly
About Love
Memory paths
Ingrained
The grips of grief
And desires
Thwarted
And so
The Weekend
Begins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Does it help that billions of miles away
planets spin in patterns drawn from spirographs?
Swirls within swirls, fractionally rotating
in invisible patterns, like the way a lily
won't open before your eyes, or how
you might even be that lily, if you don't
concern yourself with the parasite inside;
But that lily I mean, the one you didn't notice,
it's all brown petal now, so make sure you don't step on it,
instead watch your child grow taller, and allow her to lean
away, toward a parallel orbit, accept you are peripheral
and though you might have walked around here for days
and months and years, thinking you must be moving
toward something, each day was simply busy
with its own rewriting of grander patterns,
where you fit, only as a swirl, tracing another
swirl, within another swirl,
that's within another swirl.
*
THREE GOOD THINGS
On any day it might all come down
to three good things, or the way
kindness can return unpredictably
Not everyone believes these things
but today I repeat them as a mantra,
my own song that lifts up and banks
out of the littered street,
the plastic bags whose
contemporary beauty
only serves to remind me
everyone is either buying
or selling, then discarding
These words are too weak,
a breath or two might blow
them out, as a child blows
at candles on a cake.
Three good things
candles, cake, a child.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
SAM BYFIELD, born in 1981, grew up in Newcastle and after stints in Canberra & China now lives in Melbourne. He has published one chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, and his first full-length collection, Borderlands, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney). He has been published in Australia & overseas, most recently in Heat, Famous Reporter, Meridian & The Asia Literary Review.
CLIVE FAUST lives in Bendigo to where he returned in the early '70s after several years in Kyoto. Contributed to The Ear in a Wheatfield in the '70s, featured in the 4th series of Cid Corman's Origin magazine in 1978, included in John Tranter's New Australian Poetry (Makar Press) in 1979, and has published 5 chapbooks (3 with Origin Press) and a selected poems, Cold's Determination (University of Salzburg Press). His review of John Phillips' Language Is appears in Jacket #32 ('07).
ROBERT JORDAN, see note in Poems & Pieces #4
ANNE KIRKER, see note in Poems & Pieces #1
ANN SHENFIELD, see note in Poems & Pieces #2
[Compiled November/December, '08 and typed up this 1st day of January, 2009
Kris Hemensley]
________________________________________________________________
Sunday, April 20, 2008
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #1, April 2008
"The Merri Creek
A wise wince in the landscape
A complex cavalcade and gallery folded into the
Melbourne plain"
[John Anderson, the forest set out like the night, Black Pepper Press, 1995]
"The braille of the poet's words brushes my fingers and moves through them into my different calligraphy. The calligraphy tells less than the fingers feel; 'sumptuous despair' loses its dark glamour as the hand falters after it. But the hand loves the contour, tracing obscure lineaments, translating them into language. Is the language signed? Only namelessly by its century & its country of origin, influencing invisibly the contour it felt. The hand is anonymous, mine and not mine, even if my name signs what it has written."
[Helen Vendler, from the introduction to Soul Says, Harvard University Press, 1995]
"In the wintertime the Rat slept a great deal, resting early and rising late. During his short day he sometimes scribbled poetry or did other small domestic jobs about the house; and, of course, there were always animals dropping in for a chat, and consequently there was a good deal of story-telling and comparing notes on the past summer and all its doings."
[from The Wild Wood, chapter 3 of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, 1908]
_____________________________________________________________________
LAURIE FERDINANDS
STOLEN CAR
Quest for the morning
In dingy establishments
Yearning, crying, missing
Watch the gold woman
So sad to be left out
BORING ENCOURAGEMENTS
Stapled to the lapel
Were found the only words
She'd ever written
In a fit of rage
A pilgrim's song
CLAPPERS
Seething with anger
He mowed more furiously
Revisiting the sordid
Collection of clappers
Transparent as glass
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
IN CASE I EVER FORGET
getting wrapped up into a mermaid's tail of newspaper
in Ettalong Scout Hall, in the shadow of Blackwall Mountain
a place before known to me only from the outside, waiting
for my brother, carried in for a needle and carried out wailing
when he was of that age,
but when I am there, I am chosen for my smallness,
to be turned into a half-fish, half-girl
poured into broadsheet newsprint, exultant
to be swaddled in paper, with my feet inching forward
half a floor board at a time, so happy it is me
from all the supplicants to be the winning Brownie mermaid,
and then so perfectly, when it is done
someone comes in a car and takes me home.
ARTIFACT FROM A DREAM OF HAPPINESS
All those brave blue mornings that I was,
all those hopelessly soft sunsets
you fell through, the blaze of lastness
with the lake bleeding into twilight's black and white
while the highway sped past all sharp corners,
speed and mesmerism, as something waltzed languid
and wondering through our blood,
burning the idea of ecstasy into a slow reverberatory neural
loop bridging two hemispheres of cells
that was me, the language that we are.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
WILL I CEASE TO WONDER?
At the small
Figure perched
On the cave's ledge
Cradling
Her hair
A bundle
Strapped with
Cord and
Saffron robed
Marking a life
Over seventy years
Facing Ganesha
[Batu Caves, Malaysia, 2006]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GREG MCLAREN
ON LOOKING INTO PAM BROWN'S SELECTED
It's a Lewisham mid-afternoon,
clear-skied mid-winter. In the park,
reading poetry and a British non
photographer's history
of American photography.
There are children
running noisily between the trees,
bored with the see-saw,
the roundabout, the sandpit.
Page nineteen of Pam's Selected Poems 1971-
1982 is now a palimpsest.
At the start of the poem,
Pam quotes Ginsberg, and,
pencilled-in below, -- poet.
They have circled Pam's benzedrine /tequila,
and scrawled beneath, also circled, drug
and alcohol. The children's father
is naming the eucalypts to his wife,
and she calls to the kids : Jaiden! Brianna!
Back to the table! Their shadows lengthen.
CASSADY IS DEAD,
Pam proclaims, and our reader,
the book's first owner,
has inscribed : Pop star (cult heroes -- drugs, etc).
_____________________________________________________________________
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Laurie Ferdinands, lives in Melbourne. Contact, lferdinands@ihug.com.au
Carol Jenkins, lives in Sydney. Her work is published in Island, Heat, Southerly, Cordite, Antipodes, & various online journals. First book f'coming in '09 with Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney), Fishing in the Devonian. She is the publisher of the River Road Press audio-CD series of contemporary Australian poets (including P. Boyle, V. Smith, J. Beveridge, S. Hampton amongst others).
Anne Kirker, lives in Queensland. Mostly writes haiku-like verse, collaborates on artists' books with digital printmaker Normana Wight; sometimes they produce 'stand-alone' text/prints. Their books are held in special collections in Australian state & university libraries. Website, www.annekirker.com.au
Greg McLaren, grew up in the Coalfields of NSW's Hunter Valley and has since escaped to Sydney. Publications are Everything Falls In (Vagabond,2000); Darkness Disguised (Sidewalk, '02); The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, '07).
_______________________________________________________________________
A wise wince in the landscape
A complex cavalcade and gallery folded into the
Melbourne plain"
[John Anderson, the forest set out like the night, Black Pepper Press, 1995]
"The braille of the poet's words brushes my fingers and moves through them into my different calligraphy. The calligraphy tells less than the fingers feel; 'sumptuous despair' loses its dark glamour as the hand falters after it. But the hand loves the contour, tracing obscure lineaments, translating them into language. Is the language signed? Only namelessly by its century & its country of origin, influencing invisibly the contour it felt. The hand is anonymous, mine and not mine, even if my name signs what it has written."
[Helen Vendler, from the introduction to Soul Says, Harvard University Press, 1995]
"In the wintertime the Rat slept a great deal, resting early and rising late. During his short day he sometimes scribbled poetry or did other small domestic jobs about the house; and, of course, there were always animals dropping in for a chat, and consequently there was a good deal of story-telling and comparing notes on the past summer and all its doings."
[from The Wild Wood, chapter 3 of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, 1908]
_____________________________________________________________________
LAURIE FERDINANDS
STOLEN CAR
Quest for the morning
In dingy establishments
Yearning, crying, missing
Watch the gold woman
So sad to be left out
BORING ENCOURAGEMENTS
Stapled to the lapel
Were found the only words
She'd ever written
In a fit of rage
A pilgrim's song
CLAPPERS
Seething with anger
He mowed more furiously
Revisiting the sordid
Collection of clappers
Transparent as glass
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
IN CASE I EVER FORGET
getting wrapped up into a mermaid's tail of newspaper
in Ettalong Scout Hall, in the shadow of Blackwall Mountain
a place before known to me only from the outside, waiting
for my brother, carried in for a needle and carried out wailing
when he was of that age,
but when I am there, I am chosen for my smallness,
to be turned into a half-fish, half-girl
poured into broadsheet newsprint, exultant
to be swaddled in paper, with my feet inching forward
half a floor board at a time, so happy it is me
from all the supplicants to be the winning Brownie mermaid,
and then so perfectly, when it is done
someone comes in a car and takes me home.
ARTIFACT FROM A DREAM OF HAPPINESS
All those brave blue mornings that I was,
all those hopelessly soft sunsets
you fell through, the blaze of lastness
with the lake bleeding into twilight's black and white
while the highway sped past all sharp corners,
speed and mesmerism, as something waltzed languid
and wondering through our blood,
burning the idea of ecstasy into a slow reverberatory neural
loop bridging two hemispheres of cells
that was me, the language that we are.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
WILL I CEASE TO WONDER?
At the small
Figure perched
On the cave's ledge
Cradling
Her hair
A bundle
Strapped with
Cord and
Saffron robed
Marking a life
Over seventy years
Facing Ganesha
[Batu Caves, Malaysia, 2006]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GREG MCLAREN
ON LOOKING INTO PAM BROWN'S SELECTED
It's a Lewisham mid-afternoon,
clear-skied mid-winter. In the park,
reading poetry and a British non
photographer's history
of American photography.
There are children
running noisily between the trees,
bored with the see-saw,
the roundabout, the sandpit.
Page nineteen of Pam's Selected Poems 1971-
1982 is now a palimpsest.
At the start of the poem,
Pam quotes Ginsberg, and,
pencilled-in below, -- poet.
They have circled Pam's benzedrine /tequila,
and scrawled beneath, also circled, drug
and alcohol. The children's father
is naming the eucalypts to his wife,
and she calls to the kids : Jaiden! Brianna!
Back to the table! Their shadows lengthen.
CASSADY IS DEAD,
Pam proclaims, and our reader,
the book's first owner,
has inscribed : Pop star (cult heroes -- drugs, etc).
_____________________________________________________________________
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Laurie Ferdinands, lives in Melbourne. Contact, lferdinands@ihug.com.au
Carol Jenkins, lives in Sydney. Her work is published in Island, Heat, Southerly, Cordite, Antipodes, & various online journals. First book f'coming in '09 with Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney), Fishing in the Devonian. She is the publisher of the River Road Press audio-CD series of contemporary Australian poets (including P. Boyle, V. Smith, J. Beveridge, S. Hampton amongst others).
Anne Kirker, lives in Queensland. Mostly writes haiku-like verse, collaborates on artists' books with digital printmaker Normana Wight; sometimes they produce 'stand-alone' text/prints. Their books are held in special collections in Australian state & university libraries. Website, www.annekirker.com.au
Greg McLaren, grew up in the Coalfields of NSW's Hunter Valley and has since escaped to Sydney. Publications are Everything Falls In (Vagabond,2000); Darkness Disguised (Sidewalk, '02); The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, '07).
_______________________________________________________________________
Saturday, March 22, 2008
MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960
"MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960; Masterworks from the Australian & New Zealand Collections"; November 15,2007 to February 24,2008, at the National Gallery of Victoria (International), Melbourne; or "THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD"
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
12
21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
13
Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
12
21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
13
Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
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