DIVERTIMENTI : VLEESKENS, BELTRAMETTI, CALDWELL, LEBER, SPENCE

Why wouldnt I admit it? Bored, irritated, enervated by the whole biz --what John Forbes, amplifying the Sydney/Melbourne, 1970s, 'new poetry' discussion about the mainstream, called "talented earache"! Then again, as one good poem doesnt make a summer so one bad poem doesnt herald winter. Yet it speaks volumes of one's expectation for poetry that bad writing (and I hasten to qualify : in one's own opinion, thus disposition as well as the particular education undertaken in service of the art) can cause more misery than an inadequate menu or perpetually late train.
The more important complaint is not being able to see the poems for the poetics (or less --for the method of their construction). In my head I sound-off like that 70s discussion & rail against the sound of squeaky clean construction & its inevitable decorum, regardless that some of my own (particularly '90s) production is pronged on the same indictment!
And then, out of the blue, the universe deals a delightful hand --Grant Caldwell's glass clouds, Michelle Leber's The Weeping Grass, Pete Spence's Sonnets, Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti. Or do I simply wake up on the correct side of the bed? (Surely I dont have to explain that!)

A first impression of clarity of thought & expression, as I skimmed Caldwell's new collection, had me imagining a poetry of wisdom. And the image (or proposition) was still in my mind as I read Leber's poems, that they were knowing & wise. For example, regarding the latter, the gleaming blade of the line which introduces her poem, The Boonwurrung Coast, located at Cape Paterson (coincidentally where Cornelis Vleeskens hung out for many years) --"We let all things take form in the morning light."-- is capable of cutting through anything, including the taxonomy & imagery of sea-birds & flora let alone hints of initiation into shamanistic mysteries. And the triple repetition of the pregnant phrase "In the best part of May" (in the poem of that name), is similarly almost independent of the narrative (however brilliantly inhabited by the anthropomorphised persona telling its creation tale).
In Leber, the gainliness of that combination of scientific & perceptional language evokes authority. Local Barometer, for example : "Port Philip Bay is quicksilver in a glass. / Grey beryllium dust and copper sun-shards rise above waves. / A wind-whip of a baton conducts in tricky 7/8 time. / Ordinarily, a sea-gust's libretto is sung from a silver gull, / and now a gannets' gale-force chorus carves sandstone. / Within this capsule - held up by vertical cliffs / - an interior spring prevents a cloud's collapse. / The weight of water once floating in Torricelli's tube, / now scummed on a pollution-meniscus. / As a desert licks a city's hem-line, / fever rises in pacific oceans, shifts moisture to the equator; / flash-flooding in the north, yet our backyard is cinder / - tomorrow, horizon's axe will swing at noon."
No doubt these are crafted poems --they had to have been carved & chivvied to make their particular density, and a long way from what I'm going to say about Cornelis Vleeskens... But I'm being led to contradictory propositions : firstly, that what she has to say calls the tune; secondly, that her keen observation imposes veracity regardless of subject-matter. One thing for sure : no ho-hum in Michelle Leber's Weeping Grass (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010)...

As I've flagged, something of the same's entailed in Grant Caldwell's glass clouds (Five Islands Press, 2010). The tone of 'something being said' emanates from sufficient poems to impress authority. Not the old literary gravitas (no matter 'made new') but the conjunction of writing and spoken-word's well oiled tongue. From the outset let's insist Caldwell isnt casual however relaxed --the relaxation with syntax, that is, which is the crux of modern English-language poetry, --allowing then its objectors to be eccentric rather than reactionary (except for the vanguard camp, censorial to the last). Plain-speaking, however, is only one of the founding twins; the other never ditched the richer dictionary. Thus the double spring & thrust of 20thCentury & on's poetry. Caldwell's stepping-off from that rung doesnt yet qualify as construction --it's still utterance, more or less (the how it is, the what happened). And maybe it is 'irony' which distinguishes him from numerous other common speakers, and most of them unheralded --as Vleeskens is, for example --not that he's bitching : equanimity rhymes in divertimenti with wine & good music, and what more would one want?
Further to 'wise' : as though ancient Chinese hermit or mendicant poet...! Maybe it was the haiku-like poems in the centre of glass clouds (though that's 'Japanese') as well as his serious meditations on perception (necessarily equating phenomenal experience & language representation --"the window of the past is complete / but you are blind, or a blind") --which compelled the impression. Not to say subsequent reading disabused it --more, that the amount of distress also gathered there revoked the semblance of resolution. In Melbourne, though, as any capital of the Western world, where else does wisdom lie than in the tension of normal attachment & its desired opposite? Caldwell's erstwhile persona of the wry humorist (open his last book, Dreaming of Robert de Niro (FIP, '03), at random for any example) is perhaps succeeded here by the poet following doubt's philosophical trail to a halfway house of serenity (if one accepts as influence two of these poems' dedicatees, Derrida & Claire Gaskin).
Caldwell's tour de force is the hypnotic across the sea, which begins "the sea comes / across itself / here it comes / across itself / see it coming / it comes and comes / across itself / it keeps coming / it never stops", continuing in like fashion for a further 35 lines. It is a reiteration of the fact of sea --of 'the sea' as an event --which succeeds in summoning sea's ceaseless movement whilst rendering each wave's singularity, and the poet's observation of it a definitive exhileration!

Reading Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do : almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville & John Riley, who'd advised that Franco, our fellow Grosseteste Review contributor, would be visiting London in '71 --or was it shortly before the Hemensleys returned to Melbourne in '72? --but that was cancelled. Any meeting in the flesh was forever thwarted by his sudden death in 1995. He remains an exotic correspondent, then, from the golden age of hand & typewritten letters, always missed now as though a friend.
And Vleeskens' book instantly recalls Sperlonga Manhattan Express, an international anthology edited by Beltrametti (Scorribanda Productions, San Vitale, Switzerland, 1980), because of the A-4 / 210-297mm page size & the visual content --Franco's pics from all hands & lands (e.g, P. Gigli's photo of the Berrigans, poems by Koller, Raworth, Gysin, Whalen postcard/cartoon, J Blaine, G D'Agostino, et al); Cornelis' own montage, drawings, calligraphy, typography --the same mail-art internationale, Fluxus, neo-Dada style more readily recognized from Pete Spence's affiliations & practice --particularly relevant here because of the latter's regular appearance in the divertimenti.
Vleeskens & Beltrametti are both Europeans who've crucially intersected with the anti-formal (looser, casual) English-language poetry (are they 'casualties' then!), especially the post WW2 Americans, progeny of Pound & Williams, New York, San Francisco, the West Coast, at a time when Europe was reaffirming its own liberatory tradition (Dada, Surrealism & on) &, similarly, opening to new worlds. And because they're not British or North American or Australian, except by adoption, their European origins & references are never out of mind.
Not an exact match, by any means --but somewhere along the line they've both decided to riff on life & not on literature, though there is a literature of just that sort of thing, and a life that contains literature, music, painting, etc. But theirs is another reminder of the efficacy of the un-made, journal-esque writing, --as clear & direct as we reconstruct the Ancient Chinese & Japanese to be, and whose transparency doesnt necessarily prefer the naive to the esoteric or the well-known to the uncommon (take the music Vleeskens listens to daily &, therefore, records in his communiques --or his philately habit or the breadth of his correspondence, all noted).
Beltrametti's poem The Key might be credo for Vleeskens too :

What was well started shall be finished. / What was not, should be thrown away.
Lew Welch, Hermit Poems.

1 ) the place & the season : winter
2 ) somebody (myself) right here : real & unreal
3 ) what is he doing & what's going on in his head
4 ) how & why is he saying it
5 ) to somebody else (you) elsewhere
something happens?
the circle (real & unreal)
isnt closed

[27/1/72]

--published in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973), the blurbs for which by Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Claude Pelieu, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai & Guillaume Chpaltine are fair snap of his American/European compass.
Context & correspondence, as in O'Hara, Berrigan, Phil Whalen of course, are vital here in distinguishing such notes & exclamations from the bagatelle they might otherwise be --and Jeremy Prynne's terrific comment on O'Hara jumps to mind, that unlike New York's "art gallery nympholepts", he "always has that pail of serpents in view" --: the poet's obligation, as felt, to be right here, to tell how & what it is without literary diversion, the further extent of which is selling-out, blunting if not losing the existential point. (Echoing Olson's Human Universe suit for the poem as 'one of Nature's things', Ray Di Palma hazards, "a poem is one of the almost successful / forces of nature", --in the 3rd of one of Language Poetry's more beautiful sequences, Territory (from Numbers & Tempers, Selected Early Poems, 1966-86; Sun & Moon, '93), which begins, "the desperado / and his abacus / in utopia" --the perfect cartoon for what I'm getting at?! --but that project was performed within /refined writing, albeit a stepping-up of the casual, and isnt the minstrelsy of the memorandum with which I'm ever besotted!)

Divertimenti : to amuse himself & his friends --to divert & be diverted... Diverted from what? Old cliche : the bind of daily life. But hardly, since it's all this poetry's made of. His note : "These divertimenti originally appeared as individual leaflets and were written for the poet's own amusement and that of the handful of friends who were lucky enough to receive the odd one in the mail or at a poetry reading during the last two years of his life on the Victorian coast... he now lives a totally different existence on the NSW Northern Tablelands."
How would you know? His latest Earthdance chapbook, Sandals in camel (drawings & poems), is surreal as narrative & peppered with elsewhere's place names & distinctions (New York, Parisian, Berlin, Belgian, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Italian etc), persuading one of his long assumed cosmopolitan ambit. Interesting inference though --'texts' of the life as lived versus 'poems' (importantly, formed in the cross-wires of Dutch & English).
An earlier collection, Ochre Dancer (Earthdance, '99), has the same atmosphere & tone of divertimenti or better said, the divertimenti are cut from his familiar cloth differing only in the attitude of making or framing.

That's the discussion then, in the blur of any such distinction these days... Bits of life (titles & notes of musical recordings, books, lists of food & drink bought & consumed, incoming mail) intersect with thoughts, observations, conversation.
Recalling Kath Walker (Oodgeroo of Noonucull)'s admonition not to appear like a preacher or a politician, Cornelis muses, "Sometimes I wanted to PREACH // But now I just want to share / some of the ordinary things / in the days of a retired poet..."
Diversions from the notion of retirement? Retirement from poetic ambition (craft & career)? I'd identify with that myself. Breaking the cast but keeping one's hand in, and surprising oneself when something more poem than antidote happens along. The list/letter/journal poetry of our time makes it harder to distinguish source from artefact, but found or made they provide as many pleasures as there are days.

"Ah! a new month!
So I turn the calendar to March
A Corneille arial landscape
looking like a cross between
Mondriaan's sketch of a jetty
jutting into North Sea waves
and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

The calendar was published
for Corneille's 70th birthday
11 years ago but I still
flip over each month
to show that not all days are the same"

Divertimenti is a book which can be taken up anywhere. It invites flicking because of the open-endedness of its narrative.

"Find an image
of the sun's atmosphere
in The Nature of the Universe
by Fred Hoyle (1950)
so reach for Catherine de Zegher
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
hardback catalogue
of the exhibition at
The Drawing Center, New York, 2000

& put on an old vinyl recording
of Peter Sculthorpe's Sun Music #1
for Orchestra (1965)

The sun sets at 5-58

Broodje haring
broodje kaas
en 'n zure bon

Enjoy a glass or two of red
& the clear sound of Marion Verbruggen
playing airs from van Eyck's
Der Fluyten Lust-Hof "


So many dates & times of day, month, year, but the book is always written in present tense, and a sense of the present, in which historical time is subsumed, pervades. All times in diverimenti are concurrent; even the different places defer to the here of Vleeskens' whereabouts.
Despite it being a kind of 'in-lieu of writing' (an 'in-lieu-of-writing writing'?), possessing the light touch of genial conversation & a journal's talking-to-oneself, it also teases one as a discourse on time & place, & of poem as its own place where, paradoxically, its own mercuriality might be traced.

Unsurprisingly, much of this has been the preoccupation of divertimenti's fellow classical & modern music afficianado Pete Spence --typically recalled by Vleeskens at one point, "I think up these lines / while walking home / after putting Katherine / on the 6.37 a.m. bus for Melbourne / but have to wait to write them / till the telephone wakes Pete at 10.35 // My pen & paper are on the desk / in the guestroom where he snores on"...
Spence's Sonnets (a co-production of Karl-Friedrich Hacker's Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia; limited edition of 50, 2009) have been with me throughout these reflections. Sonnet 9 is a good example:

" walking Planck's constant in a red shift?
great day! upwind the day winds down
squares of light are thrown about
should i feel ok now that yesterday
is the subject of these poems? better
to be quick about it like a shadow
taking shade from today's sun! when
will i have room where there's room
where i can roam variously & hang
my tantrums & other guests?
the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!
its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!
a mullet sidles through the air
& i'm stunned by its flight! "

Riffing off life or literature? Seems to me it's a perfect blend of voice & reference, where perfection refers to an individual's inimitable register, in this case Spence's naturalization of reference, the opposite of ornamentation, of literary embellishment. It's all become as particular as experience, and 'all' are the prime sources he's so kind to append : Ted Berrigan, Laurie Duggan, Peter Schjeldahl, plus Forbes, Satie, Beckett, Shakespeare... All adds up to "Spence"!

Looking now for the perfect conclusion I find this from near to the 'end' of divertimenti :

" That photo of Peter-Jan Wagemans
makes him look like
a well-fed Vinkenoog from the sixties
In his liner notes
he comes across
as didactic & conceited

I pull on my walking-boots
& listen to Het Landschap (1990)
played by Tomoko Mukaiyama on piano
It is not the landscape I see around me
It is not any dutch landscape I recall

He states it is the landscape
of his music - but he is wrong

It is the landscape of my writing"

Boom-boom!

------------------------------------------------------------------
[16-8-10 / 18-9-10]
Kris Hemensley

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, Number 12, September, 2010

Melbourne
16 November/ 30 December, 2009

Dear Bernard,

I've begun watching the DVD of Richard Lerner's What happened to Kerouac? --such an inspiration when I saw it on the big screen in 1987. You remember the story --Retta & Tim caught it in Sydney, on their holiday with Anna Couani, same time as I saw it in Melbourne, and we all loved it --in my case, literally bounding the few miles home from the Valhalla cinema in Richmond --for the relief of it as much as anything --that the Beat life & literature had survived despite the tragic rise & fall of the chief protagonist, and was even now inspiring. I confess, though, the monster fan I'd been in the Sixties had taken a political hit from Kerouac's own, apparently reactionary, mouth in '69 when I read Vanity of Duluoz in Melbourne, and then received an aesthetic broadside in England, after reading Ed Dorn's comment in New American Story (Grove, 1965, bought from one of George Dowden's sales), that "Kerouac took care of all of what the informal range of the personal ruminator can do with our material. He continues to do so. I value his writing very much. But it is only partly satisfying. His syntax is quite dull. It allows the use of the 'I' only one device(...) But the limited presence is perhaps our greatest problem." (1963)
But, back to the film, what a buzz! I was totally energized, like Ray Smith emulating Japhy, running down the mountain --the method we learnt ourselves from Dad, as kids, --Isle of Wight summer holidays --to trust the momentum, without thought &, therefore, self-consciousness & fear! (And years passed before I tried that again --around Port Campbell (S.W. Victoria), goat-footed down the rocks & gullies, early '90s with Cathy. Must be time again for another such descent --which is a bit like saying, time I had another flying dream!)
Young acquaintance James Hamilton leant me the DVD --and it occurs to me he may be thinking of just such a project regarding the Melbourne '60s La Mama poetry scene --like, "What happened to Buckmaster (& Co.)?" The scope could & should be expanded, though the earlier one goes the less likely the subjects will be alive. This was underlined for me recently with the death of Alan Murphy. I'd hoped to conduct a formal (publishable) interview with him, informed by numerous chats we had when he visited the Shop --we'd reconnoitre his memories of WW2 & after, the '50s & '60s Melbourne scene, which I delightedly realized connected to my own forays, since the '80s, into alternative histories.

*
One of the gifts of What happened's second viewing is John Clellon Holmes' conception of Kerouac as "a prose experimenter of consequence who can be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce." The context for Kerouac's originality, says Holmes, is "The interaction of imagination & reality [which] is the source of all literature (perhaps not the Goncourt Brothers or those Realists, Naturalists, whom no one reads) in which the personality of the author, the consciousness of the author, the point of view of the author, never gets into the book."
No shock of the new when it's enjoyed or suffered half a century of amelioration! One needs, therefore, this kind of literary reminder of Kerouac's stylistic novelty. Even I tend to normalize the style as 'talk-write', familiar now in the contemporary practice of both literature & the variety of non-fiction. But when Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied on piano by Steve Allen, you hear the jazz of it --and it's the music of his language, as tho' poetry, which impresses --the texture resembling the process of remembering as well, perhaps, as the way jazz is constructed.
None of that in Bukowski whose talking-writing is more or less as-it-comes but, to use blog-lingo, he's always 'on topic'. Bukowski's facility is that ear-&-tongue craft which knows & trusts to the natural succession, succinctly deployed. No associational runs or fields, nor need there be for the writer narrator he is --just what is, what happened, what happened then, & then...

*
I'm reminded of Bukowski's great little piece on Neal Cassady as I watch the footage of Cassady & Ginsberg at City Lights Bookstore in 1965. "his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo-bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade." (Notes of a Dirty Old Man; City Lights, '69.)
In the footage, Ginsberg's stoned silly, wanting to ameliorate his friend's hostility to the young counter-culture audience. They're in front of a camera amongst a crowd you'd bet were its subscribers. Cassady ("where's the fee?" he says, as though to provoke any hippy anarchists present) can't settle. He's awkward, agitated, speedy, as if compelled to be on show --nervous as one's read of Ken Kesey or Kerouac himself come to that --nervous to express opinion. He resorts to what sounds like parody of Burroughs & Kerouac paranoia & cynicism : "All the extremists, all the civil rights, all the kids, anybody on any side(...) this is all hindsight what we're talking about --it's already too late --the Pentagon's taking care of all... they're killing us all deliberately..."
Ginsberg burbles : "Well, that's the point -- I have no idea who's running the country..." (It's only the point if running the show's important --our holy man's political shadow or his share of politics' own shadow.) As for Cassady --never an easy place to speak outside & think against the consensus. Much reason, therefore, to be jumpy.
Bukowski perceives Cassady as Kerouac's boy : "you liked him even though you didn't want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn't Neal's mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise."
Now what a can of worms that is. Off the top of my head : the ethics of attribution however complicit or acquiescent the assignee; the double edge of exemplarity; the downside of fulfilling the mythic life however transformative its promise...

*
I'll close on an entirely optimistic & beautiful note --namely, the letter from Henry Miller to Kerouac's publisher at Viking, written October 5th, 1958, reproduced in the 50th Anniversary (American) edition of The Dharma Bums (Viking, '08), which Karl Gallagher, another Dharma Bum I assure you, recently showed me. (As I understand it, your British edition has Ann Douglas's introductory essay but no letter from Miller, which is a pity.)
The line we always felt existed, as far-flung readers & enthusiasts, between Henry Miller & the Beats --though aspects of Miller also obviously resonate in Bukowski : the pariah-worker novels --Miller's Molloch, for example, a first cousin of Post Office , Ham on Rye, etc. --is here joyously underlined.
The Dharma Bums was the first Kerouac novel Miller read. His letter ripples with praise with praise & enthusiasm. He's led to say that Kerouac "is the first American writer who makes me feel optimistic about the future of American letters. Whether he is a liberated individual I don't know, but he certainly is a liberated writer. No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline." After many similar compliments, Miller concludes, "Others run out of 'material' sooner or later. Kerouac can't. He's all there is, because he's identified himself with everything, material or non-material, and with the silence and the space between. We've had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac. He doesn't throw dust in your eyes... he sings. "God, I love." Take hope, you lost ones --Jack's here!"

All best wishes for the New Year!
love,
Kris

oOo


Weymouth,
25th August, 2010

Dear Kris, Yer 'tis -- the letter that's been so long coming. I think you'll understand that I was absolutely swamped by family events. It was so difficult coping with looking after Mum as she declined following her fall last July (2009) and fracturing her left hip -- which impeded her mobility -- wheel-chair, zimmer frame and stair-lift. And then her Alzheimers.
Everything passes she said. And now she has -- April 3rd. And slowly, slowly I emerged. She released me from her for the second time. It was truly cathartic. Now I'm flowing and blossoming like never before. And I'm ready, and up for getting back to being a Dharma bum.
Having said that, I'm curtailing this correspondence for now. It certainly sustained me. Your letters kept the light flickering within me. I did tell you that it hadn't gone -- that it was still there! But now I fully understand things in my heart instead of in my head -- that poetry can save you, And what is working for me at the moment is the new initiative with my publishing. Stingy Artist Editions lives.
I've not had the head or feeling to publish anything since 1996 --14 years --& now everything --including the publishing --is flowing again. It started with my poems for Mum in July (4 Poems, i. m. Berthe Tawa). And because of that I thought of two further projects. One, for Franco Beltrametti -- a folded broadside -- two of his letters to me -- facsimile -- & two poems I'd written for him. The other publication is for dear friend Marilyn Kitchell --I wonder where she is? --a similar thing --but a folded card. In total I've got plans for a dozen or so publications between now & the end of next year. I'll be ready for 2012!
Big Dharma explosion? Where will the Bums take us? Reminds me of Franco's poem, Crucial Matters (to Robert Creeley), in Three for Nado, by Franco, which I published in 1992 :

come here
see it in print
keep it together
give me a break
and never be done
with all of it

hummingbird
on snapdragon

(?. VI.89)

We'll never be done with any of it! Anyway, Dharma brothers forever!

Love,
Bernard

________________________________________________

ART & ABOUT IN VIENTIANE

[July 25th, 2010]

Kris Hemensley : I'm keen to update our previous conversation about art in Vientiane [see Art & About in Vientiane, August 2009] and a good beginning might be to thank you for The Learning Photographer (Scholarly texts on Hans Georg Berger's art-work in Laos & Iran) [Anantha Publishing, Luang Prabang, Sept. '09]...
There are numerous cues for discussion in this nuggety little book's articles & interviews, for example (and it's crucial to what he & his critics believe he's doing) Berger's involvement with the people & place, making portraits of interaction & for his subjects. This causes a "surprising symbolic inversion. (...) he clearly defined the subject, that is himself, in the role of 'the Other' and in consequence consciously worked to overcome his condition of exclusion." (Campione, pp18/19).
I wonder if this is more semantic than substantial --not doubting for a moment that he lived there, the modern specialist with his Hasselblad, a student of the Traditional way, or that he was anything but wholeheartedly sincere --but how does one know from an image how it was philosophically informed or constructed? Campione says, "The best proof of the validity of his assumptions is the fact that the monks of Luang Prabang keep his photographs among their few personal effects, that they use them for reflection and introspective meditation. They take spiritual advantage of what Berger's photographs represent." This amplifies a previous comment about the distinction between viewers --who one is in relation to subject or photographer. But whatever its relevance to the ethnography/photography/documentary discussion it clearly confronts the idea of the (imaginative) freedom of image & artist which both in East & West in our time opposes art's status as ideologically subservient & instrumental.
Have you actually seen Berger's work?

Catherine O'Brien : Yes. In Luang Prabang --the monks doing vipassana in the forest...

K H : What was its effect?

C O'B : Since I've been travelling I look at a lot of photos --by people who take them to record their travels, & by professional photographers --and it rang a bell for me when I remembered from Susan Sontag, "everyone is a photographer" (from her Essay on Photography) --And so it seems to be that every Westerner who has something to say or show has an exhibition! --from any or all of those perspectives. I think of this all the time when I look at photography exhibitions.
The first time I saw a body of Berger's work was in The Quiet of the Land project in Luang Prabang --the documentation of the monks... a permanent exhibition in Luang Prabang, in the old palace...
When I looked at it it stood out from all others I'd seen. Everyone takes a picture of a monk! Tourists, photographers... Yet it seemed to me he'd captured the monks as though the photographer were invisible. The monk is deeply in meditation, or the monks in walking meditation seem completely unaware of his presence. Where is he? Behind a tree?!

K H : But the claim for Berger is that the photography records a relationship...

C O'B : I didnt know that before I read the book...

K H : This returns me to my point that one only sees what one sees, from the only perspective one knows, whatever that is... descriptive (ethnological), exotic, aesthetical...

C O'B : Responding to the photograph, it was the tone of the black & white... I responded to a situation one doesnt often see --in contemplation, meditation. Not the usual alms-giving scenario! And the forest context is different again.

K H : This was a clue to you that something else was going on?

C O'B : Yes... You look at this big body of work --at the stillness of the forest, of the moment the monks are in... Some of them seem to be floating or levitating in a sea of fallen leaves... as if the group of monks in walking meditation are a mirage in the forest... Looking at this, responding to it -- as though the black & white photo has created a transparency over the forest...
Then you come across coloured photographs. One --a blue piece of fabric, a mosquito net. The other, the orange of the monk's robe... Two close-ups of fabric --sky-blue & orange... And suddenly it's as though one feels the breeze moving --the fabric is an aspect of the monk's life-- The details of colour & movement take one away from the etheriality of the forest and into the life --the clothing, sleeping...
Every time I've been back to Luang Prabang I've looked at it --and I always wondered, how did he do it? How courageous to go into the forest and photograph the monks... Until I read the book...

K H : This leads beautifully into that wonderful disclosure by Berger --here he is, the contemporary Western artist, whose most important formative experience was collaboration with Joseph Beuys, sensitively explaining the potentially positive role of photography in the (vulnerable) traditional context to the Vientiane abbot, without whose blessing he couldnt work with the monks --getting the nod, working for two years, and then one day, at their regular audience, the venerable Abbot reveals his own immense collection of photography!
p.61, "(...) at a sign from the abbot, the young monks present in the room got up and began to open the doors of the dark cupboards lining his reception room: they were filled to the ceiling with boxes, frames and files, they were full of photographs! Photographs of monks, of ceremonies, of visitors who had come to Luang Prabang, going back to the time when photography was invented. All sorts of different technical processes, hundreds, maybe several thousand historic photographs. the elderly monk was a photograph collector! He had hidden his collection away, protecting it from the war, from the revolution and during the isolation. Now he was offering it to me, who had come from afar, and who could perhaps understand. The abbot became my most important referee and analyst..."
For me this is another example of the danger of stereotyping tradition vis a vis modernity, and also shows the collaboration with colonialism to the extent of re-skewing the post-colonial! That is, they've been there, with us, all along!


[Photo by Cathy O'Brien. from The Off : International Photography Festival, Luang Prabang . 2010. Photo from a series of works at Café 56 : Light in Motion , “An exhibition of performance arts” by Phoonsab Thevongsa.]


K H : Was the changed appearance of Mr. Patrick's gallery, which we witnessed in June, '09, symptomatic of a general stasis or even degradation of the 'new art movement' in your opinion?

C O'B : Hard to tell... For example, trying to explain to someone who asked me about Lao art, I revisited the gallery and it was similar & even more of a mish-mash. I've since heard it intends opening a cafe there which means reduced art space. The several times I've been to the 5 Arts gallery I felt work had been sold but not replaced, and there seemed a lack of the excitement I'd encountered there before.

K H : Replaced by the same artists or new artists?

C O'B : Less work there and the themes seemed tired...

K H : It was "recognizable" now?

C O'B : I need to revisit... When I visited my friend Sabre in a S E Games hotel she was staying at, I was amazed to find 5 Arts & Mr Patrick's gallery's artists hanging there. Instead of copies of, say, Van Gogh or Vietnamese Realist style, there were the contemporary Lao artists... Maybe they're there as a consequence of the showcase provided by the S E Asian Games... This was considered to be a major achievement for Laos.
I notice more tourist artists selling on the street --one I saw was really lovely.. . I've seen a couple of new boutique galleries. It's something I'll investigate when I return to Vientiane. I'm aware of a few Lao photographers, some of whom were included in an exhibition curated by non-Lao people in Luang Prabang.

K H : Do you think photography & the new technologies might gazump the new painting?

C O'B : Definitely there's great interest in photography & the arts of the new technologies... New Lao films at the German Centre for example.--they were excellent --technique & subject (considering the censorship that must operate) : some lyrical, comedy, social realism...

K H : No matter where you live there's no getting away from the new technologies! Is there any point, then, in protecting the traditional cultures? Can it or should it be done? (Ironic that painting in the West is now tantamount to a traditional culture! It's affected by the very same questions --except perhaps that its larger & deeper history is an in-built protection. I imagine Lao artists coming of age in the globalized culture & technology in which painting, art history, fine arts, aesthetics are the hang-ups supposedly transcended by the new technologies' place/time simultaneity!)

*

[July 31st, 2010]

C O'B : An example of them moving into the new technology is how they took on the mobile-phone without first developing land-lines. In the same way, painting begins after the founding by the French of an art school --before that was the painting for the temples, which continues. So you've really only got a handful of painters coming out of the art school --and I dont see anything new happening...

K H : Is this because there isnt new energy & ideas entering the art school?

C O'B : I dont know... however I was impressed in Luang Prabang by a project --a photography workshop --during a photography festival -- and the photos emerging from the workshop, about their lives & the culture, were impressive. You dont get this kind of content in the painting which tends to be conservative & sentimental...

K H : Even though there is interesting painting --the 'hyper-real' for example, & the surreal cartoon type of thing?

C O'B : Yes, but it's not so significant...

K H : "Significant" in what context?

C O'B : There hasnt been much development since the first work of the "opening up" period. They're copying one another's styles...

K H : Why isnt that productive?

C O'B : But they're still derivative of Marc Leguay --you can still, in the contemporary painters, see the Marc Leguay flame tree...

K H : But, so long as it's their own 'story', whatever the style...? Seems to me that the challenge to painting of photography in Vientiane is that photography's influences are contemporary (state-of-the-art), and being photography the 'mechanics' are abundantly available & amenable to whatever the practitioner wants to do...

C O'B : I think the young people have had access to t.v., film, technology unlike previous generations. And their influences via computer & DVD come from everywhere. And they're not seeing any other visual art...

K H : Yes. But the point I'm making is only because of a devotion to a particular form of visual representation, that is drawing & painting! And an abiding attraction to what I call the local or regional against the juggernaut of 'international style'. international influence, & now the global technologies! That's all!

C O'B : Well, as long as there's an art school people will paint and as long as there are temples there will be artists needed to paint the stories on the temple walls... On the other hand there is a Lao mind-set which says, knock down the old temple & build a new one! There's a horrifying incident in the '90s, I think, when a very historically & religiously significant temple, whose art had, as it happens, been photographed, was pulled down... And they though that was fine!
Anna Karlstrom in Preserving Impermanence : The Creation of Heritage in Vientiane, Laos [Studies in Global Archaeology, 13; Uppsala Universitet, 2009], describing the destruction of the Vat Ou Mong in Vientiane, says "The temple was not identified as valuable heritage until it was demolished." However, as she also says, building a new temple earns great [Buddhist] merit! The temple is only a "shell for spiritual values" [Karlstrom] --but it's still shocking to me!

K H : This is an example of an enormous collision of values isnt it?!

C O'B : Absolutely!

K H : I'm tickled by all of that --it's at the heart of the Buddhist lesson after all-- but I'm also happy with my Western fetishising & privileging!

C O'B : And I love that title, Preserving Impermanence!

K H : That says it all, for East & West! It's at the pith of the very notions of culture & history --of ourselves as historical people --as people who remember, or seek to remember -- A wonderful, fantastical futility --yes?

C O'B : Yes!


oOo

[Bendigo & Melbourne]

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BLOOMSDAY, 2010

On Wednesday, 16th June, around midday and until 2, please join us at Collected Works Bookshop, for our annual Bloomsday celebration.
For anyone who hasnt attended before, we simply read from the book, James Joyce's Ulysses, in turn, around the room. We are mostly enthusiasts & readers of Joyce. No special license required!
After Kris Hemensley's introductory remarks, the actor James Howard will offer a little drama to begin proceedings.
There will be nibbles & tipples.
Everyone is welcome.

VENUE : Collected Works Bookshop, level 1, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000
INFORMATION : tel. 03-9654-8873

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #18; June/July/August, 2010

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