Toothbrush, check, passport, check, notes for panel, check, copies of A Book of Endings to use as beercoasters give-aways, check, list of MEXICAN places to eat in San Francisco, check, US dollars (now over AUD$0.90, keep ‘em coming), check. What HAVE I forgotten?!

While I shut down my browser for the first time in weeks, here are some pretty things:

* Via Ellen Datlow, Vivian Maier’s street photography of Chicago in the 50s-70s. Awesome.
* Livia Marin’s wonderful sculptures of Broken Things. I would like for one of these to be cover art on my novel, which was called Broken Places, but which I might rename in honour of Marin’s work. I love it.

Possibly a few more distracted posts like this before I fly out tomorrow. Ahhh, Air NZ, how I love your comfy seats, supreme little TVs & excellent New Zealand reds with my meals.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

is this:

 

And get this, it’s a painting.

 

See more of Alyssa Monks’ work here and at her website.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

A good, long chat today with author rcdaniells about the importance of visual inspiration. Oddly, I don’t hear a lot of writers talking about visual influences though I suspect it’s more prevalent than a lot of people make out. Plenty of people talk about the importance of music, ‘what music do you listen to while you’re writing’, & so on. For me, I don’t listen to music. In fact, I hardly ever listen to music. But art, I’m always seeking it out. It’s like food. Sustaining & satisfying.

So I thought I better share something visual today. And here it is: Simon Hoegsberg’s uplifting (ahem) work entitled ‘we are all gonna die‘.

And music is nice, too. It’s just that to me music is rarely… relevant.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

I’m often not a fan of subversive art, finding its teenaged narcissism unattractive.

I make an exception for this guy, though. There’s just too much nutty good humour to Banksy’s art.

Described as a ‘covert graffiti artist’, the true identity of Banksy is unknown. (Instantly my mind rushed to the conclusion that it’s a consortium. I mean, if *you* had a secret identity, wouldn’t you want to share it around? It’d be far more confusing for your followers that way. And since Banksy seems to excel at thwarting expectations, it’d be an efficient way to achieve that… Just a theory).

Banksy, I think, is working in the tradition of Monty Python & other British comedians willing to look silly for the sheer fun of it. He’s suggesting a fantastical, fun, down-to-earth world. Grin-worthy art!

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

This unambiguous satire of consumerism is another Pixar paradox. In 2006, the studio was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in a well-publicised $7.4 billion takeover. It's ironic to hear anti-corporate noises from the very company that epitomises the encroaching influence of corporations - so much so that its fondness for bland commercialisation has coined a term: Disneyfication.

Sure enough, there is controversy over the apparent political content of Wall-E. Conservative bloggers have dismissed the film's environmental bent as left-wing propaganda, while eco-lobbyists are suspicious of a pro-recycling film that will generate mountains of disposable Disney merchandise.
-- Tim Walker, 'A giant bleep for mankind', SMH, August 15, 2008

It's always struck me as strange that films will tout leftist politics and preach old-fashioned values (like decency & open-mindedness) when they're built by massive, dedicated consumerist corporations. Who was it who said that the people in charge of Hollywood budgets hate movies? It's product they like. Sell, sell, buy. That sort of thing. The schism between 'art' and 'product' is eternal, & relentless. In fact, maybe that's what makes art 'art' -- having something to fight against. The grain of sand around which to wrap the pearl.

Still, every time I hear a story like the one above, it makes me grin. Maybe it's not right to bite the hand that feeds you. But I'm sure it's ok to give it a salutary nibble.

No surprise to anyone in NSW: art funding is near impossible to attain.

"I've been advised a number of times by people on staff at Arts NSW not to bother applying because there just isn't the funding," [independent director and performer, Nikki Heywood, said]. "Money is so thin on the ground that we're like hungry seagulls. We scurry for crumbs and we can't celebrate other people's success."

Yes. Biggest population. Potentially biggest number of artists, biggest audiences (I said potentially -- heck, I'm not doing an audit). And no money.

Gah.

My work was doing pretty well, and now it is doing dramatically better. Is that because people are collecting the pictures because of their notoriety? Or is that simply because people are more aware of the work, and like it, having become aware of it? I don't know. I'll never get to know.

It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively. Now that I am, I'm permanently deprived of the pleasure of knowing whether that's based entirely on my work's merit or whether that's based on amplitudes lent by notoriety. That's something that's been stolen from me that I don't get back.
-- Jock Sturges, visual artist.

Via coopstock

Via joshrubin_feed comes Joana Meroz' crackery tableware and bra cups, and plenty of other objects that combine form and function.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
-- Clive Staples Lewis via Quoteworld

I love it. :)

Via mindhacks comes the story & images of painter Chuck Close. Renowned for his early photorealism, he suffered a blood clot that changed the way he painted.

In 1988, Close had a spinal artery collapse, on the day he was to give a speech at an art awards ceremony. He felt ill beforehand, asked to be first, gave his speech, then painfully went to a hospital across the street. A few hours later he was a quadriplegic and his painting career might have been terminated.

Take a look at the Wikipedia close-up comparison of his photorealism versus his later 'topographic' style.

Freaking amazing!

As a teenager, I knew this weird girl whose mother used to make 'art' with Barbie dolls. She'd put them into bondage gear & photograph them in mock acts of fornication. The Barbie dolls, that is. Perhaps it was meant to be shocking. It certainly was amusing -- though when the artist talked about her art, she spoke with great earnestness.

It was really her earnestness which was the most shocking thing about what she was doing. Lighten up, funny artist person!

Apparently Mattel has now lodged a lawsuit against someone called China Barbie. China Barbie is not, to my knowledge, the artist I met in my youth. Her name was Brenda -- according to the current affairs story I saw on her art.

In a lawsuit filed in US District Court in Manhattan, Mattel said the website for an adult entertainer named China Barbie has tried to benefit from Mattel's success with the 48-year-old line of dolls, which includes Barbie's sister, Skipper, her best friend, Midge, and Skipper's boyfriend, Kevin.

Gods!! Wait, not Skipper, too! Thou unholy wretch...

Most human beings, Paulinus, complain about the meanness of nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, and because this spell of time that has been given to us rushes by so swiftly and rapidly that with very few exceptions life ceases for the rest of us just when we are getting ready for it. Nor is it just the man in the street and the unthinking mass of people who groan over this -- as they see it -- universal evil: the same feeling lies behind complaints from even distinguished men. Hence the dictum of the greatest of bodies: 'Life is short, art is long'.
-- Seneca the Younger, On the Shortness of Life

Once upon a time (quite recently), I was thinking to myself what an awesome thing iPods are. How even someone as musically ignorant as me can plug some half-remembered lyrics into a search engine, read the search results & think, 'Oh, right, U2 Rattle & Hum, I'm like totally down with that,' & proudly skip off to iTunes to buy the music of the youth she considered lost when the housemate with the CD collection moved out. What?

I have had a long, long day.

Anyhow, back on track, artist David Hockney has set me to rights. Where once I believed we lived in a world overly dependent on visuals, (a la cinema & television), I now understand that:

"I think we are not in a very visual age and it's producing badly dressed people. They have no interest in mass or line or things like that."

I believe Hockney because I have never met a badly dressed artist. Or, for that matter, an aurally offensive musician. Further, I believe Hockney is quite right in ignoring any suggestion that the current "fallow period in painting" is the result of the proliferation of other visual tools, such as digital manipulation (eg. PhotoShop).

Tangentially, someone needs to invent a delivery service for cake & ice cream.

I've long been a fan of immersive art: the kind of installations that surround you, often plunging the viewer into darkness so that all other senses are wiped out except the ones the artist wants you to use. Usually visual, frequently auditory, not often anything else, admittedly.

The finest example I've come across was at the Tate Modern some years ago, an installation called 'Five Angels for the Millennium', by Bill Viola. The audience entered a pitch black room where apart from the dull glow of lights beyond the exits, all that could be seen were two and a half metre screens, three on the wall in front and two behind. And on each screen a different angel. Videos of people in soft, voluminous clothes falling through water. It was a simple enough process: film people diving into a pool & then play it on half-speed, with the soft sound of bubbles and dives numbing the senses of the audience, slowing everything down. The most effective tableaus were the ones where the angels fell up -- the video played upside down, still with its water and slo-mo, but suddenly taking on a new meaning. It was a trick. It was embarrassingly effective.

It was – as I've always said art should be – beautiful. It awoke a childish awe in me that I've been looking to relive ever since.

'When I showed the finished work to Kira [Perov], my partner, she pointed out something I had not realised until that moment: this was not a film of a drowning man. Somehow, I had unconsciously run time backwards in the five films, so all but one of the figures rush upwards and out of the water. I had inadvertently created images of ascension, from death to birth.'
-- Bill Viola

So it was I went along to the Art Gallery of NSW last night, intrigued by the promise of Struck, by Michele Barker and Anna Munster. Struck finishes today, so the link won't work by tomorrow. ( Struck is … )

Dissatisfied, I wandered over to the Archibalds, which were busy screaming Art with a Capital A. (  By god, is it possible that so very many paintings are completed each year with so very much Importance attached to them? )

Well, that's enough rambling from me.

At lifehacker they have a 'MacGyver tip' -- use denture cleanser tablets to clean just about anything. Which interests me only partly because of the advice, and mostly because of the mention of Macgyver.

Now, I didn't actually watch a lot of MacGyver. Enough to know it was about a weedy science nerd with a superhuman ability to get himself into and out of a series of unusual fixes while maintaining a healthy amount of irreverance. Who'd've thought that guy could be such an effective hero?

Maybe the same people who figured a ditzy highschool girl with a history of acting out would make a good vampire slayer?

Art often celebrates the outsider, of course, granting a power not equalled by reality. Part of its raison d'etre, I'd always figured. But in my head I've always drawn a line between art and popular culture (art, says William Goldman, tells uncomfortable truths. Pop culture tells comfortable lies).

So what does it mean when the outsider is a popular hit?

Most of the people I know who read a lot of books report that, at one time or another in their history, they felt like an outsider. For book readers, it's often during childhood. For people who don't read a lot of books, well, I'm never really sure what motivates them.

But one of the things I've discovered even with people I consider popular or well-balanced or successful -- even with these people with whom, I confess, I don't identify -- these people report feeling like an outsider at least once. These people, too, have had moments of being an underdog, or invisible, or belittled.

And what's interesting, to me at least, is how often it's *these* moments that make us, rather than all the others.

Remember that Frasier episode where he dates a chick who likes to make her own pillows -- using her own hair?

No, of course not, neither do I, I'm too busy watching World News Tonight and Foreign Exchange.

Anyhow. Melanie Bilenker makes art using her own hair. And it's quite beautiful, actually, apart from the fact it's made using, you know, someone else's hair.

Via joshrubin_feed: A graduate of Philadelphia's University of the Arts, Bilenker's work is inspired by the Victorian tradition of keeping lockets of hair or miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to commemorate the memory of a lost love. Her use of physical remnants evokes an intimate connection with the mundane domestic scenes portrayed, like the Drawing A Bath brooch (pictured) which captures the subtle beauty of a quiet moment.

Via endicottstudio, some stunning images from Dutch painter Jan Toorop, an early influence on more well-known painter Gustav Klimt:

Toorop was born in Java, Indonesia (a Dutch colony), to a Javanese father and mother of British extraction. He was raised in Java and Sumatra until the age of 13, attended high school in the Netherlands, then studied painting, sculpture, craftwork, and design in Amersterdam and Brussels. Toorop traveled to England in 1885, where he met his future wife, Annie Hall, and began a life-long friendship with the Pre-Raphaelite writer, artist, and socialist William Morris. Influenced by the ideals of Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts & Crafts movement, but also by French Impressionism and Pointillism, Toorop created his own unique brand of Dutch Symbolist art, drawing heavily on the aesthetics of the Javanese side of his heritage.

Apparently artist Jill Greenberg is putting noses out of joint by taking photographs of crying children & then photoshopping them to make said children look even more unhappy. She calls this collection End Times, and says this art is indicative of her own feelings on the state of the planet. Not, as some ungenerous people might suggest, the state of art.

She's also done some striking Monkey Portraits. Yes. Monkey Portraits. But do you hear anyone feeling sorry for the monkies? No, no you don't.

I confess, what fascinates me about this case is not the art itself. I can't say I enjoy the art, and neither does it invoke much of an emotional response in me (unlike plenty of other people, it seems). Simply, I find the worked images creepy, with their doll-like shine and stylised emotional caricature. Perhaps I watch too much Law & Order, but the children look weirdly dead to me.

My interest is not even really in the idea of cruelty to children. I'm unconvinced that Greenberg's efforts are genuinely going to cause the kind of lasting psychological damage some critics claim. After all, parents make their children cry all the time. They often call this discipline. And if we're to argue that Greenberg's actions are more harmful because her sole intent was to *make* the children cry, well, I want to know how "intent" is harmful? A child knows only that she is crying. She cries one day because she wants an ice cream and her mother won't buy her one, and she cries the next because a stranger is stealing her lollypop. It's cruel, but so is the world, and so am I.

No, where my interest lies is in the phrase 'artistic immunity'.

In the name of art, strange and callous actions occur. How is it Linda Blair ever grew up 'normal' after her role in The Exorcist? How did Hitchcock get away with terrifying Janet Leigh & Tippi Hedren during the filming of their movies? How did the makers of The Beach feel when, with no sense of irony whatsoever and without regard to climate needs or implications, they 'customised' the beach they were filming by adding trees to the sandline? How are the paparazzi tolerated at all, in their sanctioned roles as stalkers?

On the one hand, I *think* I'm all for freedom. Freedom of expression, freedom of choice, freedom of action. On the other, there's a lot of expression out there I find degrading, ignorant, or stupid, & I frequently resent its existence. What kinds of immunity does art really possess?

Art, I find myself thinking -- or perhaps that should be 'wanting' -- art should have a *point*. Violent fantasies may be all very well if you're making a comment about violence. Or fantasies. Or the state of the planet. Probably. But otherwise, I'm not sure what the hell it is you're doing with your time. And I guess that's always been my idea of responsible art: having a point. Saying something.

Because art that doesn't say anything, well it's a hobby. Like scrapbooking. Or crochet. Or being boring at parties.

Everybody needs a hobby.

And some humility.

Maybe even one of them portraits of a monkey.

Or not.

From benpayne:

... because unlike many other fields of everyday life, art and silence cannot co-exist... art and silence are bitter enemies, and while art is capable of ommissions, absences, and rewriting of history, it is equally capable of subverting, of propagating diversity of voice and opinion, of intentionally or accidentally drawing our attention to those absences and ommissions and of providing recognition and empathy.

Put simply, the more art there is, the better the chance that somewhere, either as an author or as a reader, people's lives are given voice, are made "real"... and silence and erasure is held back...

It's been a weekend of ideas. Firstly, the Archibalds at the NSW Gallery of Art generally failed to connect with me this year. A few highlights, of course, but not really stuff that inspired a lot of reaction from me. That's what I look for in art: the ability to invoke reaction. Some people argue this is what's meant by 'the sublime'.

But that's a whole 'nother post.

In the end, I voted for Deborah Trusson's huge self-portrait, Naked, in which she does, indeed, pose naked. And not 'I'm just naked & standing here, rigid & haughty, like a monolith'. Trusson's Naked is very suggestively masturbatory, reclining with one hand wrapping a breast, one hand dug into her thigh. It could be argued she's not *quite* masturbating, but that argument might be a bit of a, *ahem*, wank. I mean, an unsustainability. I know my gallery-visiting-buddy, T., found Trusson's portrait a bit too confronting & anxiety-provoking, but I thought it was lustful & gorgeous, & an impressive technical achievement to boot. The realism of the skin tones (& Trusson does say it was an exercise in skin tones) is remarkable. How glorious to see the marks, the discolourations, the puffs of flesh where her bright red nails dig into her leg, the veins in the roll of breast caught by her elbow. Also, that damn painting is _remarkably_ huge! Something you just can't get a real sense of online.

( Also I liked the way it's a painting of a reclining woman, and yet it's powerful, and yet -- & this is important -- it's not aggressive. )

In other news: I'm keeping up with the happenings over in Madison at The Happiest Feminist Genre Con in the World: Wiscon. You, too, can find all the news & insights fit to blog over at: http://www.technorati.com/tag/wiscon.

I'm mad keen to make it to Wiscon in 2006. Wiscon has the hugest amount of positive press of any con I've come across (thank-you, larbalestier, Scott Westerfeld, Ellen Klages, & others). Naturally, it's not an event to suit everyone, but I've got a strong suspicion it might suit me. Fingers crossed I get to find out next year.

I was looking for this quote last night when I was thinking about Bill Henson:

"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides."
-- Artur Schnabel, pianist, (1882-1951)

I like the idea that art is partly knowing when to leave well enough alone.

And then, in renewing my search, I was reminded of this one:

"The best craftsman always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in."
-- Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto

Thomas wrote the remarkable 'Do not go gentle into that good night', where he pleads with his father to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" (you'll find the poem at the link above). Yet he himself died of alcoholism at the age of 39 -- "after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953" (ibid.). It makes me want to shout his own advice back at him.

Sounds like he lived a thunderous life, though.

When people ask me that old question about 'if you could have a dinner party & invite anyone at all, living or dead', I always start with Oscar Wilde. Then I always add Dorothy Parker. Then I have to stop & think about it. Perhaps Dylan Thomas would be my next choice.

Man, what a wild evening THAT would be... !

"What is that face, breaking our hearts, but a momentary configuration of molecules taking form and changing form and losing form, as night falls."
-- Peter Scheldahl, 1989

There is something fragile in Bill Henson's art, something that implies loss even as it offers substance. Perhaps it's the way he works with images of age, contrasting the faces of child and adult. Perhaps it's the way he uses adolescents, with their bodies snagged between youth and maturity.

Perhaps, instead, it's in his use of light. And in his use of dark.

It is -- perhaps -- all these things, & it is the very fact he manages to straddle this tension of opposites that gives his art a sense both of stillness and movement. He works in ambiguities & the spaces in-between. He can make crowd scenes look intimate and intimate scenes look oddly impersonal. He can give still moments a sense of drama and suspense, and yet despite the easy fluidity of his images, there is a weightiness there. As though fate or history is pressing down.

"Were it not for Henson's primary, almost devotional need to elicit empathy for his troubled human subjects, there's a feeling that nothing would prevent the black in his photographs from completely absorbing his attention and extinguishing his work."
-- Dennis Cooper

Henson apparently spent 5 weeks working full-time at the Art Gallery of NSW to create this latest exhibition, & what I found at least as interesting as the art was the way he presented it. He built shapes with the frames across the wall. He modified the gallery lights one by one so that they spotlighted parts of the photos, creating shadow and glare alternately. The result was one of energy. I wanted to stand still to drink in his beautiful images, but reflections in the glass meant I had to move back & forth, only ever seeing the picture incompletely. It was a kind of meta-art, forcing me to interact with the strangers in the photos.

I found a lot to like in the exhibition. Henson's preoccupations parallel my own: light & dark, tragedy & beauty, momentariness, narrative, contrast.

But the thing that has really stuck in my head is not Henson's tragic, beautiful portraits where people seem forever frozen in a moment before they speak. Nor is it his colourful and empty landscapes. It is the fact his work is apparently not sexual.

( More on Henson and art and the questions it left me with.  )