As further organising of my electronic life, yesterday I started re-labelling old email filters, as their folder names had become nonsensical in the march of time, & discovered a folder that’s been quietly collecting the poets.org Poem A Day for, oh, at least a year now (didn’t this thing used to run only in April each year?). I also managed to unsubscribe from about a dozen ‘special offer’ newsletters that, frankly, I never even read. I notice lj tells me I have about 1999 unread messages, but I figure it’s either a) those hundreds of alerts I set up for when my favourite bloggers blogged (which, er, I then stopped reading a while back), or b) all that Russian spam I’ve been getting on my journal.

I remember Lily C blogging about a house move years ago, & some spectacular advice she received: give yourself the gift of more space. That adage always stuck with me. And now I’m using it to dig my way out from under this pile of electronic wreckage. Because that’s what it feels like: wreckage. An online equivalent to the dump where Jupiter Jones secreted his hideaway in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators (hey, what a great bunch of books! I haven’t thought about them in years, but suddenly I’m right back there with Jupiter, Pete & Bob with his weird metal leg cast. What was with that, anyhow?). I’ve been living in the middle of an electronic junkyard for the last year or so, the walls slowly caving in while I stare into a blue screen, oblivious to what’s teetering around me. With the walls punched out, I’ve scored some electronic white space.

Now to remind myself to be selective about what I use that space for.

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– Robert Stoller

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Or, well, maybe it isn’t.

But somewhere in there is a nice philosophical lesson in celebrating our similarities. Be nice to do it without losing our differences, though, eh?

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Anish Kapoor’s art is beautiful, but he doesn’t set out to make it beautiful. Some pieces smack of spirituality, but he doesn’t set out to make it spiritual. What he does is design a space for the viewer, to allow the viewer to insert themselves into the art. Like with his giant Chicago piece, Cloud Gate: it reflects the sky and the people around it.

I love the generosity of his view: that art is there to draw expression out of the viewer, not to impose the view of the artist.

It’s a reversal typical of Kapoor: his Space as Object looks like a box full of emptiness; Turning the World Inside Out II does exactly what it promises to the viewer’s gaze. And works such as Yellow feature a hollow at the centre that Kapoor repeats and updates over and over. An absence at the centre and yet a place that fixes the gaze and makes us think of infinity and mortality. Another trademark is the deep blood-red found in pieces like Her Blood, with saucers of giant reflective material that look both convex and concave all at once: an over-sized visual illusion brought to life. And also Mother as a Mountain, where shape and colour are impossible to divide.

Just beautiful.

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Plenty of art at the Finders Keepers Market, much of it wearable. I found pressed metal is in, & so are teapots. I bought some $6 origami flowers & a stunning leather laptop bag that makes me WANT to be an author on the run. And now, too soon, the weekend is over.

In writing news: 32 scenes into what I’m calling the Colossal Re-Write. Slowly sloooowly … catchee … storee.

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And I love new pretty links.

Today:

Looking for business card inspiration, I found this awesomeness:
http://creativebits.org/cool_business_card_designs

Looking for the gift for the girl with everything? How about designing her some new shoes:
http://www.shoesofprey.com/

And here, a local blog on craft and pretty, inspirational things:
http://dailyimprint.blogspot.com/

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But isn’t all great art like that? A little bit more, a little bit ‘other than’ something that’s easily put into words?

Also little naked person storage is kinda funny. ;p

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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.

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Steamy Window, Alyssa Monks

And get this, it’s a painting. See more of Alyssa Monks’ work here and at her website.

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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.

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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!

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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. I’ve often found the kind of ‘re-claimings’ exercised by a number of artists (like, say, Madonna, if we’re to think about her reclamations in video & book volume) are not so much ‘this is mine’ but ‘this is not yours, so fuck you!’. So this new ability to be powerful-not-aggressive, & to assert that ‘my comment is about what I have, my comment is not about what you _don’t_ have, or what you think I’m taking away from you’ — this is exciting.

T.’s favourite painting was James Guppy’s Chagrin. Another self-portrait, & another naked self-portrait, as it happens, but Guppy’s painting, sez T. ‘makes me giggle’. And there certainly is an absence of self-importance in the work. The artist reports he painted it with the head oversized for the body, giving it a comical & distorted aspect which makes the painting awkward & embarrassing — which is exactly what being naked in front of strangers is really like, he says. Guppy also comments that self-portraits are blatant exhibitionism. An interesting insight, given just how many Archibald entries are self-portraits.

There certainly is a ‘type’ of Archibald that gets hung, despite, I’m sure, judges’ efforts to diversify the entries. Henceforth I will never worry about the insularity of the writing world, or the genre writing world in particular, because I am now fully cognisant of how many Archibalds are self-portraits, & how many other Archibalds (namely, almost all of them) are of fellow _artists_.

As usual, I wondered what did NOT make it into the Archibalds. I think I heard once there was a counter-Archibalds exhibition for the rejected paintings. I must ask around & see if that’s true.

I found more to love in the Australian Photographic Portrait Prize, though unfortunately it seems the pictures aren’t up online. In particular, John Kiely’s Tameka (Terminal), a picture of a girl with a terminal illness that has sent her blind as one of its more minor symptoms (I apologise for not noting what it was afflicting her) was an affecting piece. Says Kiely, he erased part of the photo to bring out her facial features & give the sense of those blind eyes staring into despair. By the time we see this photo in the exhibition, Tameka has already died. She has been wholly erased. But the artist’s choices in what he will & won’t erase lead, somehow, to a stronger ‘truth’ (it *is* despair on her face), despite the dishonesty of his method (ie. choosing what makes it into his photographic presentation … the camera never lies? I think not).

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.

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“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… !

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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.

Henson uses a lot of naked teenagers in his work; he also uses the faces of dark-haired women caught in a frown or a semblance of tragedy, of concern. It’s beautiful, but it’s also disturbing to realise how beautiful they are. What is the strange attractiveness of tragedy?

In the lecture beforehand, Peter Craven (Literary Light and Dark) said he found it “preposterous” that Henson has been accused of sexual imagery, simply because he uses nudity & — in particular — nude teenagers. Craven wanted to know whether our society had become so sexualised that nudity had this instant, almost dismissive, interpretation.

What I want to know is: is it possible that Henson, a modern artist, could be so out of touch with the society that views his art he wouldn’t know about our preposterous sexual obsessions? Could Henson build his beautiful, bruised images without pausing to wonder what his audience might make of the suggestive poses of nudes on canvases? Could Henson, creating art, today, in this world, not reference our apparent over-sexualisations?

Even if he means his art to ridicule us, to make light of us, to point out our flaws. Even if he thinks the rest of us — or the majority of us — are crazy for our so-called sexual obsessiveness. Even then, can he build art in this world that is immune to that? Can art be made in a vacuum?

Can Henson, with his provocative images of naked teenagers reclining or embracing in idealised, mythologised landscapes, claim that sex is not informing his art in some way?

I doubt he is so out-of-touch as all that.

But I am curious as to what he does mean, and what he thinks of fate, and beauty, and moments. And darkness. And art.

Nietzsche concurred that life is tragic, but thought that this should not preclude acceptance of the tragic with joyous affirmation, the full realization of which is art. Art confronts the terrors of the universe and is therefore only for the strong. Art can transform any experience into beauty, and by so doing transforms its horrors in such a way that they may be contemplated with enjoyment.
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761576304/Aesthetics.html

Like I say, I’ve got a lot of questions. I’m not so good on the answers.

It’s all in the journey.

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