Emerging Artists Exhibit

From the end of Semester show of the glass studio at Sydney College of the Arts ...

Spike

Nadine

Erica

Katie Ann

Art by kids

The SIBS Art Project

26-29 May

Many children's lives are profoundly affected by living with siblings who have a disability. While the needs of children with disabilities, especially Autism Spectrum Disorders, have received considerable media and political attention, there is less awareness of the lives of their brothers and sisters.
The photographs and artworks in this exhibition will shine a light on the many young people in the Marrickville area whose siblings have disabilities. These children live with caring responsibilities, intense and ambivalent emotions, difficulties and concerns, and an awareness of diversity and difference well beyond their years.
It will provide the Marrickville community with an opportunity to learn more about the effect of disability on families and young people. The SIBS Art Project showcases the work of the many siblings involved with Pathways Early Childhood Intervention Service. It is a celebration of what it is to be a SIB.

• Opening: Thursday 26 May, 6-10pm 

I was asked by Sylvana Mahmic to give a brief address and officially open the exhibition at the Chrissie Cotter Gallery in Camperdown. The gallery was overflowing and jumping.  The fifteen artists, brothers and sisters of kids with disability, all aged between 6 and 15 were pumped up, noisy, excited, impatient.  After my short speech (which went down well, brought tears to some eyes I was told later) each artist came forward when I called their name to receive a certificate from the Chair of the Board of Pathways Early Childhood Intervention Association.  All of them seemed so proud, so pleased.  It was a true pleasure, a real delight.
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Art ... all at sea

We attended a fund-raising art show held to support the work of the Sydney Heritage Fleet of which organisation my good friend Jon Simpson is CEO.  There was an additional connection because the Fleet's current artist-in-residence is Col Henry who runs a weekly workshop / place for sculptors to gather in the valley next to Dooralong.  Spike's mother attends.

The idea of having artists in residence is highly commendable .. you can hear the but coming, can't you?  I'm afraid I just couldn't warm to Mr Henry's work at all; couldn't even work up hostility and surely the indifference I felt to the works is the least desirable of all reactions.  I tried but not even the obligations one feels to my 35 year friendship with Jon could inspire any interest in the sculptures.  Sorry.

'Port Brisbane' by Don Braben

It would be impossible to feel indifferent to the paintings on display.  With one, two (or at a real push) three exceptions the displayed output of members of the Australian Society of Maritime Artists was breathtakingly banal.  Is not 'Art' meant to inspire, to be transformative, to reach into the heart of the matter, to find the underlying truth?  Seldom have I seen such an array of (mostly) technically competent superficiality.  Nothing could have drawn a purchase out of me.  And when we spent $10 on three raffle tickets (because one must support a friend's cause to at least that degree) I prayed we would not win the first prize, three boats at a wharf rendered in water colours by a member of the Society.  Thank God we lost.

Still, there was a good turn out so there will have been at least a couple of thousand dollars generated by the admission price as well as the same again (or maybe a bit less) from raffle ticket sales plus whatever was raised from the sale of art works.  I did see red spots on several labels.  Some people have more money than taste but, if it helps my mate, so be it.  Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
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Spike's cool maze

It better be an HD or there'll be trouble!!

Waiting for Guinness

Caught one of Spike's favourites, Waiting for Guinness, at Herman's Bar in (what I was surprised to see was) an almost deserted University of Sydney campus.  There wasn't a huge crowd, which means there was plenty of room for dancers to express themselves.  They did.

We took buses there and back.  Hassle free, on time (even the 00.26 back home, more or less) and quick.  Hip, hip, hooray for wheelchair accessible public transport.

It will end in tears ...

... and in less than eighteen months.  It would be hard to imagine a less inspiring or trustworthy politician than Wayne Swan, the antithesis of everything the Left is supposed to be about.  Seldom has so much principle been trashed for such little gain.

They 'triangulate' as if it were clever and seem incapable of learning the lessons of the British Labour Party's decline.  It's ghastly to witness; entirely without hope or promise.  What is the point of being in power if you have no idea of why you want to use it?

It just gets worse and worse

First we had the suicidal strategy of politically assassinating the elected Prime Minister in the full view of television cameras, leaving his body to stalk the halls of Parliament like Banquo's ghost.  Then there's the retreat from key policy areas ... one described as "the great moral challenge of our time."  You simply walk away?  Then comes "real Julia".

Had no one ever heard of the smart arse observation that when you're a hole the first act in getting yourself out is to stop digging?  Obviously not.

So, on election night, when the scale of the defeat is becoming clear; the majority is gone; the first-preference votes are mounting up for the conservative grouping and you're fighting (poorly) for your political survival how could anyone think it's safe to step up to the microphone and on live television and say (as Julia Gillard said) ... “It now appears clear that Labor has won the two-party vote. That means the majority of Australians who voted yesterday prefer a Labor government. I think this is a critical fact to weigh in the coming days.”?

Isn't there a basic rule?  Don't pose a question unless you're certain of the answer.  Don't assert any "critical fact" unless you're surer than "it now appears ..."  Appearances can be deceptive Julia.  And what do you do or say now that your hostage to fortune comes back to haunt you?

From today's Australian ...

THE Coalition has now leapt forward in the two-party-preferred vote, taking over from Labor with a lead of 1531 votes on the Australian Electoral Commission’s latest count.

Behind in the seat count.  Behind in the first preference vote count.  And now (maybe) behind on the two-party preferred count.  Where do you go now ALP?

Nincompoops!
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Nam Le: The Boat

I finished the prize-winning collection of short stories by Nam Le.  My jury is still out.  There's no doubting the technical skill of the writer.  So why do I feel a nagging doubt emotionally?  Have I written before that the collection brings to mind the quote I like of words by Charles Rennie McIntosh?  "There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist."

Too many of the stories are devoid of an emotional core.  They feel (to me) like expertly crafted writer's workshop projects; hollow, technical examinations of prose style using ideas generated (borrowed from) some other, more authentic source.  So, Cartagena  takes its inspiration from the movie City of God and it just never feels like the voice of a young, Colombian gang member (but it is well written).  Meeting Elise (the weakest story in the collection) feels like a second tier Mirimax movie from the 1990s; one that never lived up to its Oscar-material aspirations.  You can see the joins in Hiroshima: the flash of the camera then the flash of the bomb.  Tehran Calling simply disintegrates in the final two pages and I'm not really sure that I buy the idea of the American woman visiting her former best friend but it is an ambitious attempt to occupy an entirely other persona.  Halflead Bay works well, although its premise is slight.  But perhaps, like Raymond Carver's stories, it's the ordinariness of a tale occupied by almost real people that gives the story legs.

The opening piece, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is described as "magnificent" on The Boat web site.  Sorry, it's not.  I need to get over my instinctual reaction against metafiction because I was deeply suspicious of the story the first time I read it.  Save me (I thought) from a writer's workshop project about a writer's workshop participant struggling to find authenticity in his writing whilst working out his relationship with his father and to his past.  But if you can get beyond those limitations (which are real barriers, suppressing more interesting and potentially engaging writing on similar themes) the story bears a second reading.  Beyond the metafiction there is an authentic voice, I think.

The final story, The Boat, works best for me.  The fate of the boy is discernible from the outset but that's not a problem.  There is an emotional risk at the centre of the story for its characters.  It's the way we're taken to the heart of that risk, see it exposed and witness the truth of its consequences that makes such an impression.  It seems to me that there's no flashy posing in this story.  It is what it is, told expertly and with an internal consistency and force that far outstrips the other stories.

I may be too harsh with these criticisms.  For any writer's first collection of published short stories The Boat is an impressive, highly readable group.  It augers well for the future.  If this is what Nam Le can give us first time out, we can look forward (I hope) to some remarkable work in the future when he's acquired the confidence to abandon the showy front and simply tell us authentic tales of his own imagining.
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Turning the idea of democracy into a charade

It has been depressing to watch the ALP commit political suicide. What brilliant mind conceived of the strategy that you could politically assassinate your leader then ask the voters to place their trust in you 8 weeks later? The word used in Edinburgh for such people is NUMPTIES! Tony Abbott for God's sake.

Real Julia?

Michelle Grattan in The Sydney Morning Herald asks two questions, neither of them unreasonable, in a decent article in today's paper.

"The Prime Minister declares that she's unleashing "the real Julia" and taking "personal charge" of the campaign. Which raises the questions: "Who, precisely, have we been seeing? And who has been running the campaign up to now?"

You could not make-up this farce if you tried.  You really couldn't.  Toytown politics in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.

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After China ... finally!

At last, I've finished my re-reading of Brian Castro's novel.  God, it's hard work (which the author intended it should be, apparently).  I mean it's hard work in a less praiseworthy or meritorious way than I imagine BC would have hoped for.  Although I've revised upwards my initial (lack of) regard for After China I'm afraid I remain mostly underwhelmed.

I get that it's metafiction.  I understand the use of metaphor and (maybe) allegory.  I see the Cartesian dualism, the structural antagonisms of Yin and Yang, the dichotomous tensions between the male and female, the Freudian self-reflection and self-deception.  I get the collapse of the building as the collapse of self (as clunky as that metaphor sadly is).  I see Ovid in the text.  I can't avoid the much too frequent, progressively more tedious invocation of Kafka.  I am prepared to go with the 'jump cut' sophistication (which is not a compliment) of fragmentation of time, place and narrative arc.  I'm bouncing along with the multiplicity of narrative voices - who is I, who is you, who is he or who is she? - which may ultimately be the same voice.  I recognise the references to Scheherazade and the storytelling / life-prolonging intention / technique of The One Thousand and One Nights and, of course we know that when the architect has run out of tales to tell the writer must die and drift away on an Chinese wedding cabinet floating in the flooded bowels of the disintegrating hotel.  I was even prepared to follow the novel's anti-hero down into the depths of the plumbing and sewage system, wade through shite with him then witness his release / re-birth as the sewage outlet washed him out to sea.

It's cleverly constructed.  I'll concede it's better written than I first asserted; in parts it's rather beautifully written and lyrical.  Ultimately though, it's simply not rewarding enough; not worth the effort.  It lacks heart and soul and more than once teeters on the edge of narcissistic cliche before collapsing into preposterous and self-serving introspection.  By that, I mean it truly is wanky in places.

Not my favourite read ever.  But I am pleased I've read it twice now.  I know more than I did at the outset and that can't be bad.

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Here we go round the mulberry bush

So, for the first 42 years of my life I learned to live with the various ways your national team can fail (tragically/spectacularly/comically/unexpectedly/expectedly ... delete as appropriate) to reach the second phaseof the world cup. But I left Scotland and came to live in Australia where ... ah ... final minute Italian penalty last time, four-goal lesson in German this time. It must be me! There's always 2014.

After China ... again

For the second time I am trying to plough through Brian Castro's novel After China.  And, like before, I'm toiling badly.  It's driving me nuts and if I didn't have to sit a university exam on Australian literature in a little over two weeks time I'd have abandoned the text and my efforts to read it.

I get the concept, you know?  I understand post-modernism's rejection of coherent narrative form.  I know about Jacques Derrida and undecidability (is that a word?) or indeterminability (probably another not word I've just conjured up).  I think I get - Hell, I may even live - the ambiguities, uncertainties, contradictions and tensions of diaspora.  I can see the intention and I really do get the idea that fragmentation and the mysteries on non-linear, multiplicities of perspective challenge conventional notions of writing and / or reading any text.

My problem is that I think this emperor has no clothes on  I don't see it as a complex, challenging work that explores identity, place, relationships, the persistence of the un-modern in the modern, life and death.  I just think it's self-serving, self-indulgent narcissistic obscurantism that's in need of a good editor and a complete re-write.

I wish the text didn't bring out such negative responses in me but the simple fact is that I think Brian Castro, an obviously competent writer, has served up a half-baked, ill-conceived mess of a book.  I have no idea what it's doing on a university syllabus.  Big mistake guys; big mistake.

But ... to allow for the possibility that one is wrong yet again and is merely manifesting one's inner conservative old duffer ... here is BC in conversation with the admirable Johanna Featherstone of the Red Room Company.

Dreams Of Speaking

I finished my first read of Dreams Of Speaking today (the first set text of my Australian Literature course at Sydney University).   It's a compelling take on modernity.  There are one or two spots where it teeters on the precipice of being too contrived ... the assault in the Metro witnessed by Alice and a Haulacost sorvivor, the whole "nuance" / ""Eternity" thing, the co-incidence of Alice and Mr Sakamoto's interests, some others ... but the novel lets you hold on to the suspension of disbelief.  And it does draw you in, particularly if you've a liking for theoretical discourse.  Except it's never that dry.  It's a story about two people who meet on a train.  Worth reading once and certainly readable again (as I must for my course).

Next, it's Virgil.  That'll be a riot.

Rupert Bunny

Excellent show at the Art Gallery of NSW.  I hadn't realised how gifted an artist he was.  Seeing so many works in the same space made me look again, more closely.  It's impossibe not to be impressed.  He's not just some post Pre-Raphaelite (if that makes sense).  There was more to his work than that. 

Rabbit Proof Fence

First of two classes on the movie of 2002 based on the book of 1994. Asked by Dr Morrison what we thought of the film when first we saw it (on release) I found myself (surprisingly) letting rip ... didn't trust its story-telling from the moment it started until the end; tells us it's a "true story" but the film doesn't even stick with Doris's re-telling of her mother's story; scenes in the movie that simply aren't in the book - A O Neville never met Molly, no evidence that kids sang Swanee to him, the girls didn't travel south by train in a cage but by boat as passengers, Mavis is fictional, the girls didn't steal on their journey home, they didn't collapse in the desert to be saved by a bird, Gracie's capture at the railway line never took place, Molly and Daisy rode the last section on a family friend's camel. It was, I said, bleeding heart liberalism at its worse. Why couldn't Noyce simply tell the girls' story as they recounted it? Why do the whole Hollywood job on a story with enough drama in it to satisfy anyone?

The (male) movie-maker's gaze upon the precocious, defiant central character idealised her story. There were too many distorting fictions that reinforced conservative portrayals of undifferentiated aboriginality as perceived by the dominant ideology ... white, male, urban, middle-class looking at black, female, childlike, noble savage archetypes fixed firmly in the past. I suggested too that everyone in the room try the Neil Armstrong test ... name the second man on the moon or the third, fourth or fifth ... applied to black Australian actors ... name someone other than David Gulpilil ... big silence then, Ernie Dingo maybe.

But I felt the unfairness of my own argument. Phillip Noyce's movie took the story of the Stolen Generations to millions of people who would never have engaged with it otherwise. RPF raised interest in real issues at home and abroad. This is true for me as much as anyone. I find the book more compelling but I never thought of buying it until tjhe movie was made. that'll make me another bleeding heart hypocrite I guess.

Read the book. Watch the movie. Make up your own mind.

by the way ... read about the fence here. As if it could ever have kept out rabbits. What a monument to the silliness of men.

"Unfortunately, the fence did not stop the rabbits from moving westward. There were parts of the fence which eroded underneath, holes in the wire developed, and sometimes gates would be left open, enabling the rabbits to pass through."
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Study day

Spike worked on essay. I watched Rabbit Proof Fence, the movie made by Phillip Noyce. I know which one of us had the tougher academic task. My old doubts about the movie were not challenged by watching it once more. The word may be problematic.

New Breed

Thanks to free tickets as part of a promotion to spread the word about the access improvements at the Sydney Opera House we attended the afternoon show of new dance pieces at the Playhouse. The new wheelchair location is immeasurably better than the previous arrangement. We stayed for the Q & A with the choreographers. That was interesting.

The show offered the first chance for each of the choreographers to stage a piece at the SOH in front of a live (sold out) audience. All four behaved as if Christmas had come early. I enjoyed the four dances, each quite different from the others (although all of them were fairly muscular and athletic rather than balletic). Slack was the most engaging for me (Spike too) but all four were truly impressive.
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Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence

Started and finished the book by Doris Pilkington in preparation for next week's class on the movie. The short read contains a great deal. It's infinitely preferable to what I can recall of the film.

David Malouf

Tonight's university class was the second of two on David Malouf's An Imaginary Life. I read it for the first time about two year's ago (which is the last time I thought about preparing to return to university). I have to admit that before then I had never read anything by Australia great Romantic; never even heard of his imagined life of Ovid. Well, now I have.

It's an impressive read. I've no idea if the text takes me inside the head of the exiled Roman poet. Who could know such a thing? But the short novel certainly did take me inside the head of some imaginary other. I believed I was with someone crossing the frozen land of a hostile Black Sea hinterland. I could picture the Shaman drifting into a trance. I felt the scorn and suspicion of hard-working woman who felt the arrival of the wild child posed some kind of threat.

That seems even more impressive to me (as a late reader) given that so much of the novel evokes the tensions of post-colonial Australia. In some senses only an Australian could have conceived and written the text. Good stuff. Well worth the read.

I let loose my worse nature in tonight's class (although I doubt that anyone noticed). I struck a pose; made an observation about sentence construction in the novel and asked a question that was too clever by half (about what constitutes good or bad writing ... as if I didn't already know what ideologically loaded terms those are). It would have been better for me and more interesting for everyone else if I'd used this brain of mine (size of a small planet in a far off galaxy) to real effect. There is no need or benefit to underplay one's interest, intellect or perception. Why bother Dougie? You'd still have much to learn by asking questions that you don't actually know the kind of answer a tutor is likely to give (which she did).
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