Geelong Art Gallery

The John Norman Mann Bequest

A bequest directed to contemporary art, with a particular focus on First Nations practices and works by non-Indigenous artists inspired by the natural world. Some real highlights across these rooms.

Below: Judy Watson - "standing stone, kangaroo grass, bush string" (2020) & Angelina Ngal - "Bush plum Dreaming" (2010)

Also (possibly from the general permanent collection, I'm not sure): Cricket Saleh - "This too shall pass" (2018):

"Yvonne Audette - Observation and Experience"

"Moving squares" (1959)

"Modern Lives - Prints by Australian Women Artists 1900s-1950s"

Ethleen Palmer - "Honeyeater" (1935)

Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai

This really is an unusual, and unusually good, novel. Everyone in it feels like a character in a book - Ludo and Sibylla most of all - but The Last Samurai as a whole feels somehow true, in a way that doesn't require the reader to fully agree with what it's saying about the potential for human learning and development in a society less bounded that ours (which I'm not sure I do), while bringing to life both the ideas and the characters who populate its story. 

The humour is welcome and often unexpected, the pathos likewise - and the way those two are sometimes combined. The fizzing formal shifts and interventions - capital letter toddler-speak interruptions, intermittent streams of consciousness, extended excursions into language pedagogy across multiple languages - feel apt and not overly determined. It's like DeWitt has written something that's more or less a conventional novel but just molded in ways that make it actually very unconventional, and very enjoyable and thought-provoking. Whether it will linger in a more profound way, emotionally or otherwise, I'm not sure - but reading it was a different experience and a fluent one, which itself is pretty rare.

On at the Counihan Gallery

Three installations each by Australia-based artists with Asian cultural heritages who identify as queer. 

From "Fairy Tales from the Celestial Garden" - Jayanto Tan

From "Put Your Head on my Shoulder" - Andrew Chan

Also: "Yellow Paint" - Mark du Poitiers

MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

This is great! It comes in a package that maybe lends itself to being dismissed - another guy wielding an electric guitar, indie folk rock styles, and a wry, nasally dry singing-songwriting voice. But all the songs are good, the electric guitar is good, there are surprises, and in moments it reaches something even better.

"David EOY 2024"

Mostly breezily indie-sounding pop and crunchy guitars, plus quirks. My favourites - "Rip Off" (Momma), "Cheapskate" (Dune Rats), "Oysters in my Pocket" (Royel Otis), "Like I Say (I runaway)" (Nilüfer Yanya), "May Ninth" (Khruangbin).

Rebecca Solnit - Recollections of My Non-Existence

I suppose by definition any memoir by Rebecca Solnit would be Solnit-esque. What that means in Recollections of My Non-Existence - which I of course enjoyed very much - is that we get the personal perspective combined with the philosophical and social concerns that animate all of the writing ... but somehow without a great deal of psychological interiority. Which is not exactly a criticism in this case but more a feature. I do think that much of the pleasure I got from this one was possible because I'm already in some deep with her writing and work.

Encanto

High quality, with a lot of that due to the songs - music and lyrics - which add depth.

Station Eleven

Impressive how much this series is infused with the same mood as the book, while genuinely adapting (not just transposing) it for the tv format with some significant departures from the source that have the effect of putting the two - book and show - in a conversation that results in a new whole. Station Eleven the book clearly tapped into something, and so too the show - something mythic.

Rebel Ridge

 Tight modern Western.