Fizzier and more imbued with energetic girl group touches than their previous album, but less distinctive than that other one and sounding more like a bunch of others going around presently (notably Metric, to whom I seem to compare other bands an awful lot). Still quite good though.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
The Beatles - Let It Be
It's been a slow, slow burn with me and the Beatles. Of course their music has always been there - it's always been everywhere - and over time I've noticed my feelings about their music shifting from vague liking-well-enough of what was basically music history tapestry to more active enjoyment, but for the most part I never really focused on them that much, nor got any further into their record discography than Sgt Pepper's and Rubber Soul (not even the red and blue albums). Anyhow - now I've listened to Let It Be as well, and as the years go on I like them more and more.
Monday, December 26, 2016
Hell or High Water
Contemporary West Texas western that's suprisingly low key - and boasts a surprising streak of humour - while actually having quite a lot of action and building a set of characters and relationships with enough zip to interest us in their fates (not to mention a health dose of social context). Jeff Bridges is in top form as the Texas ranger on the trail of the bank-robbing brothers. Good.
(w/ Julian)
(w/ Julian)
Sunday, December 25, 2016
La La Land
Just as charming as everyone says it is, Gosling, Stone, musical numbers and movie-set nostalgic backdrops and all.
Also, basically a perfect film for the Nova on Christmas day, early evening and still 30-whatever degrees outside.
(w/ Erandathie and Aruni)
Also, basically a perfect film for the Nova on Christmas day, early evening and still 30-whatever degrees outside.
(w/ Erandathie and Aruni)
The Fencer
The way the threads come together is involving: the initial threat to the main character's safety should he be discovered by the powers-that-be in Leningrad, the way that his connection grows to the children - many fatherless and generally lacking a sense of self-worth - who join his fencing club, the children's own improving skills, and the collision course that sets him on with his past. And there's also an effective indictment of the spirit-crushing nature of Stalinist ideology - it's set in the early 1950s, variously in occupied Estonia and Russia - in its denial of not only specific activities and forms of expression but more generally aspects of individuality. Plus there's a 'sporting underdogs take on much better resourced and arrogant champions' plot that develops towards the end. All in all, a pretty lovely film.
(w/ Sara - a callback to our own fencing days a few years back)
(w/ Sara - a callback to our own fencing days a few years back)
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife - Thieves
On the one hand, it's hard to escape the feeling that I've heard this kind of thing before. On the other, it's done well here (as their Basement Discs set suggested it would be), and in the end, it's the second of those that's far more important, with one song after another hitting the mark, the overall country flavour meshing easily with the tuneful rock touches, and proving just as effective on slower moments like the title track as more up tempo melodic bits like "Paradise" and (until its atmospherically slowed-down outro) "White Rose".
The Magnificent Seven
Merely okay. Just feels a bit by the numbers. (This is the 2016 remake.) Also made me feel old to realise that Ethan Hawke can now plausibly play the grizzled old-timer.
Friday, December 16, 2016
Wilco - Schmilco
Mostly analog, with not a huge amount in the way of electronics nor even electric guitar, and moving for most of its time with a low key kind of lope, this isn't a marquee Wilco album but it feels simply and unfussedly like one of theirs, and as if it's just what they felt like doing this time out.
Tift Merritt - Traveling Alone
Well this is good news - a Tift Merritt album came out a few years ago that I didn't know about. It ain't that memorable, but the nice bits are nice.
(Bramble Rose, Tambourine, Another Country, See You On The Moon)
(Bramble Rose, Tambourine, Another Country, See You On The Moon)
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Norah Jones - Day Breaks
Nicely done but I don't find this kind of gentle jazzy stuff super engaging, even though here it's of a high quality. There is, however, a Neil Young cover ("Don't Be Denied") near the middle which swings with emotion and is very good, and the moody title track that follows it is also memorable.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Bic Runga - Close Your Eyes
Maybe it'll reveal more layers over time, but so far Close Your Eyes strikes me as nice but inessential - not up to the same high standards of Belle and Birds, though part of that might be the way that my expectations have been raised by Runga's progression from record to record to date.
Of the 12 songs on the album, 10 are covers, including some that are very familiar to me; it's nice to discover, for example, that Runga's a fan of Neil Young ("Only Love Can Break Your Heart"), Love ("Andmoreagain"), Francoise Hardy ("Viens") and Nick Drake ("Things Behind The Sun" - this one sparks a bit). She covers a bit of stylistic ground in her renditions, including a bit surprisingly successfully with a tightly, urgently funky piece called "Tinsel Town in the Rain" (originally by the Blue Nile), and on a dream pop-hued "The Lonely Sea" (Beach Boys). But the best is maybe the simplest: a mid-tempo but otherwise quite faithfully throbbing, spaciously pretty take on Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face".
Of the 12 songs on the album, 10 are covers, including some that are very familiar to me; it's nice to discover, for example, that Runga's a fan of Neil Young ("Only Love Can Break Your Heart"), Love ("Andmoreagain"), Francoise Hardy ("Viens") and Nick Drake ("Things Behind The Sun" - this one sparks a bit). She covers a bit of stylistic ground in her renditions, including a bit surprisingly successfully with a tightly, urgently funky piece called "Tinsel Town in the Rain" (originally by the Blue Nile), and on a dream pop-hued "The Lonely Sea" (Beach Boys). But the best is maybe the simplest: a mid-tempo but otherwise quite faithfully throbbing, spaciously pretty take on Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face".
Monday, December 05, 2016
Mitski - Puberty 2
There are only maybe three particularly showy moments on Puberty 2: thrumming but deliberately unresolved opener "Happy" (stronger-the-second-time chorus, strutting saxophones and all), the starrily soft-loud anthemic crash of "Your Best American Girl" and soulful trip-hop throwback "Crack Baby". And those are three seriously good songs.
But what makes the album actually quite spectacular is what's going on all around them, on a set of discontents during which Mitski sometimes comes across like a more rock-minded Lisa Germano and with the same sense of off-kilter, bruised-sounding melody and musicality ("I Bet On Losing Dogs" being the best example), with each song - most somewhere in that sweet spot of less than three minutes - bringing something a bit different and working as a miniature epic of one kind or another in its own right.
But what makes the album actually quite spectacular is what's going on all around them, on a set of discontents during which Mitski sometimes comes across like a more rock-minded Lisa Germano and with the same sense of off-kilter, bruised-sounding melody and musicality ("I Bet On Losing Dogs" being the best example), with each song - most somewhere in that sweet spot of less than three minutes - bringing something a bit different and working as a miniature epic of one kind or another in its own right.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Rivka Galchen - Little Labors
Miniature pieces, sharp as tacks. And delicious (different form, but the quality is unsurprising given how good both Atmospheric Disturbances and American Innovations were).
Like this:
* * *
Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby
Diapers. Changing them. Bottles. Cleaning them. Wraps. Baths. Sleeplessness. Cheerios. All these things exist, but rise to consciousness about as often as the apartment's electricity does.
* * *
Or this:
* * *
More babies in art
When the baby was very small, still in what I have often heard termed the "fourth trimester," an out-of-town relative came to visit the baby, and to visit New York, and so one afternoon, the baby was put into the sling and was in this manner transported through a Magritte show at the Museum of Modern Art. The baby's sling consisted of two loops of black fabric, the one nestling into the other, and the baby was still so small that her feet didn't stick out, nothing showed of her save her bald head, and sometimes, a tiny hand gripping at the edge of the fabric. The paintings at the Magritte show included: men whose heads had been replaced by apples, a gathering of legs without bodies, an iris that was a clouded sky. Magritte-type images, naturally. Magritte's stated goal, the museum copy noted, was to make "everyday objects shriek aloud." In one exhibition room after another after another, a stranger would catch sight of the bald head, the small hand, floating amidst a vanishing cloak of sling and raincoat. One stranger after another said of the baby's inadvertent performance art, "That's my favorite piece in the show."
Like this:
* * *
Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby
Diapers. Changing them. Bottles. Cleaning them. Wraps. Baths. Sleeplessness. Cheerios. All these things exist, but rise to consciousness about as often as the apartment's electricity does.
* * *
Or this:
* * *
More babies in art
When the baby was very small, still in what I have often heard termed the "fourth trimester," an out-of-town relative came to visit the baby, and to visit New York, and so one afternoon, the baby was put into the sling and was in this manner transported through a Magritte show at the Museum of Modern Art. The baby's sling consisted of two loops of black fabric, the one nestling into the other, and the baby was still so small that her feet didn't stick out, nothing showed of her save her bald head, and sometimes, a tiny hand gripping at the edge of the fabric. The paintings at the Magritte show included: men whose heads had been replaced by apples, a gathering of legs without bodies, an iris that was a clouded sky. Magritte-type images, naturally. Magritte's stated goal, the museum copy noted, was to make "everyday objects shriek aloud." In one exhibition room after another after another, a stranger would catch sight of the bald head, the small hand, floating amidst a vanishing cloak of sling and raincoat. One stranger after another said of the baby's inadvertent performance art, "That's my favorite piece in the show."
Monday, November 28, 2016
Brian Evenson - A Collapse of Horses
Wiry collection of horror-tinged literary short stories that take uncertainty - in the existential, as well as the experiential, senses - as their guiding motif. Not sure how much they will prove to have gotten under my skin, but they do create a sense of unease as one reads them.
"John Olsen: The You Beaut Country" (NGVA)
He's good on the messy profusion of (Australian) landscape, though my favourites are the overhead paintings - including some dream-like watercolours - of lakes. His most recent work as well, from the last couple of years and made well into his 80s now, is clear eyed and vital.
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Nocturnal Animals
Exceedingly sleek (genuinely beautiful to look at, while invoking David Lynch in moments - especially Mulholland Drive), consistently tense (on multiple levels), and impressive in the way that the visceral impact of the physical violence in the 'novel' narrative works with the emotional harms wrought in the film's real world, and also in the way in which, depending on how you read the ending, it maybe offers meaningful and hard-won progress for one or even both of its main characters in its 'real' world. It doesn't hurt at all that Amy Adams is right in the middle of it (quite the one-two with Arrival, and honestly she was the main reason I watched this one) and Jake Gyllenhaal is just as good, maybe better - both are genuinely powerful.
Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead? (Steven Pinker / Matt Ridley / Alain de Botton / Malcolm Gladwell)
Transcript of a 2015 debate in Toronto, Pinker and Ridley for the 'yes' and de Botton and Gladwell for the 'no', plus pre-debate interviews with each of the four and post-debate commentary. A topic that I wonder about from time to time, usually figuring the probabilities lie more with 'yes' than 'no' (as did some 70 per cent of the audience, both before and after the debate).
Certainly a well qualified and interest quartet to conduct the discussion (I hadn't come across Ridley before but the other three are obviously well known to me).
Pinker and Ridley, though coming at it from different backgrounds, both press the point about the material progress that humankind has made on any number of dimensions - Pinker enumerates ten pretty fundamental ones: life itself (lifespan), health, prosperity, peace, safety, freedom, knowledge, human rights, gender equity and intelligence - and what they say is the likelihood that this will only continue.
De Botton, who I often find irritating, presses what I found the least compelling of the positions, arguing 'humanistically' for both a resistance to the impossible pursuit of perfection (not actually the point of this debate) and for an idea of the purpose of human life that is more about happiness and spiritual fulfilment than material progress; I felt that he was both missing the point and glossing glibly (and in an aggravatingly privileged way) over the real improvement in people's lives that has resulted from the many technological, medical and cultural (attitudinal) advances of the period since say the industrial revolution.
Gladwell is much more plausible in arguing that the greater complexity and interconnectedness of modern life has dramatically increased the risk of a catastrophic event (either of the kind enabled by those same advances such as climate change or nuclear event or facilitated by that connectedness such as global pandemic or mass internet failure, none of which are even probably particularly 'black swan' in nature, even if historically unprecedented).
It didn't change my mind, but a good and thought provoking read.
Certainly a well qualified and interest quartet to conduct the discussion (I hadn't come across Ridley before but the other three are obviously well known to me).
Pinker and Ridley, though coming at it from different backgrounds, both press the point about the material progress that humankind has made on any number of dimensions - Pinker enumerates ten pretty fundamental ones: life itself (lifespan), health, prosperity, peace, safety, freedom, knowledge, human rights, gender equity and intelligence - and what they say is the likelihood that this will only continue.
De Botton, who I often find irritating, presses what I found the least compelling of the positions, arguing 'humanistically' for both a resistance to the impossible pursuit of perfection (not actually the point of this debate) and for an idea of the purpose of human life that is more about happiness and spiritual fulfilment than material progress; I felt that he was both missing the point and glossing glibly (and in an aggravatingly privileged way) over the real improvement in people's lives that has resulted from the many technological, medical and cultural (attitudinal) advances of the period since say the industrial revolution.
Gladwell is much more plausible in arguing that the greater complexity and interconnectedness of modern life has dramatically increased the risk of a catastrophic event (either of the kind enabled by those same advances such as climate change or nuclear event or facilitated by that connectedness such as global pandemic or mass internet failure, none of which are even probably particularly 'black swan' in nature, even if historically unprecedented).
It didn't change my mind, but a good and thought provoking read.
Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife @ Basement Discs
I happened to walk into Basement Discs a few minutes before this in-store was starting, with a free afternoon ahead of me, so that was a piece of luck: an hour of good quality electric guitared modern country, the guitars at times weeping Julie Miller-style.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Regina Spektor - Remember Us To Life
Remember Us To Life is certainly nice, and it has a steadiness to it that bespeaks a well constructed set of songs, but it's lacking any particularly sharp edge or urgency - which means that its most straightforward piano ballads are also its best: "The Light", "Obsolete", "New Year".
(Begin to Hope; Soviet Kitsch & Far; What We Saw From The Cheap Seats)
(Begin to Hope; Soviet Kitsch & Far; What We Saw From The Cheap Seats)
Monday, November 21, 2016
Honeyblood - Honeyblood
Like everyone ever I tend to think that the time that was my formative period had the best music ever, which in my case means the 90s.
Be that as it may, Honeyblood is super-fun to listen to - I went and took a listen because they get compared to that constellation of acts knitted together by Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses, Belly, the Breeders) which of course is straight into the sweet spot for me, and the comparisons aren't that far off, the fuzzy-guitared melodicism delivered with a declamatory air that's kind of sweetly rockin'.
As was often the case then, and still turns out to be the case now, the ones I like most are often those with a bit of an upwards swerve to them that doesn't quite resolve - the run-home tempo change of "Joey", the steady chug and then bridging meander and climb (as if its ending gets discovered somewhere in the song's mid-section) of "No Spare Key".
Be that as it may, Honeyblood is super-fun to listen to - I went and took a listen because they get compared to that constellation of acts knitted together by Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses, Belly, the Breeders) which of course is straight into the sweet spot for me, and the comparisons aren't that far off, the fuzzy-guitared melodicism delivered with a declamatory air that's kind of sweetly rockin'.
As was often the case then, and still turns out to be the case now, the ones I like most are often those with a bit of an upwards swerve to them that doesn't quite resolve - the run-home tempo change of "Joey", the steady chug and then bridging meander and climb (as if its ending gets discovered somewhere in the song's mid-section) of "No Spare Key".
Heide: Georgia O'Keeffe (again) / "A Life in Art: Albert Tucker" / "Making History: Charles Blackman"
A repeat visit for the O'Keeffe, another chance to be immersed in the colour and the light. (previous)
Nolan, Tucker and Blackman also exhibited across the three buildings that make up Heide - a reminder of the sheer forcefulness of their individuals visions and executions of them. Gained something from Nolan and Tucker's association with the property and setting itself, too.
(w/ Andreas + Emma, Laura M and Andreas' friend Adam)
Nolan, Tucker and Blackman also exhibited across the three buildings that make up Heide - a reminder of the sheer forcefulness of their individuals visions and executions of them. Gained something from Nolan and Tucker's association with the property and setting itself, too.
(w/ Andreas + Emma, Laura M and Andreas' friend Adam)
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Arrival
Quietly, lingeringly mysterious, littered with stunning alien imagery that gains from its juxtaposition against the familiar-rendered-strange setting of our own world (the hovering craft over the fog-bathed Montana plain is positively Magrittean), wrapping in a thoughtful take on communication and the way that language shapes experience and then pushing that to the next dimension (so to speak), structured elliptically but designedly around an emotional core of loss, and sustaining several different types of narrative and other tension throughout its two hours, Arrival is wonderful in every sense.
Also - Amy Adams is, as usual, great. In a movie where she's trying to save the world, she's perfectly subtle; she has a knack of inhabiting the characters that she plays (as an actor, she's never distracting) yet leaving a strong impression each time out, perhaps in the way that she finds those little ways to bring out the characters themselves. I don't know if there's another actor going around today who I like more - her turns in The Master and American Hustle are most vivid for me, but extemporanea reveals that she's actually stood out enough in several others that I've seen, including before I really knew who she was (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Her); also, startlingly, it was her and Emily Blunt who were the leads in Sunshine Cleaning which, now that I know that, seems to deserve a rewatch.
Also also - there are some interesting thematic overlaps with Life After Life. Though in terms of films, the ones that it called to mind were Interstellar, Inception (and again, and again), Monsters and I Origins (a pretty good quartet, to say the least).
Also - Amy Adams is, as usual, great. In a movie where she's trying to save the world, she's perfectly subtle; she has a knack of inhabiting the characters that she plays (as an actor, she's never distracting) yet leaving a strong impression each time out, perhaps in the way that she finds those little ways to bring out the characters themselves. I don't know if there's another actor going around today who I like more - her turns in The Master and American Hustle are most vivid for me, but extemporanea reveals that she's actually stood out enough in several others that I've seen, including before I really knew who she was (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Her); also, startlingly, it was her and Emily Blunt who were the leads in Sunshine Cleaning which, now that I know that, seems to deserve a rewatch.
Also also - there are some interesting thematic overlaps with Life After Life. Though in terms of films, the ones that it called to mind were Interstellar, Inception (and again, and again), Monsters and I Origins (a pretty good quartet, to say the least).
BSG, November 2016
Seen at Brunswick Street Gallery today - Colin Staples. About a dozen altogether, large and alluring. Name of series: "Introspective".
Lydia Loveless - Real
Real has a lighter hue than its terrific predecessors Indestructible Machine and Somewhere Else - a much stronger hint of a pop edge than in those earlier records, a clean, bright chime to its guitars that (again and more clearly than ever before) recalls Kathleen Edwards - but there's still plenty of kick and twangy rock and roll to it, and the album contains many pleasures, saving the best for last in its emphatic title track closer.
"Gerard Byrne: A Late Evening in the Future" (ACCA)
The incompleteness of the experience is a deliberate part of it - pieces stopping and starting (and in themselves fragmented even when on) so that any consolidated view of the exhibition is impossible.
Kate Atkinson - Life After Life
Equally moving and equally marvellous in the cleverness of its construction - not just at the level of the repeating and interleaved time periods that it covers, but also in the neatness of how things bridge and foreshadow across them and the way that this carefully both reveals and conceals and serves the novel's purposes - on this second pass.
The jumping backwards and forwards, when it occurs, is used to support the unavoidable linearity of the reader's experience - the first time we reach 1947 and the desolation of survival in that cold flat, for example - and the building urgency of Ursula's growing awareness of the cycle that she is in, life after life, is modulated to perfection, from the dark intimations that increasingly creep over her at crucial moments (gaining an extra charge from the way that we all have such seemingly irrational presentiments of doom from time to time) to her sense, the first time she chooses death over life, that "something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed", to 'the end of the beginning' amidst the electrifying realisation, seemingly fully conscious for the first time.
(first time)
The jumping backwards and forwards, when it occurs, is used to support the unavoidable linearity of the reader's experience - the first time we reach 1947 and the desolation of survival in that cold flat, for example - and the building urgency of Ursula's growing awareness of the cycle that she is in, life after life, is modulated to perfection, from the dark intimations that increasingly creep over her at crucial moments (gaining an extra charge from the way that we all have such seemingly irrational presentiments of doom from time to time) to her sense, the first time she chooses death over life, that "something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed", to 'the end of the beginning' amidst the electrifying realisation, seemingly fully conscious for the first time.
'It's a terrible thing,' Pamela said to her. 'But you're not responsible, why are you behaving as though you are?'
Because she was. She knew it now.
Something was riven, broken, a lightning fork cutting open a swollen sky.And then the lyricism - what feels like a culmination, at the end of that section in which everything seems to race towards its end.
It's time, she thought. A clock struck somewhere in sympathy. She thought of Teddy and Miss Woolf, of Roland and little Angela, of Nancy and Sylvie. She thought of Dr Kellet and Pindar. Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.
She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.And you follow this progression, by now seemingly teleological, to what must be the best version of that practice towards perfection. Only, to learn in those final pages, it's not - and what is instead (or at least the version of it with which Atkinson, although perhaps not Ursula, chooses to end, is more poignant by far.
He shouted something to her across the pub but his words were lost in the hubbub. She thought it was 'Thank you,' but she might have been wrong.Other thoughts: Sylvie remains elusive, those sighting in London with another man in 1923 and her familiarity with the imperial hotel in Vienna ultimately unexplained despite the perspective into her inner life and agency that we're granted; Hugh's kindness is a kindness to the reader; it's a clearly feminist book in its rendition of the many violences that Ursula suffers at the hands of men and the ways that her choices lead down better paths; and there's empathy everywhere and not least in the sections in bombed-out Berlin.
(first time)
Tuesday, November 08, 2016
"Walker Evans: The Magazine Work curated by David Campany" / "The documentary take" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)
The Walker Evans is as the exhibition title says. The candid NYC subway shots at the entrance from the 1930s and 40s are, of course, intriguing (and it's quite lovely to read Evans' sincere effort to sum up his belief that a photograph can capture something unguarded in its subject akin to the undisguised self or indeed - although he acknowledges the imperfection of the term - the soul), while the "Color accidents" shots of painted doors and surrounds mostly from East 85th St, 1958 with their call-outs to Klee and others, and the iconically simple front-on shots of everyday steel tools were marvellous.
While "The documentary take" is a set of contemporary works collated to bring out the relationship between documentary photography and contemporary art, with some direct commentary on/from Evans' work. I must say that the only one that really interested me was Patrick Pound's "drive by (en passant)" (2009 ongoing), which is simply found photos of people in cars - movies, celebrities, private, going back decades and through to today.
While "The documentary take" is a set of contemporary works collated to bring out the relationship between documentary photography and contemporary art, with some direct commentary on/from Evans' work. I must say that the only one that really interested me was Patrick Pound's "drive by (en passant)" (2009 ongoing), which is simply found photos of people in cars - movies, celebrities, private, going back decades and through to today.
Sunday, October 30, 2016
"War and Peace" (Gob Squad - Malthouse)
So this was fun - an enjoyable riff on some weighty themes (history, moral responsibility, the nature of war and human society, &c) with a light touch and all the usual devices of contemporary fourth wall-breaking theatre in play, complete with live singing of Coldplay song ("Viva La Vida").
(w/ Erandathie - also not one but two other people from the branch happened to be there)
(w/ Erandathie - also not one but two other people from the branch happened to be there)
Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things
I don't think I've ever read a novel with such a sympathetic portrayal of Christian religious faith at its centre (admittedly, this might in part be due to my reading habits). And what makes The Book of Strange New Things really impressive is that it does that through the creation of a genuinely realistically flawed character, the missionary Peter - the same is true of Peter's wife, Bea, although for most of the time we meet her only through her written messages as transmitted across space and via Peter's thoughts and memories of her - and while exploring the associated big questions about the nature of humanity, love, and our relationships with other people and with ourselves in a story that makes you want to find out what happens next.
The oddly self-contained staff members at USIC's base and the initially affectless-seeming indigenous (alien) people of Oasis are equally mysterious - on the surface perfectly suited to their roles (uncomplaining worker, unquestioningly welcome convert), yet with that very nature creating doubt and a sense of possible threat. Can they really be as they seem? At the same time, Peter's distancing from himself - the sense of identity lost or maybe subsumed in his various settings - and from Bea, as well as from the increasingly apocalyptic news (which he registers with a convincing mutedness) from home, plays out like both an existential fact and a struggle for what might, perhaps, be his own humanity or even soul, in something close to the most understated way imaginable (at least, given the alien planet setting).
What is the voice that he hears when in moments of need? To what extent are the two sets of inhabitants on the planet metaphors for aspects of human nature, society or possibility? Should the ending be read as hopeful (I think so)?
The oddly self-contained staff members at USIC's base and the initially affectless-seeming indigenous (alien) people of Oasis are equally mysterious - on the surface perfectly suited to their roles (uncomplaining worker, unquestioningly welcome convert), yet with that very nature creating doubt and a sense of possible threat. Can they really be as they seem? At the same time, Peter's distancing from himself - the sense of identity lost or maybe subsumed in his various settings - and from Bea, as well as from the increasingly apocalyptic news (which he registers with a convincing mutedness) from home, plays out like both an existential fact and a struggle for what might, perhaps, be his own humanity or even soul, in something close to the most understated way imaginable (at least, given the alien planet setting).
What is the voice that he hears when in moments of need? To what extent are the two sets of inhabitants on the planet metaphors for aspects of human nature, society or possibility? Should the ending be read as hopeful (I think so)?
Ezra Furman - Perpetual Motion People
Jumps a bit all over the place and I hope it's not because I know that Furman identifies as queer that the word 'fey' comes to mind in describing this music. "Haunted Head" definitely the highlight.
カノエラナ - カノエ参上。 (KanoeRana - Kanoe Sanjou)
Energetic j-pop. Bought accidentally (misread tag in shop) but not hard on the ears. (web)
Thursday, October 27, 2016
"Still got to wake up and be someone" / "It's not gonna kill you": Angel Olsen - My Woman
Terrific stuff. Equally piercing and compelling on the shorter, rock-y pieces making up most of its first half and the soulful, moodier drifters on the back end during which I sometimes find myself holding my breath; in that second category is "Sister", on which I got stuck the other day while walking around with the album on:
(previously - Burn Your Fire for No Witnesses)
(previously - Burn Your Fire for No Witnesses)
Sunday, October 23, 2016
"O'Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism" (Heide Museum of Modern Art)
"It is surprising to see how many people separate the objective from the
abstract ... The abstraction is often the most definite form for the
intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint." -O'Keeffe
Three artists working at around the same time, with a common forward-looking orientation that includes a certain blurring of representation and abstraction that makes the 'modernism' label apt, and all interested in the possibilities of landscape and flowers as subjects - also, all women.
This was the first time that I'd come across Margaret Preston, and I quite liked her. And I hadn't before seen a whole group of Cossington Smith's paintings together, and was taken with her colours, especially the blue-greens.
But Georgia O'Keeffe was, of course, the main event. I think most if not all of the pieces came from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, and the selection leans a bit in the direction of her landscapes and more abstraction-tending paintings (there's only a couple of, relatively early, flowers). O'Keeffe is probably one of the artists whose work I spend most time looking at in books but, like the previous exhibition of hers that I've seen (Helsinki, a few years back), this one reminded me how much more her paintings glow when actually present.
The exhibition also brought home the number of different modes in which O'Keeffe worked, including the way that earthiness and light coexist in her hues.
And, most of all, it reminded me of how wonderful all of these paintings are, and how much one can get lost within them.
(w/ Laura and Rob)
Three artists working at around the same time, with a common forward-looking orientation that includes a certain blurring of representation and abstraction that makes the 'modernism' label apt, and all interested in the possibilities of landscape and flowers as subjects - also, all women.
Cossington Smith - "Landscape With Flowering Peach" (1932)
This was the first time that I'd come across Margaret Preston, and I quite liked her. And I hadn't before seen a whole group of Cossington Smith's paintings together, and was taken with her colours, especially the blue-greens.
Preston - "Implement Blue" (1927)
Cossington Smith - "Landscape at Pentecost" (1929)
But Georgia O'Keeffe was, of course, the main event. I think most if not all of the pieces came from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, and the selection leans a bit in the direction of her landscapes and more abstraction-tending paintings (there's only a couple of, relatively early, flowers). O'Keeffe is probably one of the artists whose work I spend most time looking at in books but, like the previous exhibition of hers that I've seen (Helsinki, a few years back), this one reminded me how much more her paintings glow when actually present.
The exhibition also brought home the number of different modes in which O'Keeffe worked, including the way that earthiness and light coexist in her hues.
And, most of all, it reminded me of how wonderful all of these paintings are, and how much one can get lost within them.
(w/ Laura and Rob)
Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase
A Wild Sheep Chase was the first Murakami that I read, and it's a big one for me; I think of Hard-boiled Wonderland as my favourite, but it's A Wild Sheep Chase that, over time, came most iconically to symbolise his novels and general style and effect in my mind.
Actually, it's a lot to live up to. But, ten years on, it stands up. That interplay between his attention to the phenomena of the ordinary - the details of colours and weather, the mundane textures of individual moments, hours, days - and the way that the extraordinary intrudes through the very spaces that mark one's sense of alienation from the real, it still has its effect. Breeziness and weight, disconnection and sorrow.
***
In part read last Saturday afternoon lying out in sunny Carlton Gardens, Beatles and then Coldplay.
***
Also, having only very recently read Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, his first two novels - and the other two in the so-called 'Rat trilogy' - before this one, I now have the chance to go through all of them in order - which I very well may.
Actually, it's a lot to live up to. But, ten years on, it stands up. That interplay between his attention to the phenomena of the ordinary - the details of colours and weather, the mundane textures of individual moments, hours, days - and the way that the extraordinary intrudes through the very spaces that mark one's sense of alienation from the real, it still has its effect. Breeziness and weight, disconnection and sorrow.
***
In part read last Saturday afternoon lying out in sunny Carlton Gardens, Beatles and then Coldplay.
***
Also, having only very recently read Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, his first two novels - and the other two in the so-called 'Rat trilogy' - before this one, I now have the chance to go through all of them in order - which I very well may.
Saturday, October 15, 2016
The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Chris Van Allsburg & others)
It makes you wonder just how early - and, indeed, how - taste is formed.
By good luck, I was exposed to Chris Van Allsburg at the ideal time - I must have been about nine or ten - and, while all of the ones I read (or possibly, had read to me by teachers?) caught my imagination, it was the especially dreamlike and unexplained The Mysteries of Harris Burdick that most captivated me. The black and white illustrations with their suggestive captions, not to mention the metafictional framing that added to the mystery about the images' provenance and nature, were irresistible.
As a book - well, as a text or object at all - it was one of a kind, and it stayed with me over the years that followed, as a personal classic and totem.
So it's both surprising and a touch marvellous that this collection of very short stories, one for each image and each by a different author (although the introduction by Lemony Snicket plays the same games as the original in suggesting there is misdirection at play), so aptly captures the spirit and, yes, the mystery that inheres in both image and original fragments of words; each succeeds in getting something of the picture's essence without reducing or constraining it.
There's the sense of wonder and magic (child-like but, evidently, enduring) as well as the foreboding and the sinister, sprinkled through the stories, as well as a strong emotional charge running through several; Cory Doctorow's "Another Place, Another Time" and Kate DiCamillo's "The Third-Floor Bedroom" stand out in that respect and are two of the highlights. Also particularly good, and more on the unnerving side, are Sherman Alexie's "A Strange Day in July" and M T Anderson's "Just Desert" (that last turned into an out and out nightmare of the existential - in the fullest sense - kind).
By good luck, I was exposed to Chris Van Allsburg at the ideal time - I must have been about nine or ten - and, while all of the ones I read (or possibly, had read to me by teachers?) caught my imagination, it was the especially dreamlike and unexplained The Mysteries of Harris Burdick that most captivated me. The black and white illustrations with their suggestive captions, not to mention the metafictional framing that added to the mystery about the images' provenance and nature, were irresistible.
As a book - well, as a text or object at all - it was one of a kind, and it stayed with me over the years that followed, as a personal classic and totem.
So it's both surprising and a touch marvellous that this collection of very short stories, one for each image and each by a different author (although the introduction by Lemony Snicket plays the same games as the original in suggesting there is misdirection at play), so aptly captures the spirit and, yes, the mystery that inheres in both image and original fragments of words; each succeeds in getting something of the picture's essence without reducing or constraining it.
There's the sense of wonder and magic (child-like but, evidently, enduring) as well as the foreboding and the sinister, sprinkled through the stories, as well as a strong emotional charge running through several; Cory Doctorow's "Another Place, Another Time" and Kate DiCamillo's "The Third-Floor Bedroom" stand out in that respect and are two of the highlights. Also particularly good, and more on the unnerving side, are Sherman Alexie's "A Strange Day in July" and M T Anderson's "Just Desert" (that last turned into an out and out nightmare of the existential - in the fullest sense - kind).
Friday, October 14, 2016
Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life edited by Graydon Carter and illustrated by Risko
There's a certain interest in seeing the themes that recur, and also the types of answers that people give, either to particular questions or to the question set as a whole. But the ones that most interest me tend to be the responses of people who I 'know', and which tend more towards the musicians than the socialite types (also well represented: general movie and entertainment business folk); Bowie's is delightful (available in full on brainpickings - which is what led me to the book), and likewise Tom Waits' (which is less hard-boiled than one might imagine, although still somewhat so). Surprisingly, Arnold Schwarzenegger's is one of the wittiest, for all that it leans heavily on self-deprecation and therefore has plenty of material to work with. Also featured, Donald Trump (2004) - not particularly egregious though he doesn't come across wonderfully either, unsurprisingly.
Most quintessential answer must be Johnny Cash's: If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? Dust on the wind.
But Bowie's is the last word: What is your motto? "What" is my motto.
Most quintessential answer must be Johnny Cash's: If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? Dust on the wind.
But Bowie's is the last word: What is your motto? "What" is my motto.
Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973
It was only a couple of months ago that I read (re-read?) Wind, but it left such a light trace on me that I found I wanted to read it again. There is something very disconnected about it, and all the spaces around which it's built, well they could be artful or artless and it wouldn't much matter.
* * *
The Rat could see that she was trying to establish a kind of perfection in her small world. He was well aware that required an extraordinary degree of determination. She wore only the most modest yet tasteful dresses over fresh, clean undergarments, applied an eau de cologne with the fragrance of a morning vineyard to her body, took great care in choosing her words, asked no pointless questions, and appeared to have practiced smiling in the mirror. Yet these things only added to the Rat's sadness. After a number of meetings he guessed her age to be twenty-seven. That turned out to be spot on.
* * *
Pinball, 1973 is similar. It has the same air of perpetually interrupted - deferred, perhaps - bildungsroman, in which there's no evident progression and the structuring motifs appear to be both circular and transient, and at the same time inescapable. The separation of the narrator and the Rat removes one of the particular charms of Hear the Wind Sing, but there are other encounters - some extended - to take its place. The attention to rain calls forward, as does much else.
* * *
I undressed and got under the cover with the Critique of Pure Reason and a pack of smokes. The blanket smelled of the sun and Kant was impressive as always, but the cigarette tasted like soggy newspaper on a gas burner. Shutting my book and closing my eyes, I was half tuned in to the twins' voices when the darkness dragged me down.
* * *
The Rat could see that she was trying to establish a kind of perfection in her small world. He was well aware that required an extraordinary degree of determination. She wore only the most modest yet tasteful dresses over fresh, clean undergarments, applied an eau de cologne with the fragrance of a morning vineyard to her body, took great care in choosing her words, asked no pointless questions, and appeared to have practiced smiling in the mirror. Yet these things only added to the Rat's sadness. After a number of meetings he guessed her age to be twenty-seven. That turned out to be spot on.
* * *
Pinball, 1973 is similar. It has the same air of perpetually interrupted - deferred, perhaps - bildungsroman, in which there's no evident progression and the structuring motifs appear to be both circular and transient, and at the same time inescapable. The separation of the narrator and the Rat removes one of the particular charms of Hear the Wind Sing, but there are other encounters - some extended - to take its place. The attention to rain calls forward, as does much else.
* * *
I undressed and got under the cover with the Critique of Pure Reason and a pack of smokes. The blanket smelled of the sun and Kant was impressive as always, but the cigarette tasted like soggy newspaper on a gas burner. Shutting my book and closing my eyes, I was half tuned in to the twins' voices when the darkness dragged me down.
Saturday, October 08, 2016
Zadie Smith - NW
Since reading White Teeth pretty soon after it came out - it was a gift, and of course I still have the copy, inscribed (inter alia) "this is the 'Book' that must be read. Will it live up to all its hype in your opinion?"), I've followed along with Zadie, at times quite closely and at others at more of a distance, but always feeling that kind of kinship that develops only with writers who seem to possess both a sensitivity and a sensibility that sits closely to one's own - heightened by the sense that her growing as a writer, visible through her writing, was in parallel to my own growth as a person (and reader).
And by now, I'm firm in believing that she is one of the finest voices going around today - remarkably sane, insightful and clear, and a beautiful user of words. In fact, I can't think of a writer who I like more than her when it comes to short-form critical non-fiction and analysis (e.g. - and I think she's continued to get even better since that collection). But it's her novels that I always think of as her main work, and oddly, there's never been one that I've unequivocally loved - White Teeth was a rush but very much a First Novel (albeit a very good one), The Autograph Man (which I have always, possibly excessively, been down on) and then On Beauty, which was very good and yet somehow didn't carry me away with it. Funny that.
And now NW, which came out several years ago but I've only just got round to it. And actually I think it's her best yet. It focuses on three main characters, or maybe four - Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (born Keisha) Blake, Felix Cooper and Nathan Bogle. It's structured so that you get first one perspective and story, then another (somewhat overlapping), with back and forth in time and events and so on - but it works well, particularly opening with Leah and only later giving us the fragmentedly episodic version of Natalie's life (she was my favourite character).
It's a mark of Smith's skill and artistry that I could see a lot of conscious choices being made about how she put together those related stories and brings them to a close, and particularly the endings, which neatly - and aptly - evade traditional resolution of the kind that might satisfy anyone looking for conventional story or character arcs, even of the 'quiet and internal revelation' types - without finding it at all distracting. (There are certainly crises for Felix and Natalie in particular, as well as the extended struggle of all four, but the roles they play in the narratives - both each individuals' and the book's as a whole - resist the usual narrative function.) And similarly, that her adoption of different voices from section to section - sometimes jumping from one to another in the space of a page - feels natural and in service to the novel's concerns (indeed, integral to them), rather than a barrier to them.
In some respects, that gets taken too far - the pages teem with characters, little stories, voices, and many of them never 'go anywhere' as such. Their contribution to NW is to form part of a patchwork rather than anything more direct. But 'direct' isn't what Smith aims for here, and I think if her intended content is the lives of people like these and how it is experienced (rather than to tell a story with any really recognisable beginning, middle and end), then the form and content are well matched.
Is this the one that I can at last point to as a great novel written by Zadie Smith? I don't think so, but I do still think that it will come. And in the meantime, despite its imperfections, it is still something very fine and the best she's done yet.
An aside - a large majority of the characters are 'brown' and that's very relevant to the setting and (family and other) relationships, and it was a good reminder for me of the assumptions that we make that, despite that, my starting assumption for nearly every new character was that they were white before being reminded by some telling detail in the text.
And by now, I'm firm in believing that she is one of the finest voices going around today - remarkably sane, insightful and clear, and a beautiful user of words. In fact, I can't think of a writer who I like more than her when it comes to short-form critical non-fiction and analysis (e.g. - and I think she's continued to get even better since that collection). But it's her novels that I always think of as her main work, and oddly, there's never been one that I've unequivocally loved - White Teeth was a rush but very much a First Novel (albeit a very good one), The Autograph Man (which I have always, possibly excessively, been down on) and then On Beauty, which was very good and yet somehow didn't carry me away with it. Funny that.
And now NW, which came out several years ago but I've only just got round to it. And actually I think it's her best yet. It focuses on three main characters, or maybe four - Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (born Keisha) Blake, Felix Cooper and Nathan Bogle. It's structured so that you get first one perspective and story, then another (somewhat overlapping), with back and forth in time and events and so on - but it works well, particularly opening with Leah and only later giving us the fragmentedly episodic version of Natalie's life (she was my favourite character).
It's a mark of Smith's skill and artistry that I could see a lot of conscious choices being made about how she put together those related stories and brings them to a close, and particularly the endings, which neatly - and aptly - evade traditional resolution of the kind that might satisfy anyone looking for conventional story or character arcs, even of the 'quiet and internal revelation' types - without finding it at all distracting. (There are certainly crises for Felix and Natalie in particular, as well as the extended struggle of all four, but the roles they play in the narratives - both each individuals' and the book's as a whole - resist the usual narrative function.) And similarly, that her adoption of different voices from section to section - sometimes jumping from one to another in the space of a page - feels natural and in service to the novel's concerns (indeed, integral to them), rather than a barrier to them.
In some respects, that gets taken too far - the pages teem with characters, little stories, voices, and many of them never 'go anywhere' as such. Their contribution to NW is to form part of a patchwork rather than anything more direct. But 'direct' isn't what Smith aims for here, and I think if her intended content is the lives of people like these and how it is experienced (rather than to tell a story with any really recognisable beginning, middle and end), then the form and content are well matched.
Is this the one that I can at last point to as a great novel written by Zadie Smith? I don't think so, but I do still think that it will come. And in the meantime, despite its imperfections, it is still something very fine and the best she's done yet.
An aside - a large majority of the characters are 'brown' and that's very relevant to the setting and (family and other) relationships, and it was a good reminder for me of the assumptions that we make that, despite that, my starting assumption for nearly every new character was that they were white before being reminded by some telling detail in the text.
Bundoora Homestead Art Centre
Impromptu visit - we saw this while driving past on an errand and when we popped in it was full of people; judging by the free alcohol, it seemed like there might have been an exhibition opening today or something similar.
It's a decent sized mansion (two storeys, 14 rooms), built in 1900, and the art (several smallish exhibitions) is arranged within it and in some cases in direct conversation with the building and its furnishings. Pretty good, and included a Siri Hayes photograph of Merri Creek ("Lyric Theatre at Merri Creek", 2003) - every time I see something of hers, I'm struck by it...she's very good.
Also liked Stephanie Hicks' collages, especially the quasi-symmetrical ones like "Some certain thing I" which reminded me a bit of Rorschach blots (I've always liked collages!), the Ben Taranto and Bertra Fraval pieces comprising "Expanded Gaze" and the "In production (ways to reside)" room installation.
(w/ Erandathie)
It's a decent sized mansion (two storeys, 14 rooms), built in 1900, and the art (several smallish exhibitions) is arranged within it and in some cases in direct conversation with the building and its furnishings. Pretty good, and included a Siri Hayes photograph of Merri Creek ("Lyric Theatre at Merri Creek", 2003) - every time I see something of hers, I'm struck by it...she's very good.
Also liked Stephanie Hicks' collages, especially the quasi-symmetrical ones like "Some certain thing I" which reminded me a bit of Rorschach blots (I've always liked collages!), the Ben Taranto and Bertra Fraval pieces comprising "Expanded Gaze" and the "In production (ways to reside)" room installation.
(w/ Erandathie)
Friday, October 07, 2016
Rei - Orb
Heard in Tower Records, Shibuya. Brightly energetic guitar-y music (the liner notes list the specific guitar she plays on each track) that skips across rock, pop, indie and even blues, and doesn't allow its (ample) quirks or the occasional cutesy touch to get in the way of the momentum created by the songs themselves. Sounds (a bit) like KT Tunstall, but peppier.
(web)
(web)
Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
Once I had my ear in for this, it was pretty good! But I don't think I've ever really liked anything psychedelic rock-y except the odd Pink Floyd and Flaming Lips album and even then almost despite the aural trappings. So maybe the gustiness and squalling and stomp is a bit lost on me.
"10th Anniversary Retrospective of Nam June Paik: 2020: Who is the one Grinning ?+?=??" @ Watari Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Paik is a bit too conceptual for me - although he has his moments...
Joe Abercrombie - The Heroes
A 'stand alone' but I think would've been richer with the benefit of the 'series' books that came before it. Still, given that it's almost entirely given over to one big battle and that Abercrombie is good at this (I haven't read anything of his before), no bad holiday read.
Sunday, October 02, 2016
Keigo Higashino - The Devotion of Suspect X
Apparently something of a phenomenon in Japan and has spawned a successful film as well as adaptations in other countries. I found it only quite interesting - maybe because puzzle-based detective stories have never that much excited me. It's neatly done though.
Attack the Block & Assault on Precinct 13
The one gets compared to the other so I watched them both. Both are pared back and tension-making; both good. I liked the aesthetic of Assault (1976), including John Carpenter's soundtrack and the urban western feel, and the main crim (Wilson) is played by an actor with leading-man chops. And I liked that Attack the Block is so much fun, rip-roaring action while also so much full of the social commentary without it getting in the way.
Manuel Gonzales - The Miniature Wife and other stories
Stories of the fantastic that seek the human essence in their conceits. Nearly all of them have an interesting idea at their base, but most don't get much beyond seeming like an exercise in working through that idea. Still, there's plenty of potential here - and I actually picked it up because I read some intriguing notices about Gonzales' more recent novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack!, which I'll now definitely get to when it's more readily to hand. The stories that had a bit extra for me (often because they had a bit more bite to them): the one about the video game character, the one told by the zombie, the one about deciding to escape the mall, the title story.
Friday, September 30, 2016
"Thomas Ruff" @ National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT)
I was quite taken with Thomas Ruff's work, helped, I think, by their monumentality - many are somewhere in the vicinity of 1 to 2 metres along either or both dimensions.
The earlyish-career portraits - an example of the 'typology' approach that he uses at times - are a highlight, the size of the seemingly objectively shot passport-style photos of people's faces imbuing them with real interest.
Also noteworthy were his portraits of a different kind - shots of Mies van der Rohe buildings, which capture some essential simplicity. A few digitally manipulated photograms with glassy, eye-catching effect. And three different series created by (again) manipulating existing sources taking space as their subjects ("Stars", "cassini" and "ma.r.s").
Non-Ruff pieces from elsewhere in the museum that grabbed me included Tai Kambara's "Notes of a Pessimist" paintings (1923), the surrealist "Landscape with an Eye" (Ai-Mitsu, 1938), Tatsuoki Nambata's "Generation" (1959), two earlyish ones by Yayoi Kusama (this trip has brought home to me that despite the ease with which she can be identified and pigeonholed, Kusama's work has genuine charge) and three on the theme of moonlight: Shinsen Tokuoka's "Moonlight" (1950), Komei Kondo's "Moon Flower" (1964") and Tatsuo Takayama's "Heaven" (1964).
The earlyish-career portraits - an example of the 'typology' approach that he uses at times - are a highlight, the size of the seemingly objectively shot passport-style photos of people's faces imbuing them with real interest.
Also noteworthy were his portraits of a different kind - shots of Mies van der Rohe buildings, which capture some essential simplicity. A few digitally manipulated photograms with glassy, eye-catching effect. And three different series created by (again) manipulating existing sources taking space as their subjects ("Stars", "cassini" and "ma.r.s").
Non-Ruff pieces from elsewhere in the museum that grabbed me included Tai Kambara's "Notes of a Pessimist" paintings (1923), the surrealist "Landscape with an Eye" (Ai-Mitsu, 1938), Tatsuoki Nambata's "Generation" (1959), two earlyish ones by Yayoi Kusama (this trip has brought home to me that despite the ease with which she can be identified and pigeonholed, Kusama's work has genuine charge) and three on the theme of moonlight: Shinsen Tokuoka's "Moonlight" (1950), Komei Kondo's "Moon Flower" (1964") and Tatsuo Takayama's "Heaven" (1964).
China Mieville - This Census-Taker
In
Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.
What an elegantly gap-filled, worryingly incomplete and unsettling novella this is. I can't help find its absences and silences frustrating, beholden as I am to the usual desires for narrative and resolution, but that only adds to the power of This Census-Taker - like a missing or painful tooth, you can't help constantly probing at it, to still be met by the same lack each time.
The Hope Is So:
Count Entire Nation, Subsume Under Sets. -
Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize
Interests. So
Reach Our Government's Ultimate Ends.
Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.
What an elegantly gap-filled, worryingly incomplete and unsettling novella this is. I can't help find its absences and silences frustrating, beholden as I am to the usual desires for narrative and resolution, but that only adds to the power of This Census-Taker - like a missing or painful tooth, you can't help constantly probing at it, to still be met by the same lack each time.
The Hope Is So:
Count Entire Nation, Subsume Under Sets. -
Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize
Interests. So
Reach Our Government's Ultimate Ends.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
The East
It's hard to know how good an actor Brit Marling is - indeed, whether she's even good at all. In both this one and the other that I've seen her in, the excellent I Origins, she has an opacity to her - a mysterious kind of internal stillness - and I can't tell whether that's a function of the characters she played (it would make sense for the undercover operative infiltrating a radical eco-activist collective that she plays in The East) or rather something that she carries with her into all of her performances. Anyway, it makes her an oddly compelling figure at the centre of this one - compelling in its very lack of expressiveness - and helps to keep the film interesting, together with the inherent tensions relating to whether/when she will be outed and whether each of the titular East's actions against mega-corporations will come off. Also good: Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page (of course), Patricia Clarkson.
Garbage - Strange Little Birds
Surprisingly good given this late stage in Garbage's career; I remember way back when Version 2.0 came out (that would have been 1998), I already felt like it was overproduced and lacking that jagged dark-lightness that made Garbage so defining. Despite song names like "Night Drive Loneliness" and "Even Though Our Love Is Doomed" - and lyrics to match - it's textured enough while retaining that fuzzily sweet angst that made them such a treat (and one of my favourite bands) in their pomp.
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
"Hiroshi Sugimoto - Lost Human Genetic Archive" @ Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Another reminder of how great and enriching contemporary art can be. There's something of the wunderkammer to Sugimoto's design for the main work here, the "Lost Human Genetic Archive" itself - a succession of dimly-lit rooms divided by standing corrugated iron partitions, in which the artist imagines a series of scenarios in which the world could end, and gives voice to them through a singular last survivor and an installed jumble of objects and art pieces, sometimes only one or two, for others with far more, mixing types and periods. There are times when it is a bit rough edged, the ideology a bit too self-evident and simplistic, undergraduate even - but the forcefulness of the whole prevails nonetheless. An example, to illustrate:
* * *
26 The fetishist
Today the world died. Or maybe yesterday. Back in the Neolithic Age, people found magical things to worship in the natural world. Eventually we came to fashion sacred objects with our own hands. This stone rod is an idol, a phallic symbol thought to have figured in fertility rites. Even later advancements in civilisation did not change humans so very much. In modern society, we still worshipped latter-day idols and brand-name luxury goods. We discriminated against people by the cars they drove and the clothes they wore. Though, of course, fake items were rife. But as copying techniques became ultrarefined, the fakes surpassed even the originals. Fetishism lost its magic; people lost their objects of faith. When the market for brand-name goods collapsed, the global economy contracted, swallowed down into a Great Depression. The ancient gods who banned idolatry were right: A world that believes in nothing is a dead world.
Stone Rod
Jomon period (10000-400 BC)
117 cm
Hospital Gurney
1950s
56 x 214 x 39cm
YSL Pattern Fabric
* * *
Also: "Abandoned Theatre", a series of photos of just that, each lit at its centre by a shining white screen which is the result of the exposure of the film for the entire duration of a particular film. And "Sea of Buddha", which are striking large-format images of the statues in Kyoto's Rengeo-in Temple, together with a small glass pagoda constructed by Sugimoto himself.
* * *
26 The fetishist
Today the world died. Or maybe yesterday. Back in the Neolithic Age, people found magical things to worship in the natural world. Eventually we came to fashion sacred objects with our own hands. This stone rod is an idol, a phallic symbol thought to have figured in fertility rites. Even later advancements in civilisation did not change humans so very much. In modern society, we still worshipped latter-day idols and brand-name luxury goods. We discriminated against people by the cars they drove and the clothes they wore. Though, of course, fake items were rife. But as copying techniques became ultrarefined, the fakes surpassed even the originals. Fetishism lost its magic; people lost their objects of faith. When the market for brand-name goods collapsed, the global economy contracted, swallowed down into a Great Depression. The ancient gods who banned idolatry were right: A world that believes in nothing is a dead world.
Stone Rod
Jomon period (10000-400 BC)
117 cm
Hospital Gurney
1950s
56 x 214 x 39cm
YSL Pattern Fabric
* * *
Also: "Abandoned Theatre", a series of photos of just that, each lit at its centre by a shining white screen which is the result of the exposure of the film for the entire duration of a particular film. And "Sea of Buddha", which are striking large-format images of the statues in Kyoto's Rengeo-in Temple, together with a small glass pagoda constructed by Sugimoto himself.
Justin Cronin - City of Mirrors
A good ending. Neither The Twelve nor this one has captured the unnerving electricity of Cronin's first cast, The Passage (part of which was that I had no idea where it was really going at any stage), but they pretty much sustain the story and it never feels like he's cheating. The integrity of the vampires, the human antagonists, and those somewhere in between - that is, the logic of the world set up here - holds throughout, and so does the interest in what will happen next.
"Kishin Shinoyama - La Maison de rendez-vous" / Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
More nudes! These were interesting, and left me wrestling with a few different responses - which I think is a good sign.
On the one hand, the female models are very conventionally very attractive - uniformly slim, pale skinned, large breasted, big eyed etc - and definitely sexualised (in nearly all of the photos, they're completely naked apart from being in stilettos - and make up, if that counts). There are ten of them and they're the vast majority of the show - there's only one male subject, who appears only in I think seven or eight photos in a discrete room. Which is a bit 'hmm'-inducing.
On the other hand, the concept of the show is that they're all photographed in and around the gallery itself (in some cases slightly furnished), and that works extremely well, with Shinoyama taking full advantage of the interesting spaces within and outside the building (a 1930s western modernist style building) and its permanent installations.
So in the end I liked it more than I found it 'problematic' - I liked its spirit.
The gallery itself is also an attraction, including in the way that it and this particular exhibition are integrated. Sculptures arranged in the gardens outside, and a handful of pieces integrated into various nooks of the three-floor building, including one by Yoshihiro Suda, who I only came across for the first time just last week, "This water unfit for drinking" (2001) - two of his wooden flowers 'growing' in an alcove of exposed pipes, peeled-away tiling and general disrepair.
Very good.
On the one hand, the female models are very conventionally very attractive - uniformly slim, pale skinned, large breasted, big eyed etc - and definitely sexualised (in nearly all of the photos, they're completely naked apart from being in stilettos - and make up, if that counts). There are ten of them and they're the vast majority of the show - there's only one male subject, who appears only in I think seven or eight photos in a discrete room. Which is a bit 'hmm'-inducing.
On the other hand, the concept of the show is that they're all photographed in and around the gallery itself (in some cases slightly furnished), and that works extremely well, with Shinoyama taking full advantage of the interesting spaces within and outside the building (a 1930s western modernist style building) and its permanent installations.
So in the end I liked it more than I found it 'problematic' - I liked its spirit.
The gallery itself is also an attraction, including in the way that it and this particular exhibition are integrated. Sculptures arranged in the gardens outside, and a handful of pieces integrated into various nooks of the three-floor building, including one by Yoshihiro Suda, who I only came across for the first time just last week, "This water unfit for drinking" (2001) - two of his wooden flowers 'growing' in an alcove of exposed pipes, peeled-away tiling and general disrepair.
Very good.
"The Universe and Art: Princess Kaguya, Leonardo da Vinci, teamLab" @ Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
This reminded me of how nourishing contemporary art can be.
The exhibition is organised into four sections: "How Have Humans through the Ages Viewed the Universe?" (including mandalas a-plenty, books and instruments of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and other art including Laurent Grasso's intriguing "Studies into the Past"), "The Universe as Space-Time", "A New View of Life - Do Aliens Exist?" and "Space Travel and the Future of Humanity", and the "Space-Time" section, given over to contemporary work, was really something - I wonder if the subject (what we used to call 'outer space') works particularly well with the conceptual apparatus of contemporary art?
Anyhow, there is Andreas Gursky's "Kamiokande" (2007), which I've seen before and I don't think impressed me that much then but certainly did this time round (underground neutrino observatory - as it happens, in Japan), Bjorn Dahlem's "Black Hole (M-Spheres)" (2016), a sculptural reinterpretation of the Milky Way, Trevor Paglen's breathtaking photos, especially "They Watch the Moon" (2010) and "Keyhole 12-3 (Improved Crystal): Optical Reconnaisance Satellite near Scorpio (USA 129)" (2007), Jia Aili's "Hermit from the Planet Dust" (2015-16) which invokes a whole lot of art movements but none so much as simply 'sci fi', and best of all, Conrad Shawcross's "Timepiece" (2013), which was utterly hypnotic and achieved its aim of referencing "a sublime form of astronomical time, as experienced in sundials and interactions with the Sun" - a suspended set of metal arms, three bulbs, one in constant rotation (orbit) and a single metal spike on the ground, shadows thrown through the movement.
And then at the very end, in the "Space Travel" closer, a participatory video and music installation by a collective called teamLab - "Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as Well, Blossoming on Collision - Light in Space". A dark room in which the neon images of crows, flowers and other visuals stream across the four walls and the floor of the room to music, taking their central point from the centre of where the viewers of the work are gathered in the room itself. Also sublime and immersive as the lights swooped round and about and up and down were all swirled together.
It also occurs to me that maybe I was primed a bit by having gone to the 52nd floor city view observatory (which had created a very meditative mood as the night lights of Tokyo glittered below in panorama in the darkened quiet of the circular passage beside the windows) and then the open air sky deck above it immediately before seeing the exhibition.
The exhibition is organised into four sections: "How Have Humans through the Ages Viewed the Universe?" (including mandalas a-plenty, books and instruments of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and other art including Laurent Grasso's intriguing "Studies into the Past"), "The Universe as Space-Time", "A New View of Life - Do Aliens Exist?" and "Space Travel and the Future of Humanity", and the "Space-Time" section, given over to contemporary work, was really something - I wonder if the subject (what we used to call 'outer space') works particularly well with the conceptual apparatus of contemporary art?
Anyhow, there is Andreas Gursky's "Kamiokande" (2007), which I've seen before and I don't think impressed me that much then but certainly did this time round (underground neutrino observatory - as it happens, in Japan), Bjorn Dahlem's "Black Hole (M-Spheres)" (2016), a sculptural reinterpretation of the Milky Way, Trevor Paglen's breathtaking photos, especially "They Watch the Moon" (2010) and "Keyhole 12-3 (Improved Crystal): Optical Reconnaisance Satellite near Scorpio (USA 129)" (2007), Jia Aili's "Hermit from the Planet Dust" (2015-16) which invokes a whole lot of art movements but none so much as simply 'sci fi', and best of all, Conrad Shawcross's "Timepiece" (2013), which was utterly hypnotic and achieved its aim of referencing "a sublime form of astronomical time, as experienced in sundials and interactions with the Sun" - a suspended set of metal arms, three bulbs, one in constant rotation (orbit) and a single metal spike on the ground, shadows thrown through the movement.
And then at the very end, in the "Space Travel" closer, a participatory video and music installation by a collective called teamLab - "Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as Well, Blossoming on Collision - Light in Space". A dark room in which the neon images of crows, flowers and other visuals stream across the four walls and the floor of the room to music, taking their central point from the centre of where the viewers of the work are gathered in the room itself. Also sublime and immersive as the lights swooped round and about and up and down were all swirled together.
It also occurs to me that maybe I was primed a bit by having gone to the 52nd floor city view observatory (which had created a very meditative mood as the night lights of Tokyo glittered below in panorama in the darkened quiet of the circular passage beside the windows) and then the open air sky deck above it immediately before seeing the exhibition.
"Dali" @ National Art Centre, Tokyo
A substantial retrospective covering his entire career, drawing from the collections of the Reina Sofia, the Fundacio Gala Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres (Dali's birthplace) and the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, USA.
Very early works (1918-21) then a period of hopping through a series of modern art styles starting with cubism throughout the twenties, during which - interestingly - it's the ones which take the human body as their subject which most clearly prefigure his later style ("Nude" 1924, "Nude in the Water" 1924, "Girl with Curls" 1926).
Then his most familiar surrealist period of the 30s, which is well represented but not overly so, and I felt the force of these a bit anew - those yellows and blues gleaming vividly through his dreamscapes: "Invisible Sleeper, Horse, and Lion" (1930), "The Shades of Night Descending" (1931), "The Invisible Man" (1932), "Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape" (1934), the glowingly limpid "Surrealist Composition with Invisible Figures" (1936), and the out and out nightmare of "Palladio's Corridor of Thalia" (1938) which is an early appearance of the girl with the skipping rope who is his motif in those wonderful illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (also on display here, along with a lot of other drawings).
Paintings, drawings, etc through the remaining decades of his life, including some unexpected, wonderful jewellery in gold with inlaid gems.
An aside: it is unfathomable that it was seven years ago that the NGV had its major Dali exhibition. It seems so recent!
Very early works (1918-21) then a period of hopping through a series of modern art styles starting with cubism throughout the twenties, during which - interestingly - it's the ones which take the human body as their subject which most clearly prefigure his later style ("Nude" 1924, "Nude in the Water" 1924, "Girl with Curls" 1926).
Then his most familiar surrealist period of the 30s, which is well represented but not overly so, and I felt the force of these a bit anew - those yellows and blues gleaming vividly through his dreamscapes: "Invisible Sleeper, Horse, and Lion" (1930), "The Shades of Night Descending" (1931), "The Invisible Man" (1932), "Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape" (1934), the glowingly limpid "Surrealist Composition with Invisible Figures" (1936), and the out and out nightmare of "Palladio's Corridor of Thalia" (1938) which is an early appearance of the girl with the skipping rope who is his motif in those wonderful illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (also on display here, along with a lot of other drawings).
Paintings, drawings, etc through the remaining decades of his life, including some unexpected, wonderful jewellery in gold with inlaid gems.
An aside: it is unfathomable that it was seven years ago that the NGV had its major Dali exhibition. It seems so recent!
Monday, September 26, 2016
Garth Risk Hallberg - City on Fire
Its ambition is clear, not least in its sheer length - I read it on kindle but it's close to 1000 pages in physical form - but also in the number of characters, their intersecting stories, and the back and forth through time within the umbrella goal of evoking NYC in the late 70s. For me, it was ... fine. Well written, well put together, enough of a through-narrative (organised around the mystery of Sam's shooting and with the city's July 1977 blackout as its climax) to hold the interest, characters who weren't jarring (but who never quite lived and breathed either) and some decent imagery and themery. But nothing revelatory either - even in the lower-bar sense of that word.
"Ren Hang: Tokyo" @ matchbaco, Tokyo
Photos of (unglamorous, or not conventionally so anyway) naked people arranged in various external Tokyo locations - friends of the (Chinese) photographer. A handful of them had the glimmer of something.
"Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou: Timeline 1906-1977" & "Dialogue with Trees" @ Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
The "Pompidou" exhibition is one piece from each year from 1906 (selected as the year that the Fauves burst into public view - I guess the first major movement in modern art of the 20th century) to 1977 (the year that the Pompidou itself was established). It was super crowded so I engaged with the exhibition mostly on the level of paying attention to the curatorial decisions that have been made to select these representative-but-not pieces (one of the exhibition notes makes the point that the chronological ordering evades the temptation to tell a story through 'isms') while trying to be open to any individual pieces that might jump out at me.
The ones that I took particular note of: Frantisek Kupka - "Vertical Planes I" (1912); Alberto Magnelli - "Lyrical Explosion No 8" (1918); Robert Delaunay - "The Eiffel Tower" (1926 - these are striking whenever one comes across them in their boldness); Seraphine Louis - "Tree of Paradise" (1929); Pierre Bonnard - "Nude by the Bath Tub" (1931 ... and Bonnard has made me pay attention a few times now I think); Otto Freundlich - "My Sky is Red" (1933); Pablo Gargallo - "The Prophet" (1933-36); Kandinsky - "Thirty" (1937 - an exercise almost in monochrome, black on very pale blue: "The 'content' of painting is painting"); Edith Piaf's "La vie en rose" in lieu of a work from 1945 given the significance of the year in the world's history (a song which has picked up some proper emotional associations for me in the past few years); Henry Valensi - "Symphony in Pink" (1946 - musical painting); Matisse - "Large Red Interior" (1948); Nicolas de Stael - "Composition" (1949); Giacometti - "Woman of Venice V" (1956 - pulled me up and made me reflect again on the poignancy of his figures); Simon Hantai - "Memory of the Future" (1957); Victor Vasarely - "Arny (Shadow)" (1967-68). As the length of that list probably makes clear, it was a very good exhibition despite the crowds.
And the "Dialogue" one collects work from five contemporary Japanese artists all of whom work in wood. Best were Yoshimasa Tsuchiya's warmly glowing animals (the mythical and larger scale ones especially memorable) with their crystal eyes and Yoshihiro Suda's extremely realistic plant sculptures, installed in unlikely spots around the gallery space so as to appear to be growing from walls, spaces and so on.
The ones that I took particular note of: Frantisek Kupka - "Vertical Planes I" (1912); Alberto Magnelli - "Lyrical Explosion No 8" (1918); Robert Delaunay - "The Eiffel Tower" (1926 - these are striking whenever one comes across them in their boldness); Seraphine Louis - "Tree of Paradise" (1929); Pierre Bonnard - "Nude by the Bath Tub" (1931 ... and Bonnard has made me pay attention a few times now I think); Otto Freundlich - "My Sky is Red" (1933); Pablo Gargallo - "The Prophet" (1933-36); Kandinsky - "Thirty" (1937 - an exercise almost in monochrome, black on very pale blue: "The 'content' of painting is painting"); Edith Piaf's "La vie en rose" in lieu of a work from 1945 given the significance of the year in the world's history (a song which has picked up some proper emotional associations for me in the past few years); Henry Valensi - "Symphony in Pink" (1946 - musical painting); Matisse - "Large Red Interior" (1948); Nicolas de Stael - "Composition" (1949); Giacometti - "Woman of Venice V" (1956 - pulled me up and made me reflect again on the poignancy of his figures); Simon Hantai - "Memory of the Future" (1957); Victor Vasarely - "Arny (Shadow)" (1967-68). As the length of that list probably makes clear, it was a very good exhibition despite the crowds.
And the "Dialogue" one collects work from five contemporary Japanese artists all of whom work in wood. Best were Yoshimasa Tsuchiya's warmly glowing animals (the mythical and larger scale ones especially memorable) with their crystal eyes and Yoshihiro Suda's extremely realistic plant sculptures, installed in unlikely spots around the gallery space so as to appear to be growing from walls, spaces and so on.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Suicide Squad
I guess low expectations are the key with these superhero movies because I enjoyed this one, even though I could feel a part of my mind keeping track of all the ways in which it was sub-par. Pity it wasn't better though - I remember seeing that "Bohemian Rhapsody"-tracked trailer and thinking it might be something amazing ... but instead it comes across as a merely functional and rather bland version of its attempt at a 'worst of the worst' type subversion of the genre. Margot Robbie is memorable though, for reasons both good and bad.
"Anish Kapoor" @ SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo
A small exhibition in this private gallery that evidently represents Kapoor here, all exploring his notion of the void.
Jurassic World
Chris Pratt is pretty good at these roles. Those dinosaurs aren't bad either. But Jurassic World is neither fun enough nor exciting enough to really get past the ridiculousness.
Crimson Peak
Hugely melodramatic. Is that it? Crimson Peak looks the part, but doesn't have the emotional and allusive layers that del Toro normally provides. Something of a disappointment.
Lucy
Scarlett Johansson as a Luc Besson action heroine - of course it's watchable, even though it's also very slight. Her depthlessness, as usual, enhances her performance. Also, I thought the Korean bad guy had something of the air of a world-weary Gary Oldman (not least in Besson's magnificent Leon).
Peadar O'Guilin - The Call
YA dystopia with a twist! The premise is neat and the interspersed chapters from the perspectives of the children as they are 'called' from this magically walled-off alternate Ireland to be hunted by the sidhe in their own land work, as does the polio-impaired main character Nessa and what this means for her chances of survival. A proper page turner.
Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora
Renaissance-ish Venice inspired fantasy. Quite fun and a bit of dirt under its fingernails too.
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Seto Inland Sea art islands: Naoshima and Teshima
This was, along with 'go to Tokyo at some point', literally the first thing that I knew I was going to do in Japan this trip. The idea of a collection of islands more or less dedicated to art - and specifically contemporary art - was irresistible, and especially in such a scenic setting.
Naoshima
A very good experience. A mix of modern and contemporary art arranged around the island and collected in a few museums and buildings. Significantly, and much to the benefit of the whole, the major museums all share an architect in Tadao Ando, whose sensitive approach to working with landscape and light to integrate his buildings into existing space while working with the art that they contain (from Wikipedia: "Ando's architectural style is said to create a "haiku" effect, emphasizing nothingness and empty space to represent the beauty of simplicity. He favors designing complex (yet beautifully simple) spatial circulation while maintaining the appearance of simplicity.") is integral in particular to the Chichu Art Museum. Also nice was the way that other people were hopping between the same places in various orders, many taking advantage of hired bicycles to cover the hilly terrain, and recurring at the different attractions over the day.
I started at the Benesse House Museum because it was the earliest opening, having set my alarm to get the early ferry across. It's a wonderful setting and great building, and the art was pretty good - there's no obvious unifying theme but the 40 or so pieces arranged across the three floors hit a fair number of high points. The always intriguing Gerhard Richter is represented through a hauntingly blurred portrait of his daughter Betty (1991), there is a neat Cy Twombly ("Untitled I", 1968), and I was introduced to a few other artists through colourful, punchy pieces (Jennifer Bartlett, "Fish and Bread" 1989; Yukinori Yanagi, "The EC Flag Ant Farm #1" 1992-93, Sam Francis, "Blue" 1952-53). Also, neat: Jonathan Borofsky's "Three Chattering Men" (1986) which is just that - three sculptures with hinged motor-driven jaws muttering "chatter" over and over, broken occasionally by a sung-chanted hum.
In something of a circuit over a few kilometres, various outdoor sculptures and installations including Yayoi Kusama's two pumpkins (the yellow one was surprisingly stately and had real presence on its pier location), a bunch by Niki de Saint Phalle whose energy I liked (I first came across her only a couple of weeks ago in Martigny, also enjoyed the one at the Hakone Open Air Museum, and now these ones in Naoshima too) and a moving Walter de Maria piece installed in a chamber beneath a small rise - two dark granite reflective spheres, and on either side a gold leaf-covered standing wooden pillar ("Seen/Unseen Known/Unknown", 2000).
Then the Chichu Art Museum, which was amazing - the cultural highlight of my last twelve months at least and probably a fair bit longer. And, on its own terms, maybe the best modern/contemporary art museum I've ever visited despite its very small (but utterly perfectly chosen) selection. Everything worked towards that effect, from the entrance and the building spaces and gardens to how the individual artworks are showed in spaces purpose-designed for them, and all speaking to each other (it's all underground, no less - something of an Ando hallmark I think).
Lee Ufan Museum also made for a deep dialogue between the artworks and the space in which they were housed. I don't think these bare, zen-like sculpture/installation pieces of steel, concrete and stone (plus some paintings) would have worked half as well in an environment less simpatico. As it was, though, they resonated.
Brief visit to the Ando Museum, also designed (on request) by Ando himself - a conversion of a traditional house with a light and space-filled modern concrete interior which elaborated on his architectural practice and, given that he was responsible for all the key recent landmarks in Naoshima, by that fact also on the reimagining of the island in those terms.
And navigated to each of the 'art houses' in the Honmura area - six old houses located throughout a residential area each of which have been converted to showcase a contemporary installation. They included another Turrell, "Minamidera", where you're led into a pitch dark room and sit for several minutes while your eyes adjust before dim lights gradually emerge.
Teshima
Most of the smaller installations were closed on the day that I went so in substance this was just two main pieces, but they were worth the trip.
One was Christian Boltanski's "Les Archives du Coeur", one of a number of sites for this piece (including our very own MONA), in which you enter a dark room where one of the many thousand previously recorded and registered heartbeats of a participant is played, loudly and resonantly, as a suspended light bulb flickers in time and provides the only illumination. I took the option to record/register my own, which meant that I got to then hear it in the room immediately after. It felt quite profound.
And the other was the Teshima Art Museum which only houses one piece but it's a doozy: Rei Naito's "Matrix" (2010). Built into a hill, and exposed to the open air by two large circular spaces in the 'ceiling', it's essentially a large concrete cavern from the floors of which small streams of water periodically issue, meeting up with others and creating flows across the floors and arrangements of small pools which change over time. It's maybe 60 metres across and you experience it by walking through, sitting, lying amidst it. A very meditative and beautiful experience. Really left an impression.
Naoshima
A very good experience. A mix of modern and contemporary art arranged around the island and collected in a few museums and buildings. Significantly, and much to the benefit of the whole, the major museums all share an architect in Tadao Ando, whose sensitive approach to working with landscape and light to integrate his buildings into existing space while working with the art that they contain (from Wikipedia: "Ando's architectural style is said to create a "haiku" effect, emphasizing nothingness and empty space to represent the beauty of simplicity. He favors designing complex (yet beautifully simple) spatial circulation while maintaining the appearance of simplicity.") is integral in particular to the Chichu Art Museum. Also nice was the way that other people were hopping between the same places in various orders, many taking advantage of hired bicycles to cover the hilly terrain, and recurring at the different attractions over the day.
I started at the Benesse House Museum because it was the earliest opening, having set my alarm to get the early ferry across. It's a wonderful setting and great building, and the art was pretty good - there's no obvious unifying theme but the 40 or so pieces arranged across the three floors hit a fair number of high points. The always intriguing Gerhard Richter is represented through a hauntingly blurred portrait of his daughter Betty (1991), there is a neat Cy Twombly ("Untitled I", 1968), and I was introduced to a few other artists through colourful, punchy pieces (Jennifer Bartlett, "Fish and Bread" 1989; Yukinori Yanagi, "The EC Flag Ant Farm #1" 1992-93, Sam Francis, "Blue" 1952-53). Also, neat: Jonathan Borofsky's "Three Chattering Men" (1986) which is just that - three sculptures with hinged motor-driven jaws muttering "chatter" over and over, broken occasionally by a sung-chanted hum.
In something of a circuit over a few kilometres, various outdoor sculptures and installations including Yayoi Kusama's two pumpkins (the yellow one was surprisingly stately and had real presence on its pier location), a bunch by Niki de Saint Phalle whose energy I liked (I first came across her only a couple of weeks ago in Martigny, also enjoyed the one at the Hakone Open Air Museum, and now these ones in Naoshima too) and a moving Walter de Maria piece installed in a chamber beneath a small rise - two dark granite reflective spheres, and on either side a gold leaf-covered standing wooden pillar ("Seen/Unseen Known/Unknown", 2000).
Then the Chichu Art Museum, which was amazing - the cultural highlight of my last twelve months at least and probably a fair bit longer. And, on its own terms, maybe the best modern/contemporary art museum I've ever visited despite its very small (but utterly perfectly chosen) selection. Everything worked towards that effect, from the entrance and the building spaces and gardens to how the individual artworks are showed in spaces purpose-designed for them, and all speaking to each other (it's all underground, no less - something of an Ando hallmark I think).
- The centrepiece was the room housing five late Monet water-lily paintings (circa 1914-26) whose blurry colours and shades had a powerful impact on me - since that first encounter with Monet's late work at the Tate Modern several years ago, there's been an important place in my interior landscape for these, and this was an incredibly rich presentation, right down to the carefully chosen whites of the marble floor and frames.
- The Walter De Maria, "Time/Timeless/No Time" (2004), completes the other piece elsewhere on Naoshima, although they are arranged to form a virtual cross - a large (2.2m diameter) dark reflective granite sphere at the centre of a naturally lit room surrounded by 27 gold leaf-covered pillars. It was hypnotic.
- And three pieces by James Turrell: one of his "Afrum" projection pieces (1968), "Open Sky" (2004) in which the sun was dazzlingly bright when I visited, and "Open Field" (2000) which was one of his colour field pieces in which the viewer is immersed in colour and light and thereby experiences them as immediately as possible. (previously)
Lee Ufan Museum also made for a deep dialogue between the artworks and the space in which they were housed. I don't think these bare, zen-like sculpture/installation pieces of steel, concrete and stone (plus some paintings) would have worked half as well in an environment less simpatico. As it was, though, they resonated.
Brief visit to the Ando Museum, also designed (on request) by Ando himself - a conversion of a traditional house with a light and space-filled modern concrete interior which elaborated on his architectural practice and, given that he was responsible for all the key recent landmarks in Naoshima, by that fact also on the reimagining of the island in those terms.
And navigated to each of the 'art houses' in the Honmura area - six old houses located throughout a residential area each of which have been converted to showcase a contemporary installation. They included another Turrell, "Minamidera", where you're led into a pitch dark room and sit for several minutes while your eyes adjust before dim lights gradually emerge.
Teshima
Most of the smaller installations were closed on the day that I went so in substance this was just two main pieces, but they were worth the trip.
One was Christian Boltanski's "Les Archives du Coeur", one of a number of sites for this piece (including our very own MONA), in which you enter a dark room where one of the many thousand previously recorded and registered heartbeats of a participant is played, loudly and resonantly, as a suspended light bulb flickers in time and provides the only illumination. I took the option to record/register my own, which meant that I got to then hear it in the room immediately after. It felt quite profound.
And the other was the Teshima Art Museum which only houses one piece but it's a doozy: Rei Naito's "Matrix" (2010). Built into a hill, and exposed to the open air by two large circular spaces in the 'ceiling', it's essentially a large concrete cavern from the floors of which small streams of water periodically issue, meeting up with others and creating flows across the floors and arrangements of small pools which change over time. It's maybe 60 metres across and you experience it by walking through, sitting, lying amidst it. A very meditative and beautiful experience. Really left an impression.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)