"Biennale of Sydney: Superposition - Equilibrium & Engagement" (MCA / AGNSW / Cockatoo Island)

Highlights from the last couple of days' visits:

MCA

Sosa Joseph's Kerala-informed paintings, of which my favourite was "Your Earth, My World" (2018) with its host of whimsical grotesques:

Marjolijn Dijkman's "Navigating Polarities" (2018), video projections in a circular concave screen within a standing bowl, accompanied by audio of statements from a range of sources interpreting the concept of polarities broadly while still meaningfully - e.g. "Binary thinking is rarely symmetrical", "Some people, standing in the fore peak of a craft, or lying in the bottom or bilge, can actually sense the magnetic field of the Earth":

Marc Bauer's hand-painted ceramics and the story they tell in French, "Diary, Madam F.C." (2017):

Nicole Wong's marble-engraved top 10 google results for specific phrases, which I found poignant and amusing and entirely human, e.g. "People say" (2018):

AGNSW

Eija-Liisa Ahtila's "Potentiality for Love - Mahdollinen Rakkaus" (2018) - a quite lovely installation that included a couple of pieces, the centre of which was an LED-screen projection which felt like being immersed in love, floating through blue, blinding white light, final embrace:

Miriam Cahn's smearily bright oils:

Cockatoo Island

This was a lot of fun all round, a great setting for contemporary art, and especially the large industrial precinct which housed the two highlights of the Biennale as a whole for me (at least of those bits that I managed to catch): Yukinori Yanagi's "Icarus Container" (2018), in which you make your way through a dark series of mirrored corridors inside large shipping containers, a fiercely burning sun nearly at the entrance and a blue sky visible in reflection from far away at the end, with passages from Yukio Mishima's poem about Icarus appearing throughout, also reflecting literally/figuratively on the force of nuclear power:

And Ai Weiwei's "Law of the Journey", with its massive raft full of people and accompanying text from, among many others, Kafka, Homer, Socrates, Augustine, Zadie Smith, James Baldwin and Vaclav Havel on immigration, nationhood and humanity, which I was moved by:

There was also Koji Ryui's "Jamais vu" (2018) installation, in which the sound was an important part:

Two others of Yukinori Yanagi's (obviously an artist to look out for), "Absolute Dud" (2016) and "Landscape with an Eye" (2018), the latter of which involves nuclear explosion projections onto the titular, hanging eye:

Dimitar Solakov's "New Life for the Past" series (Bulgaria, 2015 - below, "Pliska"):

Going Down (Malthouse)

A fun show that hits its bases with verve, elevated by a terrific cast and neat staging. Hyper-local inner north / hipster-adjacent (or outright immersed) Melbourne mores plus some of the specificities of being Asian-Australian / of migrant background in that context, all of which is very piquant and recognisable for me; of course, the irony and appropriateness (the two go hand in hand here) of seeing it at the Malthouse is embraced, while important settings include the Wheeler Centre and (for a sleeplessness/sugar high/accidental crossing south of the river-induced Marimekko-involving breakdown) Emporium. To be honest I found it a tiny bit broad and loose at points, especially as it moved towards resolution of its various threads, but given its many other great qualities those things were easy to ignore.

(w/ Hayley)

Iron & Wine @ Melbourne Recital Centre, Wednesday 23 May

I wouldn't say Iron & Wine was a wholly unknown quantity but I only had a vague impression of his music beforehand - beardy, quiet, plucked and strummed folk-ish. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover a fair bit more blood coursing through the veins, in the form of a full band (cello, bass, drums, keys, and backing female harmonies) and some quite up-tempo and even rather lushly epic tunes. Enjoyable, and I liked barely knowing any of the songs.

(w/ trang)

Molly's Game

Good aspects: quite exciting, good performances by Chastain and Costner (also Elba and Cera), well-told story about - among other things - how much men get away with, the one instance of physical violence is harrowing as it should be.

Bad aspects: extremely laboured textual explaining of Molly's whole psychology by and about her psychologist father (this threw me out of the film so badly that I thought it was more likely than not that the whole scene was a hallucination or dream of some kind, and I would've disliked it as too obvious even if it had been), somewhat of a deus ex machina / implausibly idealistic resolution in the final hearing (Sorkin's tendency towards over-simplification biting on both counts).

Sort of a neutral thing but more a bad thing than a good one: how similar it felt to Miss Sloane, even down to having Chastain as the lead, but not as good.

Overall: 6/10

"Robert Hunter" (NGV)

Art finds a way. I visited the NGVA yesterday, a rainy afternoon on the back of a week of little sleep, and found my way to this retrospective (1947-2014), and the first few minutes were a struggle - looking, but not really looking, at Hunter's early, very plainly geometric pieces.

But after a bit longer - and time so often is part of it - I felt something shift, as the traced curves and their intersections with the gridded straight lines began to make a kind of sense. And then, around the corner, this untitled - they're all untitled - wall painting from 1971 drew me in still further:

And by the time I came to the final rooms, with their many, only apparently nearly white - and actually layered with all kinds of shades of shapes and patterns, punctuated with little darts of clear, faint colour - large paintings, I was enveloped. I don't know that I'd say I 'liked' this art particularly - though nor did I dislike it - but the experience I had with it was unusual and, I think, maybe quite powerful.

Isle of Dogs

This time I consciously tried to watch it more as pure entertainment, with the result that my heart was very warmed, and specifically (though not exclusively) I have a lot of particularly warm feelings towards dogs right now.

(last time)

(w/ R)

Neil Gaiman, J H Williams III & Dave Stewart - The Sandman: Overture

I had this idea that maybe I'll re-read (again) the Sandman series, especially with the oversized - 'absolute'- volumes occupying what seems like a disproportionate amount of my increasingly rationed bookshelf space. Not sure whether I'll follow through on that but it was still nice to revisit Overture, the after-the-fact prequel, and the volume with which I'm least thoroughly familiar.

(last time)

Beach House - 7

Oh Beach House, so good. I'm not sure if 7 is their best yet (it might be, which is really saying something given the swirling power of Bloom and what feels like the enduring greatness of Teen Dream in particular), but I'm almost certain it's the one most made for being wrapped up in.

Their usual haze is a bit stormier on this outing, and the piercing quality of the songs they always remember to write underneath their dreamy textures punches through strongly (and much more so than on either of their 2015 releases, Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars, as good as they both were too), so we get the excitement of surges that rise on songs like "Dark Spring" and "Dive", the downbeat thrum of "Pay No Mind" (maybe my favourite for now), the brighter droning edges of "Drunk in LA", and broodingly starry drift-along moments like "L'Inconnue" and "Black Car", and more. How wonderful.

Homecoming Queens (season 1)

Very delightful in every way. Created by Michelle Law - an enjoyable presence in the Australian arts/cultural landscape - and Chloe Reeson and loosely based on their real-life friendship and serious medical conditions (Michelle: alopecia, Chloe: breast cancer and mastectomy), with Law playing the based-on-herself and Liv Hewson (who was good in the short "Let's See How Fast This Baby Will Go" which, against my expectations at the time, is probably actually the one out of last year's 'best MIFF shorts' that has most lingered) as Chloe.

Seven episodes of about 12 to 15 minuteish each; snappy, funny, real, cringeworthily awkward, and incorporating 'diversity' in just the right way (wholeheartedly, directly, in a way that reflects contemporary Australia, and at the same time with what amounts to a big shrugged 'so what, people are people'). On sbs on demand.

The World's End

So I reckon I have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction against British comedy, at least in film/tv (maybe not so much in literature, given Pratchett, Douglas Adams etc), which is maybe why I wasn't red hot on either Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz when I saw them - though both have grown in my opinion since, including through miscellaneous seeings of bits and pieces on tv - whereas the thoroughly North American-feeling (Canadian and American respectively) Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver were both big, immediate yeses for me.

Edgar Wright's the unifying director there, though he's shared writing credits with various others, including Simon Pegg for this so-called Cornetto trilogy, and his zippiness is amply present in The World's End, across pacing, cutting and fight scenes (and musical bits). There seems to be more seriousness here than in Shaun or Fuzz in the way it tackles the toxic effects of (men) not growing up, and the cast is good fun (I liked that Walder Frey popped up) but it rushes along at a good clip. Primal Scream prominent. Bill Nighy present through voice only.

Haruki Murakami - Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

If I had a favourite writer, Murakami would have a pretty fair claim to being it - on my three remaining shelves of fiction/plays/poetry, he and Donna Tartt are the only ones whose complete works I've kept, and that's 15 books to three (well technically Rivka Galchen too but that's a grand total of two!) - and I've gotten in the habit of thinking of Hard-boiled Wonderland as my favourite of his, which has maybe, along with its intrinsic vividness, been part of what's kept it so clear in my mind in the thirteen (!) years since I previously read it.

I'm no less interested in phenomenology and subjective experience of the world now than I was back in 2005, and the way that concern is structured into the novel so that it actually forms part of its narrative engine is still impressive. And likewise the pace at which it moves forward, in the interleaved past tense and terser 'hard-boiled wonderland' and present tense and more lyrical 'end of the world' segments, both individually and, as the story progresses, in how they cross over into each other - not to mention the many repeated and mirrored details that echo across the divide between the two stories / worlds / versions of minds and the way they're diegetically explained:

"Meaning, I'll keep producing more and more new memories?"

" 'Fraid so. Or more simply, deja vus of sorts. Don't differ all that much in principle. That'll go on for a while. Till finally you reassemble a world out of these new memories."

"Reassemble a world?"

"You heard correct. This very moment you're preparin' t'move to another world. So the world you see right now is changin' bit by bit t'match up. Changin' one percept at a time. The world here and now does exist. But on the phenomenological level, this world is only one out of countless possibilities. We're talkin' about whether you put your right foot or your left foot out - changes on that order. It's not so strange that when your memories change, the world changes."

"Pretty academic if you ask me," I said. "Too conceptual. You're disregarding the time factor. You're reversing the order of things."

"No, the time paradox here's in your mind," said the Professor. "As you create memories, you're creatin' a parallel world."

"So I'm pulling away from the world as I originally knew it?"

"I'm just sayin' it's not out of the realm of possibility. Mind you, I'm not talkin' about any out-of-this-world science-fiction type parallel universe. It's all a matter of cognition. The world as perceived. And that's what's changin' in your brain, is what I think."

"Then after these changes, Junction A switches over, a completely different world appears, and I go on living there. There's no avoiding that turnover - I just sit and wait for it to happen?

" 'Fraid so."

"And for how long does that world go on?"

"Forever," said the Professor. 

Most importantly, though, the high concept cleverness and structural intricacy are all driving towards genuine emotional stakes, as the 'external' half of the narrative increasingly folds in on itself and it's made explicit that his memory is starting to run backwards as it all moves towards the end, and the nature of the 'inner' world becomes apparent, as well as how its protagonist and his shadow came to its strange Town and the meaning of the choice that he will need to make about departing or staying becomes clear. Also, how just-right the symbolism associated with the end of the world - mind - all is, from the unicorn Beasts to the Wall and the Woods and the passing of the seasons, and the way it's music that proves the crucial, final bridge. Marvellous.

"No, I really like his voice," she said. "It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain."

Agnes Obel - Citizen of Glass

Crystalline, high strung, and fairly uncategorisable. One of those curious singer-songwriter pop albums that comes along once in a while at the intersections of streams, here including the more austere type of folk and jazz's slower notes, with plenty of eerie musical and vocal elements. It hasn't grabbed me but I think it's good.

NGV

Encounters during an NGV visit earlier in the week, some sought out and others not.

The blue Soulages and red Rothko, both of which I've spent plenty of time with in the past, now installed side by side: 

Alongside them and stunning in its own right, but even better in context, an Yves Saint Laurent ensemble (1976-77, Operas Ballets Russes collection):

A bit of time with Richard Mosse's "Incoming" (2014-17), which I didn't get a good look at as part of the Triennial (I was also pleased to see that the Paulina Olowska "Painter" which I liked so much seems to be a permanent acquisition by the NGV - still on display), which had some power to it:

And, on adjacent corners to each other (I'm sure there's a word for that), two video works that, in their slowness, deliberately recall photography, Yvonne Todd's "Denim seagull" (2013, also incorporating seagull sounds) and Gianfranco Foschino's "Apartments" (2012).

The Jayhawks - Rainy Day Music

Pretty nice. Yearning melodies, guitars that sometimes jangle and sometimes chime a bit, in that gentle folk-rock alt-countryish vein.

Gurrumul

This documentary had an impact. Part of it was probably the fairly intense few days I've had, but even still. And will certainly be seeking out his music now.

(w/ Hayley)

"Diane Arbus: American Portraits" + more at Heide

The main event here was the Arbus photos, touring from the NGA in Canberra, and they were quite wonderful, making me feel many feelings. To me they felt compassionate and specific to their subjects, pulling me in and causing me to smile with something that I'd call recognition, for all that some of the context to them seemed also to raise legitimate questions about exploitation.

And an unexpected pleasure was the inclusion of plenty of photos by other American portraitist types, both influences upon and influenced by Arbus herself, including William Eggleston (whose exhibition last year I so enjoyed), Walker Evans ("Tenant Farmer's Wife, Alabama", 1936 - below), Garry Winogrand ("Los Angeles, California", 1969 - below; and I was also very struck by "World's Fair, New York", 1964), and others.

Also, in the way of things at Heide, a bit of Tucker and Blackman and a bit of Nolan - and, in this case, some contemporary European art, amongst which my favourite was Ugo Rondinone's "The Plain" (2014); also pictured is "zwölfteraugustzweitausendundvierzehn" (2014).

(w/ Angela)

Lyle Lovett - Pontiac

So actually I think 'prejudice' is exactly the right word to describe why I hadn't got to Lovett's music till now, cos he's kind of a weird-looking guy (I've always thought he looked like the fella in Eraserhead). Pontiac is fun though, reminds me of a more countryish Lloyd Cole; favourite song is "Give Back My Heart" (as in "ooh give back my heart chip-kicker redneck woman, I can't be no cowgirl paradise" ... whatever that means). 

Islamic Museum Australia

A quick look around, including at the temporary exhibition, which taught me where the '1.6 billion ways to be Muslim' posters that I've been seeing around are from. Interesting!

(w/ R)

Avengers: Age of Ultron & Infinity War

I have a funny relationship with these Marvel superhero films. I'd thought I'd seen most of them but an actual count suggests I've actually only seen about half, not quite in sequence: Iron Man (though it doesn't seem to have made it onto extemporanea, so maybe I only saw it in bits and pieces on tv), Thor, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2, Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, and now these two. I do enjoy epics and spectacle and - as far as I can tell - am happily unhampered by any kind of snobbery about the genre/industry, so it's surprising that I'm not more into these, but somehow they haven't captured my imagination.

Anyway so both Age of Ultron and Infinity War are neatly put together and I didn't find myself bored at any point while watching them (although there were definitely points in the latter where I couldn't remember where one set of characters or another had gotten to while the film was focusing on others across its dispersed range of characters and settings), in the end I don't feel like I cared very much about anything that happened in either film - and this despite having had at least some prior-film derived investment in the characters and a seriously high quality bunch of actors (Chris Hemsworth continues to be very funny as Thor, Scarlett Johansson is impressively straight and immersed in her not-particularly-nuancedly-characterised character of Black Widow, etc).