Art Gallery of Ballarat

Some highlights and notables across various exhibitions and the permanent collection:

Nana Ohnesorge's series "No Picnic at Ngannelong", commenting on the absence of Aboriginal people from Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, set on a site of deep traditional significance.

As part of "Becoming Modern: Australian women artists 1920-1950": a pencil self-portrait by Thea Proctor (undated), curiously striking; a Margaret Preston "Jug of Flowers" (1929); Marjorie Woolcock's "All set to go" (circa 1950).

Naomi Hobson's "Wild Lagoon" (2019), inspired by the Cape York landscape of the artist's family and culture, combining motifs referring to Indigenous art with elements more reminiscent of western abstraction.

Claudia Moodoonuthi's "My Vegemite Family" 1 and 2 (2018), not to mention her redesign of the Vegemite label.

Marlene Gilson's "Black Swamp - Lake Wendouree" (2018) - a Ballarat setting. I've been seeing her work everywhere lately; here's an article contextualising.

Two Eugene von Guerard landscapes; I've encountered him in the NGV, and elsewhere I think, and despite what superficially appears to be quite generic subjects, they tend to draw the eye. It might be partly the brightness and detail, and maybe some unusual composition (e.g. unusual use or disregard of the rule of thirds).

It reflects well on the gallery how much of the work being displayed was created by Indigenous artists by the way.

(w/ R)

Game of Thrones season 8

[spoilers]

At last it's over, although 'at last' may not be the right phrase given how rapidly - relative to what come before it - the last two seasons often seemed to chew through their plots.

Having spent so much time watching this show, not to mention consuming often quite detailed online commentary about it, it's hard to distil my feelings about this last season and its ending, but basically it was satisfying enough for me. I liked that the defeat of the Night King wasn't the climax, that nor was an 'all the good guys team up and beat Cersei' scenario, and that Jon Snow didn't end up the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms (or even King in the North), and I also liked where most of the characters' arcs ended up. Dany's is obviously the most difficult, and I can see how it would have been a fine balance over several seasons to lay some groundwork for where she ends up without it seemingly overly foreshadowed as an inevitability, but I don't think there was enough spadework done there and particularly given the extra degree of difficulty involved in portraying a '(strong) woman descends into madness' arc; for me the way that turn is depicted is the weakest part of this last season and how the show ends.

All up I do think Game of Thrones has been pretty great basically all the way through, even if some of the story-telling and characterisation has been rickety as it's attempted to bring things towards its close. One of the best and most notorious things about it has been the way it's subverted various types of expectation, and with the benefit of seeing how it's now played out as a whole, I don't think it's fair to criticise the show for not having held more left turns or - in particular - killing off more of its main (and, especially, sympathetic) characters through its mid to late section until right near the end. Much of its 'subversiveness' has always been in relation to familiar notions of good triumphing over evil by virtue of nobility, and associated fantasy and general story-telling archetypes, while highlighting the role that power, manipulation/scheming, pragmatism and a willingness to act immorally, and chance and circumstance all play in people's lives and ultimate fates - and I don't think the ending is especially inconsistent with those structuring themes that have tun through the show ... I don't think the show's relatively amoral worldview requires it to give its sympathetic characters unhappy endings.

Two good articles criticising the way it ends: on its shift from sociological to psychological storytelling, and on the type of experience - including of terror and horror - that the show provided in its earlier seasons.

The other thing for me is that I'm not that demanding a viewer when it comes to extended epic-type storytelling. I'm willing to overlook plenty of flaws for something that looks and feels great, and at the episode and technical level, season 8 did all the way through, just like the show as a whole, with many (many) characters, scenes and plot through-lines to linger.

Previously: seasons 1 (and again), 2, 3, 4 and 5, then 1-6, 6 again, then 7 (and maybe 7 again but unrecorded?).

Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace

A young, white forehead boring through the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl. Siss.

The opening sentence summons Steerpike for me, from the Gormenghast novels, Peake's references to his high forehead suggesting the sheer force of his will. But Siss, the primary presence in the remarkable The Ice Palace, is a very different character; equally important, while mostly absent, is her friend Unn. The intensity between them, and especially in Unn's room the one time they meet after school, trembles with the sense of all that's so vitally important and so unspeakable (including because so ungraspable, even in thought) for a certain type of child, perhaps a certain type of person.

The Ice Palace is deceptively simple, with its plain sentences and short sections, most following Siss - a notable exception is Unn's visit to the frozen waterfall which gives the book its title - and usually from her point of view. But what about the way it feels as though other perspectives and potential meanings and worlds are always thronging all around her, thrumming in complicated interaction with her own knotted internality and the way it seizes on certain symbols (the idea of the gift)? What about the strange intrusion of 'the bird' about two-thirds through, with its steel claws drawing a slanting stripe between two peaks in no time at all? What about the dream of snow-covered bridges, only the most explicit fall into poetry in a novel that operates throughout in a poetic register? (In translation from Nynorsk, one of the two officially sanctioned Norwegian languages, 1963.) What about the way it never reveals some of its most central mysteries - who is the other about whom Unn avoids thinking, and why does she fear she won't go to heaven? - in order to preserve its deeper architecture?

Most magically of all, in the end, it turns out to be as much about kindness, hope and the human spirit as it is about anything else.

Patty Griffin - Patty Griffin

The significance of Griffin choosing to make this album self-titled, this deep into a career of ten diverse and uniformly excellent albums (eleven including the equally excellent live document A Kiss in Time) and at the age of 55, is impossible to ignore, and adds to the sense one might already have from the music that Patty Griffin is something of a summation - a distillation - of where she has come to in all that time.

It's simpler and quieter, and more closely tied to the version of folk she's developed over her career than 2015's Servant of Love, and the gentleness is befitting. It doesn't have as many obvious song highlights as many of her previous records, but the musicality is at the same high standard as ever.

"Darren Sylvester: Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something" & "Rosslynd Piggott: I Sense You But I Cannot See You" (NGVA)

I can't remember the last exhibition I visited that was as sheerly pleasurable as Darren Sylvester's (maybe the Del Kathryn Barton which was installed in the same space if I remember right), spanning photography, various forms of installation and sculpture, video, and music (the latter, stronger on texture and mood than melody but very strong on those indeed, echoing throughout the gallery and setting the tone for the visual pieces).

"Broken Model" (2016) 

"Listen to me" (2012) 

"IKEA sunrise" (2018)

"Our future was ours" (2005)

Also, "You should let go of a dying relationship" (2006), Sylvester's recreation and syncing of the music videos for "Heroes" and "Wuthering Heights", marvellous.

And it was two from two for today's NGVA visit, with Rosslynd Piggott's large retrospective also resonating. Hers seems the kind of body of work that offers many keys to its own understanding, but for me, one was certainly the appearance in her "100 glasses" (1991-92) piece, which is what it sounds like, of "Marcel" and "Virginia" side by side, as in Proust and Woolf, as in the quintessential modernist explorers of subjective consciousness and experience.

"Nature morte - eggs" & "Nature morte - eggs 2" (1990-91)

Throughout her four-decade spanning work: glasses, water, blues, dreamy mistiness - although my favourites seem to cluster from the late 80s through to mid 90s.

"Italy" (1988)

"Upside-down landscape" (1989), like a sprightly little Tanguy escapee

"Pour slowly into me" (1996)

Julia Jacklin - Crushing

There's three different types of song across Julia Jacklin's Crushing, more or less. There's the muffled, moody, not-quite-ballads at the top ("Body"), anchored at track 4 ("Don't Know How To Keep Loving You") and nearly at the end ("Turn Me Down") - all ace. There's the indie-rocky ones ("Head Alone", "Pressure to Party" and "You Were Right"), which as a set are my favourites. And there's the other ones, which are a bit quieter and don't make much of an impression. Altogether, though, very good.

Avengers: Endgame

For me, Endgame stuck the landing. The culmination of a 22-film run, most of which I've seen (many recently), it does everything it could reasonably have been expected to, moving through its two and a half hours with clean lines and a neat structure which succeeds in making its resolutions to many of its major characters' arcs feel natural and satisfying.

I guess this series, or franchise, must be unique in the history of cinema in terms of the way its films have fit together (as opposed to the Bond series, with its single through-line of its main character, or the Star Wars films, which seem to have developed with a more linear spine accompanied by tangential proliferations). Moment to moment, too, it continues to be enjoyable.

Spider Man: Into The Spider-Verse

While this one is on-theme with my recent superhero movie watching catch-up, it didn't seem an essential watch - Film Crit Hulk's enthusiastic spruiking of it persuaded me. Animatedly enjoyable as it is, and as much as I recognise what he says about its merits, perhaps - again - I'm butting up against the limits of the genre's intrinsic appeal to me, despite how much of it I've watched over time.