Geelong Art Gallery

The John Norman Mann Bequest

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

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

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

"Yvonne Audette - Observation and Experience"

"Moving squares" (1959)

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

Ethleen Palmer - "Honeyeater" (1935)

Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai

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

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

On at the Counihan Gallery

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

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

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

Also: "Yellow Paint" - Mark du Poitiers

MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

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

"David EOY 2024"

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

Rebecca Solnit - Recollections of My Non-Existence

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

Encanto

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

Station Eleven

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

Rebel Ridge

 Tight modern Western.

Queensland Art Gallery

On was the 11th annual Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; I was pretty piecemeal in how I took it in given this was a bit of a snatched visit, but I liked Katsuko Ishigaki's Okinawa paintings with their US military bases, vivid blurriness and willingness to highlight the elements of their own inner composition, and Mit Jai Inn's installations which made good use of the central hall.

"View of Henoko-Oura Bay from Sedake Hill" (2023-24)

Also "Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography" which was smallish and overall not as engaging as its theme seemed likely to be, but it did remind me that Bill Henson's work, for all its over familiarity and the overly familiar discourse about its subjects and surfaces (admittedly a discourse that does continue to become more complex over time), really does have a whoosh to it - a reminder I get nearly every time I see any of it.

"Untitled #76" (1985-86)

Marisha Pessl - Darkly

The concept is fun, the execution solid enough without rising to any great heights.

"Yayoi Kusama" (NGV International)

In a way Yayoi Kusama has crept up on me over the years. I've liked her quite a lot for a long time now, including some memorable encounters - the pumpkins on Naoshima, the illuminated ladder to infinity at the NGV (and in Our Magic Hour) - but I don't think I've ever really focused on her art as a body of work. I suspect a large part of that's been because both the surfaces of the art (the dots!) and the persona of the artist loom so large, making it difficult to properly see the works themselves, in their own right and as a whole.

Things I was struck by in this large survey:

• The correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe
• The obsessive, repetitive work from early on
• The dots also being from early on
• The pumpkins, in a good way
• 'Self-obliteration'
• The darkened celestial mirror rooms have maybe always been my favourites, eg "Chandelier of Grief" (2016) below

(w/ Jade)

"Current: Brian Robinson" & Sculpture Park, McClelland Gallery

Been a while since I made it out here and this visit was mostly for the sculpture park. Those that most stood out tended to be the most monumental, and a couple for their whimsy. I might be wrong but my impression is that the artists represented in the park are notably un-diverse, seeming to lean heavily towards older white men.

Dean Collis - "Rex Australis: The king is dead, long live the king", 2012

Andrew Rogers - "The winding path, the search for truth", 2010 and (in background) "Gaia", 2014

Sebastian di Mauro - "Snuffle", 2002-03

Peter Blizzard - "Halo moon shrine", 2005

Roman Liebach - "Wharf spears", 2005

John Kelly - "Alien", 2006

R. F. Kuang - Babel

At the very least, Babel is interesting in multiple ways - an undisguised and undisguisedly angry polemic on the harms of colonialism wrapped up with an interrogation of the role of language and translation in empire and cross-border understanding, and of strategies of social change (including the necessity or otherwise of violence, and the toll that it takes), and delivered through a mostly pretty gripping alternative-historical fantasy story. 

It's repetitive, didactic, heavy-handed and more - yet these scan more as texture than as flaws, part and parcel of the particular thing that Babel is, and even admirable as indications of the novel's willingness to depart from some conventional markers of literary quality and tastefulness. There's not a lot else like it that I've read.

Gladiator II

In the shadow of the original, almost by design. 

Mission: Impossible 1-8

I've watched all of these before except #3; taken as a whole they sure are entertaining. 

Moana 2

The first one is my favourite of the Disney animations I've seen - relatively unproblematic (a low bar) with an engaging lead character (relatedly) and good music. The sequel is just fine, nothing more, and mainly because of the built-up goodwill from the first. I would've liked to've seen more of Matangi who actually seemed like a character, as well as having the best song.

(w/ R, L, J & H)

"An Insatiable Appetite for Pictorial Adventure: William Blamire Young" & "five letters cinque lettere: Filomena Coppola" (Mildura Arts Centre)

Supposedly Blamire Young is known as the master of Australian watercolour but I didn't get much from him. I could see the technical proficiency but some of his work seemed almost to be trying to create oil painting-like effects, to which I basically felt, what was the point.

I liked the Coppola exhibition, which was about the experiences of post WWII Italian migrants to the Sunraysia region, its title and theme coming from the five letters of the English alphabet that aren't in the Italian alphabet: j, k, w, x and y.

2024: "Like it's some kind of excuse"

1. Rewind - Rosali
Bite Down (Merge, 2024)

2. White Lies, White Jesus and You - Katie Pruitt
Mantras (Rounder, 2024)

3. Fish - Angie McMahon
Light, Dark, Light Again (Gracie Music, 2023)

4. I'm Not Crying, You're Crying - English Teacher
This Could Be Texas (Island, 2024)

5. It Was Coming All Along - Maggie Rogers
Don't Forget Me (Debay Sounds / Capitol, 2024)

6. The Hurtin' Kind - Orville Peck (feat. Midland)
Stampede (Warner, 2024)

7. Clams Casino - Cassandra Jenkins
My Light, My Destroyer (Dead Oceans, 2024)

8. Empires Never Know - Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer, 2024)

9. Floating on a Moment - Beth Gibbons
Lives Outgrown (Domino, 2024)

10. Good Luck, Babe! - Chappell Roan
single (Island, 2024)

11. North Country - Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Woodland (Acony, 2024)

12. Run - Miranda Lambert
Postcards from Texas (Republic / Big Loud, 2024)

13. Right Back to It - Waxahatchee (feat. MJ Lenderman)
Tigers Blood (Anti-, 2024)

A lot of great songs this year, though no albums that I really took to heart - closest was Lives Outgrown. "It Was Coming All Along" is a pretty perfect rock-pop song that calls back to the late 90s / early 2000s golden age for that genre; "Fish" runs deep and for me is thoroughly associated with a certain stream of Australian music / lit / experience that includes the likes of Holly Throsby and Jennifer Down. Katie Pruitt was back with another crisply longing collection and Cassandra Jenkins with a rockier, catchier one; I continue to mostly only like rather than love Waxahatchee's take on Americana but "Right Back to It" kept on calling to me across the year. 

(on spotify)

Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven

I suppose all novels about the end of the world are also about something else; what makes Station Eleven different is that, if anything, it's more about that other stuff - the meanings and relationships of art, society, family (birth types and otherwise) and selfhood - while also being about the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. It's so well written, sentences, scenes and structure. This is the second time I've read it (first time here) and having since read Sea of Tranquility it's clear the two are of a piece.