our lady of

 the following post is part of a conceptually tedious  essay i am writing for the research group i work for. it is in regards to our ephemeral public art project ‘there-forever’ at the Port Adelaide Festival in april 2007. but i seem to be writing it about my own state of mind. 3 days to go.

 

In Jorgan Leth’s 1967 film ‘The Perfect Human’ the narrator speaks over his mute subjects, ‘ See the perfect human, see him sit, see him tie up his shoes.’ Public space, (including architecture) always posits the perfect human as its inhabitant. The perfect human strolls down a boulevard, the perfect human drinks coffee at a street-side table, see him, see the perfect human, see him flying in a plane, see him enjoy window shopping in the sunshine. But we are all imperfect humans. What happens when we abandon timeless universal perfection as a goal? The unplanned (or that which punctures the dream of continuity) interupts the no-time of utopia.

 

Interruptions:

Something scraped smeared across a table top with a thumb.

Closing time in a pub

A spectacular dress

Hard rubbish

Spit

Dog shit

Road works

Sandwich board signs

skateboards

Big hair

Itchy foot

Bright light

Trucks passing

A greeting

 

 

Today a bird pooed on me twice. Another interruption

 

All is interruption, there is no ongoing-underlying continuum

How can you make one intervention into a permanent series of interventions.

All travelling is an interuption. It should(at least in the movies) be smooth, a creamy seamless moving through time disconnected from worry. Carving an effortless swath through places and things. Instead i am an interuption, and effortless is boring.

 

 

 

This peice of news from the wonderful blog  ‘our lady’s tears’, (link from my blog roll):
The Catholic Church has Approved a Marian Apparition, Knock, Ireland 1879

In this apparition, Mary is also known as Our Lady of Silence because she spoke no words at Knock, unlike her other famous apparitions.
OUR LADY OF KNOCK, QUEEN OF IRELAND

for those not in the know, Knock is a town in Ireland.

at the moment I am our lady of running and jumping, suitcase packing and wildly waving. Two weeks til I jet off to Japan. I will be sure to keep this site up to date.

I flew out of Adelaide on a small 30 seater Rex plane. More personal than a larger plane with an almost homely feel, the interior makes me think of ‘Cremaster 1′ and I wish that the stewardess had a more stylish uniform. The sound of the engines is more real and I can see the propellers spin, I keep willing them to not stop, keep thinking of how we are staying up in the air.

Cruising out of Adelaide we flew over the Coorong and lakes, the powdery white lines of surf continuing down the unbroken beach. The sun sets soon and descending into the darkness of Mt Gambier I was unsure where the ground was until I saw a passing car surprisingly close.

On the way home it is earlier in the day, taking off the land seemed scattered with disks of shining sliver, small dams and ponds littered the green paddocks. This country is sodden with water, it wells up the ground is moist, the rock, wet. So strange after the dryness of most of SA. I remember when I was around 6 we lived in Kingston SE, the first actual house we had lived in for years and it was so damp and cold, mould would grow on my pillow overnight from where it had touched the stone wall. Nothing could have been more different than our warm, flimsy caravan, and I hated living there.

The Coorong again, the massive estuary of the River Murray, so long! and wonderful, the sand pink in the evening light. The shades of water as it varies from the dark salty ocean to the milky ponds mixed with river silt. The beach so big it would take days to walk along, the many intricate curlings of land and water, islands, promontories and in front the unbroken beach guarding the sea.

The two Lakes, Alexandrina and Albert are huge bodies of light brown water. This is where I grew up but I am still unable to puzzle out which towns are which in their vast geography. I can hazard a guess, and in the distance I think I can see Strathalbyn.
We climb over the hills and I am so glad to be coming home.  The little city.

Directly behind the Riddoch Gallery in Mt Gambier is The Cave Garden, a strange colonialist park complete with Palms, roses and Monkey Puzzle tree, planted around a collapsed cave (sinkhole). The white soft limestone is carved with hundreds of mossy letters scratched into the rock. A tarmacked path winds down into the hole, everywhere there is water, soft moss, slimy rock, growths of pendulous bright green creepers. In the middle of the town, the cave is an otherworldly sight, quiet and apart from me, quite deserted. Down at the bottom is a Yakka growing in the swirling water-patterned sand.

Mt Gambier Has a pleasant smell of wood shavings and smoke. There are plenty of plantation forests surrounding the town, and I know they make paper here, so maybe this accounts for the smell. After the workshop I wandered around the town and discovered the Women’s Work Depot, where I purchased handmade shortbread and some underpriced knitted goods. The shortbread was stacked two deep on a piece of cardboard carefully covered in foil and the socks presented on a blue card in a cellophane bag, The total: $5.75. I gave them $6, the lady behind the counter had a Dutch accent and painfully arthritic hands. She was surprised at the extra 25cents.

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.

more of Mt Gambier.

On sunday night I flew down to Mt Gambier in order to give a workshop on installation for Country Arts SA. I am included in an exhibition called ’snapshop’ that is touring around regional SA; this show is now in Mt Gambier which is why I find myself on the ‘limestone coast’ giving a day workshop on installation. The workshop consisted of three parts: me talking about Installation as a practice and showing some images of installation works, working on a series of Ink drawings of ‘left overs’ or ‘remnants’, and the making of three group installations using the cut out ink drawings and white thread. Riddoch Gallery director Lucia Pichler very generously let us use three great sites around the gallery and to leave the works up for the duration of the ’snapshot’ show.

The group was a lively class of local TAFE visual Art students, who had not really encounted Installation before, but put in some good work. The image below is one of the finished installations.

our lady of rinds and parings

open us from the outside, and be our soft shell peeled away.

our lady has been making some sculptures of tangelo peel. They are cast in plaster and dipped in golden resin, and so look like a gudgey gooey dripping peel, covered in golden juice.

Tomorrow (sunday) I fly down to Mt Gambier in a teeny tiny plane, to do a workshop for country arts sa. 18 people are coming to hear me talk about Installation and do some ink drawings and make a very minimal installation with thread. It is fair to say I am a bit nervous.  It is also strange for me to talk about, installation, a concept that I have a  leary view of. In preparing I have been re-reading Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” one of my fav texts about Minimalism and Modernist sculpture, Fried attacks the ‘theatricality’ in installation. I think respond negatively to this too - although there are many very subtle installations. It is more the fussyness and the over determined ‘rules of engagement’ for the viewer that I object to. But having said that I still desire to control and direct spaces and people’s negotiation of space. Such a difficult line to straddle, sometimes I wonder if neat little paintings are the most humane forms of art - they give so little offense to daily life.