Progress

New project

I'm trying to make a seven minute film about time and memory, shot quickly on a simple digital camera. 

These images below are from the AIDS Memorial Garden in Fairfield: an overgrown, seemingly forgotten place of solitude, filled with reverberations of memory. Amongst the native grasses and foliage are hints of beauty: native flowers, a patch of sunlight filtered through the trees, a hidden plaque. I'm still trying to figure out what to focus my camera on, hence these blurred images. I hope to complete the film by the end of September. 

Brief reflections on three images 

Beau Travail  Claire Denis

On a recent rewatch at the cinema I got a lot out of allowing myself to 'feel' Beau Travail's images rather than constantly look for subtext or meaning within them. The film's sensuality and quietness had an enrapturing affect on me as a result. This time I found myself intrigued by simple and quieter images, such as one where a flicker of light is seen in the dark as a cigarette is lit. The hands of two male legionnaires meet around the flame in one of the film's more direct expressions of intimacy. The camera stays on the cigarette, and all we see is a little dot of light bobbing around in the dark. I love how Denis renders seemingly insignificant things incandescent and alluring, often to convey a sense of the magic of solitude.  

Denis's habitual images of people dancing passionately on their own seems to exemplify this. I recently read an interview where Denis described these images as a 'solitary appeal to the empathy of the viewer', where 'unspoken correspondences' come to light. These images are a way of coming into contact with something 'intangible, mysterious and transformative.' I think this modest image of the cigarette in the dark can be read in the same way. It hints at an inarticulate solitude that is magical and beautiful, and it felt sublime to me.

A flicker of a cigarette: Beau Travail

The Brown Bunny  Vincent Gallo 

The Brown Bunny follows a man (Gallo) as he aimlessly drives across various American states, and contains subtly beautiful images that distill loneliness and yearning.  Many of the images are out of focus and awkwardly framed, often softly filtered through hair or a dirty car windscreen, to express the introspective fog through which Gallo's character views the world.  This creates an emotional distance within the viewer, a kind of numbing, which gives you the sense that Gallo is so overcome by melancholy and loneliness that he has become a shell of a person, only able to feel subtle textures and colours.  

Aimless driving: The Brown Bunny

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

When I watched Ali I was struck by how simple, but powerful, the film's portrayal of loneliness was.  The film is about the relationship between an older woman and a migrant worker from Morocco, two outsiders who suffer the prejudice of postwar West German society.  A sense of stillness pervades the film's images, with many shots of people sitting alone in empty spaces and encountering their own loneliness.  A recurring example of this is an image of the woman resting on the staircase of her apartment building, which is where she encounters the judgement of her racist neighbours.  The staircase appears as this liminal space that lies between the woman's interior world and the alienation of the world outside.  The framing of the woman through the columns and pipes of the staircase directly communicates, in the most simple way, that the woman is trapped by her own loneliness.    

An excerpt from an interview with Fassbinder: 'the viewer has an opportunity to flesh out the relationship when the story is simple.  The simpler the stories are, the more the viewers can do with them... at some point films have to stop being films and have to come alive so that the viewers begin to ask themselves: what about me and my life?' 

  

An expression of loneliness in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Flights

I've recently developed a fascination with tracking planes that fly over my house in the evenings.  

I see them from a distance as dots of light, and watch them as they edge closer and closer, until I hear them pass overhead. I think the obsession has something to do with a strangely addictive feeling of distant intimacy, or is perhaps related to longing for a world beyond Melbourne.

'Flightradar24' informed me that these two flights originated in the Middle East:

Two dots of light in the distance

An elegy for forgotten spaces

I've always been interested in the use of neglected spaces, such as disowned empty sites and laneways, to make something beautiful and thoughtful. As a teenager, I used the lane behind my home to display sculptures I made from locally found detritus. The lane was somewhere I could retreat to after a school day and provided company with neighbours who are practising artists. They would offer encouragement, critique and share books or the names of other artists I should seek out. It was an inspiring social and artistic antidote to my secondary schooling. I cared for the lane for five years until I gave up the project, and the space returned to its original wild and dishevelled appearance. When I pass the lane these days, and see it in its current state of neglect, I'm reminded of all the memories I had there when I was younger. Those memories mean a lot to me, and it wouldn't necessarily be apparent to anyone else that this modest lane holds such emotion. It has made me think about other forgotten spaces and overgrown old ruins that hold quiet memories and stories.

The AIDS Memorial Garden is nestled in bushland alongside the Yarra River in Fairfield on the site of a former infectious diseases hospital. The garden first came to my attention in John Foster's 1993 memoir Take Me to Paris, Johnny, which recounts the intriguing life of Foster's partner Juan Cespedes until his death due to an AIDS-related illness. It was described as a rambling 'secret garden' set amongst gum trees and rose bushes, providing quiet repose for AIDS patients and their families. I was interested in visiting the garden, but I wondered what state it would be in or whether it even still existed as the site had since been taken over by a new institution. An old website that documented the garden's history revealed that the bare bones of the garden still remained, but it had otherwise fallen into a state of disrepair.  

On my first visit, I walked for ages through an eerily quiet polytechnic campus in hopeful search of it. I felt as though I was trespassing. When I eventually made it there, I followed a sign that led me into an obscure clearing. There was a dilapidated rotunda that was falling apart, with a wild rose climbing up its side.  Native grasses had grown tall and unruly and rustled in the wind like faint whispers. There are only subtle reminders of the immensity of the garden's history, such as the golden plaques attached to park benches. Each one reads as a dedication to the lives of the hospital's AIDS victims who had their ashes spread in the garden. Another weathered plaque, hidden by foliage, welcomes you into the garden: 'This garden area, a joint project marking the relationship between Fairfield Hospital and the Victorian AIDS Council in caring for people with AIDS, is for the use of all patients and their visitors at Fairfield (April 1988).' The garden's history, and its setting for sombre contemplation, as documented in passages from Foster's book, and also in Timothy Conigrave's 1995 autobiography Holding the Man, seem to be most felt in depths buried amongst overgrown foliage.  It can be felt, too, in the almost-silent shifts of native plants in the breeze.  Whenever I visit the garden I think of all the people I admire who have succumbed to AIDS around the world: Derek Jarman, Arthur Russell, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar,  Conigrave, Foster— just to name a few. Regardless of whether the garden has been forgotten or not, for me, it is loaded with their presence and links together all of their stories; their work and activism.  

A rugged corner of the AIDS Memorial Garden, Fairfield 

Wavelength

I was recently moved by Michael Snow's 1967 structural film Wavelength, which I saw projected in 16mm in a little room to the side of a bar. Wavelength is a film that plays with perception through pushing the boundaries of cinematic space and temporality to transcendental effect. The film represents a single space (a New York City studio loft), with a zoom that gradually lurches across it over a 45 minute duration. A few events partially occur within the frame: furniture is moved, two women listen to the radio, and a man later collapses on the floor. These events never imply an explicit narrative meaning, they're instead markers of particular points of time in the course of the zoom. While the fading in-and-out of daylight through long windows suggests the rapid passing of days within the image, time feels prolonged for the viewer. The zoom is so gradual that we're often held in place and subjected to a static image of the loft. In an essay on the film, Michael Sicinski describes the Wavelength experience as being akin to being in a 'slow moving car.' This sense of slow chronology is occasionally disrupted by the changing of film stock, superimpositions, and coloured filters that are reminiscent of a sunset or an overexposure of light. While space gradually narrows as the zoom moves inwards, it ultimately comes to rest on a photograph of expansive space; the sea, before eventually fading to endless white.  

After the screening I slunk past people drinking in the bar and got some fresh air outside. I ended up walking five kilometres, mulling the experience and readjusting my sense of space as I went along.  Everything felt more expansive and sensual. Within the film's rigid boundaries, I had become conscious of the space I was held within. The rackety sound of passing trams outside and the aromas of perfume and red wine around me had added tangible layers to my experience of the film. I could feel myself becoming consumed by the sensuality of space. The essay by Sicinski provided context to this: 'Wavelength dramatises our bodily location in space, thus bringing to light our spatial existence within the cinema. Wavelength asks us to physically dwell within the cinema.'  

A still from Wavelength taken from towards the beginning of the film

Bricolage

This blog feels like a room with a grey-coloured wall where bits and pieces of writing and images are pinned up like bricolage. 

I never engaged in blogging as a teenager. The only space that I had control over, aside from my bedroom, was the disused dead-end lane behind my family home. For about five years, the lane became a 'gallery' for sculptures that I made from rubbish and detritus gleaned from the neighbourhood, particularly from along the nearby train line. The exhibitions rotated every second week and I ensured that each one focused on a different theme and utilised a different part of the lane. Sometimes objects would hang from the overhanging sheltering branches of an oak tree, other times they'd be dotted around on the ground. Previous works would be dismantled and the materials reused for new sculptures. At the time I wanted to surprise people who walked past and allow them to see the lane in a different light. I don't think it was so much attention seeking borne out of loneliness, as I kept the project completely anonymous, but was simply an opportunity for teenage self expression.

Over the years, I was joined by neighbours who generously contributed bits and pieces to the project. Louise installed some of her geometric paintings on triangle-shaped pieces of wood to the side of a wooden shed that overlooked the lane. Ros pasted up some little etchings of old trees under the canopy of the 100-year-old oak tree. Thinking back to it now, I feel like the project was also a way for me to find company and collaborate with artists and neighbours who I admired. At around the age of 18, I grew out of the project and never returned to it. Although I feel like this blog is an extension of that lane, and perhaps even the longing, that was seeded as a teenager. 

☞www.facebook.com/trianglelane

The Unhomely 

Atiéna R. Kilfa's exhibition 'The Unhomely', which I saw in February at the Camden Art Centre, left a lingering impression on me.  

As I approached the exhibition's main room, I recall feeling unsettled by an eerie drone-like noise. The emanating sound was like the hum of an overworked fan, intensified to make the viewer feel deeply unwelcome. Upon entering the room, the initial sight of electrical cords exposed behind a wall of LED screens, exacerbated the hostile welcome. Having previously been shown at KW in Berlin, I was interested in seeing how the installation would translate to the space at Camden. I was also interested in experiencing how the work would deal with both cinematic and perceptual space through the union of film and installation. Integrated around the LED wall is a wooden stage which elevates and delineates the viewer's movement through the work. Once placed on the stage, you feel compelled to walk across it towards the film on the screen at the other end. 

The film unfolds across one continuous shot in a stairwell where two figures dwell in an unnerving state of tension. It was the uncanny stillness of the man and woman and their avoidance of each other's presence which startled me at first. They appear stilted and somewhat mannequin-like, but then not entirely fake either, which makes their avoidance feel even more strange. Their body language, especially of the woman who rests in a gentle position on the steps, suggests absence and loss. I was given the sense that these two people had been rendered inarticulate by trauma, perhaps inflicted by the stairwell's memory of something horrific. It's unclear whether the memory is recent, or even whether the film itself is located in present time. There are only a few incidental details within the frame that hint at the past, such as the ornate detailing of the stairwell railing and the 1950s-like formal attire of the figures, while the occasional ring of an old landline phone is left ignored. The work seems to deal with overlapping states of time: the frozen state of the figures, the languid time that flows over the course of the film's continuous loop, and the viewer's time as they navigate the work.  

The controlled formal quality of Kilfa's film made me think of Chantal Akerman's work, particularly Jeanne Dielman. Both films force the viewer to feel the flow of time over a long take confined to one domestic space, while showing little details that express tension. In Akerman's film, the tension is fulfilled with a final act of violent revenge at the end of the film. It feels overtly fictive in contrast to the literalness of the domestic scenes which come to define the film. The violence in Kilfa's film never reaches a climax, it's continuous and ongoing: present.   

There was something that compelled me to navigate the work by moving across the stage in time with the camera's movement. It was as though I was the camera itself, attempting to make sense of the tense drama before me. With every step that I took, the loud creaks of the stage's recycled floorboards added further animation to the film's drama. I felt self conscious of drawing attention to my lonely presence within the installation. As a subsequence, I guess the presence of the creaks added another overlapping tension to the film's blurred distinctions between space and time. The 'unhomely' gallery environment made me feel complicit in the violence implied by the film.   

View from stage elevation

Shadows of late autumn

Simplicty 

For her recent Pompidou Centre retrospective, Joanna Hogg has made a new 10 minute film that captures her anxieties and artistic process. The film is shot in Los Angeles, where Hogg has temporarily based herself while devising a new feature film that she intends to be shot there. Hogg films views out of her hotel window during a storm, scans over pages of writing in her notebook, and films her feet as she walks down city streets. She talks about her deep attachment to place; the basis of all of her work, but she doesn't yet know what to point her camera at in this new city. L.A is obviously still revealing itself to her and she's got to find something she finds personal about the city. In her recent The Souvenir films she played with the idea of space as an object of the past by recreating her former flat as a model contained within an empty aircraft hanger. In the Pompidou film, she goes on to mention that hotel rooms easily become 'home' as she gets used to their sounds, smells and spatial qualities. Having recently travelled from city-to-city within Europe and 'set up shop' in different hotel rooms, I understand her attachment. I recall becoming weirdly acquainted with the musty aroma of my basement flat in London... to the point where I now miss it. It's a weird feeling to have to repeatedly sever ties with a 'home' after having had so many personal thoughts and experiences within it. As in her other work, reality and dreams begin to intertwine as Hogg recounts dreams that she's had while in L.A.  These dreams have mysterious links to her concerns regarding the new film and there's the realisation that they could indeed form the basis of the new film.  They're dreams that are now attached to her experience of a new city.  

I really liked this little work from Hogg because it demonstrates that you can make a good film with the simplest of means. All you need is a camera, a sensibility, and some thoughts. And you can make a film about process, rather than something finished and certain with a cling-film gloss around it. The film finishes with Super 8 footage taken from the Pompidou Centre's exterior escalators, possibly taken in the 80s.  We see the tubes and steel details of the Centre's facade: the container of Hogg's retrospective. 

·   

On a different genre, the other night I went to see the British vocal consort The Gesualdo Six perform a concert of Renaissance music as well as contemporary pieces that experimented with old techniques. The controlled polyphony and textures of their voices was so beautifully pure. They reached emotional heights that washed over me like a rich, golden light. It's amazing that the human voice, if highly trained, can reach such a powerful level of beauty and immersion. I found it interesting that you don't need an orchestra of ninety musicians to make an impact. The more stripped back, the better. 

Image I accidentally took while walking along with phone in hand

Winter birds 

As the year moves into the cooler months in Australia, I was reminded of an image of a dead bird that I took on a cold winter's day last year.  I stood below an apple tree and admired a flock of little yellow-winged birds flit between the tree's bare branches.  There was a bitter chill in the air and I recall feeling a sense of emptiness and loss as the birds were the only sign of life I had hitherto had contact with that day.  I then looked to my feet to find a lifeless bird that had been separated from its flock and succumbed to the harshness of winter.

I recently looked at Margaret Tait's 1974 16mm film Aerial and loved the airy way in which she captured the elements of a Scottish winter.  Images include grass blowing in the wind, soil being turned over, and blackbirds flying from a snowy tree branch to Tait's window.  There's a hushed-ness, a sense of looking out at the world from the cosy confines of a living room window, with a fire providing warmth in the background.  The winter meanwhile slogs along through the heavy cover of snow and mud.  Winter's harshness is felt most deeply in an image of a dead bird: one of the birds previously seen at the window.  Its been returned to the earth, its feathers blowing in the wind like blades of grass.  

The birds I came across on that winter's day... in both life and death:

 

 

Paris birds

In the cavernous basement of the hotel I stayed at in Paris recently, I sat facing three tapestries of birds intermingled with flowers and leaves while I had my breakfast.  The hotel was right next to Gare du Nord.  The sound of trains entering and passing through the station were constant.  I heard nothing else but the mechanical sounds of a working city: screeching breaks, whistles, vibrations from the Métro below were dominant.  While I scraped away at my boiled eggs, marmalade toast and sipped my espresso, I was surprised to hear birdsong.  Perhaps my deep concentration on the tapestries had brought the birds to life.  Or perhaps I was just longing to be away from the city, imagining the peace of the countryside.

The tapestries in question

Fraught communication 

The difficulties of language is something that I think about often.  I guess that it's at the forefront of a lot of the writing on here; a kind of self consciousness around feeling as though I'm not a particularly good writer.  Being a visual person, I don't find it easy to bring out what I want to say through words.  I might say one thing, but I really mean another.  I feel that I always miss a beat.  But one must try their best to communicate, because being silent will not get you anywhere in life.  Here's a few things that dance around the idea of communication: 

Physical communication

I was on the Victoria Line.  Two teenaged boys made quite a strong entrance into the carriage by aggressively throwing themselves down onto seats opposite each other.  One boy threw a newspaper at the other boy.  I didn't hear laughter.  I then watched as they communicated to each other through sign language.  There would be an occasional pause as one boy would try to find the right word, while the other waited intently.  At one point, one of them picked up the newspaper, crossed his leg, and pretended to mimic the old English gentleman sitting next to him.  

Semi-extinct languages

Just yesterday, while spending an afternoon in my dear friend Valerie's pottery studio, a woman on holiday from Germany came in to look around.  We got talking about Europe, particularly the difficulties of sharing borders with multiple countries with different political crises and agendas.  She later mentioned that she had just been conducting 'field work' research in Papua New Guinea.  This involved documenting how semi-extinct languages, such as 'Qaqet' (only spoken by 15,000 people) is transmitted.  I found this really interesting, not only because I ashamedly lack awareness of Papua New Guinean culture and history, but because I was struck by the fact that a non-written language can become extinct.  However I was aware that prior to colonisation in Australia, there were over 250 Indigenous languages specific to different clans.  Only 40 of these languages are still spoken today due to the ongoing decimation of Indigenous culture as a result of policies made by settlers.  I read this article from The Conversation that briefly addresses the difficult link between Indigenous language and culture: "we have our culture, a strong culture- but without language, how are you supposed to keep it going?"

A Portrait of Cate Blanchett

I keep returning to a film work by David Rosetzky that I saw in an Australian portraiture exhibition last year.  A Portrait of Cate Blanchett focuses on the actor as she moves through a barren workshop used for the construction of theatre sets at the Sydney Theatre Company.  The setting nicely complements the film's exploration of artistic process and the creation of fiction.  The film begins with a close-up of Blanchett's hands; one hand moulding the other into different gestures.  Although the hands are performing this action, rather than Robert Bresson's imagery of innocent hands devoid of acting, the image from Portrait instantly brought to mind this great Bresson quote: "how many useless and encumbered words disappear when things are expressed with the hand, the head, the shoulders!"  The camera then moves backwards to gradually reveal either in-focus or blurry vision of Blanchett as the digital camera lens is changed.  Blanchett's voiceover begins by exploring the inconsistencies of identity: what is seen and unseen.  She finishes with a comment on interpretation: "I realised that exactly what I thought I was communicating would be received by someone in a completely different way- you can't control it.  You have to give interpretation over."  

In Todd Field's 2022 film TÁR, Blanchett plays a narcissistic conductor, Lydia Tár, who purposefully speaks in a way that eludes clear interpretation.  When discussing music with her orchestra or with peers, she uses ambiguous allegories to describe what she's trying to achieve.  I believe that the character performs in this way in order to alienate and gain the upper hand over people; one of many examples of her narcissistic personality and constant vie for power.  There's a revealing moment in the film's second half where she cries alone while watching her inspiration, Leonard Bernstein talk about music's emotional affects.  It's as though Tár is lamenting the fact that she's spent so much of her life performing a contrived version of herself and never been able to speak directly with an audience.  Bernstein gets to the core of what music achieves without over embellishing his point.  I liked what Bernstein said, so I'll take note of it: "music is the way it makes you feel when you hear it... you don't need to know a lot of stuff about sharps and chords to understand it.  Some of those feelings are so special, so deep that you can't even describe them in words.  We can't always name the things we feel."

A still from A Portrait of Cate Blanchett

Transcontinental encounters with Morandi

I kept seeing Morandi paintings within big museum collections and house museums across Europe.  At the beginning of the trip I saw his work in an exhibition in London, mentioned in a previous post.  His work then seemed to follow me from city to city, even appearing as props in films I watched.  Needless to say that I became quite acquainted with his airy, dreamy bottles. 

The images below are highlights from Centre Pompidou, Ca'Pesaro in Venice and Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan.  Villa Necchi was used in Luca Guadagnino's 2009 film Io sono l'amore (I am Love).  In that film, it was the residence of a modern day haute-bourgeois Milanese family, used to reflect their modern and cultured taste and accentuate their attachment to objects.  After visiting the Villa, I rewatched the film in my hotel room and took note of a scene where a Morandi still life is passed on within the family as an engagement gift. 

In a library I came across a book from a 2016 exhibition by Edmund de Waal of ceramics set within intricate display interventions that draw on the lightness of Morandi's atmosphere.  Exquisite. 

And then back in Melbourne, I saw Elio Petri's 1961 film L'assassino (The Assassin) at the Cinémathéque and noticed a Morandi in the background of a scene.  I smiled to myself as it felt like an old companion had appeared on the giant screen in front of me... a reminder of all those discoveries and emotions felt while away. 

Estorick Collection, London 

Ca'Pesaro, Venice

Villa Necchi Campiglio, Milan

A page from that Edmund de Waal book

Io sono l'amore

L'assassino

The ascent 

In Melbourne I sometimes shut my eyes and see Waterloo Bridge in London.  I see buses whizz past in a flash of red.  My vision rapidly flies over from the windows of Somerset House, through the sky and across the skyscrapers of the financial district, to the textured concrete of the National Film Theatre.  I hear people laugh, bike bells and footsteps.  Students lean against the side of the bridge and throw their cigarettes into the Thames.  I feel the fresh Thames breeze blow my hair around my face.  

A young man with a backpack slung over his shoulder and with a feather sticking out from his hat walks across the frame.  He looks determined.  This is the first bridge that he crossed on his first entrance into central London.

Music 

London Tindersticks
Paris Nina Simone

Milano Only Lovers Left Alive Soundtrack (Sqürl and Josef Van Wissem)

Venice Monteverdi

Bologna Blood Orange

Florence & Turin Sade 

These are the musicians that accompanied the many hours spent alone in various near-empty hotel rooms and on otherwise mundane walks to the grocer in each city.  Random things led me towards these artists.  For example I saw a commercial for a film in black and white on the French Arte television channel that had a Nina Simone song playing in the background.  Allured by the warmth of her piano, I listened specifically to the Nina Simone Sings the Blues album as I passed through a chilly Paris.  While in Florence, I heard a muffled version of Sade's 'Like a Tattoo' coming from behind the closed doors of a house.  I stopped for a minute and recorded the hazy sound on my phone, and then kept listening to the recording for the rest of my time in the city.  

Venice was definitely the most pleasurable city in terms of audio.  The absence of cars and traffic increased the audibility of the sound of water dripping from pipes into canals, church bells echoing down tight passages, live jazz coming from bars, and footsteps heard from around corners.  Every sound was blended into a highly pleasurable auditory collage.  One afternoon, just around the corner from San Marco, I heard a recording of Vivaldi playing out into the piazza from an old church.  Upon further inspection I discovered that the church was actually a museum dedicated to Vivaldi's work.  I went inside, and wasn't necessarily enamoured by the modest collection of instruments on display, but did discover that a Baroque composer I love, Baldassare Galuppi, is buried there.  Music history was everywhere in Venice.  At the basilica of San Marco, I was struck by the thought that Claudio Monteverdi was once the master of the chapel choir there.  From 1613 until his death in 1647, the basilica was where the last of his liturgical music was composed.  On my last morning in Venice I traipsed through the basilica with other tourists, pulling myself up its steep stairwells and gazing up at its glistening gold domed ceiling.  The extent to which the atmosphere and acoustics of the church formed this music became apparent upon entering.  Last year, in Melbourne, I saw Pinchgut Opera perform Monteverdi concertinos from his time at San Marco.  The music was so incredibly nuanced, filled with so much emotion that effortlessly touched my soul.  The voices were texturally rich and beautiful, as is the basilica itself.    

At Fondazione Querini Stampalia, a housemuseum that contains a pretty big collection of Baroque paintings, there's a walled garden designed by architect Carlo Scarpa.  The main component of Scarpa's design is a fountain that runs the length of a lawn.  Water runs down from a larger square pond into a slimmer pond and then empties through intricate steel spouts into gold leaf embellished dishes.  Scarpa's design holds deep reverence for the sound of running water.  In this garden, every other sound in the city stops.  All you hear is water as it trickles and falls from level-to-level.  It seemed to be the pinnacle of everything I had heard in Venice, as though all noise had been distilled down to focus on the most relevant and important sound to the experience of the city.  It was an exquisite and highly meditative experience.

A still from a video I took in Venice while returning to my 
hotel after dinner.  Pretty sure I was listening to
Leonard Cohen at the time

A fellow traveller

On the train between Turin and Paris, I was seated opposite a German Shepherd.  The service dog had a window seat and looked out to a view of the snow capped French Alps.  When we'd pass through pitch black tunnels, he would stare at his reflection with an expression that looked like he was contemplating his own consciousness- like a human might.  The most confronting thing was when our gaze would meet.  I'd quickly look away out of embarrassment, but the dog would continue to look at me.  I felt awkward and judged by the seriousness of his stare.

As well as his human-like expressions, the dog was distinguished by a very long tongue that almost touched the table that was situated between us.  Over the course of the journey, the table became covered in drool from his consistent panting.  I, too, received the occasional flick of dog drool on my water-proof coat.  Everyone around me ignored his presence.  He was accepted and treated like a human passenger.  It made me think about how we live our lives alongside other animals with different modes of sentience and communication.

I looked out the window to a view of Grenoble while I listened to a Sade album through my headphones.  There was something exceptionally stunning about the combination of the snowy view with the elegance of Sade's voice, and yes, with the company of my fellow canine traveller too. 

(Multiflash) of a dog's tail wagging, 
Harold Edgerton, 1939

White-to-orange 

Yesterday I arrived in Milano by train from Paris via Zurich.  The view out the window from Eastern France, through Switzerland, was covered in an impenetrable white.  Snow covered fields, alps, and pitched-roof chalets dominated all of what I could see out the window.  Once the border was eventually crossed into Northern Italy, my eyes had to readjust to bright shades of orange and red.  Ochre-coloured houses lined the railway and shone against the beautiful blue of Lake Como.  In urban Sesto San Giovanni, red and white striped window awnings and sheets became a ubiquitous sight. 

Floating in London

It's my first time back in London since the pandemic.  When I left in the middle of 2020, during a lockdown, I felt the weight of the world's uncertainty and collective anxiety.  This time, it feels like the world is ostensibly on the other side of the pandemic (or has turned a blind eye).  Things have changed since I was last here; I've grown older, etc etc.  There's also more hope and greater excitement for the life that lies ahead.   I've been walking the streets in a dream-like state (almost floating down them).  After all these years of dreaming of returning, it doesn't quite feel real.  

I saw an exhibition of Giorgio Morandi paintings at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.  Floating vessels. 

I walked along the River Lea one morning and became intrigued by the people who live in the barges that float against the riverside.  I followed one man as he and his dog moved their barge from one part of the river to another.  I guess that these are people who are constantly floating, constantly shifting location. 

While I've been walking, I've been listening to this Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds song on repeat: Night Raid from their 2019 album Ghosteen.  Although it's an entirely different genre, the song (and album) may even be as good as Cave's early timeless work.  I love Warren Ellis' electronic bell sound and Cave's intense, solemn lyrics: 'your head in a pool of your own streaming hair, Jesus lying in his mother's arms...'  The song makes me float in a reflective revery.   In a recent interview Cave said that the song 'attempts to present the idea that the everyday human gesture is always a heartbeat away from the miraculous; that ultimately we make things happen through our actions, way beyond our understanding or intention.'  

A new year 

Following more criss-crossed lines of story and thought.

...and the world flew off its axis

Last week I saw a colourful suite of paintings by Elizabeth Newman at Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney in an exhibition titled ...and the world flew off its axis.  The show consisted of larger sized paintings on linen that emanated atmospheric shades of pale pinks and blues, and smaller works on cardboard boxes that required intimate inspection.  Patches of hastily applied colour and shape were untethered to any kind of compositional axis; were left afloat in their painterly improvisation.  I guess the same could be said for Newman's ideas: they were incredibly subtle and it took some time for me to warm to the complex and enigmatic quality of her work.  

The numerous text-based paintings in the show didn't necessarily steer me towards understanding Newman's references either, but instead contributed to a sense of lyricism.  These texts gently hinted at the demise of the 'age of humanity', with one ocean green coloured watercolour reading 'a dozen dead oceans.'  Further googling on the train back to Central Station revealed that this is a line from a Bob Dylan song that was inspired by a feeling of hopelessness in the midst of tragic world events.  The 'dead oceans' text was shown next to another painting that included two slivered geodes stuck to a linen canvas.  The geodes floated on top of an amorphously shaped area of foreboding dark grey as though they were the precious remains of a collapsed world.  A painter's palette is used as a found object in a similar vein in another painting with a fog-like patch of white paint stretching outwards from behind it.  Perhaps when the world flies off its axis all there is left is a painterly haze and evidence of artistic process.

It gradually became apparent to me that the intimacy of Newman's paintings can be felt by tuning into their subtle details.  Certain marks and movements with paint and colour suggest some of her thinking; where you can tell that she's put the brush down at one point and then recommenced painting again later, or perhaps where she's given up on an idea altogether and left it unfinished and exposed.  I spent time focusing on areas of her canvases that were untouched, or edges that were painted in an entirely different colour to the rest of the scheme.  After seeing the exhibition I was left thinking about the emotional affects of colour and texture.  Looking over photos I've taken this year, I've been really attracted to particular colours: warmer shades of red, orange, yellow and pink.  Perhaps my attraction to these colours correlates with the various states of desire, hope and introspection that I've experienced this year.  I might attach these colourful images to a separate blog post.  

Travel plans

I'm planning a trip to Europe over January: London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, etc.  Everyone keeps telling me that the cities will be very quiet, that the intense cold leaves a pervading stillness over Europe during the winter.  I don't mind participating in this seasonal quietness as I want to get a sense of a modern working city, not one that's on holiday.  As clichéd as it sounds, I want to be a part of the cities' mechanics: to blend in with locals, and feel as though I've always been there. 

While looking for books related to a uni assignment, I came across a library book of photographs by Eugéne Atget from the early 1900s.  The images capture desolate Paris streets, with a focus on architectural details such as staircases, doorways, and cobbled laneways.  The absence of people is palpable.  They occasionally appear as dim reflections in shopfront windows or as blurred ghostly movement.  Hints of life: brooms, carts, and street markets lie stationary and unused.  With their recurring linear perspective, I was compelled to look into the distance for a possible sense of presence within his frames- often to no avail.  A further sense of loss and absence can be felt through Atget’s sole focus on Paris’ pre-revolution architecture in the context of the city’s then rapid modernisation.  The photographs are a sentimental document of the exhausted and diminishing spaces of the “old Paris”.  In my dreaming and planning of this trip, Atget's images have become references of particular arrondissements.  Perhaps when I'm walking through a changed Paris in a few months, I'll recall these ghostly images in my mind.  

        

Two of my favourite images by Atget.  I can imagine walking the lengths of these paths.  They remind me of stills from a Béla Tarr film.