Postcards from WamboiN 10.4.20

Deepening Crisis

The Crossing

Installation on The Arena

Star Bench 1987

PostcarDs from wamboin

Alluvial Change

The Interior and Flower

The Sea

The Interior

Self Portrait

Inside outside

Sometimes an image appears which is full enough to not require words to be added.

Wamboin April 2020

The new wOrld, for now.

New frontiers bring new sights and sounds, new silences and new absence. This photo shows Covid’s nemesis, repairing for the next conflict. This image is not a microorganism but a washing machine at the end of a washing cycle. There is no setting for latex gloves. The manufacturers of the washing machine lacked the foresight.

Recycling latex gloves

Making an idea

Thinking

Everybody’s thinking thinking. 

It’s the final frontier before panic locks in to make thinking, finally redundant. 

The racks may be empty at the supermarkets, but the information dealing with Covid is stacked to the ceiling. You can fill the trolley with it, no limits. 

The frontier between thinking and panic is rich. It is almost the most fertile place from which to draw to produce the best yields. 

We shouldn’t be grateful to find ourselves here, but we will take advantage as an option when pain and confusion are the other options available. 

Covid’s scope is big enough also to stifle creativity, just as the big moments in history removed the voices of those who lived through them. 

Is Covid too big to synthesise? 

We are now imagining, a longer lasting depression than the last, populations devastated, previous world wars as hiccups. 

We are only at the beginning, when we still imagined we had a voice. These are the good old days maybe. 

It’s, it’s. 

Day whatever. 

BC. AD. AC

Exhibition Notes

Mitch Cairns

Exhibition Notes Mitch Cairns at The Commercial March 2020

Tallies

If you can’t have the Olympics the next best thing Is Covid 19. It works in reverse though so the higher score you get, the worse you do. No score at all means you win. So, for dying you score a gold medal. New cases is worth silver. Infection is bronze. Strangely, Australia will probably achieve a similar position in this tally as in the Olympics, coming in behind the usual suspects, US, China, Europe.

Surprising improvers (?), so far are Japan and South Korea, with China after starting badly, making better progress downwards.

Naturally, you can’t make light of calamity. The British, whose sense of humour was improved by the setbacks of The Second World War were not able to build on that with subsequent disasters and their humour has been in steep decline.

Humour may be employed as a coping mechanism sometimes, but with Covid 19, there are no such escape hatches. You have to be deadly serious to survive. Day dreaming, joking is off the menu.

It must be in the National Psyche or perhaps it is just in the personal one that tallies hold the eye. The Olympic tallies are one. We love tables. Footie tables. Who is in the top eight. Who will take the wooden spoon.

I noticed today a second consecutive day is lower new cases for NSW and felt a sense of pride and triumph and hope for greater achievement.

Snakes and ladders upside down.

Watch this space. Have we ever watched a space so much?

This space takes the cake.

Mitch Cairns

Mitch Cairns

Waylaid S T O O P

The Commercial

11th March - 9th April, 2020

We have come to expect back lighting to draw the eye, whether it be I-phone, laptop, or screen of any dimension. We cannot now imagine power which is not powered and yet,

Mitch Cairns’ pictures glow. They radiate with light and life, and there is no cord in site.

How so?

Twentieth century art leapt out of the blocks, propelled from what came before it and what came with it. Picasso and Braque articulated a new way of seeing and representing the world.

That work was brought to a halt by the first world war, and the world has been shrinking from Cubism’s propositions ever since. The Cubist manifesto has been reduced to a ‘Cubist style’, in order to diminish its promise.

Despite some minor mid-twentieth century efforts to re-invigorate a cubist way of seeing, we have collectively backed away from its scope. It was too challenging and there was no way it could be appropriated for other purposes. We couldn’t find a way forward and so the world reverted to earlier ways of seeing.

Cubism, through this writer’s understanding, allows the artist to make a picture employing different views. The pictures can draw from one angle of a subject, or from many. They can draw from the lessons of history. They can employ ways of seeing induced by the sight and sound of machinery. They can take from African and New Guinea art and from Eastern and Aboriginal art. They can mine Freud.

From the explosion that was brought about by the birth of the twentieth century, Cubism provided the synthesis of the broken parts.

Cubism was a postcard from 1907 and, despite the pace of change since, mail is slow.

The new Cairns work, (just as earlier work does), provides the next chapter in ‘Cubism Revised’. Cubism employs an analytical approach, but a genuine synthesis can only be brokered intuitively.

Cairns here, strikes gold,

Hence the glow.

Frile

I would like to nominate a new word for the English language.

The word is ‘Frile’.

‘The Frile’ combines the frown and the smile. These two facial expressions are more commonly deployed separately. They signal opposite each other.

The frile makes those separate entities one.

The message delivered by friling is complex. In friling, one is amused but conditionally, warily. It may convey a certain anxiety or uncertainty as if trust may be at any moment suspended. The friler is not so easily persuaded as others might be. The frown is normally employed to distance oneself from a situation whereas the smile draws one in.

The friler may find themselves in no-mans-land caught between near and far.

Should the reader attempt a frile, they will notice more facial muscles are used than other expressions. It is quite tiring to maintain a frile. It is facially exhausting.

In friling, one quite quickly recalls previous friles and frilers. They might be relatives, friends or media personalities.

The English language is alive and can integrate new words where there is a demand for one. The way in which new words are introduced is not formalised. In this instance it is introduced here in my blog for possible inclusion. *

Please see ‘Frilie’, below.

Frilie

* On advice, I subsequently have checked and find that Frile is already listed in The Urban Dictionary and means, “A neutral expression. A facial expression that is somewhere between a frown and a smile.”

Screen Grab

Mostly, one is limited by what one finds, or what one has.

Refreshing therefore to find it up, when off, when the skylight is reflected on the screen as a movie already,

Except, only thing moving is time. There’s no immediate change to necessitate a movie. This lasts as long as daylight,

And as long as no-one uses the laptop.

It’s a screen saver.

Hop Irish

‘Hop Irish’ Paper napkin 20 cm x 20 cm

I’d like to play Hop Irish. I’ve not seen it played before.

I suppose it would be written in chalk, like the Scotch version. Each square would be foot-sized. The playing ring would need to be two metres in diameter.

If one can generalise about the Irish, which you can’t, but if you could, the task of the game would be to become confounded by it.

Numbering and layout suggests the player hops backwards. The starting point also, by being in the middle, is inaccessible.

The player’s skills therefore would lie not in the throwing of the marker as in the Scottish version, nor in the athleticism in the hopping, but in the general scrutiny and pondering.

The configuration is like a wishing well which encourages a ring of players who are able to collaborate in a communal wishing/wonder.

The game makes no division between winning and losing.

Writing in Reverse

Being left-handed sets one apart, with all the other left-handers. Yes. We did come to terms with that and found another strength. We are not complaining.

Writing in reverse is reclaiming a space on the one hand (sic). Also it is finding the ease in writing, as a left-hander, even though by now everyone has stopped writing long-hand. The benefit is in the greater ease in writing, without turning oneself inside out or smudging. *

What are the other benefits? When you can’t easily read what is written, revision is arduous. One cannot easily read back to confirm or clarify what’s been proposed. In order to inhibit the urge to reflect, revise, edit, making the text illegible allows you to keep going, to move forward, without fear. There will be plenty of time to evaluate down the track.

Writing in reverse is the equivalent to a one-take film sequence. Once committed, there is no turning back.

The appetite to write in reverse is enhanced by the calligrapher’s flourish, when the flow of the ink brings its own energies. Once committed to the flow, there is the joy of the ride and also, new subject matter, previously unavailable through other means.**

Please find samples below.

*By the sixties we had abandoned the inherent messiness of ink and had turned to the slipprier biro. (Thanks a lot, Bic).

** We had imagined the typewriter would replace writing with a pen. Then the word processor replaced the type writer. The phone then questioned the greater capacity to reflect, while seated.

Writing in Reverse Renders Revision Redundant. (A4)

Lying Down (A4)

Peeled (A4)

Alan's Eightieth

Alan 80 Party Speech

Sunday, 12th January, 2020

The Royal Oak, Balmain

I will never be eighty.

Nobody will ever be eighty

How could you presume to survive that long?

We are very fortunate today

And grateful to Alan

For going to where so few have gone before him,

So that he might light the way

And should some of us be so fortunate to follow in a similar direction,

We will know where and how to go,

And how to get there.

Should he be as fortunate and as full of guile as he has been to now,

This 80,

May prove to be another nuisance middle,

And provide no imminent conclusion of a life.

If 80 does prove to be another middle,

That should not diminish the achievement of having lived so many years.

We have found the pleasure and the romance of looking back today.

Can we find the same pleasure casting our eyes ahead?

We have not yet come to terms with the fires

We are struggling to understand what politics has become

We cannot understand the distribution of wealth without glancing in the mirror.

Climate science has us by the throat.

The future rises like an unsurmountable mountain

And only makes the past more alluring.

Celebrating the past has never been so sweet.

I only mention this because it would be remiss

To turn a blind eye for 80’s sake.

We have been waiting for a wake-up call

Lest We Forget

Bring on the Revolution!

Happy Birthday Alan.