Entries Tagged 'CONTRIBUTORS' ↓

…is not even a question for Cubans! In that other universe, for the last fifty years, the stock of pre-revolutionary gas guzzlers was (almost) all Cuba had as private transport. If they could afford the petrol. Just keeping them going and refurbished is their automotive industry.

Iconophilia thanks Jan Luedert for these recent photographs of a 1953 Buick being reconstructed in downtown Havana. Jan writes: “the pictures where taken near Trinidad the UN World Heritage City. The shop was set up by two Cubans as a private enterprise. The interesting thing about these vehicles is the way that it represents “true sustainability” as these cars are rebuilt, recycled and always find their way back to the road. What they also do at the shop is install a more modern diesel engine so the while the chassis is old style 50s the engines are usually new and often diesel. It is incredible to watch how without a fair degree of ingenuity and with how few resources a car that would rust away in our world finds its way back to the road. Cars are mostly communal in Cuba and one hardly ever finds a car with less than five people in them.”

More paint than metal, methinks. For more background, read this piece by Tom Miller from the NYT.

But who among you doesn’t feel just a little bit guilty that we in the outside world take such perverse pleasure in observing the fact that Fidel’s Revolution has subjected his country to this technological time-warp? How pictureque is it (still) that Cuban citizens are forced to live out the historical antipathy to the U.S.A. by driving around in these decaying icons of the excesses of the decade of the 1950s? Contradictions abound in such circumstances. For example, what are we to make of this 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood snapped by The Iconophile in the back streets of Tehran in 2007? If it looks somewhat abandoned, consider (a) how difficult it would be to get spare parts these days, and (b) how much more politically incorrect it would be on the streets of Tehran than Havana?

Trees in fiberglass Fiat-shaped planters? Only in Milan. Thanks to Neil and Karina for the lead…

(thanks to Bill and Amanda’s capacity to navigate between dross and gloss)

Iconophilia was excited to receive this contribution from anthropologist Lindsey Langford, (Central Desert Native Title Services), via a mutual friend Bill Kruse. Lindsey’s account of his encounter with this spectacular drawing makes enticing reading. But then again not many of us are likely to make it all the way down the Gunbarrel Highway…

“Wongawol Station station is located close to the Western edge of Lake Carnegie [north east of Wiluna]. The area is known as Pukutu country by the Martu [-speaking] people who are the traditional owners and custodians for the area.  These photos were taken during a Return to Country trip with Martu elders from Wiluna and Jigalong [once a Mission, now a community] who related their stories of  working on cattle stations as young men and women.

The photos are from the inside of the old station quarters where several Martu station-hands had spent their nights while mustering at Wongawol from the early to middle part of last century. Pictured here is Mr Frank Wongawol who grew up and worked on Pukutu/Wongawol. By the late 1970’s most of the Aboriginal stockmen in the area  had moved into Wiluna and mustering was no longer performed on horseback but with motorbikes and 4WD’s.

Watabu Handley’s art was pointed out by some of the elders in attendance who remembered him as a good stockman with whom they had worked  with on Wongawol and other stations residing on their homelands.

[One of the visitors on this occasion was Mr.] Friday Jones [whose] name [was] inscribed there [and dated] 1972. Friday was born on Carnegie station, which is just east of Wongawol, and worked as a stockman all through the area. What makes the autograph special is that Friday was with us on this trip and stood squinting  up at his name and picturing his younger self in that act.”

A friend of Iconophilia has contributed this recent photograph of exploration scars on the Hammersley Tablelands in the Pilbara… This man-made formation – created by bulldozed access roads connecting drill pads – pays careless disregard for significant sites nearby. Our sense of shock at the desecration of the austere beauty of this tract of country  is not just a question of aesthetic sensitivity. Appreciation of the natural beauty of the land as landscape and its origins in the sublime are deeply embedded in many cultures. In this case, however, it appears as a perverse parody inversion of the coded iconography of  contemporary Aboriginal landscape art. Arguably one of the oldest forms of landscape art. Insult to injury.

…has emerged as the theme of the week. See more of this slinky holiday house in a forest in Japan by Kotaro Ide in the article on designboom. Go to the Kotaro Ide ARTechnic site for some real mouse sex. Yet the sadsack sceptic inside The Iconophile thinks: desire objects sure, but maybe we over-fetishize the playpens of the super-rich? PS make sure you can’t find your credit card when you go to <shop> in designboom…

But then, if your forest is only one tree, you can still wrap both your shop and your house around it. Yesterday Kevin Miller returned from Japan with this charming vernacular analogue he found in downtown Harajuku, Tokyo (near Yoyogi Park)!

Or if you want to see some really quirky Japanese architecture: see Terunobu Fujimore’s teahouse-in-a-tree and other houses…

Who says you need a frame to define the sublime? This from Howard Morphy, discovering a Courbet on King Island, and this from Max Allen in Toronto.

Anish Kapoor: Memory, 2008

Cor-ten steel, 14.5 x 8.97 x 4.48m  Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim
Installation view: Anish Kapoor: Memory, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, November 30, 2008–February 1, 2009 Photo: Mathias Schormann
© The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Now see it from the other side on Transit Lane. Or, thinking form and space…

here’s Sputnik 1, (at the UN Building in New York, photograph contributed by Jan Luedert).

Plus listening to the land… Iconophilia reminds Canberra readers you have just this Saturday to catch Jan Hogan’s exhibition Becoming at the ANU School of Art Gallery – open from 12.00 to 5.00. This is an exhibition of prints and drawings which are the culmination of the artist’s various modes of engagement with and imprints from the land of Gundaroo Common made during her candidature as a PhD student at the School. The work above is Becoming, 2009 (woodblock matrix on floor, Japanese woodblock with Sumi ink and builder’s pigment on Kozo paper affixed to wall with rice glue, 448 x 732cm).

Jan has written about her approach to representing the land in Art Monthly Australia (June 2009): “My aim is not to draw a landscape but to find a new way of drawing the land.  I think of it as an open dialogue with materials, thoughts, the elements and the process of drawing all contributing.  The land and I need to come to some sort of understanding.  I want to feel my way in using all my senses rather than looking at the land using my perception and analytical skills.  Is it possible to convey the smell, the wind playing with the hair on my arms, the shifting shadows and the weight of the land in a drawing?

The work above is from the Emergence series, 2006-9, (Sumi ink, charcoal and Gundaroo dirt on Rives BFK, 80 x 80cm). “I lay the paper on the ground in the shadows of a large Yellow Box Tree.  The damp paper moulds itself to the indentations left by cows wallowing in the shade.  The roots of the tree make their presence felt under the paper and the shadows of the branches make extraordinary patterns on the surface.  The white paper no longer stares back awaiting a mark.  Instead it acts like a mark in the land.  My foreign piece of paper has gone and made the first step in the dialogue.  It reveals the traces of other presences and the encompassing nature of the tree…

“The paper retains traces of the land, the tree, the cattle, and the events of the day but what about human traces?  This is meant to be a dialogue after all, with as much input from the all elements as possible.  I start to put fingerprints on the paper.  I rub my finger on some compressed charcoal and then press on to the paper, accentuating the dark areas.  Gradually the fingerprints build to a multitude, acting like great crowds of people drifting across the land.  The ghostly quality of the prints as they shift in tone suggests that this is a reflection over time.  The drawing has made the past present in the now.  Generations of people have come and gone and left traces on the land.

“Something has begun to happen in the drawing, I am becoming aware that this piece of land has been traversed for centuries and continues to provide sustenance for both the community of people and the wider community of the environment.  The fingerprints amongst the dirt are poignant reminders of our eventual decline back into the earth.  What traces will be left of us?”

STOP PRESS

For Saturday only (12.00 to 5.00), Jim Cotter, the renowned Composition lecturer at the ANU School of Music, will present the sound work “Piece for Merry-go-round” (1976), at the ANU School of Art Gallery, in conjunction with Jan Hogan’s exhibition.

The piece was written for the merry-go-round in Civic to obtain a moving audience for a 4 track work. The work eventually became “The Weird Night Music” for The Man from Mukinupin after Dorothy Hewitt “fell in love with the piece”.

Coincidentally much of the original construction of the work (on paper) was undertaken in Gundaroo. The final realisation of the score was made with the first digital synthesiser in the world – the “Quasar” which was an Australian invention of the engineer Tony Furse and at the time was on loan to Jim Cotter as part of an Australia Council Grant.

Jim says he was “so impressed by the exhibition that I congratulated Jan and mentioned toungue-in-cheek that the only thing that could have improved the showing would have been some music by me! Then Nigel called me to account in an email last night – so here we are…”

Thanks to Lee Grant for the photographs…