Entries Tagged 'NEWS' ↓

Read the backstory on the ABC The Drum. Then read Lindsay Murdoch in The Age on Saturday, then Bob Gosford: “Yesterday Geoff Scott, CEO of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council made a gift to the Alyawarr people that was both symbolic and ironic and will ring a loud and clear rallying call to the Alyawarr people who just a few months ago walked off the literal cess-pit that the Ampilitawatja township had become after years of neglect from all levels of Government.

Geoff Scott gave the Alyawarr people a bright and shiny brass bell inscribed with the following message:

This Declaration Bell is presented to the Elders and families of the Alyawarra Nation by the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council on February 14, 2010 in recognition of their principled walk-off and continuing fight to uphold their land rights, culture and heritage. May it ring for justice and change.

Banjo Morton and Frank Holmes with the Alyawarr Declaration Bell

What the? Iconophilia wonders what set of smarts idiots thought that Fascist Realism would be the right style to stir up the annual jingoism around the Australia Day holiday? Yes, multiculturalism has slipped out of political fashion, but what other-than-Ayran ethnicities (with the exception of the designer boy-girl with olive complexion and well-plucked eyebrows) might feel included in this “celebration”? Indigenous? Indian? Anyone? Who is the Government Minister responsible for the creative genius on the Australia Day Committee who thought is was a good idea? At least some lowly layout designer at The Oz got it right: Think Again… And maybe patriotic Indigenous Australians like Maria (below “XOZX”) have another apology coming?

PS. We haven’t seen it since – perhaps its been pulled? Nothing on the official site… Or does this Australia Day advertisement mean Sam Kekovich has gone mainstream? Only The Punch seems to have noticed…

PPS. Ad agency CEO Russel Howcroft (George Patterson Y&R) takes the credit for it. See the comments below…

PPPS. Yesterday the blog for ad enthusiasts The Inspiration Room posted a story claiming it’s just great, and have reproduced better images, if you’re interested, and name all those who actually did the work: executive creative director Ben Coulson, copywriter Annie Egan, art director Ryan Fitzgerald, illustrator Mark Thomas and retoucher Hung Nguyen. Makes you wonder…

On Wednesday night the Canberra audience for the premiere of the movie Julie & Julia were transfixed by the appearance of a rare three dimensional self portrait attributed to the great Russian/German modernist Alexej von Jawlensky. No sooner discovered than lost again to the mysteries of art history, alas… See for yourself.

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As the story unfolds, so the plot thickens. As it should in any melodrama.

The “real story” of Petrov’s accident on the Cooma road at dawn on Christmas Eve, 1953, is a truly unlikely tale according to the myriad of sources now available to your iconophiliac. The police records, ASIO records, the numerous subsequent publications, plus the memories of local residents, are the very stuff of myth. All we need is an icon!

On 23rd April 1954 the Canberra Times rewrote the events of Christamas Eve as a “murder attempt” – probably the source of the mythology that persists in the public memory to this day. And published a photograph of the wreck the next day. Apart from the fact that it was the Christmas holidays, and that most of the police and ASIO officials were on leave when the accident occurred, the “official” accounts of what actually caused the accident, and what happened to Petrov subsequently, are as various as they are entertaining.

Frank Cain, in his ASIO: An Unofficial History (1994) gives a rollicking account of Petrov as a rather incompetent Walter Mittyesque figure, who was lured into in whisky smuggling and bawdy incidents in Kings Cross by ASIO counter-agents. On the story of the accident, Cain relates that Petrov was driving south “on a secret assignation” with a Madame Ollier, of the French Embassy. A colourful figure herself. In this version of events, after the crash, battered and bruised, he left the car, Petrov hitched a lift to Cooma, and then caught the train back to Canberra. No evidence of the truck which is said to have run him off the road was ever found.

On the evidence of the Royal Commission which followed his defection, Cain concludes that he was unlikely to have been a spy-master of any kind. The Royal Commission on Espionage, it is widely recognised, was as influential in Menzies’ re-election and Evatt’s political downfall as the visit of Her Royal Majesty in February and March 1954. Realpolitics in action. To set the scene (a Royal theme), here is Royalla today…

Senior Constable W.J. Osborne’s report relates that Petrov had “collided with a red vehicle” (surely that’s a giveaway: what other colour truck would the MVD drive?), and that he then “returned to Canberra on a train from Royalla”.

Mysteriously the accident is reported by ASIO as being “approximately 2 miles past the Royala (sic) siding” whereas local accounts place the event about half a kilometer to the north.

The secretive map of the incident site bears no relation to the topography of the area or to the actual path of the roadway, which ran parallel to the railway line for miles in either direction. No railway is shown on the map.

Other Police reports (recorded on the 4th January) describe Petrov as “a great hunter” who was traveling south to Cooma on a fishing expedition.

These different accounts from the Police and ASIO variously report him having returned home on the first train north (from Royalla Siding), while others relate how he hitched a lift to Cooma for his rendez-vous with Madame Ollier, keeping his return rail ticket as evidence when he subsequently defected. Others relate that he was in such a shaken state as to be unavailable for subsequent interview, as evidenced by the extensive bruising to the diplomatic buttocks. One wonders what else the MVD did to him when he returned home to the embassy sans Skoda.

In The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (1987) Robert Manne wrote that Petrov knew he had been lucky to escape with his life. “He claimed he had been forced off the road by a truck, and not unnaturally given his present state of mind, wondered whether his Soviet colleagues were behind some attempt on his life. Inside the Soviet embassy he received little sympathy. Petrov had never renewed the insurance policy on the Skoda. Generalov demanded he pay for a replacement with his own money. When he eventually emerged from the Soviet embassy to speak to the Canberra police about the accident, he misled them on a number of points, at least partly because he wished to conceal from the the purpose of his trip to Cooma – a conspiratorial rendezvous with Madame Ollier of the French embassy. Only an unusually heavy evening in Sydney… to bring in the New Year could temporarily mask his growing despair.”

So where did the wreck of Petrov’s Skoda end up? John Goodall, who lives just downhill from the site in the old Royalla Post Office and phone exchange, which was run by his grandmother Gladys (“Gladdie”) Burke (nee Goodall) at the time of the accident, is the only person we met who knew anything about the event. From his house about a kilometer away, he pointed to the location on the hillside where he remembers the wreck of the Skoda had been laid to rest. Where is it now? According to John, it was brutally “buried by redneck road builders” when the road was moved 100m to the west in 1991. So there you are. On John’s authority, ever since 1991 you have passed over the ghost of Petrov’s Skoda as you headed south for the snow. By the time you caught sight of the tin cowboy, you were over it, literally…

For those who want to know more – we’re still searching for the pre-1991 aerial surveys – the GPS reference for the location of the buried Skoda is [Aus Geo 1984] 55K 0694889 6068431. And yes, the evidence needs further triangulation, but who wants to ruin a good fringe-urban myth? The FJ Holden which now serves as the symbolic “Petrov’s car” is to be found at [Aus Geo 1984] 0694700 6068433. Or see our Google Map here (with thanks to my collaborators-in-procrastination Annie Jay and Pammy Faye, for most of these arcane details).

Question for Ralph Nader: is it possible to roll a Skoda at 25 mph?

Question for local bandits: who stole the front suspension within 24 hours of the crash?

Question for anyone: who would have wanted a Skoda front suspension anyway?

PS Archives ACT October 2009 “Find of the Month”: the Registration Papers for Petrov’s Skoda

Surely a myth can assume heritage value? Well here’s a contender… Just after you cross Guises Creek a few kays south of Canberra on your way towards Cooma, you see this gay happy-go-lucky silver cowboy, frantically signaling to you. What’s he on about? you ask as you zip past… Answer: he’s trying to tell you you’ve just driven past one of the best of Canberra’s urban myths. Petrov’s car.

Thanks to Annie J for the photograph. Here’s the backstory. I’m driving back from Cooma on a Sunday night with Tom’s dad Bruce – more on this adventure here – when Bruce casually lets drop “you can see Petrov’s car somewhere along here.” “What?” I exclaim, as I nearly fall out the window in amazement… Bruce calmly relates a story of a couple of years ago, when a friend, now a curator in Melbourne, showed him the wreck of “Petrov’s car” in a paddock amongst some pine trees, some 100 meters west of the road. Apparently, so the story went, the KGB tried to take out the Russian diplomat Vladimir Mihailovich Petrov three days before he defected, by running him off the road in a truck, and setting fire to his Skoda, diplomatic number DC 290 and all. Well, that’s how the story goes…

It was dark. “Somewhere here” says Bruce. It was hard to contain myself until the following Saturday when, assisted by an anthropologist and a cold war historian, armed with cameras, a GPS device and two crazy dogs, we set off on the quest. “Somewhere here?” asks the anthropologist. “Not that side, this side” says the driver. “There it is!” And so it was. And so it is, just as Bruce described.

Except. Except it’s an FJ Holden rusting out there in the paddock. Right vintage, wrong species. But now perhaps doubly iconic – as an Australian cold war icon. In its inimical, breathless, on-the-button mode of reporting, read what the Canberra Times had to say on Friday 23rd April 1954. This was twenty days after Petrov defected, and four months after the actual accident, on Christmas Eve, 1953. A “murder attempt”. Is this the origin of the myth? Perhaps it is. The whole affair has also been written about by Nic Whitlam, Robert Manne, Frank Cain, and others.  And there’s more to come on iconophilia, but you’ll have to wait until next week to hear the first hand stories, read the Police Report, and find out how you really experience Petrov’s car as you drive to Cooma. And then, there’s the story of Jack, Petrov’s Alsatian pooch, which I will bring you next week…

David Thomas: Looting, heritage management and archaeological strategies at Jam, Afghanistan

is the title of an exhibition of digital photographs at the National Film and Sound Archive. The images are derived from David MacDougall’s latest film Gandhi’s Children – the Canberra premiere of which will be held at 2.00pm this Sunday at Arc Cinema. Gandhi’s Children was filmed in late 2005 at the Prayas Children’s Home for Boys, in Jahangirpuri, New Delhi.

What do we think of when we talk of “stills”, and how we might think of the framed prints on the wall, extracted from the imagery on screen? There’s still a photography gallery in Sydney called “Stills”. Seems to me it’s almost an outdated concept. “Still photography” still invokes the mystique of “the decisive moment” – being in the right place at the right time – remembering to have your camera with you – alert to the circumstances, finger on the button. But recently, this has become a less auratic concept, now that Robert Capa’s famous image of the death of a young Republican militiaman in the Spanish civil war has been proven – seventy years later - to be a work of fiction.

That will never be the case with these images. Here we are experiencing the distinctively 21st century condition of photography, where digital technology enables an editor to distinguish between images at the rate of 25 frames per second. Despite the capacities of Photoshop to distort the truth of an image, in this instance the authenticity of the original will never be in question. The original is no longer just “in the can” but on half a dozen servers.

What David has done in this exhibition is to reverse the mad contemporary proliferation of images, in a world where Flickr expands exponentially, in a world where most of us are carrying a video camera in our pocket. As of last night there are two billion images on Flickr, all of which have been recorded (or uploaded, made accessible) since it started less than five years ago.

Sometimes, for an artist, the trick is to learn how to surf the wave. However art also happens when you swim against the tide. So how has someone like MacDougall reversed the direction of this digital tsunami, slowed down the flow of data, in order to produce images we can comprehend, that we can reflect on? In a form that enables reflection, rather than just momentary exposure?

Analogue film, 35mm film, had it built in. You could separate the frames with a pair of scissors. Video is much more slippery. There is still the editing process, by which you agonize over the formal conjunction of transitional frames, in that subtle and almost invisible formalist play of transitions. But these images are not edit points in that sense at all – they are rather images which are chosen to evoke the before and after, the continuity of the moment, confirmation for us of the sequence, the flow from which they have been selected, the continuity of both the author’s and the subject’s common experience.

Recognition of the flow has a quite different aesthetic consequence to that of the decisive moment. The image taken from the flow connotes Realism in its original art-historical sense – imagery which says, this is how it was, not just how it looked. It is through these images that David’s subjects tell us about more than the look, rather they convey the context, the existence of each individual subject, the moment, and all it connotes – fragility, survival, yet also hope and a future, and a certain post-traumatic dignity.

The ethic at work in David’s films, and now in these photographs, is one which is moving, compelling and convincing.  Somehow David has extracted from the mass of his video data a series of individual frames which has slowed down experience to the point where we might take heart from the resilience of these children, and children anywhere.

P.S. for the curious, the print size is about 285 x 505, printed on A2 Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper at the ANU School of Art. They are video stills from HDV (high definition video) recordings, exported via Quicktime to Photoshop and de-interlaced, colour-corrected, level-adjusted, etc. before printing.  None are cropped — they are all the original full frames.

Two visitors look at Warhol’s Mao Zedong in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Photograph: Kaveh Kazemi/Corbis

A sharp correspondent reveals how vulnerable one is to false projection: not unlike the line taken by The Guardian in 2007 (the source of the image above). But apparently the pile of modern art collected by the Pahlavis has just been on show – for the second time. And hardly a reflection of an era of liberalism! One could have argued this in relation to its first showing during the time of President Khatami  – but now? The contradictions are salutory.

Gertie Huddleston: Garden of Eden II 1999

Iconophilia proposes Cath Bowdler’s  Colour Country: art from Roper River at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery as a contender for the contemporary Aboriginal Art exhibition of the year. Why? Because it tells us so much about the potential of an art which develops outside the mainstream, and by contrast, some of the limitations of its near neighbours. Of all the remote communities which have participated in the Indigenous art renaissance of the past three decades, only Ngukurr has been able to develop in its own (myriad) directions, relatively free from the interventions and restrictions of the art advisors who have guided the aesthetic character of most remote art centres. True, some big city gallerists sought to corner the outputs of some of the original significant figures in the first generation of Ngukurr artists, however this exhibition shows how extraordinarily resilient that first generation proved to be.

Based on Cath Bowdler’s original scholarship, the fifty works in this exhibition trace the origins of this complex “movement” since 1987. The major figures of this first generation are artists such as Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Djambu Barra Barra (above), Willie Gudabi, Gertie Huddleston and Amy Jirwulurr Johnson. Many of the works in this exhibition have not been previously exhibited.

Roper River borders the southern boundary of Arnhem Land, and Ngukurr is the site of the original Anglican Mission. This is a community which has benefitted from its remoteness, even though it has not enjoyed the protections and independence of other Arnhem Land communities. Despite the absence of a high-profile arts centre,  Ngukurr Arts, the artist-run community art centre, has produced arguably the most consistently innovative forms and styles of any remote community.

Louise Hamby comments: “The week following the long weekend in June was a high point in openings for Aboriginal art. Some of the same people from the Melbourne opening of Lindy Allen’s Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic at the Potter made their way to Cath Bowdler’s opening of Colour Country at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. The art from the Roper River area of Arnhem Land was a strong contrast to the eloquent barks from eastern Arnhem Land from the 1930s.  I was instantly drawn to the lime green wall of the gallery. Hanging there the Sambo Sambo Burra Burra paintings were demanding attention. I have always had a soft spot for his work because of the inclusion of baskets in, on and inside the bodies of the figures he depicts. The other major draw card for me were the storyboard paintings of Gertie Huddlestone. Here the strong colours are more like threads and spots of colours stitched and quilted together. This exhibition is well worth a trip to Wagga Wagga to see such an unusual group of works all together making a different statement about colour and country.”

If these installation photographs prove too tempting, hike on down to the Wagga. If you miss it at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery (until August 2), see it at the Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide, the Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra or the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, finishing in July, 2010. A full-colour catalogue is also available.