Thursday, 24 July 2014

John Betjeman Goes By Train

John Betjeman Goes By Train: Kings Lynn to Hunstanton 

In 1962, Sir John Betjeman travels along the Kings Lynn - Hunstanton line and stops off at the Royal Wolferton Station.

Wolferton was a railway station on the King's Lynn to Hunstanton line which opened in 1862 to serve the village of Wolferton in Norfolk, England. The station was also well-known as the nearest station to Sandringham House, and royal trains brought the royal family to and from their estate until its closure in 1969. After spending some time as a museum, the station is now preserved in private hands. The signal box and part of the station are listed buildings, Grade II.

BFI and YouTube

and this in 1963 Branch Line


Glasgow Kiss

That Glasgow Kiss on 23 July as a Vine here

Great action from Scotland during the opening ceremony for Commonwealth Games 2014 taking the ground for equality and diversity and humanity.

Wednesday, 23 July 2014

Freedom Come All Ye

by Hamish Henderson 1960

Roch the wind in the clear day's dawin
Blaws the cloods heilster-gowdie owre the bay
But there's mair nor a roch wind blawin
Thro the Great Glen o the warld the day
It's a thocht that wad gar oor rottans
Aa thae rogues that gang gallus fresh an gay
Tak the road an seek ither loanins
Wi thair ill-ploys tae sport an play

Nae mair will our bonnie callants
Merch tae war when oor braggarts crousely craw
Nor wee weans frae pitheid an clachan
Mourn the ships sailin doun the Broomielaw
Broken faimlies in lands we've hairriet
Will curse 'Scotlan the Brave' nae mair, nae mair
Black an white ane-til-ither mairriet
Mak the vile barracks o thair maisters bare

Sae come aa ye at hame wi freedom
Never heed whit the houdies croak for Doom
In yer hoose aa the bairns o Adam
Will find breid, barley-bree an paintit room
When Maclean meets wi's friens in Springburn
Aa thae roses an geans will turn tae blume
An yon black boy frae yont Nyanga
Dings the fell gallows o the burghers doun

English translation here

Tuesday, 22 July 2014

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Articulated Intersect  in Tasmania
o     ABC TV http://is.gd/p7RNNQ
o     Creators Project http://is.gd/77uG3g
o     Sydney Morning Herald http://is.gd/J0Q60l
o     CCTV Chinese TV http://is.gd/SCXvbC
o     The Guardian http://is.gd/JE9ujN
o     ABC radio http://is.gd/oyxoDZ

o     Yahoo news http://is.gd/1Y073Y

Armory Show 1913

Famous for showing Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase 2 ; noted in some places as being a show that introduced European avant-garde to America which is also disputed.

Included Australian artists  Derwent Lees and Charles Condor in Gallery G 


Monday, 21 July 2014

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist cover version of Chris Isaak's Wicked Games  a version of which is used in Mercy Garden Skin Retour (2014) here . Hilarious !



Hear interview with Rist at MoMa about process


Review of Mercy Garden Skin Retour installed at MCA Sydney for the 19th Biennale here

Review of Sydney Biennale in Art Asia Pacific

Sunday, 20 July 2014

Rachel Maclean

Glasgow based video and performance artist
Maclean YouTube channel here


Q&A
Dazed Digital: What do you think of David Bowie asking Scotland to stay in the UK?

Rachel Maclean: Much of the media coverage and political machinations of the Yes and No factions of the referendum debate has already descended into bizarre farce, however this was the icing on the Great British cake of nonsense. It was amusingly surreal and I was particularly inspired by Bowie’s decision to filter the statement through the avatar of Kate Moss. I strongly believe that all future decisions affecting the unity and otherwise of these Great Isles should be delivered through the glamorous conduit of an international super model.
A Whole New World

Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland
100 Artists/ 60 Venues
Exhibitions Scotland wide 


Rachel Maclean interviewed here

Scotland's Art Revolution on BBC Four here

Wednesday, 16 July 2014

Think We Must!

Donna Haraway
"Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble", 5/9/14
Art of Living on a Damaged Planet
Vimeo of her paper here
'What people have been doing on this planet has in fact changed the planet for ever and for everyone - anthropogenic processes'

'Think we must' - Virginia Woolf Three Guineas
We need to think the consequences of the worlding we are in
The Science of SF: String Figures/ Science Fact/ Science Fiction/ Speculative Fabulation/ Speculative Feminism/ So Far

As you know from your own experience, and there are facts that prove it, the
daughters of educated men have always done their thinking from
hand to mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the cloisters
of secluded colleges. They have thought while they stirred the
pot, while they rocked the cradle. It was thus that they won us (59)
the right to our brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on
thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think we must. Let
us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the
crowd watching Coronations and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us
think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of
the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms
and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking—
what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What
are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What
are these professions and why should we make money out of
them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons
of educated men?  
Virginia Woolf Three Guineas (Hogarth Press, 1938) p. 59-60
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/chapter2.html


Inspired by Marilyn Strathern
It matters what stories tell stories
It matters what thoughts think thoughts
It matters what worlds world worlds

Situated Knowledges The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective1988
Feminist Studies Vol.14 No.3 (575 -599)

Marilyn Strathern
social anthropologist | writer |

Journal of ethnographic theory HAU

Brook Andrew resources

Brook Andrew website
Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris/ Brussels
Tolarno Galleries Melbourne

Film made for SBS 'Hidden History' produced by Intafusion. Go to website then  'In Production/ Hidden History' to see clip.

Video interview Bruce McLean and Brook at QAGOMA 21st Century: Art in the First Decade. (2010)



Making Travelling Colony (2012)


De ANIMA (2014)
review in Bendigo Advertiser with video






Bordeaux, Port of the Moon

Bordeaux, Port of the Moon, is a beautiful city of 18th Century architecture and protected by UNESCO as an inhabited world heritage site sine 2007.
The Port of the Moon, port city of Bordeaux in south-west France, is inscribed as an inhabited historic city, an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble, created in the age of the Enlightenment, whose values continued up to the first half of the 20th century, with more protected buildings than any other French city except Paris. It is also recognized for its historic role as a place of exchange of cultural values over more than 2,000 years, particularly since the 12th century due to commercial links with Britain and the Low Lands. Urban plans and architectural ensembles of the early 18th century onwards place the city as an outstanding example of innovative classical and neoclassical trends and give it an exceptional urban and architectural unity and coherence. Its urban form represents the success of philosophers who wanted to make towns into melting pots of humanism, universality and culture.
UNESCO video 
UNESCO TV / © NHK Nippon Hoso Kyokai

Musee d'Aquitaine, on cours Pasteur, displays the port's role in the slave trade and its Caribbean colonies with objects, maps and photography.

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

Christian Thompson links

Some more marginalia for Christian Thompson (Bidjara people); a multidisciplinary artist using photography, performance, video, sculpture, sound who performs the fluidity of identity through these media to great effect.

Thompson's work Emotional Striptease 2003 reviewed here by Anita Angel at RealTime Arts

A comprehensive review of Emotional Striptease here on the blog of The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things.

On Thompson's own website here

Thompson is an inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholar at Oxford Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing: interview here in 2013

In We Bury Our Own at Pitt Rivers, Christian responds to photographic collections at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. In the essay on this page he is quoted as saying he is involved with 'spiritual repatriation of the archive'.
Rather than directly invoking or re-presenting historic imagery, as is evident in the work of other artists such as Brook Andrew (who has also worked extensively with archives), Thompson has chosen to take the history of photographic representation of Aboriginal people as a starting point for the spiritual repatriation of the archive through the redemptive process of self-portraiture. Importantly, this process has not involved drawing on those historical markers of identity which are so prevalent in ethnographic imagery, but rather his own fluid and evolving transcultural identity, as well as biographical markers of another recent identity, that of an Oxford student in formal dress. 

I first saw the three channel HD video work Heat (2010) in Art Gallery Western Australian and have since seen in at Musee d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux (2014) Here is a clip from Heat (2010)

Hettie Perkins Art & Soul part 2 2014 promo here references a couple of his works.

Vimeo of interview with Hetti Perkins, art + soul 2 episode three aired 22 July at 8:30pm on ABC1. 14 mins, here

Lost Together (2009) here. I am writing on 'Dead as a Doornail' from this series shown in the 2013 Royal Academy exhibition 'Australia' in London.

Landscape, Siri Hayes,  and Lost Together series reviewed by Alison Inglis here 


Indigenous design | agencies | processes

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