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.

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

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Articulated Intersect  in Tasmania

o     ABC TV http://is.gd/p7RNNQ

o     News.com http://is.gd/3wUy8W

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     Aphra Mag http://www.aphramag.com/dark-mofo-articulated-intersect/

o     Beat Mag http://www.beat.com.au/arts/articulated-intersect

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 

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

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

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.

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 

Art writing links | incomplete

Micro fiction based on memories of exhibiting by artists and participants by Caitlin Griffiths
Art Histories

Leon Wainwright


Adrian Rifkin (ex Goldsmiths) Gai-Savoir

Courtauld 2010 project on writing art history

Frieze writing prize here

Open arts archive at the Open University

Alex J Taylor (Australian) American Art andVisual Culture Historian, Oxford

European digitised archives

Europeana is a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe.
Link here

Photographer Wayne Quilliam

Wayne Quilliam featured gallery 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/gallery/2014/jul/10/australia-through-the-eyes-of-wayne-quilliam-in-pictures

Indigenous sciences | Indigenous astronomy

Article by astrophysicist Ray Norris in The Conversation about Aboriginal sciences here

Norris is Chief Research Scientist, for CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science, & Adjunct Prof., Dept of Indigenous Studies (Warawara), Macquarie Uni at CSIRO

Ray's website emudreaming collects research and articles

Check out his further reading list

Ethnoastronomy

Norris and Hamacher: Australian Aboriginal Astronomy: An Overview 

Danie Mellor travelling 2014

Artist and chair of Visual Arts Australia council Danie Mellor  out n about at Art Basel Hong Kong and Scotland

Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirral, which opens on 1 August at the National Museum of Scotland, his first exhibition in Scotland

http://artery.australiacouncil.gov.au/2014/07/the-work-of-danie-mellor/

Additionally his exhibition Exotic Lies, Secret Ties is at TarraWara Museum until 27 July 2014

Danie Mellor Exotic lies and sacred ties (The heart that conceals, the tongue that never reveals) 2008. I
nstallation: pastel, pencil, glitter, Swarovski crystal and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, framed, with mosaic china, taxidermy animals and painted wood. 325.0 x 325.0 x 130.0 cm variable.
Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2009.

Archives | Australian art

Australian art archives online
Design and Arts Australia Online here

How the internet liberated Australia's art history by Joanna Mendelsshon

Researchers using the Design and Art Australia Online database no longer need to trek across the country to examine works such as Jean Goldberg’s “Wheels”. Powerhouse Museum, CC BY-SA

Starling murmuration

Link to RSPB website of Starling murmuration in the Cambridgeshire Fen Drayton Lakes

David Kjaer

Also in Avalon Marshes in Somerset

Starling murmuration is studied by computational biologists

George F. Young,

Luca Scardovi,

Andrea Cavagna,

Irene Giardina,

Naomi E. Leonard

Their paper Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost is here 

Author summary

Starling flocks move in beautiful ways that both captivate and intrigue the observer. Previous work has shown that starlings pay attention to their seven closest neighbors, but until now it was not understood why this number is seven. Our paper explains the mystery: when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort. To prove this result we develop a new systems-theoretic approach for understanding noisy consensus dynamics...more

Watch here - turn the music off (!)

Andrew Ross | Economic disobedience

The Rolling Jubilee is an initiative to free people from debt by buying debt then releasing it
The website is here - its a bail out of the people by the people.

'debts are the wages of the future claimed in advance'

This is a strike debt project from Occupy Wall Street and I heard of it from Prof Andrew Ross at Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2014 in Tampere, Finland

Australian Art in Paris

Commercial gallerist Stephane Jacob Arts d'Australie promotes and exhibits a wide range of work
His website here

art history & art writing

James Elkins is leaving art history
link to his website here
Link to Elkins 'writing with images' book project here
What is interesting writing in art history?

Durkheim links

Encyclopedia of Religion and Society: Hartford Institute for Religion Research | Durkheim

Wiki entry for Frances Gillan

Chicago University summary of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

The Durkheim Pages: Robert Alun Jones, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, History and Sociology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Link.

David Émile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. Wiki link.