Art & About 2007

January 19th, 2008

Salt’s influential role in world history

salt.jpgNo quietus on a Sunday morning. My frown lines have scored themselves deeply into my forehead having stained my friend’s walnut pepper carpet with burgundy blood red wine, last night. Dream light wool carpet laid for brand new lives ruined by my thighs as they caught the fringe of a table cloth and took my glass for a ride.

Material things, material sins.

Slaves to salt the four of us crawled about the carpet dabbing red splotches. Our lives, my life, depended on a vanishing act and if friendship was to be saved the wine must rise out of the ground into a memory. Propitation, reconcilliation, forgiveness and atonement would be woven into one and I would be without guilt if things were as they were before I sipped the liquid. My contemplation of divine thoughts of the Salt God was successful, I am saved. A text message arrives : Carpet as good as new.

Beyond floor talk, I can’t settle the images in my brain’s archive collected this Friday, whilst viewing ‘Culture Warriors‘, at the Canberra National Art Gallery. This exhibition presents a range of contemporary Indigenous art works, using such materials as film, oils, sound, bark, text and gum nuts. The collection and curatorial eye meant even in the crisp white walled space of a gallery Spirits sang from hollow logs and bark slits, painted wisdoms of yesterday, today and tomorrow turned over in the 2008 atmosphere and psychology and body drifted, was lifted.
For me, the taxidermy wonderland, crafted by Danie Mellor , seduced me, continues to magnify concepts of flight, feathers, second skins and magic for me. Using materials and minerals from nature and factory, Mellor’s installation bewitched a public space into a space where the psyche and physique must think in metaphors, totems and symbols in order to breathe.
In the last few humid storm days reason and fantasy have operated side by side in The Red Room.

..Time capsules, taxidermy and Pakistani poetry, in Canberra. Then, pigeon birthing, braille installations and funding applications in Sydney.

Insects and winged wonders have flown their way into our projects. Pigeons being the focus yesterday, when we filmed our preview film for the pigeon project:
Pigeon family 1.JPG pigeon cards.jpgshoot2.jpgShoot1.jpg

view 1.jpg (top l – r – Graham Davidson, world famous pigeon fancier; pigeon cards; Johanna & David at the loft; Andrew Garrick, Paul Ree and Graham Davidson; view from location, the ‘Gong.)

And today I tap open beautiful photographs a friend sent me, of fallen feathers on misty green grass and smoky Summer skies complete with a fire breasted Robin in the foreground.

January 17th, 2008

Calling from the Grffith

Canberra, better pronounced Can Berra. A circle without sound. Or, city sounds in the key of hush.

Jotting beside the lake, which floated itself and my vision, cautiously, steadily, towards the real sea. The water sounded like a blank page of writing paper.

I’m have transported The Red Room, to Canberra, for a night and two days, to meet up with an academic from ANU. Our topic is Tagore and, over dinner we cover cotton shirts, Communism, divorce and pollution. The dinner was of spinach, rice and fire. The waiter looked like Fonz of thumbs up fame and had a desperate amount of chest hair sprouting from his black shirt, so much so that it wriggled under the blow of the air conditioner.

One of our esteemed directors, Mr Henry Ergas, tells me ‘No Country for Old Men’ is part of the opening line to Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium. This poke of knowledge improves the film even more, and more was much before knowing such trivia.

The sleep tonight is in a hotel room, the space more silent than hole in the middle of the word ‘room’. Outside, I peek, the sky is padded with curly clouds, the moon splices her light closer to the balcony, which I’m typing from.

Tomorrow, Red Room makes the first move on installing our time capsule, from last year’s ‘Sustainable Sydney/Red Room Remains, project, with a visit to the National Gallery. Here I will meet with the gate keepers to discuss how we will save and install our collection of poetic visions about our future.

This Thursday, 23 years from now, place too frightening to contemplate with a body so sore from having walked 4 kilometres, by mistake, or because the Cloak Room Mistress claimed my hotel was close, quote : easily within walking distance, to the gallery.

September 28th, 2007

200px-MilesDavisAura.jpgMidday lunch of a baguette and conversation with a special friend provided a momentary space to enjoy today’s sun spring. The other Friday hours were (continue to be) spent cramped behind the wooden desk working up the RSI disability, applying for grants. The eyes and fingertips are overworked, as is the dollar symbol atop numeral 4. This week’s grant application is to the Australia Council, towards a year of adventures into the language of honesty, as written and talked about by Australia’s Best poets.

To bring an aural quality to the formal grant forms, Miles Davis trumpets colours out of the desk speakers, whilst Lyn Hejinian reads poetry out of the iBook’s mouth. But as the number crunching gets tighter and the deadline looms (Monday 5PM) both Lyn and Miles will have to shut down and the aesthetic revelry of poetry sounds will just have to wait to be heard, next week.

Odd that there’s always time for a blog when all other meetings and outings are cancelled because of ‘work’; this blog space is an indication of passive panic, particular to funding applications and the knowledge that 5PM is very real, no matter how many times the poets participating in the Red Room Remains projects claim that time is only a construct.

September 14th, 2007

Johanna: 2030: Red Room Remains

logo-1.jpgMonday evenings, over the past few weeks, have taken on a mystical component with the poets, participating in our Sustainable Sydney project (2030: Red Room Remains) recording poems and statements on the future of the world, as their minds imagine it to be in 2030.

Elliott Wheeler masterminds the controls from a table of faders, computer screens, mice and headphones. From the corner of his musical eyes he observes myself and the poet trying to seriously discuss literature whilst perched on a piano stool and a cane chair, so high off the ground, I Am A Toddler.

A note here to thank Mr Wheeler who provides our company with studio space in which to record the poets. Having reduced recording rates means all our audio is provided to the public for free.
Writing of trying to remain young brings us to examine the name of one of our poets, Bravo Child. His name changed in accordance with Law to announce of each utterance of his self that his Age is a state of mind and language a grand way to sustain modes of thought. By calling oneself ‘Young’, one is so.

Does Kevin Rudd become a nifty fish with a tobacco brown body and fire red fins, if we think of him as he is written?

You will be able to listen to all the interviews with our poets on October 5th, from 9AM onwards, to coincide with the public launch of ‘Art & About‘ – to which you are welcome to attend. The interviews will reveal how the poems for this project were designed to fit onto a city building and into the brief set by Red Room and The City of Sydney for this project.

The component of the poet recordings you are not going to hear this year is the poet’s poem or series of statements that are being placed into our audio time capsule. These pieces will be archived digitally until 2030, as will Red Room’s prediction of the future of poetry at this time. Alongside the audio each poet has given our Capsule Keeper physical objects which are being stored in a secret space, to be opened in 2030. The time capsule is currently being built and you will soon be explore details of this object shortly.
Having avoided the phone all morning and ignored the insane bubble boils of an egg on stove, behind my back, I shall blog off and begin Saturday formally. This afternoon Gareth Jenkins is bringing his newly born baby to our recording studio, part of her language will be stored in the capsule, alongside Gareth’s poetic predictions.

All people involved in this project are aware of the morbidity inherent in predicting futures.
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August 27th, 2007

Johanna: It’s impossible to be late, early or on time

Romaine arrived wrapped in a spectacular shawl which swirled in deep, rich tones and thick cotton lines sewn together to protect her from the weather and to attract eyes of patchwork admirers, like myself. Costume, combined with voice and broad smile gave Romaine the presence of a magnanimous, impressive character.

With Elliott Wheeler monitoring our whispers and hollers from his studio desk beyond the glass, Romaine and I explored the ways or non ways time decides to exist as – or we decide time to exist as. Time, in Romaine’s view has never been a reality but it is instead a grand imaginary. Making poems makes time and the trees and the water ways take it away. We also yarned about mystery and mountains, Romaine being another Sydney poet (Pam Brown, I’m thinking of) who has ventured into the blue bark.

This was the first interview recorded for our ‘Sustainable Sydney’ pod-casts and time capsules. Part of which we will reveal in October 07 and the rest in 2030.

Just as Romaine was handing me her tangible time capsule component … there was a knock knock and Brook Emery arrived with his neat brown leather satchel …
Always two words, ie. high school
If you’re speaking generally as in
“this is a program for high schools” then it’s lower case;
If you’re referring to a particular school
as in “Penrith High School” then it’s upper

August 11th, 2007

“The queer stumps had uncanny shapes, as of monstrous creatures” (John Galsworthy).

tn_0308-2657-97.jpgMost days the carpet on Level 11 of the Town Hall House is a murky ball- point blue. But, last Friday the carpet of one of the rooms was set on paintings by imagistic predictions of school children, participants in our ‘Sustainable Sydney’ project. Each student had created an A3 art work which will accompany the poem on the AMP building projection, in October. Myself and some of the project crew tip toed, crawled and bent about each illustration hand picking the art work for projection.

I would like to think my ideas in the painting selection were helpful yet, the council and projectionist has the final say. Now the poems are written Red Room can twist in a new direction, turn our backs on the poems and let you offer variations on their stories.

For this project, Red Room is now concentrating on recording the participating poets and asking them to predict the future of poetry in 2030.
The art work reflected many themes the poems contain, like hovering, flight, dogs, sun and orbiting dragons fighting and cuddling whilst keeping an eye on the earth below. However the poems condense the kid’s concerns and wishes in 5 lines, he paintings expand their ideas into thick, primary colours. These paintings are now being animated and will eventually flick in and across the 5 lined poems each poet wrote

Look for:

..digital carnival of objects (bridges, trees, houses) and idiosyncratic beings hip hopping with fire hot energy and cartoon inspired spite….

My preferred painting was an illustration without people or smiles. The student had sketched an aerial map of Hyde Park resembling some of John Wolseley‘s art which navigates Australian landscapes in stipples, scratches and linear song.
When reading the poem alongside this map design, the future was a humble geographical prediction of Sydney in 2030, the park as the beginning and end of communities and life and the walker was guided by reading lines, breath and the gaps between them.

August 5th, 2007

Johanna: poets the size of their poems

By engaging with The City of Sydney’s project ‘Sustainable Sydney’, predicting what 2030 will be like has become a daily preoccupation. So far, no morbid apocalyptic thoughts about there only a baby green leaf poking up from mound of soot, all that remains of human-land. Instead, the 2030 vision I’ve had lately is filled with thin modes of transport (the bike, the memory stick) cycling beneath hovering mobiles and around a lot of legs dog walking real life dogs cross bread with computer bred canines.

How language exists and how we communicate in 2030 will be a central question for all the 8 poets participating in Red Room’s version of Sustainable Sydney. (One of the 8 poets is Jane Gibian, whose new collection of poetry ‘Ardent’ was launched with moving and teary readings yesterday in Sydney by Occasional poet, Adam Aitken and Giramondo Press)
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Between now and October 2030 the 8 poets will have to work on their predictions, which will be recorded in studio and stored in an audio time capsule online. This capsule will be popped on line and in a public space, in October 2030. Whichever poets and Red Roomers are still here and living will have the chance to hear their original recordings broadcast around the city.

At this stage megaphones on every corner may exist, or perhaps there will be no street corners or public meeting spaces because everyone is saving themselves within the walls of their individuals worlds?